I agree that it's pointless to attack the RIAA. The thing is, though, if the RIAA is right, they're doomed. Artists are going to have to find another way to do this. P2P file sharing and copyright are mutually exclusive now. You simply cannot have both.
It's like trying to make the top bun of a hamburger illegal. Who's going to listen? No one. You can't make the top bun illegal unless you criminalize bread. You can't stop the two-bun eaters if bread is available at all. It's hopeless. You can't stop sharing music without stopping data sharing in general. If sharing data is possible at all, people will share music. In the past, they only had to go after the BIG infringers. Now everybody is a big infringer.
It's hopeless. As an artist, I'd start thinking about how you'll get your name out there post-RIAA, because they are not going to be able to hold off P2P file sharing.
They're in their own bind, too... if they're right, they're screwed no matter what they do. If they'r wrong, they're wasting loads and loads of money and getting beaten up in the press over nothing.
Sigh.
It's Freedom of Speech, not freedom of listening. Anyone is free to say whatever they want, and as long as it's true you can't get in trouble for it. That has nothing to do with listening to music. The 1st Amendment doesn't protect the audience!
If someone creates a 1st Amendment protected work, and they only want to show it to left-handed people, your rights haven't been violated. If they want to sell it, thus restricting it to people who can afford it, your rights haven't been violated.
In fact, there's a law which makes sure that you can't take their work, and sell it yourself. That law says it's wrong to take someone else's original work and make money from it without permission from the author.
Luckily, understanding that you might want to read/watch/listen to the work later, the law allows you to copy that original work however you like, as long as you still aren't charging others for it or causing the author to lose money.
Unluckily, the lawmakers didn't foresee P2P,so they didn't make any laws about how often you can make copies, or how many people you can give them to. They only restricted copying based on the financial impact to the author.
Do you understand how this works now? You don't have a right to hear anything! You have a right to speak freely, not a right to listen.
If you were to perform a song to such precision that it was indistinguishable from the original, it would be the original. If you cited the songwriter, you'd be just fine. If you put it on a record and sold a million copies without telling anyone about the author, and without compensating the author for use of their material, you're breaking the law.
The government doesn't get to restrict speech, but people can place whatever restrictions they like on their own speech. They can make it as financially free as they like, or charge whatever they think they can get. It's not a 1st Amendment violation to restrict yourself or to limit your own audience.
First off, fair use. Fair use is there to let you do what you want with what you bought for your enjoyment or potentially for you and a few friends enjoyment... it doesn't allow you to record that tape for your best bud anymore than it allows you to make that mp3 and give it to 100 people on the internet. Now it DOES entitle you to make that mp3 for yourself and that tape for yourself.
Forgive my bluntness, but you're wrong. Here's why:
Fair use allows you to do several things. It allows you to record for the purposes of timeshifting, it allows you to quote as long as you cite your source. It allows you to copy material for non-commercial purposes, and to change media. It does not restrict according to scale. You can make copies of a movie or a song and give them to your friends. That's not illegal! What's illegal is impacting the profit of the copyright holders.
This is the crux of the copyright issue. IT'S NOT ILLEGAL TO SHARE SONGS ON THE NET. It's illegal to charge for your copies, but not illegal to make them.
The thing is, the people who wrote the copyright laws never imagined that you could create an unlimited number of perfect copies, and simultaneously give them away to millions of people, AND charge absolutely nothing for them. Nobody imagined it. So, there's no restriction on scale of copying written into the law, and that's where everything begins and ends. I say I'm sharing with friends, and the RIAA says I'm impacting the bottom line by devaluing their product.
It's critical that the RIAA show they are losing money as a result of the sharing, if they want to prevent it. Where are the hard figures? None ever showed up in the Napster trial. So far, they've been able to convince the system that the possibility of losing money is enough to trigger a violation. Even this is a stretch, as violations have historically been limited to people who are actually selling the stuff they copied, thus directly diverting $$$ from the copyright holder.
Now, though, no money is changing hands at all, and it's much tougher to prove that sharing services are actually costing the RIAA money. This is the real issue here. It's not about morality or rights. You have the legal ability to copy music however you like, as long as you aren't selling it or getting it for free when you'd otherwise be buying it. You aren't stealing unless you actively decide to download INSTEAD of buying.
As regards the law, the 'law is law' argument is bullshit. Try to sell that one to Rosa Parks... she's not buying it. Tell it to Thoreau, who spent time in jail because he thought a tax was wrong. RW Emerson had to bail him out. Civil Disobedience involves voluntarily taking the punishment to demonstrate that you believe the law is wrong, and will suffer for your belief. It's about as far from anarchy as you can get, and has nothing to do with your 'attacked in the street' analogy.Even if copyright was completely destroyed as a result of P2P, it still would be unrelated to actual, physical violence.
Sheesh. Illegal pirating? I't's not illegal.It's not pirating. And you aren't guilty of anything unless you shared music with the intent of profiting from the exchange, or with the effect of costing the RIAA money as a result of your actions. Even then, it's not the sharing that's illegal, or the service, or the concept of P2P. It's your profit or the RIAA's loss due to your actions that's illegal.
Which national press were you watching? Where I was, Nader got plenty of coverage even though he didn't participate in the debates.
Did you pay any attention at all? Gore and Bush are light years apart on a ton of issues, not least the selection of SCOTUS justices and the appointment of federal judges.
And again, I'll repeat. If the turnout was higher, it would be possible to get a 3rd party candidate elected. It happened in Minnesota and in Maine re: governor's races. People in power don't care what the turnout is because there IS NO TURNOUT. Even impeachment, something with extreme venomous feelings along both sides, only caused the defeat of ONE US Rep, in California... and he lost by a whisker.
People in power make their plays to put people in office, but often in US history, it doesn't work out. Even when it does, it still puts good people in office! You should start reading some serious history instead of the highschool crap. Jefferson's election was just as fraught with intrigue and political manouvering as any other.
So you think the choices sucked this time. That shouldn't turn you off voting; it should get you more involved! It's apathy that makes our political system break down, not shadowy forces placing puppets on the throne. If your position is that the system is broken, then you are responsible for fixing it!
Lastly, what exactly is the point of placing a puppet in the presidency when you can't control him? If Clinton can get away with the shit he pulled and still have a 60%+ approval rating, what leverage can you possibly have against a president? Who's being controlled here, the President, or you?
Of course not... Whopper Junior is a name unto itself. The 'Junior' is not a descriptor, it's part of the name. That would be like saying "How many Johns Smith are there, anyway?".
Now, I do say 'attorneys general' and if people look at me funny, well, that's the look of ignorance. They aren't generals, they're attorneys. Get it straight, people!
Part of the reason it looks like your opinion doesn't count is because you're surrounded (everybody is) with people who don't vote.
