Sorry to be politically ignorant, but I've never heard of SinnFein, so I don't understand your analogy. Care to explain what they are and what their relation to the IRA is?
(I do, of course, know what the ALF is.) -- -jacob
The predictably dry American Heritage Dictionary says that a terrorist is a person who engages in terrorism, where terrorism is "The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons." PETA certainly has "ideological or political reasons" for their actions, but they have never advocated force or violence in achieving those ends. In fact, they strongly condemn it. The word "terrorist" really ought to be reserved for people who use terror as their means of doing things: think of the old version of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). They blew people up. All the time. Throwing paint on people who are wearing fur coats isn't terrorism, burning people alive is.
Seriously, don't be stupid. Calling PETA terrorists is like calling your high-school gym teacher a fascist. -- -jacob
But my right to say things in public places does not extend to my right to take things that are yours to say them. I am allowed to do a funny impression of you, but I am not allowed to steal your clothing and wear it while doing my funny impression to make it funnier. That is not, of course, an issue of free speech. The same thing is happening in the case at hand: PEatingTA has the right to make fun of PETA. They do not have the right to appropriate PETA's property to make their joke funnier. In the same way that 'toysrus.com' is Toys 'R Us's property, peta.org is PETA's property, they argue. That's not an issue of free speech. It's an issue of to what degree your name belongs to you. That's an interesting issue, but not an issue of free speech. -- -jacob
This case is not about the first amendment. If PETA had been suing peta.org to get them to stop parodying them, that would be a first amendment issue. However, PETA simply sued them to relinquish their name- they DID NOT say "you can't parody us."
This is the same as the old Toys 'R Us case where some guy registered toysrus.com. In the lawsuit that followed, it was established that since Toys 'R Us had established its name IRL, it deserved first crack at toysrus.com even if it wasn't fast enough to beat out the first person who thought of it. Same thing with PETA- PETA was an established organization, and it claims that it deserved first crack at PETA.org even though it wasn't fast enough to beat out the tasty animal eaters.
You may agree or disagree with that viewpoint, for for christ's sake, do NOT try to claim that somehow peta.org's first amendment rights are being violated. People who care about free speech do not like it when its meaning is diluted by every wanker who decides that any ruling that has anything vaguely to do with anybody saying anything constitutes a violation of freedom of speech.
(Disclaimer: I am an ethical vegan. On the other hand, I think that the PETA people are pretty much morons, though the "Got Beer?" thing was pretty damn funny. So there you go.) -- -jacob
From what I've heard, Al Gore has been much more publicly pro-Microsoft than George W. Bush. It's part of his whole "I like technology, layperson!" campaign. That isn't to say that Gore would be a bad president- I'll likely be voting for him myself, in fact- but it isn't fair to assign every belief you dislike to your political opponents or to scrub your political favorites into cute little cherubs. -- -jacob
Depends on what you mean by 'being cracked.' True, there is no way to recover a message encrypted with a one-time pad given only the ciphertext. That does not, however, mean that one-time pad-based encryption schemes are uncrackable. OTP systems in fact are notoriously hard to do properly because you must be absolutely sure 1) that your OTP is shared onlybetween the two parties involved and 2) that there is no way that anyone else could have that pad. 'Cracking' is still possible, it just means figuring out what the pad is (though you're far deeper into Mission: Impossible territory here than distributed.net typically gets).
In fact, all forms of encryption that I can think of at all are crackable, because they all work by creating some kind of secret (a one-time pad, a private key, shared session key, etc) and attempting to make it as difficult as possible to figure out what the message is without knowing the secret while making it as easy as possible to figure out the message given the secret. Which implies that cracking a security system is at most as difficult as figuring out what the secret is. You can make that tough, but you can't make it impossible, because somebody knows the secret because he/she can decrypt the messages.
By the way, somewhat off-topic: can anyone tell me why, in an OTP scheme, you can't use your pad once for data, and then once for transmitting a new pad? I'm no crypto expert, and I'm sure there's a problem with that, but I can't figure out what it is. -- -jacob
Mm. I should have responded more fully the first time. The reason the government regulates content is that the frequencies belong to the people. If the government sold you a license to broadcast at a particular frequency based on (say) first come first serve, and then you could use it any way you wanted, then you would own it- it would be your property, not the people's. Instead, the government makes you prove that you deserve to the one person who gets to broadcast at that range over everyone else who wants to, because you're becoming the custodian of a public resource. They (attempt to) make that decision based on how well you'll serve the public interest. That means saying, "If your content is not at such-and-such a level of public good, based on some method that we can measure, then you don't deserve to be the custodian of this slice of public property."
