No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.
That might be true for things like sculptures or books or theater tickets, but that's only because all those things are scarce and have a marginal cost to produce. If I can take all the books or paintings in a physical store home with me without paying, then yeah, that's probably not going to be workable. The marginal cost of a digital music file (or movie, or ebook) is basically zero.
You can't sell a 100 page book for $200, but if the subject can be accurately covered in 100 pages... I don't think I have taken a college course yet that has used more than maybe 1/2 of any given $100-200+ book that I had to purchase.
Hell, most of my textbooks don't even use half of any given page. In most of my (very expensive) math and science textbooks a huge fraction of each page is wasted on giant empty margins, big pictures that look pretty but don't actually convey any useful information, or simply left bank because it didn't fit with the page layout to have anything in those square inches of space. It's an interesting (but depressing) exercise to figure out how much space the actual content takes up on a given page, and then compare it to the area of the page. The problem is worst in low-level textbooks (Intro to calculus, chemistry, physics, etc.)
There is a lot more fuel in the two solid rocket boosters (which do NOT produce water as exhaust) than there is in the external tank. The space shuttle's main engines burn about 735 tons of hydrogen/oxygen fuel, while the two solid rocket boosters burn a combined mass of 1000 tons of solid fuel (mainly ammonium perchlorate, organic polymer, and powered aluminum). Pointing out that the SSMEs produce water but neglecting to mention the SRBs is misleading at best.
You hear that sort of thing a lot, but most scientists would MUCH rather become famous as "that guy who proved that everything we thought we knew was wrong" than advance some particular theological or philosophical agenda.
Whether or not it's feasible (or even possible) to actually calculate the outcome of a decision doesn't really have anything to do with whether the decision is deterministic or "free".
Generally when people talk about "free will" in this sort of sense they mean that if you must choose between A or B, before you make your choice there is some non-zero possibility that you could pick either A or B. If your choice is governed by the mechanisms of a deterministic universe, there is really no possibility that you could pick either one; your choice is predetermined, and an observer with enough information could calculate with certainty what your choice will be before you make it. If you want to say that being free is simply being unconstrained to do what you try to do, then a robot following a program is "free," so long as nothing interferes with it trying to do what it is programmed to do.
Has it ever been scientifically demonstrated that porn is harmful for children? Just curious - if it has, I would be genuinely interested to heard about it.
Abstinence has been REPEATEDLY shown to not be an effective way to control the spread of STDs or prevent pregnancy in populations. The problem is that people just aren't willing to be abstinent, even when they are educated about the risks of sex. It's certainly inconvenient that people aren't willing to be abstinent, but society needs to face that reality and deal with it, rather than continuing to fantasize that we can control the spread of STD and pregnancy with abstinence programs.
You seem to be forgetting that we are assuming that the pirate was definitely not going to pay any money to use the software if he wasn't able to pirate it. There are only two possible scenarios: either the user doesn't use the software and the programmer doesn't get paid, or the user pirates the software and the programmer doesn't get paid.
I would mod you up if I could. It's amazing how often slashdot readers go into long tirades about things that only exist in misleading slashdot summaries.
To get this injunction they needed to show that they would suffer a "concrete and particularized" damage if the injunction wasn't issued. The judge in this case found that 1) "Now we have to compete against more people for jobs!" isn't a "concrete and particularized" injury and 2) Even if it was, it still wouldn't be something that you deserve an injunction over. Not all harm is necessarily illegal - if I arrive at the grocery store 30 seconds before you and buy the last box of cake mix that you were planning to buy, thus ruining your dinner party, I have certainly done you a concrete and particularized harm - but it isn't a justiciable injury.
In New Zealand they have a pretty reasonable solution solution; the minimum salary for a foreign worker on their equivalent of an H-1B visa is $55,000. Since your salary is usually a pretty direct measure of how scarce people with your abilities/training are and how much demand there is, anyone who is coming into the county to fill a shortage in a particular field should almost by definition be getting a relatively high salary.
You are entitled to pirate of copy of it because in doing so you do not harm anyone. You are entitled to do *anything*, so long as it doesn't harm anyone. Or at least, in a free society you should be.
I'm not sure if you're trying to troll of if you really are this dense, but I guess I'll point out the obvious and let the joke be on me if you're a troll.
