Given that the question comes up so regularly, perhaps it's worth considering that the use of the word "free" to describe something that is neither unrestricted nor available at no cost might not be the best idea a person ever had.
You'd be shocked (assuming you have a conscience) at how much of it ends up in 'landfill' (i.e. in the open air, on fire, with children picking through it) in India, or poisoning Chinese poor people as they dip the PCBs in toxic chemicals.
Shock me. How much?
(My bullshit detector is going off, you see, so I thought I'd call the bluff.)
birth rises about 12-20% per year, deaths stay about the same, what does that tell you?
It tells me that the population is growing. But that's not sufficient to conclude that we have a population problem. Our population-- the population of the world, I mean-- is not growing at a rate that outstrips our ability to exploit natural resources.
Age-Retardation would definately intensify the over population problem.
What over-population problem? The world has the natural resources, and we have the technology to exploit them, to support a much larger population than the present one. The only real challenge facing us is one of transportation: getting the stuff from where it grows, lives, or is made to where the people are.
Do you really want to have to plot strategy every time you go shopping to make sure the powers that be don't try to screw you over?
Do you somehow think you're entitled to not being screwed over? Merchants are free to set their prices however they choose; if you don't like it, shop somewhere else.
I actually still care somewhat about the uneducated, the younger people, and the elderly.
I care about them to. I just don't care about them any more than I care about the middle-aged, the affluent, the intelligent. All men are created equal, right? Let 'em fight it out.
You're right, what we need are more refined methods for oligopolies to extract the maximum amount of money from consumers.
Hey, man, if you think it's a bad idea, then don't contribute to it or support it. But the instant you, or anybody else, suggests that maybe it ought to be illegal, they're going to get an earful.
Well in the United states a few years ago an abominable thing called slavery existed by law in some states.
Slavery was never supported by law. It was merely not prohibited by law. Those are two entirely different things.
Oh, and by the way, comparing copyright law and a copyright-related tax to slavery makes you look like a blowhard.
I postulate that is is your responsibility to disobey laws that you find morally objectionable.
And I postulate that it is your responsibility to find something more important to get morally uppity about than whether or not you can continue to download free music. Get a sense of perspective.
Basically the slippery slope argument works like this: let X be some proposed change to the status quo. I don't like X; I don't want X to be adopted. Rather than arguing that X is bad, though, I argue that X will lead inevitably to Y, Y being something that is universally accepted as bad. See the trick? I didn't actually say anything about X at all, except to associate it with Y, and arguing that Y is bad is trivial because everybody already agrees that it is. I don't even have to establish that X inevitably leads to Y; if I'm sufficiently savvy, I can just assume that my audience already knows that X leads to Y.
You recognize a slippery slope argument by taking a step back and asking yourself a few questions. First of all, is it even possible that X might, by itself, lead to Y? Or would it be necessary for other, substantial changes to the status quo to occur for Y to happen? Most slippery slope arguments fail right here. Let's try it out.
Twitter said, "It's a large step toward the end of free personal computing." If you excise the word "large," because it has no meaning in this context, the statement in and of itself is true. Making it impossible for you to use your computer for one thing is indeed a step toward absolute control over what you can and can't do with your computer.
(Is it necessary for you to have absolute control over your computer? Twitter dodges this important question.)
Twitter's implication, though, is that one restriction will inevitably lead to absolute control. Let's apply our test here. Is it possible for making it either illegal or impossible for computer users to do one illegal thing with their computer to lead to absolute control over what users can do with their computers? Or would it be necessary for other, substantial changes to occur in order to institute that total control?
Obviously the answer is "no." It is not possible for one restriction to turn into absolute control without lots of other changes to the status quo. So right there the slippery slope argument fails.
In other words, while it is possible that we might go to sleep tonight having accepted one restriction and wake up tomorrow in a totalitarian police state, it's also possible that we might all wake up to find chocolate bunnies under our pillows in the morning. Unless some pretty drastic things happen, neither one is going to occur.
