But do we all agree that Tivo/ReplayTV sucks? What do you think about your cellphone's integrated phonebook, call log, and 1-button access to voicemail?
Sometimes, expanded features "fit," even on a specialized device. I agree, those things are all fine. However, those are all features of the primary function of those specialized devices. For a TV, which is essentially a video viewing device, pause/rewind/etc are normal features; you've expect to find them in a video viewing app on a computer, too. Likewise, call logs, phonebooks, etc, are features *of* a telephony device/application, and so fit in quite well on a device that just does that one function. A TiVo with an phone/address book in it, though... that starts getting kinda funky.
The only restriction is on the restrictions. Would you say the 13th amendment made us more or less free? The GPL is exactly analogous. The GPL is more analogous to something like affirmative action laws. They don't prevent you from preventing others from doing things; they require you to enable others in specific ways. The GPL says you may not distribute the covered information without also distributing certain other information: affirmative action laws say you may not hire certain people (i.e. too many white people) unless you also hire certain other people (enough black people). Both are *restrictive* in the same of ostensibly more egalitarian outcomes. You may want to say that gains in "equality" are worth a sacrifice in liberty, but don't go around saying your "equality" is actually liberty itself.
Whether you're holding slaves, or holding copyright, you are taking away the rights of people. The GPL does not counteract copyright law. Releasing something into the public domain counteracts copyright law. The GPL relies on copyright law, albiet to different ends than usual.
Copyright law is a restriction on people's ability to distribute information as they see fit. The GPL, as a copyright license, is also a restriction on people's ability to distribute information as they see fit. The only difference is, usual copyright licenses say "you may not redistribute this information unless you pay us for another copy", while the GPL says "you may not redistribute this information unless you also distribute that other information" (the source, and any additions to it). Both of them are placing obligations on people in regard to the conditions under which they are tentatively permitted to redistribute information.
A truly free license would say simply "you may redistribute this information". That's called putting a work in the public domain: you release any claims on it.
To try (poorly) to cram this into your slavery analogy, the GPL would be like saying "that person still belongs to me, however you can do use him to plow your fields, so long as you plow an equal area yourself". True freedom, analogous to the public domain, would say "that person is free; your interactions with him are none of my business". Of course this whole analogy is busted from the start because a freed slave has rights that freed information does not.
Someone who takes open-sourced code and uses it in a closed-source project it not "locking it up". No one is suddenly prevented from using the open-sourced code. It's still out there, the same as before. Maybe someone has refrained from releasing new code they wrote to incorporate with the open-sourced code, but then, what right do you have to see their code? You might want to say "I won't show you my code unless you agree to show me yours", and that's fine, just like saying "I'll teach you tai-chi if you teach me yoga". It's just a contract to perform a service for someone, namely giving them some information, in exchange for another service. However, you cannot (ethically) say "here is my code; you may not make use of this information I have given you unless you also show me your code", any more than you can say "here is how you do tai-chi; you may not practice tai-chi or any variant of if (i.e. tai-chi + yoga) unless you also also offer to teach anyone you perform it for how to do tai-chi or your variant". In short, if you don't want to share your code unless others are going to share back, contract with them ahead of time to exchange code. But if you're just going to give information away freely (i.e distribute it, not keep it secret), you've got no right to tell the recipients of it how they may or may not make use of it.
Lets imagine for a moment that we're not talking about portable devices here at all; say batteries didn't exist or something.
In this alternate, 100% wired universe, I have a home a computer connected to the Internet, and a telephone connected to a POTS line.
I like my telephone. It's a simple, durable device that does one thing extremely well - send and receive phone calls.
I also like my computer. It's a general-purpose computing device which can do just about anything it's programmed to do.
I would absolutely hate trying to use some hacked up, modified, "enhanced" phone as some kind of email terminal, web terminal, personal calendar (that calls me with reminder notices), etc. I have a computer which does all of those things much better and more elegantly (and modularly, i.e. I can replace those programs with better ones) than any hacked-on hard-wired add-ons to a phone ever could.
However, I would love to have a telephony application on my computer (paired with a headset or a handset peripheral, or just using my speakers and microphone). It's one more thing my computer can do, and I could pick the telephony app which does it best. Eventually someone would realize that you could send voice data over the same connection that the computer uses for internet access, and you've have voicechat (VoIP) to replace the old POTS system, getting rid of one of the cables going into your computer.
In an analogous case, I've also got a television. I think we can all agree here that WebTV sucks - televisions should not try to hack on computer functions. However, a TV tuner in your computer is pretty damn cool, one fewer monitor taking up space, you can watch TV in a window, record it to an MPEG file, etc. Even cooler is video on demand over the internet ala YouTube, which, like voicechat and POTS, would eventually displace broadcast TV.
I think the people (myself included) who are clamoring for "just a phone, damnit" and thinking along these lines. Stand-alone email terminals hacked into telephones suck. (I think I actually recall a few of these in the late 90s). WebTVs suck. But that's not because we don't like integrating things together, it's because the integration is done bass-ackward: you don't stick all the popular features of your general-purpose device as special modes of your single-feature device, you add that single feature as an application on your general purpose device!
I would love a small palmtop computer, provided that it is genuinely a real, general-purpose computer, i.e. you could run Linux on it without fancy hacking, besides the software porting needed; you could write new applications for it and install them, organize files on it however you damn well please, hook it up via standard connections (Ethernet, USB, Firewire, whatever) to any other device and make them talk like you would with a computer. I would like to have PIM software (address/calendar/etc), email, text and voice chat, web, and video apps on it, little games, and what have you. But failing that, I'd rather have a phone that's just a damn phone than a phone that also pretends to be all of these other things, often poorly.
In other words, usually when people violate copyright it's through an act that increases the spread of the information, and prosecuting them for it would restict that spread. In contrast, when people violate copyright by failing to abide by the GPL, they themselves are restricting the spread of the information and prosecuting them restores it. Skype is in no way restricting the spread of information - they simply aren't spreading it themselves. Skype distributing a compiled version of the code in question, but not distributing the source, does not prevent anyone who has the source from further distributing it.
This argument is as old as the GPL itself, and while I know so many people hate it, I'm finding the analogy between the GPL and communism more apt all the time. The GPL is in the same boat as proprietary licenses in precisely the way that communism is in the same boat as merchantilism: both employ illiberal restrictions on people's freedom. The only thing that makes the GPL (or communism) any nobler than a proprietary license (or merchantilism) is the egalitarian nature of the ends it has in mind, but it hardly seems like sacrificing liberty for equality is any better than the converse.
Nobody is entitled to see another's source code, any more than they are entitled to the products of another's labor; nor are they entitled to have others propagate their code for them. However, in a world without any "intellectual property" at all, there'd be little reason for anyone to ever withhold their code from someone who wanted it. So if you truly want freedom, of both people and code, you should want a world without copyright; and you can participate in (and help to create) such a world right now, by putting your code in the public domain.
(For completeness' sake with the economic analogy, though it's getting a bit off topic here, I also believe that a [significantly modified] libertarian economy can create a situation free from any coercion or forced redistribution wherein people have little to no incentive to own more than they can make use of and so become inclined to sell it off instead, creating a buyer's market [high supply, ergo low prices] wherever you have many people with much more than they need, naturally redistributing wealth with no force or coercion. And I believe that this can be accomplished in the same way that truly free [not Stallman's "Free"] software can be: by having the government do *less*. Whereas for software freedom we need to abolish the validity of copyright, I believe that for true economic freedom, we need to abolish the validity of rent [and consequently interest] contracts. Either lend [not loan] something to someone gratis, or sell it to them [and maybe buy it back later]; but you can't give someone something, charge them money for it, and then expect to get it back later *and* still keep the money. Yes, I know all about the time value of money and how debtors and lessors are being compensated for their inability to use it while it's lent out, but if you can't afford to be without whatever you're loaning/renting out, then hang on to it, or sell it for enough to compensate you for your loss of it; and if you can afford to be without it, either let others use it if you feel like being nice, or sell it off for whatever the market will bear. Just having excess wealth already should not afford you a special ability to extract more wealth from those who have less).
Relativistic physics imply a sort of eternalism, whereby nothing is really "moving" through time at all - spacetime is a four-dimensional construct which is itself timeless, inasmuch as the four-dimensional spacetime does not change across some fifth "hypertime" dimension, so nothing in 4D spacetime really "moves"; there are just changes across the time dimension of spacetime (as a cone "narrows" in the vertical dimension even when it's not "changing" when considered as a 3D object in time, things "change" across the time dimension of spacetime even though spacetime itself never change when considered as a 4D object). So in a sense, yes, if the relativistic model is completely correct, we cannot travel to the past OR to the future, because nothing's really moving at all, four-dimensionally. Things are just different in the four-dimensional construct of spacetime at different points in time.
