History is not made by individuals. History is made by trends. Specific individuals who are surfing at the leading edge of a trend may get the spotlight, and hence the credit, but really it was the trend that made the change, not the person.
The net effect of current trends is a lot of corruption in our government, plainly visible to the public, with a large collective yawn in response.
Sitting around shouting that people need to stand up and do something will not, in and of itself, create a trend of people standing up and doing something.
For that we will need something bigger. And more painful.
If today's corporations want their regular rank-and-file employees to wear many hats, be multi-talented, and have a lot of business skills, then they're simply not doing their own jobs correctly.
When you are one of the major players in a monopoly or cartel-controlled industry, you can get away with that kind of sloth. All you really have to worry about is using your leverage in the market to make sure that when your employees leave and start their own business, they fail.
There is a fundamental, philosophical, problem with the traditional means of distribution: the product is abundant.
Cars are not abundant. It takes a significant expenditure of materials and effort to put one together. When I drive off in one, I cannot simply dupe it and give the dupe to my friend. The laws of physics dictate a level of scarcity to this good, and as such it makes perfect sense to expect to receive money from every person who obtains a car.
The world of "data" follows different laws of physics. Once I have the data in my hot little hands, I can dupe it and give it to my friends at zero direct cost to the producer. There is no deprivation of use nor loss of mineral resources nor expenditure of manpower nor anything of the sort on the part of the original developer when I dupe the game. None. And I can keep duplicating this ad infinitum, at the same cost (of zero). Furthermore, my friends can do the same thing with the copy I gave them...there is no quality loss. Once the good exists, it can instantly exist everywhere. It is "abundant."
So, since data follows these laws (rather than the laws of physics as they apply to physical goods) people feel like they are being cheated when they are asked to pretend like data follows the laws of physical matter. They feel like they are buying into a game of control that is unfounded in reality and ultimately to their detriment (since they have to pay money for something that doesn't cost anything to produce *at this point* (excluding initial development costs).
I think that is the crux of the issue. We all know the good is abundant, and we all feel like pretending it is not abundant is just silly, and harmful to us (our money is valuable and if we can get games for free then we have optimized our entertainment budget and have more money left over to spend on things like real cars or educations for our kids or what-have-you).
What about the potential sale that we are "stealing" by copying a game? We tend to respond to such a representation of the situation with great cynicism. We feel like the only reason you feel entitled to every single "potential sale" is because of your insistence in everyone pretending that an abundant good is not abundant. We also feel that the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism doesn't guarantee a ROI on any kind of development project, so when you pound your fist in frustration at your inability to monetize your efforts we just say, "so try something else...thats what every other entrepreneur in the world has had to do...what makes you special? If you can't make money making games, do something else, and stop whining." That is the same answer we get when we complain about being downsized, or having low-paying jobs, or what-have-you...so we are just responding in turn.
Lastly...the age-old mantra that if you can't get money for every copy of a game sold then nobody will produce games. I call BS. Piracy has been alive and well since before the computer games industry even existed...and since long before DRM existed...and the games industry thrived anyway. And it still thrives, despite the continued piracy. Enough people pay for the games (even though they don't have to) that the industry remains profitable. If that model suddenly stops working, alternative models will take its place (subscription-based games and so on). If that doesn't work, and we actually reach a state of utter cultural impoverishment where no games (or music or movies, for that matter) are being produced because nobody can figure out how to make a living doing it (and no hobbiests manage to churn out anything but crap)...which I maintain is an economic impossibility...but if it actually does occur THEN it might make sense to talk about legislation...and there would be a conscious buy-in to the legislation from the masses who are hungry for cultural enrichment. However, this has not happened, and I therefore submit that it makes no sense to try to preemptively pass laws based on the premise that it might happen (given that it is unlikely and that the situation could be remedied after the fact anyway).
Nobody said artists, or labels, (or software developers, for that matter) shouldn't be able to monetize their products.
The claim is that they should not continue to try to monetize them "in a specific way." In particular, by trying to collect money on every copy of the work transmitted over the Internet.
They can still make money. They will need a different arrangement to do so, of course, but they still can. In fact, many do, both in the open source world and in the entertainment world.
They made it sound like merging these two companies is somehow increasing the number of competitors in the market.
Previously, there were three big companies, EA, Activision, and Blizzard.* They were all competitors. Now, there are only two: EA and Activision-Blizzard. That does not benefit consumers. The already-existing cartel has just shrunk, moving even closer to a monopoly.
The benefits of capitalism (low prices, high quality, variety of choice, available jobs, economic health, etc...) all come to fruition in free markets with lots of competitors. When you have largely controlled markets (high barriers to entry) with very few competitors, you lose those benefits. This is Econ-101 stuff.
