I remember that one! Been a long time since I read that. Actually, it is probably still relevant, because all this water seems to basically be part of the moon rock, not sitting in underground reservoirs or something.
Agree that "knowing how it works" is not guaranteed to be a criterion for making it happen. However, "as it looks right now" can't really be said. The appearance of sentience may or may not have any connection to its actual presence, and every single "sentience-arises-magically-out-of-the-right-interaction-of-some-kind-of-information-network-or-sufficient-complexity-or-whatever" theory is really just running on its own assumed truth, and the lack of any good idea where else it comes from. Mainly this is because we have the unavoidable problem that the presence of sentience at any level or in any quantity can't be tested for. So we can only kind of guess that results we do see in tests are actually building blocks leading toward something that somehow ultimately results in sentience...and they might be, or might not be at all.
I'm not sure what you're getting at by the whole idea being a false premise. We can't "seem" extraordinarily unique unless sentience actually exists, because there would be nobody to whom "seeming" can occur. Do you mean it likely exists in a wider spectrum of things than human beings? That could be entirely true, sure.
Sentience doesn't just mean "having some trait that can be analogized to the concept of 'knowing' something," it means being aware of something, which implies the presence of some kind of being capable of experiencing awareness. My wallet "knows" how rich or poor I am on a given day, but it isn't sentient, nor my refrigerator for "knowing" whether its door is open or not.
Sapience, well, that's something I'm still hoping we can develop in human beings, much less robots.
Yes, Stalin and Pol Pot were such freedom-loving rulers that they should be a model for everyone. It's clear that religion is the source of all tyranny.
This is a common proposition, but not usually a well-examined one, considering that the most egregious violators of individual freedom and biggest attempts yet at totalitarianism have come from anti-religious states and leaders. It isn't being religious that is the problem. It is when your religion is power, that's the problem. Unfortunately, the worship of power and control is usually practiced under guises of things people think of positively, like religions, or "the social good", and it's possible to fool too many of the people too much of the time.
Yeah, especially since the American moon program seems to be getting canceled, there will be nowhere to go. I sometimes wonder if, in a hundred or two hundred years, there will be small, private groups of people trying the "leave [whatever country] for somewhere more sane" by going and starting over for themselves on various off-earth places (moon, mars, asteroids, space stations, whatever), much as the pilgrims ran off to North America. As for comparing war stories about better times, we're talking about government monitoring of internet communications, so you might not get to do even that, since it could be considered subversive.
I might have to dispute your claim about cars somewhat. Remember that the last 20 years includes the shift from the small cars that grew in popularity in the 1980's, and minivans many of which had 4-cylinder motors, to SUV's. Fuel consumption technology may have improved, but I'm not sure actual fuel consumption in the aggregate did, not to mention that there are more miles driven today and more vehicles per capita.
I don't think the FTC gets it. There are people out there whose auto warranties really are about to expire, and the robo-callers have no choice-- they are not allowed to, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Every potential conflict has the potential for life or death consequences. The shoplifer (I deleted "unarmed", because it is impossible to know that unless the person is wearing nothing) running from police isn't doing something that warrants deadly force, but it certainly is one in which the person might legitimately be tackled by police officers giving chase...which occasionally results in his or her head hitting something hard and causing death. Rare, but so is taser death. Both of them are physical restraints. Both cause some, but fairly small, danger. Tasers aren't equivalent to, or meant to replace, shooting with a gun, they are equivalent to and meant to replace a physical tussle, which _usually_ results in injury, and occasionally in severe injury or death. The problem with tasers is not that they are more dangerous than other means of accomplishing the same thing-- they are probably less so, and certainly are dangerous to fewer people. The problem is one of having an easy button to push that is going to be very tempting-- it is a lot harder, more risky to the self, and less personally removed to actually strike someone in the course of getting him to submit than to fire a taser. So you wind up with police sometimes using them in cases in which they wouldn't use old-fashioned physical violence. Of course, as others have pointed out, there are some who were and are perfectly happy to use old-fashioned force in inappropriate situations as well. I don't think it is reasonable to ask police to put themselves in greater danger, though, and engage violent criminals hand-to-hand only. In fact, the taser probably prevents deaths by offering some intermediate solution for a situation where the officer is not up to the challenge of taking on a threatening assailant in a fight but has an option short of a gun. We just need to be vigilant about standard operating guidelines for the use of force of all kinds, including tasers.
If you can't distinguish one environment you've heard of but never seen from another environment you've heard of but never seen, that means nothing at all.
They built up the Java brand brilliantly, and that's going to be hard to dismantle.
They might have built it up brilliantly to start with, but they haven't been so brilliant about letting it collapse as an end-user technology. Java applets were, and still are, one of the best things ever to hit the web. Finally someone had solved the problem of how to make an actual application, with a normal, recognizable user interface that doesn't have to reload itself from scratch every time you click a button, and put it in the hands of users. Nobody else had anything like it. The closest thing MS had was ActiveX controls, which had to be individually installed like executables and specially given permission.
