I believe that the lines drawn that differentiate one species from another are essentially arbitrary and consequently, survival of the species is a fiction.
If man evolved from (insert choice here: ape, rat, etc), man cannot interbreed with (choice) and is a different species - is that evolution considered beneficial or detrimental to the species from whence it occurred?
Speciation is a model for describing the genetic contents of commonly witnessed packages, merely a convenient fiction.
This strikes me as an extremely holistic approach to the concept of evolution, which I don't have a problem with - but I don't recognize this to be more than speculation rather than experimentally-proven hypotheses.
I think speculation is excellent when it leads to successful, or failed (the latter is just as good as the former) experiments - which can define scientific truth (at least to the poing that "theory" means "truth"). Unfortunately, such a holistic approach to the whole matter requires that some facts be taken for granted, as they've yet to be experimented with - mostly (if not wholly) due to the scale of the experiment. Unfortunately, the lack of the application of the scientific method renders this mere speculation - perhaps correct, but nonetheless unproven - and therefore it does not qualify as "theory" only hypothesis".
If you'd like to elevate this to a theory, or if someone has and I'm unaware of it, please discuss mechanisms by which the factuality of these hypotheses can be tested, they sound too abstract in the forms discussed.
Dawkins is a particularly interesting source to consider, I believe he segregates informational evolution via the concept of memes which behave like the "genes" of culture.
I didn't make any claims that traits operate by any other means other than genetic means.
If the individual with the desired trait is not breeding, how can they pass this trait on genetically?
While I agree that the theory of evolution could be used to describe the rest of your post, I feel that the term "culture" is far more accurate. This is a chicken-and-the-egg situation, does evolution create culture, or culture evolution, or are they one and the same? The only rational answer is to look for evidence for and against the hypothesis (especially against, it will save more time if the hypothesis is false). the first evidence I would present against would be this: what is the scope of evolution? Does it count when a human trains an ape to use sign-language and that ape teaches another? What about the Eureka affect - if I'm siting under a tree and an apple falls, and I hypothesize gravity - is that human evolution? It is evolution of culture, perhaps, but culture is not uniquely human. If I could describe all of these things to a Dolphin, how would that help human evolution?
The evolution genetic evolution, but perhaps informational evolution, so I do not consider this to be applicable when discussing genetic evolution. Please let me know what you think, I find this field of inquiry to be peculiarly fascinating.
I am all for speculation, but please only hypothesize if you can support your hypothesis with observed facts. If you come up with an idea and search for facts to support it, you often ignore facts which would decry it - this is the fallacy which is so common amongst pseudo-scientists.
The parent post only had 3 points when I posted that last reply, now it's up to 4. I find it unfathomable that Evolution and Natural Selection are so obviously misunderstood as to make the parent post seem to be worthy of such a high rating. The theory of evolution relies upon genetic characteristics to be passed from parents to children through sexual mating (read: "requiring more than one gender"), half of the genes being passed from the father and half from the mother so that their success in mating will propagate their successful genetic material down one more generation. Natural Selection refers to the process by which the individuals of a species Do What Needs To Be Done to survive and mate with the candidate most suited to meet their needs or complement their natural abilities - ever hear the phrase "opposites attract"?
Non-mating individuals do not pass genetic material down, do not pass "Go", and do not collect $200. Period.
Culture influences the desires of individuals and can cause shifts in evolution due to shifts in social consciousness (fat chicks seen as ugly == less breed == fewer gland problems in next generation), this is not evolution, this is sociology. Additionally, I do not know of any studies (please inform me if you do) which would support the belief that people have found people with older living relatives (and therefore a longer predicted lifespan) attractive in the recent past.
Barring metaphysics, I've never heard any evidence which supports the theory that evolution operates via means other than passing on genes through reproduction.
Has anyone else?
Re:Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 1
I'm afraid I must disagree - a corporation is a single legal entity made up of a conglomeration of its shareholders. For all intents and purposes, anything a corporation does can and should be held against it for one simple reason - corporations are given many of the rights of individuals, with those rights come responsibilities.