Whenever these mergers happen they always try to sell up the benefits to customers "by centralizing our efforts we can cut our own production costs greatly, which means we can provide better quality and even bigger savings on to our clients." While that is true in theory, in practice the lack of competition means there is nothing forcing them to provide these benefits, and so over time they don't provide them...and instead maximize their own profits by cutting corners on quality and price gouging. Merging eliminates the balancing factors in the market, which is what allows them to get away with this.
So that is what will happen. And it is nothing new. "All this has happened before. All this will happen again." --Pythia
*Yes, I am aware that there are actually other companies in the games industry at the moment...I was just filtering the set to those mentioned in the summary for the sake of simplicity. The principle still applies.
How would you feel if you were a woman shopping for a shirt, and the vendor asks, "do you intend to wear this shirt in public, in which case you must buy the version that comes with a hood, since it is wrong for women to expose their faces in public?"
Would you buy the shirt anyway, and sign a contract promising that you will also buy a detached hood and always wear that hood with the shirt?
Or would you just go find a vendor who won't impose her conservative Islamic principles on someone who doesn't share them?
In a culturally diverse society, imposing one's principles upon others is not always a recipe for harmony.
If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them.
Life requires labor. Civilized life requires even more labor. Most of that labor is unpleasant in some way. We face the grind anyway, day after day, because it keeps the ball rolling, and because it gives us the money we need to do the things we actually like doing.
If you manage to find a job that you actually like a lot, that's great. If not, hopefully you will be strong enough to accept the realities that most people face, get a boring job, be useful, and earn a decent living.
Sexual intercourse is meant to be an act performed in private ... we were taught that once Adam & Eve ate the fruit and became smart, they put clothes on... While I realize this is not a popular opinion,
Popular or no, that opinion is religiously biased. In a country that embraces religious freedom, it is not appropriate to legally impose one's own religious teachings upon someone else.
For example, do you think it would be appropriate for a group of conservative Islam-practicing Americans to propose laws that would require all women, Islamic or no, to keep their faces covered in public? Don't you feel that since you practice a different religion, you should be free to enjoy the moral allowances of that religion (including exposing your face in public, if you are a woman) so long as doing so isn't directly harmful to someone else?
This kind of moral conflict will always arise when people attempt to legislate their religion. This is exactly why our laws must be based on minimalist secular principles, rather than religious principles. The secular acid test for legality is usually a matter of assessing direct harm. By this principle, for example, forcing children to pose nude does cause them direct harm, so it should be illegal, and such materials should properly be considered obscene, whereas paying consenting adults to do the same thing does not cause such harm, and therefore should be legal.
So there you have it. I understand that your religious values are important to you, and they should be. But you must in turn understand that your values are not important to everyone else, and they should not be, and you should respect their freedom to live as they choose.
Even with private health insurance, those who live unhealthy lifestyles have the net effect of increasing insurance premiums for everyone.
The insurance companies maintain profitability by selecting price points that set them ahead, given all of the expenses they are likely to incur. The more fat people they have on their plans, the more likely they are to spend money on all the fat-related medical issues that arise, so the more they must charge.
While it may be unfair to target fat people (or smokers or drinkers or what-have-you), isn't it equally unfair to make healthy people pay a lot of extra money to support the unhealthy lifestyles of their neighbors?
As usual, this door swings both ways, and it doesn't matter whether the health care is universal or privatized...any kind of medical insurance raises these issues.
Mandating that proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances.
On the other hand, failing to mandate that proof could have the pernicious effect of depriving individual citizens of a practical remedy against erroneous copyright infringement charges in many instances.
And "erroneous copyright infringement charges" often come with a permanently-impoverishing price tag.
This sounds like you consider the claim to be irrational. If I have misread you, I apologize in advance. However, you haven't made a very good case that the claim is irrational. If you could clearly and distinctly demonstrate a logical fallacy (or similar problem), then maybe your case would be more clear.
In fact, it looks like your argument qualifies as a straw man fallacy, since you have represented your opponent's position as a bulleted list with ill-defined terms and a deliberately-inserted missing step.
I will say that the idea that a technological singularity will lead to technological transcendence is merely inductive, not deductive. Hume is famous for pointing out the subtle irrationality of all inductive reasoning, so I can concede that at least that degree of irrationality is present.
However...
Any logician who has any kind of hold on reality knows that inductive reasoning (together with its irrationality) is necessary (due to human epistemic limitations). We cannot *but* infer the future from the past, because in the real world, that is all we've got to go on.
