daveungerer

I quote: This fallacy is often confused with begging the question, which offers a premise no more plausible than, and often just a restatement of, the conclusion.

It does become a loaded question if you ask a music industry exec: "Are you aware of the fundamental difference between copyright infringement and stealing?" But, as the wikipedia article says, that's not the same as begging the question. In any case, it's not a loaded question, since it's not a question to begin with.

The original poster did not ask us to answer the question about the record / film industry, while accepting his other statement. He was saying "I believe that there is a fundamental difference between X and Y, and am dismayed by the lack of understanding of this difference in the record / film industry". I doubt he had formal logic in mind.

EDIT: But you do make some very points, and I'm willing to concede that I may be completely wrong about what the original guy was trying to say, or how it should be interpreted. I really should spend less time on HN :)

1. Stated (as fact) that there is a fundamental difference between copyright infringement and physcal theft.

2. Expressed dismay at the apparent lack of understanding of the above fact by the music / movie industries.

Expressing dismay because someone else seems unaware of something you hold as a fact is not a logical fallacy in and of itself. It may be possible to show the fact is incorrect and the dismay therefore unnecessary, but that doesn't make it a fallacy.

If you manage to use it on their servers, with the associated running costs (disk space, CPU and RAM usage, support if you're a clever cracker) then you are in fact a thief - you are stealing their resources.

If someone infringes on your copyright, you can still continue selling licences as well as fully transfer ownership of the intellectual property. That's why it's not stealing. Note: I'm not condoning copyright infringement, just pointing out that it's not equivalent to stealing.

I don't see the debate you're referring to. When the music industry chooses to redefine a word, pointing out that that's what they're doing is sufficient. I took the extra step of actually repeating the definitions here, but that shouldn't be necessary.

That gives the book some extra credibility in my eyes.

EDIT: OK, now that I've read the foreward, I see Matz himself mentions Gregory's work on Prawn. Doh.

You can't call that getting the basics right, as if it's some well established fact. Citation needed.

EDIT: The modern diet, with all its refined white flour, has a much higher GI than in the past. (White flour has a much higher GI than fruits and vegtables, for a start). What do you think is responsible for the rising diabetes epidemic?

I had the same null pointer exception about a week ago when creating a new project with Enclojure. Try opening the Enclojure preferences page and then selecting a Clojure version — it doesn’t seem to initialise this setting properly. Fixed it for me.

I also had to fix another null pointer exception before that, caused by having a Ruby version of NetBeans instead of a Java one — adding the Java module before installing Enclojure fixed that.

2) Never applied. I'm not in the USA anyway.

3) Nope. One of my first customers did want to invest, but I didn't need it.

4) http://www.simplepay.co.za (Online payroll software. Not really applicable if you're not South African. For now...)

In the rails world, for example, if you've done your validates_* declarations on an ActiveRecord model, it shouldn't be too difficult to generate the javascript required for client-side validation.

Actually found a project that goes a long way towards achieving just that: http://github.com/grimen/validatious-on-rails

But I guess you're referring to complex validations, expressed as code instead of validates_* declarations. It seems like you would prefer either an all-JS approach or an automated translation to JS, as per the blog post you linked. To me, it boils down to whether such a complicated validation is really appropriate for client-side validation and whether it blurs the lines between form validation and business logic to such an extent that it's better off just living on the server.

But I'd love to hear your further thoughts on the matter.

Now, if the US is serious about innovation and economic recovery, they will employ software patent evaluators who are actually aware of the state of the art in software engineering / computer science and who can judge the obviousness of an invention. Their failure to do so has resulted in a lot of extra friction that prevents economic growth. Every frivolous patent suit filed, every agreement to give in and pay up, is another bit of economic growth lost to friction.

Good luck with the recession.

I agree that regular exercise, a healthy diet, proper sleep, and a good schedule is a great solution most of the time.

That's the beginning of the "Hypno-Peripheral Processing" audio course "Procrastination, A Rhythmic Approach, by Dr. Lloyd Glauberman". If you identify with those statements, I would definitely recommend you give it a try. I think it takes more than a few words of good advice to change something that's so deeply ingrained. When I tried it a few years ago, the effect was immediate, and while I wouldn't ascribe it only to that, I'm definitely much less of a procrastinator today.

You may have some reservations about hypnotizing yourself, but it's really not the kind you see on TV. You're actually aware of what's happening, kind of like being semi-hypnotized I guess.

Ironically enough, I never finished the whole course. I was too busy doing all the other things I'd been procrastinating on.

But your second paragraph show's me this is all based on confusion. The parallax cue and processing different images for each eye are the same thing, not 2 different things as you're implying. And that's the one of the cues that's NOT turned off.

I'm not defending what the author is saying. I just feel you should read the article again, because your statements don't seem to address anything said in the article.

Note: I wasn't asking for rationalisations, I was asking for anecdotal evidence. Does anyone have experience in improved rankings that they would attribute to Yahoo or DMOZ?

But in a call with analysts, Mr. Schmidt made it clear the company wants to continue doing business in China, one of the world's largest markets, even though it will stop censoring its results.

There is no contradiction with their original statement, but it's very misleading of the WSJ to start the article with the quote you mentioned above, not to mention the headline: "Google Says It Is Committed to China as Net Soars"

Online payroll system for South Africa. It's my startup. Just launched a while ago. How's it going? Got a few trail users. Busy climbing the search engine rankings.

Hitting another car of the same size coming from the opposite side when each car is doing 35 mph is pretty similar to hitting a concrete wall at 35 mph. There is no 70 mph effect. The reason the pole would be safer is that it has some give. Lower acceleration = lower force.