Exactly. Writing open source software is like playing Civ 4 for twenty hours straight. Somewhere, some zealot probably thinks that's bad, but what they think isn't going to stop me.
If the entire community is slamming you, it's not because you're only slightly imperfect. On the flip side, even perfection is not good enough to prevent some oddball from slamming you. Don't mistake some oddball for the entire community, and don't expect to not get slammed.
Why do people still believe Blizz is running spyware on their computers?
Exactly. The problem is that the license lets Blizzard do so if they wanted to, and that most people simply click "I agree" without reading what they're agreeing to, not a case of actual spyware being installed, as far as we know.
Personally, I think the license thing reflects less poorly on Blizzard than the bnetd lawsuit, but that's just me.
As far as I am concerned, something is a science if you can do experiments, not just make observations.
Well unfortunately English-speaking people disagree with your definition of science. Science is about observing, rationalizing and predicting. As others have pointed out, observation and experimentation are not really different things.
That is unfortunate, because observation and experimentation really are different things: it's possible to observe something other than the results of an experiment, and the act of observing something does not constitute an experiment.
Experimentation is necessary (but not sufficient: you need other stuff too) for science.
The real problem is the dilution of the term "science". It's not science to say "this hypothesis is consistent with the evidence" if the evidence has not been experimentally reproduced. Fields like paleontology, archaeology, history and sociology use many of the tools of science, but attempting to reconstruct what has actually happened can at best only suggest avenues for future scientific inquiry.
If CSI is "science", then sure, creationism is too; you can make guesses involving intervention by supernatural beings that are consistent with the evidence. But you can't repeat those events in a lab, and even if you could, all you'd be showing is that it's possible, not that it really happened.
The parent post is brilliant, because it illustrates how politicized debates ignore the actual issues in favor of the rhetorical equivalent of breaking kneecaps.
This whole "debate" convinces me that science "education" has failed to equip even trained scientists with adequate logic, reasoning and critical thinking skills. For that reason, I'm starting to think that ID should be taught in schools, to force students to choose between two (or more) alternatives.
Some people do believe that since abortion is ok, infanticide should also be ok, since there's such a small difference between a late-term fetus and a newborn infant.
The attitude that guarantees their failure is the attitude that says that piracy must be prevented in order to avoid failure. I believe your parent poster's point is that piracy cannot be prevented, so failure (by that definition) cannot be avoided.
As usual, absolute statements are seldom true. A more reasonable statement would have been for the Civ 4 team to say that piracy on a scale large enough to prevent game sales from being profitable must be prevented in order to avoid the failure of the current profit model.
It's clear to me that LaTeX is much too fun to be widely adopted as a word processor replacement. Creating LaTeX documents in vi is almost as fun as programming itself, and having fun is not a priority in today's cutthroat business world.
That's the public perception, but I haven't seen any actual evidence that the rate of sexual abuse by clergy is higher than the rate of sexual abuse in the general population, or that the rate of sexual abuse by catholic clergy is larger than by clergy of other denominations or religions. Are there any studies that show one or both of those things?
Catholic clergy child abusers make it into the news more because for decades, the Catholic Church covered up the problem.
I agree that C is the compiled procedural language most suitable for a beginner. As others have pointed out, it's simple to start and exposes you to a lot of pitfalls that will increase your understanding of how things work "under the hood" (and you'll really appreciate things like garbage collection that you're exposed to in other languages.) There are tons of C resources out there, and a knowledge of C will let you understand many open source projects.
That being said, I'd almost be inclined to start off with something like Python. It's a quick and easy way to be productive, it has good docs and it's more fun than C.
For the record, my language learning sequence went something like this: Fortran, C/C++ (beginner C++ is mostly C), MIPS assembly, Lisp, Perl, Java, C (for real this time), misc UNIX shell scripting, Python, Prolog. I'm planning to work through a Haskell tutorial this weekend.
Where, other than copyright law, does your right to control the speech of the other person come from?
Indirectly, it comes from the capitalistic ideal of the right to "pursuit of happiness".
That still rings insufficient to my ears. What we have is fundamentally an issue of what kinds of things am I allowed to say. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.
Creative work is still work. It still takes time and effort. It's product may have greater potential to propell society forward, but does that mean society should be able to co-opt the creator's labor and deny potentially life-sustaining personal benefit, for the purpose of incremental "public good"?
