Yeah, that would sure be nice. I'd really like to see one of the many digital-signature checking systems catch on with merchants. The kind that involve a private key. That would put a lot more on the consumer to protect his keys, but it would take a lot of pressure off the merchant.
Theoretically paypal is such a system. I'm not sure what happens with paypal disputes, but at least it's difficult for somebody to claim that somebody stole their paypal account the way somebody can steal a credit card number, since the truly unique information rests solely with PayPal. But I'm told that PayPal is rather onerous in its other dealings with merchants.
I really think that the next move is up to the merchants to pick a system and stop accepting no-card-present transactions entirely. Those are so fraught with peril that I'm stunned that people accept them at all any more.
The credit card companies could create such a system very easily and wipe out Paypal right quick, but as others have pointed out their risk exposure is so minimal that they're perfectly content with the system as it is (and in fact even profit from it.) I know both Mastercard and Visa were working on such systems, and I really don't know what happened to them.
It's funny that you should mention Shakespeare. In fact, he DID try to keep his plays to himself, or rather, to the theater which hired him to produce it. Other theater troupes would try to steal them by hiring actors to make transcripts of his plays. There was no copyright law preventing them from doing so, but actors who provided copies of plays were blacklisted.
The plays would be published in print, and the printers themselves (not Shakespeare!) did own copyrights. Any other printer printing the plays would be sued.
That's one of the reasons that so many Elizabethan plays are variations on the same themes: different writers producing their own versions of the same story, to get around that problem. You couldn't use the same script (though they often stole a catchy turn of phrase from each other), but dipping into the common pool of stories was just fine.
Shakespeare wrote for money, and the guys who bought his work expected to have sole rights to it. If Shakespeare had given it away to any troupe who wanted it, or even sold it, nobody would have given him any work. (Eventually he became part owner of one of the theater troupes, and wrote exclusively for them for a while.)
Ironically, his plays are still important today partly because his copyrights are long over, but at the time he made his living off producing them under the Elizabethan equivalents of copyrights.
I suspect that the problem actors have is with the fact that as the effects people get better, will they be necessary at all? If the effects department can make better appearance of tears than Jennifer can why not just skip her entirely?
Your P2P/B2C analysis is spot on. The difference between Joost and a cable provider is that Joost focuses more in on-demand than cable providers. (Cable "networks" are realy content providers; Joost is a distribution and therefore more like a cable provider.)
Despite the familiarity of the business model, it's a considerable change from the network's point of view. By playing, say, "Lost" on Wednesdays at 9 PM (or whenever it is) they can focus their marketing around an event, and a regularly scheduled event at that.
There is limited time in that schedule, so a few dozen TV shows per season receive huge promotions, and they're always looking for Big Wins like Friends or American Idol. There's no room on the schedule for any sort of niches. The presence of alternative TV networks for nice markets hasn't changed the model very much; the networks still focus exclusively on ultra-wide appeal.
Joost radically changes that model, and the networks will probably take considerable time to adjust to that. Right now they're largely the owners of that valuable resource: people's evenings. Various things have been chipping away at that: niche cable networks, video games, and time people spend on the Internet doing non-watching things.
On Demand has worked for movies, but it's only very recently that people have tried it for shorter works. Joost's competition isn't YouTube, but iTunes "Music" Store.
Possibly. I think so myself. But I wouldn't count religion out yet. It's been around for a long, long time.
Religious people will tell you that secular societies have no heart or moral base, and that is itself maladaptive. If they do not take care of the weakest among them, for example, they'll miss out on important contributions by those who didn't happen to be fortunate or strong enough at some point.
More importantly, religion gives people a way to work together. You can dismiss it as cronyism, but it's very efficient to trust people who are trustworthy. Whether that's because they go to your church, or if it's because they believe that God will punish them for breaking their word, it can be helpful to put your faith in a co-religionist.
The counter-arguments are legion, and as atheists you and I agree on them, but I wouldn't declare religion to be completely maladaptive yet. It's had staying power, and when all else fails that's the way to bet.
At least for Jews, that problem has been faced and solved. Pig heart valves are now used regularly, and that's just fine for Orthodox Jews. The problem is eating pigs, but any other use of pig parts is just fine.
Anarcho-capitalism is precisely exchanging government tyranny for corporate tyranny. People organize themselves into groups. They always do that, because it's more effective than living entirely on your own. On your own, you're always at the mercy of some group which has organized, simply by dint of larger numbers, or by greater willingness and power to inflict violence on you.
So you're going to get "tyranny", in the sense of somebody having arbitrary power over you. The trick is to figure that out and try to come up with some sort of system whereby everybody is willing to cede that power without it being too onerous. See Rawls' Theory of Justice as a starting point for that.
Your randomly chosen officials do fit the theory of justice, but they're hardly practical. Public service isn't easy. You have to know an awful lot about an awful lot: transportation, health, technology, military strategy, etc., and a grounding in the law wouldn't hurt (unless you want to scrap all laws every few years and start over from scratch.)
The whole problem is hard. If it were easy it would have been solved a long time ago.