So the reasoning is something like this:
Human existence has many limitations which result in suffering, including limits on intelligence, longevity, sensory range and accuracy, immune system limits, dependence of a variety of nutrients which require labor, etc.
Over the course of human history, technological advances have increased the cap on these limitations, and/or reduced the suffering incurred by them.
Therefore, by inference, continued technological advances will continue to increase this cap, and continue to reduce human suffering (which is seen as ultimately desirable).
Furthermore, the rate of technological advance seems to be accelerating, and the curve is non-linear.
Therefore, by inference, a point can be reached when technology advances so quickly that it simply cannot be measured in the way in which we are currently measuring it (the "singularity"). Should that occur, based on prior inferences, we can further infer that everything we presently understand as limiting to humans (and as sources of suffering) will be addressed by our technological knowledge. Thus, humanity will achieve a transcendent (meaning, free from the burdens of material existence) state of being.
Does this still sound so irrational to you? Based on the observations made to date, there isn't much reason to discount the possibility (apart, perhaps, from preconceptions about absolute upper limits of what technological knowledge can possibly achieve).
Often you don't know where the problems will be until you put it under load.
Techniques exist to simulate load, of course. And there is always open beta testing. However, they still only give you an approximation of where the problems are and what their scope is, and the time you invest in these activities is not billable.
The money for a game has to come from somewhere. It is a huge upfront investment, with little more than crystal-ball-gazing to determine the ROI. Every dollar you invest in pre-release-optimization is a dollar that you are potentially investing in a game that won't pull much income (or in fixing problems that don't turn out to be the big ones when released).
MMO games are dangerous. At first they are fun, and if you don't have addiction problems you can balance your play time with your real life quite easily (though some may have the nagging feeling that they aren't getting their money's worth if they don't play very often).
However, eventually, you join a guild (or equivalent). And they raid with you. And your availability becomes an issue for them. Suddenly, every time you don't play, nine or more of your friends can't run they dungeon they want to run, and it is YOUR fault.
That is the real killer...the sense of importance you get from being so relied-upon, combined with the pride you get from towering over your peers due to your uber raid gear, make the end game destructively addictive.
Sure, you can quit any time, so long as you don't mind disappointing and/or pissing off a whole bunch of friends who have been relying on you, and supporting you, and sacrificing for you, for quite a long time.
Microsoft's products are primarily information products. Windows, Office, etc. Microsoft, therefore, benefits from the institution of information control, including well-enforced Intellectual Property laws and business practices.
So, Microsoft indirectly benefits from "playing ball," even if the information product in question isn't one of their own.
The motto is not "do no evil," it is "don't be evil."
Not that it really matters, "evil" is a sloppy, ill-defined, and personally relativistic concept to begin with.
And of course, having an intent doesn't guarantee the ability to realize that intent, let alone to perpetually avoid any deviation.
And of course, loudly publishing such a motto doesn't actually mean that those at the top have any intention of living up to it. The perception of benevolence is what is really useful.
They fully understand that the bible was written and translated by men.
That is a very important point. The Bible was written by humans. A copy of it was given to each owner by a fellow human. Instructions on how to interpret it were provided by humans. The teaching of the dual nature of Jesus was taught by humans.
Therefore, to put faith in the Bible, in any interpretation of the Bible, or in any church based thereupon, is to put faith in humans.
If you would like to put faith in God that is great. But when you believe what your church, or your book, says, you aren't putting faith in God. You are putting faith in humans.
Einstein says religion is childish. I say religion is an emergent phenomenon. By that I mean, a novel behavior that arises spontaneously as a result of the interactions of combinations of other behaviors.
I am referring specifically to a subset of the abilities of the most evolved brain on the planet. Humans have the ability to model their environment in terms of cause-and-effect relationships. When any human, even the most primitive, is interested in understanding what brought about an effect (whether to elicit it or to avoid it) he naturally starts enquiring into its cause. This is a level of cognition that towers above instinct in the adaptive and survival advantages it grants us.
Similarly, humans also have a very unique creative/imaginative capacity. For example, when trying random experiments to get something to happen, humans will come up with much more elaborate actions than other animals.
Humans are also good at such things as abstraction and discovery of isomorphism...again with obvious survival advantages.
I submit that the combination of these three aspects of our brain will invariably result in religious doctrines. At some point, humans will visualize the entire world as an effect and inquire about the cause. For want of easy answers, the creative/imaginative capacity will provide some interesting ones. Our abstraction/isomorphic cognitive abilities will make the likening of initial causes to familiar ones (such as other people) very intuitive. To our highly evolved brains, religion practically sells itself.
So the widespread phenomenon of religion, as disadvantageous as it may (arguably) be, is a direct result of the combination of several survival advantages that are unique to humans.