I touched briefly on this earlier, but I'll go into a little more detail now: the value of the product of an author's work is orthogonal to the amount of work that the author put into it. Well, aside from the sentimental value; if you're making a gift for your mom, she might appreciate something that you worked hard on more than something that you whipped up in 30 seconds. The same is true of how you yourself value it. If you're selling it in a store, though, or if the idea you have created is competing for mind share on the internet, it doesn't matter if you've spent 30 years or 30 seconds on it: it will stand or fall on its own merits.
I am not so much interested in the "public good" in this subthread as I am trying to establish whether there actually is a "moral right" to give someone control of an idea. (For comparison, I'm also not convinced that all of rights enumerated in the U.S. Constitution exist in a state of nature.) It just so happens that free exchange of ideas is in the public interest. I've purposely avoided discussing the practical benefits of copyright, though I do believe they exist. Just because something isn't backed up by a "moral right" doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit society.
A sign that copyright law is a practical construction, rather than something that is based directly on "moral rights" that exist in a state of nature, is the fact that it only affects technological copy mechanisms. If our brains had infinite, perfect memory, we could exchange perfect copies of any sort of copyrightable work without being impacted by copyright laws at all. Would telepathically sharing a cool short story with my buddy in the next cubicle be morally wrong?
What, other than copyright law, gives an author this "moral right"?
Well firstly, I didn't say it was a "moral right". So I'm not sure who you're quoting there.
I called it a "moral right' to distinguish it from a "copy right". Copyright doesn't exist in a state of nature; it exists because of the bargain government is willing to strike with authors. Any right that exists in a state of nature is a "moral right". When you wrote "the creator has an exclusive "product" to which he has every right to control access," you appear to be claiming that an author has more rights than simply those granted by copyright -- that copyright exists because giving authors control over the product of their work is the right thing to do. Is that not your position?
Second, it's the same thing that gives a person the right to speak or not speak an idea that they've had.
The freedom to speak your mind includes the freedom to not speak your mind. This is very different from having the right to prevent somebody else from repeating what you've said. That is what "every right to control access" means: that you can tell me something, yet prevent me from speaking it to others. What, in the state of nature, gives you the right to prevent me from "speaking my mind" and transmitting that idea, verbatim, to someone new?
If you said no, then what is so magical about the transcription process that suddenly releases the idea from being "mine", to being "everyone's"?
What is magical about the transcription (really "transmission") process is that suddenly, you are no longer the sole possessor of the idea in question. Anybody who hears that idea knows it.
It really is a small step (maybe no step at all?) from what you're expressing here, to the idea that no one's thoughts are their own.
Perhaps. That doesn't change the reality of the situation, however: your thoughts are your own, until you share them with someone else. Then you both possess those thoughts, and you both have the ability to share them with someone new. Where, other than copyright law, does your right to control the speech of the other person come from?
So what you're saying is that whenever an author refers to "my book", they're mistaken. You're saying that they really should be saying "the book I wrote",
That's a good way to put it.
because they have no real claim to the ideas that they came up with and they transcribed. Which basically means that all the effort behind this work is worth... nothing.
It depends what you mean by "no real claim". I would certainly not argue that effort is worth nothing; it was worth something to the person who engages in it, or they wouldn't have done so. The value of the product of an author's effort depends on many other variables; how much effort the author put into it is only a minor component, if it even matters at all.
If they have no claim to this stuff, then what right do they have to charge anyone for any of it?
The only right they have to charge someone for it is based on a standing offer from society: write something, and we'll let you control its dissemination for a limited time.
Over time, this has morphed into the idea that authors somehow deserve to control the ideas that they write. Ideas are big things--much too big, and too important, to allow an individual or a corporation to control forever.
Well, I say, unless you can come up with the same ideas and transcribe them in exactly the same manner, without any interaction with the creator, the creator has an exclusive "product" to which he has every right to control access. There is ownership, of a type, here. I don't see how that can be disputed.
I dispute it. What, other than copyright law, gives an author this "moral right"? God? The flying spaghetti monster?
If they were growing their own drugs you would sort of have a point. But their meth/crack/weed money goes to some fairly nasty people...
This is a good argument against participation in the illegal drug trade. Black market activities of many sorts involve giving money to unsavory people who do bad things with it. It would be much better if there were some way to funnel all that meth/crack/weed money into law-abiding, tax-paying businesses.
