Most of the comments attacking the paper attack IQ tests.
Now, go back and reread the original topic. Where does the term IQ appear? That's right, it doesn't. It's encapsulated in the phrase "number of intelligence metrics"... and the other metrics used completely defeat all the IQ-related attacks on the researchers' methodology. How many of you honestly believe that the higher IQ test results of Ashkenazi Jews, and the amazing number of Nobel Prizes they've earned, don't have a common cause? And Nobel Prizes aren't a specially chosen statistical fluke; there are TONS of other metrics of high achievement where Ashkenazi Jews are massively overrepresented.
Now, of course, that common cause doesn't have to be genetics; culture matters too. That's where the details of the research paper, and in particular, the prediction it makes, come into play. Consider several thousand Jewish families where one sibling is a heterozygous carrier of one of the sphingolipid diseases, and one isn't. Culture is statistically equalized. Random genetic variation is statistically equalized. If the carrier siblings prove to have significantly higher IQs than the non-carrier siblings, the only plausible explanation is the effect of the gene.
If IQ tests are just dependent on culture and randomness, the probability of the paper's prediction coming true is astronomically low. Thus, if the prediction does come true, you have to conclude that IQ is measuring something else as well, and that this other thing is affected by genetics. Good luck trying to argue that this other thing isn't highly correlated with intelligence, especially given that these diseases all affect neural growth.
The era of plausible deniability of genetically based group differences in intelligence is about to end. Fasten your seat belts.
While I have sympathy for your position, the unfortunate reality is that if you evade competition, you will be marginalized. Unified China, the most powerful nation for much of the previous two millennia, ended up being marginalized by the dynamic West. Europe, weary from two World Wars, became a bit too socialistic for its own good and is now in danger of being marginalized by a resurgent east Asia.
Withdrawing from the international competition is a perfectly legitimate choice for any individual. However, we cannot withdraw our entire society, if we wish for it not to be marginalized.
At least for the moment, it generally takes a significant organization to plot a terrorist act. Therefore, we deter on the organization level; suicide bombers do not ruin this. The point is that cameras, Echelon, etc. form our primary defense, not the ridiculous TSA. How effective was the Maginot Line? A wise attacker rarely fights on your terms.
When technology gets to the point where a lone rogue biologist can wipe out the population of an entire continent, ubiquitous cameras might be the only possible defense.
How do we reduce the frequency of arson? Not purely by making it physically impossible, that's for sure. Instead, law enforcement derives its effectiveness by being able to identify the criminal(s) and bring them to justice. For the most part fireproofing is designed just to prevent accidental fires.
Terrorists can attack just about anything; airplanes are just one fairly juicy target among many. Trying to prevent terrorist activities with the TSA is akin to trying to prevent arson by forcing every building in the US to adhere to extremely rigorous fireproofing standards -- a ridiculously expensive measure that, pathetically, still doesn't do all that much to achieve its objective (any fixed set of standards still has a weakest point against which an attack is still probably realistic). Instead, the solutions lie in the direction of Brin's Transparent Society, with the NSA being the stopgap we currently have available.
I cannot believe no prominent politician understands this.
The problem with such an approach is that it assumes "we" have a monopoly on R&D.
Unless we have the power to prevent anyone else from developing whatever we consider forbidden, and we are willing to use that power, we will merely delay development, and we'll eventually fall victim to "If we outlaw X, only criminals will have X".
As a Caltech alum, I'll certainly say that it was a very good value (especially if you make the most of the available opportunities; regrettably, I was not mature enough at the time to do so). However, UC Berkeley is practically unique as far as standard in-state tuition vs. quality of undergraduate education goes. They must have ranked Berkeley 40th because of lack of financial aid or something, totally missing the point.
Don't have any mod points right now, otherwise I'd mod this up.
As a rule of thumb, freedom should be maximized -- but there are specific freedoms which promote societal degeneracy, and the Opium War provides an excellent example. So, some sort of line does need to be drawn, and it's not obvious where.
Enforcement problems further complicate things. (Privacy is one particularly hot topic here.)
If someone uses a gun to commit a crime, there is a fair probability they will be caught. The more effective a society is at catching illegal uses of guns after the fact, the fewer restrictions it needs to impose on guns before the fact. Though it should be mentioned that even if we have perfect after-the-fact enforcement, some restrictions on guns should remain thanks to the irreversibility of murder.
The difficulty of tracking down acts of copyright infringement, combined with the suddenly huge frequency of such acts thanks to the popularization of the Internet, creates a problem. While any individual act of copyright infringement is practically harmless, when they occur in the millions they can unfairly hurt producers of content.
There are two categories of approaches to deal with this, both of which should be employed to some degree.
One is to ask everyone to "think outside the box" and adapt their business models to the new reality of effectively zero cost of data duplication. In the long run, this should be done in as many contexts as possible. However, the transition is not always easy, if possible at all. In the cases where it is difficult or not possible, it needs to be decided whether the old class of business model should still be kept around for the time being. While some zealots would deny it, the truth of the matter is that sometimes the answer to this last question is "yes".
