I'm sorry. I talked like an ass today, and have only noticed in retrospect. I will try to answer another day when my head is not in my ass. My apologies to you, and the other poster.
*laugh* It's a topic which often inspires such a response. Don't let it get you down.:-P
Of course that there is no evidence for God's existence is not necessarily evidence for God's nonexistence, though it might be if we had reason for thinking that if God existed there would be evidence for this.
No evidence for existence doesn't imply non-existence. That is true.
Then you say (I think)... that if god existed, and if we expected there to be evidence that he existed, our expectation of evidence being unfulfilled, we can then turn that into evidence of non existence of god. I think that's what you say, but I'm not sure.
I certainly don't accept that your one line statement has coherently summed up why I'm wrong. It sums up why you think I'm wrong, but I wouldn't call it a compelling argument.
See, from a scientific and logical point of view, you can't really say anything about the existence or non-existence of god. There is simply no measure of evidence which would conclusively establish either proposition as true. Science basically says that once you're outside of a reality you can play what if with, you're no longer playing with science.
By its very nature, any entity which would be capable of creating the universe as we know it would be outside of the realm of what we'd be able to know. So, speculating on what happens outside of the reality that we can understand and know is... well, speculating. At that point, pretty much any form of speculation is essentially equally valid -- flying spaghetti monster? Sure, why not??
The big issue here, is how plausible you, yes you personally, find the idea that "god" or whatever you define as "god" to have been able to create our planet, all other concepts and things being equal. To me, I find it implausible.
Dude, I find reality implausible. That doesn't mean I find it impossible to believe in or reject that it exists, however odd or unlikely it may seem.
Here is what I personally believe...
I believe that if such a being as god existed who could create the entire universe, that being would be so vast and profound that we could never really have a hope of forming a concept which would encompass that entity. I believe at that point that it's likely the universe would continue working within the physical rules which dictated its behavior, and planets and life would be a side effect that that universe. I don't think I can form an intelligent position on what god would be doing in the meantime, or what his opinions would be on the matter.:-P
I believe that there is absolutely zero objective evidence which could definitely establish the existence or non existence of such a being. I don't think we'd be capable of seriously evaluating this evidence anyway as it would be way more than our wee brains can possibly grasp.
I'm not advocating for the belief in a god, since I don't believe in god. I'm advocating for the belief in the belief in god.
Personally, I view it as a modified version of Pascal's Wager. I found that atheism lead to dark places without answers, and theism ignores the answers we have because those don't match what they believe. Personally, if your world view includes what we know to be scientifically true, and if you choose to believe in god, there is essentially no net harm to anyone else. The intangible personal benefits you may or may not receive are entirely your own business.
I choose to try to live my life as if there were greater consequences than a life which is merely ugly, brutish, and short. I can't accept the rigid morality of a church and an enduring "soul", and I can't accept the consequences of a system where what we do has no "big picture" implications and therefore morality is optional and a sign of weakness.
I fall into the camp of "neither this nor that". The Buddhist
Science and god are opposites.... Of course, if you like to believe in magical sky wizards, please go ahead, but don't dare bring your beliefs on anyone else in the world. They are your personal beliefs and you should be entitled to that, but not to bring that upon other people.
I think you're being a little "black and white" on this topic.
Science and god aren't opposites. It's not either science or god. Science and god speak to completely different endeavors and areas of human interest. Science attempts to explain the physical phenomenon around us. Religion contemplates mans place in the universe, his role in it, and the "meaning" of our actions and lives.
Science tells us the big bang happened. If you don't believe in the big bang, that's your problem. However, there's nothing that stops you from believing in the big bang, and the notion that god was the prime force behind it -- essentially, creationism but on a much huger scale than typically explained by religions.
There are many educated, intelligent people, who are completely capable of believing that god exists and not have to worry about any incompatibility in these two beliefs. It's the belief that either science or religion are true and there's no room for them to coexist which is the problem.
At present, science can't disprove the notion of god. In fact, god and all that implies takes over where science ends. Believing that some divine power caused the big bang isn't irrational, it just requires a leap of faith. That leap of faith, however, doesn't need to be at odds with science. I know astrophysicists who accept all of the physics on face value and still believe that, ultimately, god is out there. Their belief doesn't in any way affect their objectivity behind what the science tells us -- their religion supports their spirituality and morality, and their science allows them to investigate physical reality.
