If you think the purpose of surgery is for the doctor to intentionally hurt (as opposed to help) the patient you need to find a better doctor. If you really think that doctors are immune from torts you've never talked to one about malpractice insurance.
Screw the user is correct. When the users can write their own polished apps that work the way they want them to, they'll get them. They're getting this code for free and the code works the way the author wants it to, if they're lucky, and the code is any good. If the users don't like it, they can go shell out for commercial software which also doesn't work the way they want it to. Then they have the recourse of not shelling out.
Screw developers with over-inflated egos who think we should kiss their ass for releasing barely functional, undocumented, unusable piles of crap.
If your attitude towards your software's users is this hostile why bother even releasing it, under the GPL or any other license? By releasing it you're, as the GP post pointed out, only going to sour people's impression of open source software or software in general. Like it or not, "open source" is a brand like Coca-Cola or Starbucks and when you damage the brand you hurt anything that's associated with it.
Programming and UI design don't overlap much, but there's nothing to prevent people to be good (or even great) at both, except maybe overconfidence or arrogance.
It's not like there are only 80 years old master programmers and UI designers. You don't need to study a lifetime to become good at either, or both.
I'm a good programmer and a good UI designer. There, I said it.
It's not that programming and UI design don't overlap, it's that by knowing the things you need to know and understand to be a good programmer you've already made yourself in the upper 1% of computer users. Since you're so familiar with the underlying architecture of the program it's very attractive just to design a UI that exposes a graphical interface to your functions rather than thinking about who your users are and how they want to accomplish their ultimate goals. The skills you've learned and the knowledge you've gained also make it difficult to sympathize with the needs of the average user because you're so unlike them.
As a UI designer this is a challenge for me as well. I end up knowing a lot more about how computers work, what their limitations are and how our code works under the covers because, like it or not, I need to design around that stuff sometimes. As a computer user I'm also much more advanced than the people who use my software.
I disagree with the statement that you can't be a good programmer and a good UI designer. It would be challenging and require a significant time investment but you'd just need to do the same thing that I do; keep in contact with users, ask them questions, and test your UI. By talking to users in interviews and focus groups and asking the right questions you can stay attuned to what their needs are. By conducting frequent and iterative usability studies you can test common use cases with real users and see what they understand and what they don't, find out why, and fix it. As a programmer, you don't need to be the person running this sort of research. However, if you want to be a good UI designer you should be consuming as much of it as you can and asking your company for more research data to help you improve.
Flaunting your law breaking through non-violent means is a method of civil disobedience but that's not what this guy (or most people who download music) was doing. He didn't get up and say "Copyright unfairly enriches the music industry at the cost of artists, the public and our cultural legacy. Take my CD of copyrighted songs and play it in protest and let the RIAA try and stop me." instead he sold lots and lots of CDs full of music he didn't have the right to use and got busted for it. Boo hoo.
Getting caught isn't the result of a failed attempt at civil disobedience. It's the point.
Uh, actually you do, accordingly the guys who set all this up. When the laws have become corrupt, it is the people's right to alter or to abolish them.
True, though usually that altering or abolishing is done through either political means or through civil disobediance. This guy was caught with 81,000 CDs that, at best, exist in a grey market. That's a bit like me saying that the 200 kilos of cocaine in my trunk is part of my plan to protest the war on drugs.
I'm not sure that mix-tape's shouldn't be something that we allow. It certainly sounds like there are benefits to the DJs, the artists, and the record companies but as long as it's (at this scale) a crime you need to accept that their are certain consequences to your actions. If you still feel that following your principles requires you to act contrary to the law then have some guts and be willing to take the punishment so that you can show society how unjust the whole situation is. But lets be clear, this is not an example of civil disobediance. This is someone with a profitable (though allegedly illegal) business who got busted.
I don't know if you can assume that your 1-2% of downloaders will come from the 10% of the population that are movie fanatics. It's just as likely that those 1-2% could have been infrequent movie purchasers who took advantage of the free cost of downloading to sample more movies than they would have if they had to pay money.
(I'm assuming you were talking about how you perceived the current situation and not proposing a plan to go after the movie fanatics as a method of activism. It wasn't clear.)