And then, inexplicably, everyone promptly forgot about it, and went on to develop the so-called "web 2.0", which solves the same problems in a worse way. (Where "worse" means: lacking a consistent user interface from app to app, breaking every time you change browser versions, relying on a house of cards of javascript, and being nearly impossible to debug well in development. And still not completely eliminating the page refreshes, and certainly not the problems of state persistence.) Adobe develops Flash, Microsoft comes out with Silverlight, and suddenly there's even an acronym for the whole phenomenon (RIA). Yet read most of the articles about RIA technologies, and Java applets clearly never even cross the mind of most the authors. It apparently is yesterday's technology in the public mind.
Yes, Sun did something with Java, but it stopped being brilliant anywhere except the server side about 10 years ago. Which is a shame, because it means I'm stuck using applications developed with inferior tools (and having to use those tools myself), meaning we all have inferior applications.
"If I was going to buy a new car, it would probably be Ford or Chevy and not GMC."
"Ford and Chevy aren't cars," would be one possible response, but an unnecessary attempt at correcting something that could have been interpreted in a way that made sense to begin with.
It makes sense to speak of a language being.NET, which the earlier poster did, even if it doesn't exactly make sense to speak of.NET being a language, which you decided the earlier poster must have meant to do.
I wasn't bashing RFID, and said so in my post. I was pointing at, to put it in your sort of wording, a threat related to this particular use of it. You point out exactly the problem with your own argument: line of sight. Turns out that most people, if another person is peering over their shoulder at a document in their hands, will believe that their documents are being read. Whereas if you're holding it closed, or handing it to one specific person to be examined, you don't expect some person near you, who can't see the contents, to be able to read them.
Do you really not see a security difference between a passport that someone else can read only if they are near enough to see it clearly, manage to maneuver themselves into a position to be able to read it,if all the relevant pages are turned for them, and one that someone can read fully just by being nearby? You can exert some control over who visibly can see the pages of your passport, and you expect to shield sensitive information from view in public environments. You have no control over who can read your passport's radio transmissions.
...except when you pulled your passport out of the holder to use it, and got it scanned not only by the customs agent, but by the guy sitting on a chair nearby stealing your info, who knows that the airport is a great place to come and do that. Seriously, why would they think it is a good idea to put your data into a form that broadcasts over the air? There are lots of good uses for RFID, and I can't see how this is one of them.
Will one of the versions be numbered correctly? There is no reasonable numbering scheme that lands on 7 with Windows 7. Consider:
1. Windows 1
2. Windows 2
3. Windows 3.0/3.1/3.11/etc.
4. Windows 95
5. Windows 98
6. Windows ME
7. Windows XP
8. Windows Vista
9. Windows 7
Are they trying to consider 95, 98, and ME to all be one version? That seems silly from the perspective of the consumer, because they were definitely not presented to the outside world as the same version, and yet Windows 7 is an outside-world marketing name that breaks with the earlier marketing. Why not just go with Windows 9?
Or, perhaps they are pretending 95, 98, and ME never existed, and putting NT 4.0 in one slot between Windows 3 and Windows XP? It is odd that with all the hype I've seen around Windows 7, I've not once seen anyone take up the question of why the heck it would have that number.
The definition of theft is absolute, in that you cannot use it dynamically in a contemporary argument that refers to in any way legal rights or laws.
"Cannot use it dynamically" is partially correct. It is certainly true that the law vanishes as a useful concept when the words of the law are set adrift and can be interpreted to mean anything we like. However, consider my earlier point about the words "the press," which appear in the First Amendment to the Constitution. The U.S. Constitution says nothing about the freedom of the television news media, freedom regarding Internet publications, or even, literally speaking, about publications that use inkjet or laser printing methods rather than a printing press. And yet it is well-understood that all of these are protected.
Why? Because a part of legal interpretation is trying to figure out what people actually meant when they used a word. There are many notions which spring to mind when a person utters any given word. A sometimes difficult job of lawyers and judges is to hash out which of these meanings are the ones intended to be included by a statutory use of a word. In the case of the First Amendment, it has been long established that the main thing meant by the word "press" is not "a physical printing press," but something more akin to "publication", and by "speech" not only "audible, vocal utterances" but something like (though not exactly) "communication."
The same law, with the same words, therefore, is used to govern new acts which never were conceived of when the Bill of Rights was written. In this sense, legal definitions are inescapably dynamic. You are correct that they have to remain anchored, but what are they anchored to? "The press" is obviously not anchored to old-fashioned publishing technology, even though the word literally and originally refers to that. It is anchored to an idea, one that still has application even though hardly anyone might use what 18th Century Americans would have called a printing press.
Additionally, that same argument applies to the word infringement which you have used repeatedly as an action that can be performed upon physical objects.
I've never done any such thing. I wonder if you are reading my arguments very carefully. I've never said you can "infringe upon" a piece of land, for instance. You can, however, infringe upon my rights to occupy my own land, which are referred to as "property rights". And this is where rights and property come in connection with one another. As you have pointed out correctly, ownership is in some sense a societal convention. We agree as a society that people who control things will have the right to continue to control those things, and nobody else may, without permission, seize control of them. The government is tasked with enforcing these conventions-- property rights. Without property rights, there would be no such thing as property.
