I'm not that happy with the precedent this sets, but I get many of my movies through Netflix streaming these days, which is improving all the time. There are still hundreds of great classic movies I want to see, and I'd prefer an emphasis on those (which tend to be what is showing up on Netflix streaming) rather than getting the most recent crap out of Hollywood as fast as possible.
If you really want to see the damn movie a couple weeks sooner, buy the DVD... or better yet, go to the theatre when it's playing.
There are various trade-offs here, but there are lots of customers who don't use Netflix only as a replacement for the "latest releases" section of Blockbuster.
If you're going to really nitpick grammar, you'd know that there isn't a masculine plural pronoun.
True... in English. But you're focusing on the wrong thing. "Penises" is plural; "penis" is singular. It makes little sense to use a plural possessive pronoun with "penis." (Unless perhaps you're in some weird situation referring to a married couple, and their one penis between them.)
You can't really change from plural to singular in mid sentence ('anyone/their' -> 'his') so you have to keep using 'their' even if you're talking about a group that is exclusively male.
And now you've identified the other grammatical problem. "Anyone" is technically singular (despite recent usage trends), so there should be no "their" in the sentence to begin with. They should both be "his." If you want to criticize someone who's nitpicking grammar, know what you're talking about first.
There are also videos of robotic page flippers and information about how Google wants to use music to help humans flip pages.
From TFA:
The patent describes how a musical tone can be played from the speakers at regular intervals to give the operator a pace to flip pages to.
Not sure what this means, but what is the difference between a "musical tone" and a "tone"? Probably none, except a pleasant timbre with a pitch. From the description, it likely just means a pleasant-sounding "beep" or "ding" or something that recurs at intervals so people know when it's safe to turn the page.
In any case, hardly "using music" to encourage page-flipping -- which brings up weird images of people "Sweatin' to the Oldies" while turning pages for Google.
One addendum to what I said -- what is often wrong about previous theories is the speculative explanations of stuff behind observed phenomena. It sounds like the GP was talking about theories built upon observation, not wild speculations. Aristotle and many others are certainly guilty of speculation when they have no evidence, or adding lots of speculation onto a basic theory derived from observation. (That's arguably common practice in many scientific papers, where the possibilities raised in a discussion section sometimes greatly exceed what can actually be derived from the data.) You're absolutely right that a lot of that stuff can be "dead wrong," but I don't think that's what GP was referencing.
There are other ideas, however, that have, after being held as unassailable truth by the entire educated world for centuries, turned out to be not merely incomplete but in fact totally dead wrong. The poster boy for this phenomenon is, of course, Aristotle, but it's been repeated many times over the last three millennia.
Yes and no. Generally speaking, the only theories that have been proven wrong are ones based on incorrect observations or when people have simply made stuff of. (Which can hardly be called a scientific theory.) Actually, there are relatively few such scientific theories, even among Aristotle's works, that can't be explained by building a model on more limited or incomplete observations and/or starting from other underlying assumptions.
For example, Aristotle's physics is often maligned in introductory physics classes. To give a few commonly used examples: he thought that things in motion naturally came to a state of rest, heavy objects fall faster than light ones, and projectiles fly up in a straight line in the direction they are fired then lose their impetus and fall straight down. Today, we'd say that that objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon, that all objects fall at the same rate, and that projectiles follow a parabolic path.
Except all of these things don't accord with our everyday observations of the world. Objects in motion generally do come to rest, often because of friction. Aristotle wasn't wrong; his explanation was just incomplete. He accurately stated a common tendency of most objects under normal conditions. Only in the imaginary frictionless world of physics classes can we understand the abstract principle that makes Aristotle incomplete, and then we can build a better model incorporating variations in friction and other subtleties. Or, take heavy versus light objects. Heavy objects in most real-world circumstances do fall faster than light ones. Forget feathers and bowling balls. Even if you drop steel and wooden balls of the same size for a large distance, the steel ball will hit the ground first, since the force of air resistance has a greater effect on the wooden ball. So again, Aristotle was right. Galileo is only right for most objects in a vacuum, which isn't a naturally-occurring phenomenon on earth. Even Aristotle's theory of impetus sounds crazy until you look at the path of real projectiles (especially lighter ones), since air resistance deforms the flight path so much that it doesn't look like a parabola at all. An arrow shot up at a high angle does indeed seem to go in a roughly straight line, then curve a bit, and then suddenly plunge almost straight down. If Aristotle had tried experiments with a larger set of projectiles, he would have seen different behavior, but his ideas are not completely wrong. And they're actually a better model for observation than the supposed parabolic motion, which again many projectiles only show well in a vacuum.
Of course, there are plenty of facts that Aristotle gets wrong because he didn't see things himself or makes bad assumptions. But many of his more elaborate theories, which we lampoon him for today, are not "dead wrong," but merely incomplete descriptions.
In sum, Aristotle's ideas explained the limited observations he and many other people of his day did. Granted, those ideas inhibited later scientists, particularly when they wanted to start quantifying things more. But if you've ever taught physics to a bunch of high school students, you'll realize how counterintuitive most of modern physics seems to them... mainly because modern models try to explain more phenomena in more powerful, but more abstract, models. Yet they often contradict everyday experience, which is what Aristotle based his observations on.
Same thing with many other defunct scientific theories.
That particular mathematical model assumed a geocentric solar system. That's a testable hypothesis. It has failed every test to which it has been subjected.
Uh, what exactly is wrong with choosing earth as a frame of reference to build a model around? In some sense, you're right that the model is much simpler when we do calculations assuming that the planets are going around the sun, but that's only a matter of perspective. It actually isn't a "testable hypothesis" to define a frame of reference. You simply choose it. The planets and sun do "go around" the earth in some very complex motions. If there's an error in geocentric models, it is the idea that there is one fixed point of reference in the universe that everything must be related to, rather than whether one particular reference frame is "wrong" or "right" in an absolute sense.
There were problems with the various geocentric models that were proposed, but there's nothing per se wrong with creating a model of the solar system with the earth as center. It just makes the math really complicated.
... if one assumes the Sun is the center, all of these calculations become far simpler (i.e. Occam's Razor).
Right. Exactly. But "Occam's Razor" is not a quantifiable scientific principle. In the strictest sense, "science" creates models that have predictive power and accord with observation. If a given system of calculating the position of planets, etc., accurately predicts them, it is a good scientific model. Choosing between that model and another model that can also calculate things with equal accuracy is not something that you can decide on any scientific criteria. You might like the "elegance" of one theory, or one model might be simpler, but that says nothing about reality. Witness, for example, how the Tychonic model continued to be used alongside the Copernican model for most of the seventeenth century (and, for some, into the eighteenth), because there were no observable differences that could distinguish them, even though one was much simpler than the other for some calculation purposes.
Of course, modern physics usually assumes that there is no preferred reference frame, so the idea that "the sun is the center of the solar system" is a "true" statement, while "the earth is the center of the solar system" is "false" doesn't really hold. In that sense, geocentrism is not a testable hypothesis, as you claim.
In other words, those geocentric models are about as "wrong" as Newtonian mechanics, or the assumptions we teach students about friction or springs when they learn physics. Are we lying to them and teaching them "wrong" things even though the real world actually doesn't work like that? No, because in that case the less accurate models are also less complicated, so they're good starting models. Most geocentric models make things more complex, which is the main reason no one would use them anymore... not because they're more "wrong" than most of the models used in a first-year physics class.
Well, the roots of the word "atheism" are: "a" (the negative modifier), "theos" (meaning god or gods) and "ism" (theory, practice, or belief). Regardless of how you have chosen to redefine it for your own purpose, atheism, by definition is the belief (practice/theory/etc...) that there is no god. Therefore, when people say "atheism", I will always assume that they actually mean "atheism" unless they clarify beforehand. This conversation is about atheism.
You can play this game if you want to. Note that in my original post I qualified my statement saying that "most people who actually argue about the logic of these positions" refer to the "I dunno" position as "weak atheism." The fact is that philosophers and theologians make all sorts of distinctions between positive/negative atheism, weak/strong atheism, and various other possibilities. And they often refer to the "I dunno" position as "weak atheism." If you want to call it something else, fine. I was just telling you what people who actually debate things like this call it. (If you don't believe me, look it up.)
As for the etymology argument, I was just trying to explain how I think all those philosophers and theologians justify using the word "atheism" in the phrase "weak atheism." Etymology can only take us so far, though, and I agree that the roots of the term "atheism" have to do with actual denial of the existence of god. But again, I noted this in my post, because most societies in the past were theist, so to not believe was to make a major statement against societal morals, rather than simply "I dunno." But how the term was used centuries ago doesn't negate the fact that philosophers and theologians have come up with various distinctions within it nowadays.
In the end, we're left with a terminological problem. If someone asks you, "Do you believe in god?" If you believe, you could say, "I'm a theist." If you don't believe, you could say, "I'm an atheist." But what if you don't know or don't care? I'd hardly say you're a "theist" in that position, since most people require theists actually to believe in something. If you don't know and/or don't care, you don't believe in god (whether or not you are positively sure that there isn't a god), and therefore the most appropriate term seems to be that you're an atheist, meaning that you do not hold the belief of theism. If you want to make up another term, that's fine. Many people seem to appropriate the word "agnostic" these days, even though (as I've pointed out), that technically makes an epistemological claim, rather than simply "I dunno."
So, get annoyed at people who misuse "agnostic" or get annoyed at people who (in your opinion) misuse "atheist." I'm just going by the terms the experts use.
Bach wasn't really following rules so much as creating them for others to follow. He knew how to make music that worked well. There is a centuries old book called The Study of Counterpoint which some of the great composers learned from which lays out a lot of these rules so others can study them.
A few nitpicks. I assume by "a centuries old book called The Study of Counterpoint," you're referring to Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum ("Steps to Parnassus" -- the home of the Muses), a very short section of which was translated in the mid-20th century by Alfred Mann as "The Study of Counterpoint"? Fux's treatise is a lot more than the counterpoint section, even though that's all that people tend to know today.
