If Amazon suddenly announced their ebooks will now be DRM-free and can be read on cellphones, Ipods, et cetera, the Authors Guild would still be suing, but now they'd be suing Amazon, Apple, and Dell.
You're assuming a scenario where Amazon released DRM-free e-books without an agreement from the publishers that allowed it. The scenario I'm thinking of is one where the publishers agree to an e-book edition in an open standard format. (I'm also not assuming that the standard is DRM-free. I now see that some people might object to call that an "open" standard, so I guess I should pare down my assumption: a standard that allowed for competitive markets in e-book providers and e-book reader devices.)
No, not quite. The argument wouldn't run simply that the seller is selling both an e-book and a device that can read text out loud. That is certainly allowed. The problematic case is the one where somebody sells a device that simultaneously comprises an e-book reader that can read books out loud, and e-books in a proprietary format intended to work only in that e-book reader.
If the e-books were in some standard, open format, and there was a competitive market for devices that could read e-books in that format, then this story could well be different, because the party that provided the e-books could easily be a different party than the one that provided the text-to-speech feature; and thus, the first party could quite easily disclaim responsibility for what the second party does, while the second party could claim that it is not bound by any agreements with the copyright holder, and that it just is providing a shortcut for something the users could already do (extract the text from the e-book and pass it through text-to-speech software). And even if the e-book seller and the device seller were the same party, the existence of such a market would help, because they could argue that their relationship to the publisher qua e-book seller and their relationship to the user qua device seller are severed by the existence of such a market.
The way things are with Kindle and its e-books, however, is that Amazon can't claim to be offering two clearly severable things. Their e-books don't work without their reader, so the publisher can try to argue that the work in question is the combination of the e-book file with the Kindle device, and not the e-book file itself. The question is whether this argument will succeed.
But they aren't distributing (or selling) an audio copy of the book (the work), rather they distribute a regular ebook copy, it's just that the reader they also sell has text-to-speech support and can do the space shifting on the final distributed work. It's like arguing that Apple is selling CDs because they sell MP3s (or whatever the specific format is) and iTunes has the ability to convert those into CDs.
Does Apple's agreement with the music labels spell out that Apple's customers are allowed to burn, for their personal use, CDs of the music they buy from the iTunes Store? This could easily be a case where there is an explicit agreement that Apple's customers are allowed to do that.
I don't know the terms of Apple's agreements with the record labels, but basically, I think your argument there isn't bulletproof; it could be the case that Apple secured that ability for iTunes users by negotiating with the labels, and not on the grounds you think.
If you buy the book from Amazon and download it on your kindle, it's perfectly possible to read that book without ever using the text-to-speech capability of the device. Likewise if you purchased the exact same ebook and downloaded it onto some other device that didn't have text-to-speech capability you wouldn't be able to do the conversion without further hardware/software being involved. You might as well say your local grocery store needs a license to distribute ebook versions of the tabloids it sells since someone could go home and use OCR software to convert them into ebooks.
I think the challenge here is that the Kindle e-book is in a proprietary format that's specific to the Kindle device. The print copy of the tabloid and the OCR software were not specifically designed with each other in mind. This is one reason why the grocery store seller doesn't need an ebook license to sell print copies of the tabloid; even if the grocery store (somehow) sells both the print copies of the tabloid and the OCR software, since these two products are in no way tailored specifically toward each other, the store can't be held responsible for whether the buyers use them together in a way that infringes the tabloid publisher's copyrights.
E-books for Kindle, on the other hand, are not designed to be usable without the Kindle device and/or whatever other software Amazon provides. Amazon can't as easily claim that what the e-book buyers do is the sole responsibility of said buyers, because Amazon itself is the agent making it possible for their device, which comprises a proprietary e-book reader and a proprietarily formatted e-book (or so will the argument state it), to perform a spoken interpretation of the work, which falls outside the scope of the license that was given to Amazon to publish the e-book editions of the books in question (again, so will go the argument).
There's one big unknown in this whole situation, that's not being talked about: what are the precise terms of Amazon's license agreement with the book publishers? A lot of the outcome of cases like this may well turn on that.
Your Dell laptop does a hell of a lot more things than just be an e-book reader, and Dell isn't selling books in a specialized format that only work on its laptop.
Nah, it's the same general issue of space shifting as has already been addressed time and again (and either upheld or not in various cases). They'll lose this one, as if you already have it on the kindle you bought it (in theory) and therefore have the right to space shift that copyrighted work into whatever form you want.
