If I recall correctly, the age given for the Mount St Helens lava was "1 million years, plus or minus a couple of mill". This suggests that the dating is in no way wrong, just not sufficiently fine-grained. When you consider that that's the same dating we use to trace backwards for billions of years, this is not surprising. And it's not the same dating as is used for the majority of fossil record stuff (I think).
Well, that depends how you define species. The standard scientific definition of distinction between species is of two populations that can't produce fertile offspring (or any offspring, for a slightly stricter version). My dad (who used to be a biochemist) has personally observed speciation of fruitflies in the lab, by putting them in different environments.
Problem is that, when something like this is pointed out to religious folk, they just respond with "ah, but that's still small-scale stuff. We're looking at the large scale". Not unsurprisingly, I have never seen "large scale" defined in any way more rigorous than "whatever would take too long to duplicate in the lab".
Actually, as it stands, ID is a dodgy mathematical theorem masquerading as a scientific hypothesis. It is not just theistic evolution - that says that God might have done some of the grunt work, whereas ID says that God (or alternative all-powerful entity) must have chipped in because it's mathematically impossible for certain structures to evolve.
I haven't looked too deeply into the maths yet (although as a maths student I'll probably check it out eventually), but the wikipedia summary suggests that Dembski et al are making some extremely dodgy assumptions.
Did a student just get visited by the feds for requestion Mao's Red Book from the university library? Did a toddler just get refused access to a plane on the basis that their name was on the ultrasecret no-fly list? Did my favourite guitar tab site just drop offline thanks to the unprecedented powers being granted to Big Business?
I wouldn't call Bush a fascist because I don't think he's bad enough for it not to be a waste of a good label, but I can see how other people could disagree.
Not really. It's comparatively rare that policemen have to handle anything that Kevlar can't take. The military, on the other hand, get hit by all sorts - shaped charges, for example. When was the last time a police car got hit by a shaped charge?
How about the curious? There's still a massive great big country out there of which a decent number base their life on that little red book. As far as chinese Communists are concerned (and I don't believe Communism is illegal in the US any more) that book is the Bible. Although it probably has marginally less brutality in than the Good Book.
The point of government is to run businesses? Not to kill terrorists or jail murderers and pedophiles? Times are a changin'.
Well, more generally (and depending on which philosopher you speak to), the point of government is to supply goods with high positive externalities (justice, defence, streetlights, all that jazz). It's generally accepted, I believe, that this incorporates a degree of control over businesses acting within its jurisdiction
Of course it's silly, but it was suggested that monopolies can "dictate" prices. Not very good word usage.
You're quite right. Does appending "to a far greater extent than usual" to the end of it improve matters?
IE does suck. I'm using Firefox right now.
How would you react if Microsoft pulled a DR-DOS - "broke" their software specifically so that Firefox wouldn't work? Would you consider it their right as a corporation to do so? I don't believe that there's any necessity for a company to allow others to interoperate with their products. Unless, that is, the company is a monopoly - but I believe you've just been arguing against laws that treat monopolies any more harshly than other companies. Goodbye Firefox...
Are you saying that companies should be treated as people when it comes to morality? The whole point of treating corporations as people in the first place was (iirc) economic - I'd say the same applies to our means of legal control over them.
Anyway, a similar principle applies with human beings. If someone has power, we try to ensure that it's balanced. Police and other public servants have oversight committees. Presidents can be impeached. Abusive parents get their kids taken away. None of this applies to people who aren't police, presidents or parents but, once they put themselves into a position where the balance of power is heavily weighted towards them, a counterweight is essential.
The situation is exactly the same with Microsoft. It has exceptional power over the industry, so it's perfectly reasonable to impose exceptional limits on its behaviour to ensure that it can't abuse that power. If it can't maintain its dominant position subject to those controls then competition will flourish and we won't have to apply those controls any more. Everyone wins but Microsoft. If it can maintain its dominant position then we'll know it really deserves to be there - it must be innovative, efficient and all that good stuff. Everyone wins, including Microsoft.
Wouldn't you find it arrogant if other people told you how to run your business?
That's what government does all day, every day. That's the point of government. They told Enron how to run its business (or, rather, how not to run its business). In the UK, they're telling the telcos (classic monopoly here) how to run their business vis-a-vis local loop unbundling. They keep telling me that the running of my business should include giving them tax. I don't really see any conceptual problem with them telling Microsoft that, since they're top dog, they're no longer allowed to play silly buggers.
The possibility of competition is what keeps them going. Otherwise, they would have done exactly what the slippery slope of your theory suggests they would do - they would charge $100 million per license. Why not? After all, monopolies can "dictate" whatever price they want.
