Apparently you've never lived in a city whose FM radio band was dominated by Clear Channel.
So you think Clear Channel has monopolized the radio spectrum?
My microwave!
Or when all four major U.S. cellular carriers raised their SMS pricing from 10 cents to send and 10 cents to receive to 20 cents to send and 20 cents to receive, in near lockstep.
Monopoly doesn't mean Quadropoly. Rather nice how all those cellular monopolies offer all these choices like unlimited texting, huh?
The scarcity of radio spectrum would not result in a single radio broadcast corporation monopolizing the spectrum.
What are you basing that assertion on?
Ever hear of pirate radio? Do you understand that broadcast power falls off with the square of the distance?
How do you envision a monopoly arising from the scarcity of the radio spectrum, when all sorts of other scarce resources do not create monopolies?
Who's to say the "steady state equilibrium" wouldn't be the one guy with the most powerful transmitter drowning out every other signal?
Too big a country, and Inverse Square Law for radio broadcast. How much do you think it costs to put down the most powerful transmitterS across the entire country? How much do you think it costs to continually run it at a rate that will drown out any potential competition? Don't you think the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in at some point?
I submit it is easier to create a cable monopoly than a radio monopoly due to its higher barriers to entry. Building a transmitter is far easier than digging up a bunch of land to lay down cable. And we see that cable monopolies rely on government enforcement to actually have a monopoly.
Don't get me wrong. I am in no way saying that government granted monopolies are good or desirable. I was merely trying to point out it was possible for monopolies to form without a specific government mandate.
Yet, no one can ever point to a single "natural monopoly" actually becoming a monopoly "naturally".
"natural monopoly" is really just an argument that we should create a government monopoly because it's more efficient than the alternative. Perhaps. But monopolies are not a natural phenomenon. The nature of Nature is competition and ecological niches.
He claimed to be a son of God. And he also said "You are ALL sons of God.", unless the Aramaic was improperly translated, and it should be children of God.
Do you agree with the overall point, that Jesus claimed to be communicating things from God?
Then religous people made him into "THE son of God", and nobody else has a claim. But that wasn't what J.C. claimed.
If you ignore how often contemporary Jewish religious authorities tried to stone him for blasphemy, or how his disciples understood it that way.
Depends what you mean by enforce I guess. eg there is a limited radio broadcast spectrum. That's not government enforced, that just physics. If everyone just broadcast indiscriminately on whatever spectrum they felt like signal interference would render it useless.
The scarcity of a natural resource does not cause a monopoly to naturally occur. The scarcity of radio spectrum would not result in a single radio broadcast corporation monopolizing the spectrum.
Now, if it wasn't regulated, there would be some chaos - but the steady state equilibrium result may not be all that bad.
Even if you removed all government regulation from building cable networks (which would in practice be next to impossible to do, but for the sake of argument) you'd still never see 27 different cable providers running wires into your house because it's simply not cost effective to duplicate that infrastructure.
But you don't need to see 27 different cable providers to see any benefit from competition. Just more than one supplier aiming to meet the demand.
As for duplication; that assumes that each cable company wants to string their own set of wires. Their desire for profit and the high costs of this method would naturally push them to find other methods - either make the homeowners pay for and own it; or to rent/share with other companies.
The fact that many are unhappy with cable companies and desire more competition shows that granting them government monopolies has downsides. Do you think the US would be better off if Google Fiber efforts were banned because "natural monopoly" and "duplication" and it might not be cost effective?
Take cable - natural monopoly? Except it relies on government enforcement to create the actual monopoly. And even then, there are alternatives - DirectTV, fiber-based Internet video streaming, disc-based, public broadcast... There's more than one way to skin a cat for every technical problem.
Natural monopolies aren't all that monopolistic. It may be more efficient if they were regulated in certain ways; but then you have to accept that the downsides are linked to regulation, not just the "natural" monopoly.
What does this have to do with the point that Christians can objectively point to their religious history and say that their god has been communicating with his creation?
If Jesus exists and was who he claimed to be - would his existence and teaching represent a creator communicating to his creation?
Can you objectively describe that as a creator refusing to communicate?
How do we know this man Jesus wasn't just some nutcase ?
Not relevant to the point, which is that the religious can point to objective people, events, and artifacts as a creator communicating to his creation.
But to answer the question, you can also study what Jesus is said to have taught, and evaluate if they sound like the ravings of a madman.
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us.
Have you ever heard of this man called Jesus? Preached in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, claimed to be God, started a major world religion which formed a foundation for modern Western Civilization?
