I can't believe people are still trotting out this crap argument thinking it's clever or rational.
I am in full agreement.
I'm not sure what I find more bizarre: when people independently reinvent Pascal's Wager, and think that they alone have stumbled across some wonderful new flawless reason for believing in (their) god - or when people seem educated enough to know that it's called Pascal's Wager, and know how to look it up on the Internet, but somehow seemed to have completely missed the explanation of the gaping flaws in it.
Some things are clear to a man's conscious. I truly believe that. Child Porn? Morally wrong. Murder? Morally wrong. Stealing? Morally wrong.
"Murder" means immoral killing, so it's wrong by definition - that's a tautology. Is killing always morally wrong? Few would agree with that - it's far from an absolute.
Few would argue about child porn, but again, that does not make it absolute, as the definition is not absolute: is a sexual image of a 17 year old wrong (even where it's legal to have sex at 16)? What about two 15 year olds in a relationship who take a private photo? What about a 15 year old who takes a photo of him or herself, or poses topless on a webcam without any encouragement to do so? What counts as child porn (as opposed to simply a nude child)? No, I don't think that child porn (of under 16, at least) should be legal, but I don't think that one can say there is an absolute way of telling what images are wrong.
I'm sure I could think up cases where people might not say stealing is always wrong, such as significant inquality in wealth, or when someone needs to steal something small to survive, or stealing off of someone to prevent them from doing harm.
Sure, I don't think that any standard of morality is right just because someone thinks it's right - but that doesn't mean that morality is absolute. I don't think any morality is absolute.
What if I have my own island and I breed humans for food. Is that wrong? If so then why? it doesn't hurt _you_
See this relativist shit is too much for me. Inside every man's head (the sane ones) is a morality calling out that says "this is WRONG".
It's wrong because it hurts them. And not because of some magical voice inside your head.
Yes, if new ethical questions are raised by new technology, they should be answered. But this is done by applying reasoning. The answer is not to ban scientific research because your magic voice doesn't have an answer for it.
But simple risk analysis tells you that the lottery isn't worth playing in the first place!
I'm just curious what your criteria for playing are. Okay, so the other poster wasn't serious, but imagine a hypothetical situation where that bet was offered and was just as guaranteed as the real lottery - would you play?
If not, what's the difference? It can't be that it has better odds, because not playing the lottery at all has better odds still.
Personally I wouldn't play the lottery if I was allowed a free ticket. At an expected win of approximately 45p (for the UK one), I couldn't be bothered walking down to the shops for it, just as I don't bother bending down to pick up a discarded penny.
Mega Millions pays out fifty times your million (currently, the number changes) dollars, costs one dollar to join, and has odds of one in 175,711,536.
A sure win!
You're missing the point. Your argument was that a lottery was worth playing as long as the chance of winning was non-zero. Therefore that argument applies for his lottery also.
If you're now retreating to a claim that a lottery is only worth playing if the odds are sufficiently good, then at what point does this occur?
Oh, another thing. What you're describing is a variation on a numbers racket. It's illegal for private citizens to do. Unless you're the Prime Minister of Norway or something, of course.
Depends on the laws of where he lives. And what has this got to do with whether it's worth playing a lottery?
Indeed, the fact that we criminalise individuals setting up lotteries in order to protect them, whilst allowing the state to do the same thing to people, shows how stupid and inconsistent the whole thing is.
Should we bring back everything popular from eight years ago? How about floppy discs?
Some things should be left in the past. Emailing pictures to people is more sensible than MMS.
Flawed analogy - no one has floppy discs anymore, and they have alternative means to receive information. But there are still many phones out there that do MMS, but don't support email with attachments (another point is what if you have someone's number, but not their email?)
A better analogy would be not supporting floppy drives when they were still the most common method for transferring data, and for many there weren't yet any alternatives. But wait - Apple did that too (and for some reason got credited for it... and they weren't first with it, anyway, by several years).
Or for another analogy, how about a computer dropping support for USB? After all, that's more than 8 years old, so it must be useless now, right? Perhaps the Iphone should drop support for making phone calls too, after all, that's been around for 8 years I believe.
Copy & paste is a different matter, but even there you are not forward thinking...
Since I copy and pasted several times to write this post, how should I be forward thinking?
Sure, but the Iphone is only one phone in a massive market, many of which are capable of video calls. If that's the aim, then we should be hyping stories for every capable phone out there, in an attempt to increase the demand.
