They are not metalcore. Metalcore describes bands like Meshuggah, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Ebony Tears, etc. I believe the term you want is mallcore.
You do have the right to give money to charity if you want, you know. The problem is when you volunteer other peoples' money. You have no right to do that.
So, in other words, capitalism should apply only to those things that people don't actually need? That is, of course, ridiculous: capitalism's power to provide the best goods and services at the lowest cost works especially well when the service or good is a necessity.
Why? Because the demand is inelastic. When demand for something is inelastic, competition between companies goes up quickly because newcomers know that the demand for the good or service they are about to provide will not disappear suddenly. This increase in competition has the effect of reducing the price.
My friend Bill probably said it best a few months ago in an email to me:
Hey, I notice an interesting parallel that lots of people are
simultaneously pissed off about how much all of these following things
cost: prescription drugs, electricity (in California), and gas
(everywhere). In all cases those people think it's morally wrong for
the suppliers of these things to make a profit because we "need" those
things so much. But... isn't that the whole point of a market economy,
that you make money selling stuff people actually need? Otherwise,
there's no incentive to meet people's needs, and you'd continue to have
a fucked up situation like we've had the last few years where investors
would rather put their money into companies that would FedEx kitty
litter around the country over the Internet, instead of investing in
power plants or oil exploration that would provide (arguably) a much
more useful service.
> Contribution to the insurance is proportionnal to
> income, but the service is the same for all.
Oh, wonderful: yet another scheme to soak the rich.
You know, the whole point of insurance is that everyone pays the same but people are reimbursed at different rates (i.e., some peoples' houses will burn down, others won't; someone people will get cancer, others won't.) Why should some people pay more than others for the same good?
Guns don't cause crime. Guns, in fact, prevent crime an order of magnitude more often. Guns are used over half a million times each year to PREVENT violent crimes, and the vast majority of those uses are by citizens exercising their 2nd Amendment rights, not by police.
Last thought from my side: if ideas are so easy, I expect Jonas Salk would have come up with the polio vaccine even if he'd decided to pursue some more lucrative occupation, right?
Wake up, man. No one can seriously be this ridiculous.
...I just hope they don't cancel Family Guy, which is much, MUCH funnier. Futurama was always a show hanging onto the coattails of the once-incredible but now-abyssmal Simpsons.
> People share ideas when theres no incentive to sell
> them.
If they have the ideas. Without incentive, fewer ideas will be generated. Money is a good incentive. Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards Men is also an incentive, but not nearly as good. =)
> Competition does not equal innovation, in some
> situations it can help it and in some situations it can
> harm it.
Asserting something doesn't make it so. You got examples?
> Patents do not help people in third worlds at all, they
> cant get venture capital at all, they lack the
> information needed.
Again, asserting something doesn't make it so. Patents do indeed help people in the third world. Perhaps not directly, as they are usually not the ones receiving the patent; but they certainly benefit from the fruits of the patent: an innovative AIDS medication patented by Merck today will lose its patent protection 20 years from now, when the price will presumably drop a significant amount due to price pressure from competing generic manufacturers.
Without that patent, companies like Merck have almost no incentive to research such a medicine, so the third-worlders, instead of reaping the benefits 20 years down the line, NEVER do...
Who are you to decide what is a "better use"? The person who is donating the money is the only one who has the right to determine how he best spends his money. That, my friend, is also a basic tenet of capitalism, and something the statists (those on the left) in America seem to forget.
I'll focus on this one point, because the rest of your message depends on it:
> Millions of people in third world countries dying because of patents on drugs.
I would argue that millions of people all over the world (including in third-world countries) are ALIVE today because of patents on drugs. Patents provide economic incentive for innovation, without which we'd all still be dying from the flu.
I have yet to see anyone rebut this, and I doubt anyone will be able to. Why can't the statists just admit they lost to the capitalists, and leave the concept of IP alone? I agree that the implementation of patents and copyright in the US has to change (patent duration should be domain-specific, and copyright should be much shorter than it is currently), but the concept is sound and NECESSARY for progress.
Well, that's the market for you. If there's no money in something, the resources available to pursue it are going to be greatly limited. This is a reality of human nature, and just has to be accepted.
The only good way to get research done in areas with little intrinsic economic value is through charity: foundations should provide "bounties" for researchers who reach particular milestones.
Probably the reason private charity has been so ineffective in this arena so far is that they hand out the money beforehand---through grants---instead of providing the money to the party who wins, the way the market functions.
The only reason we haven't seen OGG Vorbis support on solid state players is that they would only lose money by doing so, at least for now. This is coming from someone who encodes all of his own CD's as.ogg's.