So when you talk about backward time travel, really all you're talking about is backward causation: can I, now, make it the case that something happened in the past, the way I seem to make it the case that things will happen in the future? This, interestingly enough, happens all the time, for antimatter is nothing but time-reversed matter. An electron and a positron being created and then annihilating with each other looks, in the four-dimensional model of spacetime, as a causal loop; the electron moves forward in time, then releases a ton of energy and turns around to go back in time - or, when you play things the other direction, a ton of energy converges on the electron to make it turn around. this electron (now with various properties reversed when viewed "forward", appearing to us as a positron) then travels back in time until it turns around, releasing a ton of energy - or, viewed the other way around in "forward" time, when a ton of energy converges upon it, turning it around. Of course, as this particle doesn't exist in times before or after its turn-around points, it doesn't look to us like we shoved a bunch of energy in with a positron and turned it into an electron; it looks to us like we shoved a bunch of energy together and a positron and an electron were created.
So, if you were to successfully travel back in time, there would have to be a backward-moving anti-you around somewhere, with whom you would have to annihilate, perfectly; from your perspective the world would then seem as antimatter, moving backward in time, and you'd somehow have to avoid annihilating yourself by touching anything, get back to the past that you want to go to, and then find another perfect anti-you to annihilate with to turn around. In forward time, this would mean that somehow, a copy of you with your future memories, and his antimatter clone, would have to be created somehow in the past; the antimatter clone would then have to be slowly changed and preserved in a precise way such that its evolution is the reverse of the normal processes that a person witnessing an antimatter universe moving backward around him would undergo, until it reaches such a state that it is a precise antimatter clone of future-you at the moment that future-you collides with it. Of course, since experiencing the trip backwards in time really isn't all that important, then the people in the past could just create a bunch of matter and antimatter, arrange the matter into a perfect clone of what you'll be like in the future when you decide to travel back in time, and then just leave the vat of antimatter in containment until that time comes that you want to travel back in time, whereupon you jump into the vat of antimatter and are annihilated......and your particles then reverse their temporal direction, travel haphazardly back in time, safely within the backward-moving containment field, until such a point as they collide with an identical bunch of antiparticles (or, viewed in forward time, regular matter), annihilating with them, or as viewed in 4D time, turning around and becoming them, and then being reassembled by some helpful scienti
It is disingenuous to bring in essentially non-narrative forms: fiction is discursive in a way that music and, in some ways, painting is not. I see many similarities between the attitude against "escapism" and fictional worlds, and the sort of pointless argumentation I've read and overheard in my (purposely limited, for this reason) expose to art criticism. I've never understood why anyone would argue over what the "purpose" of art is, like art must serve some sort of moral function or else it ought not be created - the whole notion of an idea like Socialist realism is just mind-boggling to me. Maybe it's just the little existentialist buried deep down inside me, but I see art, like life, as an end in itself. The purpose of creating art is to create it, and the purpose of enjoying art is to enjoy it. I see narratives as just as much objects of art, able of being appreciated for their aesthetic value alone, apart from any moral or practical use, as a painting, a piece of music, or (here's one out of left field) a logical or mathematic proof. The beauty is in the richness and detail, and how it all comes together so perfectly. (I think perhaps this is why I don't mind spoilers at all - if it's a good twist, I appreciate it just as much when I know it's going to happen). Using Tolkien as an example again, the Silmarillion, though it's a bore of a read to get through, portrays a rich, detailed, and fascinating world - and that is the work of art in it, perhaps less so than the text of the book itself. An analogy to this divide between the quality of delivery and the quality of the mental impression ultimately delivered might be examining a large painting piece by piece and assembling the puzzle in your head - a boring and time-consuming task, but when you're done, the big picture in your imagination could be fantastically beautiful.
Now that I think about it, this divide between delivery method and the final product is a very nice framework for the point you seem to be making. Some works can have a great, impressive delivery, but not really deliver much content at all in the end - your examples such as Harry Potter and Star Wars are good examples of that. The art part of those is the roller-coaster ride they take you on. Other works can have horrible delivery but be fascinating if you take the time to absorb the big picture that's slowly being fed to you - the Silmarillion is the best example of that I can think of, though plenty of real-world mythology fits in there too. Truly great works have excellent content and delivery, and we like to call those with just smooth delivery "shallow" or "just entertainment" and those with complex content "deep" and "real art", but I think that both content and delivery are artforms in themselves. While I'll certainly admit that I find longer-term satisfaction with "deep" stories (there's just more of them to enjoy), I enjoy plenty of "shallow tripe" too (though in those cases I go for even slicker delivery, ala movies). But in the end I enjoy them both as objects of pure aesthetic appreciation; I don't pretend that reading more classical literature will make me smarter, or that watching too many action movies will make me stupid.
To use your food analogy, it's like the difference between a peanut butter sandwich with milk, or garlic-roasted chicken breast in bleu cheese sauce with a nice cabernet sauvignon - they're both delicious and nutritious meals, and while one is certainly more complex and in need of a more discerning and experience palette to appreciate, eating a diet of PB&Js isn't going to numb your taste buds to death (though it won't develop the palette needed to appreciate more complex foods).
I'm in no way saying that all stories are equally good; rather, I'm saying that being set in the "real" world versus a fantastic one, being broad in scope (war, politics) versus narrow (a few people's personal lives), is not a factor in making the story good or bad. All of those types of stories can be done well or poorly. A Harlequin romance is (going from the stereotype only, never having read any myself) an example of poor-quality personal story set in the "real" world ("real" in quotes because unless the story is nonfiction, it's never actually the real world being depicted, but you get what I mean). But there are other, high-quality, personal stories - including (but not limited to) every great love story ever told (Romeo and Juliet anyone?) - so clearly it's not the lack of some epic scope and sociopolitical significance which makes a Harlequin romance "bad"; it's just not a well-written example of it's genre.
You say it's not about genre, and give examples of speculative fiction that's not some kind of mind-numbing narcotic tripe. But that only reinforces one of my points: painting a beautiful (or terrifying, or fascinating) fictional realm, or engrossing yourself in the intricacies and histories thereof, provides just as much food for thought as reading real-world history does, if the fiction is well-written (i.e. if the characters are fully developed with consistent and detailed personalities, and if they are put into interesting situations which engage various characteristics of those personalities) - because the verisimilitude and entertainment value of it comes from playing on familiar themes that are at play in the real world as well.
But you're still still dismissing "escapism" for its own sake as a bad thing, and that just strikes me as exceedingly closed-minded somehow. Sure, it's important to engage yourself with the real world and real life and take care of things there, but so long as you're not somehow chronically negligent of those things, there's nothing wrong with enjoying something "unproductive" just for it's own sake. Everybody needs to work, to rest, and also to play. Tell me, do you think people listen to Mozart or Beethoven "in order to provoke new ways of understanding [their] own world and lives", or simply because it's fascinatingly complex, subtle, and beautiful music which is a joy to listen to? How is reading a fascinatingly complex, subtle, and beautiful tale about a fantastic and wholly unreal world any different? Do the notes of Beethoven's 9th somehow represent the real world in a way that words about elves or aliens don't? (And for anyone who wants to say "Beethoven really existed so it's historically significant", remember that the authors of all these "escapist" books really existed too; the question is whether their *works* are somehow different in a relevant way).
As an aside, most of the deepest, most reflective and philosophical people I've ever met have also been big fans of "escapist" literature.
How did we end up with pretentious ramblings about the greatness of Lord of the Rings? The post to which I was replying, and the post to which that was a reply, were discussing stories that expand on the mythology of a fictional universe for entertainment value alone (like some people are clamoring for for the new X-Files movie), versus one-offs that serve some sort of practical purpose in making us examine our own lives rather than merely offering "escapism". This reminded me of an essay by Tolkien I came across once (apparently "On Fairy-Stories", thanks to another Slashdotter) discussing this very issue; hence the use of Tolkien's own works as examples in my discussion. I'm not saying anything about how good or bad the Lord of the Rings books are - just using them as an example of a story told for it's own sake, in a world invented for it's own sake, and not as some sort of allegory for real-world events.
You make a good point though, unrelated to this subthread about fictional world: the X-Files story is over. It's been concluded, several times over. Don't get me wrong, I was a big fan while it was on the air - at least until the last couple seasons - but it's done now, let it die. (I would have liked to see them turn more toward religious mysteries and their relations to the aliens and such, once it was revealed that yes there really are aliens and they are our progenitors and alien DNA gives people 'supernatural' powers - but instead they turned to the whole supersoldier deal and I doubt they'll go back and do religion now so far after the logical transition point in the story).
Whether the download was legal according to the law is irrelevant, since the RIAA will still send you an invoice for $15000 and a threat of lawsuit if you don't pay. If you cannot afford to defend yourself in a lawsuit, what options do you have except paying (guilty of any crimes or not)? If (for an analogy) I purchase something from a store, and then the store owner accuses me of theft, and as proof of that theft presents a video of me at the register handing over cash for the product and then walking out of the store with it - I think that's a pretty open and shut case, their "proof" shows that I paid for it and they handed it over to me, and I'm pretty sure I could just ask a judge for a complete dismissal and not even bother hiring a lawyer. Likewise, if the RIAA says "we put a file up on a file sharing network and this guy downloaded it from us and we have proof!", that's open and shut - their very "proof" shows that they sent me the file and, thus, the copy I have is authorized. Let them take me to court if that happens, they won't stand a snowball's chance in hell, and I sure as hell wouldn't pay any extortion money to evade a case that's so clearly in my favor.