It's not commonly used, because no one wants to get dressed up, or worry about what they look like, on a phone. It's also a hassle to worry about how you're holding and pointing the camera. For those that do, webcams are usually a better and simpler solution.
I'm confused as to what your point is really - we're now crediting Apple with "firsts" for things that not only are not first, but it hasn't even done, based on some assumption it'll magically make it popular?
But if video calling is deemed a minor feature that no one cares about, then that's even less reason why this story should be news.
I'm also yet to send an mms though, so maybe I'm technically retarded, but it always made more sense to email photos
That means you're restricted to cases where your recipient can access email with attachments. Having the option of MMS gives you much wider compatibility.
Hear, hear. I'm wondering why this is even news - I don't recall a Slashdot article when my dirt cheap years old Motorola V980 came out with video recording and video calls. Will we get another article for when Apple is planning to add copy and paste? Tag this Slashvertisement, I say.
(I'm also amused that the usual response to lacking these features, including video, is "Why would I want to do that?" Now that Apple is planning it, suddenly it's the best thing ever, and no doubt it'll be touted as an Apple first, because "it does it better, honest, you'll just have to take my word for it".)
You're unaware that GB means 10^9 bytes while others think it should mean 2^30 bytes?
No, I'm aware that some people think it should mean 10^9 bytes while others think it should mean 2^30 bytes. There's no right answer - it's a matter of definition. The Wikipedia link you cite clearly states "they have seen limited adoption in the real world; the use of K (or k), M and G as binary multipliers when denoting the capacity of solidstate memory like random access memory (RAM) remains a ubiquitous industry practice" - and let's face it, the only reason hard drive manufacturers adopted it was because it makes the numbers look bigger. Your claim that the term was "hijacked" is also incorrect - again, as your own link shows, the term gigabyte traditionally meant 2^30, and it was only later in 1999 that an organisation decided to redefine it.
If you want to talk about your computer having so many "gibibytes", and claim that the industry, including major operating systems, have got it wrong, then good luck to you if that makes you feel superior. But I fail to see what on earth this has to do with Gigawatt - where did anyone mention gigabyte?
Those howling that it should mean 2^30 bytes are actually wrong. In every case.
The only one "howling" here is you. No one else brought this off-topic discussion up.
Giga means 10^9 numerically, by definition. Alas, we are still fighting against recent attempts to hijack it to a new and wrong numerical definition.
I can't see where anyone in this thread has said otherwise, nor am I aware of any attempts to redefine "Giga" as an SI prefix to mean anything else.
(If you mean as in Gigabyte, then that's a completely different issue, since byte is not an SI unit. Unfortunately we are fighting against recent attempts to hijack it to a new and wrong numerical definition, simply to make it the same as the usage for SI units.)
If you ignore the threats -- which eventually progress to 24pt font on red paper in a red envelope -- they eventually cycle and you're back to the initial polite-ish reminder (I ignored them all when I had no TV).
No one really likes DRM however there is little effort on the Anti-DRM Camp to come up with a solution that fixes the companies problem, of illegal piracy, or sharing a copy with your friends.
This is an irrelevant point. DRM doesn't fix the problem of piracy either (and just as likely encourages it). It's not up to other people to fix companies' problems. Just because a perfect magic solution doesn't exist, this has nothing to do with DRM being awful.
Any of the disadvantages of DRM can be considered a trade off for reducing piracy
Evidence?
I think the goal for anti-DRM Groups is to find a way to fight and reduce piracy.
I think that should be the goal for the DRM groups - i.e., they should be anti-piracy, not pro-DRM.
and ministers introducing new bills have to declare that they are compatible with convention rights before they proceed
That's not hard - they just write on the bill "We believe the law to be compatible with convention rights". They can then justify that with whatever weak arguments they like - e.g., "Think Of The Children" and so on.
Intrestingly the European Human Rights act guarantees an individual's right to privacy - as far as I know the U.K. have not officailly signed-up to it yet.
They are (under the Human Rights Act). However, that doesn't stop them passing any laws. The ECHR unfortunately has get-out clauses such as "for the protection of morals". And even when a court does rule a law to be illegal under the ECHR, it's not clear what changes. E.g., recently the act of collecting and retaining fingerprints and DNA from anyone arrested (even if not convicted of a crime) was ruled unlawful, but AFAIK it's not changed. The Government attitude is that they might look at it again.
