Airbags are highly overrated. Minivans are just vans, suvs are just trucks, and automatic doors... are you serious? Next you are going to tell me that I should be wow'd if they throw in a free magician performance.
"Second, if you had a good car from 20 years ago, would you refuse to buy one today, even if your old car ran just fine? (Some would, some wouldn't. But cars from 10, 20, 30 years ago represent about the change in looks you'd expect in a first person shooter over 5-10 years.)"
My answer is a clear no but that isn't an apples to apples comparison. The question is, would you trade in a 10 year old model that was newly minted for a five year old model (as in, before they caved to public pressure and started releasing more gas efficient vehicles) that was also newly minted.
The answer is yes. Especially if that older model enjoyed the price savings of having been manufactured for 10 years with little or no variation and without the markup for ridiculous R&D blown to release a new lineup every year.
"I'll bet, has more to do with not liking those particular cars than with not being able to think of any car better than the one you've got."
The same was true 5, 10, and 20 years ago. Pretty much all the technology making it true (again outside the fuel economy stuff) was true then too.
"in order to get acceptable performance on Linux, Nvidia"
That's some pretty old news you have there. That was what seven or eight years ago? And the kernel reworking was pretty damn effective I'd say since 3D with the nvidia binary driver drastically outperforms the same hardware being driven by the windows version.
Really? I see lots of cars released, year after year they all put out new models. But I don't really see much improvement over the previous years models at all.
Sure in very recent history there have been improvements in fuel economy (hybrids, etc) but prior to that there hadn't been much difference in cars for 20 years. New names, new model numbers, slightly different body styles and paint jobs. Same shit, different day.
The last time I checked claimed numbers (maybe 5 or 6 years ago) there were an estimated 20mil linux desktops globally.
I'm reasonably confident that linux has grown in the desktop segment since then. Since things like Ubuntu and Dell (non-server) linux have come into being after that...
The GP was just pulling the 3mil thing out of his ass... for that matter he was drawing all his numbers out of his ass.
The point does remain though. The linux market is chump change compared to windows and it may be chump change for a company the size of ID but its certainly big enough to feed a lot of people.
How is that doubtful? Throughout my life I have lived and stayed in dozens of U.S. locales and the sort of clinics you are speaking of only exist in major cities.
Having been to said clinics they provide a dramatically inferior level of care, waits that often involve people dying on the floor waiting for care, typically little or no preventative care, and they exclude anyone with something resembling income whether it is disposable or not.
"Lovely speech, hereby resumed for the sake of any incautious reader: impossible to reason with you unless there's a gun on your head (and even that is not guaranteed)."
In other words, you've got nothing so you are going to twist a statement. Of course, the more cautious reader might have noted that you just defined ordering me to accept your unsupported view as "reasoning".
You are right about one thing. This sub-thread is definitely off topic.
"It's cruelty that I'm targeting, and that's the kind of action which yes, must be taught to be avoided and punished with increasing severity."
To quote myself:
"Thats all very well and good but I must have missed the part where that point was in contention. I believe I was fairly clear about avoiding cruelty and even supported reasonable fines to deter people from said cruelty."
"You set your bar on "humans", I'm telling you to set your bar on "sentient beings"."
Remind me again why I or anyone else should care what you tell us to do? Your argument amounts to "set the bar at sentient beings" and your only premise is because "I'm telling you to". Since you don't have a gun to my head that isn't an especially convincing argument.
Your later premise that "Cruelty is unacceptable, unethical and unjustifiable" is nothing more than a strawman. You have not made a statement about cruelty here, you have merely defined it. An action which is not unacceptable, unethical, and unjustifiable would not be cruel. Its fairly easy to knock that strawman down but nobody claimed cruelty was acceptable, ethical, or justifiable and the definition of cruelty in no way supports your argument that the bar should be set at sentient beings.
If we pretend that your argument was valid for a moment and I were to present a counter argument. I would have to point out that I did offer support for my argument that the bar should on 'human'. In nature species compete with one another for survival. Our species is human. That means that humans are or at least should be more important to other humans than other species and lifeforms.
You said: "But you're simply negating the various levels of intelligence found in every animal." I previously said that both sentience and intelligence were useless metrics for setting a bar. The reason they are useless is that they do not define a clear line of distinction at all.