You *ought* to be able to get fed up enough with two bad choices to go out and get yourself elected instead! Unfortunately, it's practically impossible to get people you see every day of your life to vote for ANYTHING, much less vote for you. So if you wanna get elected, you have to whore yourself out to people who can give you the money you need to find those 20% of people who actually are going to go vote.
If everyone voted, your opinion might have some influence. If you were eloquent enough, you might just be able to get something done! It's happened in the past, and continues to happen in small towns all over America. When you start getting to higher offices, you just can't find anyone who is voting unless you spend $$$ on ads. So, you've got to have the $$$ and you've got to get it form someone, or else your opponent will be the only person that 20% hears about.
If we had 80% turnout, practically everyone you talked to would be voting. You could hang out in the market for a week and boost your polling numbers 5%. You might even be able to counteract some of that spending.
Voting doesn't count because people don't vote. If bad candidates got tossed out of office regularly, good ones might start showing up.
Oh, and just think how all those people in Florida who agree with you felt after the last election... in some places, if even.01% more of the population had shown up, we'd have a different President. What do the 60% of non-voters in Florida think now?
I wonder how this would work. MSFT is incorporated inthe state of Washington, but their legal problems stem from federal antitrust violations. It would seem to me that the State of Washington would have to revoke their corporate charter as a seperate action heard in state court, and that all other states (and the fed) have to rely on remedies described in antitrust law.
Wow! We get to be civilized and curteous?
Well then! Would you mind moving this over to email? It's easier for me at work to email commentary of this length... send me a quick note and I'll reply there.
And I promise, I'll can the forensic debate in favor of an actual discussion. You are right, many 'debates' do bury themselves quickly in minutia to the detriment of the actual point. Now that we've established that we're both reasonable people, we can actually talk about something!
In thinking, I realize some of the points I made may not have been completely clear.
In no particular order:
The idea of a "nearest least logical argument" is self-contradicting. I'm surprised I didn't notice it earlier. If it were the least logical argument, it would necessarily be the farthest from any logical supposition it purported to contradict. If it were the nearest argument, it would necessarily be relativaly well grounded in logical thought. I suppose you could have meant that I chose the nearest argument to your own that followed your guideline of being illogical, but wouldn't that be like saying that neither position made much sense? You can't have meant that...
On further consideration, I remembered that damn near EVERY drug stays in the body in one place or another, many for years after you're dead. That's how a medical examiner tells if you've been poisoned. Some chemicals reside in the fat cells, some in the eyes, some in the hair, etc. The effect of a drug has absolutely no resemblance to the proposed effect of EM radiation on the body.
That reminds me, I've gone and accidentally gifted you the point that EM radiation is bad, and you really haven't even demonstrated that yet. Now we have to go back an entire step before we even get to talk about your original assertion, namely that the damage might be cumulative. Luckily, this is the net, and links are acceptable if you don't feel like laying it all out for me. Beware, however, that basing a strong argument on stupid facts will get you nowhere.
By saying that I would ask someone to r00t my Linux firewall just as I would ask your friend to prove he can see EM aura disturbances, what I mean to say is: I don't let unsubstantiated claims stand. Claiming you're an elite super-hacker carries about the same burden of proof, IMHO, as claiming to be able to read EM signatures in people with your bare eyeballs. While both claims may be true, neither one can stand without substantiation. I rate your cellphone experiment at about the same level as our supposed hacker showing me the latest DoS script he downloaded as proof of his sk1llz.
I should have added the 'straw man' tactic to the litany of crap you threw at me, but I missed that one. It was part of the 'ridiculous' HD example you gave.
I missed a question of yours. Yes, I have experimented with my own ability to align and redirect 'energy' from my own body into that of my wife. She has a severe back injury and sometimes, if I can get into a particularly meditative state, it seems that I'm much more effective at fixing the bone misalignments and nerve problems than I am when I'm actually 'thinking' about it. I can't really be sure of what happens, but it's a curious thing. Also, as I mentioned, I practice Aikido and part of that training is the development of ki and its use. I have had both personal and observational proof of the existance of that particular force.
Examples of how people can be fooled are perfectly relevant, especially when it's extremely possible that they are being employed! Apply Occam's Razor as needed.
As for being told the 'right' thing to believe, well, we aren't talking about belief. We're talking about demonstrating proof. I covered this numerous times, but I don't think I made it perfectly clear. Belief and proof are sometimes at odds, and an objective thinker trains himself to distinguish between the two.
Quickly, in defense of the logical burden of proof: any logical conclusion based on a complete set of true facts must be correct. All hypotheses are required to shoulder this burden, and any that meet this standard must be accepted as fact.
By "creative thinker" you really mean "good bullshitter". I hadn't specifically pointed that out, but I think I beat that particular point into the ground in my previous post.
Man, is this starting to read like Usenet or what!
Lastly, I just couldn't pass up the chance to publicly snicker at the heroin/heroine homonym mistake you made... I laughed so much that I had to reread your whole post so I could maintain the thread in my mind. Those heroines sure do have an effect on the body...
Oh, man, oh man. I think we've found a winner! This is going to be funnnnn!
I've studied this stuff for years, in all liklihood, in far greater depth than you have You've almost certainly studied fakers more than I have... it's apparently an area of expertise for you. Fair enough.
You also seem to have studied some pretty shifty ways of making a point, and as such you begin to wander into MY area of expertise; rhetoric (in the Roman sense) and legitimate constructive debate.
Here's where the problem begins:...I've learned two things from my studies
Only two things about people? Probably not, but these are the two things you base the rest of your post on, and therefore in your context, the only things that apply. People will either believe everything they hear, or rationalize away everything they don't like.
From this, you go through Clearly, you'll not believe me..., on to tested and bullied by people like you . Now, I'm not only possessing of a blind faith in science and a desire to rationalize away everything not already in my worldview, I'm also a bully who persecutes your poor friend because he's a visionary and I'm threatened by that.
Then you perform a neat little sleight-of-argument: Try to imagine if you were the only person whose eyes were sensitive to light... What you're really saying is: try to accept my premise out of hand and place yourself in a similar (but more acceptable to your limited worldview) situation. Then you associate me with those folks who refuse to believe even good evidence! That's twice over a neat trick, because it assumes that good evidence exists, and then condemns me by association for not believing it, while all the while purporting to be a plea for understanding. Masterful!
Next, we have a standard disconnection regarding faith. Luckily, your friend isn't of the 'believe or else' persuasion. He sounds more like the 'I cannot abide the faithless, sigh, poor benighted fools, I cannot help you if you cannot help yourself' kind of guy. Kinda sickening, but at least be won't be blowing up any buildings...
