You are in far more trouble if your passport gets stolen than if it gets copied: if you do not have your passport, dealing with any authorities in a strange country is going to be a problem, whereas if your passport gets copied, you still have the original.
The problems with passports can be much more subtle, so I wouldn't count on the fact that adding the same data in RFID mode didn't do anything else than just have some redundancy to prevent reading errors.
A little tale from my experience: We were flying to Brasil from Lisboa with a flight that was first landing in Natal, and then flying to Recife. For some reason we never spotted an immigration office. I don't know if we were supposed to step out in Natal, get immigration stamps in the passport and then go back to the plane (the flight from Natal to Recife was domestic, because new passengers were boarding to Recife), or if we were supposed to look for immigration at Recife Airport. We didn't, and nobody seemed to care. When we were trying to leave Brasil three weeks later, the officer at border control pointed out that we were missing the immigration stamps. We were argueing, telling the story, he was insisting on immigration stamps. In the end he just pointed us to the gate, telling us "Nao entrada, nao saida" (No entrance, no exit), meaning "You have never been here, and you have never left."
A similar occurrence was when I was cycling with a group through the then still existing Czechoslovakia. We entered through the polish-slovakian border, and everyone got his passport stamped. We were leaving a week later through the czech-german border, and the officials were just stamping the list of all members of the group. A few weeks later I was again with the bicycle in Czechoslovakia, and I got controlled by the normal police about 30 km from the border, and the police got suspicious with me because I had two immigration stamps, but no exit stamp. So looking from the papers I had entered twice without leaving once. The patrol took me to the office, and then they phoned around for 1 1/2 hours, before just setting me free around midnight, when the train I was planning to take to Prague had just left.
What I am trying to say: Whenever some inconsistencies come up with your passport, they aren't migitated by having RFID chips somewhere. No one actually cares about this type of redundancy. Immigration officers are humans only, and errors will occur, and most of them will not be solved by looking at RFID chips, but in the end by reluctance of the powers in charge to press any further because it is late, because they don't want hassle or because it's easier to pretend nothing had happened. Given U.S. immigration procedures it will probably solved by just handing persons like me to indefinite detention without access to legal counsel. Because Electronics is always right, and if not, lock up everyone not hiding fast enough.
No. Lysenko was Lamarckist and theoretized that you could breed super-grain by seeding normal grain to the best soil, harvest only the largest plants, reseed it, take the largest again etc.pp. Then the seed won from those experiments was supposed to get bigger harvests also on the normal soils everywhere because the individual seed would have learned to grow bigger because of the good conditions the parents had.
Another biologist of that Stalinist era was Mitshurin, who tried to breed new races of fruit trees by crossbreeding (which is not too bad at all), but forgot that the seeds from those crossbreedings would generate the wild type again, because you can't proliferate fruit tree races by seeds, but you have to engraft a cutting from a tree to a seedling.
This describes pretty much my greatest concern with DRM. For DRM to work, it has to be completely without holes. To be completely without holes, it has to be of higher priority than anything else, because if DRM conflicts with anything else it has to win, otherwise this would be a potential hole.
Imagine a surveillance camera. A random person in the room with the camera is starting to watch a movie on a portable DVD player or a TV enabled mobile phone or whatever. How should the camera react? According to DRM it has to shut down and not taking any pictures anymore. So for any crooks wanting to rob a bank without being recorded by surveillance cameras, they should just play a movie in the bank, and all surveillance cameras will shut down(*).
Alternatively, if surveillance cameras are excepted from DRM compliance, who will hinder you to buy surveillance equipment to make a copy of DRM protected stuff (and thus getting rid of DRM, for the recordings to make any sense you must be able to replay the recordings anytime)?
(*) Ok, if you tell me that the DRM compliance might only require to black out the part of the picture with the actual movie in it, then I reply: the crooks could just take a beamer and put the movie at the wall and operate within the beam. Same effect.
Normally the acutal mutations has happened some generations earlier than the first occurence in the phenotype. Most mutations are regressive, that means they are overridden by a dominant allel (gen variant) on the other chromosome (chromosomes other than the X or Y have a twin in the genome). This gives the mutation the chance to be spread in the population without having an actual effect on it. Only if two people carrying the mutations meet and have children together, there is a 25% chance that the mutation is present on both chromosomes of the child and thus expressed in the phenotype.
