>I'm sure if they had made large objects out of steel (skyscrapers?) we would have seen some evidence of that.
Well that's very brave of you because paleontologists aren't sure at all. Steel MELTS. At relatively low temperatures compared to what the earth has gone through at times. Steel RUSTS and forms iron oxide which flakes away and spread over vast areas because it's easily wind-carried.
The KT event alone would have had enough impact to turn every skyscraper we have no into nothing swirling bit's of the dustcloud that covers the earth for a few million years... when it all came down...
Sure the evidence would be there - but in a form recognizable as such by a species 60 million years later who 1) Isn't really looking for it 2) Wouldn't know WHAT to look for (I find the suggestion that a society of equivalent technology would have the SAME technology and materials used utterly stupid - they would have evolved in a different environment, with different resources available and different challenges to face in taming that environment) 3) Would be able to find enough in one place that even if we DID find it we could be sure that it was actually what we found.
>They'd have to use some fuel that burns. That means, exactly the same that we use. The same holds true for ore.
Would they ? Prove it? Those technologies are not ALL technologies. Were we NOT a technological civilization when we started farming ? Would that not be significant if it existed ? What if we'd based our technologies on other sources all along. What if we had reached a level of society equivalent to ours with other technologies ? We're moving AWAY from those technologies even now ! More-over - even those won't leave evidence. There are MANY ways ore moves from deep to shallow. Volcanos do it, earthquakes do it. All the gold we've ever mind weighs less than the basalt that one volcano moves from the mantle to the surface. Volcanic basalt btw. is by far the richest sources of diamonds in the world... how did that carbon get INTO the mantle in the first place ? Stop assuming science already knows everything - it's a disgrace to what science is all about.
>Don't you think it is funny that the entire surface has been reshaped several times, yet we are able to locate bones of creatures that survived hundreds of milions of years ago, and calculate their age? That is because your statement doesn't imply what you think it does. The surface changed, but under it, lots of places are still the same. Space derbris (like somebody already pointed) also won't go away in a few milion years, the ones in highter orbits will stay there until some rock puts them away, there will probably be some there when the Sun turns into a giant star. Of course, none of them will work anymore.
I answered the space debris issue. We're talking over a 10 million or more year timeperiod here, something that we didn't even INVENT until 50 years ago is frankly.. irrelevant. Humans have been around for about 5 million years, and had real technological civilizations for around 8000 of those. You are saying "but the last 50 years includes things that would be easy to find" - what if we'd have died out in the 19th century - would it mean that we wouldn't prove a technological past civilization to archeologists in another 10 million years ? Of course not. And you miss the very major point - we get some bones yes. We have all of 10 Tyranosaurus fossils in the world. Not skeletons - bones. Single bones. Out of an entire SPECIES that was around for longer than we were - 10 BONES survived. If the T-rex'es had had a civilization we'd have NO way of knowing from 10 bones bearing 70 million years of of time on them - their not even bones anymore, they are rocks shaped liked bones. You really don't GRASP what deep time means do you... let me put this way. If the entire history of the planet was compressed into a single day... we've been around for the past 20 seconds.
>But you are right on a point. If we were extinct two hundred years ago, nearly no evidence would remain. Future geologist would be very luck to gather a piece of glass, nothing else would remain. We'd probably disapear by then.
And glass doesn't prove much, even if it survives chemically intact, it can form naturally (it's rare but not unheard off -all you need is the right bit of "salt" on lying on some sand on a very hot day).
Your last paragraph and my first here does agree - and I consider that pretty significant. But I would venture that even the things we did create in the past 200 years won't be around for ever. Space debris is not eternal it lasts a long time but not forever (the odds of a satellite being hit by an asteroid is small but non-zero, on a long enough timeframe, they all come crashing down - and there are enough asteroids sucked into earths gravity well to keep that timeframe way below the life expectancy of the sun).
But lets assume there was a species that died out AT roughly our level about 20 million years ago - we would not have been ABLE to discover their space debris until the last 50 years (we may have seen it in telescopes but we likely would not have identified it for what it was till w
>Skype videocalling does work on Linux 64 bits. I know because I'm running openSUSE 64. It's not great and clicking on Show My Video will generate artifacts on the screen but otherwise it does work. Maybe you experience other problems that prevented it from working?
Well I'm glad it works for some people - that suggests it's not a V4L issue but an issue in the specific webcam driver instead. It's not distro specific or kernel specific as I've tried it on several of each.
>And, by the way, if by google-video you refer to gmail video chat capabilities, how did you put it to work? Sorry yes that's what I meant. Answer: newest pidgin has a plugin for it.
True but voyager is only 30 years old. More-over - it takes a society who has reached space-travel MORE advanced than ours to find it. If the moon can avoid a meteorite in the are where we left stuff - that has much better odds -but again, would only be discovered by a society the develops far enough to GET to the moon.
Right now - we could have missed it by just 40 years. 40 years out of 3 billion (the age of the earth) is a pretty damn small window and we don't have ANY evidence to believe we will still be here next year - though right now the most likely cause if we're not would be ourselves. Considering we had the most viable means of destroying ourselves BEFORE we went to the moon nearly 50% longer actually)... well you see what I'm getting at?
The corollary is, a society more advanced than ours from the past may have left us a nice little "we were here note" somewhere else - perhaps we'll find it on the surface of Mars or one of Jupiter's moons waiting for our great great grandchildren. Mars would have looked like an ideal candidate even a few decades ago when we thought it had little weather and no major geological activivity - now some scientists believe it has periods of mass vulcanism on a fairly regular basis that basically resurfaces the planet (like what happens on Venus but not so regularly) - so that would make it a less suitable choice. Even then, unless we go look, we won't know -and even if we look and find nothing it doesn't mean there was nobody to leave a note - it could just mean they weren't bothered to.
So you assume a previous intelligent society would have used the same fuels as us (really ? Fossil fuels used by the "people" whose time fossil fuels were LAID DOWN IN... think about that for a second).
More than that, the very surface of the earth has been reshaped a few times. There was mass vulcanism in Siberia that covered whatever was there originally under about 2 miles of magma round about the same time as the KT event - in fact some scientists believe that the KT event could have CAUSED this... so if our hypothetical intelligent dinosaurs had been living there... no trace we could find may have survived.
More-over all the stuff you mention are what, 100 years old ? So if we'd died out just a century sooner than right now - no evidence would have survived. We were a pretty advanced technological society even then though.
If what you say is so obvious - and so easy for a geologist to prove - then how come none has ? And no - they haven't. The vast majority of paleontologists and geologists believe it entirely likely that previous societies as technologically advanced as ours could have existed. Carl Sagan said "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". That is true - though of course the corollary is too - it's not proof either.
Here's a little suggestion for you. Whenever you hear "there's no evidence for" as an argument against something being possible - ask three questions: 1) Has anybody looked ? 2) If they did - would they have expected to find anything ? 3) Is the odds of evidence simply being missing bigger or smaller than the odds of it never having existed ?
Here we have: 1) No 2) Maybe - depends who looked. 3) Definitely. So even if somebody looks expecting to find, they may find nothing despite it having once existed.
>>Of course they did. But so what? That has nothing to do with the issue at hand. In fact you seem to be just full of straw-man arguments:
That's no strawman. You are claiming that progress cannot be made without these SPECIFIC means of remuneration, I am proving the opposite.
>>Patents and copyrights are one system for creating the incentive to share -so that we can do things once and move along. They are not the be-all and end-all of ways to do so.