That's where the second type of approach comes in to play. Put restrictions on the tools that change what would be tens or hundreds of copyright infringements into millions of them, in a manner that's otherwise minimally disruptive. This is not a simple thing to do. The DMCA was the first attempt, and frankly I don't think it was that bad of an attempt, but clearly it could be improved. We need to find ways to let it do its job while constantly brainstorming ideas to better achieve "minimal disruption", and help society evolve to the point where few business models still need to be protected. We need to ensure that this law, in the long run, "withers away", rather than let it be like most real life Communist regimes which do not speak highly of Marx's ability to predict history.
What we shouldn't do is retreat into a hole and ignore the problem entirely.
This argument doesn't work, for the simple reason that murder and rape are easy to penalize after the fact, while copyright infringement goes unpenalized far more often than not.
If 95+% of murderers and rapists never had to deal with legal consequences afterwards, and as a result there were millions of them, ANY sort of "technological solution" that gives law enforcement a reasonable chance, even at a significant cost to freedom, would be worth considering, because even more freedom is lost if everyone has to worry about murder and rape in their day-to-day lives.
Now, the consequences of being unable to enforce copyrights aren't as grave as that of being unable to deter murder and rape. But nevertheless there are consequences, and all other things being equal it would be good to have more effective copyright enforcement. The question is how to achieve this at least cost.
I don't think I've heard a great answer to this question yet. Ridiculous as enforcing a barrier between the analog and the digital may be, at least the guys are trying. What we should do is try to come up with better ideas, rather than dismissing the valid goal.
> When that type of copying becomes easy, the > equation changes. HARM_TO_PUBLIC from > restricting copying is suddenly a lot higher > (because the artificial monopoly is now the > primary barrier to the public). > BENEFIT_TO_PUBLIC of maintaining restrictions > may also be lower, to the extent that > publishers are no longer the only entities > technically capable of keeping works in > circulation. The existing restriction may thus > be too strong for the new situation, even if > it was perfectly balanced for the old one.
You miss what is by far the most important term in the BENEFIT_TO_PUBLIC part of the equation: incentive for certain kinds of innovation.
Which, incidentally, has a tendency to perfectly offset any increases in the HARM_TO_PUBLIC part of the equation due to greater ease of copying.
There isn't really any way around the fact that copyright needs to be effectively enforced to maintain incentive in certain fields. Notice that I qualify my statements, though; "certain kinds of innovation", "certain fields". In some cases, a pervasive "open source"-style model manages to yield the best results for the public in both the short and long term. The nontrivial question is, what are those cases, and what aren't? And will the law prove to be flexible enough to accomodate both situations?
Viewed in this light, the DMCA is not that flawed for the reasons most people give. If you don't have an anti-circumvention law, those trying to protect their products from mass piracy must engage in a copy protection arms race that results in less convenience for users. (Even with the DMCA, they still need to, but not as much as they would otherwise in the long run.) The greater degree of inconvenience that must be imposed provides a competitive advantage to those who don't care if their products are copied; while this is generally viewed as a Good Thing at a place like Slashdot, this ruins any benefit that enforced copyright would provide.
So, again, the real question is, where is enforced copyright beneficial to society? I claim that if the DMCA is flawed, it is because it enforces copyright in contexts where society is better off without copyright at all. (Incidentally, this is orthogonal to the issue of constitutionality. I'm asking here whether the DMCA is a positive utility law to have around, not whether the DMCA is a "legal law".) Music might be one of these cases.
> So I won't encourage mistakes that risk damage > to life and limb. But every other mistake that > my child is about to walk into, I want as much > as possible to stop myself from jumping in and > rescuing them. That way they get an > oppurtunity to recognize when they're walking > into problems.
...to life and LIMB.
You just killed your own argument.
Why aren't you willing to risk your children's limbs? Because that's permanent damage that will stick with them for their entire life that they almost certainly won't be able to do anything about in the future. Unlike the other setbacks of childhood, which are temporary.
In both cases, the child can learn from the setback, but in the former case they generally lose more than they gain.
Well, guess what. Genetic screening, for the most part, ONLY deals with permanent issues. Some of which are more crippling than limb damage.
So, if you're not inclined to risk your child's limbs, you have something to gain from genetic screening.
> Tread softly, you're walking down a dangerous > path. If genetic diversity is considered an > absolute "good" the next logical step is to be > against inter-racial reproduction. It causes > the same result, though it decreases genetic > elitism.
On the contrary, interracial reproduction vastly increases genetic diversity, as long as it is sufficiently randomized. The best result (from a diversity standpoint) is something resembling a continuum.
That said, it is worth noting that increased interracial reproduction accelerates natural selection (by providing more variance, that critical raw material for selection to operate on), and one consequence of this is that "obsolete" genes could decrease in frequency more quickly. But frankly, I think all the real downsides will be mitigated far before they could possibly be relevant.
The notion of designer babies is a potential major threat to diversity, however. If they become sufficiently widespread, genetic diversity will needed to be consciously managed on a global (well, hopefully multi-global, but sadly I don't see large-scale colonization of other bodies in the solar system occurring before widespread designer babies) level. Hopefully this can be done with a few minimally intrusive/disruptive policies.
> You know, police the crime, not the tools? Old fashioned notion, I know.
Unfortunately, it isn't that simple.
Let's say that destructive technology developed to the point where a single nondescript person could assemble a device to annihilate all human life within a two thousand kilometer radius, and activate it remotely.
Presumably most or even all of the chemicals/equipment required to assemble the device have household uses. Does this mean these tools shouldn't be controlled? And very very tightly, to boot?