We all are carrying "sleeping" mutations of the genome, which don't make it to the surface. This slows down the "weeding out" of bad mutations, but on the other hand it is possible to get several independent mutations "collected" which then might add some more complex differences to our phenotype. A mutation thus has several attempts at getting manifest in a species, and thus it can happen that even though it was unsuccessful several times, it might be accompagnied later by another mutation which together are benefitting to the organism.
Congratulations! You just found the proof that on an unreliable channel you can't have a 100% reliable communication. You can improve the reliability, but you can't make it perfect.
The type of proof you were using is called "infinite regress".
Another lesson that goes parallel to the one that you mentioned, however, is that the predictions that are made tend to be unrealistic and way off base.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lek put it that way: Nothing is faster outdated than the future.
You surely raise valid points why it makes sense to have copyrights. What I am disputing is something very else: Why do they work, and when are they to break? With different publishers competing and having a vital interest in keeping the competition from publishing the same works, they will come to a kind of gentlemen agreement too keep from each others turf, independently of a legal framework for copyright. In this case copyright and the interest of a publisher go nicely together. Publishers have to take care that the publishing market allows them to make a profit (which they have to share with the creators of the work, but more important is the fact that there is a profit at all).
People who copy just for themselves don't have a direct interest in a working publishing market because they aren't in the business to make a profit there. Their interest is at most indirect: they might be interested in keeping the creators compensated as an incentive to create more works, but they never negotiate with the authors directly, and they don't have any say in how much of their payment actually goes to the authors. For them there is no publishing market, just an arbitrary price set for a copy, which is completely independent from the price they have to pay to create the same copy themselves. So they don't need a working publishing market, just the ability to get hold for a short time of a single copy of the stuff they want (it might even be just aired to their TV set).
To explain this further: Imagine 3D-scanners and 3D-plotters being available to everyone for a low price. How much will design be worth? If you have a set of cups, saucers and plates, and one plate breaks: Will you really go to a store and buy a new plate, or will you just take one of the remaining plates and create a perfect copy of it (and thus deprive the designer of his share of the money)? How do you actually protect design in a world where everyone is able to create perfect copies of anything he can take?
A hypothetical U.S. founded in 1450 wouldn't have had copyrights.
Until 1477, that is. After that copyright was viable because owning a printing press was a huge investion, and it had to pay off. Ok. Some very rich people might have had a printing press purely for fun, and some revolutionaries were having them for completely different reasons. But in general people owning a printing press had somehow to conduct a business with it, and thus they were vulnerable as soon as they put their products to the public. Ever noticed that all traditional versions of copyright always make a difference between a "private copy" and a "public copy"? They may name it differently (Fair Use, or Not for Profit or whatever), but in the end the intention is always the same: As long as the copy stays private and doesn't have too much impact to the public, it is mainly tolerated, because otherwise one would have intrude into the privacy of people to detect copyright infringment.
But it wasn't necessary. Not licensed prints were (relatively) easily to detect on public markets, and with making the marketing of counterfeit copies hard, it was possible to keep the copyright infringment relatively low and maintenable, because it didn't pay off economically.
But with the "everyone is printing press owner" the economic need to go public with the output of the printing press has vanished. So you can't tackle copyright infringment anymore by making it hard to sell the copy in public. For the first time in history you have to stop the actual process of making the copy itself, because otherwise the damage is already done. For the first time in history you have to infringe on privacy to keep copyright alive. And I don't know if Adam Smith (who first stated that the limited exclusive right to the own ideas may be a tradeoff that is worthwile because it is an incentive to create), or later on the Founding Fathers would have been so fond about Copyright if they had known that you have to trade both free markets and privacy for copyright to enforce it.
First: I am not talking about a rationale for copyright. I am talking about the economic forces that allowed copyright actually to work. There surely is a rationale to build a perpetuum mobile. There are just no physical laws which allow them.
Second: Copyright is older than the U.S. The reasons why the Founding Fathers took an idea and put them into their work is a completely different topic from the question why this idea was coming up in the first place. Without the invention of the printing press (for works of art) or the industrial production (for inventions) there was no economic need for copyrights, patents or trademarks. A hypothetical U.S. founded in 1450 wouldn't have had copyrights.
Lets put it right: You can't build an economy on something that is not scarce. If everyone has unlimited access to something, there is not much of an economy here. Economy happens if something is in limited supply, and then there are strategies to distribute that to those interested. The body of those strategies is called "Economy" (which is actually greek and means 'common naming' = e.g. finding a common price). As long as the common price is zero, there is no actual common pricing.:)
Information is a strange beast because it is, once it is created, in principle unlimited, and just the costs of copy are occuring. For a long time the costs of copy were relatively high, because you had to manually copy every information bit. In those days the creation of something was costing you only a tad more than copying it, so the supply was basicly determined by the costs of copy. Middle age monks in Europe actually tried to avoid the impression of creating something new at all cost, and all the scholastics was about rearranging a canon of knowledge and information. To copy the common body of knowledge was one of the most important tasks for a monk.
