Thank you for shedding dark on the fascinating issue of how the State of California asserts Sunshine law authority over the IRS and Federal Social Security Administration. I had no idea the state was in armed rebellion until now.
For one thing, up until about 1980, making say 10,000 copies of something took enough money that anyone doing it just about had to be interested in selling them to recoup their costs. If that's no longer the case, the law should be reflect that. What's happened here is the opposite - the law has gotten tougher, because something that used to mean the violator was part of an organized ring of criminals, planning to sell the duplicates to people who in many cases didn't know they were bootlegs and so should count as part of the victims, doesn't necessarily mean any of that now.
If most people who download actually know they are not getting a legitimate copy and that no money goes back to the originator, they are not numbered among the victims - fewer victims used to mean less penalties, not more. If number of copies doesn't prove the accused was in it for profit, another thing that used to count as an agrievating circumstance has gone away, so again penalties should be less not more.
Note that all this is assuming the record producers/copyright holders are victims, and are entitled to justice. It's still reasonable as a matter of law not to seek compensation for downloaders who, unlike people buying a physical bootleg, are not in some cases innocent fools, or reasonable not to apply penalties aimed at commercial infringement for non-commercial infringment.
Some people are trying to justify their job. They're in major stress, and stupid
I don't know about the stupid part, but the rest is spot on.
When rap and hip-hop caught on, some artists were actually anti-establishment enough to advocate stealing their CDs in their lyrics. Physical theft by shoplifing rose to five or six times what was usual for a CD release for some Rap CDs, and many retailers had to swiftly adopt bulky frames to surround the normal CD packaging. It was the same people who had to go before their boards of directors and explain the large spike in shoplifting losses and the resulting protests from angry retailers that started making a big fuss about downloading. That helped shift the blame for overall losses to something 'no one could have foreseen', a new technology, and once stockholders bought that excuse, they (mostly) didn't fire people who in many cases were certainly close to getting fired otherwise.
Basically, what I've just related can all be gleaned from industry magazines, interviews with media talent scouts in sources such as Rolling Stone, and the like. The next part is a lot more speculative, because for anyone in the industry to admit to it would be absolute career suicide. It strikes me as at least fairly probable that some of these people informally claimed that targeting inner city youth was an attempt to reach audiences that weren't likely to have computers or fast Internet connections, and so they ran the risk of one kind of loss to try and avoid another and not because of stupidity. But, that's at least very easy to spin as "We targeted blacks because they are too poor and stupid to use this Internet file sharing stuff", and so no one is going to admit now that any such conversations ever happened.
So, the industry decision makers were stupid about some other things, and maybe also suffered the general stupidity of racism, but the final stupidity was more that of various boards of directors and CEOs who bought the argument.
Right. One of the first posts to this thread mentioned the difficulties of getting certain TV shows for someone with a good, heavy work schedule. Let's put that thought together with the claim that the average amount of TV watched in the USA is about 4 hours/day.
That average comes from several groups. There are some people who watch TV Zero hours a day, some 12 hours, and so on. By and large, the ones who watch most are unemployed or under employed. They aren't much inconvenienced by fixed programming times, but they also don't have much money to spend on a solution to the personal problems created by fixed programming times.
The ones who watch less are more likely to be seriously employed. By most estimates, a person with a 40 hour a week job is likely to only watch an average of about 2 hours a day of TV, or less. Even studies that don't match that number generally show a person with a fulltime job watches less than half the national average. He or she is the one more likely to be inconvenienced by fixed program schedules. He or she also has money to fix the inconvenience. That person can spend money on other entertainment, and give up TV entirely in some cases. They can persue legal solutions, or illegal ones. They have spare money that could go to advertisers if they get to watch their programs. All the anti-piracy methods in the world can't keep the people who have discressionary cash available from picking another entertainment form legally available.
That's the biggest problem I have with the RIAA's and such now. They seem to be assuming that the typical, regularly employed and probably middle class consumer is very likely to be dishonest by nature, when just about the whole rest of our society works only by assuming the opposite.
Some versions of string theory do make a genuinely interesting prediction. They predict a particle that hasn't actually been observed. A large class of the most studied string theories require adding just this one particle to the standard model, and it has to have spin 2, and mass 0.
That's a great candidate for a graviton, which is also being predicted for some other reasons. When some of the most aestetically interesting versions of string theory turned out to predict not just any particle or whole family of particles, but that specific one, many physicists got more interested in those theories.
However, general and special relativity don't actually predict gravitons - Einstein was able to treat gravity as a strain inherent in space-time and not as something mediated by a particle at all, and get some very testable results. Quantum Mechanics doesn't really require Gravitons either. Actual particle accelerator experiments have satisfied various symmetry theories from just the particles observed, and this again doesn't include gravitons.
There's no practical way to build an accelerator that could even theoretically reach the energies needed to test unification of all four fundamental forces, and gravity is the odd man out that we have no expectation will be integrated by either accelerator experiments or astronomical observations.
Proof of a mediating particle for gravity would still not prove any of the string theorys, but it would give the likelyest of them some fairly strong support. For now, we're stuck - a theory looks mathematically beautiful, and actually makes a prediction, but we aren't sure yet if that prediction is ever going to become testable, and on the other hand we have no categorical proof the prediction is fundamentally untestable. A test would be nice, but so would a stronger reason for saying there could be no test than just that we aren't yet a type 2 civilization, with the energy of a whole galaxy to use, so we are limited by the economics of it.
But the actual ownership of the copyrights is being disputed. The judge can force the issue if the grounds offered by the defendant for that dispute are unreasonable, but it's not, and (IMHO) should not be a given. There may be good reason why the ownership deserves to be questioned - in particular where the article mentions a work, the first reasonable question should usually be "how old is it?" If any of these works date back before about 1970, there's actually an increasingly good chance there's a real problem with at least one of the transfers in its history.