There are several different kinds of intellectual property. The closest thing to owning an "idea" is a patent, not a copyright. Patents are a whole different story; the idea is dubious, and the US patent office implementation of that idea is criminally negligent.
Copyright is owning a particular work: a book, a song, a recording of a song, a movie. And you need to be very careful about making up your numbers here. It's very simple: I'd rather have 10k fans buy 10k albums than have 1,000k fans buy 5k albums. If the word-of-mouth advertising is so great, why did I sell half as many albums?
Especially given the first thousand albums just go to the cost of recording. Studio time is expensive. Engineers are expensive. Mastering is expensive. Album art costs money, screen printing CDs costs money. And getting those first 10k fans to buy any copies of the album at all is expensive. Put an album out there on the web for free and nobody will download it until you play a few hundred gigs in which your money for the night MAYBE covers the gasoline it took to get there. (And god forbid the drummer should have a few beers.)
Why yes, I have been a rock band promoter, and I do know where these numbers come from. If I want to PAY the band, God forbid, I have to sell 10k albums.
Most of the things that are downloaded are things that somebody spent a LOT of money promoting in the first place. Most bands of the kind I've worked with would pay you to download their album.
There's a lot to be said for developing new models; DRM is simply holding back the ocean with a broom. But I implore you, when justifying your downloading to yourself, not to pretend that you're somehow doing the band a service until you've looked at the economics a lot more closely.
Another important feature of our culture is property rights: the idea that you can get rich by being smart in what you own. Laws ensure that if others want to use what they own they have to pay you, and because you're certain of that you'll invest in making and acquiring stuff. It's the essence of capitalism, and that investment in both intellectual and physical resources makes people rich.
The term "intellectual property" incorporates both aspects of the culture and gets to the crux of the conflict: we share our intellect but do not share our property. But as intellectual property can be shared without rivalry, the process is upended.
That's the answer to your question "What's the point?" We have two traditions in our culture: building on each other's work, and owning (and getting rich from) property. The easy sharing of information brings those two cultural values into conflict.
Those who claim that the argument has already been settled in favor of sharing over property are (IMO) missing the fact that property has always been a crucial driver of innovation and investment. Many intellectual things are expensive to create, movies most obvious among them, because they incorporate physical elements (sets, cameras, lights) before they become mere bits to be shared. The movie industry continues to believe that they can make money off their "intellectual property" on the basis of selling it like traditional property. If you manage to convince them that they're wrong, it's more likely that they'll stop making movies than that they'll produce them and expect to be unable to recoup their expenses.
The conflict of the two values will eventually produce a shift to a new order, and I don't know what that's going to look like.
[*] And except for some reason, they do. Their faith isn't just a guess, as they like to term your hypotheses and theories. Their faith comes directly from the word of God.
It's circular, and illogical. You'd dismiss it as irrelevant, if there weren't so many of them.
It does take more than a good battery, but a good battery may be a necessary step. There are only a limited number of ways to deliver power to a vehicle. Gases are hard to contain and not very dense. Liquids are great, but they're expensive to ship around, and the most effective liquids we know are limited in quantity (and those quantities are concentrated in some politically unstable places.) Alternative liquids like ethanol and biodiesel are difficult to produce, and there may not be enough farmland for it even if it is a net energy producer (and there's some question about that).
Electricity is great: you can pump it around easily, and we already have the infrastructure for it. And you can make it many different ways; we can have coal AND nuclear AND wind AND solar AND something we haven't thought of yet (burning switchgrass maybe?). But as with gases, density is a problem, and until you've mastered that the flexibility of electricity for transportation is lost.
The real alternative is finding ways to use less energy overall for transportation (better public transportation, better design of cities, etc.) But those problems present political and social problems at least as big as the technological challenges of building better batteries.
While some people do of course believe that it should be taken literally, the idea that it's metaphorical has never been a big surprise to most people, and doesn't in itself undermine the veracity or moral force of the Bible, if you accept that the book contains at least some metaphor and allegory (which it clearly does).
You don't have to convince me. But you have to remember that "some people" in the US means somewhere between 20% and 60% of the country, depending on the question you ask. Literal belief in creationism and the Bible in general is a political fact, and just asserting that it's "clearly" metaphorical doesn't change that.
The question is, what are we (the disbelievers) going to do? How can we get along in a society with a majority or near-majority who disagrees with us, so strongly that they vote reliably? We can try to change their minds, but they've resisted that.
We can wait for them to die; their children are less fervent believers than they are (in general). But in the meantime, we must address them in some other way than as "you're clearly wrong", even if I'm quite certain that they are, because they believe just as fervently the other way.
They are moral absolutists, and my moral behavior offends them so much that they wish to make it illegal. (I am not gay, but support gay causes, and am sexually promiscuous, at least relative to their code [though as a Slashdotter I should be so lucky!])
As I said before, it's as much about power as it is about belief. I know logically that God does not justify their power over me, but since God trumps logic, we're at an impasse.
Either way, I'd be curious to hear your argument about how "belief in evolution does remove the moral force of the Bible."
