There's one big issue that I wish had been brought up in this article, but that simply wasn't. How long should a copyright last?
A reasonable idea has been that a copyright should last as long as the author lives, plus a period of time for his estate. No, that wasn't the original law, but it seems to make a kind of sense. As long as an author lives, he has exclusive control of his work, unless he voluntarily transfers that control to somebody else. (In which case the clock starts ticking.)
This idea breaks when you consider that corporations are legal persons, and that they can own copyrights. The copyright for the Mickey Mouse cartoons isn't owned by Walt Disney, the deceased person. They're owned by Disney, the extant corporation. And corporations have no natural lifespan. So how long should a copyright last?
I've never heard a good argument on this question. Everybody seems to propose an arbitrary number-- 28 years, 75 years, 99 years-- without giving any good reason for it.
How's this for an idea. Copyright is granted automatically for a period of 30 years. (Yeah, there's that arbitrary number I just bitched about. But in this case, I picked it because it's more-or-less one generation.) If you want to extend your copyright, you're free to do so for some sort of proportional, sliding-scale fee. The justification would be that the copyright holder is doing society a minor but nontrivial harm by holding on to his work, but that that harm could be offset by the additional revenue to the government. If Disney wants to hold on to the copyright for "Steamboat Willie" forever, they're free to do so if they can cough up the greenbacks.
It would probably take a Constitutional amendment to make an idea like that one legal, but stranger things have happened.
See, that's your opinion. Others' opinions differ on this matter. That's why the line between communication and spam is not clear. While it may be easy for you to delineate, it is quite impossible to delineate for everybody.
Re:Religious paranoid idiots will ban anything
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See, there you go talking about "rights" some more. The idea of a "right" is a convenient shorthand for one of two things. First, saying "I have a right" can mean, "I don't want you doing this to me, and I have the ability to impose my will upon you with the coercive threat of force." That's what people mean when they say things like, "I have a right to free speech." What they mean is, "I'll say what I want, and if you try to stop me, I'll hit you really hard until you give up."
The other side of the "rights" coin is the idea that a "right" is a rule established by an outside authority. Remember that famous line, "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights?" This form of shorthand means, "I don't want you doing this to me, and somebody else has the ability to impose my will upon you with the coercive threat of force."
So "rights" are just a convenient shorthand for the idea that being able to impose your will on another person through the threat of force is, under certain societally agreed-upon circumstances, justified.
Once you understand this basic concept, the idea of "civil rights" becomes crystal clear. Your rights are those things that either you yourself can convince people not to do to you, under threat of force; or that God, society as a whole, or some other outside authority can convince people not to do to you, under threat of force.
Why do you have a right to free speech? Because if another individual attempts to limit your speech excessively, the government will exercise its power to apply force-- physical, economic, or what have you-- to convince that individual to stop. If the government itself tries to limit your speech excessively, society as a whole may exert force on the government-- through elections if possible, or ultimately armed revolt if not-- to convince the government to stop. The only reason, of course, for society to do this is fear: fear that the government, having silenced you, will then turn to them.
What this all means is that you, yourself, have no rights at all except to the extent that you are willing and able to exercise force to defend them.
Think about this, and think about what it means in the context of what you wrote above.
This is part troll, but this question has been raised before.
Oh, of course it's not part troll, unless you define "troll" as being "unpopular opinion."
Piracy for the most part doesn't really hurt anyone....
That's obviously false. Piracy does cause financial harm to copyright holders. The amount of harm caused may not be significant-- as you say, people still go to movies-- but if only one person downloads a pirated CD instead of buying it, the copyright holder has been harmed. That doesn't necessarily mean much, but it does invalidate your point that piracy doesn't harm anybody.
Spam, on the other hand, causes no financial harm at all. It's annoying, but it doesn't deprive any person or company of revenue. You could say that spam causes harm through denial of service, but the exact same thing can be said of file trading, so that point is moot.
Do you see now what I meant when I posted my original comment? The arguments for allowing file trading while banning spam just don't hold water. I just can't find a way to reconcile the ideas that file trading is okay-- even, as some Slashdotters inexplicably argue-- beneficial, while spam should be criminalized.
Oh, okay. I completely and totally misinterpreted your comment. It sounded like you were advocating the idea of little molecule-sized nuclear-powered tanks. Sorry for coming down on you.;-)
Nanotechnological diseases may or may not behave just like biological ones, depending on how they are designed.
That's kind of a cop-out. I reject your premise. Nanotechnological diseases would-- if they weren't a science-fiction fever dream-- be bounded by the same constraints that govern the capabilities and behaviors of biological diseases, and could not escape them.
And in any case, biological diseases are already capable of discrimination. For example, look at malaria, which people from equatorial regions are more resistant to than others.
You're confusing discrimination-- the ability for a disease particle, biological or otherwise, to distinguish between individuals-- with the natural feedback loop of germ resistance. Think about why vaccinations work. When you are vaccinated, a small amount of germ material is introduced into your body. Your immune system creates an antibody to the germ material, which remains in your system after the vaccine load has been eliminated. When your body comes into contact with that germ in the wild, the antibody is there to help you fight off the infection. This has nothing at all to do with some magical ability of the germ itself to tell who has received the vaccine and who hasn't. Rather, the germ just tries to do its thing indiscriminately, only to be prevented by the antibodies present in the host. Natural resistance works in basically the same way, only without the vaccine.
Different races will have different markers in their DNA (those differing phenotypes have to come from somewhere, don't they?)....
Actually, it's not really possible to distinguish between different races using gene sequencing alone. There's no "black" gene, no "white" gene. It's much more complex than that.