You can argue that the particular regulations that the FCC makes are not the best regulations for forwarding the public good, but it seems to me clear that they have have the right to influence content.
You'll notice that the laws governing print media are far less stringent than those on broadcast media. Newspapers and magazines can get away with way more than television stations can, simply because they don't use up any public resources. -- -jacob
Have you ever wondered why the Government thinks they own the airwaves? Why you need to have a license to broadcast radio and television signals? Think about it, WHO gave them the right to do this? What right does the Government have to just up and claim that the airwaves (which belong to EVERYBODY) are theirs and that they can control them and let whoever they want on there and not let on people who they don't like and who will broadcast the truth about the government.
Are you trolling, or are you serious? The government regulates broadcasting because if they didn't, the airwaves would be a big ball o' static and no one could use them for anything, including transmitting the Truth about the Government. That's why the FCC exists. It was not a plot against the citizens by the Man; it was created as a necessary regulatory body. -- -jacob
Hrm? No, it's just that when somebody says "web tax," that's generally taken to mean "a tax on using the web." Which this clearly isn't. I'm just saying that the headline (which comes to Slashdot via CNN) is bad for that reason.
(Now, why that's +5 informative is beyond me, but hey, I didn't do it.) -- -jacob
What do you know- the first thing I see after returning from the article submission screen is the exact article I submitted, posted with exactly the spin I feared it would get posted with.
The CNNfn article is misleading- they shouldn't have called it a "web tax," which to most of us means "tax on using the web." What the EU actually proposed was a value-added tax on goods and services, sold over the Internet by non-EU businesses, to customers inside the EU in order to level the playing field for EU-based companies that already have to charge a value-added tax. It is not, in the usual meaning of the word, a "web tax." Now you know. -- -jacob
Sorry, you just triggered my pet-peeve-o-meter. Nothing personal.
The phrase 'X is the most of all possible Y' is, err, the most annoying of all possible figures of speech.:) How can you possibly say that "whitespace is the silliest of all possible protests against [Python]"? Sure, it's a pretty silly protest, but the silliest possible? That's pretty severe, don't you think? In fact, there are much sillier complaints about Python, I'm sure. In fact, I think I'll take your post as a challenge to think of sillier arguments, and I accept. Here's a list:
Top Ten Sillier Things than Whitespace to Protest About Python
10. Using a language called 'Python' might give people a cavalier attitude towards snakes. 9. Python might not be Y2K compliant. 8. Object-oriented languages suxXxor. You have to use dots all over the place. 7. The Python interpreter doesn't automatically call the C preprocessor- you have to do it yourself. 6. Python is Turing-complete. I hate that! 5. MSVC has no idea how to compile it- can this possibly be a good language? 4. Clearly it was a language designed by perverts. 'Hey baby, wanna program my Python?' Sickos. 3. How could a guy named Guido possibly come up with a good language? 2. The way the code looks reminds me too much of CLR. Bad memories, man. 1. By taking a perfectly good language and naming it 'Python,' that's one less language that might become popular that could be called 'Ninja.'
So whitespace is, at the very most, the eleventh-silliest possible complaint against Python. There may be others- could it be possible that the set of complaints about Python has no silliest element? Further research into that topic is necessary, I think. (As is research into how this post relates in any way to what I think about Pike.) -- -jacob
Hrm, perhaps I was a bit too restricted- I shouldn't have said, "it doesn't prove it," I should have said, "it doesn't indicate it." On a personal level, of course, if I suspect that Napster makes album sales decline, then the finding would indicate in a fuzzy way that maybe I was right. But from the statistical point of view, finding that Napster usage going up correlated perfectly with album sales going down actually doesn't indicate at all anything else about Napster and album sales. If you were to find that they did correlate perfectly, all that would do is give you strong motivation to do a causation study. Correlations often turn out to be either coincidence or covariance on some third variable.