And while it is true that some of the "great composers" worked through exercises that were modeled on Fux (notably in late 18th century Vienna, where Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all knew of Fux), they had absolutely nothing to do with Bach. Fux was trying to lay out the rules based on the 16th-century modal style of Palestrina, with some adaptations to 18th-century practice. He wasn't trying to codify Bach's rules at all, particularly since at the time he wrote it, J.S. Bach was still a relatively young man who had only recently arrived at Leipzig, where he was yet to write many of his greatest works. Fux's messed-up version of 16th-century counterpoint doesn't reflect Bach's practice at all, in fact, other than in some general principles (like the one you mentioned to avoid parallels). And I'm not sure where you even get the idea that Bach was creating rules for others to follow either -- he had his own training in counterpoint, where he learned various rules and principles, and he probably used some, broke others, and expanded on most, just as any composer does.
It's true that Bach had a facility with counterpoint that was very rare, but the "rules" he was using were developed over centuries -- for example, parallel fifths were first prohibited in treatises of the 14th century. Bach didn't make up most of the rules. He learned them, just as composers before him had learned them for centuries.
However classical music still is what it is and I feel sorry for all the music theorists still sitting in their conservatories trying to write atonal or 12 tone music when that era is decades over.
Well, very few composers these days write straight-ahead "12[-]tone music" except as exercises. Many still write various forms of atonal music, but the concept of music has been expanded so much that it seems odd to pigeonhole composers into Glass and Reich versus "atonal and 12-tone." Moreover, there's a large amount of crossover and influence between various forms of experimental art music and popular music. I suppose there are a few "music theorists" out there who still think that it's 1920, and Schoenberg's 12-tone method is the only way to go, but I've never met one. The actual composers I talk to do a lot of different things when it comes to experimental music.
Seriously, I love classical music, but the turn of the century(ish) atonal stuff is barely music.
I'm not sure what you mean by "classical music," but since you implicitly include "atonal stuff" in that term, you should include all the stuff that came after it up to the present day, which includes a lot of stuff much more crazy than Schoenberg. Ever listen to Babbitt, or more recently people like Ferneyhough? Some of it is serialism on steroids -- and some of it is gorgeous, while other stuff truly sounds like random nonsense. And that's not even going into trends in electronic music, aleatoric music, and appropriation of noise and environmental sounds. The world of music since Schoenberg had been a lot more experimental than that "turn of the century(ish) atonal stuff."
And the twelve tone technique is barely theory. It's more of an algorithm to churn out annoying random sounding music.
I completely agree that twelve-tone technique is barely theory. Well, it's as much "theory" as determining whether to write a tonal piece in E-flat minor or F major. Some of the combinatorial properties of the rows are occasionally interesting, but not all composers exploit them, even if they put them there by design. But, in general, the idea that "understanding" a piece of Schoenberg or Webern or Berg should start with row analysis is just nonsense. It's like trying to understand a piece of Bach by looking at what key it's in and then labeling chords with chord symbols. It's not unrelated to what's going on, but it will miss most of the interesting aspects of the music.
Regarding the "random[-]sounding music," that's not what the technique is about, though admittedly part of it is about avoiding tonal tendencies. Yet Berg's music is proof enough that one can choose to write music that often has tonal moments and doesn't sound random at all, even when he's using 12-tone technique. As for Schoenberg, if you've spent any time listening to a lot of German/Austrian music of the late 19th century and first couple decades of the 20th century, you can hear his free atonal music as interacting and responding to that. The same thing often happens in his 12-tone music, with the gestures becoming more deformed or exaggerated, not entirely unlike various trends in visual arts of the same era. But once you hear it as responding to (and often avoiding in various ways) the gestures of late Romantic music, Schoenberg's music also has a lot of logic to it. Webern is yet another story and is perhaps more abstract in many of his works. Sonority is essential, rather than trying to follow the row. Schoenberg and Webern both explicitly told people not to worry about listening to the row at times... that's not what the music is about. It's just a technique to help limit the infinite possibilities that a composer would have without any restrictions. Without the gestures of tonality to guide composition, what would you use?
When I first encountered this music, I absolutely detested it. I thought it was almost morally offensive that they wrote it and claimed that it was music, when (to me) it sounded like random noise, and I thought that people who listened to it and claimed to like it were participating in some sort of grand elitist scam. Today, though, I understand it better and recognize it within its historical context. Some of it I now love, some of it I find intellectually interesting, and some of it I still think is crap. Give it a chance, though -- once you stop worrying about 12-tone technique and start trying to listen to the rest of the music, many pieces begin to have their own logic.
Musicians want to play. Actors want to act. Writers want to write.
Engineers want to engineer. Doctors want to heal. Scientists want to research.
Except the system is set up to pay these people for what they do. If we didn't provide incentives for these people, they might still want to do these things, but would they bother to achieve a high level of competence if they are just doing it in their spare time? Sure, some of them will. But do would want to drive across a bridge built by an engineer who designs them as a hobby on weekends, get surgery performed by a doctor who read a few anatomy books after work, or take a drug developed by an amateur scientist in his basement? It's possible that innovation can (and has) come from lots of amateurs in these fields, but I bet that most of the time you wouldn't want to do any of these things unless they had been tested and screened by qualified professionals who are usually trained and paid well for their work.
I think amateur artists/musicians/writers are fantastic, and new distribution networks like we have on the internet have helped create some great things. I would encourage everyone to create, no matter what your skill level. And you're right -- moderation and rating systems can help to point audience members to things that might interest them.
But what's the incentive for amateurs to cultivate their talents and to develop their skills rather than worrying about what they're going to eat tonight? Sure, some "starving artists" may do it anyway. Some may have such innate talent that they are a success right from the start. But that's not all people.
Basically, you're making an argument for artistic mediocrity. It's sort of like those who don't see a problem that teachers earn so little, yet in the US they are often required to have a master's degree, and if they teach something like science or math, they could generally earn twice as much in the "real world." Oh, but those who are "dedicated to teaching" or really, truly "want to teach" will do it anyway. And it's true, I've met quite a few very bright people who teach regardless of the fact that they could be earning 2-3 times as much with their talent and education.
But I've also been certified as a teacher myself, and I saw about 75% of the people going into the profession are some of the dumbest people I've ever met with degrees in science and math. If you don't provide incentives to people, you'll get some talent, but mostly people who are smart will go elsewhere. We can see the results in the American educational system. Do we want to encourage that trend in artistic production as well?
Again, I think you're right that some amateurs are really good. But without incentives, I think the quality and number of people who devote themselves to artistic production will decrease.
You really do get better if you practice everyday and have professional training, just like engineers, doctors, and scientists. I don't have an easy answer to the copyright problem, but I don't think the answer is simply to say, "Oh well, there are some good amateurs out there, and people will do that anyway." I wouldn't trust the quality of a bridge designed by such a group of people, and so the quality of music, writing, etc. coming from them will probably be similarly suspect a lot of the time.
QA only works well when you have some quality to begin with.
By the way, for those who associate "atheism" only with a positive belief that there is no God (and might therefore be confused about the term "weak atheism" as used in my example), I suggest thinking about similar words that use the prefix "a-", which usually means "not," rather than "against." Something that is "amoral" is ambivalent in moral terms -- neither positive nor negative -- rather than "immoral," which actually goes against morality. Similarly, "asexual" is not against sexuality, it merely states the lack of sex or sexuality.
Similarly, "atheism" is the lack of "theism" or belief in God, though given the ubiquitous nature of belief in Gods in many cultures throughout history, it has also gained the connotation that someone who is "atheist" must be actually against theists, rather than simply not subscribing to their belief.
So, "atheism" has come to encompass a lot of things. And there are lots of other terms floating around, including variants of atheism and agnosticism, things like "non-theism" or "ignosticism," etc. Unfortunately, there isn't any standardization like there is with "amoral" vs. "immoral," hence we're stuck with a debate on Slashdot every time this stuff comes up because people don't realize that there are more than a few possible positions and the boundaries between these categories are confusing.
I don't think I accept your distinction between your weak atheism definition and your agnosticism definition. Specifically, I don't think there is one. Either a person asserts that they don't believe there is a god, or they assert that they do believe there is (or isn't) a god. I'm not sure why the question of whether the answer is knowable or not comes into it?
It only comes into it because agnosticism is not a statement about religion per se. It is a statement about epistemology, but most people outside of philosophers only seem to care about the term when it is referencing religion.
Agnosticism is a position that the truth of a particular statement (or type of statement) cannot be determined. If you ask me whether it's going to rain next Thursday, I could answer, "yes, I think it will" or "no, I don't think it will." I could also answer, "I don't know." But if I answer, "We can't know whether it will rain next Thursday" (due to lack of data, the unpredictability of weather, etc.), that's a different kind of statement than simply "I don't know."
Weak atheists don't know and/or don't care. They don't make any claims about beliefs either way. Agnostics are making a statement about epistemology. It is a different type of statement than the theists or strong atheists are making, but it is a position nonetheless. (There are others as well, which have to do with other problems that are either theological or epistemological in character.)
Scientifically, the hypothesis is non-testable, so I don't think there's much dispute in the scientific arena about how knowable the answer is (ie: it's not)?
Well, what exactly is the "hypothesis"? I think you're assuming that theism is only something of the Christian variety (or similar religions) that believe in an invisible God who works miracles. But one could choose any sort of religion and define "god" in a number of ways. Perhaps one's god is an apple or a tree -- in which case, asking questions about the existence of the god is not as important as perhaps determining what it means for a god to be an apple.
Even if we want to believe in an invisible god, one could choose any evidence of experience as proof of some "god" if one wants to. For example, every time an apple falls from a tree, I could say, "Ah, God caused that apple to fall. That is proof for me." What could you do to disprove that God caused the apple to fall? You could describe theories of gravitation, but the theist will simply reply that you're giving a different description, but God was still the ultimate cause. Such a belief system is tested every time an apple falls, and it would only be disproved by an apple falling up or doing something else.
Similarly, the (strong) atheist could assert that God has nothing to do with falling apples. The atheist asserts that the regularity of falling apples does not require a God to make each one of them fall; it is simply of a property of physics, with no necessity to invoke a deity. The atheist might use the laws of physics as an explanation and would only be disproved when the apple did something that contradicted it (which under some circumstances, might be interpreted as a "miracle" by some).
