I mean, free porn sites are not the most trustworthy sites in the world. It's good that there's disincentive to use the same browser to do your on-line banking and your porn hunting.
It'd be better to do questionable things in a separate virtual machine.
In the early days of the web browsers were innocuous. The worst you could do is download and run malware. Sensible people used to protect their machines by being careful about executable attachments to their email.
Now that applications are becoming net-centric, and browsing has become a kind of universal content delivery mechanism, things aren't so simple.
I'm wondering whether running different tabs in different processes might not be enough. Perhaps tabs shouldn't be a UI facade for a process, but for entire virtual machines.
I don't get nervous, I get ANGRY. I think it's a load of crap that the racist gang "Indian Posse" beat the living shit out of our 14 year old babysitter just because she's white. She never did anything to anyone.
Which is a good reason to detest "Indian Posse".
The advantage of clear thinking is that it focuses anger on the right places, not targets of convenience.
What about racism/generalisations based on empirical evidence?
Utter garbage, for several reasons.
First, without some kind of independent sampling, you can't trust the statistical foxes in the data chicken coop. It may be true that, say, blacks commit more crimes, but whether or not they do they'll sure as hell show up in the crime statistics if the sheriff is a redneck.
Secondly, even granting that, say, green skinned people commit crimes at three times the rate as white skinned people, the chance of the next greens skinned person you meet being a criminal is not significantly different from the next white skinned person. This is called the base rate fallacy, and its the reason that uniform testing for illegal drugs is nearly useless.
If the person acts in a way that indicates a high probability of criminal intent, then the white/green thing comes into play in a Bayesian way. But you're in trouble when you get to that point anyway.
Given that data shows an overwhelming correlation between this demographic and many traits, why would it be unethical to make generalizations, as long as you allow that such generalizations are indeed generalizations, open to exceptions based on empirical evidence?
Well, depends on the "many traits" you speak of. From an ethical standpoint the problem is that anybody who falls into your broad demographic is (a) treated as guilty until proven innocent and (b) statistically almost certain to be innocent.
I grew up in a neighborhood with a few really rough guys. There was some talk a few years back of a Matt Damon movie being set a few blocks from where I grew up where a famous gang murder took place. In my town, The Italian guys who looked like wise guys were poseurs. Almostall the really crazy, dangerous criminals were Irish mobsters. That's not surprising because about half the population of the town were Irish. Still, there were probably less than a hundred or so mob guys out of tens of thousands of Irish males. If you freaked out every time you met a Murphy or a Higgins, or saw some pasty white guy with red hare, you'd be freaking out all the time.
If you want to be safe, get some street smarts. It isn't smart acting nervous around people who have a statistically unfavorable skin color. If they are bad, it just attracts their attention. Bad people prey on people who look vulnerable and nervous, like they don't know what they're doing.
"Doesn't need" is not the same as "doesn't use." IIRC, if you want to port a kernel mode driver to the user mode driver framework in Windows, the path of least resistance is to rewrite it from plain old function oriented C to C++ with COM. So it's possible that it's got direct access because that's the old default and they'd have to rewrite it.
If that's the case, Microsoft deserves a pat on the back for providing a framework for user mode drivers and a kick in the pants for making the framework totally incompatible. In any case older versions of windows don't support user mode drivers and not all Windows XP installations have the user mode framework.
At this point, we don't know where the BSOD coming from yet. Obviously Apple's driver initiates it, but it doesn't mean that's what's crashing. This could be one of those cases where such and so feature is supported correctly in some hardware and not others, so the spec might say doing certain things are kosher and they test fine on the hardware you've got, then you find out that there's a lot of people with systems with broken system hardware or drivers.
The problem is that deep-seated biases will go deeper than just influencing which conclusion you draw from what you observe; they will influence what you observe.
Yes, I agree with that. The model I presented is really a first order approximation, but you are right, and that's why racism can be so subtle that a racist doesn't know he's racist.
The important thing is that racism is simply a persistent kind of broken thinking. Biased observation is a form of broken thinking. You can't always tell broken thinking by looking at its conclusions. You've got to look at the sausage factory, not just the end result.