If Microsoft controls the formats that the majority of electronic data is stored in, there is no possibility of competition - the loss of access to their own documents would destroy businesses if they tried to switch. This reduces the elasticity of demand (if I recall correctly from my GCSE Economics class), which allows them to bump up prices and/or provide less quality*. It doesn't allow them to go to the $100 million per license mark because the market won't bear that (and it's frankly a rather silly suggestion), but it does allow them to go many times above the "natural price" of the product, and to invest less in the quality of the product, with minimal repercussions. This does no-one but Microsoft any good.
* For example, IE 7 is finally coming out, and has cool new (to Microsoft anyway) features, now that they have Firefox to compete with.
Equality under the law (as applied to companies, at least) is a means to an end. That end is a healthy marketplace - in the majority of cases, discrimination does no-one any good in the long term. By contrast, in the case of de jure or de facto monopolies (since its investment in patents began, MS is both), discrimination is absolutely necessary to give other companies even the slightest chance.
This goes double since the computer industry, like many others, is naturally inclined to monopoly. There would be no such worry in, say, the vacuum cleaner market, but traps such as proprietary file formats and protocols make entry into the market inordinately difficult for newcomers. In this case, Microsoft is leveraging that natural blockage - it makes it absolutely essential to computer vendors that they be able to install Windows on computers, and Microsoft can use that to deny them the ability to also install other operating systems. This does no-one other than Microsoft any good, and in fact massively harms the IT industry by allowing Microsoft to systematically obliterate their competition.
History shows quite strongly that market breakdown must be compensated for by government. This is a textbook example of that situation.
Yes it is. They all have agreements with Microsoft which means they lose discounts if they sell systems without Windows on.
You would not believe how hard it is these days to get a laptop without an operating system preinstalled. There are precisely two companies doing this in the whole of the UK, compared to several hundred (rough estimate) laptop+windows vendors/resellers.
You wouldn't be able to do it on hosted webspace - those things usually only allow you to use the http daemon provided. You'd need to actually rent a server, which is usually quite expensive.
For SSL proxying, you'd need to use something like this - never set one up, but it looks about right. Of course, the server would need to be outside the UK to avoid getting logged. If you don't want to go to the trouble of setting up your own, you could try something like FreeNet*, Tor*, JAP** or just a random anonymous SSL proxy (Proxomitron or MultiProxy might prove useful here). If you're a little less paranoid, you could use a CGI proxy.
* Warning: using these systems may mean that child porn is passing through your system, iirc.
** I know that at one point this system was discovered to have a government backdoor in it, but I think they cleaned up their act.
Sadly, in the UK, we have a nice little law (with lots of nice little holes in it) that basically says "give us your password. And your private key. And any session keys you may have used. What, you don't have that information any more? OK, see you in two years when you get out of jail". Fun.
Yes, the error you spotted was indeed a third error - a transitional fossil from when I realised that maybe CD prices had gone down since I bought my last non-magnatune.com* one
For the record, the other two that I noticed were:
1) the assumption that "ethical" downloaders would download as many albums per capita as unethical downloaders. If this is not the case it throws the 5 percents off slightly.
2) the assumption that "ethical" labels would charge as much as unethical labels. If this is not the case, the 1500% is probably wrong.
* Yes I am mentioning these guys a lot. No I'm not an astroturfer, I just like their motto.
Does it matter? As an (apparently) wise person posted before me, if they won't pay for it, they shouldn't have it. It's only "too expensive" if too few people buy it.
Oh, I agree. But the focus of the BSA's arguments here is the economic damage caused by copyright infringement, and I was attempting to point out why that is quite possibly bollocks.
Would you shell out big bucks to see a (insert band name here) consert if you hadn't heard any of their music?
You're making my point for me here, I feel - distributing two thousand copies online will, by this logic, do more for the artist's welfare than distributing one thousand copies via a rapacious record label.
Nothing "costs too much" if enough people buy it to make its production profitable.
Unless what's being "bought" (actually it's moving closer to being seen as licensing) is Intellectual Property, in which case the unit cost of production is practically zero and the monopoly owners (the record labels, for example) get to set their own price. In which case, production will always be profitable once you've actually recorded/created the damn thing, and increased demand will in no way bring the price down as the monopoly owner is relying on artificial scarcity to boost the price.
If $15 is too much for a CD, don't buy it. Don't steal it. Don't infringe its copyright. Leave the people who will pay that much in peace, and watch as billions are saved in legal costs by your attempting to save yourself a few hundred.
