Is it really so hard to grasp the idea that there are multiple variables at work here? Think about it this way: If you leave all the lights on in your house, this will tend to increase your energy bill. But if there's a change in the weather, and you suddenly don't have to heat/cool your house any more, your energy bill might nevertheless go down. The point is, it won't go down by as much as it would have if you had left the lights off, too.
It really shouldn't be so hard to understand. CD sales might go up or down for numerous reasons, but p2p piracy on the whole tends to make sales go up less, or down more, than they otherwise would have done.
If I download 2 or 3 songs (or an album) by an artist, and find their CD for sale at a reasonable price, I'm more likely to buy it than if I hadn't heard any of their music.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Firstly because you've shifted the focus from providers (pirates and uploaders) to consumers (purchasers and downloaders), which is not what the grandparent was talking about. Secondly, because you brought "morality" into what was previously a discussion of legality. And finally, because you're talking about downloading 2 or 3 songs from an album while ignoring the fact that people regularly download entire albums, along with jpgs of the cover art, for the very purpose of creating equivalent physical media.
Any two bit dictator sending nukes to US would do it via standard shipping containers, or via whatever way the _hundreds_ of tons of cocaine are smuggled into the US _every_ year.
I'm questioning these "studies" because they so rarely seem to match up to reality.
Reality as perceived by you. That's hardly objective. We all perceive the world as being flat, most of the time, but that proves nothing.
You would think if there was anything to these studies, I would see an occasional example or two to support them in my own life. I never do.
What exactly are you expecting to see? Even in the case of your own daughter, are you able to peer into an alternate universe to see what she MIGHT be like without computers in her life? No? Then you have no idea whether or not computers are affecting her in a positive way, a negative way, or no way. Sure, she seems to be doing fine. But you have no way of knowing how much BETTER she might (or might not) otherwise be doing. You are incapable of seeing the results because you have nothing real to compare them against. (This is the function of the control group in all of these studies which you are so quick to dismiss.)
This doesn't even address the possibility that she is simply an exception to the correlation. A correlation does not mean 100%. It doesn't even mean >50%. A statistically significant correlation could be very, very small. In other words, for a given correlation, most people could be exceptions, but that doesn't mean that it has no affect on anyone at all. The fact that YOU don't know anyone (or at least you THINK you don't know anyone) who fits the description is meaningless.
To them, hunters are drunken, slovenly hicks that can't shoot anything that they can't see from their truck. Granted, there are a lot of these types out in the woods during season, but they are not to be considered hunters.
The No True Scotsman fallacy? Is that really the best you can do?
Sure, you can make the article self-consistent easily enough; but most readers would have a 50% chance of making the article consistently wrong, which doesn't help anyone.
I don't see where anyone is advocating that you should edit an article if you don't know what you're talking about.
The problem is that for every Alexander Gordon who turns out to be right, there's another scientist, going against the consensus, who turns out to be wrong. Crichton has the benefit of hindsight for making his points, but this is no help to a science journalist covering a new idea. Sometimes it's the consensus that's wrong, and the new idea that's right; but probably more often it's the other way around. I'm curious as to how this winds up being perceived as the journalist's fault, for not being omniscient.
The point that you're missing is that even though internet piracy might only be responsible for 25% to 33% of the drop in sales, it is still one of the most important single factors. What you're doing is comparing internet piracy with all other factors, combined, which is kind of like saying that Christianity is not an important world religion because 67% of the world is non-Christian. This is stupid, wrong thinking.
For instance, the article lists a number of other explanations. What if the numbers break down something like this:
30% internet piracy
25% physical CD piracy
20% shrinking retail space
15% competition from other media
10% quality of music
Is it really so shocking that internet piracy should get so much attention? If you're bleeding from five wounds, wouldn't you want to fix the most serious ones first? Why on earth should the industry have to fix everything else first, before going after internet piracy?
No matter how you cut it, 25% to 33% is a huge chunk. If not the biggest, then surely one of the biggest. It absolutely merits the kind of attention they're giving to it. Anyone who denies this is most likely trying to avoid a crisis of conscience by clinging to old lies.
The headline says "Apple Fans Needn't Fret," not "iPod Users Needn't Fret." In other words, it's referring to fans not just of the products, but of the company. If something comes out that's better than the iPod, that would be bad for the company.