Actually, even if you showed that whenever and wherever Napster increased in usage, album sales at music stores dropped, you still wouldn't know whether or not Napster caused that sales drop. That's the funny thing about social statistics- there are jillions of things that seem obvious but aren't true. Social science has pretty much ruled that you can't prove causation with correlation ever. If you want to prove that Napster causes album sales to decline, you have have to actually isolate Napster as a variable apart from all other variables, manipulate it, and see what happens. Otherwise, you can't know for sure which way the correlation goes- if you correlate Napster and album sales, couldn't an opponent argue that if some external force caused album sales to decline (say, economic downturn, so the people don't have the money to buy the CD's anyway, for example), people would then turn to Napster to get the music they'd rather buy in the stores? In that case, the correlation would hold, but the causal link would actually be that declining album sales cause increased use of Napster.
I think the study is a lot worse. The Napster people can't back up what they said either, but they didn't say it in the context of a scientific study. Everybody knows that if I just make a statement ("Napster rescues babies from fires!") it isn't to be taken seriously unless I can back it up, even if sometimes people believe things a little more quickly than they ought. This study, on the other hand, misleads people into thinking that what they're claiming has, in fact, been backed up, when it actually hasn't. Much worse, I think, though propagating the argument that Napster helps CD sales is also irresponsible if you don't have anything to back you up.
Sigh. Mathematical proof relies on the notion of a formal system. It is great when you have a formal system. Alas, humankind has no formal system for talking about social structures- social scientists borrow from mathematics and statistics from time to time, but it's just not possible to know the axioms for social relationships. Without axioms, it isn't possible to do a formal proof. That's all there is to it. It isn't "sloppy thinking," it's a sloppy domain.
Problem with your methodology: it is just as likely to prove that using Napster hurts CD sales as it is to prove that studying political science hurts CD sales, or that computer science hurts CD sales, or anything else you can correlate with being a college student hurts CD sales. Off the top of my head, I would certainly do surveys at colleges to determine where college students were getting their music and compare that with survey data from non-college-students, with an eye towards file ripping and online music shopping. First I'd need to establish that college students are actually buying fewer CD's, which may or may not be true. Then I'd have to establish that people who aren't buying the CD's are getting the music through other sources (piracy). A possible study that comes to mind would be taking universities that have Napster and comparing them to those that don't in terms of music purchasing rates, controlling for neighborhood type and student body characteristics. That's just off the top of my head, though- there may be holes in that, and there could be a better way to do it anyway.
The point is, it really isn't adequate to do what the people who conducted this study did. It honest-to-goodness does not and cannot establish rigorously what they want to establish. If it turns out that there isn't a good way to determine what they want to determine, that doesn't suddenly make bad ways to determine things valid science.
True, "proof" in a social sciences context is different from "proof" in a mathematical context- you can't prove that Napster hurts album sales in the same way you can prove that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 on a right triangle. As you say, one must draw inferences that are much more sweeping. However, that does not mean that all forms of inference are equally valid. For example, "I believe statement X because of a long list of facts and observed phenomena that directly pertain to statement A (not statement B which is an awful lot like statement A)" is generally considered "proof" by social scientists, in that in the absence of somebody else explaining your data a different way (say, with statement C) or showing that some of your facts weren't actually true, we can consider statement A to be true. "I believe statement D because it seems on the face of it to be true" is not held in the same regard. Social scientists (and rational people, hopefully) will not consider statement D to be true, because there is no good reason to believe it.
To bring that back to the discussion of Napster, the study gives me good reason to believe that album sales are going down around universities and that this is counter to the trend of album sales going up. It makes me suspect that maybe online piracy is to blame, but it doesn't give me any facts that speak directly to that, demonstrating that online piracy is to blame rather than, say, students buying music online or being poorer or having less access to music stores than before or just not listening to music as much for whatever reason. So it gives me the first kind of inference for statement one, but only the second kind of inference for statement two. As such, we the study give us reason to believe that statement one is true, but doesn't give us reason to believe that statement two is true.
Okay: you don't understand what I'm saying at all. You suspect that the decline in album sales is due to Napster. You have your common-sense reasoning about why that might be true. You have what people who think about things for a living call "a hypothesis."
You have not proven it. It has not been proven. There is, at this point, no proof.