>No, but it's the BEST way anyone has so far invented. That's good enough for me.
Are you really that ignorant ? There have been many other proposals, some of them remarkably better. The whole CC license concept is based on an alternative to what copyright normally does, as is free/open-source software. In both cases the massive size of these cultural collections prove that the creators find them appealing.
>The first part of this is irrelevant, since "industry leaders" are generally not the innovators anyway I agree, I'm not the one who said they were. Ayn Rand did that.
>. Sure, there are ways to do it other than patent and copyright, but none of those other ways has ever worked as well. Firstly I dispute your claim that none of them ever worked as well. But that's hardly a quantifiable thing - hell I even pointed out a flaw in one of those earlier systems myself. What is much more critical is that neither copyright NOR patents are working at all anymore. Well if you think "getting the creator paid" is the only purpose that matters then I suppose you could say they are fairly working. If "for the sake of the public good" is added, as it is in every legal system in the world - then they are abject failures.
>Again irrelevant, since the subject was in fact the arts and sciences. Not irrelevant. Because the failures were the SAME in both cases, we have absolutely no reason to believe that they weren't and significant evidence that they were. Therefore what we learn from one case can be applied to the other. Not that it's very complex: if you have a good way to award creation, you are likely to have more stuff created. The core point we seem to disagree on is WHY you would WANT that. I stand by the belief, backed by every legal history on earth and both our constitutions that the ONLY reason to bother is for the sake of getting the public domain bigger.
>Once again irrelevant. This is not a valid argument for abolishing patents or copyrights. But it is good reason to fix them so that they work again... like they provably did before.
Provably ? How the hell do you intend to prove it ? Copyright started out as a censorship law and had no authorship recognition in it - instead it had an authorship OBLIGATION - so the king could ban your book and cut your head off if he didn't like what you wrote. Copyright was you think of it wasn't even proposed until the drafting of the US constitution and even then it was NOT stated as a right, merely as an ALLOWABLE diminishment of everybody ELSE's rights for a certain purpose. We don't actually have proof that it ever "worked". What we do know is that until quite a bit into the last century America refused to recognize foreign copyrights. Standing by the belief that giving their own creators all foreign creation in the public domain was the best way to benefit their own electorate. It seems that in fact, recognizing foreign copyright is by your own history provably a BAD idea for a country which is NOT a mass exporter of creative works. It only changes when your exports in these industries become competitive with international imports. So if my country actually gave a damn about me as a voter, it would take it's cue from your past and refuse to recognize foreign copyrights for (considering our current state with films like Tsotsi and District 9)... I would say about the next 30 years. Why is this important ? Because it proves that copyright even in the past was sometimes seen as doing more harm to creative industries th
>Anyway, so far we where the first ones smart enough to build weapons capable to extinguish ourselves
And your scientific basis for this assertion is?
We have no proof that we're the first, and frankly if we were extinguished tomorrow the statistical odds are that in 5 million years time there will be no single trace of evidence left that we were ever here. To assume that no species in the billion years or so prior to our arrival reached this level is... well it's absurd. Class mamalia has been around for about 20 milion years. Class dinosauria was around for just shy of 70 million years. On what basis are you assuming that none of the millions of species that made them up over that period ever had a technologically advanced society ? We know Tyranosaurus existed because we have 10 fossils. Prior to 1993 we had 3 of them. Three bones. For a species that was around longer than ours have been. We had the right bones to know what they ate and roughly how big they were and even their approximate shape. We have no idea how smart they were, if they were social creatures... and no means of finding out either.
It's just human arrogance to think we're the first creatures to dig up the ancient bones of our ancestors (or at least the cousins of our ancestors) and talk about how they evolved into us who are smart. Science does not agree.
Well, average life-expectancy of a species is 5-million years. Homo Sapience has already doubled that putting us at the extreme end of the scale that gives this average. In short, the chances of us being around long enough to need to do something is statistically negligible. Life will be around. Probably even intelligent life. Perhaps this time even life intelligent enough to do something, probably not.
If we were wiped out tomorrow, it's quite likely that zero evidence of our existence would even be around to be found 10 million years from now. There were entire species that we know existed because we have fossils, that were around longer than us - and where we know this because we have two bones. Not two skeletons - two bones.
The assumption that we're the first technologically intelligent species on this planet is just as unscientific as to assume we aren't. The absence of evidence in this case can be just as easily explained by deep time as that there wasn't anything to leave it. But we do have absolute proof that technological societies CAN evolve on earth - because we're here. Thus Occam's razor suggests it's more likely that it has happened before - probably several times than that it hasn't....sheez, and I just wanted to expand on your joke by mentioning how low the odds are of our species (or even of the entire class mamalia) still being around in 16 million years...
Skype isn't just slow on IOS, they still haven't released a 64-bit version of the Linux client which is a major problem for video-calling because 32-bit apps cannot talk properly to the 63-bit V4L driver. You can see cams from outside but your own cam is just a jumbled mess of static. The short result of this is that I haven't bothered to log into skype in a very long time. It takes some kludging to get google-video going on Linux but at least it CAN be done.
Not anymore. At the time this was first heard their largest note was a 1-billion dollar note. Their well into the hundred-billions by now, and each time they introduce a new one on top, they remove one on bottom from circulation.
In practice a hundred billion dollar note buys about the same as R5 coin in South Africa*... or rather it would if there was anything left in the stores to buy with it. What with having no exportable currency and having destroyed their once lucrative farming industry - the stores can't actually get any stock and the shelves are mostly empty.
*This figure is likely to be outdated by the time I hit submit but oh well...
>Sure, they had a lot of other problems that contributed to the collapse of their economy. But it is undeniable that their arts did suffer. And their technology suffered. How do you get citizens to share good ideas with their neighbors, if there's nothing in it for them? Why should they bother to innovate, when they get paid the same whether they do or not?
That's the crux of the matter. But that is exactly the same problem they faced in the boot-factories. It has nothing to do with patents and copyrights. Those are just one possible way to reward artists and researchers for their contributions (or more accurately - to encourage them to share so that others don't need to recreate it over and over). The fact is that both invention and the arts predated the idea of patents and copyrights by...oh right the entire existence of human society. Neither has ever been needed for it. It is also true that offering a a remuneration system of some sort has proven to be more efficient than not to. Atlas Shrugged was wrong. If you stop rewarding innovators the world will NOT stagnate. If the current industry leaders all went on strike, the rest of us wouldn't even notice for more than about a year. Others will recreate whatever they had done because frankly that's how the real world works and somebody will fill the gap and find a way to make money out of it. Patents and copyrights are one system for creating the incentive to share -so that we can do things once and move along. They are not the be-all and end-all of ways to do so.
The communist failure is that no contribution was recognized or rewarded and this was no more true of the arts and sciences than anything else. The capitalist failure (today) is that it our system for it has become SO focussed on rewarding contribution that we're losing the ability to actually BENEFIT from the contribution. A book has some value when it's written and for sale to be read. It's value increases exponentially when it's in the public domain to be used to build new books out of. Want proof ? How much do you think a copy of Hans Christian Anderson's collected works were worth in his time ? Barely anything because despite being a published and popular author he was a starving beggar. Disney's "Rapunzel" made more in it's opening night than all his works together in his entire life (even adjusted for inflation) - and would never have existed if the copyright had not expired on it. The same holds for the Grimm Brothers and Snow White. It even holds for Alexandre Dumas. Dumas died so poor his estate couldn't afford a funeral and he lies in an unmarked grave as a result (and yes he had copyright). Do you have any idea how much money films based on "The three musketeers", "The count of Monte Christo" and "The hunchback of Notre Dame" has made ? That's value for all of society (I would wager that without those films the number of people who knew those stories today would be exponentially reduced- how many people still read a 400 page novel ?