I read them and I believe that I followed them in my response. I did find it especially ironic that had the balls to link to rules requiring respondents to:
Not choose extreme examples of something and pretending it's the norm and
Don't exaggerate stuff. Period.
when you were accussing somone who held an opinion different from your own of being a paid shill. Do you think that it's the norm for people who support Microsoft to be astroturfers. Me, I think it's an astroturfer would be a rather extreme example of a Microsoft supporter and hardly the norm.
This is not specifically directed at you as I've seen this many times before but I'm tired of people being so narrow-minded as to think that anyone who disagrees with them must be a paid shill or astroturfer. As hard as it may be to believe some people just honestly don't agree with you on everything.
from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question "There is very little public information about requirements gathering, usability and user testing. In other words, how do you know whether the OLPC (i) will meet your users' needs and (ii) is easy enough for them to use? Have the target user groups been characterized? What ongoing plans do you have for this? I`d Like test the OLPC in Argentina, Please contct with me to know how. Thanks.
As far as I know, there are two local groups in Argentina with test boards (don't know if anybody has the 2B1/XO prototypes though). They are Ututo and Tuquito. I know Ututo had some explicit arrangements to let other people use/test the boards. If anybody knows about other groups (or about any local XOs) please let me know (or post in the OLPC Argentina pages. --Xavi 07:23, 6 December 2006 (EST)"
Before you go off spouting that you've designed a radical new UI that's better than anything else you might want to usability test it. Now I couldn't find anything on the link to Ututo and the link to Tuquito doesn't seem to have any English content but from the answer to the question it doesn't sound like there's a real plan for user testing a radical new UI that will be given to people who, according to the HIG are young and inexperienced.
To the designer's credit both of those criteria (young and inexperienced) give you the best possible scenario for introducing a new UI since children are more willing to play around and experiment and inexperienced computer users don't have the legacy of using an OS that worked any different from what you're giving them. Even with those advantages I'd hope that a project that is intended for a global audience would have more substantial usability testing plans than "lets give a couple to some people in Argentina and see what they think". I'm certainly not going to go all gaga over an untested UI that starts by throwing out decades of learning about how people interact with software.
NBC is owned by GE and GE advertises it's products on NBC so it's exactly the same. 20th Century Fox's movies are shown on Fox television and Fox recently got in trouble for that OJ interview based on a book published by a News Corp (Fox News' parent company) publisher. You'll also see ads for 20th Century Fox movies in the NY Post (owned by News Corp) so it's not just a TV thing either.
This is not an uncommon practice in any other industry. Google has done nothing wrong and the GP is right to say the only thing odd about this is they felt the need to respond at all.
and got interested in who didn't sign they're the gray states in this map.
In case you're wondering how 50-5=49 the attorneys general include the attorneys general from Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands. Apparently the attorneys general from
Guam
The U.S. Virgin Islands
American Samoa
The Northern Mariana Islands
The Midway Islands
Wake Island
Johnston Atoll
Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands
Kingman Reef
Navassa Island
and Palmyra Atoll
join Virginia, Minnesota, Indiana, Nebraska, and Missouri in their support of child pornography.
(This post brought to you by the original letter, the list of US territories and Fox's boring "Standoff".)
Exactly. The reason why this is so troubling is that the only evidence we have that the hacker even exists comes from law enforcement. Now there's also no evidence that they're making it all up but we need protections against this sort of thing (such as requiring the hacker to appear in court and testify in order for the evidence to be considered valid) or "my anonymous Turkish hacker friend told me" will be come the law enforcement equivalent of "sure I got laid, but she lives in Canada... and she's dead now...".
I'm not a lawyer so these sorts of protections may already exist but I find it odd that the judge even allowed this to proceed.
big? definitely. pointless? dunno, what about all this truth and justice stuff...
The pointless bit, I'd guess, would be due to a future president who persues an indictment being quickly bogged down constantly explaining how it wasn't partisan politicing to go after an ex-president for "protecting the country from the nasty terrists". It's kind of funny (in a "wow, I've underestimated the human capacity for evil" kind of way) that because the republicans went for a partisan and politically motivated impeachment of Clinton there's a perception that impeachment is a partisan and politically motivated process. Now, when we need it most, we can't use the impeachment process without being accused of doing it solely as political revenge for Clinton.
You know, some of us don't care for all the bells and whistles that make your precious chat clients unstable and buggy. Voice & Video support? That's a sure fire way to leave a memory footprint the size of Alaska on 350 million user's computers....and those grapes were sour anyway so I didn't even want them.
