Without making recourse to my own favorites studies and such, just given the figures from previous posters in this thread - that the U.S. has six times the emissions per capita, and that China has five times the population - it follows from a little simple arithmetic that the U.S. should still have higher emissions overall than China. Namely, 20% more.
I really do not see that there'll be a second time when the earth's population will be come more urban than rural. This trend is pretty much irreversible and, unless a mega-disease wipes out major urban centers, there'll be no second, third, fourth time. I read that passage to mean "now [approximately, i.e as of a few days ago] is the first moment in history in which Earth's population is more urban than rural". Many, many more moments when that is the case will follow; and as you say it's likely that that will continue to be the case indefinitely, barring some horrible disaster. But this is still the first point in time where that is true.
I think the distinction you're illustrating here is one made in ethics between RIGHT or obligatory, and simply GOOD or 'supererogatory', i.e. good but not obligatory. Not assaulting someone is obligatory, and conversely everyone has a right to not be assaulted. Not being a rude asshole is not obligatory, and no one's rights are violated just by you being such a dick; but it's still a good thing to be polite and courteous. Law, in the liberal tradition (liberal in it's plain classical sense here, not in the American-Democratic-Party sense), is considered justified to the extent that it defends people's rights, or conversely, enforces people's obligations. A lot of the problems of traditional or religious (anti-liberal) law has been the conflation of things which are simply (supererogatorily) good with things which are obligatory, and the subsequent attempt to encode into hard and fast law everything which society on average finds good, even though "good" is a much fuzzier area far more open to interpretation than "obligatory". The example you gave, about the Bush administration taking the legality of something (or lack of illegality) to be a sign that it's perfectly OK to do, is a flip side of this that I never really considered.*
This distinction between obligatory and supererogatory closely parallels that between necessary and contingent truths; e.g. 2+3=5 is a necessary truth, something which could not fail to be true by virtue of logic alone (there are fine technical points to be made here but I'm glossing over them), but that I am presently in Santa Barbara, CA is not *necessarily* true, though it *is* true. So, I find it interesting that you refer to the law-based, obligation-centric notions of right and wrong as deriving from a "logical" framework, as many ethicists hold that concepts of rights, duties or obligations do derive purely from a sort of ethical logic, e.g. Kant's "categorical imperative" and everybody who's followed that lead.
*(Though now that I think about it, the real flip side is like someone saying "I'm not required by law to eat well and exercise, so there's absolutely nothing wrong with me laying in bed eating cheesecake all day." There is something wrong with that; it's bad for you and you shouldn't do it. But you're still not *obligated* to eat well and exercise, and so there oughtn't be a law requiring that you do. Same deal as applied to the rude-asshole example. But Bush's transgressions are more of a confusion of legal and ethical obligation; you can be legally permitted to do something and still ethically obliged not to, just as you can be legally prohibited and yet ethically permitted. More still, it stems from a confusion of rights, which inherently belong to people, with powers, which are tentatively granted to governments, leading them to think that just because the law doesn't say the government can't do something, that they can do it; or equivalently, that just because the law doesn't explicitly grant people a particular right, that they don't have such rights. The government may not do anything above and beyond what a normal citizen may do, except where explicitly given permission by the citizenry, and the citizens retail permission to do anything which is not explicitly illegal. The inversion of this, to the notion that government can do anything it wants to except what's explicitly prohibited, and that the people only have the right to do what the government allows them to do, is the real root cause of rising government invasiveness).
IANAN (neurologist), so if any are here, please answer me this: is this sort of keep-sending-signals-around-in-loops method at all like how human memory works? I've often pondered what sort of physical mechanism human memory operates under, as (AFAICT) there's nothing like a hard disk platter or RAM chip or any other sort of fixed array of bits (or other units of data) in the brain; it's just a bunch of neurons firing.
If there is such a similarity between this new technology and human memory, that might explain why I've got a nearly perfect audio memory (I can memorize rhythms and melodies, comedic timing, lines from movies, etc, and to a lesser extent spoken passages like lectures, quickly and easily) and also can never seem to get this damn music out of my head....
Interesting comments from Bungie, considering one of their early projects was porting the side-scrolling platform game Abuse to the Mac... Bungie published Abuse, but the porting was done by Crack dot Com themselves. Correct.
Also, Abuse was not an early Bungie project by any stretch of the imagination. Gnop, O:DS, Minotaur, and Pathways were early Bungie games. By the time the Marathon series was through and they started expanding operations (publishing others' games, like Abuse; porting their titles to Windows; and opening a second studio in San Jose), they were already a mainstream company with a large fanbase.
The Myth era was Bungie's heyday, and though I'm fond of the Halo games, I don't consider the current Microsoft subsidiary to be the same company as published the aforementioned games.
IMO, a better breakthrough would be to see if apes have some sort of moral code Why? Because humans actually have some sort of moral code? I think most scientific research has proved otherwise. I believe the GP was speaking in terms analogous to "see if apes have some sort of language". You don't look for a gene that encodes for some particular conception of morality any more than you look for a gene that codes for speaking French. However, it makes perfect sense to look for a gene coding for moralistic thought (i.e. neurological structures involved in normative reasoning), as much as it make sense to look for a gene coding for language use (i.e. neurological structures involved in the use of language).
So the GP wasn't saying "look to see if apes are moral", he was saying "look to see if apes think about things in moral terms". In other words, does (non-human) ape thought involve concepts like "that is good" (apart from "I like that" or "that is demanded of me by a bigger ape") or "such-and-such is the right thing to do" (apart from "I want to do such-and-such" or "a bigger ape demands that I do such-and-such") - regardless of whether the things they consider good or right actually are (what we consider) good or right. Of course, you could ask the same question about people, and maybe that's what you claim scientific research has disproven, but I've studied that area quite a bit myself and never heard such a question concluded one way or the other (beyond the less-than-rigorous observation that most people SEEM to understand such concepts, which is why we have words for them). Though of course, if you know of something you think I should read on the topic, please feel free to link me...
Ah, I think we may have some semantic differences here then.
