This guy is going on about how MD5 is designed for speed; but really all hashing algorithms are designed for speed. When they wrote it, they didn't think there were any weaknesses; and really salting makes generating a password list a huge brute force effort. This is all stuff we know already.
Why is it stupid? according to you, it's stupid because you can't get it for free, right? well, it is not stupid at all. You don't have any rights to other people's works.
No, it's stupid because they want to continue to make money on what they did ages ago. I want to continue to make money on an IT infrastructure I set up for a business I worked for 5 years ago-- they're still using the server I installed some software on, so they're still benefiting from the work I did, and so they should still be paying me royalties, right? Just like Disney released Beauty and the Beast in 1991, and in 2006 has been making money from it for 15 years; originally the copyright term was 14, so now I can make an argument. Cinderella was released by Disney on February 15, 1950, and is now reaching its 61st release anniversary.
Your children's children's children will continue to pay for the work I've done, because for someone else to do all the work of copying and distributing it they must pay me simply because "it" exists, even though I am not putting in any effort to the distribution of the product anymore. Right?
Disney's core business should be Disney Land
You don't have the right to dictate a business strategy to a business. The most you can do is not buy their products.
"Should" and "is decreed as..." are two different things. Disney's production of Cinderella will always be identified with Disney; if they want to keep making money off it, they can. They don't suddenly become "another place using Cinderella," because they're the ORIGINAL place, and that's always a part of Disney. That they wouldn't have exclusive right to do so for the past 46 years had they not pushed Congress to effectively strike the "Limited" term from the copyright law our forefathers established in this country would not have changed the identity of Disney's Cinderella.
Tetris is quite old, and old things become part of our culture.
So? who says you don't have to pay for things in our culture?
You are not qualified to have this discussion; and to fully carry it out would exceed the capabilities of this forum. The truths evident here are deeply philosophical, and you will not find a solid, concrete answer here-- and likely not ever. The practicality of business is that harm to society is always more profitable; this doesn't mean businesses should be stripped of all rights (it'd be beneficial to society if everything was free; but such a society breaks the business case for everything, and then breaks down), but it does mean that a balance is needed. Whether various possible fulcrum points are set based more on "entitlement" or "rights" or "what is better for society as a whole" is not a directly scientific issue; the last case can be argued as economics, but that is not an easy or exact science.
It is an evident truth that all of Russia is made better by the Korobeinke being in proper public domain. In Ireland, it is an evident truth that the Irish Washerwoman song being free for performance and interpretation by all enhances their culture. In America, we have no such culture, save for one or two old folk songs, and nothing over a century old-- not since Disney started its tirade against copyright expiration. I would like to see Disney operate under normal copyright terms; I don't think it'd break them. I don't have a desire to see Disney destroyed. That said, Disney is responsible for a lot of this shit; they get to be a target because they ARE the evil overlord in this play.
We're allowed to perform Shakespeare and The Crucible and other old plays freely; we're not allowed to perform Beauty and the Beast (yes, this is a play, Disney owns it) without paying a lot of money. Pink Floyd's songs should be folk songs by now, covered by lots of cover b
This is why we have copyright law; because the data is not a tangible asset
Let it be written, spoken, and taken as true that we cannot tangibly demonstrate somebody playing The Legend of Zelda on Wii, or listening to An die Musik by Franz Schubert, or reading a copy of 1984 by George Orwell on their Kindle. Such things are intangible and cannot be demonstrated, examined, or proven; they can only be known by the true believer in the church of the imaginary.
In law, tangibility is the attribute of being detectable with the senses.
In criminal law, one of the elements of an offense of larceny is that the stolen property must be tangible.
In the context of intellectual property, expression in tangible form is one of the requirements for copyright protection.
To copyright something, it must be tangible, or rather it must be expressed in tangible form. You must be able to see, hear, feel, smell, or touch the damn thing, somehow. By this reason, things like license keys and such are technically tangible, but I disagree with that mainly because they're really not something sensory and we only represent them via ASCII; however, the actual program itself is interacted with directly, has configuration files, can be run and moved around, attached to, or even exports a user interface. The source code is inherently a tangible thing because it's meant to be human-readable text; a binary dump of a compiled executable I disagree with as being demonstrated tangible, but when you run the program and you get a talking dog and an evil rabbit wandering around on your screen it's demonstrated that this program is tangible and you have it.