Note that by "you" in this quotation, you mean "the user of Kindle." Let's grant that the user of Kindle has the right to make this use of the work. That doesn't answer a crucial question, which is whether Amazon, the maker and seller of Kindle and the works that can be used in it, has the right to "space-shift" the works that it sells specifically for use in its device. You can bet that this is the angle the Author's Guild is going to push, in order to pressure Amazon to agree to license audiobook rights for the e-books they sell for Kindle.
The fact that I can record myself reading somebody else's book and play that recording for myself and small private gatherings doesn't mean that I can record myself reading the same book, and sell copies of the recording to the public. The Author's Guild is most certainly trying to equate what Amazon is doing to the latter, not the former.
The closest example, actually, is if you were very good at reading books out loud, and you rented out a theatre, advertised that you were going to read Harry Potter books, sold tickets, and had complete strangers pay to come in to listen to you reading them. The copyright holders would be quite within their rights to ask you to stop, because you've set up a textbook public performance of their work.
Note that the question isn't whether people who are in possessions of a book infringe the copyright by reading it out loud. The question is whether Amazon infringes the copyrights by selling both the e-books and a machine that reads them out loud. It's not quite the same as the textbook case shown above of a public performance of the work, but neither is it the same as privately reading a book out loud; the argument would go that there is no theater hall, but other than that, Amazon is "selling tickets" to the public to have Amazon read the work out loud to you.
So there is possibly a real question here as to where the line between public performance and fair use lies.
PS note that the argument is all about whether Amazon, which is the seller, is infringing the copyrights on the works that it sells. Contrary to what the bulk of the comments to this story assume, whether the buyers or people downstream from them infringe the books doesn't seem to be the problem here; if you have a copy of a book and you read it out loud to yourself, to your children or your friends, you're clear; these are not public performances of the work.
If not done in public, 4 [public performance], 5 [public display], and 6 [public performance via digital audio transmission] are out (and 6 only covers sound recordings anyway).
Don't discount 4 so quickly. I would agree that the user of the text-to-speech feature doesn't violate any copyright for making private use of the feature. However, what about the seller the device? Does selling a device to the public specifically designed to read books count as a performance of the work?
Note that the fact that Kindle is specifically a book reader is what triggers this possibility. Text-to-speech software in general can be used to read books out loud, but they are not marketed specifically for this purpose, and can more easily be put to other uses. The problem here is that Kindle's text-to-speech feature is very closely tied to reading books that Amazon sells.
So reading a book you own aloud to yourself is copyright infringement?
The question you need to ask is whether it is a public performance of the work in question, in the sense relevant to copyright law. Reading a book out loud to yourself is fair use; reading it out loud to a small private gathering is so. A public performance of a work is a derivative; e.g., if you are really good at reading books, and you rent out a theater and sell tickets for people to come and hear you read other people's books, you would need license from the copyright holders.
Selling a machine that reads e-books out loud is somewhere in between. And note the question would most likely be whether the seller of the machine or the ebooks (not the user) is producing a derivative work of the ebook.
Wow, what you said made very little sense. Why give away the key to the real data when you can give away the key to the fake? Either is very easy.
Because they're physically torturing you, and you will give them exactly what they want because you hope that will MAKE IT STOP?
Maybe it's hard for you to understand this if you're a super-macho cool-headed ultra-rationalist who will cooly and rationally attempt to deceive the torturers while they TEAR AWAY YOUR FINGERNAILS. Or maybe you'll be more like the rest of us, and quickly think that you have the information they want, and if give it to them, you remove one powerful reason for them to continue to cause you more pain than you ever imagined before.
Legal reasoning is very different from the kind of reasoning done by ordinary computer programmers. Computer languages are formal languages, with precise mathematical definitions of what symbols occur in them, which sequences of symbols are well-formed expressions of the language, and what the semantics of the code is (in the worst case, where these things are not defined independently of the implementation, the compiler, runtime system and machine architecture act together impose such a semantics).
Legal language and reasoning is nothing at all like that. It is all informal logic and non-monotonic reasoning, using imperfect analogies to exemplars and prototypes ("precedent"). There is considerable vagueness built into the practice, because the built-in assumption is that the future will bring unanticipated circumstances that will not be easy to reconcile with the precedents set today.