Alas, I wish there were some incentive for player manufacturers to add the support. There are two ways I can see for this to happen:
(a) Make adding it as trivial as possible. If adding.ogg support required only a few days of extra development time, you'd see it.
(b) Increase the market share that OGG Vorbis has. This one is trickier, mainly because of the slim market that a good, lossy codec serves. What do I mean? Well, audiophiles aren't going to want to listen to any compressed format (though these dinosaurs claim their hissy records are better-sounding than Super Audio CD), and Joe Sixpack isn't going to notice any difference at all between.mp3 and.ogg.
Having done numerous sound quality tests of OGG Vorbis and MP3 on my own equipment, I can say without a doubt that were all things considered equal, OGG would win out. Unfortunately, OGG has had a very late start, and is up against lots of other competitors who are all "good enough" for the average person, so its supporters will have to reduce the barriers to its use before anyone will care.
Re:Chinese Rooms and Software Guys
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 1
I had never before heard Searle's argument, but upon reading a presentation of it, I can state unequivocally that I don't buy it.
I postulate an analogous argument to his
because read(2) can't parse/etc/fstab, it follows that the system consisting of the computer+user can't understand that file.
Basically, the fallacy in Searle's argument is that the intelligence has to be concentrated in one defined "spot." In his case, this is the brain of the person inside the Chinese room. In my case, this is read(2). What both neglect is that no one has proved (or disproved) that intelligence is a point-property rather than an amalgam of unintelligent parts. It would have been equivalent (and equally invalid) for him to say that the room is unintelligent because the hand moving the blocks can't understand Chinese.
I should point out that I don't necessarily believe that digital computers can model human intelligence, but that doesn't make Searle's argument valid.
For truly effective peer-to-peer of popular data, multicast would be most appropriate: in the optimal case, it would produce a rooted minimum spanning tree, whose edge costs are some combination of bandwidth constraints and bandwidth costs.
> In that line of reasoning, a parent could also say
> that "I feel my son is reponsible enough to go
> into a bar and drink." or "I feel my daughter is
> responsible enough to drive after a six pack of
> beer"
The first one is the same. I would, in fact, say that parents should be able to determine if their kids are responsible enough to drink.
However, drinking and driving is _always_ bad, i.e., it doesn't matter how old you are, if you drink, your response time is increased and you pose a clear and present danger to others on the road. NOT the same thing.
How did government ever obtain to the right to tell me how to raise my kids? If I feel my kids are responsible enough to stay at an Internet cafe until 10pm or 11pm or 2am, they should be able to.
This is a presumption of guilt, people. I can understand placing restrictions on people who have already committed crimes---i.e., gang members who've been caught in fights already---but to punish a class of people for the actions of a few is not only immoral, it's unconstitutional.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
No, what's hypocritical is complaining about big government in general when you support big government in one area. The smart person will realize that a group encouraging government intervention in one area, no matter how well intentioned, serves to encourage growth of government in general, usually in ways the same group doesn't like.
Aside: In my case, I would give up getting "for free" all the useful domestic services I now receive (e.g., roads, police) that could just as well be privately-operated and paid-for, in return for taxes slashed to a single percentage point of what they now are. With all that money I'm giving to Uncle Sam and my state government, I could prioritize what's important to _ME_ and allocate resources specifically to those things.
Getting back to my original reply, I'd take corporate entities attempting to place restrictions on me in a natural free market anyday over the situation we have today, limited liability corporations given government-granted limited monopolies. At least in the first case, there'd more likely be competition (any percentage is at least as great as 0%!).
If I might remind you all, we wouldn't be in the SSSCA or DMCA situation in the first place if government didn't have the power to grant such monopolies. Reverse engineering being legal is the "natural" state, and only by abusing their powers have the governments of the world been able to outlaw that. Think about it.
If you are in favor of government stepping in to help your own pet project, don't act so surprised when they step in to help someone else's in a way that removes some of your freedom.
I am very disappointed that you have chosen to lose law-abiding
customers by pressing discs that do not meet the Red Book standard.
Some background information: I encode all of the CD's I purchase as
compressed audio and store them on my hard drive, which can then serve
any of several devices under my own control, including a portable
player, a dedicated digital audio component of my stereo, and my
desktop machine. This provides me with the flexibility to choose
playlists composed of tracks from my entire 700+ disc collection,
which is nearly unlimited compared to a CD changer; and the
convenience of listening to them anywhere in my home or out.
