Because any government is made of the same greedy and ignorant people that a company is. So the question is, which is worse: having companies compete with some amount of regulation or having a government (of greedy people) simply rule and decide things without competition...
I prefer the bunch of bastards I can vote out of the office. You may disagree, especially if you have a lot of shares, but I don't have, so I get what little control I can.
And last I heard, there were quite a few competing governments in this world.
As each one of these applications turns away from oil, the price of oil will temporarily drop or stabilize. Eventually we'll either be 100% off oil, or at a level where it's sustainable for 1000's of years.
In order for an application to turn away from oil into other solutions, those other solutions must both exist and be economical - no, it's not sufficient to be cheaper than oil, the alternative must be cheap enough that the user can afford to pay. In order for such solutions to exist, they must be researched. That, in turn, takes time (insert a quote about nuclear fusion being 40 years away here). They won't magically appear out of nowhere simply because there is a market for them.
Besides, if we can solve our energy problems by, for example, getting nuclear fusion working, we can simply synthesize oil from carbon dioxide and water. It's not like it's particularly complex material, a basic oil being just a chain of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms stuck along it.
Oh wait, that's free market economics, and I forgot that our president has announced that "that doesn't work any more."
It never has. Human mind is simply too ingenious when it comes to thinking up "get rich quick" -schemes, and too stupid to notice them when someone else thinks them up. Add the tendency of markets to concentrate to a few large players, which take the entire economy down with them if they fall, and it would take a true ideological fanatic to not put some restraints in.
But, to get back to the subject: alternative solutions take time to develop, and there's no guarantee that the market will start developing them in time, especially since all the speculators will come crawling out of the woodwork as soon as oil price starts rising and drive the price higher still, causing problems for everyone else.
How exactly do you invade a country with thousands of nuclear warheads and enough firearms to arm every adult citizen, should the need arise?
Offer its industry leaders cheap labour, thus tempting them into moving their manufacturing capacity to your country, letting your enemy run up a debt it has no hope of ever repaying, use threats of not giving more credit to force it to devote more and more of its remaining manufacturing capacity to paying you while driving up taxes and weakening social services until the brightest young minds leave it. When it has been bled dry, cut the supply of goods, discard the hollow husk of your enemy, and keep the manufacturing plants they so graciously gave you.
It's working rather splendidly, judging by the financial crisis.
I don't recall making any comparisons. I used a tongue-in-cheek phrase to describe environmental extremists that won't be happy until mankind reverts to a hunter-gatherer culture or dies out entirely.
Calling people you don't like Nazis in order to smear them when they have nothing to do with Nazism or related ideologues is well within the scope of Godwin's law. It is also a large part of what's wrong with politics nowadays: debate about ideas has been replaced with a competition about of who can fling the most mud on their opponent. Then again, I might be giving past politicians too much credit here...
In any case, you are either a moron who doesn't think what he writes, or a demagogue attempting to crush opposition by flinging shit at them. Either way, don't complain when you get called for it.
To be fair, most of those "nudist sites" are pretty obviously porn sites, offering access to naked pictures of people, sometimes of very young age, for pay. I can't imagine any reason why anyone would pay to see someone else's vacation pictures, except the fact that they're naked vacation pictures. Not to mention that some of them combine nudism with outdoor activities in the snow, which simply can't be a part of any lifestyle, since you'd end up dying of pneumonia in short order.
You don't know why looking at child pornography is illegal? Wow. See, if my niece got raped or otherwise sexually exploited, and I knew that it had been photographed and men were downloading that picture to wank to, I'd have them strangled with their own guts.
Cool story, bro. But still boils down to "I don't like it", which is an invalid reason to forbid anything.
Or was this supposed to be some kind of attempt at argument from intimidation?
Out of curiosity: How would you react if someone took a picture of your niece in swimwear, and wanked to that? What if they simply saw her at the beach, and retreated to a WC, inspired by the memory? What her parents gave him a (non-pornographic) picture of her and he wanked over that?
CP is governed by supply and demand like everything else. If there were no buyers, then there would be no sellers. Sure, those who sexually exploit children would still do that, but the majority of people involved in CP aren't sexually interested in children - it's just a source of money for them.
