Re:I don't understand
on
The Demise of IP?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
You're going to have to be a little more specific than "if you get rid of government, people will automatically play fair" though, since that gets proven not to work quite frequently throughout world history.
Oddly enough, this is precisely what the Communists originally claimed. "State Capitalism" was supposed to be a transitory phase leading to a society ruled by perfect brotherhood. All you had to do was get rid of the evils of capitalism, and everyone would live in perfect harmony. Communism was pure Castle in the Sky bullshit; real pretty, nice to dream about, but absolutely no way to get there. What the Russians got was Stalinism, which was just more of the same old tyranny.
It's amazing how often the people on extreme right mimic the old extreme left. Subsititute the word government for capitalism in old communist rants, and you could pass a lot of them unchallenged on libertarian sites. But then, it shouldn't be too surprising, given that most of the neo-cons are ex-Marxists themselves. Same utopian shit, different bucket. The pendulum swings to the extreme yet again.
Wouldn't it be nice if we actually took the time to understand and solve our problems instead of coming up yet another utopian panacea doomed to failure?
Just a quick bit of history: a society without a government is called anarchy. It inevitably ends up being ruled by the guy with the most guns and the biggest gang (see Stalin.) People would rather recognize one big tyrant who robs them in a systematic fashion than a whole army of little tyrants who just kill them indescriminately. This is how kings and governments came to be in the first place.
A good government is one that rules the least because it recognizes where the society is going and works with it rather than against it, enforcing the social contract but not trying to dictate it. A bad government tries to impose an unnatural or outdated social contract. Successful revolutions happen when the society has moved on but the government hasn't--the "new order" already exists. Unsuccessful revolutions happen when some revolutionary group seizes power and tries to create a new order by destroying the existing one. What this means is that things can get much worse very quickly, but they usually don't get much better very quickly. Progress takes a lot of time and effort.
In the case of copyrights, a new order is taking shape. Large corporations are attempting to use government enforcers to oppose this, and even to roll back existing rights (people have been taping each others albums for 30 years now.) This will fail. The only question is whether there will be anything left of copyright when the dust settles. The longer it takes for the elected leaders to pull their heads out of their asses, the harder the fall will be when it comes.
Actually, by the time the water goes through the grounds and settles into the pot, and then into the cup, it has cooled to about 140 F or less. The optimal temperature for coffee is just at the pain threshold, no where near hot enough to cause burns. MacDonald's coffee burns because they superheat it under pressure to above boiling before forcing it through the grounds. They get more coffee out of the beans that way (although it tastes horrible, because they're actually breaking the beans down and adding sediment, rather than leaching the oils out as you're supposed to.)
The only time I've ever had MacDonald's coffee was when I was forced to while driving a long distance. There was nothing else available. After five minutes left in a freezing car, with the lid removed to cool it down, I took a little sip--and scalded my tongue so badly that I could not taste a thing for three days. My tongue was actually blistered.
And no, this is not the way coffee is supposed to be served. They do it this way because they're too damn cheap to do it properly.
Not to mention that Joe Micheal Straczynski in Babylon 5 draws heavily on both the Silmarilion and The Lord of the Rings. In my original D&D campaign years ago I called the main city of the ancient empire Minbar-- "first home" in Quenya, and the Wizard's Council the Grey Council. I used a lot of other Quenya and Sindarin derived names as well, and came up with my own dark speech based in part on the Black Speech of Mordor. Straczynski did a lot of the same for the series. Now everyone thinks those are from B5. We just happened to be drawing from the same source.:)
I understand what the point of religion is supposed to be. And like you, I used to argue that the benefit of religion far outweighed its costs and drawbacks. The people who did horrible things in the name of God just didn't get it. Religion really wasn't to blame, was it?
But arguing about interpretation means that the outcome of the belief system is by no means assured. You therefore need to pay attention to what purpose that belief system served when it was in ascendance. How do Christians, or indeed, any fervent group of religious believers, behave when they're running the show, without secular authorities to police them? The answer, throughout most of history, is: not very well. The Bible itself was edited and compiled at the Council of Nicea, where the Catholic Church was born. There were very definite political motivations in the shaping of it. The intentions of the original editors are not what you assume them to be, as a modern reader informed by the sensibilities of the enlightenment. Going into what those motivations were would take more time than I have, but suffice it to say that you would be horrified by what they hid in the pages of that book.
The idea of serving something greater than yourself is by no means unique to the religious. There were atheists working with Mother Theresa in India. Most completely secular people that I know of feel a sense of duty towards the rest of humanity and to our common future. Given that human beings might be the only conscious agents in the universe, our duty to humanity may well be a duty to the universe itself, a duty to nurture and extend the only spark of self-awareness that we know of. By comparison, the urge to go out and proselytize seems trite--a mere attempt at tribal expansion. In other words, it appears to be self-serving.
The weekly cycle of a religious gathering every seven days is suspiciously reminiscent of the high provided by a new age encounter group, like Anthony Robbins or EST. The high last 3 days, after which it fades, leaving you craving more after about 7 days. This leads one to suspect that early priests were like shamans, leading the tribe in an ecstatic ritual. But this cycle of high and low indicates that this behaviour is rooted in the same reward system that is responsible for addiction. The reward system in our brains isn't even wired to the part that is responsible for happiness.