The term 'tv tax' is just how us brits jokingly refer to the BBC licence fee, because of the special laws and allowances that have sprung up since it began. It's not actually a tax at all, it's an annual payment of about £150 that is paid to the BBC, which has independance from the government.
It may be a licence, but I think it's perfectly reasonable to also refer to it as a tax, since it is legally compulsory, and that is enforced by the Government. But yes, in a way it's worse than a tax, as it doesn't support the Government, but a private company.
The stupidest thing is that whilst people who can't see at all have to pay £69.75, a non-blind person with a black and white TV only has to pay £47... I can just imagine blind people having to get a black and white TV, just to get a lower fee!
Calling the whole industry a failure also groups in Indy artists to that same group as well as people like Reznor or Radio Head.
You mean the ones releasing material for free?
I think it's clear from the context that it wasn't referring to these groups. In fact, nowhere in the summary does it even say "whole industry" - you're making it up.
[trying again as my comment got lost for some reason]
How does that work with, for example, a 19 inch LCD with a built in tv tuner?
You need one. As does watching TV over the internet.
It's not like anyone can run a truck down the street snooping for television sets.
They resort to scaremongering, fraudulent threats and harrassment to encourage people to pay up. Even if you don't need a licence - they just assume anyone without one is breaking the law.
Yes, its common knowledge that there is a correlation, but are they in anyway meaningfully linked.
The argument put forward by the pro-RIAA camp is that downloading leads to lost sales. The burden is upon them to prove that claim. Even if it's simply that "the people who are most interested in music download and buy the most", it shows that their downloading isn't causing them to lose interest in buying music.
If you go to BMW and photocopy the blueprints for their latest engine
But that's not stealing either - that's a trade secrets issue (as well as possibly requiring illegal methods to get access to it in the first place). If however they published the blueprints, then no, I don't think it would be equivalent to stealing if people made copies of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe people are still trotting out this crap argument thinking it's clever or rational.
I am in full agreement.
I'm not sure what I find more bizarre: when people independently reinvent Pascal's Wager, and think that they alone have stumbled across some wonderful new flawless reason for believing in (their) god - or when people seem educated enough to know that it's called Pascal's Wager, and know how to look it up on the Internet, but somehow seemed to have completely missed the explanation of the gaping flaws in it.
Some things are clear to a man's conscious. I truly believe that. Child Porn? Morally wrong. Murder? Morally wrong. Stealing? Morally wrong.
"Murder" means immoral killing, so it's wrong by definition - that's a tautology. Is killing always morally wrong? Few would agree with that - it's far from an absolute.
Few would argue about child porn, but again, that does not make it absolute, as the definition is not absolute: is a sexual image of a 17 year old wrong (even where it's legal to have sex at 16)? What about two 15 year olds in a relationship who take a private photo? What about a 15 year old who takes a photo of him or herself, or poses topless on a webcam without any encouragement to do so? What counts as child porn (as opposed to simply a nude child)? No, I don't think that child porn (of under 16, at least) should be legal, but I don't think that one can say there is an absolute way of telling what images are wrong.
I'm sure I could think up cases where people might not say stealing is always wrong, such as significant inquality in wealth, or when someone needs to steal something small to survive, or stealing off of someone to prevent them from doing harm.
Sure, I don't think that any standard of morality is right just because someone thinks it's right - but that doesn't mean that morality is absolute. I don't think any morality is absolute.
What if I have my own island and I breed humans for food. Is that wrong? If so then why? it doesn't hurt _you_
See this relativist shit is too much for me. Inside every man's head (the sane ones) is a morality calling out that says "this is WRONG".
It's wrong because it hurts them. And not because of some magical voice inside your head.
Yes, if new ethical questions are raised by new technology, they should be answered. But this is done by applying reasoning. The answer is not to ban scientific research because your magic voice doesn't have an answer for it.
But simple risk analysis tells you that the lottery isn't worth playing in the first place!
I'm just curious what your criteria for playing are. Okay, so the other poster wasn't serious, but imagine a hypothetical situation where that bet was offered and was just as guaranteed as the real lottery - would you play?
If not, what's the difference? It can't be that it has better odds, because not playing the lottery at all has better odds still.
Personally I wouldn't play the lottery if I was allowed a free ticket. At an expected win of approximately 45p (for the UK one), I couldn't be bothered walking down to the shops for it, just as I don't bother bending down to pick up a discarded penny.
Mega Millions pays out fifty times your million (currently, the number changes) dollars, costs one dollar to join, and has odds of one in 175,711,536.