You know, the guy whose birth-year is the basis for the world's year numbering system? You've surely heard of him. Do you know his religion is organized around a book that claims to be God's communication to man?
Even if you don't believe that his religion is true, that is not the same as the purported creator refusing to communicate, or the communication being un-observable. The claimed attempts of communications are right there.
For a party that decries government monopolies in other sectors, they don't seem to understand that monopolies of ALL kinds are dangerous in their own ways.
What understanding are you trying to add here?
You've just complained about municipally (government) granted monopolies. Who else has that power to restrict the competition?
The Internet is the content (data/message/letter). The network is the transport (medium/postal service).
Someday, you may understand the difference.
"The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide. It is a network of networks..."
The InterNET is a network. If you think otherwise, do you think you can download "the Internet" to your computer? The Internet is not a message. It is not a set of data. It is the global communications system. It is the medium. You are confusing Internet content with the Internet.
I suggest you drop the condescension.
And, there's a difference between "internet" and "Internet."
4 references to "Internet", and you single out 1 instance where it wasn't capitalized. You're really grasping at straws when you're picking on typos on teh internetz.
The phrase 'taking [...]'s name in vain" is a useful way to emphasize that you think somebody is misusing a reference to something. I didn't really need to tell you that, did I?
It's linked to the idea of blasphemy and profanity, which is related to some idea/object being sacred. One does not blaspheme feces, for example.
The only way you make Science sacred is by elevating it into its own religion... which it is quite unsuited for.
I'm not concerned that you're disrespecting some other religion out there. I'm wondering if you recognize those phrases treat science as its own religion. Which makes your contrast of science with religion nonsensical, because science was grouped into the set of religions.
Makes as much sense as to say, "Unlike fruit, apples are tasty and good for you." Nonsense.
Don't blame the science - this is about taking science's name in vain and claiming something is proven when science has always been very up front about the limitations in what, for want of a better word, is called current knowledge.
When did science become the deity of a religion where its name can be taken in vain and it has agency that men are to respect?
We already have a working example: The human brain. So, of course it is possible, unless you believe that the human mind is based on some sort of magic.
So in your opinion, the human brain has made improvements to itself at an exponential rate?
Are you talking about individual human brains or humans as a whole? Because the former results in senile old people, while DNA doesn't work that way.
Sure. Did a the flood that Noah allegedly built an ark for actually occur? A huge global flood would leave geologic evidence that would be observable even today.
It would. And there are people who interpret geological evidence such as fossils and rock layers supporting a global flood.
You should note, however, that these are interpretations, and whether FOR or AGAINST they are not science. There's no control group you can run an experiment at the scales involved. We don't have a spare earth we can terraform and observe for a million years to confirm/disprove competing hypotheses on what actually happened.
Not every historical claim can be tested by science but a great many can.
Actually, none can. You can't experiment on the past. You could fail to replicate a historical event - but that mainly says that *you* failed with your existing technology and chosen solution - it doesn't prove that the past did not happen.
Can you build a scientific experiment to prove George Washington was president? That Julius Caeser existed? That the US fought the Battle of Midway?
You can find artifacts and documents that support those historical facts, but that's not scientific evidence. You can perform scientific experiments on the artifacts/documents to estimate their age, to evaluate their credibility as historical evidence, but that is not using science to test historical claims.
You use historical evidence, not scientific evidence, to test historical claims. Some scientific evidence can serve as historical evidence, but science is an inappropriate tool to determine what happened in the past.
There's a relationship, but like all commodities it's more complicated than that. But the futures markets and all sorts of stuff completely unrelated to supply and demand also are huge factors.
Isn't the futures market just a set of predictions on future supply/demand? So it's not completely unrelated, but perhaps prone to large errors. (since predicting the future is a risky business)
Unsurprisingly most of these claims regarding god turn out to be made up nonsense when looked at objectively or have been so twisted from the actual facts as to be effectively unrecognizable from what actually occurred.
Could you give an example? When you talk about "actual facts" and "what actually occurred", you sound like you're talking about past events.
That is indeed true. However atheism is essentially a null hypothesis. It makes FAR more sense, in the absence of credible evidence, to believe that there is no "god(s)" than to by default in a theist position.
The default answer is "I don't know", not "I believe not". Saying we must believe there is no god by default is begging the question.
However, we exist and observe ourselves and value reason and truth - which is evidence in favor of the existence of $DIETY. A further evaluation of various human religions could further narrow down the likely true options.