I agree wholeheartedly that copyright law is an infringement upon people's private property rights. (Note my disclaimer a few posts back that none of this is meant to imply support of copyright law). I merely disagree with the claim that because some law (unjustly) restricts what you can do with your own property, that you don't in fact own that property at all; and I think that statements to the effect that "you don't really own your music, you just own a license to it" play right into the hands of the RIAA and their ilk. If people get used to thinking they don't really own anything, they just license it, then there will be much less uproar than the little that there is right now. But if people have it pointed out to them that they *own* things, and yet some law is telling them what they can and cannot do with those things, then people might get a little more upset about that.
As an aside, I've just thought of a better analogy than my flawed baseball-bat one: controlled materials. There are certain substances, such as radioactive materials, which at least some people can legitimately own, and yet the things they can do with them are highly restricted. Drugs are probably another, though I'm not sure here; a pharmaceutical company can legitimately own all sorts of restricted drugs, and could legitimately claim that they were stolen or damaged or what not if they were, just like any property; but they can't just go around handing them out to schoolchildren. Again, not saying that sharing music is a bad thing cause it's like distributing uranium or meth to children; just giving an example of a case where someone legitimately owns something, and the law says that they can't do things with it (even give it away).
Ok, so that baseball bat analogy wasn't so great, and I can't think of another one off the top of my head that doesn't involve copyright, so here's one that does: books. You probably own some books, and believe, correctly, that you really do own those books. However, you are prohibited by law from making copies of them. Thus, you can own things and be prohibited from doing certain things with this. But my overarching point was just that the only right that *could* be licensed to you with regards to some hunk of data you've bought is the right to copy it, since that is the only right witheld from you by law; all other rights regarding it come with the purchase.
Of course DRM plus the DMCA throws a huge exception in there in that you're also not allowed to circumvent any encryption mechanism on the data, even though you own it; so if you buy some encrypted data, you'll have to buy a (perhaps limited) license to decrypt it to make any use of it. But this thread is about whether you can really own un-DRMd music, and you can; you're just prohibited by law from doing one thing with it, copying. In fact you can own even DRMd music, but then you are also prohibited by law from doing what is necessary to make any use of it, so really, you've bought something useless which you are prohibited from making useful, plus the limited service of having someone authorized to make it useful for you, do so. Which seems like a real rip-off to me, hence the unsavoriness of DRMd music.
If it weren't for the DMCA, DRMd music would basically be music with "some assembly required"- i.e. you'll have to break the decryption first, though there will be tools to make this easy just as there are hammers out there to make actual assembly of things easy. But with the DMCA, DRM becomes "some assembly required, assembly at home prohibited by law, please see dealer for assembly and a limited-term maintainance contract, assembly may fail upon failure to renew maintainance contract (i.e. we built it like shit so that it'll fall apart unless you pay us to keep it working)".
With un-DRMd music, all you're prohibited from doing is copying it. There's not really any real-world analogy to copying, so this is a weird special case. Though I do wonder... I'm fairly sure that sculpture is copyrightable, and I know that even a simple "X" on a page is automatically copyrighted (though good luck enforcing it), so I would imagine that anything you build, no matter how generic, you automatically have a copyright on. Now, I'm also fairly sure that accurately reproducing a work by hand counts as 'copying'; otherwise simply retyping someone's manuscript (or some GPLd code) letter-for-letter would allow you to circumvent the copyright on it. So all this taken together, it would seem to me that if someone manufactured, say, a wooden chair, that could count as a fairly simple and generic sculpture, and if you were then to get out your saw and lathe and meticulously reconstruct a bunch of identical chairs, you might be in violation of copyright law, just like if you retyped and printed copies of some book you own.
Even when you "purchase" a song, you don't own it. "Renting" or not, you never really own anything other than a license.
That's what the RIAA wants you to think.
When you purchase a song, you purchase either a piece of media on which the song is recorded, or the service of having that data sent to you. (Though actually, it's a little unclear to me what exactly you are purchasing when you purchase a "download"; maybe you're paying someone who is licensed to make copies, to make a copy to your disk?) Either way, the result is that you have paid someone who is legally authorized to make copies of copyrighted materials (the CD distributor, or download service, or whoever) *for a copy of those material*, and you now own that copy (and whatever media you may have purchased with it). You may resell that copy of the data, destroy it, do whatever you want with it like it were any other piece of property.
However, you *are* legally prohibited from making copies of it. The only relevant license someone could sell you regarding it was a license to make further copies; all other relevant rights, you already have. The only right withheld from you is the right to make copies of it. There are plenty of other things you aren't permitted to do with other things that you own (hit someone with your baseball bat, for instance), and that doesn't make you own them any less. No one can revoke your license to listen to it or do anything else with it (though with DRMd music they may have sold you something which extralegally will become useless to you unless you continue to pay them, i.e. "renting" music; but you still own that copy of the data, it's just useless to you now and you're legally prohibited from fixing it to make it useful again).
When you buy music, you *own* that music. Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.
Note: None of the above should be construed as support of copyright law.
This has nothing to do with absorption spectra and everything to do with the human colour system.
Absorption spectra and the human color system are closely related. Things appear the colors they do because they absorb light of what we'd call the complementary hue; that's what makes one color complementary to another (the apparent hue of something which absorbs light of some given frequency is the complement of the hue that that frequency of light appears to us as).
The question was "Why do plants look green?" and someone suggested "because there was a predominance of red light on the early Earth, and so plants evolved to absorb red light, and since green is the complement of red, they appear green now to us under white(ish) light!" But that's not entirely correct (regardless of whether plants really did evolve to absorb red light or not, or for what reason they did), because things which absorb red light appear cyan under white light, not green; so to explain why plants are green, you have to explain also why they absorb blue light - or really, why they *don't* absorb green light (the answer to which may just be that chance evolution had it that way and it works well enough). They may or may not also absorb light of other frequencies that humans can't see, but that has no bearing on what color they appear to us, since we couldn't tell with the naked eye whether they were absorbing those spectra or not.
I've heard that theory (from a fellow art student who wanted to be an elementary school teacher), and it sort of makes sense - she even brought her own paints to class that called themselves "red, yellow, blue" but were clearly magenta, yellow and cyan.
