Actually, there's only one derivative for all integers: zero.;^)
Well I was using the word "derrivative" in the context of law, as in "derrivative work", rather then in the context of calculus as in "derrivative of a function".
DERIVATIVE WORK - A work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a 'derivative work'. 17 U.S.C.
That certainly is open to some degree of interpretation, but it seems to me the key here is not that the torrent hash *could* be generated from the copyrighted work, but rather that it *was*. My guess is that a torrent file isn't going to count as a derivative work, but high-minded math riddles have no bearing on the situation.
Actually they do, in a sense that they demonstrate two things: a) utterly nonsensical nature of the term "derrivative works" and b) a method of circumventing that definition. In the 17 U.S.C. above: or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. is basically saying: "and anything else, up to an dincluding the entire Universe and all the alternates of thereof...". Which I simply demonstrated in a rather concise mathematical form. If an MP3 format of a song is a "derrivative work" how is my special format of substituting words for bytes using a (painstakingly chosen) translation formula so that the same song appears ans The Illiad by Homer... is the Illiad then, a "derrivative" work? Is my translation formula? If neither is, then Bingo! I just formulated a perfectly legal form of sharing the said MP3...
Look, much as you'd like it to be, legal process is not an exercise in formal logic. In deciding to prosecute or not, people always take intent into account. Would slashdot's reportage by construed as intending to facilitate crime -- no. Does Loki's business method intend to facilitate copyright infringement. Of course it bloody does. That's the difference.
Cool. Up comes the "Copyright Infringement Daily, get your daily fix of all the nasty MPAA vs. the small guy news here! We have it all! Who is infringing, why, where, and what the law is doing about it! Check out our Intenational Section for all the statistics of nastiness, which site is the top infringer and what do they infringe on! This week, we interview MPAA and RIAA representatives to give us all the terryfing details of the innards of the crime!... " etc. Shut me down now for "intent"...
So the.torrent file contains a derivative of an unauthorised derivative of a coyrighted work, and is therefore fair game.
I know that you are not a lawyer but most people tend to miss this tidbit and so I will point it out to you. The "copyrighted material" is a string of integer numbers. There exists (as per mathematical theory) an infinite number of fuctions in form of y=f(x), where x and y are integer numbers. Furthermore, there exists an infinite number of functions in that form wich additional requirement that for any number in the domain x, say X1, a pre-determined number in domain y, say Y1 the following is true Y1=f(X1). From this one can easily conclude that any "copyrighted material" has infinite number of "derrivative works" and furthermore, any copyrighted material (as well as not copyrighted one) is a derrivative work of any other.
I would like Slashdotters to ponder that little gem.
I don't see any relation between my stand and your hypothesis.
Your whole counterwriting is bringing up strawmen arguments against any of my points.
Sigh. I know it is not your fault but I really grow tired of repeating the same points to different posters over and over again. In order to understand how rich (particularly large corporate interests) are using the system to abuse the "little guy" you have to first understand how the "intellectual property" scam operates, who are its true benefactors and why there are far better and just systems available. I will be very brief: Intellectual Property is defined by its proponents in a way that it makes it patently obvious that the "(private) property" in question is information. I postulate that "Information cannot be Private Property, because it does not have the required physical attributes to do so". To prove this point, I can demonstrate that information can be subject to operations which render impossible the ability to apply to it the standard transactions of marketplace. Furthermore, I can demonstrate that any "Intellectual Property" can only partially be subject to trade as long as it is tightly coupled and inseparable (by the consumer) from a physical object. Furthermore I can demonstrate that in a true, unencumbered by anti-competitive government interference on behalf on some players, free-market, the ability to innovate is self-rewarding, the reward being proportional to the complexity and originality of the product. In addition, I can demonstrate that art and science are not subject to rules of free-market, are separate from it and their creators have to be instead rewarded by other means, one of which is an established and proven system of arts patronage and academic sponsorship. Form all of the above I can demonstrate the effects of interference with the marketplace and who the benefactors of that interference are, which will bring me to answering the "simple" question you asked.
Especially I encauraged you to bring up "a better intellectual properties law". But you did not.
See above. If you are really interested in this, I can examine all these points with you, one at a time since I don't have days to type in complex replies to a mass of questions. Briefly, the only consistent and sane possibility is abolishment of IP laws wholesale and instead focusing on other means of rewarding arts and science. If you go through the entire exercise of logic induction with me, you will see why.
How so? Asuming you are poor and you have an idea which falls under copiright, e.g. you write a novel. How does the rich now have any way in taking that novel and making it to money?
That is because in order to make money on your novel you will need the following: a publisher who will take lion share of your money and a set of "intellectual property" laws which will give you money for your book but to achieve that they will need at the same time to rob millions of people of their personal freedoms. Furthermore, your small-time book deal is but a noise and smoke screen for far larger fish who use your personal greed as leverage to entrench themselves as "gatekeepers" of all information and thus masters of our society. You of course assumed that "being ripped off" can be only measured in monetary terms. As you are expected to by those who understand better and wish to play your small-time personal greed like a flute.
I dont' know how bad situation in USA indeed is regarding copyright and (sarcasm:D ).... but I would wonder if someone could indeed just take it away from the inventor.
Back to your first question. In order to "take away" something, one would have to a) "posses it" in the first place and consequently b) the "thing" in question would have to be capable of being "owned" and thus falling under the definition of "Private Property". I can demonstrate quite quickly that information cannot be private property, thus an invention (being information) cannot be "owned
I must start by saying that with this post you have earned my respect, for two reasons.
First, you have convinced me, not yet to agree with your position, but to respect its viability. I grant you some fair points, but I still disagree with you on some key issues.
I am glad that I was able to explain my point in a way that was convincing. This issue is very difficult to discuss because of the fact that historically some decisions were made which looked common-sense on the surface and remained unquestioned until they became a fixture of our culture. Then some people have worked extremely hard to abuse that situation by propagandizing measures to worsen it further for their own benefit. Doubly unfortunate is the fact that these same people happened to be operators of American (and Western in general) media and gatekeepers of our culture. That is why the opinions of people on the issue are so hotly contested. It is difficult for anyone (myself included) to question something which appears "obvious" or "common sense". I did spend quite a bit of time researching this issue recently, but that happened only after I became aware of the frightening possibilities and disastrous effects of "IP" after a series of coincidental observations over the duration of my rather longish career finally connected in a moment of "Eureka!" a few years ago.
Second, I very much appreciate and respect the tone of your post. We, in our current and previous discussions, have dipped to pretty infantile levels of personal animosity over a difference of positions on IP. That's just not a good way to advocate for something, even if we are passionate about it.
This actually is a common situation when positions of people discussing something are so far apart that each side can only imagine the other as having a screw loose. I have been guilty of this as anybody and so my natural tendency to try to make light of depressing (to me) things combined with doubts about the other person's seriousness tends to produce my various attempts at biting satire.
Now, I'm willing to lay down my pen-sword and walk away from this discussion with a better understanding and respect for you and your position. However, because a promise is a promise, I will--at your option--continue to walk through your example. Let me know if you'd like to continue.
Since we were able to make some progress in other ways, I will skip my planned "reductio ad absurdum" exposé of the fallacy of "information as intellectual-property" and I will simply demonstrate how the trap I laid for you was supposed to work so that you might hopefully appreciate the way in which that concept is utterly unworkable for any reasonable person.
In my example, I had myself distributing a large number of files with weakly encrypted file names in format of "Titney Spears-CD1-track-7 5-12-31.mp3" (the encryption was silly ROT-13). The file names were the weakest spot of the scheme but they were merely a technical choice I made to make the demonstration simpler. I will come back to them later. The format is "[some-song-or-art] N1-N2-N3.[file type]". The N1,N2,N3 are integers from say 1-200 each. On the same web page, I had a list of 200 URLs pointing to locations away from my site, containing publicly available files under "free-for-all" public licenses. Now consider this: If any so called "Intellectual Property" is equivalent to information (even if additional documentation such as a Deed is required) then that "IP" is subject to laws of information theory, which in itself is a sub-set of mathematics. From which follows an observation that any "IP" can be represented as binary data (as per information theory). For convenience I will treat that "IP" as a series of integer numbers corresponding to their binary representation. A series of integer numbers, can be represented as a single, large, integer number. For example, one can simply concatenate the numbers (signal levels of each digital sample for example) end-to-end and end up with just such a nu
Okay. Let's say that Company A is DBA "Acme Electronics" and Company B is DBA "Acme Electronics". In your economic model this would be a perfectly valid practice, since company names are ideas and can be duplicated without "stealing" physical property. Let's also say Company A's and Company B's logos and sales collateral are 100% identical. Again, a perfectly valid business practice since logos, ads, fliers, etc are all 100% duplicable without "stealing" physical property.
That would not be possible. While duplication of all of those things is perfectly all-right, the impersonation of Company A by company B is not. Nothing to do with intellectual property. Therefore the company B would have to truthfully identify itself as such. That does not prevent them from copying all they want, but it forces them to make (minor) changes that uniquely identify them. This is the traditional, pre-"intellectual property" system. In my example of Orville and his potatoes, even if "Orville" is not any sort of intellectual property, one would expect that if another "Orville" showed up from the next village, he would have to identify himself as such. As in "Orville from The Sticks" etc. This is the only way to make sure that the consumer has full knowledge as to the source of the given product he purchased. Again, no "intellectual property" of any sort is present.
Finally, let's say that Company A did the actual R&D to create the TV and Company B acquired the design and material to make the 100% copy at no meaningful cost (much like downloading and then serving a copyrighted song online.)
The "acquisition" of the design can be achieved in many ways, such as industrial espionage or reverse-engineering. The materials have to be bought on market at the same price company A pays. Note that art and science are not "products" and are not relevant here. Even if the time to do so is a fraction of the original design time, the following self-regulatory mechanism is embedded in a free market: the time to "duplicate" a product is proportional to its complexity and degree of innovation. That is if company B wishes to reproduce a plastic spoon made by company A, all they have to do is to purchase an injection-molding machine and spend half a day making a die. Still, even then, marketing channel has to be established and employees hired/trained. On the other hand if the object is a complex piece of electronics, not only the reverse-engineered design has to be tested and its weaknesses discovered (remember, company B is responsible for its products even if they duplicated the design), complex production lines established, employees trained on the new design, literature published, marketing channels established etc. Also note that companies will try to establish anti-industrial espionage measures to slow this process down further.
Let's say Company A charges $500 for this TV (creating enough profit margin to succeed but not enough to exploit consumers) and Company B charges $50 or nothing, since their costs are trivial.
You made several invalid assumptions here. Firstly, for all the sane (as in non-"pure IP") products in the marketplace, the company A's R&D is trivial compared to the cost of the manufacturing, distribution, service etc. Following is the fact that most of the hard parts of research are done by scientists at academia and company's A engineers were merely taking advantage of that. Their new design was a mere incremental improvement on hundreds of prior ones (which they obtained freely), using basic science (also obtained freely) from the academia. Thus the difference between prices of the two sets is more like $500 to $489. Does that put the company A at a disadvantage? Yes and no. Yes if the company A wishes to maintain profits from an increasingly aging design. Not if the company A actually wants to compete in a free market.
Let me illustrate this in a more general setting using something akin to game theory. We have two players, A and B (our companie
Since this disussion is all over the map (and I am getting tired of it), I will make the following simplification. We will discuss the economic implications and social effects of "intellectual property" as soon as you demonstrate that a) it exists, b) it can be used in a "reasonable" manner in a courtroom and c) that your definition of "reasonable" is not synonymous with application of legal shaft into everyone's anal cavities, which I will define narrowly as "factual evidence is irrelevant to winning or losing the case in vast majority of cases, i.e. the results are arbitrary or random". I will return to all of these questions of economic mechanisms, social justice, motivation of innovation, etc. and provide you with replies to all your points in that regard as soon as we have this rather fundamental hurdle cleared. Note that should you succeed, you will have scored an important victory, i.e. I would have admitted the existence of a valid concept of "intellectual property".
I will make one exception though, since I cannot leave you claiming "victory" somewhat prematurely, unanswered.
There we have it! Argument over, and I win. You
can't have it both ways. Either Company A may say, "Hey! That's our product (in design and/or manifestation) and Company B is marketing our product and even our brand!" or they don't.
