Like calling Al Capone a mobster, when in fact he was really just a furniture salesman who forgot to pay one state tax bill.
Al Capone wouldn't want to sue for libel anyway so it's largely moot: if he sued you there is actually a good chance you would win and anyone could then call him a mobster with impunity. Instead, if you were lucky he would break your kneecaps and tell you not to call him a mobster again.
There is already a competitive market for creative works - if you don't want to play Spore you're welcome to play another game instead, and get your entertainment that way. Your whole argument is ludicrous, it suggests that a specific apple in the fruit store would have an infinitely high price because the fruit store has a monopoly on that specific, shiny, juicy apple
You need to look up fungibility in a handy dictionary. Hint: a specific apple is a fungible commodity. A specific game title is not.
I'd feel differently about this, if there was a net benefit to both company and workers to have a union in place. Maybe there is in places like Japan or China where the union is less adversarial or even an extension of the company.
There is no requirement for a union to be adversarial. Correctly implemented, a union is an organized way to bring employees' concerns to the attention of the employer. Many of these concerns are of such a nature that it is in the employer's best interest to address them some way or the other. For example, employees may have noticed that they can gain financially from quitting their job and moving over to the competitor - if the employer learns of this he may find it in his best interest to increase wages so as to retain an experienced work force. Unions are also excellent means by which to determine which incentives are best suited for motivating employees to do better work, or gathering information that can be used to increase efficiency of production by other means.
While I can certainly see that in a highly adversarial climate a union will just become an opposing army in the war of the workplace, this seems to me to be the exception rather than the norm. Such a dysfunctional union is the direct result of a climate that was dysfunctional in the first place and the problem probably needs to be attacked at the root cause: get management and employees to acknowledge that they are all in the same boat.
In a well-functioning situation the union will not want to be burdening the employer with all sorts of extra unnecessary expenses since that will lead to an uncompetitive business and subsequent massive layoffs of union members. I never really understood how anyone thought the big-3 health and retirement benefits could be sustainable. It is abundantly clear that such a business will start its journey to bankruptcy the minute it comes under attack from a competitor that does/not/ have the same expenses. My theory has been that big-3 management was just placating the unions and planning to ride bankruptcies to get rid of their obligations when they became too onerous. This doesn't seem to be the case though. Perhaps they were just too overconfident.
Our unions attacked this problem by getting health and retirement enshrined in law so that all domestic employers are equally burdened. Overall, much of what unions manage to negotiate for tends to go down into law and therefore affect everyone (whether unionized or not) equally. This works quite well here in pinko commie Norway, I don't expect it would be very popular in the land of the free.
Of course, there is occasional grumbling about what to do with the non-unionized free riders. Personally I think they should be left alone. Forcing people to become unionized is just wrong and forcing non-unionized people to pay union fees is even worse.
You must campaign for an amendment to the constitution allowing the government to regulate arms. (...) In fact, I'd be willing to bet that there is a significant fraction of NRA membership who would support your measure if moderate. Give them the chance.
As I suggested in a previous debate, at minimum the following needs to be added to the second amendment: "btw, only the feds can have nukes, mmkay?"
Apparently a $0.50 component would have sorted out all these problems... I'm aware that after a lot of sales this translates into profit, but seriously... this is a very short-sighted corner to cut.
Well, I don't know . . . when you sell 20 million units of those, that translates into a ten million dollar bonus to/someone/.
From a global perspective, letting companies go under due to a short term (which is becoming medium term) economic crisis is not helpful.
On the contrary, it is an excellent time for them to go under. For many, it is even the only time. When times are good, even inefficient companies can chug along and stay alive (if only barely). When times are good, management can make pretty big mistakes and still manage to break even. It is when the downtimes hit that we'll be able to rid ourselves of the marginal also-rans and redeploy their work force into more useful and profitable ventures.
The problem/this/ time has been that the banks haven't been working and so even well-functioning businesses have been at risk. That's what the bank bailouts are all about: putting the financial system back in order so that only the bad/marginal businesses get put out of business.
If DRAM vendors have screwed up their projections and sunk too much money into fabs, well, they need to feel the pain. Mistakes hurt and big mistakes hurt a lot. It's not as if their bankruptcy is going to destroy the computer market - profitable fabs will remain in business and if the bankruptcies result in shortage some of the auctioned-off fabs will be put back into production.