And, before anyone accuses me of defending the concept of religion from the perspective of a religious person -- I was raised protestant, spent about 20 years being an atheist, and now buddhism informs my morality and world view, but I don't actually believe in a god per se. But, I don't believe that all people who do believe are a bunch of crazy wing nuts who are gullible idiots.
I am a Muslim, I fully agree with your uncommonly succinct and eloquent expression of this concept. I only wish more non-theists could understand this point rather than blindly (dogmatically!) disregarding religion as incompatible with modern scientific investigation.
Well, it cuts both ways. The theists sometimes dismiss scientific evidence on the basis that it is incompatible with their beliefs in what god did, and what we're supposed to be able to do with it.
Some people coming from the theist point of view treat science as evil or irrelevant because it can come up with some items which might contradict a rigid, theism based world view -- take, evolution for instance. Among people who need to believe in the literal interpretation of Genesis, the idea of evolution and fossils runs contrary to that. The notion that life could have occurred on another planet in a vast universe seems to cause some people some consternation as they want to believe that we are singularly unique and special.
Generally, I agree with you. It is entirely possible to maintain religious beliefs in the face of science (even in tandem with science) as long as you don't allow your beliefs to override the science. You just need to keep perspective on what issues are best answered by science, and which are best answered by religion.
Me, I think the questions best addressed by theism are largely in a different domain than the ones defined by science. As long as you don't try to pretend the science is irrelevant or untrue, religion is completely compatible with science. Religion speaks to things that are basically beyond what science can intelligently speak to.
Sometimes, however, religion is incompatible with science. And, when that happens, you get people defending positions which aren't in line with objective, rational thought. Physical events are not really in the scope of theism, rejecting the reality of physical events because it doesn't match your theism is where the problems arise.
And, in a symbolic way, the mission linked the current attempts to stabilize Iraq with some of the high-profile claims about Saddam's weapons capabilities in the buildup to the 2003 invasion.... There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.
Meaning, the claims by the US government before the invasion of Iraq that they had been recently and actively trying to buy yellow cake on the open market are false.
We're talking about removing older stockpiles of this stuff, not whether or not they'd ever had any. That little bit about trying to buy it from Nigeria was quite resoundingly demonstrated to have been a forgery.
It's easy to keep repeating the same falsehood and claim it's true. In this case, the assertion about yellow cake wrt Iraq and the justifications for military action simply aren't borne out to be true.
And of course when people have an ideological/political axe to grind (as you obviously do) it becomes even more complicated.
And, keeping with the theme of this thread... just because I point these things out, doesn't make them less true.
Just because some of the Iraqis welcomed them as liberators, doesn't mean that any of the stated reasons for going there in the first place were ever true. Retroactively supporting the decision with elements which weren't part of the original reasoning is just smoke and mirrors.
I'm certainly willing to concede the fact that I have a left-leaning bias.
People don't want complexity and nuance. They want a 30 second sound bite on the evening news. Complexity and nuance implies that there are different perspectives, and that truth is more than a simple concept.
Perhaps some sort of points system might work, like a democracy of truth. People could "vote" on how accurate they believe a page to be (hopefully in an informed way) and a "How likely is this article to be accurate" index shown on each page.
Well, because that carries with it the risk of having a bunch of organized people skewing the official vote on what is "true". Organize enough right-wing zealots to simply vote their truths into favor, and, voila -- Pi is 3!!
Ultimately, if you can sway the masses, what is actually true isn't quite as important. Just because everyone believes in it, doesn't make it any more "true". It makes it more widely accepted.
If people had "voted" on the truth of the Earth being flat in the times of Galileo that doesn't mean we'd come up with a correct answer. Sometimes such voting really just allows an organized group to shout down the voices of everyone else.
The Register loves this sort of thing: is a minor example, but who knows what else has been elevated to truth by circular reasoning?
Plenty!!!
The belief that Iraq was trying to buy Yellow Cake, had an active WMD program, and that we were somehow liberating Iraq and that they'd be our friends afterwards and pay us back for our troubles and expense.
A lot of the anti-climate change stuff uses similar tactics -- a couple of dissenting voices are used to support the idea that there is "widespread disagreement" on the topic.
How about the claim that Intelligent Design is a legitimate scientific theory that should hold equal weight to evolution?
Often history depends on who gets to write the official account. You can get pretty wide differences in what happened depending on whose side you listen to. Certainly, the old colonialist powers have different stories than their colonies had.
