It does however, thanks to the team of legal snakes hired to draft its licence agreements, own the rights to everything posted on it. So one day, in theory, they could sift through the dreadful noise that is its video contributions for those few pearls and subsequently sell them.
Thoroughly screwing the original film maker in the process.
Since they started issuing Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. Oh wait, that's the UK, where they outlawed guns about a decade ago and have moved on to trying to outlaw being obnoxious. Remember-- when being anti-social is outlawed, only outlaws will be anti-social!
But I'm one of the people who see the implications of the Zimbardo prison experiment in everyday situations, probably to an extent where most people would be rolling their eyes and saying "you're really reaching now."
We chose VHS over BetaMax We chose 8VSB over OFDM (for HDTV Broadcasting)
You are quite wrong about both of these.
BetaMax had a maximum recording capacity of 60 minutes. That's part of why they got better picture quality, they threw more "bits" at the "datastream." But 60 minutes was a technical limitation that made it very undesirable for delivery of full length movies. When Sony finally got around to releasing a version of beta that could handle longer recording times, the picture quality was negligbly better than VHS and the market had mostly made up its mind by that time anyway.
The 8VSB vs COFDM fight in the US was mostly about one company trying to promote their business. In practice 8VSB works better for wider open-area coverage, while COFDM works better in crowded urban areas with lots of buildings that cause interference. The USA went with 8VSB and Europe went with COFDM. No surprise, a large amount of the US population is spread out across wide expanses of open rural areas while the majority of the european population is clustered in hi-density urban centres.
t is entirely possible that the current BluRay movies are shipping on single layer 25 GB discs to save money in manufacturing as it would be cheaper to stamp a single layer disc and "25 GB is close enough to 30 GB".
Not only that, but it appears that most current blu-ray titles are shipping on "defective" single-layer discs that have only 18-20GB or so of space due to the yields on the media still being fairly low.
Almost everyone has +- players so I go for cheaper disks every time
Bad move.
While compatibility is about equal across types, the leading indicator for compatibility turns out to be the quality of the media. So going for cheaper disks is probably the worst way to go since price and quality tend to be pretty highly correlated in the dvd media market.
Great, but Brokeback is a strawman. The only people talking about it are the ones who, like yourself, think it proves that a, "story based on sexual confusion is of no interest at all." I have yet to see anyone in this debate claim anything else about Brokeback. I certainly made no comment because I haven't seen the movie, although an ex recently told me that she didn't like it because there wasn't enough nudity.
Agreed again, but the fact that a law is easy to violate and this is widely abused does not mean that the law is not in the interest of society, nor that we should not try to enforce it and to punish those who do not obey it.
You've sidestepped my point that enforcement is highly expensive. And I'm not just talking about tax dollars spent on law enforcement efforts. There are at least two other factors -- digital restrictions like WGA impose a cost all on their own too, and restrictions on the free flow of knowledge (for example, the current scientific publishing model where the journals claim copyright on the work of the scientist, thus preventing the widespread distribution of new scientific knowledge that would otherwise happen naturally). When the cost of a law exceeds the benefit of the law, surely that must be justification to change the law.
Take an extreme case: someone who is truly determined to kill another human at any cost will often be able to commit the murder, and we know that people do get murdered. We cannot make people invulnerable, nor provide sufficient resources to protect every individual all the time. Should we therefore accept that the law against murder is flawed, because it cannot be perfectly enforced? I hope we'd agree that such an argument would be inappropriate.
It isn't a case of being perfectly enforced, it is a case of being reasonably enforced. Murder, like theft of real-property, is inherently self-limiting - its really hard to kill more than a handful of people at a time. Such events are exceptionally rare, and the laws on the books do not impose a significant cost on society.
Digital information naturally lends itself to unlimited redistribution, and despite all the laws to the contrary, such redistribution happens hundreds of millions of times per day and the laws that make such redistribution illegal have a very high cost.
Now, here's where the parallel really cuts in: in an ideal world, we might do away with arbitrary speed limits,
Speed limits are a poor example. The reason being is that the laws on the books in most, if not all states, say that speed limits must be set via a process of evaluation of driving behaviour by the local department of transportation (often the limit is suppossed to be a speed that covers the 85th percentile of drivers during a survey when there is no posted limit). In other words, the law already says that speed limits are not suppossed to be arbitrary, and in fact one relatively unknown way to get a speeding ticket thrown out of court is to have the limit ruled as illegal - you ask the prosecutuer to prove that the limit is legal by producing the survey results, they should be on file in the local county or town records, no survey, no ticket.