What I meant is that, because evolution contradicts a literal reading of Genesis, it opens the entire book up to considerably more interpretation. Simple directives like "thou shalt not murder" or "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" no longer have the force of the absolute and immediate Word of God behind them.
There may still be a God who left directions for us in the Bible, but contradiction of the facts gives you wide latitude on the implementation of those directions. You can choose to follow them, but you can no longer use the argument that I must follow them, because the Creator of the Universe said so.
That's the key point here: not what you choose for yourself, but what you want others to have. Logic has a way of forcing people to believe things, whether they want to or not. The moral force of the Bible once held that same power, and evolution gives you a logical basis on which to opt out. That's a pretty considerable change for the worse in the eyes of a creationist, because other's moral choices have an effect on you.
From my point of view, that's pretty clear on the "thou shalt not murder" thing and not at all clear on the "suffering a witch to live" thing, which is why I believe the former and not the latter. But that kind of moral relativism scares people who wonder when I'm going to stop believing in the first one too. It bugs me that I can't convince them otherwise.
Thank you. Although I let some vitriol creep in to the end of my posting a bit, I really don't think that this argument has to be impolite, and the best way to find a modus vivendi is to understand the fundamentals of the opponent's position. Those fundamentals may be irreconcilable, but finding the nut of the irreconcilable differences gives the best hope of working around them.
Belief in evolution does remove the moral force of the Bible. I don't think there should be any disagreement on that. And that _is_ a conflict, because the immediate conclusion that there is no morality leads to some rather horrifying ends.
The question is, does evolution give rise to another moral basis? And how compatible is that moral basis with the one the Bible suggests? Without getting too far into it, I find that it does lead to a number of similar conclusions.
I'd actually be all for posting 9 of the 10 commandments in schools. It's that first one that kind of trips me up, but on the "thou shalt not murder"/"take no vain oaths" thing I think we're in perfect agreement, if for different reasons.
The people who say that believe that the Old Testament was divinely inspired, that it represents the Word of God. In particular, the bits in Numbers and Leviticus which starts with "and God said unto Moses..." were written down and faithfully copied, letter for letter.
The Jews have a rather vigorous tradition concerning writing of the Torah. It's not done by just any schmuck; you have to train for years. There's no white-out in a Torah; if you screw up you chuck the entire sheet of parchment and start over. (It's made of many segments sewn together, so it's not quite as horrible as it sounds, but it's still pretty harsh.)
Compare the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern Torahs and you'll find it's letter-for-letter exact in the parts where they overlap.
There's no need to believe in a missing set of scrolls which describe evolution. It's right there in the book, beginning with "B'reshit": in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Six days later he took a nap.
Clearly, such a belief is incredibly precarious. There's absolutely no reason to believe that those scrolls are the word of God, even if they've been faithfully copied for thousands of years. The only thing that distinguishes this book from all of the others is that your priest/pastor/parents/minister told you so.
Well, that, and the feeling one gets in one's heart. You and I and every scientist on the planet knows that it's never safe to trust one's heart on matters of fact, but once somebody has stepped outside of that you're never going to use logic or evidence to bring them back into the fold of rationality.
Even as a scientist, you go with your gut instinct fairly often. Your basic notion of evidence and proof is, ultimately, more about what your gut tells you is likely to be true. Sure, it works, and everything from transistors to amoxycillin comes from that, but the whole edifice could be knocked over at any instant by a guy with a white beard who sayeth, "I am the Lord your God".
Learn to understand where they're coming from, and maybe you have some hope of convincing them not to destroy the minds of your children with their self-serving fundamentalist rubbish. Ultimately, this is far less about belief than it is about power. They hate the fact that evolution justifies everything they hate, from moral relativism to sexual promiscuity. Evolution is just the touchstone.
As long as the number of qubits required is proportional to N and not to something bigger, it still counts as polynomial time, no matter the size. It just adds an extra factor of N to the polynomial.
There was some talk a few years ago about DNA computing, which solved problems by generating all of the possible solutions in DNA and then doing an O(1) step to figure out which strand had the right properties for your solution. But since a TSP of 100 nodes required DNA weighing more than the planet Earth, that didn't go much of anywhere. It was really O(2^N) rather than O(1).
The question is, will labs in those other countries do that research? Gene patents are supposed to be an economic incentive to do the work. The US pharmaceutical industry is one of the strongest in the world, and perhaps that can be attributed to its enforcement of the intellectual property laws.
So I'd like to see if other countries do in fact step up to the plate and make themselves rich. If that leads to a revamp of gene patent and other IP laws, so much the better.
I read a bit of the JREF correspondence some time back, and I noticed the same thing. They rejected many tests which I would have considered highly indicative, if not absolute proof. If the subject had been able to pass those tests, it would have been worth it to spend some time and money verifying the claim. That absolute proof is worth a million bucks; it's an earth-shaking revolution.
They have to have an absolute prohibition on spending any time or money of their own, since they'd spend a fortune refuting tests. That sets a nearly impossible challenge for the subject, who has to fund the work himself and find his own volunteers. His own volunteers, however, would be suspect.