I'm pretty sure the tobacco industry had a bunch of them.
The entire numbers the *AA's use to describe the losses due to "IP theft" are essentially completely fiction, got referenced once in a government document, and are bandied about without any form of supporting basis for them.
There are a lot of things which are presented as truths which are nothing more than opinion, or completely fabricated to support an agenda.
Even matters of objective fact are open to interpretation and spin. Sadly, I don't think Wiki is any more (or less) susceptible to this. If anything, the fact that we're explicitly aware of it in Wiki might make it easier. It's all the little ones we're not even aware of that are probably of greater concern.
Regardless, when you're recording vacation video at 14 gigs per hour, you're gonna need a lot of space if you want to keep it all.
Well, it's a chicken and egg problem. Before it became affordable to have the disk space to produce all of that media to, nobody produced consumer applications/devices which produced that much data.
The fact that the disk storage is feasible means that now companies can produce stuff which uses 14 gigs/hr and Joe Consumer can make use of it. Prior to that, it wouldn't have been feasible for consumer products to generate this much data.
It used to be that the data people stored on computers was mostly text-based documents with some markup, but they weren't that bulky. Bigger storage and faster hardware has caused a noticeable shift to much larger data formats than before. Heck, I seem to recall the first things that came on CD would thrown in a set of encyclopedias to try to use up that massive 650MB of data which people couldn't fathom what you'd do with!!
I routinely pull a couple of gigs off of my memory card from my camera. As someone who remembers punching holes in 5.25" floppies so you could turn 'em over and another 360K by using both sides -- the ability to just casually pass around gigabytes represents a huge fundamental shift in terms of what people can do with computers.
Once it is available, and fairly cheap, it's easy to find new ways to use it.
So I agree, piracy is a terrible problem. Our hearts go out to the families of the missing sailors.
However, I would think that Microsoft would be more concerned with copyright infringement that piracy. Are they planning an anti-copyright infringement day?
So, as much as we like to bicker over this particular usage, there seems to be some contention that this is a historically valid use of the term, and way predates computers.
From the wiki article, it sounds as if it has been used this way in law for a couple of centuries.
Of course, someone will likely say the wiki article is wrong. I'd be curious to see any actual legal sources to see if this actually has been used like that for as long as it claims. If it has been widely used in this regard for that long, then we should stop bitching about it since it would, in fact, be a perfectly valid use of the word piracy.
Well... My netbook has 2 GB of memory, 160 GB of storage, gigabit networking and thinks it has two 32 bit cores. It's a veritable late 80's, early 90's supercomputer that fits in my backpack.
Even in the mid 90's, GHz processors, and gigs of RAM/hard disk were still largely uncommon. I think you're talking late 90's before that started to become relatively common.
I continue to be stunned at what you can buy as an entry level box nowadays for a really cheap dollar amount. My local "white box" PC store will sell you a dual-core 5GHz (or whatever) 64-bit AMD machine for under $300 -- add a little RAM and disk space and you've got a helluva system for not very much money.
How many home PCs nowadays have TB's of storage? I know several people who do -- I remember when home users didn't have gigabytes, terabytes would have been unimaginable.
This seems counterintuitive. If it's a PRIVATE company that can be sold in a private transaction, then there is no "value on the stock market" because it's not publically traded.
You misunderstand me. The OP said:
It's a little more complex than that because an individual business does have a quantifiable worth: in the case of a publicly traded company, it's their stock valuation; in the case of a privately held company, it's how much they'd get if they went public.
My response is that the stock market does not actually define the valuation of a private company which is sold in a private sale, because it's not valued on the stock market. Further, that value isn't defined in terms of how much you'd get if you went public.
I'm asserting that the statement that an "individual business does not have quantifiable worth" without reference to the stock market is bogus. People can, and do, assign values to companies which are not traded on stock exchanges. It happens all the time.
I'm saying you can arrive at a quantifiable value for a company without having the stock market involved. I'm not talking about a private sale of a company which is publicly traded. I'm saying that the stock market is not the only measure of value of a corporate entity. And, private equity sales of businesses happens every day.
However even my pedantically simple "initial cost" analysis was more complex than theirs. They were just flat-out wrong, man! That ain't a free bridge!
If that bridge is free then I'll sign on the dotted line for it right now and immediately impose a $1/car toll.
Agreed, and, for many of the same reasons, it's meaningless to argue that Linux can't have a value associated with it and things that run on it.