Let's assume all 3 major autos go out of business. With out the manufacturer to perform warranty repairs and someone to be held accountable for defects that are life threatening people will not buy those cars. This causes layoffs and closings of the dealerships, potentially 10's of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.
People aren't going to stop buying cars just because they can no longer buy one of the three big US brands. Either the dealerships in question will start selling Toyotas or else the local Toyota dealership will be hiring people to cover the increased demand.
On top of the dealerships going under you'll have the parts suppliers losing both of their major clients, the auto makers and the dealerships that do repairs for those makers, this causes them to lay off people and close down, another potential hundreds of thousands of people for just the warehouse/store work.
If the demand for parts, repairs and warehousing of Ford/Chrysler/GM cars decreases, the demand for these services for Toyota etc. will increase. Because people will still be getting new cars and foreign brands aren't immune to breakdowns or warehousing needs.
At this point you get the picture of how it could spiral downward from 3 companies going out of business.
It's basic scaremongering in an attempt to hush down the/real/ reason the car companies must be rescued: to save face. It's just too embarrassing for the US to lose its car industry, or even a large part of it.
The problem is when you have monolithic industries, or quasi monolithic industries, where the whole industry for one region sinks together. If you have one mega-bakery and that is badly run, you cannot let it go bust because there will be no bread and people will starve.
That isn't really going to happen. More realistically, the mega-bakery will go into chapter 11 bankruptcy and will continue to bake bread while its assets are "reorganized" or just plain old auctioned off. After the bankruptcy, the mega-bakery will either go on as a new much slimmer organization (if chapter 11 was a success), or its many bakeries will now be run by various investors who bought the assets on auction (if it was forced to go into chapter 7).
(... DRAM...)
The same was true in the finance industry: because of their size, AIG, Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac were "too big to fail". Lehmann was adjudge not to be too big - but the repercussions of its failure are turning out much larger than expected.
The real reason the finance industry cannot be allowed to have bankruptcies is that no one understands how the various institutions work or how they are interconnected. They thought they knew this about Lehman and based upon this illusion allowed it to fail. The consequences, as you say, turned out to be catastrophic and revealed that they are clueless about how this market operates. They don't dare to do more to rock this particular boat hence the no-questions-asked bailouts.
The same is true in cars. (...)
Cars is a bit different. Similar arguments are being used but the real reason it's so important to bail them out is national pride, pure and simple. Building cars is such an important part of the nation's sense of self worth it's just very very difficult to let it go. As the Senate showed us, however, capitalism is sufficiently strong in the US that cars will eventually have to face the music. It may take many more tax-payer billions before it happens but sooner or later Detroit will be left to the wolves of the free market.
Yes, it's quite easy to delude yourself into believing you have the moral upper-hand when you cut off a quote right before the "unless", don't you agree?
The "unless" would have been:
e.g. pre-2k so I wasn't really pirating it, unless Microsoft wants to pursue me for pirating abandonware (...)
"Abandonware" has no legal status and whether or not you are pirating software is in no way related to whether or not Microsoft pursues you for it. There seems to be no question about whether you were pirating it, you clearly were.
If you are going to pirate software, you owe it to yourself to realize that this is in fact what you are doing.
Ubisoft is saying "We don't believe that DRM reduces our sales, but we're going to test it by releasing an a-list title without DRM."
I'm going to buy it just to reward the company for doing something intelligent.
If you like the science of it then you shouldn't be getting it unless you otherwise would have, or you will be polluting the results of the study.
They are not trying to measure how many would buy a non-DRM'd game out of pure hatred for DRM, they are trying to measure how many who would buy a DRM'd one will pirate it instead when it does not have DRM (i.e. pirates normally thwarted by DRM) and how many would buy a non-DRM'd one who would otherwise have pirated a DRM'd one (i.e. potential customers heading over to TPB due to draconian DRM).
Any suggestions that also have some kind of chance to succeed? Don't get me wrong, but I've been trying to reason with people for too long to still have any kind of hope it might have any kind of effect.