I remember one exchange (sadly, I did not bookmark it) in which the proposer was very open to reason, and kept modifying the experiment to suit their goals, but couldn't find something that would work. I wanted to contact him and say, "Look, I'll run this experiment with you, since it costs no money. If you succeed, I'll pay to have you run a real experiment for Randi."
Sadly, I didn't, partly because it just seemed incredibly unlikely. It involved predicting astronomical signs, and I can't imagine how that isn't garbage. Any real power seems like it would manifest itself in a way which was more easily verifiable. And that was probably the JREF's attitude: it's so wildly unlikely to succeed that it wasn't worth any effort on their part at all. But the seemed very snarky in the exchange, and the propose seemed very reasonable.
I am no historian but I think that one will find that wherever an authority (government, dictator, king, Pope, etc.) has tried to exceed their authority, the people have awoken and mightily rebelled.
There I must respectfully disagree with you, sir. Rebellions are suppressed all the time, and some governments have fallen only due to outside pressure rather than the rebellion.
The Holocaust, for example, was a mighty abuse of power, but there was never any resistance to speak of except in small pockets which were suppressed. The genocides in Cambodia and Darfur followed/are following a similar pattern.
The Soviet Union and China have both engaged in large-scale executions of their people. The former fell not to a rebellion but to economic forces. The latter is reforming slowly rather than suffer the same fate (and doing quite well for it).
I don't particularly fear that national ID cards will a much bigger step over existing driver's licenses as IDs. If a power came to government capable of and interested in a real "papers, please" kind of government, it can do so with existing technologies, just a bit less efficiently.
I don't think that this small difference in efficiency will the the tipping point, or anything like it. That will be something more like a radical change in social ethos (like a wave of fundamentalism) or significant security event.
Most of the "experts" took 2003, while the "newbies" took 2007.
That's interesting. As a designer, you hate to sacrifice long-term usability for ease of learning. Clippy was annoying served as a way to get to expert level (as long as you could shut him off when you got there.) You're supposed to spend a lot more time interacting as an expert (years) than as a novice (hopefully days or weeks at most), but everybody's first impression is as a novice.
I've known some UI designers to insist that there doesn't have to be a difference between expert interaction and novice interaction, but I have a hard time believing that.
I haven't had a chance to play with the ribbons yet. I'm disappointed to hear that the experts preferred 2003, and that it took them less time to use it.
Well, yes and no. Those middle schoolers aren't passing around indie bands. They're passing around what EMI sells them. Those middle schoolers are extremely influenced by advertising. That's why all the middle schoolers are trading the same stuff (and why it's so easy to find on file sharing networks: they're all sharing the same stuff).
I've never heard of an indie band being discovered by middle school students. Occasionally one gets heard and achieves a kind of cult status among college students, but hardly the gold-record status EMI is capable of producing.
It is. You have to go looking for them. That's the problem with the Long Tail: just because the stuff is there and theoretically findable doesn't mean that you will. Unlike YouTube, which doesn't take any promotion from the Big Hump on the Left, the indies are drowned out by the majors on iTMS.
iTMS shifts the problem for a band from distribution to marketing. Now that people can get to you, how are they supposed to find you? Anderson is vague on the topic, and what he does say is not very hopeful. You're competing not just against the majors in the space but the rest of the long tail, and there are a LOT of artists in it. That's why they call it "long".
iTMS is open to indies. CDBaby, for example, puts all of its artists on iTMS.
The problem with indies is, obviously, that you've never heard of them. They don't end up on the front page because that's incredibly valuable real estate, and only the majors can afford it. (I don't know if they actually pay for it or not, but I suspect they do.)
They'll show up in the recommendation engine, but the problem with the Long Tail is that there are only a few people rating each indie artist, and many rating the big famous ones.
The Long Tail theory does not predict that indies will one day take over from the majors. The mass of the curve may shift somewhat to the right, but the hump will always be on the left. Maybe a few hits will break out of the long tail, but the theory is a lot better for customers (who have a chance to find what they want) than for artists (who are still doomed to obscurity in the tail). Just because they can find you doesn't mean that a lot of people will.
Government regulation is not incompatible with a free market. In a free-market society, government exists to enforce agreements between people. It is itself an agreement between the people to create a set of rules by which other disagreements can be resolved.
For example, if the people say, "Dumping pollution into the rivers is bad", in a free market they get together to define "pollution" and enforce the rule. Government is only the mechanism by which that happens. The market is still entirely free.
Of course, actual governments are composed of people who can be persuaded not to do their jobs properly. And the final results are always far more complicated than "don't pollute". That's why conservatives (confusingly also called "classic liberals" by economists) tend to prefer less government rather than more: the less there is the easier it is to see where it's going wrong. Just like in code.
So I'm reluctant to let the government enshrine net neutrality rules before we see what the big companies actually do. It restricts the ability to innovate, not just by big companies but also by small ones. Once the big companies actually start engaging in nightmare scenarios (e.g. forcing you to use their own download services rather than a competitor's), then regulation will be in order.