What is sentient? It has been shown that plants detect their siblings and avoid competing with them for light and nourishment. Does that make them sentient? Fish avoid perceived threats... in other words they are afraid. Does that make them sentient? Cockroaches do the same. In at least one example a robotic ball was constructed a cockroach could move by running. After a moment it learned to operate the ball and when the light was turned on darted for the nearest dark space LARGE ENOUGH TO ACCOMODATE the ball. Does that make cockroaches sentient?
Sentience is a very very fuzzy line that can be moved to encompass anything for which someone can anthropomorphize and subsequently feel empathy toward. Setting such a fuzzy line to judge people and even harm them as punishment would be... cruel.
Intelligence is no better. Even if you do not accept that ants are intelligent, there is no question that there is an emergence intelligence in a colony. Should it then be punishable by fine and imprisonment to kill a colony that takes residence outside your home? After all, those ants aren't harming you when they crawl on your counter and eat your crumbs and killing them is about territory and therefore human ego.
If emergence intelligence doesn't count then you wouldn't believe that actions toward humans or any animal is cruel. After all, our own intelligence is nothing more than an emergence phenomenon that results from lots of neurons (ants) each performing very specific functions. Our brain and nervous system and entire body really is nothing more than a colony.
Human versus non-human on the other hand is a very solid and clear line for now. We can test it with genetic evidence.
"Speaking of which, when you dismiss my "similar cases" because they all involve humans, maybe you ignore that people who apply those arguments could care less about that "coincidence""
I do ignore it because I fail to see the relevance of the opinions of some random individuals on a topic that we have already established is unrelated to our own. We aren't talking about racism or divisions and disagreements among men. We are talking about beings that everyone outside a padded room agrees are clearly not human.
Most hosting companies censor the content published on their services. They might be lax in enforcing the policies or lousy at catching offenders (unless they are using lots of resources) but the policies are usually there. It is common for usage policies to forbid porn, illegal content, and hate speech for example.
Actually that is false. That is the reason for authors lobbying for a copyright.
The reason it was granted was in the hope that giving these authors rights which belong to the people, a very substantial purchase price indeed, would result in more artistic works being produced. Obviously the implication was that these works should be available or they wouldn't be of much value to the society which bought them.
Those cases aren't similar at all. They are all references to comparisons between humans.
It is not practical to hold all life and automations sacred. At some point I'm bound to wash my hands with soap, light a fire, allow something to ferment, use mouthwash, or mow my lawn. All of those things are cruel to some sort of lifeform, in all those cases I prefer to value my own life over those others.
"My point: cruelty is bad. You should avoid it regardless of who or what's the target."
Thats all very well and good but I must have missed the part where that point was in contention. I believe I was fairly clear about avoiding cruelty and even supported reasonable fines to deter people from said cruelty.
"Someone's ego should never have priority over the well being of anything with a clear identifiable level of sentience."
I would say that should depend. First of all sentience is as useless a delineater as intelligence. These distinctions ultimately come down to how close to us and our behaviors things are. For now at least, there is a pretty clear line between human and non-human. Since no life is sacred and we are all competing for resources and survival it seems pretty reasonable that we at least choose to give our own species priority over the competition.
I mean its nice to pretend that dogs, cats, and other pet animals have some sort of intellect and form attachments to them. But actually imprisoning our own or even leaving them a criminal record which negates real employment for the rest of their life for the benefit of something that would literally eat us under the right circumstances seems out of kilter.
"While your idea would be a better plan if it wasn't for that pesky copyright law, movie studios would not buy into it."
Pesky copyright law wouldn't be a problem, I'm talking about a legal venue... in fact there is no need for a Netflix, the studios can run the tracker themselves and cut out the third parties.
"Torrents only work when the content can be freely copied."
Only among those authorized to use the torrent. Private trackers can limit those to paying customers of the studio run tracker.
"Why would you have a legal recourse? No one is obligated to sell you a product, let alone sell you one in the form you desire."
Because no one owns a copyrighted work, or the public owns a copyrighted work depending on how you prefer to look at it. Copyright isn't something you have innately, it is something that is gifted to you for a limited time in EXCHANGE for making that material available.
You are making one big assumption here. This model is effectively opt-out not opt-in and its opt-out of every single uploaded torrent.