This dude falls for the old trap that he doesn't understand something, therefore "God did it". Personal incredulity
Understanding what a low probability event is does not mean a lack of understanding.
Most people have no idea how cell phones work. Does that mean God made cell phones?
Wrong analogy. Can cell phones assemble themselves through random events, undirected by outside forces?
When you see a cell-phone, you don't think, "Neat accident!" You expect that some other human being designed and built it.
When it comes to a human being, we're order of magnitude more complex than the cell-phone, with correspondingly more capabilities. Yet somehow we're supposed to believe that the human being is a lucky accident, even as we acknowledge the cellphone to be an intelligently designed system.
Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. There is a finite amounts of it. Every human takes away from that finite amount, the energy need to make that human survive comes from that amount, and any additional amount used to make their life better comes from that amount. The more people, the less extra that can be used purely for increased standard of living. At some point you just have a bunch of people and the resources to keep them alive. There is nothing left to make them happy.
I've already addressed the finite matter point - one trillion, one googol - those are both finite numbers; but are large enough to boggle human imagination.
It's plausible that there's some point where earth's resources are the bottleneck for a human standard of living, but you have not demonstrated that we are anywhere close to that point.
We are the most valuable resource of all.
Source?
It's self-evidently true. You're posting on Slashdot, which was built by people, through a computer, which was built by people, over the Internet, which was built by people, using electricity generated by a power plant, which was built by people.
Notice a pattern there? People create. People design. People build. People figure out how to collect raw materials and finish it into the wide variety of products that make modern life prosperous and comfortable.
If you can't figure out that people are immensely valuable - go out into the wilderness and live off your own efforts. Civilization exists because it has people who build it up and maintain it. Take away the people, you don't get to enjoy civilization anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you've never lived in a city whose FM radio band was dominated by Clear Channel.
So you think Clear Channel has monopolized the radio spectrum?
My microwave!
Or when all four major U.S. cellular carriers raised their SMS pricing from 10 cents to send and 10 cents to receive to 20 cents to send and 20 cents to receive, in near lockstep.
Monopoly doesn't mean Quadropoly. Rather nice how all those cellular monopolies offer all these choices like unlimited texting, huh?
The scarcity of radio spectrum would not result in a single radio broadcast corporation monopolizing the spectrum.
What are you basing that assertion on?
Ever hear of pirate radio? Do you understand that broadcast power falls off with the square of the distance?
How do you envision a monopoly arising from the scarcity of the radio spectrum, when all sorts of other scarce resources do not create monopolies?
Who's to say the "steady state equilibrium" wouldn't be the one guy with the most powerful transmitter drowning out every other signal?
Too big a country, and Inverse Square Law for radio broadcast. How much do you think it costs to put down the most powerful transmitterS across the entire country? How much do you think it costs to continually run it at a rate that will drown out any potential competition? Don't you think the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in at some point?
I submit it is easier to create a cable monopoly than a radio monopoly due to its higher barriers to entry. Building a transmitter is far easier than digging up a bunch of land to lay down cable. And we see that cable monopolies rely on government enforcement to actually have a monopoly.
Don't get me wrong. I am in no way saying that government granted monopolies are good or desirable. I was merely trying to point out it was possible for monopolies to form without a specific government mandate.
Yet, no one can ever point to a single "natural monopoly" actually becoming a monopoly "naturally".
"natural monopoly" is really just an argument that we should create a government monopoly because it's more efficient than the alternative. Perhaps. But monopolies are not a natural phenomenon. The nature of Nature is competition and ecological niches.
He claimed to be a son of God. And he also said "You are ALL sons of God.", unless the Aramaic was improperly translated, and it should be children of God.
Do you agree with the overall point, that Jesus claimed to be communicating things from God?
Then religous people made him into "THE son of God", and nobody else has a claim. But that wasn't what J.C. claimed.
If you ignore how often contemporary Jewish religious authorities tried to stone him for blasphemy, or how his disciples understood it that way.
Depends what you mean by enforce I guess. eg there is a limited radio broadcast spectrum. That's not government enforced, that just physics. If everyone just broadcast indiscriminately on whatever spectrum they felt like signal interference would render it useless.
The scarcity of a natural resource does not cause a monopoly to naturally occur. The scarcity of radio spectrum would not result in a single radio broadcast corporation monopolizing the spectrum.
Now, if it wasn't regulated, there would be some chaos - but the steady state equilibrium result may not be all that bad.
