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I may have trolled before but i have put that aside to bring the truth about ACTA/SOPA/PIPA.

Please watch:

This is not just America, this is a WORLDWIDE problem.
Stop SOPA/PIPA/ACTA.

The videos are long, but they are nice.

And, you don't happen to know a little thing called "MMMeme" do you?

"The Senate of Mexico voted unanimously to withdraw Mexico from ACTA negotiations on 30 September 2010."

QUICK, EVERYONE TO MEXICO!

Hopefully, it won't pass in the EU. Germany has a lot of clout. A lot.

I just got an email today saying that I've been blacklisted by a copyright protection agency (RIAA).

(I knew it was spam so I just deleted it).

Backtrace them, download LOIC, and proxy up. Or use /b/ as your personal army of vengeance.
They'd do it. You know they would.

It was a spam email, bro.

Still. I demand that you kill it, preferably with fire.

You can't set a packet of electronic information on fire.

Nobody cares about issues in politics unless a large enough group to make people feel secure is already established.

There are tons of things by far more important then this, and yet this takes the spot light like a huge media whore while people are dying in countries like Syria, because the UN is not doing it's job properly.

While this info is interesting, this guy puts Verbose and me to shame. About five minutes into the first 15-minute video, I feel like I've heard 90 seconds of useful information, tops. Somebody needs to summarize stuff like this for us folks with short attention spans.

Speaking of which, I have an altogether more extensive rant about a claim made in the video that won't fit in this post, so go to the next post if you want to see "lies, damned lies, and statistics" in action.

As a mathematician/statistician, I always strive to call out statistical bullshit:

[photo:252105]

Indeed, I thought about it for all of five seconds before I realized this was way off-base mathematically, so I went to check on the factuality. Now all I have to say here assumes that the data in the graph are accurate, as well as the information in the Wikipedia article on for-profit prisons so one should still take it all with a grain of salt, but I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt on those points.

First of all, as is often the case with statistical claims, the phrase "Once USA for Profit Prisons became Legal, Convictions and long Prison Terms SKYROCKETED 500%!" is mathematically meaningless. (I'll ignore grammatical issues such as the Random Capitalization of Words for now, since they are minor in comparison to the issues I will enumerate.) Real, proper statistical claims give context, meaningful measurement standards, and error margins.

Going through the claim not in order of importance but order of the wording, the word "once" in this context means "immediately at the time", and while clearly the numbers rose significantly, it was also clearly a gradual process; this is a semantic issue, and the sentence should really say something like "In the x-year period following the legalization of for-profit prisons in the USA…"

Next, if I'm reading the Wikipedia article correctly, there are two problems with "became legal". For one thing, it would seem that for-profit prisons have never been technically illegal, it's just that the government didn't use them before the Reagan years (not that I'm blaming Reagan for this; I'll get to blaming Reagan on one or two other issues below). Even if we call the moment that the government made that shift "legalization" (while it's not technically correct, I'll admit there is an essence of truth to the concept), the arrow in the graph points to 1980, while the actual year for-profit prisons came into use was actually 1984. It may be that the data points on the chart are the only ones the chart-maker had available, but that in itself is also a flaw in the analysis, if so. Consider that I graduated from high school in 1990, and in that year had an income of zero, but in the year 2000, my income was (I don't remember, but let's say…) $30,000. You might say that graduating from high school caused my income to "skyrocket", but you'd be missing some big pieces of the puzzle by skipping a decade of data. Of note, my income in 1991 was likewise zero, in 1994 I received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics, in 1996 I moved to a more affluent area of California, and in 1997 I got married, causing my income from that year forward to be the combined income of two laborers from at least four different jobs.

But back to our prison example, you will see in the Wikipedia article that the reason the government started contracting out incarceration was that they couldn't deal with the influx of prisoners due to the "War on Drugs". I have no evidence in particular, but I suspect that this dramatic increase in incarceration was due to a poorly-planned policy decision by the Reagan administration, which created a market demand that didn't previously exist. If true, for-profit prisons would be a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

Finally, and the thing I noticed immediately was the drastically wrong math of the claim. Where did "500%" come from? Even assuming that this number is supposed to represent the change from 1980 (the wrong year for a comparison, as I explained above) to 2008 (not the last data point, but the highest one) increase from 220 per 100,000 to 753 per 100,000 doesn't come out to 500% even by using bad math. 753 is 342% of 220, the biggest percentage I can squeeze out of the data, but by erroneous mathematics. Since with percentages your starting point of a comparison is always 100%, this means that 753 is a 242% increase over 220, a surprising number, but hardly 500%. If the chart creator was trying to use absolute numbers, thinking "753-220=533 → 500%!", then he completely misunderstood the data, as the percentage for 1980 was 0.22% (these are rates per 100,000, remember?) and the percentage for 2008 was 0.753%, which means not an increase of 500%, but just a tad more than one-half of 1%!

In summary (with respect to that chart) the claim is imprecise, the data are invalid, and the math is so far off it's laughable. I do think the data suggest something alarming, but what they really suggest is something completely different and not nearly as severe as it's made out to be.

Next, if I’m reading the Wikipedia article correctly, there are two problems with “became legal”. For one thing, it would seem that for-profit prisons have never been technically illegal, it’s just that the government didn’t use them before the Reagan years (not that I’m blaming Reagan for this; I’ll get to blaming Reagan on one or two other issues below). Even if we call the moment that the government made that shift “legalization” (while it’s not technically correct, I’ll admit there is an essence of truth to the concept), the arrow in the graph points to 1980, while the actual year for-profit prisons came into use was actually 1984. It may be that the data points on the chart are the only ones the chart-maker had available, but that in itself is also a flaw in the analysis, if so. Consider that I graduated from high school in 1990, and in that year had an income of zero, but in the year 2000, my income was (I don’t remember, but let’s say…) $30,000. You might say that graduating from high school caused my income to “skyrocket”, but you’d be missing some big pieces of the puzzle by skipping a decade of data. Of note, my income in 1991 was likewise zero, in 1994 I received a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics, in 1996 I moved to a more affluent area of California, and in 1997 I got married, causing my income from that year forward to be the combined income of two laborers from at least four different jobs.

@Brucker is not a meme!

Does the Wikipedia article have a citation with the statement?

Obama and the RIAA:

No, Wikipedia does not have a citation on my life through the 1990s. Or is that what you meant?

You got me, still a good habit to ask this when ever a Wikipedia article is used, it works 120% of the time.

The music website RnBXclusive.com has been taken down by SOCA and its visitors have been warned of facing 10 years in prison and an unlimited fine.

See, they don't need to spy on everyone to stop copyright violation. They can just take down the source.
They don't need the powers they're requesting to fight piracy. They're using the situation to give themselves more power then they need. That's worrying.