Then there were the first methods invented to replicate something in several copies: sigils, wood cuts, jigs, molds, etchings (o.k. most of them were invented long before, but seldom used to copy knowledge). Those were the first information processing items where you had an economy of scale: suddenly the cost of creating just another copy was much lower than creating the first one. You still had a very high cost for the creation of the first copy (the master copy, the actual wood cut or etching for instance), but every additional copy was cheap. Creating the master copy was still an artful and creative process, comparable with the actual cost of the creation of the work of art. In those days many artists were actually "master copy creators" by trade. But at this point it actually paid to be a copist, because you were able to create something in demand cheaper than others, because you could use the economics of scale. But still the creator of the work and the copist were often the same person.
But then there was the invention of the printing press. Suddenly the cost of creating the master copy was getting considerably lower, because you could assemble it from prefactured parts. The initial cost then was mostly paid by setting up the printshop itself, independent from the information you wanted to copy. Suddenly even the process of creating the master copy was disattached from the actual process of creation of a work of art. So at this point there was an incentive to create a "common pricing" for works of art completely independent from the actual cost of copy, because the owner of the printing press need something to feed into it to get it paid off by selling the copies. This was also the time when the idea of copyright was born, mostly as a way to fight off competitors for the own printing press. Everyone else selling the same work of art would have limited your own ability to recurr your costs. There was the treat of mutual destruction between the printshops: Are you printing mine, I'll print yours, and sell it cheaper. Giving the actual creators some rights to their own works thus was in the very interest of the printing press owner and treating the competitor with the shutdown of the printshop for the violation of it was a sharp weapon to keep most printing press owners faithfully for most of the time, and until today the "printing press owners" are the fiercest combattants for stronger copyrights.
Today everyone can (in general) create a copy of any information completely on his own, because even the cost of generating the master copy is fastly approaching zero. With scanners, photocopiers, burners, computers and the thorough digitalizing of any information you can get information in any form you like, and you are instantly able to create a master copy which in turn can be copied without limit. Today everyone is a print
Maybe we can agree, that the Mediterran houses are mainly built from stone, and that most of the countries that were part of the Roman Empire (and also being close to the sea) are widely deforested (so we are talking mainly about Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, Ireland and Turkey here). That's because the forests there felt victim to the construction of the huge Roman (and before that the Greek and Phoenican) fleets. That's also one of the reasons why the Romans invented the Roman Arc, because they needed the timbers to build ships:)
I guess you don't understand what Catholicism and Celibacy is about:) Priests, monks and nuns are in no way more "memberly" than laymen (even though they often act that way;) ). A member of the catholic church is everyone who is baptized in a catholic rite and was never excommunicated. The one baptizing the new member doesn't even need to be a priest, a diacon can also hold the rite. And diacons often are people who are or were married (and now widowed), and whose children are already grown up.
The requirement for priests to be celibate was created to prevent dynasties in the clerical hierarchy (even though it didn't help all the time). But it is for the hierarchy only, not for the church as a whole.
Giving birth is forbidden by a religion? Ok... maybe there are some "Last Day" sects who say that those are the last days of the world anyway, so you shouldn't procreate anymore. But for some reason those sects don't last longer than a generation;)
Giving advise, pointing out direction and educate the minors? How do those religions survive? How do the pass on even the interdictum of advisory, direction giving and education without pointing out that it is actually forbidden?
Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children? Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones? Where is the economy in giving education to minors? Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town? Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table? Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?
As you can see: We are giving for completely uneconomic reasons all the time. Does that make us bad people?
I wonder why my European parents have a wooden house (wooden frame filled with stone wool and covered with wooden planks, built in 1998), why their neighbours save one have also wooden frame houses, the oldest one being from 1654 (yeah, that's more than 350 years ago), why 25% of Germany's area is covered by forests, why Europe is in fact increasing its forest area, why towns like Quedlinburg or Erfurt are declared UNESCO cultural inheritance for their timber frame town centres, where all those pittoresce Black Forest and Bavarian rural houses come from, why we talk about "balconies" (which is just the german word Balken = timber).
Wood is a very common material in residential construction in Germany, and in fact its usage has increased with the larger number of prebuilt houses being built here.