There will probably be a great deal of interesting content that the movie and music industries haven't gotten around to making takedown requests on yet.
Yes but Netflix has a tiny selection, device key crap that prevents you from taking the service with you from one pc/device to another at will, and platform specific drm that prevents me from using a decent OS on my laptop.
A torrent site is a better idea, make all the content available at different quality levels. For instance ALL movies ranging from the quality of axxo divx, dvd-r images, to blue ray images. Maybe a week after the movie hits theaters. The users foot all the distribution and bandwidth costs. The same for books, tv shows, software, etc. Basically, just like a torrent site now but legal, all high quality officially released content, and a low monthly fee. I'd pay as much as $20/month for unlimited access to unlimited drm free full quality digital content.
You could have pricing tiers but instead of changing content access you change ratio requirements. Maybe range from $5/month 4.0 ratio requirement to $20 for 1:1 to $100/month for full blown leech access.
The added bonus is that the content industries and all their legal muscle would support net neutrality at that point.
Agreed. I pay the same monthly fee. Mostly because I am stuck between wanting to support Netflix for doing this in the first place and wanting to boycott them because I can't want the video on my Linux laptop. Also the limited number of devices key thing pisses me off. So basically, atm I pay $10/month for a service I can't even use because the dvd by mail thing is so slow as to be useless.
I would rather pay a monthly $20 subscription for legal access to a torrent site. Something that had all the movies and shows, in blue ray, dvd-r image, and divx torrents along with all the digital books in pdf and txt, audio books, games, software. Complete legal, drm free, unlimited access with no ratio requirements or strings beyond bare copyright law attached.
Content industry, if you want me to pay for content you are going to have to embrace the digital world. Beyond actually making the original content the above scheme leaves you no costs, even the distribution is paid for by the users. At that low a cost you will be competing with the cable companies and I think you will be successful. Will you do it? Probably not you greedy assholes, you still want to charge me for every piece of content I utilize.
It demonstrates that different parts of the brain are used to make decisions when using cold logic versus making decisions after having formed an emotional attachment aka taken a side aka closed your mind aka taken a stance, or whatever other term you want to use for committing to a view rather than keeping an open mind... once you take a side you use emotional centers in the brain when reaching conclusions about that issue or things related to that issue from there on.
Indeed the scientific method is based on a few assumptions. This is one of them. However at this point they are not untested assumptions at all, every time a hypothesis or theory is successfully employed to make a prediction the assumptions of the scientific method are tested.
"You have taken the side that there is a difference between "open minded" and "closed minded" when the two act the same. So there are sides."
There is no need to take sides in the presence of an invalid argument. I do not disagree with your argument, you have not presented a valid argument in the first place. I have presented an argument but my argument rests entirely upon the conclusion of reference material. Since the dictionary represents the consensus on the meaning of language for everyone who accepts the consensus my conclusion is not an opinion but a fact.
If you do not accept this concensus then there is nothing for us to discuss. After all language and its definition are intangibles and only correct on an individual basis. Useful language is a communication tool but expression is legitimate even if unsuccessful. A toddlers blob of paint is a tree for them whether it successfully convey's the idea of tree or not.
The importance of the difference between open-mindedness and close-mindedness is an assumption of the scientific method rather than myself. I am always open to the possibility of it being wrong but thus far my observation supports that the scientific method is the best way to arrive at working models.
This discussion doesn't seem to be very productive. I have already made predictions about your views on other topics such as UFO's and alien visitation based on your admitted closemindness that have proven correct. In those instances and in this very discussion your close-mindedness has demonstrably led to you ignoring the evidence in favor of your view. Yet another observation that suggests that the scientific method is correct in assuming the importance of an open mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd go with 25, then again at 40, and every 20 years thereafter up to the thousand we are supposed to live when they fix that pesky aging thing.
Actually yeah. If you look to the animal kingdom you will find that old animals do indeed have worn down teeth that are no longer sharp and effective.
Humans wear out joints, spines, feet, wrists, hearts, livers, kidneys, etc from those parts just doing what they were meant to do.
Airbags are highly overrated. Minivans are just vans, suvs are just trucks, and automatic doors... are you serious? Next you are going to tell me that I should be wow'd if they throw in a free magician performance.
