How wrong you are. If you don't backstop the investors, all that delicious foreign capital the US has become addicted to would evaporate overnight as they went running for the hills. And given the US economy has been running on credit for, what, 20 or 30 years? means that the US economy would basically grind to a halt if that happened.
This of course is the classic "argument" against doing anything at all for anybody else other then the "investor" (read: aristocracy) class. Inhuman conditions in the workplace? Too bad, cannot regulate because it would make poor investors run to Bangladesh. Minimum wage? No way, poor investors are already packing their bags. Taxes? Why only a place in which you do not pay taxes on capital gains can have "investors" because that's where they all run. Etc and so on and on and on ad nauseum.
The end result of course being a classical case of a "race to the bottom" in which nations compete on how low will they prostrate themselves before the "investors", to the point that they are now pretty much supplying their own vasoline to make the "investor's" back entry easier.
The truth unfortunately is that when you build your entire economy based upon good graces of thieves and loan sharks, there will come a time when the effects of what you have done catch up with you. Postponing it will only make the final reckoning more painful. And no, there is no "fixing" this mess save for a fundamental overhaul of the entire delusion of "global free market" that the Americans have so painstakingly been bamboozled into believing over the last 50-year plus years, along with its attendant delusions of credit-financed economy and out-of-control size of corporations.
Actually, in the case of Freddie and Fannie, it's because the government values you not having to live through an economic recession to rival the great depression.
If that was the case they would be propping up the home owners who are the ones with the ridiculous debts, not the loan sharks. The buddies of the kleptocratic oligarchs in the government are quite content if 90% of the "little" people lose their houses and go bankrupt thus causing the very depression we are supposedly being "protected" against, but the corporation?!! Never!!!
Note that bailing out the loan shark does nothing whatsoever for the economy as the home-"owners" will still go under in massive numbers and thus their purchasing power will be reduced to near zero, not to mention all kinds of fun effects on the prices of the piles of sticks and cardboard called "homes" in the US. But it does help billionaire investors, their investment corporations and CEO buddies of the politicos to get out before its too late... which is the entire objective of the exercise.
it didn't evolve this ability, just some mutation happened that allowed it to do...
You guys crack me up. "Mutate" and "evolve" are synonymous as mutation (alongside of cross-over) is one of the driving forces of evolution.
And the experiment showed another nice thing. It took 30,000 generations to hit that switch even with the extreme evolutionary pressure used in the experiment.
That is because bacteria lack the "evolution acceleration" system, which higher organisms possess, i.e. the sexual reproduction system thus are unable to take advantage of the cross-over mechanism which accelerates the search algorithm of the evolution by many orders of magnitude. Instead, bacteria and other single-cell organisms depend on vast parallelism of their huge populations, which under lab conditions is severely limited thus prolonging the process drastically in the lab.
In human terms, this would mean more than a half a million years to "evolve" with 99% of the population starving to death every 130 years to get a tiny change in the digestive system that it basically already knew how to do. To uses Blout's own words this is rate is "extremely low."
Apples and oranges. Higher organisms evolve much more rapidly then bacteria at the expense of slowly increasing limitations of the breadth of the scope of the possible changes. You simply have no understanding as to the mathematical foundations of genetic processes.
A quick look at wikipedia says Homo Sapiens supposedly branched off 250,000 years ago. At the rates shown in this experiment, that's not enough time to "evolve" basically anything.
See above. The much more advanced process by which Hominids evolve is far more rapid than that of bacteria, but at the expense of Hominids being unable to effect radical changes which bacteria is capable of. By "radical" I mean processes which alter the fundamental nature of cell chemistry, which is what the bacteria did in the article I linked to. It would be an equivalent of a human child being born capable of living in vacuum and thriving on photosynthesis. Such avenues are no longer available to higher organisms as the fundamentals of their cell chemistry were set early on in their history but instead they gain an ability to rapidly alter other factors of their bodies, such as brain connectivity or shape of their limbs.
Not that I think you'll ever read this, since it took me a while to read up on the experiment you provided causing such a late response. Thank you for it though, it was an interesting read.
As you can see I did read it. It is a very interesting experiment. It is just too bad that you did not put more effort into understanding it in a wider picture of evolutionary processes.
At the same place where a fetus becomes a human life.
A (human) fetus is human from the moment of inception as it carries human DNA, which is the only true criterion which defines human species. If it is aware or sentient however is a completely different question, to which we do not know the precise answer past the obvious observation that the necessary brain structures do not form until late in the pregnancy thus precluding both awareness and sentience before that point.
Having said that, the development of a human fetus has nothing whatsoever do do with "intellectual property" and you bringing it in here is a truly pathetic "Look there! Shiny!"-style attempt at changing the subject when it became apparent that the discussion got way over your head and all your arguments were demonstrated to be invalid.
This one is an old-standby of the anti-IP crowd. OK. Owning 4 is ridiculous. Now let's encode "Gone with the Wind" and print it out in decimal. Wow. Given a novel of that length, how many other numbers are there that represent nonsense, or some other novel?
Sigh. They are both information. Information in all forms can be ultimately encoded as numbers. You are trying to pretend that some sequences of numbers are "special" and can be "owned" and some others (which you will arbitrarily choose) are not. Very well, let me demonstrate the depth of illogic this kind of "reasoning" leads to.
Lets take your "Gone with the Wind" encoded as a sequence of integers. Let me re-arrange them so that every sequence corresponding to the word "I" is now replaced with "Ugu". Is the result still "Gone with the wind?" and someone's property? How about if I repeat the process for other words, re-arrange sentences and grammar via an automated process... is the end result still "Gone with the wind?". Where does this stop? Remember there is an infinite number of mathematical transforms which I can apply to this... all the way to reducing the whole thing (irreversibly) to the very number "4" we discussed. Where on the continuum of "Gone with the wind" to "number 4" does "Gone with the wind" ceases to be the magical "Intellectual Property" and becomes "ordinary numbers"?