That's not so surprising: Let's have a car with a weight of 3600 pound (~1600 kg), with an average person inside (180 pounds or ~80kg) and an engine efficency of 20% (as said before: A gasoline engine or a diesel engine is only efficient at a limited range of rotations per minute, and the transmission takes its toll). So we move 20 times the weight of the person with 20% efficiency, or in other words: From the initial energy only 1% actually moves the person.
Pipelines are very efficient means of transport, because here the transport vessel is at the same time the transport way. Also ships are very efficient, and often the empty vessel weighs less than a quarter the registered tonnage. For human transport over land the most efficient vehicle today is the bicycle, which consumes about 30% the energy of walking, and which weighs normally between 15 and 20% of the transported good (e.g. the person). The average truck in Europe also has less empty weight than he can carry. Most European trucks with a trailer weigh about 10-12 tons for the truck and another 3-4 tons for the trailer and are allowed to weigh up to 40 tons together with the load. In the end: The car (and the siblings SUV and minivan) are just the worst means of transport from an efficiency point of view. There are quite reasonable means of transport out there:)
If you look at the overall efficiency for a car, it is nearly zero;) (at least for the roundtrip, because the mechanical energy before and after the roundtrip is the same: the car is in the same spot, people are in the same house, and the stuff bought under way doesn't really add to the system, at least if the height difference is also nearly zero).
The best ones are the directly injected Diesel engines (like the TDI or HDI) with about 46%, then the directly injected gasoline engines (~43%). For a car you have to subtract the losses due to the transmission, the clutch and the tires, and you have to take into consideration that the engine runs most efficiently only in a narrow band of rotations per minute (around 40% of the max revs for four-stroke machines, about 70% of max revs for two-stroke machines).
Power use is not really an argument to upgrade a desktop. Just calculate how much an average desktop actually consume: with 70 watts for 10 hours a day, you are at 700 watt hours per day, or (taking 260 working days a year) 182 kWh per year. I don't know what you pay per kWh, but I guess that even if the new computer doesn't take any power at all, it takes years for the investment to return in terms of money saving.
But you describe the Homesian deduction principle: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign Of Four), where the hypotheses, that remain after a bunch of them are eliminated due to contradictions with observations, are the ones that are considered correct until more evidence shows up. That's quite different from induction, where you collect evidence until you spot a pattern and then use the pattern to form a hypothesis.
In fact many cultures were very wary in accepting inductive results: We all have experienced that the Sun comes up every morning, and that after every winter there is springtime, but a lot of cultures don't trust this and have elaborate cults to force the Sun to come up every morning and to get the Winter to leave the country. And all our security measures, if they make sense, are designed to expect that tomorrow is different than today (e.g. that history is not inductively predictable).
Hey, I bought my minivan also years before I had kids, for exactly the same reason: Going camping with lots of stuff (and even sleeping inside). Later on I was moving several times, and having a car where the new cupboard actually fits in saves a lot of trouble. I had a station wagon before (a VW Quantum), which was not too bad, but still, the higher roof allows for more bulky stuff.
... And incidentally a leap year is 1/365 longer than a normal year, which is about ~0,0027. Additionally the relation between weekends and workdays shifts a little each year. Some years have one weekend day more than others and one workday less, because the length of a normal year is 52 weeks plus one day, which in turn can either be a workday or a weekend. Holidays, which are bound to a fixed date (like Independence Day) may also fall on a weekend or a regular workday, and again we have a different driving pattern, because many people don't drive to work on weekends. For some countries (like Germany) the economic growth can be about 0.5% more or less, depending on the actual number of workdays in a year.
As a man who drives a minivan, never talks on the mobile while driving, doesn't put up makeup and always uses the turn signal whenever he changes lanes or directions, I strongly resent!:) And I would never consider replacing the minivan with a SUV... they just come with lots of things I don't need, it's plainly wasted money to buy one to me. I rather have the additional space the more carlike minivan axles provide than buy the next bigger SUV (with worse mileage, more complicated handling and more noise).
There are filters that recreate the LP sound for any digital media (in fact it's just a low pass filter cutting at 16 kHz, a filter to get the dynamic down to 60 dB from the 96dB a CD offers, and some sound engines also offer the additional random crack).
The problem with people not liking the CD sound is that of education: During your whole childhood you had the HiFi LP as the right sound. Now something with a different characteristic comes out (more dynamic, higher frequencies), and of course this sounds "metallic" and "hollow" to you (because metallic, hollow sound needs more dynamic and more high frequencies and is not easily reproduceable with an LP). What you are actually hearing is the more natural recording. It's no problem to cripple that down to the LP sound at all.