Or, to put it plainly, we are so dumb because we are so smart.
I will agree that it is childish only insofar as a properly developed and exercised brain should, at some point, apply its logical and critical thinking capacities to the problem and see the strong disparity of scope between the claims being made and the nature of the evidence presented. Many humans are either too lazy or ill-equipped to develop these mental capacities, or they have made such a strong emotional attachment (another survival advantage being mis-applied) to a belief system that their logical and critical thinking capacities are overpowered.
In my opinion, religion was also a significant rung-in-the-ladder in the evolution of our species, empowering us to survive through some very interesting (and difficult) stages in our development. We have, however, climbed high enough that clinging to this rung is holding us back more than supporting us. It is time to let go of religious thinking and embrace a more pure and direct path to authentic spirituality. We don't need a set of myths and unsupportable absolutes to guide us to a deep and profound understanding of (and participation in) the mysteries that surround us.
Truth has nothing to fear from simple and direct investigation.
They say that if I am a good citizen who is following the rules, then I should have nothing to hide, and shouldn't mind a high level of governmental monitoring of my private life.
Well I DO have something to hide *from criminals.*
The data that the government monitors gets stored and handled by an incompetent IT staff overseen by decision-makers who are even less competent. The level of data tracking that the government insists it is justified in doing directly harms the people being tracked, not because of abuse from the government itself (though that is debatable, of course), but because of abuse from the criminals who manage to gain access to that data.
Though you didn't imply that copyright law needs to change because the RIAA are asshats, the entire theme of this post did. So I would like to challenge that directly.
1) The RIAA claims that we need to strictly enforce copyright law (and charge per copy) in order to ensure that artists get paid and continue making music.
2) The RIAA are asshats.
Therefore: we don't need copyright law (and strict enforcement) in order to ensure that artists get paid and continue making music.
This is an example of the "ad hominem" logical fallacy. Yes, they are asshats, but that has no bearing on the arguments they use to defend their business model.
I would summarize their position as a variant of the Hypothetical Syllogism (I am adding more premises than allowed, for brevity).
1) If we do not have strict interpretation and enforcement of copyright law, then people will be able to get an artists work for free.
2) If people can get an artists work for free, then most people will.
3) If most people get an artists work for free, then artists will not be able to make enough money to sustain themselves.
4) If artists cannot make enough money to sustain themselves, then they will have no economic incentive to produce music.
5) If artists have no economic incentive to produce music, then they will not make music.
Therefore: in order for there to be music (which we obviously want), there must be strict enforcement of copyright law.
To the best of my knowledge, that is the line of reasoning being advocated, and it should therefore be logically attacked.
I would specifically (and individually) attack premises 3, 4, and 5. According to the US Department of Labor most musicians work part time (already can't sustain themselves but work anyway) and also many of them earn money through live performances (monetizing their work even though free music is presently available). So my attacks, specifically, are:
3) Artists can still monetize their work, through live performances, merchandising, and alternative business models.
4) Even the lesser gains of part time employment or low-income alternative business models qualify as economic incentive.
5) Some artists produce music for the love of producing music, and think of compensation only after the fact.
So there you have it. In a nutshell I would say that we should at least experiment with the alternative business models, and see how they pan out. If all artists stop making music and America starts to experience cultural starvation, we can always reintroduce strict copyright enforcement later on...and then with much more universal support. As it stands, we are unwilling to even try, largely as a result of irrational argumentation (and, of course, a few wealthy/powerful entities who stand to benefit from our irrational behavior).
In theory, money exists merely to facilitate the barter system by providing an abstract representation of wealth. We tend to associate a high dollar velocity with wealth creation, though the two are not really the same thing.
Open Source software is, by any reasonable definition, valuable. The individual programs are useful products that people want. Their existence makes the community (in this case, the whole planet) more wealthy. Therefore, open source is not the value-sink that its competitors would dress it up as being.
"Objectivity" is very easy to say, but very hard to do. Objectivity is not by any means the path of least resistance. The scientific method (and everything that surrounds it) is our attempt to overcome our own inherent lack of objectivity in our investigative processes. Not all humans who strive to be good at it actually succeed.
But a handful of people calling their non-scientific practices "science" do not automatically undermine the value of scientific inquiry, nor do their mistakes automatically invalidate the compelling warrant that has already been established for actual scientific theories.
Slashdot Mirror
History is not made by individuals. History is made by trends. Specific individuals who are surfing at the leading edge of a trend may get the spotlight, and hence the credit, but really it was the trend that made the change, not the person.
The net effect of current trends is a lot of corruption in our government, plainly visible to the public, with a large collective yawn in response.