Every case of CP I've ever heard of involved some moron recording/photographing his activities and posting them online for bragging rights. This usually leads to said person getting caught, since they almost invariable leave enough clues to be identified - the infamous Swirl Face being a good example.
This, then, leads to an argument that allowing CP would actually lessen child molesting, since it would give molesters more opportunities to get themselves caught.
Why it's more socially and morally acceptable to hurt people than to show affection is beyond me, though.
Adrenalin makes people easy to manipulate, and the guilt resulting from the deeds done under said manipulations allow hooks to sink ever deeper. Sexual frustration and resulting perversions make this task even easier. On the other hand, sex makes people calm, relaxed and feeling good, as well as promotes building of bonds, making it hard to divide and conquer them.
A neurotic wreck is much easier to rule over than a healthy, confident and strong person. Which one do you thing your overlords, past and present, prefer?
In any case, you are in a tiny minority in not being offended by child pornography. Even in the US, where SCOTUS has found that CP per se is protected speech (and the offenders are the personae you refer to), the law of obscenity, which is determined by local "community values," will almost always criminalise CP.
So you have a right to speak freely, unless someone doesn't like what you say to third parties.
Wouldn't it be a lot more honest to simply admit that people don't have the guts to deal with the consequences of free speech - namely the fact that even people they don't like can say things they don't agree with - and remove the First Amendment from the Constitution? All this twisted reasoning to explain why a particular limitation doesn't really break it would be unneccessary, then. Do the judges really honestly believe that rubbish, or are they simply trying to keep up appearances? Or, more on a more sinister vein, do they want the benefits of free speech for themselves while denying it for others?
I guess the difference between you and me is that I don't fear death, and if I was given that bad news about cancer, rather than *waste* 500,000 trying to give myself an extra year of life, I'd give the money to my grandchildren so they can go to college. Better to spend the money wisely than foolishly.
So basically, in libertarian utopia, one saves everything one earns, living miserly, never spending a cent, but still die as soon as they get seriously ill. But, if they're extremely lucky, they might be able to save the half a million dollars it takes to send their kids to school so they'll learn to read - oh the joys of private schooling! - and can thus get a nice job as a McDonald's clerk rather than the burger-flipper.
I wonder why no one votes libertarian - can't the sheep recognize a good deal when they see it?
I should also add that the "public option" is, according to Congressman Barney Frank, just step one. He was caught on camera saying that healthcare will be completely taken-over by government circa 2020. Mr. Frank probably won't be there on that date, but that's the roadmap the Democrats have laid-out. They want the US to have a UK-style government monopoly.
Actually, that's a good thing. Either have something taken care of by the Government and funded by taxes, or leave it to private sector and people's own volition. Having the Government mandate that you pay a corporation combines all the worst sides of both, the best sides of neither, and adds a dose of "this isn't socialism since you're paying a corporation" doublethink - or, day I say it, fascism - as flavoring.
Car insurance has a similar mandatory insurance system here in Finland, and basically works out to a tax that's paid to an insurance company. And not a small tax either.
Didn't somebody do some research where they could analyze the shadows of a painting to convert it into geometry? Then it would be possible to convert any painting into a plaster sculpture.
You are making the assumption that the generated geometry is consistent. Besides, if the painting shows a someone watching fields with Sun rising over a mountain range in the distance, how are you going to make a rasonably sized yet still non-distorted sculpture of that?
Otherwise it would take an infinite amount of energy.
No, you are thinking of a particle exiting the loop and entering it again besides its own earlier incarnation(s) again and again. I'm talking about the loop itself, passing information to its own causal past, causing more or less random changes there until you finally by chance end up with a history without the loop, at which point it stops changing.
Goes through the loop once, conditions are changed, conditions for looping no longer apply, time (and the particles) continues to flow forward.
The loop is affecting its own causal past. That means that information does does go through the loop again and again. If it doesn't, if information exiting the loop can't enter the loop again, then by definition no time travel has taken place.
The whole point it's impossible to put together a consistent spacetime which includes loops. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle simply don't fit together that way. And inconsistencies represent breaches in the rules on how one point in spacetime fits to neighbouring points - the laws of physics, in other words. So, my argument is that if there's any nonempty set of rules for causal connectivity between points in spacetime - any truly unbreakable laws of physics, in other words - then time travel is impossible.