That said, you're proposing that a nanotechnological disease could somehow enter either the nucleus or the mitochondria of a cell directly, and manipulate the DNA in order to identify the host. Scale is against you here; it's very difficult to envision an object large enough to perform some kind of rudimentary calculations based on the sequencing of an entire genome and yet small enough to enter the nucleus or mitochondria of a cell. Furthermore, it would not be possible to perform the sort of test you propose without destroying the genome of the cell, thereby killing it. The heat generated by the device in traversing the chromosomes alone would probably be sufficient to denature the bonds holding the chromosomes together. This would have the effect of shutting down protein synthesis inside the cell completely. The result would almost certainly be immediate apoptosis. As a result, the nanotechnological disease particle would be unable to finish its job before destroying the very thing it's trying to sequence. Not terribly effective as a discrimination mechanism; you can either kill everybody, or no one.
The agents would be program to remain inert and unnoticed until they received a certain trigger message (transmitted by radio or other means)
So now we're talking about molecular-scale objects, smaller than an organelle but larger than a protein, that are equipped with radio receivers? You're kidding, right? You know that a radio antenna has physical limits on its minimum size, don't you? Nanotechnological disease particles would be far to small to even interact with radio waves, much less receive and interpret them.
The only way to communicate at that scale is chemically. You'd have to get the disease particles out there-- into everybody, presumably-- and then deliver some activating agent to just the people you want killed, and somehow get that activating agent into the cells themselves. This is, for all practical purposes, impossible. And even if a way were conceived to make it possible and practical, it would still be absurdly complex and completely-- not practically, but completely-- impossible to control.
Do you see now why this whole idea is just science fiction? And bad science fiction at that.
Re:Religious paranoid idiots will ban anything
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Don't Stymie Nanotech
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As I said under another post, I support Libertarian nutjobs* like yourself because I think the world needs all points of view. Reasonable people-- such as I flatter myself to be-- can look at your position, realize that while it has merit no society could ever function that way, and get on with building, or maintaining, a system that really works.
Sometime you might want to consider spending some time thinking about the nature of man-- whether man, left to his own devices, tends more toward good than toward evil, as an aggregate-- and the interrelationship between "rights," about which you speak at length and with great familiarity, and responsibilities.
You can start here: there are no rights; there are only obligations that the members of society impose on one another through an implicit or explicit social contract, and these obligations are carried out only under the coercive threat of force.
See what your noodle can make of that.
I'm not trying to change your opinion at all. I'm just hoping to inspire some new thoughts.
* Just kidding. It's a term of affection, seriously.
Hmm, according to your *ahum* logic, blackhat hackers are FREE to own your machine.
How do you figure? The law in many jurisdictions makes unauthorized access to a computer a crime of property. United States law (specifically, Title 18 section 2701) makes unauthorized access to any facility to which electronic communications access is provided a crime punishable by up to one year in prison in the first offense.
But that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is the fact that many Slashdotters oppose one form of electronic communication which is, at present, entirely legal, but support another which is, at present, entirely illegal. Their reasons for supporting file trading make it essentially impossible to argue for banning spam, while their reasons for banning spam make it impossible to argue for allowing file trading.
This is funny to me.
Let me give you a little advice: skip comparing apples and pears, it makes you look stupid.
Let me give you some advice in return: don't assert that two things are as different as apples and pears when, in fact, they are essentially the same thing.
Yours is the first sensible response to my post that I've seen so far. I don't agree with it, entirely, but I think you make a good argument.
All too many Slashdotters seem to oppose copyright on principle. You, on the other hand, seem to disapprove of the current implementation of copyright law. I find it much more interesting to hear about ideas like yours than to listen to obviously uninformed souls argue that copyright-- indeed all of intellectual property-- as a concept must be abolished.
That's trivia. The mechanism doesn't matter; the real issue is annoyance. (By the way, I'm not talking about trading information. I'm talking about trading copyrighted materials, like movies, TV shows, music, and so on. Huge difference.)
Spam is an annoyance to its recipients. Some people say, therefore, that spam is bad and wrong. Some of those people say that spam should, in fact, be illegal, or prevented through technological means.
File trading of copyrighted materials is an annoyance to the copyright holders. But the same people here on Slashdot who say that spam is an annoyance and that it should (possibly) be banned or stopped reject the premise that file trading should be banned or stopped for the same reasons. I find this ironic, and funny in its irony. Basically, the reasoning goes, spam should be stopped because it annoys me, while file trading is okay because it only annoys others.
The reason why file-trading, etc. is accepted here and SPAM is not is because of the intrusiveness of SPAM.
Just FYI, "SPAM" is a meat product sold by Hormel; "spam" is unsolicited junk email. The two terms can't be used interchangeably for trademark reasons.
That said, file trading is also intrusive. It's intrusive on the rights, granted by law, of the copyright holder. The only difference is that spam intrudes on you, personally, while file trading doesn't. But both are intrusive, and in the same way.
This is the irony that tickles my funny bone. The prevailing consensus of opinion on Slashdot is that file trading is okay because it only infringes on the rights of others, while spam is not okay because it infringes on the (notional, and in fact completely fictitious) rights of me.
Spam is annoying. But annoyances, in general, are not against the law. Trading copyrighted materials, on the other hand, is explicitly against the law. Yet one of these is morally okay, and the other is morally intolerable, by Slashdot standards.
Can you seriously tell me that this doesn't absolutely crack you up?
Man, what an asshole. In the interest of being friendly, I'll just ignore your flames and respond to the actual content of your post instead. I know, it's a radical idea, but I'll give it a shot and see what happens.
Communication between two consenting adults is different than unsolicitated advertisement.
True. Or is it?
Let's say you and I are friends, and I send you an email that says, "Hey, how are you?" Even if you're not expecting the email, that's surely communication between consenting adults, right? I mean, if you and I are friends, it's silly to think that I should be required to ask permission before sending you a social email, right? So that's okay.
Other end of the spectrum. I'm a spammer based in Hong Kong. I get your email address from a web-scraper, or other indiscriminate source. I send you a message, using carefully forged headers, advertising nasty kiddie-animal porn. That's not okay, right, because you never consented, even implicitly, to receive that email. And, given the choice, you never would have consented to receive it. So that's obviously bad and wrong.