What I don't get though is that, if you're teaching young kids about color for the first time anyway, why not just teach them what cyan and magenta are to begin with? Certainly it's no harder to learn that [this hue] is cyan than it is to learn that [that use] is blue. In some places kids still learn the classic Newtonian 7-color spectrum of red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet, and "indigo" and "violet" are little more common terms than "cyan" or "magenta", especially now in the digital age, so it doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to teach kids those terms.
(As a sidenote, speaking of spectra, I also say we need to name more tertiary colors in the blue spectrum... I'm particularly fond of the complement of orange, hue 210, which I like to call Aqua. It makes for a nice refinement of Newton's 7 colors, to red-orange-yellow-green-cyan-aqua-blue).
Red and green aren't complementary colors in the light spectrum, they're both primary colors.
Red and green aren't complementary colors *period*. The Red-Yellow-Blue spectrum still taught to children and art students is simply incorrect, and the mixing of different ratios of "complementary" colors to get black is just a hack atop a poorly designed system. (And I say this as someone with an art degree, so don't think I'm bashing on art students here).
The additive primaries ("in the light spectrum" as you said) are red, green, and blue.
The subtractive primaries (as useful in inks and other pigments) are cyan, magenta, and yellow. This is what they ought to use in art classes.
The additive secondaries are the subtractive primaries, and vice versa; the two spectra are complementary. (As an additive primary is light of a frequency which stimulates only one of the cone types in the human eye, and a subtractive primary is something which absorbs only one such frequency range and reflects the rest).
Thus, the complement of red is not green, but cyan, which is a sort of blue-green. Interestingly enough, some of the earliest and most prevalent photosynthetic life forms were the blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria.
An approach that resulted in nothing being written without a market for it would result in less pages produced annually, but it would lead to only the stuff that people were actually willing to pay for getting written.
I heartily agree with your post, but I'd like to add one thing further. In addition to works which people are actually willing to pay for, you'd also end up with those works which are made just for the sake of them being made - because the author/artist/etc just felt the need to create them and had the means to do so available. The cost of production and distribution continues to decrease with improvements in technology (granted, the former more slowly than the latter). The average lifestyle in the industrialized world is becoming more leisurely and luxurious all the time (which is not to deny all the social ills there are today, but would you rather be an average citizen of $INDUSTRIALIZED_COUNTRY today, or an average citizen of that same country 500, 300, even 100 years ago?). With these two factors combined, I imagine we'll continue to see more and more works being produced by talented 'amateurs' just for the love of the art, because they had something to say or a vision in their head that they just had to share with the world. And that, IMO, is most often the highest quality work out there.
The copyright owner can sell me a 'license' to modify (extend) my rights to it regarding -distribution and reproduction- (after all that's what copyright should be all about) of such work, but in no way what I can do with it in the privacy of my own house. It's MY copy and I'll use it for whatever I fucking like.
I asked a similar question the first time this story was reported here on Slashdot, and never did get a satisfactory answer. So, any lawyers or law students out there, or people who've been sued for violating EULAs, please, enlighten us all on this issue.
Say Company X (MS in this case) owns some copyrights and some patents and some trademarks, and some physical equipment and resources and facilities (land). This covers about everything they can legally own - all they can exercise exclusive control over. So, they exercise their right to use their patents in designing some software, exercise their copyrights to create (or pay someone to create) a bunch of copies of that software using equipment they legally own and materials (blank CDs, cardboard and paper for boxes, etc) they legally own in facilities they own or lease, and then market it using their trademarks, in storefronts they or someone else legally owns, on on websites they legally own, etc.
Now, I legally walk into a brick-and-mortal store, or legally go to CompanyXStore.com, and I legally purchase a disc from them, with legitimate money from my legitimate bank account that I legitimately earned, and on that disc I now legally own is a legally-made copy of Company X's software, and I take it back to the home that I own or rent, stick it in the computer that I legally own, launch the installer, and suddenly up pops a whole bunch of legalese which says, in effect, that I may not use their software in such-and-such a way (say, I can't run it under virtualization). And the first thing that comes to my mind is......OR ELSE FUCKING WHAT?
Lets see... I own the disc? Check. Copy of the software on it was legally made by the copyright holder or a licensee? Check. I own the computer and all associated hardware it's going on? Check. I own or otherwise legally occupy the place the computer and I are in? Check. I'm not trying to sell anything under Company X's trademarks? Check, I'm not selling anything, I'm just using it. I'm not trying to create anything using a patented technique? Check, I'm not creating anything, I'm just using it.
So on what fucking planet, under what crazy-assed law, am I under any obligation to do what some scary digital note that an installer pops up says? Ooh, watch me now, here I go, I'm installing Vista consumer edition under virtualization(*)... oh there it is, heavens no! Ok Microsoft, come and get me for stealing your property! Wait no, all property concerned here, I own. Oh, so it's copyright infringement? Except you made the fucking copy yourself. Patent infringement? I'll admit I'm a little hazier here, but I'm pretty sure my lawnmower manufacturer, who surely has some patents on their lawnmower designs, can't dictate what type of grass I can mow with the damn lawnmower, so it looks like you're up shit creek here too. Trademark infringement maybe? Except nothing is being traded, and even if it were, I can sell a legitimate MS Windows CD as a legitimate MS Windows CD all I want, so long as I don't try to pawn my own OS off as new MS Windows Omega Edition. So come on, you say I'm not allowed to do this, and now I'm calling you out on it. I can't do that... OR ELSE WHAT? You'll cry? Or write me an angry letter?
(*) Disclaimer - above account is fictional, as I wouldn't touch Windows with a 10-foot pole.
IANAL (though I did take a couple of courses in intellectual property while getting my multimedia arts degree), but it sounds to me like you're confusing copyright and patent somewhat. What it MEANS to be in the public domain is that there is no copyright/patent/etc claims on the work in question. I know wiki is a horrible thing to cite, but this isn't a paper and I'm lazy tonight, so two relevant sentences from the top of the wiki page on public domain:
Public domain comprises the body of knowledge and innovation (especially creative works such as writing, art, music, and inventions) in relation to which no person or other legal entity can establish or maintain proprietary interests within a particular legal jurisdiction.
and
If an item ("work") is not in the public domain, this may be the result of a proprietary interest such as a copyright, patent, or other sui generis right.