If the conditions are reset to one in which there is no time travel, then it seems to me that the initial conditions would go back to the ones that allowed time travel in the first place.
That's where the quantum improbabilities come in, allowing events to evolve differently from the same starting point.
It seems to me that a more likely event is that it would decay into one where time travel is self reinforcing, but extremely limited, and probably of minimal usefulness. Think 12 Monkeys.
No, because as long as the time loop exists it will cause the past to keep changing, however slightly. It's just a matter of time (metatime? we need new terminology for discussions of time travel) before it changes in such a way as to break the loop.
Self-reinforcing systems are still unstable in the presence of a more stable state, if there's no upper bound to maximum deviation before the system is forced to return to its local stability point. And since we're talking about things that happen outside of time, to time in fact, there's all eternity for the system to decay.
Why? Even if you were to go in the past and change the future, that doesn't mean the future would be changed enough to prevent the travel back to the past.
The part you quoted already answered that, but I'll reiterate:
If you travel into the past, and end up causing any changes, then those changes cause the conditions at the point where you start your travel to be slightly different (because laws of physics treat past and future symmetrically, so each current state has not only just one possible future, but also just one possible past, so any change in the past is guaranteed to change the current state slightly). Since the conditions are different, your actions in the past will also be different. This then causes further changes to the conditions of your travel, and so forth.
Since the period of time that forms the loop keeps on changing, it's guaranteed to eventually hit a sequence where your time travel doesn't happen. Once it does, it'll stop changing, since the loop has been eliminated.
Another way of looking at this is to remember that, according to the Theory of Relativity, time is a property of the universe rather than something that exists independently of it. Consequently, the view of universe as a system evolving according to a set of rules is misleading. A more accurate model would be a jigsaw puzzle, with locations in space and time as the pieces and laws of physics as the rules that dictate how they can be connected together. In this view, time travel is unlikely to happen because the more neighbours a piece has, the more difficult (maybe impossible after a certain limit) it is for it to satisfy the consistency - or causality - requirements of them all.
However, that model requires one to give up the simple notion of causality as past events influencing future ones, since which piece can be fit where in a jigsaw puzzle depends on all neighbouring pieces, including the future ones. This is actually more consistent with the laws of physics, which don't discriminate based on teh direction of time, and also used all the time by humans to try to piece together past events from evidence, but it's also somewhat counter-intuitive and easy to mistake for time travel.
Different roads can still lead to the same destination... or have you never heard of the expression "All roads lead to Rome."
Different orbital paths might cross at the same point, put the objects following them have different velocities, so they'll continue on different paths.
And all that's assuming that the universe won't tolerate what, to us, is a paradox - not a sure thing, or that causality is preserved, which is also debatable.
True. However, please understand that universe tolerating a paradox would also logically invalidate the whole of science, including anything the LHC might find. In fact, it would likely invalidate logic itself.
... and why, pray tell, was such apparently critical equipment not in some sort of enclosure?
Because if it was, it would had been the roof collapsing that would had disabled it, and that would had caused a lot worse mess.
As a side note, I think that this confirms my pet theory concerning time travel: any attempt to do it will change the past, which changes the conditions of the travel slightly, which changes the past, and so on, until the travel never occurs and the past stops changing. In other words, a spacetime where time travel happens is unstable and decays into one where it won't. Quantum uncertainty would, in this interpretation, be there to allow causality to "stretch" enough to allow such decay; a hypothethical universe without quantum uncertainty but with sentience and time travel (which is an inevitable outcome of the Theory of Relativity, which in turn is an inevitable outcome from the laws of physics being the same for all observers) would tear itself apart. You can thus deduct the Uncertainty Principle from the Anthropic Principle (we are here, so this universe must be able to support sentient life).
I wonder if you could calculate the minimum required amount of uncertainty for spacetime to stay consistent, and how it would relate to observed/otherwise calculated values? Assume that the first singularity formed at t=0, and has been moving infinitely close to lightspeed ever since, and connects to every other time period through a wormhole, and go from there. The math is beyond me, does anyone else care to try?
