Mahy - Slashdot User

IBM Patents Pricing Motorists Off Highways 805

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @02:03PM from the prior-art-stuck-at-the-tollbooth dept.

theodp writes "Self-professed patent reformer IBM snagged a patent Tuesday for the Variable Rate Toll System, which covers the rather anti-egalitarian scheme of pricing motorists off of the roads by raising tolls as congestion increases. 'Congestion pricing of traffic is emerging as a completely new services market for IBM,' boasted Jamie Houghton, IBM's Global Leader for Road Charging."

Comment The problem with this argument is... (Score 1) 397

by Mahy on Monday November 05, 2007 @01:14PM (#21243873) Attached to: Paying People to Argue With You

Clearly #2:

If that's true for the entire group of underage smokers, then it's also true for each individual smoker under 18. In other words, even if only one person under 18 smoked in the entire country, it would still be justified for the government to ban them from smoking.

This is the classical fallacy of division (See, for example, http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/division.html). Note that it is *possible* that an *individual* smoker might be immune to the harmful effects of smoking, but this is clearly not a feature of the group of all smokers. Therefore, your claim that this is a logical argument is the actual problem.

Now, if none of your readers identified this correctly, I would argue that your experiment failed. I require my students to be able to identify such mistakes in news articles they read for class.

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