The boil-a-frog variation is basically the same as the slippery slope argument, only with the extra rhetorical spice of implied malicious intent on the part of an unseen actor. "They're boiling us, folks! It's happening slow, so we don't notice it, but they're boiling us! Jump for your lives!"
In other words, my dear friend, the whole line of reasoning is day-old bullshit, and it stinks.
Here's the problem. If everyone -- and I mean *everyone* -- is violating some particular law, then that law needs to be revisited. Obviously that law isn't for the good of the people, if the people themselves are violating it.
Not all laws exist for the good of the people. Some laws exist for a different good, but people must still obey them.
Look at it this way. The penalty for speeding is very minor-- a small fine-- and the likelihood of getting caught is low. The penalty for shoplifting is more serious, and the likelihood of getting caught is higher. The penalty for bankrobbing is very severe, and getting caught is a virtual certainty.
Hardly anyone robs banks, some people shoplift, and virtually everyone speeds.
We can address the problem of widespread casual piracy by making the penalty for doing so severe, and the likelihood of getting caught high. Say, if the fine for downloading a copyrighted MP3 were $10,000, and the odds of getting caught were 50/50.
It's a horrible summation. It ignores the fact that content brokers are only one of the parties affected by piracy.
Look, let's assume that all record companies, for example, evaporate tomorrow. "This Internet thing has really busted our asses," they say, "and we've all decided to move to the country and take up fishing." Suddenly people who want to make a living making music have to distribute their recordings themselves. No big deal; instead of manufacturing and distributing CD's through retail channels, they'll just sell their MP3's over their web sites.
Do you think piracy is going to go away? Do you think that just because the content brokers are out of business, people will decide to give up Kazaa and other pirate-to-pirate (P2P) tools and start paying for their music again? Do you think college kids are going to stop sharing their music collections with anybody who wants to copy them?
Of course not. People don't pirate music because they hate record companies. People pirate music because they want something for nothing. And unless we completely destroy the music economy-- indeed, the media economy as a whole-- that's not going to change.
The problem of digital piracy doesn't just affect the content brokers. They're the ones who are taking it in the shorts, yes, but if they weren't around, it would be the artists who get screwed by it. Blaming the brokers just pushes the problem off on somebody that you don't like.
It's a large step toward the end of free personal computing.
As I said in some other context: the "slippery slope" argument was old when the first caveman used it against another caveman to explain why cave paintings were a bad idea.
This isn't "a large step" toward anything. It's just an idea. Maybe it's a good idea, maybe it's a bad idea. If you want to argue that it's a bad idea, then by all means do so. But saying that this idea inevitably leads to something else, and that something else would be bad... that's just bogus.
NYT headline, Washington Post op-ed pieces, etc. They are all biased and they all push an agenda, albeit a little more subtly.
There is a huge difference between an editor choosing one word over another for a headline and letting a little bias slip through and an editor cackling to himself in the pale light of his computer screen mumbling, "Yes, this will show everyone how much I dislike Microsoft. Behold as I use a dollar sign in place of the letter S!"
Windows 2000 handles dual processors pretty well, but it doesn't appear (I'm talking about image here, not substance) to work twice as fast.
The thing about a multi-processor system-- I'm speaking of Macs here; I don't really do Windows-- is not that it's twice as fast. It's that it offers the same degree of interactivity under load.
Generally speaking, desktop computers don't need to be any faster to run the applications we use today. They need to be capable of maintaining an acceptable level of interactivity under load. Multiple CPUs gives you that capability.
That's code for "I made it up," right? Look, Sparky, it's not possible to reason your way to a natural or divine right. You simply can't get there from here. If you want to point at a Bible verse that says, "Thou shalt keep and bear arms," that's fine. But starting with absolutely nothing and ending up at the second amendment just doesn't work.
rights are orthogonal to the law
Okay. Then shut up about it, okay? Since your conception of rights is neither influenced by nor an influence on the law, you're kind of wasting your breath.