In other words 4!=(an astronomical number beyond human comprehension). In other words, it requires judgement and common sense.
What you mean is that you expect to get to decide arbitratily, based on your whim (or more practically like on some attorney's whim) what is and what is not "Intellectual Property". Note that it is very much like that "Motion Property" I described in my analogy, whereby the furniture movers get to decide what is and what is not "Motion Property". Contrast this with traditional "private property", like a chair or a table, where no controversy whatsoever exists as to what is and what is not "the chair".
BTW, I'm done with this thread. You have a core belief that IP is an invalid concept, and I don't. That's all we can really establish here, and it's very unlikely that either side will sway the other in a reasonable ammount of time.
The difference between us is that I can demonstrate the validity of what I talk about, you cannot.
Even the FSF doesn't want to get rid of copyright, because without it all their work would be Public Domain--they wouldn't be able to prevent people from using it in works that are a trade secret.
Err... "trade secrets" are also part of the "Intellectual Property" regime. If IP is dead, GPL would be simply unnecessary as anyone would be free to copy any software and no corporation would be able to "lock" down the community's stuff in their product.
You will never be able to eliminate trade secrets, even if you abolish intellectual property law. If you try to eliminate trade secrets, then you have the government knocking on the doors of businesses, forcing them to report on their processes. Now who is the totalitarian?
You are utterly confused. No, abolishment of "Trade Secrets" law does not mean that every business has to operate in the open. It means that the government does not actively protect business secrets! Today, when you divulge some company's "secret", the government will enforce that secret via a court of law and punish you for it! That is what "Trade Secrets" law means!
I just shake my had at the level of brain-washing you've been apparently exposed to...
You are making judgements regarding the type of material that would be produced under IP vs. a patronage system. Who are you to judge? In fact, we already have patronage systems (PBS, art galleries, the symphony etc.) for those who have want "highbrow" entertainment. The two systems co-exist side-by-side.
Not if your system requires me to relinquish my fundamental, inalienable rights as a human being, they can not.
Note that under no copyright system you are still free to "buy" all the music you want from any lousy pop-star in her 15-minutes-of-fame, only you will not be able to get the government to deploy its goons if someone decides not to.
At any rate, you are holding patronage art in higher esteme than industrial art. It's a value judgement. And if patronage were the only wan to fund works then who, praytell, sits on the board of patronage? I'll tell you. The same people who write the laws now.
As I pointed out, without "Intellectual Property" you are free to pay any goofus you want any amount of money to produce your kind of "art". Mortgage your house to pay your diva for all I care. Its your freedom. But you do not get to restrict my freedoms just because you want to "make a killing" by working once in your life and getting paid "like, forevah man!".
Now who is the totalitarian?
See above. Everything you propose involves restricting my freedoms. Everything I propose involves removing restrictions and authoritarian measures required to maintain these restrictions.
The bottom line? I think Dave Barry said it best when he said the government ought to have a "department of Ida Mae". Ida Mae was a hypothetical aunt who knew nothing other than common sense. Were there such a department, the DMCA would be thrown out. The patent regime would be reduced, and Fewer patents would be issued; but when you came to here and asked her to eliminate all forms of IP she would say NO to that too.
As I explained to you before, "Intellectual Property" has nothing whatsoever to do with "common sense". It can easily be demonstrated that it is an utterly internally-inconsistent and wholly unscientific "idea". Your "Ida Mae" would have no choice but to agree.
In the 2nd paragraph of your analogy, you introduce a concept that's patently silly (no pun intended).
The idea of "Intellectual Property" is equally silly. Information simply lacks the necessary attributes to be "owned" and thus to be "property". This is simply the fundamental nature of information, just like motions of someone's furniture cannot be owned. I chose the example specifically to create a close parallel.
If you do not believe me, make this simple thought experiment: Who owns the number "4"? How would you establish an "ownership" of the number "4" or any other integer number? Is there only one number "4" or does everyone who thinks "four" in their heads get another unique number "4" to materialize in their brains? If you cannot answer these, why do you believe that a sequence of integers is somehow magically more suitable to be "owned"? Because, you know, all information is ultimately capable of being encoded as a series of integers....
The problem with your arguments is that you assumes non-silly ideas inevitably degenerate into silly ideas, which inevitably degenerate into evil ideas.
See above. I can demonstrate that "Intellectual Property" is a silly, internally inconsistent idea. Very much like that "Motion Property" example I gave. And yes, most, if not all, of such illogic when applied to law sooner or later backfires breeding evil, and in this conclusion you are indeed correct. Which incidentally was my main point.
Of course, ANY idea can degenerate if it's placed in the hands of evil, power-hungry people.
Some ideas however are particularly compatible with evil, power-hungry people, especially ideas involving control of others. And none is so appetizing to them as the idea of owning and controlling other people's thoughts and knowledge, which, once you get down to its fundamental premises, "Intellectual Property" is all about.
The only real way to prevent that from happening is to negotiate positions around the idea, not eliminate it or equate it with what it might become in the hands of the wrong people. It's like arguing that freedom is totalitarianism because it can degenerate into totalitarianism.
No, the only real way is to prevent idiotic ideas which benefit these "evil, power-hungry" people above all others from being enshrined into laws of societies. Once that happens, the battle is pretty much lost, and the scenario will unfold in the way I described. Such are the historically proven inter-dependencies of such things.
So (see my other reply to your reply) while you get no argument from me that powerful interests have perverted IP law, you have failed to convince me that IP is an inherently flawed concept.
You "failed to be convinced" only because you did not think this through in depth.
Getting rid of it would be like closing all the public parks because drug dealers and pervs are hanging out in them.
No, getting rid of it would be like getting rid of Gulags because torturers tend to hang around in them. Parks and junkies are not an automatic and inevitable association, Gulags and torturers are.
No new drugs, because no patents. Less literature of consequence, becausee no royalties. Please don't cite examples like Radio Head, because they got bootstrapped by the IP system.