CPU is always 100% utilized or 0; however, as you get one sample point every 20ms or 50ms, what you get is the average: how much actual time was used, how much was spent idle? When I press a key, my CPU spikes to 100% for a few thousand cycles out of 2.9 billion per second.
Disney extended the copyright term because they wanted to not lose copyright on their characters. It was originally something like 14 years. This is stupid; and doubly so since Disney still puts out cool shit. It's time Beauty and the Beast goes into the public domain, while people still pay every 10 years for a Disney official collector's edition from the vault. People still pay for 1984 when you can read it for free.
Disney's core business should be Disney Land (because hey, Cinderella is authentic Disney, and the props there are pure Disney, even if someone else is ripping them off) and Pixar; sales of old films should count on the value of authentic Disney collector's edition reprints in Blu-Ray/HDDVD/BetaMax/DVD/whatever and the fact that the new printing is copyrighted even though the old one isn't. If you copy the latest digital remaster, you deserve to get owned; if you're selling copies of the 15 year old version, that's fine. Disney still owns the master films and master tracks as a trade secret, too.
Tetris is quite old, and old things become part of our culture. The reason patent and copyright law used to release shit to public domain after 14 years--and trademark law still caveats a "Genericized Trademark" if your trademark falls into common use (i.e. Bandaid, Photoshop--Adobe HATES when people call shit "Photoshopping" because they'll lose their trademark--etc)--is to protect our culture from this sort of death-grip. We're allowed to perform Shakespeare and The Crucible and other old plays freely; we're not allowed to perform Beauty and the Beast (yes, this is a play, Disney owns it) without paying a lot of money. Pink Floyd's songs should be folk songs by now, covered by lots of cover bands.
The simple fact here is if you actually slap them with that, and the judge sides with you, and it gets appealed, and the appellate sides with you, and it goes high enough that the supreme court has to deny taking the case.... you can countersue for lawyer fees. Might not get them, but oh well. And also, The Tetris Company will basically collapse because they can't sue anyone anymore. Oh, and also, everyone they took down before can sue on lost income and damages (if they were making money), and legal fees, and abuse of the legal system; it'd be a class action suit probably. They would get owned pretty hard even without a class action suit, just because now there's a legal case saying, "Yeah, 99% of your business activity is suing people... um, you're not allowed to do that now."
I think the idea is there's some method for taking a munged picture and going, "Watch, I'll run an algorithm and... oh, look, a message with a hole cut in it where your ex-girlfriend's head is sucking that black man's cock..."
I was certain the P value was the direct probability. This coming from someone who got a grand total of 4 questions wrong on all tests taking in statistics and got every single question on the final right. Maybe it's been too long.
Ah that's strange, Wikipedia effectively claims the P value and the alpha value are the same:
Traditionally, one rejects the null hypothesis if the p-value is smaller than or equal to the significance level,[2] often represented by the Greek letter (alpha).
(Well, okay, the alpha value is effectively meaningless and stands for "this is the number I want to see before I'll believe it." It has nothing to do with the actual data.)
One day you don't have The Legend of Zelda: Return of the Hero of Time. The next day you do. You have now acquired a tangible asset. Your fat ass is sitting in front of the Wii eating cheesy poofs and dancing like a retarded stepchild.
You have now acquired a tangible asset, to which you have paid somewhere in the distribution line a value that in part went to the merchant, part to the distributor carrying it to the merchant, and part to the developer, part of which goes to the laborer who created that asset (programmer).
Oh, wait, no you didn't. You didn't give anyone any money. You skipped the merchant and the distributor; they didn't produce any work, they just lost business. The creator of the original good did some work-- a company that created an environment conducive to creating the game-- and they didn't get paid for one copy of the work landing in someone's hands.
Your argument is that somehow getting your hands on a tangible asset that somebody else produced without putting in anything in trade to compensate the original producer is not related to stealing in any way. My argument is if we could all torrent everything on the third day of release, who the hell would buy on release day? You're not allowed to return CDs or DVDs because people were buying them, copying to the computer, and returning; this is apparently not "stealing" either.
You're pretty well spoken for someone who can't terminate a paragraph with a period, or capitalize.
This opened on a bleeding heart cry out over a tragedy that's a simple statistic; people die every day, children die every day, and children are starving to death in other countries. This guy is not remarkable in any respect and not worth special comment.