Note that in this case, violation of expectations could disprove both theist or atheist attitudes -- because they are interpretations of evidence, not necessarily about statements of fact. Then, the agnostic comes along who says, "We cannot know what the ultimate cause of the falling apple is -- if there is a God involved, we cannot know either way." That's actually the scientific view you're endorsing by claiming that it is untestable. You're making a claim about what is testable and what is untestable, and that is defined by your scientific worldview. But what I "believe" and what I can "test" are not necessarily about the same things.
You state "I don't think there is one." Do you mean, "I believe there is no such thing as God"
The Agnostic has a lack of belief, an Athiest believes in a negative.
Frankly, you don't know what you're talking about.
You discuss the "logic" of the claims of theism, atheism, and agnosticism, but it seems that you don't actually know the logical consequences of what's going on. You're in line with some of the connotations that people think these words have, but if you want to have a rigorous argument about the logic of belief systems, read up about what you're talking about first.
Part of the difficulty is because of the ambiguity used in the word "atheism," which can mean non-belief, or it can mean a positive belief that there is no god. Those are two different claims (sometimes referred to as "weak atheism" and "strong atheism"). And you obviously don't know what agnosticism is.
Here's a simple example of arguments that state a view on whether it will rain next Thursday.
THEISM: "I believe that it will rain next Thursday."
STRONG ATHEISM: "I believe that it will not rain next Thursday."
AGNOSTICISM: "I believe that we cannot know whether it will rain next Thursday." (Due to lack of data, or some other problem with epistemology.)
WEAK ATHEISM: "I don't know whether it will rain next Thursday."
Theism is a positive statement of belief, strong atheism is a negative statement of belief, and agnosticism is a statement that we cannot logically believe either positively or negatively. Agnosticism is thus also making a specific claim about the state of knowledge and what can or cannot be deduced from it.
Agnosticism is not simply stating "I dunno" and going on with our lives. It is an epistemological claim about the evidence for a god. Stating "I dunno" is a fourth position that is not theism, strong atheism, or agnosticism. Most people who actually argue about the logic of these positions call the "I dunno" crowd "weak atheists" because they don't really believe, but they aren't making a negative assertion either. They simply don't believe either way.
In sum, there are more possible logical positions than you acknowledge. These are the most common ones.
We have a lot of literature from Ancient Greece, obviously only a tiny fraction of what was produced due to the reasons you describe, but we do have a lot. They are almost all poems and plays. We don't have anything resembling a book from the time period.
Huh? If you mean a "book" in the physical sense, I guess you're right.
But there are a number of significant large works that are not poems and plays, like, for instance, the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, or perhaps the philosophy of Plato (including lengthy works like the Republic or the Laws) and Aristotle. And I'm not sure why you disqualify Homer's epic poems, for example, which are clearly long enough to make a rather large "book."
So yeah, we do have some "books" from that time -- they are the founding documents of Western philosophy and historiography.
Copyright came about in the first place because third parties began copying and selling other people's books, undercutting them and driving them out of work.
Well, no.
Copyright began in England.
Well, no.
You make a lot of good points, but try reading up on the history of copyright before spouting off a nonsense story about why copyright came into being in general. Your story is about the history of copyright in England, which is not the first place copyright arose. Moreover, the situation you describe in England conflates a lot of history that happened over almost two centuries.
In reality, the first copyrights were granted in what is now Italy. They were granted for a number of different reasons, and they were meant to benefit various groups (authors, patrons, printers, rulers, etc.). The early history of copyright is a messy business, and England is only one case study. Developments throughout Europe went various ways, and it took hundreds of years before an international standard developed.
Because the US inherited a lot of copyright law from the tradition in England, modern debates on copyright focus on English history. But there were other countries and other models (and reasons) for copyright out there.
I generally find that people who 'know their vodkas' are idiots who think that advertising and spending a lot makes a product better.
That's true of just about everything. Studies have shown that even wine judges in major competitions (who certainly are supposed to "know they wines") display enough variance as to make their collective ratings almost meaningless. And wines usually have much more variation than vodka. Most people who think they have "taste" in anything are like this, so it's not unique to vodka.
I bet you can't tell Smirnoff from your favorite vodka double blind.
Perhaps for some or even most. Not for me. My favorite vodka is fermented from potatos, rather than grain-based, and it tastes quite a bit different from Smirnoff. But I generally don't care enough to pay the premium for it. Vodkas can be remarkably different in taste due to variations in distillation and the type of water used. Yes, they're all very close to pure ethanol plus water, but the little bit of junk left in can sometimes make a big difference in flavor. I'm not saying that makes it worth paying ridiculous amounts of money for it -- Smirnoff is perfectly fine for most purposes -- but if someone wants to pay a premium for that subtle flavor that they may or may not actually taste, who am I to judge?
That said, I did a little blind tasting a few years back after I first bought my favorite potato vodka. Three friends tried four vodkas blind. One of them considers himself a bit of a booze snob, one drinks quite a bit but has little "taste", and one has probably had less than a dozen drinks in his entire life. The four vodkas were a premium mainstream vodka, my premium potato vodka, Smirnoff, and a really cheap vodka (cheaper than Smirnoff). They all made their decisions privately before sharing them.
All three caught the really cheap vodka and declared it awful (not as smooth as the others, a bit caustic and astringent). All three also declared the potato vodka to be one of the premium ones (probably for its distinctive flavor), though they couldn't agree on whether it actually tasted "better" -- it was just "different". As for the remaining two vodkas, my booze snob friend identified the Smirnoff correctly (and said it wasn't as good), my drinker friend with no "taste" liked the Smirnoff better, and my friend who doesn't drink expressed a mild preference for the premium, though he really didn't know.
So, say what you will, but I think there is at least an argument to be made that some premium vodkas have distinctive flavors, even though they are all trying to be pure ethanol and water. Whether it's worth spending $25-40 on a bottle instead of $10-15... well, that's your choice. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a difference, at least among some.
I certainly agree with you that anyone who claims that a $40 bottle of vodka is generally "better" than a $20 bottle is generally full of crap. Vodka is essentially supposed to be close to pure ethanol and pure water. Smirnoff and similarly priced vodkas get close enough to this ideal that expensive vodkas are not actually "better."
That isn't to say that they aren't quite different in character. Potato vodkas, for example, are often quite different from grain-based vodkas. And the kind of water that is used can make a big difference in flavor.
So, while I agree with you that Smirnoff is a perfectly fine vodka, I also think people can prefer some of the subtle variations of flavor offered by different brands. If you want to pay a premium of a couple hundred percent for that subtle flavor, that's your choice. You may not be getting any closer to the "ideal" vodka, but if you're drinking it straight, you can tell the difference with many brands. (If you're just mixing it, I agree that you're an idiot to throw expensive vodka in.)
While you bring up some very good points, and I obviously agree with you about the GP's error, I'm not quite sure I follow your argument.
Before copyright, the writer had a substantial independent income or he had a sponsor or patron.
True enough. That was the way it worked for most people before about 1700. Then English law introduced copyright for the author, and after that it became possible for more and more authors to make at least part of their living off their writings. I'm not sure what that has to do with your cited article about international bootlegs in the mid-1800s. Dickens had copyright in England, as all authors had had for over a century. Those lobbying for international copyright were trying to enhance their profits, not assert copyright for the first time.
The church. The government. The merchant price. Each with their own agenda.
A J.R.R Tolkien or C. S. Lewis can navigate that environment and thrive.
I'm confused. You cite the publishing conditions that prevailed pre-1700 in England and then cite two 20th century authors as if they had to deal with the church and the government controlling printing. While there still were censorship boards, it's not as if Tolkien and Lewis were living in the era of patronage and government monopolies on the press.
But the American writer - particularly the writer of genre fiction - mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, suspense, the thriller - and so on - tends to be an outsider. He and she didn't come into this business to serve their betters - to win their way into the Establishment.
WHAT?!? Again, Tolkien and Lewis were not living within some sort of Elizabethan patronage culture. Plenty of English writers of their generation made their own money. You can argue that the social stratification of English culture well into the early 20th century made it more difficult for a lower-class writer to succeed, but very few English writers after the 18th century were writing "to serve their betters" and satisfy a patron.
Finally, I should note that plenty of British writers wrote "genre fiction" just as American writers did, though we can argue about the origins of the various genres.
But what the heck does any of this have to do with the early (pre-1700) days of copyright?
Actually, when copyright protection was first introduced, writers were not even allowed to publish their own works (unless they were stationers), nor were they regarded as owners of such works. The stationers guild was, and the stationers member who printed a book became 'owner' of it.
Once again, people quoting the history of English law as though it is the history of the entire world.
Let's be honest here -- English copyright law certainly has been influential, particularly on the modern American system. But the real beginning of that influence started with the first real copyright act in the Statute of Queen Anne in the early 1700s, which incidentally granted rights to the author.
But the stuff you're talking about from the 1600s is only one out of many early copyright situations in Europe. (And even in England the stationers guild was initially more about royal power and preventing sedition than it was about rewarding printers. That's the reason you weren't allowed to publish your own book -- you might be writing something treasonous.)
Copyright was granted in various domains for a multitude of reasons, e.g., to exercise control over the presses by a ruler, to grant favors (whether to author, printer, or another person) by a ruler, to protect printer, author, or editor from bootlegging, to ensure amicable relations about printers, to protect the rights of patrons who were funding publications, to promote high quality books or to encourage a variety of publications, occasionally to even protect the ideas or writings of an author, etc., etc.
Basically, the situation was complex. The way it was in England, however, was not the way it was everywhere. And your description somewhat misrepresents even how it was in England.
It's ironic that you say that, since those who want to act like 16th and 17th century copyright was only about publishers making money overlook the fact that publisher guilds were often, in fact, a old version of "Fox News." Those in power preferred to have only one guild to deal with, since it made censorship of published literature easier. Thus, particularly in England (which is the only place anyone ever seems to talk about early copyright) the monopoly of the authorized presses was as much to benefit the political whims of the government and church by spouting propaganda as it was to secure the financial stability of the printers. Of course, the difference today is that the government doesn't use copyright as a method of censorship; Fox News chooses its format because it's good business.