Sitting around shouting that people need to stand up and do something will not, in and of itself, create a trend of people standing up and doing something.
For that we will need something bigger. And more painful.
If today's corporations want their regular rank-and-file employees to wear many hats, be multi-talented, and have a lot of business skills, then they're simply not doing their own jobs correctly.
When you are one of the major players in a monopoly or cartel-controlled industry, you can get away with that kind of sloth. All you really have to worry about is using your leverage in the market to make sure that when your employees leave and start their own business, they fail.
No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art'
So charge for concert tickets, t-shirts, trinkets, datastream subscriptions, and so forth.
I say, open the borders, let everybody in, in every profession. It'll depress our wages,
so the poor get poorer
but at least it'll keep immigrant workers spending their money in *our* economy,
so the rich get richer
and hopefully some of them will decide to become citizens and come to expect our standards of living.
standards which are now much lower.
Great plan.
There is a fundamental, philosophical, problem with the traditional means of distribution: the product is abundant.
Cars are not abundant. It takes a significant expenditure of materials and effort to put one together. When I drive off in one, I cannot simply dupe it and give the dupe to my friend. The laws of physics dictate a level of scarcity to this good, and as such it makes perfect sense to expect to receive money from every person who obtains a car.
The world of "data" follows different laws of physics. Once I have the data in my hot little hands, I can dupe it and give it to my friends at zero direct cost to the producer. There is no deprivation of use nor loss of mineral resources nor expenditure of manpower nor anything of the sort on the part of the original developer when I dupe the game. None. And I can keep duplicating this ad infinitum, at the same cost (of zero). Furthermore, my friends can do the same thing with the copy I gave them...there is no quality loss. Once the good exists, it can instantly exist everywhere. It is "abundant."
So, since data follows these laws (rather than the laws of physics as they apply to physical goods) people feel like they are being cheated when they are asked to pretend like data follows the laws of physical matter. They feel like they are buying into a game of control that is unfounded in reality and ultimately to their detriment (since they have to pay money for something that doesn't cost anything to produce *at this point* (excluding initial development costs).
I think that is the crux of the issue. We all know the good is abundant, and we all feel like pretending it is not abundant is just silly, and harmful to us (our money is valuable and if we can get games for free then we have optimized our entertainment budget and have more money left over to spend on things like real cars or educations for our kids or what-have-you).
What about the potential sale that we are "stealing" by copying a game? We tend to respond to such a representation of the situation with great cynicism. We feel like the only reason you feel entitled to every single "potential sale" is because of your insistence in everyone pretending that an abundant good is not abundant. We also feel that the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism doesn't guarantee a ROI on any kind of development project, so when you pound your fist in frustration at your inability to monetize your efforts we just say, "so try something else...thats what every other entrepreneur in the world has had to do...what makes you special? If you can't make money making games, do something else, and stop whining." That is the same answer we get when we complain about being downsized, or having low-paying jobs, or what-have-you...so we are just responding in turn.
Lastly...the age-old mantra that if you can't get money for every copy of a game sold then nobody will produce games. I call BS. Piracy has been alive and well since before the computer games industry even existed...and since long before DRM existed...and the games industry thrived anyway. And it still thrives, despite the continued piracy. Enough people pay for the games (even though they don't have to) that the industry remains profitable. If that model suddenly stops working, alternative models will take its place (subscription-based games and so on). If that doesn't work, and we actually reach a state of utter cultural impoverishment where no games (or music or movies, for that matter) are being produced because nobody can figure out how to make a living doing it (and no hobbiests manage to churn out anything but crap)...which I maintain is an economic impossibility...but if it actually does occur THEN it might make sense to talk about legislation...and there would be a conscious buy-in to the legislation from the masses who are hungry for cultural enrichment. However, this has not happened, and I therefore submit that it makes no sense to try to preemptively pass laws based on the premise that it might happen (given that it is unlikely and that the situation could be remedied after the fact anyway).
God forbid people make money to live on.
Nobody said artists, or labels, (or software developers, for that matter) shouldn't be able to monetize their products.
The claim is that they should not continue to try to monetize them "in a specific way." In particular, by trying to collect money on every copy of the work transmitted over the Internet.
They can still make money. They will need a different arrangement to do so, of course, but they still can. In fact, many do, both in the open source world and in the entertainment world.
They made it sound like merging these two companies is somehow increasing the number of competitors in the market.
Previously, there were three big companies, EA, Activision, and Blizzard.* They were all competitors. Now, there are only two: EA and Activision-Blizzard. That does not benefit consumers. The already-existing cartel has just shrunk, moving even closer to a monopoly.