I frequent DailyKos, and let me tell you as a liberal, even accounting for trolling and conservative astroturfing, there's a lot of broken thinking over there. I'm sure it's the same over on Republican blogs. I don't have to demonize somebody before I decide I don't want to vote for him. I don't have to condemn every word out of John McCain's mouth or discount everything he's ever done to be against his candidacy. So I happen to agree with the conclusions of people there on my preferred candidate, I just don't approve of their reasoning. You can't use stupidity very long before it starts using you.
I'm interested because I design mobile apps for a living. I personally try to avoid text entry, but if a geek could get to 50% of their typing speed, I'd bet that the average hunt-and-peck typist would be considerably faster.
One of the things that Apple engineers excel at is tuning obscure user interface parameters to enhance usability, but not in a way you can easily... er... put your finger on.
I had the very first Apple "BlackBird" laptop -- a true landmark machine. It had a touchpad in an era when laptops came with trackballs -- basically inverted mice. It worked flawlessly and intuitively. It was years before I ever found a Windows laptop whose touchpad wasn't irritating by comparison. Apple somehow managed to make the touchpad accurate, and most of all responsive without being squirrelly.
I have an iPod touch for watching video podcasts. It has an onscreen QWERTY keyboard that I expected to be horrible, but is actually OK. You wouldn't want to type on it, but it's fine for even reasonably complex URLs. I have large fingers and contrary to expectations I don't find myself hitting the wrong key all the time, although it does happen.
I still prefer the classic Graffiti on the Palm, but the iPod QWERTY keyboard is acceptable; better than any hardware keyboard I've used on a smartphone.
Speaking of Palm, the Chinese version of Graffiti is, I am told, extremely good. I know a person who's been using her Palm for years to compose emails back home to her parents in Taiwan because she finds it preferable to a keyboard.
Well, I can't disagree with what you're saying. People do use rules of thumb, and as I said, it's not always possible to know which rules of thumb are being used, if any.
However, if I were to summarize my point more succinctly, racism is a form of ignorance; or perhaps more precisely it is refractory pattern of ignorant thinking. I wouldn't call somebody a racist because they're scared of a black bum. I'd call them racist on the basis of how they justify being scared of that individual.
Racists show a pattern of intellectual impoverishment, factual carelessness, and malignant narcissism in their thinking. For example, they'd say, "My saying that bum is dangerous is not racist, because some of my best friends are black." This kind of answer shows all three patterns.
(1) Intellectual impoverishment: who the person associate with, in itself, has no logical connection to whether his opinion is justified.
(2) Factual carelessness: in most cases it is doubtful that black persons the claimant knows could really be describe as among his "best friends". The most common form factual carelessness takes is imperviousness to contrary information or facts, but this illustrates the way that "facts" are conjured or banished strictly according to need.
(3) Malignant narcissism: the person is claiming that his ideas are literally above or beyond reproach because they belong to him.
Racial bias is simply cognitive bias. Cognitive biases have their advantages in certain situations even though they are wrong. Racism is ignorant and broken thinking.
Cognitive bias doesn't mean we're doomed to ignorance. Because we tend to have bad intuitions about, say, probability doesn't preclude our surmounting those cognitive biases and becoming statistically literate. Because we have racial bias doesn't mean we're doomed to be racists. It just means we have to put in more effort.
Well, we all have many cognitive biases, such as sample bias and so forth. Of the socially learned biases, racial bias is the most widespread of all, so all things being equal one can assume that one carries at least a bit of it.
I think, however, that being a racist has to do with how you rationalize your biases.
Suppose you don't like somebody who happens to be green skinned, and somebody puts the race card on the table. I think virtually everybody would, at least initially, deny race has anything to do with it. It seems that we can consider a range of responses:
(1) Maybe I am being racist. Let me think about it.
(2) No, I don't like him because he doesn't listen and he interrupts.
(3) He is disrespectful.
(4) Green people are ignorant; they should keep their mouths shut unless spoken to.
Response 3 is right on the cusp of racism. It's not necessarily different from 2, it's just the point where you go from specifics about behavior to generalizations about the person. Those generalizations can be drawn from two sources: the behavior of the individual, and stereotypes about the race. If you are drawing your generalization from 2 it is not racist; if you are drawing your generalization from 3 it is.
In a society where racism is strongly frowned upon, it's not always obvious when somebody is drawing a characterization from a stereotype and when he is drawing it from an individual's behavior. In fact, you can do both, since people are very skillful at seeing what they expect to see.
