Incorrect. Unlike any of those we do have evidence that our understanding of quantum phenomena is vastly incomplete. We also know that quantum phenomena play a key role in electro-chemical reactions which in turn play a key role in the operation of neurons. So dismissing avenues of investigation out of hand is not equivalent here to dismissing fantastic creations of which there is zero empirical evidence.
That is why the science world doesn't bulieve in anything, where we don't have scientific proofs. They COULD exist, but they don't, untill proven so.
Again, some of the theoretical quantum physics constructs (such as the string theory) invite certain possible interpetations, which (unlike Unicorns and the like) can be experimentally verified. Since in this case we not only lack the evidence but also a sufficient model which explains all of the observable so far phenomena, this is wholly unlike that of pretending that exotic creations exist in, pretty much, the realm of Newtonian physics and traditional biology, for which we do have comprehensive and experimentally verified models. You are talking apples and oranges.
That's because all other scientific hypotheses have been experimentally disproven.
Really? How so? You are implying that absence of evidence is equivalent to the evidence of absence. Our knowledge is simply too weak in the areas of sub-atomic structure of the Universe to be able to make such claims with certainty, yet you do. What you are exhibiting is a form of faith.
It's not certainty, but it's as close as rational humans ever get to certainty.
Could you again elaborate where does this in-depth understanding of quantum phenomena, not possesed by mere scientists, come from?
All those speculations fall into two categories: those that are unobservable in principle (so they are not part of physical reality) and those that have no bearing on the continuation of consciousness after death.
Untrue. There are possibilities of interaction of matter/energy forms in extra-dimentional spaces as prescribed by some of the theoretical physics constructs (such as some forms of the string theory) which could infuence/be-influenced by the function of systems composed of matter/energy (such as the brain) and which could persist in some form in those dimentions should these systems be destroyed in our mundane 3 dimentions of space-time. Such interactions can be experimentally proven and theoretical models can be constructed, providing we have sufficient theoretical foundations and apparatus which is capable of detecting (even indirectly) such interactions. And that is only one of the possibilities.
What disturbs me is that many people today exibit the absolute certainty eqivalent to that of "knowing" that Newtonian physics is 100% correct and unchallengeable, while experimental evidence abounds that it is vastly incomplete. The term for that is "hubris".
When Falwell died, and his brain stopped working, his consciousness ended. It ceased to be. If his thoughts were like music on a cassette tape, then the tape ended... and not just to silence, it stopped as if it never existed. No amount of faith in today's religion can change that, haha.
To be fair and to hold to the principles of science we simply cannot say that with certainty. What you just did is the exact same thing all the religious people do, i.e. you made an absolute claim in the absence of conclusive evidence to support it.
We simply do not, at this point, understand the nature of consciousness. We theorize that it has similar properties to that of various computational systems and that the neuronal functions are reducible to programs which can be executed by Turing machines or some other well-defined automata, but we, at this point, cannot demonstrate that it is so.
For example, it is conceivable that some fundamental properties of matter/energy on quantum (or lower) level play a part in the phenomenon of consciousness by influencing (and possibly being influenced by) the electro-chemical processes within neurons. What if that is so? What if Everett's "multiple universe" theory (or some such like thing) combined with murky phenomena in some directly unobservable by physicists dimentions of space combine to play a direct role and we simply are not grasping the implications because we still lack appropriate explanatory models and/or apparatus? Remember that fundamental areas of quantum physics and the properties of space-time continuum are still largely a mistery, despite tremendous progress made so far.
Until more conclusive evidence comes in, i.e. for example we have managed to replicate a complete human brain in some other hardware and its functions and actions can be demonstrated to be precisely as those of a "living" one, you simply lack the empirical and theoretical foundations to make absolute claims of this nature.
That is why I am a "we have insufficient data" sort of an Agnostic. It is in my view the only scientifically honest position.
This of course in no way endorses any of the "mainstream" religions, which consist for the most part of, to put it diplomatically, loads of ridiculous donkey manure, lovingly shaped to entice the weak minded into slavery of one sort or another.
I am saying that the majority of people there are doing good things, or at the very least not involved in that fraction of idiots doing stupid shit, you insist that none of them are doing good things saying 50% of them are bad and the rest are helping them(incidentally, I think its safe to assume that the 10% of criminals would be in the 40% who wouldn't report not an additional 40%, but you are kinda showing your negative bias there).
Are you even paying attention? The 50% is from the poll. Let me repeat: nearly 50% of Army and over 50% of Marines answered that they would not report their buddies for commiting attrocities. I did precisely what you wanted and I included that 10% of those who actually admitted to committing the attrocities in the 50%. Otherwise the numbers would be over 60%.
Also nowhere did I insist that the remaining 50% does not engage in naive attempts at "good works". They might as well be doing that, but I keep pointing out that their activities, in the context of the large picture of the goings on in Iraq, are like trying to extinguish a nuclear explosion by pissing at it. And that is why their efforts are pretty much ignored by everybody, especially by the majority of the Iraqis, who are the only ones who count in this. And that is not even taking into account the fact that these "good works" are usually an incompetently executed mish-mash of corporate feeding frenzy, foreign contractors, corruption and cultural conflicts. Just last month it was reported (again by the US government study) that most of the major "reconstruction" projects marked as "completed" are already in total state of disrepair and decrepitude only 1 year after being declared "operational".
And no, handing candy on street corners so that the poor kids who gather around can be blown up by an incoming religious wacko who is driving a car bomb towards the soldiers doing the handing out is not very likely to count either.
I was talking about documented history where the locals were actually being very cooperative and helpful because *surprise* a group of our soldiers said "Hey, these are people too, with their own customs, and I bet we would get alot farther finding the bad guys by treating the average joe's like normal people" Again, you can't accept that any of our service members are people, only that they are cold blooded killer crimials.
You are again putting words into my mouth. Sure, it is quite likely that some US troops did precisely what you described, naivety of which I was laughing at, and it is also quite likely that the locals were "helpful" and "cooperative". Until an opportunity arouse to do some shooting at the said troops at night, that is.
Why is it always an assumption of naive "do gooders" such as you to believe that because someone is smiling at you and does not pull a knife on first sight then he is automatically a "friend" of yours? How do you suppose residents of an "insurgent" supporting neighbourhood would behave? Wear t-shirts with "I am with Al-Queda!" on them?! Or simply supply the "insurgents" with food, shelter and weapons at night, while being docile and "helpful" to the invaders when they come calling to search your house during the day?
The vast majority of these people are not jihadists and murderers, they just look the other way, are threatened into silence, or otherwise scared that we will bail out like we did in the first gulf war when Saddam rounded up all the Iraqis that welcomed us waving flags hoping that we would help and then murdered them while Gdub senior turned his back.
I would not be at all surprised if the proportion of the active insurgents to those who "look the other way" amongst the Iraqis mirrored exactly the same proportions in the US troops, i.e. out of 61% of the Iraqis who think it is a good thing to attack the coalition forces 10% being those who do the attacking and the remaining 51% doing the "looking the othe
You insist on saying all troops would behave this way because the conditions have not changed (incredibly false, but since I doubt you have actually been there I'm not even going to get into a discussion about the changing situation there) because a few Army and Marines folks in a survey
Really? Conditions have changed? How? Did the "insurgency" spring up just in the last month? Did the sectarian violence pop up last Tuesday out of nowhere? Did the US troops become targets just this past Sunday? Or perheaps all of that was going on way back in 2003 already, no?