Now let's blur the line a bit. Let's say we're friends, and I send you an email-- which you are not expecting-- that says, "Hey, how are you? I'm trying to sell my lawnmower; would you like to buy it?" That's obviously an advertisement, albeit an informal one between friends. You don't know that I'm selling my lawnmower; you've never expressed an interest in buying my lawnmower. My email to you was completely unsolicited. But it's still okay, because we're friends. You wouldn't try to get my ISP to shut off my email account for that-- unless you're just a complete and total asshole, a possibility based on your response that I'm not willing to rule out yet.
Now let's blur things a little more. What if I'm a friend of a friend. I don't know you directly, but I'm asking around about selling my lawnmower and a mutual acquaintance of ours says, "I don't want it, but my friend Henry V.009 just bought a new house with a big yard, so he might be interested. Here's his email address." I send you an email-- unsolicited, with no prior relationship, for commercial purposes-- asking if you want to buy my lawnmower. Is that spam? No, because our mutual friend had a reason to think that you might be interested, so it was reasonable for him to give me your address, and reasonable for me to contact you. No spam there.
What if our mutual friend had no particular reason to think that you'd be interested in my lawnmower? What if he just said, "Try Henry V.009. He might want it." Is it spam then?
What if I'm simultaneously doing this same sort of thing with everybody I know? Is it spam then?
Some things are obviously spam. And some things are obviously not. But in the middle, you have lots of stuff that's not obviously either. In deciding which is which, you have to make a judgment call. Which, it seems, puts the lie to your statement that "communication between two consenting adults is different than unsolicitated advertisement." In some cases, communication between two consenting adults is, in fact, just barely distinguishable from unsolicited advertisement.
Ever been in Japan? Ever heard the vans with loud-speakers that go around town campaigning for a certain candidate? Notice how a politician in the U.S. would go to jail if he tried it.
Nobody would go to jail. Disturbance of the peace is not an offense that warrants being taken to jail. If you play your stereo too loudly-- either because you like loud music or because you want people to hear it-- you'll get a citation, nothing more.
This example, of course, has nothing at all to do with advertisement or communication. It has to do with the idea of the commons, over which society has jurisdiction. Same principle that makes littering on city property a crime. Because communication has, as you say, "certain safeguards of privacy and freedom," it's pretty tough to argue that the conduit of communication-- in this case, the network that connects computers via email-- can be treated as a commons by the state.
Good one. If you're on a shared connection-- either shared in the cable modem sense, or shared in the upstream provider sense-- and somebody spends all day and night downloading The Two Towers, you're being deprived in precisely the same way as if you were getting hit with gigs and gigs of spam. The only difference is, after it's all said and done, you don't even get to keep the spam.
So, let me see if I understand your argument. Spam, which is annoying to you, is bad and wrong. Trading copyrighted material, which is both annoying to the people who own the copyrights on that material and illegal to boot, is okay. Because... because it doesn't annoy you personally?
Free is free, man. If you want to be free to trade copyrighted materials-- and it's not clear that you do, but most Slashdot posters hold that position-- then the spammers have to be free to send you junk mail. If you accept that limits on freedom are sometimes necessary and just, then it seems like there's a much stronger case against the file traders than against the spammers.
Excellent question. I wish I could have phrased it so well. If 100 is Hitler and 1 is... um... the obnoxious kid at Best Buy who tries to strike up a conversation with you while you're checking out when all you really want to do is go home and watch your new DVDs, I'd say that spammers rank about a 2.
Yeah, seriously. I get some spam, although most of it is filtered out. I delete it, and get on with my day. I also get junk mail in my (real) mail box. I throw that stuff out with the trash, and the waste of it all would have me rank real-life junk mailers at around 6. (Telemarketers, because they interrupt my otherwise peaceful time at home, get a 5. At least they're not killing trees. I do have to wonder though... somebody must be buying stuff from telemarketers, otherwise they wouldn't do it. It must suck to me that person.)
But despite the fact that all of these things hit close to home, none of them are as evil as, say, the next-door neighbor of mine who used to kick his dog. That's just eeeeee-vil.
It always cracks me up when I read Slashdot articles about spam. The exchange of music, movies, and copyrighted software is universally-- well, almost; there are a few dissenters, but we're a minority-- upheld as just fine and dandy, and those who try to put a stop to it are accused of being totalitarian dinosaurs who are rapidly getting left behind by the Internet age.
Spammers, on the other hand, are the lowest form of scum.
This dichotomy amuses me. If you guys want to be free to trade music and movies and whatnot, then it's pretty hard to argue that spammers shouldn't also be free to email out their billions of pieces of junk mail.
If you don't know anything about bacteria, and imagine bacteria sized self assembling little armored tanks with superior memory and AI to bacteria, that can somehow extract energy from their environment faster and more efficiently than bacteria (maybe with little nuclear engines?) the idea makes alot of sense.
The idea makes, in fact, no sense at all. Let's start at the beginning.
little armored tanks
How do you propose to "armor" an item the size of a bacterium? With metal? At that level, metal is just atoms, and in fact it's quite reactive with its environment. A bacterium-or-smaller object made of metal wouldn't last very long in the presence of oxygen, either in gaseous or aqueous form.
If you want to build an object on that scale, you're going to have to start with carbon. And objects made of carbon aren't particularly well armored.
superior memory and AI
Using what, rod logic? Drexler's work on rod logic makes for an interesting read, but it's impossible to imagine it ever working in the real world. One stray UV photon would scatter the carbon chain into a million fragments.
And as for AI... when you get around to figuring out how to make it work, call me. Until then, let's just assume that these little objects are run by microscopic leprechauns. It's about as plausible.
that can somehow extract energy from their environment
Somehow? At that scale, your options are chemical energy-- the energy of atomic bonds as they form and re-form in chemical reactions-- and solar energy. Plants have mastered both, and they've been working on it a lot longer than you have. It's hard to imagine a molecular-scale system that's more energy-efficient than a living cell.
maybe with little nuclear engines?
Yeah, maybe. When you figure out how to solve the heat transfer and molecular lubrication problems (I'll give you a hint: you can't) let me know.
the idea makes alot of sense.
Not really. Sorry.