I did not say that property rights only apply to land exactly. However, they really do in a way. I think you are trying to extend property rights over other physical property such as clothes, apples, oranges, chairs, etc. I just don't see how that is true. Once again a right is a legal entitlement. Sure the state is interested in preventing people from taking other peoples apples from each other, but do we really create a relationship with the state over every single object in existence?
Actually, yes we do. It simply isn't a recorded one; it is an implied one. The state has the obligation under its laws to protect all property rights. If you don't believe it, try walking out of a convenience store with a bag of apples you haven't paid for, then attempt to convince the police officer that the state has no involvement here. The only reason certain property, such as land and automobiles and a few other things, has title deeds is because those are 1) very valuable items over which ownership historically has ver
1. The definition of theft is an absolute and there are exceptions to it. If the problem with this claim is not obvious, then this argument is not worth having.
2. Property rights apply only to land. This is utter nonsense. All of our possessions are regularly referred to as property, and throughout legal and government (and economic) theory it is well-recognized that a society only works well when the government enforces property rights. The means by which it enforces many of those rights is by criminal and civil penalties against taking of that property. (And land does not all belong to the government, by the way. The government merely does not recognize as absolute your property rights-- it has granted itself "takings" rights and "taxation" rights and various others that can override "property" rights in certain cases. Unsurprisingly, many people quite readily and unhappily apply the word "theft" to the exercise of these powers under certain circumstances, though they usually know that this is not a legal-language definition of the word.)
3. Property can only be physical. This is the base assertion of your entire thesis and it falls flat on its face in several examples I've already come up with, and yet you can show no reason why you believe it to be so. You just talk louder and louder re-asserting it. You talk about a business being registered and so on, blah blah blah, but you never explain why you think it is impossible for us to talk about a business being owned by someone. Guess what? When you purchase stock, you aren't just buying a piece of paper. You are buying a portion of a legally defined entity called a business. A corporation, as such, doesn't even exist anywhere except in the minds of the law and the people. It, in turn, owns various land, buildings, machinery, and so on.
Money you don't want to get into, for obvious reasons: it forces a hole in your absolutism. You dismiss this with a wave of the hand and a comment about how it "used to" be backed by gold. Guess you "used to" own money, and taking it "used to" be theft? As for your insistence that money is primarily physical in nature, rather than being a concept, I bet you'd have a hard time finding a single economist anywhere who would agree with that claim. You seem to be saying that money is different because it has real value, but that's not a difference. Everything we're talking about has real value, and it all is regularly exchanged for measurable amounts of real-world objects. An electronic representation of the idea that you can, if you wish, ask for a certain number of pieces of paper which have value only by convention, and none of which you own (you own the dollars behind those pieces of paper, not the bills themselves), is not a physical object at all. And yet if someone infringes on your right to keep that number free from outside adjustment in someone else's favor, they have stolen from you.
4. Theft means only physical things, according to dictionaries and the law, and that is that. I don't know what country you are from, but in the United States, at least, legal documents all over the place refer to theft of intellectual property. Criminal complaints use this language, lawyers use this language, the web sites of the federal agencies tasked with enforcing laws relating to it use this language. There is theft of intellectual property, theft of trade secrets, theft of services; none of these is a physical object. This is already in the law and in the courtroom, and various dictionary definitions could easily be interpreted as allowing for this as well. For that matter, the dictionary is a book designed to reflect what words mean, not enforce what they mean. That's why dictionaries change over time.
And you use an example such as saying, "She stole my heart." If what you say is true, the sentence is actually nonsense. But it is not. It is a valid English sentence, made up of words being used in a way
As far as language goes, the word theft is the same as the word steal and both EXPLICITLY involve PHYSICAL PROPERTY . You cannot change the English language and laws to conform to your own incorrect interpretations.
Sorry, capitalization, which you are fond of, does not causally affect reality. Nor does declaring "absolutes". Words mean whatever they are used to mean. There is not a stone tablet somewhere given by God that declares the exact bounds of the mental concepts we are allowed to associate with the five letters t-h-e-f-t.
The meanings of words as used by society at large adjust over time, because our culture encounters concepts which map in some way, either by high overlap or by analogy, to a word already in use. Do you think that "the press" EXPLICITLY CAN ONLY refer to a physical printing press? That this could be declared as an absolute, and everyone who uses it differently is WRONG and has been BRAINWASHED? No, it is a concept that was used to refer to the printing press, and then by extension to the use of that machine and the people and tasks it is used with...and with technological developments, some of those tasks and people now carry on without ever even touching a physical printing press.
