There would be no incentive to go to the work of "refining" this "infinite" product at the price of $0.00, so Britney Spears would be performing live from the front door of an Airstream at trailer park in Mobile.
Precisely, which proves there is a limited supply of what is actually wanted. Scarcity isn't only about the most abstract notion of a thing. In that case, _everything_ is essentially infinite not just in potential quantities as in digital copies, but also in actual, natural, physical occurrence. Scarcity is also about identification, production, fabrication, refinement, quality, packaging and delivery--and that applies as much to entertainment as it does to steel. You could not have, for instance, something as appallingly successful as Britney Spears without every single one of those components and at each stage there is opportunity cost and, ergo, scarcity. Oddly enough, the largess of such celebrities is precisely what makes them what they are. That is to say, there is actually a demand for the greed that creates them. Go to a "commons" distribution and they would cease to exist not just because they'd "lose" money, but because the fact that they horde so much money is actually what people are buying.
I'm not arguing about the social or legal implications of whether people feel there is justification in charging for this "content" or criminalizing the infringment/theft/whatever of it. All I'm saying is that the _economic_ argument is conveniently ignoring every component of the process but the final electronic duplication and even then, it is ignoring the resources that are being used and even more to the point is ignoring a great deal of what the product actually is in the first place.
CD content or ebooks are infinitely available in supply
Wrong. DIGITAL COPIES of that content are POTENTIALLY infinite. The content itself, however, most certainly is NOT, nor is the delivery mechanism. This argument is a total fantasy. Hydrogen is also for all intents and purposes in "infinite" supply, but I can assure you, the price is not and should not be $0.00.
And the FSF should be suing these states at the Hague daily.
Precisely how would they go about that? As a non-state entity, the US Federal courts or the courts of the offending country are your only options. Unless you can get a state to bring the case to the ICJ/ICC, you're not going to get past the gate.
...makes people who _are_ otherwise good communicators respond with variations of "RTFM--how the hell do you think *I* learned how to do this?" You assume and treat them like arrogant, yet ignorant, people who can't communicate, yet you insist on asking them questions about things you admittedly don't understand but take for granted that they do--and scoff at anything short of exhaustive, encyclopedic knowledge as evidence of incompetence, no matter how trivial your query--well, suffice it to say, you get what you give, sweetheart.
...and you could use another obvious solution in use almost everywhere: group the elevator lobbies into banks by each of 1/2 or 1/4 the number of floors and/or by odd/even numbered floors. I would put money on that after all the AI and "fuzzy logic" analysis of daily behavior, you would end up with much the same pattern in almost any building.
I find that example rather amusing in this context since their version of democracy goes back roughly to Roman times (AD 930) and coincides quite nicely with a rather profound cessation of violence...well, except for that later produced by certain christian monarchies (See: Sweden, Denmark). But, really, I don't recall much mention of the Great Icelandic Wars in the last thousand years they've had a nearly continuously functioning democracy.
They were violating copyright. The argument seems to be "well, dang, I used to steal from 7/11 all the time and never got caught, but now you're telling me it's illegal!!! WAAAH!!!!"
The college had the appropriate licenses--and the labels DO send out heaps of promo copies to the DJs just for asking ESPECIALLY to college radio stations.
Just because _you_ didn't personally pay for the license doesn't mean it wasn't in place.
Granted, TFA is about the UK, but I'm sure the arrangement is similar to the United States where there is no need for the individual DJ to possess anything more than the recording--because the _venue_ generally possesses one that covers all performances in that space. In absence of the venue license, you had better believe the DJ is legally required to have more than just the CD/Vinyl/whatever...which is why it states that in so many words on the CD itself.
You know, oddly enough, I've only ever had a problem with pornographic spam on the accounts I've, er, "misused." I've run my own email servers for quite awhile and never really had any major problems with those that I, well, never used to sign up for porn--including the "free" email accounts I don't physically control.
With limited exceptions of scatterbombing, they gotta get your address from somewhere... Ahem.
Whenever someone argues that ID is scientific, then argues that all of science is just religion, that argument necessitates that ID is religious and, voila, you know you're dealing with a looney.
It isn't really about scale at all. There is nothing stopping a Mom and Pop operation from aggregating their data and selling it to other companies, larger or smaller in addition to using it for sending you their newsletter or special offers. The difference is that people are somewhat irrationally assuming that certain types of contact are more trustworthy than others and frankly rather arbitrarily assigning value to the "privacy" of certain information in certain situations when they freely give out MUCH more sensitive information in others.