I've been peripherally involved in a case where the history of a copyrighted work had literally a dozen irregularities (Note my sig - I wasn't a lawyer for either side, just a library researcher, and I can't reveal some specifics either). There were claims to have sold all rights, by companies that had only purchased first sale rights, there were copyright renewals where names and, particularly middle initials and titles (i.e. Dr. Mr. Mrs.) didn't match the first set of papers, there were documents filed by 'incorporated' entities, where the record of incorporation listed only one person rather than the state of issue's required minimum of three, and there was one set of such documents signed only by one person that was eventually proven to be a convicted felon at that time. There were signatures of 'lawyers' that cannot be found in the bar records for their states. There were corporate names (small publishing houses), that no one could find any other record of that company's existence or activities, so they were presumably incorporated just to receive that one copyright and hold it for a brief period.
Extending this to other works in the same case, there was a claim that a large publisher had gone against their internally recorded practice at the time, and individually sold all sorts of rights separately to many smaller publishers instead of selling in bulk lots, for just this one, not particularly prominent author. It was basically necessary to believe this for the plantiff's claims to work.
When you get back to about the great depression, this sort of thing apparently becomes very common, for both print fiction and music. Lawyers cleaning up receiverships and estates evidently routinely transferred assets the dead company didn't actually have as a way of giving debtors something where there was just no money to be had, or used a standard form that they didn't bother to amend when clearly needed. They passed out assets without due care a lot, figuring most of the stuff was valueless and these ownerships would never result in anyone actually making money to fight over, so disputes would be insignificant.
For written works from the late 40's through the 1970's, it's less ubiquitous but still surprisingly common. Recent extensions in the life of corporate copyright on work for hire and worse ones for individual authors have created a minefield. Works by authors as famous as Edgar Rice Burroughs and H P Lovecraft are included in this problem, which means that companies as large as Disney are also already known to be impacted. For musical works, I understand something similar prevails, but certain areas, such as Jazz, have a tendency to be in exceptional disarray up through the 1980's, and a lot of the early punk rock stuff is horribly tangled even though it was the 90's.
John Brunner's novel Total Eclipse: An alien race uses the right to breed with superior blood lines as backing for its currency. Those bloodlines eventually accumulate bad recessive genes, but their equivalent of the stock market doesn't dare devalue them as the whole economy would enter a deep recession. Eventually, the last alien dies, a pitiful, deformed, eyeless creature, half normal size and with its shell mottled with parasitic fungi its distant ancestors had resistances to. The human colonial explorers who discover the aliens go through their own collapse and die. The parent human culture dies without getting off any other colony vessels. In every case except for the colonists, some form of economic rule dictates that the 'rational' thing to do is actually something that leads to the extinction of the entire species, and even the colonists die in large part because Earth made bad economic based decisions.
I'm glad you put quotes around 'see' there - it sums things up nicely. The datamodel we experience when reading contains lots of interlocking sensory cues. A simple concept, such as the word 'cow', may trigger a visual image of a cow, the sound of the spoken word cow, or for some rare people, even a smell cue. Sometimes a reader may become aware of a related sensory or logical image, i.e. first thinking of the sound of the word 'cow' may trigger the brain recalling the sound a cow makes and adding that to the mental 'picture'. And just as 'cow' can trigger 'moo', some readers may approach it from the opposite direction, activating the sound 'cow' after they have first added the sound 'moo' to their active model.
It's very hard to put these sorts of brain actions into temporal order though. The brain may report that you thought of several related concepts in a particular order, but introspection often lies. Foe two examples that relate to this story, when you blink, the brain seems to distort your time sense so you are not aware of how long a blink really takes, and a blink 'feels' like there was zero time with the eyes fully closed, and if you look into a mirror, and shift your visual focus back and forth from one eye to the other, the brain edits out the movement, so normally, you are aware of looking into one eye, then the other, but you don't notice your gaze passing across the bridge of your nose in between. With deliberate practice, people can become aware of these 'self-editing' experiences, but most of us are routinely tricked by our own brains this way.
One of the big tricks some high level martial arts teaches (but usually not until you are pretty damned far along), is that the strike that just hit the opponent (Poww!!) right in the left kidney, was launched exactly as their eyelids reached closed position, and they missed seeing the first 200/1,000'ths of a second of the blow coming. If they had trained enough, their response would have been automatic, directed by a part of the brain not subject to this editing, and that wouldn't have worked.
I don't see Thompson successfully accomplishing his goals (assuming a successful law practice, making a good living and getting laws against violent games passed were among of his major goals, he's pretty much the equivalent of Gandhi never getting past running for dog-catcher, or Jonathan Swift only getting a nibble from a guy who already wants to publish an Irish Baby cookbook).
It's too soon to tell with Michael Moore - he could definitely make a documentary where his editing crossed into such blatant propagandizing that he lost just about all his viewers, but so far, and right or wrong, he's kept a sizable and increasing audience.
I'm not sure about Fred Phelps - sometimes I think his big goal is to become a martyr, so maybe he's not doing so great either. Just remember, when people laughed at Gandhi, he ended up winning anyway (by his own quote), but laughing Fred off the political stage means he loses.
Re:Did time start with the big bang?
on
Why Myths Persist
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Right! There are some variations on the basic Big Bang theory that are approximately neutral on the issue of what, if anything, might be before or outside of the universe. What's called the standard model now, since about 1985, is Guth's inflationary universe. There's less need for an intelligent designer in this model, because we don't have to explain why certain fundamental constants are so fine tuned - they adjust automagically as the original universe undergoes secondary inflation. There's also Hawking's 'brief history' model - it makes time something inside the universe, with only imaginary time 'before', so there's less need to postulate a God acting in Its own time to account for anything (less need, if only because there's no real negative time for anything to happen in, whether supernatural or natural).
The various cyclic big bang or bang/crunch/rebound models were proposed in the 60's and 70's. They give you an eternal universe, like the steady state, but unlike the steady state model, it's not a spatially infinite universe. You can use a cyclic big bang to argue that there's no first moment of creation, and so we don't need to hypothesize a creator to explain what never happened.