As it turns out, nobody, including you, in actual use or mental concept, actually limits "theft" to the narrow meaning you describe. You claim that money is a special case. (Hmm. There goes the "absolute".) For me to change bits in your bank's computer that shifted money from your account to mine isn't to even touch anything physical of yours. It involves changing something physical belonging to the bank (its storage media) that is used to represent numbers, which in turn represent something (money) that only exists as an abstract concept. Money, even when represented by paper or coinage, isn't a physical thing, it is an idea. And yet if I change records that say you own it, to say I own it, then everyone, including the law, would say that I "stole" it. In fact, you can't believe that you "own" money at all without considering something non-physical to be your property. If you would like to revise yourself and start claiming that you don't "own" money, but you just have a "right" to its use, go right ahead, but you'll be at odds with nearly 100% of the users of the English language, all of whom would be quite comfortable applying the words "theft" and "property" to this and all cases involving money, and you therefore definitely won't have any kind of legitimate claim to an absolute, universal truth of your personal definition of the words involved.
So your "absolute number one" is no such thing. You defined something "for the purposes of this discussion" and then claimed it applied everywhere and in all cases. That isn't allowed by logic. And any linguist, or even any serious scholar of the law, would tell you that the only facts we have about the meanings of words are interpretations. Since even you have been shown not to share the interpretations of "theft" and "property" that you are claiming are absolute, maybe it would be more useful to drop the substitution of assertion for argument, and reason about the particular case of copyright and how property concepts do and don't apply.
Rights and property are more intertwined than you think. Imagine that I have a contract with you, whereby you invest money in an orchard business that I am starting. We agree that I own the land and equipment, but you, having fronted money for the operating costs, own a portion of the business (here's another case of an abstract, non-physical entity-- a "business"-- as property), and you have a right to one half of all of the oranges I may grow in the future. After some time, I successfully harvest 1000 oranges. If I keep all of them myself, you may sue me. And when you do, a judge will order that I give you 500 of those oranges. Why? Because he or she legally will determine that they are your property by right. I produce
If you own something, and someone takes that something, it can reasonably, if somewhat colloquially, be called theft. That something might be a car. That something might be a right to copy. And yes, that something might be a copy of a file. If you think theft only applies to grabbing hold of material objects that now are not left in the hands of their original owners, then don't go calling it theft when I manipulate some bytes in your bank's computer.
If you have copyright on something, then when I take a copy, that copy belongs to you, too. Not just the original. I can't point to the original and say, "Look, see, the owner still has all his or her property right there," because the copy I have is also your property. I've effectively taken for myself the right to copy (which itself could arguably be called theft), and then I've taken for myself the extra copy produced (which legally belongs to you and is now in my hands rather than yours, thus meeting your own definition of theft).
Man, I knew I should have turned off the Aero features before asking my Vista-capable computer whether entropy could be reversed. Darn thing has been frozen ever since. Now I'm stuck waiting for Microsoft to pay out $8 billion before I can find out the answer. If only I'd used Vista Home Basic instead.
Yeah, but will Europe be smart enough to develop their own, too? Otherwise when the Russia shuts down the software pipeline through the Ukraine they'll all be staring at blank screens.
There's got to be a nerdier way of making a joke about "Russix | Europe" having Ukrainian dependencies, but I don't have time to figure it out.
"[I]t may be only 96% accurate, or 90% accurate..." or 15% accurate. How are we to know? Only by showing the mechanism by which it works. There is utterly no way someone should be sent to jail because of the results of a machine whose inner workings are hidden. Sure, many of them are probably guilty. But you are making that as a subjective judgment based on even less evidence than the police had at the scene. Based on what, that they defended themselves? How do we know that the machine isn't screwed up by Altoids? Or by operating it when the temperature is under 40 degrees? Or that it doesn't have a bug that makes the results totally random?
The point here is that the objective machine may not follow an objective algorithm that gives the right answer, and you are coming up with completely subjective guesses as to how likely it is that it does...and based not even on a field test of the machine, but just on your personal assumption.
True, but it still doesn't mean the industry, or any of the players in it, are in trouble. If I sell 100 of something this year, and 101 of something next year, my company is growing, regardless of whether it is growing as fast as the population is growing.
But try telling that to a shareholder. Even on zero growth, one could frame it perfectly well as, "We made record profits last year, and this year we did just as well." But unfortunately in the business world doing just as well as last year, even if last year was good, is considered a failure. That has always seemed unfortunate to me, and contributes to a lot of short-term thinking, because every year has to post greater profits than the last, no matter what the cost.
I didn't say "banned from carrying all encrypted traffic." I said "banned from carrying traffic that can't be opened up and examined." There are already plenty of government efforts to block encryption that they can't read, or force you to cough up certificates/passwords/keys/etc. Okay, my post was over-reaching some, but the stupidity and impracticality of enforcing laws requiring, say, licensing to use encryption, or something along those lines, aren't guaranteed to stop those laws from happening.
Unfortunately, if the triggers that bring about massive online encrypted transmissions are child porn and illegal file-sharing, that will in turn trigger the resurgence of anti-encryption laws, because encryption will be seen as only something needed by criminals who have something illegal to hide. Just wait until ISP's are banned from carrying traffic that can't be opened up and examined. I don't think this is a battle the governments are guaranteed to lose.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember that one! Been a long time since I read that. Actually, it is probably still relevant, because all this water seems to basically be part of the moon rock, not sitting in underground reservoirs or something.