I think, the Segway will be my relief when I get old and can't walk as good as now. It should be a nice replacement for those grandma walking aids that must be used these days.
Now it makes sense. The Segway's market is that large group of elderly people who can't walk long distances but are able to stand for long periods of time.
"Somewhere between mobility and the Rascal Scooter? Consider Segway!"
I'm not sure where you're from, but nowhere in America is it against the law for any group to marry...
If a man can't find a woman to marry, that's his problem, not mine. Well, actually it IS mine, because even though I'm hetero I can't find a woman to marry.
Here's an idea, move to Boston and find a nice guy (or is marrying someone who's not of your preferred gender not a good option for you).
You see, it was not the law that prevented this sort of behavior, it was an ethical motivation. People, in general, don't like to hurt or even disappoint others. They want to do right by them. When they are treated unethically in turn, that motivation disappears.
While I agree that the qualities you've listed make for a better business, both in terms of a better workplace as well as a business that is concerned more with the next 10 years than the next quarter, I have to disagree with the above statement. It makes it sound like your average worker is one bad meeting or one lousy review away from ripping you off. In my experience that's not the case. Most people I've worked with at least try to act honestly and fairly with others (if I've got enough anecdotes it proves something -- right?).
To tweak your point slightly I'd say that there's always a certain small percentage of the workforce that, if given the opportunity, will act unethically in order to achieve some larger (either personal or corporate) goal. The change in the U.S. workplace environment just gave those people the bad example they needed to justify their behavior. After all, if major business can crap all over their employees and enjoy record profits and AT&T can sell your information to the feds who cares if I crack my bosses password to make things a little easier (or to see the results of my review a few weeks early).
I think the key distinction though is that these employees were already the type of people that would do whatever they could get away with (and they've just seen the bar for "what you can get away with" ascend into the stratosphere) and not your typical office worker.
Let me make my point this way; do you agree that a WWII game where the characters were named after soldiers who died in WWII would be worse than a game without character names? In a WWII game without character names you're reenacting the horrors of war, maybe gleefully killing nameless civilians and desecrating villages but I tend to think if you knew that the civilians you were killing actually lived in that town and were killed you might pause.
As a personal example, I have no problem killing civilians in GTA games. If I get bored I might kill some civilians to get the cops to chase me. I've started playing the Godfather game and the first time I grabbed a civilian to kill them the guy begged for his life and I let him go. Now I notice that the people compliment me on the street and because of those two things I haven't been doing that same "kill the civilians to attract the cops" game.
In both cases the more real the characters got the less likely I am to feel good about killing them. You might say that I'm just fooling myself and that there's no difference between killing a sprite in a video game and a slightly fuller featured sprite but as technology improves we may face this more and more. In an extreme example, would we feel that a person who spent hours on a holodeck killing virtual representations of his friends and family was more like a video gamer blowing off steam or a psychopath rehearsing a killing spree? I'd be worried if he was killing virtual me.
More the difference between playing a game where you are a character based loosely on the main characters of popular movies (Vice City = Scarface) and playing a game where you are a participant in the reenaction of a mass murder.
I'm proud to be in a country without one news source monopolizing all of the channels. The most popular news source in the US only came in at 11%! I think that's pretty surprising...and not something to be sad about. You're sad that 1 in 10 americans like fox news? Give me a break...that's one of the most diverse percentages I've heard about this country in a long time. It's something to cheer about.
Just wanted to repeat that. It's a very good point.
Microsoft's contention it's easy is exactly that, their contention.
I think google's argument that changing the default search engine is difficult is undercut by the ad I see when I visit google.com with IE7. It has a big red arrow that points to the search bar in IE and says "Make Google your search engine in Internet Explorer" and has a button titled "Make Google my search". Sounds pretty easy to me.
"One important reason why developers can work for cheap in india is the prevelance of slave, indentured and child labor there. Because of a permanent underclass of slaves and near slaves the developers get all their needs for housing, food, clothing etc met dirt cheap. When your bricks are made by 14 year olds who have been sold into slavery it's pretty cheap to build a house."
Don't worry, Indy and Short Round will recover the Sankara stones, free the enslaved children and stop Mola Ram before he kills again.