So, at this point, saying "See? Napster hurts album sales!" is a lie. If you want it not to be a lie, you must prove it.
A lot of people have been yelling about Hemos's comment that the study is FUD. That was my reaction too- "Not everything that goes against a particular belief system is FUD," I thought to myself, and got all ready to post a long diatribe about it.
Then I read the article in question. Here's what it says (my paraphrase): "CD sales around colleges have gone down, while CD sales elsewhere have gone up. Therefore, Napster hurts album sales."
The conclusion that Napster is to blame for the drop is completely unfounded. It was just made up. Even worse, it was tied to something that wasn't made up (ie the sales drop) in such a way that it seems on the face of it like a valid conclusion to make ("They did a study, and they found that Napster hurts album sales, see?"). That is FUD. It is a particularly bad kind of FUD. It would be sort of like Microsoft saying, "Windows 2000 didn't sell as well as expected among college students, and here's our study to prove it. Therefore, online piracy is having a demonstrable effect on our sales." It sounds almost like real science, but in fact it's a made-up lie to scare people and get your way.
That does not mean that Napster doesn't hurt CD sales. It just means that the study didn't prove it. If they wanted to prove it, they would have to actually do a followup study that actually analyzed why those sales dropped. Which they didn't do, so they can't legitimately say anything about it.
Apparently , a new computer virus has been engineered by a user of America Online that is unparalleled in its destructive capability. Other, more well-known viruses such as Stoned, Airwolf, and Michaelangelo pale in comparison to the prospects of this newest creation by a warped mentality.
What makes this virus so terrifying is the fact that no program needs to be exchanged for a new computer to be infected. It can be spread through the existing e-mail systems of the InterNet.
Luckily, there is one sure means of detecting what is now known as the "Good Times" virus. It always travels to new computers the same way - in a text e-mail message with the subject line reading simply "Good Times". Avoiding infection is easy once the file has been received - not reading it. The act of loading the file into the mail server's ASCII buffer causes the "Good Times" mainline program to initialize and execute.
The program is highly intelligent - it will send copies of itself to everyone whose e-mail address is contained in a received-mail file or a sent-mail file, if it can find one. It will then proceed to trash the computer it is running on.
The bottom line here is - if you receive a file with the subject line "Good TImes", delete it immediately! Do not read it! Rest assured that whoever's name was on the "From:" line was surely struck by the virus. Warn your friends and local system users of this newest threat to the InterNet! It could save them a lot of time and money.
The Good Times virus described by that message never existed. You can claim that the message itself is a virus, but then it wouldn't be the Good Times virus, it would be the "meta-Good Times virus." (And if I get you to repeat this description to your friends, you could call that the "meta-meta-Good-Times virus," and then they could spread the "meta-meta-meta-Good-Times virus" and so on... GEB, here we come! =])
Grin... I remember getting that one. It's pretty old, originally being a parody of the "Good Times" virus hoax. Ironically, the Good Times virus was purported to be a virus that you could get just by reading an infected e-mail, which would have the subject line "Good Times." It would do horrible things to your computer and send it out to all of your friends. At the time, people who were "in the know" laughed off the idea that a virus could actually do that, and the "Bad Times" joke was based on that idea.
And now, it turns out that Good Times was real after all, they just got the name wrong and called it early...
I'm installing a subspace harmonics dampener as we speak. Don't want to take any chances.
I don't go digging up people's emails myself, so I don't know what most isps do, but I do know that businesses often keep backups of everything going back a long time. IIRC, that's how the Microsoft memos got unearthed. They were deleted off the senders' and recipients' computers (and off the mail servers), but were still recoverable from the server backups. (I would be amazed if most isps didn't keep nightly backups on tape or something for a few weeks, at least, but I don't know so I can't say.)
In any event, the point is that unless you KNOW for sure that there isn't a backup or other record of anything anywhere on an unpredictable chain of computers, you can't say that your mail is unrecoverable. It's always going to hinge on a computer you can't control and probably don't know the configuration of. It's certainly totally naive to think that if I do my best to nuke the mail off my hard drive, that means nobody can read it anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to be politically ignorant, but I've never heard of SinnFein, so I don't understand your analogy. Care to explain what they are and what their relation to the IRA is?
(I do, of course, know what the ALF is.)