I think your portrayal of those intrigued by fictional worlds as "self-absorbed" is just a nasty a slight as the person to which you're replying.
While meandering about a library once I picked up some book vaguely related to Lord of the Rings or Tolkien or some such and read a bit of it wherein Tolkien was lamenting the popular (at the time of his writing) disdain for fictional worlds as works of art in their own, and the insistence that all fictional stories serve some allegorical purpose of illustrating something about some particulars here in the real world. (If anyone can cite the passage I'm trying to recall I'd much appreciate that!) Of course all stories, no matter what "world" they're set in, will touch on and illustrate themes about "human" nature, whether or not the characters are actually human, because for the story to be engaging at all they've still got to be recognizable as people and thus will have (and act according to, and suffer the consequences of) psychological traits just like humans in the real world do. But the War of the Rings doesn't have to be an allegory for World War II; Sauron's Orcish army doesn't have to be a representation of the German war machine; Gandalf is not Jesus Christ come to guide the West against the forces of evil! Certainly real-world events and history can influence the creation of a fictional world - e.g. Tolkien's mythology draws clear inspiration from real-world mythology, both Christian and pagan - but that doesn't mean the fictional world has to be somehow a proxy for the real one. Maybe someone just wanted to tell a cool story against a cool backdrop. Or maybe, as was the origin of Middle-Earth, maybe someone just wanted to create a cool backdrop. Reading real-world mythology isn't always that engaging, but it paints an interesting and sometimes beautiful picture of the world.
This debate seems to me like arguing whether portraits or landscapes make for better paintings; or more accurately, whether representational painting (of real things that actually exist before the painter) is better than purely imaginative painting (of things that exist nowhere but in the artist's mind). Each sort requires a different kind of talent and is useful to different ends: a representational painter must be able to accurately reproduce the details of the real things before him, and as such talk about the details of his painting, if it's well done, can serve as proxy for talk about the real thing. But an imaginative painter who creates fanciful images from whole cloth has a level of creativity and inspiration that someone who can only paint representationally lacks, and such fanciful art is great for - you said it - escapism, which is a perfectly fine recreational activity. Likewise with portraits vs landscapes - different levels of scope, different levels of detail, both valid art forms.
Some people like vast, epic stories that flesh out grand worlds; some people like close, character-driven stories instead; some people like stories set in the real world, during real events, with which the reader is familiar to some extent; others like stories created ex nihlo which transport you into a wholly original, novel experience. All of these things have their appeal, and arguing for one over the other is as silly as arguing over favorite colors or ice cream flavors.
One difference is that the RIAA can lurk on filesharing networks, sending you an invoice if they see your IP address If an RIAA-controlled computer is on a filesharing network sharing some RIAA-controlled music with the full knowledge and consent of the RIAA, then either (A) the person who downloaded from that RIAA computer has just gotten free, legal music direct from the copyright holder or their authorized agents (the only way the RIAA could get an IP is if someone connected to one of the machines), or (B) some RIAA company, or most likely the agents thereof, has just made an illegal copy of some music that they don't hold the copyrights to and are in deep shit (remember, the RIAA is an association of several different companies; Universal can't give away copies of Sony's music without Sony's permission).
Either way, receiving an unauthorized copy is never illegal (unlike receiving stolen property). Unauthorized copying (i.e. making the unauthorized copy) is what's illegal.
Though this makes me wonder about distribution. If you've received an unauthorized copy - and lets say for the sake of simplicity it's a really convincing well-made copy on CD with replica labels and all that jazz, so you think it's legit - and then you sell it, say at a garage sale (or on eBay), are you in trouble? What if you know it's illegitimate, is it a crime just to distribute a pre-made unauthorized copy? (This doesn't apply to "distributing" on the internet of course, where it's always copying too). What if you've got a regular source of known-illegitimate copies which you don't make, you just buy and sell? Are you in violation of copyright law there? Copyright law, AFAIK, only restricts copying, so just passing around bits of plastic and foil, on which happens to be unauthorized copies (that you didn't make), wouldn't seem to be a crime. Still, I'm sure there's something on the books against it - the DMCA sure doesn't limit itself to restrictions on copying.
You can't say 'I murdered him because he was a pedophile'. You get tried for murder, he (if he lives) gets tried for pedophilia Minor nitpick: pedophilia isn't a crime, pedophilia is a psychological disorder. Child molestation is a crime, which may be (and probably most often is) motivated by pedophilia. So, you can't actually get charged with "pedophilia", as that's just a mental condition, not an act; and we don't try people just for thinking bad things, only for actually doing them.
What we care about is the freedom of information. The law is just an expedient to secure that freedom. When the law becomes injurious to that freedom we must break it. The GPL equivalent for music would be giving it away with the sheet music, and allowing others to redistribute it or modify it as they pleased, so long as they also distributed the modified sheet music with it. Would you be happy with a "music license" like that? (Also note the parallel here, what if you only modify the binary/mp3 and not the code/sheet? Do you have to create code/sheet to match your modified binary/mp3 and distribute that, too?)
As I see it, the problem underlying this whole thing is the very concept of "wholesale".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this ruling wouldn't stop me from buying a whole bunch of something at retail from the manufacturer's retail outlet, and then reselling them below retail (at a loss) over the internet, right? This just means that manufacturers can say that they won't sell me something at a discounted (less than retail, i.e. wholesale) price unless I agree not to resell it below a certain price. While I certainly agree that they oughtn't be allowed to do that (any more than, say, a lawnmower manufacture should be able to stipulate what sort of grass I can cut with lawnmowers I buy from them), I think this whole problem stems from this odd notion of wholesale.
Let manufacturers make their things and sell them for whatever price they want. They can give volume discounts, discounts for buying via certain channels (e.g. sell cheaper via phone/internet/mail order than in their brick-and-mortar store), even discounts for membership in a certain club (ala Costco), or combinations thereof, and let that do the work of giving discounts to retailers ("wholesale prices)", who make frequent orders (justifying club membership) in large volumes direct from warehouses (rather than in storefronts). But once someone ("reseller" or not - lets not make arbitrary distinctions between privileged businesspeople and ordinary consumers) has bought it at that price, its theirs and they can do whatever the hell they want with it, including reselling it at any damn price they want. If they can manage to resell cheaper than the manufacturer's retail outlets and still make a profit, tough - that's competition for you. Why do you hate capitalism?
On that note, I see a lot of people calling this "conservative" ruling, and while it may be a very modern-Republican thing to do, it is certainly not conservative in the usual economic sense of pro-capitalism. Though I suppose, if you go back far enough in time, conservative means merchantilist and liberal means capitalist, and this is certainly a very merchantilist ruling here...
Second, while I can understand your concern with him climbing over stair railings and such, and I can certainly empathize with the strain that having a child like this must put on your life (I'm having similar, though less severe, issues sharing a house with some younger friends who won't let me get any sleep), it disturbs me that the main concern you're expressing here is about how your son's condition disturbs your life, not about his well-being. Perhaps your son is perfectly happy how he is and wouldn't like to be changed?
I'm also interested in this issue with the stair railings, which is why I'm curious as to your son's age. While I haven't gone in to be diagnosed formally, I seem to have many of the typical autism-spectrum symptoms. I'm easily over-stimulated by lights, noises, clutter, etc, uncomfortable in unfamiliar crowds, asocial, etc; I like dark, calm, quiet, clean places away from other people where I can focus on one activity. Thinking about how you say your son has no fear (of heights, in your example), I realize that I too have always been rather fearless of such things, and both as a child and today I was always up on a cliff or tree in the mountains or far out in the water at the ocean, which always frightened my parents, but I had (more then than now) an acute sense of where my limits were and what I could do safely. I guess what I'm saying is, while I can understand your concern for his safety, maybe he does know what he's doing. But again, a lot of this depends on how old he is.
I seem to recall they got their start in personal computers:) Even more interesting, Jobs and Woz got their start, prior to even the Apple I, with... hacking the (AT&T) phone system. Ironic, isn't it?
Man... from Apple Computer vs Apple records to iPods and iTunes, from phone phreaks to iPhones... things really come full circle, don't they?
Then why are you here? I've never understood people who enter a conversation, not even to tell everybody else that they're wrong, but just to tell them all to shut up and stop talking about it. If you're tired of talking about it, then just go away; if you think everybody else talking about it is on the wrong track, tell them why you think so. (I do this all the time in philosophical debates where I feel both sides are off their respective rockers). But don't just come into the room and yell at everybody to stop talking.