Most of the people I know who are deeply religious pursue their faith in this way. There is the same neediness, the sense that they are filling a hole with something that just doesn't fit. Most of them are now on anti-depressants. And that is the main criteria for an addiction--something you feel compelled to do even though it doesn't work and doesn't make you happy.
This kind of crap is seriously motivating me never to buy another music CD again. I've never been one to download music for free, but nowadays, unless I can get the music online, there is so much crap on CD's that I simply don't trust them anymore. Even without this Trojan, it's a crap shoot whether you can take your CD and play it on your computer, or on any of the older CD players. So this is yet another incentive to move to BitTorrent. And of course, the more you share on BitTorrent, the more you can get.
These idiots are ultimately screwing themselves, and everyone else in the music industry. They are providing a very strong incentive for people who otherwise would never pirate music to go and do just that. They fail to understand the limitations of the law--to stop all music sharing, you would need the power of a totalitarian state. The legal system as it now exists doesn't have time for all this crap.
Or perhaps they do understand this, and that is precisely what they intend...
It's a little more complex than that. I don't give a damn about celebrities. They're completely irrelevant. Saying that people love or hate Nixon because he's famous is a joke. They love or hate him because he often decided who lived or died. And we don't hate someone as much after they're dead because dead people no longer have the power to act.
Successful captains of industry who have star status set the tone for their entire industry. They are watched, studied carefully, and emulated. So, if you work in software, animation, or the computer hardware field, Steve Jobs has a lot to say about what your worklife is going to be like. If you're working 90 hours a week in one of these industries, he's one of the people you have to thank. And in much of the Apple lore, Jobs often turns into just another pointy haired boss. That's where the hate part comes from.
On the other hand, as a consumer of any of these products, Jobs has a tremendous influence on what is going to be available, and he's very good at putting out cool stuff. That's the love part. But people don't have strong feelings about him because he's a celebrity. They have strong feelings about him because he can have a strong effect on their lives.
Science does not disprove God, but it does make God redundant as an explanatory principle. There are also certain physical consequences that one might expect to find if there were a supreme being behind it all--answers to prayers, certain paranormal or supernatural events, etc. All "evidence" of God has been explained via purely naturalistic causes. If there is a God, He has left no trace, and that's pretty odd considering how big He's supposed to be. God is neither verifiable nor falsifiable, but by the criteria of science, that makes God a bad theory. He falls, not by disproof, but by Ockam's Razor. God adds nothing to our understanding of the universe; indeed, the addition of an unknown and unknowable factor in the physical world actually interferes with the progress of knowledge by discouraging further inquiry.
And this is where strident atheists, like Richard Dawkins, take their starting point. Religion now discourages the entire scientific enterprise, and has done so ever since it became abundantly clear that science provides physical explanations with no need of the divine. As a biologist specializing in evolutionary theory, Dawkins has no doubt encountered no end of people who take offense at his work for no other reason than superstitious bias. To any scientist dedicated to free and open enquiry, this is profoundly disturbing.
Carl Sagan called science "a candle in the dark" dispelling the shadows of the "demon haunted world." It is that darkness that gave the Dark Ages their name. The purpose of ID isn't just to challenge evolution, but to initiate a campaign to undermine the materialistic worldview and replace it with a magical worldview. ID proponents call this strategy "The Wedge." Darwin is only the beginning; their goal is nothing less than the destruction of the entire scientific worldview, and they have stated this quite clearly. This is a long term strategy, embarked on decades ago. It is not a response to militant atheists. Militant atheism is a response to an existing offensive.
We simply cannot support this many people on the planet, nor meet the challenges now facing us, without science. The consequences of this flight into fantasy will be the deaths of billions of people, and quite possibly, the extinction of humanity. This attempted retreat into a childlike world of magic and supersition is nothing less than a wholesale attack on truth, and upon the very means by which truth may be discovered.
The prophets and philosophers on whose visions we have built our culture had a word for such an attack on truth. They called it evil.
This is a little too high tech for terrorists, too many moving parts and unknowns. 9/11 was actually quite low tech, using box cutters and people with western passports. It worked because it was simple and unexpected.
Besides, shutting down the internet would shut down all the terrorist networks as well--there's not much more to them then a few isolated cells connected through the web. You could probably fit the leadership of all these groups onto a single bus. Shut down the internet, and they lose most of their means of recruitment, and these guys are nothing without the young cannon fodder they sucker into being the next walking bombs.
And I'm still not sure what it is all these countries find so disagreeable about the way it's being run, apart from the fact that it's being run by Americans. As far as I can see, they're doing a good job, which is really all that matters. If someone has specific criticisms of the way it's being run, propose an alternate way, and put it to a vote. But protesting about America running it, just because it's America, is bullshit, and makes me rather suspicious of their motives. And I'm not even an American...