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Yeah, that would sure be nice. I'd really like to see one of the many digital-signature checking systems catch on with merchants. The kind that involve a private key. That would put a lot more on the consumer to protect his keys, but it would take a lot of pressure off the merchant.
Theoretically paypal is such a system. I'm not sure what happens with paypal disputes, but at least it's difficult for somebody to claim that somebody stole their paypal account the way somebody can steal a credit card number, since the truly unique information rests solely with PayPal. But I'm told that PayPal is rather onerous in its other dealings with merchants.
I really think that the next move is up to the merchants to pick a system and stop accepting no-card-present transactions entirely. Those are so fraught with peril that I'm stunned that people accept them at all any more.
The credit card companies could create such a system very easily and wipe out Paypal right quick, but as others have pointed out their risk exposure is so minimal that they're perfectly content with the system as it is (and in fact even profit from it.) I know both Mastercard and Visa were working on such systems, and I really don't know what happened to them.
It's funny that you should mention Shakespeare. In fact, he DID try to keep his plays to himself, or rather, to the theater which hired him to produce it. Other theater troupes would try to steal them by hiring actors to make transcripts of his plays. There was no copyright law preventing them from doing so, but actors who provided copies of plays were blacklisted.
The plays would be published in print, and the printers themselves (not Shakespeare!) did own copyrights. Any other printer printing the plays would be sued.
That's one of the reasons that so many Elizabethan plays are variations on the same themes: different writers producing their own versions of the same story, to get around that problem. You couldn't use the same script (though they often stole a catchy turn of phrase from each other), but dipping into the common pool of stories was just fine.
Shakespeare wrote for money, and the guys who bought his work expected to have sole rights to it. If Shakespeare had given it away to any troupe who wanted it, or even sold it, nobody would have given him any work. (Eventually he became part owner of one of the theater troupes, and wrote exclusively for them for a while.)
Ironically, his plays are still important today partly because his copyrights are long over, but at the time he made his living off producing them under the Elizabethan equivalents of copyrights.
I suspect that the problem actors have is with the fact that as the effects people get better, will they be necessary at all? If the effects department can make better appearance of tears than Jennifer can why not just skip her entirely?
Your P2P/B2C analysis is spot on. The difference between Joost and a cable provider is that Joost focuses more in on-demand than cable providers. (Cable "networks" are realy content providers; Joost is a distribution and therefore more like a cable provider.)
Despite the familiarity of the business model, it's a considerable change from the network's point of view. By playing, say, "Lost" on Wednesdays at 9 PM (or whenever it is) they can focus their marketing around an event, and a regularly scheduled event at that.
There is limited time in that schedule, so a few dozen TV shows per season receive huge promotions, and they're always looking for Big Wins like Friends or American Idol. There's no room on the schedule for any sort of niches. The presence of alternative TV networks for nice markets hasn't changed the model very much; the networks still focus exclusively on ultra-wide appeal.
Joost radically changes that model, and the networks will probably take considerable time to adjust to that. Right now they're largely the owners of that valuable resource: people's evenings. Various things have been chipping away at that: niche cable networks, video games, and time people spend on the Internet doing non-watching things.
On Demand has worked for movies, but it's only very recently that people have tried it for shorter works. Joost's competition isn't YouTube, but iTunes "Music" Store.
But that time is passed.
Possibly. I think so myself. But I wouldn't count religion out yet. It's been around for a long, long time.
Religious people will tell you that secular societies have no heart or moral base, and that is itself maladaptive. If they do not take care of the weakest among them, for example, they'll miss out on important contributions by those who didn't happen to be fortunate or strong enough at some point.
More importantly, religion gives people a way to work together. You can dismiss it as cronyism, but it's very efficient to trust people who are trustworthy. Whether that's because they go to your church, or if it's because they believe that God will punish them for breaking their word, it can be helpful to put your faith in a co-religionist.
The counter-arguments are legion, and as atheists you and I agree on them, but I wouldn't declare religion to be completely maladaptive yet. It's had staying power, and when all else fails that's the way to bet.
At least for Jews, that problem has been faced and solved. Pig heart valves are now used regularly, and that's just fine for Orthodox Jews. The problem is eating pigs, but any other use of pig parts is just fine.
The Muslims, however, are still debating it, as far as I can tell.
Anarcho-capitalism is precisely exchanging government tyranny for corporate tyranny. People organize themselves into groups. They always do that, because it's more effective than living entirely on your own. On your own, you're always at the mercy of some group which has organized, simply by dint of larger numbers, or by greater willingness and power to inflict violence on you.
So you're going to get "tyranny", in the sense of somebody having arbitrary power over you. The trick is to figure that out and try to come up with some sort of system whereby everybody is willing to cede that power without it being too onerous. See Rawls' Theory of Justice as a starting point for that.
Your randomly chosen officials do fit the theory of justice, but they're hardly practical. Public service isn't easy. You have to know an awful lot about an awful lot: transportation, health, technology, military strategy, etc., and a grounding in the law wouldn't hurt (unless you want to scrap all laws every few years and start over from scratch.)
The whole problem is hard. If it were easy it would have been solved a long time ago.
