True enough, not everyone who downloaded it from you, would have bought the song.
That wasn't my point though, my point was that if the fines where SANE, then those people who honestly believe themselves innocent could afford to fight the battle.
If losing the battle costs 5 years salary, whereas you can settly for $1000 -- can you really afford to fight it ? Even if you think you're 90% likely to come out as innocent ?
That's what enables the blackmail: a situation where not even those who are likely innocent, can afford to fight.
No, you actually couldn't, not if the claim isn't obviously frivolous.
"You owe me money, pay up, or I'll be forced to take the matter to court", is even, in principle, entirely reasonable in some situations.
The problem is that the punishments are so out of line with the severity of the transgression, that people cannot afford to let the courts sort it out, even in cases where they're quite possibly innocent.
If I say the above, and demand $700 from you for NOT taking it to court, and you know that being taken to court means potentially a year-long battle and hundreds of thousands if you loose, can you afford to take that gamble, even if you think you're most-probably going to come out innocent ?
Or do you buckle ?
That's the point where it becomes blackmail.
If the punishment for uploading copyrighted material was limited to something sane, this problem would go away.
Say if you downloaded 300 songs from piratebay, and have a share-ratio of 2, and they calculated this means 600 people illegally got a song from you, at $0.99 a song, that's a loss of $600 -- so they convict you guilty and demand you pay $1000.
That's not what happens though, you potentially end up paying orders of magnitude more. And that's wrong.
His real problem is a different one. With ebooks, many of the people living in the ecosystem BETWEEN the author and the reader are superfluous with ebooks.
If I like Neil Gaiman, and I read his blog. And he makes a new book, which is a pdf.
What do the two of us need anyone else for ? I can send him some cash, he can send me the book, end of story.
That's not an ending that Mr. Murdoch likes though, because it makes him irrelevant.
It's not only journalism, it's also fundamentally human.
We're hardwired to remember the spectacular more than the mundane, the extraordinary, more than the everyday.
So, we notice when a jet-airliner crash into a building -- but ignore it when the average weight of the adult American creep another 2 pounds upwards, despite the fact that the latter provably kills a hundred times as many.
Or if you argue, that the latter is self-inflicted, so thus less serious, then consider that salmonella is significantly more deadly than terrorism, and ask yourself, where's the $X00-billion war on salmonella ? A -tiny- fraction of the war-costs would lower salmonella-deaths a lot.
We're just not very good at evaluating risk. The same thing in reverse, can explain why human beings have a tendency to play lotteries.
True that. It's not fun picking on someone who honestly don't care about your opinion. But you can't make someone confident just by telling them to be.
I can say, to the -minute- when the last time was that I was bullied in school. I'd gotten a girlfriend a little time before, and the weekend was hmm, somewhat intimate, and in the shower after sports, a bully noticed I had a hickey or too. So he attempted to make fun of it; "Eivind has a hickey".
"And you don't." I said. Several seconds of silence, then laugther, but not at my expense. End of story.
True enough. The problem is that when hundreds of millions get some treatment, quite a few of those WILL (for entirely unrelated reasons) fall ill shortly after the treatment, thus the existence of these people prove nothing at all.
Like a doctor commented: If 10 million people get the H1N1 vaccine, you'll have around 8000 that die within a month after getting the vaccine. Proof that the vaccine is dangerous ? No, just the result of the fact that in a sample of 10 million, around 8000 will die EVERY month. And if you offer the vaccine first to the weakened, the elderly, those who are typically the most at risk, then the death-numbers will look even worse.
Besides, the question is never if something is entirely safe. The proper question is, is it safer than the alternative. Even if a vaccine -does- have side-effects (and all of them do, to varying degrees) it can still be totally worth it, if the total suffering from side-effects is significantly smaller than the suffering from the disease would otherwise be.
Me too. Energy scales with the square of the speed, so since 28 is 5.6 times faster than 5, you'd need a braking-distance 32 times longer to get the same deceleration.
When you hit something in 5 mph, the bumper of the car deforms about an inch, and elasticity in seatbelts, clothing and flesh etc gives you an additional stopping-distance of around 3 inches.
To get the same deceleration from 28 mph, you MUST thus have a stopping-distance of atleast 32 * 4 inches = 120 inches. That is 10 FEET.
They claim this foam compress 80%, so to gain 10 feet of stopping-distance, you'd need to add 12 feet of this foam behind the bumper, which would then smoothly compress to 2 feet.
But 12 feet isn't practically possible, and is certainly not what is alluded to by "adding a bit of this foam behind the bumper".