The benefits of capitalism (low prices, high quality, variety of choice, available jobs, economic health, etc...) all come to fruition in free markets with lots of competitors. When you have largely controlled markets (high barriers to entry) with very few competitors, you lose those benefits. This is Econ-101 stuff.
Whenever these mergers happen they always try to sell up the benefits to customers "by centralizing our efforts we can cut our own production costs greatly, which means we can provide better quality and even bigger savings on to our clients." While that is true in theory, in practice the lack of competition means there is nothing forcing them to provide these benefits, and so over time they don't provide them...and instead maximize their own profits by cutting corners on quality and price gouging. Merging eliminates the balancing factors in the market, which is what allows them to get away with this.
So that is what will happen. And it is nothing new. "All this has happened before. All this will happen again." --Pythia
*Yes, I am aware that there are actually other companies in the games industry at the moment...I was just filtering the set to those mentioned in the summary for the sake of simplicity. The principle still applies.
How would you feel if you were a woman shopping for a shirt, and the vendor asks, "do you intend to wear this shirt in public, in which case you must buy the version that comes with a hood, since it is wrong for women to expose their faces in public?"
Would you buy the shirt anyway, and sign a contract promising that you will also buy a detached hood and always wear that hood with the shirt?
Or would you just go find a vendor who won't impose her conservative Islamic principles on someone who doesn't share them?
In a culturally diverse society, imposing one's principles upon others is not always a recipe for harmony.
If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them.
Life requires labor. Civilized life requires even more labor. Most of that labor is unpleasant in some way. We face the grind anyway, day after day, because it keeps the ball rolling, and because it gives us the money we need to do the things we actually like doing.
If you manage to find a job that you actually like a lot, that's great. If not, hopefully you will be strong enough to accept the realities that most people face, get a boring job, be useful, and earn a decent living.
Sexual intercourse is meant to be an act performed in private ... ...
we were taught that once Adam & Eve ate the fruit and became smart, they put clothes on
While I realize this is not a popular opinion,
Popular or no, that opinion is religiously biased. In a country that embraces religious freedom, it is not appropriate to legally impose one's own religious teachings upon someone else.
For example, do you think it would be appropriate for a group of conservative Islam-practicing Americans to propose laws that would require all women, Islamic or no, to keep their faces covered in public? Don't you feel that since you practice a different religion, you should be free to enjoy the moral allowances of that religion (including exposing your face in public, if you are a woman) so long as doing so isn't directly harmful to someone else?
This kind of moral conflict will always arise when people attempt to legislate their religion. This is exactly why our laws must be based on minimalist secular principles, rather than religious principles. The secular acid test for legality is usually a matter of assessing direct harm. By this principle, for example, forcing children to pose nude does cause them direct harm, so it should be illegal, and such materials should properly be considered obscene, whereas paying consenting adults to do the same thing does not cause such harm, and therefore should be legal.
So there you have it. I understand that your religious values are important to you, and they should be. But you must in turn understand that your values are not important to everyone else, and they should not be, and you should respect their freedom to live as they choose.
Even with private health insurance, those who live unhealthy lifestyles have the net effect of increasing insurance premiums for everyone.
The insurance companies maintain profitability by selecting price points that set them ahead, given all of the expenses they are likely to incur. The more fat people they have on their plans, the more likely they are to spend money on all the fat-related medical issues that arise, so the more they must charge.
While it may be unfair to target fat people (or smokers or drinkers or what-have-you), isn't it equally unfair to make healthy people pay a lot of extra money to support the unhealthy lifestyles of their neighbors?
As usual, this door swings both ways, and it doesn't matter whether the health care is universal or privatized...any kind of medical insurance raises these issues.
Mandating that proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances.
On the other hand, failing to mandate that proof could have the pernicious effect of depriving individual citizens of a practical remedy against erroneous copyright infringement charges in many instances.
And "erroneous copyright infringement charges" often come with a permanently-impoverishing price tag.
Personally, I think these theorists are just stringing us along.
coming from people who claim to be 100% rational
This sounds like you consider the claim to be irrational. If I have misread you, I apologize in advance. However, you haven't made a very good case that the claim is irrational. If you could clearly and distinctly demonstrate a logical fallacy (or similar problem), then maybe your case would be more clear.
In fact, it looks like your argument qualifies as a straw man fallacy, since you have represented your opponent's position as a bulleted list with ill-defined terms and a deliberately-inserted missing step.
I will say that the idea that a technological singularity will lead to technological transcendence is merely inductive, not deductive. Hume is famous for pointing out the subtle irrationality of all inductive reasoning, so I can concede that at least that degree of irrationality is present.
However...