I'm bored of this. As a final closing, since you want to point out society as an "emergent phenomenon," I point you to H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine" for a read. The original, poorly written ramblings version... Amazon gives it away free on Kindle. His explanation for the state of society is an eventual lack of need for intelligence, which produced the evolutionary split and the completely primitive societies in the book. There's your emergent behavior.
Wow. This is a troll, right? You can't possibly believe that justifying copying a file which is hurting nobody is the same as killing someone?
Equivalence of argument isn't necessary for the arguments to be of the same logical structure. "Your mom fed you candy" and "The agent gave you a briefcase bomb" are two different things, but the sentence structures are the same; "The agent blew you up with a bomb" is a different sentence structure, even though it compares better with the second sentence.
This is the essence of a strawman argument, by the way: we produce two things that look to be on the same magnitude, maybe similar in some way, but logically the processes don't actually reflect each other. My argument is sort of the reversal: the arguments appear wildly different, but in truth they're roughly the same concept.
So basically, while there is plenty of evidence that people who download more music buy more music, and that downloads often lead to eventual sales, there is no evidence that anyone who downloaded it WOULD have paid for it, but you're going to argue such anyway? Because frankly, all the evidence is on my side, even if none of it says precisely what I would like it to say (and I am willing to admit my own bias.) None of it says even vaguely what you would like it to say.
There's plenty of evidence that aspartame is highly toxic too. In fact I'm pretty sure it is; but there's also plenty of evidence that it isn't. But then, this is a strawman argument: the reasons that these conflicting bits of evidence exist for aspartame have absolutely nothing in common with this particular problem.
I've studied statistics, so this may be a little out there for you. What I'm talking about here is called selection bias and self-selection bias. On one hand, we have the selection bias of "observer's bias" where I point out to you that I know a lot of people who download tons of music and talk about how, lol, you don't pay for music, are you stupid? This argument gets complex because these are different people from the ones that tend to buy: those people tend to download a song or two here or there to evaluate bands, not torrent gigs and gigs and gigs of thousands of mp3s.
Self-selection bias, on the other hand, comes when you start asking people things like, "Well if you couldn't download, would you buy it?" It's where you get answers like, "Well, no, I really wouldn't have anyway," when the real answer is more like, "Uh, eventually. I mean I'd have to. or copy it from a friend I guess. I'd get it somehow." People who are willing to invest more time than money into acquiring something are likely to say, "No I wouldn't buy," but also to some degree likely to buy to avoid the hassle of borrowing a CD from a friend (maybe it's a Daft Punk CD, so this isn't feasible) if they can't download it.
Further, you can't study this because you can't make it impossible to download: anyone who isn't going to download is going to self-impose the not downloading thing on themselves, which makes them a different type of person, and again this comes down to self-selection. In the end, we have plenty of studies we can talk about, but no actual way to get anything concrete.
In other words... we can do nothing except constantly argue about it.
When it comes down to it, obviously the good has a value to you. If you're not going to cough up something, you shouldn't have the good;
You have still not actually shown this in any way. When you can show that I shouldn't have something simply because I can't or won't pay for it and for no other reason then you will have an argument.
Your argument speaks vaguely of entitlement. You can't or won't pay for it, but that doesn't mean you don't have a God-given right to it? I suppose the counter-argument might come in the form of "well nobody else has to pay for me to have it," but
Oh, that. Semicolons are a valid way to separate a list. In this case, I don't want to play [the game of Go, Geometry, and Philosophy]; but rather [the game of Go], [Geometry], and [Philosophy]. The common correct use for this is to separate a list containing commons, something that people fail at routinely. Think about the following five lists:
Hash browns, biscuits, a bacon, egg, and cheese bagel, bacon, and sausage.
Hash browns; biscuits; a bacon, egg, and cheese bagel; bacon; and sausage.
Hash browns, biscuits, a bagel, bacon, and sausage.
Hash browns, biscuits, a bagel with cream cheese, bacon, and sausage.
Hash browns; biscuits; a bagel with cream cheese; bacon; and sausage.
List (1) is simply incorrect. List (4) is correct technically, but somewhat ambiguous. List (5) is also correct, and not ambiguous.
What do you do with a B.A. in English? What is my life going to be? Four years in college--and plenty of knowledge!--have earned me this useless degree!... and the ability to annoy people on Slashdot who think they're grammar nazis.