It is nigh impossible to reason with people over religion. If they haven't already learned critical thinking by the time they're adults, chances are they are hopelessly lost to whatever myths they accumulated along the way. (It may be possible to reprogram them for all I know but this wouldn't really solve the root problem.) The real hope lies in ensuring that the next generation benefits from better education and so will be capable of making fewer mistakes than what ours did.
What is the argument against drawings of child porn? That showing the act is as much criminal as the act itself? (...) Could anyone explain to me the logic behind that? I'm sorry, I don't get it.
Simple. It's Christian morality gone off the deep end. Logic does not enter into it.
If you want this sort of thing to stop you may want to support campaigns to teach more critical thinking in school, get more people through college/university, etc.
(...) His fatality rate plummeted but still the majority of doctors refused to change how they worked and he wound up literally driven insane because he had worked out how one could easily save thousands of lives but nobody was prepared to even give his idea a go.
Unfortunately I forget his name now so I can't easily find more information to point you at.
I could see it... I am not being filtered. Frankly, I don't see child porn...
This is where we see the genius of this new censorship system in action: They have transparently replaced the child porn picture with an innocuous picture of a naked girl and nobody's the wiser! Brilliant, my hat's off to these people! </sarcasm>
Which also I find quite bizarre. Talk about indoctrination from an early age. But I also find the obsession in the US with flags a little disturbing. (...)
Traditionally there wasn't really much to hold US citizens together. They came from a hodge-podge of different nations and subscribed to a hodge-podge of different religions that were often at odds with one another. One might have hoped that they would resort to their Constitution in order to create a nucleus to unite around but perhaps that document is just too heavy on points one can disagree with. So they used a symbol that is devoid of any meaning other than the one each individual puts their for himself: their colours.
The statesmen that once set out to create a national identify for my own country, Norway, learned this from the US and made us the no.2 flag-wavers of the free world. Absent anything else of much use, what united Norway and what set us apart from our Swedish overlords was our colours.
Most other established nations have hundreds and hundreds of years of culture to use as social binding agent. The US did/does not.
I doubt they'll have some ultra-advanced ranging system combined with self-steerable beams to focus all of the beams onto a single point from variable distances.
No, that would require an expensive laser rangefinder or something and that would just . . . oh, wait . . .:-)
I predict that if you jump out of the window from the 50th floor, you will be pulled by gravity to your death. This fact has nothing to do with belief, religion, opinion etc etc - it's just an undeniable fact - an absolute truth, if you like.
It is quite possible to survive this so you would be wrong in calling it an absolute truth.
Someone will have to see your data sooner or later. An institution that you would normally trust not to steal from you would be under no obligation to do so. If you have a bank account, someone (or something), somewhere has to know your personal details, even if only fleetingly. What if they took that data, and told everyone? By your argument, that data isn't yours.
You seem to think that I have a copyright on my bank account number, or my PIN code. I do not. Nobody has this and nobody/can/ have this because the information has no artistic value and so is not copyrightable in the first place. When banks do not share your data it is due to contractual obligations, due to govt regulation and because they want to keep getting more customers in the future. Copyright has absolutely nothing to do with this at all.
Which, of course, they'd be allowed to do, because information doesn't belong to them, and those credit card details are just a sequence of digits and letters. If they're allowed to type 16 digits and a name into a text box, then why not some credit card info? It's not like the person who gave them the information "owns" that information.
You are focusing on the technical implementation when the real crime is in the bigger picture. Your argument is along the lines of "but moving my finger isn't illegal so I shouldn't be arrested just because I happened to be holding a loaded gun and pointing it at some guy while I was doing so".
The crime is not "copying information" or "writing down numbers". The crime is impersonating someone else and fraudulently gaining access to their money. It doesn't matter/how/ you do this - it is illegal regardless.
Um, you do realize that there are a few itty bitty fundamental differences between your brain and an electronic medium? Like, for example, the ability to upload the data for others to download and circumvent copyright laws, and therefore is significantly different than a brain.
While an electronic medium may/enable/ you to upload the data it does not, at least not in my part of the world,/force/ you to do so.
Yes, I know and while my reply was somewhat on the pedantic side I feel it's a very important distinction in the case at hand.
