Because digital media can be pirated at near zero cost, all it takes is a couple of people to completely destroy a new technology.
Hang on there. These people have explicitly given people the right to make copies of the performance they are providing, they can hardly complain if someone does exactly that.
Then again, the Europeans have yet to launch man rated platforms, as well the Japanese, and Canadians. The Russians crashed a cargo ship into Mir as well...
We've all blown up people in space-related ventures. Shit happens.
Lets work toward sharing our ideas so we can avoid more it in the future.
Yes, I know we can't just send them our technology, gotta defend the US and all that. That wouldn't be as much a problem if international economies weren't so isolated.
I think Bush's advisors are smart enough to realize that we don't yet have a solid enough relationship with China to give them info that could be used against us.
After we establish a better relationship with them, and can be fairly confident that they aren't going to turn on us, then we can give them that info.
Politicions are sneaky bastards by their nature, so they have a hard time trusting anyone. We have to give them some time to figure out how they and their counterpart sneaky bastards over in China can both make themselves look good/get rich by cooperating.
Trying to change China's view on things is going to be a least as challenging as trying to change America's. (I like you guys, I really do, but this For Us Or Against Us bullshit has made it very difficult lately.
Unfortunately too many of us are either too stupid to realize that nations should cooperation, or just don't care, and our leaders seem to think that having the biggest GDP is the most imporant. I think it means we should set some examples for international cooperation, so we can all succeed together.
I think its great that we all have good economies and that other countries are set to grow.
I think it sucks that we, the US, think that we always need to be on top, even at the expense of other countries.
Last time I checked, we're all humans living in the same boat. The world is in increasingly small place, the time for isolationism and nationalism is over, we should all be working together to ensure economic success for everyone.
Organizations like the WTO are a good thing as long as most of us can remember that the object is not to screw our neighbors so we can get ahead.
How did the movie industry become what it is today, especially knowing it was founded by people frustrated by the control of Thomas Edison and decided to create an organization to fight that control ?
Duh. Control is only bad if its in someone elses hands.
Consider the reaction of US citizens when the WTO tells them to play fair. (oh, you're taking our soverenty!)
allowing encryption circumvention, for any reason, opens a can of worms
Not at all. Circumventing the encryption doesn't mean I'm violating the copyright. I might be doing exactly the same thing as a hundred million other people, sitting alone in the basement watching a movie on my (linux) computer. No copyright infringment there. I might even have a licensed DVD player upstairs in the living room, or access to one at a friends house, or as a rental from the local video store.
The problem isn't with decryption, its with serial copying. If they wanted to do it right, they'd toss out the encryption crap and give you the right to give away a certain small number of second-gen copies. Then they'd have much, much less resistance from regular people, and they'd have a legal footing from which to smite the most egregious violators.
As it is, they are ignoring the progress of technology and attempting to tighten their grip too much.
I think you're attacking a popular caricature of religion there; equating religion with zealotry
Not so much religion as people who cling to what they think they know, be it religious or scientific beliefs. The idea is that a 'scientific' view should be focused more on providing explinations that fit the evidence, and not on defending a position because it is popular or long-held. I tend to use religious zealotry as an example just because it tends to be a target-rich environment that many people can relate to, but there is no shortage of other examples.
It's not possible to distinguish "knowledge" and "belief" in the way that you suggest
Agree, also re 'true' belief. Although that particular definition seems weak.
The distinction I think you're trying to make is one of justification, rather than belief
Perhaps. Some propositions, I can, in principle, test by verifying their justifications, reproducing any observations and experiments from which they were infered.
Some other propositions I cannot test, even in principle, because their justifications cannot be tested. They must either be take them as true, or rejected.
It seems that for many people, once a propositions that cannot be tested has been taken as true, it cannot easily be changed, whereas beliefs that can be tested may be discarded when their justfications are eliminated.
I personally place much more value on facts/propositions that can be verified than on those that cannot. This is not to say that I don't respect others who place value differently, just that doing so does not appeal to my particular conciousness. I must have strong justification before I promote a proposition from 'idea' to 'tentative belief', and so far nothing has made it past that point to 'firm belief':)
I would agree with Feyerabend's assertion that science should be placed in the same catagory as religions. It is certainly a more elegant arrangment, and that does appeal to me.
