Apple's DRM Is Bad For Consumers and Business 364
BoredStiff writes "Cory Doctorow, noted sci-fi writer and Boing Boing editor, marshals a strong argument against digital rights management in a recent InformationWeek article. His assertion is that there's no good DRM and that Apple's copy-protection technology makes media companies into its servants. Other copy-protection technologies, like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, are just as bad."
sooooo they say... (Score:3, Funny)
naughty! (Score:1, Funny)
Re:This guy must be a slashdot reader... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Your first mistake (Score:3, Funny)
I feel sorry for people getting music from anywhere but iTunes or eMusic or mp3bogs like 3hive or buying CDs in used music stores and ripping them or...
Re:"Borrowing" = Stealing (Score:5, Funny)
Mentally, you are retarded.
Re:nice (Score:2, Funny)
Re:argumentum ad hominem (Score:3, Funny)
Apart from insulting being fun, the ad-hominem attack is very effective. Why is this? Is it a quirk of human nature "I hate this guy so I don't listen to anything he says," or is it actually rational? I've mentioned this earlier on slashdot, and I'd like you to think about this for a moment:
If one takes a Bayesian view of probability [wikipedia.org] (probability represents one's degree of belief in a proposition, not a frequency of occurrance), then if one is a rational Bayesian agent, one must incorporate all "relevant" information when ascertaining the belief of a hypothesis, through the chaining of probabilities. Starting with a prior on a statement (unfortunately what prior to choose is often unclear, and is perhaps even arbitrary), one modifies the belief by multiplying by conditional probabilities as gathered by evidence.
One can easily make the claim (the "proof" for this shall be left as an exercise to the reader) that given the sum of experiences one has collected over their lifetime, (direct experience or transitive experience through discussion, books, and other media) one can infer that there is indeed a conditional probability connecting the probability that entity A is a "zealot" and that information from entity A is incorrect.
Bayesian reasoning/inference differs significantly from "pure" boolean reasoning in that it captures this information in a way tha tis actually useful in real life. For instance, the statement "if someone is pointing a gun at you, they will kill you" is obviously false under boolean logic systems, however in real life it is prudent to infer that it is likely enough that htey will kill you that you should take it into account in your planning process. Similarly with the "ad hominem" attacks. The following statements are all valid in a Bayesian framework (when one takes into account the independence of these propositions from other information known about entity A):
- Entity A is a zealot/crackpot, therefore assertion X made by A is more likely to be incorrect.
- Entity A is a well respected, unbiased source, therefore assertion X is likely to be correct.
- Assertion X is known to conflict with deep laws of science/politics, or is a minority viewpoint which is considered to be "fringe thinking"/"crackpottery"/un-preferred worldview (i.e. over-unity devices, fascism, tinfoil-hat), therefore Entity A is likely to be an untrustworthy source.
- Assertion X, Y, Z, etc have proven to be correct and are in-line with generally accepted theory, therefore Entity A is more likely to be a trustworthy source.
All of these statements are fairly vague (I'm sure one can find a far more rigorous discussion of this somewhere online), however I trust you can see that independent of all other information on Entity A these statements are correct.That leads me to conclude (in an albeit simplified fashion) that because information on a subject/individual/particular point is highly limited (indeed, with things like global warming, etc, even having a PhD in the field is only a reasonable start, not a comprehensive, authoritative educaiton), one must consider all information about an argument (and weight it according to statistical correlation) when one makes an inference (once again assuming one is a Bayesian, which is a strong assumption, but definitely closer to human reasoning under uncertainty than pure boolean logic, or frequentism). Therefore ad-hominmen attacks are actually important - if you must extend "trust" to a source (you are trusting their reasoning or their data), you must first ascertain the level of trust you should extend. Ad-hominem attacks are therefore effective precisely because they provide evidence (often very unbiased, but sometimes not) that the data should not be trusted. This does not in any way prove that the data or reasoning is wrong, merely that is should have a reduced weighting in the final inference of belief.
Yes, but... (Score:1, Funny)