We're now losing the ability to gain that value. So our public domain is diminishing. The results will be exactly the SAME as communism. Their public domain suffered from less books being written - we have no such problem, but ours is suffering from books being written but never getting to it. In practical terms - that makes absolutely no difference.
More-over the changes that society has gone through particularly technologically need to be considered. When-ever new technology appears we have to consider our laws and social-structures in light of them. There was no need for a copyright law before we invented the printing press. Now - new technology means we must consider if this law is still the best way to achieve the end goal: maximizing the size of the public domain.
I daresay that it is not - if it's diminishing the public domain now, then we have to scrap it and come up with a new system. Before copyright there was patronage. Patronage had only one major problem: those who paid could be rather selective about which
And many of us believe it WASN'T a problem. In fact I pointed out to you that many of their greatest successes - happened in fields where according to the corporate rhetoric no success can exist without patents or copyright. I even gave you examples.
It's not like the gold world was (or is) free from fraud and corruption anyway. In theory the amount of gold for trade is fairly finite and it's getting more and more so as it gets harder and harder mine the last bits out.
But here's a fun fact for you - the amount of gold ever mined is only about half as much as there are gold certificates in trade for. Which means if people actually cashed in their gold certificates, half of them could not be honored.
You joke -but right now it is actually CHEAPER to wipe your ass on zimbabwean dollars than it is to buy toilet paper (since you need about 8 billion dollar bills for a roll of paper).
>It's not an "outdated idea". If you really think that copyrights and patents are a bad idea, you need only look at countries where they did not exist -- like Russia during its peak of Socialist power -- to see how that works out economically. Hint: it doesn't.
Oh that's right, Russia's economy failed because they didn't have IP laws. Odd they wrote some of the 20th century's best literature (Dostoyevski for example) without copyright. They made some of the 20th century's most important scientific advances without patents (they got to space BEFORE America remember). Seem the facts don't match your claims but you must be right because you studied history. Obviously an excessive amount of government power and high levels of (creativity diminishing) censorship had nothing to do with it. The fact that every xerox machine in Russia had an armed guard next to it to prevent samizdat in fact made for a much more complete control of copying (with the technology of the time) than the copyright in the west did - and modern copyright regimes have far more in COMMON with Russia's control over copying during communism than it does with capitalism.
The fact that their economy was tied up by a massive an inefficient beaurocracy didn't contribute to their failure at all and of course all those factory workers who didn't bother to be productive because in that kind of communist system there is no way to advance anyway and even if you did you'd still be earning just as little (unless of course you were military or in politics and could get special favors) didn't do anything to harm their productivity (and thus their economy). All those economics theorists and philosophers who say so are obviously just trying to trick us all. Good thing the trick worked because it was the cornerstone of the US's approach to beating Russia during the last decade of the cold war.
The dictatorial system with it's endemic corruption also did no harm to Russia's economy. It all failed because they didn't have strong enough patent and copyright laws and we can prove this by indicating that after 20 years the only countries where these laws are not getting pretty damn draconian are the ones which have no government to speak off, or at least, none that the rest of the world gives a damn about and so their people tend to suffer. Yeah that makes sense. The good countries are good because they have draconian IP laws. It isn't that the people who lobby for draconian IP laws tend not to bother with the poorest countries on earth because there's no point trying play extortionist with people who don't have any money you can fleece them for. That has nothing to do with it.
Thanks you're intelligently researched arguments with their undeniable factual basis, so complete and devoid of any selective reporting have changed my minds. IP laws for the win...
PS. If you haven't figured it out by now. This post is a textbook example of sarcasm.
Keep in mind further a huge chunk of that code is GLIBC code - that is code that isn't part of Linux, it's from GNU and was written by the FSF (interestingly SCO never tried to sue the FSF, but non profit orgs tend to lack much money so I guess their not great targets for an extortionist).
IBM may have contributed some code to glibc but under FSF rules it could not be accepted unless they signed over copyright anyway. Still if it was infringing from there then I can see the point of sueing IBM.
All this are more like an intro though to my actual response to your comment: which is yes, and so did GNU. In fact RMS details in the history of the gnu project the (rather radically) different design decisions that he and his team made early on in their writing of unix-like components for gnu where their implementations completely deviated from the original UNIX versions:
1) Whenever a file was small enough (I believe their limit CA 1988) was 2mb) it would be read entirely into memory and not buffered in chunks from disk for any program, and then written back as a whole again. This uses more memory but is a much faster way to work. Today Linux (and other OS's) actually does this on the filesystem level with massive amounts of file changes kept in memory and only written out in idle-times or at dismount time because memory is so much faster than disk. 2) They made no attempt to support any architectures below 32-bit, so no you couldn't compile gnu on a 16-bit system. Downside - even if you could port the linux kernel to a 286 the rest of the base system wouldn't be able to compile on it. Upside - it could actually take advantage of the capabilities of 32-bit systems, especially with regard to memory addressing and use optimizations in how variables were defined based on this.
These are just some pieces of a much longer list, but they were the main reason why the gnu tools developed a major reputation for being faster and more reliable than their unix counterparts and the popularity of the gnu toolchain prior to the appearance of any kernel. When Linux appeared on the scene and was married to the two, it's own approach of maximising it's target platforrm's abilities (the same thing that made Tanenbaum angry) created probably the most performance efficient operating system of the time. Much faster than any other unix then available and able to run on commodity hardware. The legendary portability would only come later (you can largely thank Jon Maddog Hall for that as he got that ball rolling).
But the core point is - for very good reasons both the FSF and the Linux developers used some radically different fundamental design goals in how they wrote their tools compared to unix, these differences led to things be implemented in radically different ways on some levels. Your suggestion is verifiable and documented fact. This doesn't change that there really is only one way to write a proper quicksort - the core algorythms may well have had significant similarity, but the surrounding code was designed differently (how the data got INTO the algorythm in the first place was one of the things that GNU deliberately didn't do the same way unix did - as per example one above).
>But we're talking about a structured programming language - with far more structure and rules than the English language
Not to mention a far smaller vocabulary, the complete absense of abstract forms of speech (no metaphors, similes)and in fact of even fundemental sentences. The vast majority of sentences in a programming language are verb(subject); THAT'S it, a rare few have an "object" (e.g. substr(S1,S2)) but at heart, that's 99% of the lines in a program. Simple commands. There are identifiers, control concepts (loops and conditionals) and structural stuff (classes, functions and the like) but these make up very little of the bulk. The implementation section consists of commands and variables for them to act on. Thus for the same algorythmic task, barring minor changes in indentation and identifier naming (which will be minor because both are matters on whic standards exist and within organisations some or other standard is usually enforced) the statistical likelihood of two programmers writing and identical solution to the problem is very high. After all, programming is maths and there is only so many ways you can calculate the same equation - which is basically all any algorithm does.
You need a lot more than a few functions with identical structures to prove copyright violation when the scope for individual change is that much more limited. Creativity in programming is VERY rarely coming up with a NEW algorythm for an old task. Nearly always it lies in how we combine algorythms with one another to solve the bigger problems. The bits and pieces of code are like nuts and bolts, every engine has a million of them and they all look pretty much the same.
>I think you're confusing the technical ability to break encryption with its legality. It seems that the new proposed legislation would allow you to legally break the DRM encryption to use something under fair use. It doesn't say that whoever put DRM must tell you how to break it or give you keys.