Using the same analogy, you go to a bar, hand your keys to a valet and your ID to a doorman who may even electronically scan it for validity. Those two people now have your address, your keys (probably house keys too) and your car, and can easily cross-reference your spending habits, electronically or just by watching. Hell, they may even have your coat at this point. You then open a tab and hand over your credit card to a third person who holds it for several hours while someone puts on your coat, gets in your car, drives to your house (totally unnoticed since they're now practically indistinguishable from you), cleans you out and goes on an online spending spree from your home computer with your credit card, making for a very embarassing exchange when you scream at your credit card company and they call your ISP, confirming the charges were made in your own living room.
There are innumerable situations like that and worse that people just blithely stumble through assuming the trust of complete strangers, but oh no, someone knows you bought a Ute Lemper CD and Englebert Humperdink poster and THAT'S the scary breach of privacy.
Would probably have a conniption fit if they walked into a bar and the bartender brought them "their usual" without being prompted. When it's a human, this is called "good customer service." Suddenly, when it's a computer, it is the root of all evil. As long as they keep it to themselves, sort of like the bartender not running up to your office and telling everyone you like to have fifteen martinis every wednesday night, I don't see the big deal.
Aside from the fact that even my university days were largely parochial, up until five years ago and this little meme popped up even then, ID in its many forms--in America alone--has been around for over two centuries (see: "The Watchmaker" argument, Wm.Paley ca.1800), but I'd go back at least to St. Augustine (ca. 400, not as literal as Paley, but he's certainly relevant) -- just in the context of Christianity, without getting into, say, pre-christian Greek thoughts on the subject. Let's face it, anything that can fall under the broad topic of "theology" is essentially an attempt to present "intelligent design." So not being over 5000 years old, no, my little sunday-school experiences certainly did not pre-date "intelligent design."
I agreed that the whole thing was flamebait... but I never made THAT ridiculous argument, however, I do find it rather enlightens the problem with the debate:
Science deals only with what is knowable. It does not attempt to explain anything beyond that, given ANY amount of time. Religion, on the other hand, attempts to explain the unknowable--immediately.
I'd dare say that makes them very different beasts, n'est-ce pas?
If you cannot find a single, solitary religion that has as its fundamental tenet that it must assume it is false, then you have no basis for equating science with religion or vice versa because that IS the basis of science.
I don't find this calling science a religion thing upsetting. I just find it tiresomely solipsistic.
The Scientific Method(tm) must be considered apart from our current body of scientific knowledge as the former allows for the wholesale falsification and subsequent discarding of the latter. Yes, every g.d. thing we "understand" today may be utterly and completely wrong, but if there is one fundamental assumption that T.S.M. makes, it is that that is more likely the case than not, so saying "gee, god'll getcha in the end and prove you wrong," well, doesn't really hit that hard because we already assume we're wrong.
That religion can explain everything doesn't mean that the explanations provided carry the same usefulness. If all else fails, "[Are|Is]n't [the] [g|G]od[s] mysterious!" Well, yeah, that can "explain everything," but what do you do with it other than generate a sense of comfort?
Just calling science "another religion" is silly. Correct, science cannot explain everything. However, what it does attempt to explain is not based on faith that what we believe is right. Rather the opposite, it is based on the perpetual pessimism that everything we believe, no mattern how many times we have "proven" it, is WRONG.
The first sentence begins with "Proponents of intelligent design..."
It is the proponents of ID that have used the inability to explain things as the foundation of their theory, saying "science is incapable of explaining X." So, when science explains "X" they then say "well, okay, so you CAN explain X... uhm, er, we bet you can't explain Y! You can't can you?! SEE!!!!" (flash forward a few years) "Uh, yeah, we can explain that to." "But, but, what about Z?!?! That's REALLY hard!"
Ad nauseam. Yawn.
So, yes, both the article and summary are "flamebait," but damned amusing, since I remember this exact example being given during my parochial school days. Just because something is flamebait doesn't mean it isn't noteworthy.
...and Mono contributes heavily to that. It has _nothing_ to do with having 10 editors and 4 browsers yadda-yadda and everything to do with a handful of components that do not necessarily benefit from being shackled to the Mono CLI.
Slashdot Mirror
There would be no incentive to go to the work of "refining" this "infinite" product at the price of $0.00, so Britney Spears would be performing live from the front door of an Airstream at trailer park in Mobile.