There are several different kinds of intellectual property. The closest thing to owning an "idea" is a patent, not a copyright. Patents are a whole different story; the idea is dubious, and the US patent office implementation of that idea is criminally negligent.
Copyright is owning a particular work: a book, a song, a recording of a song, a movie. And you need to be very careful about making up your numbers here. It's very simple: I'd rather have 10k fans buy 10k albums than have 1,000k fans buy 5k albums. If the word-of-mouth advertising is so great, why did I sell half as many albums?
Especially given the first thousand albums just go to the cost of recording. Studio time is expensive. Engineers are expensive. Mastering is expensive. Album art costs money, screen printing CDs costs money. And getting those first 10k fans to buy any copies of the album at all is expensive. Put an album out there on the web for free and nobody will download it until you play a few hundred gigs in which your money for the night MAYBE covers the gasoline it took to get there. (And god forbid the drummer should have a few beers.)
Why yes, I have been a rock band promoter, and I do know where these numbers come from. If I want to PAY the band, God forbid, I have to sell 10k albums.
Most of the things that are downloaded are things that somebody spent a LOT of money promoting in the first place. Most bands of the kind I've worked with would pay you to download their album.
There's a lot to be said for developing new models; DRM is simply holding back the ocean with a broom. But I implore you, when justifying your downloading to yourself, not to pretend that you're somehow doing the band a service until you've looked at the economics a lot more closely.
Another important feature of our culture is property rights: the idea that you can get rich by being smart in what you own. Laws ensure that if others want to use what they own they have to pay you, and because you're certain of that you'll invest in making and acquiring stuff. It's the essence of capitalism, and that investment in both intellectual and physical resources makes people rich.
The term "intellectual property" incorporates both aspects of the culture and gets to the crux of the conflict: we share our intellect but do not share our property. But as intellectual property can be shared without rivalry, the process is upended.
That's the answer to your question "What's the point?" We have two traditions in our culture: building on each other's work, and owning (and getting rich from) property. The easy sharing of information brings those two cultural values into conflict.
Those who claim that the argument has already been settled in favor of sharing over property are (IMO) missing the fact that property has always been a crucial driver of innovation and investment. Many intellectual things are expensive to create, movies most obvious among them, because they incorporate physical elements (sets, cameras, lights) before they become mere bits to be shared. The movie industry continues to believe that they can make money off their "intellectual property" on the basis of selling it like traditional property. If you manage to convince them that they're wrong, it's more likely that they'll stop making movies than that they'll produce them and expect to be unable to recoup their expenses.
The conflict of the two values will eventually produce a shift to a new order, and I don't know what that's going to look like.
[*] And except for some reason, they do. Their faith isn't just a guess, as they like to term your hypotheses and theories. Their faith comes directly from the word of God.
It's circular, and illogical. You'd dismiss it as irrelevant, if there weren't so many of them.
It does take more than a good battery, but a good battery may be a necessary step. There are only a limited number of ways to deliver power to a vehicle. Gases are hard to contain and not very dense. Liquids are great, but they're expensive to ship around, and the most effective liquids we know are limited in quantity (and those quantities are concentrated in some politically unstable places.) Alternative liquids like ethanol and biodiesel are difficult to produce, and there may not be enough farmland for it even if it is a net energy producer (and there's some question about that).
Electricity is great: you can pump it around easily, and we already have the infrastructure for it. And you can make it many different ways; we can have coal AND nuclear AND wind AND solar AND something we haven't thought of yet (burning switchgrass maybe?). But as with gases, density is a problem, and until you've mastered that the flexibility of electricity for transportation is lost.
The real alternative is finding ways to use less energy overall for transportation (better public transportation, better design of cities, etc.) But those problems present political and social problems at least as big as the technological challenges of building better batteries.
While some people do of course believe that it should be taken literally, the idea that it's metaphorical has never been a big surprise to most people, and doesn't in itself undermine the veracity or moral force of the Bible, if you accept that the book contains at least some metaphor and allegory (which it clearly does).
You don't have to convince me. But you have to remember that "some people" in the US means somewhere between 20% and 60% of the country, depending on the question you ask. Literal belief in creationism and the Bible in general is a political fact, and just asserting that it's "clearly" metaphorical doesn't change that.
The question is, what are we (the disbelievers) going to do? How can we get along in a society with a majority or near-majority who disagrees with us, so strongly that they vote reliably? We can try to change their minds, but they've resisted that.
We can wait for them to die; their children are less fervent believers than they are (in general). But in the meantime, we must address them in some other way than as "you're clearly wrong", even if I'm quite certain that they are, because they believe just as fervently the other way.
They are moral absolutists, and my moral behavior offends them so much that they wish to make it illegal. (I am not gay, but support gay causes, and am sexually promiscuous, at least relative to their code [though as a Slashdotter I should be so lucky!])
As I said before, it's as much about power as it is about belief. I know logically that God does not justify their power over me, but since God trumps logic, we're at an impasse.
Either way, I'd be curious to hear your argument about how "belief in evolution does remove the moral force of the Bible."