The difference is that when you pirate software that you were not going to purchase, you don't actually deprive anyone of anything. If I'm not going to buy a piece of software, that company simply isn't going to get my money. Once you have established that they won't be getting any money from me, it does not harm them in any way for me to use a free pirated copy of their software - they have lost nothing, and are left in exactly the same state after I pirate the software as they were before I pirated the software. That's obviously not the case with stealing from someone's house, where you actually deprive the person of their property and the person is left worse off than they were before.
Of course, that reasoning only works if I really wasn't going to buy it in the first place. If I was going to buy it but decide to pirate it anyway, then you could argue that I have deprived the software maker of money that they would have made.
Indeed. Along exactly the same lines as science, voters are expected to decide which candidate has the best policy on, say, Iran. But I'm guessing that people would do even worse trying to answer very basic questions about recent middle eastern history and politics than they do basic science questions.
I'm not sure how things work outside the U.S., but it is virtually impossible for anyone here to actually fail a humanities class, so long as they put effort into it. Don't get me wrong, a humanities class can be a lot of work and consume a lot of time - but if you actually work hard, you are sure to pass. You might not get an A, but you certainly aren't going to get an F.
That's a BIG contrast with many math, science, and engineering classes, where a person can work hard and still fail.
As a result, the US has not been doing groundbreaking chemistry in over a decade.
As someone who is currently writing my PhD dissertation in chemistry, I disagree that the US has not done any groundbreaking chemistry in over a decade. But a lot of it is being done by foreign students who come from Asia (particularly China and India).
A better analogy would be blindly firing a shotgun in a town vs. blindly firing a shotgun in the middle of the desert after checking to make sure the no one is around, and then claiming that they were completely different. One poses a danger to others (and their expensive property) while the other does not.
1) almost nobody is smart enough to reliably, safely and accurately diagnose themselves using the internet
That might be true. I don't really know. Which is exactly why I said I would like to see a study on it.
2) even if you got it right, the treatment you administered to yourself could be dangerous to you for entirely different reasons which you hadn't even thought to check up on. The alternative is for people to be permitted to treat themselves. Utterly horrific things would result.
Doctors screw things up all the time. The question is how the success rate of a doctor compares to the success rate of a person trying to treat themselves. Which again, we don't really know. Doctors are very expensive. I can't rationally decide if going to a doctor is worth my money unless I have statistics on how going to a doctor improves my chances. Which, again, is why I would like to see such a study.
Demand does strange things when the cost is zero. It's no different from some random teenager who downloads gigs and gigs of music that he would never even consider buying and might not ever even listen to. If it's free, why not?
If the odds of being in a car crash are 1-in-million during your lifetime, a reasonable person could easily decide that it wasn't worth wearing a seatbelt. You are able to decide to wear a seatbelt because you know how likely you are to experience a crash (or at least have a vague idea that the odds are unacceptably high). Of course, the costs of wearing a seatbelt are pretty trivial - just whatever slight inconvenience and annoyance you suffer from putting it on and wearing it while you drive. The costs associated with seeing a doctor, on the other hand, are NOT trivial. Wearing a seatbelt and going to a doctor are both ways of hedging against risk. But you can't decide if it's worth the cost of hedging without knowing how much the hedge will actually protect you.
Cars are not abundant. It takes a significant expenditure of materials and effort to put one together. When I drive off in one, I cannot simply dupe it and give the dupe to my friend. The laws of physics dictate a level of scarcity to this good, and as such it makes perfect sense to expect to receive money from every person who obtains a car.
TO be fair, there isn't really any law of physics that dictates that a car has to be scarce either; we just don't have the technology to create a copy of a car with near-zero expense. But I wonder, if we had some fantastical technology for copying objects (nanomachines, star trek style replicators, etc) would we see car companies trying to stop people from downloading the plans for their car and making a new coy of one out of $50 worth of scrap metal?
Indeed, perhaps there isn't a reason for you to wear your seatbelt - you couldn't rationally decide that without knowing how likely they are to experience a crash. Just like a person can't rationally decide whether or not to see a doctor or attempt to self-diagnose without knowing the statistics on the success rate of self-diagnosis. Which is why I said I wanted to see a study on it. Thanks for playing, but try to follow along better next time.
Slashdot Mirror
There are roughly a billion Hindus who refute this hypothesis.
No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.