So, yes, in that sense, you're 100% correct.
Precisely, which proves there is a limited supply of what is actually wanted. Scarcity isn't only about the most abstract notion of a thing. In that case, _everything_ is essentially infinite not just in potential quantities as in digital copies, but also in actual, natural, physical occurrence. Scarcity is also about identification, production, fabrication, refinement, quality, packaging and delivery--and that applies as much to entertainment as it does to steel. You could not have, for instance, something as appallingly successful as Britney Spears without every single one of those components and at each stage there is opportunity cost and, ergo, scarcity. Oddly enough, the largess of such celebrities is precisely what makes them what they are. That is to say, there is actually a demand for the greed that creates them. Go to a "commons" distribution and they would cease to exist not just because they'd "lose" money, but because the fact that they horde so much money is actually what people are buying.
I'm not arguing about the social or legal implications of whether people feel there is justification in charging for this "content" or criminalizing the infringment/theft/whatever of it. All I'm saying is that the _economic_ argument is conveniently ignoring every component of the process but the final electronic duplication and even then, it is ignoring the resources that are being used and even more to the point is ignoring a great deal of what the product actually is in the first place.
That's all well and good, but your notion of supply and demand--particularly your assumption that digital=inifite--is what is flawed.
That is all.
CD content or ebooks are infinitely available in supply
Wrong. DIGITAL COPIES of that content are POTENTIALLY infinite. The content itself, however, most certainly is NOT, nor is the delivery mechanism. This argument is a total fantasy. Hydrogen is also for all intents and purposes in "infinite" supply, but I can assure you, the price is not and should not be $0.00.
I was using the "literary" you as well and that was precisely my point. Thank you for so effectively illustrating it AGAIN.
And the FSF should be suing these states at the Hague daily.
Precisely how would they go about that? As a non-state entity, the US Federal courts or the courts of the offending country are your only options. Unless you can get a state to bring the case to the ICJ/ICC, you're not going to get past the gate.
...makes people who _are_ otherwise good communicators respond with variations of "RTFM--how the hell do you think *I* learned how to do this?" You assume and treat them like arrogant, yet ignorant, people who can't communicate, yet you insist on asking them questions about things you admittedly don't understand but take for granted that they do--and scoff at anything short of exhaustive, encyclopedic knowledge as evidence of incompetence, no matter how trivial your query--well, suffice it to say, you get what you give, sweetheart.
...and you could use another obvious solution in use almost everywhere: group the elevator lobbies into banks by each of 1/2 or 1/4 the number of floors and/or by odd/even numbered floors. I would put money on that after all the AI and "fuzzy logic" analysis of daily behavior, you would end up with much the same pattern in almost any building.
I find that example rather amusing in this context since their version of democracy goes back roughly to Roman times (AD 930) and coincides quite nicely with a rather profound cessation of violence...well, except for that later produced by certain christian monarchies (See: Sweden, Denmark). But, really, I don't recall much mention of the Great Icelandic Wars in the last thousand years they've had a nearly continuously functioning democracy.
'nuff said.
They were violating copyright. The argument seems to be "well, dang, I used to steal from 7/11 all the time and never got caught, but now you're telling me it's illegal!!! WAAAH!!!!"
Yawn.
The college had the appropriate licenses--and the labels DO send out heaps of promo copies to the DJs just for asking ESPECIALLY to college radio stations.
Just because _you_ didn't personally pay for the license doesn't mean it wasn't in place.
Granted, TFA is about the UK, but I'm sure the arrangement is similar to the United States where there is no need for the individual DJ to possess anything more than the recording--because the _venue_ generally possesses one that covers all performances in that space. In absence of the venue license, you had better believe the DJ is legally required to have more than just the CD/Vinyl/whatever...which is why it states that in so many words on the CD itself.
You know, oddly enough, I've only ever had a problem with pornographic spam on the accounts I've, er, "misused." I've run my own email servers for quite awhile and never really had any major problems with those that I, well, never used to sign up for porn--including the "free" email accounts I don't physically control.
With limited exceptions of scatterbombing, they gotta get your address from somewhere... Ahem.
Whenever someone argues that ID is scientific, then argues that all of science is just religion, that argument necessitates that ID is religious and, voila, you know you're dealing with a looney.
It isn't really about scale at all. There is nothing stopping a Mom and Pop operation from aggregating their data and selling it to other companies, larger or smaller in addition to using it for sending you their newsletter or special offers. The difference is that people are somewhat irrationally assuming that certain types of contact are more trustworthy than others and frankly rather arbitrarily assigning value to the "privacy" of certain information in certain situations when they freely give out MUCH more sensitive information in others.
