Then the question is incorrectly phrased in two ways. Firstly, it omits the fact that there are 100 families all with two children only and that the parent concerned is a parent in one of these families. Secondly, the question is about whether or not one has guessed correctly, not what the child actually is.
Actually, I'm going to give a less glib answer now. Somebody tell me if it's wrong. The whole thing hinges on firstly, the other child being 50:50 boy or girl (we'll ignore twins, triplets, etc. and that society generally has a slight gender imbalance) and secondly, this business about the possible ordering of the children: (boy,girl),(boy,boy),(girl,boy). The thing is, that whilst the first probability is relevant, the second one is entirely contingent on the first and has no bearing of itself. The correct possibilities are:
Other child a boy (one sub-possibility: boy-boy, at 100%)
Other child a girl (two sub-possibilities: girl-boy and boy-girl, at 50%/50%)
So the probabilities for the girl-boy and the boy-girl are actually 25% each, adding up to 50%, so it's still 50:50 whether it's a boy or a girl. These people seem to have just taken three permutations and said that they have equal probabilities with no foundation for saying so.
But yeah, I was referring to the Antarctica part of the post, not Australia generally. Though I didn't realise it was quite as lateral to the Sahara as that.
North Africa is a bit closer to the Equator than Antarctica. Certainly you'd reap benefits in the Antarctic Summer with those long days, but I don't know that you'd want to go without power through the Winter. Steady and reliable is often better than super bursts, especially when it comes to power generation. Still, I saw some really nice solar tower projects planned for Australia. Anyone know what happened to them?
Bollocks. The US is happy to keep burning its way through its vasdt, cheap and polluting coal supplies. If anyone was protesting on the grounds of tortoises, they were doing it on behalf of the coal industry. The environmentally minded want us off coal and onto nuclear or renewable power as fast as possible.
I suspect a lot of the politicians voting through these laws are old people who haven't really taken up Internet usage. They have people who bring them printed out reports and do the typing up of their notes for them. They get their news from papers or television and they communicate with their friends by meeting up or telephone. For people like this, it may not have even sunk in that Internet is a part of people's everyday communication with each other and that's what they're snooping on. They probably think of communicating by Internet as some sort of aberration or tool for criminal behaviour. After all, it's a method of communication and socialising used by other people.
True, but I'm objecting to the statement made that it is obvious that a PDF ought to cost the same as a book
What statement? I wrote: "The value of a book or a song or a film is not in the effort it takes to "arrange the bits". It is in the information. For you to say that the value of a novel is suddenly less because I bought it as a PDF rather than a book, is obviously wrong. For the reference books I have bought, the value of the electronic version, being searchable, is actually increased."
To clarify, books and PDFs have advantages and disadvantages over each other, and those are going to vary from person to person. Want to carry a book with you to read? Maybe print is nicer. Need to carry a dozen or more reference books or you want a selection of novels to read? Digital is suddenly a lot more portable. When I said that it's obviously wrong to say the value of a book is suddenly less because it is a PDF, that doesn't logically mean that it obviously can't be; it's to say that it's doesn't have to be, or that it necessarily should be. Obviously if a product in some format is worth less to you, then you pay less for it or try to. That's fair. If you end up paying more for it then it's obviously worth that much to you or you wouldn't have bought it. A buyer and a seller agree on a price and exchange things. If one party doesn't agree then there's no exchange and the other must adjust their prices or walk. Digital production allows one party to adjust their prices more easily so maybe you bargain harder and say: "no, I wont pay as much for the PDF or the MP3" and you find it gets sold for less. And indeed that's what happens. But for one party in the negotiation to say the other party gets no say, that they'll just take what they want, destroys everything. And it's certainly a stupid argument of the OP's to try and justify that by saying the value of something is determined entirely by the cost of reproduction and therefore he has a right to the other parties goods if he can reproduce it without cost. The principle of his argument is that if he can take something, he has a right to it. It's the mentality of a three year old.
So, yes, a PDF does have less intrinsic value than a book from my point of view.
But only from your point of view and none of your reasons have anything to do with the ease of reproduction. The GP is arguing that these products should be free because they can be easily copied. That actually is what he's saying.
Well the semantic mistake you made, is just by the by. It's a pet peeve of mine. Ignore that part of the post if you like. But as regards a strawman, I have made none. You are putting forward that the ease of reproducing digital copies negates the value of the product because it costs the company doing it next to nothing. I'm pointing out that the value of a product doesn't depend on how easy or hard it is to copy. That's not a strawman, that's a correction.
You'll note that I directly addressed the argument of what you posted. You didn't address what I was saying at all, you just claimed (falsely) that I'd made a strawman. Which makes your post nothing but an ad hominem. If you want to debate, address my argument. If you're offended by my using the word stupid about your argument, I'm afraid you'll have to live with that for as long as your argument depends on saying a product has no value if its easy to copy.