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The problems with passports can be much more subtle, so I wouldn't count on the fact that adding the same data in RFID mode didn't do anything else than just have some redundancy to prevent reading errors.
A little tale from my experience: We were flying to Brasil from Lisboa with a flight that was first landing in Natal, and then flying to Recife. For some reason we never spotted an immigration office. I don't know if we were supposed to step out in Natal, get immigration stamps in the passport and then go back to the plane (the flight from Natal to Recife was domestic, because new passengers were boarding to Recife), or if we were supposed to look for immigration at Recife Airport. We didn't, and nobody seemed to care. When we were trying to leave Brasil three weeks later, the officer at border control pointed out that we were missing the immigration stamps. We were argueing, telling the story, he was insisting on immigration stamps. In the end he just pointed us to the gate, telling us "Nao entrada, nao saida" (No entrance, no exit), meaning "You have never been here, and you have never left."
A similar occurrence was when I was cycling with a group through the then still existing Czechoslovakia. We entered through the polish-slovakian border, and everyone got his passport stamped. We were leaving a week later through the czech-german border, and the officials were just stamping the list of all members of the group. A few weeks later I was again with the bicycle in Czechoslovakia, and I got controlled by the normal police about 30 km from the border, and the police got suspicious with me because I had two immigration stamps, but no exit stamp. So looking from the papers I had entered twice without leaving once. The patrol took me to the office, and then they phoned around for 1 1/2 hours, before just setting me free around midnight, when the train I was planning to take to Prague had just left.
What I am trying to say: Whenever some inconsistencies come up with your passport, they aren't migitated by having RFID chips somewhere. No one actually cares about this type of redundancy. Immigration officers are humans only, and errors will occur, and most of them will not be solved by looking at RFID chips, but in the end by reluctance of the powers in charge to press any further because it is late, because they don't want hassle or because it's easier to pretend nothing had happened. Given U.S. immigration procedures it will probably solved by just handing persons like me to indefinite detention without access to legal counsel. Because Electronics is always right, and if not, lock up everyone not hiding fast enough.
No. Lysenko was Lamarckist and theoretized that you could breed super-grain by seeding normal grain to the best soil, harvest only the largest plants, reseed it, take the largest again etc.pp.
Then the seed won from those experiments was supposed to get bigger harvests also on the normal soils everywhere because the individual seed would have learned to grow bigger because of the good conditions the parents had.
Another biologist of that Stalinist era was Mitshurin, who tried to breed new races of fruit trees by crossbreeding (which is not too bad at all), but forgot that the seeds from those crossbreedings would generate the wild type again, because you can't proliferate fruit tree races by seeds, but you have to engraft a cutting from a tree to a seedling.
This describes pretty much my greatest concern with DRM. For DRM to work, it has to be completely without holes. To be completely without holes, it has to be of higher priority than anything else, because if DRM conflicts with anything else it has to win, otherwise this would be a potential hole.
Imagine a surveillance camera. A random person in the room with the camera is starting to watch a movie on a portable DVD player or a TV enabled mobile phone or whatever. How should the camera react? According to DRM it has to shut down and not taking any pictures anymore. So for any crooks wanting to rob a bank without being recorded by surveillance cameras, they should just play a movie in the bank, and all surveillance cameras will shut down(*).
Alternatively, if surveillance cameras are excepted from DRM compliance, who will hinder you to buy surveillance equipment to make a copy of DRM protected stuff (and thus getting rid of DRM, for the recordings to make any sense you must be able to replay the recordings anytime)?
(*) Ok, if you tell me that the DRM compliance might only require to black out the part of the picture with the actual movie in it, then I reply: the crooks could just take a beamer and put the movie at the wall and operate within the beam. Same effect.
Normally the acutal mutations has happened some generations earlier than the first occurence in the phenotype. Most mutations are regressive, that means they are overridden by a dominant allel (gen variant) on the other chromosome (chromosomes other than the X or Y have a twin in the genome). This gives the mutation the chance to be spread in the population without having an actual effect on it. Only if two people carrying the mutations meet and have children together, there is a 25% chance that the mutation is present on both chromosomes of the child and thus expressed in the phenotype.