If the only rights we have are guaranteed by law then how can we argue that the law should be changed to protect our rights?
Suddenly he gets it. Arguing that the law should be changed to protect "our rights" is complete crap. When you say, "The law should be changed to protect my rights," what you're really saying is, "I think the law should offer me a guarantee that it does not presently extend," which is just a verbose way of saying "I want the law changed."
Simply walking up to somebody and saying "I have a right to a free lunch every Tuesday, so let's pass a 'Free Lunch Tuesday' bill in Congress" doesn't get you very far. If you want to affect political change, you're going to have to start with something other than "I've got rights!" If the majority disagrees with you, then you're simply out of luck.
By claiming that privacy is only a right if guaranteed by law, is to use circular logic that laws should not be changed to protect privacy because it is not a right because the laws do not protect it.
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said that the law should or shouldn't be changed. I simply said that the law does not recognize a right to privacy. If you want to argue that the law should recognize a right to privacy, the you're going to have to come up with something better than "privacy is a right." Because all I have to do is say "no, it isn't," and we're right back where we started from.
The right to privacy must stand or fall on its own merits
Fine. I say that there is no right to privacy. Poof. Done.
As such, no company can tell you which programs you can and cannot use with their software.
Battle.net isn't software. It's a service. And as such, it has terms of service. If you want to use Battle.net, you have to abide by the terms of service.
Hmmm, given the way this statement is phrased, I think I can assume that you're of a libertarian bent, assuming that less regulation is almost always better than any regulation.
You are very wrong about that. I think that, in general, libertarians are even bigger idiots than socialists. I'm simply stating a basic principle of law. If there's no reason to prohibit an act, the act should not be prohibited. And that which is not expressly prohibited is allowed.
Using that kind of metric, societal mechanisms which reduce the amount of control that individuals have over their own lives tend to reduce the happiness of those individuals.
Yawn. If you decide to get back to talking about reality, let me know. If you would prefer to delve into mumbo-jumbo, you're on your own.
Currently it isn't guaranteed in the USA but that doesn't mean that it isn't a right.
That is, in fact, exactly what it means. If it's not guaranteed, it's merely an assertion.
If I go to the U.K., even though owning a gun is illegal, I still have the right because it is part of being human.
You're really fixated on this, aren't you? Where do you get the idea that the "right" to bear arms is a natural or divine right? On what do you base this assertion?
But I believe they were referring to the energy stored in oil came from the Sun.
Oh, okay. I thought when Hawkbug said "the big picture" that he was talking about the big picture. Not the stupid big picture.
The worst that will happen if we don't act responsibly is the planet will go through some major climate changes that may kill off most of the population.
The world is a bigger place than you realize. If this is going to happen, it's going to happen whether we "act responsibly" or not.
The best part is that these bacteria are perfectly happy being fed wastewater, which helps to solve another one of our environmental problems.
No, it doesn't. Give wastewater-- water with contaminants in it-- to a water-eating bacterium and you end up with hydrogen gas and, you guessed it, the contaminants.
Yeah, but following your logic then, neither is oil. We get Energy by burning oil. We get energy by seperating electrons from hydrogen. It's all the same if you look at the big picture.
No, it's not. You can go get oil out of the ground and use it to generate far more energy than you expended in extracting it. Unless, as granddaddy poster said, there's a hydrogen mine somewhere, it's not the same thing at all.
Here's what you do. Get to work on a system for turning methane into hydrogen gas and diamonds. You'll probably win a Nobel for chemistry and become rich beyond your wildest dreams to boot.
You're trying to argue that there has to be a justification for the collection of information in order for that collection to be legal. That's not right. There has to be a reason not to allow collection in order for collection to be illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that the question comes up so regularly, perhaps it's worth considering that the use of the word "free" to describe something that is neither unrestricted nor available at no cost might not be the best idea a person ever had.
You'd be shocked (assuming you have a conscience) at how much of it ends up in 'landfill' (i.e. in the open air, on fire, with children picking through it) in India, or poisoning Chinese poor people as they dip the PCBs in toxic chemicals.