Now, these details have not stopped many towns and neighborhoods from posting arbitrarily low speed-limits, but that does not mean the law has been followed.
Just to fill in the details on that - in many states there are indeed default limits that are defined by characteristics of the road - 2 lane vs 4 lane, etc - and the surrounding land - dense residential, industrial park, open country, etc. So you might still point to those limits as being arbitrary, but my contention is that because they are defined by the characteristics of the area in conjunction with a well studied baseline that they are rarely arbitrary as is is the case in speed-traps and what-not.
I realize I've strayed far from your point, but I felt that simply saying, "Speed limits are not a good example of useful but arbitrary laws" without backing that up would be unfair. I guess I could have focused on the fact that unlike copyright, speed limits impose little cost on society instead, probably would have been simpler. The opportunity cost of laws and their enforcement against murder, speeding and even theft of real property are quite small in comparison to the opportunity costs of copyright law.
I question your methodology for assesing this man's involvment as well, you remarks smack of ad-hominem attack fueled by your distaste for his choice of driving a "gas guzzling SUV", however you seem to be suffering from the same shortsightedness that many of the savagely anti-SUV crowd does
Damn you are touchy.
To us normal people, the implication of "gas-guzzling" was pretty clear -- that operation of the vehicle has become very expensive recently, you know, because gasoline prices have gone through the roof.
He said artificial scarcity. Not "protected artificially."
The difference is that real property is naturally scarce, or more technically it is rivalrous, and thus inherently "protectable" since there is only one instance to keep track of, either you have it or you don't.
that recognition works just fine as long as everyone plays by the same rules.
However, it is both many orders of magnitude more difficult to enforce the rules for information than it is for real property, and it is in conflict with human nature (the natural urge to share knowledge that is probably a key, if not the key to the development of civilization). So, its much harder to enforce and because it conflicts with human nature, people naturally violate it many more times than they do similar rules for real property.
All that enforcement eventually results in a higher cost - the more society tries to enforce those rules, the more it costs us. Many people believe that the additional costs involved for protecting ownership of ideas are now high enough that they make the model infeasible, that it is a net drain on society that retards progress rather than encourages it.
People like cliffski, with their heads stuck in the box that hollywood has selfishly crammed it into, can't see that the model is breaking, if not already broken. And what's worse, they can't see that alternative models can, and probably must, take its place. Models that harness human nature rather than oppose it. Instead all you get are ironic comments like "Try thinking through the implications to changing the business model," because his own lack of imagination prevents him from thinking things through enough to come up with a business model that can work given the new parameters of modern digital distribution.
Spelling and grammar flames? Hallmark of a sanctimonius twit, no surprise since you felt the need to publicly attach your lips to the ass of another sanctimonius twit and then proclaim to the world just how wonderful the crap that he spews tastes.
But let's address your denial:
cliffski: But rather than lobby for change, you've decided just to take stuff without paying. Interesting.
stonecypher: I wish there were more people like you, who were willing to mock thieves to their faces for their self-serving contrived nonsense.
nobody has attacked anyone's credibility
Do you wish to continue to deny that both you and cliffski are calling bogtha a thief? In fact, his entire response is just an attempt to impune bogtha's character by calling him and his friends thieves, all in response to bogtha's proposition that cliffski's opinion about copyright was not the only moral position available.
The guy was an idiot and your were congratulating him on it.
He did the equivalent of saying that only druggies complain about drug laws, or only speeders think speed enforcement laws are often abusive, or only gun-nuts dislike gun-restriction laws, etc, etc.
In his self-righteousness, he couldn't even conceive of the possibility that one might make a rational argument criticisizing the state of copyright law without himself being a copyright violator. That's worse than attacking the messenger and ignoring the message, its making up strawmen to impune the integrity of someone you disagree with but can't otherwise justify your disagreement.
And you thought that was just great. Hoo-rah! Just the kind of behaviour we need more of online.
Look, everything I'm writing applies as much to copyright as to patents and trademarks: intellectual property.
More proof by assertion. Everything you have written does NOT apply as much to copyright or trademarks as it does to patents. Don't believe me? Just how does one use "DRM" for a patent? And trademarks, they should not be perpetual?
Once more, Twitter's posting laid out a well reasoned, logical argument for the effective nullification of copyright - not patents - which is just about the only thing that applies to your original question about bootleged information.