The thing is, the steady state was once considered the most likely model (from about 1880 to 1947). Many prominent and organized Atheists (i.e. Bertrand Russell) used it to argue against God, saying that there was no before the universe, and no outside of it, so God couldn't have been there/then. There was no moment of creation, so a creator was superfluous. When the basic Big Bang became the dominant model, not one of the prominent Atheists changed their opinion. Instead, they argued that even though the basic, unmodified Big Bang seemed exactly opposite to the Steady State in every other prediction it made, the two theories both proved there was no need to hypothesize a "God". A claim that two such apparently opposed theories share one and only prediction in common is certainly a spectacular claim, and I would like to see a strong proof of it, or that claim should be rejected.
This affects all these more modern theories as well. Inflation, Cyclic Expansion, Imaginary Time, all have in common that they become more like the steady state theory in this one respect - they seem to suggest certain initial variables can be random, without requiring an explanation for how we ended up in a wildly improbably universe, and so they make the idea of some 'Bringer of Order out of Chaos' less necessary. Do these models reflect an 'objective search for capital-T-Truth', or the same bias that made people such as Russell incredibly unable to accept anything that couldn't be made to support their arguments for Atheism.
Now I know, shooting down a disproof of God is not the same as proving God. If Sagan had stuck with some variation on "Absence of Evidence is not the same as Evidence of Absence", I'd let it rest. I don't claim that Atheists have a duty to prove God doesn't exist. Point is, some of them, duty or no, have claimed to have just such proofs, and there's some huge holes in them.
Actually, that's just the point. Halfway down the first page of my link, your entire argument is presented as an example of a modally naive argument that Godel didn't accept. Godel himself started off by showing why the very argument you've substituted didn't work, and it was obviously something he knew as well as you (or better). Then he wrote a logical argument that takes all that into account and was specifically intended to be free of that flaw. That's the argument you need to rebut, not the straw man you've just raised. Godel, one of the worlds leading authorities on self-reference, a man who showed how self-reference in mathematical systems was what made provability a more limited concept than truth, wrote a paper that specifically avoided the self referential trap you are claiming he fell into, and actually used that trap to strengthen his proof.
It's Slashdot, where not actually reading the article is a tradition.
"In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish couragiously to persue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that god has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?" - Carl Sagan - Cosmos p.257
Before writing this, Dr. Sagan has already outlined the two main recent theories of cosmogenesis in previous chapters - The "Big Bang' theory, and the competing "Steady State" theory. He has then explained why the best evidence supports the "Big Bang" model. All this is in general agreement with the overwhelming bulk of the scientific community. However, if we accept the big bang model, we can't simultaniously conclude that the universe has always existed.
Dr. Sagan, by his own writings, does not actually think the steady state theory was fundamentally unscientific, and should have never been seriously considered. Instead he writes like it was a perfectly legitimate theory, that has been rejected because of evidence. So he has a good reason for not thinking there is a general principle of science that lets him save "that final step". Why can't we conclude that the universe has always existed? It's not a rhetorical question even though he is treating it as one, above.
Because the cosmic microwave background records the flash of its birth, we have a specific reason we are not allowed to take that step. That's not the same as a general reason why we can't postulate that other things might not have an origin, just a rule that only applies to one specific case - when the universe is shown to be a big bang universe.
So obviously, either Dr. Sagan "had no concept of eternity", or he failed to apply it to his reasoning here. Either way, it's a "really horrible" philosophical argument (The use of emotional appeals such as "courageously" is just icing on the cake).
Now I'm not going to characterize ALL anti-God arguments as 'really horrible" on the basis of that one. They can stand or fall individually. But of course no one is going to be able to convince anyone to become religious. I doubt I've convinced a single person who formerly agreed with Dr. Sagan's paragraph that he made some grievous logical errors in it, so why on earth would should someone expect to convince them to change their whole world view?
Actually, there is a proof: Kurt Godel (you know, the guy who turned modern mathematics on its head after Whitehead tried to create a complete model of Mathematical processes by showing Consistent and Comlete were not mutually cooperative goals, and created a true revolution, basically by showing that provable and true were not the same thing. The fellow Cantor and Einstein called the greatest mathematician since Euclid, etc.) Actually devised a formal proof of the existence of God. It's sometimes referred to as his third great proof, with the incompleteness theorem counting as his second.
If they don't already have a PhD in Math, or at least some real familiarity with the specific area of modal logic, it will probably take 6 months to a year of work acquiring the basic concepts for the average person who would give a damn to check this out.
I haven't done any of you Atheists a favor by pointing this out. Many of you will dismiss it. Some will follow through, and end up believing they are now saved, part of a special group of really bright people who know the truth, but they will be believing in the kind of God who sits around in heaven, surrounded by only a few mathematically brilliant saints. A formal religion based only on Godel's 3rd proof would be the most emotionally sterile 'faith' I can imagine. Posting this link to you was, in a very literal sense, damnable, and I will feel the burden of having done it for at least the rest of my life, but now all of you get to share that weight too.
That analogy involved two things which I would have never expected to see related. Yet it actually seems both reasonably accurate and unstrained - why are you posting it to Slashdot? (Worse, it doesn't have any cars in it - you know that's not how we do things round here!).
This is probably an adaptation of something the U.S.'s Office of Strategic Reconnaissance has been using for the last 10 years or so to do just that. (But remember - If I actually knew that for sure, I couldn't say anything).
This is a potentially very good area for aspiring young engineers and scientists to focus on in their education.
Take the Mars base as just one of a big class of problems. Obviously, the robots can't just be capable of self replication. They have to self replicate up to useful numbers, and then do other tasks. Once that very general model is applied, refining it is mostly a matter of efficiency, and that efficiency determines whether the project will ultimately be funded or not.
The engineer who figures out how few robots can be sent as payload, or how quickly some robots should turn from generalized self-replication to specializing in just part of the task while passing the results on to other robots to finish up, or how to detect and minimize robotic 'mutations', will make or break the project.