This is precisely why I used the periodic table as an example. It's a complex collection of information which I, personally, no longer possess the ability to deduce myself, if indeed I ever really did. Chemistry is not my forte and so I don't recall enough of it that I could sit down and recreate a periodic table from scratch; I doubt that most lay people could, though most chemists probably could. However, I do remember enough about valence shells, etc, to have some vague idea of why things are where they are in the periodic table. But more relevantly, I have enough experience with science and scientists that if I walk over to the chem lab and see a chart on the wall telling me that there are 79 protons in the nucleus of a gold atom, I'll believe it, even though I'm not entirely sure how to go about checking that fact myself. But I understand that it is meant to be a reproducible fact, I vaguely grasp some of the repercussions that would ensue if things were otherwise (gold would weigh more or less than it actually does), and I'm confident that if I asked the right people around the chem lab, I could find out exactly how to verify that fact for myself.
But that's just the story of *why* I have faith in (read: trust the word of) scientists - because I understand their methods and see that, if I really needed to, I could ask "how do you know that?", get an answer, and then see for myself whether they're right or wrong. But just as nobody can afford to read every source cited by every nonfiction book they ever read to verify that the information therein is accurate (and then read all the sources cited by each of those books), I don't have the time or energy (or money, or equipment) to go around recreating every science experiment ever conducted to convince myself that the results are correct; I've just got to take it on faith (that is, trust) that these people are reputable and so their results are probably right, and if something relevant to me ends up looking like they're wrong, then maybe I'll go back and try to reproduce their results. And it is precisely the fact that they say "here is how we arrived at this conclusion; try it for yourself" which makes me inclined to trust them - that is, to have faith, of this particular variety, in them - even if I'm unable to actually try it for myself just now.
Note that we're only talking about faith of one of the varieties I mentioned earlier: namely, believing something despite personally lacking evidence for it. Scientific people have that kind of faith all the time: every time a friend tells you something and you believe him without going to double-check the facts with your own eyes, because you consider him a trustworthy source, that's faith of this kind. That's very different from believing something for which (or against which) evidence is impossible, which is the kind of faith that science really distinguishes itself against.
Its called faith you stupid jackass. Some people have it and others don't. Deal with it.
I'll give you the benefit of a doubt that you're not merely a troll, but legitimately upset that some people don't believe as you do, and so ask you this simple question: What is it that is "called faith"? That is, what do you mean by faith? The usual meaning I hear is "belief in something without evidence". But I'm not talking about evidence or skepticism at all. Faith of that sort is not always misplaced: for example, I have faith that the person who put together the periodic table of elements in my chemistry class did so correctly. We wouldn't get very far if we didn't have faith of that sort, because it's beyond any of us to build our entire knowledge base from the ground up.
But since that's not the kind of thing I was talking about at all, I'm at a loss as to what you mean by faith and what it has to do with verifiability. Are you saying that acceptance of unverifiable propositions (that is to say, things that don't make any descriptive claims about the world at all) is faith? Cause I don't have any problem with that either: if you say that the sky is blue and water is wet and 2+2=4 and all sleezborgs are foodlebaks, I can agree with you 100%, because I agree that the sky is blue, and that water is wet, and that 2+2=4, and since 'sleezeborg' and 'foodlebak' are meaningless words I just made up right now, you can agree or disagree with that bit and it won't make any difference to me. So if both you and Joe Blow agree that the physical (i.e. observable) world operates according to such-and-such laws and has such-and such history, but you believe that that is the case because an in-principle unverifiable mind wills it to be so, and Joe Blow ostensibly disagrees, you two actually agree on all matters of fact; your point of contention is, literally, an empty statement with no truth-value (neither true nor false), so it makes no difference whether you say that's the case or not. For a mathematical analogy: if you say the measure of something is equal to 2 plus 1 plus 0, and Joe Blow says it's equal to 2 plus 1 minus 0, you're both equally right (or wrong) because you're both saying the same thing, namely that the measure of that thing is 3 - despite your difference in words.
An important footnote here: by "in-principle unverifiable" I don't just mean that no one anywhere ever WILL have opportunity to observe it, as may be the case with events far away in space or time; rather, I mean something like, if you had absolutely perfect instruments of every variety available to you, and a magic device that could take you any place and any time, even in that fantastic case there is no observation you could make that could prove or disprove the hypothesis in question. In short: a statement is verifiable if and only if, were there someone in the right place(s) at the right time(s) with the right sensors, they would be able to tell by observation whether the statement was true or not.
Now the third thing I can think of that you might mean by faith is something of a cross between the two above: where you say "I don't know what the things he's saying mean, but I agree with him 100%". This kind of blind faith is reprehensible. As I said before, I have faith (of the first variety) in my professors, whereby when they say something and I don't know any better I generally trust that what they say is correct. However, when I hear a professor say something that I don't understand (something which has not conveyed any meaning to me, though perhaps the speaker did mean something by it), I don't think "well, I don't know that to be false, and I trust him, so I'll believe that". I think "what?". And I try to ask questions until I can understand what's being said, and then, if I can finally tease out what exactly he means, then I'll either believe it or not based first on how much I know about the matter and then on how much I trust the professor's beliefs on the matter.
why is it any different for a Christian believing the Bible? Time and time again, I've found what it says to be true, so I believe it is. I'm curious, what is it that the Bible has claimed which you have observed to be true? I'm assuming here that by "found" you mean something like "observed", and not just "well that sounds right to me", as intuition is clearly no basis for grounding an argument, since arguing that way, you'd only ever convince people who already agreed with you, and never anybody who didn't.
Note that there is a big difference between saying non-false things and saying true things. If what you say implies nothing at all, then you've not really said anything descriptive of the world, and that non-statement is no more false, but also no more true, than silence. So feel-good emotional language (blessed are so-and-so...), lists of commands (thou shalt not...), and so forth, are not even candidates for being true or false. Also bear in mind that "The Bible" is not one big theory, hypothesis, or proposition: it's a whole bunch of them, and as such, some of them could be right and others wrong, and so finding some true statements in there doesn't imply that all statements therein are true.
In my experience, those claims that the Bible makes which are meaningful (actually say something with observable implications), and not evidently false (such as a literal reading of Genesis), are fairly trivial and not disputed even by atheists. (Christians and non-Christians, for all their differences, still agree on a whole lot of things, like for example that 2+2=4, so there are plenty of trivial things in the Bible than even an atheist will agree are true). So if you've read something in there which is meaningful, controversial (i.e. something Christians believe and non-Christians don't), and which you've observed evidence for, I'd be rather interested in hearing what is was, and what sort of evidence you've observed.
Consider: people who are anti-abortion-control often aren't pro-abortion. I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but I really wish I had included this obligatory Simpsons quote, appropriate to your sig:
[Kang and Kodos are running for office]
Kang & Kodos: Abortions for everyone! Crowd: Boo! Kang & Kodos: Uh, abortions for no one! Crowd: Boo! Kang & Kodos: Um... abortions for some... tiny American flags for others! Crowd: Yaay!
As long as you're willing to accept use by others, you're not that anti-drug.
Not at all. "People ought not to do X" (a statement about goodness) and "people ought not to be permitted to do X" (a statement about permission) are very different statements, analogous to "people do X" (a statement about truth) and "people could do X" (a statement about possibility). Something can be possible and yet false; likewise, something can be permissible and yet bad. So you can be very anti-drug, and say "I strongly believe that people ought not to take drugs", and yet also very anti-drug-control, and says "I strongly believe that people ought to be permitted to take drugs" - like the person you're replying to, or (to a lesser degree) myself.
Conflation of goodness and permissibility is what leads some people to say "You're anti-X-control? Why are you pro-X, that's crazy!" Consider: people who are anti-abortion-control often aren't pro-abortion. I'm becoming pretty convinced that confusions about modal logic like (confusing truth, possibility, belief, certainty, goodness, permission, desire, etc) this are at the root of almost all religious/political/philosophical conflicts.
Interestingly enough, though I'm in no way a physicist myself - I was, until this past weekends commencement, a philosophy student - I've heard talk of something like decoherence in an assortment of philosophy classes before, so the new stuff is getting out there to schools, just in unlikely places it seems. I'm a fan of modal realism myself (i.e. all possible worlds are equally real), so I don't have problems with indeterminism in the local world so long as the "multiverse" (i.e. the superposition of all possible worlds) is deterministic. Though I don't think it was mentioned by the name decoherence specifically, we've discussed in class the idea that wavefunction collapse upon observation is in fact the opposite: the observer enters a superposed state along with the observed system, simultaneously "observing the system collapse" in every possible way at once, in effect creating multiple "copies" of the observer in alternate "universes", each of which observes a different collapse of the observed system. Of course, examining the wavefunction of the complete universe you wouldn't see it this way; you'd just see the superimposition of histories wherein the observer and the observed system interacted in various ways, and the evolution of that universal wavefunction would, like any other, be completely deterministic.
One thing I don't get, though, which you sort of raised in your discussion of decoherence, is that if if it's really all a question of information transmission, and everything is constantly interacting with everything else (i.e. everything is constantly "observing" everything else), then shouldn't all events within our light cone be "collapsed" already, whether or not we've gone about making any measurements? So how is it that we can say some particle over there in the lab is presently in a superposed state, when by the time we've finished saying such a thing, everything interacting with the particle has been conveying information to us (whether or not we're conscious of it) at the speed of light? Is it perhaps precisely the fact that the only systems wherein we observe (so to speak) this superposition of unobserved systems are the very conveyors of information (e.g. photons) themselves, which allows them to be within our light cone and yet still not have conveyed any information to us? As in, what is there to tell us about the state of some photon flying by, except for something intercepting that photon and sending some more photons our way to let us know what it was doing?