I am discounting your reasoning that all troops to include the services not polled would behave the same way and actively commit atrocities.
You are discounting my reasoning without providing any logical reasons for doing so. As I keep repeating, the poll applies to all the troops which saw combat in Iraq since the conditions of that place have remained unchanged since shortly after the 2003 invasion.
To call those idiots the last sane ones in that mess is unbelievably blind
You are building strawmen here to burn. In no way shape or form did I endorse the reasoning behind the Vietnam war. I merely pointed out that even the idiot politicos had enough common sense not to go after the Soviets, in response to your assertion that they have somehow doomed the war effort by not allowing the US forces to go completely ape and presumably bomb Moscow (as that is the place where the NVA war materiel was being supplied from). Which you immediately assumed to be a wholesale endorsement of the whole Vietnam fiasco, even though I specifically said otherwise. You appear not only to ignore anything I write, you are debating with some phantom you have created for your own amusement.
Here we are again, justifying how evil the soldiers are, for suffering through bullshit caused by idiot politicians who won't see a SHRED of accountability for the fucking mess. Just another generation of young men and women to be demonized for serving their country under the will of madmen voted in by the same civilians who think its kosher to treat them like shit.
If you are trying to make a point that politicians should be more accountable for attrocities on such battlefields then the soldiers, then I agree with you. That is why we had the Nuremburg trials. This does not however let the soldiers scot free. They are all complicit in this, both the masterminds and the trigger pullers.
(Our) military is nothing like those other armies.
(followed by some seriously deluded patriotic rah rah rah)
That is a rather famous line uttered by every drill sergeant of every army in the world to every hapless fresh recruit they just managed to snatch.
In the early days of the war the first special forces on the ground quit shaving to respect the local customs while they were going door to door, they allowed the men of the house to hide the daughters in the back as is custom and everything, it was incredibly effective, the locals were much more trusting and the forces on the ground were getting much more accurate information. Why did it stop? Because a bunch of pictures of these bearded US soldiers made it back stateside through the media and some idiot asshat political types demanded that our troops start shaving because they are supposed to be clean cut! And now we are back to kicking down doors and waterboarding as "viable" methods of getting information. Once again a nice cute political decision fucking it all up, and the troops bearing the blame for it.
This, beside being a seriously comical fit of stupidity, is yet another example of utter and complete ignorance of the realities of Middle East by fools with good intentions. The US has a very long and very negative history of meddling on the side of Isr
Once again you say that 50% of them are demons, based on a random sample of CURRENT combat troops.
The current troops levels are around 120000 mark which is what I was mentioning repeatedly. These are the only troops that count at the moment since they are the ones who are in Iraq and thus have opportunity to act on their opinions. You on the other hand keep trying to bring all of the states-side troops into this. Therefore I am simply pointing out to you that because the conditions in Iraq have not changed over a prolonged period of time, there is no reason to believe that the previous troop rotations were behaving any different under the same conditions. You claim otherwise. Could you explain why do you believe so?
Also I did not mention anything about demons, I simply point out that the attitudes and behaviour of US troops is consistent with those of all the other empires past, under similar conditions.
You also are back on this broad generalization nonsense about Christian Dominionists running the Air Force which is once again just ignorant, opinionated, and just as offensive as saying that Islam preaches spreading Islam by the sword.
Although I did use a sweeping statement, it was based on repeated statements of the very top Air Force officials, disproportionately many of whom are Christian Fundamentalists and who use phrases such as ".. my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." etc and on events such as the "top" Air Force Academy graduates engaging in wholesale spamming of all the other students with Christian Dominionist missives.
Vietnam was fought by a VERY large portion of nonvolunteers, or criminals who volunteered for service instead of prison time, not exactly the kind of people you want out running about with weapons or you wind up with the kind of atrocities mentioned with a disturbingly high frequency. We have had an all volunteer force for a very long time now.
So you are saying that "volunteers", who originate mostly from poverty stricken strata of the society and who see the service as a way to get education or to lift themsevles from otherwise hopeless situations, and whose ranks are bolstered recently with the very criminals you bemoan, since the Army has significantly relaxed its rules due to the personnel crisis in Iraq, are cut from completely different cloth then Joe Doe picked up at random from any US city or town? That because they are "volunteers" (and I use that term rather sarcastically) then they are therefore pure as driven snow, since, clearly, they "volunteered" due to their heart-felt desire to purify the world of Evil. Getting money in exchange for a few weekends of excercises in the Reserve had nothing to do with it whatsoever. I sense that your desperation to somehow salvage the, so dear to you, image of exceptionalism and "inherent goodness" of the USA is starting to eat at your sanity.
"You can kill the soldiers that come close, but you can't bomb the factories feeding their war machine"
Your grasp of history is somewhat amusing. Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities were bombed on a regular basis. So were the roads and railways supplying the NVA and VC. Even Cambodia and Laos were bombed. NVA simply was too resiliant and kept rebuilding. Also, due to the influx of Soviet-made SAMs the bombing campaings of the Northern cities were frought with danger resulting in large losses of US bombers. NVA also had an Air Force equipped with MIG fighters which defended those cities.
Unless of course by the "factories feeding their war machine" you mean the ones in the Ural mountains. In which case bombing them would have most likely ended the history of humankind.
Our politicians created an impossible to win conflict with their stupid target restrictions and then just fed unwilling people into a meat grinder for years, t
Look, if you are hell bent on believing that all service members are demons then that is up to you.
Not all, but roughly 50% at this point can be qualified as such according to their own assesment.
This is what prolonged wars of occupation and attricion do to occupying armies, especially wars of conquest conducted based on fabricated pretenses.
Add to this a conviction of American exceptionalism which is being instilled from the young age into nearly every citizen of the USA, sprinkle with religious zealotry of Christian Dominionists who are permeating the US armed forces (they practically run the Air Force), add some hate-mongering of Limbaugh, Coulter and the like, and you get a rather explosive mixture.
This parallels roughly the state of affairs in the Werhmacht during the WWII, or as a matter of fact also the Japanese Imperial Army in the similiar time-frame. The result in those cases were wide-scale attrocities commited by both, and under very similar conditions the US army is doing pretty much the same.
This is simply a logical result of the long list of societal, political and ideological circumstances coming together with prolonged combat stress.
If that reflected the average service member it would have to be a random sample, and a bunch of soldiers and marines in a combat zone are not a random sample.
Incorrect. They are a random sample of... soldiers and marines in a combat zone.
If you want to argue that the troops in the combat zone are stretched thin, stressed out, and prone to making bad judgments due to combat stress then I have no problem with that, in fact I think that was the whole point. But to base an opinion that all service members are like that based on that poll is ignorant at best. It didn't sample service members that have not been in combat, it didn't sample service members who have been removed from combat for some time, it didn't sample 2 entire branches of the military.
As I keep repeating, the poll applies to the troops who saw combat in Iraq, and is quite sufficient to establish that their attitude now (irrespective of any earlier ones, perheaps held in 1998 while comfortably deployed in Jersey, or some such) resembles that of the combat troops of Wehrmacht in 1943. Since a great majority of US troops have been rotated in and out of Iraq within the last two years or so, while the conditions in Iraq remained fundamentally unchanged throughout that period, it is logical to conclude that those who share the same background and who have been through the same conditions would hold the same attitudes.