Re:Religious paranoid idiots will ban anything
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I do agree, the risk of acting without forethought is there, but also there is the risk of not acting.
All of your statements about the crosswalk analogy are valid, and I won't argue them with you. But I do take issue with this one statement. The risk of acting, in any situation, is that the result of your actions will make things worse than the status quo. The risk of not acting, though, is that you will fail to improve on the status quo. Nanotechnology offers no realistic benefits that I can see. (Sure, you can talk about assembling tiny machines to clean out arteries and repair brain damage and whatnot, but thus far these ideas are nothing more than science fiction. It has not even been demonstrated theoretically that such ideas could ever be made to work, so it makes little sense to talk about them in serious discussion.)
In the absence of outside factors, the risk of acting is always greater than the risk of not acting. We face no crisis, as a species, that drives us to consider desperate measures. Because nanotechnology offers no realistic benefits to us at this time, there's no risk in taking things slowly and, if you'll pardon the expression, looking before we leap.
But should we not at least try to find the answer, or should we just throw up our arms and say "It is the work of God!"
Despite what you and several other posters have written, nobody is trying to put a halt to all research medieval style. On the contrary, I'm simply advocating reasoned caution, rather than blindly pursuing a particular area of research simply because we can. Individual scientists, as well as society as a whole, should carefully consider the possible consequences of their actions before, as dh003i suggests, "embracing the future and figuring out how to use new technologies to our advantage."
As to the whole life question, there is more to this issue than morality. There is also an ethical argument. Take, as a given, that the arbitrary killing of people is a bad thing. (Why? Because nobody wants it to happen to them.) Therefore, placing a great deal of value on human life is a good thing, because it works to prevent the arbitrary taking of that life. Blurring the line between life and lifelessness, when dealing with matters like elective abortion, cloning, and so on, serves to reduce the overall value that society as a whole places on human life. The net result, then, is bad.
That's a simplistic argument, of course, but I just want to demonstrate that it is possible to have a moral or ethical discussion of these sorts of issues without resorting to, "It is the work of God!"
Re:Religious paranoid idiots will ban anything
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Don't Stymie Nanotech
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's impossible to come to any (useful) purely deductive conclusion without starting from some set of external, a priori axioms.
Well, yes and no. In the strictest possible sense, you're right. When making ethical judgments-- which are, at their heart, value judgments-- you have to start with some basis for value. There has to be an explicit or implicit "X is good" in there somewhere. For example, in order for my previous trivial example of an ethical argument against capital punishment, you have to start with the implicit assumption that a benefit to society is a good thing, and that depriving society of a benefit is to be avoided.
But there's a significant qualitative difference between starting with "avoid doing harm" and starting with "God exists and he has given us rules by which to live." One starts with a proposition so obvious that it requires no rationalization. The other starts with a proposition based purely on faith, for which no rationalization is possible.
How do you prove that 1+1=2 without reference to anything external?
That's exactly what Whitehead and Russell did in their Principia Mathematica. (Not to be confused with Newton's book of a similar name.) They started with absolutely nothing and developed the principles of symbolic logic, sets, and relations, then finally got to cardinal arithmetic at the beginning of volume 2. So it is definitely possible to reduce something as fundamental as arithmetic down to first principles. It's not easy, but it's possible.
Re:Religious paranoid idiots will ban anything
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Don't Stymie Nanotech
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Nothing is *simply* morally wrong.
Actually, anything that's morally wrong is simply morally wrong. That's because morality depends on one or more fundamental axioms provided from outside of the moral system. Every culture-- big or small-- has some set of moral axioms, and though not every member may agree on them, they can be used to construct childishly simple moral arguments. Capital punishment, for example, is morally wrong because the question of the time of a man's death is a choice that only God can make, and choosing to kill a man is to place oneself in the position of God, which is blasphemy, which is wrong. That argument only holds water if you accept all of the fundamental assumptions-- that God exists, that only God has the right to choose when a man dies, and so on-- but if you do, the argument is trivial.
Ethics, however, are more complex, because an ethical system is expected to be internally consistent, starting with no external axioms at all. An ethical argument against capital punishment might be that no one can predict what a person might do in the remainder of his natural life, so ending that person's life may be depriving society as a whole of a greater good. That argument, which many people find to be pretty compelling, doesn't depend on any unfounded assumptions, so it's more complex, but it requires less... oh, faith, I suppose, for lack of a better word.
Some people, though, reject all concepts of morality and ethics. These people, as I said before, are basically broken in my opinion. Arguing morality or ethics with them is a fool's errand, because they reject the prospect that one should act based on moral or ethical choices. Talking about ethics with a person like that is enough to make you want to jump off the roof, so I just won't bother.
To put it bluntly, it was canceled because it really began to stink. I mean really. The first two-and-a-half seasons were outstanding, but things really took a dive after that.
As much as it pains me to admit it-- I used to be such a gianormous fan-- it's a good time for Farscape to go.
Nanotechnological diseases would behave just like biological ones. They could not discriminate. Nothing on a biological level separates the White Hats from the Black Hats, so it is simply not possible to engineer a disease-- biological or otherwise-- that gets them but not us. The only hope for such a battle plan is geographic isolation, which, like counting on the direction of the wind in the trenches of the Great War, is no plan at all.
If, on the other hand, you're talking about somehow getting a nanotechnological agent into an enemy leader directly, rather than infecting an entire population, just cut out the BS and shoot the bastard instead. You're close enough, and it's much less expensive.
Control in the nanotechnology "gray goo" sense. Arbitrary and externally imposed limits on growth. Like I said before, everywhere plants can grow, they are growing. I doubt we would like it very much if self-reproducing nanotechnological assemblers followed that same pattern.
Re:It has more benefits than drawbacks...
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Don't Stymie Nanotech
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· Score: 3, Informative
If you're going to get a (3, Insightful) for this post, then you really ought to back up the above with a good solid argument.