Yeah, except millions of ordinary office workers, 40 and up, bring their CD's to work, pop them into their CD drive, and listen to them there. The RIAA is going to tell them they can't do this? Well, guess what... they can, they just don't have to pay for them. You'd be amazed just how fast a complete technical noob can pick up on and learn how to use peer-to-peer. I know people in their 50's and 60's who can't even plug in a printer, but have all the latest and greatest of file sharing applications up and running just fine, and have Gigs of music on their drives. And for every DRM they come out with, there will be someone who will be able to crack it within hours or days. CD doesn't work? Don't bother with it, just get the contents from someone else.
Frustrate a demand and you create a black market. Try to use force to shut it down, and you get an armed black market--a criminal network. Mind you, this is pretty much what the RIAA and its cohorts are becoming anyway. They just try to use the courts and cops as hired thugs. There's an interesting sort of Hegelian dialectic going on here, and the striking thing about an Hegelian thesis and anti-thesis is not what makes them different, but how much they have in common. The RIAA will create its own equal and opposite, and the inevitable outcome, the synthesis required to resolve this stupidity (which will come after a lot of wasted time and effort) will be the annihilation of the RIAA and everything like it.
The only way to stop duplication of music is to shut down the profiteers that are driving it.
Don't try game programming--it's all trigonometry. Same goes for most engineering.
This sounds like a variant of trig calculations that you often use in computer algorithms, where it's much faster to calculate the square of something than the root. If you do it right, you can avoid roots completely for comparisons, and only do one at the very end of the calculation for actual lengths and distances. Sine and cosine usually appear as the quotient of lengths of sides of a triangle--you rarely calculate sin(x) or cos(x). The one place where roots are unavoidable is normals, which are just so damn handy. But even there you can sometimes get away without normalizing for comparisons in things like backface culling.
This might be a way of busting the anti-science trend that you see in Intelligent Design and various other post-modernist or new-age flakiness. Face it, a country where 60% of the population believes in Satan but only 20% believes in evolution is not going to remain a superpower or technological or scientific leader for much longer. And with the visa restrictions due to the war on terror, IBM has to settle for what they can get in America, which right now, isn't very good pickings.
I'm sorry, but most of the new-age and fundamentalist beliefs out there amount to sloppy thinking. The current plague of fundamentalism is just new-age occultism with a biblical spin. Cat Stevens was a major league acid casualty before he went all Muslim and started rooting for Khomeini against Salman Rushdie--that should give you an idea of the flake factor at play amongst the Born Agains. How much of that do you think a company like IBM can take without it affecting the bottom line? This is a company whose slogan was "Think!", and these people won't.
I'm glad to see IBM is doing something about it. I wonder how long it will be before Bill Gates catches on and wades in with all his money. Somebody's gotta do it, because, unlike England, the U.S. doesn't have a rich colony to pitch in when it reaches senile old age.
Agreed. It's the 800 lb gorilla because it's good. It has a ton of content and supports single and group play, PvP, etc. It isn't the best at everything (City of Heroes wins the title for best group play, Dark Age of Camelot has the best PvP) but it is the best overall. And it runs on an average machine. Hell, the late EQ2 crawled on a top end machine.
I'm reminded of that line by Londo Mollari in Babylon 5: "You know, there were two intelligent species on our planet, but we wiped the other one out. Do you know what the last one said just before he died? AAAAAAAAGGGHHH!!!."
Paying for it is one thing, but what many distributers do is nickel and dime the original game development company to death...literally. The guys who came up with the game get to finish the game...maybe. That's about it. The lawyers swoop in and pick the corpse clean, dismantle the team, take all the tools and intellectual property they can find. The distributer then bangs out a couple of expansions and rides the franchise into the ground. You'll never see another great game from that team because the team no longer exists.
The risk is borne entirely by the original developers, who often have a near finished product developed with their own time and money when they sign the deal. Then the distributer begins to load on extra conditions and unnecessary delays, and does some creative accounting when the game ships to make certain the people who did the work get the least money. The company that developed the game goes down in flames under the weight of the development debt, and the distributor walks away with all the money.
So, no, the creators do not get paid. In fact, they were the ones who paid for the damn thing in the first place!
What I've just described is EA's business model. The amount of anti-competitive maneuvering in the game industry is incredible. EA just bought Renderware and are now killing it, in an attempt to break Rockstar games. Why compete with better and more interesting games when you can just kill them off, by yanking their tools out from under them?
What the industry needs is a free and open source suite of tools and engine components that nobody can buy, but that anyone can use. If the little companies want to win, that's where they should start, by pooling their resources, because anything that is commercially owned can be bought by your biggest competition, and building your own engine and tools from scratch is just too damned expensive.
I fear what the next thing is to piss off your parents will be.
Extremist religion. No shit, that's a large part of where Muslim extremists are getting there support in the west--Muslim kids trying to piss off their moderate parents. Fanatacism is the new punk. But it'll pass...
The ironic part of this is that these were the very people who could have told the Spanish government how to use its newfound wealth. The result was that the Spanish suffered staggering inflation and bankruptcy.
