The negative = something that's "not"
How do you prove something "ISN'T"? If the fact that something "IS" can't be proved, it means it isn't.
For example how would you prove there ISN'T a ghost in your room?
But that doesn't mean you can't prove a negative.
How do you prove there isn't a human lawyer hiding somewhere in your room? If you search all possible spots in your room, you can claim with good plausibility (beyond reasonable doubt) that there is not a lawyer hiding anywhere in your room. Record all spots in your room 24/7, for a month straight, analyze all the footage, and that's very strong proof. He'd have to have appeared sometime or die out of dehydration.
What is generally meant with "proving a negative" is that you can't prove "something does not exist". That becomes a problem with ill-defined phenomena that have never been observed before.
How do I prove there isn't a
magical, invisible, immaterial, aphonic, human-shaped lawyer hiding in my room? Well, that I can't prove with any of my means. The vagueness and lack of concrete definitions for the first word makes the case ever more difficult. Is the human-shaped lawyer invisible only to the capacity of the human eye, or
magically invisible?
Anyway, for those of us who registered after the drama in the old forums, I understand totallyred's concerns. What I can say is that the mods and their diaries seem pretty trustworthy.
I'd also like to think this forum operates on a loss.