A sure win!
You're missing the point. Your argument was that a lottery was worth playing as long as the chance of winning was non-zero. Therefore that argument applies for his lottery also.
If you're now retreating to a claim that a lottery is only worth playing if the odds are sufficiently good, then at what point does this occur?
Oh, another thing. What you're describing is a variation on a numbers racket. It's illegal for private citizens to do. Unless you're the Prime Minister of Norway or something, of course.
Depends on the laws of where he lives. And what has this got to do with whether it's worth playing a lottery?
Indeed, the fact that we criminalise individuals setting up lotteries in order to protect them, whilst allowing the state to do the same thing to people, shows how stupid and inconsistent the whole thing is.
Whilst I think the dig at Vista in the summary was probably out of place, it sounds like someone has an axe to grind here.
his favorite pastimes are blocking entire US states for being sockpuppets of banned user
Since we're talking Wikipedia - citation needed?
Should we bring back everything popular from eight years ago? How about floppy discs?
Some things should be left in the past. Emailing pictures to people is more sensible than MMS.
Flawed analogy - no one has floppy discs anymore, and they have alternative means to receive information. But there are still many phones out there that do MMS, but don't support email with attachments (another point is what if you have someone's number, but not their email?)
A better analogy would be not supporting floppy drives when they were still the most common method for transferring data, and for many there weren't yet any alternatives. But wait - Apple did that too (and for some reason got credited for it ... and they weren't first with it, anyway, by several years).
Or for another analogy, how about a computer dropping support for USB? After all, that's more than 8 years old, so it must be useless now, right? Perhaps the Iphone should drop support for making phone calls too, after all, that's been around for 8 years I believe.
Copy & paste is a different matter, but even there you are not forward thinking...
Since I copy and pasted several times to write this post, how should I be forward thinking?
Sure, but the Iphone is only one phone in a massive market, many of which are capable of video calls. If that's the aim, then we should be hyping stories for every capable phone out there, in an attempt to increase the demand.
It's not commonly used, because no one wants to get dressed up, or worry about what they look like, on a phone. It's also a hassle to worry about how you're holding and pointing the camera. For those that do, webcams are usually a better and simpler solution.
I'm confused as to what your point is really - we're now crediting Apple with "firsts" for things that not only are not first, but it hasn't even done, based on some assumption it'll magically make it popular?
But if video calling is deemed a minor feature that no one cares about, then that's even less reason why this story should be news.
I'm also yet to send an mms though, so maybe I'm technically retarded, but it always made more sense to email photos
That means you're restricted to cases where your recipient can access email with attachments. Having the option of MMS gives you much wider compatibility.
Hear, hear. I'm wondering why this is even news - I don't recall a Slashdot article when my dirt cheap years old Motorola V980 came out with video recording and video calls. Will we get another article for when Apple is planning to add copy and paste? Tag this Slashvertisement, I say.
(I'm also amused that the usual response to lacking these features, including video, is "Why would I want to do that?" Now that Apple is planning it, suddenly it's the best thing ever, and no doubt it'll be touted as an Apple first, because "it does it better, honest, you'll just have to take my word for it".)
You're unaware that GB means 10^9 bytes while others think it should mean 2^30 bytes?
No, I'm aware that some people think it should mean 10^9 bytes while others think it should mean 2^30 bytes. There's no right answer - it's a matter of definition. The Wikipedia link you cite clearly states "they have seen limited adoption in the real world; the use of K (or k), M and G as binary multipliers when denoting the capacity of solidstate memory like random access memory (RAM) remains a ubiquitous industry practice" - and let's face it, the only reason hard drive manufacturers adopted it was because it makes the numbers look bigger. Your claim that the term was "hijacked" is also incorrect - again, as your own link shows, the term gigabyte traditionally meant 2^30, and it was only later in 1999 that an organisation decided to redefine it.
If you want to talk about your computer having so many "gibibytes", and claim that the industry, including major operating systems, have got it wrong, then good luck to you if that makes you feel superior. But I fail to see what on earth this has to do with Gigawatt - where did anyone mention gigabyte?
Those howling that it should mean 2^30 bytes are actually wrong. In every case.
The only one "howling" here is you. No one else brought this off-topic discussion up.
Giga means 10^9 numerically, by definition. Alas, we are still fighting against recent attempts to hijack it to a new and wrong numerical definition.
I can't see where anyone in this thread has said otherwise, nor am I aware of any attempts to redefine "Giga" as an SI prefix to mean anything else.