If the board of directors of a corporation make a bad decision, perhaps a mistake, and it kills 100 people, how is that logically different from a trucker making an error in judgement and accidentally killing 100 on a bus? It's manslaughter or murder, but it's most definitely not his truck's fault. Corporate executives need to be held accountable for their decisions much like the captain of a ship is responsible for his crew - responsible leadership starts at the top. Cutting into the funds of the company with fines is like giving the trucker a less powerful engine in his truck, it doesn't really cut into his bottom line, especially when he can write-off buying a new engine on his taxes. The executives who make the bad decisions aren't punished, they don't take the hit to their wallets, they just layoff their peons to cut spending and have to cut even more corners to keep their paycheck high.
I would imagine this is the opposite of what is intended.
The only way to make the output look the same as the input (for a man-in-the-middle attack) would be to break the entanglement of the source photons, read the data, and entangle the output photon with the source photons. Currently there is no known or theoretical technique to accomplish this task, but I may be missing something.
I'd like to point out that this is a raging generalization. I am a lisp programmer, I do not do this; I work with lisp programmers, they do not do this. When a small subset of a community is "louder" than the majority due to the nature of their communication, the community is perceived-of as being bad.
The real problem here is that the judgement call is being made on the level of the community, not of the individual with the unpleasant opinion. If you were to visit a foreign country and you observed a group of (insert ethnicity here) doing something you disapprove of, would you think "(insert ethnicity here) are bad:: their community is bad" or would you restrict that judgement to the ones who you observed?
when you're perusing the makeup of a "community" online, you're a tourist in a foreign land, and like all foreign lands, some miscreants will always be present, don't consider that small slice of the community to be representative of the whole community. Last I checked, the country you're in probably has a few miscreants too.
I would like to address the popular idea that these anthrax attacks were "significant": In what way was this so? These attacks could have amounted to a total of less than 100 fatalities, which is statistically trivial. More people than this die from undercooked pork. The significance would have been far more pronounced had this biological agent been deployed via aerosol on a crowded football/baseball/whatever happens to be in season stadium, but nobody seems to notice that the goal here is not to kill as many US citizens as possible. I don't know what the goal is, since nobody has laid claim to these acts, and neither do you. One thing I do know is that the agent in question has been sent to mediapathic targets in small doses, and the "potential" threat of large scale terrorism has been used to trump many of our civil rights in a way that does not help prevent terrorism. In fact, I seem to hear more and more people pissed-off about this daily, one has to wonder how many "domestic terrorists" or "patriotic freedom fighters" this kneejerking has/has-the-"potential" to spawn.
Please quit being so agitated on both sides and start looking at this situation rationally: all of this hysteria is the problem, not the terrorism or loss of freedoms - those are symptoms. Keep a calm head and everything is capable of being worked-out, but first it must be discussed rationally and publicly.
This only applys to people who are granted a special administrative measure which applys to less than a tenth of a percent of people.
And out of 250,000,000 people in the US, that means that 250,000 are affected.. 1/1000 - but how many people are in court at any given time? Much more than 1/1000 right? Hell - I know 300 people in court at the moment... oh wait, no I don't.
"...especially www.franz.com--list commercial customers who have been satisfied with developing software in Common Lisp."
Here's a link to the "Success Stories" section of www.franz.com - I believe that many people will find these to be particularly surprising, but that's a prejudice I'll attempt to debunk through action rather than words.
Aside from the scholastic value of lisp (or scheme) as a system of abstract logic, there is a thriving commercial industry - it's not huge, but it does include some big names - Yahoo, Orbitz.. the list goes on..
There are quite a few major applications of lisp on the market right now - yahoo storefront is one example (although they've been changing some things around lately inside the company), and Orbitz.
Check out the list here - it's sure to make you think twice about the commercial viability of lisp: Lisp Success Stories
Oh, I almost forgot to mention - we've also got an opensource lisp nexus setup at http://opensource.franz.com - lots of slick stuff there, like Ahmon's NFS server for windows: it's better than Hummingbird's - faster, and has some account handling hacks.