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-jacob
The predictably dry American Heritage Dictionary says that a terrorist is a person who engages in terrorism, where terrorism is "The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons." PETA certainly has "ideological or political reasons" for their actions, but they have never advocated force or violence in achieving those ends. In fact, they strongly condemn it. The word "terrorist" really ought to be reserved for people who use terror as their means of doing things: think of the old version of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). They blew people up. All the time. Throwing paint on people who are wearing fur coats isn't terrorism, burning people alive is.
Seriously, don't be stupid. Calling PETA terrorists is like calling your high-school gym teacher a fascist.
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-jacob
But my right to say things in public places does not extend to my right to take things that are yours to say them. I am allowed to do a funny impression of you, but I am not allowed to steal your clothing and wear it while doing my funny impression to make it funnier. That is not, of course, an issue of free speech. The same thing is happening in the case at hand: PEatingTA has the right to make fun of PETA. They do not have the right to appropriate PETA's property to make their joke funnier. In the same way that 'toysrus.com' is Toys 'R Us's property, peta.org is PETA's property, they argue. That's not an issue of free speech. It's an issue of to what degree your name belongs to you. That's an interesting issue, but not an issue of free speech.
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-jacob
Because PEatingTA got to peta.org first. PETA was a little slow in the domain-name game, but they're making up for it in volume... :)
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-jacob
PETA is not a terrorist group. They are banal, not dangerous. Far too corporate for that.
(Disclaimer: I am an ethical vegan. On the other hand, I think the PETA people are pretty much morons in general.)
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-jacob
This case is not about the first amendment. If PETA had been suing peta.org to get them to stop parodying them, that would be a first amendment issue. However, PETA simply sued them to relinquish their name- they DID NOT say "you can't parody us."
This is the same as the old Toys 'R Us case where some guy registered toysrus.com. In the lawsuit that followed, it was established that since Toys 'R Us had established its name IRL, it deserved first crack at toysrus.com even if it wasn't fast enough to beat out the first person who thought of it. Same thing with PETA- PETA was an established organization, and it claims that it deserved first crack at PETA.org even though it wasn't fast enough to beat out the tasty animal eaters.
You may agree or disagree with that viewpoint, for for christ's sake, do NOT try to claim that somehow peta.org's first amendment rights are being violated. People who care about free speech do not like it when its meaning is diluted by every wanker who decides that any ruling that has anything vaguely to do with anybody saying anything constitutes a violation of freedom of speech.
(Disclaimer: I am an ethical vegan. On the other hand, I think that the PETA people are pretty much morons, though the "Got Beer?" thing was pretty damn funny. So there you go.)
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-jacob
From what I've heard, Al Gore has been much more publicly pro-Microsoft than George W. Bush. It's part of his whole "I like technology, layperson!" campaign. That isn't to say that Gore would be a bad president- I'll likely be voting for him myself, in fact- but it isn't fair to assign every belief you dislike to your political opponents or to scrub your political favorites into cute little cherubs.
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-jacob
Actually, I think that a post along the lines of:
"Those things that you think of as bugs? Those are not bugs. They are actually hot grits. Which are in my pants."
would have been considerably less lame than the actual post made. Just my two cents.
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-jacob
Depends on what you mean by 'being cracked.' True, there is no way to recover a message encrypted with a one-time pad given only the ciphertext. That does not, however, mean that one-time pad-based encryption schemes are uncrackable. OTP systems in fact are notoriously hard to do properly because you must be absolutely sure 1) that your OTP is shared onlybetween the two parties involved and 2) that there is no way that anyone else could have that pad. 'Cracking' is still possible, it just means figuring out what the pad is (though you're far deeper into Mission: Impossible territory here than distributed.net typically gets).
In fact, all forms of encryption that I can think of at all are crackable, because they all work by creating some kind of secret (a one-time pad, a private key, shared session key, etc) and attempting to make it as difficult as possible to figure out what the message is without knowing the secret while making it as easy as possible to figure out the message given the secret. Which implies that cracking a security system is at most as difficult as figuring out what the secret is. You can make that tough, but you can't make it impossible, because somebody knows the secret because he/she can decrypt the messages.