It has value. Albeit, one which is hard to come up with a specific dollar figure for.
Both people arguing that the bridge is "free" are idiots. There is no "hidden value." The cost of the bridge was, simply put, the labor of the workers who built it and the cost of their raw materials. That's the price tag.
That was the price tag then. You also have to look at how much it would cost you to replace it now. The fact that they likely spend millions/year in maintaining it means that it inherently has more value than just its "book value", which is almost meaningless for a bridge.
It would cost a lot more money in todays dollars to replace that than it did to build it in the first place. And not having it would be hugely disruptive to traffic, economy, and psyche of New Yorkers.
Valuation is far more complex than the initial cost to purchase. I think this thread is massively overly simplifying things here, and I doubt most of us are economists or qualified to really speak about such things.
I wonder how much the Linux ecosystem would be worth if it were valued by an organization that didn't have a vested interest.
Depends on if they have a vested interest in the other way.
Microsoft would argue that Linux clearly has a negative value due to all of those patents which it may or may not be infringing on and the licensing fees you owe them.
IBM will argue it has a high value since they make gobs of money on services as a result of it.
At some point, you have to try to value it in terms of industry revenues associated with it, as well as the intangible value of how long it would take to build your own, or to buy a commercial solution to replace it.
If every company using Linux were forced to replace it with a Microsoft solution, I can easily see the valuation to industry being measured in the billions.
In terms of the resources being managed under Linux machines, how they're used, and what it would take to swap them out... there's an awful lot of stuff you'd have to be spending a lot of money on to replace.
It's a little more complex than that because an individual business does have a quantifiable worth: in the case of a publicly traded company, it's their stock valuation; in the case of a privately held company, it's how much they'd get if they went public.
I don't think that's quite right.
There are many cases of private companies being sold in a private transaction, and the value on the stock market isn't a factor. Using plain old balance sheets and some measure of good will you can certainly quantify the value of a private business.
It's entirely possible to arrive at a valuation of a company without using the stock market. In fact, it might be a more sound and objective measure than the stock market -- it often has little with do with fundamentals as it does the emotional state of investors wrt a given stock.
Morrison & Foerster [wikipedia.org] is a internationally recognized and prestigious law firm established in 1883, that has been going by the nickname MoFo since 1973. More on the linked wikipedia article for those still interested or skeptical.
But, you have to admit, given how the current usage of "MoFo" has changed, it's an unfortunate domain name. That, or it's now the Samuel L. Jackson of domain names.
If they're your attorneys, you can say that your lawyers are some bad-assed MoFo's and be entirely correct.:-P
To be honest, I'd be awfully leery about clicking on mofo.com through a Slashdot link. Certainly, not while I'm at work. It would simply not occur to me it's a law firm!!
Once companies have to encrypt the user data, I'm waiting for some poor schmuck to be coming back into the US with data on his laptop. The border guys will insist you decrypt -- and, then you're screwed either way.
If you don't decrypt it, immigration and DHS will arrest you. If you do, the states will arrest you.:-P
I kid, hopefully this wouldn't be a real scenario. But, dueling laws is always fun to ponder.
It's my understanding that the initial foundation for the concept of compression was a mathematical notion in Information Theory, and it literally took 30+ years for anyone to be able to actually come up with a practical way of doing it or recognizing how useful it would be.
That's definitely an example of something being basically a concept for a few decades.
You know what I hate? Those santa figures that start going "hohoho" if you go within about 30 feet of them. You know, it's a lucky thing halloween is when it is, or they'd have all the xmas tat in the stores already.
I don't know about where you live, but in my area, the xmas crap is alongside the halloween crap.
Seriously, in the first week of October I was seeing retailers with both stuff on display. I remember when the Christmas stuff dutifully waited until after halloween -- I don't think that's the case any more.
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone with more of a clue than I have about such things maybe give us a high-level summary as to exactly what mechanism is at play here?
I find myself having no idea of how this would work, and TFA doesn't really seem to say much about the mechanism. It just seems so damned bizarre.
Cheers
*laugh* It's a topic which often inspires such a response. Don't let it get you down. :-P
No harm no foul.
Cheers
No evidence for existence doesn't imply non-existence. That is true.
Then you say (I think) ... that if god existed, and if we expected there to be evidence that he existed, our expectation of evidence being unfulfilled, we can then turn that into evidence of non existence of god. I think that's what you say, but I'm not sure.