Actually, it DOES. It states that the DRM MUST allow you to exercise (any and all off) your fair-use rights. It makes it a criminal offense punishable with a fine to prevent them. This means that if a user demands the keys in order to make a backup copy of a piece of media, they would be committing a crime if they refused to provide them, unless of course, the DRM in question is built in such a way that it makes these fair use rights actively doable already (like e.g. steam's allowed-backup system).
My point is the copyright is now so much of a faillure at serving the public good, that it should be ignored as an act of civil disobedience until massively reformed.
>If different cultures differ greatly on this matter, why do you believe it is not a cultural feature? Occam's razor vs a innate trait that is repressed depending on whatever.
Because they don't - the few cultures that deviate from the norm are an incredibly rare exception. That suggests an externality veering them from the course that is normally taken. I would call your corporate controlled media a major externality.
>You do not understand how wealth works. I perform a great service that people are happy to pay me for. I invent something, pay good money for its manufacture & sale, people love it, and it sells millions. Who have I exploited? Business is the creation of wealth, not the reluctant sequestration of somebody else's money. It's turning skills, time, and raw materials into more valuable goods and services, ie a delta-positive change in the total sum of wealth in society. Good trades have both parties benefiting from the transaction; the customer got their money's worth for something they wanted/needed, and the business has another successful sale.
Really ?How absolutely stupidly naive can you be ? This was true in Henry Ford's day. It sure as hell isn't true today. Most wealthy people don't even WORK for the companies they make their money from. In fact in "rich dad poor dad" the author states that a business you own CANNOT BE CALLED AN ASSET UNLESS YOU DO NOT DO ANY OF THE LABOUR OR MANAGEMENT YOURSELF.
>Okay, now you're just being blindly and ignorantly prejudiced against the wealthy. I don't believe you've ever interacted with anybody in that situation; you're just going from bad stereotypes you've heard on TV. Educate yourself; you sound like a little kid when you say things like that. I'm sure these numbers only come from the true sharing poor people, not anybody rich who would ever dare parting with their precious blood money.
Go read up J. Arthur W. Brown. That's my cousin. I grew up with the guy. I probably know the truly wealthy and their real nature better than you. There are still hardworking millionaires in the world, there's no such thing as an honest billionaire. It's impossible. You cannot honestly compete against dishonest competitors. The moment it became possible to make more money corruptly than honestly, the chances for a good man to become truly rich became nill. More-over, most businesses nowadays are corporations - run by CEO's - in the vast majority of cases those CEO's had NOTHING to do with the founding of the company. They are hired later - to make the shareholders more money. By law the company's board CANNOT consider ANY other goals BUT shareholder profit. They HAVE to do bottom-line thinking, cut jobs if they can get away with it. When nothing BUT profit is ALLOWED to matter, how can you be a good citizen ? There was always the odd lunatic who would poison the well and kill 20 people. It takes a corporation to poison the groundwater and kill thousands over decades. And it just happens over and over and over. Several studies have repeatedly found that if a corporation was a person, corporate behaviour would be textbook psychosis - don't you know this ? And the CEO's who sit on top ? How many of them are truly good people ? There is the odd one out, who discovers the harm they do, actually care, and then makes it a major corporate goal to reverse that. They are one in a billion - they refer to themselves and other CEO's as the "conscienceless plunderers". I respect THOSE CEO's.
>Well, "society" with no qualifiers can also suck, go on for generations being self-destructive, crumble into chaos, etc etc. "Society" is just a unit of people who consistently interact with each other in life. But I'd center a *well-functioning* human society's definition around mutually beneficial acts. It has little to do with resources, but more with trade of time, allowances, trust, and also goods & services. When those things are protected by the powers that be (either strong cultural norms, or legal systems), people feel free t
You speak from a very American point of view. Human minds evolve much faster than our genetics do - and lets just say most cultures are a LOT less selfish than yours. I've lived in cultures where people will, as a matter of course, when they learn that the new foreigner at the office lives alone (so he's not from the tight circle, and they don't even know him well) go and prepare an extra helping at dinner to bring for him tomorrow - just to be sure he has a healthy well-balanced meal (the sort that lone-livers often don't get). Not a person in the culture - MOST of them.
Your culture actively suppresses the sharing instinct, other cultures in the past have done the same, that doesn't mean it isn't there - and that it doesn't explain it's prevalence in other cultures.
I know plenty of countries where "doing your part" requires no campaigning, many people who never complain about paying their taxes (but they sure DO complain if they don't get the services for it that they ought to) because paying your taxes is seen as your moral obligation to your fellow man.
I know cultures where they very idea that money should ever be a question when it comes to healthcare or food appalls people. I have lived in over 40 countries, never for less than 3 months, and never as a tourist- lived and worked among and with the regular people of those countries. In the vast majority - that has been my experience. Not only of how *I* was treated, but of how they treated one another.
Of course they have a selfish side, of course there is an urge to protect me-and-mine first. But me-and-mine CAN become an ever-widening circle. I have come to believe it includes for myself the entire human race. I also believe it an unavoidable consequence of the communications revolution that this will become the average belief among all people. Most social scientists are in agreement that the internet's unavoidable consequence is the creation of a single human global superculture. And that MUST lead to exactly this.
The country I visited, where I felt the greatest hope for my species was Brazil. Do you know WHAT about Brazil gave me such hope ? I saw thousands of young couples, as you do everywhere, but in Brazil, I think a total of 5 of them were of the same race. Mixed-race couples are the NORM.
What does that mean ? It means within a few generations - no more races, just one race with the best genetic advantages from everybody. If ever there was proof of just how ridiculous the very IDEA of races is, a simple walk down the streets of Sao Paulo or San Francisco Xavier (big city and small rural village respectively) or Fortaleza (beach town) provides it in such abundance as to leave no room for argument.
>Whoever can and will take charge, does so. This is especially true in the context of pure Darwinian processes, but also in legal/government structures.
Yes, this is why we invented democracy. So we can have some say about who gets to be in charge. But my point wasn't about that. My point was that when we decide how resources should be distributed, we should not listen to those who genuinely believe the system should be designed to give all the resources to themselves. That is not a smart type of resource allocation. Another aspect here is that you accuse me of hating rich-people. I do not, but I do not agree with them either. I think it's morally impossible to be both a good person AND a rich one in the world we live in. That's not hatred, it's simply a summary of the state of the world. You CANNOT be rich unless you exploited people to become so. So I don't RESPECT rich people - that's a far cry from hating them. I also don't believe we should give them any say whatsoever in how the world is run (making lobbying and campaign donations the most undemocratic idea in history) because they are ipso-facto the worst possible people to give that say to. They are the kind of people who don't feel compassion and believe it's okay to enrich yourself at the expense of others. When we let them have politic
Valid point but not all that relevant anyway. Disney made a crapload of money out of movies made from out-of-copyright stories, it's a bloody rip-off that they refuse ot let their own creations go out of copyright and contribute back to the public domain pool they so enriched themselves from. Whether cars made more or less money than snow white is not the point. The point is they sure made a LOT more money out of Snow White than Hans Christian Anderson ever did - and they will do everything in their power ot make sure nobody else ever makes money out of cars in the same way (or even Mickey Mouse for that matter).
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, you're right. That was a typo.
*glares at 1-key*
>I'm sure if they had made large objects out of steel (skyscrapers?) we would have seen some evidence of that.