It's just so satisfying to see the look on their faces when some born-again zealot runs his "what/are/ the chances of everything being just as it is" line and you can reply, confidently, "100%":-)
As usual, a long, pedantic diatribe ignoring the issue that copying games without paying for them is ethically wrong.
It's all about getting something for nothing.
(Emphasis mine)
Are you trying to imply that I should feel bad for not paying for every breath of air that I take? I'm getting it all the time and I'm not paying anything at all for it in spite of the fact that immense resources have been put into improving air quality over the last several decades.
Of course, I do pay taxes. Perhaps it's only for the poor that breathing should be considered ethically wrong? Please enlighten us.
The same kids might break a window in your house. Do you think you should have a backup window included in the price of your original installation?
I think you will find that consumers who express an interest in being able to backup their data do not, as a rule, expect the software vendor to supply the backup in addition to the original. Rather, these consumers will want to produce the backup themselves.
And if I am to take your broken analogy seriously: if the house owner was capable of easily manufacturing his own new window to replace the broken one, is it your position that he should be prohibited by law from doing so, or that the original window vendor should have the power to prevent him from manufacturing his own replacement?
The reason the question is interesting is that electrons can orbit in atoms, protons either don't decay or decay slowly, gravity is weak enough to allow structures to form, etc. and it just takes INCREDIBLY tiny changes to not have any of that and have a Universe in heat death, (...)
How do we know that these changes are "tiny"? Did we try to do the changes, find that it was fairly easy, and conclude that the change required would therefore be tiny? Or are we just tricking ourselves with numbers, e.g. "it is only a change of 1e-15 on our (incredibly mis-proportioned) scale so it must be tiny!"
I mean, changing the mean temperature by a mere -500 would be completely devastating to any prospect for life and 500 isn't a very big number if you don't take into account the fact that temperature actually stops at 0K and so that when you actually consider the units involved the entire concept becomes laughable. Do we know that "changing cosmological constant x" is any less laughable? Do we know that "imagine a universe where cosmological constant x is y" is any less laughable?
Slashdot Mirror
Mmmm, human rice, the perfect food to get you through post-apocalyptic cannibalistic times.
Human rice is PEOPLE!
Like calling Al Capone a mobster, when in fact he was really just a furniture salesman who forgot to pay one state tax bill.
Al Capone wouldn't want to sue for libel anyway so it's largely moot: if he sued you there is actually a good chance you would win and anyone could then call him a mobster with impunity. Instead, if you were lucky he would break your kneecaps and tell you not to call him a mobster again.
There is already a competitive market for creative works - if you don't want to play Spore you're welcome to play another game instead, and get your entertainment that way. Your whole argument is ludicrous, it suggests that a specific apple in the fruit store would have an infinitely high price because the fruit store has a monopoly on that specific, shiny, juicy apple
You need to look up fungibility in a handy dictionary. Hint: a specific apple is a fungible commodity. A specific game title is not.
I'd feel differently about this, if there was a net benefit to both company and workers to have a union in place. Maybe there is in places like Japan or China where the union is less adversarial or even an extension of the company.
There is no requirement for a union to be adversarial. Correctly implemented, a union is an organized way to bring employees' concerns to the attention of the employer. Many of these concerns are of such a nature that it is in the employer's best interest to address them some way or the other. For example, employees may have noticed that they can gain financially from quitting their job and moving over to the competitor - if the employer learns of this he may find it in his best interest to increase wages so as to retain an experienced work force. Unions are also excellent means by which to determine which incentives are best suited for motivating employees to do better work, or gathering information that can be used to increase efficiency of production by other means.
While I can certainly see that in a highly adversarial climate a union will just become an opposing army in the war of the workplace, this seems to me to be the exception rather than the norm. Such a dysfunctional union is the direct result of a climate that was dysfunctional in the first place and the problem probably needs to be attacked at the root cause: get management and employees to acknowledge that they are all in the same boat.
In a well-functioning situation the union will not want to be burdening the employer with all sorts of extra unnecessary expenses since that will lead to an uncompetitive business and subsequent massive layoffs of union members. I never really understood how anyone thought the big-3 health and retirement benefits could be sustainable. It is abundantly clear that such a business will start its journey to bankruptcy the minute it comes under attack from a competitor that does /not/ have the same expenses. My theory has been that big-3 management was just placating the unions and planning to ride bankruptcies to get rid of their obligations when they became too onerous. This doesn't seem to be the case though. Perhaps they were just too overconfident.