You must be very careful to apply the term ad hominem correctly, because people often do it wrong. Here are two schematic arguments:
You're stupid. Therefore, the argument you want us to accept is invalid.
The argument you want us to accept is invalid. Therefore, you're stupid.
The first one is an ad hominem argument. The second one is just pointing out that the argument you want us to accept is invalid, and that this is sufficient grounds for concluding that you are stupid.
If you hide the encrypted partition (and especially, create a second, unencrypted partition if the OS is encrypted), you have plausible deniability.
It is not uncommon for people under torture to confess to crimes they did not commit. Plausible deniability won't help you if you confess to the real, valuable partition just to get the wrench dudes to stop.
Hard drive encryption isn't meant to protect against social engineering attacks. It's meant to protect against attacks that don't require social engineering, like stealing or cloning a database server's drives for the information. More than anything, it's meant to provide reasonable assurance that if one of your employees' computers gets stolen by a common thief who just wants to sell it for the cash value, somebody else down the line won't be able to read the data in the drive and take advantage of it.
Yeah, that's a pretty interesting point. Intelligence isn't well understood, so the gaping whole in all of it is "intelligence + 1 = ?".
We more or less agree about that being a gaping hole, but I don't think it's even as simple as "intelligence isn't well understood"; to me, it's more along the lines of "all the cognitivist talk about 'intelligence' as an objective property is obscurantist." There is no fact of the matter as to whether anything is intelligent in the first place; it all comes down to a set of complex cultural discourses about human values and relationships, that can never be pinned down.
His reasoning goes on to say that if you could simulate a human mind on a piece (many pieces) of silicon, then that human mind becomes subject to accelerating returns of hardware advancement. (This assumes hardware keeps advancing). So a mind that runs on my 2025 486 runs 32 times as fast on my 2035 PIV - and assuming there's advances in tech maybe it runs hundreds of times faster. Then you've got a brain that can cover a thousand years of thinking in one year.
The gap I find in his logic is that a) the mind doesn't go mad because its inputs are happening really slowly (having a conversation with the outside world is like talking, waiting a day, then getting a response), b) that one guy sitting around for a thousand years will build something better than itself.
I don't buy that argument either, as I said in another post which very much echoes what you say. I think I do go a bit further, in that I reject the assumption that such a "sped-up fake brain" would work at all in the first place.
More generally, I'm skeptical about AI/cognition talk that focuses excessively on the brain, to the exclusion of environment and culture; see, as a general source of criticisim of that kind of thinking, embodied cognition.
I don't find the concept of machine intelligence ridiculous, but I find that Kurzweil flounders a bit trying to make predictions about what a true machine intelligence will be like as we're still so far away from producing one.
I find the concept of machine intelligence as interesting as the concept of swimming machines. When you get down to it and strip away a lot of rationalizations, we don't say that people are "intelligent" because of any one objective fact about people; we call them "intelligent" because of the way that we relate to them. Folks may some day build machines that we relate to very much like we relate to people, and that would require impressive technical feats, but it would be more fundamentally a cultural change on how people relate to machines than a scientific advance.
What you're describing is towards the tail end of it - his main proposition is still that machine intelligence (and enhanced human intelligence) will lead to faster and faster scientific breakthroughs, which lead to smarter machines, which leads to....the singularity is dependent on new generations of people/machines that can improve on their own intelligence.
Yup. And this has the serious problem that "improving their own intelligence" is a completely undefined concept. (I'd go further and say undefinable, but one step at a time.)
I think of course the part he missed is when they wake up the first smarter than human computer intelligence. They tell it to go to work on making something smarter than itself, and it tells them to "GTFO, I'm going to be a screenwriter, not a stupid nerdy computer scientist!"
That joke can be generalized: perhaps "intelligent," when you really get down to it, just means "like us": something is intelligent when it deals with its environment and with people the way that we do. In that case, "superintelligence" is just an oxymoron, because nothing could be more like us than we already are.
More narrowly, your joke also suggests that their view of what a "superintelligence" would do is infected with value judgements about what kind of projects are important to pursue (in this case, science and technology). And thus, that their measuring standard about whether a machine was "superintelligent" might implicitly be that the machine is better at science and technology than its inventors, as judged by how the inventors value of what the machine does. So, perhaps the inventors would judge your machine as actually not being "superintelligent," simply because they think that scientists are intelligent people and screenwriters are stupid people, and thus they would judge an artificial superscientist as superintelligent, but an artificial superscreenwriter as superstupid.