Shock me. How much?
(My bullshit detector is going off, you see, so I thought I'd call the bluff.)
birth rises about 12-20% per year, deaths stay about the same, what does that tell you?
It tells me that the population is growing. But that's not sufficient to conclude that we have a population problem. Our population-- the population of the world, I mean-- is not growing at a rate that outstrips our ability to exploit natural resources.
Age-Retardation would definately intensify the over population problem.
What over-population problem? The world has the natural resources, and we have the technology to exploit them, to support a much larger population than the present one. The only real challenge facing us is one of transportation: getting the stuff from where it grows, lives, or is made to where the people are.
Do you really want to have to plot strategy every time you go shopping to make sure the powers that be don't try to screw you over?
Do you somehow think you're entitled to not being screwed over? Merchants are free to set their prices however they choose; if you don't like it, shop somewhere else.
I actually still care somewhat about the uneducated, the younger people, and the elderly.
I care about them to. I just don't care about them any more than I care about the middle-aged, the affluent, the intelligent. All men are created equal, right? Let 'em fight it out.
You're right, what we need are more refined methods for oligopolies to extract the maximum amount of money from consumers.
Hey, man, if you think it's a bad idea, then don't contribute to it or support it. But the instant you, or anybody else, suggests that maybe it ought to be illegal, they're going to get an earful.
Well in the United states a few years ago an abominable thing called slavery existed by law in some states.
Slavery was never supported by law. It was merely not prohibited by law. Those are two entirely different things.
Oh, and by the way, comparing copyright law and a copyright-related tax to slavery makes you look like a blowhard.
I postulate that is is your responsibility to disobey laws that you find morally objectionable.
And I postulate that it is your responsibility to find something more important to get morally uppity about than whether or not you can continue to download free music. Get a sense of perspective.
I need to get to the smaller store near Fermilab (although I have heard it is not as big)
You don't say?
Why is this argument so bad?
Because it falsely assumes inevitability.
Basically the slippery slope argument works like this: let X be some proposed change to the status quo. I don't like X; I don't want X to be adopted. Rather than arguing that X is bad, though, I argue that X will lead inevitably to Y, Y being something that is universally accepted as bad. See the trick? I didn't actually say anything about X at all, except to associate it with Y, and arguing that Y is bad is trivial because everybody already agrees that it is. I don't even have to establish that X inevitably leads to Y; if I'm sufficiently savvy, I can just assume that my audience already knows that X leads to Y.
You recognize a slippery slope argument by taking a step back and asking yourself a few questions. First of all, is it even possible that X might, by itself, lead to Y? Or would it be necessary for other, substantial changes to the status quo to occur for Y to happen? Most slippery slope arguments fail right here. Let's try it out.
Twitter said, "It's a large step toward the end of free personal computing." If you excise the word "large," because it has no meaning in this context, the statement in and of itself is true. Making it impossible for you to use your computer for one thing is indeed a step toward absolute control over what you can and can't do with your computer.
(Is it necessary for you to have absolute control over your computer? Twitter dodges this important question.)
Twitter's implication, though, is that one restriction will inevitably lead to absolute control. Let's apply our test here. Is it possible for making it either illegal or impossible for computer users to do one illegal thing with their computer to lead to absolute control over what users can do with their computers? Or would it be necessary for other, substantial changes to occur in order to institute that total control?
Obviously the answer is "no." It is not possible for one restriction to turn into absolute control without lots of other changes to the status quo. So right there the slippery slope argument fails.
In other words, while it is possible that we might go to sleep tonight having accepted one restriction and wake up tomorrow in a totalitarian police state, it's also possible that we might all wake up to find chocolate bunnies under our pillows in the morning. Unless some pretty drastic things happen, neither one is going to occur.
The boil-a-frog variation is basically the same as the slippery slope argument, only with the extra rhetorical spice of implied malicious intent on the part of an unseen actor. "They're boiling us, folks! It's happening slow, so we don't notice it, but they're boiling us! Jump for your lives!"