Doesn't matter what they blame it on in public. They know.
They already know. It doesn't affect their behaviour.
"It'll never work" is not a valid reason not to boycott them.
Actually, "it'ss never work" is as good a reason as they come to not engage in a course of action.
As an individual, when you give them money you are blessing their behavior.
I haven't bought DVDs for a long time; they are expensive, and come with minutes-long unskippable anti-piracy ads.
No one _needs_ to buy a DVD.
And the MPAA doesn't need to sell DVDs in order to make money. They are powerful enough to survive any conceivable action my you, me or anyone.
Copyright is a bit like cancer: it starts out harmless enough, but the lump of cells grows and comes malignant, twisting the surrounding tissues out of shape and setting up remote tumours everywhere in the body. Just look at the 3-strike laws and other abominations it has resulted in. The only cure is to remove the tumour entirely; the people who campaign for "limited copyright" are fooling themselves.
I thought that the whole idea of capitalism was you do well in your business or you fail. And if you fail, you open the market up to others that can try to succeed where you failed...
And that works fine as long as you are small enough that you don't represent a significant fraction of the whole economy. If you do, your failure starts a domino effect taking the whole economy with you. Add the fact that succesful businesses usually invest their returns in expanding the business, and thus grow exponentially, and it should be clear that unregulated capitalism results in economic chaos even under ideal circumstances. And that's not even taking into action the very rational business practice of using your money to buy laws favourable to you.
Basically, "capitalism" is to an economic system like this diagram is to an internal combustion engine: it describes the principle of operation but leaves out little details like lubrication, cooling, throttle, fuel regulation, ignition, etc. without which the system can't work. The calls for pure unregulated capitalism are about as intelligent as demands for pure unthrottled 4-stroke engines. Unfortunately, while the latter would be ignored by any engineer, the former is sometimes taken seriously enough to actually try to implement, leading for example to our current economic foes.
You are looking at this the wrong way around. This treaty isn't something intended to force the politicians against their will; it's something the politicians can use as an excuse when passing unjust and unpopular laws to help their corporate masters.
They need to know that they need us more than we need them.
Except that they don't. If your boycott works, then Hollywood will simply blame it on piracy and lobby the Congress to put a levy on empty DVDs, hard disks, ISPs and such, to compensate them for lost sales.
Once you get to a position of power, you are basically invincible, and can basically parasite away at society's expense without doing anything useful. Large corporations are in such a position; just look at the bailouts for an example. That adds a dimension of bitter irony to right-wingers complaints about "wellfare queens" and such, when it's their own pet corporations that are the true harmful parasites.
An attacker that can store a file on your filesystem can then replace your precious data with crafted data with the same hash.
Actually, since your data was there first, the attacker could not replace it - the portion of his file that hashed to the same value would be replaced with your data, not the other way around. He could read it, but he'd have to know it already in order to know the hash. In order to attack, he'd have to anticipate what you're going to store, and get there first.
But it's the authors that *choose* to use those distributors and record labels and grant them permission to do the distribution for them. No one is forcing them to currently either. Shouldn't they be able to choose?
Certainly. No one's arguing against authors having rights. On the contrary, we're arguing about what rights the readers have; for example, I'm wondering why I should be forced to honor the author's wishes? Shouldn't I be able to choose?
Now let's see how many responses claiming that the author being unable to force me to obey his terms means I've forced him to release his work do I get...
This type of thinking will eventually lead to the creation of things whose cost is zero and no higher.
Good thing that computer technology is getting to the point where making your own movies with nice special effects is quite possible, if still needlessly difficult. The main problem nowadays is not graphics rendering, but UI and voice acting. Those need to be solved, but once they have been, Hollywood is done for.
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I prefer the bunch of bastards I can vote out of the office. You may disagree, especially if you have a lot of shares, but I don't have, so I get what little control I can.
And last I heard, there were quite a few competing governments in this world.
In order for an application to turn away from oil into other solutions, those other solutions must both exist and be economical - no, it's not sufficient to be cheaper than oil, the alternative must be cheap enough that the user can afford to pay. In order for such solutions to exist, they must be researched. That, in turn, takes time (insert a quote about nuclear fusion being 40 years away here). They won't magically appear out of nowhere simply because there is a market for them.