As I said before, pre-1700 copyright was about many things and took many forms in different regions and time periods, but claiming that it was only about excessive and undeserved profits for publishers (and thus exactly equivalent to copyright abuses today) is "misinterpret[ing], mischaracteriz[ing], and selective[ly] quoting" historical documents for some modern agenda.
Actually, that's incorrect. Before copyright, there were no artists or writers clamouring for "protection". The people pushing copyright were the publishers, who wanted copyright to benefit themselves (which is exactly what we have right now.) The whole "think of the artists" stuff is propaganda invented to create support for copyright from artists and "average" people.
Sort of. Did you actually read the Wikipedia article you linked to? While you're right that generally speaking the benefit was generally to the publisher rather than the author, those benefits were not necessarily monetary, a big distinction from the modern situation. When authors were paid for their work, it was more common to be paid a lump sum, rather than modern royalties, since generally in the 16th and 17th centuries many works were only intended to go through one printing. The situation was not "exactly what we have right now."
Read your linked Wikipedia article:
The printing press brought the possibility of compensation for literary labor. Very speedily, however, the unrestricted rivalry of printers brought into existence competing and unauthorized editions of various works, which diminished prospects of any payment, or even entailed loss, for the authors, editors, and printers of the original issue, and thus discouraged further undertaking.
Not just printers.
Protection for the authors and their representatives was sought through special privileges obtained for separate works as issued.
Furthermore, there's more explanation of why publishers as well as rulers might want to grant copyright. Again, from the article:
Most early Italian enactments in regard to literature were framed not so much with reference to the protection of authors as for the purpose of inducing printers (acting as publishers) to undertake certain literary enterprises which were believed to be important to the community. The Republic of Venice, the dukes of Florence, and Leo X and other Popes conceded at different times to certain printers the exclusive privilege of printing for specific terms (rarely exceeding 14 years) editions of classic authors; not so much to secure profits for the printers, but rather to encourage, for the benefit of the community, literary ventures on the part of the editors and printers.
There's a lot more information out there, but I thought it might be nice to quote from the very source you provided.
I've worked with a lot of printed books from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and early on many of these grants of copyright were certainly more to protect the work of both printer and by extension author/editor so that it would encourage the publication of quality books. And again, most of the early copyright terms were for 5-15 years, enough time for publishers to sell off their stock while preparing more projects. Some of the more elaborate publications of thousands of pages could require months of typesetting and printing, and prominent authors sometimes required the patronage of aristocrats (even kings and emperors) to fund the production of a major work. A printer (and/or a patron) had little incentive to take such a risk when a rare successful publications would immediately be followed by low-quality bootleg abridged copies generated by another publishing house. Hence, copyright for a very limited period after publication to allow the recouping of costs.
So, while you're right that generally publishers were the ones granted copyright, the reasons were not always the same as they are today, and the situation is simply not analogous to the modern corporate greed that tries to keep works out of the public domain for generations.
What you don't understand is that the liberal arts "background" was unreachable for you when you were in your early 20s. You had to grow up some 10-20 years to understand it.
It's really sad to hear people say things like this. The current pathetic state of our primary and secondary education is bad enough that everyone seems convinced that a person in his/her late teens or early 20s can't possibly think or understand "deep" things like philosophy, complex arguments about art, literature, history, etc. Yet most physicists or mathematicians will readily admit that there is the occasional "genius" who masters advanced material rather early.
While I acknowledge that I certainly understand things in the liberal arts better now than when I was in my early 20s, the difference is one of depth (due to being exposed to more things over the years), not of ability or quality.
Before the advent of the standardized primary, secondary, and post-secondary educational system in the 19th and 20th centuries with standard numbers of grades and fixed numbers of years you are normally in school, things were a lot different, at least for those few in the classes that could afford advanced education. Many of those people could and did make significant contributions to discourse in the "liberal arts" in their early 20s, and some even in their teens.
It all boils down to early education, mostly. Today we put kids in day care or set them in front of the TV. Before the high-school movement in the 1920s and 30s, most people only went to school for 4-8 years (at least in the US), so a grammar school education required a student to be fluent in basic skills like reading, writing, and practical arithmetic. Nowadays, we have basic skills tests that are often requiring similar things after 12 years of education. In the past, those later 4-8 years of education could have been spent on essentially what is now "college-level" studies in the liberal arts (though perhaps not with quite as much detail), at least for those wealthy enough to be able to go to secondary school. (And those who went to secondary schools also often started tutoring their children from a very young age, rather than putting them in front of a TV, which gave them an even greater advantage.) Some of the elite private schools today still manage to do exactly that, and while of course it doesn't work for all students, they often have a great deal more exposure to creative thought and methodologies for approaching problems than the average public school student. The private school kids would get a heck of a lot out of two intensive college years in the liberal arts.
Unfortunately, you're right for most students. They just don't have the background. Part of it is a changing world where various technical skills also have to be taught in addition to traditional liberal arts subjects, and in the past students could rely on a certain central "canon" of humanities sources that they would learn in primary and secondary school, so they'd be ready to analyze it in detail in college (and even to have original thoughts about it!). Arguably, students today should have more breadth than students of the past when they graduate high school, but it seems that we've lost more than the canon... we've lost the critical thinking that went with it, and the minimal standards for graduation have become pathetic.
By the way, if you doubt what I'm saying, take a look at the first "standardized tests" in the US. Take a look at the subjects tested in the first couple decades of the New York Regents Exams. Here's the list of subject tests a HIGH SCHOOL student could take before graduating in 1879:
o Rhetoric and English composition
o English literature
o Algebra, through quadratics
o Plane geometry
o Plane trigonometry
o American history
o Science of government
o Political economy
o General history
o Classical geography and antiquities
o Physical geography
o Physiology and hygiene
o Zoology
Once again, thanks for taking the time to respond. I don't know if you'll even notice this late reply (I've been really busy for the past week or so), but I do have a final way of thinking about the issue.
That is, what happens if the rules change? A main point in your argument is that people have always been sharing things like this, just in different forms. In the past, they were advertisement or whatever, and they will still be. I understand that, and I agree with that.
But electronic distribution is different. I'm sorry, but it is. You mentioned the "gray area" about trading music -- that happens more and more often. In fact, it was already happening on a massive scale in colleges over a decade ago. A number of people I knew even back then had never bought a single CD. They had never bought a single video game. Why? Because they could get it all for free from various repositories and friends and such. I agree that even if mp3s and cracked versions of games didn't exist, those people would never have bought ALL of those games and CDs. True. No argument there. But they would have bought MANY of them; certainly many, many more than they did, even as poor college students.
In the past, a taped copy of an LP or a tape of a radio broadcast would usually be a lower quality than an LP. Today, the successors to mp3s are a high enough quality that most people have gotten used to them. They don't need to buy an LP or a CD to get what is considered the full quality of the recording for most people, so why would they when they could get it for free? They don't need to, and many don't. It's that simple. I knew many people like that a decade ago; from my encounters with college students today, it seems to be the same.
Also, taping and copying in the past was a laborious task, so this kind of transfer didn't make any sense. You had to tape often in real time, or perhaps make high-speed copies, but in the time it took to make one tape 30 years ago with standard technology, today I can copy thousands of recordings. Back then, if I wanted to make a copy of a recording that my friend had, I could spend an hour making a lower quality tape off of an LP, or I could go out and buy one probably in less time from the store down the street with higher quality. Today, I can just transfer the entire contents of my friend's iPod, with its hundreds of recordings, in a matter of minutes, and sort out what things I want and what I don't want later. Even if one accepts your premise that the rules were for "free content" back then, I don't see how anyone could automatically decide that the same principles NECESSARILY should apply when the way content can be transferred now requires very little time or money investment.
For newspapers, a similar thing happened. A couple decades ago, sure you could share a newspaper or even copy a newspaper and give it to your friends, but the latter would take so much time to distribute and get it to your friends that it wouldn't usually be worth it, since the value of news is short-lived, by definition. But newspapers could make a lot of money off of distributing AP content and similar things, since there was no other easy way to get your hands on those stories for free other than sharing a newspaper or whatever. That's not true anymore. Now, AP content is available for free and can be read instantaneously by millions of people from one source, unlike the previous newspaper copies that could only be shared by maybe a couple dozen people at most.
Thus, newspapers will have to change their business model. But it doesn't mean that content was ever "free." Newspapers always paid for that content when they paid for their own reporters to create it. They "paid" for the AP more indirectly by contributing stories (again created by their writers) to the AP pool as members of the AP. To assert that the AP has no value is to adopt a mindset that will result in a tragedy of the commons.
The content is the "carrot" that gets you to spend the money on the physical object.
How does this apply to actual books or newspapers? The print in the book is actually "physical" ink. Unlike CDs or DVDs, there's not even a machine required to decode those parts of the "physical object" -- our eyes can easily make use of the ink natively (for literate people, anyway). Without that print, nobody would buy the blank book.
You might as well say that the cereal inside a cereal box is the "carrot" that gets you to spend money on the box. Really, food companies are just selling containers, but all the food inside comes free! Oh, but you claim we can reuse the content of the CD. Fine. I buy a box of sponges or a bag of rubber bands. I reuse them... again and again, just like reading a book over and over. I use the content over and over, and eventually they'll wear out, just like all media will after some period of time.
But in those cases, I'm not actually buying sponges or rubber bands. I'm buying a box and a bag. The sponges and rubber bands are "free." Don't you see how ridiculous that argument sounds?
I know you're going to make some sort of argument that the "content" of books or music or whatever is different. But it isn't different, except somebody came up with a way to manufacture new COPIES of the content very easily. And if somebody did that for a (relatively new) design of sponges or rubber bands or whatever, they could be infringing on a patent by making copies, instead of infringing copyright. It's still about appropriating the product of someone else's labor and distributing it without their permission.
The main difference with your "content" is that people have figured out a way to copy and distribute it easily and with little cost. That doesn't mean we should consider the moral question of ownership just as valid.
Slashdot Mirror
TWITTER
...
3. intr. To move tremulously, tremble, shake, quiver, shiver...