"Also, hauling out the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a defense is kind of silly, because the original poster would probably site that as an example of a broken law. That basically represents an argument by appealing to authority, and is also a debating technique to use when you have no solid facts or reasoning to back you up."
His "appeal to authority" was a citation of the equal accommodation promised by the Civil Rights Act. According to American law an American restaurant owner is forbidden from discriminating on the basis of race (even though the restaurant is the owner's property).
Finally, an appeal to authority is only an example of a logical fallacy when the person or source in question is NOT a legitimate authority on the subject. Any sensible person could see that you only bolster your argument by citing an authoritative source. In this case, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is quite clearly a legitimate authority on whether or not an American restaurant owner can discriminate on the basis of race.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think the purpose of surgery is for the doctor to intentionally hurt (as opposed to help) the patient you need to find a better doctor. If you really think that doctors are immune from torts you've never talked to one about malpractice insurance.
In short, no.
Screw developers with over-inflated egos who think we should kiss their ass for releasing barely functional, undocumented, unusable piles of crap.
If your attitude towards your software's users is this hostile why bother even releasing it, under the GPL or any other license? By releasing it you're, as the GP post pointed out, only going to sour people's impression of open source software or software in general. Like it or not, "open source" is a brand like Coca-Cola or Starbucks and when you damage the brand you hurt anything that's associated with it.
It's not that programming and UI design don't overlap, it's that by knowing the things you need to know and understand to be a good programmer you've already made yourself in the upper 1% of computer users. Since you're so familiar with the underlying architecture of the program it's very attractive just to design a UI that exposes a graphical interface to your functions rather than thinking about who your users are and how they want to accomplish their ultimate goals. The skills you've learned and the knowledge you've gained also make it difficult to sympathize with the needs of the average user because you're so unlike them.
As a UI designer this is a challenge for me as well. I end up knowing a lot more about how computers work, what their limitations are and how our code works under the covers because, like it or not, I need to design around that stuff sometimes. As a computer user I'm also much more advanced than the people who use my software.
I disagree with the statement that you can't be a good programmer and a good UI designer. It would be challenging and require a significant time investment but you'd just need to do the same thing that I do; keep in contact with users, ask them questions, and test your UI. By talking to users in interviews and focus groups and asking the right questions you can stay attuned to what their needs are. By conducting frequent and iterative usability studies you can test common use cases with real users and see what they understand and what they don't, find out why, and fix it. As a programmer, you don't need to be the person running this sort of research. However, if you want to be a good UI designer you should be consuming as much of it as you can and asking your company for more research data to help you improve.
Flaunting your law breaking through non-violent means is a method of civil disobedience but that's not what this guy (or most people who download music) was doing. He didn't get up and say "Copyright unfairly enriches the music industry at the cost of artists, the public and our cultural legacy. Take my CD of copyrighted songs and play it in protest and let the RIAA try and stop me." instead he sold lots and lots of CDs full of music he didn't have the right to use and got busted for it. Boo hoo.
Getting caught isn't the result of a failed attempt at civil disobedience. It's the point.
True, though usually that altering or abolishing is done through either political means or through civil disobediance. This guy was caught with 81,000 CDs that, at best, exist in a grey market. That's a bit like me saying that the 200 kilos of cocaine in my trunk is part of my plan to protest the war on drugs.
I'm not sure that mix-tape's shouldn't be something that we allow. It certainly sounds like there are benefits to the DJs, the artists, and the record companies but as long as it's (at this scale) a crime you need to accept that their are certain consequences to your actions. If you still feel that following your principles requires you to act contrary to the law then have some guts and be willing to take the punishment so that you can show society how unjust the whole situation is. But lets be clear, this is not an example of civil disobediance. This is someone with a profitable (though allegedly illegal) business who got busted.
I don't know if you can assume that your 1-2% of downloaders will come from the 10% of the population that are movie fanatics. It's just as likely that those 1-2% could have been infrequent movie purchasers who took advantage of the free cost of downloading to sample more movies than they would have if they had to pay money.
(I'm assuming you were talking about how you perceived the current situation and not proposing a plan to go after the movie fanatics as a method of activism. It wasn't clear.)