Well that's very brave of you because paleontologists aren't sure at all. Steel MELTS. At relatively low temperatures compared to what the earth has gone through at times. Steel RUSTS and forms iron oxide which flakes away and spread over vast areas because it's easily wind-carried.
The KT event alone would have had enough impact to turn every skyscraper we have no into nothing swirling bit's of the dustcloud that covers the earth for a few million years... when it all came down...
Sure the evidence would be there - but in a form recognizable as such by a species 60 million years later who
1) Isn't really looking for it
2) Wouldn't know WHAT to look for (I find the suggestion that a society of equivalent technology would have the SAME technology and materials used utterly stupid - they would have evolved in a different environment, with different resources available and different challenges to face in taming that environment)
3) Would be able to find enough in one place that even if we DID find it we could be sure that it was actually what we found.
>They'd have to use some fuel that burns. That means, exactly the same that we use. The same holds true for ore.
Would they ? Prove it? Those technologies are not ALL technologies. Were we NOT a technological civilization when we started farming ? Would that not be significant if it existed ? What if we'd based our technologies on other sources all along. What if we had reached a level of society equivalent to ours with other technologies ? We're moving AWAY from those technologies even now !
More-over - even those won't leave evidence. There are MANY ways ore moves from deep to shallow. Volcanos do it, earthquakes do it. All the gold we've ever mind weighs less than the basalt that one volcano moves from the mantle to the surface. Volcanic basalt btw. is by far the richest sources of diamonds in the world... how did that carbon get INTO the mantle in the first place ? Stop assuming science already knows everything - it's a disgrace to what science is all about.
>Don't you think it is funny that the entire surface has been reshaped several times, yet we are able to locate bones of creatures that survived hundreds of milions of years ago, and calculate their age? That is because your statement doesn't imply what you think it does. The surface changed, but under it, lots of places are still the same. Space derbris (like somebody already pointed) also won't go away in a few milion years, the ones in highter orbits will stay there until some rock puts them away, there will probably be some there when the Sun turns into a giant star. Of course, none of them will work anymore.
I answered the space debris issue. We're talking over a 10 million or more year timeperiod here, something that we didn't even INVENT until 50 years ago is frankly.. irrelevant. Humans have been around for about 5 million years, and had real technological civilizations for around 8000 of those. You are saying "but the last 50 years includes things that would be easy to find" - what if we'd have died out in the 19th century - would it mean that we wouldn't prove a technological past civilization to archeologists in another 10 million years ? Of course not. ... let me put this way. If the entire history of the planet was compressed into a single day... we've been around for the past 20 seconds.
And you miss the very major point - we get some bones yes. We have all of 10 Tyranosaurus fossils in the world. Not skeletons - bones. Single bones. Out of an entire SPECIES that was around for longer than we were - 10 BONES survived. If the T-rex'es had had a civilization we'd have NO way of knowing from 10 bones bearing 70 million years of of time on them - their not even bones anymore, they are rocks shaped liked bones.
You really don't GRASP what deep time means do you
>But you are right on a point. If we were extinct two hundred years ago, nearly no evidence would remain. Future geologist would be very luck to gather a piece of glass, nothing else would remain. We'd probably disapear by then.
And glass doesn't prove much, even if it survives chemically intact, it can form naturally (it's rare but not unheard off -all you need is the right bit of "salt" on lying on some sand on a very hot day).
Your last paragraph and my first here does agree - and I consider that pretty significant. But I would venture that even the things we did create in the past 200 years won't be around for ever. Space debris is not eternal it lasts a long time but not forever (the odds of a satellite being hit by an asteroid is small but non-zero, on a long enough timeframe, they all come crashing down - and there are enough asteroids sucked into earths gravity well to keep that timeframe way below the life expectancy of the sun).
But lets assume there was a species that died out AT roughly our level about 20 million years ago - we would not have been ABLE to discover their space debris until the last 50 years (we may have seen it in telescopes but we likely would not have identified it for what it was till w
>Skype videocalling does work on Linux 64 bits. I know because I'm running openSUSE 64. It's not great and clicking on Show My Video will generate artifacts on the screen but otherwise it does work. Maybe you experience other problems that prevented it from working?
Well I'm glad it works for some people - that suggests it's not a V4L issue but an issue in the specific webcam driver instead. It's not distro specific or kernel specific as I've tried it on several of each.
>And, by the way, if by google-video you refer to gmail video chat capabilities, how did you put it to work?
Sorry yes that's what I meant. Answer: newest pidgin has a plugin for it.
True but voyager is only 30 years old. More-over - it takes a society who has reached space-travel MORE advanced than ours to find it. If the moon can avoid a meteorite in the are where we left stuff - that has much better odds -but again, would only be discovered by a society the develops far enough to GET to the moon.
Right now - we could have missed it by just 40 years. 40 years out of 3 billion (the age of the earth) is a pretty damn small window and we don't have ANY evidence to believe we will still be here next year - though right now the most likely cause if we're not would be ourselves. Considering we had the most viable means of destroying ourselves BEFORE we went to the moon nearly 50% longer actually)... well you see what I'm getting at?
The corollary is, a society more advanced than ours from the past may have left us a nice little "we were here note" somewhere else - perhaps we'll find it on the surface of Mars or one of Jupiter's moons waiting for our great great grandchildren. Mars would have looked like an ideal candidate even a few decades ago when we thought it had little weather and no major geological activivity - now some scientists believe it has periods of mass vulcanism on a fairly regular basis that basically resurfaces the planet (like what happens on Venus but not so regularly) - so that would make it a less suitable choice.
Even then, unless we go look, we won't know -and even if we look and find nothing it doesn't mean there was nobody to leave a note - it could just mean they weren't bothered to.
So you assume a previous intelligent society would have used the same fuels as us (really ? Fossil fuels used by the "people" whose time fossil fuels were LAID DOWN IN... think about that for a second).
More than that, the very surface of the earth has been reshaped a few times. There was mass vulcanism in Siberia that covered whatever was there originally under about 2 miles of magma round about the same time as the KT event - in fact some scientists believe that the KT event could have CAUSED this... so if our hypothetical intelligent dinosaurs had been living there ... no trace we could find may have survived.
More-over all the stuff you mention are what, 100 years old ? So if we'd died out just a century sooner than right now - no evidence would have survived. We were a pretty advanced technological society even then though.
If what you say is so obvious - and so easy for a geologist to prove - then how come none has ? And no - they haven't. The vast majority of paleontologists and geologists believe it entirely likely that previous societies as technologically advanced as ours could have existed.
Carl Sagan said "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". That is true - though of course the corollary is too - it's not proof either.
Here's a little suggestion for you. Whenever you hear "there's no evidence for" as an argument against something being possible - ask three questions:
1) Has anybody looked ?
2) If they did - would they have expected to find anything ?
3) Is the odds of evidence simply being missing bigger or smaller than the odds of it never having existed ?
Here we have:
1) No
2) Maybe - depends who looked.
3) Definitely. So even if somebody looks expecting to find, they may find nothing despite it having once existed.
>>Of course they did. But so what? That has nothing to do with the issue at hand. In fact you seem to be just full of straw-man arguments:
That's no strawman. You are claiming that progress cannot be made without these SPECIFIC means of remuneration, I am proving the opposite.
>>Patents and copyrights are one system for creating the incentive to share -so that we can do things once and move along. They are not the be-all and end-all of ways to do so.
>No, but it's the BEST way anyone has so far invented. That's good enough for me.