The Balfour Declaration was intended to serve the same purpose: an infusion of Jewish talent into the Middle East to teach the Arabs how to make the best use of their new oil wealth. Unfortunately, anti-semitism was already ripe (which is really ironic, considering that the Arabs are also semitic.) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion showed up on the scene shortly after, drawing Muslim leaders to it like flies to shit. They rejected the Jews out of hand when they were actually a gift, not an invasion. Nazi propaganda still circulates in the Middle East. When the oil runs out, the Middle East will be in worse shape than ever. The only country there that even knows how to feed itself is Israel. By the end of this century, the Muslim countries of the Middle East are likely to win the largest Darwin Award in history.
That is, unless America becomes the Christian States of America. Then America might win it.
I'll wait for an independent confirming study, thank you very much. More than 1/3rd of all scientific reports about drugs are later proven false. Nothing like a falsified article to hype your stock so you can dump it and make a quick fortune.
Got any research that support that statement ? I mean, real research as opposed to that crap webpage where some amateur without knowledge of statistics selects data to prove a point ?
If you wanted to knock the American economy down a peg or two then convincing us that Kyoto is a good idea is a good way to do it.
Another good way to do it would be to leave America largely dependent on oil from Saudi Arabia, a country which may suffer a political and economic implosion any day now. Or to continue to pour money into that country when there is no doubt that a lot of that money is being used to fund the very people who are trying to kill you.
Global warming isn't the only reason to get off oil. If Kyoto will have that much of an impact on the economy, it's a good sign that something is already very wrong.
Nuclear power, by the way, has experienced something of a renaissance with environmentalists, especially with recent innovations like the pebble bed reactor which are far more resistant to meltdown. The problem with nuclear reactors is that they're expensive.
As for China, they aren't likely to do anything as long as their disregard for the environment and their labour gives them a competitive advantage. Because it isn't like a totalitarian regime is going to listen to the environmentalist lobby--they'll do whatever they can get away with. The only way to put pressure on them is to stop buying their goods. To spell it out for you, we would have to stop buying goods simply on the basis of cheap prices, and start considering the hidden costs. But too many large corporations cut costs by buying from countries that pay their people almost nothing and disregard the environment (Mexico is another example,) and the government looks the other way.
So yeah, that's a good question: why isn't anyone pressuring the Chinese to clean up their neighborhood?
No, the average temperature continues to climb. Parts of the north (like Northern Europe) will get cooler. The Carribean will get stinking hot, because the heat is no longer being carried away by ocean currents.
Well said. I've stopped buying CD's, because I don't want to give any more money to the bloated corporate entities that overcharge for music while they screw the artists. I buy my music on iTunes now. The next step is to get a direct pipe from artists to net distribution without involving the record companies at all, something that promotes new music through user reviews and ratings, and links tastes through similarity (people with your tastes also liked...) This last part would be a natural for Google.
On the other hand, people who copy music without paying anything for it are censoring themselves. The money that you spend is a vote. You can bitch all you like about Wal Mart, but if you shop there, you're supporting it. You can rave all you like about a band, but if you never buy anything they make, nobody is going to know or care what you think. There were bands in the 90's who had a strong following amongst the computer crowd who couldn't make any money because people just shared it around. If you like it, money talks. Pay for it. Otherwise you can look forward to a world where all you can get is people like Celine Dion and Britanny Spears. In other words, music for people who are too stupid to know how to copy it.
The sword was worth a good 5000 yuan on the open market. Adjusting that for GDP, that's around $3000 in the US.
In a society where factory workers often make less than a dollar a day, that's a lot more than $3000 is worth to an American. To some people, that's 10 years pay, so it's more like $300,000 to an American. Nothing justifies murder, but it gives you an idea of the emotional impact.
And it's only gotten 5 degrees warmer since the coldest part of the ice age. The other 4 degrees took hundreds of millenia. That last degree took only 50 years. And this at a time when the overall trend, due to solar activity and other factors, should have resulted in cooling (hence the less that 1 degree over the past 150 years--the first hundred of that saw a general cooling trend.)
That first 4 degrees transformed the planet, permitting ice masses that were up to a mile thick to retreat from about the 40th parallel to the artic circle. Since it happened gradually, the ecosystem was able to adapt, moving with the climatic zones. But 1 degree in just 50 years is a hell of a shock. Plants and animals are now trying to survive in climatic zones that they really don't belong in. In a sparsely populated world adaptation might take care of this, but the ecosystem is already under a strain. Populations aren't large enough to diversify, and movement between areas of climate is obstructed by human development of all kinds.
It isn't just a matter of everywhere getting 1 degree warmer. The average temperature in cities has increased 2 degrees over the past 50 years. The overall change is not an even one, and temperature differential change weather patterns. The change affects rainfall, turning temperate zones into deserts, lengthening storm seasons, and increasing rainfall in areas that may already have too much.
50% of the human race live in coastal areas that will be inundated if all land based glaciers melt. This includes the American eastern seaboard. The midwest, the primary food producing area, is running out of water, and hotter temperatures will speed this process up. The southwest is dependant on the same water table. And the southeast can look forward to longer and more violent storm seasons.
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You're going to have to be a little more specific than "if you get rid of government, people will automatically play fair" though, since that gets proven not to work quite frequently throughout world history.