So, for an alternative article summary: the USGS will use twitterers on Twitter who are twittering about twittering.
[cue chorus of groans]
Mod parent up. This is an important caveat.
I'm not that happy with the precedent this sets, but I get many of my movies through Netflix streaming these days, which is improving all the time. There are still hundreds of great classic movies I want to see, and I'd prefer an emphasis on those (which tend to be what is showing up on Netflix streaming) rather than getting the most recent crap out of Hollywood as fast as possible.
If you really want to see the damn movie a couple weeks sooner, buy the DVD... or better yet, go to the theatre when it's playing.
There are various trade-offs here, but there are lots of customers who don't use Netflix only as a replacement for the "latest releases" section of Blockbuster.
If you're going to really nitpick grammar, you'd know that there isn't a masculine plural pronoun.
True... in English. But you're focusing on the wrong thing. "Penises" is plural; "penis" is singular. It makes little sense to use a plural possessive pronoun with "penis." (Unless perhaps you're in some weird situation referring to a married couple, and their one penis between them.)
You can't really change from plural to singular in mid sentence ('anyone/their' -> 'his') so you have to keep using 'their' even if you're talking about a group that is exclusively male.
And now you've identified the other grammatical problem. "Anyone" is technically singular (despite recent usage trends), so there should be no "their" in the sentence to begin with. They should both be "his." If you want to criticize someone who's nitpicking grammar, know what you're talking about first.
There are also videos of robotic page flippers and information about how Google wants to use music to help humans flip pages.
From TFA:
The patent describes how a musical tone can be played from the speakers at regular intervals to give the operator a pace to flip pages to.
Not sure what this means, but what is the difference between a "musical tone" and a "tone"? Probably none, except a pleasant timbre with a pitch. From the description, it likely just means a pleasant-sounding "beep" or "ding" or something that recurs at intervals so people know when it's safe to turn the page.
In any case, hardly "using music" to encourage page-flipping -- which brings up weird images of people "Sweatin' to the Oldies" while turning pages for Google.
One addendum to what I said -- what is often wrong about previous theories is the speculative explanations of stuff behind observed phenomena. It sounds like the GP was talking about theories built upon observation, not wild speculations. Aristotle and many others are certainly guilty of speculation when they have no evidence, or adding lots of speculation onto a basic theory derived from observation. (That's arguably common practice in many scientific papers, where the possibilities raised in a discussion section sometimes greatly exceed what can actually be derived from the data.) You're absolutely right that a lot of that stuff can be "dead wrong," but I don't think that's what GP was referencing.
There are other ideas, however, that have, after being held as unassailable truth by the entire educated world for centuries, turned out to be not merely incomplete but in fact totally dead wrong. The poster boy for this phenomenon is, of course, Aristotle, but it's been repeated many times over the last three millennia.
Yes and no. Generally speaking, the only theories that have been proven wrong are ones based on incorrect observations or when people have simply made stuff of. (Which can hardly be called a scientific theory.) Actually, there are relatively few such scientific theories, even among Aristotle's works, that can't be explained by building a model on more limited or incomplete observations and/or starting from other underlying assumptions.
For example, Aristotle's physics is often maligned in introductory physics classes. To give a few commonly used examples: he thought that things in motion naturally came to a state of rest, heavy objects fall faster than light ones, and projectiles fly up in a straight line in the direction they are fired then lose their impetus and fall straight down. Today, we'd say that that objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon, that all objects fall at the same rate, and that projectiles follow a parabolic path.
Except all of these things don't accord with our everyday observations of the world. Objects in motion generally do come to rest, often because of friction. Aristotle wasn't wrong; his explanation was just incomplete. He accurately stated a common tendency of most objects under normal conditions. Only in the imaginary frictionless world of physics classes can we understand the abstract principle that makes Aristotle incomplete, and then we can build a better model incorporating variations in friction and other subtleties. Or, take heavy versus light objects. Heavy objects in most real-world circumstances do fall faster than light ones. Forget feathers and bowling balls. Even if you drop steel and wooden balls of the same size for a large distance, the steel ball will hit the ground first, since the force of air resistance has a greater effect on the wooden ball. So again, Aristotle was right. Galileo is only right for most objects in a vacuum, which isn't a naturally-occurring phenomenon on earth. Even Aristotle's theory of impetus sounds crazy until you look at the path of real projectiles (especially lighter ones), since air resistance deforms the flight path so much that it doesn't look like a parabola at all. An arrow shot up at a high angle does indeed seem to go in a roughly straight line, then curve a bit, and then suddenly plunge almost straight down. If Aristotle had tried experiments with a larger set of projectiles, he would have seen different behavior, but his ideas are not completely wrong. And they're actually a better model for observation than the supposed parabolic motion, which again many projectiles only show well in a vacuum.
Of course, there are plenty of facts that Aristotle gets wrong because he didn't see things himself or makes bad assumptions. But many of his more elaborate theories, which we lampoon him for today, are not "dead wrong," but merely incomplete descriptions.
In sum, Aristotle's ideas explained the limited observations he and many other people of his day did. Granted, those ideas inhibited later scientists, particularly when they wanted to start quantifying things more. But if you've ever taught physics to a bunch of high school students, you'll realize how counterintuitive most of modern physics seems to them... mainly because modern models try to explain more phenomena in more powerful, but more abstract, models. Yet they often contradict everyday experience, which is what Aristotle based his observations on.
Same thing with many other defunct scientific theories.
That particular mathematical model assumed a geocentric solar system. That's a testable hypothesis. It has failed every test to which it has been subjected.
Uh, what exactly is wrong with choosing earth as a frame of reference to build a model around? In some sense, you're right that the model is much simpler when we do calculations assuming that the planets are going around the sun, but that's only a matter of perspective. It actually isn't a "testable hypothesis" to define a frame of reference. You simply choose it. The planets and sun do "go around" the earth in some very complex motions. If there's an error in geocentric models, it is the idea that there is one fixed point of reference in the universe that everything must be related to, rather than whether one particular reference frame is "wrong" or "right" in an absolute sense.
There were problems with the various geocentric models that were proposed, but there's nothing per se wrong with creating a model of the solar system with the earth as center. It just makes the math really complicated.
... if one assumes the Sun is the center, all of these calculations become far simpler (i.e. Occam's Razor).
Right. Exactly. But "Occam's Razor" is not a quantifiable scientific principle. In the strictest sense, "science" creates models that have predictive power and accord with observation. If a given system of calculating the position of planets, etc., accurately predicts them, it is a good scientific model. Choosing between that model and another model that can also calculate things with equal accuracy is not something that you can decide on any scientific criteria. You might like the "elegance" of one theory, or one model might be simpler, but that says nothing about reality. Witness, for example, how the Tychonic model continued to be used alongside the Copernican model for most of the seventeenth century (and, for some, into the eighteenth), because there were no observable differences that could distinguish them, even though one was much simpler than the other for some calculation purposes.
Of course, modern physics usually assumes that there is no preferred reference frame, so the idea that "the sun is the center of the solar system" is a "true" statement, while "the earth is the center of the solar system" is "false" doesn't really hold. In that sense, geocentrism is not a testable hypothesis, as you claim.
In other words, those geocentric models are about as "wrong" as Newtonian mechanics, or the assumptions we teach students about friction or springs when they learn physics. Are we lying to them and teaching them "wrong" things even though the real world actually doesn't work like that? No, because in that case the less accurate models are also less complicated, so they're good starting models. Most geocentric models make things more complex, which is the main reason no one would use them anymore... not because they're more "wrong" than most of the models used in a first-year physics class.
Well, the roots of the word "atheism" are: "a" (the negative modifier), "theos" (meaning god or gods) and "ism" (theory, practice, or belief). Regardless of how you have chosen to redefine it for your own purpose, atheism, by definition is the belief (practice/theory/etc...) that there is no god. Therefore, when people say "atheism", I will always assume that they actually mean "atheism" unless they clarify beforehand. This conversation is about atheism.
You can play this game if you want to. Note that in my original post I qualified my statement saying that "most people who actually argue about the logic of these positions" refer to the "I dunno" position as "weak atheism." The fact is that philosophers and theologians make all sorts of distinctions between positive/negative atheism, weak/strong atheism, and various other possibilities. And they often refer to the "I dunno" position as "weak atheism." If you want to call it something else, fine. I was just telling you what people who actually debate things like this call it. (If you don't believe me, look it up.)
As for the etymology argument, I was just trying to explain how I think all those philosophers and theologians justify using the word "atheism" in the phrase "weak atheism." Etymology can only take us so far, though, and I agree that the roots of the term "atheism" have to do with actual denial of the existence of god. But again, I noted this in my post, because most societies in the past were theist, so to not believe was to make a major statement against societal morals, rather than simply "I dunno." But how the term was used centuries ago doesn't negate the fact that philosophers and theologians have come up with various distinctions within it nowadays.
In the end, we're left with a terminological problem. If someone asks you, "Do you believe in god?" If you believe, you could say, "I'm a theist." If you don't believe, you could say, "I'm an atheist." But what if you don't know or don't care? I'd hardly say you're a "theist" in that position, since most people require theists actually to believe in something. If you don't know and/or don't care, you don't believe in god (whether or not you are positively sure that there isn't a god), and therefore the most appropriate term seems to be that you're an atheist, meaning that you do not hold the belief of theism. If you want to make up another term, that's fine. Many people seem to appropriate the word "agnostic" these days, even though (as I've pointed out), that technically makes an epistemological claim, rather than simply "I dunno."
So, get annoyed at people who misuse "agnostic" or get annoyed at people who (in your opinion) misuse "atheist." I'm just going by the terms the experts use.
Bach wasn't really following rules so much as creating them for others to follow. He knew how to make music that worked well. There is a centuries old book called The Study of Counterpoint which some of the great composers learned from which lays out a lot of these rules so others can study them.
A few nitpicks. I assume by "a centuries old book called The Study of Counterpoint," you're referring to Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum ("Steps to Parnassus" -- the home of the Muses), a very short section of which was translated in the mid-20th century by Alfred Mann as "The Study of Counterpoint"? Fux's treatise is a lot more than the counterpoint section, even though that's all that people tend to know today.