I do not distribute my digital audio to others over peer-to-peer
networks, because I do not believe that Constitutional Fair Use or the
Audio Home Recording Act cover mass distribution of copyrighted
material to strangers. However, your technological solution to the
problem of people violating copyright en masse will have only one
effect: It will irritate many of your law-abiding customers, who want
only the freedom to use the music they purchased as they see fit
within the limits of Fair Use, reducing your sales and revenue.
In particular, it will have _no_ effect on pirates. As long as music
can be heard by human ears, it can be heard by a microphone, so it can
be re-recorded, encoded, and distributed over the same channels in use
today. There is no way for you to stop this, so if no one has told
you yet: adapt your business model to reality.
One way to do this would be to reduce the price of CD's. Like many
people who both consider value and who do not have unlimited funds, I
will not ever pay $18.99 for a CD. It doesn't matter how much I like
the band or want to hear the music, no 74 minutes of digital audio is
worth $19. Hint: I can guarantee you that my CD purchasing would more
than double were prices to be cut in half. $19 is unreasonable. $9
is reasonable.
You may also want to consider distributing unencumbered digital audio
over the web for a small fee. I would pay $0.50-1.00 for a single
track of high-fidelity digital audio (OGG Vorbis at quality level 4.5
is a good benchmark) that I could play on any device at any time
without limitations. I would not pay any price for digital audio with
restricted to a certain number of plays or to a certain device or set
of devices.
Similarly, I would not ever purchase a disc encumbered by similar
restrictions. If you persist in this "copy protection" [sic] plan, you
will lose me and many others as customers. Furthermore, as an Internet DJ
and a member of several online music groups, I will make sure to educate
others about your attacks on their Fair Use rights, and recommend to
the stores in which I shop that they stop stocking your CD's or
clearly mark them as "not Red Book compatible and unlikely to work in
your computer."
Please take this advice seriously: your intended approach will only
alienate your customers and will have _no_ effect on unauthorized
distribution. Digital audio distribution over the Internet is here to
stay, moral or immoral, legal or illegal. You can either adapt your
business model to reality, or fail.
...I would rather have the freedom to tell the big guys to screw off and go write my own free secure system with my buds, than to have to do my business with them or not at all because no one else (read: me, smaller vendors, etc.) can afford to meet the requirements of this law.
Absolutely. That is covered under contract law (mispresentation, fraud, etc.). If you don't like the contract associated with a piece of software, don't use it.
According to the Silmarillion, Men were the second Children of Illuvatar (the creator) and were to be given a special place in His new chorus at the end of the world, an honor that even the Eldar did not receive.
Sorry to be a Tolkien nerd, but I couldn't let that pass... =)
Slashdot Mirror
They are not metalcore. Metalcore describes bands like Meshuggah, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Ebony Tears, etc. I believe the term you want is mallcore.
You do have the right to give money to charity if you want, you know. The problem is when you volunteer other peoples' money. You have no right to do that.
Why? Because the demand is inelastic. When demand for something is inelastic, competition between companies goes up quickly because newcomers know that the demand for the good or service they are about to provide will not disappear suddenly. This increase in competition has the effect of reducing the price.
My friend Bill probably said it best a few months ago in an email to me:
> Contribution to the insurance is proportionnal to
> income, but the service is the same for all.
Oh, wonderful: yet another scheme to soak the rich.
You know, the whole point of insurance is that everyone pays the same but people are reimbursed at different rates (i.e., some peoples' houses will burn down, others won't; someone people will get cancer, others won't.) Why should some people pay more than others for the same good?
Guns don't cause crime. Guns, in fact, prevent crime an order of magnitude more often. Guns are used over half a million times each year to PREVENT violent crimes, and the vast majority of those uses are by citizens exercising their 2nd Amendment rights, not by police.
I tire of this foolishness.
Last thought from my side: if ideas are so easy, I expect Jonas Salk would have come up with the polio vaccine even if he'd decided to pursue some more lucrative occupation, right?
Wake up, man. No one can seriously be this ridiculous.
...I just hope they don't cancel Family Guy, which is much, MUCH funnier. Futurama was always a show hanging onto the coattails of the once-incredible but now-abyssmal Simpsons.
> People share ideas when theres no incentive to sell
> them.
If they have the ideas. Without incentive, fewer ideas will be generated. Money is a good incentive. Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards Men is also an incentive, but not nearly as good. =)
> Competition does not equal innovation, in some
> situations it can help it and in some situations it can
> harm it.
Asserting something doesn't make it so. You got examples?
> Patents do not help people in third worlds at all, they
> cant get venture capital at all, they lack the
> information needed.