What I meant is that, because evolution contradicts a literal reading of Genesis, it opens the entire book up to considerably more interpretation. Simple directives like "thou shalt not murder" or "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" no longer have the force of the absolute and immediate Word of God behind them.
There may still be a God who left directions for us in the Bible, but contradiction of the facts gives you wide latitude on the implementation of those directions. You can choose to follow them, but you can no longer use the argument that I must follow them, because the Creator of the Universe said so.
That's the key point here: not what you choose for yourself, but what you want others to have. Logic has a way of forcing people to believe things, whether they want to or not. The moral force of the Bible once held that same power, and evolution gives you a logical basis on which to opt out. That's a pretty considerable change for the worse in the eyes of a creationist, because other's moral choices have an effect on you.
From my point of view, that's pretty clear on the "thou shalt not murder" thing and not at all clear on the "suffering a witch to live" thing, which is why I believe the former and not the latter. But that kind of moral relativism scares people who wonder when I'm going to stop believing in the first one too. It bugs me that I can't convince them otherwise.
Thank you. Although I let some vitriol creep in to the end of my posting a bit, I really don't think that this argument has to be impolite, and the best way to find a modus vivendi is to understand the fundamentals of the opponent's position. Those fundamentals may be irreconcilable, but finding the nut of the irreconcilable differences gives the best hope of working around them.
Belief in evolution does remove the moral force of the Bible. I don't think there should be any disagreement on that. And that _is_ a conflict, because the immediate conclusion that there is no morality leads to some rather horrifying ends.
The question is, does evolution give rise to another moral basis? And how compatible is that moral basis with the one the Bible suggests? Without getting too far into it, I find that it does lead to a number of similar conclusions.
I'd actually be all for posting 9 of the 10 commandments in schools. It's that first one that kind of trips me up, but on the "thou shalt not murder"/"take no vain oaths" thing I think we're in perfect agreement, if for different reasons.
The people who say that believe that the Old Testament was divinely inspired, that it represents the Word of God. In particular, the bits in Numbers and Leviticus which starts with "and God said unto Moses..." were written down and faithfully copied, letter for letter.
The Jews have a rather vigorous tradition concerning writing of the Torah. It's not done by just any schmuck; you have to train for years. There's no white-out in a Torah; if you screw up you chuck the entire sheet of parchment and start over. (It's made of many segments sewn together, so it's not quite as horrible as it sounds, but it's still pretty harsh.)
Compare the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern Torahs and you'll find it's letter-for-letter exact in the parts where they overlap.
There's no need to believe in a missing set of scrolls which describe evolution. It's right there in the book, beginning with "B'reshit": in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Six days later he took a nap.
Clearly, such a belief is incredibly precarious. There's absolutely no reason to believe that those scrolls are the word of God, even if they've been faithfully copied for thousands of years. The only thing that distinguishes this book from all of the others is that your priest/pastor/parents/minister told you so.
Well, that, and the feeling one gets in one's heart. You and I and every scientist on the planet knows that it's never safe to trust one's heart on matters of fact, but once somebody has stepped outside of that you're never going to use logic or evidence to bring them back into the fold of rationality.
Even as a scientist, you go with your gut instinct fairly often. Your basic notion of evidence and proof is, ultimately, more about what your gut tells you is likely to be true. Sure, it works, and everything from transistors to amoxycillin comes from that, but the whole edifice could be knocked over at any instant by a guy with a white beard who sayeth, "I am the Lord your God".
Learn to understand where they're coming from, and maybe you have some hope of convincing them not to destroy the minds of your children with their self-serving fundamentalist rubbish. Ultimately, this is far less about belief than it is about power. They hate the fact that evolution justifies everything they hate, from moral relativism to sexual promiscuity. Evolution is just the touchstone.
As long as the number of qubits required is proportional to N and not to something bigger, it still counts as polynomial time, no matter the size. It just adds an extra factor of N to the polynomial.
There was some talk a few years ago about DNA computing, which solved problems by generating all of the possible solutions in DNA and then doing an O(1) step to figure out which strand had the right properties for your solution. But since a TSP of 100 nodes required DNA weighing more than the planet Earth, that didn't go much of anywhere. It was really O(2^N) rather than O(1).
The question is, will labs in those other countries do that research? Gene patents are supposed to be an economic incentive to do the work. The US pharmaceutical industry is one of the strongest in the world, and perhaps that can be attributed to its enforcement of the intellectual property laws.
So I'd like to see if other countries do in fact step up to the plate and make themselves rich. If that leads to a revamp of gene patent and other IP laws, so much the better.
That's an interesting way to look at it. Are you also entitled to a refund of a movie ticket if you didn't enjoy it? What about a concert?
I read a bit of the JREF correspondence some time back, and I noticed the same thing. They rejected many tests which I would have considered highly indicative, if not absolute proof. If the subject had been able to pass those tests, it would have been worth it to spend some time and money verifying the claim. That absolute proof is worth a million bucks; it's an earth-shaking revolution.
They have to have an absolute prohibition on spending any time or money of their own, since they'd spend a fortune refuting tests. That sets a nearly impossible challenge for the subject, who has to fund the work himself and find his own volunteers. His own volunteers, however, would be suspect.