You are a victim of years of propaganda. Most of the science of drugs is based on freely available discoveries of other scientists. All science in fact is incremental, that is the last dude adding his piece makes a tiny (in proportion to the body of knowledge before him) contribution. It fact "intellectual property" is a great impediment to science. If every idea in science was copyrighted or patented no progress would be possible as in order to make any discovery at all one would have to pay massive royalties to thousands of scientists and universities!
As to art and literature, only kitsch makers do it to "to get" rich. The very premise of art is to share one's artistic expression with as many people as possible because it is a calling and not a business! Music "industry" simply isn't. It is an oxymoron. A contradiction in terms.
Sure, artists need to eat, but there are many ways to give them that, like for example an updated for modern times system of patronage.
Would we have less crap on radio and TV? Absolutely! But it also would be... well... much less crap.
The DMCA fits into your model of "control of information", but not all IP does that. Patents even require publication.
Ultimately all forms of IP are destructive to a society. The enforcement schemes required, coupled with increasing ease of an average denizen to circumvent them, will, as they must corrupt the society into totalitarianism. Patent system on its own, while originally created with good intentions, has the ultimate effect of slowing down progress, which is in direct contradiction of its original premise, even if it was not already corrupted beyond recognition by the unleashed powers of greed that it created to the point that the length of patents is now past 20 years and will likely expand towards infinity. Publication of someone's land deeds is not the same as being able to walk that land.
And yeah, the analogy was sure to have flaws as it was whipped up quite hastily. Sorry about that.
I gave you a more accurate version in the other post. Read it and I hope you will understand the logic behind my original claim.
IP is nowhere near as deadly as road construction. That is why, as I keep pointing out, the so called "transportation infrastructure" has the ulitmate effect of creating a totalitarian society. It happens via the deadly mix of technological progress creating increased mobility for both the populace and the military, and resulting in the ever more draconian incursion of armed troops into daily life. That impacts society so because the ability to move troops is the control of our everday lives (as is the only logical outcome of road construction) and must lead to a totalitarian society as a whole.
I will even provide for you an analogy, using your premise, more in keeping with the idea of "intellectual property". Imagine the very scenario of roads and cars, as you described. No, the roads by themselves (just like the Internet by itself) do not create the required conditions for a totalitarian state. So a free state has roads with free citizens in their cars on them and a military in its barracks.
But then a group of businesses, in the business of moving furniture, manage to lobby the government for a silly concept of "Motion Property". They argue that whomever moved a piece of hardware from a store to a customers home (a service which this group pretty-much monopolizes) is forever entitled to be the only mover of that item, until the item falls apart, at which point they are entitled to be the only ones moving the remains to the garbage dump. The free state wishes to be "commerce friendly" and passes the laws.
Of course the citizenry laughs at the idea and keeps moving the chairs and potted plants in the trunks of their cars. The "Authorized Movers" are incensed and talk about wide-spread "theft" of their labor, cite multi-billion "losses" and lobby the government to do something about it. After much bribing and cajoling the government passes the MMMA (Motion Millenium Moving Act) to force the populace to behave.
The populace keeps laughing, shaking their heads at the stupidity and points out that they have always done what they are doing now, first on their backs, then on donkeys, and now in cars.
But the money to be made is very great. So the "Motion Owners" manage to get the government to start randomly inspecting cars and suspending people's driving licenses. But in order for this to work, inspection checkpoints have to be established and individual liberties suspended ("temporarily"). Facing "billions" of "losses" the government proceeds to do this to ensure "progress" is not threatened by a "few bad apples". First by using police as a backup and allowing the "Motion Owners" to deploy private investigators in the lead. But that does not work. There are ever more cars, bigger roads are being built and people keep moving their aquariums and flower pots in their trunks.
The government is faced with two choices: give up, or crack down. If it decides to be faithful to the idea of "Motion Ownership" it must crack down, and the only way to do so is via establishing an ever increasing (as the populace keeps finding new way to move their stuff) checkpoints, with ever more violent (because by now the populace is starting to actively resist) methods of enforcing this "Motion Ownership" idea.
Ultimately the decision to be faithful to the idea must transform that society from a free one to a totalitarian nightmare.
And it all begun innocently with a small group of special-interest lobbyists, and escalated because a society keeps building more and more roads and more and more citizens were able to move more and more stuff in their trunks, just as it is with the Internet allowing more and more free dissemination of information.
IP is a tool like any other. A totalitarian government will use it as a tool to enforce draconian discipline. A better government will use it to secure rights for creative people.
Not true.
The reason is very simple: in order to "secure rights" one has to control the flow of information. Controlling the flow of information is one of the key societal features conductive for a totalitarian state.
A totalitarian government is helped by "intellectual property" (or more precisely by the necessary laws required to enforce such a scheme) while an open government is hindered by such a scheme (in part by a requirement to contradict its own ideology by enforcing information restrictions). This distinction becomes ever more drastic with increasing ease of mass information dissemination by the general public.
Or to put it more simply: "intellectual property" is all about stopping "unauthorized" information dissemination, and establishment any such "authority" as far as information is concerned, and mechanisms to enforce such "authority", are one of the very pillars of a totalitarian state.
IP is nowhere near as deadly as road construction. That is why, as I keep pointing out, the so called "transportation infrastructure" has the ulitmate effect of creating a totalitarian society. It happens via the deadly mix of technological progress creating increased mobility for both the populace and the military, and resulting in the ever more draconian incursion of armed troops into daily life. That impacts society so because the ability to move troops is the control of our everday lives (as is the only logical outcome of road construction) and must lead to a totalitarian society as a whole
Your "analogy" is hopelessly flawed. That is so because the military troop movement is not automatically linked to the freedom of the populace to move. That is, more people moving in their cars does not imply a threat to the military and thus armed troops do not get deployed to stop people from moving. Your analogy would be correct if for example some people were "unauthorized" to move without prior consent of the government and that the numbers of those violating this "law" was increasing, in response to which the government deployed more and more troops and created armed checkpoints to stop these people. At some point a combination of roads, military checkpoints and mass numbers of "undesirable" car owners would result in a totalitarian state.