Nothing of the kind. The only thing in question is athenticity of a product. Authenticity (or attribution in this context) is simply achieved by determining the origin of an item. This requires no "intellectual property" or "ownership of an idea" of a product whatsoever. Simply we are discussing something like: one potato came from Orville's farm and the other one didn't. Note that neither the potato itself not Orville person are "intellectual property", nor is the name "Orville" (being a name of hundreds of other people and farm animals). No measure of originality is required. If instead of potatos we were looking at TV sets, one only has to determine if a TV set was originally shipped from a factory of company A to determine that company A made it. Again this has nothing whatsoever with ant sort of "ownership of ideas" aka "intellectual property". A specific situation whereby a company B manufacturers a 100% copy of the TV set made by company A is valid and acceptable (as with potatos) and the only thing of concern to the consumer is if the set was indeed made by A or B or someone else. Again, mere shipping records are sufficient to determine that. This of course is in a normal capitalist system whereby products, rather then shapes, designs, ideas, names and farts are subject of trade. Again all of this is moot if you cannot demonstrate validity of "IP" in simple practical terms as our little Q&A session will quickly demonstrate.
So, you've previously argued that there is no scientifically valid, unarbitrary method to differentiate original works. Now, you're saying that authenticity is the only important thing.
Tell me, How do you authenticate origination without determining originality? Can you? Can't you? Please, oh wise and consistent one, please tell me.
As I explained, no test for originality is required to determine the attribution of products, thus their authenticity. Since products (as oposed to "intellectual property" nonsense) are physical, one can simply trace their origin via examinig their shipment history.
But now back to our empirical test:
Questions:
I am not sure of your reply format, I assume you are trying to predict my responses, in mostly incorrect way. I will omit your guesses and only supply answers to the questions posed.
Q1:
Were you serving the content to an audience that could assumably include a RIAA representative or agent? Or did the RIAA blackhat the data off of a non-serving host protected by minimally due diligant security?
The contents was located on my computer. It was "pointed to" by a web server, also running on my comput
I've define first art well enough by now, and I'm using verifiable within its standard definition, look it up if required.
Nothing of the sort. All you have provided is misdirections, vague hints, ambiguous excuses worthy of a crook running for an office, innuendo and fancy footwork, delightful examples of which follow..
My point was pretty fucking obvious. If you destroy the underpinnings of our current ecomonic model there will be no direct revenue or income for supporting patronage. Like it or not, our current economy is reliant on branding, trademarks, servicemarks, and similar methods of protecting product and service differentiation.
No, your point was fucking stupid. Only a small fraction (the least beneficial to society) of our economy depends on "branding, trademarks, servicemarks, and similar methods of" connivery. Not only did I present you with irrefutable evidence that healthy economic systems not dependent on this crap are possible (as they were in operation for millenia) but the legal monopolies created by these aberrate laws are staunchly anti-free market since they represent extra-systemic interference by governmental bodies. If you are serious about it, we can discuss in detail the anti-free market action of these ill-conceived laws. The system I described is not only proven to work (by our history) but also avoids these market-distorting pitfalls. And I wont even get into the disasters that await us if the "intellectual property" robber-barrons and their apologists (that means you) succeed in totally devouring Western legal systems. Also there exist other methods dealing with ensuring athenticity of products which do not involve any sort of "intellectual property" bullshit.
If you went to the general store to buy corn, that corn was locally grown and was in a big bin labeled "corn". There was no branding and no need for it, because local demand was usually equivalent to local production, and even if they were askew, there was little to be done, because long distance distribution was a pretty difficult task.
This example does not provide any imperative for "branding" of any sort.
As the Industrial revolution increased productivity and distribution speed, the concept of branding came hand in hand to fill a need to separate Paul's widgets from Peter's widgets.
By "branding" you seem to refer to simple attribution. Inventing new words in order to screw the legal system up is a classic example of the sort of activities "IP" proponents are up to.
In an every-increasing global market, branding and advertising to differentiate became the norm.
Again you speak of atribution of products. I grant you that making sure that "widget A" came indeed from company "A" and not someone predending to be "A" is important. But that has nothing to do whatsoever with any sort of "intellectual property". Attribution and determination of authenticity were with us since times immemorial. "branding" crookery wasnt. Note here, that "branding" represents one of the lowest and most useless elements of modern capitalist societies, whereby various psychological manipulation gimmicks, lies, misrepresentations and all sorts of other slime is used to make sheeple buy severely overpriced and frequently inferior products, usually made by 3rd parties and sold under falsified attribution. In direct contradiction to free market theories of capitalism.
Companies had to have methods to protect their brands, products and services from being copied by competitors, and so IP law was born.
Nothing of the sort. The only requirement in existance is that a product can be certified as authentically made by a company. The "IP" law was born when some crooks realized that by pretending to protect their companies from "unfair" competition they can create anti-competetive interference by governments. Thus controls of not only determination of authenticity (justified) but of "ownership" of concepts and ideas (completely unju
Actually Israel was created under pressure by the major controlling nations who were the fledgling nation's allies.
I see UN was "good" when it was helping Israel...
Since then the UN has become decidedly anti-semitic and specifically anti-Israel.
And then it was "bad" because it criticised Israel...
Not because Israel fucked up and deserved it.... nooooo! It was the UN that has changed! The definition of being "good" is to be pro-Israel according to you! Fuckwit.
Perhaps you haven't heard of Israel's "Test Resolution"? The Israelis proposed a resolution to protect Israeli children from terrorism. The UN had just approved a similar proposal from Egypt to protect Palestinian children.
This is the most audacious high-flying mis-representing bullshit ever conceived. One had to do with nearly every Palestinian child living in poverty under occupation and the other with an attempt to portray Israel as a victim.
Yet Egypt then led opposition to the Israeli resolution. The entire Non-Aligned Movement (led by Egypt) did their best to sabotage this document with amendments and changes. Israel pulled it because their point had been made.
No. They pulled it when it became obvious that it would pass when only the part about "protecting children from violence" was left and not the "we Israeli are poor innocent victims of Evil Palestinians" one tied skillfully to the other. It is a classic stunt of pro-Israel dis-information and deceit, you surely were not expecting me to take your bullshit at face value, were you?
And don't you just love when pedantry backfires? Yes, "semite" does mean "member of a group of Semitic-speaking individuals." But the term "anti-semitic" is defined as "discrimination against or hostility towards Jews".
No it is not. Some militant Jews merely succesfully (by much repetition and propaganda) appropriated the term "semite" to mean themselves, in an attempt to marginalize Arabs.
You might also be interested to know that while the word "kill" means to take the life of, "kilometer" does not mean to take the life of a meter.
"kill" and "kilo" have little in common with each other and nothing whatsoever with the discussion on hand.
And one last thing. Since you called me a "coward" for not supporting your insanity, I would like to point out who the true coward is around here. Since it is your dearest conviction that what the USA is doing in Iraq is just and noble, why the fuck are you on Slashdot and not in the Marines? Unless your next post comes from Falluja, I have to assume that you are just a yellowbelly, big-mouth, chickenshit who is all there to agitate and wave the flag as long it is other people who go do the dying and maiming.
How typical of a conspiracy theorist to find one source that he can distort to back up his ridiculous position, and ignore all other evidence.
Oh drats! You found us out! Me and ol' George's academic staff are in on it together! Shhhh! Tell noone!
You discontinue your shallow analysis at the point at which the US installed missiles in Turkey. Thus, obviously in your analysis this is the cause - you refuse to consider any other factors (the conduct of the Soviet Union following WWII, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the massacare of millions of innocent Germans, Kruschev's posturing, etc). If you start your account of history with an action by one party, by your account everything is a result of that action. But this is only because you are distorting the truth.
I also neglected to consider the position of Uranus and all its sattelites at the time, the edicts of King Richard the 1st and the fashion sense of Katarina The Great. The specific question we were discussing was Cuban Missile Crisis. Not what Stalin ate for breakfast on May the 7th in 1934. If the question was "who was the first to draw blood, the USSR or the West" the answer is... the West. You see, when the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution against the Tzar and his buddies occured with the subsequent civil war, the USA (and others, including Canada - then still under British command) sent (using an excuse of "rescuing" Czech troops) an expeditionary force to "limit" the Bolsheviks in the East and if possible to put them down. The US troops actually fought the Red Army. On Russian soil. Using bullets too. Real ones. People got killed dead. There is your "first punch". Since you asked, I am only pleased to oblidge. And you are welcome!
[pathetic attempts at ridicule of the GWU research snipped]
Your credentials in this regard as compared to the GWU researchers are nil. Zippo. Nada. You are only making yourself look more idiotic by trying to refute them. If you have problems with that research, email the contact on that page, I am sure as soon as you provide appropriate historical evidence, they will update their findings in your favor. Until then, you just make me laugh.
I'm interested to know - which parts do you think were fabrications?
The parts dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis being percipitated by the Berlin Wall for example.
That the USSR slaughtered millions of innocent Germans after WWII in an act of "retributive justice" (this is thoroughly documented - I suggest you look up the words "Berlin Airlift" for starters)?
This is quite a study in hipocrisy here. Perheaps you never heard of bombing of Dresden? As to USSR slaughtering "millions of innocent Germans" neither you or I have any right to pass any sort of moral judgement on a nation who lost over 20 million people to the German Army, an army which commited unspeakable acts of evil against truly innocent (as in not complicit in Hitler's plan) civilians in their campaign. Having said that, I never heard of any mass murder of German civilians after the WWII by the USSR and the Berlin Airlift was due to isolation of West Berlin geographically within East Germany, who in an escalation of tit-for-tat bravado, refused passage to trains from West Germany. Perheaps you will be so kind as to provide some info on this "retributive justice" phenomenon with millions of dead German civilians everywhere.
That the USSR erected the Berlin Wall (I suggest you pay a visit to reality for that one)?
Actually, it was East Germany who asked for and got the wall.
That Kruschev did not wish to expand control of the USSR?
Now this is pretty funny. Khrustchev?! How about this. Something about "peaceful coexistence", visits to the USA etc.
So, in your own words: you recant your original position, that the USSR was not a threat and thus was a strawman. That's all that matters.
You are nuts. I say "no" and in the next of your replies I get "so you said yes!". This is some sort of comprehension disorder on display here on your part. I suspect that it does not matter at all what is being said, you will just come back with "aha! I was right!" to absolutely everything.
You claim that the USSR was forced to place missiles in Cuba because of US missiles in Turkey. This is, simply, ludicrous.... [subsequent fantastic flights of fancy ommited for brevity]....
The new documentation, combined with recent testimony by Soviet and Cuban officials, also sheds light on what is perhaps the most important puzzle of the missile crisis, namely, what motivated the Soviets to deploy nuclear weapons in Cuba. The declassified record shows that U.S. officials were well aware that their deployment of Jupiter missiles near Soviet borders in Turkey and Italy in 1959 would be deeply resented by Soviet officials; even President Eisenhower noted that it would be a "provocative" step analogous to the deployment of Soviet missiles in "Mexico or Cuba.(9) A declassified military history of the Jupiter system reveals that the rockets became operational in April 1962 - an event that may have contributed to Khrushchev's proposal, made the very same month, to deploy similar weapons in Cuba.(10)
In addition, the documents lend credence to Khrushchev's claim that a primary Soviet motivation was the defense of Cuba against a U.S. invasion. For years, U.S. analysts have dismissed this as a face-saving, after-the-fact rationale that enabled the Soviets to declare victory in the confrontation rather than admit defeat. But formerly top-secret documents, released to the National Security Archive in January 1989, provide a detailed description of a 1962 U.S. covert action program known as OPERATION MONGOOSE, which combined sabotage, infiltration, and psychological warfare activities with military exercises and contingency operations for a possible invasion to overthrow the Castro government. Guidelines for OPERATION MONGOOSE, tacitly approved by President Kennedy in March 1962, noted that the "final success" of the program would "require decisive U.S. military intervention." Although Kennedy never formally authorized an invasion, former administration officials acknowledge that Cuban intelligence had infiltrated the CIA's exile groups and learned of plans for a potential invasion - which, ironically, was scheduled for October 1962.
You will forgive me if I take their analysis over your incomprehensible, unsubstantiated, delusional fabrications.
It's actually an expression of anti-Semitism, largely because so many of the UN member countries have large Islamic communities. Israel cannot be erased, it was created and has a right to exist - no matter how much you anti-Semites want to destroy it or enact your "final solution".
Yup. You are nuts. First they create the state of Israel, the anti-semitic bunch, and then in a fit of anti-semitism, they give it to the Jews! And all that so they can pass resolutions against Israel when it goes berserk later! Talk about sneaky!! Why, those clever anti-semites! They created it in order to destroy it! Oh, by the way, "semite" is a member of "group of people using semitic language", which includes Palestinians as well as most Arabs and some North Africans. Your head will probably explode upon discovering that.