And while it is true that some of the "great composers" worked through exercises that were modeled on Fux (notably in late 18th century Vienna, where Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all knew of Fux), they had absolutely nothing to do with Bach. Fux was trying to lay out the rules based on the 16th-century modal style of Palestrina, with some adaptations to 18th-century practice. He wasn't trying to codify Bach's rules at all, particularly since at the time he wrote it, J.S. Bach was still a relatively young man who had only recently arrived at Leipzig, where he was yet to write many of his greatest works. Fux's messed-up version of 16th-century counterpoint doesn't reflect Bach's practice at all, in fact, other than in some general principles (like the one you mentioned to avoid parallels). And I'm not sure where you even get the idea that Bach was creating rules for others to follow either -- he had his own training in counterpoint, where he learned various rules and principles, and he probably used some, broke others, and expanded on most, just as any composer does.
It's true that Bach had a facility with counterpoint that was very rare, but the "rules" he was using were developed over centuries -- for example, parallel fifths were first prohibited in treatises of the 14th century. Bach didn't make up most of the rules. He learned them, just as composers before him had learned them for centuries.
However classical music still is what it is and I feel sorry for all the music theorists still sitting in their conservatories trying to write atonal or 12 tone music when that era is decades over.
Well, very few composers these days write straight-ahead "12[-]tone music" except as exercises. Many still write various forms of atonal music, but the concept of music has been expanded so much that it seems odd to pigeonhole composers into Glass and Reich versus "atonal and 12-tone." Moreover, there's a large amount of crossover and influence between various forms of experimental art music and popular music. I suppose there are a few "music theorists" out there who still think that it's 1920, and Schoenberg's 12-tone method is the only way to go, but I've never met one. The actual composers I talk to do a lot of different things when it comes to experimental music.
Seriously, I love classical music, but the turn of the century(ish) atonal stuff is barely music.
I'm not sure what you mean by "classical music," but since you implicitly include "atonal stuff" in that term, you should include all the stuff that came after it up to the present day, which includes a lot of stuff much more crazy than Schoenberg. Ever listen to Babbitt, or more recently people like Ferneyhough? Some of it is serialism on steroids -- and some of it is gorgeous, while other stuff truly sounds like random nonsense. And that's not even going into trends in electronic music, aleatoric music, and appropriation of noise and environmental sounds. The world of music since Schoenberg had been a lot more experimental than that "turn of the century(ish) atonal stuff."
And the twelve tone technique is barely theory. It's more of an algorithm to churn out annoying random sounding music.
I completely agree that twelve-tone technique is barely theory. Well, it's as much "theory" as determining whether to write a tonal piece in E-flat minor or F major. Some of the combinatorial properties of the rows are occasionally interesting, but not all composers exploit them, even if they put them there by design. But, in general, the idea that "understanding" a piece of Schoenberg or Webern or Berg should start with row analysis is just nonsense. It's like trying to understand a piece of Bach by looking at what key it's in and then labeling chords with chord symbols. It's not unrelated to what's going on, but it will miss most of the interesting aspects of the music.
Regarding the "random[-]sounding music," that's not what the technique is about, though admittedly part of it is about avoiding tonal tendencies. Yet Berg's music is proof enough that one can choose to write music that often has tonal moments and doesn't sound random at all, even when he's using 12-tone technique. As for Schoenberg, if you've spent any time listening to a lot of German/Austrian music of the late 19th century and first couple decades of the 20th century, you can hear his free atonal music as interacting and responding to that. The same thing often happens in his 12-tone music, with the gestures becoming more deformed or exaggerated, not entirely unlike various trends in visual arts of the same era. But once you hear it as responding to (and often avoiding in various ways) the gestures of late Romantic music, Schoenberg's music also has a lot of logic to it. Webern is yet another story and is perhaps more abstract in many of his works. Sonority is essential, rather than trying to follow the row. Schoenberg and Webern both explicitly told people not to worry about listening to the row at times... that's not what the music is about. It's just a technique to help limit the infinite possibilities that a composer would have without any restrictions. Without the gestures of tonality to guide composition, what would you use?
When I first encountered this music, I absolutely detested it. I thought it was almost morally offensive that they wrote it and claimed that it was music, when (to me) it sounded like random noise, and I thought that people who listened to it and claimed to like it were participating in some sort of grand elitist scam. Today, though, I understand it better and recognize it within its historical context. Some of it I now love, some of it I find intellectually interesting, and some of it I still think is crap. Give it a chance, though -- once you stop worrying about 12-tone technique and start trying to listen to the rest of the music, many pieces begin to have their own logic.
Musicians want to play. Actors want to act. Writers want to write.
Engineers want to engineer. Doctors want to heal. Scientists want to research.
Except the system is set up to pay these people for what they do. If we didn't provide incentives for these people, they might still want to do these things, but would they bother to achieve a high level of competence if they are just doing it in their spare time? Sure, some of them will. But do would want to drive across a bridge built by an engineer who designs them as a hobby on weekends, get surgery performed by a doctor who read a few anatomy books after work, or take a drug developed by an amateur scientist in his basement? It's possible that innovation can (and has) come from lots of amateurs in these fields, but I bet that most of the time you wouldn't want to do any of these things unless they had been tested and screened by qualified professionals who are usually trained and paid well for their work.
I think amateur artists/musicians/writers are fantastic, and new distribution networks like we have on the internet have helped create some great things. I would encourage everyone to create, no matter what your skill level. And you're right -- moderation and rating systems can help to point audience members to things that might interest them.
But what's the incentive for amateurs to cultivate their talents and to develop their skills rather than worrying about what they're going to eat tonight? Sure, some "starving artists" may do it anyway. Some may have such innate talent that they are a success right from the start. But that's not all people.
Basically, you're making an argument for artistic mediocrity. It's sort of like those who don't see a problem that teachers earn so little, yet in the US they are often required to have a master's degree, and if they teach something like science or math, they could generally earn twice as much in the "real world." Oh, but those who are "dedicated to teaching" or really, truly "want to teach" will do it anyway. And it's true, I've met quite a few very bright people who teach regardless of the fact that they could be earning 2-3 times as much with their talent and education.
But I've also been certified as a teacher myself, and I saw about 75% of the people going into the profession are some of the dumbest people I've ever met with degrees in science and math. If you don't provide incentives to people, you'll get some talent, but mostly people who are smart will go elsewhere. We can see the results in the American educational system. Do we want to encourage that trend in artistic production as well?
Again, I think you're right that some amateurs are really good. But without incentives, I think the quality and number of people who devote themselves to artistic production will decrease.
You really do get better if you practice everyday and have professional training, just like engineers, doctors, and scientists. I don't have an easy answer to the copyright problem, but I don't think the answer is simply to say, "Oh well, there are some good amateurs out there, and people will do that anyway." I wouldn't trust the quality of a bridge designed by such a group of people, and so the quality of music, writing, etc. coming from them will probably be similarly suspect a lot of the time.
QA only works well when you have some quality to begin with.
By the way, for those who associate "atheism" only with a positive belief that there is no God (and might therefore be confused about the term "weak atheism" as used in my example), I suggest thinking about similar words that use the prefix "a-", which usually means "not," rather than "against." Something that is "amoral" is ambivalent in moral terms -- neither positive nor negative -- rather than "immoral," which actually goes against morality. Similarly, "asexual" is not against sexuality, it merely states the lack of sex or sexuality.
Similarly, "atheism" is the lack of "theism" or belief in God, though given the ubiquitous nature of belief in Gods in many cultures throughout history, it has also gained the connotation that someone who is "atheist" must be actually against theists, rather than simply not subscribing to their belief.
So, "atheism" has come to encompass a lot of things. And there are lots of other terms floating around, including variants of atheism and agnosticism, things like "non-theism" or "ignosticism," etc. Unfortunately, there isn't any standardization like there is with "amoral" vs. "immoral," hence we're stuck with a debate on Slashdot every time this stuff comes up because people don't realize that there are more than a few possible positions and the boundaries between these categories are confusing.
I don't think I accept your distinction between your weak atheism definition and your agnosticism definition. Specifically, I don't think there is one. Either a person asserts that they don't believe there is a god, or they assert that they do believe there is (or isn't) a god. I'm not sure why the question of whether the answer is knowable or not comes into it?
It only comes into it because agnosticism is not a statement about religion per se. It is a statement about epistemology, but most people outside of philosophers only seem to care about the term when it is referencing religion.
Agnosticism is a position that the truth of a particular statement (or type of statement) cannot be determined. If you ask me whether it's going to rain next Thursday, I could answer, "yes, I think it will" or "no, I don't think it will." I could also answer, "I don't know." But if I answer, "We can't know whether it will rain next Thursday" (due to lack of data, the unpredictability of weather, etc.), that's a different kind of statement than simply "I don't know."
Weak atheists don't know and/or don't care. They don't make any claims about beliefs either way. Agnostics are making a statement about epistemology. It is a different type of statement than the theists or strong atheists are making, but it is a position nonetheless. (There are others as well, which have to do with other problems that are either theological or epistemological in character.)
Scientifically, the hypothesis is non-testable, so I don't think there's much dispute in the scientific arena about how knowable the answer is (ie: it's not)?
Well, what exactly is the "hypothesis"? I think you're assuming that theism is only something of the Christian variety (or similar religions) that believe in an invisible God who works miracles. But one could choose any sort of religion and define "god" in a number of ways. Perhaps one's god is an apple or a tree -- in which case, asking questions about the existence of the god is not as important as perhaps determining what it means for a god to be an apple.
Even if we want to believe in an invisible god, one could choose any evidence of experience as proof of some "god" if one wants to. For example, every time an apple falls from a tree, I could say, "Ah, God caused that apple to fall. That is proof for me." What could you do to disprove that God caused the apple to fall? You could describe theories of gravitation, but the theist will simply reply that you're giving a different description, but God was still the ultimate cause. Such a belief system is tested every time an apple falls, and it would only be disproved by an apple falling up or doing something else.