Oddly enough, this is precisely what the Communists originally claimed. "State Capitalism" was supposed to be a transitory phase leading to a society ruled by perfect brotherhood. All you had to do was get rid of the evils of capitalism, and everyone would live in perfect harmony. Communism was pure Castle in the Sky bullshit; real pretty, nice to dream about, but absolutely no way to get there. What the Russians got was Stalinism, which was just more of the same old tyranny.
It's amazing how often the people on extreme right mimic the old extreme left. Subsititute the word government for capitalism in old communist rants, and you could pass a lot of them unchallenged on libertarian sites. But then, it shouldn't be too surprising, given that most of the neo-cons are ex-Marxists themselves. Same utopian shit, different bucket. The pendulum swings to the extreme yet again.
Wouldn't it be nice if we actually took the time to understand and solve our problems instead of coming up yet another utopian panacea doomed to failure?
Just a quick bit of history: a society without a government is called anarchy. It inevitably ends up being ruled by the guy with the most guns and the biggest gang (see Stalin.) People would rather recognize one big tyrant who robs them in a systematic fashion than a whole army of little tyrants who just kill them indescriminately. This is how kings and governments came to be in the first place.
A good government is one that rules the least because it recognizes where the society is going and works with it rather than against it, enforcing the social contract but not trying to dictate it. A bad government tries to impose an unnatural or outdated social contract. Successful revolutions happen when the society has moved on but the government hasn't--the "new order" already exists. Unsuccessful revolutions happen when some revolutionary group seizes power and tries to create a new order by destroying the existing one. What this means is that things can get much worse very quickly, but they usually don't get much better very quickly. Progress takes a lot of time and effort.
In the case of copyrights, a new order is taking shape. Large corporations are attempting to use government enforcers to oppose this, and even to roll back existing rights (people have been taping each others albums for 30 years now.) This will fail. The only question is whether there will be anything left of copyright when the dust settles. The longer it takes for the elected leaders to pull their heads out of their asses, the harder the fall will be when it comes.
Actually, by the time the water goes through the grounds and settles into the pot, and then into the cup, it has cooled to about 140 F or less. The optimal temperature for coffee is just at the pain threshold, no where near hot enough to cause burns. MacDonald's coffee burns because they superheat it under pressure to above boiling before forcing it through the grounds. They get more coffee out of the beans that way (although it tastes horrible, because they're actually breaking the beans down and adding sediment, rather than leaching the oils out as you're supposed to.)
The only time I've ever had MacDonald's coffee was when I was forced to while driving a long distance. There was nothing else available. After five minutes left in a freezing car, with the lid removed to cool it down, I took a little sip--and scalded my tongue so badly that I could not taste a thing for three days. My tongue was actually blistered.
And no, this is not the way coffee is supposed to be served. They do it this way because they're too damn cheap to do it properly.
Not to mention that Joe Micheal Straczynski in Babylon 5 draws heavily on both the Silmarilion and The Lord of the Rings. In my original D&D campaign years ago I called the main city of the ancient empire Minbar-- "first home" in Quenya, and the Wizard's Council the Grey Council. I used a lot of other Quenya and Sindarin derived names as well, and came up with my own dark speech based in part on the Black Speech of Mordor. Straczynski did a lot of the same for the series. Now everyone thinks those are from B5. We just happened to be drawing from the same source. :)
I understand what the point of religion is supposed to be. And like you, I used to argue that the benefit of religion far outweighed its costs and drawbacks. The people who did horrible things in the name of God just didn't get it. Religion really wasn't to blame, was it?
But arguing about interpretation means that the outcome of the belief system is by no means assured. You therefore need to pay attention to what purpose that belief system served when it was in ascendance. How do Christians, or indeed, any fervent group of religious believers, behave when they're running the show, without secular authorities to police them? The answer, throughout most of history, is: not very well. The Bible itself was edited and compiled at the Council of Nicea, where the Catholic Church was born. There were very definite political motivations in the shaping of it. The intentions of the original editors are not what you assume them to be, as a modern reader informed by the sensibilities of the enlightenment. Going into what those motivations were would take more time than I have, but suffice it to say that you would be horrified by what they hid in the pages of that book.
The idea of serving something greater than yourself is by no means unique to the religious. There were atheists working with Mother Theresa in India. Most completely secular people that I know of feel a sense of duty towards the rest of humanity and to our common future. Given that human beings might be the only conscious agents in the universe, our duty to humanity may well be a duty to the universe itself, a duty to nurture and extend the only spark of self-awareness that we know of. By comparison, the urge to go out and proselytize seems trite--a mere attempt at tribal expansion. In other words, it appears to be self-serving.
The weekly cycle of a religious gathering every seven days is suspiciously reminiscent of the high provided by a new age encounter group, like Anthony Robbins or EST. The high last 3 days, after which it fades, leaving you craving more after about 7 days. This leads one to suspect that early priests were like shamans, leading the tribe in an ecstatic ritual. But this cycle of high and low indicates that this behaviour is rooted in the same reward system that is responsible for addiction. The reward system in our brains isn't even wired to the part that is responsible for happiness.