Any logician who has any kind of hold on reality knows that inductive reasoning (together with its irrationality) is necessary (due to human epistemic limitations). We cannot *but* infer the future from the past, because in the real world, that is all we've got to go on.
So the reasoning is something like this:
Human existence has many limitations which result in suffering, including limits on intelligence, longevity, sensory range and accuracy, immune system limits, dependence of a variety of nutrients which require labor, etc.
Over the course of human history, technological advances have increased the cap on these limitations, and/or reduced the suffering incurred by them.
Therefore, by inference, continued technological advances will continue to increase this cap, and continue to reduce human suffering (which is seen as ultimately desirable).
Furthermore, the rate of technological advance seems to be accelerating, and the curve is non-linear.
Therefore, by inference, a point can be reached when technology advances so quickly that it simply cannot be measured in the way in which we are currently measuring it (the "singularity"). Should that occur, based on prior inferences, we can further infer that everything we presently understand as limiting to humans (and as sources of suffering) will be addressed by our technological knowledge. Thus, humanity will achieve a transcendent (meaning, free from the burdens of material existence) state of being.
Does this still sound so irrational to you? Based on the observations made to date, there isn't much reason to discount the possibility (apart, perhaps, from preconceptions about absolute upper limits of what technological knowledge can possibly achieve).
Often you don't know where the problems will be until you put it under load.
Techniques exist to simulate load, of course. And there is always open beta testing. However, they still only give you an approximation of where the problems are and what their scope is, and the time you invest in these activities is not billable.
The money for a game has to come from somewhere. It is a huge upfront investment, with little more than crystal-ball-gazing to determine the ROI. Every dollar you invest in pre-release-optimization is a dollar that you are potentially investing in a game that won't pull much income (or in fixing problems that don't turn out to be the big ones when released).
MMO games are dangerous. At first they are fun, and if you don't have addiction problems you can balance your play time with your real life quite easily (though some may have the nagging feeling that they aren't getting their money's worth if they don't play very often).
However, eventually, you join a guild (or equivalent). And they raid with you. And your availability becomes an issue for them. Suddenly, every time you don't play, nine or more of your friends can't run they dungeon they want to run, and it is YOUR fault.
That is the real killer...the sense of importance you get from being so relied-upon, combined with the pride you get from towering over your peers due to your uber raid gear, make the end game destructively addictive.
Sure, you can quit any time, so long as you don't mind disappointing and/or pissing off a whole bunch of friends who have been relying on you, and supporting you, and sacrificing for you, for quite a long time.
Microsoft's products are primarily information products. Windows, Office, etc. Microsoft, therefore, benefits from the institution of information control, including well-enforced Intellectual Property laws and business practices.
So, Microsoft indirectly benefits from "playing ball," even if the information product in question isn't one of their own.
The motto is not "do no evil," it is "don't be evil."
Not that it really matters, "evil" is a sloppy, ill-defined, and personally relativistic concept to begin with.
And of course, having an intent doesn't guarantee the ability to realize that intent, let alone to perpetually avoid any deviation.
And of course, loudly publishing such a motto doesn't actually mean that those at the top have any intention of living up to it. The perception of benevolence is what is really useful.
They fully understand that the bible was written and translated by men.
That is a very important point. The Bible was written by humans. A copy of it was given to each owner by a fellow human. Instructions on how to interpret it were provided by humans. The teaching of the dual nature of Jesus was taught by humans.
Therefore, to put faith in the Bible, in any interpretation of the Bible, or in any church based thereupon, is to put faith in humans.
If you would like to put faith in God that is great. But when you believe what your church, or your book, says, you aren't putting faith in God. You are putting faith in humans.
And humans are fallible.
Einstein says religion is childish. I say religion is an emergent phenomenon. By that I mean, a novel behavior that arises spontaneously as a result of the interactions of combinations of other behaviors.
I am referring specifically to a subset of the abilities of the most evolved brain on the planet. Humans have the ability to model their environment in terms of cause-and-effect relationships. When any human, even the most primitive, is interested in understanding what brought about an effect (whether to elicit it or to avoid it) he naturally starts enquiring into its cause. This is a level of cognition that towers above instinct in the adaptive and survival advantages it grants us.
Similarly, humans also have a very unique creative/imaginative capacity. For example, when trying random experiments to get something to happen, humans will come up with much more elaborate actions than other animals.
Humans are also good at such things as abstraction and discovery of isomorphism...again with obvious survival advantages.
I submit that the combination of these three aspects of our brain will invariably result in religious doctrines. At some point, humans will visualize the entire world as an effect and inquire about the cause. For want of easy answers, the creative/imaginative capacity will provide some interesting ones. Our abstraction/isomorphic cognitive abilities will make the likening of initial causes to familiar ones (such as other people) very intuitive. To our highly evolved brains, religion practically sells itself.