It's kind of like fans of a sports team fretting about a rival team obtaining a star player. It doesn't make *their* team any worse, but obviously it affects their chances of success.
if there existed a technological method to easily make a copy of my loaf of bread, so that you could have one and I would still have mine, sure, go ahead and make a copy of my bread--I would still have mine then, it wouldn't have been stolen.
The person who owns the intellectual property on the process used to create that loaf of bread might have a different opinion on the matter. He loses a potential sale for every copy you make.
4. Interactive content. Imagine watching a game show where the viewers get to vote with a remote control. This is not done yet, but the technology is in place.
Er... My analog cable could do that as far back as 1982. It never really caught on, but it was there, and it worked.
Anyway, Excel couldn't fix the problem, and OOo could, which was the point of the anecdote.
And like most anecdotes, it's pretty much worthless outside of its entertainment value as a story.
Just yesterday, my wife was trying to edit a Word document in OOo, and it crashed consistently every time she clicked on certain portions of the document. So she copied+pasted the whole document into Microsoft Works (the only other "word processor" installed on our PC) to finish editing it.
Microsoft Works could solve a problem that OOo couldn't. So what does my anecdote prove?
(That was rhetorical; none of these anecdotes prove anything.)
I don't think this is such a heinous idea - that you should only cast informed votes...
It sounds very simple when you put it in either/or terms. But that does not reflect the reality of the situation. A person is not simply informed or uninformed; he is 22% informed, or 63% informed, etc. How informed is "informed enough?"
Even if you could break it down into a simple percentage like this, it's not such an easy line to draw. Then there is the difference between being informed and simply believing yourself to be informed. What if you're only 10% informed, but you believe it's closer to 90%? Or vice versa?
Further complicating it is the fact that different people do not agree on what the truth is. So a person might be considered 75% informed according to the conservative interpretation of reality, but only 25% informed according to the liberal interpretation. (And even "conservative" vs. "liberal" is not an either/or distinction.) Nobody really knows how informed they are according to the objective truth.
Personally, I would rather see someone going to the polls as an "uninformed" voter than as a dittohead. Because I believe that MISinformed is much worse than UNinformed. But that's just me. Another person might feel the same way about voters who follow Michael Moore.
Finally, I think people tend to lose sight of the real cause and effect on this issue. It isn't just that people stay home from the polls because they're uninformed, and don't know who they would vote for. The converse is equally true: a person who has already decided not to vote isn't going to bother paying attention to the campaigns. What would be the point?
If you succeed in convincing an uninformed person to vote, then you also succeed in getting them to think about HOW they're going to vote. It seems to me that such a person will be more likely to watch the debates, pay attention to the news, etc. than they were before. In other words, merely deciding to vote will indirectly make them become better informed.
Do you really believe that any significant number of unprotected access points in residential neighborhoods, originating from private residences, were deliberately set up to be used freely by anyone who happens to drive by?
Do you think that even the wardrivers themselves really believe this?
Or, more to the point, do you think that a reasonable person would believe this?
they throw the club on because the theif will move on to the next car.
Ah, but if everyone used the club, then there wouldn't be any easier targets to tempt the thief away from your car. So maybe the fact that Joe Average doesn't use WEP isn't such a bad thing...
Oh, how I wish I had mod points. You are absolutely correct. There is no magical threshold for being "informed enough." And trying to determine which facts are necessary for "informed voters" to know quickly becomes partisan and very messy. You would have people complaining that their opponents are uninformed or even misinformed because they get their news from, say, FOX News instead of NPR, or from Rush Limbaugh instead of Jon Stewart, or vice versa. The point isn't who's right; the point is that you would never be able to get people to agree to a common standard. It is an unfortunate fact that the people who are the among the worst-informed often consider themselves to be the best-informed, and you'll never be able to convince them otherwise.
And the opposite is true, too. It was recently discovered that people who get their news from comedy shows like Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" are actually better informed, on average, than people who just watch "the news." Who would have thought it? Before the study was done, a lot of people would have assumed that they were uninformed (or as Bill O'Reilly put it, "stoners and slackers") because they got their news from a comedy show. Again, the point is that even if there is a magic threshold at which someone is adequately informed, we are too ignorant and prejudiced to be able to tell whether someone has crossed it.
Lastly, the grandparent seems very confident that he is one of the informed voters. I'm not saying that he is or isn't, but I guarantee that someone, somewhere would consider him uninformed. It would be all well and good to exclude uninformed voters as long as HE got to pick the threshold... Maybe not so good for him if someone else did.