I agree re. the engineering behind ICE's. Thats why my money is on the combo of hybrid diesel electric. Two technologies with lots of engineering behind them that can work better together.
I'd really like to see a hybrid sterling electric. The biggest problem with sterling powered cars was the start-up time (it takes a sterling engine a while to get going), this would not be much of an issue in an electric hybrid.
What makes you think laptops have to be more fragile than books?
As the market for them gets bigger some ruggedized designs will appear that bring the price down and the longevity up. I wouldn't be surprised to see a laptop last 5-10 years with no problem.
Why bother with books? Lets give the students little chalkboards and have the copy the lessons off a big board up front that the teacher can write on.
Or heck, lets throw out all that stuff and just have them memorize everything.
These schools are early adoptors, and they will suffer a bit for it. Eventually some company is going to recognize the market for cheap, rugged laptops with very homogenous hardware that are very well suited for early education, and then we'll start seeing more success in this area.
Referbs are nice when you are supplying a couple laptops for your kids, but if you have to be able to maintain drivers and updates for an army of 500 munchkins each with different hardware, twice the price is worth only needing one or two different sets of drivers.
I've tried reading ebooks on a laptop and it's just plain uncomfortable for any long duration. I haven't been to cost justify one yet, but a tablet pc might be better.
I've used a couple of tablet PC's, and while they are cool, they have inferiour screen quality. I'm guessing this is because of both the requirement for touchscreen capability and because they have to be more rugged (The screen is exposed and can't be folded down for protection during transport).
They are definately cool, but they would also be much less suitable for reading text.
Besides that, with some of the subpixel rendering stuff I see on these new laptops, I'm astonished at the text quality. I'd rather have a nice WXUGA (or whatever alphabet soup means 'really honking high resolution' nowdays), than a nice 19" CRT.
I'd be more interested in using it as environment space.
I want my nice 19" full color display in front of me, then I want to put on one of these and with a head position sensor, so that I can have the area around me be an extended destop visible only in monochrome. I could leave windows lying all around outside the bounds of my monitor.
Bonus perihiperial, some kind of machine vision system that will let me slide those windows around using my hands.
rumor has it that biodiesel takes more real fossil fuels to make than it yeilds. That is, we'd be better off putting the fossildiesel into consumer vehicles instead of using it to farm stuff that has to be distilled into biodiesel that then has to be trucked out to distribution points.
I dunno if its true, but I can see how it would be hard to judge.
The problem with calling science, "the latest and best refinement of the method by which we gain knowledge about the world around us", is that it falsely assumes that there is one single such method.
Perhaps 'method' implies more than what I mean. I don't believe that there is some specific flowchart that defines how one should go about the discovery and learning process. The 'scientific method' is a much more general guide than that. It incorporates not only observation and theorization, but prediction and experimentation.
It also includes a principle of seperation of knowledge from ones belief system. Scientific knowledge is never 100% certain and should never be treated as if it is (although questioning well-established natural laws without some inkling as to a failure mode is not terribly poductive). This is as opposed to beliefs such as religion, which tend to be founded in faith, a system wherein knowledge is 100% certain because one feels that it is correct. The purpose of this seperation is to allow for corrections and additions without the need to attack someones religious beliefs, so that progress can be more rapid and less bloody.
It also begs the question as to how we determined that the method was the best in the first place
That requires first defining the criteria by which the methods are judged. There are many, and different people have different sets by which they make judgements. I place much emphasis on the predictive power and ability of the generated knowledge to create new technology. Someone with values radicly different from my own might find a method of discovering knowledge that centers around their religion to be better.
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Because digital media can be pirated at near zero cost, all it takes is a couple of people to completely destroy a new technology.
Hang on there. These people have explicitly given people the right to make copies of the performance they are providing, they can hardly complain if someone does exactly that.
Then again, the Europeans have yet to launch man rated platforms, as well the Japanese, and Canadians. The Russians crashed a cargo ship into Mir as well...
We've all blown up people in space-related ventures. Shit happens.
Lets work toward sharing our ideas so we can avoid more it in the future.
Yes, I know we can't just send them our technology, gotta defend the US and all that. That wouldn't be as much a problem if international economies weren't so isolated.