Anyway... I've sort of lost my train of thought in here somewhere. Thank you for an interesting conversation. I feel sorry for the other states of myself which never got to entangle with such states of yourself:-)
In quantum physics, there are certain questions about the physical universe which are in principle unanswerable - it's not just a matter of needing better equipment or experimental methods, you just cannot, in principle, ever get that information - and in such cases, it's held that said information in fact does not exist at all. Take radioactive decay, a prime example: supposedly it is a truly random process, such that even if you knew the complete state of the universe right now, ever bit of information about it, you could not deduce whether any given atom of Carbon-14 will decay into Carbon-12 in the next second or not, so it must not yet be a fact about the universe that that atom will (or will not) decay, since by hypothesis you know all the information there is to know, but you don't know that. As such, the unobserved future is in "superposition" - the atom both will and will not decay (or neither; both phrasings are somewhat loose and innacurate from what I'm told), until that time comes to pass and we can see whether or not it does, at which point there is some fact about the matter.
This applies equally well to unobserved things in the present, as demonstrated by double-slit experiments demonstrating wave-particle duality and its relation to observation. Because of things like this, you get some weird results like the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment, where an unobserved cat whose possible death is tied to the decay of an unobserved radioisotope is simultaneously alive and dead (or, again, neither; it's in a state of quantum superposition). Another present fact you cannot possibly determine (which information, thus, does not in fact exist) is the precise position and velocity of any given particle; the more determined the position, the less determined the velocity, and vice versa.
Thus, as past events outside our light cone (things which occurred far enough away and recently enough that there's been no chance for their light to reach us) are in principle unobservable right now (until such a time as they come to be observable, just like the possible future decay of our Carbon 14 atom), then right now there is no fact of the matter, no information in the universe, about whether such events occurred, and it's just as much a matter of chance which past will turn out to have occurred as it is a matter of chance which future will occur.
As this relates to black holes, if information really is destroyed when things fall into one, then that black hole has, in effect, a very random past, i.e. it does not follow from the present state of the black hole (and the rest of the universe it's in) that it has any particular history, precisely as it does not follow from the present state of a given Carbon-14 atom (and the rest of the universe it's in) that it will or will not decay at any given moment. That information about the past does not exist anywhere in the universe (it's not just a matter of it not existing in our minds), and so there is no fact of the matter at all about which past actually occurred.
Just as relativity was a huge push for eternalism (a.k.a. "block time"; the position that the past and future are just as real as the present), quantum theory is a big push for presentism (the position that there really are no true statements about the past or the future at all; only the present is real), and I for one am quite eager to see how these two are eventually reconciled, for I find myself thinking sometimes as an eternalist and sometimes as a presentist and they seem, despite the apparent contradictions, somehow reconcilable, if only someone could manage to articulate how...
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes, expanded features "fit," even on a specialized device. I agree, those things are all fine. However, those are all features of the primary function of those specialized devices. For a TV, which is essentially a video viewing device, pause/rewind/etc are normal features; you've expect to find them in a video viewing app on a computer, too. Likewise, call logs, phonebooks, etc, are features *of* a telephony device/application, and so fit in quite well on a device that just does that one function. A TiVo with an phone/address book in it, though... that starts getting kinda funky.
Copyright law is a restriction on people's ability to distribute information as they see fit. The GPL, as a copyright license, is also a restriction on people's ability to distribute information as they see fit. The only difference is, usual copyright licenses say "you may not redistribute this information unless you pay us for another copy", while the GPL says "you may not redistribute this information unless you also distribute that other information" (the source, and any additions to it). Both of them are placing obligations on people in regard to the conditions under which they are tentatively permitted to redistribute information.
A truly free license would say simply "you may redistribute this information". That's called putting a work in the public domain: you release any claims on it.
To try (poorly) to cram this into your slavery analogy, the GPL would be like saying "that person still belongs to me, however you can do use him to plow your fields, so long as you plow an equal area yourself". True freedom, analogous to the public domain, would say "that person is free; your interactions with him are none of my business". Of course this whole analogy is busted from the start because a freed slave has rights that freed information does not.
Someone who takes open-sourced code and uses it in a closed-source project it not "locking it up". No one is suddenly prevented from using the open-sourced code. It's still out there, the same as before. Maybe someone has refrained from releasing new code they wrote to incorporate with the open-sourced code, but then, what right do you have to see their code? You might want to say "I won't show you my code unless you agree to show me yours", and that's fine, just like saying "I'll teach you tai-chi if you teach me yoga". It's just a contract to perform a service for someone, namely giving them some information, in exchange for another service. However, you cannot (ethically) say "here is my code; you may not make use of this information I have given you unless you also show me your code", any more than you can say "here is how you do tai-chi; you may not practice tai-chi or any variant of if (i.e. tai-chi + yoga) unless you also also offer to teach anyone you perform it for how to do tai-chi or your variant". In short, if you don't want to share your code unless others are going to share back, contract with them ahead of time to exchange code. But if you're just going to give information away freely (i.e distribute it, not keep it secret), you've got no right to tell the recipients of it how they may or may not make use of it.
Lets imagine for a moment that we're not talking about portable devices here at all; say batteries didn't exist or something.
In this alternate, 100% wired universe, I have a home a computer connected to the Internet, and a telephone connected to a POTS line.
I like my telephone. It's a simple, durable device that does one thing extremely well - send and receive phone calls.
I also like my computer. It's a general-purpose computing device which can do just about anything it's programmed to do.
I would absolutely hate trying to use some hacked up, modified, "enhanced" phone as some kind of email terminal, web terminal, personal calendar (that calls me with reminder notices), etc. I have a computer which does all of those things much better and more elegantly (and modularly, i.e. I can replace those programs with better ones) than any hacked-on hard-wired add-ons to a phone ever could.
However, I would love to have a telephony application on my computer (paired with a headset or a handset peripheral, or just using my speakers and microphone). It's one more thing my computer can do, and I could pick the telephony app which does it best. Eventually someone would realize that you could send voice data over the same connection that the computer uses for internet access, and you've have voicechat (VoIP) to replace the old POTS system, getting rid of one of the cables going into your computer.
In an analogous case, I've also got a television. I think we can all agree here that WebTV sucks - televisions should not try to hack on computer functions. However, a TV tuner in your computer is pretty damn cool, one fewer monitor taking up space, you can watch TV in a window, record it to an MPEG file, etc. Even cooler is video on demand over the internet ala YouTube, which, like voicechat and POTS, would eventually displace broadcast TV.
I think the people (myself included) who are clamoring for "just a phone, damnit" and thinking along these lines. Stand-alone email terminals hacked into telephones suck. (I think I actually recall a few of these in the late 90s). WebTVs suck. But that's not because we don't like integrating things together, it's because the integration is done bass-ackward: you don't stick all the popular features of your general-purpose device as special modes of your single-feature device, you add that single feature as an application on your general purpose device!
I would love a small palmtop computer, provided that it is genuinely a real, general-purpose computer, i.e. you could run Linux on it without fancy hacking, besides the software porting needed; you could write new applications for it and install them, organize files on it however you damn well please, hook it up via standard connections (Ethernet, USB, Firewire, whatever) to any other device and make them talk like you would with a computer. I would like to have PIM software (address/calendar/etc), email, text and voice chat, web, and video apps on it, little games, and what have you. But failing that, I'd rather have a phone that's just a damn phone than a phone that also pretends to be all of these other things, often poorly.
This argument is as old as the GPL itself, and while I know so many people hate it, I'm finding the analogy between the GPL and communism more apt all the time. The GPL is in the same boat as proprietary licenses in precisely the way that communism is in the same boat as merchantilism: both employ illiberal restrictions on people's freedom. The only thing that makes the GPL (or communism) any nobler than a proprietary license (or merchantilism) is the egalitarian nature of the ends it has in mind, but it hardly seems like sacrificing liberty for equality is any better than the converse.
Nobody is entitled to see another's source code, any more than they are entitled to the products of another's labor; nor are they entitled to have others propagate their code for them. However, in a world without any "intellectual property" at all, there'd be little reason for anyone to ever withhold their code from someone who wanted it. So if you truly want freedom, of both people and code, you should want a world without copyright; and you can participate in (and help to create) such a world right now, by putting your code in the public domain.