That's what makes racial bias insidious when we draw conclusions about people's general character. It is possible to be unconsciously racist. But it's also generally wiser in all instances to avoid generalizations about a person if it is not strictly necessary. Racism is only one kind of bias.
Shortly after I started using Vista on a dual boot computer, I had what was much more of a Unix-y kind of crash: the sound driver went berserk. Just the sound. White noise was blaring out of the speakers, but everything else worked.
That is good. It shows real architectural progress.
I can't see that X crashes are much of a problem on Linux. For one thing, the exotic 3D drivers for the feature du jour don't tend to be there. Sometimes X becomes unresponsive, and indeed it is very useful to be able to go to a command line to kill whatever it is that is slurping up all the resources. Granted this doesn't help most users, but most users could learn to do this if it were a serious problem, which it's not.
Actually, the cure for this is not to fix texting. It's to fix it so that it's easy for the consumer to compare all the costs of services between carriers.
There should be a standardized form and services should have standard designations so you could take the form from one carrier and set it next to a form from another character and go through it line by line.
So much of mobile phone marketing is based on obfuscation. It would be like armageddon.
One could say that a thesaurus contains no original content when compared with a dictionary. But the structure, method of distribution, and presentation are all contributions.
Really? So in principle, one could write a PERL script that takes a dictionary as input and spits out thesaurus entry equating fallacious with either illogical, inaccurate as well as delusory?
Re:The LHC should be destroyed
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
Most of them dissipate harmlessly.
Ummm... "Most of them"? Did I miss something, like when I came back from vacation last summer and everybody but me knew Manny Ramirez had been traded?
Well, I think you have some good points, but the fundamental shift I see is not in how music is distributed, but how it is consumed
The LP album is, essentially, a concert piece. Thirty years ago, singles from an album were what hooked people into buying, but people sat down and listened to a whole album, all of the A side then all the B side. They didn't play one track, hop up and take the needle off, remove the disk and put it in its sleeve, remove another record put it on the platter, then carefully set the needle down on a specific track.
CDs are the same.
With digital music players, they can and do play a jumbled sequence of single tracks. It's a kind of return to the day when wealthy patrons had musician servants that composed short pieces like "Fanfare as Lord So and So Sits Down to Dinner". People use music players to provide that kind of soundtrack to things they do in their lives, like working out on a Stair Master.
The LP or CD is more like a symphony, a longer work that makes sense in the context of middle class people making an evening of going to the concert hall.
If the labels want to sell CDs, then they have to sell CDs that are more than random collections of mediocre songs tied to one or two song that the consumer wants. It's not the mediocrity of the filler material that's the problem, it's that it is filler material in the first place. I happen to like opera, but there a plenty of bits in even the best opera nobody is going to put on their play list unless they're listening to the whole thing through.
Well, anybody who has a practical interest in this question (or thinks they might) really ought to hire a lawyer.
That said, I'll proceed to the usual bloviation.
I believe what you're grasping for is something that is called "the fruit of the poisoned tree." Evidence gained by illegal means is usually inadmissible. In this case, it is not the actions in question (scanning P2P networks) that is illegal. It is doing so in the capacity of a professional private investigator without a license to act in that capacity.
In that case, all of human advancement from the caves to about 150 years ago was something "pretty close" to theft... because what is now called "property" used to just be known as culture.
By that argument, human advancement (or at least historical advancement) proceeds by means of genocide, theft and double dealing, at least in the case of the United States and its treatment of indigenous people. Arguably "we all" are much better of for that that. There are a few individuals who were murdered, killed in wars of conquest, or herded onto the least desirable land, but there was a net benefit to society as a whole.
It's not that I don't agree with you. I just really dislike that argument.
I think it's better point out that in this case at least, a "state of nature" argument applies. There is no fundamental reason for people not to copy information. It's a basic human activity, as natural to our species as crowing is to rooster. Copyright is a pragmatic institution that, in the context of the kind of society we've created, allows us to increase the amount of valuable information generated. It's basically a deal between members of society, for the benefit of society.
Therefore, when the deal is amended in a way that harms society, it's a bad thing.
Most people don't see file sharing as "taking" anything though - and that's a sentiment that is common far beyond computer geekdom.
To play devil's advocate though, the fact that people don't think something is wrong doesn't make it right. I grew up in a neighborhood where stuff left in plain sight in a locked car was practically considered abandoned property.