Agree that "knowing how it works" is not guaranteed to be a criterion for making it happen. However, "as it looks right now" can't really be said. The appearance of sentience may or may not have any connection to its actual presence, and every single "sentience-arises-magically-out-of-the-right-interaction-of-some-kind-of-information-network-or-sufficient-complexity-or-whatever" theory is really just running on its own assumed truth, and the lack of any good idea where else it comes from. Mainly this is because we have the unavoidable problem that the presence of sentience at any level or in any quantity can't be tested for. So we can only kind of guess that results we do see in tests are actually building blocks leading toward something that somehow ultimately results in sentience...and they might be, or might not be at all.
I'm not sure what you're getting at by the whole idea being a false premise. We can't "seem" extraordinarily unique unless sentience actually exists, because there would be nobody to whom "seeming" can occur. Do you mean it likely exists in a wider spectrum of things than human beings? That could be entirely true, sure.
Sentience doesn't just mean "having some trait that can be analogized to the concept of 'knowing' something," it means being aware of something, which implies the presence of some kind of being capable of experiencing awareness. My wallet "knows" how rich or poor I am on a given day, but it isn't sentient, nor my refrigerator for "knowing" whether its door is open or not.
Sapience, well, that's something I'm still hoping we can develop in human beings, much less robots.
Yes, Stalin and Pol Pot were such freedom-loving rulers that they should be a model for everyone. It's clear that religion is the source of all tyranny.
This is a common proposition, but not usually a well-examined one, considering that the most egregious violators of individual freedom and biggest attempts yet at totalitarianism have come from anti-religious states and leaders. It isn't being religious that is the problem. It is when your religion is power, that's the problem. Unfortunately, the worship of power and control is usually practiced under guises of things people think of positively, like religions, or "the social good", and it's possible to fool too many of the people too much of the time.
Yeah, especially since the American moon program seems to be getting canceled, there will be nowhere to go. I sometimes wonder if, in a hundred or two hundred years, there will be small, private groups of people trying the "leave [whatever country] for somewhere more sane" by going and starting over for themselves on various off-earth places (moon, mars, asteroids, space stations, whatever), much as the pilgrims ran off to North America. As for comparing war stories about better times, we're talking about government monitoring of internet communications, so you might not get to do even that, since it could be considered subversive.
I might have to dispute your claim about cars somewhat. Remember that the last 20 years includes the shift from the small cars that grew in popularity in the 1980's, and minivans many of which had 4-cylinder motors, to SUV's. Fuel consumption technology may have improved, but I'm not sure actual fuel consumption in the aggregate did, not to mention that there are more miles driven today and more vehicles per capita.
I don't think the FTC gets it. There are people out there whose auto warranties really are about to expire, and the robo-callers have no choice-- they are not allowed to, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Every potential conflict has the potential for life or death consequences. The shoplifer (I deleted "unarmed", because it is impossible to know that unless the person is wearing nothing) running from police isn't doing something that warrants deadly force, but it certainly is one in which the person might legitimately be tackled by police officers giving chase...which occasionally results in his or her head hitting something hard and causing death. Rare, but so is taser death. Both of them are physical restraints. Both cause some, but fairly small, danger. Tasers aren't equivalent to, or meant to replace, shooting with a gun, they are equivalent to and meant to replace a physical tussle, which _usually_ results in injury, and occasionally in severe injury or death. The problem with tasers is not that they are more dangerous than other means of accomplishing the same thing-- they are probably less so, and certainly are dangerous to fewer people. The problem is one of having an easy button to push that is going to be very tempting-- it is a lot harder, more risky to the self, and less personally removed to actually strike someone in the course of getting him to submit than to fire a taser. So you wind up with police sometimes using them in cases in which they wouldn't use old-fashioned physical violence. Of course, as others have pointed out, there are some who were and are perfectly happy to use old-fashioned force in inappropriate situations as well. I don't think it is reasonable to ask police to put themselves in greater danger, though, and engage violent criminals hand-to-hand only. In fact, the taser probably prevents deaths by offering some intermediate solution for a situation where the officer is not up to the challenge of taking on a threatening assailant in a fight but has an option short of a gun. We just need to be vigilant about standard operating guidelines for the use of force of all kinds, including tasers.
If you can't distinguish one environment you've heard of but never seen from another environment you've heard of but never seen, that means nothing at all.
They built up the Java brand brilliantly, and that's going to be hard to dismantle.
They might have built it up brilliantly to start with, but they haven't been so brilliant about letting it collapse as an end-user technology. Java applets were, and still are, one of the best things ever to hit the web. Finally someone had solved the problem of how to make an actual application, with a normal, recognizable user interface that doesn't have to reload itself from scratch every time you click a button, and put it in the hands of users. Nobody else had anything like it. The closest thing MS had was ActiveX controls, which had to be individually installed like executables and specially given permission.