This is an extreme case, but it's meant to illustrate the point that sometimes an ideal isn't applicable to real life, because a condition it requires breaks down. The Ideal Gas Law is an approximation based on statistics and requires a large number of gas-state molecules and large spaces between them to be reliable. Your Ideal Crime Law needs individual crimes to not be overly destructive and after-the-fact punishment to be sufficiently powerful and/or consistent, such that rational people won't commit crimes and irrational people won't do too much harm with any crimes they do commit. In the above example, the Law breaks down because an individual crime is overly destructive; no punishment could possibly fit the crime (especially if all people involved were killed in the process of the crime; then no punishment can be administered at all!).
So where does it break down in the Blizzard/bnetd case?
If you try to go after individual servers, but it's difficult to consistently stick the operators with tough punishments, they will keep popping up everywhere and someone who pirates Warcraft III can fully expect to be able to play random multiplayer games at all times utilizing the rogue servers that are standing at any given time. The battle is then lost; the Law has broken down, and the law is unenforceable via "policing the crime, not the tools". Anything distributed can create the conditions for the Law to fail, because they prevent after-the-fact punishment from being effective, as there are too many indistinguishable targets. The "open source" aspect isn't even critical here, a few widely distributed non-crippled binaries do the job nearly as well.
Now, in some sense it isn't that bad if the Law fails a bit, if for some reason people don't tend to exploit it. But as we all know, there is a fairly large segment of the game market that will buy a game if and only if they need to buy it to get the gameplay they want out of it. I'll admit it: I used to be part of this segment.
So, to conclude, I think your "police the crime, not the tools" rhetoric is empty. Blizzard is behaving in a reasonable manner here, because they know that policing the crime in the manner you suggest cannot be expected to be effective in the long run.
Your principle, stamping out violence and hate in the world by resisting your own impulses of that nature, and thus theoretically shunting a feedback cycle, is noble.
Alas, applying a theory without fully understanding its context can be just as fatal in the social sciences as it is in the "hard" sciences.
The question is, is the primary dynamic here a feedback cycle of violence and hate? Or are there other factors here we have to pay attention to? Some groups can be appeased effectively and a reasonable or even highly mutually beneficial coexistence can be arranged. Others cannot be, and either us or them will end up exterminated. Anyone who says that all cases are of one type are ignorant of history.
So, the question becomes, what sort of enemy are these terrorists? I would argue the latter, and I'm prepared to back it up. But it would be pointless for me to do so before you're willing to admit that a determination needs to be made in the first place.
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.
That said, I've heard of this "Apple Computer" company which markets a different OS that supports MS Office...
Re:MS Tactic to end reverse-engineering?
on
Shared Source?
·
· Score: 1
int main (){
make_app_look_really_big (active_application);
if (check_crashed = 0) \\ if we haven't crashed
bluescreen (rand);
Methinks there should be a double-equals here. Update Wine as necessary.
Hmmm... your sentence does not compute. You have a double negative in there so what you are really saying is:
As far as I can see, his position is that programmers should have the freedom to speak (release their code); he then says that this is standing up for freedom.
The sentence did compute, and it meant something very different from what you transformed it to.
Of course, that doesn't mean it was correct; but your post is even less correct than the post you replied to.
I independently thought of the same thing just a few minutes ago.
The personal motivation to get insurance is to do everything possible to eliminate the scary low end of the probability distribution of possible futures. Taking a genetic test an insurance company has access to has the opposite effect, once the results of the test are known, you're either a bit better off, or you're really screwed and STUCK at the low end! This is precisely the sort of thing where there is a demand for insurance.
If genetic testing results are available to people, and not the insurance companies, the insurance companies will no longer have the odds in their favor in some situations, and more importantly, only the people will know where that is the case. When large numbers of people start restricting their bets to where the expected return is positive, the insurance companies are in deep deep trouble, and they get forced into the extremely bad position of having a vital interest in the mathematical illiteracy of the American population.
That's because you couldn't carry out the genetic test either. Thus your information wasn't any better than the insurance companies'.
Once you can obtain personal genetic test results, and the insurance companies cannot use them, your information is superior, and you can extract a profit from this. If enough people do this (and trust me, they will, if America's history is any guide), the insurance companies are doomed, or at least will be forced to subsidize the exploiters with higher premiums across the board on everyone else. Is that what we want?
Last time I checked, they still tend to charge women lower auto insurance premiums.
What do you think insurance is? If I have a 0% chance of being afflicted with something later in life, I don't need insurance for that. If I have a 1% chance, I might pay a small amount for insurance. 10%, I'd be willing to pay more, and I'd care more about the quality of coverage. And I SHOULD pay more, since the expected cost for the insurer is greater. Anything else would be a government subsidy.
Now, a public health system is not necessarily a bad thing. But understand that as long as we're sticking to private health insurance, premiums will vary based on expected outlay; anything else goes against free market principles.
Kenneth Arrow's famous "Impossibility Theorem" (1951) showed, among other things, that there is no "perfect" voting system. Thus, we must choose the system we use based on empirical considerations. Even a cursory look at the Borda count reveals that it is a DANGEROUS system that forces individuals to make distinctions which are irrelevant to them; but these "irrelevant" distinctions could very well decide the election.