You don't even know how many people were killed in Vietnam after we finally withdrew (estimates are 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 killed by Pol Pot's regime after we withdrew; war deaths were lower than that)
It would be funny if it wasnt so pathetic watching you whine. Pol Pot came to power
If goods are cheaper, doesn't that help the poor? Why is this a bad thing? Cheaper goods lowers the cost of living, so that the poor find it easier to meet their basic necessities. There's a reason why the poor shop at Walmart instead of trendy expensive mainstreet boutiques
That is because this trend is unsustainable. By lowering the purchasing power so that only a discounted, no-frills, foreign-slave-labour suppliers can fill the need, one creates a vicious cycle of ever lowering purchasing power until the Wallmart will simply be unable to make their stuff any cheaper. You are simply hiding the poverty. Which brings me to:
For food there are food stamps, for clothing there are those $1 Chinese garments you mention. For shelter there is section 8 and low income housing. Just because you don't personally earn the money, and it is handed to you instead, doesn't mean it's not a resource.
That figure does not include non-income resources, such as food stamps, housing assistance, and other forms of welfare.
... all of which is precisely that, a method of hiding, in an unsustainable way, poverty. You can fund expanding poverty via taxes only for a short little while before going broke, as greater and greater number of people become poor (poor cant buy locally made goods, thus inducing "offshoring", thus inducing more poor, rinse, repeat). So unless you stabilise the numbers at very low levels and have incomes and size of middle class increase, or in emergency, institute massive taxes for the rich to bootstrap the poor somehow, you are heading for a crash.
Also, we were disucssing the social deal. If the insane gap between poor and rich is even further increasing, it simply invalidates the whole fundamental premise of the social order and, like always in the past, will in the end result in a catastrophic collapse. Note that the US trade deficits and budget deficits are at this point truly astronomical and unprecedented. A growing number of experts believe that an implosion akin to the "great depression" is within sight. There are some corrective measures that one could try but it appears that those at the helm are insane and are actually trying to steer towards the cliff. They are acting like a gambler who lost his shirt and is desperately, with his last penny, trying to "get back" what he lost.
But then, you can always try foreign conquest and a culture of fear combined with a persecution complex to divert attention from the economy to "foreign and domestic enemies". It worked for Adolf and Benito, who is to say it wont work here. For a little while at least...
That would be nonsensical and stupid, but I suppose you've got to wear the shoes that fit. I didn't change the meaning at all, I just dumbed down the wording because you whined about it. They're equivalent and interchangeable.
You provided 2 sub-definitions to be taken together taken as one to define your version of "intellectual property". I focused on point #2. I am not sure what your ranting about "nonsensical and stupid" refers to other then to your own ideas.
By "claiming first art" I mean "asserting claim of original work in accordance with applicable laws." The literal definition of art as "creative work" isn't remotely relavent to this discussion. In addition, the claimed work need not even be factually original, so "First how?" doesn't matter. For example: If you are the tenth person to manifest some given work, and none of the first nine people stated a claim of originality, then you could reasonably and successfuly claim the work yourself. However, in a case where you're the second person to manifest some given work and the first person has claimed it, if you attempt to claim originality, you would fail, and the other person would prevail. Clear enough?
You make me laugh. Not only this is a muddled mumbo jumbo consisting of: if the first dude didnt claim it and if the ninth one did then its the ninth who "owns" it... owns fucking what?! The whole point of me asking you to define "first art" was not for you to go into some circular definition of what does it mean to be a first person in a queue. What you did not define in even the most vague of ways is how do you distinguish one piece of "art" that someone claimed dibs on from another! You can have 25 people in line, all claiming the some thing, and each of them has it in 25 different colors! Is it 25 pieces of unique art? 1 in 25 colors? Are they all owners of "first art"? Is only the first one? What about of each of those thing has different scale? Some pieces shuffled around? Etc. In other words, your entire rant is based on a non-definition of "first art" that you arbitrarily concocted out of thin air. Unless you come up with a way to determine what is and what is not "first art" in a scientific and verifiable way your whole argument is not worth the web page space it occupies and only serves to appologise for a system where the one who has more lawyers gets to claim your arbitrarily defined, unverifiable, subjective, "first art". On a second thought, this is the point of "Intellectual Property" law, to create a morass of nonsensical, mutually-contradictory definitions which can be exploited to corporate advantage...
information *BY ITSELF*" is not IP... If the information IS NOT someone else's IP
I am sorry. You probably do not realize such nuances of logic, and so I must break the bad news to you: you can't have it both ways. Either the information is the IP or it is not. It can be a "component" of IP, which you seem to suggest (information+legal claim), but in that case it can be freely copied as it is a mere component, akin to sand used to make a statue (the statue being your "IP"). So unless the information, on its own, is the "property" that can be "stolen", the game is basically over as far as information is concerned, and you might as well drop it from your discussion and come up with some other way of putting shackles on us all.
If we all agree to be bound by rule of law, then this threshold can be arbitrated or litigated,on case by case basis or as a whole, by applicable governing bodies. We both live in nations where we are bound by rule of law, so this applies to both of us. Of course, we could choose to ignore this binding agreement if we accept the consequences of that choice
I agree that comparing data, including the information and the accompanying claim(s) of originality, is a fair way to arbitrate disputed originality.
Nice try. Comparing data is woefully insufficient to determine "originality". It is a trap I set for you
That's right, I don't see it. I see people poorer than me. I see people considerably poorer than me. But I don't see poverty. Let me explain. There is a difference between being poor and being in poverty. Poverty means destitution. It means you insufficient resources to cover the necessities.
No. Poverty means... poverty, destitution means destitution. For example, there are people who are "working poor". The definition of poverty used is "an extremely low level of income as compared to necesities of living". Your own Census Bureau calculates that threshold based on family status, age, dependants etc. (I think the current number is $9,393 for a single adult yearly income). Also the fact that you "dont see it" might have a lot to do with the fact that the poor people tend to live in particular areas and not be visible in well-off neighbourhoods. Also they might just be able to get clothing that hides them better, these are the days of $1 Chinese garnments.
That doesn't mean that there aren't poor people! It just means that the situation isn't as horribly desperate as it was forty years ago when we started the "War on Poverty".
I can only go by your official statistics, acording to them the poverty was in excess of 20% at the start of the "War on Poverty" (man can you be less war-like, it seems there is wars on "everything" going on over there) and is still around of 17% now, after dipping as low as 14% at one point.
Let's move on to the rich. Imagine ten people. Nine of them make $50,000 a year. One of them makes $450,000. That one person owns just as much as the other nine. That doesn't make those nine people poor. It doesn't place them into poverty. Now let's use YOUR numbers. I think they're fishy, but let's use them for the sake of argument. Imagine 99 people making $50k and one making $4,950k. That last guy is making a heck of a lot of money. But doesn't make the $50k everyone else has any less. In fact, that guy can't spend that kind of money without benefiting the other 99. It's basic economics.
I gave the reference to my numbers, they come from your official IRS and other publications. Your example is valid as long as the dude at the top shares burden of taxes proportonate to his fortune and the others are actually earning a proper living. There has to be also some sanity here. 20%/60% sounds sane. But at 1% - 90% ratio any semblance of a fair deal is gone. None of the other industrialized nations come even close. For example, the "middle class" constitutes only 53% of population as compared to say, Sweden, at 79% or Japan at over 90%. I think all these Wallmarts are managing to hide the state of affairs by supplying the kinds of everyday goods that people still can afford. But this cant last. The total wages of all people who earned less than $50,000 a year (about 85 percent of all Americans) increased an average of 2 percent a year from 1980 to 1989, which did not even keep pace with inflation. By contrast, the total wages of all millionaires shot up 243 percent a year. In other words, rich are getting richer and poor poorer. Additionally, back in 1945, people in the top income bracket paid a whopping 99% in income tax. In 1991 that was 31%. The Bush tax cut made it much lower. Your billionaires now have lower tax rate now then the bottom middle class!
Transactions can only occur through cooperation, and every transaction results in a benefit to both sides.
There are conditions on that. If the market is indeed free (an ideal state of affairs never hereto observed anywhere) that would be true for all transactions. But in the real world, other factors such as ownership and subsequent gauging of fees on unique and important national resources is possible. Mis-information and chickanery is possible. Ownership of conglomerate media and "lemming-like" behaviour of "free press" is possible. Competition in the courtroom is possible. Back-handed deals ala Haliburton are possible. Enron and WorldCom (and the whole
My original position: USSR = strawman. The refined position: USSR no threat to Canada ergo USSR = strawman. The more refined version: USSR threat to its own citizens and silly nations whose dictators invited it, USSR no threat to Canada, ergo USSR = strawman. The very refined position: USSR threat to its own citizens and silly nations whose dictators invited it, USSR threat to others introduced because of mad arms race started by USA and panic within USSR about it, but still USSR no threat to Canada ergo USSR = strawman.
In other words you do not get to threaten someone you do not like with a gun on the street and then claim to "defend" innocent bystanders if the other guy produces his own gun. Even if the other guy swears blasphemously in Russian, beats up on his wife and had an altrication with a neighbour once. Still noone appointed you a cop. The threat to the bystanders was introduced by your beligerent, self-righteous action not his.
I will refine this further yet for your convenience, you need only to ask.
First the Soviet Union was a strawman - not a real threat. Then when examples were given of what type of threat the Soviet Union was, you stated they were a real threat, but only because they were responding to US aggression.
I already made it as simple as humanely possible above for you. I can try big letters if that will help.
So to summarize your position: the USSR was a nonexistent threat that was supremely brutal.
Quite right. The threat can be (this part is obviously beyond you ) local. As in if you have a vicious dog in your house, he cannot bite me up here in Canada while he is there with you. Thus a threat the dog represents to you is nonexistant to me. If you were to demand that I send you money to protect me from the threat of your vicious dog, I would call the threat of the dog "strawman" (hmm "strawdog"?). Or should I try those big letters?
The USSR was a non-brutal brutal strawman which didn't act aggressively, but if they did it was just because the US provoked them into it.
Nothing of the sort, although your attempt at putting words into my mouth is amusing.
Your anti-American bias is, frankly, psychotic.
You are confusing my devotion to reality with "anti-American bias" and it is indeed making you psychotic.
Your position: Islamists bomb the US, its allies, and random innocent people because we have bases on "their land" (including land granted the Jews by the UN, which you still believe belongs to the Islamists)
Not only you have bases but you actively meddle in the internal affairs of countries in the Middle East. Additionally, the land "given" by the UN was not UN's to give in the first place. But even if one accepts existence of Israel on that land, the 1947 borders are but a fraction of the present state of Israel, vast majority of "its" land is indeed the result of aggression and conquest. But all of this aside, you claim that I said that "US is sole motivating force of terrorism" which is patently not the case, as being (unlike Canada) "a cause" does not equal "only cause" which is the part that you made up. Islamists also bomb the various corrupt "governments" in their own countries. None of which has anything to do with "defense" of Canada, a subject which you are again desperately trying to depart.
Again, let us summarize. You know more than the UN. You know more than the US. If only we were all as enlightened as you. You're nothing more than a thinly-veiled, anti-American, anti-Semitic racist. You seem to believe that the world can just sort itself out, and we should never get involved.
Nothing of the sort. I base my assertion on this simple fact: since the creation of Israel the UN General Assembly passed 429 anti-Israel resolutions, in which Israel was "condemned" 321 times. From 1967 to 1988 the Security Council passed 88 resolutions directly against Israel. During that span, Is
You missed my entire point when I said that I was speculating.
No I didnt, this very line of "speculation" is disturbing.
Based on our history, I don't expect humans to be particularly kind in their treatment of "non human intelligences," and I would expect that the above questions about "what is death" and "what is cruelty" will be major points of contention when the issue arises.
Which (what worries me immensly) some people will choose to define to their advantage and convenience. If this occurs, justified machine retaliations are all but certain.
Please don't go around judging people when they haven't even told you what their position is. Are you really interested in analyzing this issue, or are you just out to accuse those who you think disagree with you? If you think that the things I'm suggesting are wrong, then don't you think it's a good idea to think about them? Shouldn't you consider the possibilities so you can arrive at an educated opinion? Shouldn't you analyze possible arguments in advance in order to be better prepared if this becomes a real issue?