Didn't realize I needed one. It seems to me that the drawbacks to Drexler's ideas are blindingly obvious. But, if you need to hear them, try reading this. What you're looking for, stated incredibly briefly, is near the bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
There's one big issue that I wish had been brought up in this article, but that simply wasn't. How long should a copyright last?
A reasonable idea has been that a copyright should last as long as the author lives, plus a period of time for his estate. No, that wasn't the original law, but it seems to make a kind of sense. As long as an author lives, he has exclusive control of his work, unless he voluntarily transfers that control to somebody else. (In which case the clock starts ticking.)
This idea breaks when you consider that corporations are legal persons, and that they can own copyrights. The copyright for the Mickey Mouse cartoons isn't owned by Walt Disney, the deceased person. They're owned by Disney, the extant corporation. And corporations have no natural lifespan. So how long should a copyright last?
I've never heard a good argument on this question. Everybody seems to propose an arbitrary number-- 28 years, 75 years, 99 years-- without giving any good reason for it.
How's this for an idea. Copyright is granted automatically for a period of 30 years. (Yeah, there's that arbitrary number I just bitched about. But in this case, I picked it because it's more-or-less one generation.) If you want to extend your copyright, you're free to do so for some sort of proportional, sliding-scale fee. The justification would be that the copyright holder is doing society a minor but nontrivial harm by holding on to his work, but that that harm could be offset by the additional revenue to the government. If Disney wants to hold on to the copyright for "Steamboat Willie" forever, they're free to do so if they can cough up the greenbacks.
It would probably take a Constitutional amendment to make an idea like that one legal, but stranger things have happened.
See, that's your opinion. Others' opinions differ on this matter. That's why the line between communication and spam is not clear. While it may be easy for you to delineate, it is quite impossible to delineate for everybody.
See, there you go talking about "rights" some more. The idea of a "right" is a convenient shorthand for one of two things. First, saying "I have a right" can mean, "I don't want you doing this to me, and I have the ability to impose my will upon you with the coercive threat of force." That's what people mean when they say things like, "I have a right to free speech." What they mean is, "I'll say what I want, and if you try to stop me, I'll hit you really hard until you give up."
The other side of the "rights" coin is the idea that a "right" is a rule established by an outside authority. Remember that famous line, "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights?" This form of shorthand means, "I don't want you doing this to me, and somebody else has the ability to impose my will upon you with the coercive threat of force."
So "rights" are just a convenient shorthand for the idea that being able to impose your will on another person through the threat of force is, under certain societally agreed-upon circumstances, justified.
Once you understand this basic concept, the idea of "civil rights" becomes crystal clear. Your rights are those things that either you yourself can convince people not to do to you, under threat of force; or that God, society as a whole, or some other outside authority can convince people not to do to you, under threat of force.
Why do you have a right to free speech? Because if another individual attempts to limit your speech excessively, the government will exercise its power to apply force-- physical, economic, or what have you-- to convince that individual to stop. If the government itself tries to limit your speech excessively, society as a whole may exert force on the government-- through elections if possible, or ultimately armed revolt if not-- to convince the government to stop. The only reason, of course, for society to do this is fear: fear that the government, having silenced you, will then turn to them.
What this all means is that you, yourself, have no rights at all except to the extent that you are willing and able to exercise force to defend them.
Think about this, and think about what it means in the context of what you wrote above.
I wish you had posted this as yourself rather than anonymously, so I could put you on my "friends" list.
Oh, well. At least somebody gets it.
This is part troll, but this question has been raised before.
Oh, of course it's not part troll, unless you define "troll" as being "unpopular opinion."
Piracy for the most part doesn't really hurt anyone....
That's obviously false. Piracy does cause financial harm to copyright holders. The amount of harm caused may not be significant-- as you say, people still go to movies-- but if only one person downloads a pirated CD instead of buying it, the copyright holder has been harmed. That doesn't necessarily mean much, but it does invalidate your point that piracy doesn't harm anybody.
Spam, on the other hand, causes no financial harm at all. It's annoying, but it doesn't deprive any person or company of revenue. You could say that spam causes harm through denial of service, but the exact same thing can be said of file trading, so that point is moot.
Do you see now what I meant when I posted my original comment? The arguments for allowing file trading while banning spam just don't hold water. I just can't find a way to reconcile the ideas that file trading is okay-- even, as some Slashdotters inexplicably argue-- beneficial, while spam should be criminalized.
Oh, okay. I completely and totally misinterpreted your comment. It sounded like you were advocating the idea of little molecule-sized nuclear-powered tanks. Sorry for coming down on you. ;-)
Nanotechnological diseases may or may not behave just like biological ones, depending on how they are designed.
That's kind of a cop-out. I reject your premise. Nanotechnological diseases would-- if they weren't a science-fiction fever dream-- be bounded by the same constraints that govern the capabilities and behaviors of biological diseases, and could not escape them.
And in any case, biological diseases are already capable of discrimination. For example, look at malaria, which people from equatorial regions are more resistant to than others.
You're confusing discrimination-- the ability for a disease particle, biological or otherwise, to distinguish between individuals-- with the natural feedback loop of germ resistance. Think about why vaccinations work. When you are vaccinated, a small amount of germ material is introduced into your body. Your immune system creates an antibody to the germ material, which remains in your system after the vaccine load has been eliminated. When your body comes into contact with that germ in the wild, the antibody is there to help you fight off the infection. This has nothing at all to do with some magical ability of the germ itself to tell who has received the vaccine and who hasn't. Rather, the germ just tries to do its thing indiscriminately, only to be prevented by the antibodies present in the host. Natural resistance works in basically the same way, only without the vaccine.
Different races will have different markers in their DNA (those differing phenotypes have to come from somewhere, don't they?)....
Actually, it's not really possible to distinguish between different races using gene sequencing alone. There's no "black" gene, no "white" gene. It's much more complex than that.