I feel horribly dirty for pointing you to my own company's site, as I am the webmaster, but the company I work for - Franz, makers of Allegro Common Lisp have a slew of success stories on our website - Orbitz, the guys who made Crash Bandicoot, the group that made the Final Fantasy movie.. etc.
Take a look - the best part is, there aren't any ads - there's only one company's products on the site;)
I was recently (April) hired-on as webmaster at Franz, a commercial lisp company (we make Allegro Common Lisp) which has introduced me to lisp in a very loud way. Since joining these guys (and gals), I've been thoroughly indoctrinated - with my full consent - because of my belief that as computing hardware progresses programming in more abstract languages will allow for more creative and effective use of the platform. Sure, coding assembler on a new super-duper petaflop chip will still be possible and less wasteful, but who would want to code a million lines of asm to save a few (or even a few thousand) operations out of a few billion, or trillion when it will only net a difference of nanoseconds in the end? I'm less interested in making super-fast programs than I am in making artistic and super-functional programs.
I'm not expressing the views of Franz, every member of the company has their own beliefs on what makes for great programming - which is one of the major reasons I find this place so fulfilling, everyone has complex reasons for their design considerations, and everyone communicates them (something I've grown to appreciate from working in too many places where this was definitely not the case), and consequently I've been exposed to quite a few different techniques of Lisp coding since my introduction half a year ago. I'm constantly amazed that so many different styles of programming can be expressed in the same language, it's capable of accomodating any logical thought process that can be converted to code - and I doubt many of you often use recursion in a logical way on a daily basis, but even that can be done efficiently in lisp.
I'm still very new to lisp, and I was never a serious programmer in the past, but I've always been accustomed to asking questions, and here are a few that I'd like some input on:
If you learned any other programming language, did you initially find the formalities of its structure to be a significant stumbling block to understanding the language as a whole? Was the same true of learning lisp?
How much time do you spend debugging non-lisp code? How much on lisp?
What language took you the most time to learn - was it your first?
What feature do you consider to be the most important for an abstract language to support efficiently - and which features have you found to be most poorly implemented in lisp distributions?
I'd love to hear about what people think sucks about lisp and needs improvement - or can't be improved, so far I haven't found anything that I could complain about, the most difficult thing for me has been managing all the documentation on a half-century old language in the process of learning it. I've begun to love working in lisp, but I suppose being surrounded by a group so full of passion for it has helped contribute to my bias - if I'm wrong, help snap me out of it with a good argument against using lisp.;)
I've been waiting for a way to lose my fillings while I eat my dinner.
Re:Audiophiles are *worse* than drug addicts
on
Insanely Audiophile
·
· Score: 1
That is both an extremely witty critique of the silly topics Slashdot often covers as "news", and a precise argument against the social impact of masturbatory corporate-funding consumer practices. Bravo.