I firmly believe that you consistently resort to the tactic of proof by assertion because you are unable to justify your position. And the reason I believe that is not because I think you are dumb, its because I think no rational justification can stand against Twitter's logic. You can't produce something that does not exist.
You're just trying to split hairs and look for rhetorical openings in my propositions. Hardly. I am asking you to stay on topic. If you really believe that patents, trademarks and copyrights are all identical under your arguments then I am going to have to take back my claim about not thinking you are dumb.
The Constitution, which you asked me to clarify, doesn't distinguish between them.
I sure as shit did not ask you to clarify the constitution. I asked you to justify your dismissal of Twitter's deconstruction of copyright. But, if you are using the constitution as the sole basis for your positions, then you've got problems with internal cosistency because the constitution doesn't say word one, not even an implication, about trademarks.
You've worn out your welcome.
It seems much more likely that you just can't accept the logical fallacies in your baseline beliefs, you'd rather pretend that they don't exist. Which explains why you still have not answered my other question -- Why should you even care if your authentic copy of software/movie/song/whatever is legit or bootleg?
Do you realize that you've strayed from the discussion of copyrights into the discussion of patents? All that you say only applies to patents while everything twitter said, and your own original post dealt with, was in relation to copyright and possibly trademark. So in summary, pretty much a red herring. Care to try again?
In ten years I suspect that Lord of the Rings will remain known as one of the greatest sets of movies ever, while something like (dare I say it) Brokeback Mountain will be relegated to a minority and dwindling fanbase. Movies that do one step worse and sacrifice everything for the message are doomed to failure.
You have made the mistake of equating popularity with quality. The lord of the rings challenged no one to think. As storylines go, it's pretty much pure pablum - that you think it has "depth of plot" says more about your viewpoint than it does about the story. A story which clearly had length, but so many characters and so many events were archetypes right out of Joeseph Campbell's monomyth that it was as familiar and pedestrian as a thousand other good-battles-evil stories.
The movies were popular because they looked pretty, had enormous advertising budgets and were faithful enough to a story that huge numbers of people enjoyed as teenagers because it was one of their first exposures to the monomyth and thus played on the human tendency to mistake novelity for sophistication.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the movies were bad. The are just simplistic and bland - requiring no thought on the part of the audience, which is good enough for most people. But certainly nothing more than "chewing gum for the mind."
Actually it is a big deal because you can't be arrested in your own home without an arrest warrant.
I am pretty sure that is not true. Just like cops don't need a warrant to enter your house if they see something that makes them think there is emminent danger to someone or an illegal activity in progress.
Good luck with that one. Taste is purely in the mind of the beholder. What you think is good taste is unlikely to be what any significant majority of the population thinks it is. Your implications about David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino and your outright dismissal of any stories based on sexual confusion is glaring proof of the subjectivity of taste.
For example, while vast numbers of Americans clearly think "Passion" was in good taste, there are more than a few who saw it as exploitive, crude and excessively violent. Similarly with "The DaVinci Code" - I even got email from some people I know who thought it worthy of boycotting because its blasphemy was in such poor taste.
I'll even go out on a limb and say that no movie can rise above the level of passable but forgettably simple entertainment unless it challenges some of the widely held perceptions of what is acceptable in society. Any movie that makes such a challenge is certain, almost by definition, to conflict with what a large number of people in that same society would consider "tasteful."
I'm not saying those things don't happen. I'm saying that they are highly illegal and not common place. Signing off on a design for an engineer is like preparing legal documents without being a lawyer or giving medical advice without being a doctor.
Your post gave me a massive case of deja vu.
It was the late 90s and I was a regular on siliconinvestor.com. On one of the message boards there was a large discussion of "cooking the books" at large corps. One the participants claimed to be a CPA and gave no reason to doubt him, his posts were never insane and he often had good insight into the financial operations of public companies at large. IIRC, his usename was "Dave R."
So in this particular case, we were all talking about cooking the books to give a more favorable impression to wallstreet. Lots of talk about different sorts of dirty tricks that could theoretically be used. Dave swore up and down about how such shennigans would require the cooperation of the independent auditors and how that was so extremely unlikely that it effectively never happened. At the time I had my doubts, having worked for a medium-sized tech company where jokes about shipping product on "December 35th" were frequently heard. But other than those jokes I had no real reason beyond my personal cyncism to doubt Dave's claims about the strict integrity of the corporate auditing companies.
