Except, in your examples, existing regulatory/enforcement methods seem to work reasonably well already (like HIPAA regulations). Unlike mass media content being sold to (and potentially copied by) zillions of people, it's pretty trivial to determine who is responsible when your medical records show up on the Pirate Bay. Medical and financial professionals might want to build automated compliance safeguards into their own computer systems to, e.g., automatically delete expired "borrowed" files --- but, unlike DRM, such systems can be *entirely under the control of the computer user* (not forced on them by third parties).
I guess you've got some specific, well-funded, noble alternative to retask all these resources on?
Well, nuclear anti-proliferation is a pretty nice start, which just requires enough funding to yank the plug out of the wall. But, since you've already presumably got funding for operation and research personnel for the bomb-maintenance tasks, you could just re-task that along with the computer (not designing bombs is a good start in itself). I don't currently have any personal pet projects that need a supercomputer, but perhaps I could refer you to the poster "aussie.virologist" further down the thread noting this could be handy for viral simulations. Researching new antiviral drugs (and releasing the results free to the world so anyone can manufacture them) seems like a pretty "noble alternative" to assuring we can initiate global nuclear holocaust at a minute's notice.
Let me re-iterate that I'm not trying to indicate "getting a crappy science education" is equivalent to "suffering." But, if (for whatever your reasons) you suspect someone might be "suffering," then you should weigh your reaction against some higher concerns (like respect for privacy and autonomy) rather than "not my kids; let 'em suffer."
'Screw you if you're not me or mine' is just the reflection of 'Whatever you want to do; no skin off my back'.
In this case, one is considering a third party: "Whatever you want to do to those children; no skin off my back." That's a little different from staying out of people's business to harm themselves. Now, in this case, as in many, there can be plenty of other mitigating circumstances: "saving" a child from a negligibly small harm isn't worth the far greater harms of meddling in others' affairs. But whatever your reasoning is for deciding whether or not to interfere in a situation, "my kids are fine so screw yours" is a crummy basis for moral guidance.
I don't entirely agree here. The smart-in-the-sense-of-scientific kids will ignore it. The smart-in-the-sense-of-manipulative-sociopath kids will learn the lessons very well --- how they can rally and manipulate the support of others around this "unimportant" point for more important ends. And while the smart-in-the-sense-of-scientific kids have grown up to become researchers, the smart-in-the-sense-of-manipulative-sociopath kid has become the senator for their district, sitting on committees for science funding, environmental protections, and education.
Whereas evolution has not been revised since it was proposed by Darwin.
This is blatantly wrong. Our understanding of evolution, like our understanding of gravity, has been immensely refined and elaborated since Darwin's time. Perhaps the most radical addition was the discovery of genetics --- a physical mechanism for inheritance of traits and production of variability unknown in Darwin's time. We've now got a huge array of tools to produce a far more detailed and comprehensive evolutionary model, quantitatively answering a huge number of questions left open by Darwin, while posing new ones.
How you could draw "fine if only someone else gets hurt" from that is beyond me.
Here's what you said right at the top of your initial post:
Why? It's their own kids that will suffer.
This is different from:
Why? Their own kid's won't suffer so much as to justify violating parental rights.
I respect your later analyses that scientific education might not be worth intruding on fundamental parent-child relations. However, your original argument (which I attacked) was, in your own words, "their own kids suffer," but you needn't worry because you can send your own kids to private school or move away.
On a separate note:
Like you claim you experienced, I was exposed to much of that same bullshit with overt religious tampering in my education and all it did in the long run is damage my view of religion.
This isn't quite the experience I claimed; I was fortunate, actually, to not experience hostility between science and religion in my own upbringing. I wasn't raised in a fundamentalist-nutjob background.
Democracy looks like Proposition 8. Majority gets what it wants, even if it means a minority is oppressed.
Yep. And it also looks like the democratic movements to create marriage equality in many other states (despite gays being just as much a minority). You win some, you lose some. I haven't particularly seen our antidemocratic overlords stepping up for marriage equality against popular opinion, either.
The wealthy are a minority, so we'll just vote to take their money make everybody poor.
Yeah, it's so important to protect that minority, that we'd better put them in control of who gets rich and who gets poor. What's that? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer? What a shocker!
And as Polybius and contemporaries documented long ago, such simplistic political forms fall inevitably into ochlochcracy.
Right, because democracy can only take the most simplistic strawman forms, and the ancient Greeks were the final word on all political science. Better to stay safe with oligarchy.