By the way, somewhat off-topic:
can anyone tell me why, in an OTP scheme, you can't use your pad once for data, and then once for transmitting a new pad? I'm no crypto expert, and I'm sure there's a problem with that, but I can't figure out what it is.
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-jacob
Mm. I should have responded more fully the first time. The reason the government regulates content is that the frequencies belong to the people. If the government sold you a license to broadcast at a particular frequency based on (say) first come first serve, and then you could use it any way you wanted, then you would own it- it would be your property, not the people's. Instead, the government makes you prove that you deserve to the one person who gets to broadcast at that range over everyone else who wants to, because you're becoming the custodian of a public resource. They (attempt to) make that decision based on how well you'll serve the public interest. That means saying, "If your content is not at such-and-such a level of public good, based on some method that we can measure, then you don't deserve to be the custodian of this slice of public property."
You can argue that the particular regulations that the FCC makes are not the best regulations for forwarding the public good, but it seems to me clear that they have have the right to influence content.
You'll notice that the laws governing print media are far less stringent than those on broadcast media. Newspapers and magazines can get away with way more than television stations can, simply because they don't use up any public resources.
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-jacob
Are you trolling, or are you serious? The government regulates broadcasting because if they didn't, the airwaves would be a big ball o' static and no one could use them for anything, including transmitting the Truth about the Government. That's why the FCC exists. It was not a plot against the citizens by the Man; it was created as a necessary regulatory body.
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-jacob
Hrm? No, it's just that when somebody says "web tax," that's generally taken to mean "a tax on using the web." Which this clearly isn't. I'm just saying that the headline (which comes to Slashdot via CNN) is bad for that reason.
(Now, why that's +5 informative is beyond me, but hey, I didn't do it.)
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-jacob
What do you know- the first thing I see after returning from the article submission screen is the exact article I submitted, posted with exactly the spin I feared it would get posted with.
The CNNfn article is misleading- they shouldn't have called it a "web tax," which to most of us means "tax on using the web." What the EU actually proposed was a value-added tax on goods and services, sold over the Internet by non-EU businesses, to customers inside the EU in order to level the playing field for EU-based companies that already have to charge a value-added tax. It is not, in the usual meaning of the word, a "web tax." Now you know.
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-jacob
Sorry, you just triggered my pet-peeve-o-meter. Nothing personal.
:) How can you possibly say that "whitespace is the silliest of all possible protests against [Python]"? Sure, it's a pretty silly protest, but the silliest possible? That's pretty severe, don't you think? In fact, there are much sillier complaints about Python, I'm sure. In fact, I think I'll take your post as a challenge to think of sillier arguments, and I accept. Here's a list:
The phrase 'X is the most of all possible Y' is, err, the most annoying of all possible figures of speech.
Top Ten Sillier Things than Whitespace to Protest About Python
10. Using a language called 'Python' might give people a cavalier attitude towards snakes.
9. Python might not be Y2K compliant.
8. Object-oriented languages suxXxor. You have to use dots all over the place.
7. The Python interpreter doesn't automatically call the C preprocessor- you have to do it yourself.
6. Python is Turing-complete. I hate that!
5. MSVC has no idea how to compile it- can this possibly be a good language?
4. Clearly it was a language designed by perverts. 'Hey baby, wanna program my Python?' Sickos.
3. How could a guy named Guido possibly come up with a good language?
2. The way the code looks reminds me too much of CLR. Bad memories, man.
1. By taking a perfectly good language and naming it 'Python,' that's one less language that might become popular that could be called 'Ninja.'
So whitespace is, at the very most, the eleventh-silliest possible complaint against Python. There may be others- could it be possible that the set of complaints about Python has no silliest element? Further research into that topic is necessary, I think. (As is research into how this post relates in any way to what I think about Pike.)
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-jacob
Hrm, perhaps I was a bit too restricted- I shouldn't have said, "it doesn't prove it," I should have said, "it doesn't indicate it." On a personal level, of course, if I suspect that Napster makes album sales decline, then the finding would indicate in a fuzzy way that maybe I was right. But from the statistical point of view, finding that Napster usage going up correlated perfectly with album sales going down actually doesn't indicate at all anything else about Napster and album sales. If you were to find that they did correlate perfectly, all that would do is give you strong motivation to do a causation study. Correlations often turn out to be either coincidence or covariance on some third variable.