What am I talking about? Let's say John Q. Voter wants Bush to be in office. It's a no-brainer for him to put Bush as first preference... and Gore as last preference. Anything else, and he's throwing away part or all of his vote!! What about the other candidates? They will be randomly ordered in the middle, with any other candidates he fears might win the election put near the bottom.
One cannot expect "principle" to win out here and stabilize the results. The results from our existing system are proof enough that the majority of people do not like to waste their votes. You can not safely assume that people will be stupid and rank Bush 1st and Gore 2nd, especially after the first such election (which I guess could be a sort of "party IQ test"...). 45 percent will rank candidate A first and candidate B last, 45 percent will rank candidate B first and candidate A last. Now, the election will be decided by the random noise of intermediate rankings of the mainstream voters, and the divided outlier 10 percent. Methinks "random noise" wins the day. The voting population obviously won't like "random noise", but they're forced, in very large numbers, to make the decision between supporting their choice's opponent, or accepting a microscopically increased risk of a random winner. This sort of thing is much worse than what we have now!
I find "approval voting" a much more practical (and conveniently, simple) system, though it may not be the best; I leave it an exercise to the reader to observe it poses none of the major risks and discomfort associated with popular Borda count.
The question on economics is a question on viable distributed systems. (This is probably an abuse of the phrase "distributed system(s)", but I think my meaning is clear.)
The economics of the market is a concern if it is the only system we can sustain. This is not a matter that can be dismissed; ideal communism showed promise as an organizing mechanism for productivity potentially more moral and more effective than capitalism, but eventually failed spectacularly, as motivating unifying factors like World War II (for the Russians) faded into the background and the grudging day-to-day reality of life in a centrally planned universe set in. Then, psychic rewards for contributing were no longer sufficient for the system as a whole to be superior to a mixed market economy. If we want to dismiss market economic concerns for a greater good, we need a workable, durable alternative framework, and constructing one is essentially equivalent to succeeding where communism failed.
ESR's Homesteading the Noosphere looks in the right direction, analyzing current open source culture as a gift economy, and looking at precedents. If this sort of work can be extended and put into practice on ever-larger scales, we have the best chance of reconciling individual freedom and total productivity. There are non-trivial problems to be solved; not the least of which is getting the population as a whole to voluntarily subscribe to open source culture notions of reputation, and essentially dismiss selfish materialism, which the market economy so effectively harnesses. But I seriously hope that these problems can be solved, because on the positive side we have already built a sizable culture which does operate under these principles, and on the negative side we will have to subordinate individual freedom to market economics if we cannot creatively solve these problems.
Back in the 1930's, most economists blindly subscribed to notions like the importance of a balanced budget at all times, and essentially thought of economics in passive terms. John Maynard Keynes was an exception; he saw the unnecessary misery which was the Depression, took the approach "how can I exploit the 'physics' of the system to remedy the situation?", saw what governments could do with properly timed deficit spending, and got it implemented. (FDR was not the most willing implementor, straying from Keynes' principle in ~1937-38 and thereby causing another economic dip... but WWII (somewhat involuntarily) caused the implementation of Keynes' principles to the extreme, with appropriate results.) We must take a similar aggressive constructive approach, understanding on a much deeper level the 'physics' necessary to make a large-scale gift economy or something similar work.
Re: Inf + 1 is still Inf... I think Bill Joy has a point re: nanomachines being a fundamental new danger for humanity. It's a question of scale. Even one nuclear weapon is quite difficult for a single pissed-off individual to obtain, and when detonated, will only damage a limited area. You actually need a reasonably large organization to achieve total destruction of humanity; and there is a gap between the largest feasible cult size with a sufficiently nihilistic philosophy, and the smallest number of people you need working together to engineer nuclear Armageddon. Instead, the only real threat so far has been from pre-existing large organizations (specifically, the U.S. and former U.S.S.R.) possibly willing to use their nuclear arsenals in war (if they aren't there to be used in any circumstance, why do they exist?). Nanomachines and biotechnology are a different story. Only ONE person needs to design ONE prototype to exploit ONE vulnerability in human biology. Program/design the prototype to wait until a specific time to attack, when copies of it can be expected to have spread to almost all inhabited areas, and when it finally strikes, everyone will be dead too quickly to mount an effective response. There is no 'edge to the offensive or defensive' here. If we fail to defend ONCE, it could be the near-instantaneous death of all human life on Earth. There is a quote from the Ender trilogy about the scientists having "a series of footraces" with the descolada virus, where they had to win every single one. It's the same sort of logic here. As a side note, Joy's question to Merkle, "Do you think biological weaponry gives an advantage to the offensive or defensive", brings up another relevant point, which Merkle unfortunately seemed to miss. The point being, that there used to be no dangerous "offensive" or "defensive" to speak about in the first place. Bacteria, virii, etc. may be annoying, but they only adapt under evolutionary forces; medical science has been advancing fast enough to keep ahead of them, and I expect it to continue doing so. Because evolution is blind. Biological weaponry opens a NEW FRONT where formerly none existed, and the defense used to win by default. And the offense only needs to find one vulnerability to overpower the defense on this front. To block off even trivial vulnerabilities on this front, everyone would need to spend most of their time in sealed suits, which is not practical even for the military. But at least biological weapons are still constrained by matters of scale as well; Aum Shinrikyo could attack a Tokyo subway station, but it couldn't suddenly blanket all of Japan with sarin.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the comments attacking the paper attack IQ tests.