Our unions attacked this problem by getting health and retirement enshrined in law so that all domestic employers are equally burdened. Overall, much of what unions manage to negotiate for tends to go down into law and therefore affect everyone (whether unionized or not) equally. This works quite well here in pinko commie Norway, I don't expect it would be very popular in the land of the free.
Of course, there is occasional grumbling about what to do with the non-unionized free riders. Personally I think they should be left alone. Forcing people to become unionized is just wrong and forcing non-unionized people to pay union fees is even worse.
You must campaign for an amendment to the constitution allowing the government to regulate arms.
(...)
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that there is a significant fraction of NRA membership who would support your measure if moderate. Give them the chance.
As I suggested in a previous debate, at minimum the following needs to be added to the second amendment: "btw, only the feds can have nukes, mmkay?"
The wording may need some work.
Apparently a $0.50 component would have sorted out all these problems... I'm aware that after a lot of sales this translates into profit, but seriously... this is a very short-sighted corner to cut.
Well, I don't know . . . when you sell 20 million units of those, that translates into a ten million dollar bonus to /someone/.
From a global perspective, letting companies go under due to a short term (which is becoming medium term) economic crisis is not helpful.
On the contrary, it is an excellent time for them to go under. For many, it is even the only time. When times are good, even inefficient companies can chug along and stay alive (if only barely). When times are good, management can make pretty big mistakes and still manage to break even. It is when the downtimes hit that we'll be able to rid ourselves of the marginal also-rans and redeploy their work force into more useful and profitable ventures.
The problem /this/ time has been that the banks haven't been working and so even well-functioning businesses have been at risk. That's what the bank bailouts are all about: putting the financial system back in order so that only the bad/marginal businesses get put out of business.
If DRAM vendors have screwed up their projections and sunk too much money into fabs, well, they need to feel the pain. Mistakes hurt and big mistakes hurt a lot. It's not as if their bankruptcy is going to destroy the computer market - profitable fabs will remain in business and if the bankruptcies result in shortage some of the auctioned-off fabs will be put back into production.
Let's assume all 3 major autos go out of business. With out the manufacturer to perform warranty repairs and someone to be held accountable for defects that are life threatening people will not buy those cars.
This causes layoffs and closings of the dealerships, potentially 10's of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.
People aren't going to stop buying cars just because they can no longer buy one of the three big US brands. Either the dealerships in question will start selling Toyotas or else the local Toyota dealership will be hiring people to cover the increased demand.
On top of the dealerships going under you'll have the parts suppliers losing both of their major clients, the auto makers and the dealerships that do repairs for those makers, this causes them to lay off people and close down, another potential hundreds of thousands of people for just the warehouse/store work.
If the demand for parts, repairs and warehousing of Ford/Chrysler/GM cars decreases, the demand for these services for Toyota etc. will increase. Because people will still be getting new cars and foreign brands aren't immune to breakdowns or warehousing needs.
At this point you get the picture of how it could spiral downward from 3 companies going out of business.
It's basic scaremongering in an attempt to hush down the /real/ reason the car companies must be rescued: to save face. It's just too embarrassing for the US to lose its car industry, or even a large part of it.
The problem is when you have monolithic industries, or quasi monolithic industries, where the whole industry for one region sinks together. If you have one mega-bakery and that is badly run, you cannot let it go bust because there will be no bread and people will starve.
That isn't really going to happen. More realistically, the mega-bakery will go into chapter 11 bankruptcy and will continue to bake bread while its assets are "reorganized" or just plain old auctioned off. After the bankruptcy, the mega-bakery will either go on as a new much slimmer organization (if chapter 11 was a success), or its many bakeries will now be run by various investors who bought the assets on auction (if it was forced to go into chapter 7).
(... DRAM ...)
The same was true in the finance industry: because of their size, AIG, Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac were "too big to fail". Lehmann was adjudge not to be too big - but the repercussions of its failure are turning out much larger than expected.