What is evil here is the law. Imagine an anonymous poster, somewhere on the front lines of a war, exposing some monumental lie or an atrocity by filming it and posting on YouTube. The government or any other entity who wishes for the public to remain ignorant simply issues a DMCA take-down notice. YouTube complies instantly and uncritically. The anonymous whistle-blower will not reveal himself to issue a "counter-notice" because doing so exposes him/her to being "taken down" himself, via a bullet to the head "friendly fire" incident or being found out an "enemy combatant" and disappeared for life into torture in some dark and secret dungeon.
That is why, as I keep pointing out, the so-called "intellectual property" has the ultimate effect of creating a totalitarian society. It happens via a deadly mix of the fundamental scientific illogic of the concept of "intellectual property" being exposed by progress of technology and the resulting ever more draconian attempts to reverse the effects of such progress by those whose profits depend on keeping the populace on a chain. That impacts the society so because totalitarian control of information (as is the only logical outcome of "intellectual property") must also lead to a totalitarian society as a whole.
To point out that people who promote the use of condoms as an absolute cure-all and license to do whatever you please with whomever you please...
Except of course no one does that on any large scale. There is no conspiracy to promote condoms and sex with everyone and everything including the lamp-posts being wrought by dastardly men on a mission from the Devil. I am afraid that it is all in your head. Last time "free love" was in the popular culture, besandaled, bearded men high on LSD drove around in VW vans adorned with huge painted flowers on the side and the Beatles were at the top of the charts. It is your pre-conceived obsession with people having sex you disapprove of that drives you to imagine such a thing, because it appears that you need some boogey-man to be the focus of all your secret Freudian fears.
... is a scientific and medical fallacy being accepted in our culture and taught in our schools...
And as I pointed out repeatedly, condoms are not a "fallacy", they do work, but like every other device man ever invented they are not invincible. This fact is also thought in schools and such information is scientific.
... We're already, so to speak, 'doing it wrong'.
Yes, of course, because forcible imposition of your "morality" on the whole universe is the only way of 'doing it right', no? Or has it escaped your attention that teenagers had sex since before men recorded history, and will keep doing so until such time that Homo-Sapiens is no longer genetically capable of sexual intercourse?
Thank you!
There is no sense thanking me as I am doing you no favors here.
If by "observe the process of evolution" you mean observing mutation or some other method creating some function to the life form that did not previously exist in the DNA of said life form, then I am
not aware of that haven't ever been observed.
I shouldn't be really feeding ACs, but this is just a perfect example of the sort of ignorance that goes around. Read this.. Then go away. And don't even bother claiming that these traits existed in the DNA of the bacteria already, as all traits of all the modern living creatures are composed of just four DNA coding blocks and it is merely their sequences that change.
Only that condoms are an effective method (but nothing is perfect) of preventing pregnancies and act as an impediment to spread of STDs.
May I remind you that it is you who waltzed into this thread with an accusation that people promoting use of condoms as means of reducing pregnancies and spread of AIDS have it all wrong and are no different then religious wackos trying to convince everyone that Earth is 6000 years old. When I point it out to you that the use of condoms is in fact quite effective (although bound by practical limits) you go off and start accusing me that I am intent "on proving they Have None".
Any company that includes Linux is RTP/STP should go out in the street with them. Though at least you got Solaris correct.
You have no clue. When people mention Linux in these environments they mean Linux running on one of these, not a home-brew distro running on a $150 PC.
I don't know, that depends on your point of view... I don't think 15-20% failure rate under typical use for pregnancy and 15-20% failure rate under best conditions for most STD's is good enough odds to declare it a 'statistically insignificant'.
Why do I attract all these obsessed people like you? Condom failure rates are far below 1% in the lab and 2-3% (cumulative) in real life, not "15-20%". You are confusing the pregnancy rates of women whose partners claim to use condoms, some or most of the time. "Perfect" use, i.e. with every intercourse yields the 2-3% rates, and that does not take into account how they are used (i.e. the guy might end up putting it on wrong and it is does not form a proper seal etc.).
Also the actual measurement is not 2-3% chance on every use, it is 2-3% of women getting pregnant over a course of a year of study, after possibly hundreds of intercourses as is the case with prostitutes.
Apparently you didn't think so either, despite your mocking language, because you felt the need to append the all-important "while intact" and focus on the pregnancies while ignoring the STD's.
Sigh. I added that to account for your kind of "education", likely involving application of pins to condoms in order to "prove" your world-view. Condoms have a very low (as to be statistically insignificant) rate of failure in their intended use and they do block STDs, just as they block sperm, by means of straight-forward physics. Transmission of STDs however is a more complicated matter and can be theoretically initiated via means other then insertion of a condom-covered member during a particularly kinky intercourse. Thus condoms are no cure for lack of common sense.
Hold on, are you saying that condoms (while intact) cannot prevent pregnancies? Is there some new knowledge about the human reporductory system which only you are privy to? Something involving storks and the Evil Eye perhaps?
So at what point did Science disprove god?
And I'm an atheist.
Not another one! Man, do you even bother reading a thread before deciding to add your 2 cents to it? How many times did I explain that the term "creationism" in this, US politics, context means "Biblical literalism", anti-evolution movement, 6000 year old Earth, dino-riding Jesus and the rest of the US fundie nonsense and not a discussion of origins of the Universe which remains respectful of and consistent with scientific discoveries? How many more times do I have to do this?!
IMHO, this IS an intellectually-consistent libertarian position. Libertarianism assumes free-market transactions made between informed buyers and sellers.