And then, inexplicably, everyone promptly forgot about it, and went on to develop the so-called "web 2.0", which solves the same problems in a worse way. (Where "worse" means: lacking a consistent user interface from app to app, breaking every time you change browser versions, relying on a house of cards of javascript, and being nearly impossible to debug well in development. And still not completely eliminating the page refreshes, and certainly not the problems of state persistence.) Adobe develops Flash, Microsoft comes out with Silverlight, and suddenly there's even an acronym for the whole phenomenon (RIA). Yet read most of the articles about RIA technologies, and Java applets clearly never even cross the mind of most the authors. It apparently is yesterday's technology in the public mind.
Yes, Sun did something with Java, but it stopped being brilliant anywhere except the server side about 10 years ago. Which is a shame, because it means I'm stuck using applications developed with inferior tools (and having to use those tools myself), meaning we all have inferior applications.
Consider the following sentence:
.NET, which the earlier poster did, even if it doesn't exactly make sense to speak of .NET being a language, which you decided the earlier poster must have meant to do.
"If I was going to buy a new car, it would probably be Ford or Chevy and not GMC."
"Ford and Chevy aren't cars," would be one possible response, but an unnecessary attempt at correcting something that could have been interpreted in a way that made sense to begin with.
It makes sense to speak of a language being
I wasn't bashing RFID, and said so in my post. I was pointing at, to put it in your sort of wording, a threat related to this particular use of it. You point out exactly the problem with your own argument: line of sight. Turns out that most people, if another person is peering over their shoulder at a document in their hands, will believe that their documents are being read. Whereas if you're holding it closed, or handing it to one specific person to be examined, you don't expect some person near you, who can't see the contents, to be able to read them.
Do you really not see a security difference between a passport that someone else can read only if they are near enough to see it clearly, manage to maneuver themselves into a position to be able to read it,if all the relevant pages are turned for them, and one that someone can read fully just by being nearby? You can exert some control over who visibly can see the pages of your passport, and you expect to shield sensitive information from view in public environments. You have no control over who can read your passport's radio transmissions.
...except when you pulled your passport out of the holder to use it, and got it scanned not only by the customs agent, but by the guy sitting on a chair nearby stealing your info, who knows that the airport is a great place to come and do that. Seriously, why would they think it is a good idea to put your data into a form that broadcasts over the air? There are lots of good uses for RFID, and I can't see how this is one of them.
Will one of the versions be numbered correctly? There is no reasonable numbering scheme that lands on 7 with Windows 7. Consider:
1. Windows 1
2. Windows 2
3. Windows 3.0/3.1/3.11/etc.
4. Windows 95
5. Windows 98
6. Windows ME
7. Windows XP
8. Windows Vista
9. Windows 7
Are they trying to consider 95, 98, and ME to all be one version? That seems silly from the perspective of the consumer, because they were definitely not presented to the outside world as the same version, and yet Windows 7 is an outside-world marketing name that breaks with the earlier marketing. Why not just go with Windows 9?
Or, perhaps they are pretending 95, 98, and ME never existed, and putting NT 4.0 in one slot between Windows 3 and Windows XP? It is odd that with all the hype I've seen around Windows 7, I've not once seen anyone take up the question of why the heck it would have that number.
The definition of theft is absolute, in that you cannot use it dynamically in a contemporary argument that refers to in any way legal rights or laws.
"Cannot use it dynamically" is partially correct. It is certainly true that the law vanishes as a useful concept when the words of the law are set adrift and can be interpreted to mean anything we like. However, consider my earlier point about the words "the press," which appear in the First Amendment to the Constitution. The U.S. Constitution says nothing about the freedom of the television news media, freedom regarding Internet publications, or even, literally speaking, about publications that use inkjet or laser printing methods rather than a printing press. And yet it is well-understood that all of these are protected.
Why? Because a part of legal interpretation is trying to figure out what people actually meant when they used a word. There are many notions which spring to mind when a person utters any given word. A sometimes difficult job of lawyers and judges is to hash out which of these meanings are the ones intended to be included by a statutory use of a word. In the case of the First Amendment, it has been long established that the main thing meant by the word "press" is not "a physical printing press," but something more akin to "publication", and by "speech" not only "audible, vocal utterances" but something like (though not exactly) "communication."
The same law, with the same words, therefore, is used to govern new acts which never were conceived of when the Bill of Rights was written. In this sense, legal definitions are inescapably dynamic. You are correct that they have to remain anchored, but what are they anchored to? "The press" is obviously not anchored to old-fashioned publishing technology, even though the word literally and originally refers to that. It is anchored to an idea, one that still has application even though hardly anyone might use what 18th Century Americans would have called a printing press.
Additionally, that same argument applies to the word infringement which you have used repeatedly as an action that can be performed upon physical objects.
I've never done any such thing. I wonder if you are reading my arguments very carefully. I've never said you can "infringe upon" a piece of land, for instance. You can, however, infringe upon my rights to occupy my own land, which are referred to as "property rights". And this is where rights and property come in connection with one another. As you have pointed out correctly, ownership is in some sense a societal convention. We agree as a society that people who control things will have the right to continue to control those things, and nobody else may, without permission, seize control of them. The government is tasked with enforcing these conventions-- property rights. Without property rights, there would be no such thing as property.