Am I the only person here who would insist on checking out a band on Napster before I'd buy their CD? (well, not 100% of the time, but close)
How does the RIAA justify that the advent of Napster spurred an increase in sales? Where is the "loss"? I can point my finger right at it - the loss is loss of distribution control. Picture this - we have a resource at point A, and a consumer at point B, but for B to get A, A must pass through middleman C who can levy whatever overhead he wants. Now say we found a way for all the A's and the B's out there to skip middlemen and connect directly (think "big computer network".. oh - hey, Internet!) to each other. I'll admit that yes, while this could become a bad thing if people didn't have social obligations - they do! How slick is a guy going to look when he pops in his make-out music CD for the ladies and they notice that his whole CD case is full of burns with hand-written Sharpie-ink labels? How slick would it be for a person to give a burned CD to his/her partner for the econo-liday of the week? My point is, people value originals and authenticity. This will definitely change with the advent of nanotechnological reproduction, and we have to recognize that we're entering an time where our normal business models break-down. How can you sell anything when it could be mass-reproduced with a simple common 3d-xerox machine? You'd have to sell it based on license. But if the license was just there to make you money, for what length of time would you be the intellectual property holder/sole beneficiary? 20 years? 28? It seems clear to me that this would stifle growth, and here's why: If all the basic needs were covered for free - food/housing/etc, what would we base our economy on? Entertainment, essentially. Now, when you define two different products that are entertainment oriented - say a walkman and a Batman DVD - it's pretty clear how they're different, so a person could be awarded IP rights, one is a portable, battery-operated music playing device, the other is a motion picture in digital format about a man who fights crime. Now what happens when you try to make a movie, say - Robocop, and Batman was already IP? Robocop is about a man who fights crime, it's an infringement! Wait.. no - he's a cyborg, Batman's a bat. Well, that's clear, but was it explicitly stated in the IP patent? No, it was a motion picture in digital format about a man who fights crime.. well - so if you were to try and define it _specifically_ on the patent, and you got every detail in there, then it's not generalized enough to cover anything but Batman.. Batman 2 wouldn't count because it has different characters and settings, if not a plot.
There's no middle-ground right now in the digital IP age, and it is currently being defined. To ensure our individual freedom to produce and innovate, it is important that the middle ground be less generalized, but not infinitely specific - and it is important for people to understand what it is that they're granting IP rights for. I think we should institute a new branch of the US Patent Office for computer-related technologies, and have a board of qualified (or maybe elected) officials review applications. Maybe something else would work better - anyone?
Don't take this the wrong way - it's not intended as targeted criticism - but there's a simple P2P mechanism that you're all overlooking. TCP/IP is the protocol used for the predominance of internet traffic, it is a peer-to-peer protocol, nobody is designated as a client or server, and anyone can route between the networks (peer groups) they are connected to. In fact, the world wide web could be considered an elaborate construct on top of the largest P2P network ever conceived. I mean, to get technical, tcp/ip has syn and ack which could be construed to define client and server roles, but napster/gnutella/etc all have similar features - they're necessary for the network model to function. P2P is an artificial distinction.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that the lines drawn that differentiate one species from another are essentially arbitrary and consequently, survival of the species is a fiction.
If man evolved from (insert choice here: ape, rat, etc), man cannot interbreed with (choice) and is a different species - is that evolution considered beneficial or detrimental to the species from whence it occurred?
Speciation is a model for describing the genetic contents of commonly witnessed packages, merely a convenient fiction.
Agreed with much gusto. Well put on all counts.
This strikes me as an extremely holistic approach to the concept of evolution, which I don't have a problem with - but I don't recognize this to be more than speculation rather than experimentally-proven hypotheses.
I think speculation is excellent when it leads to successful, or failed (the latter is just as good as the former) experiments - which can define scientific truth (at least to the poing that "theory" means "truth"). Unfortunately, such a holistic approach to the whole matter requires that some facts be taken for granted, as they've yet to be experimented with - mostly (if not wholly) due to the scale of the experiment. Unfortunately, the lack of the application of the scientific method renders this mere speculation - perhaps correct, but nonetheless unproven - and therefore it does not qualify as "theory" only hypothesis".
If you'd like to elevate this to a theory, or if someone has and I'm unaware of it, please discuss mechanisms by which the factuality of these hypotheses can be tested, they sound too abstract in the forms discussed.
Dawkins is a particularly interesting source to consider, I believe he segregates informational evolution via the concept of memes which behave like the "genes" of culture.
Check out www.memecentral.com
I didn't make any claims that traits operate by any other means other than genetic means.
If the individual with the desired trait is not breeding, how can they pass this trait on genetically?