Of course, one of the fundamental flaws in the Capitalist, and by extension the Anarcho-capitalist (i.e. Libertarian), ideology is that for a vast majority of market transactions the buyers are not only not informed, but with the increasing complexity of products, they cannot (practically) be informed as the necessary scientific and technological background exceeds their ability to acquire it within their life-spans. In some cases the very circumstances of a "transaction" preclude informed purchase, such as, for example, an emergency surgery in the nearest (for reasons of maximum expedience) hospital while unconscious (and that is of course assuming that the "buyer" was an expert in surgical procedure...). Etc and so on.
A typical cop-out offered by the Capitalist "theorists" is that one does not need to be fully informed, merely "good enough". Unfortunately this destroys the very premise of the marketplace as this "good enough" level of the information becomes in itself a market factor, leading to fatal distortions in the marketplace as competition based on the relative merits of the products proper is quickly being replaced with information warfare about the products instead. Thus "branding" and a myriad of other brain-washing campaigns enter the fray. And so no more "free" market (not that such a thing was truly possible in the first place).
The whole show unravels from this (amongst many others) thread like a cheap rug.
I'm still waiting to see the "proof" of evolution that many people claim exists...out of either innocent ignorance of the facts, or intentional distortion of the truth. Surely one of you can provide a few links to some of this supposedly abundant "proof". If you, IgnoramusMaximus, have "observed the process of evolution", as you claim, then please, by all means, share some of the details of your
unique experience.
Yes. Because I want to see how knowing that dinosaurs evolved from fish in any way *proves* that our world wasn't designed by intelligent beings, which is the core belief of ID. Not, as some people
around here think, that everything in the Bible is true, that's Catholic fundamentalism, a completely different brand of stupidity.
It, combined with biochemistry, genetics and a host of other disciplines proves, rather conclusively, that humans evolved along other animals. And this what the core "belief" of the the US-brand "creationism" (or "ID") we are discussing here is riled up against, not the theoretical origins of the Universe. When the word "creationism" is used in the context of the US politics it does mean literal Bible interpretation, 6000 year old Earth, Eve from Adam's rib and wild "conclusions" such as Jesus in a saddle on a dinosaur etc etc etc. That is so because the most deranged lunatics are also the most politically active in the USA, and unfortunately very numerous, proportionally far, far more so then in Europe for example.
That meaning of the term "creationism" (which in the US political context means not only "anti-evolution" but also "Biblical literalism") seems to confuse a lot of people apparently, yourself included.
Are you for real? Are you really expecting me to launch into a multi-volume dissertation on the evidence encompassing planetary history, geophysics, evolutionary record etc etc etc right here in this thread?
Listen dude, you keep saying "creationism" as if this term somehow did not mean "anti-evolution" in this context. No matter how many times you do it, it does not change the fact that "creationism" in this case means no evolution, 6000 year old Earth, dino-riding Jesus and the whole lunatic ball of wax that the nutbars have concocted, for that is who Palin's constituents are: fundamentalist wackos. It is not what you and some other posters here purported, that is an (utterly unscientific in its own right) discussion of a possibility of a Deity who somehow was responsible for the Big Bang, while respectful to all the other scientific discoveries.
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This of course is the classic "argument" against doing anything at all for anybody else other then the "investor" (read: aristocracy) class. Inhuman conditions in the workplace? Too bad, cannot regulate because it would make poor investors run to Bangladesh. Minimum wage? No way, poor investors are already packing their bags. Taxes? Why only a place in which you do not pay taxes on capital gains can have "investors" because that's where they all run. Etc and so on and on and on ad nauseum.
The end result of course being a classical case of a "race to the bottom" in which nations compete on how low will they prostrate themselves before the "investors", to the point that they are now pretty much supplying their own vasoline to make the "investor's" back entry easier.
The truth unfortunately is that when you build your entire economy based upon good graces of thieves and loan sharks, there will come a time when the effects of what you have done catch up with you. Postponing it will only make the final reckoning more painful. And no, there is no "fixing" this mess save for a fundamental overhaul of the entire delusion of "global free market" that the Americans have so painstakingly been bamboozled into believing over the last 50-year plus years, along with its attendant delusions of credit-financed economy and out-of-control size of corporations.
If that was the case they would be propping up the home owners who are the ones with the ridiculous debts, not the loan sharks. The buddies of the kleptocratic oligarchs in the government are quite content if 90% of the "little" people lose their houses and go bankrupt thus causing the very depression we are supposedly being "protected" against, but the corporation?!! Never!!!
Note that bailing out the loan shark does nothing whatsoever for the economy as the home-"owners" will still go under in massive numbers and thus their purchasing power will be reduced to near zero, not to mention all kinds of fun effects on the prices of the piles of sticks and cardboard called "homes" in the US. But it does help billionaire investors, their investment corporations and CEO buddies of the politicos to get out before its too late ... which is the entire objective of the exercise.
You guys crack me up. "Mutate" and "evolve" are synonymous as mutation (alongside of cross-over) is one of the driving forces of evolution.
That is because bacteria lack the "evolution acceleration" system, which higher organisms possess, i.e. the sexual reproduction system thus are unable to take advantage of the cross-over mechanism which accelerates the search algorithm of the evolution by many orders of magnitude. Instead, bacteria and other single-cell organisms depend on vast parallelism of their huge populations, which under lab conditions is severely limited thus prolonging the process drastically in the lab.
Apples and oranges. Higher organisms evolve much more rapidly then bacteria at the expense of slowly increasing limitations of the breadth of the scope of the possible changes. You simply have no understanding as to the mathematical foundations of genetic processes.
See above. The much more advanced process by which Hominids evolve is far more rapid than that of bacteria, but at the expense of Hominids being unable to effect radical changes which bacteria is capable of. By "radical" I mean processes which alter the fundamental nature of cell chemistry, which is what the bacteria did in the article I linked to. It would be an equivalent of a human child being born capable of living in vacuum and thriving on photosynthesis. Such avenues are no longer available to higher organisms as the fundamentals of their cell chemistry were set early on in their history but instead they gain an ability to rapidly alter other factors of their bodies, such as brain connectivity or shape of their limbs.