I did not say that property rights only apply to land exactly. However, they really do in a way. I think you are trying to extend property rights over other physical property such as clothes, apples, oranges, chairs, etc. I just don't see how that is true. Once again a right is a legal entitlement. Sure the state is interested in preventing people from taking other peoples apples from each other, but do we really create a relationship with the state over every single object in existence?
Actually, yes we do. It simply isn't a recorded one; it is an implied one. The state has the obligation under its laws to protect all property rights. If you don't believe it, try walking out of a convenience store with a bag of apples you haven't paid for, then attempt to convince the police officer that the state has no involvement here. The only reason certain property, such as land and automobiles and a few other things, has title deeds is because those are 1) very valuable items over which ownership historically has ver
So you want to say:
1. The definition of theft is an absolute and there are exceptions to it. If the problem with this claim is not obvious, then this argument is not worth having.
2. Property rights apply only to land. This is utter nonsense. All of our possessions are regularly referred to as property, and throughout legal and government (and economic) theory it is well-recognized that a society only works well when the government enforces property rights. The means by which it enforces many of those rights is by criminal and civil penalties against taking of that property. (And land does not all belong to the government, by the way. The government merely does not recognize as absolute your property rights-- it has granted itself "takings" rights and "taxation" rights and various others that can override "property" rights in certain cases. Unsurprisingly, many people quite readily and unhappily apply the word "theft" to the exercise of these powers under certain circumstances, though they usually know that this is not a legal-language definition of the word.)
3. Property can only be physical. This is the base assertion of your entire thesis and it falls flat on its face in several examples I've already come up with, and yet you can show no reason why you believe it to be so. You just talk louder and louder re-asserting it. You talk about a business being registered and so on, blah blah blah, but you never explain why you think it is impossible for us to talk about a business being owned by someone. Guess what? When you purchase stock, you aren't just buying a piece of paper. You are buying a portion of a legally defined entity called a business. A corporation, as such, doesn't even exist anywhere except in the minds of the law and the people. It, in turn, owns various land, buildings, machinery, and so on.
Money you don't want to get into, for obvious reasons: it forces a hole in your absolutism. You dismiss this with a wave of the hand and a comment about how it "used to" be backed by gold. Guess you "used to" own money, and taking it "used to" be theft? As for your insistence that money is primarily physical in nature, rather than being a concept, I bet you'd have a hard time finding a single economist anywhere who would agree with that claim. You seem to be saying that money is different because it has real value, but that's not a difference. Everything we're talking about has real value, and it all is regularly exchanged for measurable amounts of real-world objects. An electronic representation of the idea that you can, if you wish, ask for a certain number of pieces of paper which have value only by convention, and none of which you own (you own the dollars behind those pieces of paper, not the bills themselves), is not a physical object at all. And yet if someone infringes on your right to keep that number free from outside adjustment in someone else's favor, they have stolen from you.
4. Theft means only physical things, according to dictionaries and the law, and that is that. I don't know what country you are from, but in the United States, at least, legal documents all over the place refer to theft of intellectual property. Criminal complaints use this language, lawyers use this language, the web sites of the federal agencies tasked with enforcing laws relating to it use this language. There is theft of intellectual property, theft of trade secrets, theft of services; none of these is a physical object. This is already in the law and in the courtroom, and various dictionary definitions could easily be interpreted as allowing for this as well. For that matter, the dictionary is a book designed to reflect what words mean, not enforce what they mean. That's why dictionaries change over time.
And you use an example such as saying, "She stole my heart." If what you say is true, the sentence is actually nonsense. But it is not. It is a valid English sentence, made up of words being used in a way
As far as language goes, the word theft is the same as the word steal and both EXPLICITLY involve PHYSICAL PROPERTY . You cannot change the English language and laws to conform to your own incorrect interpretations.
Sorry, capitalization, which you are fond of, does not causally affect reality. Nor does declaring "absolutes". Words mean whatever they are used to mean. There is not a stone tablet somewhere given by God that declares the exact bounds of the mental concepts we are allowed to associate with the five letters t-h-e-f-t.
The meanings of words as used by society at large adjust over time, because our culture encounters concepts which map in some way, either by high overlap or by analogy, to a word already in use. Do you think that "the press" EXPLICITLY CAN ONLY refer to a physical printing press? That this could be declared as an absolute, and everyone who uses it differently is WRONG and has been BRAINWASHED? No, it is a concept that was used to refer to the printing press, and then by extension to the use of that machine and the people and tasks it is used with...and with technological developments, some of those tasks and people now carry on without ever even touching a physical printing press.