The difference is that funding abortion does not promote a religion, directly or indirectly. School vouchers do. Therefore, one of them runs afoul of the First Amendment, and the other does not.
We cannot ban public funding of abortion on religious grounds. Judge Midge Rendell of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote: "We acknowledge the sincerity of Adams's beliefs, but... we can easily imagine a plethora of other sects that would also have an equally legitimate concern with the usage of tax dollars to fund activities antithetical to their religion."
Those words were written in reference to a Quaker woman who had withheld a portion of her taxes on religious grounds because, as a pacifist, she did not want them to support the military. But the words are equally applicable to the issue of abortion funding. (For the record, the woman lost the case, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear it.)
In other words, if you can eliminate public funding of abortion on religious grounds, then you also have to give the Quakers their way and eliminate public funding of the military. And you have to give the Mormons their way, on whatever it is that they might object to. And the Mennonites. And the Satanists. Et cetera.
Funding abortion is, in this sense, much the same as funding the military. People might object to either on religious grounds, but neither practice violates the First Amendment since they do not promote or establish a religion. School vouchers are different because they put tax dollars directly into the hands of organizations dedicated to the very purpose of promoting religion.
As far as your views on secular humanism are concerned, a) secular humanism is not a religion, b) even if it were, public schools do not promote it, and c) if they did, the ACLU would oppose them with just as much zeal as if the schools were promoting Christianity.
Perot (whatever you thought of him) was a more legitimate "3rd option" since he was drawing from the discontented on both sides and it was within the realm of possibility that he could get close to 33% and really contest the race.
You're ignoring the most important reason why Perot came anywhere near 33%: Money.
I agree with most of what you say, as far as it goes... We do need a 3rd party candidate who can actually win. But the #1 deciding factor isn't whether the candidate is liberal, conservative, moderate, or somewhere on the fringes. It's whether or not he/she has the funding to compete with the Republicrats. Perot did. Which is not to say that being something of a moderate didn't help him, but it was ultimately not as important as the fact that he was a billionaire with money to burn.
If it's so "unfair" that Clinton won the election with only 43% of the popular vote, surely it would have been even less fair if Bush had won with 37%, or Perot with 18%.
Lumping Perot in with Bush is nonsense. None of the three candidates would have won against the other two. And while it's likely that it would have been a much closer race if Perot hadn't run, it's far from certain that the outcome would have been any different.
Fact is, when someone says they hear a difference, the "thing" IS being detected. The difference IS being measured.
And someone who says that they feel better after taking a sugar pill IS being cured, I suppose?
It's much more likely that the only difference is a psychological one. There are ways to factor out that variable, but hardly anyone goes to that kind of trouble outside of a laboratory.
Slashdot Mirror
It really shouldn't be so hard to understand. CD sales might go up or down for numerous reasons, but p2p piracy on the whole tends to make sales go up less, or down more, than they otherwise would have done.
This doesn't even address the possibility that she is simply an exception to the correlation. A correlation does not mean 100%. It doesn't even mean >50%. A statistically significant correlation could be very, very small. In other words, for a given correlation, most people could be exceptions, but that doesn't mean that it has no affect on anyone at all. The fact that YOU don't know anyone (or at least you THINK you don't know anyone) who fits the description is meaningless.
If you don't want to see any more stories from Hemos, you don't have to.
The problem is that for every Alexander Gordon who turns out to be right, there's another scientist, going against the consensus, who turns out to be wrong. Crichton has the benefit of hindsight for making his points, but this is no help to a science journalist covering a new idea. Sometimes it's the consensus that's wrong, and the new idea that's right; but probably more often it's the other way around. I'm curious as to how this winds up being perceived as the journalist's fault, for not being omniscient.
For instance, the article lists a number of other explanations. What if the numbers break down something like this:
Is it really so shocking that internet piracy should get so much attention? If you're bleeding from five wounds, wouldn't you want to fix the most serious ones first? Why on earth should the industry have to fix everything else first, before going after internet piracy?No matter how you cut it, 25% to 33% is a huge chunk. If not the biggest, then surely one of the biggest. It absolutely merits the kind of attention they're giving to it. Anyone who denies this is most likely trying to avoid a crisis of conscience by clinging to old lies.
It's kind of like fans of a sports team fretting about a rival team obtaining a star player. It doesn't make *their* team any worse, but obviously it affects their chances of success.