Are you really that ignorant ? There have been many other proposals, some of them remarkably better. The whole CC license concept is based on an alternative to what copyright normally does, as is free/open-source software. In both cases the massive size of these cultural collections prove that the creators find them appealing.
>The first part of this is irrelevant, since "industry leaders" are generally not the innovators anyway
I agree, I'm not the one who said they were. Ayn Rand did that.
>. Sure, there are ways to do it other than patent and copyright, but none of those other ways has ever worked as well.
Firstly I dispute your claim that none of them ever worked as well. But that's hardly a quantifiable thing - hell I even pointed out a flaw in one of those earlier systems myself. What is much more critical is that neither copyright NOR patents are working at all anymore. Well if you think "getting the creator paid" is the only purpose that matters then I suppose you could say they are fairly working. If "for the sake of the public good" is added, as it is in every legal system in the world - then they are abject failures.
>Again irrelevant, since the subject was in fact the arts and sciences.
Not irrelevant. Because the failures were the SAME in both cases, we have absolutely no reason to believe that they weren't and significant evidence that they were. Therefore what we learn from one case can be applied to the other. Not that it's very complex: if you have a good way to award creation, you are likely to have more stuff created. The core point we seem to disagree on is WHY you would WANT that.
I stand by the belief, backed by every legal history on earth and both our constitutions that the ONLY reason to bother is for the sake of getting the public domain bigger.
>Once again irrelevant. This is not a valid argument for abolishing patents or copyrights. But it is good reason to fix them so that they work again... like they provably did before.
Provably ? How the hell do you intend to prove it ? Copyright started out as a censorship law and had no authorship recognition in it - instead it had an authorship OBLIGATION - so the king could ban your book and cut your head off if he didn't like what you wrote. Copyright was you think of it wasn't even proposed until the drafting of the US constitution and even then it was NOT stated as a right, merely as an ALLOWABLE diminishment of everybody ELSE's rights for a certain purpose. ... I would say about the next 30 years.
We don't actually have proof that it ever "worked". What we do know is that until quite a bit into the last century America refused to recognize foreign copyrights. Standing by the belief that giving their own creators all foreign creation in the public domain was the best way to benefit their own electorate.
It seems that in fact, recognizing foreign copyright is by your own history provably a BAD idea for a country which is NOT a mass exporter of creative works. It only changes when your exports in these industries become competitive with international imports. So if my country actually gave a damn about me as a voter, it would take it's cue from your past and refuse to recognize foreign copyrights for (considering our current state with films like Tsotsi and District 9)
Why is this important ? Because it proves that copyright even in the past was sometimes seen as doing more harm to creative industries th
>Anyway, so far we where the first ones smart enough to build weapons capable to extinguish ourselves
And your scientific basis for this assertion is?
We have no proof that we're the first, and frankly if we were extinguished tomorrow the statistical odds are that in 5 million years time there will be no single trace of evidence left that we were ever here. To assume that no species in the billion years or so prior to our arrival reached this level is... well it's absurd. ... and no means of finding out either.
Class mamalia has been around for about 20 milion years. Class dinosauria was around for just shy of 70 million years. On what basis are you assuming that none of the millions of species that made them up over that period ever had a technologically advanced society ? We know Tyranosaurus existed because we have 10 fossils. Prior to 1993 we had 3 of them. Three bones. For a species that was around longer than ours have been. We had the right bones to know what they ate and roughly how big they were and even their approximate shape. We have no idea how smart they were, if they were social creatures
It's just human arrogance to think we're the first creatures to dig up the ancient bones of our ancestors (or at least the cousins of our ancestors) and talk about how they evolved into us who are smart. Science does not agree.
Well, average life-expectancy of a species is 5-million years. Homo Sapience has already doubled that putting us at the extreme end of the scale that gives this average.
In short, the chances of us being around long enough to need to do something is statistically negligible. Life will be around. Probably even intelligent life. Perhaps this time even life intelligent enough to do something, probably not.
If we were wiped out tomorrow, it's quite likely that zero evidence of our existence would even be around to be found 10 million years from now. There were entire species that we know existed because we have fossils, that were around longer than us - and where we know this because we have two bones. Not two skeletons - two bones.
The assumption that we're the first technologically intelligent species on this planet is just as unscientific as to assume we aren't. The absence of evidence in this case can be just as easily explained by deep time as that there wasn't anything to leave it. But we do have absolute proof that technological societies CAN evolve on earth - because we're here. Thus Occam's razor suggests it's more likely that it has happened before - probably several times than that it hasn't. ...sheez, and I just wanted to expand on your joke by mentioning how low the odds are of our species (or even of the entire class mamalia) still being around in 16 million years...
Skype isn't just slow on IOS, they still haven't released a 64-bit version of the Linux client which is a major problem for video-calling because 32-bit apps cannot talk properly to the 63-bit V4L driver. You can see cams from outside but your own cam is just a jumbled mess of static.
The short result of this is that I haven't bothered to log into skype in a very long time. It takes some kludging to get google-video going on Linux but at least it CAN be done.
Not anymore. At the time this was first heard their largest note was a 1-billion dollar note. Their well into the hundred-billions by now, and each time they introduce a new one on top, they remove one on bottom from circulation.
In practice a hundred billion dollar note buys about the same as R5 coin in South Africa*... or rather it would if there was anything left in the stores to buy with it. What with having no exportable currency and having destroyed their once lucrative farming industry - the stores can't actually get any stock and the shelves are mostly empty.
*This figure is likely to be outdated by the time I hit submit but oh well...
>Sure, they had a lot of other problems that contributed to the collapse of their economy. But it is undeniable that their arts did suffer. And their technology suffered. How do you get citizens to share good ideas with their neighbors, if there's nothing in it for them? Why should they bother to innovate, when they get paid the same whether they do or not?
That's the crux of the matter. But that is exactly the same problem they faced in the boot-factories. It has nothing to do with patents and copyrights. Those are just one possible way to reward artists and researchers for their contributions (or more accurately - to encourage them to share so that others don't need to recreate it over and over). The fact is that both invention and the arts predated the idea of patents and copyrights by...oh right the entire existence of human society.
Neither has ever been needed for it. It is also true that offering a a remuneration system of some sort has proven to be more efficient than not to. Atlas Shrugged was wrong. If you stop rewarding innovators the world will NOT stagnate. If the current industry leaders all went on strike, the rest of us wouldn't even notice for more than about a year. Others will recreate whatever they had done because frankly that's how the real world works and somebody will fill the gap and find a way to make money out of it.
Patents and copyrights are one system for creating the incentive to share -so that we can do things once and move along. They are not the be-all and end-all of ways to do so.
The communist failure is that no contribution was recognized or rewarded and this was no more true of the arts and sciences than anything else. The capitalist failure (today) is that it our system for it has become SO focussed on rewarding contribution that we're losing the ability to actually BENEFIT from the contribution.
A book has some value when it's written and for sale to be read. It's value increases exponentially when it's in the public domain to be used to build new books out of. Want proof ? How much do you think a copy of Hans Christian Anderson's collected works were worth in his time ? Barely anything because despite being a published and popular author he was a starving beggar. Disney's "Rapunzel" made more in it's opening night than all his works together in his entire life (even adjusted for inflation) - and would never have existed if the copyright had not expired on it. The same holds for the Grimm Brothers and Snow White.
It even holds for Alexandre Dumas. Dumas died so poor his estate couldn't afford a funeral and he lies in an unmarked grave as a result (and yes he had copyright). Do you have any idea how much money films based on "The three musketeers", "The count of Monte Christo" and "The hunchback of Notre Dame" has made ?