I certainly don't accept that your one line statement has coherently summed up why I'm wrong. It sums up why you think I'm wrong, but I wouldn't call it a compelling argument.
See, from a scientific and logical point of view, you can't really say anything about the existence or non-existence of god. There is simply no measure of evidence which would conclusively establish either proposition as true. Science basically says that once you're outside of a reality you can play what if with, you're no longer playing with science.
By its very nature, any entity which would be capable of creating the universe as we know it would be outside of the realm of what we'd be able to know. So, speculating on what happens outside of the reality that we can understand and know is ... well, speculating. At that point, pretty much any form of speculation is essentially equally valid -- flying spaghetti monster? Sure, why not??
Dude, I find reality implausible. That doesn't mean I find it impossible to believe in or reject that it exists, however odd or unlikely it may seem.
Here is what I personally believe ...
I believe that if such a being as god existed who could create the entire universe, that being would be so vast and profound that we could never really have a hope of forming a concept which would encompass that entity. I believe at that point that it's likely the universe would continue working within the physical rules which dictated its behavior, and planets and life would be a side effect that that universe. I don't think I can form an intelligent position on what god would be doing in the meantime, or what his opinions would be on the matter. :-P
I believe that there is absolutely zero objective evidence which could definitely establish the existence or non existence of such a being. I don't think we'd be capable of seriously evaluating this evidence anyway as it would be way more than our wee brains can possibly grasp.
I'm not advocating for the belief in a god, since I don't believe in god. I'm advocating for the belief in the belief in god.
Personally, I view it as a modified version of Pascal's Wager. I found that atheism lead to dark places without answers, and theism ignores the answers we have because those don't match what they believe. Personally, if your world view includes what we know to be scientifically true, and if you choose to believe in god, there is essentially no net harm to anyone else. The intangible personal benefits you may or may not receive are entirely your own business.
I choose to try to live my life as if there were greater consequences than a life which is merely ugly, brutish, and short. I can't accept the rigid morality of a church and an enduring "soul", and I can't accept the consequences of a system where what we do has no "big picture" implications and therefore morality is optional and a sign of weakness.
I fall into the camp of "neither this nor that". The Buddhist
I think you're being a little "black and white" on this topic.
Science and god aren't opposites. It's not either science or god. Science and god speak to completely different endeavors and areas of human interest. Science attempts to explain the physical phenomenon around us. Religion contemplates mans place in the universe, his role in it, and the "meaning" of our actions and lives.
Science tells us the big bang happened. If you don't believe in the big bang, that's your problem. However, there's nothing that stops you from believing in the big bang, and the notion that god was the prime force behind it -- essentially, creationism but on a much huger scale than typically explained by religions.
There are many educated, intelligent people, who are completely capable of believing that god exists and not have to worry about any incompatibility in these two beliefs. It's the belief that either science or religion are true and there's no room for them to coexist which is the problem.
At present, science can't disprove the notion of god. In fact, god and all that implies takes over where science ends. Believing that some divine power caused the big bang isn't irrational, it just requires a leap of faith. That leap of faith, however, doesn't need to be at odds with science. I know astrophysicists who accept all of the physics on face value and still believe that, ultimately, god is out there. Their belief doesn't in any way affect their objectivity behind what the science tells us -- their religion supports their spirituality and morality, and their science allows them to investigate physical reality.
And, before anyone accuses me of defending the concept of religion from the perspective of a religious person -- I was raised protestant, spent about 20 years being an atheist, and now buddhism informs my morality and world view, but I don't actually believe in a god per se. But, I don't believe that all people who do believe are a bunch of crazy wing nuts who are gullible idiots.
Cheers
Well, it cuts both ways. The theists sometimes dismiss scientific evidence on the basis that it is incompatible with their beliefs in what god did, and what we're supposed to be able to do with it.
Some people coming from the theist point of view treat science as evil or irrelevant because it can come up with some items which might contradict a rigid, theism based world view -- take, evolution for instance. Among people who need to believe in the literal interpretation of Genesis, the idea of evolution and fossils runs contrary to that. The notion that life could have occurred on another planet in a vast universe seems to cause some people some consternation as they want to believe that we are singularly unique and special.
Generally, I agree with you. It is entirely possible to maintain religious beliefs in the face of science (even in tandem with science) as long as you don't allow your beliefs to override the science. You just need to keep perspective on what issues are best answered by science, and which are best answered by religion.