Similarly, the (strong) atheist could assert that God has nothing to do with falling apples. The atheist asserts that the regularity of falling apples does not require a God to make each one of them fall; it is simply of a property of physics, with no necessity to invoke a deity. The atheist might use the laws of physics as an explanation and would only be disproved when the apple did something that contradicted it (which under some circumstances, might be interpreted as a "miracle" by some).
Note that in this case, violation of expectations could disprove both theist or atheist attitudes -- because they are interpretations of evidence, not necessarily about statements of fact. Then, the agnostic comes along who says, "We cannot know what the ultimate cause of the falling apple is -- if there is a God involved, we cannot know either way." That's actually the scientific view you're endorsing by claiming that it is untestable. You're making a claim about what is testable and what is untestable, and that is defined by your scientific worldview. But what I "believe" and what I can "test" are not necessarily about the same things.
You state "I don't think there is one." Do you mean, "I believe there is no such thing as God"
The Agnostic has a lack of belief, an Athiest believes in a negative.
Frankly, you don't know what you're talking about. You discuss the "logic" of the claims of theism, atheism, and agnosticism, but it seems that you don't actually know the logical consequences of what's going on. You're in line with some of the connotations that people think these words have, but if you want to have a rigorous argument about the logic of belief systems, read up about what you're talking about first.
Part of the difficulty is because of the ambiguity used in the word "atheism," which can mean non-belief, or it can mean a positive belief that there is no god. Those are two different claims (sometimes referred to as "weak atheism" and "strong atheism"). And you obviously don't know what agnosticism is.
Here's a simple example of arguments that state a view on whether it will rain next Thursday.
THEISM: "I believe that it will rain next Thursday."
STRONG ATHEISM: "I believe that it will not rain next Thursday."
AGNOSTICISM: "I believe that we cannot know whether it will rain next Thursday." (Due to lack of data, or some other problem with epistemology.)
WEAK ATHEISM: "I don't know whether it will rain next Thursday."
Theism is a positive statement of belief, strong atheism is a negative statement of belief, and agnosticism is a statement that we cannot logically believe either positively or negatively. Agnosticism is thus also making a specific claim about the state of knowledge and what can or cannot be deduced from it.
Agnosticism is not simply stating "I dunno" and going on with our lives. It is an epistemological claim about the evidence for a god. Stating "I dunno" is a fourth position that is not theism, strong atheism, or agnosticism. Most people who actually argue about the logic of these positions call the "I dunno" crowd "weak atheists" because they don't really believe, but they aren't making a negative assertion either. They simply don't believe either way.
In sum, there are more possible logical positions than you acknowledge. These are the most common ones.
We have a lot of literature from Ancient Greece, obviously only a tiny fraction of what was produced due to the reasons you describe, but we do have a lot. They are almost all poems and plays. We don't have anything resembling a book from the time period.
Huh? If you mean a "book" in the physical sense, I guess you're right.
But there are a number of significant large works that are not poems and plays, like, for instance, the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, or perhaps the philosophy of Plato (including lengthy works like the Republic or the Laws) and Aristotle. And I'm not sure why you disqualify Homer's epic poems, for example, which are clearly long enough to make a rather large "book."
So yeah, we do have some "books" from that time -- they are the founding documents of Western philosophy and historiography.
Copyright came about in the first place because third parties began copying and selling other people's books, undercutting them and driving them out of work.
Well, no.
Copyright began in England.
Well, no.
You make a lot of good points, but try reading up on the history of copyright before spouting off a nonsense story about why copyright came into being in general. Your story is about the history of copyright in England, which is not the first place copyright arose. Moreover, the situation you describe in England conflates a lot of history that happened over almost two centuries.
In reality, the first copyrights were granted in what is now Italy. They were granted for a number of different reasons, and they were meant to benefit various groups (authors, patrons, printers, rulers, etc.). The early history of copyright is a messy business, and England is only one case study. Developments throughout Europe went various ways, and it took hundreds of years before an international standard developed.
Because the US inherited a lot of copyright law from the tradition in England, modern debates on copyright focus on English history. But there were other countries and other models (and reasons) for copyright out there.
I generally find that people who 'know their vodkas' are idiots who think that advertising and spending a lot makes a product better.
That's true of just about everything. Studies have shown that even wine judges in major competitions (who certainly are supposed to "know they wines") display enough variance as to make their collective ratings almost meaningless. And wines usually have much more variation than vodka. Most people who think they have "taste" in anything are like this, so it's not unique to vodka.
I bet you can't tell Smirnoff from your favorite vodka double blind.
Perhaps for some or even most. Not for me. My favorite vodka is fermented from potatos, rather than grain-based, and it tastes quite a bit different from Smirnoff. But I generally don't care enough to pay the premium for it. Vodkas can be remarkably different in taste due to variations in distillation and the type of water used. Yes, they're all very close to pure ethanol plus water, but the little bit of junk left in can sometimes make a big difference in flavor. I'm not saying that makes it worth paying ridiculous amounts of money for it -- Smirnoff is perfectly fine for most purposes -- but if someone wants to pay a premium for that subtle flavor that they may or may not actually taste, who am I to judge?
That said, I did a little blind tasting a few years back after I first bought my favorite potato vodka. Three friends tried four vodkas blind. One of them considers himself a bit of a booze snob, one drinks quite a bit but has little "taste", and one has probably had less than a dozen drinks in his entire life. The four vodkas were a premium mainstream vodka, my premium potato vodka, Smirnoff, and a really cheap vodka (cheaper than Smirnoff). They all made their decisions privately before sharing them.
All three caught the really cheap vodka and declared it awful (not as smooth as the others, a bit caustic and astringent). All three also declared the potato vodka to be one of the premium ones (probably for its distinctive flavor), though they couldn't agree on whether it actually tasted "better" -- it was just "different". As for the remaining two vodkas, my booze snob friend identified the Smirnoff correctly (and said it wasn't as good), my drinker friend with no "taste" liked the Smirnoff better, and my friend who doesn't drink expressed a mild preference for the premium, though he really didn't know.
So, say what you will, but I think there is at least an argument to be made that some premium vodkas have distinctive flavors, even though they are all trying to be pure ethanol and water. Whether it's worth spending $25-40 on a bottle instead of $10-15... well, that's your choice. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a difference, at least among some.
I certainly agree with you that anyone who claims that a $40 bottle of vodka is generally "better" than a $20 bottle is generally full of crap. Vodka is essentially supposed to be close to pure ethanol and pure water. Smirnoff and similarly priced vodkas get close enough to this ideal that expensive vodkas are not actually "better."
That isn't to say that they aren't quite different in character. Potato vodkas, for example, are often quite different from grain-based vodkas. And the kind of water that is used can make a big difference in flavor.
So, while I agree with you that Smirnoff is a perfectly fine vodka, I also think people can prefer some of the subtle variations of flavor offered by different brands. If you want to pay a premium of a couple hundred percent for that subtle flavor, that's your choice. You may not be getting any closer to the "ideal" vodka, but if you're drinking it straight, you can tell the difference with many brands. (If you're just mixing it, I agree that you're an idiot to throw expensive vodka in.)
Before copyright, the writer had a substantial independent income or he had a sponsor or patron.
True enough. That was the way it worked for most people before about 1700. Then English law introduced copyright for the author, and after that it became possible for more and more authors to make at least part of their living off their writings. I'm not sure what that has to do with your cited article about international bootlegs in the mid-1800s. Dickens had copyright in England, as all authors had had for over a century. Those lobbying for international copyright were trying to enhance their profits, not assert copyright for the first time.
The church. The government. The merchant price. Each with their own agenda.
A J.R.R Tolkien or C. S. Lewis can navigate that environment and thrive.
I'm confused. You cite the publishing conditions that prevailed pre-1700 in England and then cite two 20th century authors as if they had to deal with the church and the government controlling printing. While there still were censorship boards, it's not as if Tolkien and Lewis were living in the era of patronage and government monopolies on the press.
But the American writer - particularly the writer of genre fiction - mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, suspense, the thriller - and so on - tends to be an outsider. He and she didn't come into this business to serve their betters - to win their way into the Establishment.
WHAT?!? Again, Tolkien and Lewis were not living within some sort of Elizabethan patronage culture. Plenty of English writers of their generation made their own money. You can argue that the social stratification of English culture well into the early 20th century made it more difficult for a lower-class writer to succeed, but very few English writers after the 18th century were writing "to serve their betters" and satisfy a patron.
Finally, I should note that plenty of British writers wrote "genre fiction" just as American writers did, though we can argue about the origins of the various genres.
But what the heck does any of this have to do with the early (pre-1700) days of copyright?
Actually, when copyright protection was first introduced, writers were not even allowed to publish their own works (unless they were stationers), nor were they regarded as owners of such works. The stationers guild was, and the stationers member who printed a book became 'owner' of it.
Once again, people quoting the history of English law as though it is the history of the entire world.
Let's be honest here -- English copyright law certainly has been influential, particularly on the modern American system. But the real beginning of that influence started with the first real copyright act in the Statute of Queen Anne in the early 1700s, which incidentally granted rights to the author. But the stuff you're talking about from the 1600s is only one out of many early copyright situations in Europe. (And even in England the stationers guild was initially more about royal power and preventing sedition than it was about rewarding printers. That's the reason you weren't allowed to publish your own book -- you might be writing something treasonous.)
Copyright was granted in various domains for a multitude of reasons, e.g., to exercise control over the presses by a ruler, to grant favors (whether to author, printer, or another person) by a ruler, to protect printer, author, or editor from bootlegging, to ensure amicable relations about printers, to protect the rights of patrons who were funding publications, to promote high quality books or to encourage a variety of publications, occasionally to even protect the ideas or writings of an author, etc., etc.
Basically, the situation was complex. The way it was in England, however, was not the way it was everywhere. And your description somewhat misrepresents even how it was in England.
Have you considered a career with Fox News?
It's ironic that you say that, since those who want to act like 16th and 17th century copyright was only about publishers making money overlook the fact that publisher guilds were often, in fact, a old version of "Fox News." Those in power preferred to have only one guild to deal with, since it made censorship of published literature easier. Thus, particularly in England (which is the only place anyone ever seems to talk about early copyright) the monopoly of the authorized presses was as much to benefit the political whims of the government and church by spouting propaganda as it was to secure the financial stability of the printers. Of course, the difference today is that the government doesn't use copyright as a method of censorship; Fox News chooses its format because it's good business.