My point is that it's one thing to copy a book. It takes time, resources, etc. It does not take time, resources, etc. to copy digital anything.
I could frankly care less what's in the content of the book.
Firstly, you mean that you "couldn't" care less about the content of the book. Secondly, your argument that the content of a book is irrelevant and that it is the difficulty of reproducing it that is significant in terms of value, is unutterably stupid.
So... you are perfectly okay with a company making as many free copies of their product as they want and making the same profit on each one as if they meticulously handcrafted each bit, but you are not okay with a user making as many free copies of the same object?
That is absurd. The value of a book or a song or a film is not in the effort it takes to "arrange the bits". It is in the information. For you to say that the value of a novel is suddenly less because I bought it as a PDF rather than a book, is obviously wrong. For the reference books I have bought, the value of the electronic version, being searchable, is actually increased. If people don't want to buy something at a given price, then they're not forced to. That's the negotiation that goes on between the seller and the buyer. But if the buyer just takes what they want and removes the power of the buyer to negotiate, then it just collapses.
I don't get what contradiction you think you're highlighting by saying "I'm okay with the producer copying things and selling them, but not others copying and distributing them for free." Yes, that's my position. All this goes for software, music, movies as well as books.
: everybody keeps harping on that particular strawman as if establishing that he committed a crime is the end of the story.
Ah, but you forget that a large percentage of Americans have a very absolutist point of view. Once they've established that a wrong has been done, they proceed immediately to the position that they should be hit with every punishment the human mind can devise. At that point discussion ceases and they simply sit there repeating "can't do the time, don't do the crime" in a permanent loop.
So if the impact of a local library on sales is 0.5%, then the impact of "an infinite library with infinite copies for infinite lengths of time with no cost to the user" might be, what? Infinitely greater than 0.5% ?
I don't get these arguments people trot out that work on the principle of "if one person doing something doesn't cause a big harm, then a vastly larger amount of people doing so vastly more efficiently can't cause a big harm". It seems dubious in some way that I just can't quite put my finger on...
Hell, I'm a man in the street with no industry ties and I think the judges are woefully misguided. Lending a book I've purchased to people within my social circle is not similar to sharing the electronic version of that book with an unlimited number of people online. One, the numbers are vastly different. Two, I am not transferring possession of a single item, restricting its use to one person at a time, instead I am replicating that possession an unlimited number of times and without limiting the use of it to a single active user. Three, I am advertising the product to the whole world.
Judges in Spain say that sharing online is similar to lending the item to my friends? These are demonstrable and large differences. Judges in Spain must be drunk off their arses.
Yeah, I know it was TBL's point. It's mine, saying what the packet of crisps metaphor really suggests, I think. I agree with you about the difficulty of implementing a "semantic web". But TBL is an academic in a tall tower, very far removed from the coal face of actually trying to code up some of this stuff. I think when we do start reaching the point of a semantic web, we're going to have to come up with some very clever ways of keeping bias out of the system (i.e. your people trying to game the system).
Dont get me wrong, I think it's far more stable than Windows 7, but it's not perfect and there are big enough "oopsies" that they need to fix them and release 10.04.1 right away.
Okay. I'm fine with anyone liking Ubuntu (though I use Gentoo myself and my Ubuntu install is actually Kubuntu because I prefer KDE). But I have had fewer problems with Windows 7 than I've had with Ubuntu. Windows 7 has become my preferred operating system for vanilla tasks like word processing, etc. Excel, OneNote, Word. Like 'em all since the latest version of Office came out. Top stuff. I wouldn't want to develop on Windows and I don't. Linux is what I use for anything remotely likely coding - even web-design, and Linux is the backbone of my home network (i.e. my backup and media server). But Windows 7 has been excellent for me so far and most definitely *not* unstable.
Well as it's already spoiled for you, I might as well look at his analogy further. I'm not sure exactly what point he thinks he's making here, but what it says to me is that people don't look at the ingredients list or where things come from. They just look at the branding on the front. That's important for the minority of groups that actually produce content on the Internet. Nobody will think of you. They'll just see Yahoo or Google or Gizmodo or whatever slapped on the front of what you make and that's as far as it goes. You don't have to do anything other than package up other people's ingredients and sell it as your own to make a profit. Just ask Slashdot.;)
Best not. The government doesn't like people being able to look after themselves. Makes it feel a bit insecure. Better to remain ignorant and helpless and depend on the government to look after you. (They wont, mind you, but they react very badly to being doubted).
We in the UK aren't facing an 'epidemic of knife crime', either. It was just the Daily Mail looking for something to get excited about and the Labour government looking for more reasons to justify whatever they wanted to do.