Having to go trough a lot of "procedures" IS a punishment in itself. It means being atleast in principle in legal jeopardy, often for a long time, and often with a less-than-100% certain outcome. It also typically means having to spend time, energy and perhaps money educating oneself so as to ensure one doesn't do some legal mistake thus amplifying the problem.
It's not about size. It's about acting, when it's needed. Some people do, others don't. You could ask a psychologist.
And you're right, if you -do- act, in a crisis of some sort, you'll think a lot better of yourself afterwards, than if you remain one of the dumb sheep.
I agree. It actually tends to be the other way around though. There's no laws in Germany in any way restricting how much religios teaching (or indoctrination, depending on your point of view) you can subject your kids to.
The problem tends to be the other way: Some religious people insist that there's certain things their kids should NOT be exposed to, or certain theories they should NOT learn about. Which is a problem if those things are otherwise considered a part of basic education. Notice that there's no requirement that you *agree* with any of the theories or subjects, only that you've learnt about them.
You don't have to believe in evolution -- but you should have a basic idea what the theory says. You don't have to believe it's ethically acceptable to use contraception -- but you should have basic knowledge of how humans reproduce and how the most common contraceptives work. You don't have to be a Hindu, but you should have heard a little about the basis of what the hindus believe in. You're free to believe that God created earth, literally in 7 days; but you should also have heard about the most common scientific theories for the history of the universe, such as the big bang.
True. And people are more likely to remain passive in a group. And you're right, people should know about this and be prepared to counter it, both if they're one of the group, and if they're the one needing help.
Countering it isn't difficult, you just need to talk to someone as an -individual- instead of to the -group-. People on the scene of a traffic-accident, say, will respond if someone, ANYONE takes charge, most are sheep, happy to have someone tell 'em what to do. Even if it's something obvious: "That guy looks as if he's having a heart-attack, you standing there with the iphone in the hand, call 911 now please."
That's actually an excellent example of how crazy it's possible to be.
If someone is in need of CPR, they're eaither not breathing, or their heart isn't beating. Being "exposed" in public is the LEAST of their problems in such a situation.
Infact it's a complaint of the "Yes, he saved both of my kids, and put out the fire which would otherwise have burnt the house down, but you see, he left dirty footprints in the hallway in the process"
i.e. a complaint that doesn't even rise to the level where it could be reasonably called ridicolous.
A law-system that'll respond to such a complaint with something other than laugther, deserves to be shot.
True. A competently configured firewall would REJECT disallowed connections, and only change to DROP if there's some sign of flooding. For example, you could have a rule to REJECT a maximum of 3 connections a second, with a bucket-size of 30, for one port, or from one IP.
Nine out of Ten firewalls aren't competently configured though.
No you're not. Seriously. No company in this world will sell you a resistor and say: "if this breaks, and makes a nuclear reactor go down in flames, we assume liability", not for $1, not for $100, not for ANY price.
Such devices need to be, an ideally are, constructed so that there's a tolerance for error -- a single broken resistor shouldn't be able to cause a danger.
That's slightly optimistic, but yes, you can save enough fairly quickly. As a rule of thumb, if you've got 15 times what you spend yearly, you don't need to work anymore.
Which means if you save half your income, you're done saving in 15 years, assuming you want to continue living equally frugally. Most people probably don't. So no, you can't save enough to retire in 5 years, not the kind of retirement most people would want anyway.
You can however, without even going to extremes, retire by the time you're 40 or 45, though there's a tendency it tends to become later if you've got kids, both because they cost money, and because there's a tendency that both parents don't work full-time all the years with kids.
Agreed. Suffering own losses is pretty much the only thing that in practice limits the willingness of some leaders to wage war. It doesn't limit it all that much either, truth be told. But the endless rows of young american men coming home horisontally, DID play a major role in turning opinion in cases like the Vietnam War, and I think it'll do the same in Afghanistan and Iraq. The american public tire of sacrificing an endless row of their young, for issues and countries they don't really care -that- much about.
Already, technological differences means that the US can wage war with very low body-counts. Around 4500 US soldiers has been killed in Iraq, which compares favourably with the ~100K Iraqis who's been killed. (a 1:20 ratio, aproximately). I do not think the US public would've accepted the war (many of them don't accept it, even now) if the ratio to be expected had been closer to 1:1.
I can't help but wonder how many wars the next Bush will choose to engage in, if it can be done with a 1:100 ratio, or a 1:1000, or a 1:5000. If you could overthrow a major government, while losing -20- of your own men, would the reluctance to do so be smaller ? I think it would.
True. Assuming all the parameters are correct, and there's no major ones he's forgotten about (whether the object of desire finds HIM attractive seems the obvious one), multiplying DOES correctly yield the product of some numbers.