Besides, if we can solve our energy problems by, for example, getting nuclear fusion working, we can simply synthesize oil from carbon dioxide and water. It's not like it's particularly complex material, a basic oil being just a chain of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms stuck along it.
It never has. Human mind is simply too ingenious when it comes to thinking up "get rich quick" -schemes, and too stupid to notice them when someone else thinks them up. Add the tendency of markets to concentrate to a few large players, which take the entire economy down with them if they fall, and it would take a true ideological fanatic to not put some restraints in.
But, to get back to the subject: alternative solutions take time to develop, and there's no guarantee that the market will start developing them in time, especially since all the speculators will come crawling out of the woodwork as soon as oil price starts rising and drive the price higher still, causing problems for everyone else.
Offer its industry leaders cheap labour, thus tempting them into moving their manufacturing capacity to your country, letting your enemy run up a debt it has no hope of ever repaying, use threats of not giving more credit to force it to devote more and more of its remaining manufacturing capacity to paying you while driving up taxes and weakening social services until the brightest young minds leave it. When it has been bled dry, cut the supply of goods, discard the hollow husk of your enemy, and keep the manufacturing plants they so graciously gave you.
It's working rather splendidly, judging by the financial crisis.
Calling people you don't like Nazis in order to smear them when they have nothing to do with Nazism or related ideologues is well within the scope of Godwin's law. It is also a large part of what's wrong with politics nowadays: debate about ideas has been replaced with a competition about of who can fling the most mud on their opponent. Then again, I might be giving past politicians too much credit here...
In any case, you are either a moron who doesn't think what he writes, or a demagogue attempting to crush opposition by flinging shit at them. Either way, don't complain when you get called for it.
To be fair, most of those "nudist sites" are pretty obviously porn sites, offering access to naked pictures of people, sometimes of very young age, for pay. I can't imagine any reason why anyone would pay to see someone else's vacation pictures, except the fact that they're naked vacation pictures. Not to mention that some of them combine nudism with outdoor activities in the snow, which simply can't be a part of any lifestyle, since you'd end up dying of pneumonia in short order.
Cool story, bro. But still boils down to "I don't like it", which is an invalid reason to forbid anything.
Or was this supposed to be some kind of attempt at argument from intimidation?
Out of curiosity: How would you react if someone took a picture of your niece in swimwear, and wanked to that? What if they simply saw her at the beach, and retreated to a WC, inspired by the memory? What her parents gave him a (non-pornographic) picture of her and he wanked over that?
Every case of CP I've ever heard of involved some moron recording/photographing his activities and posting them online for bragging rights. This usually leads to said person getting caught, since they almost invariable leave enough clues to be identified - the infamous Swirl Face being a good example.
This, then, leads to an argument that allowing CP would actually lessen child molesting, since it would give molesters more opportunities to get themselves caught.
Adrenalin makes people easy to manipulate, and the guilt resulting from the deeds done under said manipulations allow hooks to sink ever deeper. Sexual frustration and resulting perversions make this task even easier. On the other hand, sex makes people calm, relaxed and feeling good, as well as promotes building of bonds, making it hard to divide and conquer them.
A neurotic wreck is much easier to rule over than a healthy, confident and strong person. Which one do you thing your overlords, past and present, prefer?
So you have a right to speak freely, unless someone doesn't like what you say to third parties.
Wouldn't it be a lot more honest to simply admit that people don't have the guts to deal with the consequences of free speech - namely the fact that even people they don't like can say things they don't agree with - and remove the First Amendment from the Constitution? All this twisted reasoning to explain why a particular limitation doesn't really break it would be unneccessary, then. Do the judges really honestly believe that rubbish, or are they simply trying to keep up appearances? Or, more on a more sinister vein, do they want the benefits of free speech for themselves while denying it for others?
So basically, in libertarian utopia, one saves everything one earns, living miserly, never spending a cent, but still die as soon as they get seriously ill. But, if they're extremely lucky, they might be able to save the half a million dollars it takes to send their kids to school so they'll learn to read - oh the joys of private schooling! - and can thus get a nice job as a McDonald's clerk rather than the burger-flipper.