Now, go back and reread the original topic. Where does the term IQ appear? That's right, it doesn't. It's encapsulated in the phrase "number of intelligence metrics"... and the other metrics used completely defeat all the IQ-related attacks on the researchers' methodology. How many of you honestly believe that the higher IQ test results of Ashkenazi Jews, and the amazing number of Nobel Prizes they've earned, don't have a common cause? And Nobel Prizes aren't a specially chosen statistical fluke; there are TONS of other metrics of high achievement where Ashkenazi Jews are massively overrepresented.
Now, of course, that common cause doesn't have to be genetics; culture matters too. That's where the details of the research paper, and in particular, the prediction it makes, come into play. Consider several thousand Jewish families where one sibling is a heterozygous carrier of one of the sphingolipid diseases, and one isn't. Culture is statistically equalized. Random genetic variation is statistically equalized. If the carrier siblings prove to have significantly higher IQs than the non-carrier siblings, the only plausible explanation is the effect of the gene.
If IQ tests are just dependent on culture and randomness, the probability of the paper's prediction coming true is astronomically low. Thus, if the prediction does come true, you have to conclude that IQ is measuring something else as well, and that this other thing is affected by genetics. Good luck trying to argue that this other thing isn't highly correlated with intelligence, especially given that these diseases all affect neural growth.
The era of plausible deniability of genetically based group differences in intelligence is about to end. Fasten your seat belts.
While I have sympathy for your position, the unfortunate reality is that if you evade competition, you will be marginalized. Unified China, the most powerful nation for much of the previous two millennia, ended up being marginalized by the dynamic West. Europe, weary from two World Wars, became a bit too socialistic for its own good and is now in danger of being marginalized by a resurgent east Asia.
Withdrawing from the international competition is a perfectly legitimate choice for any individual. However, we cannot withdraw our entire society, if we wish for it not to be marginalized.
At least for the moment, it generally takes a significant organization to plot a terrorist act. Therefore, we deter on the organization level; suicide bombers do not ruin this. The point is that cameras, Echelon, etc. form our primary defense, not the ridiculous TSA. How effective was the Maginot Line? A wise attacker rarely fights on your terms.
When technology gets to the point where a lone rogue biologist can wipe out the population of an entire continent, ubiquitous cameras might be the only possible defense.
How do we reduce the frequency of arson? Not purely by making it physically impossible, that's for sure. Instead, law enforcement derives its effectiveness by being able to identify the criminal(s) and bring them to justice. For the most part fireproofing is designed just to prevent accidental fires.
Terrorists can attack just about anything; airplanes are just one fairly juicy target among many. Trying to prevent terrorist activities with the TSA is akin to trying to prevent arson by forcing every building in the US to adhere to extremely rigorous fireproofing standards -- a ridiculously expensive measure that, pathetically, still doesn't do all that much to achieve its objective (any fixed set of standards still has a weakest point against which an attack is still probably realistic). Instead, the solutions lie in the direction of Brin's Transparent Society, with the NSA being the stopgap we currently have available.
I cannot believe no prominent politician understands this.
I don't buy the population pressure rationale. It will be cheaper to build underground cities than to build space bubbles on Mars.
The problem with such an approach is that it assumes "we" have a monopoly on R&D.
Unless we have the power to prevent anyone else from developing whatever we consider forbidden, and we are willing to use that power, we will merely delay development, and we'll eventually fall victim to "If we outlaw X, only criminals will have X".
Yes, that makes zero sense to me.
As a Caltech alum, I'll certainly say that it was a very good value (especially if you make the most of the available opportunities; regrettably, I was not mature enough at the time to do so). However, UC Berkeley is practically unique as far as standard in-state tuition vs. quality of undergraduate education goes. They must have ranked Berkeley 40th because of lack of financial aid or something, totally missing the point.
Don't have any mod points right now, otherwise I'd mod this up.
As a rule of thumb, freedom should be maximized -- but there are specific freedoms which promote societal degeneracy, and the Opium War provides an excellent example. So, some sort of line does need to be drawn, and it's not obvious where.
Enforcement problems further complicate things. (Privacy is one particularly hot topic here.)
The problem is one of enforcement.
If someone uses a gun to commit a crime, there is a fair probability they will be caught. The more effective a society is at catching illegal uses of guns after the fact, the fewer restrictions it needs to impose on guns before the fact. Though it should be mentioned that even if we have perfect after-the-fact enforcement, some restrictions on guns should remain thanks to the irreversibility of murder.
The difficulty of tracking down acts of copyright infringement, combined with the suddenly huge frequency of such acts thanks to the popularization of the Internet, creates a problem. While any individual act of copyright infringement is practically harmless, when they occur in the millions they can unfairly hurt producers of content.
There are two categories of approaches to deal with this, both of which should be employed to some degree.
One is to ask everyone to "think outside the box" and adapt their business models to the new reality of effectively zero cost of data duplication. In the long run, this should be done in as many contexts as possible. However, the transition is not always easy, if possible at all. In the cases where it is difficult or not possible, it needs to be decided whether the old class of business model should still be kept around for the time being. While some zealots would deny it, the truth of the matter is that sometimes the answer to this last question is "yes".