- Don't exaggerate stuff. Period.
when you were accussing somone who held an opinion different from your own of being a paid shill. Do you think that it's the norm for people who support Microsoft to be astroturfers. Me, I think it's an astroturfer would be a rather extreme example of a Microsoft supporter and hardly the norm.This is not specifically directed at you as I've seen this many times before but I'm tired of people being so narrow-minded as to think that anyone who disagrees with them must be a paid shill or astroturfer. As hard as it may be to believe some people just honestly don't agree with you on everything.
is the one that hasn't been usability tested yet.
from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question
"There is very little public information about requirements gathering, usability and user testing. In other words, how do you know whether the OLPC (i) will meet your users' needs and (ii) is easy enough for them to use? Have the target user groups been characterized? What ongoing plans do you have for this? I`d Like test the OLPC in Argentina, Please contct with me to know how. Thanks.
As far as I know, there are two local groups in Argentina with test boards (don't know if anybody has the 2B1/XO prototypes though). They are Ututo and Tuquito. I know Ututo had some explicit arrangements to let other people use/test the boards. If anybody knows about other groups (or about any local XOs) please let me know (or post in the OLPC Argentina pages. --Xavi 07:23, 6 December 2006 (EST)"
Before you go off spouting that you've designed a radical new UI that's better than anything else you might want to usability test it. Now I couldn't find anything on the link to Ututo and the link to Tuquito doesn't seem to have any English content but from the answer to the question it doesn't sound like there's a real plan for user testing a radical new UI that will be given to people who, according to the HIG are young and inexperienced.
To the designer's credit both of those criteria (young and inexperienced) give you the best possible scenario for introducing a new UI since children are more willing to play around and experiment and inexperienced computer users don't have the legacy of using an OS that worked any different from what you're giving them. Even with those advantages I'd hope that a project that is intended for a global audience would have more substantial usability testing plans than "lets give a couple to some people in Argentina and see what they think". I'm certainly not going to go all gaga over an untested UI that starts by throwing out decades of learning about how people interact with software.
NBC is owned by GE and GE advertises it's products on NBC so it's exactly the same. 20th Century Fox's movies are shown on Fox television and Fox recently got in trouble for that OJ interview based on a book published by a News Corp (Fox News' parent company) publisher. You'll also see ads for 20th Century Fox movies in the NY Post (owned by News Corp) so it's not just a TV thing either.
This is not an uncommon practice in any other industry. Google has done nothing wrong and the GP is right to say the only thing odd about this is they felt the need to respond at all.
Mike
- Guam
- The U.S. Virgin Islands
- American Samoa
- The Northern Mariana Islands
- The Midway Islands
- Wake Island
- Johnston Atoll
- Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands
- Kingman Reef
- Navassa Island
- and Palmyra Atoll
join Virginia, Minnesota, Indiana, Nebraska, and Missouri in their support of child pornography. (This post brought to you by the original letter, the list of US territories and Fox's boring "Standoff".)Exactly. The reason why this is so troubling is that the only evidence we have that the hacker even exists comes from law enforcement. Now there's also no evidence that they're making it all up but we need protections against this sort of thing (such as requiring the hacker to appear in court and testify in order for the evidence to be considered valid) or "my anonymous Turkish hacker friend told me" will be come the law enforcement equivalent of "sure I got laid, but she lives in Canada... and she's dead now...".
I'm not a lawyer so these sorts of protections may already exist but I find it odd that the judge even allowed this to proceed.
big? definitely. pointless? dunno, what about all this truth and justice stuff...
The pointless bit, I'd guess, would be due to a future president who persues an indictment being quickly bogged down constantly explaining how it wasn't partisan politicing to go after an ex-president for "protecting the country from the nasty terrists". It's kind of funny (in a "wow, I've underestimated the human capacity for evil" kind of way) that because the republicans went for a partisan and politically motivated impeachment of Clinton there's a perception that impeachment is a partisan and politically motivated process. Now, when we need it most, we can't use the impeachment process without being accused of doing it solely as political revenge for Clinton.
The visuals may be great but the AI sucks.
You know, some of us don't care for all the bells and whistles that make your precious chat clients unstable and buggy. Voice & Video support? That's a sure fire way to leave a memory footprint the size of Alaska on 350 million user's computers. ...and those grapes were sour anyway so I didn't even want them.
I think, the Segway will be my relief when I get old and can't walk as good as now. It should be a nice replacement for those grandma walking aids that must be used these days.
Now it makes sense. The Segway's market is that large group of elderly people who can't walk long distances but are able to stand for long periods of time.