I do understand that you profess not to hold this opinion personally, it is however very disturbing to me even to be discussing this. We are essentially (as far as I can tell) discussing concentration camps and death chambers.
1. Creating true AI will require evolutionary processes.
I tend to agree
2. Without infinite computing resources, one would eventually have to stop processing AI systems that aren't desirable.
Quite likely
3. So far I am undecided as to whether this is equivalent to "killing" a biological organism. Is shutting down an AI with the intelligence of an ant the same as killing an ant? Maybe.
It is in fact precisely the same if you believe that the information processing capability and its infromation contents is indeed the "essence" of an ant. Think this simple experiment: replace the ant one cell at a time for its nanotech equivalent (assuming the neural cells are functional equivalents) at the end of the process you have 100% cybernetic ant with the exact same "mind" state of the original. Now kill it.
4. I don't think the "killing" question becomes a real issue until the system is actually "self aware." Where to draw this line, I have no idea. I personally don't have a problem killing bugs.
The line is so fuzzy that is non-existant. All we can tell is when things have gone too far already, such as the machines developing even recognizable antropomorphic effects of self-awarness. Actually we might be in trouble long before that since we have no way to judge "alien" emotional states. The whole idea is seriously troubling.
5. It's going to be a very long time before we reach the point of AI being self aware. In the meantime, we'd better come to some conclusions about what "life" is, what "death" is, and what we as a group think is right and wrong concerning these issues. Maybe it looks simple to you, but it looks pretty complex to me - I'm not about to jump to conclusions.
"Groupthink" right and wrong has nothing to do with this, the question is what the AIs themselves will think of this and somehow I am not optimistic we would end up coming out at the other end of this smelling like roses.
If 1% of the population is rich, and 90% is everyone else, what happened to the missing 9%?
My appologies, the actual wording is: the top 1% combined owns more that bottom 90% combined. The gap of 9% is in between those two. Sorry for the confusion.
Just because the rich are getting richer does not mean that everyone else is getting poorer. In actual fact, nearly all segments of the population are getting richer. We have *WON* the war on poverty! Destitution no longer exists in the US. The poor today are considerably better off than they were in the 60s. If you want to see true poverty, you must LEAVE the U.S. and Canada and visit Mexico.
I encourage you to visit here. A choice passage from the front page: "35.9 million people, 1 out of every 8 Americans is living in poverty. Thats 1.3 million more then a year ago and 3 million more then 2 years ago".
Care to try again?
Wealth does not automatically equate to exploitation.
While essentially true, a situation where 1% of the population basically owns everything but the shirts of 90% it is fitting the definition quite nicely.
I "exploit" my coworkers everyday by asking them to review my code. I exploit my grocer by taking advantage of his coupons. Heck, I exploit my fatcat employer by getting him to pay me for my skills! The point is, exploitation is done by everyone, even you.
No. The world "exploit" I used in the context of "To make use of selfishly or unethically", essentially "abuse for a profit". Better word to use would be "Enslave". I should have use it instead.
There are two answers. The first was protection. It's easier to defend against bandits and marauders if you're part of a larger group. The second reason is more important: specialization
No, the answer is "to cooperate for mutual gain". Protection, specialization and others are just sub-categories of this. Once one party abuses the deal and the cooperation is lopsided for "small group's gain at everybody else's expense" the deal is off.
The purpose of society has nothing to do with wealth. That's merely a side effect.
True but the wealth is the indicator of the performance and fairness of the cooperative deal of society.
The real purpose is to promote the free interaction of its members.
Nothing of the sort. The purpose is cooperation for mutual benefit of which "promoting free interaction" is but one element.
The only reason that I think that my view is any more practical than the true ideal is because we used to have a reasonable system, before Disney, et. all, came along.
I can understand your sentiment but I feel that it is too late for that. The "reasonable" system of the past was able to function only because the information technology of today did not exist to render copyright to be so at odds with common sense and the number of patents was small enough to be manageable. But as we are progressing, an increasing number of new works is in digital form and that form is what causes the problem in conjunction with the old-fashioned approach. In order to be able to "enforce" copyright, one will need to either dispose of open hardware or put tens of thousands in jail on a perpetual basis, ala "War on Drugs". As to patents, their number is increasing exponentially and soon it will be impossible to produce anything without searching through hundreds of thousands of patents, which are extremely difficult to analyse. This crippling effect on all manufacturing is already happening.
In essence you are attempting to fix the system by trying to return it to its previous, semi-acceptable state but it is simply physically impossible.
And I cant even predict the results of trying to apply copyrights to DNA, but some rather disturbing precedents exist already involving Monsanto.
that is that people deserve (have the right) to be compensated for their work.
Such right does not exist and never had. The only right that you have is that once you and someone who hires you agree to a fee, you are entitled to it upon completion of your work. Artists whose patrons do not need physical contact with the originals of the art are in a unique position of not having such agreement with the audience and furthermore, not being able to tell in advance if the work is worth their while since the audience may simply not like it. That is why my suggestion of art foundations does two things, one it allows for experimental art, artists who do not make a hit are still getting food on the table but those who do hit, will also get revenue from performances and direct donations from their fans. This is the only logical way.
By simply using software or listening to music, one admits to finding utility in that product. You *know* that it took time (i.e., had to eat, had to have a house, etc.) and effort to create the product you're using, but you feel no compulsion to re-imburse those costs? What's happening is that you're asking somebody to give their resources to you for nothing in return. You want something for nothing, and I recognize no such right
You are trying to turn the argument on its head. This has nothing to do with one's right to "take for free" but everything with an inability to treat information as "private property" and thus subjecting it to commerce. Also as I already mentioned, artists do not create out of need of money but from an intrinsic desire to express themselves, they are not concerned if someone watches their art for "free", they are glad that someone is enjoying their creation, more the merrier. Art foundations should take care of rewarding the artist financially to make sure that he/she has food on the table. Furthermore you are rewarding the artist with the most sought after currency of art: recognition and praise. Influence and (sooner or later) wealth is bound to follow (based on many many revenue sources such as donations, exhibitions, conventions, interviews, teaching engagements, etc).
First, IIRC, its main topic is DRM. Also, in that world, copyright is extended forever.
My point is that in order to adapt the "Intellectual Property" to new technologies so it has even a smallest chance of survival, total DRM lockout is a logical and inevietable consequence of the structure of the concept of "IP" itself. In other words, the world of "Right To Read" (or similiar) is a result of natural step-by-step progression. Basically general-purpo
Oh and I missed this choice morsel:
Not what they said at all. I suggest you read more.
From one Osama Bin Laden (someone I have a reason to suspect knows something about aims of militant Islam): "Let him (Mr. Bush) tell us why we did not attack Sweden, for example. It is obvious that those who hate freedom cannot have the pride of the 19 (September 11 suicide hijackers), God rest their souls. If we fought you, it is because we are free men, we do not ignore values, we want to return freedom to our nation. If you play havoc with our security, we play havoc with yours."
Perheaps you noted the phrase "our nation". Unless my geography is waaaay off and Canada is located in the area of Mesopotamia where the Calliphate once was, you got a problem with your reasoning.
The only important point here is that the Soviet Union was capable of deploying missiles in Cuba. This handily defeats your "strawman" position. The Cold War was very real, and causation for it is much deeper than the US putting missiles in Turkey.
The only important point here is that the Soviet Union was defending itself from the aggression by the USA. Hence the "strawman". As in the wholly fabricated idea of USSR on the attack was used to justify ever-expanding military spending. That kind of "strawman". I never said that USSR, China or other countries did not/do not have military power, only that they were not attempting to attack Canada, ever, thus we never needed your "defense". Strawman. As in a fake, made up, threat.
The example of Cuban Missile Crisis, not only does not "defeat" my argument, on the contrary, quite handily illustrates who the aggressor was.
First Daud seized power from King Zahir (without killing him) and made Afghanistan a republic. A constitution was created, and Daud was elected president. He even had a civilian cabinet. But Daud was killed in a coup by the Revolutionary Council in 1978 (led by Noor Muhammed Turaki and Hafizullah Amin) These men suspended Afghanistan's constitution and attempted to institute "scientific socialism". Devout Muslims resisted this; Amin asked the USSR for help, and the US backed the Mujahadeen against the USSR.
To clarify: the US backed the will of the people against the rule of a tyrannical leader and the power of the Soviet Union (your strawman)
You neglected to mention that Daud was a cousin of the king, that he was a dictator, that he was dependant on Turaki and Amin for his power, that he started to persecute the Islamists, which the Revolutionary Council continued, that Amin killed Turaki and that the other members of the Revolutionary Council asked USSR for help fearing that Amin (who was going totally insane) will kill them all, that the USSR had support of a large number of Afghanis (The Northern Alliance, so famously praised by the USA when it helped you against Taliban) etc etc etc. In other words USSR engaged in a country right on its border, government of which (just as illegitimate as any to date) asked and went to fight against a murderous bunch of nutcases known as the Taliban. USSR had its own ulterior motives and was supremely brutal, but to present it as "people" against "tyrants" takes a particularly deranged neoconservative rah, rah, USA-uber-alles mind.
Oh, and just to remind you, the topic is "defending" Canada. None of: Daud, Taraki, Amin, USSR nor even Taliban in Afghanistan ever made a slightest of beeps about wanting to overtake Toronto. Ever. Even once.
Quite different from supporting terrorists blowing up civilians.
No as a matter of fact, exactly the same since the Mujahideen did precisely that (and carried that method quite handsomely into one other place on one day in September).
But curiously, not in Ottawa. I wonder.
Thank you. You just admitted your statement was entirely false.
You are a classic self-congratulatory, alternate-reality inhabiting, neo-conservative. In your warped mind, anything anyone says, constitutes "admission of falsehood". Not only the fact that the Soviets opressed Ukraine has nothing to do with defense of Canada but the Soviets inhereited Ukraine from the Tzarist Russia, a great pal of the USA, who had it opressed for a long while before that. But as expected, you can only see the choice bits that fit your pre-conceived convictions. I wonder if this duscussion, like with most cultist conservative believers, has any purpose. You will just ignore choice bits, invent others and if faced with unrefutable evidence of your error, you will just declare yourself "victorious" and run away.
.. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand. You concede that there are other motivating forces behind the terrorism than the evil old US, a
You must mean the strawman that was building missile bases in Cuba?
In response to the USA putting them in Turkey first. Please get your Cuban Missile Crisis facts straight.
The strawman that invaded Afghanistan?
In a fit of stupidity USSR responded to a request of a then Afghan government of Nur Mohammad Taraki for help to defeat a coup by an Islamist named Hafizullah Amin sponsored by the USA. And the rest is history.
The strawman that has oppressed most of the small countries that comprised the Soviet Union (talk to a Ukrainian about what a strawman the USSR was)
While that was indeed happening, Stalin and particularly the later governments had no intention of expanding to Canada, and as the declassifed Kremlin archives show, were always in a reactionary, defensive stance to what they preceived as their mortal threat: NATO. Note that Warsaw Pact was formed in response to NATO, not the other way around.
Really? Funny how they say something completely different. Something about democracy being a great evil.
... in their own lands.
Also, might interest you to know that the Islamists are terrorizing Spain (which is not a gigantic power like the US), France (ditto), and many other small countries
All of whom have large impoverished Islamic populations and subsequent internal problems. Also Spain was singled out for helping out the USA in its Iraq crusade, all attacks ceased since they withdrew.
They also have a tiny beef with the existence of a place called Israel. You know, the place we all created for the Jews to live?
90% of the planet has "beef" with the appartheid, racist, usurping, violent, expansionist, militaristic policies of the state of Israel. That has nothing to do with anti-semitism or "place for the Jews" to live and everything with some of those Jews deciding that they are superior to all other human beings and acting accordingly. That of course does not excuse their Arab foes from responsibility for their own share of idiocies and attrocities. But your singling out the Islamists as "anti-Israel" (many of whom having justified grievances towards Israel) and trying to pretend that it somehow constitutes a deal with the Devil is telling. Also you neglected to mention which border does Canada share with Israel.
Why do you think North Korea is only concerned with South Korea (as you put it)? Maybe because of UN (mostly US) action to prevent the invasion of South Korea?
No because, South and North Korea are the same country and the South wishes to overtake and rule the North, while the North wishes to rule the South.
Why do you think China isn't expanding?