"Second, if you had a good car from 20 years ago, would you refuse to buy one today, even if your old car ran just fine? (Some would, some wouldn't. But cars from 10, 20, 30 years ago represent about the change in looks you'd expect in a first person shooter over 5-10 years.)"
My answer is a clear no but that isn't an apples to apples comparison. The question is, would you trade in a 10 year old model that was newly minted for a five year old model (as in, before they caved to public pressure and started releasing more gas efficient vehicles) that was also newly minted.
The answer is yes. Especially if that older model enjoyed the price savings of having been manufactured for 10 years with little or no variation and without the markup for ridiculous R&D blown to release a new lineup every year.
"I'll bet, has more to do with not liking those particular cars than with not being able to think of any car better than the one you've got."
The same was true 5, 10, and 20 years ago. Pretty much all the technology making it true (again outside the fuel economy stuff) was true then too.
"in order to get acceptable performance on Linux, Nvidia"
That's some pretty old news you have there. That was what seven or eight years ago? And the kernel reworking was pretty damn effective I'd say since 3D with the nvidia binary driver drastically outperforms the same hardware being driven by the windows version.
"Cars... can still be innovative"
Really? I see lots of cars released, year after year they all put out new models. But I don't really see much improvement over the previous years models at all.
Sure in very recent history there have been improvements in fuel economy (hybrids, etc) but prior to that there hadn't been much difference in cars for 20 years. New names, new model numbers, slightly different body styles and paint jobs. Same shit, different day.
The last time I checked claimed numbers (maybe 5 or 6 years ago) there were an estimated 20mil linux desktops globally.
I'm reasonably confident that linux has grown in the desktop segment since then. Since things like Ubuntu and Dell (non-server) linux have come into being after that...
The GP was just pulling the 3mil thing out of his ass... for that matter he was drawing all his numbers out of his ass.
The point does remain though. The linux market is chump change compared to windows and it may be chump change for a company the size of ID but its certainly big enough to feed a lot of people.
How is that doubtful? Throughout my life I have lived and stayed in dozens of U.S. locales and the sort of clinics you are speaking of only exist in major cities.
Having been to said clinics they provide a dramatically inferior level of care, waits that often involve people dying on the floor waiting for care, typically little or no preventative care, and they exclude anyone with something resembling income whether it is disposable or not.
"Lovely speech, hereby resumed for the sake of any incautious reader: impossible to reason with you unless there's a gun on your head (and even that is not guaranteed)."
In other words, you've got nothing so you are going to twist a statement. Of course, the more cautious reader might have noted that you just defined ordering me to accept your unsupported view as "reasoning".
You are right about one thing. This sub-thread is definitely off topic.
"It's cruelty that I'm targeting, and that's the kind of action which yes, must be taught to be avoided and punished with increasing severity."
To quote myself:
"Thats all very well and good but I must have missed the part where that point was in contention. I believe I was fairly clear about avoiding cruelty and even supported reasonable fines to deter people from said cruelty."
"You set your bar on "humans", I'm telling you to set your bar on "sentient beings"."
Remind me again why I or anyone else should care what you tell us to do? Your argument amounts to "set the bar at sentient beings" and your only premise is because "I'm telling you to". Since you don't have a gun to my head that isn't an especially convincing argument.
Your later premise that "Cruelty is unacceptable, unethical and unjustifiable" is nothing more than a strawman. You have not made a statement about cruelty here, you have merely defined it. An action which is not unacceptable, unethical, and unjustifiable would not be cruel. Its fairly easy to knock that strawman down but nobody claimed cruelty was acceptable, ethical, or justifiable and the definition of cruelty in no way supports your argument that the bar should be set at sentient beings.
If we pretend that your argument was valid for a moment and I were to present a counter argument. I would have to point out that I did offer support for my argument that the bar should on 'human'. In nature species compete with one another for survival. Our species is human. That means that humans are or at least should be more important to other humans than other species and lifeforms.
You said: "But you're simply negating the various levels of intelligence found in every animal." I previously said that both sentience and intelligence were useless metrics for setting a bar. The reason they are useless is that they do not define a clear line of distinction at all.