Me, I think the questions best addressed by theism are largely in a different domain than the ones defined by science. As long as you don't try to pretend the science is irrelevant or untrue, religion is completely compatible with science. Religion speaks to things that are basically beyond what science can intelligently speak to.
Sometimes, however, religion is incompatible with science. And, when that happens, you get people defending positions which aren't in line with objective, rational thought. Physical events are not really in the scope of theism, rejecting the reality of physical events because it doesn't match your theism is where the problems arise.
Cheers
Wow, I had no idea that was part of the definition of third world.
I guess I've never really thought about the specifics of the origin of the term.
Cheers
In fact, no. From the very article you cite ...
Meaning, the claims by the US government before the invasion of Iraq that they had been recently and actively trying to buy yellow cake on the open market are false.
We're talking about removing older stockpiles of this stuff, not whether or not they'd ever had any. That little bit about trying to buy it from Nigeria was quite resoundingly demonstrated to have been a forgery.
It's easy to keep repeating the same falsehood and claim it's true. In this case, the assertion about yellow cake wrt Iraq and the justifications for military action simply aren't borne out to be true.
Cheers
And, keeping with the theme of this thread ... just because I point these things out, doesn't make them less true.
Just because some of the Iraqis welcomed them as liberators, doesn't mean that any of the stated reasons for going there in the first place were ever true. Retroactively supporting the decision with elements which weren't part of the original reasoning is just smoke and mirrors.
I'm certainly willing to concede the fact that I have a left-leaning bias.
People don't want complexity and nuance. They want a 30 second sound bite on the evening news. Complexity and nuance implies that there are different perspectives, and that truth is more than a simple concept.
Cheers
Wow, publish an actual book so you can correct an article on wikipedia??
What an odd idea.
Cheers
Well, because that carries with it the risk of having a bunch of organized people skewing the official vote on what is "true". Organize enough right-wing zealots to simply vote their truths into favor, and, voila -- Pi is 3!!
Ultimately, if you can sway the masses, what is actually true isn't quite as important. Just because everyone believes in it, doesn't make it any more "true". It makes it more widely accepted.
If people had "voted" on the truth of the Earth being flat in the times of Galileo that doesn't mean we'd come up with a correct answer. Sometimes such voting really just allows an organized group to shout down the voices of everyone else.
Cheers
Plenty!!!
There are a lot of things which are presented as truths which are nothing more than opinion, or completely fabricated to support an agenda.
Even matters of objective fact are open to interpretation and spin. Sadly, I don't think Wiki is any more (or less) susceptible to this. If anything, the fact that we're explicitly aware of it in Wiki might make it easier. It's all the little ones we're not even aware of that are probably of greater concern.
Cheers
Well, it's a chicken and egg problem. Before it became affordable to have the disk space to produce all of that media to, nobody produced consumer applications/devices which produced that much data.
The fact that the disk storage is feasible means that now companies can produce stuff which uses 14 gigs/hr and Joe Consumer can make use of it. Prior to that, it wouldn't have been feasible for consumer products to generate this much data.
It used to be that the data people stored on computers was mostly text-based documents with some markup, but they weren't that bulky. Bigger storage and faster hardware has caused a noticeable shift to much larger data formats than before. Heck, I seem to recall the first things that came on CD would thrown in a set of encyclopedias to try to use up that massive 650MB of data which people couldn't fathom what you'd do with!!
I routinely pull a couple of gigs off of my memory card from my camera. As someone who remembers punching holes in 5.25" floppies so you could turn 'em over and another 360K by using both sides -- the ability to just casually pass around gigabytes represents a huge fundamental shift in terms of what people can do with computers.
Once it is available, and fairly cheap, it's easy to find new ways to use it.
Cheers
So, as much as we like to bicker over this particular usage, there seems to be some contention that this is a historically valid use of the term, and way predates computers.
From the wiki article, it sounds as if it has been used this way in law for a couple of centuries.
Of course, someone will likely say the wiki article is wrong. I'd be curious to see any actual legal sources to see if this actually has been used like that for as long as it claims. If it has been widely used in this regard for that long, then we should stop bitching about it since it would, in fact, be a perfectly valid use of the word piracy.
Cheers
Even in the mid 90's, GHz processors, and gigs of RAM/hard disk were still largely uncommon. I think you're talking late 90's before that started to become relatively common.