That's value for all of society (I would wager that without those films the number of people who knew those stories today would be exponentially reduced- how many people still read a 400 page novel ?
We're now losing the ability to gain that value. So our public domain is diminishing. The results will be exactly the SAME as communism. Their public domain suffered from less books being written - we have no such problem, but ours is suffering from books being written but never getting to it. In practical terms - that makes absolutely no difference.
More-over the changes that society has gone through particularly technologically need to be considered. When-ever new technology appears we have to consider our laws and social-structures in light of them. There was no need for a copyright law before we invented the printing press. Now - new technology means we must consider if this law is still the best way to achieve the end goal: maximizing the size of the public domain.
I daresay that it is not - if it's diminishing the public domain now, then we have to scrap it and come up with a new system. Before copyright there was patronage. Patronage had only one major problem: those who paid could be rather selective about which
And many of us believe it WASN'T a problem. In fact I pointed out to you that many of their greatest successes - happened in fields where according to the corporate rhetoric no success can exist without patents or copyright.
I even gave you examples.
It's not like the gold world was (or is) free from fraud and corruption anyway. In theory the amount of gold for trade is fairly finite and it's getting more and more so as it gets harder and harder mine the last bits out.
But here's a fun fact for you - the amount of gold ever mined is only about half as much as there are gold certificates in trade for. Which means if people actually cashed in their gold certificates, half of them could not be honored.
You joke -but right now it is actually CHEAPER to wipe your ass on zimbabwean dollars than it is to buy toilet paper (since you need about 8 billion dollar bills for a roll of paper).
>It's not an "outdated idea". If you really think that copyrights and patents are a bad idea, you need only look at countries where they did not exist -- like Russia during its peak of Socialist power -- to see how that works out economically. Hint: it doesn't.
Oh that's right, Russia's economy failed because they didn't have IP laws. Odd they wrote some of the 20th century's best literature (Dostoyevski for example) without copyright. They made some of the 20th century's most important scientific advances without patents (they got to space BEFORE America remember).
Seem the facts don't match your claims but you must be right because you studied history. Obviously an excessive amount of government power and high levels of (creativity diminishing) censorship had nothing to do with it. The fact that every xerox machine in Russia had an armed guard next to it to prevent samizdat in fact made for a much more complete control of copying (with the technology of the time) than the copyright in the west did - and modern copyright regimes have far more in COMMON with Russia's control over copying during communism than it does with capitalism.
The fact that their economy was tied up by a massive an inefficient beaurocracy didn't contribute to their failure at all and of course all those factory workers who didn't bother to be productive because in that kind of communist system there is no way to advance anyway and even if you did you'd still be earning just as little (unless of course you were military or in politics and could get special favors) didn't do anything to harm their productivity (and thus their economy). All those economics theorists and philosophers who say so are obviously just trying to trick us all. Good thing the trick worked because it was the cornerstone of the US's approach to beating Russia during the last decade of the cold war.
The dictatorial system with it's endemic corruption also did no harm to Russia's economy. It all failed because they didn't have strong enough patent and copyright laws and we can prove this by indicating that after 20 years the only countries where these laws are not getting pretty damn draconian are the ones which have no government to speak off, or at least, none that the rest of the world gives a damn about and so their people tend to suffer.
Yeah that makes sense. The good countries are good because they have draconian IP laws. It isn't that the people who lobby for draconian IP laws tend not to bother with the poorest countries on earth because there's no point trying play extortionist with people who don't have any money you can fleece them for. That has nothing to do with it.
Thanks you're intelligently researched arguments with their undeniable factual basis, so complete and devoid of any selective reporting have changed my minds. IP laws for the win...
PS. If you haven't figured it out by now. This post is a textbook example of sarcasm.
Keep in mind further a huge chunk of that code is GLIBC code - that is code that isn't part of Linux, it's from GNU and was written by the FSF (interestingly SCO never tried to sue the FSF, but non profit orgs tend to lack much money so I guess their not great targets for an extortionist).
IBM may have contributed some code to glibc but under FSF rules it could not be accepted unless they signed over copyright anyway. Still if it was infringing from there then I can see the point of sueing IBM.
All this are more like an intro though to my actual response to your comment: which is yes, and so did GNU. In fact RMS details in the history of the gnu project the (rather radically) different design decisions that he and his team made early on in their writing of unix-like components for gnu where their implementations completely deviated from the original UNIX versions:
1) Whenever a file was small enough (I believe their limit CA 1988) was 2mb) it would be read entirely into memory and not buffered in chunks from disk for any program, and then written back as a whole again. This uses more memory but is a much faster way to work. Today Linux (and other OS's) actually does this on the filesystem level with massive amounts of file changes kept in memory and only written out in idle-times or at dismount time because memory is so much faster than disk.
2) They made no attempt to support any architectures below 32-bit, so no you couldn't compile gnu on a 16-bit system. Downside - even if you could port the linux kernel to a 286 the rest of the base system wouldn't be able to compile on it. Upside - it could actually take advantage of the capabilities of 32-bit systems, especially with regard to memory addressing and use optimizations in how variables were defined based on this.
These are just some pieces of a much longer list, but they were the main reason why the gnu tools developed a major reputation for being faster and more reliable than their unix counterparts and the popularity of the gnu toolchain prior to the appearance of any kernel. When Linux appeared on the scene and was married to the two, it's own approach of maximising it's target platforrm's abilities (the same thing that made Tanenbaum angry) created probably the most performance efficient operating system of the time. Much faster than any other unix then available and able to run on commodity hardware. The legendary portability would only come later (you can largely thank Jon Maddog Hall for that as he got that ball rolling).
But the core point is - for very good reasons both the FSF and the Linux developers used some radically different fundamental design goals in how they wrote their tools compared to unix, these differences led to things be implemented in radically different ways on some levels. Your suggestion is verifiable and documented fact. This doesn't change that there really is only one way to write a proper quicksort - the core algorythms may well have had significant similarity, but the surrounding code was designed differently (how the data got INTO the algorythm in the first place was one of the things that GNU deliberately didn't do the same way unix did - as per example one above).
>In other news: fire is hot, and bears shit in the woods.
Stay tuned for the 11-o-clock news however when there won't be any bears left, or woods for them to shit in.
This is news, it only has to be true till the end of the show.
>But we're talking about a structured programming language - with far more structure and rules than the English language
Not to mention a far smaller vocabulary, the complete absense of abstract forms of speech (no metaphors, similes)and in fact of even fundemental sentences.
The vast majority of sentences in a programming language are verb(subject); THAT'S it, a rare few have an "object" (e.g. substr(S1,S2)) but at heart, that's 99% of the lines in a program. Simple commands. There are identifiers, control concepts (loops and conditionals) and structural stuff (classes, functions and the like) but these make up very little of the bulk. The implementation section consists of commands and variables for them to act on.
Thus for the same algorythmic task, barring minor changes in indentation and identifier naming (which will be minor because both are matters on whic standards exist and within organisations some or other standard is usually enforced) the statistical likelihood of two programmers writing and identical solution to the problem is very high. After all, programming is maths and there is only so many ways you can calculate the same equation - which is basically all any algorithm does.
You need a lot more than a few functions with identical structures to prove copyright violation when the scope for individual change is that much more limited. Creativity in programming is VERY rarely coming up with a NEW algorythm for an old task. Nearly always it lies in how we combine algorythms with one another to solve the bigger problems. The bits and pieces of code are like nuts and bolts, every engine has a million of them and they all look pretty much the same.
Four words:
White men can't jump.
