The benefits of going to Mars a few years early DO NOT outweigh the cost of a human life, even if that life is given voluntarily. The prospect seems irrational and somehow unethical to me.
Some posters have compared this to soldiers sacrificing their lives in war. That's a silly comparison. A soldier throwing himself on a grenade is trying to directly save lives. No soldier would throw himself on a grenade if he was the only person in danger -- that would be suicide, no matter how 'brave' that soldier was.
As the parent suggests, there is a line between bravery and stupidity. That line is defined by intelligence and rational thought.
[and the moderation here is absurd, btw]
Re:Pretending the world is NOT random is most logi
on
Fooled by Randomness
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· Score: 1
Most of us think that the reason we were so unpopular was that we were smarter than everyone else.
It's much more likely that we were/are unpopular because we're socially inept.
Hint: acting like you're smarter than everyone else is socially inept.
But that's exactly what copyright law protects against. Without copyright law, John Doe could take Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" and publish it as "Nuclear Nightmare" by John Doe. In the more likely scenario, Clancy's publisher (Putnam) would get screwed because competing publishers would be able to publish exact copies of Clancy's books without paying Clancy or Putnam anything. Therefore, in a world without copyright protection, no artist or author would get paid for their works.
You're right that some authors write even if they had no chance of being paid, or even if their name wasn't clearly associated with their works. But this would represent a small fraction of the books that are written today -- our bookshelves would be a lot bleaker without copyright protection.
As for Mozart and the Renaissance, those were different times for artists. Most (if not all) were employed by the wealthy elite so that their physical needs were met. Today, very few artists have that luxury. Instead, most need to sell their works in order to eat and pay rent.
but if I say I have no incentive to bring things into the public domain without a copyright monopoly - they just take it on faith, they don't even question it.
They don't take it on faith, they use their brains: without copyright protection, there is a huge disincentive to produce material for public consumption. Why would I write a book if the day after it was published, someone could re-publish it in their own name?
This issue at stake here is the length of copyright protection, not the necessity of that protection.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you on this, JudgeFurious.
The benefits of going to Mars a few years early DO NOT outweigh the cost of a human life, even if that life is given voluntarily. The prospect seems irrational and somehow unethical to me.
Some posters have compared this to soldiers sacrificing their lives in war. That's a silly comparison. A soldier throwing himself on a grenade is trying to directly save lives. No soldier would throw himself on a grenade if he was the only person in danger -- that would be suicide, no matter how 'brave' that soldier was.
As the parent suggests, there is a line between bravery and stupidity. That line is defined by intelligence and rational thought.
[and the moderation here is absurd, btw]
bullseye!
Most of us think that the reason we were so unpopular was that we were smarter than everyone else. It's much more likely that we were/are unpopular because we're socially inept. Hint: acting like you're smarter than everyone else is socially inept.
But that's exactly what copyright law protects against. Without copyright law, John Doe could take Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" and publish it as "Nuclear Nightmare" by John Doe. In the more likely scenario, Clancy's publisher (Putnam) would get screwed because competing publishers would be able to publish exact copies of Clancy's books without paying Clancy or Putnam anything. Therefore, in a world without copyright protection, no artist or author would get paid for their works.
You're right that some authors write even if they had no chance of being paid, or even if their name wasn't clearly associated with their works. But this would represent a small fraction of the books that are written today -- our bookshelves would be a lot bleaker without copyright protection.
As for Mozart and the Renaissance, those were different times for artists. Most (if not all) were employed by the wealthy elite so that their physical needs were met. Today, very few artists have that luxury. Instead, most need to sell their works in order to eat and pay rent.
They don't take it on faith, they use their brains: without copyright protection, there is a huge disincentive to produce material for public consumption. Why would I write a book if the day after it was published, someone could re-publish it in their own name?
This issue at stake here is the length of copyright protection, not the necessity of that protection.