Actually, even if you showed that whenever and wherever Napster increased in usage, album sales at music stores dropped, you still wouldn't know whether or not Napster caused that sales drop. That's the funny thing about social statistics- there are jillions of things that seem obvious but aren't true. Social science has pretty much ruled that you can't prove causation with correlation ever. If you want to prove that Napster causes album sales to decline, you have have to actually isolate Napster as a variable apart from all other variables, manipulate it, and see what happens. Otherwise, you can't know for sure which way the correlation goes- if you correlate Napster and album sales, couldn't an opponent argue that if some external force caused album sales to decline (say, economic downturn, so the people don't have the money to buy the CD's anyway, for example), people would then turn to Napster to get the music they'd rather buy in the stores? In that case, the correlation would hold, but the causal link would actually be that declining album sales cause increased use of Napster.
Social statistics are very subtle things.
I think the study is a lot worse. The Napster people can't back up what they said either, but they didn't say it in the context of a scientific study. Everybody knows that if I just make a statement ("Napster rescues babies from fires!") it isn't to be taken seriously unless I can back it up, even if sometimes people believe things a little more quickly than they ought. This study, on the other hand, misleads people into thinking that what they're claiming has, in fact, been backed up, when it actually hasn't. Much worse, I think, though propagating the argument that Napster helps CD sales is also irresponsible if you don't have anything to back you up.
Sigh. Mathematical proof relies on the notion of a formal system. It is great when you have a formal system. Alas, humankind has no formal system for talking about social structures- social scientists borrow from mathematics and statistics from time to time, but it's just not possible to know the axioms for social relationships. Without axioms, it isn't possible to do a formal proof. That's all there is to it. It isn't "sloppy thinking," it's a sloppy domain.
Problem with your methodology: it is just as likely to prove that using Napster hurts CD sales as it is to prove that studying political science hurts CD sales, or that computer science hurts CD sales, or anything else you can correlate with being a college student hurts CD sales. Off the top of my head, I would certainly do surveys at colleges to determine where college students were getting their music and compare that with survey data from non-college-students, with an eye towards file ripping and online music shopping. First I'd need to establish that college students are actually buying fewer CD's, which may or may not be true. Then I'd have to establish that people who aren't buying the CD's are getting the music through other sources (piracy). A possible study that comes to mind would be taking universities that have Napster and comparing them to those that don't in terms of music purchasing rates, controlling for neighborhood type and student body characteristics. That's just off the top of my head, though- there may be holes in that, and there could be a better way to do it anyway.
The point is, it really isn't adequate to do what the people who conducted this study did. It honest-to-goodness does not and cannot establish rigorously what they want to establish. If it turns out that there isn't a good way to determine what they want to determine, that doesn't suddenly make bad ways to determine things valid science.
True, "proof" in a social sciences context is different from "proof" in a mathematical context- you can't prove that Napster hurts album sales in the same way you can prove that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 on a right triangle. As you say, one must draw inferences that are much more sweeping. However, that does not mean that all forms of inference are equally valid. For example, "I believe statement X because of a long list of facts and observed phenomena that directly pertain to statement A (not statement B which is an awful lot like statement A)" is generally considered "proof" by social scientists, in that in the absence of somebody else explaining your data a different way (say, with statement C) or showing that some of your facts weren't actually true, we can consider statement A to be true. "I believe statement D because it seems on the face of it to be true" is not held in the same regard. Social scientists (and rational people, hopefully) will not consider statement D to be true, because there is no good reason to believe it.
To bring that back to the discussion of Napster, the study gives me good reason to believe that album sales are going down around universities and that this is counter to the trend of album sales going up. It makes me suspect that maybe online piracy is to blame, but it doesn't give me any facts that speak directly to that, demonstrating that online piracy is to blame rather than, say, students buying music online or being poorer or having less access to music stores than before or just not listening to music as much for whatever reason. So it gives me the first kind of inference for statement one, but only the second kind of inference for statement two. As such, we the study give us reason to believe that statement one is true, but doesn't give us reason to believe that statement two is true.
Okay: you don't understand what I'm saying at all. You suspect that the decline in album sales is due to Napster. You have your common-sense reasoning about why that might be true. You have what people who think about things for a living call "a hypothesis."
You have not proven it. It has not been proven. There is, at this point, no proof.