(hey, see what I did there? I made a cynical joke, and also lumped your friend in with wacko terrorists and Pentacostal religious crackpots! woo woo! not bad, eh? You're rubbing off on me)
Finally, we get to the actual EM argument! The thing is, hard drives are designed to retain their altered state until altered again. The body is permanently damaged, in a clearly detectable way, through heroin use. There is nothing I know of to suggest that EM fields have a permanent or cumulative effect on cells based on your examples. In fact, you basically compare apples to oranges with no discussion of why they might be similar, and also deride me for picking the "nearest least logical argument" while providing no proof that I did so. BTW, I'm not clearly predisposed to anything, certainly not based on your 'arguments'. Nothing at all about me has been illuminated by your series of verbal swipes.
Now, you say: Living systems adapt over time to the repeated exosure of ANY strong enough stimulus but I can think of half a dozen strong stimuli that the body does not adapt do during its lifespan. Physical trauma. Electrical shock. Vertigo. Sunlight is a perfect example. Your skin burns in a cause-effect relationship if you lie naked in the sun all day for a year. Eventually, it bakes to the point that you won't burn so badly, but you haven't "adapted". It's stimulus-response. If you go back indoors for a year, your skin returns to its normal state. For an adaptation to occur (increased melatonin) it takes thousands of generations. So, now we're back to the original question re: EM interference; if EM damage is cumulative, what cellular process does it interrupt or alter to cause the damage, and how long will the effect last? Is it permanet? Do you propose that EM radiation has an effect like sunlight, baking the cells like a turkey? Or does it have an effect like what happens to my monitor when my cell phone rings, i.e. temporary frequency disturbance that fades immediately?
BTW, most drugs ARE stored in the body for a time... LSD, for example, is practically never gone.
Finally, having derided me enough, we descend into: Don't kid yourself. You are nowhere nearly as objective as you would like to believe. --It is far easier for you to believe that I am a fool who thinks that, 'cells store EM interferrence,' than face the horrifying possibility that I might actually know what I'm talking about. If I knew something which you did not, (impossible!), then that could potentially begin the unraveling of your safe little 'reality'.
Having (in your mind) soundly browbeaten me into a state of bewilderment, and exposed me for a faithless idiot in public, you feel safe in taking undisguised pot-shots at me! Unfortunately, you've shown me exactly nothing that suggests you might actually know what you're talking about, and quite a lot to suggest that you would rather attack me or dismiss me (or both) than present an idea.
How very brash of you. Let me set the record straight. People can react in more than two ways to an occurance with no immediate explanation. I, in fact, take the path of most people who've studied the process of reasoned thought: anything that is true can be proven, and anything that can be proven is true. Your friend can see EM fields and auras, fair enough. That's a hypothesis. Design a method of demonstrating it, without moving the goalposts or resorting to any of the other nasty little debate tricks that lots of scientists AND extra-sensory proponents love so much, and I'll believe it! Willingly and without cynicism, because I'm actually objective. I have no motive and no emotional investment. Can you say the same?
It might surprise you to know that my own beliefs run probably very close to your own. I, however, retain honest, real, unbiased objectivity and expect the same level of proof from all possible invloved parties. This includes myself, and being an accomplished aikido student familiar with ki (having been on the receiving end more often than I like...) I think it's perfectly fair of me. Your friend can see auras? Fine, but picking cellphone users out of a pool with a likely 85% positive hit rate isn't proof... in fact, it lends itself to falsehood and by doing so, he casts the mantle of doubt across his own shoulders. Gimme real proof. I'd ask the same thing from a new employee who says he can r00t my firewall. Okay, you 3733t hax0r you, get some! Prove it.
What you've done in your post is nothing short of a rhetorical drive-by. When, BTW, did you lose your own objectivity? My guess is that you never had it. You were a debunker, and then you flipped. Now you're a defender. Neither one is very well equipped to make unbiased observations. I suspect your friend might like both sides equally well... I've found that those who set their goalpost at faith are likely to use the faithless as stronger proof of their belief! The more ridiculous the statement, the more faith required to accept it. The more you argue something's absurdity, the more it proves the power of faith!
Now, would you like to try again, without personal attack as a substitute for reasoned thought? Without guilt by association, comparing apples to oranges, and false (or flawed) logical connections?
Will you try again, under the scrutiny of someone who can actually see through your verbal trickery to the threadbare idea underneath?
You're an expert in charlatans... well, gosh. So am I!
We're consuming bacteria at a faster rate than it's being replenished? Come on, man! Gimme a break here.
Your arguments are really flimsy here... giving up Fritos won't help the planet. Ceasing consumption of non-sustenance food items might help a bit, but you're right in that people won't do something that drastic. I don't think you've thought this through very well. What happens to all the people who work in the junkfood industry, and all the people all over the world that get affected by the ripples of its disappearance? Eventually, you bump a whole group of people down into social welfare of some sort, which is hugely wasteful and probably a worse drain on the environment than if they were still working for Frito-Lay (or Frito Shipping, Inc., or 7-11, or its shareholders, including that 80-yr old retired guy who lives off his Frito shares and gets kicked out of his retirement center, or the broker who recommended them before the industry dried up in a matter of months, or all the people who listened to him, etc.). Do you get the point here? As for the straws, I'd rather that than have the guy who just wiped his nose on his hand give me an unwrapped one; poor example selection.
If we shrink the economy enough, we could be China! Wait, N. Korea hardly uses any resources at all... there's a perfect model.
More efficiency is certainly better, but you can't just do this stuff by fiat. What, should we ban books on paper? Where do you get the money to make sure everyone has an electronic reader? You can't be suggesting that you only get to read if you can afford the proper device... you have to take this stuff out to it's logical end. You have to consider ALL the ramifications, not just the parts that seem to support your opinion.
Actually, you're going to have to shift your focus away from the 'environment' altogether; I'll get to that in a second.
Run out of plankton? You've got to be joking. Plankton makes up (and this is only a slightly informed guess) like half the biomass on the planet, and a great amount of the total photosynthesis that occurs. If we warm up the oceans, we get MORE plankton, not less. More photosynthesis! More oxygen and less carbon dioxide! There's a downside here?
Now, let me skip past eco-catastrophe and come back to that momentarily... I've got to cover the economics thing.
If, as you say, efficiency = using fewer resources to achieve the same or better return, than economists talk all the time about consumption of natural resources. Get some economist to talk about International Paper and you'll hear loads of talk about consumption of resources. Talk to any competent Director of Finance in Arizona or south/west Texas or New Mexico or Southern CA and you'll see that water consumption is high on the list of worries.
No economist would ever suggest that everyone could be a millionaire. That would make a million effectively the same as zero. No one is saying that there is infinite money, either. What I (and most economists) am saying is that more for me does not necessarily (or even very often) equal less for you. This is why resources!=money. $.03 worth of wood pulp might only be worth slightly more if it's made into toilet paper, but it's worth LOTS more if it's made into a share of eBay stock (BTW, currently at about $53). Resources don't equal money, and consumption of resources doesn't equal economy. You can burn through tons of resources and not be worth much at all (think PG&E) or exactly the opposite (think AOL). Money (and wealth) is a human intellectual construct, and consumption of resources is just a factor, like lots and lots of other factors, and is often not applicable and rarely quantifiable.