I'm not a believer in morality as an absolute, aka religious stuff, but if you put it into (beneficial|detractive) for (me|some group|society|the human race), I'd say drugs are on the detractive side. Maybe not for the individual crackhead (probably though), but the laws are (ideally, some crap exists) there to guide society onto a route that is beneficial for society, not dopeheads.
Not an allergy sufferer, I take it? Or an asthmatic? As both, I put drugs firmly on the positive side, for me and for society.
Some drugs are certainly bad for you, but what gives me the right to force you to live your life according to how I think life should be lived? If I and 50 million like-minded voters can force you to live safely (one aspect of how I think life should be lived), why shouldn't we force you to follow our religion (whichever one that might be)? After all, we (all fifty million and one of us) think that society would be on a more beneficial route if everybody shared our beliefs. Does the fact that we make up the majority of voters in our country make it ok to force you to live as if you shared our morality?
(That's a rhetorical question. The answer is "no, of course it doesn't.")
Millennia of apologists have come up with ever-more-baroque philosophical explanations for the Problem of Suffering (both natural and man-made) and not a single one of them has ever arrived at a convincing answer.
I've heard several plausible answers. Maybe by holding out for "convincing" you're setting the bar too high.
While true, it's often missed that suppositions about something that has actually happened are not science either; it's not possible to show via repeatable experiment that one particular critter actually did evolve from another particular critter, though the underlying scientific theories that would allow that to happen can theoretically be shown to be true.
Which is precisely why evolutionary theory makes falsifiable predictions based on observations that can be (and have been) tested. Evolution a lot more than ruminating on how one dinosaur turned into another.
That seems like a non-sequitur to me, possibly because "evolutionary theory" means different things to different people. What I consider to be "evolutionary theories" can be tested repeatably in a laboratory under controlled conditions. Those tests say what is true now; they cannot say what actually happened 65 million years ago. Teaching evolutionary theories as fact today is a matter of science; teaching that it is how we arrived here is its own thing.
This doesn't mean that paleontology is worthless, of course; it should certainly be discussed. But in paleontology class, where it belongs, not science class.
Paleontology takes observations and generates testable theories, it is consistent with other existing knowledge, it is under constant refinement as new evidence is found and old theories are proven false, it uses controlled, repeatable methodologies, it does not claim to already know everything that can be known.
Our observations of the fossil record do not constitute scientific experiments. Paleontology attempts to explain what actually happened, and that is not science. Paleontology is the study of the past. It says "Based on this evidence, we think that this is what happened." That's interesting (to some), but it's not science.
Note that I'm not claiming that creationism is science either. Personally, I find it even more boring than paleontology, which is pretty boring. In a perfect world, they'd both be elective courses; the only interesting thing about them is the controversy itself.
I have thought about the problem of corruption, and I haven't been able to come up with a good solution to it. People will be corrupt; it's inevitable. With government, the solution is not so hard: make government weak enough so that when it's made up of corrupt people, it can't do much damage to its citizens. But, a too-weak government leaves powerful corporations unchecked.
The capitalist free market as well as the democratic societies in general are simply not equipped to deal with artificial "persons" of immesurable power and wealth, rivalling those of the representative governments.
Your description of corporations reminds me of some of the super-intelligent beings that populate singularity fiction. I'm not among those who think that a singularity inspired by sentient software is just around the corner, but it seems very reasonable that a group of people, equipped with modern information technology, could emulate a super-intelligence pretty well.
So what are the solutions to the problem you've raised?
With corporations, I can think of a couple: we could use the law to limit their power, and we could change their explicit purpose to include certain other goals (like social responsibility.) (This is in theory; in practice, it might be too late.)
Are there others? What would be the negative side effects of restricting the size and power of corporations?
Whats wrong with creationism being given equal time with science as an alternative explanation for life as we know it?
Because it's not science.
While true, it's often missed that suppositions about something that has actually happened are not science either; it's not possible to show via repeatable experiment that one particular critter actually did evolve from another particular critter, though the underlying scientific theories that would allow that to happen can theoretically be shown to be true.
This doesn't mean that paleontology is worthless, of course; it should certainly be discussed. But in paleontology class, where it belongs, not science class.
Slashdot Mirror
Since that's not what happens in the so-called "fair tax" scheme, why bring it up?
This should not be used as an excuse to avoid improvement.