To be fair, I could state this as "Geometry, Philosophy, and the game of Go" to remove all ambiguity. In fact, I like the way that flows mentally more ("the game of Go" is too much to process up front, but leading out it flows naturally in the mind). I think I'll change that.
I would argue that where there is no potential loss of profit, there has been no harm and thus there is no justification for any charges, especially criminal ones. I believe this to be the prevailing mindset here but I have no actual figures to back this up.
This is what I'm talking about. That's a fancy argument and it's the same argument as executing all cancer patients because "they're going to die anyway": on one side you'll have statistics about how maybe chemo will save them, or extend their life for X months/years, or something; on the other you have arguments that all that stuff is fancy and usually just makes them sicker for a few more months and then they die.
Here we have "Well if I wouldn't have paid, and You wouldn't have paid, then obviously this isn't a problem!" arguments that come down to questions like... oh I don't know, you downloaded it didn't you? 2 months down the line, would you still download it? If yes, then after 2 months of wanting it would you just go ahead and throw the $1 for the track off Amazon, or the $10 for the whole CD? We can make up numbers for this or try to find data; but really there's a hell of a lot of selection bias, and the data is crap. All we can do is constantly argue about it.
When it comes down to it, obviously the good has a value to you. If you're not going to cough up something, you shouldn't have the good; depriving you of an MP3 file containing somebody else's work isn't wrong... unless you happen to have paid for it (look if you buy from GetYourTunes.com and it turns out they're a pirate reseller, they're responsible for coughing up the cash; you should be compensated somehow, either by keeping the product or by having your money returned. Caveats for willful conspiracy to commit infringement, etc etc). If you want it so bad, pay for it out of your beer money.
When you make a copy and give it away you're putting yourself in the chain where you don't belong. Hell, what if you didn't download it for free? Do you want it that bad that you'd pay for it? (the answer is invariably "no, not really, so it's okay for me to download it 'cause I wouldn't have bought it anyway!")
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This guy is going on about how MD5 is designed for speed; but really all hashing algorithms are designed for speed. When they wrote it, they didn't think there were any weaknesses; and really salting makes generating a password list a huge brute force effort. This is all stuff we know already.
Patricia Trie with pointers into compressed data, compress hashes in blocks. It's still a lot.
This is stupid
Why is it stupid? according to you, it's stupid because you can't get it for free, right? well, it is not stupid at all. You don't have any rights to other people's works.
No, it's stupid because they want to continue to make money on what they did ages ago. I want to continue to make money on an IT infrastructure I set up for a business I worked for 5 years ago-- they're still using the server I installed some software on, so they're still benefiting from the work I did, and so they should still be paying me royalties, right? Just like Disney released Beauty and the Beast in 1991, and in 2006 has been making money from it for 15 years; originally the copyright term was 14, so now I can make an argument. Cinderella was released by Disney on February 15, 1950, and is now reaching its 61st release anniversary.
Your children's children's children will continue to pay for the work I've done, because for someone else to do all the work of copying and distributing it they must pay me simply because "it" exists, even though I am not putting in any effort to the distribution of the product anymore. Right?
Disney's core business should be Disney Land
You don't have the right to dictate a business strategy to a business. The most you can do is not buy their products.
"Should" and "is decreed as..." are two different things. Disney's production of Cinderella will always be identified with Disney; if they want to keep making money off it, they can. They don't suddenly become "another place using Cinderella," because they're the ORIGINAL place, and that's always a part of Disney. That they wouldn't have exclusive right to do so for the past 46 years had they not pushed Congress to effectively strike the "Limited" term from the copyright law our forefathers established in this country would not have changed the identity of Disney's Cinderella.
Tetris is quite old, and old things become part of our culture.
So? who says you don't have to pay for things in our culture?
You are not qualified to have this discussion; and to fully carry it out would exceed the capabilities of this forum. The truths evident here are deeply philosophical, and you will not find a solid, concrete answer here-- and likely not ever. The practicality of business is that harm to society is always more profitable; this doesn't mean businesses should be stripped of all rights (it'd be beneficial to society if everything was free; but such a society breaks the business case for everything, and then breaks down), but it does mean that a balance is needed. Whether various possible fulcrum points are set based more on "entitlement" or "rights" or "what is better for society as a whole" is not a directly scientific issue; the last case can be argued as economics, but that is not an easy or exact science.