Even if you removed all government regulation from building cable networks (which would in practice be next to impossible to do, but for the sake of argument) you'd still never see 27 different cable providers running wires into your house because it's simply not cost effective to duplicate that infrastructure.
But you don't need to see 27 different cable providers to see any benefit from competition. Just more than one supplier aiming to meet the demand.
As for duplication; that assumes that each cable company wants to string their own set of wires. Their desire for profit and the high costs of this method would naturally push them to find other methods - either make the homeowners pay for and own it; or to rent/share with other companies.
The fact that many are unhappy with cable companies and desire more competition shows that granting them government monopolies has downsides. Do you think the US would be better off if Google Fiber efforts were banned because "natural monopoly" and "duplication" and it might not be cost effective?
The laws of physics?
Physics doesn't enforce monopolies.
Take cable - natural monopoly? Except it relies on government enforcement to create the actual monopoly. And even then, there are alternatives - DirectTV, fiber-based Internet video streaming, disc-based, public broadcast ... There's more than one way to skin a cat for every technical problem.
Natural monopolies aren't all that monopolistic. It may be more efficient if they were regulated in certain ways; but then you have to accept that the downsides are linked to regulation, not just the "natural" monopoly.
What does this have to do with the point that Christians can objectively point to their religious history and say that their god has been communicating with his creation?
If Jesus exists and was who he claimed to be - would his existence and teaching represent a creator communicating to his creation?
Can you objectively describe that as a creator refusing to communicate?
How do we know this man Jesus wasn't just some nutcase ?
Not relevant to the point, which is that the religious can point to objective people, events, and artifacts as a creator communicating to his creation.
But to answer the question, you can also study what Jesus is said to have taught, and evaluate if they sound like the ravings of a madman.
My God, it's full of GOTOs!
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us.
Have you ever heard of this man called Jesus? Preached in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, claimed to be God, started a major world religion which formed a foundation for modern Western Civilization?
You know, the guy whose birth-year is the basis for the world's year numbering system? You've surely heard of him. Do you know his religion is organized around a book that claims to be God's communication to man?
Even if you don't believe that his religion is true, that is not the same as the purported creator refusing to communicate, or the communication being un-observable. The claimed attempts of communications are right there.
For a party that decries government monopolies in other sectors, they don't seem to understand that monopolies of ALL kinds are dangerous in their own ways.
What understanding are you trying to add here?
You've just complained about municipally (government) granted monopolies. Who else has that power to restrict the competition?
this seems to good to be true... it's what the populace wants, what the corporations didn't, and it makes sense.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix aren't corporations, now?
I don't understand the need to delude oneself about the parties on each side of the debate.
The Internet is the content (data/message/letter). The network is the transport (medium/postal service).
Someday, you may understand the difference.
"The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide. It is a network of networks ..."
The InterNET is a network. If you think otherwise, do you think you can download "the Internet" to your computer? The Internet is not a message. It is not a set of data. It is the global communications system. It is the medium. You are confusing Internet content with the Internet.
I suggest you drop the condescension.
And, there's a difference between "internet" and "Internet."
4 references to "Internet", and you single out 1 instance where it wasn't capitalized. You're really grasping at straws when you're picking on typos on teh internetz.
Medium vs. message. Seems like a pretty clear distinction.
So you think Internet access is a medium, while the Internet is a message? What is the message of the Internet?
The internet is a packet delivery service, just as the postal service is a mail delivery service. No access = No service.
The phrase 'taking [...]'s name in vain" is a useful way to emphasize that you think somebody is misusing a reference to something. I didn't really need to tell you that, did I?
It's linked to the idea of blasphemy and profanity, which is related to some idea/object being sacred. One does not blaspheme feces, for example.
The only way you make Science sacred is by elevating it into its own religion ... which it is quite unsuited for.
I'm not concerned that you're disrespecting some other religion out there. I'm wondering if you recognize those phrases treat science as its own religion. Which makes your contrast of science with religion nonsensical, because science was grouped into the set of religions.
Makes as much sense as to say, "Unlike fruit, apples are tasty and good for you." Nonsense.
This is not regulation of the Internet, but regulation of the means by which the Internet is accessed.
Please explain what distinction you think you've made here.
Because the entire purpose of the Internet is ACCESS to network resources, from clients to servers and from peer to peer.
Regulating Internet access is by definition regulation of the Internet.
Don't blame the science - this is about taking science's name in vain and claiming something is proven when science has always been very up front about the limitations in what, for want of a better word, is called current knowledge.