And this points to another very general and very common problem with folks like Kurzweil: they are profoundly confused about facts and values, and their arguments are more often than not trying to pass value judgements as fact judgements. If "intelligence" is best seen as a value instead of a fact, i.e., if we see "intelligence" as a relation between persons that is based on what people want and expect out of each other, the whole concept of "superintelligence" falls apart, because then a "superintelligence" is nothing more than a machine that we judge to be more intelligent than ourselves, which makes it a fact about how people relate to machines, and not some objective property of the machine itself.
The last human invention will be a computer that can simulate the brain in software, but run much faster.
Sure. Then they implant those brains on people. Then those people end up thinking so fast that, when they need to go to the bathroom, by the time they finish standing up they've forgotten why they were getting up, start thinking about something else (well, actually, a million something elses), and piss themselves.
That was a joke, sure, but it's a joke based on a larger, important point: the concept of a "sped-up human brain" doesn't quite make sense. Why? Because to the extent the brain can be meaningfully said to have a "speed" like computers do, it's more likely than not that its "speed" is set by the environment. So a supposed "high-speed simulated brain" would, in fact, be a brain running at the wrong "speed."
A simplistic model of neuronal functioning can also show us one crucial way in which this "sped-up brain" idea is wrong. Suppose we have three neurons, A, B and C, such that neuron A fires on external stimulus x, neuron B fires on external stimulus y, and C fires on the simultaneous internal stimulus of A and B. Suppose that once a neuron fires, it remains active for 500ms in a real brain, 5ms in a fake, "high-speed" brain.
Now consider the situation where external stimuli x and y arrive in sequence, 100ms apart. In the real brain, this will cause C to fire. In the fake, "sped-up" brain, C will not fire, because A's activation will decay much before the second external stimulus arrives.
Yes, this is a simplistic, almost cartoonish model, but it drives the point even further: there is no guarantee that a "sped-up brain" will even work at all in the first place, or have an interesting pattern of activity.
It's not what you do, it's what they can prove. If the "proof" is an IP address on iTunes' logfiles, then where you "are" is wherever the SSH tunnel end was visible.
No, you really do violate the agreement if you order from outside the USA. It's also relatively easy to prove that you don't live in the USA if you don't in fact do so. It's just not easy enough that they would benefit from doing so.
I mean, what's your point, anyway? I can understand the wish to violate such an annoying agreement with iTunes, if you think you can get away with it by using an SSH tunnel. What I just don't understand is why you would want to rationalize it with a transparently bad argument to the effect that you didn't actually violate the agreement because they can't (or won't bother to) prove that you did so.
Just as an analogy, that'd be like saying that an actual murderer, if he was exonerated, did therefore not murder the victim. Do you agree with the argument that, since OJ was found innocent of murdering his ex, therefore he didn't murder her?
I understand how SSH tunneling works. This is not a technology issue, it's a legal issue. The purchaser is the person who purchases the songs, the location of the purchaser is the place where the actual person is located, and whether the purchaser is in the USA is whether that location is under the jurisdiction of the USA. SSH is completely irrelevant.
If Warner owns song X in the US, and Sony owns it Brazil, then no matter how much Warner wants to sell you the song in Brazil they CAN'T. And if Sony owns it but doesn't want to sell it, or wants to sell it but charge more than Warner, that's life. Warner can't do squat about it except say, hey, come to the US and buy a copy while you are actually here.
The thing that bothers me about this argument is that there is no law against me, in the USA, ordering music from a store in Brazil over the mail, and them delivering the product over the mail. I don't know Brazilian law, but I would guess they don't have any laws like that either. So I'm skeptical that a label in the USA would violate their agreements by allowing iTunes, based in the USA, to sell music online to foreigners.
So it's not about iTunes being restricted by the labels' agreements, but rather, the labels not wanting the purpose of their agreements (local market monopolies) to be undermined by the potential global reach of services like iTunes.
BTW, Microsoft's subscription model (which is way heavier on DRM than iTunes ever was) is virtually ignored because most people consider it vastly inferior. Who wants to pay a fee each and every month to listen to music, only to lose all their music should they stop paying? How many times do you feel the need to pay for that copy of Baba O'Riley anyway?
Have you ever heard of satellite radio?