What it sounds like you're thinking of is how patents are designed such that people will tell the world about their invention, in exchange for the security that others can't just run off and produce that invention without the permission (usually at a price) of the inventor; as opposed to keeping all inventions as trade secrets, which then die quiet deaths if the inventor is unable to bring it to market himself.
The closest analog to that in the realm of copyright is simply not publishing your creation, which is kind of pointless unless you're only creating it for your own enjoyment. Even then, copyright is automatic, and if you show a friend your awesome painting that you've never shown anyone. and he snaps a nice high-res photo while you're in the bathroom and runs away to publish his photo, you have grounds to sue him for copyright infringement, even if you never registered your copyright or any such thing.
You are right, at least, that the record companies do not "own" the works in any sense beyond the right to say who can make copies of them. So all this nonsense about you buying a license to use their music is just that - nonsense. The only licensing going on is their licensing of the distributor to create the CDs. Once that's done, you're buying a physical disc on which is a legally-made copy of some music, and you're free to do whatever the hell you want with that, aside from make further (unlicensed) copies; though even then there are fair-use exceptions.
Of course if you happen to be a lawyer or something and it turns out I'm talking out my ass, please feel free to correct me, but as far as I understand intellectual property law in America, that's how things work.
Sounds like the government has about as much right to regulate this as they have to regulate somehow growing and consuming something in his own basement. More, in fact. (Which is still to say, none at all).
While most Mac folks would think it anathema to do it, I've always had no probs with getting a Mac w/ only the CPU strength I want, then buffing out the hardware specs everywhere else once I got it home - saves tons of cash that way.
Actually that's fairly standard practice amongst the Mac saavy, and back when I worked an an authorized Apple shop (not an Apple Store; this was before those days) we'd do that when putting together custom high-end orders for our clients. Nevermind that it was also better for the business, since we got practically no profit margins from reselling stock Apple stuff, and made almost all of our money (aside from service/repair) off of parts and accessories, including RAM/HD/etc.
There is no need to switch ISPs, just switch your own dns settings. Switch to servers other than your isp's... problem solved.
True, there is no technical need for users to switch ISPs to use a new DNS, but only the saavy advanced users are going to know to do that, much less how to do that. The point I was responding to was the one that if the US govt messes with the current root DNS, then all the ISPs will just switch to a better root DNS and all the users won't need to do anything. That, it seems to me, is false - the broadband ISPs have no incentive to use any other DNS besides the root one, and no reason to mind if the US government somehow does something to it.
On a side-note, to whatever mods are listening, how is any of this off-topic? (It seems someone has modded most of the posts in this subthread Overrated of Off-Topic). It's tangential, sure, but the progression of discussion is perfectly natural.
And because this is usually handled by the ISP itself (they just change which DNS server their servers have to ask), the users won't even notice the change.
And this is where your otherwise pretty picture breaks down, for us Americans at least. All the broadband ISPs here are major telecom conglomerates who are happily in bed with the nice governments who so generously give them legally enforced local monopolies, lots of public funding to expand their networks, and the use of eminent domain to run their lines. Why would those ISPs ever use any other root DNS but the one that Washington tells them to? And if the government did fuck with the root DNS, and the ISPs played along and didn't care, why would any Joe Average User switch away from their two nice, fast broadband options to the only remaining choice - slow-ass dialup?
What's really needed to solve this dilemma (dialing-while-driving issues in general aside) is a technology which will allow software to subtly deform a touch screen to give tactile feedback. So buttons actually stand out from the screen a bit, etc. I seem to recall there being a technology like this in one of the later of Asimov's Foundation books (Foundation's Edge of Foundation and Earth, I don't recall which): the main character had an inclined, desk-like board on his ship which was a tactile touch screen. I imagine some combination of flexible (and probably elastic) LCDs and something like those toy pinboards (where you've got thousands of tiny dull metal pins arrayed on a board, and you can make impressions of your face and whatnot in them) could accomplish this. The hard part would be controlling all those tiny pins electronically; making the LCD elastic enough to keep snug to the contours of the pinboard would probably also be tough. But imagine the possibilities! You could actually feel the smooth, round curves of... er... those shiny Aqua buttons in OSX.... yeah, that's it. Though other possibilities may help popularize it faster.:-)
f you use the word 'should' in a sentence, then it's a moral issue.
If you define morality as being unconcerned with practical decisions, then you need another word, and another code with a presumably different standard of value, to guide those practical decisions. In other words, why shouldn't I do such things? They are impractical according to which ultimate goal?
The lack of an absolute, universal goal is what makes them not moral issues. To say you "shouldn't" do such things is in this sense just to say that they are detrimental to your happiness/survival/reproductive fitness/etc. You may value such things, and I assume you do, and so by saying you shouldn't do them I'm just advising you that they are counterproductive to what I presume are your goals. But those aren't my necessarily my goals - I may not care whether or not you're happy or alive or whatever (though as a matter of fact I do).
Imagine I say "I want eat a Big Mac", and then you say "then you should go to McDonalds". You're not telling me that I ought to eat a Big Mac, or even that I ought to go to McDonalds, in any moral sense - just that going to McDonalds is conducive to eating a Big Mac. There are some things we presume everybody wants, like happiness and survival, and so we unqualifiedly say "you should do X", meaning that X is conducive to happiness/survival/etc, which we presume everybody wants. But that doesn't necessarily imply that we're saying "you ought to be happy" or "you ought to survive" - that's up to you, though we generally assume that you want such things. If you're familiar with Kant, they're hypothetical imperatives, not categorical ones. Morality is concerned with categorical imperatives: things that you always necessarily ought or ought not to do, regardless of what you want. And categorical imperatives are generally understood as only regarding things which affect other people - if it affects only you, it's entirely up to you whether you do it or not. That is, it depends on what you want; it's merely hypothetically imperative.
"You shouldn't eat sand, play with scorpions, or drink or gamble a lot" are hypothetical imperatives assuming that you want to live a long healthy life. But if you don't, that's your choice - you're under no duty to stay alive. So nobody else can tell you that you morally ought not to do those things categorically, regardless of what you want. There can merely warn you of their consequences; and if you're fine with those consequences, that's your choice.