As you can see I did read it. It is a very interesting experiment. It is just too bad that you did not put more effort into understanding it in a wider picture of evolutionary processes.
A (human) fetus is human from the moment of inception as it carries human DNA, which is the only true criterion which defines human species. If it is aware or sentient however is a completely different question, to which we do not know the precise answer past the obvious observation that the necessary brain structures do not form until late in the pregnancy thus precluding both awareness and sentience before that point.
Having said that, the development of a human fetus has nothing whatsoever do do with "intellectual property" and you bringing it in here is a truly pathetic "Look there! Shiny!"-style attempt at changing the subject when it became apparent that the discussion got way over your head and all your arguments were demonstrated to be invalid.
Sigh. They are both information. Information in all forms can be ultimately encoded as numbers. You are trying to pretend that some sequences of numbers are "special" and can be "owned" and some others (which you will arbitrarily choose) are not. Very well, let me demonstrate the depth of illogic this kind of "reasoning" leads to.
Lets take your "Gone with the Wind" encoded as a sequence of integers. Let me re-arrange them so that every sequence corresponding to the word "I" is now replaced with "Ugu". Is the result still "Gone with the wind?" and someone's property? How about if I repeat the process for other words, re-arrange sentences and grammar via an automated process... is the end result still "Gone with the wind?". Where does this stop? Remember there is an infinite number of mathematical transforms which I can apply to this... all the way to reducing the whole thing (irreversibly) to the very number "4" we discussed. Where on the continuum of "Gone with the wind" to "number 4" does "Gone with the wind" ceases to be the magical "Intellectual Property" and becomes "ordinary numbers"?
What you mean is that you expect to get to decide arbitratily, based on your whim (or more practically like on some attorney's whim) what is and what is not "Intellectual Property". Note that it is very much like that "Motion Property" I described in my analogy, whereby the furniture movers get to decide what is and what is not "Motion Property". Contrast this with traditional "private property", like a chair or a table, where no controversy whatsoever exists as to what is and what is not "the chair".
The difference between us is that I can demonstrate the validity of what I talk about, you cannot.
Err... "trade secrets" are also part of the "Intellectual Property" regime. If IP is dead, GPL would be simply unnecessary as anyone would be free to copy any software and no corporation would be able to "lock" down the community's stuff in their product.
You are utterly confused. No, abolishment of "Trade Secrets" law does not mean that every business has to operate in the open. It means that the government does not actively protect business secrets! Today, when you divulge some company's "secret", the government will enforce that secret via a court of law and punish you for it! That is what "Trade Secrets" law means!
I just shake my had at the level of brain-washing you've been apparently exposed to...
Not if your system requires me to relinquish my fundamental, inalienable rights as a human being, they can not.
Note that under no copyright system you are still free to "buy" all the music you want from any lousy pop-star in her 15-minutes-of-fame, only you will not be able to get the government to deploy its goons if someone decides not to.
As I pointed out, without "Intellectual Property" you are free to pay any goofus you want any amount of money to produce your kind of "art". Mortgage your house to pay your diva for all I care. Its your freedom. But you do not get to restrict my freedoms just because you want to "make a killing" by working once in your life and getting paid "like, forevah man!".
See above. Everything you propose involves restricting my freedoms. Everything I propose involves removing restrictions and authoritarian measures required to maintain these restrictions.
As I explained to you before, "Intellectual Property" has nothing whatsoever to do with "common sense". It can easily be demonstrated that it is an utterly internally-inconsistent and wholly unscientific "idea". Your "Ida Mae" would have no choice but to agree.
The idea of "Intellectual Property" is equally silly. Information simply lacks the necessary attributes to be "owned" and thus to be "property". This is simply the fundamental nature of information, just like motions of someone's furniture cannot be owned. I chose the example specifically to create a close parallel.
If you do not believe me, make this simple thought experiment: Who owns the number "4"? How would you establish an "ownership" of the number "4" or any other integer number? Is there only one number "4" or does everyone who thinks "four" in their heads get another unique number "4" to materialize in their brains? If you cannot answer these, why do you believe that a sequence of integers is somehow magically more suitable to be "owned"? Because, you know, all information is ultimately capable of being encoded as a series of integers....
See above. I can demonstrate that "Intellectual Property" is a silly, internally inconsistent idea. Very much like that "Motion Property" example I gave. And yes, most, if not all, of such illogic when applied to law sooner or later backfires breeding evil, and in this conclusion you are indeed correct. Which incidentally was my main point.
Some ideas however are particularly compatible with evil, power-hungry people, especially ideas involving control of others. And none is so appetizing to them as the idea of owning and controlling other people's thoughts and knowledge, which, once you get down to its fundamental premises, "Intellectual Property" is all about.
No, the only real way is to prevent idiotic ideas which benefit these "evil, power-hungry" people above all others from being enshrined into laws of societies. Once that happens, the battle is pretty much lost, and the scenario will unfold in the way I described. Such are the historically proven inter-dependencies of such things.
You "failed to be convinced" only because you did not think this through in depth.
No, getting rid of it would be like getting rid of Gulags because torturers tend to hang around in them. Parks and junkies are not an automatic and inevitable association, Gulags and torturers are.
You are a victim of years of propaganda. Most of the science of drugs is based on freely available discoveries of other scientists. All science in fact is incremental, that is the last dude adding his piece makes a tiny (in proportion to the body of knowledge before him) contribution. It fact "intellectual property" is a great impediment to science. If every idea in science was copyrighted or patented no progress would be possible as in order to make any discovery at all one would have to pay massive royalties to thousands of scientists and universities!
As to art and literature, only kitsch makers do it to "to get" rich. The very premise of art is to share one's artistic expression with as many people as possible because it is a calling and not a business! Music "industry" simply isn't. It is an oxymoron. A contradiction in terms.