More directly, it seems to me like a subscription model isn't as silly a choice as you make it to be, if implemented right. Basically, with the buy-a-copy model, you pay for each track or album separately, so your cost goes up the more track or albums you buy, but you get to listen to them forever. In various versions of the subscription model, your cost is fixed independently of how many different tracks you listen to, but you only get to listen as long as your subscription is current.
And more importantly, since these models aren't mutually exclusive, you could have a subscription service that allows you to listen to anything you want on the service, but also to buy permanent copies of what you really would like to keep after your subscription lapses.
How is it "inaccurate" to talk about ownership of one's work, and of whatever else of value one trades that work for?
Because ownership of wealth is not contingent on being responsible for the production of said wealth. A child that benefits from being given its parents' wealth ends up with wealth it did not work for (which compounds generationally, too). More generally, it is important to distinguish wealth from work because allowing people to arbitrarily transfer their wealth to their children (or anybody else), with no restrictions at all, leads to large wealth that is not in any way attributable only to the work of the bearer of that wealth.
Note that it's not only parents giving their wealth to their children that's relevant here. Any time somebody else's work indirectly makes you wealthier, a portion of your wealth is now not due to your own work. (Stereotypical example: roads.)
This defeats your various arguments about how you should have an absolute, unfettered right to determine how your wealth is used, because you rely on equating your wealth and the output of your work. As soon as we recognize that a huge portion of your wealth is actually due to other people's work, this impairs your claim that you should have arbitrary control over your wealth. You can still have a claim over its disposition based on the value of your actual work, but that value is less than the value of your wealth.
But of course, you prefer to dwell on strawmen that presuppose that the only alternative to arbitrary control over your wealth is that the evil guvmint comes and to takes away your toothpick to give it away to stupid freeloaders that are worse than you.
You forgot to explain to us why children should be entitled to benefit from their parents' wealth in the first place. (And note that I said wealth, not "work" as you inaccurately put it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Because perhaps the cost of removing them according to the proper removal procedure is more expensive than the second-hand cameras on their own.
Also see other messages in this thread about Homeland Security funds return.
You're assuming a scenario where Amazon released DRM-free e-books without an agreement from the publishers that allowed it. The scenario I'm thinking of is one where the publishers agree to an e-book edition in an open standard format. (I'm also not assuming that the standard is DRM-free. I now see that some people might object to call that an "open" standard, so I guess I should pare down my assumption: a standard that allowed for competitive markets in e-book providers and e-book reader devices.)
No, not quite. The argument wouldn't run simply that the seller is selling both an e-book and a device that can read text out loud. That is certainly allowed. The problematic case is the one where somebody sells a device that simultaneously comprises an e-book reader that can read books out loud, and e-books in a proprietary format intended to work only in that e-book reader.
If the e-books were in some standard, open format, and there was a competitive market for devices that could read e-books in that format, then this story could well be different, because the party that provided the e-books could easily be a different party than the one that provided the text-to-speech feature; and thus, the first party could quite easily disclaim responsibility for what the second party does, while the second party could claim that it is not bound by any agreements with the copyright holder, and that it just is providing a shortcut for something the users could already do (extract the text from the e-book and pass it through text-to-speech software). And even if the e-book seller and the device seller were the same party, the existence of such a market would help, because they could argue that their relationship to the publisher qua e-book seller and their relationship to the user qua device seller are severed by the existence of such a market.
The way things are with Kindle and its e-books, however, is that Amazon can't claim to be offering two clearly severable things. Their e-books don't work without their reader, so the publisher can try to argue that the work in question is the combination of the e-book file with the Kindle device, and not the e-book file itself. The question is whether this argument will succeed.
Does Apple's agreement with the music labels spell out that Apple's customers are allowed to burn, for their personal use, CDs of the music they buy from the iTunes Store? This could easily be a case where there is an explicit agreement that Apple's customers are allowed to do that.
I don't know the terms of Apple's agreements with the record labels, but basically, I think your argument there isn't bulletproof; it could be the case that Apple secured that ability for iTunes users by negotiating with the labels, and not on the grounds you think.
I think the challenge here is that the Kindle e-book is in a proprietary format that's specific to the Kindle device. The print copy of the tabloid and the OCR software were not specifically designed with each other in mind. This is one reason why the grocery store seller doesn't need an ebook license to sell print copies of the tabloid; even if the grocery store (somehow) sells both the print copies of the tabloid and the OCR software, since these two products are in no way tailored specifically toward each other, the store can't be held responsible for whether the buyers use them together in a way that infringes the tabloid publisher's copyrights.