I suppose you could say, perhaps, that you have a duty to live and be happy, whether you want to or not. In which case things affecting your survival and happiness would be moral issues. But I would disagree with that premise. Whether you live, happily or not, is up to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Well sweety, you see, when a hexagon and a quadrilateral love each other very much...
Without making recourse to my own favorites studies and such, just given the figures from previous posters in this thread - that the U.S. has six times the emissions per capita, and that China has five times the population - it follows from a little simple arithmetic that the U.S. should still have higher emissions overall than China. Namely, 20% more.
Just being helpful, please continue...
I think the distinction you're illustrating here is one made in ethics between RIGHT or obligatory, and simply GOOD or 'supererogatory', i.e. good but not obligatory. Not assaulting someone is obligatory, and conversely everyone has a right to not be assaulted. Not being a rude asshole is not obligatory, and no one's rights are violated just by you being such a dick; but it's still a good thing to be polite and courteous. Law, in the liberal tradition (liberal in it's plain classical sense here, not in the American-Democratic-Party sense), is considered justified to the extent that it defends people's rights, or conversely, enforces people's obligations. A lot of the problems of traditional or religious (anti-liberal) law has been the conflation of things which are simply (supererogatorily) good with things which are obligatory, and the subsequent attempt to encode into hard and fast law everything which society on average finds good, even though "good" is a much fuzzier area far more open to interpretation than "obligatory". The example you gave, about the Bush administration taking the legality of something (or lack of illegality) to be a sign that it's perfectly OK to do, is a flip side of this that I never really considered.*
This distinction between obligatory and supererogatory closely parallels that between necessary and contingent truths; e.g. 2+3=5 is a necessary truth, something which could not fail to be true by virtue of logic alone (there are fine technical points to be made here but I'm glossing over them), but that I am presently in Santa Barbara, CA is not *necessarily* true, though it *is* true. So, I find it interesting that you refer to the law-based, obligation-centric notions of right and wrong as deriving from a "logical" framework, as many ethicists hold that concepts of rights, duties or obligations do derive purely from a sort of ethical logic, e.g. Kant's "categorical imperative" and everybody who's followed that lead.
*(Though now that I think about it, the real flip side is like someone saying "I'm not required by law to eat well and exercise, so there's absolutely nothing wrong with me laying in bed eating cheesecake all day." There is something wrong with that; it's bad for you and you shouldn't do it. But you're still not *obligated* to eat well and exercise, and so there oughtn't be a law requiring that you do. Same deal as applied to the rude-asshole example. But Bush's transgressions are more of a confusion of legal and ethical obligation; you can be legally permitted to do something and still ethically obliged not to, just as you can be legally prohibited and yet ethically permitted. More still, it stems from a confusion of rights, which inherently belong to people, with powers, which are tentatively granted to governments, leading them to think that just because the law doesn't say the government can't do something, that they can do it; or equivalently, that just because the law doesn't explicitly grant people a particular right, that they don't have such rights. The government may not do anything above and beyond what a normal citizen may do, except where explicitly given permission by the citizenry, and the citizens retail permission to do anything which is not explicitly illegal. The inversion of this, to the notion that government can do anything it wants to except what's explicitly prohibited, and that the people only have the right to do what the government allows them to do, is the real root cause of rising government invasiveness).
IANAN (neurologist), so if any are here, please answer me this: is this sort of keep-sending-signals-around-in-loops method at all like how human memory works? I've often pondered what sort of physical mechanism human memory operates under, as (AFAICT) there's nothing like a hard disk platter or RAM chip or any other sort of fixed array of bits (or other units of data) in the brain; it's just a bunch of neurons firing.
If there is such a similarity between this new technology and human memory, that might explain why I've got a nearly perfect audio memory (I can memorize rhythms and melodies, comedic timing, lines from movies, etc, and to a lesser extent spoken passages like lectures, quickly and easily) and also can never seem to get this damn music out of my head....
Also, Abuse was not an early Bungie project by any stretch of the imagination. Gnop, O:DS, Minotaur, and Pathways were early Bungie games. By the time the Marathon series was through and they started expanding operations (publishing others' games, like Abuse; porting their titles to Windows; and opening a second studio in San Jose), they were already a mainstream company with a large fanbase.
The Myth era was Bungie's heyday, and though I'm fond of the Halo games, I don't consider the current Microsoft subsidiary to be the same company as published the aforementioned games.
So the GP wasn't saying "look to see if apes are moral", he was saying "look to see if apes think about things in moral terms". In other words, does (non-human) ape thought involve concepts like "that is good" (apart from "I like that" or "that is demanded of me by a bigger ape") or "such-and-such is the right thing to do" (apart from "I want to do such-and-such" or "a bigger ape demands that I do such-and-such") - regardless of whether the things they consider good or right actually are (what we consider) good or right. Of course, you could ask the same question about people, and maybe that's what you claim scientific research has disproven, but I've studied that area quite a bit myself and never heard such a question concluded one way or the other (beyond the less-than-rigorous observation that most people SEEM to understand such concepts, which is why we have words for them). Though of course, if you know of something you think I should read on the topic, please feel free to link me...
Ah, I think we may have some semantic differences here then.
I agree wholeheartedly that copyright law is an infringement upon people's private property rights. (Note my disclaimer a few posts back that none of this is meant to imply support of copyright law). I merely disagree with the claim that because some law (unjustly) restricts what you can do with your own property, that you don't in fact own that property at all; and I think that statements to the effect that "you don't really own your music, you just own a license to it" play right into the hands of the RIAA and their ilk. If people get used to thinking they don't really own anything, they just license it, then there will be much less uproar than the little that there is right now. But if people have it pointed out to them that they *own* things, and yet some law is telling them what they can and cannot do with those things, then people might get a little more upset about that.