That might be true for things like sculptures or books or theater tickets, but that's only because all those things are scarce and have a marginal cost to produce. If I can take all the books or paintings in a physical store home with me without paying, then yeah, that's probably not going to be workable. The marginal cost of a digital music file (or movie, or ebook) is basically zero.
You can't sell a 100 page book for $200, but if the subject can be accurately covered in 100 pages... I don't think I have taken a college course yet that has used more than maybe 1/2 of any given $100-200+ book that I had to purchase.
Hell, most of my textbooks don't even use half of any given page. In most of my (very expensive) math and science textbooks a huge fraction of each page is wasted on giant empty margins, big pictures that look pretty but don't actually convey any useful information, or simply left bank because it didn't fit with the page layout to have anything in those square inches of space. It's an interesting (but depressing) exercise to figure out how much space the actual content takes up on a given page, and then compare it to the area of the page. The problem is worst in low-level textbooks (Intro to calculus, chemistry, physics, etc.)
There is a lot more fuel in the two solid rocket boosters (which do NOT produce water as exhaust) than there is in the external tank. The space shuttle's main engines burn about 735 tons of hydrogen/oxygen fuel, while the two solid rocket boosters burn a combined mass of 1000 tons of solid fuel (mainly ammonium perchlorate, organic polymer, and powered aluminum). Pointing out that the SSMEs produce water but neglecting to mention the SRBs is misleading at best.
That's in the middle of a cloudless day. You'll need to multiply that by at least 3 or 4 to account for things like clouds and nighttime.
In case anyone wants some perspective on that 550 MW figure, the US uses about 430 GW of electricity on average.
You hear that sort of thing a lot, but most scientists would MUCH rather become famous as "that guy who proved that everything we thought we knew was wrong" than advance some particular theological or philosophical agenda.
Whether or not it's feasible (or even possible) to actually calculate the outcome of a decision doesn't really have anything to do with whether the decision is deterministic or "free".
Generally when people talk about "free will" in this sort of sense they mean that if you must choose between A or B, before you make your choice there is some non-zero possibility that you could pick either A or B. If your choice is governed by the mechanisms of a deterministic universe, there is really no possibility that you could pick either one; your choice is predetermined, and an observer with enough information could calculate with certainty what your choice will be before you make it. If you want to say that being free is simply being unconstrained to do what you try to do, then a robot following a program is "free," so long as nothing interferes with it trying to do what it is programmed to do.
Has it ever been scientifically demonstrated that porn is harmful for children? Just curious - if it has, I would be genuinely interested to heard about it.
Abstinence has been REPEATEDLY shown to not be an effective way to control the spread of STDs or prevent pregnancy in populations. The problem is that people just aren't willing to be abstinent, even when they are educated about the risks of sex. It's certainly inconvenient that people aren't willing to be abstinent, but society needs to face that reality and deal with it, rather than continuing to fantasize that we can control the spread of STD and pregnancy with abstinence programs.
You seem to be forgetting that we are assuming that the pirate was definitely not going to pay any money to use the software if he wasn't able to pirate it. There are only two possible scenarios: either the user doesn't use the software and the programmer doesn't get paid, or the user pirates the software and the programmer doesn't get paid.
I would mod you up if I could. It's amazing how often slashdot readers go into long tirades about things that only exist in misleading slashdot summaries.
To get this injunction they needed to show that they would suffer a "concrete and particularized" damage if the injunction wasn't issued. The judge in this case found that 1) "Now we have to compete against more people for jobs!" isn't a "concrete and particularized" injury and 2) Even if it was, it still wouldn't be something that you deserve an injunction over. Not all harm is necessarily illegal - if I arrive at the grocery store 30 seconds before you and buy the last box of cake mix that you were planning to buy, thus ruining your dinner party, I have certainly done you a concrete and particularized harm - but it isn't a justiciable injury.
In New Zealand they have a pretty reasonable solution solution; the minimum salary for a foreign worker on their equivalent of an H-1B visa is $55,000. Since your salary is usually a pretty direct measure of how scarce people with your abilities/training are and how much demand there is, anyone who is coming into the county to fill a shortage in a particular field should almost by definition be getting a relatively high salary.
You are entitled to pirate of copy of it because in doing so you do not harm anyone. You are entitled to do *anything*, so long as it doesn't harm anyone. Or at least, in a free society you should be.