Usually, this sort of problem has been seen as a management issue, but we are seeing a whole class of challenging projects where only technically very competent management could even possibly make a good decision, and up to date technical skills will increasingly matter more than people skills.
As just one more down to earth example, it's possible right now to build 'smart' construction materials, with implanted chips and networking so that they can direct a semi-skilled worker in their own use. Imagine a window that directs a worker to take it to a certain opening, and then confirms that enough caulk has been applied around it, and requests a 3/16ths shim be used on the bottom left edge to level it. Now, how much skill do you program into the materials, and how much do you train into the construction workers? What's worth having the machines do, and what remains the province of people? Just getting and keeping enough skilled workers in some inner city locations can be every bit as challenging as providing medical care for a Mars-naut that is 23 million miles from an earthly hospital.
So, once you have a few thousand self replicating robots on mars, do they build complete habitat domes, or do they build raw panels and trusses and let the arriving humans take it from there? What's an acceptable percentage of robots going rogue and continuing to replicate instead of shifting to new tasks? If you're an engineer, or a working research scientist (as opposed to a pure theoretician), you're likely to face analogous questions for many new projects, and if you're to narrowly focused to answer them well, the projects will be run totally by MBAs. As our tools and materials get smarter, that's not going to work.
You can choose another ISP, or use some other method, i.e. having a copy mailed to you or even sneakernet, to legally get any material that isn't legally obscene. The law doesn't count the ISP's actions as censorship, in part because of all the other legal alternatives, including alternatives that exist even in places where there is no choice of ISP.
There's a huge and increasing gap between De Facto, and De Jure here. With Copyright law and the DCMA as they are, those other alternatives may not in fact be legally available. ISPs often don't actually have competition, or all ISPs in an area may collude to block certain material. Using programs that allow someone to record streaming video or similar methods and making even a single hard copy may not count as fair use with the current system and so leave a citizen in technical violation even if there is no unauthorized distribution to a second party.
So effectively, this is a form of censorship, and the existing constitution doesn't protect against it unless the DMCA, at least, is declared unconstitutional. It's also a form of censorship that will work better on poor people, people in rural areas, more law abiding people, and the technically illiterate. Those last two types just describe usual limitations of censorship, but the first two groups are supposed to be entitled to equal protection under law.
The trouble is, going father into the future, especially using most of the pre-existing material, means the new ship is likely a timeship, and the plot becomes a time travel plot by default. Since the best film in the series so far is also a time travel film (yes , I liked Wrath of Whale Buddies), I don't see how Paramount resists the temptation to try for success that way. That actually stacks the odds against a good picture.
Star Trek got very lucky and pulled off really good time travel episodes more than once, so it won't surprise me if there's some executive producer who thinks this could work, but I kinda doubt Harlan Ellison is gonna write one, and that's probably what it would take to get lucky the third time.
What amazes me is his A, B, and C are of this form.
A (Economic system) B ??? C (Nation-state)
And he's trying to claim that's the only logical way to present an argument here. Since Tibet isn't practicing unlimited free market capitalism, what the hell could "B" possibly be - An Osterizer? Cauliflower? J. Edgar Hoover? The AC's 'logic' isn't like other people's logic.
Mercantilism as a political movement is generally very closely linked to colonialism in ALL historical cases. What that point has to do with Tibet seems pretty straightforward.
but the OP may be drawing a stronger conclusion:
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
Benito Mussolini
(And anyone who thinks I just godwinned the thread needs to actually read what Godwin said.)
The Chinese government has many of the characteristics of a well established and successful Fascism, including extensive Mercantilism, Colonialism, and exaggerated historical worship of an earlier Imperial phase. They also have some racialist behaviors, (which is not the same thing as saying they are about to put all of any Group X into concentration camps). For example, the PRC government has several times argued that being of Chinese descent makes a person subject to the PRC government even if they are a citizen of another nation.
One of the reasons I picked Benny and not Adolph to quote above is that Italian Fascism seems to be a better match. The Italians didn't really cooperate much with the mass exterminations of already pacified or indigenous populations the Germans initiated, but they were still certainly Fascists.
Fascism has three common principles which all tend to destabilize international affairs. The belief in wars of aggression, the overuse of centralized planning where there is not enough data to justify the plans and not enough cybernetization to implement them, and the heavy use of scapegoating any time those plans fail.
In criminal trials, judges are rapidly being taught that they have to work with someone who insists on being his own attny. to keep them from making obvious (to a lawyer) errors. A lot of this boils down to hand holding and even bending over backwards to advise the accused in chambers before presenting the case to the jury. Otherwise, the case usually just gets appealed if the 'fool' loses. Usually, the DA is also present for the judge's admonishments, so even in a system that in theory automatically favors the defendant, the interests of 'the people' are balanced.
This needs to be passed down from death penalty cases, where it started, to all sorts of more trivial cases, including civil ones. It's actually simpler to do this in non-jury cases - problems such as the defendant starting a line of questioning that actually hurts his case before the judge can explain the consequences in chambers don't matter in a judge only venue.
That's not a claim I would want to present in court without an actual lawyer to evaluate it first. Someone earlier in this thread said the defendants wrote only about 3 paragraphs to explain their methods - does showing how you allowed remote access without the files appearing available to the general torrent user sound like something that could be adequately covered in such a short span?
I strongly suspect the defendants had intent to share the files with any and all torrent users, knew they were copyrighted work, and so on, but if they actually somehow didn't have all the requisite intent, they have done a disservice to other people who may be accused, by letting the plaintiff have an automatic win.
The difference between me and you is that once I convince you to keep your fractured, pathological myths out of the voting booth and out of my child's classroom, I'll go away and leave you alone.
You're absolutely right - I'll let you take your own opinions into the voting booth, and you can teach children your viewpoint, and I'll still go away and leave you alone. In fact, I'll do it now.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for shedding dark on the fascinating issue of how the State of California asserts Sunshine law authority over the IRS and Federal Social Security Administration. I had no idea the state was in armed rebellion until now.