Exactly. Writing open source software is like playing Civ 4 for twenty hours straight. Somewhere, some zealot probably thinks that's bad, but what they think isn't going to stop me.
If the entire community is slamming you, it's not because you're only slightly imperfect. On the flip side, even perfection is not good enough to prevent some oddball from slamming you. Don't mistake some oddball for the entire community, and don't expect to not get slammed.
Exactly. The problem is that the license lets Blizzard do so if they wanted to, and that most people simply click "I agree" without reading what they're agreeing to, not a case of actual spyware being installed, as far as we know.
Personally, I think the license thing reflects less poorly on Blizzard than the bnetd lawsuit, but that's just me.
That's "in addition to which", not "no".
That is unfortunate, because observation and experimentation really are different things: it's possible to observe something other than the results of an experiment, and the act of observing something does not constitute an experiment.
Experimentation is necessary (but not sufficient: you need other stuff too) for science.
If CSI is "science", then sure, creationism is too; you can make guesses involving intervention by supernatural beings that are consistent with the evidence. But you can't repeat those events in a lab, and even if you could, all you'd be showing is that it's possible, not that it really happened.
This whole "debate" convinces me that science "education" has failed to equip even trained scientists with adequate logic, reasoning and critical thinking skills. For that reason, I'm starting to think that ID should be taught in schools, to force students to choose between two (or more) alternatives.
Some people do believe that since abortion is ok, infanticide should also be ok, since there's such a small difference between a late-term fetus and a newborn infant.
As usual, absolute statements are seldom true. A more reasonable statement would have been for the Civ 4 team to say that piracy on a scale large enough to prevent game sales from being profitable must be prevented in order to avoid the failure of the current profit model.
It's clear to me that LaTeX is much too fun to be widely adopted as a word processor replacement. Creating LaTeX documents in vi is almost as fun as programming itself, and having fun is not a priority in today's cutthroat business world.
To do that with only three lines of code is impressive. But can Haskell match the power of Lisp minus whitespace? I'll find out soon enough.
Catholic clergy child abusers make it into the news more because for decades, the Catholic Church covered up the problem.
Of course it does. You can't fit more pixels on the screen than your resolution allows.
That being said, I'd almost be inclined to start off with something like Python. It's a quick and easy way to be productive, it has good docs and it's more fun than C.
For the record, my language learning sequence went something like this: Fortran, C/C++ (beginner C++ is mostly C), MIPS assembly, Lisp, Perl, Java, C (for real this time), misc UNIX shell scripting, Python, Prolog. I'm planning to work through a Haskell tutorial this weekend.
That still rings insufficient to my ears. What we have is fundamentally an issue of what kinds of things am I allowed to say. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.
I touched briefly on this earlier, but I'll go into a little more detail now: the value of the product of an author's work is orthogonal to the amount of work that the author put into it. Well, aside from the sentimental value; if you're making a gift for your mom, she might appreciate something that you worked hard on more than something that you whipped up in 30 seconds. The same is true of how you yourself value it. If you're selling it in a store, though, or if the idea you have created is competing for mind share on the internet, it doesn't matter if you've spent 30 years or 30 seconds on it: it will stand or fall on its own merits.
I am not so much interested in the "public good" in this subthread as I am trying to establish whether there actually is a "moral right" to give someone control of an idea. (For comparison, I'm also not convinced that all of rights enumerated in the U.S. Constitution exist in a state of nature.) It just so happens that free exchange of ideas is in the public interest. I've purposely avoided discussing the practical benefits of copyright, though I do believe they exist. Just because something isn't backed up by a "moral right" doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit society.
A sign that copyright law is a practical construction, rather than something that is based directly on "moral rights" that exist in a state of nature, is the fact that it only affects technological copy mechanisms. If our brains had infinite, perfect memory, we could exchange perfect copies of any sort of copyrightable work without being impacted by copyright laws at all. Would telepathically sharing a cool short story with my buddy in the next cubicle be morally wrong?
I called it a "moral right' to distinguish it from a "copy right". Copyright doesn't exist in a state of nature; it exists because of the bargain government is willing to strike with authors. Any right that exists in a state of nature is a "moral right". When you wrote "the creator has an exclusive "product" to which he has every right to control access," you appear to be claiming that an author has more rights than simply those granted by copyright -- that copyright exists because giving authors control over the product of their work is the right thing to do. Is that not your position?