The real reason the finance industry cannot be allowed to have bankruptcies is that no one understands how the various institutions work or how they are interconnected. They thought they knew this about Lehman and based upon this illusion allowed it to fail. The consequences, as you say, turned out to be catastrophic and revealed that they are clueless about how this market operates. They don't dare to do more to rock this particular boat hence the no-questions-asked bailouts.
The same is true in cars. (...)
Cars is a bit different. Similar arguments are being used but the real reason it's so important to bail them out is national pride, pure and simple. Building cars is such an important part of the nation's sense of self worth it's just very very difficult to let it go.
As the Senate showed us, however, capitalism is sufficiently strong in the US that cars will eventually have to face the music. It may take many more tax-payer billions before it happens but sooner or later Detroit will be left to the wolves of the free market.
Yes, it's quite easy to delude yourself into believing you have the moral upper-hand when you cut off a quote right before the "unless", don't you agree?
The "unless" would have been:
e.g. pre-2k so I wasn't really pirating it, unless Microsoft wants to pursue me for pirating abandonware (...)
"Abandonware" has no legal status and whether or not you are pirating software is in no way related to whether or not Microsoft pursues you for it. There seems to be no question about whether you were pirating it, you clearly were.
If you are going to pirate software, you owe it to yourself to realize that this is in fact what you are doing.
No, this is science, and I like it.
Ubisoft is saying "We don't believe that DRM reduces our sales, but we're going to test it by releasing an a-list title without DRM."
I'm going to buy it just to reward the company for doing something intelligent.
If you like the science of it then you shouldn't be getting it unless you otherwise would have, or you will be polluting the results of the study.
They are not trying to measure how many would buy a non-DRM'd game out of pure hatred for DRM, they are trying to measure how many who would buy a DRM'd one will pirate it instead when it does not have DRM (i.e. pirates normally thwarted by DRM) and how many would buy a non-DRM'd one who would otherwise have pirated a DRM'd one (i.e. potential customers heading over to TPB due to draconian DRM).
Any suggestions that also have some kind of chance to succeed? Don't get me wrong, but I've been trying to reason with people for too long to still have any kind of hope it might have any kind of effect.
It is nigh impossible to reason with people over religion. If they haven't already learned critical thinking by the time they're adults, chances are they are hopelessly lost to whatever myths they accumulated along the way. (It may be possible to reprogram them for all I know but this wouldn't really solve the root problem.)
The real hope lies in ensuring that the next generation benefits from better education and so will be capable of making fewer mistakes than what ours did.
What is the argument against drawings of child porn? That showing the act is as much criminal as the act itself?
(...)
Could anyone explain to me the logic behind that? I'm sorry, I don't get it.
Simple. It's Christian morality gone off the deep end. Logic does not enter into it.
If you want this sort of thing to stop you may want to support campaigns to teach more critical thinking in school, get more people through college/university, etc.
(...) His fatality rate plummeted but still the majority of doctors refused to change how they worked and he wound up literally driven insane because he had worked out how one could easily save thousands of lives but nobody was prepared to even give his idea a go.
Unfortunately I forget his name now so I can't easily find more information to point you at.
Doctor Cassandra, possibly? :-)
I could see it... I am not being filtered. Frankly, I don't see child porn...
This is where we see the genius of this new censorship system in action: They have transparently replaced the child porn picture with an innocuous picture of a naked girl and nobody's the wiser! Brilliant, my hat's off to these people!
</sarcasm>
Which also I find quite bizarre. Talk about indoctrination from an early age. But I also find the obsession in the US with flags a little disturbing. (...)
Traditionally there wasn't really much to hold US citizens together. They came from a hodge-podge of different nations and subscribed to a hodge-podge of different religions that were often at odds with one another. One might have hoped that they would resort to their Constitution in order to create a nucleus to unite around but perhaps that document is just too heavy on points one can disagree with. So they used a symbol that is devoid of any meaning other than the one each individual puts their for himself: their colours.
The statesmen that once set out to create a national identify for my own country, Norway, learned this from the US and made us the no.2 flag-wavers of the free world. Absent anything else of much use, what united Norway and what set us apart from our Swedish overlords was our colours.
Most other established nations have hundreds and hundreds of years of culture to use as social binding agent. The US did/does not.