For one thing, up until about 1980, making say 10,000 copies of something took enough money that anyone doing it just about had to be interested in selling them to recoup their costs. If that's no longer the case, the law should be reflect that. What's happened here is the opposite - the law has gotten tougher, because something that used to mean the violator was part of an organized ring of criminals, planning to sell the duplicates to people who in many cases didn't know they were bootlegs and so should count as part of the victims, doesn't necessarily mean any of that now.
If most people who download actually know they are not getting a legitimate copy and that no money goes back to the originator, they are not numbered among the victims - fewer victims used to mean less penalties, not more. If number of copies doesn't prove the accused was in it for profit, another thing that used to count as an agrievating circumstance has gone away, so again penalties should be less not more.
Note that all this is assuming the record producers/copyright holders are victims, and are entitled to justice. It's still reasonable as a matter of law not to seek compensation for downloaders who, unlike people buying a physical bootleg, are not in some cases innocent fools, or reasonable not to apply penalties aimed at commercial infringement for non-commercial infringment.
Some people are trying to justify their job. They're in major stress, and stupid
I don't know about the stupid part, but the rest is spot on.
When rap and hip-hop caught on, some artists were actually anti-establishment enough to advocate stealing their CDs in their lyrics. Physical theft by shoplifing rose to five or six times what was usual for a CD release for some Rap CDs, and many retailers had to swiftly adopt bulky frames to surround the normal CD packaging. It was the same people who had to go before their boards of directors and explain the large spike in shoplifting losses and the resulting protests from angry retailers that started making a big fuss about downloading. That helped shift the blame for overall losses to something 'no one could have foreseen', a new technology, and once stockholders bought that excuse, they (mostly) didn't fire people who in many cases were certainly close to getting fired otherwise.
Basically, what I've just related can all be gleaned from industry magazines, interviews with media talent scouts in sources such as Rolling Stone, and the like. The next part is a lot more speculative, because for anyone in the industry to admit to it would be absolute career suicide. It strikes me as at least fairly probable that some of these people informally claimed that targeting inner city youth was an attempt to reach audiences that weren't likely to have computers or fast Internet connections, and so they ran the risk of one kind of loss to try and avoid another and not because of stupidity. But, that's at least very easy to spin as "We targeted blacks because they are too poor and stupid to use this Internet file sharing stuff", and so no one is going to admit now that any such conversations ever happened.
So, the industry decision makers were stupid about some other things, and maybe also suffered the general stupidity of racism, but the final stupidity was more that of various boards of directors and CEOs who bought the argument.
Right. One of the first posts to this thread mentioned the difficulties of getting certain TV shows for someone with a good, heavy work schedule. Let's put that thought together with the claim that the average amount of TV watched in the USA is about 4 hours/day.
That average comes from several groups. There are some people who watch TV Zero hours a day, some 12 hours, and so on. By and large, the ones who watch most are unemployed or under employed. They aren't much inconvenienced by fixed programming times, but they also don't have much money to spend on a solution to the personal problems created by fixed programming times.
The ones who watch less are more likely to be seriously employed. By most estimates, a person with a 40 hour a week job is likely to only watch an average of about 2 hours a day of TV, or less. Even studies that don't match that number generally show a person with a fulltime job watches less than half the national average. He or she is the one more likely to be inconvenienced by fixed program schedules. He or she also has money to fix the inconvenience. That person can spend money on other entertainment, and give up TV entirely in some cases. They can persue legal solutions, or illegal ones. They have spare money that could go to advertisers if they get to watch their programs. All the anti-piracy methods in the world can't keep the people who have discressionary cash available from picking another entertainment form legally available.
That's the biggest problem I have with the RIAA's and such now. They seem to be assuming that the typical, regularly employed and probably middle class consumer is very likely to be dishonest by nature, when just about the whole rest of our society works only by assuming the opposite.
Some versions of string theory do make a genuinely interesting prediction. They predict a particle that hasn't actually been observed. A large class of the most studied string theories require adding just this one particle to the standard model, and it has to have spin 2, and mass 0.
That's a great candidate for a graviton, which is also being predicted for some other reasons. When some of the most aestetically interesting versions of string theory turned out to predict not just any particle or whole family of particles, but that specific one, many physicists got more interested in those theories.
However, general and special relativity don't actually predict gravitons - Einstein was able to treat gravity as a strain inherent in space-time and not as something mediated by a particle at all, and get some very testable results. Quantum Mechanics doesn't really require Gravitons either. Actual particle accelerator experiments have satisfied various symmetry theories from just the particles observed, and this again doesn't include gravitons.
There's no practical way to build an accelerator that could even theoretically reach the energies needed to test unification of all four fundamental forces, and gravity is the odd man out that we have no expectation will be integrated by either accelerator experiments or astronomical observations.
Proof of a mediating particle for gravity would still not prove any of the string theorys, but it would give the likelyest of them some fairly strong support. For now, we're stuck - a theory looks mathematically beautiful, and actually makes a prediction, but we aren't sure yet if that prediction is ever going to become testable, and on the other hand we have no categorical proof the prediction is fundamentally untestable. A test would be nice, but so would a stronger reason for saying there could be no test than just that we aren't yet a type 2 civilization, with the energy of a whole galaxy to use, so we are limited by the economics of it.
But the actual ownership of the copyrights is being disputed. The judge can force the issue if the grounds offered by the defendant for that dispute are unreasonable, but it's not, and (IMHO) should not be a given. There may be good reason why the ownership deserves to be questioned - in particular where the article mentions a work, the first reasonable question should usually be "how old is it?" If any of these works date back before about 1970, there's actually an increasingly good chance there's a real problem with at least one of the transfers in its history.
I've been peripherally involved in a case where the history of a copyrighted work had literally a dozen irregularities (Note my sig - I wasn't a lawyer for either side, just a library researcher, and I can't reveal some specifics either). There were claims to have sold all rights, by companies that had only purchased first sale rights, there were copyright renewals where names and, particularly middle initials and titles (i.e. Dr. Mr. Mrs.) didn't match the first set of papers, there were documents filed by 'incorporated' entities, where the record of incorporation listed only one person rather than the state of issue's required minimum of three, and there was one set of such documents signed only by one person that was eventually proven to be a convicted felon at that time. There were signatures of 'lawyers' that cannot be found in the bar records for their states. There were corporate names (small publishing houses), that no one could find any other record of that company's existence or activities, so they were presumably incorporated just to receive that one copyright and hold it for a brief period.