As I said before, pre-1700 copyright was about many things and took many forms in different regions and time periods, but claiming that it was only about excessive and undeserved profits for publishers (and thus exactly equivalent to copyright abuses today) is "misinterpret[ing], mischaracteriz[ing], and selective[ly] quoting" historical documents for some modern agenda.
Actually, that's incorrect. Before copyright, there were no artists or writers clamouring for "protection". The people pushing copyright were the publishers, who wanted copyright to benefit themselves (which is exactly what we have right now.) The whole "think of the artists" stuff is propaganda invented to create support for copyright from artists and "average" people.
Sort of. Did you actually read the Wikipedia article you linked to? While you're right that generally speaking the benefit was generally to the publisher rather than the author, those benefits were not necessarily monetary, a big distinction from the modern situation. When authors were paid for their work, it was more common to be paid a lump sum, rather than modern royalties, since generally in the 16th and 17th centuries many works were only intended to go through one printing. The situation was not "exactly what we have right now."
Read your linked Wikipedia article:
The printing press brought the possibility of compensation for literary labor. Very speedily, however, the unrestricted rivalry of printers brought into existence competing and unauthorized editions of various works, which diminished prospects of any payment, or even entailed loss, for the authors, editors, and printers of the original issue, and thus discouraged further undertaking.
Not just printers.
Protection for the authors and their representatives was sought through special privileges obtained for separate works as issued.
Furthermore, there's more explanation of why publishers as well as rulers might want to grant copyright. Again, from the article:
Most early Italian enactments in regard to literature were framed not so much with reference to the protection of authors as for the purpose of inducing printers (acting as publishers) to undertake certain literary enterprises which were believed to be important to the community. The Republic of Venice, the dukes of Florence, and Leo X and other Popes conceded at different times to certain printers the exclusive privilege of printing for specific terms (rarely exceeding 14 years) editions of classic authors; not so much to secure profits for the printers, but rather to encourage, for the benefit of the community, literary ventures on the part of the editors and printers.
There's a lot more information out there, but I thought it might be nice to quote from the very source you provided.
I've worked with a lot of printed books from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and early on many of these grants of copyright were certainly more to protect the work of both printer and by extension author/editor so that it would encourage the publication of quality books. And again, most of the early copyright terms were for 5-15 years, enough time for publishers to sell off their stock while preparing more projects. Some of the more elaborate publications of thousands of pages could require months of typesetting and printing, and prominent authors sometimes required the patronage of aristocrats (even kings and emperors) to fund the production of a major work. A printer (and/or a patron) had little incentive to take such a risk when a rare successful publications would immediately be followed by low-quality bootleg abridged copies generated by another publishing house. Hence, copyright for a very limited period after publication to allow the recouping of costs.
So, while you're right that generally publishers were the ones granted copyright, the reasons were not always the same as they are today, and the situation is simply not analogous to the modern corporate greed that tries to keep works out of the public domain for generations.
What you don't understand is that the liberal arts "background" was unreachable for you when you were in your early 20s. You had to grow up some 10-20 years to understand it.
It's really sad to hear people say things like this. The current pathetic state of our primary and secondary education is bad enough that everyone seems convinced that a person in his/her late teens or early 20s can't possibly think or understand "deep" things like philosophy, complex arguments about art, literature, history, etc. Yet most physicists or mathematicians will readily admit that there is the occasional "genius" who masters advanced material rather early.
While I acknowledge that I certainly understand things in the liberal arts better now than when I was in my early 20s, the difference is one of depth (due to being exposed to more things over the years), not of ability or quality.
Before the advent of the standardized primary, secondary, and post-secondary educational system in the 19th and 20th centuries with standard numbers of grades and fixed numbers of years you are normally in school, things were a lot different, at least for those few in the classes that could afford advanced education. Many of those people could and did make significant contributions to discourse in the "liberal arts" in their early 20s, and some even in their teens.
It all boils down to early education, mostly. Today we put kids in day care or set them in front of the TV. Before the high-school movement in the 1920s and 30s, most people only went to school for 4-8 years (at least in the US), so a grammar school education required a student to be fluent in basic skills like reading, writing, and practical arithmetic. Nowadays, we have basic skills tests that are often requiring similar things after 12 years of education. In the past, those later 4-8 years of education could have been spent on essentially what is now "college-level" studies in the liberal arts (though perhaps not with quite as much detail), at least for those wealthy enough to be able to go to secondary school. (And those who went to secondary schools also often started tutoring their children from a very young age, rather than putting them in front of a TV, which gave them an even greater advantage.) Some of the elite private schools today still manage to do exactly that, and while of course it doesn't work for all students, they often have a great deal more exposure to creative thought and methodologies for approaching problems than the average public school student. The private school kids would get a heck of a lot out of two intensive college years in the liberal arts.
Unfortunately, you're right for most students. They just don't have the background. Part of it is a changing world where various technical skills also have to be taught in addition to traditional liberal arts subjects, and in the past students could rely on a certain central "canon" of humanities sources that they would learn in primary and secondary school, so they'd be ready to analyze it in detail in college (and even to have original thoughts about it!). Arguably, students today should have more breadth than students of the past when they graduate high school, but it seems that we've lost more than the canon... we've lost the critical thinking that went with it, and the minimal standards for graduation have become pathetic.
By the way, if you doubt what I'm saying, take a look at the first "standardized tests" in the US. Take a look at the subjects tested in the first couple decades of the New York Regents Exams. Here's the list of subject tests a HIGH SCHOOL student could take before graduating in 1879:
o Rhetoric and English composition o English literature o Algebra, through quadratics o Plane geometry o Plane trigonometry o American history o Science of government o Political economy o General history o Classical geography and antiquities o Physical geography o Physiology and hygiene o Zoology
Once again, thanks for taking the time to respond. I don't know if you'll even notice this late reply (I've been really busy for the past week or so), but I do have a final way of thinking about the issue.
That is, what happens if the rules change? A main point in your argument is that people have always been sharing things like this, just in different forms. In the past, they were advertisement or whatever, and they will still be. I understand that, and I agree with that.
But electronic distribution is different. I'm sorry, but it is. You mentioned the "gray area" about trading music -- that happens more and more often. In fact, it was already happening on a massive scale in colleges over a decade ago. A number of people I knew even back then had never bought a single CD. They had never bought a single video game. Why? Because they could get it all for free from various repositories and friends and such. I agree that even if mp3s and cracked versions of games didn't exist, those people would never have bought ALL of those games and CDs. True. No argument there. But they would have bought MANY of them; certainly many, many more than they did, even as poor college students.
In the past, a taped copy of an LP or a tape of a radio broadcast would usually be a lower quality than an LP. Today, the successors to mp3s are a high enough quality that most people have gotten used to them. They don't need to buy an LP or a CD to get what is considered the full quality of the recording for most people, so why would they when they could get it for free? They don't need to, and many don't. It's that simple. I knew many people like that a decade ago; from my encounters with college students today, it seems to be the same.
Also, taping and copying in the past was a laborious task, so this kind of transfer didn't make any sense. You had to tape often in real time, or perhaps make high-speed copies, but in the time it took to make one tape 30 years ago with standard technology, today I can copy thousands of recordings. Back then, if I wanted to make a copy of a recording that my friend had, I could spend an hour making a lower quality tape off of an LP, or I could go out and buy one probably in less time from the store down the street with higher quality. Today, I can just transfer the entire contents of my friend's iPod, with its hundreds of recordings, in a matter of minutes, and sort out what things I want and what I don't want later. Even if one accepts your premise that the rules were for "free content" back then, I don't see how anyone could automatically decide that the same principles NECESSARILY should apply when the way content can be transferred now requires very little time or money investment.
For newspapers, a similar thing happened. A couple decades ago, sure you could share a newspaper or even copy a newspaper and give it to your friends, but the latter would take so much time to distribute and get it to your friends that it wouldn't usually be worth it, since the value of news is short-lived, by definition. But newspapers could make a lot of money off of distributing AP content and similar things, since there was no other easy way to get your hands on those stories for free other than sharing a newspaper or whatever. That's not true anymore. Now, AP content is available for free and can be read instantaneously by millions of people from one source, unlike the previous newspaper copies that could only be shared by maybe a couple dozen people at most.
Thus, newspapers will have to change their business model. But it doesn't mean that content was ever "free." Newspapers always paid for that content when they paid for their own reporters to create it. They "paid" for the AP more indirectly by contributing stories (again created by their writers) to the AP pool as members of the AP. To assert that the AP has no value is to adopt a mindset that will result in a tragedy of the commons.
Books will be the next thing, as people get
The content is the "carrot" that gets you to spend the money on the physical object.
How does this apply to actual books or newspapers? The print in the book is actually "physical" ink. Unlike CDs or DVDs, there's not even a machine required to decode those parts of the "physical object" -- our eyes can easily make use of the ink natively (for literate people, anyway). Without that print, nobody would buy the blank book.
You might as well say that the cereal inside a cereal box is the "carrot" that gets you to spend money on the box. Really, food companies are just selling containers, but all the food inside comes free! Oh, but you claim we can reuse the content of the CD. Fine. I buy a box of sponges or a bag of rubber bands. I reuse them... again and again, just like reading a book over and over. I use the content over and over, and eventually they'll wear out, just like all media will after some period of time.
But in those cases, I'm not actually buying sponges or rubber bands. I'm buying a box and a bag. The sponges and rubber bands are "free." Don't you see how ridiculous that argument sounds?
I know you're going to make some sort of argument that the "content" of books or music or whatever is different. But it isn't different, except somebody came up with a way to manufacture new COPIES of the content very easily. And if somebody did that for a (relatively new) design of sponges or rubber bands or whatever, they could be infringing on a patent by making copies, instead of infringing copyright. It's still about appropriating the product of someone else's labor and distributing it without their permission.
The main difference with your "content" is that people have figured out a way to copy and distribute it easily and with little cost. That doesn't mean we should consider the moral question of ownership just as valid.