Most of the people I know who are deeply religious pursue their faith in this way. There is the same neediness, the sense that they are filling a hole with something that just doesn't fit. Most of them are now on anti-depressants. And that is the main criteria for an addiction--something you feel compelled to do even though it doesn't work and doesn't make you happy.
This kind of crap is seriously motivating me never to buy another music CD again. I've never been one to download music for free, but nowadays, unless I can get the music online, there is so much crap on CD's that I simply don't trust them anymore. Even without this Trojan, it's a crap shoot whether you can take your CD and play it on your computer, or on any of the older CD players. So this is yet another incentive to move to BitTorrent. And of course, the more you share on BitTorrent, the more you can get.
These idiots are ultimately screwing themselves, and everyone else in the music industry. They are providing a very strong incentive for people who otherwise would never pirate music to go and do just that. They fail to understand the limitations of the law--to stop all music sharing, you would need the power of a totalitarian state. The legal system as it now exists doesn't have time for all this crap.
Or perhaps they do understand this, and that is precisely what they intend...
It's a little more complex than that. I don't give a damn about celebrities. They're completely irrelevant. Saying that people love or hate Nixon because he's famous is a joke. They love or hate him because he often decided who lived or died. And we don't hate someone as much after they're dead because dead people no longer have the power to act.
Successful captains of industry who have star status set the tone for their entire industry. They are watched, studied carefully, and emulated. So, if you work in software, animation, or the computer hardware field, Steve Jobs has a lot to say about what your worklife is going to be like. If you're working 90 hours a week in one of these industries, he's one of the people you have to thank. And in much of the Apple lore, Jobs often turns into just another pointy haired boss. That's where the hate part comes from.
On the other hand, as a consumer of any of these products, Jobs has a tremendous influence on what is going to be available, and he's very good at putting out cool stuff. That's the love part. But people don't have strong feelings about him because he's a celebrity. They have strong feelings about him because he can have a strong effect on their lives.
Science does not disprove God, but it does make God redundant as an explanatory principle. There are also certain physical consequences that one might expect to find if there were a supreme being behind it all--answers to prayers, certain paranormal or supernatural events, etc. All "evidence" of God has been explained via purely naturalistic causes. If there is a God, He has left no trace, and that's pretty odd considering how big He's supposed to be. God is neither verifiable nor falsifiable, but by the criteria of science, that makes God a bad theory. He falls, not by disproof, but by Ockam's Razor. God adds nothing to our understanding of the universe; indeed, the addition of an unknown and unknowable factor in the physical world actually interferes with the progress of knowledge by discouraging further inquiry.
And this is where strident atheists, like Richard Dawkins, take their starting point. Religion now discourages the entire scientific enterprise, and has done so ever since it became abundantly clear that science provides physical explanations with no need of the divine. As a biologist specializing in evolutionary theory, Dawkins has no doubt encountered no end of people who take offense at his work for no other reason than superstitious bias. To any scientist dedicated to free and open enquiry, this is profoundly disturbing.
Carl Sagan called science "a candle in the dark" dispelling the shadows of the "demon haunted world." It is that darkness that gave the Dark Ages their name. The purpose of ID isn't just to challenge evolution, but to initiate a campaign to undermine the materialistic worldview and replace it with a magical worldview. ID proponents call this strategy "The Wedge." Darwin is only the beginning; their goal is nothing less than the destruction of the entire scientific worldview, and they have stated this quite clearly. This is a long term strategy, embarked on decades ago. It is not a response to militant atheists. Militant atheism is a response to an existing offensive.
We simply cannot support this many people on the planet, nor meet the challenges now facing us, without science. The consequences of this flight into fantasy will be the deaths of billions of people, and quite possibly, the extinction of humanity. This attempted retreat into a childlike world of magic and supersition is nothing less than a wholesale attack on truth, and upon the very means by which truth may be discovered.
The prophets and philosophers on whose visions we have built our culture had a word for such an attack on truth. They called it evil.
This is a little too high tech for terrorists, too many moving parts and unknowns. 9/11 was actually quite low tech, using box cutters and people with western passports. It worked because it was simple and unexpected.
Besides, shutting down the internet would shut down all the terrorist networks as well--there's not much more to them then a few isolated cells connected through the web. You could probably fit the leadership of all these groups onto a single bus. Shut down the internet, and they lose most of their means of recruitment, and these guys are nothing without the young cannon fodder they sucker into being the next walking bombs.
And I'm still not sure what it is all these countries find so disagreeable about the way it's being run, apart from the fact that it's being run by Americans. As far as I can see, they're doing a good job, which is really all that matters. If someone has specific criticisms of the way it's being run, propose an alternate way, and put it to a vote. But protesting about America running it, just because it's America, is bullshit, and makes me rather suspicious of their motives. And I'm not even an American...
Yeah, except millions of ordinary office workers, 40 and up, bring their CD's to work, pop them into their CD drive, and listen to them there. The RIAA is going to tell them they can't do this? Well, guess what... they can, they just don't have to pay for them. You'd be amazed just how fast a complete technical noob can pick up on and learn how to use peer-to-peer. I know people in their 50's and 60's who can't even plug in a printer, but have all the latest and greatest of file sharing applications up and running just fine, and have Gigs of music on their drives. And for every DRM they come out with, there will be someone who will be able to crack it within hours or days. CD doesn't work? Don't bother with it, just get the contents from someone else.