E-books for Kindle, on the other hand, are not designed to be usable without the Kindle device and/or whatever other software Amazon provides. Amazon can't as easily claim that what the e-book buyers do is the sole responsibility of said buyers, because Amazon itself is the agent making it possible for their device, which comprises a proprietary e-book reader and a proprietarily formatted e-book (or so will the argument state it), to perform a spoken interpretation of the work, which falls outside the scope of the license that was given to Amazon to publish the e-book editions of the books in question (again, so will go the argument).
There's one big unknown in this whole situation, that's not being talked about: what are the precise terms of Amazon's license agreement with the book publishers? A lot of the outcome of cases like this may well turn on that.
Your Dell laptop does a hell of a lot more things than just be an e-book reader, and Dell isn't selling books in a specialized format that only work on its laptop.
Note that by "you" in this quotation, you mean "the user of Kindle." Let's grant that the user of Kindle has the right to make this use of the work. That doesn't answer a crucial question, which is whether Amazon, the maker and seller of Kindle and the works that can be used in it, has the right to "space-shift" the works that it sells specifically for use in its device. You can bet that this is the angle the Author's Guild is going to push, in order to pressure Amazon to agree to license audiobook rights for the e-books they sell for Kindle.
The fact that I can record myself reading somebody else's book and play that recording for myself and small private gatherings doesn't mean that I can record myself reading the same book, and sell copies of the recording to the public. The Author's Guild is most certainly trying to equate what Amazon is doing to the latter, not the former.
The closest example, actually, is if you were very good at reading books out loud, and you rented out a theatre, advertised that you were going to read Harry Potter books, sold tickets, and had complete strangers pay to come in to listen to you reading them. The copyright holders would be quite within their rights to ask you to stop, because you've set up a textbook public performance of their work.
Note that the question isn't whether people who are in possessions of a book infringe the copyright by reading it out loud. The question is whether Amazon infringes the copyrights by selling both the e-books and a machine that reads them out loud. It's not quite the same as the textbook case shown above of a public performance of the work, but neither is it the same as privately reading a book out loud; the argument would go that there is no theater hall, but other than that, Amazon is "selling tickets" to the public to have Amazon read the work out loud to you.
So there is possibly a real question here as to where the line between public performance and fair use lies.
PS note that the argument is all about whether Amazon, which is the seller, is infringing the copyrights on the works that it sells. Contrary to what the bulk of the comments to this story assume, whether the buyers or people downstream from them infringe the books doesn't seem to be the problem here; if you have a copy of a book and you read it out loud to yourself, to your children or your friends, you're clear; these are not public performances of the work.
Don't discount 4 so quickly. I would agree that the user of the text-to-speech feature doesn't violate any copyright for making private use of the feature. However, what about the seller the device? Does selling a device to the public specifically designed to read books count as a performance of the work?
Note that the fact that Kindle is specifically a book reader is what triggers this possibility. Text-to-speech software in general can be used to read books out loud, but they are not marketed specifically for this purpose, and can more easily be put to other uses. The problem here is that Kindle's text-to-speech feature is very closely tied to reading books that Amazon sells.
The question you need to ask is whether it is a public performance of the work in question, in the sense relevant to copyright law. Reading a book out loud to yourself is fair use; reading it out loud to a small private gathering is so. A public performance of a work is a derivative; e.g., if you are really good at reading books, and you rent out a theater and sell tickets for people to come and hear you read other people's books, you would need license from the copyright holders.
Selling a machine that reads e-books out loud is somewhere in between. And note the question would most likely be whether the seller of the machine or the ebooks (not the user) is producing a derivative work of the ebook.
Yup. Also, don't forget the good old Unwittingly Ironic Ad Hominem: "He called me stupid, therefore, he's wrong!"
Because they're physically torturing you, and you will give them exactly what they want because you hope that will MAKE IT STOP?
Maybe it's hard for you to understand this if you're a super-macho cool-headed ultra-rationalist who will cooly and rationally attempt to deceive the torturers while they TEAR AWAY YOUR FINGERNAILS. Or maybe you'll be more like the rest of us, and quickly think that you have the information they want, and if give it to them, you remove one powerful reason for them to continue to cause you more pain than you ever imagined before.