(Unless you count contractions as double-words because then it's five words).
>I think you're confusing the technical ability to break encryption with its legality. It seems that the new proposed legislation would allow you to legally break the DRM encryption to use something under fair use. It doesn't say that whoever put DRM must tell you how to break it or give you keys.
Actually, it DOES. It states that the DRM MUST allow you to exercise (any and all off) your fair-use rights. It makes it a criminal offense punishable with a fine to prevent them. This means that if a user demands the keys in order to make a backup copy of a piece of media, they would be committing a crime if they refused to provide them, unless of course, the DRM in question is built in such a way that it makes these fair use rights actively doable already (like e.g. steam's allowed-backup system).
My point is the copyright is now so much of a faillure at serving the public good, that it should be ignored as an act of civil disobedience until massively reformed.
>If different cultures differ greatly on this matter, why do you believe it is not a cultural
feature? Occam's razor vs a innate trait that is repressed depending on whatever.
Because they don't - the few cultures that deviate from the norm are an incredibly rare exception. That suggests an externality veering them from the course that is normally taken. I would call your corporate controlled media a major externality.
>You do not understand how wealth works. I perform a great service that people are happy to pay me for. I invent something, pay good money for its manufacture & sale, people love it, and it sells millions. Who have I exploited? Business is the creation of wealth, not the reluctant sequestration of somebody else's money. It's turning skills, time, and raw materials into more valuable goods and services, ie a delta-positive change in the total sum of wealth in society. Good trades have both parties benefiting from the transaction; the customer got their money's worth for something they wanted/needed, and the business has another successful sale.
Really ?How absolutely stupidly naive can you be ? This was true in Henry Ford's day. It sure as hell isn't true today. Most wealthy people don't even WORK for the companies they make their money from. In fact in "rich dad poor dad" the author states that a business you own CANNOT BE CALLED AN ASSET UNLESS YOU DO NOT DO ANY OF THE LABOUR OR MANAGEMENT YOURSELF.
>Okay, now you're just being blindly and ignorantly prejudiced against the wealthy. I don't believe you've ever interacted with anybody in that situation; you're just going from bad stereotypes you've heard on TV. Educate yourself; you sound like a little kid when you say things like that. I'm sure these numbers only come from the true sharing poor people, not anybody rich who would ever dare parting with their precious blood money.
Go read up J. Arthur W. Brown. That's my cousin. I grew up with the guy. I probably know the truly wealthy and their real nature better than you. There are still hardworking millionaires in the world, there's no such thing as an honest billionaire. It's impossible. You cannot honestly compete against dishonest competitors.
The moment it became possible to make more money corruptly than honestly, the chances for a good man to become truly rich became nill. More-over, most businesses nowadays are corporations - run by CEO's - in the vast majority of cases those CEO's had NOTHING to do with the founding of the company. They are hired later - to make the shareholders more money. By law the company's board CANNOT consider ANY other goals BUT shareholder profit. They HAVE to do bottom-line thinking, cut jobs if they can get away with it. When nothing BUT profit is ALLOWED to matter, how can you be a good citizen ?
There was always the odd lunatic who would poison the well and kill 20 people. It takes a corporation to poison the groundwater and kill thousands over decades. And it just happens over and over and over. Several studies have repeatedly found that if a corporation was a person, corporate behaviour would be textbook psychosis - don't you know this ?
And the CEO's who sit on top ? How many of them are truly good people ? There is the odd one out, who discovers the harm they do, actually care, and then makes it a major corporate goal to reverse that. They are one in a billion - they refer to themselves and other CEO's as the "conscienceless plunderers".
I respect THOSE CEO's.
>Well, "society" with no qualifiers can also suck, go on for generations being self-destructive, crumble into chaos, etc etc. "Society" is just a unit of people who consistently interact with each other in life. But I'd center a *well-functioning* human society's definition around mutually beneficial acts. It has little to do with resources, but more with trade of time, allowances, trust, and also goods & services. When those things are protected by the powers that be (either strong cultural norms, or legal systems), people feel free t
You speak from a very American point of view. Human minds evolve much faster than our genetics do - and lets just say most cultures are a LOT less selfish than yours. I've lived in cultures where people will, as a matter of course, when they learn that the new foreigner at the office lives alone (so he's not from the tight circle, and they don't even know him well) go and prepare an extra helping at dinner to bring for him tomorrow - just to be sure he has a healthy well-balanced meal (the sort that lone-livers often don't get).
Not a person in the culture - MOST of them.
Your culture actively suppresses the sharing instinct, other cultures in the past have done the same, that doesn't mean it isn't there - and that it doesn't explain it's prevalence in other cultures.
I know plenty of countries where "doing your part" requires no campaigning, many people who never complain about paying their taxes (but they sure DO complain if they don't get the services for it that they ought to) because paying your taxes is seen as your moral obligation to your fellow man.
I know cultures where they very idea that money should ever be a question when it comes to healthcare or food appalls people. I have lived in over 40 countries, never for less than 3 months, and never as a tourist- lived and worked among and with the regular people of those countries. In the vast majority - that has been my experience. Not only of how *I* was treated, but of how they treated one another.
Of course they have a selfish side, of course there is an urge to protect me-and-mine first. But me-and-mine CAN become an ever-widening circle. I have come to believe it includes for myself the entire human race. I also believe it an unavoidable consequence of the communications revolution that this will become the average belief among all people.
Most social scientists are in agreement that the internet's unavoidable consequence is the creation of a single human global superculture. And that MUST lead to exactly this.
The country I visited, where I felt the greatest hope for my species was Brazil. Do you know WHAT about Brazil gave me such hope ? I saw thousands of young couples, as you do everywhere, but in Brazil, I think a total of 5 of them were of the same race. Mixed-race couples are the NORM.
What does that mean ? It means within a few generations - no more races, just one race with the best genetic advantages from everybody. If ever there was proof of just how ridiculous the very IDEA of races is, a simple walk down the streets of Sao Paulo or San Francisco Xavier (big city and small rural village respectively) or Fortaleza (beach town) provides it in such abundance as to leave no room for argument.
>Whoever can and will take charge, does so. This is especially true in the context of pure Darwinian processes, but also in legal/government structures.
Yes, this is why we invented democracy. So we can have some say about who gets to be in charge. But my point wasn't about that. My point was that when we decide how resources should be distributed, we should not listen to those who genuinely believe the system should be designed to give all the resources to themselves. That is not a smart type of resource allocation.
Another aspect here is that you accuse me of hating rich-people. I do not, but I do not agree with them either. I think it's morally impossible to be both a good person AND a rich one in the world we live in. That's not hatred, it's simply a summary of the state of the world. You CANNOT be rich unless you exploited people to become so. So I don't RESPECT rich people - that's a far cry from hating them.
I also don't believe we should give them any say whatsoever in how the world is run (making lobbying and campaign donations the most undemocratic idea in history) because they are ipso-facto the worst possible people to give that say to. They are the kind of people who don't feel compassion and believe it's okay to enrich yourself at the expense of others. When we let them have politic
Valid point but not all that relevant anyway. Disney made a crapload of money out of movies made from out-of-copyright stories, it's a bloody rip-off that they refuse ot let their own creations go out of copyright and contribute back to the public domain pool they so enriched themselves from. Whether cars made more or less money than snow white is not the point. The point is they sure made a LOT more money out of Snow White than Hans Christian Anderson ever did - and they will do everything in their power ot make sure nobody else ever makes money out of cars in the same way (or even Mickey Mouse for that matter).