Now, eco-doom: this planet has already survived a catastrophe humans would be very hard pressed to replicate. There is no danger of the ecosystem disintegrating around us, nor will there ever be unless we decided to nuke the everlasting fuck out of ourselves, and even then it's pretty likely that the planet will straighten out eventually.
What you want to be worried about is if people are going to be able to survive. The fact is, we're just organisms like all the rest. We're incredibly successful at adapting and using our surroundings, which is why we aren't stuck on an island somewhere evolving into marsupials to survive. Everything on the planet consumes resources, and usually they consume more than they put back, just like us. People are certainly capable of consuming so much that there isn't enough left to support the population. This is also exactly like other organisms, except that we fill a LOT of ecological niches and we tend to affect the environment across a much much wider range than your average apex predator. Luckily, even basic environmental systems are extremely complex and frequently possessing of a high redundancy level. Really, though, on an environmental level, we aren't too much different from any other apex predator group, and the results of overusing our resources are therefore rather predictable.
The thing is, we don't like it when masses of humans start kicking off, because we're possessing of a soul and we're humans and all that. So, we innovate like a motherfucker to keep the race expanding. Incidentally, that's exactly like every other race on the planet. We're just much better at it because we seem to keep coming up with kick-ass solutions, and so we don't have to wait on evolution to save what's left of us.
So it's perfectly reasonable to wonder if we're going to expand past our ability to survive, but since we're a lot more like a pride of lions than a hive of bees, we aren't really built to think about 'humanity' on a survival level. It's likely that practically nothing proactive will be done about it on a global scale; we aren't really programmed to care about the pride in Somalia as long as the home range is still bountiful. IMHO, we're going to figure out how to double the lifespan of a human before we start really running out of resources, and THAT is a bigger concern than anything else. Let yourself start projecting what'll happen to the economy if the average worker lives to be 160 and the birthrate stays the same, and you'll REALLY get freaked out.
None of this, however, has much of anything to do with the US economy and whether or not +1 for me is -1 for you (which it's not).
I wonder how many people out there are NOT using cell phones, just in general. Your friend probably had, at worst, a good shot at 85% accuracy. That's enough to sell any average joe on something, and a slam dunk to sell to someone who already wants to buy.
He might as well have been predicting whether or not people were wearing underwear.
Sheesh... and your friend considers it rude to test him? Gosh, we wouldn't want to offend his sensibilities. How about insisting that he actually tell you something he's got a fair chance of being wrong about... maybe he could pick out the left handed cell phone users. Of course, if he's any kind of a decent huckster, he'll spot the lefties faster than you will...
BTW, you might ask your friend how the cells 'store' EM interference. If the effects are cumulative, there must be a way for cells to retain the EM interference they receive... and does it fade if you stop using a phone? If so, what's the 'half-life' of an EM interfered cell? How long does it last? How does cellular lifespan affect your total EM accumulation?
Do you see how silly this is getting? Of course, your friend would be offended by objective (read: non-believer) types, so maybe you shouldn't mention all this stuff to him...
To begin with, this is a complete shift in the discussion, which was: the job of a corp. is to get more money, and the effect of that is that Joe Schmo has less, such that the more money the corps have, the less the people have.
That, of course, is nonsense.
Now, onward: You're right! We take out more oil than we put back. Same thing with the other fossil fuels. The solution to this is, of course, to kill enough people that the tide turns back.
Maybe you have a better solution?
Natural resources fuel the economy, but they do not equal the economy. Your statement that economic growth has consequences is true, but completely off-point. In fact, that statement has absolutely nothing to do with the 'rising tide' argument. The consequence of a growing economy actually proves the argument FOR the 'rising tide'!
Yes, you're right. We're burning through resources at quite a rate. That has little to do with whether our economy grows, though , or whether a growing economy creates wealth for all involved. Look at the computer industry. It has created wealth far in excess of the value of the resources it has consumed. It has contributed to the reduction in use of natural resources while increasing the quality of life for those involved and generating new revenue streams for companies that would never have existed. Imagine if Amazon.com were doing its business only in the physical world. Imagine the electric bills alone! Not to mention the waste in wharehoused, unsold books.
On a micro scale, it's not a zero sum. If you deliver groceries promptly and with skill, I migh trecommend you to others, and because of your demand, you might start charging more for the service. We've just created wealth, i.e. you're using the same resources but getting more money. Maybe if you get popular enough, you might hire me to help! More wealth.
On a macro scale, it basically works the same way. We're not talking about dollar bills. If you were allowed to print your own money, you'd be decreasing your wealth because the dollar would be worth less. It's not a zero sum game because the economy, while dependant on resources, is not equivalent to them. Your argument, while possibly true, is completely off-point.
But it is correct. If the drivers are written to detect and take advantage of certain parts of the quake code, changing the.exe name shouldn't affect anything. Clearly, all they did was look for the name and silently trade visuals for FPS in order to fool the gaming public.
The real point here is, ATI fudged the operation of their drivers to make the Radeon appear to perform better than it actually does with standard benchmarking tool. Whether or not they manage to think of a way to justify it is irrelevant. I've never been impressed with ATI, and IMHO this tears it. I'm through with them.
By that rationale, a perfect copy of a Rembrandt would be worth as much as the original.
Millions of perfect copies devalue the entire market... that's why RAM prices have steadily and dropped. Were you around when it cost $15 for an individual 256K DRAM chip? now it's +-$25 for 256MB! If RAM was rare and hard to make, it would still be expensive.
Every copy of a CD ought to cost $9 or so. If you flood the market, however, they end up being worth about $0.
How the recording industry is still selling CD's is beyond me.
But at the time, there wasn't much in the way of US force projected into his region, and we didn't have anything near a mandate to 'suggest' that he wrap up the issue. Nowadays, it might just start looking a lot like international terrorism to us warmongers in the USA... and we've got quite a big force projected right into his lap.
Maybe he'll see the light, given the right amount of persuasion.
But the economy of the US as a whole can't be undermined by a single entity in a zero-sum manner. Even Standard Oil and AT&T were creating wealth even as they were hopping up and down on their competitors and making little squishy noises.
If I were doing it, I'd try to use our influence to get Gen. Musharef to quit backing kashmir guerrilas , which will make India very very happy and also create an excellent check on Pakistan's power without us having to do much of anything.
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Before you accept PayPal as a success story, please take a look at this warning.
Some people have had nightmarish times getting money, and some peopl ehave had their businesses and good names destroyed by PayPal.
As an American and a fan living overseas, will this show be available on any UK/Irish stations? Where might I see it if I'm living in Ireland?
You have the right to not be oppressed by the government with regards to your speech. That's it.
yaay!