As an aside, I've just thought of a better analogy than my flawed baseball-bat one: controlled materials. There are certain substances, such as radioactive materials, which at least some people can legitimately own, and yet the things they can do with them are highly restricted. Drugs are probably another, though I'm not sure here; a pharmaceutical company can legitimately own all sorts of restricted drugs, and could legitimately claim that they were stolen or damaged or what not if they were, just like any property; but they can't just go around handing them out to schoolchildren. Again, not saying that sharing music is a bad thing cause it's like distributing uranium or meth to children; just giving an example of a case where someone legitimately owns something, and the law says that they can't do things with it (even give it away).
And I'll check out those links, too. Thanks.
Ok, so that baseball bat analogy wasn't so great, and I can't think of another one off the top of my head that doesn't involve copyright, so here's one that does: books. You probably own some books, and believe, correctly, that you really do own those books. However, you are prohibited by law from making copies of them. Thus, you can own things and be prohibited from doing certain things with this. But my overarching point was just that the only right that *could* be licensed to you with regards to some hunk of data you've bought is the right to copy it, since that is the only right witheld from you by law; all other rights regarding it come with the purchase.
Of course DRM plus the DMCA throws a huge exception in there in that you're also not allowed to circumvent any encryption mechanism on the data, even though you own it; so if you buy some encrypted data, you'll have to buy a (perhaps limited) license to decrypt it to make any use of it. But this thread is about whether you can really own un-DRMd music, and you can; you're just prohibited by law from doing one thing with it, copying. In fact you can own even DRMd music, but then you are also prohibited by law from doing what is necessary to make any use of it, so really, you've bought something useless which you are prohibited from making useful, plus the limited service of having someone authorized to make it useful for you, do so. Which seems like a real rip-off to me, hence the unsavoriness of DRMd music.
If it weren't for the DMCA, DRMd music would basically be music with "some assembly required"- i.e. you'll have to break the decryption first, though there will be tools to make this easy just as there are hammers out there to make actual assembly of things easy. But with the DMCA, DRM becomes "some assembly required, assembly at home prohibited by law, please see dealer for assembly and a limited-term maintainance contract, assembly may fail upon failure to renew maintainance contract (i.e. we built it like shit so that it'll fall apart unless you pay us to keep it working)".
With un-DRMd music, all you're prohibited from doing is copying it. There's not really any real-world analogy to copying, so this is a weird special case. Though I do wonder... I'm fairly sure that sculpture is copyrightable, and I know that even a simple "X" on a page is automatically copyrighted (though good luck enforcing it), so I would imagine that anything you build, no matter how generic, you automatically have a copyright on. Now, I'm also fairly sure that accurately reproducing a work by hand counts as 'copying'; otherwise simply retyping someone's manuscript (or some GPLd code) letter-for-letter would allow you to circumvent the copyright on it. So all this taken together, it would seem to me that if someone manufactured, say, a wooden chair, that could count as a fairly simple and generic sculpture, and if you were then to get out your saw and lathe and meticulously reconstruct a bunch of identical chairs, you might be in violation of copyright law, just like if you retyped and printed copies of some book you own.
Even when you "purchase" a song, you don't own it. "Renting" or not, you never really own anything other than a license.
That's what the RIAA wants you to think.
When you purchase a song, you purchase either a piece of media on which the song is recorded, or the service of having that data sent to you. (Though actually, it's a little unclear to me what exactly you are purchasing when you purchase a "download"; maybe you're paying someone who is licensed to make copies, to make a copy to your disk?) Either way, the result is that you have paid someone who is legally authorized to make copies of copyrighted materials (the CD distributor, or download service, or whoever) *for a copy of those material*, and you now own that copy (and whatever media you may have purchased with it). You may resell that copy of the data, destroy it, do whatever you want with it like it were any other piece of property.
However, you *are* legally prohibited from making copies of it. The only relevant license someone could sell you regarding it was a license to make further copies; all other relevant rights, you already have. The only right withheld from you is the right to make copies of it. There are plenty of other things you aren't permitted to do with other things that you own (hit someone with your baseball bat, for instance), and that doesn't make you own them any less. No one can revoke your license to listen to it or do anything else with it (though with DRMd music they may have sold you something which extralegally will become useless to you unless you continue to pay them, i.e. "renting" music; but you still own that copy of the data, it's just useless to you now and you're legally prohibited from fixing it to make it useful again).
When you buy music, you *own* that music. Don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.
Note: None of the above should be construed as support of copyright law.
This has nothing to do with absorption spectra and everything to do with the human colour system.
Absorption spectra and the human color system are closely related. Things appear the colors they do because they absorb light of what we'd call the complementary hue; that's what makes one color complementary to another (the apparent hue of something which absorbs light of some given frequency is the complement of the hue that that frequency of light appears to us as).
The question was "Why do plants look green?" and someone suggested "because there was a predominance of red light on the early Earth, and so plants evolved to absorb red light, and since green is the complement of red, they appear green now to us under white(ish) light!" But that's not entirely correct (regardless of whether plants really did evolve to absorb red light or not, or for what reason they did), because things which absorb red light appear cyan under white light, not green; so to explain why plants are green, you have to explain also why they absorb blue light - or really, why they *don't* absorb green light (the answer to which may just be that chance evolution had it that way and it works well enough). They may or may not also absorb light of other frequencies that humans can't see, but that has no bearing on what color they appear to us, since we couldn't tell with the naked eye whether they were absorbing those spectra or not.
I've heard that theory (from a fellow art student who wanted to be an elementary school teacher), and it sort of makes sense - she even brought her own paints to class that called themselves "red, yellow, blue" but were clearly magenta, yellow and cyan.
What I don't get though is that, if you're teaching young kids about color for the first time anyway, why not just teach them what cyan and magenta are to begin with? Certainly it's no harder to learn that [this hue] is cyan than it is to learn that [that use] is blue. In some places kids still learn the classic Newtonian 7-color spectrum of red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet, and "indigo" and "violet" are little more common terms than "cyan" or "magenta", especially now in the digital age, so it doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to teach kids those terms.
(As a sidenote, speaking of spectra, I also say we need to name more tertiary colors in the blue spectrum... I'm particularly fond of the complement of orange, hue 210, which I like to call Aqua. It makes for a nice refinement of Newton's 7 colors, to red-orange-yellow-green-cyan-aqua-blue).
Red and green aren't complementary colors in the light spectrum, they're both primary colors.