Sure, artists need to eat, but there are many ways to give them that, like for example an updated for modern times system of patronage.
Would we have less crap on radio and TV? Absolutely! But it also would be ... well ... much less crap.
Ultimately all forms of IP are destructive to a society. The enforcement schemes required, coupled with increasing ease of an average denizen to circumvent them, will, as they must corrupt the society into totalitarianism. Patent system on its own, while originally created with good intentions, has the ultimate effect of slowing down progress, which is in direct contradiction of its original premise, even if it was not already corrupted beyond recognition by the unleashed powers of greed that it created to the point that the length of patents is now past 20 years and will likely expand towards infinity. Publication of someone's land deeds is not the same as being able to walk that land.
I gave you a more accurate version in the other post. Read it and I hope you will understand the logic behind my original claim.
I will even provide for you an analogy, using your premise, more in keeping with the idea of "intellectual property". Imagine the very scenario of roads and cars, as you described. No, the roads by themselves (just like the Internet by itself) do not create the required conditions for a totalitarian state. So a free state has roads with free citizens in their cars on them and a military in its barracks.
But then a group of businesses, in the business of moving furniture, manage to lobby the government for a silly concept of "Motion Property". They argue that whomever moved a piece of hardware from a store to a customers home (a service which this group pretty-much monopolizes) is forever entitled to be the only mover of that item, until the item falls apart, at which point they are entitled to be the only ones moving the remains to the garbage dump. The free state wishes to be "commerce friendly" and passes the laws.
Of course the citizenry laughs at the idea and keeps moving the chairs and potted plants in the trunks of their cars. The "Authorized Movers" are incensed and talk about wide-spread "theft" of their labor, cite multi-billion "losses" and lobby the government to do something about it. After much bribing and cajoling the government passes the MMMA (Motion Millenium Moving Act) to force the populace to behave.
The populace keeps laughing, shaking their heads at the stupidity and points out that they have always done what they are doing now, first on their backs, then on donkeys, and now in cars.
But the money to be made is very great. So the "Motion Owners" manage to get the government to start randomly inspecting cars and suspending people's driving licenses. But in order for this to work, inspection checkpoints have to be established and individual liberties suspended ("temporarily"). Facing "billions" of "losses" the government proceeds to do this to ensure "progress" is not threatened by a "few bad apples". First by using police as a backup and allowing the "Motion Owners" to deploy private investigators in the lead. But that does not work. There are ever more cars, bigger roads are being built and people keep moving their aquariums and flower pots in their trunks.
The government is faced with two choices: give up, or crack down. If it decides to be faithful to the idea of "Motion Ownership" it must crack down, and the only way to do so is via establishing an ever increasing (as the populace keeps finding new way to move their stuff) checkpoints, with ever more violent (because by now the populace is starting to actively resist) methods of enforcing this "Motion Ownership" idea.
Ultimately the decision to be faithful to the idea must transform that society from a free one to a totalitarian nightmare.
And it all begun innocently with a small group of special-interest lobbyists, and escalated because a society keeps building more and more roads and more and more citizens were able to move more and more stuff in their trunks, just as it is with the Internet allowing more and more free dissemination of information.
This is a far more accurate analogy.
Not true.
The reason is very simple: in order to "secure rights" one has to control the flow of information. Controlling the flow of information is one of the key societal features conductive for a totalitarian state.
A totalitarian government is helped by "intellectual property" (or more precisely by the necessary laws required to enforce such a scheme) while an open government is hindered by such a scheme (in part by a requirement to contradict its own ideology by enforcing information restrictions). This distinction becomes ever more drastic with increasing ease of mass information dissemination by the general public.
Or to put it more simply: "intellectual property" is all about stopping "unauthorized" information dissemination, and establishment any such "authority" as far as information is concerned, and mechanisms to enforce such "authority", are one of the very pillars of a totalitarian state.
Your "analogy" is hopelessly flawed. That is so because the military troop movement is not automatically linked to the freedom of the populace to move. That is, more people moving in their cars does not imply a threat to the military and thus armed troops do not get deployed to stop people from moving. Your analogy would be correct if for example some people were "unauthorized" to move without prior consent of the government and that the numbers of those violating this "law" was increasing, in response to which the government deployed more and more troops and created armed checkpoints to stop these people. At some point a combination of roads, military checkpoints and mass numbers of "undesirable" car owners would result in a totalitarian state.
What is evil here is the law. Imagine an anonymous poster, somewhere on the front lines of a war, exposing some monumental lie or an atrocity by filming it and posting on YouTube. The government or any other entity who wishes for the public to remain ignorant simply issues a DMCA take-down notice. YouTube complies instantly and uncritically. The anonymous whistle-blower will not reveal himself to issue a "counter-notice" because doing so exposes him/her to being "taken down" himself, via a bullet to the head "friendly fire" incident or being found out an "enemy combatant" and disappeared for life into torture in some dark and secret dungeon.
That is why, as I keep pointing out, the so-called "intellectual property" has the ultimate effect of creating a totalitarian society. It happens via a deadly mix of the fundamental scientific illogic of the concept of "intellectual property" being exposed by progress of technology and the resulting ever more draconian attempts to reverse the effects of such progress by those whose profits depend on keeping the populace on a chain. That impacts the society so because totalitarian control of information (as is the only logical outcome of "intellectual property") must also lead to a totalitarian society as a whole.
Except of course no one does that on any large scale. There is no conspiracy to promote condoms and sex with everyone and everything including the lamp-posts being wrought by dastardly men on a mission from the Devil. I am afraid that it is all in your head. Last time "free love" was in the popular culture, besandaled, bearded men high on LSD drove around in VW vans adorned with huge painted flowers on the side and the Beatles were at the top of the charts. It is your pre-conceived obsession with people having sex you disapprove of that drives you to imagine such a thing, because it appears that you need some boogey-man to be the focus of all your secret Freudian fears.