It is an evident truth that all of Russia is made better by the Korobeinke being in proper public domain. In Ireland, it is an evident truth that the Irish Washerwoman song being free for performance and interpretation by all enhances their culture. In America, we have no such culture, save for one or two old folk songs, and nothing over a century old-- not since Disney started its tirade against copyright expiration. I would like to see Disney operate under normal copyright terms; I don't think it'd break them. I don't have a desire to see Disney destroyed. That said, Disney is responsible for a lot of this shit; they get to be a target because they ARE the evil overlord in this play.
We're allowed to perform Shakespeare and The Crucible and other old plays freely; we're not allowed to perform Beauty and the Beast (yes, this is a play, Disney owns it) without paying a lot of money. Pink Floyd's songs should be folk songs by now, covered by lots of cover b
This is why we have copyright law; because the data is not a tangible asset
Let it be written, spoken, and taken as true that we cannot tangibly demonstrate somebody playing The Legend of Zelda on Wii, or listening to An die Musik by Franz Schubert, or reading a copy of 1984 by George Orwell on their Kindle. Such things are intangible and cannot be demonstrated, examined, or proven; they can only be known by the true believer in the church of the imaginary.
To copyright something, it must be tangible, or rather it must be expressed in tangible form. You must be able to see, hear, feel, smell, or touch the damn thing, somehow. By this reason, things like license keys and such are technically tangible, but I disagree with that mainly because they're really not something sensory and we only represent them via ASCII; however, the actual program itself is interacted with directly, has configuration files, can be run and moved around, attached to, or even exports a user interface. The source code is inherently a tangible thing because it's meant to be human-readable text; a binary dump of a compiled executable I disagree with as being demonstrated tangible, but when you run the program and you get a talking dog and an evil rabbit wandering around on your screen it's demonstrated that this program is tangible and you have it.
CPU is always 100% utilized or 0; however, as you get one sample point every 20ms or 50ms, what you get is the average: how much actual time was used, how much was spent idle? When I press a key, my CPU spikes to 100% for a few thousand cycles out of 2.9 billion per second.
You're describing Zinga; and originality should be protected for a limited term. Limited.
ReactOS is the clone of MS Windows. Linux is a clone of UNIX, which is far older than Windows.
Disney extended the copyright term because they wanted to not lose copyright on their characters. It was originally something like 14 years. This is stupid; and doubly so since Disney still puts out cool shit. It's time Beauty and the Beast goes into the public domain, while people still pay every 10 years for a Disney official collector's edition from the vault. People still pay for 1984 when you can read it for free.
Disney's core business should be Disney Land (because hey, Cinderella is authentic Disney, and the props there are pure Disney, even if someone else is ripping them off) and Pixar; sales of old films should count on the value of authentic Disney collector's edition reprints in Blu-Ray/HDDVD/BetaMax/DVD/whatever and the fact that the new printing is copyrighted even though the old one isn't. If you copy the latest digital remaster, you deserve to get owned; if you're selling copies of the 15 year old version, that's fine. Disney still owns the master films and master tracks as a trade secret, too.
Tetris is quite old, and old things become part of our culture. The reason patent and copyright law used to release shit to public domain after 14 years--and trademark law still caveats a "Genericized Trademark" if your trademark falls into common use (i.e. Bandaid, Photoshop--Adobe HATES when people call shit "Photoshopping" because they'll lose their trademark--etc)--is to protect our culture from this sort of death-grip. We're allowed to perform Shakespeare and The Crucible and other old plays freely; we're not allowed to perform Beauty and the Beast (yes, this is a play, Disney owns it) without paying a lot of money. Pink Floyd's songs should be folk songs by now, covered by lots of cover bands.
The simple fact here is if you actually slap them with that, and the judge sides with you, and it gets appealed, and the appellate sides with you, and it goes high enough that the supreme court has to deny taking the case.... you can countersue for lawyer fees. Might not get them, but oh well. And also, The Tetris Company will basically collapse because they can't sue anyone anymore. Oh, and also, everyone they took down before can sue on lost income and damages (if they were making money), and legal fees, and abuse of the legal system; it'd be a class action suit probably. They would get owned pretty hard even without a class action suit, just because now there's a legal case saying, "Yeah, 99% of your business activity is suing people... um, you're not allowed to do that now."