The poll might not accurately describe the state of affairs in the Army administration buldings in Washington amongst those who never rotated into Iraq, or perheaps the crews of ICMB-carrying submarines etc. But those who did not somehow get mired in the Iraqi quagmire are irrelevant since they have no opportunity to put their opinions into action on the ground in Iraq, and subsequently they do not fundemntally change the situation there.
Please note that similiar things happened in Vietnam, where incidents like My Lai were common (although only few of them reached that kind of iconic status), resulting in nearly 3 million Vietnamese civilians being dead and a string of rapes, torture, infantocide that competes with that of the Japanese Imperial Army in China or Korea.
That is because this is the very nature of wars of conquest and occupation conducted from a supremacist position. And it is the very nature of occupying armies to attain those attitudes, sooner or later. Irrespective of who is the occupier and who are the occupied. If the occupied keep on resisting, this must happen. Always. Inevietably.
In essence you are arguing your position against 5000 years of recorded history of warfare.
I'm sorry General. I had no idea that the same 120,000 troops have been there the whole time.
It does not take 3 years to conduct a poll, few weeks at the most, so troop rotation is not a factor as the poll is a snapshot of the state of the combat troops in Iraq.
Besides, as I already mentioned, that sample size is more then statistically adequate even for 1 million troops if it were to be used that way, since taking the great depth of rotation of US troops into account it would then mean that the individuals chosen presently in Iraq are representing a reasonable sample of all US troops, because of the fact that a great majority of US troups were by now rotated into Iraq at least once. At this point even Air Force personnel is being pressed into infantry duty.
Polls conducted in the US have sample sizes of 1000 - 2000 individuals for the whole country of 300 million, or so, individuals. There are mathematical formulae which govern this sort of thing which one can use to determine standard deviation and subsequently margins of error of such small samples, and as I said before, the sample size of the Pentagon poll is huge even if all active and reserve troops were taken into account, so it does not matter which way you slice this thing, really, all you are doing is increasing the statistical sampling error rate from less then 1% to around 2%, 19 times out of 20.
Coin tosses for example...a coin doesn't have a good day, a bad day, or really much of a choice. A coin doesn't have its words taken out of context.
As I said, you are denying validity of all statistical sampling in any social context, which means all polls of any kind since you apparently believe that human opinions cannot be sampled in any way as there are "emotional lunatics on either side chanting with a fervor" as soon as any human opinion is involved. While polls can be manipulated (which in this case it was Pentagon conducting its own study and any manipulation would likely be to lessen the negative result of the study) their power to judge prevailing opinions has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt over the last few centuries of their use.
There are approximately 1.1 million Army members counting active and reserve, they talked to a little over 1000 as cited by your link. Now since you are so hot shit to explain to me how I deny statistical sampling, would you care to explain in what field that approximately.09% sampling is valid enough for you to make these broad sweeping claims?
The study specifically applied to the combat troops in Iraq. There is 120000 or so of those. The sample is then around 1%, which is a very large sample size for any sampling of large populations. The size of the sample was selected to produce error rate of around 1%, 19 times out of 20.
would you care to explain in what field that approximately.09% sampling is valid enough for you to make these broad sweeping claims?
The sample size was 10 times larger, relatively, which is huge statistically speaking (most poll samples are much smaller then that) and I do not make any "sweeping claims" other then what the study says: that nearly 1/2 of US soldiers in Iraq would look the other way if their comrades commit attrocities and at least 10% of them admit to committing those attrocities and yet they were not caught or prosecuted and thus were able to participate in this poll. That is according to the soldiers themselves, not me.
So because 179 marines said they wouldn't report it that means that 40% of ALL marines wouldn't report it? I'm so terribly happy that you are so good at buzz and alarmism and so horrible at math, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun to laugh at this.
So you reject all statistical sampling then, and subsequently nearly all of the empirical sciences? Glad to know.
And you plan to replace the said statistical sampling with what? "Faith" based "science"? Gut feelings? Delusions?
Talk about "horrible at math"... and physics... and chemistry... and economics... all based on statistical sampling and extrapolation from those samples to determine models of large scale empirical phenomena.
After all if a sample of 2000 coin tosses came up roughly 50% heads, it surely must, according to you, mean that another 120000 tosses will nearly all come up tails, no? It could happen, except that the probability of that event is lower then that of you growing a brain.
I don't like what is going on over there right now, but idiots like you are no better than the assholes who send Americans over there in the first place.
That study was conducted by the Pentagon. "Idiots" apparently includes everyone but you, who are, seemingly thanks to divine intervention, better informed then the Pentagon about the state of the Army and the Marines.
There is not, nor there ever was, any Goodwin "law". Goodwin's silly jest was simply an ill-conceived, although well meaning, attempt to curb a popualr habit in some Usenet based discussions whereby everything ended up being compared to the Nazis.
This is not a case here, whereby an actual military aggression has occured and whereby an actual military occupation is in progress and where actual torture and collective punishment was commited by the US troops. This, as well as the US war in Vietnam, are legitimate targets for comparison to the activities in various wars past, such as the WWII in particular.
In this case the Godwin "law" is evoked by cowards who desperately wish to avoid exposition of any similarities or parallels, no matter how limited in scope, between the activities of the USA and that of the Nazi Germany.
You make me sick. The number of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines over there doing good things for the locals VASTLY outnumbers your disgusting stereotypes.
You state the existence of that vast disproportion based on what empirical evidence, exactly?
Don't fall prey to a blind, unthinking, tibal nationalism. The "Good Germans" have pioneered that one before you to perfection and you should mind the results.
Just because they are "your" guys, that does not automatically make them (or even a vast majority of them) "good".
Then, it doesn't really matter if information wanted to be free or not,
Information does not "want" to "be free" (I assume you are referring to 'propagation' here) any more than fire "wants" to burn. Neither is a sentient entity.
as it's a slave to its promotion and distribution
Propagation of information can be influenced by promotion and methods of distribution, but that is like saying that fire is a "slave" to matches, or rain is a "slave" to a barrel.
They ignore copyright as much as you seem to loathe it, but I wouldn't exactly say it's the key to humanity's progress and enlightenment.
Yes and one of the first practical applications of nuclear fission was to burn 80,000 people alive.
That aside, one has to consider the worst case scenarios on both sides of this copyright debacle: on one hand we have a possibility of a plagiator, who cannot sell his works because "selling" information is no longer possible, but who instead can, at best, hope for some naive fans to subsidise him for a while before he gets caught, and on the other hand a totalitarian police state where DRM protections rule lives of the hapless denizens of the place, possibly and conceivably resulting in demands for cybernetic DRM augmentation of the said hapless denizens so that no "theft" of information is possible.
Excuse me while I ponder which is more enlightened and respects our innate desires for personal freedom and pursuit of happiness....
I'm paid to do my job, which is to apply my creativity on problems presented to me (through some sensibility filtering) by various customers.
Again, your activity is that of a service (labour more specifically) of producing custom software, for which labour you are getting paid per-hour, and for which you would continue getting paid, irrespective of existence of copyright, because the need for customization of software would always remain. More so in Open Source economy. The difference would be that your output would no longer be "protected" from being used by others. The flip-side of this is that you would be free to use other's software as parts in your efforts with no restrictions. In the end your customer would benefit as would you, as the only criterion by which your efforts would be measured is the resulting effects in the business operations of the customer, for producing which effects you get paid from the profits he makes. But you would not be allowed to "labour once and profit infinitely", which is the very premise of the copyright system.