I agree that it's pointless to attack the RIAA. The thing is, though, if the RIAA is right, they're doomed. Artists are going to have to find another way to do this. P2P file sharing and copyright are mutually exclusive now. You simply cannot have both.
It's like trying to make the top bun of a hamburger illegal. Who's going to listen? No one. You can't make the top bun illegal unless you criminalize bread. You can't stop the two-bun eaters if bread is available at all. It's hopeless. You can't stop sharing music without stopping data sharing in general. If sharing data is possible at all, people will share music. In the past, they only had to go after the BIG infringers. Now everybody is a big infringer.
It's hopeless. As an artist, I'd start thinking about how you'll get your name out there post-RIAA, because they are not going to be able to hold off P2P file sharing.
They're in their own bind, too... if they're right, they're screwed no matter what they do. If they'r wrong, they're wasting loads and loads of money and getting beaten up in the press over nothing.
Sigh.
It's Freedom of Speech, not freedom of listening. Anyone is free to say whatever they want, and as long as it's true you can't get in trouble for it. That has nothing to do with listening to music. The 1st Amendment doesn't protect the audience!
If someone creates a 1st Amendment protected work, and they only want to show it to left-handed people, your rights haven't been violated. If they want to sell it, thus restricting it to people who can afford it, your rights haven't been violated.
In fact, there's a law which makes sure that you can't take their work, and sell it yourself. That law says it's wrong to take someone else's original work and make money from it without permission from the author.
Luckily, understanding that you might want to read/watch/listen to the work later, the law allows you to copy that original work however you like, as long as you still aren't charging others for it or causing the author to lose money.
Unluckily, the lawmakers didn't foresee P2P,so they didn't make any laws about how often you can make copies, or how many people you can give them to. They only restricted copying based on the financial impact to the author.
Do you understand how this works now? You don't have a right to hear anything! You have a right to speak freely, not a right to listen.
If you were to perform a song to such precision that it was indistinguishable from the original, it would be the original. If you cited the songwriter, you'd be just fine. If you put it on a record and sold a million copies without telling anyone about the author, and without compensating the author for use of their material, you're breaking the law.
The government doesn't get to restrict speech, but people can place whatever restrictions they like on their own speech. They can make it as financially free as they like, or charge whatever they think they can get. It's not a 1st Amendment violation to restrict yourself or to limit your own audience.
Got it?
First off, fair use. Fair use is there to let you do what you want with what you bought for your enjoyment or potentially for you and a few friends enjoyment... it doesn't allow you to record that tape for your best bud anymore than it allows you to make that mp3 and give it to 100 people on the internet. Now it DOES entitle you to make that mp3 for yourself and that tape for yourself.
Forgive my bluntness, but you're wrong. Here's why:
Fair use allows you to do several things. It allows you to record for the purposes of timeshifting, it allows you to quote as long as you cite your source. It allows you to copy material for non-commercial purposes, and to change media. It does not restrict according to scale. You can make copies of a movie or a song and give them to your friends. That's not illegal! What's illegal is impacting the profit of the copyright holders.
This is the crux of the copyright issue. IT'S NOT ILLEGAL TO SHARE SONGS ON THE NET. It's illegal to charge for your copies, but not illegal to make them.
The thing is, the people who wrote the copyright laws never imagined that you could create an unlimited number of perfect copies, and simultaneously give them away to millions of people, AND charge absolutely nothing for them. Nobody imagined it. So, there's no restriction on scale of copying written into the law, and that's where everything begins and ends. I say I'm sharing with friends, and the RIAA says I'm impacting the bottom line by devaluing their product.
It's critical that the RIAA show they are losing money as a result of the sharing, if they want to prevent it. Where are the hard figures? None ever showed up in the Napster trial. So far, they've been able to convince the system that the possibility of losing money is enough to trigger a violation. Even this is a stretch, as violations have historically been limited to people who are actually selling the stuff they copied, thus directly diverting $$$ from the copyright holder.
Now, though, no money is changing hands at all, and it's much tougher to prove that sharing services are actually costing the RIAA money. This is the real issue here. It's not about morality or rights. You have the legal ability to copy music however you like, as long as you aren't selling it or getting it for free when you'd otherwise be buying it. You aren't stealing unless you actively decide to download INSTEAD of buying.
As regards the law, the 'law is law' argument is bullshit. Try to sell that one to Rosa Parks... she's not buying it. Tell it to Thoreau, who spent time in jail because he thought a tax was wrong. RW Emerson had to bail him out. Civil Disobedience involves voluntarily taking the punishment to demonstrate that you believe the law is wrong, and will suffer for your belief. It's about as far from anarchy as you can get, and has nothing to do with your 'attacked in the street' analogy.Even if copyright was completely destroyed as a result of P2P, it still would be unrelated to actual, physical violence.
Sheesh. Illegal pirating? I't's not illegal.It's not pirating. And you aren't guilty of anything unless you shared music with the intent of profiting from the exchange, or with the effect of costing the RIAA money as a result of your actions. Even then, it's not the sharing that's illegal, or the service, or the concept of P2P. It's your profit or the RIAA's loss due to your actions that's illegal.
Which national press were you watching? Where I was, Nader got plenty of coverage even though he didn't participate in the debates.
Did you pay any attention at all? Gore and Bush are light years apart on a ton of issues, not least the selection of SCOTUS justices and the appointment of federal judges.
And again, I'll repeat. If the turnout was higher, it would be possible to get a 3rd party candidate elected. It happened in Minnesota and in Maine re: governor's races. People in power don't care what the turnout is because there IS NO TURNOUT. Even impeachment, something with extreme venomous feelings along both sides, only caused the defeat of ONE US Rep, in California... and he lost by a whisker.
People in power make their plays to put people in office, but often in US history, it doesn't work out. Even when it does, it still puts good people in office! You should start reading some serious history instead of the highschool crap. Jefferson's election was just as fraught with intrigue and political manouvering as any other.
So you think the choices sucked this time. That shouldn't turn you off voting; it should get you more involved! It's apathy that makes our political system break down, not shadowy forces placing puppets on the throne. If your position is that the system is broken, then you are responsible for fixing it!
Lastly, what exactly is the point of placing a puppet in the presidency when you can't control him? If Clinton can get away with the shit he pulled and still have a 60%+ approval rating, what leverage can you possibly have against a president? Who's being controlled here, the President, or you?
If I had mod points, you'd get one!
LOL
Of course not... Whopper Junior is a name unto itself. The 'Junior' is not a descriptor, it's part of the name. That would be like saying "How many Johns Smith are there, anyway?".
Now, I do say 'attorneys general' and if people look at me funny, well, that's the look of ignorance. They aren't generals, they're attorneys. Get it straight, people!
Part of the reason it looks like your opinion doesn't count is because you're surrounded (everybody is) with people who don't vote.
.01% more of the population had shown up, we'd have a different President. What do the 60% of non-voters in Florida think now?