Again, asserting something doesn't make it so. Patents do indeed help people in the third world. Perhaps not directly, as they are usually not the ones receiving the patent; but they certainly benefit from the fruits of the patent: an innovative AIDS medication patented by Merck today will lose its patent protection 20 years from now, when the price will presumably drop a significant amount due to price pressure from competing generic manufacturers.
Without that patent, companies like Merck have almost no incentive to research such a medicine, so the third-worlders, instead of reaping the benefits 20 years down the line, NEVER do...
Who are you to decide what is a "better use"? The person who is donating the money is the only one who has the right to determine how he best spends his money. That, my friend, is also a basic tenet of capitalism, and something the statists (those on the left) in America seem to forget.
I'll focus on this one point, because the rest of your message depends on it:
> Millions of people in third world countries dying because of patents on drugs.
I would argue that millions of people all over the world (including in third-world countries) are ALIVE today because of patents on drugs. Patents provide economic incentive for innovation, without which we'd all still be dying from the flu.
I have yet to see anyone rebut this, and I doubt anyone will be able to. Why can't the statists just admit they lost to the capitalists, and leave the concept of IP alone? I agree that the implementation of patents and copyright in the US has to change (patent duration should be domain-specific, and copyright should be much shorter than it is currently), but the concept is sound and NECESSARY for progress.
Well, that's the market for you. If there's no money in something, the resources available to pursue it are going to be greatly limited. This is a reality of human nature, and just has to be accepted.
The only good way to get research done in areas with little intrinsic economic value is through charity: foundations should provide "bounties" for researchers who reach particular milestones.
Probably the reason private charity has been so ineffective in this arena so far is that they hand out the money beforehand---through grants---instead of providing the money to the party who wins, the way the market functions.
That was exactly my point. Right now, it would be more than "a few days' development time" to integrate OGG support. Thanks for being redundant. =)
The only reason we haven't seen OGG Vorbis support on solid state players is that they would only lose money by doing so, at least for now. This is coming from someone who encodes all of his own CD's as .ogg's.
.ogg support required only a few days of extra development time, you'd see it.
.mp3 and .ogg.
Alas, I wish there were some incentive for player manufacturers to add the support. There are two ways I can see for this to happen:
(a) Make adding it as trivial as possible. If adding
(b) Increase the market share that OGG Vorbis has. This one is trickier, mainly because of the slim market that a good, lossy codec serves. What do I mean? Well, audiophiles aren't going to want to listen to any compressed format (though these dinosaurs claim their hissy records are better-sounding than Super Audio CD), and Joe Sixpack isn't going to notice any difference at all between
Having done numerous sound quality tests of OGG Vorbis and MP3 on my own equipment, I can say without a doubt that were all things considered equal, OGG would win out. Unfortunately, OGG has had a very late start, and is up against lots of other competitors who are all "good enough" for the average person, so its supporters will have to reduce the barriers to its use before anyone will care.
I postulate an analogous argument to his
Basically, the fallacy in Searle's argument is that the intelligence has to be concentrated in one defined "spot." In his case, this is the brain of the person inside the Chinese room. In my case, this is read(2). What both neglect is that no one has proved (or disproved) that intelligence is a point-property rather than an amalgam of unintelligent parts. It would have been equivalent (and equally invalid) for him to say that the room is unintelligent because the hand moving the blocks can't understand Chinese.
I should point out that I don't necessarily believe that digital computers can model human intelligence, but that doesn't make Searle's argument valid.
For truly effective peer-to-peer of popular data, multicast would be most appropriate: in the optimal case, it would produce a rooted minimum spanning tree, whose edge costs are some combination of bandwidth constraints and bandwidth costs.
> In that line of reasoning, a parent could also say
> that "I feel my son is reponsible enough to go
> into a bar and drink." or "I feel my daughter is
> responsible enough to drive after a six pack of
> beer"
The first one is the same. I would, in fact, say that parents should be able to determine if their kids are responsible enough to drink.
However, drinking and driving is _always_ bad, i.e., it doesn't matter how old you are, if you drink, your response time is increased and you pose a clear and present danger to others on the road. NOT the same thing.
Kyle
How did government ever obtain to the right to tell me how to raise my kids? If I feel my kids are responsible enough to stay at an Internet cafe until 10pm or 11pm or 2am, they should be able to.
This is a presumption of guilt, people. I can understand placing restrictions on people who have already committed crimes---i.e., gang members who've been caught in fights already---but to punish a class of people for the actions of a few is not only immoral, it's unconstitutional.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
Take a stand against big government: join the Libertarian Party.