I think, arguably, that illegal copying might be taking something away from the copyright holder. It's just not the copyrighted work. In some cases it is the right to control the work artistically, as in the case of sampling, or using the work in a commercial or political campaign. In other cases, it may be economic value.
It doesn't even have to be the economic value of the individual copy itself. It may be a contribution to an environment in which the copyright holder can't obtain any remuneration for his work.
Imagine you've written a book and passed a few private copies to reviewers. You then try to sell the book to a publisher, who balks because the book is now widely distributed on P2P. The law clearly intends that an artificial scarcity be created for your work, and thus that your work has market value. Each person who shares the book infringes an infinitesimal amount on the market value of your book, but in aggregate the impact is finite.
Yes, that's a lot for most people to think through. But that's the primary reason copyright is there.
I think there's a much different ethical situation when we talk about economically moribund works, or works from the distant past that still fall under copyright. But it might not be so different legally.
That's the problem with analogies. People don't know how far to take them. When people fight with dueling analogies, at best they could hope to do is find some midpoint determined by the relative artistic appeals of the analogies. Since that midpoint is not chosen in any way according the actual issue at hand, it's about as arbitrary as flipping a coin.
If we remove ALL the figurative language here, what we are talking about here are the following questions:
(1) Does making a copyrighted work available for somebody else to copy fall into any category of activities that the copyright holders have an exclusive right to do under the law? (Noting exceptions to each category in the law, of course)
(2) If the activity is an infringement, does it damage the interests of the copyright holder established by the law?
(3) If an infringing activity damages the copyright holder's interests, can (or should) we put a monetary value on that damage?
It seems to me that these are the relevant questions. All the figurative language, even the term "intellectual property" itself, only confuses the issue and invites an overly emotional response where a little cool judgment would suffice.
OK, we'll probably go through this about once every decade or so. Last decade it was MS, this one it is Google.
It's not obtaining a monopoly that subjects you to anti-trust actions. It evading competition.
So, if you win a monopoly fair and square, bully for you. If you get a monopoly by getting together with your biggest rival and agreeing to cooperate to keep new competitors out... bad. Using your unique monopoly clout to block entry of new competitors by punishing vendors that work with them... bad.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, free porn sites are not the most trustworthy sites in the world. It's good that there's disincentive to use the same browser to do your on-line banking and your porn hunting.
It'd be better to do questionable things in a separate virtual machine.
In the early days of the web browsers were innocuous. The worst you could do is download and run malware. Sensible people used to protect their machines by being careful about executable attachments to their email.
Now that applications are becoming net-centric, and browsing has become a kind of universal content delivery mechanism, things aren't so simple.
I'm wondering whether running different tabs in different processes might not be enough. Perhaps tabs shouldn't be a UI facade for a process, but for entire virtual machines.
Which is a good reason to detest "Indian Posse".
The advantage of clear thinking is that it focuses anger on the right places, not targets of convenience.
If it's chess, I'd guess "no".
Utter garbage, for several reasons.
First, without some kind of independent sampling, you can't trust the statistical foxes in the data chicken coop. It may be true that, say, blacks commit more crimes, but whether or not they do they'll sure as hell show up in the crime statistics if the sheriff is a redneck.
Secondly, even granting that, say, green skinned people commit crimes at three times the rate as white skinned people, the chance of the next greens skinned person you meet being a criminal is not significantly different from the next white skinned person. This is called the base rate fallacy, and its the reason that uniform testing for illegal drugs is nearly useless.
If the person acts in a way that indicates a high probability of criminal intent, then the white/green thing comes into play in a Bayesian way. But you're in trouble when you get to that point anyway.
Well, depends on the "many traits" you speak of. From an ethical standpoint the problem is that anybody who falls into your broad demographic is (a) treated as guilty until proven innocent and (b) statistically almost certain to be innocent.
I grew up in a neighborhood with a few really rough guys. There was some talk a few years back of a Matt Damon movie being set a few blocks from where I grew up where a famous gang murder took place. In my town, The Italian guys who looked like wise guys were poseurs. Almostall the really crazy, dangerous criminals were Irish mobsters. That's not surprising because about half the population of the town were Irish. Still, there were probably less than a hundred or so mob guys out of tens of thousands of Irish males. If you freaked out every time you met a Murphy or a Higgins, or saw some pasty white guy with red hare, you'd be freaking out all the time.