Where in my post did I say that democracy was guaranteed ponies and rainbows? I was just pointing out that we get to enjoy many of the sucky oppressive parts of democracy, without many of the potential upsides. However, unlike dyed-in-the-wool authoritarians, I have a more optimistic outlook on humankind's capacity for democracy (I don't think we need a tiny oligarchical ruling elite to decide what's best for everyone else). For example, at least in this country, I'm pretty certain that you can gather an overwhelming majority who would support keeping protections for religious freedoms, even if "their own religion" could swing 51% of the vote. And, I believe that populations can be empowered to use democracy *responsibly* when given opportunity and practice --- while the population isn't competent to directly vote on macroeconomic affairs *this afternoon,* I bet they'd learn pretty fast if actually handed the terrifying power to actually control things that shape their lives and communities.
And the alternative solution, adopted by the US, is to make sure that when it's one frat boy and three girls, the frat boy is still in charge of deciding how to spend the evening (lest he be abused by tyranny of the majority).
As stated in another reply: the point of my response wasn't to say that giving your kids a religious upbringing is like drunkenly beating them; rather, to question your motivating "logic" of "why should I care if someone else' kids suffer." Perhaps it's my religious upbringing and Christian beliefs talking here, but I don't think "fine if only someone else gets hurt" is a good basis for deciding how to act. You might decide not to interfere for other reasons, like "I respect the right of other parents to raise their children according to their own beliefs," or "the kids aren't harmed enough to justify intervention" --- but "screw you if you're not me or mine," the reasoning that lead off your prior post, is not a philosophical stance I am particularly friendly towards.
The point of my post wasn't to say that giving your kids a religious upbringing is as bad as drunkenly beating them; rather, to attack the motivating "logic" of "why should I care if someone else' kids suffer." Perhaps it's my religious upbringing and Christian beliefs talking here, but I don't think "fine if only someone else gets hurt" is a good basis for deciding how to act. You might decide not to interfere for other reasons, like "I respect the right of other parents to raise their children according to their own beliefs," or "the kids aren't really harmed, anyway" --- but "screw you if you're not me or mine" is not a philosophical stance I am particularly friendly towards.
Yeah, I'd pretty much agree. I do think in a few cases it's not so much a slick/smart individual as the slick/smart managers behind them --- e.g. Bush II, who has now retired to his true calling of painting naked shower self-portraits, and Reagan, who was by many insider accounts pretty far gone to dementia --- though most positions below President are won on individual wiles.
They do and say exactly what it takes to get themselves re-elected.
Don't be so simplistic. They balance this against other concerns, like doing what it takes to please the wealthy corporations that might give them highly-paid "political consulting jobs" after retirement from public service.
Well, we have democracy whenever it suits the interests of a tiny power elite. If "the people" really ruled by democracy, we'd be entangled in a lot less foreign wars, have much lower disparity in wealth distribution, no big push for austerity, no too-big-to-fail bank bailouts, etc. As it is, we get stupid crowd-pleasers like nods toward eliminating separation of church and state, but not any democratically favored changes that oppose the oligarchy.
Is this the same logic you'd use if you noticed that your neighbor came home stinking drunk and beat his kids every night? And, in case caring for the well-being of other peoples' kids is too much of a stretch for you, how about a little self-interest: you own kids are going to grow up to share the world with these guys.
The US military budget is about as much as the next 10 biggest national military budgets *combined.* The US isn't one player in a delicate balance of superpowers; it is a massive unilateral force, driven by greed and paranoia to utterly irrational levels of military spending. No matter how much the US has, war hawks clamor for more. "Fewer bombs" is a sick joke in the context of the ridiculous number of bombs the US has. Scrap 90% of our military, and we'd still be an untouchable superpower.
I'm not sure quite what you're trying to clarify here? If you want to make more money than you currently charge, then charge more than you currently charge. A scheme like the bitcoin mining plan is just an underhanded way to (probably grossly inefficiently) suck money from your customers' inability to calculate the actual costs of the "free" deal. As noted in SharpFang's post below, most customers running on normal hardware will probably be mining bitcoin at a steep loss --- paying much more in energy, both for the computer and air conditioning to remove the excess heat --- than the bitcoins are even worth. Trying to scrape a bit of extra profit with large hidden costs to the customer might be a successful marketing plan, but you're an asshole for doing it. Just be up-front about what you charge; and, if you honestly think your customers would benefit from some better use of their computer's idle time, then give them separate tools to allow them to make that choice for themselves (educated with all the necessary information) --- don't make those choices for them just to pad your bottom line.