What is sentient? It has been shown that plants detect their siblings and avoid competing with them for light and nourishment. Does that make them sentient? Fish avoid perceived threats... in other words they are afraid. Does that make them sentient? Cockroaches do the same. In at least one example a robotic ball was constructed a cockroach could move by running. After a moment it learned to operate the ball and when the light was turned on darted for the nearest dark space LARGE ENOUGH TO ACCOMODATE the ball. Does that make cockroaches sentient?
Sentience is a very very fuzzy line that can be moved to encompass anything for which someone can anthropomorphize and subsequently feel empathy toward. Setting such a fuzzy line to judge people and even harm them as punishment would be... cruel.
Intelligence is no better. Even if you do not accept that ants are intelligent, there is no question that there is an emergence intelligence in a colony. Should it then be punishable by fine and imprisonment to kill a colony that takes residence outside your home? After all, those ants aren't harming you when they crawl on your counter and eat your crumbs and killing them is about territory and therefore human ego.
If emergence intelligence doesn't count then you wouldn't believe that actions toward humans or any animal is cruel. After all, our own intelligence is nothing more than an emergence phenomenon that results from lots of neurons (ants) each performing very specific functions. Our brain and nervous system and entire body really is nothing more than a colony.
Human versus non-human on the other hand is a very solid and clear line for now. We can test it with genetic evidence.
"Speaking of which, when you dismiss my "similar cases" because they all involve humans, maybe you ignore that people who apply those arguments could care less about that "coincidence""
I do ignore it because I fail to see the relevance of the opinions of some random individuals on a topic that we have already established is unrelated to our own. We aren't talking about racism or divisions and disagreements among men. We are talking about beings that everyone outside a padded room agrees are clearly not human.
Parody and fair use apply to copyrighted content, free speech has nothing to do with it.
Most hosting companies censor the content published on their services. They might be lax in enforcing the policies or lousy at catching offenders (unless they are using lots of resources) but the policies are usually there. It is common for usage policies to forbid porn, illegal content, and hate speech for example.
Actually that is false. That is the reason for authors lobbying for a copyright.
The reason it was granted was in the hope that giving these authors rights which belong to the people, a very substantial purchase price indeed, would result in more artistic works being produced. Obviously the implication was that these works should be available or they wouldn't be of much value to the society which bought them.
"similar cases"
Those cases aren't similar at all. They are all references to comparisons between humans.
It is not practical to hold all life and automations sacred. At some point I'm bound to wash my hands with soap, light a fire, allow something to ferment, use mouthwash, or mow my lawn. All of those things are cruel to some sort of lifeform, in all those cases I prefer to value my own life over those others.
"My point: cruelty is bad. You should avoid it regardless of who or what's the target."
Thats all very well and good but I must have missed the part where that point was in contention. I believe I was fairly clear about avoiding cruelty and even supported reasonable fines to deter people from said cruelty.
"Someone's ego should never have priority over the well being of anything with a clear identifiable level of sentience."
I would say that should depend. First of all sentience is as useless a delineater as intelligence. These distinctions ultimately come down to how close to us and our behaviors things are. For now at least, there is a pretty clear line between human and non-human. Since no life is sacred and we are all competing for resources and survival it seems pretty reasonable that we at least choose to give our own species priority over the competition.
I mean its nice to pretend that dogs, cats, and other pet animals have some sort of intellect and form attachments to them. But actually imprisoning our own or even leaving them a criminal record which negates real employment for the rest of their life for the benefit of something that would literally eat us under the right circumstances seems out of kilter.
The statement was to the purpose of copyrights, not the requirements for getting one.
I don't remember saying anything about existing laws or requirements being functional in accomplishing that purpose.
"While your idea would be a better plan if it wasn't for that pesky copyright law, movie studios would not buy into it."
Pesky copyright law wouldn't be a problem, I'm talking about a legal venue... in fact there is no need for a Netflix, the studios can run the tracker themselves and cut out the third parties.
"Torrents only work when the content can be freely copied."
Only among those authorized to use the torrent. Private trackers can limit those to paying customers of the studio run tracker.
Who's to stop someone from buying drm-free content, then turning around and giving it away and making their profit through ad revenue?
Copyright law. Nobody said anything about making piracy legal.
A new format does not a new copyrighted work make.
Why is that a bad analogy? There are times when it is legal for me to shoot you and there are times when it is legal to broadcast.