I wonder why no one votes libertarian - can't the sheep recognize a good deal when they see it?
Actually, that's a good thing. Either have something taken care of by the Government and funded by taxes, or leave it to private sector and people's own volition. Having the Government mandate that you pay a corporation combines all the worst sides of both, the best sides of neither, and adds a dose of "this isn't socialism since you're paying a corporation" doublethink - or, day I say it, fascism - as flavoring.
Car insurance has a similar mandatory insurance system here in Finland, and basically works out to a tax that's paid to an insurance company. And not a small tax either.
Of course you can, just install DownloadHelper addon for Firefox.
But the thing about Flash being a crapfest is spot on.
You are making the assumption that the generated geometry is consistent. Besides, if the painting shows a someone watching fields with Sun rising over a mountain range in the distance, how are you going to make a rasonably sized yet still non-distorted sculpture of that?
No, you are thinking of a particle exiting the loop and entering it again besides its own earlier incarnation(s) again and again. I'm talking about the loop itself, passing information to its own causal past, causing more or less random changes there until you finally by chance end up with a history without the loop, at which point it stops changing.
The loop is affecting its own causal past. That means that information does does go through the loop again and again. If it doesn't, if information exiting the loop can't enter the loop again, then by definition no time travel has taken place.
The whole point it's impossible to put together a consistent spacetime which includes loops. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle simply don't fit together that way. And inconsistencies represent breaches in the rules on how one point in spacetime fits to neighbouring points - the laws of physics, in other words. So, my argument is that if there's any nonempty set of rules for causal connectivity between points in spacetime - any truly unbreakable laws of physics, in other words - then time travel is impossible.
That's where the quantum improbabilities come in, allowing events to evolve differently from the same starting point.
No, because as long as the time loop exists it will cause the past to keep changing, however slightly. It's just a matter of time (metatime? we need new terminology for discussions of time travel) before it changes in such a way as to break the loop.
Self-reinforcing systems are still unstable in the presence of a more stable state, if there's no upper bound to maximum deviation before the system is forced to return to its local stability point. And since we're talking about things that happen outside of time, to time in fact, there's all eternity for the system to decay.
The part you quoted already answered that, but I'll reiterate:
If you travel into the past, and end up causing any changes, then those changes cause the conditions at the point where you start your travel to be slightly different (because laws of physics treat past and future symmetrically, so each current state has not only just one possible future, but also just one possible past, so any change in the past is guaranteed to change the current state slightly). Since the conditions are different, your actions in the past will also be different. This then causes further changes to the conditions of your travel, and so forth.
Since the period of time that forms the loop keeps on changing, it's guaranteed to eventually hit a sequence where your time travel doesn't happen. Once it does, it'll stop changing, since the loop has been eliminated.
Another way of looking at this is to remember that, according to the Theory of Relativity, time is a property of the universe rather than something that exists independently of it. Consequently, the view of universe as a system evolving according to a set of rules is misleading. A more accurate model would be a jigsaw puzzle, with locations in space and time as the pieces and laws of physics as the rules that dictate how they can be connected together. In this view, time travel is unlikely to happen because the more neighbours a piece has, the more difficult (maybe impossible after a certain limit) it is for it to satisfy the consistency - or causality - requirements of them all.
However, that model requires one to give up the simple notion of causality as past events influencing future ones, since which piece can be fit where in a jigsaw puzzle depends on all neighbouring pieces, including the future ones. This is actually more consistent with the laws of physics, which don't discriminate based on teh direction of time, and also used all the time by humans to try to piece together past events from evidence, but it's also somewhat counter-intuitive and easy to mistake for time travel.
Different orbital paths might cross at the same point, put the objects following them have different velocities, so they'll continue on different paths.
True. However, please understand that universe tolerating a paradox would also logically invalidate the whole of science, including anything the LHC might find. In fact, it would likely invalidate logic itself.
In Soviet Union, everything is awesome, and only an imperialist enemy of the people would say otherwise.
Because if it was, it would had been the roof collapsing that would had disabled it, and that would had caused a lot worse mess.