I remember one exchange (sadly, I did not bookmark it) in which the proposer was very open to reason, and kept modifying the experiment to suit their goals, but couldn't find something that would work. I wanted to contact him and say, "Look, I'll run this experiment with you, since it costs no money. If you succeed, I'll pay to have you run a real experiment for Randi."
Sadly, I didn't, partly because it just seemed incredibly unlikely. It involved predicting astronomical signs, and I can't imagine how that isn't garbage. Any real power seems like it would manifest itself in a way which was more easily verifiable. And that was probably the JREF's attitude: it's so wildly unlikely to succeed that it wasn't worth any effort on their part at all. But the seemed very snarky in the exchange, and the propose seemed very reasonable.
I am no historian but I think that one will find that wherever an authority (government, dictator, king, Pope, etc.) has tried to exceed their authority, the people have awoken and mightily rebelled.
There I must respectfully disagree with you, sir. Rebellions are suppressed all the time, and some governments have fallen only due to outside pressure rather than the rebellion.
The Holocaust, for example, was a mighty abuse of power, but there was never any resistance to speak of except in small pockets which were suppressed. The genocides in Cambodia and Darfur followed/are following a similar pattern.
The Soviet Union and China have both engaged in large-scale executions of their people. The former fell not to a rebellion but to economic forces. The latter is reforming slowly rather than suffer the same fate (and doing quite well for it).
I don't particularly fear that national ID cards will a much bigger step over existing driver's licenses as IDs. If a power came to government capable of and interested in a real "papers, please" kind of government, it can do so with existing technologies, just a bit less efficiently.
I don't think that this small difference in efficiency will the the tipping point, or anything like it. That will be something more like a radical change in social ethos (like a wave of fundamentalism) or significant security event.
Most of the "experts" took 2003, while the "newbies" took 2007.
That's interesting. As a designer, you hate to sacrifice long-term usability for ease of learning. Clippy was annoying served as a way to get to expert level (as long as you could shut him off when you got there.) You're supposed to spend a lot more time interacting as an expert (years) than as a novice (hopefully days or weeks at most), but everybody's first impression is as a novice.
I've known some UI designers to insist that there doesn't have to be a difference between expert interaction and novice interaction, but I have a hard time believing that.
I haven't had a chance to play with the ribbons yet. I'm disappointed to hear that the experts preferred 2003, and that it took them less time to use it.
Well, yes and no. Those middle schoolers aren't passing around indie bands. They're passing around what EMI sells them. Those middle schoolers are extremely influenced by advertising. That's why all the middle schoolers are trading the same stuff (and why it's so easy to find on file sharing networks: they're all sharing the same stuff).
I've never heard of an indie band being discovered by middle school students. Occasionally one gets heard and achieves a kind of cult status among college students, but hardly the gold-record status EMI is capable of producing.
It is. You have to go looking for them. That's the problem with the Long Tail: just because the stuff is there and theoretically findable doesn't mean that you will. Unlike YouTube, which doesn't take any promotion from the Big Hump on the Left, the indies are drowned out by the majors on iTMS.
iTMS shifts the problem for a band from distribution to marketing. Now that people can get to you, how are they supposed to find you? Anderson is vague on the topic, and what he does say is not very hopeful. You're competing not just against the majors in the space but the rest of the long tail, and there are a LOT of artists in it. That's why they call it "long".
iTMS is open to indies. CDBaby, for example, puts all of its artists on iTMS.
The problem with indies is, obviously, that you've never heard of them. They don't end up on the front page because that's incredibly valuable real estate, and only the majors can afford it. (I don't know if they actually pay for it or not, but I suspect they do.)
They'll show up in the recommendation engine, but the problem with the Long Tail is that there are only a few people rating each indie artist, and many rating the big famous ones.
The Long Tail theory does not predict that indies will one day take over from the majors. The mass of the curve may shift somewhat to the right, but the hump will always be on the left. Maybe a few hits will break out of the long tail, but the theory is a lot better for customers (who have a chance to find what they want) than for artists (who are still doomed to obscurity in the tail). Just because they can find you doesn't mean that a lot of people will.
Government regulation is not incompatible with a free market. In a free-market society, government exists to enforce agreements between people. It is itself an agreement between the people to create a set of rules by which other disagreements can be resolved.
For example, if the people say, "Dumping pollution into the rivers is bad", in a free market they get together to define "pollution" and enforce the rule. Government is only the mechanism by which that happens. The market is still entirely free.
Of course, actual governments are composed of people who can be persuaded not to do their jobs properly. And the final results are always far more complicated than "don't pollute". That's why conservatives (confusingly also called "classic liberals" by economists) tend to prefer less government rather than more: the less there is the easier it is to see where it's going wrong. Just like in code.
So I'm reluctant to let the government enshrine net neutrality rules before we see what the big companies actually do. It restricts the ability to innovate, not just by big companies but also by small ones. Once the big companies actually start engaging in nightmare scenarios (e.g. forcing you to use their own download services rather than a competitor's), then regulation will be in order.