When did science become the deity of a religion where its name can be taken in vain and it has agency that men are to respect?
We already have a working example: The human brain. So, of course it is possible, unless you believe that the human mind is based on some sort of magic.
So in your opinion, the human brain has made improvements to itself at an exponential rate?
Are you talking about individual human brains or humans as a whole? Because the former results in senile old people, while DNA doesn't work that way.
Advertise a field as So Dumb a Woman Could Do It.
Yea... but it wasn't a secret conspiratorial rule of the world though. So it doesn't count. :-p
Ah, but FDR was just the front man for his Communist/Masonic superiors! :P
Sure. Did a the flood that Noah allegedly built an ark for actually occur? A huge global flood would leave geologic evidence that would be observable even today.
It would. And there are people who interpret geological evidence such as fossils and rock layers supporting a global flood.
You should note, however, that these are interpretations, and whether FOR or AGAINST they are not science. There's no control group you can run an experiment at the scales involved. We don't have a spare earth we can terraform and observe for a million years to confirm/disprove competing hypotheses on what actually happened.
Not every historical claim can be tested by science but a great many can.
Actually, none can. You can't experiment on the past. You could fail to replicate a historical event - but that mainly says that *you* failed with your existing technology and chosen solution - it doesn't prove that the past did not happen.
Can you build a scientific experiment to prove George Washington was president? That Julius Caeser existed? That the US fought the Battle of Midway?
You can find artifacts and documents that support those historical facts, but that's not scientific evidence. You can perform scientific experiments on the artifacts/documents to estimate their age, to evaluate their credibility as historical evidence, but that is not using science to test historical claims.
You use historical evidence, not scientific evidence, to test historical claims. Some scientific evidence can serve as historical evidence, but science is an inappropriate tool to determine what happened in the past.
There's a relationship, but like all commodities it's more complicated than that. But the futures markets and all sorts of stuff completely unrelated to supply and demand also are huge factors.
Isn't the futures market just a set of predictions on future supply/demand? So it's not completely unrelated, but perhaps prone to large errors. (since predicting the future is a risky business)
Unsurprisingly most of these claims regarding god turn out to be made up nonsense when looked at objectively or have been so twisted from the actual facts as to be effectively unrecognizable from what actually occurred.
Could you give an example? When you talk about "actual facts" and "what actually occurred", you sound like you're talking about past events.
Are historical claims a domain of science?
That is indeed true. However atheism is essentially a null hypothesis. It makes FAR more sense, in the absence of credible evidence, to believe that there is no "god(s)" than to by default in a theist position.
The default answer is "I don't know", not "I believe not". Saying we must believe there is no god by default is begging the question.
However, we exist and observe ourselves and value reason and truth - which is evidence in favor of the existence of $DIETY. A further evaluation of various human religions could further narrow down the likely true options.
This dude falls for the old trap that he doesn't understand something, therefore "God did it". Personal incredulity
Understanding what a low probability event is does not mean a lack of understanding.
Most people have no idea how cell phones work. Does that mean God made cell phones?
Wrong analogy. Can cell phones assemble themselves through random events, undirected by outside forces?
When you see a cell-phone, you don't think, "Neat accident!" You expect that some other human being designed and built it.
When it comes to a human being, we're order of magnitude more complex than the cell-phone, with correspondingly more capabilities. Yet somehow we're supposed to believe that the human being is a lucky accident, even as we acknowledge the cellphone to be an intelligently designed system.
Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. There is a finite amounts of it. Every human takes away from that finite amount, the energy need to make that human survive comes from that amount, and any additional amount used to make their life better comes from that amount. The more people, the less extra that can be used purely for increased standard of living. At some point you just have a bunch of people and the resources to keep them alive. There is nothing left to make them happy.
I've already addressed the finite matter point - one trillion, one googol - those are both finite numbers; but are large enough to boggle human imagination.
It's plausible that there's some point where earth's resources are the bottleneck for a human standard of living, but you have not demonstrated that we are anywhere close to that point.
We are the most valuable resource of all.
Source?
It's self-evidently true. You're posting on Slashdot, which was built by people, through a computer, which was built by people, over the Internet, which was built by people, using electricity generated by a power plant, which was built by people.
Notice a pattern there? People create. People design. People build. People figure out how to collect raw materials and finish it into the wide variety of products that make modern life prosperous and comfortable.
If you can't figure out that people are immensely valuable - go out into the wilderness and live off your own efforts. Civilization exists because it has people who build it up and maintain it. Take away the people, you don't get to enjoy civilization anymore.