The freedom to speak your mind includes the freedom to not speak your mind. This is very different from having the right to prevent somebody else from repeating what you've said. That is what "every right to control access" means: that you can tell me something, yet prevent me from speaking it to others. What, in the state of nature, gives you the right to prevent me from "speaking my mind" and transmitting that idea, verbatim, to someone new?
What is magical about the transcription (really "transmission") process is that suddenly, you are no longer the sole possessor of the idea in question. Anybody who hears that idea knows it.
Perhaps. That doesn't change the reality of the situation, however: your thoughts are your own, until you share them with someone else. Then you both possess those thoughts, and you both have the ability to share them with someone new. Where, other than copyright law, does your right to control the speech of the other person come from?
That's a good way to put it.
It depends what you mean by "no real claim". I would certainly not argue that effort is worth nothing; it was worth something to the person who engages in it, or they wouldn't have done so. The value of the product of an author's effort depends on many other variables; how much effort the author put into it is only a minor component, if it even matters at all.
The only right they have to charge someone for it is based on a standing offer from society: write something, and we'll let you control its dissemination for a limited time.
Over time, this has morphed into the idea that authors somehow deserve to control the ideas that they write. Ideas are big things--much too big, and too important, to allow an individual or a corporation to control forever.
I dispute it. What, other than copyright law, gives an author this "moral right"? God? The flying spaghetti monster?
This is a good argument against participation in the illegal drug trade. Black market activities of many sorts involve giving money to unsavory people who do bad things with it. It would be much better if there were some way to funnel all that meth/crack/weed money into law-abiding, tax-paying businesses.
Not an allergy sufferer, I take it? Or an asthmatic? As both, I put drugs firmly on the positive side, for me and for society.
Some drugs are certainly bad for you, but what gives me the right to force you to live your life according to how I think life should be lived? If I and 50 million like-minded voters can force you to live safely (one aspect of how I think life should be lived), why shouldn't we force you to follow our religion (whichever one that might be)? After all, we (all fifty million and one of us) think that society would be on a more beneficial route if everybody shared our beliefs. Does the fact that we make up the majority of voters in our country make it ok to force you to live as if you shared our morality?
(That's a rhetorical question. The answer is "no, of course it doesn't.")
I've heard several plausible answers. Maybe by holding out for "convincing" you're setting the bar too high.
That seems like a non-sequitur to me, possibly because "evolutionary theory" means different things to different people. What I consider to be "evolutionary theories" can be tested repeatably in a laboratory under controlled conditions. Those tests say what is true now; they cannot say what actually happened 65 million years ago. Teaching evolutionary theories as fact today is a matter of science; teaching that it is how we arrived here is its own thing.
Our observations of the fossil record do not constitute scientific experiments. Paleontology attempts to explain what actually happened, and that is not science. Paleontology is the study of the past. It says "Based on this evidence, we think that this is what happened." That's interesting (to some), but it's not science.
Note that I'm not claiming that creationism is science either. Personally, I find it even more boring than paleontology, which is pretty boring. In a perfect world, they'd both be elective courses; the only interesting thing about them is the controversy itself.
I have thought about the problem of corruption, and I haven't been able to come up with a good solution to it. People will be corrupt; it's inevitable. With government, the solution is not so hard: make government weak enough so that when it's made up of corrupt people, it can't do much damage to its citizens. But, a too-weak government leaves powerful corporations unchecked.
From an environmental perspective, it would be counterproductive if it resulted in a nuclear war.
Your description of corporations reminds me of some of the super-intelligent beings that populate singularity fiction. I'm not among those who think that a singularity inspired by sentient software is just around the corner, but it seems very reasonable that a group of people, equipped with modern information technology, could emulate a super-intelligence pretty well.
So what are the solutions to the problem you've raised?
With corporations, I can think of a couple: we could use the law to limit their power, and we could change their explicit purpose to include certain other goals (like social responsibility.) (This is in theory; in practice, it might be too late.)
Are there others? What would be the negative side effects of restricting the size and power of corporations?
While true, it's often missed that suppositions about something that has actually happened are not science either; it's not possible to show via repeatable experiment that one particular critter actually did evolve from another particular critter, though the underlying scientific theories that would allow that to happen can theoretically be shown to be true.
This doesn't mean that paleontology is worthless, of course; it should certainly be discussed. But in paleontology class, where it belongs, not science class.