We all are carrying "sleeping" mutations of the genome, which don't make it to the surface. This slows down the "weeding out" of bad mutations, but on the other hand it is possible to get several independent mutations "collected" which then might add some more complex differences to our phenotype. A mutation thus has several attempts at getting manifest in a species, and thus it can happen that even though it was unsuccessful several times, it might be accompagnied later by another mutation which together are benefitting to the organism.
Congratulations! You just found the proof that on an unreliable channel you can't have a 100% reliable communication. You can improve the reliability, but you can't make it perfect.
The type of proof you were using is called "infinite regress".
Stanislaw Jerzy Lek put it that way: Nothing is faster outdated than the future.
You surely raise valid points why it makes sense to have copyrights. What I am disputing is something very else: Why do they work, and when are they to break? With different publishers competing and having a vital interest in keeping the competition from publishing the same works, they will come to a kind of gentlemen agreement too keep from each others turf, independently of a legal framework for copyright. In this case copyright and the interest of a publisher go nicely together. Publishers have to take care that the publishing market allows them to make a profit (which they have to share with the creators of the work, but more important is the fact that there is a profit at all).
People who copy just for themselves don't have a direct interest in a working publishing market because they aren't in the business to make a profit there. Their interest is at most indirect: they might be interested in keeping the creators compensated as an incentive to create more works, but they never negotiate with the authors directly, and they don't have any say in how much of their payment actually goes to the authors. For them there is no publishing market, just an arbitrary price set for a copy, which is completely independent from the price they have to pay to create the same copy themselves. So they don't need a working publishing market, just the ability to get hold for a short time of a single copy of the stuff they want (it might even be just aired to their TV set).
To explain this further: Imagine 3D-scanners and 3D-plotters being available to everyone for a low price. How much will design be worth? If you have a set of cups, saucers and plates, and one plate breaks: Will you really go to a store and buy a new plate, or will you just take one of the remaining plates and create a perfect copy of it (and thus deprive the designer of his share of the money)? How do you actually protect design in a world where everyone is able to create perfect copies of anything he can take?
Until 1477, that is. After that copyright was viable because owning a printing press was a huge investion, and it had to pay off. Ok. Some very rich people might have had a printing press purely for fun, and some revolutionaries were having them for completely different reasons. But in general people owning a printing press had somehow to conduct a business with it, and thus they were vulnerable as soon as they put their products to the public. Ever noticed that all traditional versions of copyright always make a difference between a "private copy" and a "public copy"? They may name it differently (Fair Use, or Not for Profit or whatever), but in the end the intention is always the same: As long as the copy stays private and doesn't have too much impact to the public, it is mainly tolerated, because otherwise one would have intrude into the privacy of people to detect copyright infringment.
But it wasn't necessary. Not licensed prints were (relatively) easily to detect on public markets, and with making the marketing of counterfeit copies hard, it was possible to keep the copyright infringment relatively low and maintenable, because it didn't pay off economically.
But with the "everyone is printing press owner" the economic need to go public with the output of the printing press has vanished. So you can't tackle copyright infringment anymore by making it hard to sell the copy in public. For the first time in history you have to stop the actual process of making the copy itself, because otherwise the damage is already done. For the first time in history you have to infringe on privacy to keep copyright alive. And I don't know if Adam Smith (who first stated that the limited exclusive right to the own ideas may be a tradeoff that is worthwile because it is an incentive to create), or later on the Founding Fathers would have been so fond about Copyright if they had known that you have to trade both free markets and privacy for copyright to enforce it.
First: I am not talking about a rationale for copyright. I am talking about the economic forces that allowed copyright actually to work. There surely is a rationale to build a perpetuum mobile. There are just no physical laws which allow them.
Second: Copyright is older than the U.S. The reasons why the Founding Fathers took an idea and put them into their work is a completely different topic from the question why this idea was coming up in the first place. Without the invention of the printing press (for works of art) or the industrial production (for inventions) there was no economic need for copyrights, patents or trademarks. A hypothetical U.S. founded in 1450 wouldn't have had copyrights.
Lets put it right: You can't build an economy on something that is not scarce. If everyone has unlimited access to something, there is not much of an economy here. Economy happens if something is in limited supply, and then there are strategies to distribute that to those interested. The body of those strategies is called "Economy" (which is actually greek and means 'common naming' = e.g. finding a common price). As long as the common price is zero, there is no actual common pricing. :)
Information is a strange beast because it is, once it is created, in principle unlimited, and just the costs of copy are occuring. For a long time the costs of copy were relatively high, because you had to manually copy every information bit. In those days the creation of something was costing you only a tad more than copying it, so the supply was basicly determined by the costs of copy. Middle age monks in Europe actually tried to avoid the impression of creating something new at all cost, and all the scholastics was about rearranging a canon of knowledge and information. To copy the common body of knowledge was one of the most important tasks for a monk.