If you want to be safe, get some street smarts. It isn't smart acting nervous around people who have a statistically unfavorable skin color. If they are bad, it just attracts their attention. Bad people prey on people who look vulnerable and nervous, like they don't know what they're doing.
"Doesn't need" is not the same as "doesn't use." IIRC, if you want to port a kernel mode driver to the user mode driver framework in Windows, the path of least resistance is to rewrite it from plain old function oriented C to C++ with COM. So it's possible that it's got direct access because that's the old default and they'd have to rewrite it.
If that's the case, Microsoft deserves a pat on the back for providing a framework for user mode drivers and a kick in the pants for making the framework totally incompatible. In any case older versions of windows don't support user mode drivers and not all Windows XP installations have the user mode framework.
At this point, we don't know where the BSOD coming from yet. Obviously Apple's driver initiates it, but it doesn't mean that's what's crashing. This could be one of those cases where such and so feature is supported correctly in some hardware and not others, so the spec might say doing certain things are kosher and they test fine on the hardware you've got, then you find out that there's a lot of people with systems with broken system hardware or drivers.
Yes, I agree with that. The model I presented is really a first order approximation, but you are right, and that's why racism can be so subtle that a racist doesn't know he's racist.
The important thing is that racism is simply a persistent kind of broken thinking. Biased observation is a form of broken thinking. You can't always tell broken thinking by looking at its conclusions. You've got to look at the sausage factory, not just the end result.
I frequent DailyKos, and let me tell you as a liberal, even accounting for trolling and conservative astroturfing, there's a lot of broken thinking over there. I'm sure it's the same over on Republican blogs. I don't have to demonize somebody before I decide I don't want to vote for him. I don't have to condemn every word out of John McCain's mouth or discount everything he's ever done to be against his candidacy. So I happen to agree with the conclusions of people there on my preferred candidate, I just don't approve of their reasoning. You can't use stupidity very long before it starts using you.
So, autocorrect is the secret sauce?
I'm interested because I design mobile apps for a living. I personally try to avoid text entry, but if a geek could get to 50% of their typing speed, I'd bet that the average hunt-and-peck typist would be considerably faster.
I agree, tactile feedback is a good thing.
I don't think doing many things that require visual attention while texting is so good.
One of the things that Apple engineers excel at is tuning obscure user interface parameters to enhance usability, but not in a way you can easily ... er ... put your finger on.
I had the very first Apple "BlackBird" laptop -- a true landmark machine. It had a touchpad in an era when laptops came with trackballs -- basically inverted mice. It worked flawlessly and intuitively. It was years before I ever found a Windows laptop whose touchpad wasn't irritating by comparison. Apple somehow managed to make the touchpad accurate, and most of all responsive without being squirrelly.
I have an iPod touch for watching video podcasts. It has an onscreen QWERTY keyboard that I expected to be horrible, but is actually OK. You wouldn't want to type on it, but it's fine for even reasonably complex URLs. I have large fingers and contrary to expectations I don't find myself hitting the wrong key all the time, although it does happen.
I still prefer the classic Graffiti on the Palm, but the iPod QWERTY keyboard is acceptable; better than any hardware keyboard I've used on a smartphone.
Speaking of Palm, the Chinese version of Graffiti is, I am told, extremely good. I know a person who's been using her Palm for years to compose emails back home to her parents in Taiwan because she finds it preferable to a keyboard.
Well, I can't disagree with what you're saying. People do use rules of thumb, and as I said, it's not always possible to know which rules of thumb are being used, if any.
However, if I were to summarize my point more succinctly, racism is a form of ignorance; or perhaps more precisely it is refractory pattern of ignorant thinking. I wouldn't call somebody a racist because they're scared of a black bum. I'd call them racist on the basis of how they justify being scared of that individual.
Racists show a pattern of intellectual impoverishment, factual carelessness, and malignant narcissism in their thinking. For example, they'd say, "My saying that bum is dangerous is not racist, because some of my best friends are black." This kind of answer shows all three patterns.
(1) Intellectual impoverishment: who the person associate with, in itself, has no logical connection to whether his opinion is justified.