In other words, my dear friend, the whole line of reasoning is day-old bullshit, and it stinks.
Here's the problem. If everyone -- and I mean *everyone* -- is violating some particular law, then that law needs to be revisited. Obviously that law isn't for the good of the people, if the people themselves are violating it.
Not all laws exist for the good of the people. Some laws exist for a different good, but people must still obey them.
Look at it this way. The penalty for speeding is very minor-- a small fine-- and the likelihood of getting caught is low. The penalty for shoplifting is more serious, and the likelihood of getting caught is higher. The penalty for bankrobbing is very severe, and getting caught is a virtual certainty.
Hardly anyone robs banks, some people shoplift, and virtually everyone speeds.
We can address the problem of widespread casual piracy by making the penalty for doing so severe, and the likelihood of getting caught high. Say, if the fine for downloading a copyrighted MP3 were $10,000, and the odds of getting caught were 50/50.
That's a lovely summation, IMO.
It's a horrible summation. It ignores the fact that content brokers are only one of the parties affected by piracy.
Look, let's assume that all record companies, for example, evaporate tomorrow. "This Internet thing has really busted our asses," they say, "and we've all decided to move to the country and take up fishing." Suddenly people who want to make a living making music have to distribute their recordings themselves. No big deal; instead of manufacturing and distributing CD's through retail channels, they'll just sell their MP3's over their web sites.
Do you think piracy is going to go away? Do you think that just because the content brokers are out of business, people will decide to give up Kazaa and other pirate-to-pirate (P2P) tools and start paying for their music again? Do you think college kids are going to stop sharing their music collections with anybody who wants to copy them?
Of course not. People don't pirate music because they hate record companies. People pirate music because they want something for nothing. And unless we completely destroy the music economy-- indeed, the media economy as a whole-- that's not going to change.
The problem of digital piracy doesn't just affect the content brokers. They're the ones who are taking it in the shorts, yes, but if they weren't around, it would be the artists who get screwed by it. Blaming the brokers just pushes the problem off on somebody that you don't like.
It's a large step toward the end of free personal computing.
As I said in some other context: the "slippery slope" argument was old when the first caveman used it against another caveman to explain why cave paintings were a bad idea.
This isn't "a large step" toward anything. It's just an idea. Maybe it's a good idea, maybe it's a bad idea. If you want to argue that it's a bad idea, then by all means do so. But saying that this idea inevitably leads to something else, and that something else would be bad... that's just bogus.
NYT headline, Washington Post op-ed pieces, etc. They are all biased and they all push an agenda, albeit a little more subtly.
There is a huge difference between an editor choosing one word over another for a headline and letting a little bias slip through and an editor cackling to himself in the pale light of his computer screen mumbling, "Yes, this will show everyone how much I dislike Microsoft. Behold as I use a dollar sign in place of the letter S!"
Windows 2000 handles dual processors pretty well, but it doesn't appear (I'm talking about image here, not substance) to work twice as fast.
The thing about a multi-processor system-- I'm speaking of Macs here; I don't really do Windows-- is not that it's twice as fast. It's that it offers the same degree of interactivity under load.
Generally speaking, desktop computers don't need to be any faster to run the applications we use today. They need to be capable of maintaining an acceptable level of interactivity under load. Multiple CPUs gives you that capability.
NUMAlink. It's a high-speed parallel interconnect. 3.2 GB/s, if I remember correctly. It's a NUMA think, not a cluster thing.
I want 16cpu MB with 8MB cache per chip damnit!
Okay.
From logic and inductional thinking.
That's code for "I made it up," right? Look, Sparky, it's not possible to reason your way to a natural or divine right. You simply can't get there from here. If you want to point at a Bible verse that says, "Thou shalt keep and bear arms," that's fine. But starting with absolutely nothing and ending up at the second amendment just doesn't work.
rights are orthogonal to the law
Okay. Then shut up about it, okay? Since your conception of rights is neither influenced by nor an influence on the law, you're kind of wasting your breath.