"assuming I mulitply this arbitrary set of arbitrary numbers, I get this product"
All this proves is that if you're allowed to pick as many numbers as you like, and choose each number yourself, and then multiply them, you can get whatever answer you like. This is nice, as a critique of the Drake-equation.
Essentially all of his choices are arbitrary. Must live in London. Why ? What fraction of men end up marrying a woman who does not currently live in the same city they do ? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that of the Norwegians who married last year, around 20% ended up marrying someone who's not even from Norway.
Must have university-degree ? Oh really. He acknowledges himself that there's tons of people with no degree, but nevertheless a functioning brain, thus killing his own argument.
Must be 24-34. Why exactly -those- limits ? They're arbitrary. Not every 23-year-old is a kid, and 35 ain't -that- much older than 31.
Exactly. It's not that it matters, directly. It's just that it's part of the image you project of yourself. And so having a stupid inapropriate email-adress is exactly as counterproductive as presenting yourself unprofesionally in other ways.
But there's only two possible theories of law; violation of trademark, and of copyright. The first can't apply since they don't actually -have- a trademark on Nexus six at all, much less one on a phone under that name.
That leaves copyright. But you can't copyright an idea, only an expression of that idea. And since the word "nexus" isn't an invention of theirs, but a generic word, they can hardly claim copyright on that. Same for "six".
Which leaves them with the combination. But claiming that combining "nexus" and "six" creates a creative work, and that naming something unrelated "nexus one", is stretching it extremely far. Doubt this'll fly, or even quiver on the ground, for that matter.
Yeah. You're about 10 times as likely to die to Salmonella, as you are of dying to terrorist-attack. Where's the 700 billion (and counting) war on salmonella ? Seriously.
The upkeep should be exponential then. First 10 years for free. $1000 For another 5. Doubling for every renewal thereafter. Doubling in real money, i.e. inflation-corrected.
At the 10th renewal (after 60 years) you'd be asking a million.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. But you can pay people to do these things.
Not: "We fix it for you, and hand you percentages"
But: "I publish the book, when I need help with some task, I hire someone for the job."
The latter gives the author a 1000 times more control. Particularily established authors. Which are the cash-cows anyway.
True enough, not everyone who downloaded it from you, would have bought the song.
That wasn't my point though, my point was that if the fines where SANE, then those people who honestly believe themselves innocent could afford to fight the battle.
If losing the battle costs 5 years salary, whereas you can settly for $1000 -- can you really afford to fight it ? Even if you think you're 90% likely to come out as innocent ?
That's what enables the blackmail: a situation where not even those who are likely innocent, can afford to fight.
True, to some degree. But even so it's a monumental problem for Murdoch and friends if they lose everyone who is "established".
No, you actually couldn't, not if the claim isn't obviously frivolous.
"You owe me money, pay up, or I'll be forced to take the matter to court", is even, in principle, entirely reasonable in some situations.
The problem is that the punishments are so out of line with the severity of the transgression, that people cannot afford to let the courts sort it out, even in cases where they're quite possibly innocent.
If I say the above, and demand $700 from you for NOT taking it to court, and you know that being taken to court means potentially a year-long battle and hundreds of thousands if you loose, can you afford to take that gamble, even if you think you're most-probably going to come out innocent ?
Or do you buckle ?
That's the point where it becomes blackmail.
If the punishment for uploading copyrighted material was limited to something sane, this problem would go away.
Say if you downloaded 300 songs from piratebay, and have a share-ratio of 2, and they calculated this means 600 people illegally got a song from you, at $0.99 a song, that's a loss of $600 -- so they convict you guilty and demand you pay $1000.
That's not what happens though, you potentially end up paying orders of magnitude more. And that's wrong.
Absolutely. Books are here to stay.
His real problem is a different one. With ebooks, many of the people living in the ecosystem BETWEEN the author and the reader are superfluous with ebooks.
If I like Neil Gaiman, and I read his blog. And he makes a new book, which is a pdf.
What do the two of us need anyone else for ? I can send him some cash, he can send me the book, end of story.
That's not an ending that Mr. Murdoch likes though, because it makes him irrelevant.
True. But it depends on -why- the shots are fired, no ?
Self-defence, is different from taking out a hostage-taker is different from forcing a burglar to stop running.
Different risk is acceptable in different situations.
It's not only journalism, it's also fundamentally human.
We're hardwired to remember the spectacular more than the mundane, the extraordinary, more than the everyday.
So, we notice when a jet-airliner crash into a building -- but ignore it when the average weight of the adult American creep another 2 pounds upwards, despite the fact that the latter provably kills a hundred times as many.