(2) Factual carelessness: in most cases it is doubtful that black persons the claimant knows could really be describe as among his "best friends". The most common form factual carelessness takes is imperviousness to contrary information or facts, but this illustrates the way that "facts" are conjured or banished strictly according to need.
(3) Malignant narcissism: the person is claiming that his ideas are literally above or beyond reproach because they belong to him.
Racial bias is simply cognitive bias. Cognitive biases have their advantages in certain situations even though they are wrong. Racism is ignorant and broken thinking.
Cognitive bias doesn't mean we're doomed to ignorance. Because we tend to have bad intuitions about, say, probability doesn't preclude our surmounting those cognitive biases and becoming statistically literate. Because we have racial bias doesn't mean we're doomed to be racists. It just means we have to put in more effort.
Well, we all have many cognitive biases, such as sample bias and so forth. Of the socially learned biases, racial bias is the most widespread of all, so all things being equal one can assume that one carries at least a bit of it.
I think, however, that being a racist has to do with how you rationalize your biases.
Suppose you don't like somebody who happens to be green skinned, and somebody puts the race card on the table. I think virtually everybody would, at least initially, deny race has anything to do with it. It seems that we can consider a range of responses:
(1) Maybe I am being racist. Let me think about it.
(2) No, I don't like him because he doesn't listen and he interrupts.
(3) He is disrespectful.
(4) Green people are ignorant; they should keep their mouths shut unless spoken to.
Response 3 is right on the cusp of racism. It's not necessarily different from 2, it's just the point where you go from specifics about behavior to generalizations about the person. Those generalizations can be drawn from two sources: the behavior of the individual, and stereotypes about the race. If you are drawing your generalization from 2 it is not racist; if you are drawing your generalization from 3 it is.
In a society where racism is strongly frowned upon, it's not always obvious when somebody is drawing a characterization from a stereotype and when he is drawing it from an individual's behavior. In fact, you can do both, since people are very skillful at seeing what they expect to see.
That's what makes racial bias insidious when we draw conclusions about people's general character. It is possible to be unconsciously racist. But it's also generally wiser in all instances to avoid generalizations about a person if it is not strictly necessary. Racism is only one kind of bias.
Shortly after I started using Vista on a dual boot computer, I had what was much more of a Unix-y kind of crash: the sound driver went berserk. Just the sound. White noise was blaring out of the speakers, but everything else worked.
That is good. It shows real architectural progress.
I can't see that X crashes are much of a problem on Linux. For one thing, the exotic 3D drivers for the feature du jour don't tend to be there. Sometimes X becomes unresponsive, and indeed it is very useful to be able to go to a command line to kill whatever it is that is slurping up all the resources. Granted this doesn't help most users, but most users could learn to do this if it were a serious problem, which it's not.
Actually, the cure for this is not to fix texting. It's to fix it so that it's easy for the consumer to compare all the costs of services between carriers.
There should be a standardized form and services should have standard designations so you could take the form from one carrier and set it next to a form from another character and go through it line by line.
So much of mobile phone marketing is based on obfuscation. It would be like armageddon.
One could say that a thesaurus contains no original content when compared with a dictionary. But the structure, method of distribution, and presentation are all contributions.
Really? So in principle, one could write a PERL script that takes a dictionary as input and spits out thesaurus entry equating fallacious with either illogical, inaccurate as well as delusory?
Ummm... "Most of them"? Did I miss something, like when I came back from vacation last summer and everybody but me knew Manny Ramirez had been traded?
It's in a state of superposition ... on a female cat.
Because ... all our memories became strange at the same instant...
It fits!
They did destroy the universe, you just weren't there to notice.
You see, destroying the universe is indistinguishable from creating the universe looked at from the other side.
Henceforth "Last Thursdayism" shall be called "Last Wednesdayism" in honor of this event.
Well, I think you have some good points, but the fundamental shift I see is not in how music is distributed, but how it is consumed
The LP album is, essentially, a concert piece. Thirty years ago, singles from an album were what hooked people into buying, but people sat down and listened to a whole album, all of the A side then all the B side. They didn't play one track, hop up and take the needle off, remove the disk and put it in its sleeve, remove another record put it on the platter, then carefully set the needle down on a specific track.
CDs are the same.