Extending this to other works in the same case, there was a claim that a large publisher had gone against their internally recorded practice at the time, and individually sold all sorts of rights separately to many smaller publishers instead of selling in bulk lots, for just this one, not particularly prominent author. It was basically necessary to believe this for the plantiff's claims to work.
When you get back to about the great depression, this sort of thing apparently becomes very common, for both print fiction and music. Lawyers cleaning up receiverships and estates evidently routinely transferred assets the dead company didn't actually have as a way of giving debtors something where there was just no money to be had, or used a standard form that they didn't bother to amend when clearly needed. They passed out assets without due care a lot, figuring most of the stuff was valueless and these ownerships would never result in anyone actually making money to fight over, so disputes would be insignificant.
For written works from the late 40's through the 1970's, it's less ubiquitous but still surprisingly common. Recent extensions in the life of corporate copyright on work for hire and worse ones for individual authors have created a minefield. Works by authors as famous as Edgar Rice Burroughs and H P Lovecraft are included in this problem, which means that companies as large as Disney are also already known to be impacted. For musical works, I understand something similar prevails, but certain areas, such as Jazz, have a tendency to be in exceptional disarray up through the 1980's, and a lot of the early punk rock stuff is horribly tangled even though it was the 90's.
John Brunner's novel Total Eclipse: An alien race uses the right to breed with superior blood lines as backing for its currency. Those bloodlines eventually accumulate bad recessive genes, but their equivalent of the stock market doesn't dare devalue them as the whole economy would enter a deep recession. Eventually, the last alien dies, a pitiful, deformed, eyeless creature, half normal size and with its shell mottled with parasitic fungi its distant ancestors had resistances to. The human colonial explorers who discover the aliens go through their own collapse and die. The parent human culture dies without getting off any other colony vessels. In every case except for the colonists, some form of economic rule dictates that the 'rational' thing to do is actually something that leads to the extinction of the entire species, and even the colonists die in large part because Earth made bad economic based decisions.
I'm glad you put quotes around 'see' there - it sums things up nicely. The datamodel we experience when reading contains lots of interlocking sensory cues. A simple concept, such as the word 'cow', may trigger a visual image of a cow, the sound of the spoken word cow, or for some rare people, even a smell cue. Sometimes a reader may become aware of a related sensory or logical image, i.e. first thinking of the sound of the word 'cow' may trigger the brain recalling the sound a cow makes and adding that to the mental 'picture'. And just as 'cow' can trigger 'moo', some readers may approach it from the opposite direction, activating the sound 'cow' after they have first added the sound 'moo' to their active model.
It's very hard to put these sorts of brain actions into temporal order though. The brain may report that you thought of several related concepts in a particular order, but introspection often lies. Foe two examples that relate to this story, when you blink, the brain seems to distort your time sense so you are not aware of how long a blink really takes, and a blink 'feels' like there was zero time with the eyes fully closed, and if you look into a mirror, and shift your visual focus back and forth from one eye to the other, the brain edits out the movement, so normally, you are aware of looking into one eye, then the other, but you don't notice your gaze passing across the bridge of your nose in between. With deliberate practice, people can become aware of these 'self-editing' experiences, but most of us are routinely tricked by our own brains this way.
One of the big tricks some high level martial arts teaches (but usually not until you are pretty damned far along), is that the strike that just hit the opponent (Poww!!) right in the left kidney, was launched exactly as their eyelids reached closed position, and they missed seeing the first 200/1,000'ths of a second of the blow coming. If they had trained enough, their response would have been automatic, directed by a part of the brain not subject to this editing, and that wouldn't have worked.
I don't see Thompson successfully accomplishing his goals (assuming a successful law practice, making a good living and getting laws against violent games passed were among of his major goals, he's pretty much the equivalent of Gandhi never getting past running for dog-catcher, or Jonathan Swift only getting a nibble from a guy who already wants to publish an Irish Baby cookbook).
It's too soon to tell with Michael Moore - he could definitely make a documentary where his editing crossed into such blatant propagandizing that he lost just about all his viewers, but so far, and right or wrong, he's kept a sizable and increasing audience.
I'm not sure about Fred Phelps - sometimes I think his big goal is to become a martyr, so maybe he's not doing so great either. Just remember, when people laughed at Gandhi, he ended up winning anyway (by his own quote), but laughing Fred off the political stage means he loses.
Right! There are some variations on the basic Big Bang theory that are approximately neutral on the issue of what, if anything, might be before or outside of the universe. What's called the standard model now, since about 1985, is Guth's inflationary universe. There's less need for an intelligent designer in this model, because we don't have to explain why certain fundamental constants are so fine tuned - they adjust automagically as the original universe undergoes secondary inflation. There's also Hawking's 'brief history' model - it makes time something inside the universe, with only imaginary time 'before', so there's less need to postulate a God acting in Its own time to account for anything (less need, if only because there's no real negative time for anything to happen in, whether supernatural or natural).
The various cyclic big bang or bang/crunch/rebound models were proposed in the 60's and 70's. They give you an eternal universe, like the steady state, but unlike the steady state model, it's not a spatially infinite universe. You can use a cyclic big bang to argue that there's no first moment of creation, and so we don't need to hypothesize a creator to explain what never happened.
The thing is, the steady state was once considered the most likely model (from about 1880 to 1947). Many prominent and organized Atheists (i.e. Bertrand Russell) used it to argue against God, saying that there was no before the universe, and no outside of it, so God couldn't have been there/then. There was no moment of creation, so a creator was superfluous. When the basic Big Bang became the dominant model, not one of the prominent Atheists changed their opinion. Instead, they argued that even though the basic, unmodified Big Bang seemed exactly opposite to the Steady State in every other prediction it made, the two theories both proved there was no need to hypothesize a "God". A claim that two such apparently opposed theories share one and only prediction in common is certainly a spectacular claim, and I would like to see a strong proof of it, or that claim should be rejected.