Then there were the first methods invented to replicate something in several copies: sigils, wood cuts, jigs, molds, etchings (o.k. most of them were invented long before, but seldom used to copy knowledge). Those were the first information processing items where you had an economy of scale: suddenly the cost of creating just another copy was much lower than creating the first one. You still had a very high cost for the creation of the first copy (the master copy, the actual wood cut or etching for instance), but every additional copy was cheap. Creating the master copy was still an artful and creative process, comparable with the actual cost of the creation of the work of art. In those days many artists were actually "master copy creators" by trade. But at this point it actually paid to be a copist, because you were able to create something in demand cheaper than others, because you could use the economics of scale. But still the creator of the work and the copist were often the same person.
But then there was the invention of the printing press. Suddenly the cost of creating the master copy was getting considerably lower, because you could assemble it from prefactured parts. The initial cost then was mostly paid by setting up the printshop itself, independent from the information you wanted to copy. Suddenly even the process of creating the master copy was disattached from the actual process of creation of a work of art. So at this point there was an incentive to create a "common pricing" for works of art completely independent from the actual cost of copy, because the owner of the printing press need something to feed into it to get it paid off by selling the copies. This was also the time when the idea of copyright was born, mostly as a way to fight off competitors for the own printing press. Everyone else selling the same work of art would have limited your own ability to recurr your costs. There was the treat of mutual destruction between the printshops: Are you printing mine, I'll print yours, and sell it cheaper. Giving the actual creators some rights to their own works thus was in the very interest of the printing press owner and treating the competitor with the shutdown of the printshop for the violation of it was a sharp weapon to keep most printing press owners faithfully for most of the time, and until today the "printing press owners" are the fiercest combattants for stronger copyrights.
Today everyone can (in general) create a copy of any information completely on his own, because even the cost of generating the master copy is fastly approaching zero. With scanners, photocopiers, burners, computers and the thorough digitalizing of any information you can get information in any form you like, and you are instantly able to create a master copy which in turn can be copied without limit. Today everyone is a print
Maybe we can agree, that the Mediterran houses are mainly built from stone, and that most of the countries that were part of the Roman Empire (and also being close to the sea) are widely deforested (so we are talking mainly about Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, Ireland and Turkey here). That's because the forests there felt victim to the construction of the huge Roman (and before that the Greek and Phoenican) fleets. That's also one of the reasons why the Romans invented the Roman Arc, because they needed the timbers to build ships :)
I guess you don't understand what Catholicism and Celibacy is about :) Priests, monks and nuns are in no way more "memberly" than laymen (even though they often act that way ;) ). A member of the catholic church is everyone who is baptized in a catholic rite and was never excommunicated. The one baptizing the new member doesn't even need to be a priest, a diacon can also hold the rite. And diacons often are people who are or were married (and now widowed), and whose children are already grown up.
The requirement for priests to be celibate was created to prevent dynasties in the clerical hierarchy (even though it didn't help all the time). But it is for the hierarchy only, not for the church as a whole.
Giving birth is forbidden by a religion? Ok... maybe there are some "Last Day" sects who say that those are the last days of the world anyway, so you shouldn't procreate anymore. But for some reason those sects don't last longer than a generation ;)
Giving advise, pointing out direction and educate the minors? How do those religions survive? How do the pass on even the interdictum of advisory, direction giving and education without pointing out that it is actually forbidden?
Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children? Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones? Where is the economy in giving education to minors? Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town? Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table? Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?
As you can see: We are giving for completely uneconomic reasons all the time. Does that make us bad people?
I wonder why my European parents have a wooden house (wooden frame filled with stone wool and covered with wooden planks, built in 1998), why their neighbours save one have also wooden frame houses, the oldest one being from 1654 (yeah, that's more than 350 years ago), why 25% of Germany's area is covered by forests, why Europe is in fact increasing its forest area, why towns like Quedlinburg or Erfurt are declared UNESCO cultural inheritance for their timber frame town centres, where all those pittoresce Black Forest and Bavarian rural houses come from, why we talk about "balconies" (which is just the german word Balken = timber).
Wood is a very common material in residential construction in Germany, and in fact its usage has increased with the larger number of prebuilt houses being built here.