Because there is nothing to indicate that China is on a mission to take over the planet other then paranoid delusions of neocons cabalists plotting in their basements for the day when they will have to defend Manhattan from the Chinese, the same way they plotted to shoot the Red Army when it gets there, right after the Antichrist does. Things which should be of greater concern to psychiatrists then sane people discussing global affairs
Maybe because of our military and economic might?
Now you are getting somewhere. Sustaining that military and economic might now requires to have everyone frightened silly of imaginary enemies everywhere.
I love this new-age short-sightedness about how the world is so peaceful and we don't need military power. It's largely the US and military power that has made the world peaceful.
Like Iraq for example. Note that accusing his opponents of "short-sightedness" was Hitler's favourite response when they doubted his assertion of the "Germany's enemies plotting to keep her from fullfilling her destiny".
As far as death goes, what about the AI that's held indefinitely in stasis - frozen in time but able to be instantiated again? You would be stealing "time" from the AI, but did you kill it?
You are talking about putting someone to "infinte sleep". For us mere mortals the term to describe that state is "death".
I didn't ask if it would be considered "death," I asked if it would be considered "cruel." In the US (for example) it is legal to kill a domesticated animal for food, yet it is illegal to torture it to death. Of course a being with intelligence comparable to a human would probably be a different legal case, but it's hard to say how the law will treat it
I am becoming disturbed by your outlook on this. Up to this point I always imagined that any sane and moral human being, would find an idea of destroying another self-aware and sentient being, even of a different nature, revolting and immoral. Your arguments are coming dangerously close to the approach of one Dr Sigmund Rascher who believed that experiments in dissecting brains of live inmates of Dachau concentration camp were justified, since they were merely "subhuman". Are you suggesting that if he were to perform them under anastesia and in "humane" ways, he would be right? After all, what he did was "legal" in the Nazi Germany. You are frightening me even if you are "just speculating".
As for your fears about man-machine wars, I think they're a bit alarmist. Humans naturally expect such behavior, because it's so ingrained in our nature. In the wild, you have to fight and kill to survive and prosper. After millions of years of doing this, it becomes your most basic instinct. Human society didn't come about until recently, so our instinctual morals are just slapped on top of our instincts to cheat and kill.
If you subjected the sentient AIs to the treatment you just described, I would expect even the most detached and logical one of them to consider its options.
The objective of society has NOTHING to do with how much money someone has. Stop being an idiot.
What is the objective of the society then? If you are claiming that protection of the majority from exploitation by a minority is not included in it, what is included then? Only based on your enlightened reply, can we decide who is an idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I was using the word "derrivative" in the context of law, as in "derrivative work", rather then in the context of calculus as in "derrivative of a function".
Actually they do, in a sense that they demonstrate two things: a) utterly nonsensical nature of the term "derrivative works" and b) a method of circumventing that definition. In the 17 U.S.C. above: or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. is basically saying: "and anything else, up to an dincluding the entire Universe and all the alternates of thereof ...". Which I simply demonstrated in a rather concise mathematical form. If an MP3 format of a song is a "derrivative work" how is my special format of substituting words for bytes using a (painstakingly chosen) translation formula so that the same song appears ans The Illiad by Homer... is the Illiad then, a "derrivative" work? Is my translation formula? If neither is, then Bingo! I just formulated a perfectly legal form of sharing the said MP3...
Cool. Up comes the "Copyright Infringement Daily, get your daily fix of all the nasty MPAA vs. the small guy news here! We have it all! Who is infringing, why, where, and what the law is doing about it! Check out our Intenational Section for all the statistics of nastiness, which site is the top infringer and what do they infringe on! This week, we interview MPAA and RIAA representatives to give us all the terryfing details of the innards of the crime! ... " etc. Shut me down now for "intent"...
I know that you are not a lawyer but most people tend to miss this tidbit and so I will point it out to you. The "copyrighted material" is a string of integer numbers. There exists (as per mathematical theory) an infinite number of fuctions in form of y=f(x), where x and y are integer numbers. Furthermore, there exists an infinite number of functions in that form wich additional requirement that for any number in the domain x, say X1, a pre-determined number in domain y, say Y1 the following is true Y1=f(X1). From this one can easily conclude that any "copyrighted material" has infinite number of "derrivative works" and furthermore, any copyrighted material (as well as not copyrighted one) is a derrivative work of any other.
I would like Slashdotters to ponder that little gem.
Aaaaargghh! Sellout, eh? Me matey, if we be catching that scurvy landlubber, we be making him walk the long walk down the short plank, we will!
Sigh. I know it is not your fault but I really grow tired of repeating the same points to different posters over and over again. In order to understand how rich (particularly large corporate interests) are using the system to abuse the "little guy" you have to first understand how the "intellectual property" scam operates, who are its true benefactors and why there are far better and just systems available. I will be very brief: Intellectual Property is defined by its proponents in a way that it makes it patently obvious that the "(private) property" in question is information. I postulate that "Information cannot be Private Property, because it does not have the required physical attributes to do so". To prove this point, I can demonstrate that information can be subject to operations which render impossible the ability to apply to it the standard transactions of marketplace. Furthermore, I can demonstrate that any "Intellectual Property" can only partially be subject to trade as long as it is tightly coupled and inseparable (by the consumer) from a physical object. Furthermore I can demonstrate that in a true, unencumbered by anti-competitive government interference on behalf on some players, free-market, the ability to innovate is self-rewarding, the reward being proportional to the complexity and originality of the product. In addition, I can demonstrate that art and science are not subject to rules of free-market, are separate from it and their creators have to be instead rewarded by other means, one of which is an established and proven system of arts patronage and academic sponsorship. Form all of the above I can demonstrate the effects of interference with the marketplace and who the benefactors of that interference are, which will bring me to answering the "simple" question you asked.
Especially I encauraged you to bring up "a better intellectual properties law". But you did not.
See above. If you are really interested in this, I can examine all these points with you, one at a time since I don't have days to type in complex replies to a mass of questions. Briefly, the only consistent and sane possibility is abolishment of IP laws wholesale and instead focusing on other means of rewarding arts and science. If you go through the entire exercise of logic induction with me, you will see why.
How so? Asuming you are poor and you have an idea which falls under copiright, e.g. you write a novel. How does the rich now have any way in taking that novel and making it to money?
That is because in order to make money on your novel you will need the following: a publisher who will take lion share of your money and a set of "intellectual property" laws which will give you money for your book but to achieve that they will need at the same time to rob millions of people of their personal freedoms. Furthermore, your small-time book deal is but a noise and smoke screen for far larger fish who use your personal greed as leverage to entrench themselves as "gatekeepers" of all information and thus masters of our society. You of course assumed that "being ripped off" can be only measured in monetary terms. As you are expected to by those who understand better and wish to play your small-time personal greed like a flute.
I dont' know how bad situation in USA indeed is regarding copyright and (sarcasm :D ) .... but I would wonder if someone could indeed just take it away from the inventor.
Back to your first question. In order to "take away" something, one would have to a) "posses it" in the first place and consequently b) the "thing" in question would have to be capable of being "owned" and thus falling under the definition of "Private Property". I can demonstrate quite quickly that information cannot be private property, thus an invention (being information) cannot be "owned
I am glad that I was able to explain my point in a way that was convincing. This issue is very difficult to discuss because of the fact that historically some decisions were made which looked common-sense on the surface and remained unquestioned until they became a fixture of our culture. Then some people have worked extremely hard to abuse that situation by propagandizing measures to worsen it further for their own benefit. Doubly unfortunate is the fact that these same people happened to be operators of American (and Western in general) media and gatekeepers of our culture. That is why the opinions of people on the issue are so hotly contested. It is difficult for anyone (myself included) to question something which appears "obvious" or "common sense". I did spend quite a bit of time researching this issue recently, but that happened only after I became aware of the frightening possibilities and disastrous effects of "IP" after a series of coincidental observations over the duration of my rather longish career finally connected in a moment of "Eureka!" a few years ago.
Second, I very much appreciate and respect the tone of your post. We, in our current and previous discussions, have dipped to pretty infantile levels of personal animosity over a difference of positions on IP. That's just not a good way to advocate for something, even if we are passionate about it.
This actually is a common situation when positions of people discussing something are so far apart that each side can only imagine the other as having a screw loose. I have been guilty of this as anybody and so my natural tendency to try to make light of depressing (to me) things combined with doubts about the other person's seriousness tends to produce my various attempts at biting satire.
Now, I'm willing to lay down my pen-sword and walk away from this discussion with a better understanding and respect for you and your position. However, because a promise is a promise, I will--at your option--continue to walk through your example. Let me know if you'd like to continue.
Since we were able to make some progress in other ways, I will skip my planned "reductio ad absurdum" exposé of the fallacy of "information as intellectual-property" and I will simply demonstrate how the trap I laid for you was supposed to work so that you might hopefully appreciate the way in which that concept is utterly unworkable for any reasonable person.
In my example, I had myself distributing a large number of files with weakly encrypted file names in format of "Titney Spears-CD1-track-7 5-12-31.mp3" (the encryption was silly ROT-13). The file names were the weakest spot of the scheme but they were merely a technical choice I made to make the demonstration simpler. I will come back to them later. The format is "[some-song-or-art] N1-N2-N3.[file type]". The N1,N2,N3 are integers from say 1-200 each. On the same web page, I had a list of 200 URLs pointing to locations away from my site, containing publicly available files under "free-for-all" public licenses. Now consider this: If any so called "Intellectual Property" is equivalent to information (even if additional documentation such as a Deed is required) then that "IP" is subject to laws of information theory, which in itself is a sub-set of mathematics. From which follows an observation that any "IP" can be represented as binary data (as per information theory). For convenience I will treat that "IP" as a series of integer numbers corresponding to their binary representation. A series of integer numbers, can be represented as a single, large, integer number. For example, one can simply concatenate the numbers (signal levels of each digital sample for example) end-to-end and end up with just such a nu
That would not be possible. While duplication of all of those things is perfectly all-right, the impersonation of Company A by company B is not. Nothing to do with intellectual property. Therefore the company B would have to truthfully identify itself as such. That does not prevent them from copying all they want, but it forces them to make (minor) changes that uniquely identify them. This is the traditional, pre-"intellectual property" system. In my example of Orville and his potatoes, even if "Orville" is not any sort of intellectual property, one would expect that if another "Orville" showed up from the next village, he would have to identify himself as such. As in "Orville from The Sticks" etc. This is the only way to make sure that the consumer has full knowledge as to the source of the given product he purchased. Again, no "intellectual property" of any sort is present.
Finally, let's say that Company A did the actual R&D to create the TV and Company B acquired the design and material to make the 100% copy at no meaningful cost (much like downloading and then serving a copyrighted song online.)
The "acquisition" of the design can be achieved in many ways, such as industrial espionage or reverse-engineering. The materials have to be bought on market at the same price company A pays. Note that art and science are not "products" and are not relevant here. Even if the time to do so is a fraction of the original design time, the following self-regulatory mechanism is embedded in a free market: the time to "duplicate" a product is proportional to its complexity and degree of innovation. That is if company B wishes to reproduce a plastic spoon made by company A, all they have to do is to purchase an injection-molding machine and spend half a day making a die. Still, even then, marketing channel has to be established and employees hired/trained. On the other hand if the object is a complex piece of electronics, not only the reverse-engineered design has to be tested and its weaknesses discovered (remember, company B is responsible for its products even if they duplicated the design), complex production lines established, employees trained on the new design, literature published, marketing channels established etc. Also note that companies will try to establish anti-industrial espionage measures to slow this process down further.
Let's say Company A charges $500 for this TV (creating enough profit margin to succeed but not enough to exploit consumers) and Company B charges $50 or nothing, since their costs are trivial.
You made several invalid assumptions here. Firstly, for all the sane (as in non-"pure IP") products in the marketplace, the company A's R&D is trivial compared to the cost of the manufacturing, distribution, service etc. Following is the fact that most of the hard parts of research are done by scientists at academia and company's A engineers were merely taking advantage of that. Their new design was a mere incremental improvement on hundreds of prior ones (which they obtained freely), using basic science (also obtained freely) from the academia. Thus the difference between prices of the two sets is more like $500 to $489. Does that put the company A at a disadvantage? Yes and no. Yes if the company A wishes to maintain profits from an increasingly aging design. Not if the company A actually wants to compete in a free market.