Legal reasoning is very different from the kind of reasoning done by ordinary computer programmers. Computer languages are formal languages, with precise mathematical definitions of what symbols occur in them, which sequences of symbols are well-formed expressions of the language, and what the semantics of the code is (in the worst case, where these things are not defined independently of the implementation, the compiler, runtime system and machine architecture act together impose such a semantics).
Legal language and reasoning is nothing at all like that. It is all informal logic and non-monotonic reasoning, using imperfect analogies to exemplars and prototypes ("precedent"). There is considerable vagueness built into the practice, because the built-in assumption is that the future will bring unanticipated circumstances that will not be easy to reconcile with the precedents set today.
You must be very careful to apply the term ad hominem correctly, because people often do it wrong. Here are two schematic arguments:
The first one is an ad hominem argument. The second one is just pointing out that the argument you want us to accept is invalid, and that this is sufficient grounds for concluding that you are stupid.
It is not uncommon for people under torture to confess to crimes they did not commit. Plausible deniability won't help you if you confess to the real, valuable partition just to get the wrench dudes to stop.
Hard drive encryption isn't meant to protect against social engineering attacks. It's meant to protect against attacks that don't require social engineering, like stealing or cloning a database server's drives for the information. More than anything, it's meant to provide reasonable assurance that if one of your employees' computers gets stolen by a common thief who just wants to sell it for the cash value, somebody else down the line won't be able to read the data in the drive and take advantage of it.
We more or less agree about that being a gaping hole, but I don't think it's even as simple as "intelligence isn't well understood"; to me, it's more along the lines of "all the cognitivist talk about 'intelligence' as an objective property is obscurantist." There is no fact of the matter as to whether anything is intelligent in the first place; it all comes down to a set of complex cultural discourses about human values and relationships, that can never be pinned down.
I don't buy that argument either, as I said in another post which very much echoes what you say. I think I do go a bit further, in that I reject the assumption that such a "sped-up fake brain" would work at all in the first place.
More generally, I'm skeptical about AI/cognition talk that focuses excessively on the brain, to the exclusion of environment and culture; see, as a general source of criticisim of that kind of thinking, embodied cognition.
I find the concept of machine intelligence as interesting as the concept of swimming machines. When you get down to it and strip away a lot of rationalizations, we don't say that people are "intelligent" because of any one objective fact about people; we call them "intelligent" because of the way that we relate to them. Folks may some day build machines that we relate to very much like we relate to people, and that would require impressive technical feats, but it would be more fundamentally a cultural change on how people relate to machines than a scientific advance.
Yup. And this has the serious problem that "improving their own intelligence" is a completely undefined concept. (I'd go further and say undefinable, but one step at a time.)
That joke can be generalized: perhaps "intelligent," when you really get down to it, just means "like us": something is intelligent when it deals with its environment and with people the way that we do. In that case, "superintelligence" is just an oxymoron, because nothing could be more like us than we already are.
More narrowly, your joke also suggests that their view of what a "superintelligence" would do is infected with value judgements about what kind of projects are important to pursue (in this case, science and technology). And thus, that their measuring standard about whether a machine was "superintelligent" might implicitly be that the machine is better at science and technology than its inventors, as judged by how the inventors value of what the machine does. So, perhaps the inventors would judge your machine as actually not being "superintelligent," simply because they think that scientists are intelligent people and screenwriters are stupid people, and thus they would judge an artificial superscientist as superintelligent, but an artificial superscreenwriter as superstupid.
And this points to another very general and very common problem with folks like Kurzweil: they are profoundly confused about facts and values, and their arguments are more often than not trying to pass value judgements as fact judgements. If "intelligence" is best seen as a value instead of a fact, i.e., if we see "intelligence" as a relation between persons that is based on what people want and expect out of each other, the whole concept of "superintelligence" falls apart, because then a "superintelligence" is nothing more than a machine that we judge to be more intelligent than ourselves, which makes it a fact about how people relate to machines, and not some objective property of the machine itself.
Sure. Then they implant those brains on people. Then those people end up thinking so fast that, when they need to go to the bathroom, by the time they finish standing up they've forgotten why they were getting up, start thinking about something else (well, actually, a million something elses), and piss themselves.