So, a few years later when the stories about Enron and Worldcom and all the others broke and kept on breaking, and when Arthur Andersen went tits-up because of their complicity, and all of the other auditors took hits for their roles at their clients, I remembered Dave and wondered if his opinion about the way his industry works had changed.
But the Constitution's provision for temporary artificial monopolies on information products to protect inventors (and authors) is still relevant.
Proof? Twitter put in about two entire paragraphs building a logical case based on facts for his ultimate conclusion which you dismiss with the wave of your hand. You should at least try to make a case for your claim.
Slashdot Mirror
First you are going to have to castrate him in order to turn the grumpy old man of the submitter's story into a sociopathic woman.
Just learned my $10 pc speakers top out at 14k Hz. (apparently 6k too low)
According to the frequency analysis in audacity there are peaks at 15.7KHz and 16.4KHz and it falls off pretty rapidly outside of that range.
Thoroughly screwing the original film maker in the process.
Oh baloney.
Here's what it says: What is so hard to understand about that?
You don't want them to redistribute your creation anymore?
Then take it off the damn website fer chrissakes!
Either way personally, I would never ever post anything on that site.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Huh? What do guns have to do with anything?
Once they got rid of the guns, they had to come up with something else to go after.
Since when was being anti-social a crime?
Since they started issuing Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. Oh wait, that's the UK, where they outlawed guns about a decade ago and have moved on to trying to outlaw being obnoxious. Remember-- when being anti-social is outlawed, only outlaws will be anti-social!
But I'm one of the people who see the implications of the Zimbardo prison experiment in everyday situations, probably to an extent where most people would be rolling their eyes and saying "you're really reaching now."
And you are a misanthrope, so whaddya expect?
We chose VHS over BetaMax
We chose 8VSB over OFDM (for HDTV Broadcasting)
You are quite wrong about both of these.
BetaMax had a maximum recording capacity of 60 minutes. That's part of why they got better picture quality, they threw more "bits" at the "datastream." But 60 minutes was a technical limitation that made it very undesirable for delivery of full length movies. When Sony finally got around to releasing a version of beta that could handle longer recording times, the picture quality was negligbly better than VHS and the market had mostly made up its mind by that time anyway.
The 8VSB vs COFDM fight in the US was mostly about one company trying to promote their business. In practice 8VSB works better for wider open-area coverage, while COFDM works better in crowded urban areas with lots of buildings that cause interference. The USA went with 8VSB and Europe went with COFDM. No surprise, a large amount of the US population is spread out across wide expanses of open rural areas while the majority of the european population is clustered in hi-density urban centres.
t is entirely possible that the current BluRay movies are shipping on single layer 25 GB discs to save money in manufacturing as it would be cheaper to stamp a single layer disc and "25 GB is close enough to 30 GB".
Not only that, but it appears that most current blu-ray titles are shipping on "defective" single-layer discs that have only 18-20GB or so of space due to the yields on the media still being fairly low.
Almost everyone has +- players so I go for cheaper disks every time
Bad move.
While compatibility is about equal across types, the leading indicator for compatibility turns out to be the quality of the media. So going for cheaper disks is probably the worst way to go since price and quality tend to be pretty highly correlated in the dvd media market.
Or so says a recent NIST study of recordable DVD media.
Great, but Brokeback is a strawman. The only people talking about it are the ones who, like yourself, think it proves that a, "story based on sexual confusion is of no interest at all." I have yet to see anyone in this debate claim anything else about Brokeback. I certainly made no comment because I haven't seen the movie, although an ex recently told me that she didn't like it because there wasn't enough nudity.
Ah shut up already you damn dirty baby-killer!
Agreed again, but the fact that a law is easy to violate and this is widely abused does not mean that the law is not in the interest of society, nor that we should not try to enforce it and to punish those who do not obey it.
You've sidestepped my point that enforcement is highly expensive. And I'm not just talking about tax dollars spent on law enforcement efforts. There are at least two other factors -- digital restrictions like WGA impose a cost all on their own too, and restrictions on the free flow of knowledge (for example, the current scientific publishing model where the journals claim copyright on the work of the scientist, thus preventing the widespread distribution of new scientific knowledge that would otherwise happen naturally). When the cost of a law exceeds the benefit of the law, surely that must be justification to change the law.
Take an extreme case: someone who is truly determined to kill another human at any cost will often be able to commit the murder, and we know that people do get murdered. We cannot make people invulnerable, nor provide sufficient resources to protect every individual all the time. Should we therefore accept that the law against murder is flawed, because it cannot be perfectly enforced? I hope we'd agree that such an argument would be inappropriate.