You *ought* to be able to get fed up enough with two bad choices to go out and get yourself elected instead! Unfortunately, it's practically impossible to get people you see every day of your life to vote for ANYTHING, much less vote for you. So if you wanna get elected, you have to whore yourself out to people who can give you the money you need to find those 20% of people who actually are going to go vote.
If everyone voted, your opinion might have some influence. If you were eloquent enough, you might just be able to get something done! It's happened in the past, and continues to happen in small towns all over America. When you start getting to higher offices, you just can't find anyone who is voting unless you spend $$$ on ads. So, you've got to have the $$$ and you've got to get it form someone, or else your opponent will be the only person that 20% hears about.
If we had 80% turnout, practically everyone you talked to would be voting. You could hang out in the market for a week and boost your polling numbers 5%. You might even be able to counteract some of that spending.
Voting doesn't count because people don't vote. If bad candidates got tossed out of office regularly, good ones might start showing up.
Oh, and just think how all those people in Florida who agree with you felt after the last election... in some places, if even
I wonder how this would work. MSFT is incorporated inthe state of Washington, but their legal problems stem from federal antitrust violations. It would seem to me that the State of Washington would have to revoke their corporate charter as a seperate action heard in state court, and that all other states (and the fed) have to rely on remedies described in antitrust law.
In light of recent events, do we have to imagine what a group of spies could do?
Wow! We get to be civilized and curteous?
Well then! Would you mind moving this over to email? It's easier for me at work to email commentary of this length... send me a quick note and I'll reply there.
And I promise, I'll can the forensic debate in favor of an actual discussion. You are right, many 'debates' do bury themselves quickly in minutia to the detriment of the actual point. Now that we've established that we're both reasonable people, we can actually talk about something!
Thanks! I'll await your note...
In thinking, I realize some of the points I made may not have been completely clear.
In no particular order:
The idea of a "nearest least logical argument" is self-contradicting. I'm surprised I didn't notice it earlier. If it were the least logical argument, it would necessarily be the farthest from any logical supposition it purported to contradict. If it were the nearest argument, it would necessarily be relativaly well grounded in logical thought. I suppose you could have meant that I chose the nearest argument to your own that followed your guideline of being illogical, but wouldn't that be like saying that neither position made much sense? You can't have meant that...
On further consideration, I remembered that damn near EVERY drug stays in the body in one place or another, many for years after you're dead. That's how a medical examiner tells if you've been poisoned. Some chemicals reside in the fat cells, some in the eyes, some in the hair, etc. The effect of a drug has absolutely no resemblance to the proposed effect of EM radiation on the body.
That reminds me, I've gone and accidentally gifted you the point that EM radiation is bad, and you really haven't even demonstrated that yet. Now we have to go back an entire step before we even get to talk about your original assertion, namely that the damage might be cumulative. Luckily, this is the net, and links are acceptable if you don't feel like laying it all out for me. Beware, however, that basing a strong argument on stupid facts will get you nowhere.
By saying that I would ask someone to r00t my Linux firewall just as I would ask your friend to prove he can see EM aura disturbances, what I mean to say is: I don't let unsubstantiated claims stand. Claiming you're an elite super-hacker carries about the same burden of proof, IMHO, as claiming to be able to read EM signatures in people with your bare eyeballs. While both claims may be true, neither one can stand without substantiation. I rate your cellphone experiment at about the same level as our supposed hacker showing me the latest DoS script he downloaded as proof of his sk1llz.
I should have added the 'straw man' tactic to the litany of crap you threw at me, but I missed that one. It was part of the 'ridiculous' HD example you gave.
I missed a question of yours. Yes, I have experimented with my own ability to align and redirect 'energy' from my own body into that of my wife. She has a severe back injury and sometimes, if I can get into a particularly meditative state, it seems that I'm much more effective at fixing the bone misalignments and nerve problems than I am when I'm actually 'thinking' about it. I can't really be sure of what happens, but it's a curious thing. Also, as I mentioned, I practice Aikido and part of that training is the development of ki and its use. I have had both personal and observational proof of the existance of that particular force.
Examples of how people can be fooled are perfectly relevant, especially when it's extremely possible that they are being employed! Apply Occam's Razor as needed.
As for being told the 'right' thing to believe, well, we aren't talking about belief. We're talking about demonstrating proof. I covered this numerous times, but I don't think I made it perfectly clear. Belief and proof are sometimes at odds, and an objective thinker trains himself to distinguish between the two.
Quickly, in defense of the logical burden of proof: any logical conclusion based on a complete set of true facts must be correct. All hypotheses are required to shoulder this burden, and any that meet this standard must be accepted as fact.
By "creative thinker" you really mean "good bullshitter". I hadn't specifically pointed that out, but I think I beat that particular point into the ground in my previous post.
Man, is this starting to read like Usenet or what!
Lastly, I just couldn't pass up the chance to publicly snicker at the heroin/heroine homonym mistake you made... I laughed so much that I had to reread your whole post so I could maintain the thread in my mind. Those heroines sure do have an effect on the body...
LOL!
Oh, man, oh man. I think we've found a winner! This is going to be funnnnn!
...I've learned two things from my studies
I've studied this stuff for years, in all liklihood, in far greater depth than you have
You've almost certainly studied fakers more than I have... it's apparently an area of expertise for you. Fair enough.
You also seem to have studied some pretty shifty ways of making a point, and as such you begin to wander into MY area of expertise; rhetoric (in the Roman sense) and legitimate constructive debate.
Here's where the problem begins:
Only two things about people? Probably not, but these are the two things you base the rest of your post on, and therefore in your context, the only things that apply. People will either believe everything they hear, or rationalize away everything they don't like.
From this, you go through Clearly, you'll not believe me..., on to tested and bullied by people like you . Now, I'm not only possessing of a blind faith in science and a desire to rationalize away everything not already in my worldview, I'm also a bully who persecutes your poor friend because he's a visionary and I'm threatened by that.
Then you perform a neat little sleight-of-argument: Try to imagine if you were the only person whose eyes were sensitive to light...
What you're really saying is: try to accept my premise out of hand and place yourself in a similar (but more acceptable to your limited worldview) situation. Then you associate me with those folks who refuse to believe even good evidence! That's twice over a neat trick, because it assumes that good evidence exists, and then condemns me by association for not believing it, while all the while purporting to be a plea for understanding. Masterful!
Next, we have a standard disconnection regarding faith. Luckily, your friend isn't of the 'believe or else' persuasion. He sounds more like the 'I cannot abide the faithless, sigh, poor benighted fools, I cannot help you if you cannot help yourself' kind of guy. Kinda sickening, but at least be won't be blowing up any buildings...