That said, you're proposing that a nanotechnological disease could somehow enter either the nucleus or the mitochondria of a cell directly, and manipulate the DNA in order to identify the host. Scale is against you here; it's very difficult to envision an object large enough to perform some kind of rudimentary calculations based on the sequencing of an entire genome and yet small enough to enter the nucleus or mitochondria of a cell. Furthermore, it would not be possible to perform the sort of test you propose without destroying the genome of the cell, thereby killing it. The heat generated by the device in traversing the chromosomes alone would probably be sufficient to denature the bonds holding the chromosomes together. This would have the effect of shutting down protein synthesis inside the cell completely. The result would almost certainly be immediate apoptosis. As a result, the nanotechnological disease particle would be unable to finish its job before destroying the very thing it's trying to sequence. Not terribly effective as a discrimination mechanism; you can either kill everybody, or no one.
The agents would be program to remain inert and unnoticed until they received a certain trigger message (transmitted by radio or other means)
So now we're talking about molecular-scale objects, smaller than an organelle but larger than a protein, that are equipped with radio receivers? You're kidding, right? You know that a radio antenna has physical limits on its minimum size, don't you? Nanotechnological disease particles would be far to small to even interact with radio waves, much less receive and interpret them.
The only way to communicate at that scale is chemically. You'd have to get the disease particles out there-- into everybody, presumably-- and then deliver some activating agent to just the people you want killed, and somehow get that activating agent into the cells themselves. This is, for all practical purposes, impossible. And even if a way were conceived to make it possible and practical, it would still be absurdly complex and completely-- not practically, but completely-- impossible to control.
Do you see now why this whole idea is just science fiction? And bad science fiction at that.
As I said under another post, I support Libertarian nutjobs* like yourself because I think the world needs all points of view. Reasonable people-- such as I flatter myself to be-- can look at your position, realize that while it has merit no society could ever function that way, and get on with building, or maintaining, a system that really works.
Sometime you might want to consider spending some time thinking about the nature of man-- whether man, left to his own devices, tends more toward good than toward evil, as an aggregate-- and the interrelationship between "rights," about which you speak at length and with great familiarity, and responsibilities.
You can start here: there are no rights; there are only obligations that the members of society impose on one another through an implicit or explicit social contract, and these obligations are carried out only under the coercive threat of force.
See what your noodle can make of that.
I'm not trying to change your opinion at all. I'm just hoping to inspire some new thoughts.
* Just kidding. It's a term of affection, seriously.
Hmm, according to your *ahum* logic, blackhat hackers are FREE to own your machine.
How do you figure? The law in many jurisdictions makes unauthorized access to a computer a crime of property. United States law (specifically, Title 18 section 2701) makes unauthorized access to any facility to which electronic communications access is provided a crime punishable by up to one year in prison in the first offense.
But that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is the fact that many Slashdotters oppose one form of electronic communication which is, at present, entirely legal, but support another which is, at present, entirely illegal. Their reasons for supporting file trading make it essentially impossible to argue for banning spam, while their reasons for banning spam make it impossible to argue for allowing file trading.
This is funny to me.
Let me give you a little advice: skip comparing apples and pears, it makes you look stupid.
Let me give you some advice in return: don't assert that two things are as different as apples and pears when, in fact, they are essentially the same thing.
*Sigh* some people need a lot of explaining.
They sure do.
Yours is the first sensible response to my post that I've seen so far. I don't agree with it, entirely, but I think you make a good argument.
All too many Slashdotters seem to oppose copyright on principle. You, on the other hand, seem to disapprove of the current implementation of copyright law. I find it much more interesting to hear about ideas like yours than to listen to obviously uninformed souls argue that copyright-- indeed all of intellectual property-- as a concept must be abolished.
That's trivia. The mechanism doesn't matter; the real issue is annoyance. (By the way, I'm not talking about trading information. I'm talking about trading copyrighted materials, like movies, TV shows, music, and so on. Huge difference.)
Spam is an annoyance to its recipients. Some people say, therefore, that spam is bad and wrong. Some of those people say that spam should, in fact, be illegal, or prevented through technological means.
File trading of copyrighted materials is an annoyance to the copyright holders. But the same people here on Slashdot who say that spam is an annoyance and that it should (possibly) be banned or stopped reject the premise that file trading should be banned or stopped for the same reasons. I find this ironic, and funny in its irony. Basically, the reasoning goes, spam should be stopped because it annoys me, while file trading is okay because it only annoys others.
The reason why file-trading, etc. is accepted here and SPAM is not is because of the intrusiveness of SPAM.
Just FYI, "SPAM" is a meat product sold by Hormel; "spam" is unsolicited junk email. The two terms can't be used interchangeably for trademark reasons.
That said, file trading is also intrusive. It's intrusive on the rights, granted by law, of the copyright holder. The only difference is that spam intrudes on you, personally, while file trading doesn't. But both are intrusive, and in the same way.
This is the irony that tickles my funny bone. The prevailing consensus of opinion on Slashdot is that file trading is okay because it only infringes on the rights of others, while spam is not okay because it infringes on the (notional, and in fact completely fictitious) rights of me.
Spam is annoying. But annoyances, in general, are not against the law. Trading copyrighted materials, on the other hand, is explicitly against the law. Yet one of these is morally okay, and the other is morally intolerable, by Slashdot standards.
Can you seriously tell me that this doesn't absolutely crack you up?
Man, what an asshole. In the interest of being friendly, I'll just ignore your flames and respond to the actual content of your post instead. I know, it's a radical idea, but I'll give it a shot and see what happens.
.009 just bought a new house with a big yard, so he might be interested. Here's his email address." I send you an email-- unsolicited, with no prior relationship, for commercial purposes-- asking if you want to buy my lawnmower. Is that spam? No, because our mutual friend had a reason to think that you might be interested, so it was reasonable for him to give me your address, and reasonable for me to contact you. No spam there.
.009. He might want it." Is it spam then?
Communication between two consenting adults is different than unsolicitated advertisement.
True. Or is it?
Let's say you and I are friends, and I send you an email that says, "Hey, how are you?" Even if you're not expecting the email, that's surely communication between consenting adults, right? I mean, if you and I are friends, it's silly to think that I should be required to ask permission before sending you a social email, right? So that's okay.