Let me illustrate this in a more general setting using something akin to game theory. We have two players, A and B (our companie
Since this disussion is all over the map (and I am getting tired of it), I will make the following simplification. We will discuss the economic implications and social effects of "intellectual property" as soon as you demonstrate that a) it exists, b) it can be used in a "reasonable" manner in a courtroom and c) that your definition of "reasonable" is not synonymous with application of legal shaft into everyone's anal cavities, which I will define narrowly as "factual evidence is irrelevant to winning or losing the case in vast majority of cases, i.e. the results are arbitrary or random". I will return to all of these questions of economic mechanisms, social justice, motivation of innovation, etc. and provide you with replies to all your points in that regard as soon as we have this rather fundamental hurdle cleared. Note that should you succeed, you will have scored an important victory, i.e. I would have admitted the existence of a valid concept of "intellectual property".
I will make one exception though, since I cannot leave you claiming "victory" somewhat prematurely, unanswered.
There we have it! Argument over, and I win. You can't have it both ways. Either Company A may say, "Hey! That's our product (in design and/or manifestation) and Company B is marketing our product and even our brand!" or they don't.
Nothing of the kind. The only thing in question is athenticity of a product. Authenticity (or attribution in this context) is simply achieved by determining the origin of an item. This requires no "intellectual property" or "ownership of an idea" of a product whatsoever. Simply we are discussing something like: one potato came from Orville's farm and the other one didn't. Note that neither the potato itself not Orville person are "intellectual property", nor is the name "Orville" (being a name of hundreds of other people and farm animals). No measure of originality is required. If instead of potatos we were looking at TV sets, one only has to determine if a TV set was originally shipped from a factory of company A to determine that company A made it. Again this has nothing whatsoever with ant sort of "ownership of ideas" aka "intellectual property". A specific situation whereby a company B manufacturers a 100% copy of the TV set made by company A is valid and acceptable (as with potatos) and the only thing of concern to the consumer is if the set was indeed made by A or B or someone else. Again, mere shipping records are sufficient to determine that. This of course is in a normal capitalist system whereby products, rather then shapes, designs, ideas, names and farts are subject of trade. Again all of this is moot if you cannot demonstrate validity of "IP" in simple practical terms as our little Q&A session will quickly demonstrate.
So, you've previously argued that there is no scientifically valid, unarbitrary method to differentiate original works. Now, you're saying that authenticity is the only important thing. Tell me, How do you authenticate origination without determining originality? Can you? Can't you? Please, oh wise and consistent one, please tell me.
As I explained, no test for originality is required to determine the attribution of products, thus their authenticity. Since products (as oposed to "intellectual property" nonsense) are physical, one can simply trace their origin via examinig their shipment history.
But now back to our empirical test:
Questions:
I am not sure of your reply format, I assume you are trying to predict my responses, in mostly incorrect way. I will omit your guesses and only supply answers to the questions posed.
Q1: Were you serving the content to an audience that could assumably include a RIAA representative or agent? Or did the RIAA blackhat the data off of a non-serving host protected by minimally due diligant security?
The contents was located on my computer. It was "pointed to" by a web server, also running on my comput
Nothing of the sort. All you have provided is misdirections, vague hints, ambiguous excuses worthy of a crook running for an office, innuendo and fancy footwork, delightful examples of which follow..
My point was pretty fucking obvious. If you destroy the underpinnings of our current ecomonic model there will be no direct revenue or income for supporting patronage. Like it or not, our current economy is reliant on branding, trademarks, servicemarks, and similar methods of protecting product and service differentiation.
No, your point was fucking stupid. Only a small fraction (the least beneficial to society) of our economy depends on "branding, trademarks, servicemarks, and similar methods of" connivery. Not only did I present you with irrefutable evidence that healthy economic systems not dependent on this crap are possible (as they were in operation for millenia) but the legal monopolies created by these aberrate laws are staunchly anti-free market since they represent extra-systemic interference by governmental bodies. If you are serious about it, we can discuss in detail the anti-free market action of these ill-conceived laws. The system I described is not only proven to work (by our history) but also avoids these market-distorting pitfalls. And I wont even get into the disasters that await us if the "intellectual property" robber-barrons and their apologists (that means you) succeed in totally devouring Western legal systems. Also there exist other methods dealing with ensuring athenticity of products which do not involve any sort of "intellectual property" bullshit.
If you went to the general store to buy corn, that corn was locally grown and was in a big bin labeled "corn". There was no branding and no need for it, because local demand was usually equivalent to local production, and even if they were askew, there was little to be done, because long distance distribution was a pretty difficult task.
This example does not provide any imperative for "branding" of any sort.
As the Industrial revolution increased productivity and distribution speed, the concept of branding came hand in hand to fill a need to separate Paul's widgets from Peter's widgets.
By "branding" you seem to refer to simple attribution. Inventing new words in order to screw the legal system up is a classic example of the sort of activities "IP" proponents are up to.
In an every-increasing global market, branding and advertising to differentiate became the norm.
Again you speak of atribution of products. I grant you that making sure that "widget A" came indeed from company "A" and not someone predending to be "A" is important. But that has nothing to do whatsoever with any sort of "intellectual property". Attribution and determination of authenticity were with us since times immemorial. "branding" crookery wasnt. Note here, that "branding" represents one of the lowest and most useless elements of modern capitalist societies, whereby various psychological manipulation gimmicks, lies, misrepresentations and all sorts of other slime is used to make sheeple buy severely overpriced and frequently inferior products, usually made by 3rd parties and sold under falsified attribution. In direct contradiction to free market theories of capitalism.
Companies had to have methods to protect their brands, products and services from being copied by competitors, and so IP law was born.
Nothing of the sort. The only requirement in existance is that a product can be certified as authentically made by a company. The "IP" law was born when some crooks realized that by pretending to protect their companies from "unfair" competition they can create anti-competetive interference by governments. Thus controls of not only determination of authenticity (justified) but of "ownership" of concepts and ideas (completely unju
Actually Israel was created under pressure by the major controlling nations who were the fledgling nation's allies.
I see UN was "good" when it was helping Israel...
Since then the UN has become decidedly anti-semitic and specifically anti-Israel.
And then it was "bad" because it criticised Israel...
Not because Israel fucked up and deserved it .... nooooo! It was the UN that has changed! The definition of being "good" is to be pro-Israel according to you! Fuckwit.
Perhaps you haven't heard of Israel's "Test Resolution"? The Israelis proposed a resolution to protect Israeli children from terrorism. The UN had just approved a similar proposal from Egypt to protect Palestinian children.
This is the most audacious high-flying mis-representing bullshit ever conceived. One had to do with nearly every Palestinian child living in poverty under occupation and the other with an attempt to portray Israel as a victim.
Yet Egypt then led opposition to the Israeli resolution. The entire Non-Aligned Movement (led by Egypt) did their best to sabotage this document with amendments and changes. Israel pulled it because their point had been made.
No. They pulled it when it became obvious that it would pass when only the part about "protecting children from violence" was left and not the "we Israeli are poor innocent victims of Evil Palestinians" one tied skillfully to the other. It is a classic stunt of pro-Israel dis-information and deceit, you surely were not expecting me to take your bullshit at face value, were you?
And don't you just love when pedantry backfires? Yes, "semite" does mean "member of a group of Semitic-speaking individuals." But the term "anti-semitic" is defined as "discrimination against or hostility towards Jews".
No it is not. Some militant Jews merely succesfully (by much repetition and propaganda) appropriated the term "semite" to mean themselves, in an attempt to marginalize Arabs.
You might also be interested to know that while the word "kill" means to take the life of, "kilometer" does not mean to take the life of a meter.
"kill" and "kilo" have little in common with each other and nothing whatsoever with the discussion on hand.
And one last thing. Since you called me a "coward" for not supporting your insanity, I would like to point out who the true coward is around here. Since it is your dearest conviction that what the USA is doing in Iraq is just and noble, why the fuck are you on Slashdot and not in the Marines? Unless your next post comes from Falluja, I have to assume that you are just a yellowbelly, big-mouth, chickenshit who is all there to agitate and wave the flag as long it is other people who go do the dying and maiming.
Oh drats! You found us out! Me and ol' George's academic staff are in on it together! Shhhh! Tell noone!
You discontinue your shallow analysis at the point at which the US installed missiles in Turkey. Thus, obviously in your analysis this is the cause - you refuse to consider any other factors (the conduct of the Soviet Union following WWII, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the massacare of millions of innocent Germans, Kruschev's posturing, etc). If you start your account of history with an action by one party, by your account everything is a result of that action. But this is only because you are distorting the truth.
I also neglected to consider the position of Uranus and all its sattelites at the time, the edicts of King Richard the 1st and the fashion sense of Katarina The Great. The specific question we were discussing was Cuban Missile Crisis. Not what Stalin ate for breakfast on May the 7th in 1934. If the question was "who was the first to draw blood, the USSR or the West" the answer is ... the West. You see, when the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution against the Tzar and his buddies occured with the subsequent civil war, the USA (and others, including Canada - then still under British command) sent (using an excuse of "rescuing" Czech troops) an expeditionary force to "limit" the Bolsheviks in the East and if possible to put them down. The US troops actually fought the Red Army. On Russian soil. Using bullets too. Real ones. People got killed dead. There is your "first punch". Since you asked, I am only pleased to oblidge. And you are welcome!
[pathetic attempts at ridicule of the GWU research snipped]
Your credentials in this regard as compared to the GWU researchers are nil. Zippo. Nada. You are only making yourself look more idiotic by trying to refute them. If you have problems with that research, email the contact on that page, I am sure as soon as you provide appropriate historical evidence, they will update their findings in your favor. Until then, you just make me laugh.
I'm interested to know - which parts do you think were fabrications?
The parts dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis being percipitated by the Berlin Wall for example.
That the USSR slaughtered millions of innocent Germans after WWII in an act of "retributive justice" (this is thoroughly documented - I suggest you look up the words "Berlin Airlift" for starters)?
This is quite a study in hipocrisy here. Perheaps you never heard of bombing of Dresden? As to USSR slaughtering "millions of innocent Germans" neither you or I have any right to pass any sort of moral judgement on a nation who lost over 20 million people to the German Army, an army which commited unspeakable acts of evil against truly innocent (as in not complicit in Hitler's plan) civilians in their campaign. Having said that, I never heard of any mass murder of German civilians after the WWII by the USSR and the Berlin Airlift was due to isolation of West Berlin geographically within East Germany, who in an escalation of tit-for-tat bravado, refused passage to trains from West Germany. Perheaps you will be so kind as to provide some info on this "retributive justice" phenomenon with millions of dead German civilians everywhere.
That the USSR erected the Berlin Wall (I suggest you pay a visit to reality for that one)?
Actually, it was East Germany who asked for and got the wall.
That Kruschev did not wish to expand control of the USSR?
Now this is pretty funny. Khrustchev?! How about this. Something about "peaceful coexistence", visits to the USA etc.
You are nuts. I say "no" and in the next of your replies I get "so you said yes!". This is some sort of comprehension disorder on display here on your part. I suspect that it does not matter at all what is being said, you will just come back with "aha! I was right!" to absolutely everything.
You claim that the USSR was forced to place missiles in Cuba because of US missiles in Turkey. This is, simply, ludicrous. ... [subsequent fantastic flights of fancy ommited for brevity]....
From George Washington University Cuban Missile Crisis site:
You will forgive me if I take their analysis over your incomprehensible, unsubstantiated, delusional fabrications.
It's actually an expression of anti-Semitism, largely because so many of the UN member countries have large Islamic communities. Israel cannot be erased, it was created and has a right to exist - no matter how much you anti-Semites want to destroy it or enact your "final solution".
Yup. You are nuts. First they create the state of Israel, the anti-semitic bunch, and then in a fit of anti-semitism, they give it to the Jews! And all that so they can pass resolutions against Israel when it goes berserk later! Talk about sneaky!! Why, those clever anti-semites! They created it in order to destroy it! Oh, by the way, "semite" is a member of "group of people using semitic language", which includes Palestinians as well as most Arabs and some North Africans. Your head will probably explode upon discovering that.
You don't even know how many people were killed in Vietnam after we finally withdrew (estimates are 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 killed by Pol Pot's regime after we withdrew; war deaths were lower than that)
It would be funny if it wasnt so pathetic watching you whine. Pol Pot came to power
That is because this trend is unsustainable. By lowering the purchasing power so that only a discounted, no-frills, foreign-slave-labour suppliers can fill the need, one creates a vicious cycle of ever lowering purchasing power until the Wallmart will simply be unable to make their stuff any cheaper. You are simply hiding the poverty. Which brings me to:
For food there are food stamps, for clothing there are those $1 Chinese garments you mention. For shelter there is section 8 and low income housing. Just because you don't personally earn the money, and it is handed to you instead, doesn't mean it's not a resource.