With digital music players, they can and do play a jumbled sequence of single tracks. It's a kind of return to the day when wealthy patrons had musician servants that composed short pieces like "Fanfare as Lord So and So Sits Down to Dinner". People use music players to provide that kind of soundtrack to things they do in their lives, like working out on a Stair Master.
The LP or CD is more like a symphony, a longer work that makes sense in the context of middle class people making an evening of going to the concert hall.
If the labels want to sell CDs, then they have to sell CDs that are more than random collections of mediocre songs tied to one or two song that the consumer wants. It's not the mediocrity of the filler material that's the problem, it's that it is filler material in the first place. I happen to like opera, but there a plenty of bits in even the best opera nobody is going to put on their play list unless they're listening to the whole thing through.
Well, anybody who has a practical interest in this question (or thinks they might) really ought to hire a lawyer.
That said, I'll proceed to the usual bloviation.
I believe what you're grasping for is something that is called "the fruit of the poisoned tree." Evidence gained by illegal means is usually inadmissible. In this case, it is not the actions in question (scanning P2P networks) that is illegal. It is doing so in the capacity of a professional private investigator without a license to act in that capacity.
So, you want information "bounty hunters" poking around in the details of your private life? That's libertarian is it?
By that argument, human advancement (or at least historical advancement) proceeds by means of genocide, theft and double dealing, at least in the case of the United States and its treatment of indigenous people. Arguably "we all" are much better of for that that. There are a few individuals who were murdered, killed in wars of conquest, or herded onto the least desirable land, but there was a net benefit to society as a whole.
It's not that I don't agree with you. I just really dislike that argument.
I think it's better point out that in this case at least, a "state of nature" argument applies. There is no fundamental reason for people not to copy information. It's a basic human activity, as natural to our species as crowing is to rooster. Copyright is a pragmatic institution that, in the context of the kind of society we've created, allows us to increase the amount of valuable information generated. It's basically a deal between members of society, for the benefit of society.
Therefore, when the deal is amended in a way that harms society, it's a bad thing.
To play devil's advocate though, the fact that people don't think something is wrong doesn't make it right. I grew up in a neighborhood where stuff left in plain sight in a locked car was practically considered abandoned property.
I think, arguably, that illegal copying might be taking something away from the copyright holder. It's just not the copyrighted work. In some cases it is the right to control the work artistically, as in the case of sampling, or using the work in a commercial or political campaign. In other cases, it may be economic value.
It doesn't even have to be the economic value of the individual copy itself. It may be a contribution to an environment in which the copyright holder can't obtain any remuneration for his work.
Imagine you've written a book and passed a few private copies to reviewers. You then try to sell the book to a publisher, who balks because the book is now widely distributed on P2P. The law clearly intends that an artificial scarcity be created for your work, and thus that your work has market value. Each person who shares the book infringes an infinitesimal amount on the market value of your book, but in aggregate the impact is finite.
Yes, that's a lot for most people to think through. But that's the primary reason copyright is there.
I think there's a much different ethical situation when we talk about economically moribund works, or works from the distant past that still fall under copyright. But it might not be so different legally.
That's the problem with analogies. People don't know how far to take them. When people fight with dueling analogies, at best they could hope to do is find some midpoint determined by the relative artistic appeals of the analogies. Since that midpoint is not chosen in any way according the actual issue at hand, it's about as arbitrary as flipping a coin.
If we remove ALL the figurative language here, what we are talking about here are the following questions:
(1) Does making a copyrighted work available for somebody else to copy fall into any category of activities that the copyright holders have an exclusive right to do under the law? (Noting exceptions to each category in the law, of course)
(2) If the activity is an infringement, does it damage the interests of the copyright holder established by the law?
(3) If an infringing activity damages the copyright holder's interests, can (or should) we put a monetary value on that damage?
It seems to me that these are the relevant questions. All the figurative language, even the term "intellectual property" itself, only confuses the issue and invites an overly emotional response where a little cool judgment would suffice.
OK, we'll probably go through this about once every decade or so. Last decade it was MS, this one it is Google.
It's not obtaining a monopoly that subjects you to anti-trust actions. It evading competition.
So, if you win a monopoly fair and square, bully for you. If you get a monopoly by getting together with your biggest rival and agreeing to cooperate to keep new competitors out ... bad. Using your unique monopoly clout to block entry of new competitors by punishing vendors that work with them ... bad.
There, you see? Simple. See y'all next decade.