Frustrate a demand and you create a black market. Try to use force to shut it down, and you get an armed black market--a criminal network. Mind you, this is pretty much what the RIAA and its cohorts are becoming anyway. They just try to use the courts and cops as hired thugs. There's an interesting sort of Hegelian dialectic going on here, and the striking thing about an Hegelian thesis and anti-thesis is not what makes them different, but how much they have in common. The RIAA will create its own equal and opposite, and the inevitable outcome, the synthesis required to resolve this stupidity (which will come after a lot of wasted time and effort) will be the annihilation of the RIAA and everything like it.
The only way to stop duplication of music is to shut down the profiteers that are driving it.
Don't try game programming--it's all trigonometry. Same goes for most engineering.
This sounds like a variant of trig calculations that you often use in computer algorithms, where it's much faster to calculate the square of something than the root. If you do it right, you can avoid roots completely for comparisons, and only do one at the very end of the calculation for actual lengths and distances. Sine and cosine usually appear as the quotient of lengths of sides of a triangle--you rarely calculate sin(x) or cos(x). The one place where roots are unavoidable is normals, which are just so damn handy. But even there you can sometimes get away without normalizing for comparisons in things like backface culling.
This might be a way of busting the anti-science trend that you see in Intelligent Design and various other post-modernist or new-age flakiness. Face it, a country where 60% of the population believes in Satan but only 20% believes in evolution is not going to remain a superpower or technological or scientific leader for much longer. And with the visa restrictions due to the war on terror, IBM has to settle for what they can get in America, which right now, isn't very good pickings.
I'm sorry, but most of the new-age and fundamentalist beliefs out there amount to sloppy thinking. The current plague of fundamentalism is just new-age occultism with a biblical spin. Cat Stevens was a major league acid casualty before he went all Muslim and started rooting for Khomeini against Salman Rushdie--that should give you an idea of the flake factor at play amongst the Born Agains. How much of that do you think a company like IBM can take without it affecting the bottom line? This is a company whose slogan was "Think!", and these people won't.
I'm glad to see IBM is doing something about it. I wonder how long it will be before Bill Gates catches on and wades in with all his money. Somebody's gotta do it, because, unlike England, the U.S. doesn't have a rich colony to pitch in when it reaches senile old age.
Agreed. It's the 800 lb gorilla because it's good. It has a ton of content and supports single and group play, PvP, etc. It isn't the best at everything (City of Heroes wins the title for best group play, Dark Age of Camelot has the best PvP) but it is the best overall. And it runs on an average machine. Hell, the late EQ2 crawled on a top end machine.
:)
I, for one, welcome our orcish overlords.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to log on...
I'm reminded of that line by Londo Mollari in Babylon 5: "You know, there were two intelligent species on our planet, but we wiped the other one out. Do you know what the last one said just before he died? AAAAAAAAGGGHHH!!!."
Paying for it is one thing, but what many distributers do is nickel and dime the original game development company to death...literally. The guys who came up with the game get to finish the game...maybe. That's about it. The lawyers swoop in and pick the corpse clean, dismantle the team, take all the tools and intellectual property they can find. The distributer then bangs out a couple of expansions and rides the franchise into the ground. You'll never see another great game from that team because the team no longer exists.
The risk is borne entirely by the original developers, who often have a near finished product developed with their own time and money when they sign the deal. Then the distributer begins to load on extra conditions and unnecessary delays, and does some creative accounting when the game ships to make certain the people who did the work get the least money. The company that developed the game goes down in flames under the weight of the development debt, and the distributor walks away with all the money.
So, no, the creators do not get paid. In fact, they were the ones who paid for the damn thing in the first place!
What I've just described is EA's business model. The amount of anti-competitive maneuvering in the game industry is incredible. EA just bought Renderware and are now killing it, in an attempt to break Rockstar games. Why compete with better and more interesting games when you can just kill them off, by yanking their tools out from under them?
What the industry needs is a free and open source suite of tools and engine components that nobody can buy, but that anyone can use. If the little companies want to win, that's where they should start, by pooling their resources, because anything that is commercially owned can be bought by your biggest competition, and building your own engine and tools from scratch is just too damned expensive.
Someone invented Mickey Mouse; people are still willing to pay for him; why should parasites who put no effort into the character get a free ride?
Oh, you mean like the Disney lawyers? Or Disney itself, which based most of its movies on public domain material?
You take some, and you put some back in. That's the way it works. The parasites are the people who don't want to pay back their debts...ever!
I fear what the next thing is to piss off your parents will be.
Extremist religion. No shit, that's a large part of where Muslim extremists are getting there support in the west--Muslim kids trying to piss off their moderate parents. Fanatacism is the new punk. But it'll pass...
The ironic part of this is that these were the very people who could have told the Spanish government how to use its newfound wealth. The result was that the Spanish suffered staggering inflation and bankruptcy.