I probably wouldn't be doing similar projects if it were just my spare time, and neither is it all fun and roses.
That is a false dichotomy of either "copyright world" or "all hobbyists world", as I demonstrated above.
But guess what - I still enjoy solving those problems, and it lets me live in my own apartment instead of mom's basement and put food on my plate. I'm not a label artist or a scientist with a grant, so I probably don't fit into your particular ideology, but that's fine by me as well. Copyright protects the value of my work in a very concrete way.
No, copyright system is pretending to "protect" your work, but in fact it only furthers the interests of mega-corporate behemoths. The days of your "freedom" to develop software in this scenario are numbered, no matter how loudly you decry this "injustice", simply because either copyrights are abolished, or the society will self-destruct in a loud totalitarian explosion. In order to "enforce" copyrights going forward, with ever expanding technological means to take advantage of the innate ability of information to propagate, you will be eventually forced to replace eyes and ears of infants with electronic "DRM enabled" interfaces to stop the "theft" of information.
Copyright also helps in retaining the value of their original works and keeps them in business, whether you like the word or not.
It is not an issue if I "like it or not", any more then if I "like" the force of gravity. My "liking" of it has no impact on its existence and properties. It is simply an objective obesrvation: information cannot be subject to commerce, because it does not have the required characteristics to be so, anymore then fire or rain-water does. Period.
But you have just stated that information can't be controlled. This seems somewhat self-contradictory for a man who speaks so loudly of logic.
You are confused. Information cannot be controlled once it is released to the public in any form, but its desirability can be promoted selectively. A message imploring you to go to a concert and the concert itself are completely spearate from each other. Similarly a message promoting an artist and his actual art have no relationship.
In the case I described, anyone can re-propagate the song on the radio, this does not however mean that the radio is not influential in the sense that it made that song far more easily available then those which it did not promote.
If I may say so, being blind to seemingly opposing views isn't a very good way of gathering information.
Since your position is equivalent to that of insisting that 2+2=7 in a decimal system, my "blindness" to your "opposing view" is the result of my unwillinges to include the paranormal a
You seem to live under the illusion that a professional artist is simply a hobbyist who happens to get paid.
No, he is an artist whose living expenses are paid by art fans. If he becomes a "businessman" however, this immediately becomes contradictory to the whole notion of "art". That is why a vast majority of the output of the so called "art industries" is worthless, formulaistic, repeticious kitsch.
Talent is only half the job of being an artist, graphic designer, writer, software engineer or a scientist, as getting to a point where you can actually take your raw ideas and bring them to completion as a finished piece isn't just something you pick up beside your day job
Hence the foundations I mentioned. Their role is to pickup amateur artists who show promise and offer them an opportunity to expand their wings. If the fans enjoy the results, they can then support specifically that artist and his art through their specific patronage. This has an advantage over the "commercial" system because the unknown, but promising, artists are being supported by the public even if their art is at that stage not widely recognized and thus would be "unprofitable" for a business concern. Also "profit" is no longer a factor in the process, thus allowing more innovative and thus more likely to be less popular with the public forms of art to be developed but which are nevertheless the very essence of art as other artists can build on these ideas.
As to software, it is pretty much obvious by now that Open Source software, where engineers are paid to develop by academia and industry sponsored foundations, but where the resulting code is in public domain, is the optimal, from the point of view of the users, standards and efficiency of development, scenario. The so called "commercial" software is essentially an oxymoron, very much like "commercial science", resulting in abberations like Microsoft's monopolistic activities, whereby nearly all of the world's business and education is held hostage by what is essnetialy a gigantic parasite and where various companies exist solely due to gullibility of their "customers".
One employs a creative worker to create information which isn't trivial to come across; if it was, you wouldn't need him in the first place. That value doesn't go away once you've reached that information for the first time, though. Distributors are there to promote and make that information available and to transfer a compensation back to the artist.
You can stubbornly refuse to accept the rules of the universe, such as the force of gravity, but that will not make you float. Similarly, you can, for ideological reasons, insist that information can be "bought", "sold" or "distrubuted for a fee" as if it were boxes of nails, but the universe will remain unimpressed by your efforts. As soon as one "sale" is performed (in actuality resulting in transmission of information) that information is immediately available for infinite re-transmission at next to no cost. What you are demanding is that an artifical scarcity be introduced by pretending that it is not so, akin to demanding that people cease to drink rain and river water because you own a business that has a "monopoly" on water in the town's well. Yes, you can pass laws forbidding drinking of "unapproved" water, but that will only lead to a scenario where you will have to position an armed thug near every person to watch him/her 24/7.
And this is precisely the same direction in which the so called "Intelectual Property" laws are heading, with inevietable escalation of increasingly draconian and violent penalites and corresponding removal of all the freedom of use of electronic devices from the hands of individuals, who will be reduced to the status of "consumers", deprived of many intellectual freedoms and where the equipment they "purchased" is completely controlled by mega-industrial "contents distrubution" olig
Copyright is there to emphasize the value of that work - numbers without context aren't creative works, and as far as I've understood the AACS don't even make claims to such an end.
This, of course, is one of the ways the various greed-mongers are attempting to confuse the issue and you apparently fell for it. What is happening here is that two completely separate and wholly tangential to each other issues are being shotgun-wedded in order to create an illusion that information is somehow measurable in terms of labour or monetary value.
The truth however is that information and labour (in terms of marketplace) are completely independent from each other. Your own example of a random number generator is one way to show it, but there are many others. For example the labour of an artist occurs at the time of creation and/or performance, but it does not re-occur if the performance is done by a machine or another person. In other words the creation becomes independent of the labour used to create it (or more precisely to find it in the domain of all possible large numerical values). Furthermore, since information lacks some of the crucial attributes needed to make it compatible with the concept of "private property", such creation can be duplicated endlessly without diminishing the original in any way, but labour of which is done by people (or machines) other then the original creator and so the creation propagates even if the creator is still "in possesion" of the "original" item and performs no action with it.
The way to logically solve this problem is, of course, to treat information and the labour needed to produce it as separate. There are many ways of doing so but all of them have to acknowledge that control of information, once released, is impossible. One of such methods being true and tried -- but updated to modern realities -- "patronage" system, whereby authors get paid by foundations, which in turn are subsidised by either individual art enthusiasts and/or governmental and charitable concerns. Publicly funded academia was always, until very recent times, responsible for the corresponding support of authors in the realm of science.
Please note, and this is a very important element, that art is not commerce. It is not a business. It is not an "industry". Music "Industry" isn't. Film "Industry" isn't. Art is an effort by an artist to share his thoughts with as wide an audience as possible, and to be rewarded by recognition and fullfillment of his artistic desires. Money is completely incidental to art and only enters the equation in terms of giving artists freedom to create. Same goes for science, whereby scientists pursue knowledge for their personal gratification (and recognition amongst peers) and not for money. An "artist" who does his "art" for money is no longer an artist, he becomes a kitsch peddler. A scientist who wishes to charge everyone for his discoveries is very quickly reduced to being a crackpot, because none of his discoveries can be corroborated.