(For completeness' sake with the economic analogy, though it's getting a bit off topic here, I also believe that a [significantly modified] libertarian economy can create a situation free from any coercion or forced redistribution wherein people have little to no incentive to own more than they can make use of and so become inclined to sell it off instead, creating a buyer's market [high supply, ergo low prices] wherever you have many people with much more than they need, naturally redistributing wealth with no force or coercion. And I believe that this can be accomplished in the same way that truly free [not Stallman's "Free"] software can be: by having the government do *less*. Whereas for software freedom we need to abolish the validity of copyright, I believe that for true economic freedom, we need to abolish the validity of rent [and consequently interest] contracts. Either lend [not loan] something to someone gratis, or sell it to them [and maybe buy it back later]; but you can't give someone something, charge them money for it, and then expect to get it back later *and* still keep the money. Yes, I know all about the time value of money and how debtors and lessors are being compensated for their inability to use it while it's lent out, but if you can't afford to be without whatever you're loaning/renting out, then hang on to it, or sell it for enough to compensate you for your loss of it; and if you can afford to be without it, either let others use it if you feel like being nice, or sell it off for whatever the market will bear. Just having excess wealth already should not afford you a special ability to extract more wealth from those who have less).
Relativistic physics imply a sort of eternalism, whereby nothing is really "moving" through time at all - spacetime is a four-dimensional construct which is itself timeless, inasmuch as the four-dimensional spacetime does not change across some fifth "hypertime" dimension, so nothing in 4D spacetime really "moves"; there are just changes across the time dimension of spacetime (as a cone "narrows" in the vertical dimension even when it's not "changing" when considered as a 3D object in time, things "change" across the time dimension of spacetime even though spacetime itself never change when considered as a 4D object). So in a sense, yes, if the relativistic model is completely correct, we cannot travel to the past OR to the future, because nothing's really moving at all, four-dimensionally. Things are just different in the four-dimensional construct of spacetime at different points in time.
...and your particles then reverse their temporal direction, travel haphazardly back in time, safely within the backward-moving containment field, until such a point as they collide with an identical bunch of antiparticles (or, viewed in forward time, regular matter), annihilating with them, or as viewed in 4D time, turning around and becoming them, and then being reassembled by some helpful scienti
So when you talk about backward time travel, really all you're talking about is backward causation: can I, now, make it the case that something happened in the past, the way I seem to make it the case that things will happen in the future? This, interestingly enough, happens all the time, for antimatter is nothing but time-reversed matter. An electron and a positron being created and then annihilating with each other looks, in the four-dimensional model of spacetime, as a causal loop; the electron moves forward in time, then releases a ton of energy and turns around to go back in time - or, when you play things the other direction, a ton of energy converges on the electron to make it turn around. this electron (now with various properties reversed when viewed "forward", appearing to us as a positron) then travels back in time until it turns around, releasing a ton of energy - or, viewed the other way around in "forward" time, when a ton of energy converges upon it, turning it around. Of course, as this particle doesn't exist in times before or after its turn-around points, it doesn't look to us like we shoved a bunch of energy in with a positron and turned it into an electron; it looks to us like we shoved a bunch of energy together and a positron and an electron were created.
So, if you were to successfully travel back in time, there would have to be a backward-moving anti-you around somewhere, with whom you would have to annihilate, perfectly; from your perspective the world would then seem as antimatter, moving backward in time, and you'd somehow have to avoid annihilating yourself by touching anything, get back to the past that you want to go to, and then find another perfect anti-you to annihilate with to turn around. In forward time, this would mean that somehow, a copy of you with your future memories, and his antimatter clone, would have to be created somehow in the past; the antimatter clone would then have to be slowly changed and preserved in a precise way such that its evolution is the reverse of the normal processes that a person witnessing an antimatter universe moving backward around him would undergo, until it reaches such a state that it is a precise antimatter clone of future-you at the moment that future-you collides with it. Of course, since experiencing the trip backwards in time really isn't all that important, then the people in the past could just create a bunch of matter and antimatter, arrange the matter into a perfect clone of what you'll be like in the future when you decide to travel back in time, and then just leave the vat of antimatter in containment until that time comes that you want to travel back in time, whereupon you jump into the vat of antimatter and are annihilated...
Now that I think about it, this divide between delivery method and the final product is a very nice framework for the point you seem to be making. Some works can have a great, impressive delivery, but not really deliver much content at all in the end - your examples such as Harry Potter and Star Wars are good examples of that. The art part of those is the roller-coaster ride they take you on. Other works can have horrible delivery but be fascinating if you take the time to absorb the big picture that's slowly being fed to you - the Silmarillion is the best example of that I can think of, though plenty of real-world mythology fits in there too. Truly great works have excellent content and delivery, and we like to call those with just smooth delivery "shallow" or "just entertainment" and those with complex content "deep" and "real art", but I think that both content and delivery are artforms in themselves. While I'll certainly admit that I find longer-term satisfaction with "deep" stories (there's just more of them to enjoy), I enjoy plenty of "shallow tripe" too (though in those cases I go for even slicker delivery, ala movies). But in the end I enjoy them both as objects of pure aesthetic appreciation; I don't pretend that reading more classical literature will make me smarter, or that watching too many action movies will make me stupid.
To use your food analogy, it's like the difference between a peanut butter sandwich with milk, or garlic-roasted chicken breast in bleu cheese sauce with a nice cabernet sauvignon - they're both delicious and nutritious meals, and while one is certainly more complex and in need of a more discerning and experience palette to appreciate, eating a diet of PB&Js isn't going to numb your taste buds to death (though it won't develop the palette needed to appreciate more complex foods).
I'm in no way saying that all stories are equally good; rather, I'm saying that being set in the "real" world versus a fantastic one, being broad in scope (war, politics) versus narrow (a few people's personal lives), is not a factor in making the story good or bad. All of those types of stories can be done well or poorly. A Harlequin romance is (going from the stereotype only, never having read any myself) an example of poor-quality personal story set in the "real" world ("real" in quotes because unless the story is nonfiction, it's never actually the real world being depicted, but you get what I mean). But there are other, high-quality, personal stories - including (but not limited to) every great love story ever told (Romeo and Juliet anyone?) - so clearly it's not the lack of some epic scope and sociopolitical significance which makes a Harlequin romance "bad"; it's just not a well-written example of it's genre.
You say it's not about genre, and give examples of speculative fiction that's not some kind of mind-numbing narcotic tripe. But that only reinforces one of my points: painting a beautiful (or terrifying, or fascinating) fictional realm, or engrossing yourself in the intricacies and histories thereof, provides just as much food for thought as reading real-world history does, if the fiction is well-written (i.e. if the characters are fully developed with consistent and detailed personalities, and if they are put into interesting situations which engage various characteristics of those personalities) - because the verisimilitude and entertainment value of it comes from playing on familiar themes that are at play in the real world as well.
But you're still still dismissing "escapism" for its own sake as a bad thing, and that just strikes me as exceedingly closed-minded somehow. Sure, it's important to engage yourself with the real world and real life and take care of things there, but so long as you're not somehow chronically negligent of those things, there's nothing wrong with enjoying something "unproductive" just for it's own sake. Everybody needs to work, to rest, and also to play. Tell me, do you think people listen to Mozart or Beethoven "in order to provoke new ways of understanding [their] own world and lives", or simply because it's fascinatingly complex, subtle, and beautiful music which is a joy to listen to? How is reading a fascinatingly complex, subtle, and beautiful tale about a fantastic and wholly unreal world any different? Do the notes of Beethoven's 9th somehow represent the real world in a way that words about elves or aliens don't? (And for anyone who wants to say "Beethoven really existed so it's historically significant", remember that the authors of all these "escapist" books really existed too; the question is whether their *works* are somehow different in a relevant way).
As an aside, most of the deepest, most reflective and philosophical people I've ever met have also been big fans of "escapist" literature.
You make a good point though, unrelated to this subthread about fictional world: the X-Files story is over. It's been concluded, several times over. Don't get me wrong, I was a big fan while it was on the air - at least until the last couple seasons - but it's done now, let it die. (I would have liked to see them turn more toward religious mysteries and their relations to the aliens and such, once it was revealed that yes there really are aliens and they are our progenitors and alien DNA gives people 'supernatural' powers - but instead they turned to the whole supersoldier deal and I doubt they'll go back and do religion now so far after the logical transition point in the story).
I think your portrayal of those intrigued by fictional worlds as "self-absorbed" is just a nasty a slight as the person to which you're replying.
While meandering about a library once I picked up some book vaguely related to Lord of the Rings or Tolkien or some such and read a bit of it wherein Tolkien was lamenting the popular (at the time of his writing) disdain for fictional worlds as works of art in their own, and the insistence that all fictional stories serve some allegorical purpose of illustrating something about some particulars here in the real world. (If anyone can cite the passage I'm trying to recall I'd much appreciate that!) Of course all stories, no matter what "world" they're set in, will touch on and illustrate themes about "human" nature, whether or not the characters are actually human, because for the story to be engaging at all they've still got to be recognizable as people and thus will have (and act according to, and suffer the consequences of) psychological traits just like humans in the real world do. But the War of the Rings doesn't have to be an allegory for World War II; Sauron's Orcish army doesn't have to be a representation of the German war machine; Gandalf is not Jesus Christ come to guide the West against the forces of evil! Certainly real-world events and history can influence the creation of a fictional world - e.g. Tolkien's mythology draws clear inspiration from real-world mythology, both Christian and pagan - but that doesn't mean the fictional world has to be somehow a proxy for the real one. Maybe someone just wanted to tell a cool story against a cool backdrop. Or maybe, as was the origin of Middle-Earth, maybe someone just wanted to create a cool backdrop. Reading real-world mythology isn't always that engaging, but it paints an interesting and sometimes beautiful picture of the world.