I think Bush's advisors are smart enough to realize that we don't yet have a solid enough relationship with China to give them info that could be used against us.
After we establish a better relationship with them, and can be fairly confident that they aren't going to turn on us, then we can give them that info.
Politicions are sneaky bastards by their nature, so they have a hard time trusting anyone. We have to give them some time to figure out how they and their counterpart sneaky bastards over in China can both make themselves look good/get rich by cooperating.
Oh, grow up, we're all big kids now, we can drop the 'US vs. Them' attitude now.
Everybody work together now, thats good boys and girls.
Trying to change China's view on things is going to be a least as challenging as trying to change America's. (I like you guys, I really do, but this For Us Or Against Us bullshit has made it very difficult lately.
Unfortunately too many of us are either too stupid to realize that nations should cooperation, or just don't care, and our leaders seem to think that having the biggest GDP is the most imporant. I think it means we should set some examples for international cooperation, so we can all succeed together.
I think its great that we all have good economies and that other countries are set to grow.
I think it sucks that we, the US, think that we always need to be on top, even at the expense of other countries.
Last time I checked, we're all humans living in the same boat. The world is in increasingly small place, the time for isolationism and nationalism is over, we should all be working together to ensure economic success for everyone.
Organizations like the WTO are a good thing as long as most of us can remember that the object is not to screw our neighbors so we can get ahead.
How did the movie industry become what it is today, especially knowing it was founded by people frustrated by the control of Thomas Edison and decided to create an organization to fight that control ?
Duh. Control is only bad if its in someone elses hands.
Consider the reaction of US citizens when the WTO tells them to play fair. (oh, you're taking our soverenty!)
That will probably lead only to large unions of (semi)skilled workers that extract exorbitant prices for their work.
And we all know how well THAT works.
allowing encryption circumvention, for any reason, opens a can of worms
Not at all. Circumventing the encryption doesn't mean I'm violating the copyright. I might be doing exactly the same thing as a hundred million other people, sitting alone in the basement watching a movie on my (linux) computer. No copyright infringment there. I might even have a licensed DVD player upstairs in the living room, or access to one at a friends house, or as a rental from the local video store.
The problem isn't with decryption, its with serial copying. If they wanted to do it right, they'd toss out the encryption crap and give you the right to give away a certain small number of second-gen copies. Then they'd have much, much less resistance from regular people, and they'd have a legal footing from which to smite the most egregious violators.
As it is, they are ignoring the progress of technology and attempting to tighten their grip too much.
I think you're attacking a popular caricature of religion there; equating religion with zealotry
:)
Not so much religion as people who cling to what they think they know, be it religious or scientific beliefs. The idea is that a 'scientific' view should be focused more on providing explinations that fit the evidence, and not on defending a position because it is popular or long-held. I tend to use religious zealotry as an example just because it tends to be a target-rich environment that many people can relate to, but there is no shortage of other examples.
It's not possible to distinguish "knowledge" and "belief" in the way that you suggest
Agree, also re 'true' belief. Although that particular definition seems weak.
The distinction I think you're trying to make is one of justification, rather than belief
Perhaps. Some propositions, I can, in principle, test by verifying their justifications, reproducing any observations and experiments from which they were infered.
Some other propositions I cannot test, even in principle, because their justifications cannot be tested. They must either be take them as true, or rejected.
It seems that for many people, once a propositions that cannot be tested has been taken as true, it cannot easily be changed, whereas beliefs that can be tested may be discarded when their justfications are eliminated.
I personally place much more value on facts/propositions that can be verified than on those that cannot. This is not to say that I don't respect others who place value differently, just that doing so does not appeal to my particular conciousness. I must have strong justification before I promote a proposition from 'idea' to 'tentative belief', and so far nothing has made it past that point to 'firm belief'
I would agree with Feyerabend's assertion that science should be placed in the same catagory as religions. It is certainly a more elegant arrangment, and that does appeal to me.
I agree re. the engineering behind ICE's. Thats why my money is on the combo of hybrid diesel electric. Two technologies with lots of engineering behind them that can work better together.
I'd really like to see a hybrid sterling electric. The biggest problem with sterling powered cars was the start-up time (it takes a sterling engine a while to get going), this would not be much of an issue in an electric hybrid.