I'm not sure if you're trying to troll of if you really are this dense, but I guess I'll point out the obvious and let the joke be on me if you're a troll.
The difference is that when you pirate software that you were not going to purchase, you don't actually deprive anyone of anything. If I'm not going to buy a piece of software, that company simply isn't going to get my money. Once you have established that they won't be getting any money from me, it does not harm them in any way for me to use a free pirated copy of their software - they have lost nothing, and are left in exactly the same state after I pirate the software as they were before I pirated the software. That's obviously not the case with stealing from someone's house, where you actually deprive the person of their property and the person is left worse off than they were before.
Of course, that reasoning only works if I really wasn't going to buy it in the first place. If I was going to buy it but decide to pirate it anyway, then you could argue that I have deprived the software maker of money that they would have made.
Indeed. Along exactly the same lines as science, voters are expected to decide which candidate has the best policy on, say, Iran. But I'm guessing that people would do even worse trying to answer very basic questions about recent middle eastern history and politics than they do basic science questions.
I'm not sure how things work outside the U.S., but it is virtually impossible for anyone here to actually fail a humanities class, so long as they put effort into it. Don't get me wrong, a humanities class can be a lot of work and consume a lot of time - but if you actually work hard, you are sure to pass. You might not get an A, but you certainly aren't going to get an F. That's a BIG contrast with many math, science, and engineering classes, where a person can work hard and still fail.
As a result, the US has not been doing groundbreaking chemistry in over a decade.
As someone who is currently writing my PhD dissertation in chemistry, I disagree that the US has not done any groundbreaking chemistry in over a decade. But a lot of it is being done by foreign students who come from Asia (particularly China and India).
A better analogy would be blindly firing a shotgun in a town vs. blindly firing a shotgun in the middle of the desert after checking to make sure the no one is around, and then claiming that they were completely different. One poses a danger to others (and their expensive property) while the other does not.
1) almost nobody is smart enough to reliably, safely and accurately diagnose themselves using the internet
That might be true. I don't really know. Which is exactly why I said I would like to see a study on it.
2) even if you got it right, the treatment you administered to yourself could be dangerous to you for entirely different reasons which you hadn't even thought to check up on. The alternative is for people to be permitted to treat themselves. Utterly horrific things would result.
Doctors screw things up all the time. The question is how the success rate of a doctor compares to the success rate of a person trying to treat themselves. Which again, we don't really know. Doctors are very expensive. I can't rationally decide if going to a doctor is worth my money unless I have statistics on how going to a doctor improves my chances. Which, again, is why I would like to see such a study.
Demand does strange things when the cost is zero. It's no different from some random teenager who downloads gigs and gigs of music that he would never even consider buying and might not ever even listen to. If it's free, why not?
If the odds of being in a car crash are 1-in-million during your lifetime, a reasonable person could easily decide that it wasn't worth wearing a seatbelt. You are able to decide to wear a seatbelt because you know how likely you are to experience a crash (or at least have a vague idea that the odds are unacceptably high). Of course, the costs of wearing a seatbelt are pretty trivial - just whatever slight inconvenience and annoyance you suffer from putting it on and wearing it while you drive. The costs associated with seeing a doctor, on the other hand, are NOT trivial. Wearing a seatbelt and going to a doctor are both ways of hedging against risk. But you can't decide if it's worth the cost of hedging without knowing how much the hedge will actually protect you.
Cars are not abundant. It takes a significant expenditure of materials and effort to put one together. When I drive off in one, I cannot simply dupe it and give the dupe to my friend. The laws of physics dictate a level of scarcity to this good, and as such it makes perfect sense to expect to receive money from every person who obtains a car.
TO be fair, there isn't really any law of physics that dictates that a car has to be scarce either; we just don't have the technology to create a copy of a car with near-zero expense. But I wonder, if we had some fantastical technology for copying objects (nanomachines, star trek style replicators, etc) would we see car companies trying to stop people from downloading the plans for their car and making a new coy of one out of $50 worth of scrap metal?
Indeed, perhaps there isn't a reason for you to wear your seatbelt - you couldn't rationally decide that without knowing how likely they are to experience a crash. Just like a person can't rationally decide whether or not to see a doctor or attempt to self-diagnose without knowing the statistics on the success rate of self-diagnosis. Which is why I said I wanted to see a study on it. Thanks for playing, but try to follow along better next time.