Red and green aren't complementary colors *period*. The Red-Yellow-Blue spectrum still taught to children and art students is simply incorrect, and the mixing of different ratios of "complementary" colors to get black is just a hack atop a poorly designed system. (And I say this as someone with an art degree, so don't think I'm bashing on art students here).
The additive primaries ("in the light spectrum" as you said) are red, green, and blue.
The subtractive primaries (as useful in inks and other pigments) are cyan, magenta, and yellow. This is what they ought to use in art classes.
The additive secondaries are the subtractive primaries, and vice versa; the two spectra are complementary. (As an additive primary is light of a frequency which stimulates only one of the cone types in the human eye, and a subtractive primary is something which absorbs only one such frequency range and reflects the rest).
Thus, the complement of red is not green, but cyan, which is a sort of blue-green. Interestingly enough, some of the earliest and most prevalent photosynthetic life forms were the blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria.
Is it because of your mother that you see your penis has been rated redundant? -Eliza
What are you talking about?
Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
An approach that resulted in nothing being written without a market for it would result in less pages produced annually, but it would lead to only the stuff that people were actually willing to pay for getting written.
I heartily agree with your post, but I'd like to add one thing further. In addition to works which people are actually willing to pay for, you'd also end up with those works which are made just for the sake of them being made - because the author/artist/etc just felt the need to create them and had the means to do so available. The cost of production and distribution continues to decrease with improvements in technology (granted, the former more slowly than the latter). The average lifestyle in the industrialized world is becoming more leisurely and luxurious all the time (which is not to deny all the social ills there are today, but would you rather be an average citizen of $INDUSTRIALIZED_COUNTRY today, or an average citizen of that same country 500, 300, even 100 years ago?). With these two factors combined, I imagine we'll continue to see more and more works being produced by talented 'amateurs' just for the love of the art, because they had something to say or a vision in their head that they just had to share with the world. And that, IMO, is most often the highest quality work out there.
The copyright owner can sell me a 'license' to modify (extend) my rights to it regarding -distribution and reproduction- (after all that's what copyright should be all about) of such work, but in no way what I can do with it in the privacy of my own house. It's MY copy and I'll use it for whatever I fucking like.
...OR ELSE FUCKING WHAT?
I asked a similar question the first time this story was reported here on Slashdot, and never did get a satisfactory answer. So, any lawyers or law students out there, or people who've been sued for violating EULAs, please, enlighten us all on this issue.
Say Company X (MS in this case) owns some copyrights and some patents and some trademarks, and some physical equipment and resources and facilities (land). This covers about everything they can legally own - all they can exercise exclusive control over. So, they exercise their right to use their patents in designing some software, exercise their copyrights to create (or pay someone to create) a bunch of copies of that software using equipment they legally own and materials (blank CDs, cardboard and paper for boxes, etc) they legally own in facilities they own or lease, and then market it using their trademarks, in storefronts they or someone else legally owns, on on websites they legally own, etc.
Now, I legally walk into a brick-and-mortal store, or legally go to CompanyXStore.com, and I legally purchase a disc from them, with legitimate money from my legitimate bank account that I legitimately earned, and on that disc I now legally own is a legally-made copy of Company X's software, and I take it back to the home that I own or rent, stick it in the computer that I legally own, launch the installer, and suddenly up pops a whole bunch of legalese which says, in effect, that I may not use their software in such-and-such a way (say, I can't run it under virtualization). And the first thing that comes to my mind is...
Lets see... I own the disc? Check. Copy of the software on it was legally made by the copyright holder or a licensee? Check. I own the computer and all associated hardware it's going on? Check. I own or otherwise legally occupy the place the computer and I are in? Check. I'm not trying to sell anything under Company X's trademarks? Check, I'm not selling anything, I'm just using it. I'm not trying to create anything using a patented technique? Check, I'm not creating anything, I'm just using it.
So on what fucking planet, under what crazy-assed law, am I under any obligation to do what some scary digital note that an installer pops up says? Ooh, watch me now, here I go, I'm installing Vista consumer edition under virtualization(*)... oh there it is, heavens no! Ok Microsoft, come and get me for stealing your property! Wait no, all property concerned here, I own. Oh, so it's copyright infringement? Except you made the fucking copy yourself. Patent infringement? I'll admit I'm a little hazier here, but I'm pretty sure my lawnmower manufacturer, who surely has some patents on their lawnmower designs, can't dictate what type of grass I can mow with the damn lawnmower, so it looks like you're up shit creek here too. Trademark infringement maybe? Except nothing is being traded, and even if it were, I can sell a legitimate MS Windows CD as a legitimate MS Windows CD all I want, so long as I don't try to pawn my own OS off as new MS Windows Omega Edition. So come on, you say I'm not allowed to do this, and now I'm calling you out on it. I can't do that... OR ELSE WHAT? You'll cry? Or write me an angry letter?
(*) Disclaimer - above account is fictional, as I wouldn't touch Windows with a 10-foot pole.
IANAL (though I did take a couple of courses in intellectual property while getting my multimedia arts degree), but it sounds to me like you're confusing copyright and patent somewhat. What it MEANS to be in the public domain is that there is no copyright/patent/etc claims on the work in question. I know wiki is a horrible thing to cite, but this isn't a paper and I'm lazy tonight, so two relevant sentences from the top of the wiki page on public domain:
Public domain comprises the body of knowledge and innovation (especially creative works such as writing, art, music, and inventions) in relation to which no person or other legal entity can establish or maintain proprietary interests within a particular legal jurisdiction.
and
If an item ("work") is not in the public domain, this may be the result of a proprietary interest such as a copyright, patent, or other sui generis right.
What it sounds like you're thinking of is how patents are designed such that people will tell the world about their invention, in exchange for the security that others can't just run off and produce that invention without the permission (usually at a price) of the inventor; as opposed to keeping all inventions as trade secrets, which then die quiet deaths if the inventor is unable to bring it to market himself.