Just yesterday, my wife was trying to edit a Word document in OOo, and it crashed consistently every time she clicked on certain portions of the document. So she copied+pasted the whole document into Microsoft Works (the only other "word processor" installed on our PC) to finish editing it.
Microsoft Works could solve a problem that OOo couldn't. So what does my anecdote prove?
(That was rhetorical; none of these anecdotes prove anything.)
Even if you could break it down into a simple percentage like this, it's not such an easy line to draw. Then there is the difference between being informed and simply believing yourself to be informed. What if you're only 10% informed, but you believe it's closer to 90%? Or vice versa?
Further complicating it is the fact that different people do not agree on what the truth is. So a person might be considered 75% informed according to the conservative interpretation of reality, but only 25% informed according to the liberal interpretation. (And even "conservative" vs. "liberal" is not an either/or distinction.) Nobody really knows how informed they are according to the objective truth.
Personally, I would rather see someone going to the polls as an "uninformed" voter than as a dittohead. Because I believe that MISinformed is much worse than UNinformed. But that's just me. Another person might feel the same way about voters who follow Michael Moore.
Finally, I think people tend to lose sight of the real cause and effect on this issue. It isn't just that people stay home from the polls because they're uninformed, and don't know who they would vote for. The converse is equally true: a person who has already decided not to vote isn't going to bother paying attention to the campaigns. What would be the point?
If you succeed in convincing an uninformed person to vote, then you also succeed in getting them to think about HOW they're going to vote. It seems to me that such a person will be more likely to watch the debates, pay attention to the news, etc. than they were before. In other words, merely deciding to vote will indirectly make them become better informed.
Do you think that even the wardrivers themselves really believe this?
Or, more to the point, do you think that a reasonable person would believe this?
And the opposite is true, too. It was recently discovered that people who get their news from comedy shows like Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" are actually better informed, on average, than people who just watch "the news." Who would have thought it? Before the study was done, a lot of people would have assumed that they were uninformed (or as Bill O'Reilly put it, "stoners and slackers") because they got their news from a comedy show. Again, the point is that even if there is a magic threshold at which someone is adequately informed, we are too ignorant and prejudiced to be able to tell whether someone has crossed it.
Lastly, the grandparent seems very confident that he is one of the informed voters. I'm not saying that he is or isn't, but I guarantee that someone, somewhere would consider him uninformed. It would be all well and good to exclude uninformed voters as long as HE got to pick the threshold... Maybe not so good for him if someone else did.
We cannot ban public funding of abortion on religious grounds. Judge Midge Rendell of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote: "We acknowledge the sincerity of Adams's beliefs, but ... we can easily imagine a plethora of other sects that would also have an equally legitimate concern with the usage of tax dollars to fund activities antithetical to their religion."
Those words were written in reference to a Quaker woman who had withheld a portion of her taxes on religious grounds because, as a pacifist, she did not want them to support the military. But the words are equally applicable to the issue of abortion funding. (For the record, the woman lost the case, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear it.)
In other words, if you can eliminate public funding of abortion on religious grounds, then you also have to give the Quakers their way and eliminate public funding of the military. And you have to give the Mormons their way, on whatever it is that they might object to. And the Mennonites. And the Satanists. Et cetera.
Funding abortion is, in this sense, much the same as funding the military. People might object to either on religious grounds, but neither practice violates the First Amendment since they do not promote or establish a religion. School vouchers are different because they put tax dollars directly into the hands of organizations dedicated to the very purpose of promoting religion.
As far as your views on secular humanism are concerned, a) secular humanism is not a religion, b) even if it were, public schools do not promote it, and c) if they did, the ACLU would oppose them with just as much zeal as if the schools were promoting Christianity.
I agree with most of what you say, as far as it goes... We do need a 3rd party candidate who can actually win. But the #1 deciding factor isn't whether the candidate is liberal, conservative, moderate, or somewhere on the fringes. It's whether or not he/she has the funding to compete with the Republicrats. Perot did. Which is not to say that being something of a moderate didn't help him, but it was ultimately not as important as the fact that he was a billionaire with money to burn.
Lumping Perot in with Bush is nonsense. None of the three candidates would have won against the other two. And while it's likely that it would have been a much closer race if Perot hadn't run, it's far from certain that the outcome would have been any different.
It's much more likely that the only difference is a psychological one. There are ways to factor out that variable, but hardly anyone goes to that kind of trouble outside of a laboratory.