The whole idea of greed being the main motivator of artistic expression and scientific progress is a recent abberration, introduced by avarice-worshipping market-religion ideologues, and it is patently, and demonstrably false. In the realm of art one only has to look at the present choices in film or music to see what I mean. In science, the costs of research are escalating and whole segments of the scientific community are practically crippled by the greed-oriented concerns which are diametrically opposed to the whole concept of science where free sharing of research results is the very foundation of progress. If Albert Einstein had to pay the current rates for the scientific journals he read in the 1920s, he would have died still a patent clerk.
The source code to Windows Vista is "just a number" too. Alan Turing described all this decades ago. Although I think we can all agree that it is protected by copyright.
No we cannot. Many of us believe that for that very reason (attempt at "ownership" or integer numbers, in defiance of the very phillosphical ideas of "ownership" or "trade") the so called "copyrights" are nothing but a scam, although they might have originated as an badly thought out, naive scheme to promote arts and science.
All of the so-called "intellectual property" schemes invariably fail the test of basic logic when analysed in depth, primarily due to the fact that they attempt to treat information as an entity which is subject to "trade" or "private ownership", for which information simply lacks the required attributes.
Wait, so Bob and Mallory are the same person?!? My head a-splode.
Funny, yes, but referring to Alice, Bob, Charlie etc as the role-players in various communication scenarios is pretty much a part of the folklore of cryptography.
Also, there is another angle to be considered: the fact that Bob is in fact both the recipient and the attacker after the message has already passed out of the DRM device.
In this scenario, the message for Bob has to be composed in such a way that Bob is able to understand it, in case of a TV signal this means human-readable image and sound, which message in that form is now widely open to rebroadcast to yet another party, James, who was not an intended recipient of Alice's message.
To further the argument, another angle has to be considered: the fact that Bob is in fact both the recipient and the attacker after the message has already passed out of the DRM device.
In this scenario, the message for Bob has to be composed in such a way that Bob is able to understand it, in case of a TV signal this means human-readable image and sound, which message in that form is now widely open to rebroadcast to yet another party, James, who was not an intended recipient of Alice's message.
Your sig is reasonably accurate, as I pointed out to the dude who claimed otherwise. There is no "Charlie" present in the path of the conversation, only a non-sentient mechanical device, over which Bob has absolute control, and his range of attacks on that device is limited only by Bob's creativity and imagination. "Charlie" would only be present in the path of the message if he was indeed a live, sentient person with all the rights and privileges of one.
Charlie in your case, to make it analogous to the DRM scenario, is not a "paraplegic living in Bob's house", it is a device to which Bob can apply any technique, including destroying it, in his efforts to compromise it it, at will. Unlike Charlie, torture and piece-by-piece decomposition of whom would be, we hope, out of range of the "attacks" Bob can employ. Your liking of the Bob "attacks" to "rummaging through Charlie's quaters" is purposefuly designed to make Bob's case much weaker than it really is.
So the parent is essentially right in his sig, Bob is the intended recipient with a caviat that he is supposed to use a non-sentient mechanical gizmo (not to be confused with another party in the conversation) which requirement Bob is free to circumvent at will. So even though the problem is not precisely that of Alice sending "encrypted" communications to Bob, who is both the recipient and attacker, it is can be reduced to this scenario by one simple transofrmation. It is akin to stating that an equation of 1 = 1 + ( 1 / 1 ) is not the same as 1 = 1. The extra term introduces no effect on the equation, even though, taken literally as opposed to logically, the two equations are different.
Slashdot Mirror
Incorrect. Unlike any of those we do have evidence that our understanding of quantum phenomena is vastly incomplete. We also know that quantum phenomena play a key role in electro-chemical reactions which in turn play a key role in the operation of neurons. So dismissing avenues of investigation out of hand is not equivalent here to dismissing fantastic creations of which there is zero empirical evidence.
Again, some of the theoretical quantum physics constructs (such as the string theory) invite certain possible interpetations, which (unlike Unicorns and the like) can be experimentally verified. Since in this case we not only lack the evidence but also a sufficient model which explains all of the observable so far phenomena, this is wholly unlike that of pretending that exotic creations exist in, pretty much, the realm of Newtonian physics and traditional biology, for which we do have comprehensive and experimentally verified models. You are talking apples and oranges.
Really? How so? You are implying that absence of evidence is equivalent to the evidence of absence. Our knowledge is simply too weak in the areas of sub-atomic structure of the Universe to be able to make such claims with certainty, yet you do. What you are exhibiting is a form of faith.
Could you again elaborate where does this in-depth understanding of quantum phenomena, not possesed by mere scientists, come from?
Untrue. There are possibilities of interaction of matter/energy forms in extra-dimentional spaces as prescribed by some of the theoretical physics constructs (such as some forms of the string theory) which could infuence/be-influenced by the function of systems composed of matter/energy (such as the brain) and which could persist in some form in those dimentions should these systems be destroyed in our mundane 3 dimentions of space-time. Such interactions can be experimentally proven and theoretical models can be constructed, providing we have sufficient theoretical foundations and apparatus which is capable of detecting (even indirectly) such interactions. And that is only one of the possibilities.
What disturbs me is that many people today exibit the absolute certainty eqivalent to that of "knowing" that Newtonian physics is 100% correct and unchallengeable, while experimental evidence abounds that it is vastly incomplete. The term for that is "hubris".
To be fair and to hold to the principles of science we simply cannot say that with certainty. What you just did is the exact same thing all the religious people do, i.e. you made an absolute claim in the absence of conclusive evidence to support it.
We simply do not, at this point, understand the nature of consciousness. We theorize that it has similar properties to that of various computational systems and that the neuronal functions are reducible to programs which can be executed by Turing machines or some other well-defined automata, but we, at this point, cannot demonstrate that it is so.
For example, it is conceivable that some fundamental properties of matter/energy on quantum (or lower) level play a part in the phenomenon of consciousness by influencing (and possibly being influenced by) the electro-chemical processes within neurons. What if that is so? What if Everett's "multiple universe" theory (or some such like thing) combined with murky phenomena in some directly unobservable by physicists dimentions of space combine to play a direct role and we simply are not grasping the implications because we still lack appropriate explanatory models and/or apparatus? Remember that fundamental areas of quantum physics and the properties of space-time continuum are still largely a mistery, despite tremendous progress made so far.
Until more conclusive evidence comes in, i.e. for example we have managed to replicate a complete human brain in some other hardware and its functions and actions can be demonstrated to be precisely as those of a "living" one, you simply lack the empirical and theoretical foundations to make absolute claims of this nature.
That is why I am a "we have insufficient data" sort of an Agnostic. It is in my view the only scientifically honest position.
This of course in no way endorses any of the "mainstream" religions, which consist for the most part of, to put it diplomatically, loads of ridiculous donkey manure, lovingly shaped to entice the weak minded into slavery of one sort or another.
Are you even paying attention? The 50% is from the poll. Let me repeat: nearly 50% of Army and over 50% of Marines answered that they would not report their buddies for commiting attrocities. I did precisely what you wanted and I included that 10% of those who actually admitted to committing the attrocities in the 50%. Otherwise the numbers would be over 60%.
Also nowhere did I insist that the remaining 50% does not engage in naive attempts at "good works". They might as well be doing that, but I keep pointing out that their activities, in the context of the large picture of the goings on in Iraq, are like trying to extinguish a nuclear explosion by pissing at it. And that is why their efforts are pretty much ignored by everybody, especially by the majority of the Iraqis, who are the only ones who count in this. And that is not even taking into account the fact that these "good works" are usually an incompetently executed mish-mash of corporate feeding frenzy, foreign contractors, corruption and cultural conflicts. Just last month it was reported (again by the US government study) that most of the major "reconstruction" projects marked as "completed" are already in total state of disrepair and decrepitude only 1 year after being declared "operational".