The Balfour Declaration was intended to serve the same purpose: an infusion of Jewish talent into the Middle East to teach the Arabs how to make the best use of their new oil wealth. Unfortunately, anti-semitism was already ripe (which is really ironic, considering that the Arabs are also semitic.) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion showed up on the scene shortly after, drawing Muslim leaders to it like flies to shit. They rejected the Jews out of hand when they were actually a gift, not an invasion. Nazi propaganda still circulates in the Middle East. When the oil runs out, the Middle East will be in worse shape than ever. The only country there that even knows how to feed itself is Israel. By the end of this century, the Muslim countries of the Middle East are likely to win the largest Darwin Award in history.
That is, unless America becomes the Christian States of America. Then America might win it.
I'll wait for an independent confirming study, thank you very much. More than 1/3rd of all scientific reports about drugs are later proven false. Nothing like a falsified article to hype your stock so you can dump it and make a quick fortune.
Got any research that support that statement ? I mean, real research as opposed to that crap webpage where some amateur without knowledge of statistics selects data to prove a point ?
Yeah, here it is.
And no, this is not some crap web page. The Economist does not publish crap.
If you wanted to knock the American economy down a peg or two then convincing us that Kyoto is a good idea is a good way to do it.
Another good way to do it would be to leave America largely dependent on oil from Saudi Arabia, a country which may suffer a political and economic implosion any day now. Or to continue to pour money into that country when there is no doubt that a lot of that money is being used to fund the very people who are trying to kill you.
Global warming isn't the only reason to get off oil. If Kyoto will have that much of an impact on the economy, it's a good sign that something is already very wrong.
Nuclear power, by the way, has experienced something of a renaissance with environmentalists, especially with recent innovations like the pebble bed reactor which are far more resistant to meltdown. The problem with nuclear reactors is that they're expensive.
As for China, they aren't likely to do anything as long as their disregard for the environment and their labour gives them a competitive advantage. Because it isn't like a totalitarian regime is going to listen to the environmentalist lobby--they'll do whatever they can get away with. The only way to put pressure on them is to stop buying their goods. To spell it out for you, we would have to stop buying goods simply on the basis of cheap prices, and start considering the hidden costs. But too many large corporations cut costs by buying from countries that pay their people almost nothing and disregard the environment (Mexico is another example,) and the government looks the other way.
So yeah, that's a good question: why isn't anyone pressuring the Chinese to clean up their neighborhood?
No, the average temperature continues to climb. Parts of the north (like Northern Europe) will get cooler. The Carribean will get stinking hot, because the heat is no longer being carried away by ocean currents.
Well said. I've stopped buying CD's, because I don't want to give any more money to the bloated corporate entities that overcharge for music while they screw the artists. I buy my music on iTunes now. The next step is to get a direct pipe from artists to net distribution without involving the record companies at all, something that promotes new music through user reviews and ratings, and links tastes through similarity (people with your tastes also liked...) This last part would be a natural for Google.
On the other hand, people who copy music without paying anything for it are censoring themselves. The money that you spend is a vote. You can bitch all you like about Wal Mart, but if you shop there, you're supporting it. You can rave all you like about a band, but if you never buy anything they make, nobody is going to know or care what you think. There were bands in the 90's who had a strong following amongst the computer crowd who couldn't make any money because people just shared it around. If you like it, money talks. Pay for it. Otherwise you can look forward to a world where all you can get is people like Celine Dion and Britanny Spears. In other words, music for people who are too stupid to know how to copy it.
The sword was worth a good 5000 yuan on the open market. Adjusting that for GDP, that's around $3000 in the US.
In a society where factory workers often make less than a dollar a day, that's a lot more than $3000 is worth to an American. To some people, that's 10 years pay, so it's more like $300,000 to an American. Nothing justifies murder, but it gives you an idea of the emotional impact.
And it's only gotten 5 degrees warmer since the coldest part of the ice age. The other 4 degrees took hundreds of millenia. That last degree took only 50 years. And this at a time when the overall trend, due to solar activity and other factors, should have resulted in cooling (hence the less that 1 degree over the past 150 years--the first hundred of that saw a general cooling trend.)
That first 4 degrees transformed the planet, permitting ice masses that were up to a mile thick to retreat from about the 40th parallel to the artic circle. Since it happened gradually, the ecosystem was able to adapt, moving with the climatic zones. But 1 degree in just 50 years is a hell of a shock. Plants and animals are now trying to survive in climatic zones that they really don't belong in. In a sparsely populated world adaptation might take care of this, but the ecosystem is already under a strain. Populations aren't large enough to diversify, and movement between areas of climate is obstructed by human development of all kinds.
It isn't just a matter of everywhere getting 1 degree warmer. The average temperature in cities has increased 2 degrees over the past 50 years. The overall change is not an even one, and temperature differential change weather patterns. The change affects rainfall, turning temperate zones into deserts, lengthening storm seasons, and increasing rainfall in areas that may already have too much.
50% of the human race live in coastal areas that will be inundated if all land based glaciers melt. This includes the American eastern seaboard. The midwest, the primary food producing area, is running out of water, and hotter temperatures will speed this process up. The southwest is dependant on the same water table. And the southeast can look forward to longer and more violent storm seasons.
So, where will your grandchildren live?