This affects all these more modern theories as well. Inflation, Cyclic Expansion, Imaginary Time, all have in common that they become more like the steady state theory in this one respect - they seem to suggest certain initial variables can be random, without requiring an explanation for how we ended up in a wildly improbably universe, and so they make the idea of some 'Bringer of Order out of Chaos' less necessary. Do these models reflect an 'objective search for capital-T-Truth', or the same bias that made people such as Russell incredibly unable to accept anything that couldn't be made to support their arguments for Atheism.
Now I know, shooting down a disproof of God is not the same as proving God. If Sagan had stuck with some variation on "Absence of Evidence is not the same as Evidence of Absence", I'd let it rest. I don't claim that Atheists have a duty to prove God doesn't exist. Point is, some of them, duty or no, have claimed to have just such proofs, and there's some huge holes in them.
Actually, that's just the point. Halfway down the first page of my link, your entire argument is presented as an example of a modally naive argument that Godel didn't accept. Godel himself started off by showing why the very argument you've substituted didn't work, and it was obviously something he knew as well as you (or better). Then he wrote a logical argument that takes all that into account and was specifically intended to be free of that flaw. That's the argument you need to rebut, not the straw man you've just raised. Godel, one of the worlds leading authorities on self-reference, a man who showed how self-reference in mathematical systems was what made provability a more limited concept than truth, wrote a paper that specifically avoided the self referential trap you are claiming he fell into, and actually used that trap to strengthen his proof.
It's Slashdot, where not actually reading the article is a tradition.
"In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish couragiously to persue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that god has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?" - Carl Sagan - Cosmos p.257
Before writing this, Dr. Sagan has already outlined the two main recent theories of cosmogenesis in previous chapters - The "Big Bang' theory, and the competing "Steady State" theory. He has then explained why the best evidence supports the "Big Bang" model. All this is in general agreement with the overwhelming bulk of the scientific community. However, if we accept the big bang model, we can't simultaniously conclude that the universe has always existed.
Dr. Sagan, by his own writings, does not actually think the steady state theory was fundamentally unscientific, and should have never been seriously considered. Instead he writes like it was a perfectly legitimate theory, that has been rejected because of evidence. So he has a good reason for not thinking there is a general principle of science that lets him save "that final step". Why can't we conclude that the universe has always existed? It's not a rhetorical question even though he is treating it as one, above.
Because the cosmic microwave background records the flash of its birth, we have a specific reason we are not allowed to take that step. That's not the same as a general reason why we can't postulate that other things might not have an origin, just a rule that only applies to one specific case - when the universe is shown to be a big bang universe.
So obviously, either Dr. Sagan "had no concept of eternity", or he failed to apply it to his reasoning here. Either way, it's a "really horrible" philosophical argument (The use of emotional appeals such as "courageously" is just icing on the cake).
Now I'm not going to characterize ALL anti-God arguments as 'really horrible" on the basis of that one. They can stand or fall individually. But of course no one is going to be able to convince anyone to become religious. I doubt I've convinced a single person who formerly agreed with Dr. Sagan's paragraph that he made some grievous logical errors in it, so why on earth would should someone expect to convince them to change their whole world view?
Actually, there is a proof: Kurt Godel (you know, the guy who turned modern mathematics on its head after Whitehead tried to create a complete model of Mathematical processes by showing Consistent and Comlete were not mutually cooperative goals, and created a true revolution, basically by showing that provable and true were not the same thing. The fellow Cantor and Einstein called the greatest mathematician since Euclid, etc.) Actually devised a formal proof of the existence of God. It's sometimes referred to as his third great proof, with the incompleteness theorem counting as his second.
t ml
http://www.stats.uwaterloo.ca/~cgsmall/ontology.h
If they don't already have a PhD in Math, or at least some real familiarity with the specific area of modal logic, it will probably take 6 months to a year of work acquiring the basic concepts for the average person who would give a damn to check this out.
I haven't done any of you Atheists a favor by pointing this out. Many of you will dismiss it. Some will follow through, and end up believing they are now saved, part of a special group of really bright people who know the truth, but they will be believing in the kind of God who sits around in heaven, surrounded by only a few mathematically brilliant saints. A formal religion based only on Godel's 3rd proof would be the most emotionally sterile 'faith' I can imagine. Posting this link to you was, in a very literal sense, damnable, and I will feel the burden of having done it for at least the rest of my life, but now all of you get to share that weight too.
That analogy involved two things which I would have never expected to see related. Yet it actually seems both reasonably accurate and unstrained - why are you posting it to Slashdot?
(Worse, it doesn't have any cars in it - you know that's not how we do things round here!).
This is probably an adaptation of something the U.S.'s Office of Strategic Reconnaissance has been using for the last 10 years or so to do just that. (But remember - If I actually knew that for sure, I couldn't say anything).
This is a potentially very good area for aspiring young engineers and scientists to focus on in their education.
Take the Mars base as just one of a big class of problems. Obviously, the robots can't just be capable of self replication. They have to self replicate up to useful numbers, and then do other tasks. Once that very general model is applied, refining it is mostly a matter of efficiency, and that efficiency determines whether the project will ultimately be funded or not.
The engineer who figures out how few robots can be sent as payload, or how quickly some robots should turn from generalized self-replication to specializing in just part of the task while passing the results on to other robots to finish up, or how to detect and minimize robotic 'mutations', will make or break the project.
Usually, this sort of problem has been seen as a management issue, but we are seeing a whole class of challenging projects where only technically very competent management could even possibly make a good decision, and up to date technical skills will increasingly matter more than people skills.