Using the same analogy, you go to a bar, hand your keys to a valet and your ID to a doorman who may even electronically scan it for validity. Those two people now have your address, your keys (probably house keys too) and your car, and can easily cross-reference your spending habits, electronically or just by watching. Hell, they may even have your coat at this point. You then open a tab and hand over your credit card to a third person who holds it for several hours while someone puts on your coat, gets in your car, drives to your house (totally unnoticed since they're now practically indistinguishable from you), cleans you out and goes on an online spending spree from your home computer with your credit card, making for a very embarassing exchange when you scream at your credit card company and they call your ISP, confirming the charges were made in your own living room.
There are innumerable situations like that and worse that people just blithely stumble through assuming the trust of complete strangers, but oh no, someone knows you bought a Ute Lemper CD and Englebert Humperdink poster and THAT'S the scary breach of privacy.
Would probably have a conniption fit if they walked into a bar and the bartender brought them "their usual" without being prompted. When it's a human, this is called "good customer service." Suddenly, when it's a computer, it is the root of all evil. As long as they keep it to themselves, sort of like the bartender not running up to your office and telling everyone you like to have fifteen martinis every wednesday night, I don't see the big deal.
Aside from the fact that even my university days were largely parochial, up until five years ago and this little meme popped up even then, ID in its many forms--in America alone--has been around for over two centuries (see: "The Watchmaker" argument, Wm.Paley ca.1800), but I'd go back at least to St. Augustine (ca. 400, not as literal as Paley, but he's certainly relevant) -- just in the context of Christianity, without getting into, say, pre-christian Greek thoughts on the subject. Let's face it, anything that can fall under the broad topic of "theology" is essentially an attempt to present "intelligent design." So not being over 5000 years old, no, my little sunday-school experiences certainly did not pre-date "intelligent design."
I agreed that the whole thing was flamebait... but I never made THAT ridiculous argument, however, I do find it rather enlightens the problem with the debate:
Science deals only with what is knowable. It does not attempt to explain anything beyond that, given ANY amount of time. Religion, on the other hand, attempts to explain the unknowable--immediately.
I'd dare say that makes them very different beasts, n'est-ce pas?
If you cannot find a single, solitary religion that has as its fundamental tenet that it must assume it is false, then you have no basis for equating science with religion or vice versa because that IS the basis of science.
I don't find this calling science a religion thing upsetting. I just find it tiresomely solipsistic.
Which religions teach that their god[s] most likely do not exist at all and that all of its explanations of the world are most likely totally wrong?
The Scientific Method(tm) must be considered apart from our current body of scientific knowledge as the former allows for the wholesale falsification and subsequent discarding of the latter. Yes, every g.d. thing we "understand" today may be utterly and completely wrong, but if there is one fundamental assumption that T.S.M. makes, it is that that is more likely the case than not, so saying "gee, god'll getcha in the end and prove you wrong," well, doesn't really hit that hard because we already assume we're wrong.
That religion can explain everything doesn't mean that the explanations provided carry the same usefulness. If all else fails, "[Are|Is]n't [the] [g|G]od[s] mysterious!" Well, yeah, that can "explain everything," but what do you do with it other than generate a sense of comfort?
Just calling science "another religion" is silly. Correct, science cannot explain everything. However, what it does attempt to explain is not based on faith that what we believe is right. Rather the opposite, it is based on the perpetual pessimism that everything we believe, no mattern how many times we have "proven" it, is WRONG.
The first sentence begins with "Proponents of intelligent design..."
It is the proponents of ID that have used the inability to explain things as the foundation of their theory, saying "science is incapable of explaining X." So, when science explains "X" they then say "well, okay, so you CAN explain X... uhm, er, we bet you can't explain Y! You can't can you?! SEE!!!!" (flash forward a few years) "Uh, yeah, we can explain that to." "But, but, what about Z?!?! That's REALLY hard!"
Ad nauseam. Yawn.
So, yes, both the article and summary are "flamebait," but damned amusing, since I remember this exact example being given during my parochial school days. Just because something is flamebait doesn't mean it isn't noteworthy.
...and Mono contributes heavily to that. It has _nothing_ to do with having 10 editors and 4 browsers yadda-yadda and everything to do with a handful of components that do not necessarily benefit from being shackled to the Mono CLI.