What they heck are you using to print them?
Why, monks of course. The turnaround is abysmal, but the illistrations are worth it!
I find it extremely hard to believe that they can afford IBM Thinkpads, but not manage to get dead tree books.
Evidently they have the money, but the books are sold out. At least they can't run out of eBooks.
Hear hear. Thats what Post-Its are for.
What makes you think laptops have to be more fragile than books?
As the market for them gets bigger some ruggedized designs will appear that bring the price down and the longevity up. I wouldn't be surprised to see a laptop last 5-10 years with no problem.
Why bother with books? Lets give the students little chalkboards and have the copy the lessons off a big board up front that the teacher can write on.
Or heck, lets throw out all that stuff and just have them memorize everything.
These schools are early adoptors, and they will suffer a bit for it. Eventually some company is going to recognize the market for cheap, rugged laptops with very homogenous hardware that are very well suited for early education, and then we'll start seeing more success in this area.
Referbs are nice when you are supplying a couple laptops for your kids, but if you have to be able to maintain drivers and updates for an army of 500 munchkins each with different hardware, twice the price is worth only needing one or two different sets of drivers.
I've tried reading ebooks on a laptop and it's just plain uncomfortable for any long duration. I haven't been to cost justify one yet, but a tablet pc might be better.
I've used a couple of tablet PC's, and while they are cool, they have inferiour screen quality. I'm guessing this is because of both the requirement for touchscreen capability and because they have to be more rugged (The screen is exposed and can't be folded down for protection during transport).
They are definately cool, but they would also be much less suitable for reading text.
Besides that, with some of the subpixel rendering stuff I see on these new laptops, I'm astonished at the text quality. I'd rather have a nice WXUGA (or whatever alphabet soup means 'really honking high resolution' nowdays), than a nice 19" CRT.
I'd be more interested in using it as environment space.
I want my nice 19" full color display in front of me, then I want to put on one of these and with a head position sensor, so that I can have the area around me be an extended destop visible only in monochrome. I could leave windows lying all around outside the bounds of my monitor.
Bonus perihiperial, some kind of machine vision system that will let me slide those windows around using my hands.
rumor has it that biodiesel takes more real fossil fuels to make than it yeilds. That is, we'd be better off putting the fossildiesel into consumer vehicles instead of using it to farm stuff that has to be distilled into biodiesel that then has to be trucked out to distribution points.
I dunno if its true, but I can see how it would be hard to judge.
I'd sure agree that its not linear, but more money does mean faster research, particularly during experimentation.
Sure, you can't get a researcher to think harder by paying him more, but you can sure use more money to remove other bottlenecks.
The problem with calling science, "the latest and best refinement of the method by which we gain knowledge about the world around us", is that it falsely assumes that there is one single such method.
Perhaps 'method' implies more than what I mean. I don't believe that there is some specific flowchart that defines how one should go about the discovery and learning process. The 'scientific method' is a much more general guide than that. It incorporates not only observation and theorization, but prediction and experimentation.
It also includes a principle of seperation of knowledge from ones belief system. Scientific knowledge is never 100% certain and should never be treated as if it is (although questioning well-established natural laws without some inkling as to a failure mode is not terribly poductive). This is as opposed to beliefs such as religion, which tend to be founded in faith, a system wherein knowledge is 100% certain because one feels that it is correct. The purpose of this seperation is to allow for corrections and additions without the need to attack someones religious beliefs, so that progress can be more rapid and less bloody.
It also begs the question as to how we determined that the method was the best in the first place
That requires first defining the criteria by which the methods are judged. There are many, and different people have different sets by which they make judgements. I place much emphasis on the predictive power and ability of the generated knowledge to create new technology. Someone with values radicly different from my own might find a method of discovering knowledge that centers around their religion to be better.
Thanks for the discussion.
Well, if you had the same budget that was used to get to the moon, it probably wouldn't be a problem.
The problem is that there just aren't enough people with that magnitude of resources who take this seriously.
I say we keep driving H2's and melt the sucker out.
If it does have a little plaque, I hope it says at the bottom "ca. 5000 B.C."
I wonder if anyone is working on that problem? Designing software that can take a scanned sketch and turn it into a draft 3D image?