That's where the second type of approach comes in to play. Put restrictions on the tools that change what would be tens or hundreds of copyright infringements into millions of them, in a manner that's otherwise minimally disruptive. This is not a simple thing to do. The DMCA was the first attempt, and frankly I don't think it was that bad of an attempt, but clearly it could be improved. We need to find ways to let it do its job while constantly brainstorming ideas to better achieve "minimal disruption", and help society evolve to the point where few business models still need to be protected. We need to ensure that this law, in the long run, "withers away", rather than let it be like most real life Communist regimes which do not speak highly of Marx's ability to predict history.
What we shouldn't do is retreat into a hole and ignore the problem entirely.
This argument doesn't work, for the simple reason that murder and rape are easy to penalize after the fact, while copyright infringement goes unpenalized far more often than not.
If 95+% of murderers and rapists never had to deal with legal consequences afterwards, and as a result there were millions of them, ANY sort of "technological solution" that gives law enforcement a reasonable chance, even at a significant cost to freedom, would be worth considering, because even more freedom is lost if everyone has to worry about murder and rape in their day-to-day lives.
Now, the consequences of being unable to enforce copyrights aren't as grave as that of being unable to deter murder and rape. But nevertheless there are consequences, and all other things being equal it would be good to have more effective copyright enforcement. The question is how to achieve this at least cost.
I don't think I've heard a great answer to this question yet. Ridiculous as enforcing a barrier between the analog and the digital may be, at least the guys are trying. What we should do is try to come up with better ideas, rather than dismissing the valid goal.
> When that type of copying becomes easy, the
> equation changes. HARM_TO_PUBLIC from
> restricting copying is suddenly a lot higher
> (because the artificial monopoly is now the
> primary barrier to the public).
> BENEFIT_TO_PUBLIC of maintaining restrictions
> may also be lower, to the extent that
> publishers are no longer the only entities
> technically capable of keeping works in
> circulation. The existing restriction may thus
> be too strong for the new situation, even if
> it was perfectly balanced for the old one.
You miss what is by far the most important term in the BENEFIT_TO_PUBLIC part of the equation: incentive for certain kinds of innovation.
Which, incidentally, has a tendency to perfectly offset any increases in the HARM_TO_PUBLIC part of the equation due to greater ease of copying.
There isn't really any way around the fact that copyright needs to be effectively enforced to maintain incentive in certain fields. Notice that I qualify my statements, though; "certain kinds of innovation", "certain fields". In some cases, a pervasive "open source"-style model manages to yield the best results for the public in both the short and long term. The nontrivial question is, what are those cases, and what aren't? And will the law prove to be flexible enough to accomodate both situations?
Viewed in this light, the DMCA is not that flawed for the reasons most people give. If you don't have an anti-circumvention law, those trying to protect their products from mass piracy must engage in a copy protection arms race that results in less convenience for users. (Even with the DMCA, they still need to, but not as much as they would otherwise in the long run.) The greater degree of inconvenience that must be imposed provides a competitive advantage to those who don't care if their products are copied; while this is generally viewed as a Good Thing at a place like Slashdot, this ruins any benefit that enforced copyright would provide.
So, again, the real question is, where is enforced copyright beneficial to society? I claim that if the DMCA is flawed, it is because it enforces copyright in contexts where society is better off without copyright at all. (Incidentally, this is orthogonal to the issue of constitutionality. I'm asking here whether the DMCA is a positive utility law to have around, not whether the DMCA is a "legal law".) Music might be one of these cases.
> So I won't encourage mistakes that risk damage
> to life and limb. But every other mistake that
> my child is about to walk into, I want as much
> as possible to stop myself from jumping in and
> rescuing them. That way they get an
> oppurtunity to recognize when they're walking
> into problems.
...to life and LIMB.
You just killed your own argument.
Why aren't you willing to risk your children's limbs? Because that's permanent damage that will stick with them for their entire life that they almost certainly won't be able to do anything about in the future. Unlike the other setbacks of childhood, which are temporary.
In both cases, the child can learn from the setback, but in the former case they generally lose more than they gain.
Well, guess what. Genetic screening, for the most part, ONLY deals with permanent issues. Some of which are more crippling than limb damage.
So, if you're not inclined to risk your child's limbs, you have something to gain from genetic screening.
> Tread softly, you're walking down a dangerous
> path. If genetic diversity is considered an
> absolute "good" the next logical step is to be
> against inter-racial reproduction. It causes
> the same result, though it decreases genetic
> elitism.
On the contrary, interracial reproduction vastly increases genetic diversity, as long as it is sufficiently randomized. The best result (from a diversity standpoint) is something resembling a continuum.
That said, it is worth noting that increased interracial reproduction accelerates natural selection (by providing more variance, that critical raw material for selection to operate on), and one consequence of this is that "obsolete" genes could decrease in frequency more quickly. But frankly, I think all the real downsides will be mitigated far before they could possibly be relevant.
The notion of designer babies is a potential major threat to diversity, however. If they become sufficiently widespread, genetic diversity will needed to be consciously managed on a global (well, hopefully multi-global, but sadly I don't see large-scale colonization of other bodies in the solar system occurring before widespread designer babies) level. Hopefully this can be done with a few minimally intrusive/disruptive policies.
> You know, police the crime, not the tools? Old fashioned notion, I know.
Unfortunately, it isn't that simple.