That figure does not include non-income resources, such as food stamps, housing assistance, and other forms of welfare.
... all of which is precisely that, a method of hiding, in an unsustainable way, poverty. You can fund expanding poverty via taxes only for a short little while before going broke, as greater and greater number of people become poor (poor cant buy locally made goods, thus inducing "offshoring", thus inducing more poor, rinse, repeat). So unless you stabilise the numbers at very low levels and have incomes and size of middle class increase, or in emergency, institute massive taxes for the rich to bootstrap the poor somehow, you are heading for a crash.
Also, we were disucssing the social deal. If the insane gap between poor and rich is even further increasing, it simply invalidates the whole fundamental premise of the social order and, like always in the past, will in the end result in a catastrophic collapse. Note that the US trade deficits and budget deficits are at this point truly astronomical and unprecedented. A growing number of experts believe that an implosion akin to the "great depression" is within sight. There are some corrective measures that one could try but it appears that those at the helm are insane and are actually trying to steer towards the cliff. They are acting like a gambler who lost his shirt and is desperately, with his last penny, trying to "get back" what he lost.
But then, you can always try foreign conquest and a culture of fear combined with a persecution complex to divert attention from the economy to "foreign and domestic enemies". It worked for Adolf and Benito, who is to say it wont work here. For a little while at least...
You provided 2 sub-definitions to be taken together taken as one to define your version of "intellectual property". I focused on point #2. I am not sure what your ranting about "nonsensical and stupid" refers to other then to your own ideas.
By "claiming first art" I mean "asserting claim of original work in accordance with applicable laws." The literal definition of art as "creative work" isn't remotely relavent to this discussion. In addition, the claimed work need not even be factually original, so "First how?" doesn't matter. For example: If you are the tenth person to manifest some given work, and none of the first nine people stated a claim of originality, then you could reasonably and successfuly claim the work yourself. However, in a case where you're the second person to manifest some given work and the first person has claimed it, if you attempt to claim originality, you would fail, and the other person would prevail. Clear enough?
You make me laugh. Not only this is a muddled mumbo jumbo consisting of: if the first dude didnt claim it and if the ninth one did then its the ninth who "owns" it... owns fucking what?! The whole point of me asking you to define "first art" was not for you to go into some circular definition of what does it mean to be a first person in a queue. What you did not define in even the most vague of ways is how do you distinguish one piece of "art" that someone claimed dibs on from another! You can have 25 people in line, all claiming the some thing, and each of them has it in 25 different colors! Is it 25 pieces of unique art? 1 in 25 colors? Are they all owners of "first art"? Is only the first one? What about of each of those thing has different scale? Some pieces shuffled around? Etc. In other words, your entire rant is based on a non-definition of "first art" that you arbitrarily concocted out of thin air. Unless you come up with a way to determine what is and what is not "first art" in a scientific and verifiable way your whole argument is not worth the web page space it occupies and only serves to appologise for a system where the one who has more lawyers gets to claim your arbitrarily defined, unverifiable, subjective, "first art". On a second thought, this is the point of "Intellectual Property" law, to create a morass of nonsensical, mutually-contradictory definitions which can be exploited to corporate advantage...
information *BY ITSELF*" is not IP... If the information IS NOT someone else's IP
I am sorry. You probably do not realize such nuances of logic, and so I must break the bad news to you: you can't have it both ways. Either the information is the IP or it is not. It can be a "component" of IP, which you seem to suggest (information+legal claim), but in that case it can be freely copied as it is a mere component, akin to sand used to make a statue (the statue being your "IP"). So unless the information, on its own, is the "property" that can be "stolen", the game is basically over as far as information is concerned, and you might as well drop it from your discussion and come up with some other way of putting shackles on us all.
If we all agree to be bound by rule of law, then this threshold can be arbitrated or litigated,on case by case basis or as a whole, by applicable governing bodies. We both live in nations where we are bound by rule of law, so this applies to both of us. Of course, we could choose to ignore this binding agreement if we accept the consequences of that choice
I agree that comparing data, including the information and the accompanying claim(s) of originality, is a fair way to arbitrate disputed originality.
Nice try. Comparing data is woefully insufficient to determine "originality". It is a trap I set for you
No. Poverty means ... poverty, destitution means destitution. For example, there are people who are "working poor". The definition of poverty used is "an extremely low level of income as compared to necesities of living". Your own Census Bureau calculates that threshold based on family status, age, dependants etc. (I think the current number is $9,393 for a single adult yearly income). Also the fact that you "dont see it" might have a lot to do with the fact that the poor people tend to live in particular areas and not be visible in well-off neighbourhoods. Also they might just be able to get clothing that hides them better, these are the days of $1 Chinese garnments.
That doesn't mean that there aren't poor people! It just means that the situation isn't as horribly desperate as it was forty years ago when we started the "War on Poverty".
I can only go by your official statistics, acording to them the poverty was in excess of 20% at the start of the "War on Poverty" (man can you be less war-like, it seems there is wars on "everything" going on over there) and is still around of 17% now, after dipping as low as 14% at one point.
Let's move on to the rich. Imagine ten people. Nine of them make $50,000 a year. One of them makes $450,000. That one person owns just as much as the other nine. That doesn't make those nine people poor. It doesn't place them into poverty. Now let's use YOUR numbers. I think they're fishy, but let's use them for the sake of argument. Imagine 99 people making $50k and one making $4,950k. That last guy is making a heck of a lot of money. But doesn't make the $50k everyone else has any less. In fact, that guy can't spend that kind of money without benefiting the other 99. It's basic economics.
I gave the reference to my numbers, they come from your official IRS and other publications. Your example is valid as long as the dude at the top shares burden of taxes proportonate to his fortune and the others are actually earning a proper living. There has to be also some sanity here. 20%/60% sounds sane. But at 1% - 90% ratio any semblance of a fair deal is gone. None of the other industrialized nations come even close. For example, the "middle class" constitutes only 53% of population as compared to say, Sweden, at 79% or Japan at over 90%. I think all these Wallmarts are managing to hide the state of affairs by supplying the kinds of everyday goods that people still can afford. But this cant last. The total wages of all people who earned less than $50,000 a year (about 85 percent of all Americans) increased an average of 2 percent a year from 1980 to 1989, which did not even keep pace with inflation. By contrast, the total wages of all millionaires shot up 243 percent a year. In other words, rich are getting richer and poor poorer. Additionally, back in 1945, people in the top income bracket paid a whopping 99% in income tax. In 1991 that was 31%. The Bush tax cut made it much lower. Your billionaires now have lower tax rate now then the bottom middle class!
Transactions can only occur through cooperation, and every transaction results in a benefit to both sides.
There are conditions on that. If the market is indeed free (an ideal state of affairs never hereto observed anywhere) that would be true for all transactions. But in the real world, other factors such as ownership and subsequent gauging of fees on unique and important national resources is possible. Mis-information and chickanery is possible. Ownership of conglomerate media and "lemming-like" behaviour of "free press" is possible. Competition in the courtroom is possible. Back-handed deals ala Haliburton are possible. Enron and WorldCom (and the whole
My original position: USSR = strawman. The refined position: USSR no threat to Canada ergo USSR = strawman. The more refined version: USSR threat to its own citizens and silly nations whose dictators invited it, USSR no threat to Canada, ergo USSR = strawman. The very refined position: USSR threat to its own citizens and silly nations whose dictators invited it, USSR threat to others introduced because of mad arms race started by USA and panic within USSR about it, but still USSR no threat to Canada ergo USSR = strawman.
In other words you do not get to threaten someone you do not like with a gun on the street and then claim to "defend" innocent bystanders if the other guy produces his own gun. Even if the other guy swears blasphemously in Russian, beats up on his wife and had an altrication with a neighbour once. Still noone appointed you a cop. The threat to the bystanders was introduced by your beligerent, self-righteous action not his.
I will refine this further yet for your convenience, you need only to ask.
First the Soviet Union was a strawman - not a real threat. Then when examples were given of what type of threat the Soviet Union was, you stated they were a real threat, but only because they were responding to US aggression.
I already made it as simple as humanely possible above for you. I can try big letters if that will help.
So to summarize your position: the USSR was a nonexistent threat that was supremely brutal.
Quite right. The threat can be (this part is obviously beyond you ) local. As in if you have a vicious dog in your house, he cannot bite me up here in Canada while he is there with you. Thus a threat the dog represents to you is nonexistant to me. If you were to demand that I send you money to protect me from the threat of your vicious dog, I would call the threat of the dog "strawman" (hmm "strawdog"?). Or should I try those big letters?
The USSR was a non-brutal brutal strawman which didn't act aggressively, but if they did it was just because the US provoked them into it.
Nothing of the sort, although your attempt at putting words into my mouth is amusing.
Your anti-American bias is, frankly, psychotic.
You are confusing my devotion to reality with "anti-American bias" and it is indeed making you psychotic.
Your position: Islamists bomb the US, its allies, and random innocent people because we have bases on "their land" (including land granted the Jews by the UN, which you still believe belongs to the Islamists)
Not only you have bases but you actively meddle in the internal affairs of countries in the Middle East. Additionally, the land "given" by the UN was not UN's to give in the first place. But even if one accepts existence of Israel on that land, the 1947 borders are but a fraction of the present state of Israel, vast majority of "its" land is indeed the result of aggression and conquest. But all of this aside, you claim that I said that "US is sole motivating force of terrorism" which is patently not the case, as being (unlike Canada) "a cause" does not equal "only cause" which is the part that you made up. Islamists also bomb the various corrupt "governments" in their own countries. None of which has anything to do with "defense" of Canada, a subject which you are again desperately trying to depart.
Again, let us summarize. You know more than the UN. You know more than the US. If only we were all as enlightened as you. You're nothing more than a thinly-veiled, anti-American, anti-Semitic racist. You seem to believe that the world can just sort itself out, and we should never get involved.
Nothing of the sort. I base my assertion on this simple fact: since the creation of Israel the UN General Assembly passed 429 anti-Israel resolutions, in which Israel was "condemned" 321 times. From 1967 to 1988 the Security Council passed 88 resolutions directly against Israel. During that span, Is
No I didnt, this very line of "speculation" is disturbing.
Based on our history, I don't expect humans to be particularly kind in their treatment of "non human intelligences," and I would expect that the above questions about "what is death" and "what is cruelty" will be major points of contention when the issue arises.
Which (what worries me immensly) some people will choose to define to their advantage and convenience. If this occurs, justified machine retaliations are all but certain.
Please don't go around judging people when they haven't even told you what their position is. Are you really interested in analyzing this issue, or are you just out to accuse those who you think disagree with you? If you think that the things I'm suggesting are wrong, then don't you think it's a good idea to think about them? Shouldn't you consider the possibilities so you can arrive at an educated opinion? Shouldn't you analyze possible arguments in advance in order to be better prepared if this becomes a real issue?
I do understand that you profess not to hold this opinion personally, it is however very disturbing to me even to be discussing this. We are essentially (as far as I can tell) discussing concentration camps and death chambers.
1. Creating true AI will require evolutionary processes.
I tend to agree
2. Without infinite computing resources, one would eventually have to stop processing AI systems that aren't desirable.
Quite likely
3. So far I am undecided as to whether this is equivalent to "killing" a biological organism. Is shutting down an AI with the intelligence of an ant the same as killing an ant? Maybe.
It is in fact precisely the same if you believe that the information processing capability and its infromation contents is indeed the "essence" of an ant. Think this simple experiment: replace the ant one cell at a time for its nanotech equivalent (assuming the neural cells are functional equivalents) at the end of the process you have 100% cybernetic ant with the exact same "mind" state of the original. Now kill it.
4. I don't think the "killing" question becomes a real issue until the system is actually "self aware." Where to draw this line, I have no idea. I personally don't have a problem killing bugs.
The line is so fuzzy that is non-existant. All we can tell is when things have gone too far already, such as the machines developing even recognizable antropomorphic effects of self-awarness. Actually we might be in trouble long before that since we have no way to judge "alien" emotional states. The whole idea is seriously troubling.
5. It's going to be a very long time before we reach the point of AI being self aware. In the meantime, we'd better come to some conclusions about what "life" is, what "death" is, and what we as a group think is right and wrong concerning these issues. Maybe it looks simple to you, but it looks pretty complex to me - I'm not about to jump to conclusions.