(hey, see what I did there? I made a cynical joke, and also lumped your friend in with wacko terrorists and Pentacostal religious crackpots! woo woo! not bad, eh? You're rubbing off on me)
Finally, we get to the actual EM argument! The thing is, hard drives are designed to retain their altered state until altered again. The body is permanently damaged, in a clearly detectable way, through heroin use. There is nothing I know of to suggest that EM fields have a permanent or cumulative effect on cells based on your examples. In fact, you basically compare apples to oranges with no discussion of why they might be similar, and also deride me for picking the "nearest least logical argument" while providing no proof that I did so. BTW, I'm not clearly predisposed to anything, certainly not based on your 'arguments'. Nothing at all about me has been illuminated by your series of verbal swipes.
Now, you say: Living systems adapt over time to the repeated exosure of ANY strong enough stimulus but I can think of half a dozen strong stimuli that the body does not adapt do during its lifespan. Physical trauma. Electrical shock. Vertigo. Sunlight is a perfect example. Your skin burns in a cause-effect relationship if you lie naked in the sun all day for a year. Eventually, it bakes to the point that you won't burn so badly, but you haven't "adapted". It's stimulus-response. If you go back indoors for a year, your skin returns to its normal state. For an adaptation to occur (increased melatonin) it takes thousands of generations. So, now we're back to the original question re: EM interference; if EM damage is cumulative, what cellular process does it interrupt or alter to cause the damage, and how long will the effect last? Is it permanet? Do you propose that EM radiation has an effect like sunlight, baking the cells like a turkey? Or does it have an effect like what happens to my monitor when my cell phone rings, i.e. temporary frequency disturbance that fades immediately?
BTW, most drugs ARE stored in the body for a time... LSD, for example, is practically never gone.
Finally, having derided me enough, we descend into: Don't kid yourself. You are nowhere nearly as objective as you would like to believe. --It is far easier for you to believe that I am a fool who thinks that, 'cells store EM interferrence,' than face the horrifying possibility that I might actually know what I'm talking about. If I knew something which you did not, (impossible!), then that could potentially begin the unraveling of your safe little 'reality'.
Having (in your mind) soundly browbeaten me into a state of bewilderment, and exposed me for a faithless idiot in public, you feel safe in taking undisguised pot-shots at me! Unfortunately, you've shown me exactly nothing that suggests you might actually know what you're talking about, and quite a lot to suggest that you would rather attack me or dismiss me (or both) than present an idea.
How very brash of you. Let me set the record straight. People can react in more than two ways to an occurance with no immediate explanation. I, in fact, take the path of most people who've studied the process of reasoned thought: anything that is true can be proven, and anything that can be proven is true. Your friend can see EM fields and auras, fair enough. That's a hypothesis. Design a method of demonstrating it, without moving the goalposts or resorting to any of the other nasty little debate tricks that lots of scientists AND extra-sensory proponents love so much, and I'll believe it! Willingly and without cynicism, because I'm actually objective. I have no motive and no emotional investment. Can you say the same?
It might surprise you to know that my own beliefs run probably very close to your own. I, however, retain honest, real, unbiased objectivity and expect the same level of proof from all possible invloved parties. This includes myself, and being an accomplished aikido student familiar with ki (having been on the receiving end more often than I like...) I think it's perfectly fair of me. Your friend can see auras? Fine, but picking cellphone users out of a pool with a likely 85% positive hit rate isn't proof... in fact, it lends itself to falsehood and by doing so, he casts the mantle of doubt across his own shoulders. Gimme real proof. I'd ask the same thing from a new employee who says he can r00t my firewall. Okay, you 3733t hax0r you, get some! Prove it.
What you've done in your post is nothing short of a rhetorical drive-by. When, BTW, did you lose your own objectivity? My guess is that you never had it. You were a debunker, and then you flipped. Now you're a defender. Neither one is very well equipped to make unbiased observations. I suspect your friend might like both sides equally well... I've found that those who set their goalpost at faith are likely to use the faithless as stronger proof of their belief! The more ridiculous the statement, the more faith required to accept it. The more you argue something's absurdity, the more it proves the power of faith!
Now, would you like to try again, without personal attack as a substitute for reasoned thought? Without guilt by association, comparing apples to oranges, and false (or flawed) logical connections?
Will you try again, under the scrutiny of someone who can actually see through your verbal trickery to the threadbare idea underneath?
You're an expert in charlatans... well, gosh. So am I!
We're consuming bacteria at a faster rate than it's being replenished? Come on, man! Gimme a break here.
Your arguments are really flimsy here... giving up Fritos won't help the planet. Ceasing consumption of non-sustenance food items might help a bit, but you're right in that people won't do something that drastic. I don't think you've thought this through very well. What happens to all the people who work in the junkfood industry, and all the people all over the world that get affected by the ripples of its disappearance? Eventually, you bump a whole group of people down into social welfare of some sort, which is hugely wasteful and probably a worse drain on the environment than if they were still working for Frito-Lay (or Frito Shipping, Inc., or 7-11, or its shareholders, including that 80-yr old retired guy who lives off his Frito shares and gets kicked out of his retirement center, or the broker who recommended them before the industry dried up in a matter of months, or all the people who listened to him, etc.). Do you get the point here? As for the straws, I'd rather that than have the guy who just wiped his nose on his hand give me an unwrapped one; poor example selection.
If we shrink the economy enough, we could be China! Wait, N. Korea hardly uses any resources at all... there's a perfect model.
More efficiency is certainly better, but you can't just do this stuff by fiat. What, should we ban books on paper? Where do you get the money to make sure everyone has an electronic reader? You can't be suggesting that you only get to read if you can afford the proper device... you have to take this stuff out to it's logical end. You have to consider ALL the ramifications, not just the parts that seem to support your opinion.
Actually, you're going to have to shift your focus away from the 'environment' altogether; I'll get to that in a second.
Run out of plankton? You've got to be joking. Plankton makes up (and this is only a slightly informed guess) like half the biomass on the planet, and a great amount of the total photosynthesis that occurs. If we warm up the oceans, we get MORE plankton, not less. More photosynthesis! More oxygen and less carbon dioxide! There's a downside here?
Now, let me skip past eco-catastrophe and come back to that momentarily... I've got to cover the economics thing.
If, as you say, efficiency = using fewer resources to achieve the same or better return, than economists talk all the time about consumption of natural resources. Get some economist to talk about International Paper and you'll hear loads of talk about consumption of resources. Talk to any competent Director of Finance in Arizona or south/west Texas or New Mexico or Southern CA and you'll see that water consumption is high on the list of worries.
No economist would ever suggest that everyone could be a millionaire. That would make a million effectively the same as zero. No one is saying that there is infinite money, either. What I (and most economists) am saying is that more for me does not necessarily (or even very often) equal less for you. This is why resources!=money. $.03 worth of wood pulp might only be worth slightly more if it's made into toilet paper, but it's worth LOTS more if it's made into a share of eBay stock (BTW, currently at about $53). Resources don't equal money, and consumption of resources doesn't equal economy. You can burn through tons of resources and not be worth much at all (think PG&E) or exactly the opposite (think AOL). Money (and wealth) is a human intellectual construct, and consumption of resources is just a factor, like lots and lots of other factors, and is often not applicable and rarely quantifiable.