So, at this point, saying "See? Napster hurts album sales!" is a lie. If you want it not to be a lie, you must prove it.
A lot of people have been yelling about Hemos's comment that the study is FUD. That was my reaction too- "Not everything that goes against a particular belief system is FUD," I thought to myself, and got all ready to post a long diatribe about it.
Then I read the article in question. Here's what it says (my paraphrase): "CD sales around colleges have gone down, while CD sales elsewhere have gone up. Therefore, Napster hurts album sales."
The conclusion that Napster is to blame for the drop is completely unfounded. It was just made up. Even worse, it was tied to something that wasn't made up (ie the sales drop) in such a way that it seems on the face of it like a valid conclusion to make ("They did a study, and they found that Napster hurts album sales, see?"). That is FUD. It is a particularly bad kind of FUD. It would be sort of like Microsoft saying, "Windows 2000 didn't sell as well as expected among college students, and here's our study to prove it. Therefore, online piracy is having a demonstrable effect on our sales." It sounds almost like real science, but in fact it's a made-up lie to scare people and get your way.
That does not mean that Napster doesn't hurt CD sales. It just means that the study didn't prove it. If they wanted to prove it, they would have to actually do a followup study that actually analyzed why those sales dropped. Which they didn't do, so they can't legitimately say anything about it.
From the Good Times virus hoax FAQ, the original message announcing the Good Times virus read:
Thought you might like to know...
Apparently , a new computer virus has been engineered by a user of America Online that is
unparalleled in its destructive capability. Other, more well-known viruses such as Stoned,
Airwolf, and Michaelangelo pale in comparison to the prospects of this newest creation by a
warped mentality.
What makes this virus so terrifying is the fact that no program needs to be exchanged for a new
computer to be infected. It can be spread through the existing e-mail systems of the InterNet.
Luckily, there is one sure means of detecting what is now known as the "Good Times" virus. It
always travels to new computers the same way - in a text e-mail message with the subject line
reading simply "Good Times". Avoiding infection is easy once the file has been received - not
reading it. The act of loading the file into the mail server's ASCII buffer causes the "Good
Times" mainline program to initialize and execute.
The program is highly intelligent - it will send copies of itself to everyone whose e-mail
address is contained in a received-mail file or a sent-mail file, if it can find one. It will
then proceed to trash the computer it is running on.
The bottom line here is - if you receive a file with the subject line "Good TImes", delete it
immediately! Do not read it! Rest assured that whoever's name was on the "From:" line was
surely struck by the virus. Warn your friends and local system users of this newest threat to
the InterNet! It could save them a lot of time and money.
The Good Times virus described by that message never existed. You can claim that the message itself is a virus, but then it wouldn't be the Good Times virus, it would be the "meta-Good Times virus." (And if I get you to repeat this description to your friends, you could call that the "meta-meta-Good-Times virus," and then they could spread the "meta-meta-meta-Good-Times virus" and so on... GEB, here we come! =])
Grin... I remember getting that one. It's pretty old, originally being a parody of the "Good Times" virus hoax. Ironically, the Good Times virus was purported to be a virus that you could get just by reading an infected e-mail, which would have the subject line "Good Times." It would do horrible things to your computer and send it out to all of your friends. At the time, people who were "in the know" laughed off the idea that a virus could actually do that, and the "Bad Times" joke was based on that idea.
And now, it turns out that Good Times was real after all, they just got the name wrong and called it early...
I'm installing a subspace harmonics dampener as we speak. Don't want to take any chances.
I don't go digging up people's emails myself, so I don't know what most isps do, but I do know that businesses often keep backups of everything going back a long time. IIRC, that's how the Microsoft memos got unearthed. They were deleted off the senders' and recipients' computers (and off the mail servers), but were still recoverable from the server backups. (I would be amazed if most isps didn't keep nightly backups on tape or something for a few weeks, at least, but I don't know so I can't say.)
In any event, the point is that unless you KNOW for sure that there isn't a backup or other record of anything anywhere on an unpredictable chain of computers, you can't say that your mail is unrecoverable. It's always going to hinge on a computer you can't control and probably don't know the configuration of. It's certainly totally naive to think that if I do my best to nuke the mail off my hard drive, that means nobody can read it anymore.