"Why would you have a legal recourse? No one is obligated to sell you a product, let alone sell you one in the form you desire."
Because no one owns a copyrighted work, or the public owns a copyrighted work depending on how you prefer to look at it. Copyright isn't something you have innately, it is something that is gifted to you for a limited time in EXCHANGE for making that material available.
in the back seat of your car.
You are making one big assumption here. This model is effectively opt-out not opt-in and its opt-out of every single uploaded torrent.
There will probably be a great deal of interesting content that the movie and music industries haven't gotten around to making takedown requests on yet.
Yes but Netflix has a tiny selection, device key crap that prevents you from taking the service with you from one pc/device to another at will, and platform specific drm that prevents me from using a decent OS on my laptop.
A torrent site is a better idea, make all the content available at different quality levels. For instance ALL movies ranging from the quality of axxo divx, dvd-r images, to blue ray images. Maybe a week after the movie hits theaters. The users foot all the distribution and bandwidth costs. The same for books, tv shows, software, etc. Basically, just like a torrent site now but legal, all high quality officially released content, and a low monthly fee. I'd pay as much as $20/month for unlimited access to unlimited drm free full quality digital content.
You could have pricing tiers but instead of changing content access you change ratio requirements. Maybe range from $5/month 4.0 ratio requirement to $20 for 1:1 to $100/month for full blown leech access.
The added bonus is that the content industries and all their legal muscle would support net neutrality at that point.
Agreed. I pay the same monthly fee. Mostly because I am stuck between wanting to support Netflix for doing this in the first place and wanting to boycott them because I can't want the video on my Linux laptop. Also the limited number of devices key thing pisses me off. So basically, atm I pay $10/month for a service I can't even use because the dvd by mail thing is so slow as to be useless.
I would rather pay a monthly $20 subscription for legal access to a torrent site. Something that had all the movies and shows, in blue ray, dvd-r image, and divx torrents along with all the digital books in pdf and txt, audio books, games, software. Complete legal, drm free, unlimited access with no ratio requirements or strings beyond bare copyright law attached.
Content industry, if you want me to pay for content you are going to have to embrace the digital world. Beyond actually making the original content the above scheme leaves you no costs, even the distribution is paid for by the users. At that low a cost you will be competing with the cable companies and I think you will be successful. Will you do it? Probably not you greedy assholes, you still want to charge me for every piece of content I utilize.
Additionally, you may find this study interesting:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn.2006.18.11.1947
It demonstrates that different parts of the brain are used to make decisions when using cold logic versus making decisions after having formed an emotional attachment aka taken a side aka closed your mind aka taken a stance, or whatever other term you want to use for committing to a view rather than keeping an open mind... once you take a side you use emotional centers in the brain when reaching conclusions about that issue or things related to that issue from there on.
"That's an untested guess that is anti-science."
Indeed the scientific method is based on a few assumptions. This is one of them. However at this point they are not untested assumptions at all, every time a hypothesis or theory is successfully employed to make a prediction the assumptions of the scientific method are tested.
"You have taken the side that there is a difference between "open minded" and "closed minded" when the two act the same. So there are sides."
There is no need to take sides in the presence of an invalid argument. I do not disagree with your argument, you have not presented a valid argument in the first place. I have presented an argument but my argument rests entirely upon the conclusion of reference material. Since the dictionary represents the consensus on the meaning of language for everyone who accepts the consensus my conclusion is not an opinion but a fact.
If you do not accept this concensus then there is nothing for us to discuss. After all language and its definition are intangibles and only correct on an individual basis. Useful language is a communication tool but expression is legitimate even if unsuccessful. A toddlers blob of paint is a tree for them whether it successfully convey's the idea of tree or not.
The importance of the difference between open-mindedness and close-mindedness is an assumption of the scientific method rather than myself. I am always open to the possibility of it being wrong but thus far my observation supports that the scientific method is the best way to arrive at working models.
This discussion doesn't seem to be very productive. I have already made predictions about your views on other topics such as UFO's and alien visitation based on your admitted closemindness that have proven correct. In those instances and in this very discussion your close-mindedness has demonstrably led to you ignoring the evidence in favor of your view. Yet another observation that suggests that the scientific method is correct in assuming the importance of an open mind.