I doubt they'll have some ultra-advanced ranging system combined with self-steerable beams to focus all of the beams onto a single point from variable distances.
No, that would require an expensive laser rangefinder or something and that would just . . . oh, wait . . . :-)
I predict that if you jump out of the window from the 50th floor, you will be pulled by gravity to your death. This fact has nothing to do with belief, religion, opinion etc etc - it's just an undeniable fact - an absolute truth, if you like.
It is quite possible to survive this so you would be wrong in calling it an absolute truth.
Someone will have to see your data sooner or later. An institution that you would normally trust not to steal from you would be under no obligation to do so. If you have a bank account, someone (or something), somewhere has to know your personal details, even if only fleetingly. What if they took that data, and told everyone? By your argument, that data isn't yours.
You seem to think that I have a copyright on my bank account number, or my PIN code. I do not. Nobody has this and nobody /can/ have this because the information has no artistic value and so is not copyrightable in the first place. When banks do not share your data it is due to contractual obligations, due to govt regulation and because they want to keep getting more customers in the future. Copyright has absolutely nothing to do with this at all.
Which, of course, they'd be allowed to do, because information doesn't belong to them, and those credit card details are just a sequence of digits and letters. If they're allowed to type 16 digits and a name into a text box, then why not some credit card info? It's not like the person who gave them the information "owns" that information.
You are focusing on the technical implementation when the real crime is in the bigger picture. Your argument is along the lines of "but moving my finger isn't illegal so I shouldn't be arrested just because I happened to be holding a loaded gun and pointing it at some guy while I was doing so".
The crime is not "copying information" or "writing down numbers". The crime is impersonating someone else and fraudulently gaining access to their money. It doesn't matter /how/ you do this - it is illegal regardless.
Um, you do realize that there are a few itty bitty fundamental differences between your brain and an electronic medium? Like, for example, the ability to upload the data for others to download and circumvent copyright laws, and therefore is significantly different than a brain.
While an electronic medium may /enable/ you to upload the data it does not, at least not in my part of the world, /force/ you to do so.
But yay precrime I suppose.
That's exactly what I'm getting at.
Yes, I know and while my reply was somewhat on the pedantic side I feel it's a very important distinction in the case at hand.
It's just so satisfying to see the look on their faces when some born-again zealot runs his "what /are/ the chances of everything being just as it is" line and you can reply, confidently, "100%" :-)
As usual, a long, pedantic diatribe ignoring the issue that copying games without paying for them is ethically wrong.
It's all about getting something for nothing.
(Emphasis mine)
Are you trying to imply that I should feel bad for not paying for every breath of air that I take? I'm getting it all the time and I'm not paying anything at all for it in spite of the fact that immense resources have been put into improving air quality over the last several decades.
Of course, I do pay taxes. Perhaps it's only for the poor that breathing should be considered ethically wrong? Please enlighten us.
The same kids might break a window in your house. Do you think you should have a backup window included in the price of your original installation?
I think you will find that consumers who express an interest in being able to backup their data do not, as a rule, expect the software vendor to supply the backup in addition to the original. Rather, these consumers will want to produce the backup themselves.
And if I am to take your broken analogy seriously: if the house owner was capable of easily manufacturing his own new window to replace the broken one, is it your position that he should be prohibited by law from doing so, or that the original window vendor should have the power to prevent him from manufacturing his own replacement?
The reason the question is interesting is that electrons can orbit in atoms, protons either don't decay or decay slowly, gravity is weak enough to allow structures to form, etc. and it just takes INCREDIBLY tiny changes to not have any of that and have a Universe in heat death, (...)
How do we know that these changes are "tiny"? Did we try to do the changes, find that it was fairly easy, and conclude that the change required would therefore be tiny? Or are we just tricking ourselves with numbers, e.g. "it is only a change of 1e-15 on our (incredibly mis-proportioned) scale so it must be tiny!"
I mean, changing the mean temperature by a mere -500 would be completely devastating to any prospect for life and 500 isn't a very big number if you don't take into account the fact that temperature actually stops at 0K and so that when you actually consider the units involved the entire concept becomes laughable. Do we know that "changing cosmological constant x" is any less laughable? Do we know that "imagine a universe where cosmological constant x is y" is any less laughable?