Other end of the spectrum. I'm a spammer based in Hong Kong. I get your email address from a web-scraper, or other indiscriminate source. I send you a message, using carefully forged headers, advertising nasty kiddie-animal porn. That's not okay, right, because you never consented, even implicitly, to receive that email. And, given the choice, you never would have consented to receive it. So that's obviously bad and wrong.
Now let's blur the line a bit. Let's say we're friends, and I send you an email-- which you are not expecting-- that says, "Hey, how are you? I'm trying to sell my lawnmower; would you like to buy it?" That's obviously an advertisement, albeit an informal one between friends. You don't know that I'm selling my lawnmower; you've never expressed an interest in buying my lawnmower. My email to you was completely unsolicited. But it's still okay, because we're friends. You wouldn't try to get my ISP to shut off my email account for that-- unless you're just a complete and total asshole, a possibility based on your response that I'm not willing to rule out yet.
Now let's blur things a little more. What if I'm a friend of a friend. I don't know you directly, but I'm asking around about selling my lawnmower and a mutual acquaintance of ours says, "I don't want it, but my friend Henry V
What if our mutual friend had no particular reason to think that you'd be interested in my lawnmower? What if he just said, "Try Henry V
What if I'm simultaneously doing this same sort of thing with everybody I know? Is it spam then?
Some things are obviously spam. And some things are obviously not. But in the middle, you have lots of stuff that's not obviously either. In deciding which is which, you have to make a judgment call. Which, it seems, puts the lie to your statement that "communication between two consenting adults is different than unsolicitated advertisement." In some cases, communication between two consenting adults is, in fact, just barely distinguishable from unsolicited advertisement.
Ever been in Japan? Ever heard the vans with loud-speakers that go around town campaigning for a certain candidate? Notice how a politician in the U.S. would go to jail if he tried it.
Nobody would go to jail. Disturbance of the peace is not an offense that warrants being taken to jail. If you play your stereo too loudly-- either because you like loud music or because you want people to hear it-- you'll get a citation, nothing more.
This example, of course, has nothing at all to do with advertisement or communication. It has to do with the idea of the commons, over which society has jurisdiction. Same principle that makes littering on city property a crime. Because communication has, as you say, "certain safeguards of privacy and freedom," it's pretty tough to argue that the conduit of communication-- in this case, the network that connects computers via email-- can be treated as a commons by the state.
Good one. If you're on a shared connection-- either shared in the cable modem sense, or shared in the upstream provider sense-- and somebody spends all day and night downloading The Two Towers, you're being deprived in precisely the same way as if you were getting hit with gigs and gigs of spam. The only difference is, after it's all said and done, you don't even get to keep the spam.
So, let me see if I understand your argument. Spam, which is annoying to you, is bad and wrong. Trading copyrighted material, which is both annoying to the people who own the copyrights on that material and illegal to boot, is okay. Because... because it doesn't annoy you personally?
Free is free, man. If you want to be free to trade copyrighted materials-- and it's not clear that you do, but most Slashdot posters hold that position-- then the spammers have to be free to send you junk mail. If you accept that limits on freedom are sometimes necessary and just, then it seems like there's a much stronger case against the file traders than against the spammers.
(BTW, what is this "troll" of which you speak?)
So -- on a scale of 1 to 100, spammers rank (?).
Excellent question. I wish I could have phrased it so well. If 100 is Hitler and 1 is... um... the obnoxious kid at Best Buy who tries to strike up a conversation with you while you're checking out when all you really want to do is go home and watch your new DVDs, I'd say that spammers rank about a 2.
Yeah, seriously. I get some spam, although most of it is filtered out. I delete it, and get on with my day. I also get junk mail in my (real) mail box. I throw that stuff out with the trash, and the waste of it all would have me rank real-life junk mailers at around 6. (Telemarketers, because they interrupt my otherwise peaceful time at home, get a 5. At least they're not killing trees. I do have to wonder though... somebody must be buying stuff from telemarketers, otherwise they wouldn't do it. It must suck to me that person.)
But despite the fact that all of these things hit close to home, none of them are as evil as, say, the next-door neighbor of mine who used to kick his dog. That's just eeeeee-vil.
It always cracks me up when I read Slashdot articles about spam. The exchange of music, movies, and copyrighted software is universally-- well, almost; there are a few dissenters, but we're a minority-- upheld as just fine and dandy, and those who try to put a stop to it are accused of being totalitarian dinosaurs who are rapidly getting left behind by the Internet age.
Spammers, on the other hand, are the lowest form of scum.
This dichotomy amuses me. If you guys want to be free to trade music and movies and whatnot, then it's pretty hard to argue that spammers shouldn't also be free to email out their billions of pieces of junk mail.
If you don't know anything about bacteria, and imagine bacteria sized self assembling little armored tanks with superior memory and AI to bacteria, that can somehow extract energy from their environment faster and more efficiently than bacteria (maybe with little nuclear engines?) the idea makes alot of sense.
The idea makes, in fact, no sense at all. Let's start at the beginning.
little armored tanks
How do you propose to "armor" an item the size of a bacterium? With metal? At that level, metal is just atoms, and in fact it's quite reactive with its environment. A bacterium-or-smaller object made of metal wouldn't last very long in the presence of oxygen, either in gaseous or aqueous form.
If you want to build an object on that scale, you're going to have to start with carbon. And objects made of carbon aren't particularly well armored.
superior memory and AI
Using what, rod logic? Drexler's work on rod logic makes for an interesting read, but it's impossible to imagine it ever working in the real world. One stray UV photon would scatter the carbon chain into a million fragments.
And as for AI... when you get around to figuring out how to make it work, call me. Until then, let's just assume that these little objects are run by microscopic leprechauns. It's about as plausible.
that can somehow extract energy from their environment
Somehow? At that scale, your options are chemical energy-- the energy of atomic bonds as they form and re-form in chemical reactions-- and solar energy. Plants have mastered both, and they've been working on it a lot longer than you have. It's hard to imagine a molecular-scale system that's more energy-efficient than a living cell.
maybe with little nuclear engines?