This debate seems to me like arguing whether portraits or landscapes make for better paintings; or more accurately, whether representational painting (of real things that actually exist before the painter) is better than purely imaginative painting (of things that exist nowhere but in the artist's mind). Each sort requires a different kind of talent and is useful to different ends: a representational painter must be able to accurately reproduce the details of the real things before him, and as such talk about the details of his painting, if it's well done, can serve as proxy for talk about the real thing. But an imaginative painter who creates fanciful images from whole cloth has a level of creativity and inspiration that someone who can only paint representationally lacks, and such fanciful art is great for - you said it - escapism, which is a perfectly fine recreational activity. Likewise with portraits vs landscapes - different levels of scope, different levels of detail, both valid art forms.
Some people like vast, epic stories that flesh out grand worlds; some people like close, character-driven stories instead; some people like stories set in the real world, during real events, with which the reader is familiar to some extent; others like stories created ex nihlo which transport you into a wholly original, novel experience. All of these things have their appeal, and arguing for one over the other is as silly as arguing over favorite colors or ice cream flavors.
Either way, receiving an unauthorized copy is never illegal (unlike receiving stolen property). Unauthorized copying (i.e. making the unauthorized copy) is what's illegal.
Though this makes me wonder about distribution. If you've received an unauthorized copy - and lets say for the sake of simplicity it's a really convincing well-made copy on CD with replica labels and all that jazz, so you think it's legit - and then you sell it, say at a garage sale (or on eBay), are you in trouble? What if you know it's illegitimate, is it a crime just to distribute a pre-made unauthorized copy? (This doesn't apply to "distributing" on the internet of course, where it's always copying too). What if you've got a regular source of known-illegitimate copies which you don't make, you just buy and sell? Are you in violation of copyright law there? Copyright law, AFAIK, only restricts copying, so just passing around bits of plastic and foil, on which happens to be unauthorized copies (that you didn't make), wouldn't seem to be a crime. Still, I'm sure there's something on the books against it - the DMCA sure doesn't limit itself to restrictions on copying.
Stolen code becomes less free.
What we care about is the freedom of information. The law is just an expedient to secure that freedom. When the law becomes injurious to that freedom we must break it. The GPL equivalent for music would be giving it away with the sheet music, and allowing others to redistribute it or modify it as they pleased, so long as they also distributed the modified sheet music with it. Would you be happy with a "music license" like that? (Also note the parallel here, what if you only modify the binary/mp3 and not the code/sheet? Do you have to create code/sheet to match your modified binary/mp3 and distribute that, too?)
As I see it, the problem underlying this whole thing is the very concept of "wholesale".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this ruling wouldn't stop me from buying a whole bunch of something at retail from the manufacturer's retail outlet, and then reselling them below retail (at a loss) over the internet, right? This just means that manufacturers can say that they won't sell me something at a discounted (less than retail, i.e. wholesale) price unless I agree not to resell it below a certain price. While I certainly agree that they oughtn't be allowed to do that (any more than, say, a lawnmower manufacture should be able to stipulate what sort of grass I can cut with lawnmowers I buy from them), I think this whole problem stems from this odd notion of wholesale.
Let manufacturers make their things and sell them for whatever price they want. They can give volume discounts, discounts for buying via certain channels (e.g. sell cheaper via phone/internet/mail order than in their brick-and-mortar store), even discounts for membership in a certain club (ala Costco), or combinations thereof, and let that do the work of giving discounts to retailers ("wholesale prices)", who make frequent orders (justifying club membership) in large volumes direct from warehouses (rather than in storefronts). But once someone ("reseller" or not - lets not make arbitrary distinctions between privileged businesspeople and ordinary consumers) has bought it at that price, its theirs and they can do whatever the hell they want with it, including reselling it at any damn price they want. If they can manage to resell cheaper than the manufacturer's retail outlets and still make a profit, tough - that's competition for you. Why do you hate capitalism?
On that note, I see a lot of people calling this "conservative" ruling, and while it may be a very modern-Republican thing to do, it is certainly not conservative in the usual economic sense of pro-capitalism. Though I suppose, if you go back far enough in time, conservative means merchantilist and liberal means capitalist, and this is certainly a very merchantilist ruling here...
First: out of curiosity, how old is your son?
Second, while I can understand your concern with him climbing over stair railings and such, and I can certainly empathize with the strain that having a child like this must put on your life (I'm having similar, though less severe, issues sharing a house with some younger friends who won't let me get any sleep), it disturbs me that the main concern you're expressing here is about how your son's condition disturbs your life, not about his well-being. Perhaps your son is perfectly happy how he is and wouldn't like to be changed?
I'm also interested in this issue with the stair railings, which is why I'm curious as to your son's age. While I haven't gone in to be diagnosed formally, I seem to have many of the typical autism-spectrum symptoms. I'm easily over-stimulated by lights, noises, clutter, etc, uncomfortable in unfamiliar crowds, asocial, etc; I like dark, calm, quiet, clean places away from other people where I can focus on one activity. Thinking about how you say your son has no fear (of heights, in your example), I realize that I too have always been rather fearless of such things, and both as a child and today I was always up on a cliff or tree in the mountains or far out in the water at the ocean, which always frightened my parents, but I had (more then than now) an acute sense of where my limits were and what I could do safely. I guess what I'm saying is, while I can understand your concern for his safety, maybe he does know what he's doing. But again, a lot of this depends on how old he is.
Man... from Apple Computer vs Apple records to iPods and iTunes, from phone phreaks to iPhones... things really come full circle, don't they?
Then why are you here? I've never understood people who enter a conversation, not even to tell everybody else that they're wrong, but just to tell them all to shut up and stop talking about it. If you're tired of talking about it, then just go away; if you think everybody else talking about it is on the wrong track, tell them why you think so. (I do this all the time in philosophical debates where I feel both sides are off their respective rockers). But don't just come into the room and yell at everybody to stop talking.
This is precisely why I used the periodic table as an example. It's a complex collection of information which I, personally, no longer possess the ability to deduce myself, if indeed I ever really did. Chemistry is not my forte and so I don't recall enough of it that I could sit down and recreate a periodic table from scratch; I doubt that most lay people could, though most chemists probably could. However, I do remember enough about valence shells, etc, to have some vague idea of why things are where they are in the periodic table. But more relevantly, I have enough experience with science and scientists that if I walk over to the chem lab and see a chart on the wall telling me that there are 79 protons in the nucleus of a gold atom, I'll believe it, even though I'm not entirely sure how to go about checking that fact myself. But I understand that it is meant to be a reproducible fact, I vaguely grasp some of the repercussions that would ensue if things were otherwise (gold would weigh more or less than it actually does), and I'm confident that if I asked the right people around the chem lab, I could find out exactly how to verify that fact for myself.
But that's just the story of *why* I have faith in (read: trust the word of) scientists - because I understand their methods and see that, if I really needed to, I could ask "how do you know that?", get an answer, and then see for myself whether they're right or wrong. But just as nobody can afford to read every source cited by every nonfiction book they ever read to verify that the information therein is accurate (and then read all the sources cited by each of those books), I don't have the time or energy (or money, or equipment) to go around recreating every science experiment ever conducted to convince myself that the results are correct; I've just got to take it on faith (that is, trust) that these people are reputable and so their results are probably right, and if something relevant to me ends up looking like they're wrong, then maybe I'll go back and try to reproduce their results. And it is precisely the fact that they say "here is how we arrived at this conclusion; try it for yourself" which makes me inclined to trust them - that is, to have faith, of this particular variety, in them - even if I'm unable to actually try it for myself just now.
Note that we're only talking about faith of one of the varieties I mentioned earlier: namely, believing something despite personally lacking evidence for it. Scientific people have that kind of faith all the time: every time a friend tells you something and you believe him without going to double-check the facts with your own eyes, because you consider him a trustworthy source, that's faith of this kind. That's very different from believing something for which (or against which) evidence is impossible, which is the kind of faith that science really distinguishes itself against.
Its called faith you stupid jackass. Some people have it and others don't. Deal with it.
I'll give you the benefit of a doubt that you're not merely a troll, but legitimately upset that some people don't believe as you do, and so ask you this simple question: What is it that is "called faith"? That is, what do you mean by faith? The usual meaning I hear is "belief in something without evidence". But I'm not talking about evidence or skepticism at all. Faith of that sort is not always misplaced: for example, I have faith that the person who put together the periodic table of elements in my chemistry class did so correctly. We wouldn't get very far if we didn't have faith of that sort, because it's beyond any of us to build our entire knowledge base from the ground up.