So the widespread phenomenon of religion, as disadvantageous as it may (arguably) be, is a direct result of the combination of several survival advantages that are unique to humans.
Or, to put it plainly, we are so dumb because we are so smart.
I will agree that it is childish only insofar as a properly developed and exercised brain should, at some point, apply its logical and critical thinking capacities to the problem and see the strong disparity of scope between the claims being made and the nature of the evidence presented. Many humans are either too lazy or ill-equipped to develop these mental capacities, or they have made such a strong emotional attachment (another survival advantage being mis-applied) to a belief system that their logical and critical thinking capacities are overpowered.
In my opinion, religion was also a significant rung-in-the-ladder in the evolution of our species, empowering us to survive through some very interesting (and difficult) stages in our development. We have, however, climbed high enough that clinging to this rung is holding us back more than supporting us. It is time to let go of religious thinking and embrace a more pure and direct path to authentic spirituality. We don't need a set of myths and unsupportable absolutes to guide us to a deep and profound understanding of (and participation in) the mysteries that surround us.
Truth has nothing to fear from simple and direct investigation.
They say that if I am a good citizen who is following the rules, then I should have nothing to hide, and shouldn't mind a high level of governmental monitoring of my private life.
Well I DO have something to hide *from criminals.*
The data that the government monitors gets stored and handled by an incompetent IT staff overseen by decision-makers who are even less competent. The level of data tracking that the government insists it is justified in doing directly harms the people being tracked, not because of abuse from the government itself (though that is debatable, of course), but because of abuse from the criminals who manage to gain access to that data.
Asshats!
Though you didn't imply that copyright law needs to change because the RIAA are asshats, the entire theme of this post did. So I would like to challenge that directly.
1) The RIAA claims that we need to strictly enforce copyright law (and charge per copy) in order to ensure that artists get paid and continue making music.
2) The RIAA are asshats.
Therefore: we don't need copyright law (and strict enforcement) in order to ensure that artists get paid and continue making music.
This is an example of the "ad hominem" logical fallacy. Yes, they are asshats, but that has no bearing on the arguments they use to defend their business model.
I would summarize their position as a variant of the Hypothetical Syllogism (I am adding more premises than allowed, for brevity).
1) If we do not have strict interpretation and enforcement of copyright law, then people will be able to get an artists work for free.
2) If people can get an artists work for free, then most people will.
3) If most people get an artists work for free, then artists will not be able to make enough money to sustain themselves.
4) If artists cannot make enough money to sustain themselves, then they will have no economic incentive to produce music.
5) If artists have no economic incentive to produce music, then they will not make music.
Therefore: in order for there to be music (which we obviously want), there must be strict enforcement of copyright law.
To the best of my knowledge, that is the line of reasoning being advocated, and it should therefore be logically attacked.
I would specifically (and individually) attack premises 3, 4, and 5. According to the US Department of Labor most musicians work part time (already can't sustain themselves but work anyway) and also many of them earn money through live performances (monetizing their work even though free music is presently available). So my attacks, specifically, are:
3) Artists can still monetize their work, through live performances, merchandising, and alternative business models.
4) Even the lesser gains of part time employment or low-income alternative business models qualify as economic incentive.
5) Some artists produce music for the love of producing music, and think of compensation only after the fact.
So there you have it. In a nutshell I would say that we should at least experiment with the alternative business models, and see how they pan out. If all artists stop making music and America starts to experience cultural starvation, we can always reintroduce strict copyright enforcement later on...and then with much more universal support. As it stands, we are unwilling to even try, largely as a result of irrational argumentation (and, of course, a few wealthy/powerful entities who stand to benefit from our irrational behavior).
In theory, money exists merely to facilitate the barter system by providing an abstract representation of wealth. We tend to associate a high dollar velocity with wealth creation, though the two are not really the same thing.
Open Source software is, by any reasonable definition, valuable. The individual programs are useful products that people want. Their existence makes the community (in this case, the whole planet) more wealthy. Therefore, open source is not the value-sink that its competitors would dress it up as being.
"Objectivity" is very easy to say, but very hard to do. Objectivity is not by any means the path of least resistance. The scientific method (and everything that surrounds it) is our attempt to overcome our own inherent lack of objectivity in our investigative processes. Not all humans who strive to be good at it actually succeed.
But a handful of people calling their non-scientific practices "science" do not automatically undermine the value of scientific inquiry, nor do their mistakes automatically invalidate the compelling warrant that has already been established for actual scientific theories.