Though this isn't me arguing against gun ownership, it's just trying to strip away hysteria and media manipulation.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope someone doesn't get in trouble for this. It's pretty funny and harmless.
Then the question is incorrectly phrased in two ways. Firstly, it omits the fact that there are 100 families all with two children only and that the parent concerned is a parent in one of these families. Secondly, the question is about whether or not one has guessed correctly, not what the child actually is.
Actually, I'm going to give a less glib answer now. Somebody tell me if it's wrong. The whole thing hinges on firstly, the other child being 50:50 boy or girl (we'll ignore twins, triplets, etc. and that society generally has a slight gender imbalance) and secondly, this business about the possible ordering of the children: (boy,girl),(boy,boy),(girl,boy). The thing is, that whilst the first probability is relevant, the second one is entirely contingent on the first and has no bearing of itself. The correct possibilities are:
Other child a boy (one sub-possibility: boy-boy, at 100%)
Other child a girl (two sub-possibilities: girl-boy and boy-girl, at 50%/50%)
So the probabilities for the girl-boy and the boy-girl are actually 25% each, adding up to 50%, so it's still 50:50 whether it's a boy or a girl. These people seem to have just taken three permutations and said that they have equal probabilities with no foundation for saying so.
Bah. It's a 50:50 chance - we all know this. Clearly what this demonstrates is merely that the laws of mathematics are wrong!
*Raises fist* Mercator! You fooled me again!!!
But yeah, I was referring to the Antarctica part of the post, not Australia generally. Though I didn't realise it was quite as lateral to the Sahara as that.
You would be dead by 30.
North Africa is a bit closer to the Equator than Antarctica. Certainly you'd reap benefits in the Antarctic Summer with those long days, but I don't know that you'd want to go without power through the Winter. Steady and reliable is often better than super bursts, especially when it comes to power generation. Still, I saw some really nice solar tower projects planned for Australia. Anyone know what happened to them?
Bollocks. The US is happy to keep burning its way through its vasdt, cheap and polluting coal supplies. If anyone was protesting on the grounds of tortoises, they were doing it on behalf of the coal industry. The environmentally minded want us off coal and onto nuclear or renewable power as fast as possible.
I suspect a lot of the politicians voting through these laws are old people who haven't really taken up Internet usage. They have people who bring them printed out reports and do the typing up of their notes for them. They get their news from papers or television and they communicate with their friends by meeting up or telephone. For people like this, it may not have even sunk in that Internet is a part of people's everyday communication with each other and that's what they're snooping on. They probably think of communicating by Internet as some sort of aberration or tool for criminal behaviour. After all, it's a method of communication and socialising used by other people.
What statement? I wrote: "The value of a book or a song or a film is not in the effort it takes to "arrange the bits". It is in the information. For you to say that the value of a novel is suddenly less because I bought it as a PDF rather than a book, is obviously wrong. For the reference books I have bought, the value of the electronic version, being searchable, is actually increased."
To clarify, books and PDFs have advantages and disadvantages over each other, and those are going to vary from person to person. Want to carry a book with you to read? Maybe print is nicer. Need to carry a dozen or more reference books or you want a selection of novels to read? Digital is suddenly a lot more portable. When I said that it's obviously wrong to say the value of a book is suddenly less because it is a PDF, that doesn't logically mean that it obviously can't be; it's to say that it's doesn't have to be, or that it necessarily should be. Obviously if a product in some format is worth less to you, then you pay less for it or try to. That's fair. If you end up paying more for it then it's obviously worth that much to you or you wouldn't have bought it. A buyer and a seller agree on a price and exchange things. If one party doesn't agree then there's no exchange and the other must adjust their prices or walk. Digital production allows one party to adjust their prices more easily so maybe you bargain harder and say: "no, I wont pay as much for the PDF or the MP3" and you find it gets sold for less. And indeed that's what happens. But for one party in the negotiation to say the other party gets no say, that they'll just take what they want, destroys everything. And it's certainly a stupid argument of the OP's to try and justify that by saying the value of something is determined entirely by the cost of reproduction and therefore he has a right to the other parties goods if he can reproduce it without cost. The principle of his argument is that if he can take something, he has a right to it. It's the mentality of a three year old.
But only from your point of view and none of your reasons have anything to do with the ease of reproduction. The GP is arguing that these products should be free because they can be easily copied. That actually is what he's saying.
Makes note to add to list of arguments against the kindle next time it comes up on Slashdot. ;)
Thanks,
H.
Well the semantic mistake you made, is just by the by. It's a pet peeve of mine. Ignore that part of the post if you like. But as regards a strawman, I have made none. You are putting forward that the ease of reproducing digital copies negates the value of the product because it costs the company doing it next to nothing. I'm pointing out that the value of a product doesn't depend on how easy or hard it is to copy. That's not a strawman, that's a correction.