Or if you argue, that the latter is self-inflicted, so thus less serious, then consider that salmonella is significantly more deadly than terrorism, and ask yourself, where's the $X00-billion war on salmonella ? A -tiny- fraction of the war-costs would lower salmonella-deaths a lot.
We're just not very good at evaluating risk. The same thing in reverse, can explain why human beings have a tendency to play lotteries.
True that. It's not fun picking on someone who honestly don't care about your opinion. But you can't make someone confident just by telling them to be.
I can say, to the -minute- when the last time was that I was bullied in school. I'd gotten a girlfriend a little time before, and the weekend was hmm, somewhat intimate, and in the shower after sports, a bully noticed I had a hickey or too. So he attempted to make fun of it; "Eivind has a hickey".
"And you don't." I said. Several seconds of silence, then laugther, but not at my expense. End of story.
True enough. The problem is that when hundreds of millions get some treatment, quite a few of those WILL (for entirely unrelated reasons) fall ill shortly after the treatment, thus the existence of these people prove nothing at all.
Like a doctor commented: If 10 million people get the H1N1 vaccine, you'll have around 8000 that die within a month after getting the vaccine. Proof that the vaccine is dangerous ? No, just the result of the fact that in a sample of 10 million, around 8000 will die EVERY month. And if you offer the vaccine first to the weakened, the elderly, those who are typically the most at risk, then the death-numbers will look even worse.
Besides, the question is never if something is entirely safe. The proper question is, is it safer than the alternative. Even if a vaccine -does- have side-effects (and all of them do, to varying degrees) it can still be totally worth it, if the total suffering from side-effects is significantly smaller than the suffering from the disease would otherwise be.
Me too. Energy scales with the square of the speed, so since 28 is 5.6 times faster than 5, you'd need a braking-distance 32 times longer to get the same deceleration.
When you hit something in 5 mph, the bumper of the car deforms about an inch, and elasticity in seatbelts, clothing and flesh etc gives you an additional stopping-distance of around 3 inches.
To get the same deceleration from 28 mph, you MUST thus have a stopping-distance of atleast 32 * 4 inches = 120 inches. That is 10 FEET.
They claim this foam compress 80%, so to gain 10 feet of stopping-distance, you'd need to add 12 feet of this foam behind the bumper, which would then smoothly compress to 2 feet.
But 12 feet isn't practically possible, and is certainly not what is alluded to by "adding a bit of this foam behind the bumper".
Having to go trough a lot of "procedures" IS a punishment in itself. It means being atleast in principle in legal jeopardy, often for a long time, and often with a less-than-100% certain outcome. It also typically means having to spend time, energy and perhaps money educating oneself so as to ensure one doesn't do some legal mistake thus amplifying the problem.
It's not about size. It's about acting, when it's needed. Some people do, others don't. You could ask a psychologist.
And you're right, if you -do- act, in a crisis of some sort, you'll think a lot better of yourself afterwards, than if you remain one of the dumb sheep.
I agree. It actually tends to be the other way around though. There's no laws in Germany in any way restricting how much religios teaching (or indoctrination, depending on your point of view) you can subject your kids to.
The problem tends to be the other way: Some religious people insist that there's certain things their kids should NOT be exposed to, or certain theories they should NOT learn about. Which is a problem if those things are otherwise considered a part of basic education. Notice that there's no requirement that you *agree* with any of the theories or subjects, only that you've learnt about them.
You don't have to believe in evolution -- but you should have a basic idea what the theory says. You don't have to believe it's ethically acceptable to use contraception -- but you should have basic knowledge of how humans reproduce and how the most common contraceptives work. You don't have to be a Hindu, but you should have heard a little about the basis of what the hindus believe in. You're free to believe that God created earth, literally in 7 days; but you should also have heard about the most common scientific theories for the history of the universe, such as the big bang.
True. And people are more likely to remain passive in a group. And you're right, people should know about this and be prepared to counter it, both if they're one of the group, and if they're the one needing help.
Countering it isn't difficult, you just need to talk to someone as an -individual- instead of to the -group-. People on the scene of a traffic-accident, say, will respond if someone, ANYONE takes charge, most are sheep, happy to have someone tell 'em what to do. Even if it's something obvious: "That guy looks as if he's having a heart-attack, you standing there with the iphone in the hand, call 911 now please."
That's actually an excellent example of how crazy it's possible to be.
If someone is in need of CPR, they're eaither not breathing, or their heart isn't beating. Being "exposed" in public is the LEAST of their problems in such a situation.