As it turns out, nobody, including you, in actual use or mental concept, actually limits "theft" to the narrow meaning you describe. You claim that money is a special case. (Hmm. There goes the "absolute".) For me to change bits in your bank's computer that shifted money from your account to mine isn't to even touch anything physical of yours. It involves changing something physical belonging to the bank (its storage media) that is used to represent numbers, which in turn represent something (money) that only exists as an abstract concept. Money, even when represented by paper or coinage, isn't a physical thing, it is an idea. And yet if I change records that say you own it, to say I own it, then everyone, including the law, would say that I "stole" it. In fact, you can't believe that you "own" money at all without considering something non-physical to be your property. If you would like to revise yourself and start claiming that you don't "own" money, but you just have a "right" to its use, go right ahead, but you'll be at odds with nearly 100% of the users of the English language, all of whom would be quite comfortable applying the words "theft" and "property" to this and all cases involving money, and you therefore definitely won't have any kind of legitimate claim to an absolute, universal truth of your personal definition of the words involved.
So your "absolute number one" is no such thing. You defined something "for the purposes of this discussion" and then claimed it applied everywhere and in all cases. That isn't allowed by logic. And any linguist, or even any serious scholar of the law, would tell you that the only facts we have about the meanings of words are interpretations. Since even you have been shown not to share the interpretations of "theft" and "property" that you are claiming are absolute, maybe it would be more useful to drop the substitution of assertion for argument, and reason about the particular case of copyright and how property concepts do and don't apply.
Rights and property are more intertwined than you think. Imagine that I have a contract with you, whereby you invest money in an orchard business that I am starting. We agree that I own the land and equipment, but you, having fronted money for the operating costs, own a portion of the business (here's another case of an abstract, non-physical entity-- a "business"-- as property), and you have a right to one half of all of the oranges I may grow in the future. After some time, I successfully harvest 1000 oranges. If I keep all of them myself, you may sue me. And when you do, a judge will order that I give you 500 of those oranges. Why? Because he or she legally will determine that they are your property by right. I produce
If you own something, and someone takes that something, it can reasonably, if somewhat colloquially, be called theft. That something might be a car. That something might be a right to copy. And yes, that something might be a copy of a file. If you think theft only applies to grabbing hold of material objects that now are not left in the hands of their original owners, then don't go calling it theft when I manipulate some bytes in your bank's computer.
If you have copyright on something, then when I take a copy, that copy belongs to you, too. Not just the original. I can't point to the original and say, "Look, see, the owner still has all his or her property right there," because the copy I have is also your property. I've effectively taken for myself the right to copy (which itself could arguably be called theft), and then I've taken for myself the extra copy produced (which legally belongs to you and is now in my hands rather than yours, thus meeting your own definition of theft).
Man, I knew I should have turned off the Aero features before asking my Vista-capable computer whether entropy could be reversed. Darn thing has been frozen ever since. Now I'm stuck waiting for Microsoft to pay out $8 billion before I can find out the answer. If only I'd used Vista Home Basic instead.
jamie points out that Obama's views and opinions were made clear through his Senate vote and numerous public statements
in which he said that he was going to help filibuster the Senate bill that he then voted for. Whoops.
Yeah, but will Europe be smart enough to develop their own, too? Otherwise when the Russia shuts down the software pipeline through the Ukraine they'll all be staring at blank screens. There's got to be a nerdier way of making a joke about "Russix | Europe" having Ukrainian dependencies, but I don't have time to figure it out.
"[I]t may be only 96% accurate, or 90% accurate..." or 15% accurate. How are we to know? Only by showing the mechanism by which it works. There is utterly no way someone should be sent to jail because of the results of a machine whose inner workings are hidden. Sure, many of them are probably guilty. But you are making that as a subjective judgment based on even less evidence than the police had at the scene. Based on what, that they defended themselves? How do we know that the machine isn't screwed up by Altoids? Or by operating it when the temperature is under 40 degrees? Or that it doesn't have a bug that makes the results totally random? The point here is that the objective machine may not follow an objective algorithm that gives the right answer, and you are coming up with completely subjective guesses as to how likely it is that it does...and based not even on a field test of the machine, but just on your personal assumption.
True, but it still doesn't mean the industry, or any of the players in it, are in trouble. If I sell 100 of something this year, and 101 of something next year, my company is growing, regardless of whether it is growing as fast as the population is growing. But try telling that to a shareholder. Even on zero growth, one could frame it perfectly well as, "We made record profits last year, and this year we did just as well." But unfortunately in the business world doing just as well as last year, even if last year was good, is considered a failure. That has always seemed unfortunate to me, and contributes to a lot of short-term thinking, because every year has to post greater profits than the last, no matter what the cost.
I didn't say "banned from carrying all encrypted traffic." I said "banned from carrying traffic that can't be opened up and examined." There are already plenty of government efforts to block encryption that they can't read, or force you to cough up certificates/passwords/keys/etc. Okay, my post was over-reaching some, but the stupidity and impracticality of enforcing laws requiring, say, licensing to use encryption, or something along those lines, aren't guaranteed to stop those laws from happening.
Unfortunately, if the triggers that bring about massive online encrypted transmissions are child porn and illegal file-sharing, that will in turn trigger the resurgence of anti-encryption laws, because encryption will be seen as only something needed by criminals who have something illegal to hide. Just wait until ISP's are banned from carrying traffic that can't be opened up and examined. I don't think this is a battle the governments are guaranteed to lose.