Let's say that destructive technology developed to the point where a single nondescript person could assemble a device to annihilate all human life within a two thousand kilometer radius, and activate it remotely.
Presumably most or even all of the chemicals/equipment required to assemble the device have household uses. Does this mean these tools shouldn't be controlled? And very very tightly, to boot?
This is an extreme case, but it's meant to illustrate the point that sometimes an ideal isn't applicable to real life, because a condition it requires breaks down. The Ideal Gas Law is an approximation based on statistics and requires a large number of gas-state molecules and large spaces between them to be reliable. Your Ideal Crime Law needs individual crimes to not be overly destructive and after-the-fact punishment to be sufficiently powerful and/or consistent, such that rational people won't commit crimes and irrational people won't do too much harm with any crimes they do commit. In the above example, the Law breaks down because an individual crime is overly destructive; no punishment could possibly fit the crime (especially if all people involved were killed in the process of the crime; then no punishment can be administered at all!).
So where does it break down in the Blizzard/bnetd case?
If you try to go after individual servers, but it's difficult to consistently stick the operators with tough punishments, they will keep popping up everywhere and someone who pirates Warcraft III can fully expect to be able to play random multiplayer games at all times utilizing the rogue servers that are standing at any given time. The battle is then lost; the Law has broken down, and the law is unenforceable via "policing the crime, not the tools". Anything distributed can create the conditions for the Law to fail, because they prevent after-the-fact punishment from being effective, as there are too many indistinguishable targets. The "open source" aspect isn't even critical here, a few widely distributed non-crippled binaries do the job nearly as well.
Now, in some sense it isn't that bad if the Law fails a bit, if for some reason people don't tend to exploit it. But as we all know, there is a fairly large segment of the game market that will buy a game if and only if they need to buy it to get the gameplay they want out of it. I'll admit it: I used to be part of this segment.
So, to conclude, I think your "police the crime, not the tools" rhetoric is empty. Blizzard is behaving in a reasonable manner here, because they know that policing the crime in the manner you suggest cannot be expected to be effective in the long run.
Your principle, stamping out violence and hate in the world by resisting your own impulses of that nature, and thus theoretically shunting a feedback cycle, is noble.
Alas, applying a theory without fully understanding its context can be just as fatal in the social sciences as it is in the "hard" sciences.
The question is, is the primary dynamic here a feedback cycle of violence and hate? Or are there other factors here we have to pay attention to? Some groups can be appeased effectively and a reasonable or even highly mutually beneficial coexistence can be arranged. Others cannot be, and either us or them will end up exterminated. Anyone who says that all cases are of one type are ignorant of history.
So, the question becomes, what sort of enemy are these terrorists? I would argue the latter, and I'm prepared to back it up. But it would be pointless for me to do so before you're willing to admit that a determination needs to be made in the first place.
-- Dog of Justice. *waves at rossz*
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft. That said, I've heard of this "Apple Computer" company which markets a different OS that supports MS Office...
int main (){ make_app_look_really_big (active_application); if (check_crashed = 0) \\ if we haven't crashed bluescreen (rand); Methinks there should be a double-equals here. Update Wine as necessary.
The sentence did compute, and it meant something very different from what you transformed it to.
Of course, that doesn't mean it was correct; but your post is even less correct than the post you replied to.
I independently thought of the same thing just a few minutes ago.
The personal motivation to get insurance is to do everything possible to eliminate the scary low end of the probability distribution of possible futures. Taking a genetic test an insurance company has access to has the opposite effect, once the results of the test are known, you're either a bit better off, or you're really screwed and STUCK at the low end! This is precisely the sort of thing where there is a demand for insurance.
If genetic testing results are available to people, and not the insurance companies, the insurance companies will no longer have the odds in their favor in some situations, and more importantly, only the people will know where that is the case. When large numbers of people start restricting their bets to where the expected return is positive, the insurance companies are in deep deep trouble, and they get forced into the extremely bad position of having a vital interest in the mathematical illiteracy of the American population.
That's because you couldn't carry out the genetic test either. Thus your information wasn't any better than the insurance companies'. Once you can obtain personal genetic test results, and the insurance companies cannot use them, your information is superior, and you can extract a profit from this. If enough people do this (and trust me, they will, if America's history is any guide), the insurance companies are doomed, or at least will be forced to subsidize the exploiters with higher premiums across the board on everyone else. Is that what we want?
Last time I checked, they still tend to charge women lower auto insurance premiums. What do you think insurance is? If I have a 0% chance of being afflicted with something later in life, I don't need insurance for that. If I have a 1% chance, I might pay a small amount for insurance. 10%, I'd be willing to pay more, and I'd care more about the quality of coverage. And I SHOULD pay more, since the expected cost for the insurer is greater. Anything else would be a government subsidy. Now, a public health system is not necessarily a bad thing. But understand that as long as we're sticking to private health insurance, premiums will vary based on expected outlay; anything else goes against free market principles.
Kenneth Arrow's famous "Impossibility Theorem" (1951) showed, among other things, that there is no "perfect" voting system. Thus, we must choose the system we use based on empirical considerations. Even a cursory look at the Borda count reveals that it is a DANGEROUS system that forces individuals to make distinctions which are irrelevant to them; but these "irrelevant" distinctions could very well decide the election.