If Atari tried that, Nintendo would have put them in atari immediately.
The best part is you could make a Tetris game with the Tetris music, because it was Korobeinke and Johann Sebastian Bach.
But "Tetrada" Is a portmanteau of "tetra" and "da." Tetris Holdings' trademark on fou-tennis (Tet[ra][tenn]is) applies to four-yes (Tetra, da?).
Like accelerating the version number major releases suddenly makes the release cycle better. More bugs?
I think the idea is there's some method for taking a munged picture and going, "Watch, I'll run an algorithm and... oh, look, a message with a hole cut in it where your ex-girlfriend's head is sucking that black man's cock..."
The company, not the device. Gates didn't invent a damn thing.
I was certain the P value was the direct probability. This coming from someone who got a grand total of 4 questions wrong on all tests taking in statistics and got every single question on the final right. Maybe it's been too long.
Ah that's strange, Wikipedia effectively claims the P value and the alpha value are the same:
Traditionally, one rejects the null hypothesis if the p-value is smaller than or equal to the significance level,[2] often represented by the Greek letter (alpha).
(Well, okay, the alpha value is effectively meaningless and stands for "this is the number I want to see before I'll believe it." It has nothing to do with the actual data.)
Statistics is complex.
It's a tangible asset.
One day you don't have The Legend of Zelda: Return of the Hero of Time. The next day you do. You have now acquired a tangible asset. Your fat ass is sitting in front of the Wii eating cheesy poofs and dancing like a retarded stepchild.
You have now acquired a tangible asset, to which you have paid somewhere in the distribution line a value that in part went to the merchant, part to the distributor carrying it to the merchant, and part to the developer, part of which goes to the laborer who created that asset (programmer).
Oh, wait, no you didn't. You didn't give anyone any money. You skipped the merchant and the distributor; they didn't produce any work, they just lost business. The creator of the original good did some work-- a company that created an environment conducive to creating the game-- and they didn't get paid for one copy of the work landing in someone's hands.
Your argument is that somehow getting your hands on a tangible asset that somebody else produced without putting in anything in trade to compensate the original producer is not related to stealing in any way. My argument is if we could all torrent everything on the third day of release, who the hell would buy on release day? You're not allowed to return CDs or DVDs because people were buying them, copying to the computer, and returning; this is apparently not "stealing" either.
or you won't care, and say nothing
but your current state: voluminously explaining how much you don't care, only reveals that you care, a lot
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to boredom.
You're pretty well spoken for someone who can't terminate a paragraph with a period, or capitalize.
This opened on a bleeding heart cry out over a tragedy that's a simple statistic; people die every day, children die every day, and children are starving to death in other countries. This guy is not remarkable in any respect and not worth special comment.
I'm bored of this. As a final closing, since you want to point out society as an "emergent phenomenon," I point you to H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine" for a read. The original, poorly written ramblings version... Amazon gives it away free on Kindle. His explanation for the state of society is an eventual lack of need for intelligence, which produced the evolutionary split and the completely primitive societies in the book. There's your emergent behavior.
Wow. This is a troll, right? You can't possibly believe that justifying copying a file which is hurting nobody is the same as killing someone?
Equivalence of argument isn't necessary for the arguments to be of the same logical structure. "Your mom fed you candy" and "The agent gave you a briefcase bomb" are two different things, but the sentence structures are the same; "The agent blew you up with a bomb" is a different sentence structure, even though it compares better with the second sentence.
This is the essence of a strawman argument, by the way: we produce two things that look to be on the same magnitude, maybe similar in some way, but logically the processes don't actually reflect each other. My argument is sort of the reversal: the arguments appear wildly different, but in truth they're roughly the same concept.
So basically, while there is plenty of evidence that people who download more music buy more music, and that downloads often lead to eventual sales, there is no evidence that anyone who downloaded it WOULD have paid for it, but you're going to argue such anyway? Because frankly, all the evidence is on my side, even if none of it says precisely what I would like it to say (and I am willing to admit my own bias.) None of it says even vaguely what you would like it to say.
There's plenty of evidence that aspartame is highly toxic too. In fact I'm pretty sure it is; but there's also plenty of evidence that it isn't. But then, this is a strawman argument: the reasons that these conflicting bits of evidence exist for aspartame have absolutely nothing in common with this particular problem.