But since that's not the kind of thing I was talking about at all, I'm at a loss as to what you mean by faith and what it has to do with verifiability. Are you saying that acceptance of unverifiable propositions (that is to say, things that don't make any descriptive claims about the world at all) is faith? Cause I don't have any problem with that either: if you say that the sky is blue and water is wet and 2+2=4 and all sleezborgs are foodlebaks, I can agree with you 100%, because I agree that the sky is blue, and that water is wet, and that 2+2=4, and since 'sleezeborg' and 'foodlebak' are meaningless words I just made up right now, you can agree or disagree with that bit and it won't make any difference to me. So if both you and Joe Blow agree that the physical (i.e. observable) world operates according to such-and-such laws and has such-and such history, but you believe that that is the case because an in-principle unverifiable mind wills it to be so, and Joe Blow ostensibly disagrees, you two actually agree on all matters of fact; your point of contention is, literally, an empty statement with no truth-value (neither true nor false), so it makes no difference whether you say that's the case or not. For a mathematical analogy: if you say the measure of something is equal to 2 plus 1 plus 0, and Joe Blow says it's equal to 2 plus 1 minus 0, you're both equally right (or wrong) because you're both saying the same thing, namely that the measure of that thing is 3 - despite your difference in words.
An important footnote here: by "in-principle unverifiable" I don't just mean that no one anywhere ever WILL have opportunity to observe it, as may be the case with events far away in space or time; rather, I mean something like, if you had absolutely perfect instruments of every variety available to you, and a magic device that could take you any place and any time, even in that fantastic case there is no observation you could make that could prove or disprove the hypothesis in question. In short: a statement is verifiable if and only if, were there someone in the right place(s) at the right time(s) with the right sensors, they would be able to tell by observation whether the statement was true or not.
Now the third thing I can think of that you might mean by faith is something of a cross between the two above: where you say "I don't know what the things he's saying mean, but I agree with him 100%". This kind of blind faith is reprehensible. As I said before, I have faith (of the first variety) in my professors, whereby when they say something and I don't know any better I generally trust that what they say is correct. However, when I hear a professor say something that I don't understand (something which has not conveyed any meaning to me, though perhaps the speaker did mean something by it), I don't think "well, I don't know that to be false, and I trust him, so I'll believe that". I think "what?". And I try to ask questions until I can understand what's being said, and then, if I can finally tease out what exactly he means, then I'll either believe it or not based first on how much I know about the matter and then on how much I trust the professor's beliefs on the matter.
As a philoso
Note that there is a big difference between saying non-false things and saying true things. If what you say implies nothing at all, then you've not really said anything descriptive of the world, and that non-statement is no more false, but also no more true, than silence. So feel-good emotional language (blessed are so-and-so...), lists of commands (thou shalt not...), and so forth, are not even candidates for being true or false. Also bear in mind that "The Bible" is not one big theory, hypothesis, or proposition: it's a whole bunch of them, and as such, some of them could be right and others wrong, and so finding some true statements in there doesn't imply that all statements therein are true.
In my experience, those claims that the Bible makes which are meaningful (actually say something with observable implications), and not evidently false (such as a literal reading of Genesis), are fairly trivial and not disputed even by atheists. (Christians and non-Christians, for all their differences, still agree on a whole lot of things, like for example that 2+2=4, so there are plenty of trivial things in the Bible than even an atheist will agree are true). So if you've read something in there which is meaningful, controversial (i.e. something Christians believe and non-Christians don't), and which you've observed evidence for, I'd be rather interested in hearing what is was, and what sort of evidence you've observed.
[Kang and Kodos are running for office] Kang & Kodos: Abortions for everyone!
Crowd: Boo!
Kang & Kodos: Uh, abortions for no one!
Crowd: Boo!
Kang & Kodos: Um... abortions for some... tiny American flags for others!
Crowd: Yaay!
As long as you're willing to accept use by others, you're not that anti-drug.
Not at all. "People ought not to do X" (a statement about goodness) and "people ought not to be permitted to do X" (a statement about permission) are very different statements, analogous to "people do X" (a statement about truth) and "people could do X" (a statement about possibility). Something can be possible and yet false; likewise, something can be permissible and yet bad. So you can be very anti-drug, and say "I strongly believe that people ought not to take drugs", and yet also very anti-drug-control, and says "I strongly believe that people ought to be permitted to take drugs" - like the person you're replying to, or (to a lesser degree) myself.
Conflation of goodness and permissibility is what leads some people to say "You're anti-X-control? Why are you pro-X, that's crazy!" Consider: people who are anti-abortion-control often aren't pro-abortion. I'm becoming pretty convinced that confusions about modal logic like (confusing truth, possibility, belief, certainty, goodness, permission, desire, etc) this are at the root of almost all religious/political/philosophical conflicts.
Interestingly enough, though I'm in no way a physicist myself - I was, until this past weekends commencement, a philosophy student - I've heard talk of something like decoherence in an assortment of philosophy classes before, so the new stuff is getting out there to schools, just in unlikely places it seems. I'm a fan of modal realism myself (i.e. all possible worlds are equally real), so I don't have problems with indeterminism in the local world so long as the "multiverse" (i.e. the superposition of all possible worlds) is deterministic. Though I don't think it was mentioned by the name decoherence specifically, we've discussed in class the idea that wavefunction collapse upon observation is in fact the opposite: the observer enters a superposed state along with the observed system, simultaneously "observing the system collapse" in every possible way at once, in effect creating multiple "copies" of the observer in alternate "universes", each of which observes a different collapse of the observed system. Of course, examining the wavefunction of the complete universe you wouldn't see it this way; you'd just see the superimposition of histories wherein the observer and the observed system interacted in various ways, and the evolution of that universal wavefunction would, like any other, be completely deterministic.
:-)
One thing I don't get, though, which you sort of raised in your discussion of decoherence, is that if if it's really all a question of information transmission, and everything is constantly interacting with everything else (i.e. everything is constantly "observing" everything else), then shouldn't all events within our light cone be "collapsed" already, whether or not we've gone about making any measurements? So how is it that we can say some particle over there in the lab is presently in a superposed state, when by the time we've finished saying such a thing, everything interacting with the particle has been conveying information to us (whether or not we're conscious of it) at the speed of light? Is it perhaps precisely the fact that the only systems wherein we observe (so to speak) this superposition of unobserved systems are the very conveyors of information (e.g. photons) themselves, which allows them to be within our light cone and yet still not have conveyed any information to us? As in, what is there to tell us about the state of some photon flying by, except for something intercepting that photon and sending some more photons our way to let us know what it was doing?
Anyway... I've sort of lost my train of thought in here somewhere. Thank you for an interesting conversation. I feel sorry for the other states of myself which never got to entangle with such states of yourself
In quantum physics, there are certain questions about the physical universe which are in principle unanswerable - it's not just a matter of needing better equipment or experimental methods, you just cannot, in principle, ever get that information - and in such cases, it's held that said information in fact does not exist at all. Take radioactive decay, a prime example: supposedly it is a truly random process, such that even if you knew the complete state of the universe right now, ever bit of information about it, you could not deduce whether any given atom of Carbon-14 will decay into Carbon-12 in the next second or not, so it must not yet be a fact about the universe that that atom will (or will not) decay, since by hypothesis you know all the information there is to know, but you don't know that. As such, the unobserved future is in "superposition" - the atom both will and will not decay (or neither; both phrasings are somewhat loose and innacurate from what I'm told), until that time comes to pass and we can see whether or not it does, at which point there is some fact about the matter.
This applies equally well to unobserved things in the present, as demonstrated by double-slit experiments demonstrating wave-particle duality and its relation to observation. Because of things like this, you get some weird results like the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment, where an unobserved cat whose possible death is tied to the decay of an unobserved radioisotope is simultaneously alive and dead (or, again, neither; it's in a state of quantum superposition). Another present fact you cannot possibly determine (which information, thus, does not in fact exist) is the precise position and velocity of any given particle; the more determined the position, the less determined the velocity, and vice versa.
Thus, as past events outside our light cone (things which occurred far enough away and recently enough that there's been no chance for their light to reach us) are in principle unobservable right now (until such a time as they come to be observable, just like the possible future decay of our Carbon 14 atom), then right now there is no fact of the matter, no information in the universe, about whether such events occurred, and it's just as much a matter of chance which past will turn out to have occurred as it is a matter of chance which future will occur.
As this relates to black holes, if information really is destroyed when things fall into one, then that black hole has, in effect, a very random past, i.e. it does not follow from the present state of the black hole (and the rest of the universe it's in) that it has any particular history, precisely as it does not follow from the present state of a given Carbon-14 atom (and the rest of the universe it's in) that it will or will not decay at any given moment. That information about the past does not exist anywhere in the universe (it's not just a matter of it not existing in our minds), and so there is no fact of the matter at all about which past actually occurred.
Just as relativity was a huge push for eternalism (a.k.a. "block time"; the position that the past and future are just as real as the present), quantum theory is a big push for presentism (the position that there really are no true statements about the past or the future at all; only the present is real), and I for one am quite eager to see how these two are eventually reconciled, for I find myself thinking sometimes as an eternalist and sometimes as a presentist and they seem, despite the apparent contradictions, somehow reconcilable, if only someone could manage to articulate how...