That was a joke, sure, but it's a joke based on a larger, important point: the concept of a "sped-up human brain" doesn't quite make sense. Why? Because to the extent the brain can be meaningfully said to have a "speed" like computers do, it's more likely than not that its "speed" is set by the environment. So a supposed "high-speed simulated brain" would, in fact, be a brain running at the wrong "speed."
A simplistic model of neuronal functioning can also show us one crucial way in which this "sped-up brain" idea is wrong. Suppose we have three neurons, A, B and C, such that neuron A fires on external stimulus x, neuron B fires on external stimulus y, and C fires on the simultaneous internal stimulus of A and B. Suppose that once a neuron fires, it remains active for 500ms in a real brain, 5ms in a fake, "high-speed" brain.
Now consider the situation where external stimuli x and y arrive in sequence, 100ms apart. In the real brain, this will cause C to fire. In the fake, "sped-up" brain, C will not fire, because A's activation will decay much before the second external stimulus arrives.
Yes, this is a simplistic, almost cartoonish model, but it drives the point even further: there is no guarantee that a "sped-up brain" will even work at all in the first place, or have an interesting pattern of activity.
No, you really do violate the agreement if you order from outside the USA. It's also relatively easy to prove that you don't live in the USA if you don't in fact do so. It's just not easy enough that they would benefit from doing so.
I mean, what's your point, anyway? I can understand the wish to violate such an annoying agreement with iTunes, if you think you can get away with it by using an SSH tunnel. What I just don't understand is why you would want to rationalize it with a transparently bad argument to the effect that you didn't actually violate the agreement because they can't (or won't bother to) prove that you did so.
Just as an analogy, that'd be like saying that an actual murderer, if he was exonerated, did therefore not murder the victim. Do you agree with the argument that, since OJ was found innocent of murdering his ex, therefore he didn't murder her?
I understand how SSH tunneling works. This is not a technology issue, it's a legal issue. The purchaser is the person who purchases the songs, the location of the purchaser is the place where the actual person is located, and whether the purchaser is in the USA is whether that location is under the jurisdiction of the USA. SSH is completely irrelevant.
The thing that bothers me about this argument is that there is no law against me, in the USA, ordering music from a store in Brazil over the mail, and them delivering the product over the mail. I don't know Brazilian law, but I would guess they don't have any laws like that either. So I'm skeptical that a label in the USA would violate their agreements by allowing iTunes, based in the USA, to sell music online to foreigners.
So it's not about iTunes being restricted by the labels' agreements, but rather, the labels not wanting the purpose of their agreements (local market monopolies) to be undermined by the potential global reach of services like iTunes.
Have you ever heard of satellite radio?
More directly, it seems to me like a subscription model isn't as silly a choice as you make it to be, if implemented right. Basically, with the buy-a-copy model, you pay for each track or album separately, so your cost goes up the more track or albums you buy, but you get to listen to them forever. In various versions of the subscription model, your cost is fixed independently of how many different tracks you listen to, but you only get to listen as long as your subscription is current.
And more importantly, since these models aren't mutually exclusive, you could have a subscription service that allows you to listen to anything you want on the service, but also to buy permanent copies of what you really would like to keep after your subscription lapses.
No. You'd be purchasing wherever you are physically located.
Because ownership of wealth is not contingent on being responsible for the production of said wealth. A child that benefits from being given its parents' wealth ends up with wealth it did not work for (which compounds generationally, too). More generally, it is important to distinguish wealth from work because allowing people to arbitrarily transfer their wealth to their children (or anybody else), with no restrictions at all, leads to large wealth that is not in any way attributable only to the work of the bearer of that wealth.
Note that it's not only parents giving their wealth to their children that's relevant here. Any time somebody else's work indirectly makes you wealthier, a portion of your wealth is now not due to your own work. (Stereotypical example: roads.)
This defeats your various arguments about how you should have an absolute, unfettered right to determine how your wealth is used, because you rely on equating your wealth and the output of your work. As soon as we recognize that a huge portion of your wealth is actually due to other people's work, this impairs your claim that you should have arbitrary control over your wealth. You can still have a claim over its disposition based on the value of your actual work, but that value is less than the value of your wealth.
But of course, you prefer to dwell on strawmen that presuppose that the only alternative to arbitrary control over your wealth is that the evil guvmint comes and to takes away your toothpick to give it away to stupid freeloaders that are worse than you.
You forgot to explain to us why children should be entitled to benefit from their parents' wealth in the first place. (And note that I said wealth, not "work" as you inaccurately put it.)