Well, so long as RMS isn't a complete fucking moron like you, it's not exactly a baffling logical paradox how one could both support some thing and object to use of that thing for nefarious purposes.
"Oh noes! How can I like fluffy kittens, yet object to murdering people by shoving fluffy kittens down their throat until they suffocate! My head asplode!"
No reason it can't be both at once. In fact, ad hominem attacks are almost always irrelevant to the subject under discussion: "DRM is opposed by Stallman, but Stallman eats babies and has icky hair, so yay for DRM!"
No. If you want to make money (in whatever currency) for your programs, then charge money for your programs --- don't be a douchebag who preys on customers' vulnerability to not accurately counting hidden costs of your schemes. You think your customers would benefit from using their computer time to mine Bitcoin? Then provide them with a handy bitcoin-mining app that they can control, and accept bitcoins as payment for your products.
How is adding a DRM interface to the spec and different than what you already have?
Because ease-of-use and widespread standardization aids adoption of technologies? It's unfortunate enough that people tie themselves to third-party solutions with DRM; integrating this functionality more closely into core standards will make it just that much more appealing for someone with a borderline interest in using DRM to deploy it (instead of deciding it's not worth the extra hassle of working outside everyone's-browser-can-view-it standards). DRM is used on flash videos today; but do you want to end up where the entire plain text content of webpages is DRM'd by default (because it's easy, and some retarded control freak at corporate HQ decided he liked it)?
What you're missing is knowing the key to encrypt 0 and 1. If you already have the key to encrypt/decrypt the data, then you're already set. Without the encryption keys, how do you know whether 0 is represented by '852ee92374f0527bf7499161c' or '6dba27a49b5e0fc6979' (or whatever else)?
Think of a can as a small hand held keg. No real difference in the storage container other than size.
The big difference is not just the size, but the surface area to volume ratio. A can ~1/5th the linear size of a keg will have 5x more surface area relative to the liquid, so any wall interaction effects will be ~5x stronger. Not to say that even 5x of pretty much nothing particularly adds up to a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, in your examples, existing regulatory/enforcement methods seem to work reasonably well already (like HIPAA regulations). Unlike mass media content being sold to (and potentially copied by) zillions of people, it's pretty trivial to determine who is responsible when your medical records show up on the Pirate Bay. Medical and financial professionals might want to build automated compliance safeguards into their own computer systems to, e.g., automatically delete expired "borrowed" files --- but, unlike DRM, such systems can be *entirely under the control of the computer user* (not forced on them by third parties).
I guess you've got some specific, well-funded, noble alternative to retask all these resources on?
Well, nuclear anti-proliferation is a pretty nice start, which just requires enough funding to yank the plug out of the wall. But, since you've already presumably got funding for operation and research personnel for the bomb-maintenance tasks, you could just re-task that along with the computer (not designing bombs is a good start in itself). I don't currently have any personal pet projects that need a supercomputer, but perhaps I could refer you to the poster "aussie.virologist" further down the thread noting this could be handy for viral simulations. Researching new antiviral drugs (and releasing the results free to the world so anyone can manufacture them) seems like a pretty "noble alternative" to assuring we can initiate global nuclear holocaust at a minute's notice.
Let me re-iterate that I'm not trying to indicate "getting a crappy science education" is equivalent to "suffering." But, if (for whatever your reasons) you suspect someone might be "suffering," then you should weigh your reaction against some higher concerns (like respect for privacy and autonomy) rather than "not my kids; let 'em suffer."
'Screw you if you're not me or mine' is just the reflection of 'Whatever you want to do; no skin off my back'.
In this case, one is considering a third party: "Whatever you want to do to those children; no skin off my back." That's a little different from staying out of people's business to harm themselves. Now, in this case, as in many, there can be plenty of other mitigating circumstances: "saving" a child from a negligibly small harm isn't worth the far greater harms of meddling in others' affairs. But whatever your reasoning is for deciding whether or not to interfere in a situation, "my kids are fine so screw yours" is a crummy basis for moral guidance.
The smart kids are going to ignore it anyway.
I don't entirely agree here. The smart-in-the-sense-of-scientific kids will ignore it. The smart-in-the-sense-of-manipulative-sociopath kids will learn the lessons very well --- how they can rally and manipulate the support of others around this "unimportant" point for more important ends. And while the smart-in-the-sense-of-scientific kids have grown up to become researchers, the smart-in-the-sense-of-manipulative-sociopath kid has become the senator for their district, sitting on committees for science funding, environmental protections, and education.