I've studied statistics, so this may be a little out there for you. What I'm talking about here is called selection bias and self-selection bias. On one hand, we have the selection bias of "observer's bias" where I point out to you that I know a lot of people who download tons of music and talk about how, lol, you don't pay for music, are you stupid? This argument gets complex because these are different people from the ones that tend to buy: those people tend to download a song or two here or there to evaluate bands, not torrent gigs and gigs and gigs of thousands of mp3s.
Self-selection bias, on the other hand, comes when you start asking people things like, "Well if you couldn't download, would you buy it?" It's where you get answers like, "Well, no, I really wouldn't have anyway," when the real answer is more like, "Uh, eventually. I mean I'd have to. or copy it from a friend I guess. I'd get it somehow." People who are willing to invest more time than money into acquiring something are likely to say, "No I wouldn't buy," but also to some degree likely to buy to avoid the hassle of borrowing a CD from a friend (maybe it's a Daft Punk CD, so this isn't feasible) if they can't download it.
Further, you can't study this because you can't make it impossible to download: anyone who isn't going to download is going to self-impose the not downloading thing on themselves, which makes them a different type of person, and again this comes down to self-selection. In the end, we have plenty of studies we can talk about, but no actual way to get anything concrete.
In other words... we can do nothing except constantly argue about it.
When it comes down to it, obviously the good has a value to you. If you're not going to cough up something, you shouldn't have the good;
You have still not actually shown this in any way. When you can show that I shouldn't have something simply because I can't or won't pay for it and for no other reason then you will have an argument.
Your argument speaks vaguely of entitlement. You can't or won't pay for it, but that doesn't mean you don't have a God-given right to it? I suppose the counter-argument might come in the form of "well nobody else has to pay for me to have it," but
Oh, that. Semicolons are a valid way to separate a list. In this case, I don't want to play [the game of Go, Geometry, and Philosophy]; but rather [the game of Go], [Geometry], and [Philosophy]. The common correct use for this is to separate a list containing commons, something that people fail at routinely. Think about the following five lists:
List (1) is simply incorrect. List (4) is correct technically, but somewhat ambiguous. List (5) is also correct, and not ambiguous.
What do you do with a B.A. in English? What is my life going to be? Four years in college--and plenty of knowledge!--have earned me this useless degree! ... and the ability to annoy people on Slashdot who think they're grammar nazis.
To be fair, I could state this as "Geometry, Philosophy, and the game of Go" to remove all ambiguity. In fact, I like the way that flows mentally more ("the game of Go" is too much to process up front, but leading out it flows naturally in the mind). I think I'll change that.
I would argue that where there is no potential loss of profit, there has been no harm and thus there is no justification for any charges, especially criminal ones. I believe this to be the prevailing mindset here but I have no actual figures to back this up.
This is what I'm talking about. That's a fancy argument and it's the same argument as executing all cancer patients because "they're going to die anyway": on one side you'll have statistics about how maybe chemo will save them, or extend their life for X months/years, or something; on the other you have arguments that all that stuff is fancy and usually just makes them sicker for a few more months and then they die.
Here we have "Well if I wouldn't have paid, and You wouldn't have paid, then obviously this isn't a problem!" arguments that come down to questions like... oh I don't know, you downloaded it didn't you? 2 months down the line, would you still download it? If yes, then after 2 months of wanting it would you just go ahead and throw the $1 for the track off Amazon, or the $10 for the whole CD? We can make up numbers for this or try to find data; but really there's a hell of a lot of selection bias, and the data is crap. All we can do is constantly argue about it.
When it comes down to it, obviously the good has a value to you. If you're not going to cough up something, you shouldn't have the good; depriving you of an MP3 file containing somebody else's work isn't wrong... unless you happen to have paid for it (look if you buy from GetYourTunes.com and it turns out they're a pirate reseller, they're responsible for coughing up the cash; you should be compensated somehow, either by keeping the product or by having your money returned. Caveats for willful conspiracy to commit infringement, etc etc). If you want it so bad, pay for it out of your beer money.
When you make a copy and give it away you're putting yourself in the chain where you don't belong. Hell, what if you didn't download it for free? Do you want it that bad that you'd pay for it? (the answer is invariably "no, not really, so it's okay for me to download it 'cause I wouldn't have bought it anyway!")
Only because we bitchslapped Jack Thompson.
Yeah! All five of us should boycott! That'll show 'em.