That's not so surprising: Let's have a car with a weight of 3600 pound (~1600 kg), with an average person inside (180 pounds or ~80kg) and an engine efficency of 20% (as said before: A gasoline engine or a diesel engine is only efficient at a limited range of rotations per minute, and the transmission takes its toll). So we move 20 times the weight of the person with 20% efficiency, or in other words: From the initial energy only 1% actually moves the person.
Pipelines are very efficient means of transport, because here the transport vessel is at the same time the transport way. Also ships are very efficient, and often the empty vessel weighs less than a quarter the registered tonnage. For human transport over land the most efficient vehicle today is the bicycle, which consumes about 30% the energy of walking, and which weighs normally between 15 and 20% of the transported good (e.g. the person). The average truck in Europe also has less empty weight than he can carry. Most European trucks with a trailer weigh about 10-12 tons for the truck and another 3-4 tons for the trailer and are allowed to weigh up to 40 tons together with the load. :)
In the end: The car (and the siblings SUV and minivan) are just the worst means of transport from an efficiency point of view. There are quite reasonable means of transport out there
If you look at the overall efficiency for a car, it is nearly zero ;) (at least for the roundtrip, because the mechanical energy before and after the roundtrip is the same: the car is in the same spot, people are in the same house, and the stuff bought under way doesn't really add to the system, at least if the height difference is also nearly zero).
The best ones are the directly injected Diesel engines (like the TDI or HDI) with about 46%, then the directly injected gasoline engines (~43%). For a car you have to subtract the losses due to the transmission, the clutch and the tires, and you have to take into consideration that the engine runs most efficiently only in a narrow band of rotations per minute (around 40% of the max revs for four-stroke machines, about 70% of max revs for two-stroke machines).
Power use is not really an argument to upgrade a desktop. Just calculate how much an average desktop actually consume: with 70 watts for 10 hours a day, you are at 700 watt hours per day, or (taking 260 working days a year) 182 kWh per year. I don't know what you pay per kWh, but I guess that even if the new computer doesn't take any power at all, it takes years for the investment to return in terms of money saving.
But you describe the Homesian deduction principle: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign Of Four), where the hypotheses, that remain after a bunch of them are eliminated due to contradictions with observations, are the ones that are considered correct until more evidence shows up. That's quite different from induction, where you collect evidence until you spot a pattern and then use the pattern to form a hypothesis.
In fact many cultures were very wary in accepting inductive results: We all have experienced that the Sun comes up every morning, and that after every winter there is springtime, but a lot of cultures don't trust this and have elaborate cults to force the Sun to come up every morning and to get the Winter to leave the country. And all our security measures, if they make sense, are designed to expect that tomorrow is different than today (e.g. that history is not inductively predictable).
Hey, I bought my minivan also years before I had kids, for exactly the same reason: Going camping with lots of stuff (and even sleeping inside). Later on I was moving several times, and having a car where the new cupboard actually fits in saves a lot of trouble. I had a station wagon before (a VW Quantum), which was not too bad, but still, the higher roof allows for more bulky stuff.
... And incidentally a leap year is 1/365 longer than a normal year, which is about ~0,0027. Additionally the relation between weekends and workdays shifts a little each year. Some years have one weekend day more than others and one workday less, because the length of a normal year is 52 weeks plus one day, which in turn can either be a workday or a weekend. Holidays, which are bound to a fixed date (like Independence Day) may also fall on a weekend or a regular workday, and again we have a different driving pattern, because many people don't drive to work on weekends. For some countries (like Germany) the economic growth can be about 0.5% more or less, depending on the actual number of workdays in a year.
As a man who drives a minivan, never talks on the mobile while driving, doesn't put up makeup and always uses the turn signal whenever he changes lanes or directions, I strongly resent! :)
And I would never consider replacing the minivan with a SUV... they just come with lots of things I don't need, it's plainly wasted money to buy one to me. I rather have the additional space the more carlike minivan axles provide than buy the next bigger SUV (with worse mileage, more complicated handling and more noise).
There are filters that recreate the LP sound for any digital media (in fact it's just a low pass filter cutting at 16 kHz, a filter to get the dynamic down to 60 dB from the 96dB a CD offers, and some sound engines also offer the additional random crack).
The problem with people not liking the CD sound is that of education: During your whole childhood you had the HiFi LP as the right sound. Now something with a different characteristic comes out (more dynamic, higher frequencies), and of course this sounds "metallic" and "hollow" to you (because metallic, hollow sound needs more dynamic and more high frequencies and is not easily reproduceable with an LP). What you are actually hearing is the more natural recording. It's no problem to cripple that down to the LP sound at all.