As a side note, I think that this confirms my pet theory concerning time travel: any attempt to do it will change the past, which changes the conditions of the travel slightly, which changes the past, and so on, until the travel never occurs and the past stops changing. In other words, a spacetime where time travel happens is unstable and decays into one where it won't. Quantum uncertainty would, in this interpretation, be there to allow causality to "stretch" enough to allow such decay; a hypothethical universe without quantum uncertainty but with sentience and time travel (which is an inevitable outcome of the Theory of Relativity, which in turn is an inevitable outcome from the laws of physics being the same for all observers) would tear itself apart. You can thus deduct the Uncertainty Principle from the Anthropic Principle (we are here, so this universe must be able to support sentient life).
I wonder if you could calculate the minimum required amount of uncertainty for spacetime to stay consistent, and how it would relate to observed/otherwise calculated values? Assume that the first singularity formed at t=0, and has been moving infinitely close to lightspeed ever since, and connects to every other time period through a wormhole, and go from there. The math is beyond me, does anyone else care to try?
They already know. It doesn't affect their behaviour.
Actually, "it'ss never work" is as good a reason as they come to not engage in a course of action.
I haven't bought DVDs for a long time; they are expensive, and come with minutes-long unskippable anti-piracy ads.
And the MPAA doesn't need to sell DVDs in order to make money. They are powerful enough to survive any conceivable action my you, me or anyone.
Copyright is a bit like cancer: it starts out harmless enough, but the lump of cells grows and comes malignant, twisting the surrounding tissues out of shape and setting up remote tumours everywhere in the body. Just look at the 3-strike laws and other abominations it has resulted in. The only cure is to remove the tumour entirely; the people who campaign for "limited copyright" are fooling themselves.
And that works fine as long as you are small enough that you don't represent a significant fraction of the whole economy. If you do, your failure starts a domino effect taking the whole economy with you. Add the fact that succesful businesses usually invest their returns in expanding the business, and thus grow exponentially, and it should be clear that unregulated capitalism results in economic chaos even under ideal circumstances. And that's not even taking into action the very rational business practice of using your money to buy laws favourable to you.
Basically, "capitalism" is to an economic system like this diagram is to an internal combustion engine: it describes the principle of operation but leaves out little details like lubrication, cooling, throttle, fuel regulation, ignition, etc. without which the system can't work. The calls for pure unregulated capitalism are about as intelligent as demands for pure unthrottled 4-stroke engines. Unfortunately, while the latter would be ignored by any engineer, the former is sometimes taken seriously enough to actually try to implement, leading for example to our current economic foes.
You are looking at this the wrong way around. This treaty isn't something intended to force the politicians against their will; it's something the politicians can use as an excuse when passing unjust and unpopular laws to help their corporate masters.
Except that they don't. If your boycott works, then Hollywood will simply blame it on piracy and lobby the Congress to put a levy on empty DVDs, hard disks, ISPs and such, to compensate them for lost sales.
Once you get to a position of power, you are basically invincible, and can basically parasite away at society's expense without doing anything useful. Large corporations are in such a position; just look at the bailouts for an example. That adds a dimension of bitter irony to right-wingers complaints about "wellfare queens" and such, when it's their own pet corporations that are the true harmful parasites.
What's "new" in a malicious secretive dictatorship?
BTW, I love how your comment was marked "redundant": "Copyright cartels are planning to take over the world? No shit, Sherlock" :).
Actually, since your data was there first, the attacker could not replace it - the portion of his file that hashed to the same value would be replaced with your data, not the other way around. He could read it, but he'd have to know it already in order to know the hash. In order to attack, he'd have to anticipate what you're going to store, and get there first.
Certainly. No one's arguing against authors having rights. On the contrary, we're arguing about what rights the readers have; for example, I'm wondering why I should be forced to honor the author's wishes? Shouldn't I be able to choose?
Now let's see how many responses claiming that the author being unable to force me to obey his terms means I've forced him to release his work do I get...
Good thing that computer technology is getting to the point where making your own movies with nice special effects is quite possible, if still needlessly difficult. The main problem nowadays is not graphics rendering, but UI and voice acting. Those need to be solved, but once they have been, Hollywood is done for.