What am I talking about? Let's say John Q. Voter wants Bush to be in office. It's a no-brainer for him to put Bush as first preference... and Gore as last preference. Anything else, and he's throwing away part or all of his vote!! What about the other candidates? They will be randomly ordered in the middle, with any other candidates he fears might win the election put near the bottom.
One cannot expect "principle" to win out here and stabilize the results. The results from our existing system are proof enough that the majority of people do not like to waste their votes. You can not safely assume that people will be stupid and rank Bush 1st and Gore 2nd, especially after the first such election (which I guess could be a sort of "party IQ test"...). 45 percent will rank candidate A first and candidate B last, 45 percent will rank candidate B first and candidate A last. Now, the election will be decided by the random noise of intermediate rankings of the mainstream voters, and the divided outlier 10 percent. Methinks "random noise" wins the day. The voting population obviously won't like "random noise", but they're forced, in very large numbers, to make the decision between supporting their choice's opponent, or accepting a microscopically increased risk of a random winner. This sort of thing is much worse than what we have now!
I find "approval voting" a much more practical (and conveniently, simple) system, though it may not be the best; I leave it an exercise to the reader to observe it poses none of the major risks and discomfort associated with popular Borda count.
The question on economics is a question on viable distributed systems. (This is probably an abuse of the phrase "distributed system(s)", but I think my meaning is clear.)
The economics of the market is a concern if it is the only system we can sustain. This is not a matter that can be dismissed; ideal communism showed promise as an organizing mechanism for productivity potentially more moral and more effective than capitalism, but eventually failed spectacularly, as motivating unifying factors like World War II (for the Russians) faded into the background and the grudging day-to-day reality of life in a centrally planned universe set in. Then, psychic rewards for contributing were no longer sufficient for the system as a whole to be superior to a mixed market economy. If we want to dismiss market economic concerns for a greater good, we need a workable, durable alternative framework, and constructing one is essentially equivalent to succeeding where communism failed.
ESR's Homesteading the Noosphere looks in the right direction, analyzing current open source culture as a gift economy, and looking at precedents. If this sort of work can be extended and put into practice on ever-larger scales, we have the best chance of reconciling individual freedom and total productivity. There are non-trivial problems to be solved; not the least of which is getting the population as a whole to voluntarily subscribe to open source culture notions of reputation, and essentially dismiss selfish materialism, which the market economy so effectively harnesses. But I seriously hope that these problems can be solved, because on the positive side we have already built a sizable culture which does operate under these principles, and on the negative side we will have to subordinate individual freedom to market economics if we cannot creatively solve these problems.
Back in the 1930's, most economists blindly subscribed to notions like the importance of a balanced budget at all times, and essentially thought of economics in passive terms. John Maynard Keynes was an exception; he saw the unnecessary misery which was the Depression, took the approach "how can I exploit the 'physics' of the system to remedy the situation?", saw what governments could do with properly timed deficit spending, and got it implemented. (FDR was not the most willing implementor, straying from Keynes' principle in ~1937-38 and thereby causing another economic dip... but WWII (somewhat involuntarily) caused the implementation of Keynes' principles to the extreme, with appropriate results.) We must take a similar aggressive constructive approach, understanding on a much deeper level the 'physics' necessary to make a large-scale gift economy or something similar work.
Re: Inf + 1 is still Inf... I think Bill Joy has a point re: nanomachines being a fundamental new danger for humanity. It's a question of scale. Even one nuclear weapon is quite difficult for a single pissed-off individual to obtain, and when detonated, will only damage a limited area. You actually need a reasonably large organization to achieve total destruction of humanity; and there is a gap between the largest feasible cult size with a sufficiently nihilistic philosophy, and the smallest number of people you need working together to engineer nuclear Armageddon. Instead, the only real threat so far has been from pre-existing large organizations (specifically, the U.S. and former U.S.S.R.) possibly willing to use their nuclear arsenals in war (if they aren't there to be used in any circumstance, why do they exist?). Nanomachines and biotechnology are a different story. Only ONE person needs to design ONE prototype to exploit ONE vulnerability in human biology. Program/design the prototype to wait until a specific time to attack, when copies of it can be expected to have spread to almost all inhabited areas, and when it finally strikes, everyone will be dead too quickly to mount an effective response. There is no 'edge to the offensive or defensive' here. If we fail to defend ONCE, it could be the near-instantaneous death of all human life on Earth. There is a quote from the Ender trilogy about the scientists having "a series of footraces" with the descolada virus, where they had to win every single one. It's the same sort of logic here. As a side note, Joy's question to Merkle, "Do you think biological weaponry gives an advantage to the offensive or defensive", brings up another relevant point, which Merkle unfortunately seemed to miss. The point being, that there used to be no dangerous "offensive" or "defensive" to speak about in the first place. Bacteria, virii, etc. may be annoying, but they only adapt under evolutionary forces; medical science has been advancing fast enough to keep ahead of them, and I expect it to continue doing so. Because evolution is blind. Biological weaponry opens a NEW FRONT where formerly none existed, and the defense used to win by default. And the offense only needs to find one vulnerability to overpower the defense on this front. To block off even trivial vulnerabilities on this front, everyone would need to spend most of their time in sealed suits, which is not practical even for the military. But at least biological weapons are still constrained by matters of scale as well; Aum Shinrikyo could attack a Tokyo subway station, but it couldn't suddenly blanket all of Japan with sarin.