Whereas evolution has not been revised since it was proposed by Darwin.
This is blatantly wrong. Our understanding of evolution, like our understanding of gravity, has been immensely refined and elaborated since Darwin's time. Perhaps the most radical addition was the discovery of genetics --- a physical mechanism for inheritance of traits and production of variability unknown in Darwin's time. We've now got a huge array of tools to produce a far more detailed and comprehensive evolutionary model, quantitatively answering a huge number of questions left open by Darwin, while posing new ones.
How you could draw "fine if only someone else gets hurt" from that is beyond me.
Here's what you said right at the top of your initial post:
Why? It's their own kids that will suffer.
This is different from:
Why? Their own kid's won't suffer so much as to justify violating parental rights.
I respect your later analyses that scientific education might not be worth intruding on fundamental parent-child relations. However, your original argument (which I attacked) was, in your own words, "their own kids suffer," but you needn't worry because you can send your own kids to private school or move away.
On a separate note:
Like you claim you experienced, I was exposed to much of that same bullshit with overt religious tampering in my education and all it did in the long run is damage my view of religion.
This isn't quite the experience I claimed; I was fortunate, actually, to not experience hostility between science and religion in my own upbringing. I wasn't raised in a fundamentalist-nutjob background.
Democracy looks like Proposition 8. Majority gets what it wants, even if it means a minority is oppressed.
Yep. And it also looks like the democratic movements to create marriage equality in many other states (despite gays being just as much a minority). You win some, you lose some. I haven't particularly seen our antidemocratic overlords stepping up for marriage equality against popular opinion, either.
The wealthy are a minority, so we'll just vote to take their money make everybody poor.
Yeah, it's so important to protect that minority, that we'd better put them in control of who gets rich and who gets poor. What's that? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer? What a shocker!
And as Polybius and contemporaries documented long ago, such simplistic political forms fall inevitably into ochlochcracy.
Right, because democracy can only take the most simplistic strawman forms, and the ancient Greeks were the final word on all political science. Better to stay safe with oligarchy.
Where in my post did I say that democracy was guaranteed ponies and rainbows? I was just pointing out that we get to enjoy many of the sucky oppressive parts of democracy, without many of the potential upsides. However, unlike dyed-in-the-wool authoritarians, I have a more optimistic outlook on humankind's capacity for democracy (I don't think we need a tiny oligarchical ruling elite to decide what's best for everyone else). For example, at least in this country, I'm pretty certain that you can gather an overwhelming majority who would support keeping protections for religious freedoms, even if "their own religion" could swing 51% of the vote. And, I believe that populations can be empowered to use democracy *responsibly* when given opportunity and practice --- while the population isn't competent to directly vote on macroeconomic affairs *this afternoon,* I bet they'd learn pretty fast if actually handed the terrifying power to actually control things that shape their lives and communities.
And the alternative solution, adopted by the US, is to make sure that when it's one frat boy and three girls, the frat boy is still in charge of deciding how to spend the evening (lest he be abused by tyranny of the majority).
As stated in another reply: the point of my response wasn't to say that giving your kids a religious upbringing is like drunkenly beating them; rather, to question your motivating "logic" of "why should I care if someone else' kids suffer." Perhaps it's my religious upbringing and Christian beliefs talking here, but I don't think "fine if only someone else gets hurt" is a good basis for deciding how to act. You might decide not to interfere for other reasons, like "I respect the right of other parents to raise their children according to their own beliefs," or "the kids aren't harmed enough to justify intervention" --- but "screw you if you're not me or mine," the reasoning that lead off your prior post, is not a philosophical stance I am particularly friendly towards.
The point of my post wasn't to say that giving your kids a religious upbringing is as bad as drunkenly beating them; rather, to attack the motivating "logic" of "why should I care if someone else' kids suffer." Perhaps it's my religious upbringing and Christian beliefs talking here, but I don't think "fine if only someone else gets hurt" is a good basis for deciding how to act. You might decide not to interfere for other reasons, like "I respect the right of other parents to raise their children according to their own beliefs," or "the kids aren't really harmed, anyway" --- but "screw you if you're not me or mine" is not a philosophical stance I am particularly friendly towards.
Yeah, I'd pretty much agree. I do think in a few cases it's not so much a slick/smart individual as the slick/smart managers behind them --- e.g. Bush II, who has now retired to his true calling of painting naked shower self-portraits, and Reagan, who was by many insider accounts pretty far gone to dementia --- though most positions below President are won on individual wiles.