It isn't a case of being perfectly enforced, it is a case of being reasonably enforced. Murder, like theft of real-property, is inherently self-limiting - its really hard to kill more than a handful of people at a time. Such events are exceptionally rare, and the laws on the books do not impose a significant cost on society.
Digital information naturally lends itself to unlimited redistribution, and despite all the laws to the contrary, such redistribution happens hundreds of millions of times per day and the laws that make such redistribution illegal have a very high cost.
Now, here's where the parallel really cuts in: in an ideal world, we might do away with arbitrary speed limits,
Speed limits are a poor example. The reason being is that the laws on the books in most, if not all states, say that speed limits must be set via a process of evaluation of driving behaviour by the local department of transportation (often the limit is suppossed to be a speed that covers the 85th percentile of drivers during a survey when there is no posted limit). In other words, the law already says that speed limits are not suppossed to be arbitrary, and in fact one relatively unknown way to get a speeding ticket thrown out of court is to have the limit ruled as illegal - you ask the prosecutuer to prove that the limit is legal by producing the survey results, they should be on file in the local county or town records, no survey, no ticket.
Now, these details have not stopped many towns and neighborhoods from posting arbitrarily low speed-limits, but that does not mean the law has been followed.
Just to fill in the details on that - in many states there are indeed default limits that are defined by characteristics of the road - 2 lane vs 4 lane, etc - and the surrounding land - dense residential, industrial park, open country, etc. So you might still point to those limits as being arbitrary, but my contention is that because they are defined by the characteristics of the area in conjunction with a well studied baseline that they are rarely arbitrary as is is the case in speed-traps and what-not.
I realize I've strayed far from your point, but I felt that simply saying, "Speed limits are not a good example of useful but arbitrary laws" without backing that up would be unfair. I guess I could have focused on the fact that unlike copyright, speed limits impose little cost on society instead, probably would have been simpler. The opportunity cost of laws and their enforcement against murder, speeding and even theft of real property are quite small in comparison to the opportunity costs of copyright law.
In a perfect world, of course, ever
To us normal people, the implication of "gas-guzzling" was pretty clear -- that operation of the vehicle has become very expensive recently, you know, because gasoline prices have gone through the roof.
All property is protected artificially.
He said artificial scarcity. Not "protected artificially."
The difference is that real property is naturally scarce, or more technically it is rivalrous, and thus inherently "protectable" since there is only one instance to keep track of, either you have it or you don't.
that recognition works just fine as long as everyone plays by the same rules.
However, it is both many orders of magnitude more difficult to enforce the rules for information than it is for real property, and it is in conflict with human nature (the natural urge to share knowledge that is probably a key, if not the key to the development of civilization). So, its much harder to enforce and because it conflicts with human nature, people naturally violate it many more times than they do similar rules for real property.
All that enforcement eventually results in a higher cost - the more society tries to enforce those rules, the more it costs us. Many people believe that the additional costs involved for protecting ownership of ideas are now high enough that they make the model infeasible, that it is a net drain on society that retards progress rather than encourages it.
People like cliffski, with their heads stuck in the box that hollywood has selfishly crammed it into, can't see that the model is breaking, if not already broken. And what's worse, they can't see that alternative models can, and probably must, take its place. Models that harness human nature rather than oppose it. Instead all you get are ironic comments like "Try thinking through the implications to changing the business model," because his own lack of imagination prevents him from thinking things through enough to come up with a business model that can work given the new parameters of modern digital distribution.
But let's address your denial:
nobody has attacked anyone's credibility
Do you wish to continue to deny that both you and cliffski are calling bogtha a thief? In fact, his entire response is just an attempt to impune bogtha's character by calling him and his friends thieves, all in response to bogtha's proposition that cliffski's opinion about copyright was not the only moral position available.
Haha.
The guy was an idiot and your were congratulating him on it.
He did the equivalent of saying that only druggies complain about drug laws, or only speeders think speed enforcement laws are often abusive, or only gun-nuts dislike gun-restriction laws, etc, etc.
In his self-righteousness, he couldn't even conceive of the possibility that one might make a rational argument criticisizing the state of copyright law without himself being a copyright violator. That's worse than attacking the messenger and ignoring the message, its making up strawmen to impune the integrity of someone you disagree with but can't otherwise justify your disagreement.
And you thought that was just great. Hoo-rah! Just the kind of behaviour we need more of online.