While I agree that the theory of evolution could be used to describe the rest of your post, I feel that the term "culture" is far more accurate. This is a chicken-and-the-egg situation, does evolution create culture, or culture evolution, or are they one and the same? The only rational answer is to look for evidence for and against the hypothesis (especially against, it will save more time if the hypothesis is false). the first evidence I would present against would be this: what is the scope of evolution? Does it count when a human trains an ape to use sign-language and that ape teaches another? What about the Eureka affect - if I'm siting under a tree and an apple falls, and I hypothesize gravity - is that human evolution? It is evolution of culture, perhaps, but culture is not uniquely human. If I could describe all of these things to a Dolphin, how would that help human evolution?
The evolution genetic evolution, but perhaps informational evolution, so I do not consider this to be applicable when discussing genetic evolution. Please let me know what you think, I find this field of inquiry to be peculiarly fascinating.
That is an accurate portrayal of my sentiment.
I am all for speculation, but please only hypothesize if you can support your hypothesis with observed facts. If you come up with an idea and search for facts to support it, you often ignore facts which would decry it - this is the fallacy which is so common amongst pseudo-scientists.
The parent post only had 3 points when I posted that last reply, now it's up to 4. I find it unfathomable that Evolution and Natural Selection are so obviously misunderstood as to make the parent post seem to be worthy of such a high rating. The theory of evolution relies upon genetic characteristics to be passed from parents to children through sexual mating (read: "requiring more than one gender"), half of the genes being passed from the father and half from the mother so that their success in mating will propagate their successful genetic material down one more generation. Natural Selection refers to the process by which the individuals of a species Do What Needs To Be Done to survive and mate with the candidate most suited to meet their needs or complement their natural abilities - ever hear the phrase "opposites attract"?
Non-mating individuals do not pass genetic material down, do not pass "Go", and do not collect $200. Period.
Culture influences the desires of individuals and can cause shifts in evolution due to shifts in social consciousness (fat chicks seen as ugly == less breed == fewer gland problems in next generation), this is not evolution, this is sociology. Additionally, I do not know of any studies (please inform me if you do) which would support the belief that people have found people with older living relatives (and therefore a longer predicted lifespan) attractive in the recent past.
Barring metaphysics, I've never heard any evidence which supports the theory that evolution operates via means other than passing on genes through reproduction.
Has anyone else?
I'm afraid I must disagree - a corporation is a single legal entity made up of a conglomeration of its shareholders. For all intents and purposes, anything a corporation does can and should be held against it for one simple reason - corporations are given many of the rights of individuals, with those rights come responsibilities.
If the board of directors of a corporation make a bad decision, perhaps a mistake, and it kills 100 people, how is that logically different from a trucker making an error in judgement and accidentally killing 100 on a bus? It's manslaughter or murder, but it's most definitely not his truck's fault. Corporate executives need to be held accountable for their decisions much like the captain of a ship is responsible for his crew - responsible leadership starts at the top. Cutting into the funds of the company with fines is like giving the trucker a less powerful engine in his truck, it doesn't really cut into his bottom line, especially when he can write-off buying a new engine on his taxes. The executives who make the bad decisions aren't punished, they don't take the hit to their wallets, they just layoff their peons to cut spending and have to cut even more corners to keep their paycheck high.
I would imagine this is the opposite of what is intended.
Note that the segment you highlighted did not say "YES" - why do you suppose they didn't say yes?
The only way to make the output look the same as the input (for a man-in-the-middle attack) would be to break the entanglement of the source photons, read the data, and entangle the output photon with the source photons. Currently there is no known or theoretical technique to accomplish this task, but I may be missing something.
I'd like to point out that this is a raging generalization. I am a lisp programmer, I do not do this; I work with lisp programmers, they do not do this. When a small subset of a community is "louder" than the majority due to the nature of their communication, the community is perceived-of as being bad.
The real problem here is that the judgement call is being made on the level of the community, not of the individual with the unpleasant opinion. If you were to visit a foreign country and you observed a group of (insert ethnicity here) doing something you disapprove of, would you think "(insert ethnicity here) are bad :: their community is bad" or would you restrict that judgement to the ones who you observed?
when you're perusing the makeup of a "community" online, you're a tourist in a foreign land, and like all foreign lands, some miscreants will always be present, don't consider that small slice of the community to be representative of the whole community. Last I checked, the country you're in probably has a few miscreants too.