They do and say exactly what it takes to get themselves re-elected.
Don't be so simplistic. They balance this against other concerns, like doing what it takes to please the wealthy corporations that might give them highly-paid "political consulting jobs" after retirement from public service.
No, I wouldn't use the same logic there. ... See the difference now?
Yes, I can see that if you are a coward, standing on principle to help others is not part of your logic.
Well, we have democracy whenever it suits the interests of a tiny power elite. If "the people" really ruled by democracy, we'd be entangled in a lot less foreign wars, have much lower disparity in wealth distribution, no big push for austerity, no too-big-to-fail bank bailouts, etc. As it is, we get stupid crowd-pleasers like nods toward eliminating separation of church and state, but not any democratically favored changes that oppose the oligarchy.
Why? It's their own kids that will suffer.
Is this the same logic you'd use if you noticed that your neighbor came home stinking drunk and beat his kids every night? And, in case caring for the well-being of other peoples' kids is too much of a stretch for you, how about a little self-interest: you own kids are going to grow up to share the world with these guys.
The US military budget is about as much as the next 10 biggest national military budgets *combined.* The US isn't one player in a delicate balance of superpowers; it is a massive unilateral force, driven by greed and paranoia to utterly irrational levels of military spending. No matter how much the US has, war hawks clamor for more. "Fewer bombs" is a sick joke in the context of the ridiculous number of bombs the US has. Scrap 90% of our military, and we'd still be an untouchable superpower.
Now, if only we found better uses for top supercomputers than assuring our WMD supply is always in tip-top shape for mass murder.
I'm not sure quite what you're trying to clarify here? If you want to make more money than you currently charge, then charge more than you currently charge. A scheme like the bitcoin mining plan is just an underhanded way to (probably grossly inefficiently) suck money from your customers' inability to calculate the actual costs of the "free" deal. As noted in SharpFang's post below, most customers running on normal hardware will probably be mining bitcoin at a steep loss --- paying much more in energy, both for the computer and air conditioning to remove the excess heat --- than the bitcoins are even worth. Trying to scrape a bit of extra profit with large hidden costs to the customer might be a successful marketing plan, but you're an asshole for doing it. Just be up-front about what you charge; and, if you honestly think your customers would benefit from some better use of their computer's idle time, then give them separate tools to allow them to make that choice for themselves (educated with all the necessary information) --- don't make those choices for them just to pad your bottom line.
Well, so long as RMS isn't a complete fucking moron like you, it's not exactly a baffling logical paradox how one could both support some thing and object to use of that thing for nefarious purposes.
"Oh noes! How can I like fluffy kittens, yet object to murdering people by shoving fluffy kittens down their throat until they suffocate! My head asplode!"
No reason it can't be both at once. In fact, ad hominem attacks are almost always irrelevant to the subject under discussion: "DRM is opposed by Stallman, but Stallman eats babies and has icky hair, so yay for DRM!"
No. If you want to make money (in whatever currency) for your programs, then charge money for your programs --- don't be a douchebag who preys on customers' vulnerability to not accurately counting hidden costs of your schemes. You think your customers would benefit from using their computer time to mine Bitcoin? Then provide them with a handy bitcoin-mining app that they can control, and accept bitcoins as payment for your products.
How is adding a DRM interface to the spec and different than what you already have?
Because ease-of-use and widespread standardization aids adoption of technologies? It's unfortunate enough that people tie themselves to third-party solutions with DRM; integrating this functionality more closely into core standards will make it just that much more appealing for someone with a borderline interest in using DRM to deploy it (instead of deciding it's not worth the extra hassle of working outside everyone's-browser-can-view-it standards). DRM is used on flash videos today; but do you want to end up where the entire plain text content of webpages is DRM'd by default (because it's easy, and some retarded control freak at corporate HQ decided he liked it)?
What you're missing is knowing the key to encrypt 0 and 1. If you already have the key to encrypt/decrypt the data, then you're already set. Without the encryption keys, how do you know whether 0 is represented by '852ee92374f0527bf7499161c' or '6dba27a49b5e0fc6979' (or whatever else)?
Think of a can as a small hand held keg. No real difference in the storage container other than size.
The big difference is not just the size, but the surface area to volume ratio. A can ~1/5th the linear size of a keg will have 5x more surface area relative to the liquid, so any wall interaction effects will be ~5x stronger. Not to say that even 5x of pretty much nothing particularly adds up to a problem.