(If you mean as in Gigabyte, then that's a completely different issue, since byte is not an SI unit. Unfortunately we are fighting against recent attempts to hijack it to a new and wrong numerical definition, simply to make it the same as the usage for SI units.)
Watching TV on the internet does not need a license. It's on the website if you care enough to check.
If watching material on the Internet at the same time as it is broadcasted as TV, then you need a licence. See http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/information/index.jsp .
If you ignore the threats -- which eventually progress to 24pt font on red paper in a red envelope -- they eventually cycle and you're back to the initial polite-ish reminder (I ignored them all when I had no TV).
Indeed - this website is quite amusing :)
No one really likes DRM however there is little effort on the Anti-DRM Camp to come up with a solution that fixes the companies problem, of illegal piracy, or sharing a copy with your friends.
This is an irrelevant point. DRM doesn't fix the problem of piracy either (and just as likely encourages it). It's not up to other people to fix companies' problems. Just because a perfect magic solution doesn't exist, this has nothing to do with DRM being awful.
Any of the disadvantages of DRM can be considered a trade off for reducing piracy
Evidence?
I think the goal for anti-DRM Groups is to find a way to fight and reduce piracy.
I think that should be the goal for the DRM groups - i.e., they should be anti-piracy, not pro-DRM.
They're not diddling the goverment out of £40 a week, they screwing *me* out of it.
You pay for the billions given to the banks too.
I'm not saying money given to the banks was right or wrong, but your point doesn't invalidate his argument.
And similarly, if the music industry wants to take money off of people, it should wait until they buy it, rather than stealing the money from them.
That's the point that is referred to as a failed business model - not the fact that some people might copy the music.
and ministers introducing new bills have to declare that they are compatible with convention rights before they proceed
That's not hard - they just write on the bill "We believe the law to be compatible with convention rights". They can then justify that with whatever weak arguments they like - e.g., "Think Of The Children" and so on.
Intrestingly the European Human Rights act guarantees an individual's right to privacy - as far as I know the U.K. have not officailly signed-up to it yet.
They are (under the Human Rights Act). However, that doesn't stop them passing any laws. The ECHR unfortunately has get-out clauses such as "for the protection of morals". And even when a court does rule a law to be illegal under the ECHR, it's not clear what changes. E.g., recently the act of collecting and retaining fingerprints and DNA from anyone arrested (even if not convicted of a crime) was ruled unlawful, but AFAIK it's not changed. The Government attitude is that they might look at it again.
The term 'tv tax' is just how us brits jokingly refer to the BBC licence fee, because of the special laws and allowances that have sprung up since it began. It's not actually a tax at all, it's an annual payment of about £150 that is paid to the BBC, which has independance from the government.
It may be a licence, but I think it's perfectly reasonable to also refer to it as a tax, since it is legally compulsory, and that is enforced by the Government. But yes, in a way it's worse than a tax, as it doesn't support the Government, but a private company.
You get 50% off if you're blind.
It's very generous of them, isn't it!
The stupidest thing is that whilst people who can't see at all have to pay £69.75, a non-blind person with a black and white TV only has to pay £47... I can just imagine blind people having to get a black and white TV, just to get a lower fee!
Calling the whole industry a failure also groups in Indy artists to that same group as well as people like Reznor or Radio Head.
You mean the ones releasing material for free?
I think it's clear from the context that it wasn't referring to these groups. In fact, nowhere in the summary does it even say "whole industry" - you're making it up.
[trying again as my comment got lost for some reason]
How does that work with, for example, a 19 inch LCD with a built in tv tuner?
You need one. As does watching TV over the internet.
It's not like anyone can run a truck down the street snooping for television sets.
They resort to scaremongering, fraudulent threats and harrassment to encourage people to pay up. Even if you don't need a licence - they just assume anyone without one is breaking the law.
Yes, its common knowledge that there is a correlation, but are they in anyway meaningfully linked.
The argument put forward by the pro-RIAA camp is that downloading leads to lost sales. The burden is upon them to prove that claim. Even if it's simply that "the people who are most interested in music download and buy the most", it shows that their downloading isn't causing them to lose interest in buying music.
If you go to BMW and photocopy the blueprints for their latest engine
But that's not stealing either - that's a trade secrets issue (as well as possibly requiring illegal methods to get access to it in the first place). If however they published the blueprints, then no, I don't think it would be equivalent to stealing if people made copies of it.