I would like to address the popular idea that these anthrax attacks were "significant": In what way was this so? These attacks could have amounted to a total of less than 100 fatalities, which is statistically trivial. More people than this die from undercooked pork. The significance would have been far more pronounced had this biological agent been deployed via aerosol on a crowded football/baseball/whatever happens to be in season stadium, but nobody seems to notice that the goal here is not to kill as many US citizens as possible. I don't know what the goal is, since nobody has laid claim to these acts, and neither do you. One thing I do know is that the agent in question has been sent to mediapathic targets in small doses, and the "potential" threat of large scale terrorism has been used to trump many of our civil rights in a way that does not help prevent terrorism. In fact, I seem to hear more and more people pissed-off about this daily, one has to wonder how many "domestic terrorists" or "patriotic freedom fighters" this kneejerking has/has-the-"potential" to spawn.
Please quit being so agitated on both sides and start looking at this situation rationally: all of this hysteria is the problem, not the terrorism or loss of freedoms - those are symptoms. Keep a calm head and everything is capable of being worked-out, but first it must be discussed rationally and publicly.
This only applys to people who are granted a special administrative measure which applys to less than a tenth of a percent of people.
And out of 250,000,000 people in the US, that means that 250,000 are affected.. 1/1000 - but how many people are in court at any given time? Much more than 1/1000 right? Hell - I know 300 people in court at the moment... oh wait, no I don't.
"...especially www.franz.com--list commercial customers who have been satisfied with developing software in Common Lisp."
Here's a link to the "Success Stories" section of www.franz.com - I believe that many people will find these to be particularly surprising, but that's a prejudice I'll attempt to debunk through action rather than words.
Aside from the scholastic value of lisp (or scheme) as a system of abstract logic, there is a thriving commercial industry - it's not huge, but it does include some big names - Yahoo, Orbitz.. the list goes on..
Check out this list for some lisp job listings.
There are quite a few major applications of lisp on the market right now - yahoo storefront is one example (although they've been changing some things around lately inside the company), and Orbitz.
Check out the list here - it's sure to make you think twice about the commercial viability of lisp: Lisp Success Stories
Oh, I almost forgot to mention - we've also got an opensource lisp nexus setup at http://opensource.franz.com - lots of slick stuff there, like Ahmon's NFS server for windows: it's better than Hummingbird's - faster, and has some account handling hacks.
I feel horribly dirty for pointing you to my own company's site, as I am the webmaster, but the company I work for - Franz, makers of Allegro Common Lisp have a slew of success stories on our website - Orbitz, the guys who made Crash Bandicoot, the group that made the Final Fantasy movie.. etc.
Take a look - the best part is, there aren't any ads - there's only one company's products on the site ;)
I was recently (April) hired-on as webmaster at Franz, a commercial lisp company (we make Allegro Common Lisp) which has introduced me to lisp in a very loud way. Since joining these guys (and gals), I've been thoroughly indoctrinated - with my full consent - because of my belief that as computing hardware progresses programming in more abstract languages will allow for more creative and effective use of the platform. Sure, coding assembler on a new super-duper petaflop chip will still be possible and less wasteful, but who would want to code a million lines of asm to save a few (or even a few thousand) operations out of a few billion, or trillion when it will only net a difference of nanoseconds in the end? I'm less interested in making super-fast programs than I am in making artistic and super-functional programs.
I'm not expressing the views of Franz, every member of the company has their own beliefs on what makes for great programming - which is one of the major reasons I find this place so fulfilling, everyone has complex reasons for their design considerations, and everyone communicates them (something I've grown to appreciate from working in too many places where this was definitely not the case), and consequently I've been exposed to quite a few different techniques of Lisp coding since my introduction half a year ago. I'm constantly amazed that so many different styles of programming can be expressed in the same language, it's capable of accomodating any logical thought process that can be converted to code - and I doubt many of you often use recursion in a logical way on a daily basis, but even that can be done efficiently in lisp.