Now, eco-doom: this planet has already survived a catastrophe humans would be very hard pressed to replicate. There is no danger of the ecosystem disintegrating around us, nor will there ever be unless we decided to nuke the everlasting fuck out of ourselves, and even then it's pretty likely that the planet will straighten out eventually.
What you want to be worried about is if people are going to be able to survive. The fact is, we're just organisms like all the rest. We're incredibly successful at adapting and using our surroundings, which is why we aren't stuck on an island somewhere evolving into marsupials to survive. Everything on the planet consumes resources, and usually they consume more than they put back, just like us. People are certainly capable of consuming so much that there isn't enough left to support the population. This is also exactly like other organisms, except that we fill a LOT of ecological niches and we tend to affect the environment across a much much wider range than your average apex predator. Luckily, even basic environmental systems are extremely complex and frequently possessing of a high redundancy level. Really, though, on an environmental level, we aren't too much different from any other apex predator group, and the results of overusing our resources are therefore rather predictable.
The thing is, we don't like it when masses of humans start kicking off, because we're possessing of a soul and we're humans and all that. So, we innovate like a motherfucker to keep the race expanding. Incidentally, that's exactly like every other race on the planet. We're just much better at it because we seem to keep coming up with kick-ass solutions, and so we don't have to wait on evolution to save what's left of us.
So it's perfectly reasonable to wonder if we're going to expand past our ability to survive, but since we're a lot more like a pride of lions than a hive of bees, we aren't really built to think about 'humanity' on a survival level. It's likely that practically nothing proactive will be done about it on a global scale; we aren't really programmed to care about the pride in Somalia as long as the home range is still bountiful. IMHO, we're going to figure out how to double the lifespan of a human before we start really running out of resources, and THAT is a bigger concern than anything else. Let yourself start projecting what'll happen to the economy if the average worker lives to be 160 and the birthrate stays the same, and you'll REALLY get freaked out.
None of this, however, has much of anything to do with the US economy and whether or not +1 for me is -1 for you (which it's not).
1G wireless is just to unreliable should also be "1G wireless is just too unreliable".
Time for a nap, dude...
Sigh...
I wonder how many people out there are NOT using cell phones, just in general. Your friend probably had, at worst, a good shot at 85% accuracy. That's enough to sell any average joe on something, and a slam dunk to sell to someone who already wants to buy.
He might as well have been predicting whether or not people were wearing underwear.
Sheesh... and your friend considers it rude to test him? Gosh, we wouldn't want to offend his sensibilities. How about insisting that he actually tell you something he's got a fair chance of being wrong about... maybe he could pick out the left handed cell phone users. Of course, if he's any kind of a decent huckster, he'll spot the lefties faster than you will...
BTW, you might ask your friend how the cells 'store' EM interference. If the effects are cumulative, there must be a way for cells to retain the EM interference they receive... and does it fade if you stop using a phone? If so, what's the 'half-life' of an EM interfered cell? How long does it last? How does cellular lifespan affect your total EM accumulation?
Do you see how silly this is getting? Of course, your friend would be offended by objective (read: non-believer) types, so maybe you shouldn't mention all this stuff to him...
It was working while we were there!
I seem to recall that we moved into Haiti during Clinton's first term... am I wrong on this?
Besides, the point is we've gotten it right at least a few times...
To begin with, this is a complete shift in the discussion, which was: the job of a corp. is to get more money, and the effect of that is that Joe Schmo has less, such that the more money the corps have, the less the people have.
That, of course, is nonsense.
Now, onward: You're right! We take out more oil than we put back. Same thing with the other fossil fuels. The solution to this is, of course, to kill enough people that the tide turns back.
Maybe you have a better solution?
Natural resources fuel the economy, but they do not equal the economy. Your statement that economic growth has consequences is true, but completely off-point. In fact, that statement has absolutely nothing to do with the 'rising tide' argument. The consequence of a growing economy actually proves the argument FOR the 'rising tide'!
Yes, you're right. We're burning through resources at quite a rate. That has little to do with whether our economy grows, though , or whether a growing economy creates wealth for all involved. Look at the computer industry. It has created wealth far in excess of the value of the resources it has consumed. It has contributed to the reduction in use of natural resources while increasing the quality of life for those involved and generating new revenue streams for companies that would never have existed. Imagine if Amazon.com were doing its business only in the physical world. Imagine the electric bills alone! Not to mention the waste in wharehoused, unsold books.
On a micro scale, it's not a zero sum. If you deliver groceries promptly and with skill, I migh trecommend you to others, and because of your demand, you might start charging more for the service. We've just created wealth, i.e. you're using the same resources but getting more money. Maybe if you get popular enough, you might hire me to help! More wealth.
On a macro scale, it basically works the same way. We're not talking about dollar bills. If you were allowed to print your own money, you'd be decreasing your wealth because the dollar would be worth less. It's not a zero sum game because the economy, while dependant on resources, is not equivalent to them. Your argument, while possibly true, is completely off-point.
But it is correct. If the drivers are written to detect and take advantage of certain parts of the quake code, changing the .exe name shouldn't affect anything. Clearly, all they did was look for the name and silently trade visuals for FPS in order to fool the gaming public.
The real point here is, ATI fudged the operation of their drivers to make the Radeon appear to perform better than it actually does with standard benchmarking tool. Whether or not they manage to think of a way to justify it is irrelevant. I've never been impressed with ATI, and IMHO this tears it. I'm through with them.
By that rationale, a perfect copy of a Rembrandt would be worth as much as the original.
Millions of perfect copies devalue the entire market... that's why RAM prices have steadily and dropped. Were you around when it cost $15 for an individual 256K DRAM chip? now it's +-$25 for 256MB! If RAM was rare and hard to make, it would still be expensive.
Every copy of a CD ought to cost $9 or so. If you flood the market, however, they end up being worth about $0.
How the recording industry is still selling CD's is beyond me.
But at the time, there wasn't much in the way of US force projected into his region, and we didn't have anything near a mandate to 'suggest' that he wrap up the issue. Nowadays, it might just start looking a lot like international terrorism to us warmongers in the USA... and we've got quite a big force projected right into his lap.
Maybe he'll see the light, given the right amount of persuasion.
But the economy of the US as a whole can't be undermined by a single entity in a zero-sum manner. Even Standard Oil and AT&T were creating wealth even as they were hopping up and down on their competitors and making little squishy noises.
If I were doing it, I'd try to use our influence to get Gen. Musharef to quit backing kashmir guerrilas , which will make India very very happy and also create an excellent check on Pakistan's power without us having to do much of anything.
Will it fall out like that? Anybody's guess...