I continue to be stunned at what you can buy as an entry level box nowadays for a really cheap dollar amount. My local "white box" PC store will sell you a dual-core 5GHz (or whatever) 64-bit AMD machine for under $300 -- add a little RAM and disk space and you've got a helluva system for not very much money.
How many home PCs nowadays have TB's of storage? I know several people who do -- I remember when home users didn't have gigabytes, terabytes would have been unimaginable.
Cheers
You misunderstand me. The OP said:
My response is that the stock market does not actually define the valuation of a private company which is sold in a private sale, because it's not valued on the stock market. Further, that value isn't defined in terms of how much you'd get if you went public.
I'm asserting that the statement that an "individual business does not have quantifiable worth" without reference to the stock market is bogus. People can, and do, assign values to companies which are not traded on stock exchanges. It happens all the time.
I'm saying you can arrive at a quantifiable value for a company without having the stock market involved. I'm not talking about a private sale of a company which is publicly traded. I'm saying that the stock market is not the only measure of value of a corporate entity. And, private equity sales of businesses happens every day.
Cheers
Agreed, and, for many of the same reasons, it's meaningless to argue that Linux can't have a value associated with it and things that run on it.
It has value. Albeit, one which is hard to come up with a specific dollar figure for.
Cheers
That was the price tag then. You also have to look at how much it would cost you to replace it now. The fact that they likely spend millions/year in maintaining it means that it inherently has more value than just its "book value", which is almost meaningless for a bridge.
It would cost a lot more money in todays dollars to replace that than it did to build it in the first place. And not having it would be hugely disruptive to traffic, economy, and psyche of New Yorkers.
Valuation is far more complex than the initial cost to purchase. I think this thread is massively overly simplifying things here, and I doubt most of us are economists or qualified to really speak about such things.
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Depends on if they have a vested interest in the other way.
Microsoft would argue that Linux clearly has a negative value due to all of those patents which it may or may not be infringing on and the licensing fees you owe them.
IBM will argue it has a high value since they make gobs of money on services as a result of it.
At some point, you have to try to value it in terms of industry revenues associated with it, as well as the intangible value of how long it would take to build your own, or to buy a commercial solution to replace it.
If every company using Linux were forced to replace it with a Microsoft solution, I can easily see the valuation to industry being measured in the billions.
In terms of the resources being managed under Linux machines, how they're used, and what it would take to swap them out ... there's an awful lot of stuff you'd have to be spending a lot of money on to replace.
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I don't think that's quite right.
There are many cases of private companies being sold in a private transaction, and the value on the stock market isn't a factor. Using plain old balance sheets and some measure of good will you can certainly quantify the value of a private business.
It's entirely possible to arrive at a valuation of a company without using the stock market. In fact, it might be a more sound and objective measure than the stock market -- it often has little with do with fundamentals as it does the emotional state of investors wrt a given stock.
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Luxury!! When I started we had 300 baud modems, not your fancy kilobits.
Of course, we were using line editors. Talk about uphill, both ways, in the snow. :-P
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But, you have to admit, given how the current usage of "MoFo" has changed, it's an unfortunate domain name. That, or it's now the Samuel L. Jackson of domain names.
If they're your attorneys, you can say that your lawyers are some bad-assed MoFo's and be entirely correct. :-P
To be honest, I'd be awfully leery about clicking on mofo.com through a Slashdot link. Certainly, not while I'm at work. It would simply not occur to me it's a law firm!!
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This could provide all sorts of amusement.
Once companies have to encrypt the user data, I'm waiting for some poor schmuck to be coming back into the US with data on his laptop. The border guys will insist you decrypt -- and, then you're screwed either way.
If you don't decrypt it, immigration and DHS will arrest you. If you do, the states will arrest you. :-P
I kid, hopefully this wouldn't be a real scenario. But, dueling laws is always fun to ponder.
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What, like compression?
It's my understanding that the initial foundation for the concept of compression was a mathematical notion in Information Theory, and it literally took 30+ years for anyone to be able to actually come up with a practical way of doing it or recognizing how useful it would be.
That's definitely an example of something being basically a concept for a few decades.
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Why would I pay for an electronic version of that?? I can do that to a real plan in about a week. :-P
Cheers
I don't know about where you live, but in my area, the xmas crap is alongside the halloween crap.
Seriously, in the first week of October I was seeing retailers with both stuff on display. I remember when the Christmas stuff dutifully waited until after halloween -- I don't think that's the case any more.
Cheers/Humbug