If the only rights we have are guaranteed by law then how can we argue that the law should be changed to protect our rights?
Suddenly he gets it. Arguing that the law should be changed to protect "our rights" is complete crap. When you say, "The law should be changed to protect my rights," what you're really saying is, "I think the law should offer me a guarantee that it does not presently extend," which is just a verbose way of saying "I want the law changed."
Simply walking up to somebody and saying "I have a right to a free lunch every Tuesday, so let's pass a 'Free Lunch Tuesday' bill in Congress" doesn't get you very far. If you want to affect political change, you're going to have to start with something other than "I've got rights!" If the majority disagrees with you, then you're simply out of luck.
By claiming that privacy is only a right if guaranteed by law, is to use circular logic that laws should not be changed to protect privacy because it is not a right because the laws do not protect it.
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said that the law should or shouldn't be changed. I simply said that the law does not recognize a right to privacy. If you want to argue that the law should recognize a right to privacy, the you're going to have to come up with something better than "privacy is a right." Because all I have to do is say "no, it isn't," and we're right back where we started from.
The right to privacy must stand or fall on its own merits
Fine. I say that there is no right to privacy. Poof. Done.
What's wrong with that?
As such, no company can tell you which programs you can and cannot use with their software.
Battle.net isn't software. It's a service. And as such, it has terms of service. If you want to use Battle.net, you have to abide by the terms of service.
Hmmm, given the way this statement is phrased, I think I can assume that you're of a libertarian bent, assuming that less regulation is almost always better than any regulation.
You are very wrong about that. I think that, in general, libertarians are even bigger idiots than socialists. I'm simply stating a basic principle of law. If there's no reason to prohibit an act, the act should not be prohibited. And that which is not expressly prohibited is allowed.
Using that kind of metric, societal mechanisms which reduce the amount of control that individuals have over their own lives tend to reduce the happiness of those individuals.
Yawn. If you decide to get back to talking about reality, let me know. If you would prefer to delve into mumbo-jumbo, you're on your own.
Currently it isn't guaranteed in the USA but that doesn't mean that it isn't a right.
That is, in fact, exactly what it means. If it's not guaranteed, it's merely an assertion.
If I go to the U.K., even though owning a gun is illegal, I still have the right because it is part of being human.
You're really fixated on this, aren't you? Where do you get the idea that the "right" to bear arms is a natural or divine right? On what do you base this assertion?
But I believe they were referring to the energy stored in oil came from the Sun.
Oh, okay. I thought when Hawkbug said "the big picture" that he was talking about the big picture. Not the stupid big picture.
The worst that will happen if we don't act responsibly is the planet will go through some major climate changes that may kill off most of the population.
The world is a bigger place than you realize. If this is going to happen, it's going to happen whether we "act responsibly" or not.
The best part is that these bacteria are perfectly happy being fed wastewater, which helps to solve another one of our environmental problems.
No, it doesn't. Give wastewater-- water with contaminants in it-- to a water-eating bacterium and you end up with hydrogen gas and, you guessed it, the contaminants.
Yeah, but following your logic then, neither is oil. We get Energy by burning oil. We get energy by seperating electrons from hydrogen. It's all the same if you look at the big picture.
No, it's not. You can go get oil out of the ground and use it to generate far more energy than you expended in extracting it. Unless, as granddaddy poster said, there's a hydrogen mine somewhere, it's not the same thing at all.
Here's what you do. Get to work on a system for turning methane into hydrogen gas and diamonds. You'll probably win a Nobel for chemistry and become rich beyond your wildest dreams to boot.
The moderation on this post serves as proof positive that mods can't read. ;-)
Okay, that's just about the funniest damn thing I've read all day.
You're trying to argue that there has to be a justification for the collection of information in order for that collection to be legal. That's not right. There has to be a reason not to allow collection in order for collection to be illegal.