I'm still very new to lisp, and I was never a serious programmer in the past, but I've always been accustomed to asking questions, and here are a few that I'd like some input on:
I'd love to hear about what people think sucks about lisp and needs improvement - or can't be improved, so far I haven't found anything that I could complain about, the most difficult thing for me has been managing all the documentation on a half-century old language in the process of learning it. I've begun to love working in lisp, but I suppose being surrounded by a group so full of passion for it has helped contribute to my bias - if I'm wrong, help snap me out of it with a good argument against using lisp. ;)
I've been waiting for a way to lose my fillings while I eat my dinner.
That is both an extremely witty critique of the silly topics Slashdot often covers as "news", and a precise argument against the social impact of masturbatory corporate-funding consumer practices. Bravo.
Am I the only person here who would insist on checking out a band on Napster before I'd buy their CD? (well, not 100% of the time, but close)
How does the RIAA justify that the advent of Napster spurred an increase in sales? Where is the "loss"? I can point my finger right at it - the loss is loss of distribution control. Picture this - we have a resource at point A, and a consumer at point B, but for B to get A, A must pass through middleman C who can levy whatever overhead he wants. Now say we found a way for all the A's and the B's out there to skip middlemen and connect directly (think "big computer network".. oh - hey, Internet!) to each other. I'll admit that yes, while this could become a bad thing if people didn't have social obligations - they do! How slick is a guy going to look when he pops in his make-out music CD for the ladies and they notice that his whole CD case is full of burns with hand-written Sharpie-ink labels? How slick would it be for a person to give a burned CD to his/her partner for the econo-liday of the week? My point is, people value originals and authenticity. This will definitely change with the advent of nanotechnological reproduction, and we have to recognize that we're entering an time where our normal business models break-down. How can you sell anything when it could be mass-reproduced with a simple common 3d-xerox machine? You'd have to sell it based on license. But if the license was just there to make you money, for what length of time would you be the intellectual property holder/sole beneficiary? 20 years? 28? It seems clear to me that this would stifle growth, and here's why: If all the basic needs were covered for free - food/housing/etc, what would we base our economy on? Entertainment, essentially. Now, when you define two different products that are entertainment oriented - say a walkman and a Batman DVD - it's pretty clear how they're different, so a person could be awarded IP rights, one is a portable, battery-operated music playing device, the other is a motion picture in digital format about a man who fights crime. Now what happens when you try to make a movie, say - Robocop, and Batman was already IP? Robocop is about a man who fights crime, it's an infringement! Wait.. no - he's a cyborg, Batman's a bat. Well, that's clear, but was it explicitly stated in the IP patent? No, it was a motion picture in digital format about a man who fights crime.. well - so if you were to try and define it _specifically_ on the patent, and you got every detail in there, then it's not generalized enough to cover anything but Batman.. Batman 2 wouldn't count because it has different characters and settings, if not a plot.
There's no middle-ground right now in the digital IP age, and it is currently being defined. To ensure our individual freedom to produce and innovate, it is important that the middle ground be less generalized, but not infinitely specific - and it is important for people to understand what it is that they're granting IP rights for. I think we should institute a new branch of the US Patent Office for computer-related technologies, and have a board of qualified (or maybe elected) officials review applications. Maybe something else would work better - anyone?
Don't take this the wrong way - it's not intended as targeted criticism - but there's a simple P2P mechanism that you're all overlooking. TCP/IP is the protocol used for the predominance of internet traffic, it is a peer-to-peer protocol, nobody is designated as a client or server, and anyone can route between the networks (peer groups) they are connected to. In fact, the world wide web could be considered an elaborate construct on top of the largest P2P network ever conceived. I mean, to get technical, tcp/ip has syn and ack which could be construed to define client and server roles, but napster/gnutella/etc all have similar features - they're necessary for the network model to function. P2P is an artificial distinction.