Once more, Twitter's posting laid out a well reasoned, logical argument for the effective nullification of copyright - not patents - which is just about the only thing that applies to your original question about bootleged information.
I firmly believe that you consistently resort to the tactic of proof by assertion because you are unable to justify your position. And the reason I believe that is not because I think you are dumb, its because I think no rational justification can stand against Twitter's logic. You can't produce something that does not exist.
Ooooh, but mocking self-righteousness and ignorance is baaaad!
Do you realize that you've strayed from the discussion of copyrights into the discussion of patents? All that you say only applies to patents while everything twitter said, and your own original post dealt with, was in relation to copyright and possibly trademark. So in summary, pretty much a red herring. Care to try again?
In ten years I suspect that Lord of the Rings will remain known as one of the greatest sets of movies ever, while something like (dare I say it) Brokeback Mountain will be relegated to a minority and dwindling fanbase. Movies that do one step worse and sacrifice everything for the message are doomed to failure.
You have made the mistake of equating popularity with quality. The lord of the rings challenged no one to think. As storylines go, it's pretty much pure pablum - that you think it has "depth of plot" says more about your viewpoint than it does about the story. A story which clearly had length, but so many characters and so many events were archetypes right out of Joeseph Campbell's monomyth that it was as familiar and pedestrian as a thousand other good-battles-evil stories.
The movies were popular because they looked pretty, had enormous advertising budgets and were faithful enough to a story that huge numbers of people enjoyed as teenagers because it was one of their first exposures to the monomyth and thus played on the human tendency to mistake novelity for sophistication.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the movies were bad. The are just simplistic and bland - requiring no thought on the part of the audience, which is good enough for most people. But certainly nothing more than "chewing gum for the mind."
Actually it is a big deal because you can't be arrested in your own home without an arrest warrant.
I am pretty sure that is not true. Just like cops don't need a warrant to enter your house if they see something that makes them think there is emminent danger to someone or an illegal activity in progress.
Aren't you forgetting something?
What difference does it make if he was on his own property or not?
Taking a picture from your lawn or from the sidewalk next to your lawn is just as legal.
So big deal if he was not on his own property when arrested. He still should not have been arrested.
good taste
Good luck with that one. Taste is purely in the mind of the beholder. What you think is good taste is unlikely to be what any significant majority of the population thinks it is. Your implications about David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino and your outright dismissal of any stories based on sexual confusion is glaring proof of the subjectivity of taste.
For example, while vast numbers of Americans clearly think "Passion" was in good taste, there are more than a few who saw it as exploitive, crude and excessively violent. Similarly with "The DaVinci Code" - I even got email from some people I know who thought it worthy of boycotting because its blasphemy was in such poor taste.
I'll even go out on a limb and say that no movie can rise above the level of passable but forgettably simple entertainment unless it challenges some of the widely held perceptions of what is acceptable in society. Any movie that makes such a challenge is certain, almost by definition, to conflict with what a large number of people in that same society would consider "tasteful."
I'm not saying those things don't happen. I'm saying that they are highly illegal and not common place. Signing off on a design for an engineer is like preparing legal documents without being a lawyer or giving medical advice without being a doctor.
Your post gave me a massive case of deja vu.
It was the late 90s and I was a regular on siliconinvestor.com. On one of the message boards there was a large discussion of "cooking the books" at large corps. One the participants claimed to be a CPA and gave no reason to doubt him, his posts were never insane and he often had good insight into the financial operations of public companies at large. IIRC, his usename was "Dave R."
So in this particular case, we were all talking about cooking the books to give a more favorable impression to wallstreet. Lots of talk about different sorts of dirty tricks that could theoretically be used. Dave swore up and down about how such shennigans would require the cooperation of the independent auditors and how that was so extremely unlikely that it effectively never happened. At the time I had my doubts, having worked for a medium-sized tech company where jokes about shipping product on "December 35th" were frequently heard. But other than those jokes I had no real reason beyond my personal cyncism to doubt Dave's claims about the strict integrity of the corporate auditing companies.
So, a few years later when the stories about Enron and Worldcom and all the others broke and kept on breaking, and when Arthur Andersen went tits-up because of their complicity, and all of the other auditors took hits for their roles at their clients, I remembered Dave and wondered if his opinion about the way his industry works had changed.
Proof? Twitter put in about two entire paragraphs building a logical case based on facts for his ultimate conclusion which you dismiss with the wave of your hand. You should at least try to make a case for your claim.