And as I pointed out repeatedly, condoms are not a "fallacy", they do work, but like every other device man ever invented they are not invincible. This fact is also thought in schools and such information is scientific.
Yes, of course, because forcible imposition of your "morality" on the whole universe is the only way of 'doing it right', no? Or has it escaped your attention that teenagers had sex since before men recorded history, and will keep doing so until such time that Homo-Sapiens is no longer genetically capable of sexual intercourse?
There is no sense thanking me as I am doing you no favors here.
I shouldn't be really feeding ACs, but this is just a perfect example of the sort of ignorance that goes around. Read this.. Then go away. And don't even bother claiming that these traits existed in the DNA of the bacteria already, as all traits of all the modern living creatures are composed of just four DNA coding blocks and it is merely their sequences that change.
Only that condoms are an effective method (but nothing is perfect) of preventing pregnancies and act as an impediment to spread of STDs.
May I remind you that it is you who waltzed into this thread with an accusation that people promoting use of condoms as means of reducing pregnancies and spread of AIDS have it all wrong and are no different then religious wackos trying to convince everyone that Earth is 6000 years old. When I point it out to you that the use of condoms is in fact quite effective (although bound by practical limits) you go off and start accusing me that I am intent "on proving they Have None".
So what is it exactly that you want here?
You have no clue. When people mention Linux in these environments they mean Linux running on one of these, not a home-brew distro running on a $150 PC.
Why do I attract all these obsessed people like you? Condom failure rates are far below 1% in the lab and 2-3% (cumulative) in real life, not "15-20%". You are confusing the pregnancy rates of women whose partners claim to use condoms, some or most of the time. "Perfect" use, i.e. with every intercourse yields the 2-3% rates, and that does not take into account how they are used (i.e. the guy might end up putting it on wrong and it is does not form a proper seal etc.).
Also the actual measurement is not 2-3% chance on every use, it is 2-3% of women getting pregnant over a course of a year of study, after possibly hundreds of intercourses as is the case with prostitutes.
Sigh. I added that to account for your kind of "education", likely involving application of pins to condoms in order to "prove" your world-view. Condoms have a very low (as to be statistically insignificant) rate of failure in their intended use and they do block STDs, just as they block sperm, by means of straight-forward physics. Transmission of STDs however is a more complicated matter and can be theoretically initiated via means other then insertion of a condom-covered member during a particularly kinky intercourse. Thus condoms are no cure for lack of common sense.
Hold on, are you saying that condoms (while intact) cannot prevent pregnancies? Is there some new knowledge about the human reporductory system which only you are privy to? Something involving storks and the Evil Eye perhaps?
Not another one! Man, do you even bother reading a thread before deciding to add your 2 cents to it? How many times did I explain that the term "creationism" in this, US politics, context means "Biblical literalism", anti-evolution movement, 6000 year old Earth, dino-riding Jesus and the rest of the US fundie nonsense and not a discussion of origins of the Universe which remains respectful of and consistent with scientific discoveries? How many more times do I have to do this?!
Of course, one of the fundamental flaws in the Capitalist, and by extension the Anarcho-capitalist (i.e. Libertarian), ideology is that for a vast majority of market transactions the buyers are not only not informed, but with the increasing complexity of products, they cannot (practically) be informed as the necessary scientific and technological background exceeds their ability to acquire it within their life-spans. In some cases the very circumstances of a "transaction" preclude informed purchase, such as, for example, an emergency surgery in the nearest (for reasons of maximum expedience) hospital while unconscious (and that is of course assuming that the "buyer" was an expert in surgical procedure...). Etc and so on.
A typical cop-out offered by the Capitalist "theorists" is that one does not need to be fully informed, merely "good enough". Unfortunately this destroys the very premise of the marketplace as this "good enough" level of the information becomes in itself a market factor, leading to fatal distortions in the marketplace as competition based on the relative merits of the products proper is quickly being replaced with information warfare about the products instead. Thus "branding" and a myriad of other brain-washing campaigns enter the fray. And so no more "free" market (not that such a thing was truly possible in the first place).
The whole show unravels from this (amongst many others) thread like a cheap rug.
I do not get paid for educating you.
However, you can start here.
As to evolution-in-progress observations, not only that site and others like it have many, even Slashdot carried stories, such as this, recently.
It, combined with biochemistry, genetics and a host of other disciplines proves, rather conclusively, that humans evolved along other animals. And this what the core "belief" of the the US-brand "creationism" (or "ID") we are discussing here is riled up against, not the theoretical origins of the Universe. When the word "creationism" is used in the context of the US politics it does mean literal Bible interpretation, 6000 year old Earth, Eve from Adam's rib and wild "conclusions" such as Jesus in a saddle on a dinosaur etc etc etc. That is so because the most deranged lunatics are also the most politically active in the USA, and unfortunately very numerous, proportionally far, far more so then in Europe for example.
That meaning of the term "creationism" (which in the US political context means not only "anti-evolution" but also "Biblical literalism") seems to confuse a lot of people apparently, yourself included.
Are you for real? Are you really expecting me to launch into a multi-volume dissertation on the evidence encompassing planetary history, geophysics, evolutionary record etc etc etc right here in this thread?
Wait, logic is NOT a fundamental part of science?!!!
The other poster was right, you are a nut-case. Discussion over. The rest of your babble is not even worth addressing.
Listen dude, you keep saying "creationism" as if this term somehow did not mean "anti-evolution" in this context. No matter how many times you do it, it does not change the fact that "creationism" in this case means no evolution, 6000 year old Earth, dino-riding Jesus and the whole lunatic ball of wax that the nutbars have concocted, for that is who Palin's constituents are: fundamentalist wackos. It is not what you and some other posters here purported, that is an (utterly unscientific in its own right) discussion of a possibility of a Deity who somehow was responsible for the Big Bang, while respectful to all the other scientific discoveries.
So just quit pretending.