You'll note that I directly addressed the argument of what you posted. You didn't address what I was saying at all, you just claimed (falsely) that I'd made a strawman. Which makes your post nothing but an ad hominem. If you want to debate, address my argument. If you're offended by my using the word stupid about your argument, I'm afraid you'll have to live with that for as long as your argument depends on saying a product has no value if its easy to copy.
Firstly, you mean that you "couldn't" care less about the content of the book. Secondly, your argument that the content of a book is irrelevant and that it is the difficulty of reproducing it that is significant in terms of value, is unutterably stupid.
That is absurd. The value of a book or a song or a film is not in the effort it takes to "arrange the bits". It is in the information. For you to say that the value of a novel is suddenly less because I bought it as a PDF rather than a book, is obviously wrong. For the reference books I have bought, the value of the electronic version, being searchable, is actually increased. If people don't want to buy something at a given price, then they're not forced to. That's the negotiation that goes on between the seller and the buyer. But if the buyer just takes what they want and removes the power of the buyer to negotiate, then it just collapses.
I don't get what contradiction you think you're highlighting by saying "I'm okay with the producer copying things and selling them, but not others copying and distributing them for free." Yes, that's my position. All this goes for software, music, movies as well as books.
Ah, but you forget that a large percentage of Americans have a very absolutist point of view. Once they've established that a wrong has been done, they proceed immediately to the position that they should be hit with every punishment the human mind can devise. At that point discussion ceases and they simply sit there repeating "can't do the time, don't do the crime" in a permanent loop.
So if the impact of a local library on sales is 0.5%, then the impact of "an infinite library with infinite copies for infinite lengths of time with no cost to the user" might be, what? Infinitely greater than 0.5% ?
I don't get these arguments people trot out that work on the principle of "if one person doing something doesn't cause a big harm, then a vastly larger amount of people doing so vastly more efficiently can't cause a big harm". It seems dubious in some way that I just can't quite put my finger on...
Hell, I'm a man in the street with no industry ties and I think the judges are woefully misguided. Lending a book I've purchased to people within my social circle is not similar to sharing the electronic version of that book with an unlimited number of people online. One, the numbers are vastly different. Two, I am not transferring possession of a single item, restricting its use to one person at a time, instead I am replicating that possession an unlimited number of times and without limiting the use of it to a single active user. Three, I am advertising the product to the whole world.
Judges in Spain say that sharing online is similar to lending the item to my friends? These are demonstrable and large differences. Judges in Spain must be drunk off their arses.
Take the keyboard off, put Windows 7 on it, and I'd buy it. Not otherwise, though.
(5pts) Is the above statement...
A. Always right. B. Never right. C. Sometimes right.
Yeah, I know it was TBL's point. It's mine, saying what the packet of crisps metaphor really suggests, I think. I agree with you about the difficulty of implementing a "semantic web". But TBL is an academic in a tall tower, very far removed from the coal face of actually trying to code up some of this stuff. I think when we do start reaching the point of a semantic web, we're going to have to come up with some very clever ways of keeping bias out of the system (i.e. your people trying to game the system).
Okay. I'm fine with anyone liking Ubuntu (though I use Gentoo myself and my Ubuntu install is actually Kubuntu because I prefer KDE). But I have had fewer problems with Windows 7 than I've had with Ubuntu. Windows 7 has become my preferred operating system for vanilla tasks like word processing, etc. Excel, OneNote, Word. Like 'em all since the latest version of Office came out. Top stuff. I wouldn't want to develop on Windows and I don't. Linux is what I use for anything remotely likely coding - even web-design, and Linux is the backbone of my home network (i.e. my backup and media server). But Windows 7 has been excellent for me so far and most definitely *not* unstable.
Well as it's already spoiled for you, I might as well look at his analogy further. I'm not sure exactly what point he thinks he's making here, but what it says to me is that people don't look at the ingredients list or where things come from. They just look at the branding on the front. That's important for the minority of groups that actually produce content on the Internet. Nobody will think of you. They'll just see Yahoo or Google or Gizmodo or whatever slapped on the front of what you make and that's as far as it goes. You don't have to do anything other than package up other people's ingredients and sell it as your own to make a profit. Just ask Slashdot. ;)
Best not. The government doesn't like people being able to look after themselves. Makes it feel a bit insecure. Better to remain ignorant and helpless and depend on the government to look after you. (They wont, mind you, but they react very badly to being doubted).
We in the UK aren't facing an 'epidemic of knife crime', either. It was just the Daily Mail looking for something to get excited about and the Labour government looking for more reasons to justify whatever they wanted to do.
Though this isn't me arguing against gun ownership, it's just trying to strip away hysteria and media manipulation.