And no, handing candy on street corners so that the poor kids who gather around can be blown up by an incoming religious wacko who is driving a car bomb towards the soldiers doing the handing out is not very likely to count either.
You are again putting words into my mouth. Sure, it is quite likely that some US troops did precisely what you described, naivety of which I was laughing at, and it is also quite likely that the locals were "helpful" and "cooperative". Until an opportunity arouse to do some shooting at the said troops at night, that is.
Why is it always an assumption of naive "do gooders" such as you to believe that because someone is smiling at you and does not pull a knife on first sight then he is automatically a "friend" of yours? How do you suppose residents of an "insurgent" supporting neighbourhood would behave? Wear t-shirts with "I am with Al-Queda!" on them?! Or simply supply the "insurgents" with food, shelter and weapons at night, while being docile and "helpful" to the invaders when they come calling to search your house during the day?
I would not be at all surprised if the proportion of the active insurgents to those who "look the other way" amongst the Iraqis mirrored exactly the same proportions in the US troops, i.e. out of 61% of the Iraqis who think it is a good thing to attack the coalition forces 10% being those who do the attacking and the remaining 51% doing the "looking the othe
Really? Conditions have changed? How? Did the "insurgency" spring up just in the last month? Did the sectarian violence pop up last Tuesday out of nowhere? Did the US troops become targets just this past Sunday? Or perheaps all of that was going on way back in 2003 already, no?
You are discounting my reasoning without providing any logical reasons for doing so. As I keep repeating, the poll applies to all the troops which saw combat in Iraq since the conditions of that place have remained unchanged since shortly after the 2003 invasion.
You are building strawmen here to burn. In no way shape or form did I endorse the reasoning behind the Vietnam war. I merely pointed out that even the idiot politicos had enough common sense not to go after the Soviets, in response to your assertion that they have somehow doomed the war effort by not allowing the US forces to go completely ape and presumably bomb Moscow (as that is the place where the NVA war materiel was being supplied from). Which you immediately assumed to be a wholesale endorsement of the whole Vietnam fiasco, even though I specifically said otherwise. You appear not only to ignore anything I write, you are debating with some phantom you have created for your own amusement.
If you are trying to make a point that politicians should be more accountable for attrocities on such battlefields then the soldiers, then I agree with you. That is why we had the Nuremburg trials. This does not however let the soldiers scot free. They are all complicit in this, both the masterminds and the trigger pullers.
That is a rather famous line uttered by every drill sergeant of every army in the world to every hapless fresh recruit they just managed to snatch.
This, beside being a seriously comical fit of stupidity, is yet another example of utter and complete ignorance of the realities of Middle East by fools with good intentions. The US has a very long and very negative history of meddling on the side of Isr
The current troops levels are around 120000 mark which is what I was mentioning repeatedly. These are the only troops that count at the moment since they are the ones who are in Iraq and thus have opportunity to act on their opinions. You on the other hand keep trying to bring all of the states-side troops into this. Therefore I am simply pointing out to you that because the conditions in Iraq have not changed over a prolonged period of time, there is no reason to believe that the previous troop rotations were behaving any different under the same conditions. You claim otherwise. Could you explain why do you believe so?
Also I did not mention anything about demons, I simply point out that the attitudes and behaviour of US troops is consistent with those of all the other empires past, under similar conditions.
Although I did use a sweeping statement, it was based on repeated statements of the very top Air Force officials, disproportionately many of whom are Christian Fundamentalists and who use phrases such as ".. my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." etc and on events such as the "top" Air Force Academy graduates engaging in wholesale spamming of all the other students with Christian Dominionist missives.
So you are saying that "volunteers", who originate mostly from poverty stricken strata of the society and who see the service as a way to get education or to lift themsevles from otherwise hopeless situations, and whose ranks are bolstered recently with the very criminals you bemoan, since the Army has significantly relaxed its rules due to the personnel crisis in Iraq, are cut from completely different cloth then Joe Doe picked up at random from any US city or town? That because they are "volunteers" (and I use that term rather sarcastically) then they are therefore pure as driven snow, since, clearly, they "volunteered" due to their heart-felt desire to purify the world of Evil. Getting money in exchange for a few weekends of excercises in the Reserve had nothing to do with it whatsoever. I sense that your desperation to somehow salvage the, so dear to you, image of exceptionalism and "inherent goodness" of the USA is starting to eat at your sanity.
Your grasp of history is somewhat amusing. Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities were bombed on a regular basis. So were the roads and railways supplying the NVA and VC. Even Cambodia and Laos were bombed. NVA simply was too resiliant and kept rebuilding. Also, due to the influx of Soviet-made SAMs the bombing campaings of the Northern cities were frought with danger resulting in large losses of US bombers. NVA also had an Air Force equipped with MIG fighters which defended those cities.
Unless of course by the "factories feeding their war machine" you mean the ones in the Ural mountains. In which case bombing them would have most likely ended the history of humankind.
Not all, but roughly 50% at this point can be qualified as such according to their own assesment.
This is what prolonged wars of occupation and attricion do to occupying armies, especially wars of conquest conducted based on fabricated pretenses.
Add to this a conviction of American exceptionalism which is being instilled from the young age into nearly every citizen of the USA, sprinkle with religious zealotry of Christian Dominionists who are permeating the US armed forces (they practically run the Air Force), add some hate-mongering of Limbaugh, Coulter and the like, and you get a rather explosive mixture.
This parallels roughly the state of affairs in the Werhmacht during the WWII, or as a matter of fact also the Japanese Imperial Army in the similiar time-frame. The result in those cases were wide-scale attrocities commited by both, and under very similar conditions the US army is doing pretty much the same.
This is simply a logical result of the long list of societal, political and ideological circumstances coming together with prolonged combat stress.
Incorrect. They are a random sample of ... soldiers and marines in a combat zone.
As I keep repeating, the poll applies to the troops who saw combat in Iraq, and is quite sufficient to establish that their attitude now (irrespective of any earlier ones, perheaps held in 1998 while comfortably deployed in Jersey, or some such) resembles that of the combat troops of Wehrmacht in 1943. Since a great majority of US troops have been rotated in and out of Iraq within the last two years or so, while the conditions in Iraq remained fundamentally unchanged throughout that period, it is logical to conclude that those who share the same background and who have been through the same conditions would hold the same attitudes.
The poll might not accurately describe the state of affairs in the Army administration buldings in Washington amongst those who never rotated into Iraq, or perheaps the crews of ICMB-carrying submarines etc. But those who did not somehow get mired in the Iraqi quagmire are irrelevant since they have no opportunity to put their opinions into action on the ground in Iraq, and subsequently they do not fundemntally change the situation there.
Please note that similiar things happened in Vietnam, where incidents like My Lai were common (although only few of them reached that kind of iconic status), resulting in nearly 3 million Vietnamese civilians being dead and a string of rapes, torture, infantocide that competes with that of the Japanese Imperial Army in China or Korea.
That is because this is the very nature of wars of conquest and occupation conducted from a supremacist position. And it is the very nature of occupying armies to attain those attitudes, sooner or later. Irrespective of who is the occupier and who are the occupied. If the occupied keep on resisting, this must happen. Always. Inevietably.