"Somewhere between mobility and the Rascal Scooter? Consider Segway!"
I'm not sure where you're from, but nowhere in America is it against the law for any group to marry...
If a man can't find a woman to marry, that's his problem, not mine. Well, actually it IS mine, because even though I'm hetero I can't find a woman to marry.
Here's an idea, move to Boston and find a nice guy (or is marrying someone who's not of your preferred gender not a good option for you).
Thanks for the clarifying that. I'd love to see some of those studies you mentioned. Do you have a link?
You see, it was not the law that prevented this sort of behavior, it was an ethical motivation. People, in general, don't like to hurt or even disappoint others. They want to do right by them. When they are treated unethically in turn, that motivation disappears.
While I agree that the qualities you've listed make for a better business, both in terms of a better workplace as well as a business that is concerned more with the next 10 years than the next quarter, I have to disagree with the above statement. It makes it sound like your average worker is one bad meeting or one lousy review away from ripping you off. In my experience that's not the case. Most people I've worked with at least try to act honestly and fairly with others (if I've got enough anecdotes it proves something -- right?).
To tweak your point slightly I'd say that there's always a certain small percentage of the workforce that, if given the opportunity, will act unethically in order to achieve some larger (either personal or corporate) goal. The change in the U.S. workplace environment just gave those people the bad example they needed to justify their behavior. After all, if major business can crap all over their employees and enjoy record profits and AT&T can sell your information to the feds who cares if I crack my bosses password to make things a little easier (or to see the results of my review a few weeks early).
I think the key distinction though is that these employees were already the type of people that would do whatever they could get away with (and they've just seen the bar for "what you can get away with" ascend into the stratosphere) and not your typical office worker.
Let me make my point this way; do you agree that a WWII game where the characters were named after soldiers who died in WWII would be worse than a game without character names? In a WWII game without character names you're reenacting the horrors of war, maybe gleefully killing nameless civilians and desecrating villages but I tend to think if you knew that the civilians you were killing actually lived in that town and were killed you might pause.
As a personal example, I have no problem killing civilians in GTA games. If I get bored I might kill some civilians to get the cops to chase me. I've started playing the Godfather game and the first time I grabbed a civilian to kill them the guy begged for his life and I let him go. Now I notice that the people compliment me on the street and because of those two things I haven't been doing that same "kill the civilians to attract the cops" game.
In both cases the more real the characters got the less likely I am to feel good about killing them. You might say that I'm just fooling myself and that there's no difference between killing a sprite in a video game and a slightly fuller featured sprite but as technology improves we may face this more and more. In an extreme example, would we feel that a person who spent hours on a holodeck killing virtual representations of his friends and family was more like a video gamer blowing off steam or a psychopath rehearsing a killing spree? I'd be worried if he was killing virtual me.
More the difference between playing a game where you are a character based loosely on the main characters of popular movies (Vice City = Scarface) and playing a game where you are a participant in the reenaction of a mass murder.
Just wanted to repeat that. It's a very good point.
I think google's argument that changing the default search engine is difficult is undercut by the ad I see when I visit google.com with IE7. It has a big red arrow that points to the search bar in IE and says "Make Google your search engine in Internet Explorer" and has a button titled "Make Google my search". Sounds pretty easy to me.
"One important reason why developers can work for cheap in india is the prevelance of slave, indentured and child labor there. Because of a permanent underclass of slaves and near slaves the developers get all their needs for housing, food, clothing etc met dirt cheap. When your bricks are made by 14 year olds who have been sold into slavery it's pretty cheap to build a house."
Don't worry, Indy and Short Round will recover the Sankara stones, free the enslaved children and stop Mola Ram before he kills again.
"Also, hauling out the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a defense is kind of silly, because the original poster would probably site that as an example of a broken law. That basically represents an argument by appealing to authority, and is also a debating technique to use when you have no solid facts or reasoning to back you up."
His "appeal to authority" was a citation of the equal accommodation promised by the Civil Rights Act. According to American law an American restaurant owner is forbidden from discriminating on the basis of race (even though the restaurant is the owner's property).
Finally, an appeal to authority is only an example of a logical fallacy when the person or source in question is NOT a legitimate authority on the subject. Any sensible person could see that you only bolster your argument by citing an authoritative source. In this case, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is quite clearly a legitimate authority on whether or not an American restaurant owner can discriminate on the basis of race.