As just one more down to earth example, it's possible right now to build 'smart' construction materials, with implanted chips and networking so that they can direct a semi-skilled worker in their own use. Imagine a window that directs a worker to take it to a certain opening, and then confirms that enough caulk has been applied around it, and requests a 3/16ths shim be used on the bottom left edge to level it. Now, how much skill do you program into the materials, and how much do you train into the construction workers? What's worth having the machines do, and what remains the province of people? Just getting and keeping enough skilled workers in some inner city locations can be every bit as challenging as providing medical care for a Mars-naut that is 23 million miles from an earthly hospital.
So, once you have a few thousand self replicating robots on mars, do they build complete habitat domes, or do they build raw panels and trusses and let the arriving humans take it from there? What's an acceptable percentage of robots going rogue and continuing to replicate instead of shifting to new tasks? If you're an engineer, or a working research scientist (as opposed to a pure theoretician), you're likely to face analogous questions for many new projects, and if you're to narrowly focused to answer them well, the projects will be run totally by MBAs. As our tools and materials get smarter, that's not going to work.
You can choose another ISP, or use some other method, i.e. having a copy mailed to you or even sneakernet, to legally get any material that isn't legally obscene. The law doesn't count the ISP's actions as censorship, in part because of all the other legal alternatives, including alternatives that exist even in places where there is no choice of ISP.
There's a huge and increasing gap between De Facto, and De Jure here. With Copyright law and the DCMA as they are, those other alternatives may not in fact be legally available. ISPs often don't actually have competition, or all ISPs in an area may collude to block certain material. Using programs that allow someone to record streaming video or similar methods and making even a single hard copy may not count as fair use with the current system and so leave a citizen in technical violation even if there is no unauthorized distribution to a second party.
So effectively, this is a form of censorship, and the existing constitution doesn't protect against it unless the DMCA, at least, is declared unconstitutional. It's also a form of censorship that will work better on poor people, people in rural areas, more law abiding people, and the technically illiterate. Those last two types just describe usual limitations of censorship, but the first two groups are supposed to be entitled to equal protection under law.
The trouble is, going father into the future, especially using most of the pre-existing material, means the new ship is likely a timeship, and the plot becomes a time travel plot by default. Since the best film in the series so far is also a time travel film (yes , I liked Wrath of Whale Buddies), I don't see how Paramount resists the temptation to try for success that way. That actually stacks the odds against a good picture.
Star Trek got very lucky and pulled off really good time travel episodes more than once, so it won't surprise me if there's some executive producer who thinks this could work, but I kinda doubt Harlan Ellison is gonna write one, and that's probably what it would take to get lucky the third time.
What amazes me is his A, B, and C are of this form.
A (Economic system)
B ???
C (Nation-state)
And he's trying to claim that's the only logical way to present an argument here. Since Tibet isn't practicing unlimited free market capitalism, what the hell could "B" possibly be - An Osterizer? Cauliflower? J. Edgar Hoover? The AC's 'logic' isn't like other people's logic.
All you really need is a motivated, talented, sociopathic personality that believes a doomsday device is to his or her benefit or furthers his goals.
I first read that as "furthers his goats" for some reason. What's worse is, it made sense that way.
I'm not seeing how you got the "cotton you can't wear" part...
"Partial state ownership of industry", especially as the PRC practices it, is basically mercantilism.
- fin
http://www.answers.com/topic/mercantilism?cat=biz
There's one definition from the web for people interested.
Mercantilism as a political movement is generally very closely linked to colonialism in ALL historical cases. What that point has to do with Tibet seems pretty straightforward.
but the OP may be drawing a stronger conclusion:
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
Benito Mussolini
(And anyone who thinks I just godwinned the thread needs to actually read what Godwin said.)
The Chinese government has many of the characteristics of a well established and successful Fascism, including extensive Mercantilism, Colonialism, and exaggerated historical worship of an earlier Imperial phase. They also have some racialist behaviors, (which is not the same thing as saying they are about to put all of any Group X into concentration camps). For example, the PRC government has several times argued that being of Chinese descent makes a person subject to the PRC government even if they are a citizen of another nation.
One of the reasons I picked Benny and not Adolph to quote above is that Italian Fascism seems to be a better match. The Italians didn't really cooperate much with the mass exterminations of already pacified or indigenous populations the Germans initiated, but they were still certainly Fascists.
Fascism has three common principles which all tend to destabilize international affairs. The belief in wars of aggression, the overuse of centralized planning where there is not enough data to justify the plans and not enough cybernetization to implement them, and the heavy use of scapegoating any time those plans fail.
Here's something 'better' (MHO):
In criminal trials, judges are rapidly being taught that they have to work with someone who insists on being his own attny. to keep them from making obvious (to a lawyer) errors. A lot of this boils down to hand holding and even bending over backwards to advise the accused in chambers before presenting the case to the jury. Otherwise, the case usually just gets appealed if the 'fool' loses. Usually, the DA is also present for the judge's admonishments, so even in a system that in theory automatically favors the defendant, the interests of 'the people' are balanced.
This needs to be passed down from death penalty cases, where it started, to all sorts of more trivial cases, including civil ones. It's actually simpler to do this in non-jury cases - problems such as the defendant starting a line of questioning that actually hurts his case before the judge can explain the consequences in chambers don't matter in a judge only venue.
That's not a claim I would want to present in court without an actual lawyer to evaluate it first. Someone earlier in this thread said the defendants wrote only about 3 paragraphs to explain their methods - does showing how you allowed remote access without the files appearing available to the general torrent user sound like something that could be adequately covered in such a short span?
I strongly suspect the defendants had intent to share the files with any and all torrent users, knew they were copyrighted work, and so on, but if they actually somehow didn't have all the requisite intent, they have done a disservice to other people who may be accused, by letting the plaintiff have an automatic win.
The difference between me and you is that once I convince you to keep your fractured, pathological myths out of the voting booth and out of my child's classroom, I'll go away and leave you alone.
You're absolutely right - I'll let you take your own opinions into the voting booth, and you can teach children your viewpoint, and I'll still go away and leave you alone. In fact, I'll do it now.