In essence you are arguing your position against 5000 years of recorded history of warfare.
It does not take 3 years to conduct a poll, few weeks at the most, so troop rotation is not a factor as the poll is a snapshot of the state of the combat troops in Iraq.
Besides, as I already mentioned, that sample size is more then statistically adequate even for 1 million troops if it were to be used that way, since taking the great depth of rotation of US troops into account it would then mean that the individuals chosen presently in Iraq are representing a reasonable sample of all US troops, because of the fact that a great majority of US troups were by now rotated into Iraq at least once. At this point even Air Force personnel is being pressed into infantry duty.
Polls conducted in the US have sample sizes of 1000 - 2000 individuals for the whole country of 300 million, or so, individuals. There are mathematical formulae which govern this sort of thing which one can use to determine standard deviation and subsequently margins of error of such small samples, and as I said before, the sample size of the Pentagon poll is huge even if all active and reserve troops were taken into account, so it does not matter which way you slice this thing, really, all you are doing is increasing the statistical sampling error rate from less then 1% to around 2%, 19 times out of 20.
As I said, you are denying validity of all statistical sampling in any social context, which means all polls of any kind since you apparently believe that human opinions cannot be sampled in any way as there are "emotional lunatics on either side chanting with a fervor" as soon as any human opinion is involved. While polls can be manipulated (which in this case it was Pentagon conducting its own study and any manipulation would likely be to lessen the negative result of the study) their power to judge prevailing opinions has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt over the last few centuries of their use.
The study specifically applied to the combat troops in Iraq. There is 120000 or so of those. The sample is then around 1%, which is a very large sample size for any sampling of large populations. The size of the sample was selected to produce error rate of around 1%, 19 times out of 20.
The sample size was 10 times larger, relatively, which is huge statistically speaking (most poll samples are much smaller then that) and I do not make any "sweeping claims" other then what the study says: that nearly 1/2 of US soldiers in Iraq would look the other way if their comrades commit attrocities and at least 10% of them admit to committing those attrocities and yet they were not caught or prosecuted and thus were able to participate in this poll. That is according to the soldiers themselves, not me.
So you reject all statistical sampling then, and subsequently nearly all of the empirical sciences? Glad to know.
And you plan to replace the said statistical sampling with what? "Faith" based "science"? Gut feelings? Delusions?
Talk about "horrible at math"... and physics ... and chemistry ... and economics ... all based on statistical sampling and extrapolation from those samples to determine models of large scale empirical phenomena.
After all if a sample of 2000 coin tosses came up roughly 50% heads, it surely must, according to you, mean that another 120000 tosses will nearly all come up tails, no? It could happen, except that the probability of that event is lower then that of you growing a brain.
That study was conducted by the Pentagon. "Idiots" apparently includes everyone but you, who are, seemingly thanks to divine intervention, better informed then the Pentagon about the state of the Army and the Marines.
There is not, nor there ever was, any Goodwin "law". Goodwin's silly jest was simply an ill-conceived, although well meaning, attempt to curb a popualr habit in some Usenet based discussions whereby everything ended up being compared to the Nazis.
This is not a case here, whereby an actual military aggression has occured and whereby an actual military occupation is in progress and where actual torture and collective punishment was commited by the US troops. This, as well as the US war in Vietnam, are legitimate targets for comparison to the activities in various wars past, such as the WWII in particular.
In this case the Godwin "law" is evoked by cowards who desperately wish to avoid exposition of any similarities or parallels, no matter how limited in scope, between the activities of the USA and that of the Nazi Germany.
You state the existence of that vast disproportion based on what empirical evidence, exactly?
Because those who know better have this.
Don't fall prey to a blind, unthinking, tibal nationalism. The "Good Germans" have pioneered that one before you to perfection and you should mind the results.
Just because they are "your" guys, that does not automatically make them (or even a vast majority of them) "good".
Really?
I am told the "Good Germans" also sang accolades about their "good guys" in the Wehrmacht.
Don't fall prey to a blind, unthinking, tibal nationalism.
Just because they are "your" guys, that does not make them "good".
Information does not "want" to "be free" (I assume you are referring to 'propagation' here) any more than fire "wants" to burn. Neither is a sentient entity.
Propagation of information can be influenced by promotion and methods of distribution, but that is like saying that fire is a "slave" to matches, or rain is a "slave" to a barrel.
Yes and one of the first practical applications of nuclear fission was to burn 80,000 people alive.
That aside, one has to consider the worst case scenarios on both sides of this copyright debacle: on one hand we have a possibility of a plagiator, who cannot sell his works because "selling" information is no longer possible, but who instead can, at best, hope for some naive fans to subsidise him for a while before he gets caught, and on the other hand a totalitarian police state where DRM protections rule lives of the hapless denizens of the place, possibly and conceivably resulting in demands for cybernetic DRM augmentation of the said hapless denizens so that no "theft" of information is possible.
Excuse me while I ponder which is more enlightened and respects our innate desires for personal freedom and pursuit of happiness ....
Not.
Again, your activity is that of a service (labour more specifically) of producing custom software, for which labour you are getting paid per-hour, and for which you would continue getting paid, irrespective of existence of copyright, because the need for customization of software would always remain. More so in Open Source economy. The difference would be that your output would no longer be "protected" from being used by others. The flip-side of this is that you would be free to use other's software as parts in your efforts with no restrictions. In the end your customer would benefit as would you, as the only criterion by which your efforts would be measured is the resulting effects in the business operations of the customer, for producing which effects you get paid from the profits he makes. But you would not be allowed to "labour once and profit infinitely", which is the very premise of the copyright system.
That is a false dichotomy of either "copyright world" or "all hobbyists world", as I demonstrated above.
No, copyright system is pretending to "protect" your work, but in fact it only furthers the interests of mega-corporate behemoths. The days of your "freedom" to develop software in this scenario are numbered, no matter how loudly you decry this "injustice", simply because either copyrights are abolished, or the society will self-destruct in a loud totalitarian explosion. In order to "enforce" copyrights going forward, with ever expanding technological means to take advantage of the innate ability of information to propagate, you will be eventually forced to replace eyes and ears of infants with electronic "DRM enabled" interfaces to stop the "theft" of information.
It is not an issue if I "like it or not", any more then if I "like" the force of gravity. My "liking" of it has no impact on its existence and properties. It is simply an objective obesrvation: information cannot be subject to commerce, because it does not have the required characteristics to be so, anymore then fire or rain-water does. Period.
You are confused. Information cannot be controlled once it is released to the public in any form, but its desirability can be promoted selectively. A message imploring you to go to a concert and the concert itself are completely spearate from each other. Similarly a message promoting an artist and his actual art have no relationship.
In the case I described, anyone can re-propagate the song on the radio, this does not however mean that the radio is not influential in the sense that it made that song far more easily available then those which it did not promote.
Since your position is equivalent to that of insisting that 2+2=7 in a decimal system, my "blindness" to your "opposing view" is the result of my unwillinges to include the paranormal a
No, he is an artist whose living expenses are paid by art fans. If he becomes a "businessman" however, this immediately becomes contradictory to the whole notion of "art". That is why a vast majority of the output of the so called "art industries" is worthless, formulaistic, repeticious kitsch.