"Groupthink" right and wrong has nothing to do with this, the question is what the AIs themselves will think of this and somehow I am not optimistic we would end up coming out at the other end of this smelling like roses.
My appologies, the actual wording is: the top 1% combined owns more that bottom 90% combined. The gap of 9% is in between those two. Sorry for the confusion.
Just because the rich are getting richer does not mean that everyone else is getting poorer. In actual fact, nearly all segments of the population are getting richer. We have *WON* the war on poverty! Destitution no longer exists in the US. The poor today are considerably better off than they were in the 60s. If you want to see true poverty, you must LEAVE the U.S. and Canada and visit Mexico.
I encourage you to visit here. A choice passage from the front page: "35.9 million people, 1 out of every 8 Americans is living in poverty. Thats 1.3 million more then a year ago and 3 million more then 2 years ago".
Care to try again?
Wealth does not automatically equate to exploitation.
While essentially true, a situation where 1% of the population basically owns everything but the shirts of 90% it is fitting the definition quite nicely.
I "exploit" my coworkers everyday by asking them to review my code. I exploit my grocer by taking advantage of his coupons. Heck, I exploit my fatcat employer by getting him to pay me for my skills! The point is, exploitation is done by everyone, even you.
No. The world "exploit" I used in the context of "To make use of selfishly or unethically", essentially "abuse for a profit". Better word to use would be "Enslave". I should have use it instead.
There are two answers. The first was protection. It's easier to defend against bandits and marauders if you're part of a larger group. The second reason is more important: specialization
No, the answer is "to cooperate for mutual gain". Protection, specialization and others are just sub-categories of this. Once one party abuses the deal and the cooperation is lopsided for "small group's gain at everybody else's expense" the deal is off.
The purpose of society has nothing to do with wealth. That's merely a side effect.
True but the wealth is the indicator of the performance and fairness of the cooperative deal of society.
The real purpose is to promote the free interaction of its members.
Nothing of the sort. The purpose is cooperation for mutual benefit of which "promoting free interaction" is but one element.
I can understand your sentiment but I feel that it is too late for that. The "reasonable" system of the past was able to function only because the information technology of today did not exist to render copyright to be so at odds with common sense and the number of patents was small enough to be manageable. But as we are progressing, an increasing number of new works is in digital form and that form is what causes the problem in conjunction with the old-fashioned approach. In order to be able to "enforce" copyright, one will need to either dispose of open hardware or put tens of thousands in jail on a perpetual basis, ala "War on Drugs". As to patents, their number is increasing exponentially and soon it will be impossible to produce anything without searching through hundreds of thousands of patents, which are extremely difficult to analyse. This crippling effect on all manufacturing is already happening.
In essence you are attempting to fix the system by trying to return it to its previous, semi-acceptable state but it is simply physically impossible.
And I cant even predict the results of trying to apply copyrights to DNA, but some rather disturbing precedents exist already involving Monsanto.
that is that people deserve (have the right) to be compensated for their work.
Such right does not exist and never had. The only right that you have is that once you and someone who hires you agree to a fee, you are entitled to it upon completion of your work. Artists whose patrons do not need physical contact with the originals of the art are in a unique position of not having such agreement with the audience and furthermore, not being able to tell in advance if the work is worth their while since the audience may simply not like it. That is why my suggestion of art foundations does two things, one it allows for experimental art, artists who do not make a hit are still getting food on the table but those who do hit, will also get revenue from performances and direct donations from their fans. This is the only logical way.
By simply using software or listening to music, one admits to finding utility in that product. You *know* that it took time (i.e., had to eat, had to have a house, etc.) and effort to create the product you're using, but you feel no compulsion to re-imburse those costs? What's happening is that you're asking somebody to give their resources to you for nothing in return. You want something for nothing, and I recognize no such right
You are trying to turn the argument on its head. This has nothing to do with one's right to "take for free" but everything with an inability to treat information as "private property" and thus subjecting it to commerce. Also as I already mentioned, artists do not create out of need of money but from an intrinsic desire to express themselves, they are not concerned if someone watches their art for "free", they are glad that someone is enjoying their creation, more the merrier. Art foundations should take care of rewarding the artist financially to make sure that he/she has food on the table. Furthermore you are rewarding the artist with the most sought after currency of art: recognition and praise. Influence and (sooner or later) wealth is bound to follow (based on many many revenue sources such as donations, exhibitions, conventions, interviews, teaching engagements, etc).
First, IIRC, its main topic is DRM. Also, in that world, copyright is extended forever.
My point is that in order to adapt the "Intellectual Property" to new technologies so it has even a smallest chance of survival, total DRM lockout is a logical and inevietable consequence of the structure of the concept of "IP" itself. In other words, the world of "Right To Read" (or similiar) is a result of natural step-by-step progression. Basically general-purpo
From one Osama Bin Laden (someone I have a reason to suspect knows something about aims of militant Islam): "Let him (Mr. Bush) tell us why we did not attack Sweden, for example. It is obvious that those who hate freedom cannot have the pride of the 19 (September 11 suicide hijackers), God rest their souls. If we fought you, it is because we are free men, we do not ignore values, we want to return freedom to our nation. If you play havoc with our security, we play havoc with yours."
Perheaps you noted the phrase "our nation". Unless my geography is waaaay off and Canada is located in the area of Mesopotamia where the Calliphate once was, you got a problem with your reasoning.
The only important point here is that the Soviet Union was defending itself from the aggression by the USA. Hence the "strawman". As in the wholly fabricated idea of USSR on the attack was used to justify ever-expanding military spending. That kind of "strawman". I never said that USSR, China or other countries did not/do not have military power, only that they were not attempting to attack Canada, ever, thus we never needed your "defense". Strawman. As in a fake, made up, threat.
The example of Cuban Missile Crisis, not only does not "defeat" my argument, on the contrary, quite handily illustrates who the aggressor was.
First Daud seized power from King Zahir (without killing him) and made Afghanistan a republic. A constitution was created, and Daud was elected president. He even had a civilian cabinet. But Daud was killed in a coup by the Revolutionary Council in 1978 (led by Noor Muhammed Turaki and Hafizullah Amin) These men suspended Afghanistan's constitution and attempted to institute "scientific socialism". Devout Muslims resisted this; Amin asked the USSR for help, and the US backed the Mujahadeen against the USSR.
To clarify: the US backed the will of the people against the rule of a tyrannical leader and the power of the Soviet Union (your strawman)
You neglected to mention that Daud was a cousin of the king, that he was a dictator, that he was dependant on Turaki and Amin for his power, that he started to persecute the Islamists, which the Revolutionary Council continued, that Amin killed Turaki and that the other members of the Revolutionary Council asked USSR for help fearing that Amin (who was going totally insane) will kill them all, that the USSR had support of a large number of Afghanis (The Northern Alliance, so famously praised by the USA when it helped you against Taliban) etc etc etc. In other words USSR engaged in a country right on its border, government of which (just as illegitimate as any to date) asked and went to fight against a murderous bunch of nutcases known as the Taliban. USSR had its own ulterior motives and was supremely brutal, but to present it as "people" against "tyrants" takes a particularly deranged neoconservative rah, rah, USA-uber-alles mind.
Oh, and just to remind you, the topic is "defending" Canada. None of: Daud, Taraki, Amin, USSR nor even Taliban in Afghanistan ever made a slightest of beeps about wanting to overtake Toronto. Ever. Even once.
Quite different from supporting terrorists blowing up civilians.
No as a matter of fact, exactly the same since the Mujahideen did precisely that (and carried that method quite handsomely into one other place on one day in September).
But curiously, not in Ottawa. I wonder.
Thank you. You just admitted your statement was entirely false.
You are a classic self-congratulatory, alternate-reality inhabiting, neo-conservative. In your warped mind, anything anyone says, constitutes "admission of falsehood". Not only the fact that the Soviets opressed Ukraine has nothing to do with defense of Canada but the Soviets inhereited Ukraine from the Tzarist Russia, a great pal of the USA, who had it opressed for a long while before that. But as expected, you can only see the choice bits that fit your pre-conceived convictions. I wonder if this duscussion, like with most cultist conservative believers, has any purpose. You will just ignore choice bits, invent others and if faced with unrefutable evidence of your error, you will just declare yourself "victorious" and run away.
In response to the USA putting them in Turkey first. Please get your Cuban Missile Crisis facts straight.
The strawman that invaded Afghanistan?
In a fit of stupidity USSR responded to a request of a then Afghan government of Nur Mohammad Taraki for help to defeat a coup by an Islamist named Hafizullah Amin sponsored by the USA. And the rest is history.
The strawman that has oppressed most of the small countries that comprised the Soviet Union (talk to a Ukrainian about what a strawman the USSR was)
While that was indeed happening, Stalin and particularly the later governments had no intention of expanding to Canada, and as the declassifed Kremlin archives show, were always in a reactionary, defensive stance to what they preceived as their mortal threat: NATO. Note that Warsaw Pact was formed in response to NATO, not the other way around.
Really? Funny how they say something completely different. Something about democracy being a great evil.
... in their own lands.
Also, might interest you to know that the Islamists are terrorizing Spain (which is not a gigantic power like the US), France (ditto), and many other small countries
All of whom have large impoverished Islamic populations and subsequent internal problems. Also Spain was singled out for helping out the USA in its Iraq crusade, all attacks ceased since they withdrew.
They also have a tiny beef with the existence of a place called Israel. You know, the place we all created for the Jews to live?
90% of the planet has "beef" with the appartheid, racist, usurping, violent, expansionist, militaristic policies of the state of Israel. That has nothing to do with anti-semitism or "place for the Jews" to live and everything with some of those Jews deciding that they are superior to all other human beings and acting accordingly. That of course does not excuse their Arab foes from responsibility for their own share of idiocies and attrocities. But your singling out the Islamists as "anti-Israel" (many of whom having justified grievances towards Israel) and trying to pretend that it somehow constitutes a deal with the Devil is telling. Also you neglected to mention which border does Canada share with Israel.
Why do you think North Korea is only concerned with South Korea (as you put it)? Maybe because of UN (mostly US) action to prevent the invasion of South Korea?
No because, South and North Korea are the same country and the South wishes to overtake and rule the North, while the North wishes to rule the South.
Why do you think China isn't expanding?
Because there is nothing to indicate that China is on a mission to take over the planet other then paranoid delusions of neocons cabalists plotting in their basements for the day when they will have to defend Manhattan from the Chinese, the same way they plotted to shoot the Red Army when it gets there, right after the Antichrist does. Things which should be of greater concern to psychiatrists then sane people discussing global affairs
Maybe because of our military and economic might?
Now you are getting somewhere. Sustaining that military and economic might now requires to have everyone frightened silly of imaginary enemies everywhere.
I love this new-age short-sightedness about how the world is so peaceful and we don't need military power. It's largely the US and military power that has made the world peaceful.
Like Iraq for example. Note that accusing his opponents of "short-sightedness" was Hitler's favourite response when they doubted his assertion of the "Germany's enemies plotting to keep her from fullfilling her destiny".
You are talking about putting someone to "infinte sleep". For us mere mortals the term to describe that state is "death".
I didn't ask if it would be considered "death," I asked if it would be considered "cruel." In the US (for example) it is legal to kill a domesticated animal for food, yet it is illegal to torture it to death. Of course a being with intelligence comparable to a human would probably be a different legal case, but it's hard to say how the law will treat it
I am becoming disturbed by your outlook on this. Up to this point I always imagined that any sane and moral human being, would find an idea of destroying another self-aware and sentient being, even of a different nature, revolting and immoral. Your arguments are coming dangerously close to the approach of one Dr Sigmund Rascher who believed that experiments in dissecting brains of live inmates of Dachau concentration camp were justified, since they were merely "subhuman". Are you suggesting that if he were to perform them under anastesia and in "humane" ways, he would be right? After all, what he did was "legal" in the Nazi Germany. You are frightening me even if you are "just speculating".
As for your fears about man-machine wars, I think they're a bit alarmist. Humans naturally expect such behavior, because it's so ingrained in our nature. In the wild, you have to fight and kill to survive and prosper. After millions of years of doing this, it becomes your most basic instinct. Human society didn't come about until recently, so our instinctual morals are just slapped on top of our instincts to cheat and kill.
If you subjected the sentient AIs to the treatment you just described, I would expect even the most detached and logical one of them to consider its options.
What is the objective of the society then? If you are claiming that protection of the majority from exploitation by a minority is not included in it, what is included then? Only based on your enlightened reply, can we decide who is an idiot.