No, what's hypocritical is complaining about big government in general when you support big government in one area. The smart person will realize that a group encouraging government intervention in one area, no matter how well intentioned, serves to encourage growth of government in general, usually in ways the same group doesn't like.
Aside: In my case, I would give up getting "for free" all the useful domestic services I now receive (e.g., roads, police) that could just as well be privately-operated and paid-for, in return for taxes slashed to a single percentage point of what they now are. With all that money I'm giving to Uncle Sam and my state government, I could prioritize what's important to _ME_ and allocate resources specifically to those things.
Getting back to my original reply, I'd take corporate entities attempting to place restrictions on me in a natural free market anyday over the situation we have today, limited liability corporations given government-granted limited monopolies. At least in the first case, there'd more likely be competition (any percentage is at least as great as 0%!).
If I might remind you all, we wouldn't be in the SSSCA or DMCA situation in the first place if government didn't have the power to grant such monopolies. Reverse engineering being legal is the "natural" state, and only by abusing their powers have the governments of the world been able to outlaw that. Think about it.
If you are in favor of government stepping in to help your own pet project, don't act so surprised when they step in to help someone else's in a way that removes some of your freedom.
Take a stand against big government: join the Libertarian Party.
Dear Sir/Madam:
I am very disappointed that you have chosen to lose law-abiding
customers by pressing discs that do not meet the Red Book standard.
Some background information: I encode all of the CD's I purchase as
compressed audio and store them on my hard drive, which can then serve
any of several devices under my own control, including a portable
player, a dedicated digital audio component of my stereo, and my
desktop machine. This provides me with the flexibility to choose
playlists composed of tracks from my entire 700+ disc collection,
which is nearly unlimited compared to a CD changer; and the
convenience of listening to them anywhere in my home or out.
I do not distribute my digital audio to others over peer-to-peer
networks, because I do not believe that Constitutional Fair Use or the
Audio Home Recording Act cover mass distribution of copyrighted
material to strangers. However, your technological solution to the
problem of people violating copyright en masse will have only one
effect: It will irritate many of your law-abiding customers, who want
only the freedom to use the music they purchased as they see fit
within the limits of Fair Use, reducing your sales and revenue.
In particular, it will have _no_ effect on pirates. As long as music
can be heard by human ears, it can be heard by a microphone, so it can
be re-recorded, encoded, and distributed over the same channels in use
today. There is no way for you to stop this, so if no one has told
you yet: adapt your business model to reality.
One way to do this would be to reduce the price of CD's. Like many
people who both consider value and who do not have unlimited funds, I
will not ever pay $18.99 for a CD. It doesn't matter how much I like
the band or want to hear the music, no 74 minutes of digital audio is
worth $19. Hint: I can guarantee you that my CD purchasing would more
than double were prices to be cut in half. $19 is unreasonable. $9
is reasonable.
You may also want to consider distributing unencumbered digital audio
over the web for a small fee. I would pay $0.50-1.00 for a single
track of high-fidelity digital audio (OGG Vorbis at quality level 4.5
is a good benchmark) that I could play on any device at any time
without limitations. I would not pay any price for digital audio with
restricted to a certain number of plays or to a certain device or set
of devices.
Similarly, I would not ever purchase a disc encumbered by similar
restrictions. If you persist in this "copy protection" [sic] plan, you
will lose me and many others as customers. Furthermore, as an Internet DJ
and a member of several online music groups, I will make sure to educate
others about your attacks on their Fair Use rights, and recommend to
the stores in which I shop that they stop stocking your CD's or
clearly mark them as "not Red Book compatible and unlikely to work in
your computer."
Please take this advice seriously: your intended approach will only
alienate your customers and will have _no_ effect on unauthorized
distribution. Digital audio distribution over the Internet is here to
stay, moral or immoral, legal or illegal. You can either adapt your
business model to reality, or fail.
Yours Truly,
Kyle Rose
...I would rather have the freedom to tell the big guys to screw off and go write my own free secure system with my buds, than to have to do my business with them or not at all because no one else (read: me, smaller vendors, etc.) can afford to meet the requirements of this law.
n/p
Absolutely. That is covered under contract law (mispresentation, fraud, etc.). If you don't like the contract associated with a piece of software, don't use it.
Be careful what powers you give to the government.
According to the Silmarillion, Men were the second Children of Illuvatar (the creator) and were to be given a special place in His new chorus at the end of the world, an honor that even the Eldar did not receive.
Sorry to be a Tolkien nerd, but I couldn't let that pass... =)