Hence the foundations I mentioned. Their role is to pickup amateur artists who show promise and offer them an opportunity to expand their wings. If the fans enjoy the results, they can then support specifically that artist and his art through their specific patronage. This has an advantage over the "commercial" system because the unknown, but promising, artists are being supported by the public even if their art is at that stage not widely recognized and thus would be "unprofitable" for a business concern. Also "profit" is no longer a factor in the process, thus allowing more innovative and thus more likely to be less popular with the public forms of art to be developed but which are nevertheless the very essence of art as other artists can build on these ideas.
As to software, it is pretty much obvious by now that Open Source software, where engineers are paid to develop by academia and industry sponsored foundations, but where the resulting code is in public domain, is the optimal, from the point of view of the users, standards and efficiency of development, scenario. The so called "commercial" software is essentially an oxymoron, very much like "commercial science", resulting in abberations like Microsoft's monopolistic activities, whereby nearly all of the world's business and education is held hostage by what is essnetialy a gigantic parasite and where various companies exist solely due to gullibility of their "customers".
You can stubbornly refuse to accept the rules of the universe, such as the force of gravity, but that will not make you float. Similarly, you can, for ideological reasons, insist that information can be "bought", "sold" or "distrubuted for a fee" as if it were boxes of nails, but the universe will remain unimpressed by your efforts. As soon as one "sale" is performed (in actuality resulting in transmission of information) that information is immediately available for infinite re-transmission at next to no cost. What you are demanding is that an artifical scarcity be introduced by pretending that it is not so, akin to demanding that people cease to drink rain and river water because you own a business that has a "monopoly" on water in the town's well. Yes, you can pass laws forbidding drinking of "unapproved" water, but that will only lead to a scenario where you will have to position an armed thug near every person to watch him/her 24/7.
And this is precisely the same direction in which the so called "Intelectual Property" laws are heading, with inevietable escalation of increasingly draconian and violent penalites and corresponding removal of all the freedom of use of electronic devices from the hands of individuals, who will be reduced to the status of "consumers", deprived of many intellectual freedoms and where the equipment they "purchased" is completely controlled by mega-industrial "contents distrubution" olig
This, of course, is one of the ways the various greed-mongers are attempting to confuse the issue and you apparently fell for it. What is happening here is that two completely separate and wholly tangential to each other issues are being shotgun-wedded in order to create an illusion that information is somehow measurable in terms of labour or monetary value.
The truth however is that information and labour (in terms of marketplace) are completely independent from each other. Your own example of a random number generator is one way to show it, but there are many others. For example the labour of an artist occurs at the time of creation and/or performance, but it does not re-occur if the performance is done by a machine or another person. In other words the creation becomes independent of the labour used to create it (or more precisely to find it in the domain of all possible large numerical values). Furthermore, since information lacks some of the crucial attributes needed to make it compatible with the concept of "private property", such creation can be duplicated endlessly without diminishing the original in any way, but labour of which is done by people (or machines) other then the original creator and so the creation propagates even if the creator is still "in possesion" of the "original" item and performs no action with it.
The way to logically solve this problem is, of course, to treat information and the labour needed to produce it as separate. There are many ways of doing so but all of them have to acknowledge that control of information, once released, is impossible. One of such methods being true and tried -- but updated to modern realities -- "patronage" system, whereby authors get paid by foundations, which in turn are subsidised by either individual art enthusiasts and/or governmental and charitable concerns. Publicly funded academia was always, until very recent times, responsible for the corresponding support of authors in the realm of science.
Please note, and this is a very important element, that art is not commerce. It is not a business. It is not an "industry". Music "Industry" isn't. Film "Industry" isn't. Art is an effort by an artist to share his thoughts with as wide an audience as possible, and to be rewarded by recognition and fullfillment of his artistic desires. Money is completely incidental to art and only enters the equation in terms of giving artists freedom to create. Same goes for science, whereby scientists pursue knowledge for their personal gratification (and recognition amongst peers) and not for money. An "artist" who does his "art" for money is no longer an artist, he becomes a kitsch peddler. A scientist who wishes to charge everyone for his discoveries is very quickly reduced to being a crackpot, because none of his discoveries can be corroborated.
The whole idea of greed being the main motivator of artistic expression and scientific progress is a recent abberration, introduced by avarice-worshipping market-religion ideologues, and it is patently, and demonstrably false. In the realm of art one only has to look at the present choices in film or music to see what I mean. In science, the costs of research are escalating and whole segments of the scientific community are practically crippled by the greed-oriented concerns which are diametrically opposed to the whole concept of science where free sharing of research results is the very foundation of progress. If Albert Einstein had to pay the current rates for the scientific journals he read in the 1920s, he would have died still a patent clerk.
No we cannot. Many of us believe that for that very reason (attempt at "ownership" or integer numbers, in defiance of the very phillosphical ideas of "ownership" or "trade") the so called "copyrights" are nothing but a scam, although they might have originated as an badly thought out, naive scheme to promote arts and science.
All of the so-called "intellectual property" schemes invariably fail the test of basic logic when analysed in depth, primarily due to the fact that they attempt to treat information as an entity which is subject to "trade" or "private ownership", for which information simply lacks the required attributes.
Funny, yes, but referring to Alice, Bob, Charlie etc as the role-players in various communication scenarios is pretty much a part of the folklore of cryptography.
Also, there is another angle to be considered: the fact that Bob is in fact both the recipient and the attacker after the message has already passed out of the DRM device.
In this scenario, the message for Bob has to be composed in such a way that Bob is able to understand it, in case of a TV signal this means human-readable image and sound, which message in that form is now widely open to rebroadcast to yet another party, James, who was not an intended recipient of Alice's message.
To further the argument, another angle has to be considered: the fact that Bob is in fact both the recipient and the attacker after the message has already passed out of the DRM device.
In this scenario, the message for Bob has to be composed in such a way that Bob is able to understand it, in case of a TV signal this means human-readable image and sound, which message in that form is now widely open to rebroadcast to yet another party, James, who was not an intended recipient of Alice's message.
Your sig is reasonably accurate, as I pointed out to the dude who claimed otherwise. There is no "Charlie" present in the path of the conversation, only a non-sentient mechanical device, over which Bob has absolute control, and his range of attacks on that device is limited only by Bob's creativity and imagination. "Charlie" would only be present in the path of the message if he was indeed a live, sentient person with all the rights and privileges of one.
Opps.
That example equation in my previous reply was supposed to read: "1 = 1 + ( 1 - 1 )"
Your description of a problem is also inaccurate.
Charlie in your case, to make it analogous to the DRM scenario, is not a "paraplegic living in Bob's house", it is a device to which Bob can apply any technique, including destroying it, in his efforts to compromise it it, at will. Unlike Charlie, torture and piece-by-piece decomposition of whom would be, we hope, out of range of the "attacks" Bob can employ. Your liking of the Bob "attacks" to "rummaging through Charlie's quaters" is purposefuly designed to make Bob's case much weaker than it really is.
So the parent is essentially right in his sig, Bob is the intended recipient with a caviat that he is supposed to use a non-sentient mechanical gizmo (not to be confused with another party in the conversation) which requirement Bob is free to circumvent at will. So even though the problem is not precisely that of Alice sending "encrypted" communications to Bob, who is both the recipient and attacker, it is can be reduced to this scenario by one simple transofrmation. It is akin to stating that an equation of 1 = 1 + ( 1 / 1 ) is not the same as 1 = 1. The extra term introduces no effect on the equation, even though, taken literally as opposed to logically, the two equations are different.