The closest analog to that in the realm of copyright is simply not publishing your creation, which is kind of pointless unless you're only creating it for your own enjoyment. Even then, copyright is automatic, and if you show a friend your awesome painting that you've never shown anyone. and he snaps a nice high-res photo while you're in the bathroom and runs away to publish his photo, you have grounds to sue him for copyright infringement, even if you never registered your copyright or any such thing.
You are right, at least, that the record companies do not "own" the works in any sense beyond the right to say who can make copies of them. So all this nonsense about you buying a license to use their music is just that - nonsense. The only licensing going on is their licensing of the distributor to create the CDs. Once that's done, you're buying a physical disc on which is a legally-made copy of some music, and you're free to do whatever the hell you want with that, aside from make further (unlicensed) copies; though even then there are fair-use exceptions.
Of course if you happen to be a lawyer or something and it turns out I'm talking out my ass, please feel free to correct me, but as far as I understand intellectual property law in America, that's how things work.
The internet runs between states.
You can do commerce over the internet.
This kid's comments were made on the internet.
Sounds like the government has about as much right to regulate this as they have to regulate somehow growing and consuming something in his own basement. More, in fact. (Which is still to say, none at all).
But shh, I won't tell if you won't.
Wait, I thought Linux was supposed to be communism? I recall someone saying that once. And wouldn't that make McBride = McCarthy?
While most Mac folks would think it anathema to do it, I've always had no probs with getting a Mac w/ only the CPU strength I want, then buffing out the hardware specs everywhere else once I got it home - saves tons of cash that way.
Actually that's fairly standard practice amongst the Mac saavy, and back when I worked an an authorized Apple shop (not an Apple Store; this was before those days) we'd do that when putting together custom high-end orders for our clients. Nevermind that it was also better for the business, since we got practically no profit margins from reselling stock Apple stuff, and made almost all of our money (aside from service/repair) off of parts and accessories, including RAM/HD/etc.
There is no need to switch ISPs, just switch your own dns settings. Switch to servers other than your isp's... problem solved.
True, there is no technical need for users to switch ISPs to use a new DNS, but only the saavy advanced users are going to know to do that, much less how to do that. The point I was responding to was the one that if the US govt messes with the current root DNS, then all the ISPs will just switch to a better root DNS and all the users won't need to do anything. That, it seems to me, is false - the broadband ISPs have no incentive to use any other DNS besides the root one, and no reason to mind if the US government somehow does something to it.
On a side-note, to whatever mods are listening, how is any of this off-topic? (It seems someone has modded most of the posts in this subthread Overrated of Off-Topic). It's tangential, sure, but the progression of discussion is perfectly natural.
And because this is usually handled by the ISP itself (they just change which DNS server their servers have to ask), the users won't even notice the change.
And this is where your otherwise pretty picture breaks down, for us Americans at least. All the broadband ISPs here are major telecom conglomerates who are happily in bed with the nice governments who so generously give them legally enforced local monopolies, lots of public funding to expand their networks, and the use of eminent domain to run their lines. Why would those ISPs ever use any other root DNS but the one that Washington tells them to? And if the government did fuck with the root DNS, and the ISPs played along and didn't care, why would any Joe Average User switch away from their two nice, fast broadband options to the only remaining choice - slow-ass dialup?
What's really needed to solve this dilemma (dialing-while-driving issues in general aside) is a technology which will allow software to subtly deform a touch screen to give tactile feedback. So buttons actually stand out from the screen a bit, etc. I seem to recall there being a technology like this in one of the later of Asimov's Foundation books (Foundation's Edge of Foundation and Earth, I don't recall which): the main character had an inclined, desk-like board on his ship which was a tactile touch screen. I imagine some combination of flexible (and probably elastic) LCDs and something like those toy pinboards (where you've got thousands of tiny dull metal pins arrayed on a board, and you can make impressions of your face and whatnot in them) could accomplish this. The hard part would be controlling all those tiny pins electronically; making the LCD elastic enough to keep snug to the contours of the pinboard would probably also be tough. But imagine the possibilities! You could actually feel the smooth, round curves of... er... those shiny Aqua buttons in OSX.... yeah, that's it. Though other possibilities may help popularize it faster. :-)
f you use the word 'should' in a sentence, then it's a moral issue.
If you define morality as being unconcerned with practical decisions, then you need another word, and another code with a presumably different standard of value, to guide those practical decisions. In other words, why shouldn't I do such things? They are impractical according to which ultimate goal?
The lack of an absolute, universal goal is what makes them not moral issues. To say you "shouldn't" do such things is in this sense just to say that they are detrimental to your happiness/survival/reproductive fitness/etc. You may value such things, and I assume you do, and so by saying you shouldn't do them I'm just advising you that they are counterproductive to what I presume are your goals. But those aren't my necessarily my goals - I may not care whether or not you're happy or alive or whatever (though as a matter of fact I do).
Imagine I say "I want eat a Big Mac", and then you say "then you should go to McDonalds". You're not telling me that I ought to eat a Big Mac, or even that I ought to go to McDonalds, in any moral sense - just that going to McDonalds is conducive to eating a Big Mac. There are some things we presume everybody wants, like happiness and survival, and so we unqualifiedly say "you should do X", meaning that X is conducive to happiness/survival/etc, which we presume everybody wants. But that doesn't necessarily imply that we're saying "you ought to be happy" or "you ought to survive" - that's up to you, though we generally assume that you want such things. If you're familiar with Kant, they're hypothetical imperatives, not categorical ones. Morality is concerned with categorical imperatives: things that you always necessarily ought or ought not to do, regardless of what you want. And categorical imperatives are generally understood as only regarding things which affect other people - if it affects only you, it's entirely up to you whether you do it or not. That is, it depends on what you want; it's merely hypothetically imperative.
"You shouldn't eat sand, play with scorpions, or drink or gamble a lot" are hypothetical imperatives assuming that you want to live a long healthy life. But if you don't, that's your choice - you're under no duty to stay alive. So nobody else can tell you that you morally ought not to do those things categorically, regardless of what you want. There can merely warn you of their consequences; and if you're fine with those consequences, that's your choice.
I suppose you could say, perhaps, that you have a duty to live and be happy, whether you want to or not. In which case things affecting your survival and happiness would be moral issues. But I would disagree with that premise. Whether you live, happily or not, is up to you.