Infact it's a complaint of the "Yes, he saved both of my kids, and put out the fire which would otherwise have burnt the house down, but you see, he left dirty footprints in the hallway in the process"
i.e. a complaint that doesn't even rise to the level where it could be reasonably called ridicolous.
A law-system that'll respond to such a complaint with something other than laugther, deserves to be shot.
True. A competently configured firewall would REJECT disallowed connections, and only change to DROP if there's some sign of flooding. For example, you could have a rule to REJECT a maximum of 3 connections a second, with a bucket-size of 30, for one port, or from one IP.
Nine out of Ten firewalls aren't competently configured though.
No you're not. Seriously. No company in this world will sell you a resistor and say: "if this breaks, and makes a nuclear reactor go down in flames, we assume liability", not for $1, not for $100, not for ANY price.
Such devices need to be, an ideally are, constructed so that there's a tolerance for error -- a single broken resistor shouldn't be able to cause a danger.
That's slightly optimistic, but yes, you can save enough fairly quickly. As a rule of thumb, if you've got 15 times what you spend yearly, you don't need to work anymore.
Which means if you save half your income, you're done saving in 15 years, assuming you want to continue living equally frugally. Most people probably don't. So no, you can't save enough to retire in 5 years, not the kind of retirement most people would want anyway.
You can however, without even going to extremes, retire by the time you're 40 or 45, though there's a tendency it tends to become later if you've got kids, both because they cost money, and because there's a tendency that both parents don't work full-time all the years with kids.
Agreed. Suffering own losses is pretty much the only thing that in practice limits the willingness of some leaders to wage war. It doesn't limit it all that much either, truth be told. But the endless rows of young american men coming home horisontally, DID play a major role in turning opinion in cases like the Vietnam War, and I think it'll do the same in Afghanistan and Iraq. The american public tire of sacrificing an endless row of their young, for issues and countries they don't really care -that- much about.
Already, technological differences means that the US can wage war with very low body-counts. Around 4500 US soldiers has been killed in Iraq, which compares favourably with the ~100K Iraqis who's been killed. (a 1:20 ratio, aproximately). I do not think the US public would've accepted the war (many of them don't accept it, even now) if the ratio to be expected had been closer to 1:1.
I can't help but wonder how many wars the next Bush will choose to engage in, if it can be done with a 1:100 ratio, or a 1:1000, or a 1:5000. If you could overthrow a major government, while losing -20- of your own men, would the reluctance to do so be smaller ? I think it would.
True. Assuming all the parameters are correct, and there's no major ones he's forgotten about (whether the object of desire finds HIM attractive seems the obvious one), multiplying DOES correctly yield the product of some numbers.
"assuming I mulitply this arbitrary set of arbitrary numbers, I get this product"
isn't going to give any new insights though.
All this proves is that if you're allowed to pick as many numbers as you like, and choose each number yourself, and then multiply them, you can get whatever answer you like. This is nice, as a critique of the Drake-equation.
Essentially all of his choices are arbitrary. Must live in London. Why ? What fraction of men end up marrying a woman who does not currently live in the same city they do ? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that of the Norwegians who married last year, around 20% ended up marrying someone who's not even from Norway.
Must have university-degree ? Oh really. He acknowledges himself that there's tons of people with no degree, but nevertheless a functioning brain, thus killing his own argument.
Must be 24-34. Why exactly -those- limits ? They're arbitrary. Not every 23-year-old is a kid, and 35 ain't -that- much older than 31.
One could go on like this with his other numbers.
Exactly. It's not that it matters, directly. It's just that it's part of the image you project of yourself. And so having a stupid inapropriate email-adress is exactly as counterproductive as presenting yourself unprofesionally in other ways.
But there's only two possible theories of law; violation of trademark, and of copyright. The first can't apply since they don't actually -have- a trademark on Nexus six at all, much less one on a phone under that name.
That leaves copyright. But you can't copyright an idea, only an expression of that idea. And since the word "nexus" isn't an invention of theirs, but a generic word, they can hardly claim copyright on that. Same for "six".
Which leaves them with the combination. But claiming that combining "nexus" and "six" creates a creative work, and that naming something unrelated "nexus one", is stretching it extremely far. Doubt this'll fly, or even quiver on the ground, for that matter.
Yeah. You're about 10 times as likely to die to Salmonella, as you are of dying to terrorist-attack. Where's the 700 billion (and counting) war on salmonella ? Seriously.
The upkeep should be exponential then. First 10 years for free. $1000 For another 5. Doubling for every renewal thereafter. Doubling in real money, i.e. inflation-corrected.
At the 10th renewal (after 60 years) you'd be asking a million.