Yeah, maybe. When you figure out how to solve the heat transfer and molecular lubrication problems (I'll give you a hint: you can't) let me know.
the idea makes alot of sense.
Not really. Sorry.
I do agree, the risk of acting without forethought is there, but also there is the risk of not acting.
All of your statements about the crosswalk analogy are valid, and I won't argue them with you. But I do take issue with this one statement. The risk of acting, in any situation, is that the result of your actions will make things worse than the status quo. The risk of not acting, though, is that you will fail to improve on the status quo. Nanotechnology offers no realistic benefits that I can see. (Sure, you can talk about assembling tiny machines to clean out arteries and repair brain damage and whatnot, but thus far these ideas are nothing more than science fiction. It has not even been demonstrated theoretically that such ideas could ever be made to work, so it makes little sense to talk about them in serious discussion.)
In the absence of outside factors, the risk of acting is always greater than the risk of not acting. We face no crisis, as a species, that drives us to consider desperate measures. Because nanotechnology offers no realistic benefits to us at this time, there's no risk in taking things slowly and, if you'll pardon the expression, looking before we leap.
But should we not at least try to find the answer, or should we just throw up our arms and say "It is the work of God!"
Despite what you and several other posters have written, nobody is trying to put a halt to all research medieval style. On the contrary, I'm simply advocating reasoned caution, rather than blindly pursuing a particular area of research simply because we can. Individual scientists, as well as society as a whole, should carefully consider the possible consequences of their actions before, as dh003i suggests, "embracing the future and figuring out how to use new technologies to our advantage."
As to the whole life question, there is more to this issue than morality. There is also an ethical argument. Take, as a given, that the arbitrary killing of people is a bad thing. (Why? Because nobody wants it to happen to them.) Therefore, placing a great deal of value on human life is a good thing, because it works to prevent the arbitrary taking of that life. Blurring the line between life and lifelessness, when dealing with matters like elective abortion, cloning, and so on, serves to reduce the overall value that society as a whole places on human life. The net result, then, is bad.
That's a simplistic argument, of course, but I just want to demonstrate that it is possible to have a moral or ethical discussion of these sorts of issues without resorting to, "It is the work of God!"
It's impossible to come to any (useful) purely deductive conclusion without starting from some set of external, a priori axioms.
Well, yes and no. In the strictest possible sense, you're right. When making ethical judgments-- which are, at their heart, value judgments-- you have to start with some basis for value. There has to be an explicit or implicit "X is good" in there somewhere. For example, in order for my previous trivial example of an ethical argument against capital punishment, you have to start with the implicit assumption that a benefit to society is a good thing, and that depriving society of a benefit is to be avoided.
But there's a significant qualitative difference between starting with "avoid doing harm" and starting with "God exists and he has given us rules by which to live." One starts with a proposition so obvious that it requires no rationalization. The other starts with a proposition based purely on faith, for which no rationalization is possible.
How do you prove that 1+1=2 without reference to anything external?
That's exactly what Whitehead and Russell did in their Principia Mathematica. (Not to be confused with Newton's book of a similar name.) They started with absolutely nothing and developed the principles of symbolic logic, sets, and relations, then finally got to cardinal arithmetic at the beginning of volume 2. So it is definitely possible to reduce something as fundamental as arithmetic down to first principles. It's not easy, but it's possible.
Nothing is *simply* morally wrong.
Actually, anything that's morally wrong is simply morally wrong. That's because morality depends on one or more fundamental axioms provided from outside of the moral system. Every culture-- big or small-- has some set of moral axioms, and though not every member may agree on them, they can be used to construct childishly simple moral arguments. Capital punishment, for example, is morally wrong because the question of the time of a man's death is a choice that only God can make, and choosing to kill a man is to place oneself in the position of God, which is blasphemy, which is wrong. That argument only holds water if you accept all of the fundamental assumptions-- that God exists, that only God has the right to choose when a man dies, and so on-- but if you do, the argument is trivial.
Ethics, however, are more complex, because an ethical system is expected to be internally consistent, starting with no external axioms at all. An ethical argument against capital punishment might be that no one can predict what a person might do in the remainder of his natural life, so ending that person's life may be depriving society as a whole of a greater good. That argument, which many people find to be pretty compelling, doesn't depend on any unfounded assumptions, so it's more complex, but it requires less... oh, faith, I suppose, for lack of a better word.
Some people, though, reject all concepts of morality and ethics. These people, as I said before, are basically broken in my opinion. Arguing morality or ethics with them is a fool's errand, because they reject the prospect that one should act based on moral or ethical choices. Talking about ethics with a person like that is enough to make you want to jump off the roof, so I just won't bother.
To put it bluntly, it was canceled because it really began to stink. I mean really. The first two-and-a-half seasons were outstanding, but things really took a dive after that.
As much as it pains me to admit it-- I used to be such a gianormous fan-- it's a good time for Farscape to go.
Nanotechnological diseases would behave just like biological ones. They could not discriminate. Nothing on a biological level separates the White Hats from the Black Hats, so it is simply not possible to engineer a disease-- biological or otherwise-- that gets them but not us. The only hope for such a battle plan is geographic isolation, which, like counting on the direction of the wind in the trenches of the Great War, is no plan at all.
If, on the other hand, you're talking about somehow getting a nanotechnological agent into an enemy leader directly, rather than infecting an entire population, just cut out the BS and shoot the bastard instead. You're close enough, and it's much less expensive.
what's "control"?
Control in the nanotechnology "gray goo" sense. Arbitrary and externally imposed limits on growth. Like I said before, everywhere plants can grow, they are growing. I doubt we would like it very much if self-reproducing nanotechnological assemblers followed that same pattern.
If you're going to get a (3, Insightful) for this post, then you really ought to back up the above with a good solid argument.
Didn't realize I needed one. It seems to me that the drawbacks to Drexler's ideas are blindingly obvious. But, if you need to hear them, try reading this. What you're looking for, stated incredibly briefly, is near the bottom.