As I say, I agree - I no longer illegally copy music. That doesn't invalidate the aforementioned hypothesis that the BSA is speaking out of its collective ass, which was rather the point of this thread.
True, there are a number of people with the "gimme" mentality. However, there are a few other factors to consider:
1) Would these misers have been willing to splash out for the product anyway? Probably not. For example, a copyright infringer with 1,000 albums on his/her hard drive would never have been able to afford more than a couple of percent of that. In fact, being miserly, they probably wouldn't have bought more than five albums, if that, coming to a grand total of $15*5 = $75 lost sales at absolute maximum. Of course, the RIAA would count this as $15*1,000 = £15,000 of lost sales.
2) To what extent is this countered by the increased exposure of the target demographic to the product? Say the above miserly copyright infringer uploads 2,000 copies of assorted albums to other people. Now say just 5% of recipients are honest (probably a low figure), and go out and buy just 5% of the albums they receive. The money spent is then $15*2,000*0.05*0.05 = $75 - cancelling out the original "loss" to the copyright holder. (No I didn't fudge my numbers, it was just a flukey estimate)
3) (This one applies to music) How much of this actually goes to the artist? Since the misers who are forced to buy albums if the filesharing networks close aren't exactly publically-minded citizens, they'll just get their albums from the stores. By Courtney Love's arithmetic, the record label gets about $50 profit from the $75 spent, whilst the artists get a total of $2.38 profit. Now, if the albums are downloaded and then paid for, the recipients are likely to be individuals who are sympathetic to the plight of musicians, and hence will often donate via a band's site or buy from an ethical label, as I did just last night (despite being a poor student). Result: the artist is likely to get at least 1/2 the loot, a 1500% increase over the other system
4) (This one applies to software) What happens when people want to use a superb tool like Lightwave in a professional context? They have to license it, or recommend that it be licensed. So, by not shooting down the bored teenage downloader who'd never be able to afford this $800 software, Newtek is able to sell several copies to the company he/she ends up working for. It's like farming only not.
In conclusion, the positive side-effects of wide-ranging copyright infringement will often outweigh the negative side-effects, especially in industries where the content producers are getting shafted or where the product is most lucratively licensed in a professional context. There's probably an equivalent argument for films but my brain's dead.
Speaking of ruptured braincells, there's at least two errors in the above calculations. I'm too tired to figure out how to correct them, so I'll just say: please give bonus points to anyone who finds three mistakes:)
My understanding is that most of the bloat is inherited from StarOffice, and that the open source volunteers (who have carte blanche to explore the entire codebase, and can thus recognise how bad it is) have been desperately trying to hack it away. Turning an overgrown code jungle into something that not just a mother could love is no joke.
This understanding could indeed be wrong - it's been a while since this issue came up - so I'd appreciate it if anyone with personal experience of the project could comment.
Get it right we punks are all anti-creationist anti-intelligent design.
My sincere apologies for unintentionally slandering Punk and its adherents. I'm not sure redneck is the right word either - there are intelligent, educated atheists who self-identify as rednecks. How about we just stick with 'assholes'?
Who knows? I don't, but I feel sorry for all involved... the militant religious, the militant atheists, and stupids who have to put up with such a politicized anti-Evolution anti-religious crap.
I agree wholeheartedly on demographic #3, but I can't remember any instances in the news of committed young atheists beating up pastors for their comments about Dawkins. And I sure as hell don't feel sorry for the assholes who pulled this stunt. Equally, I'm not particularly weeping tears for the less literally militant religious folk who are attempting to shove creationism into schoolkids in the guise of science - to them I say "get your own damn credibility".
I would have downmodded the parent (yay! Mod points!) but sadly there isn't actually a moderation option for 'bollocks'. You'll note that, of the parent's links, one is just Mirecki refusing to speak to a fundamentalist journalist (this is what we call "following the lawyer's advice", and from the tone of the subsequent interview I can only say that I would have done the same). The second is a Conservative activist incisively pointing out that not all information on brutal beatings is immediately made available to the public (or it would be incisive if that's what he realised he was doing) and suggesting that the request for Mirecki's resignation (which iirc occurred before the beating) indicates he's a shifty sort of fellow.
This is complete trash. It barely even suggests that Mirecki lied, let alone naturally pointing towards that conclusion. There are no inconsistencies. There is no need for double-quotes round the word 'beating'. There is only a respected member of the academic community, who planned a controversial course (and then made a stupid comment about it on an obscure mailing list), getting beaten up by two punks and a heavy object for suggesting that their beloved Creationism might, just possibly, be classed as a 'myth' in Religious Studies circles (which happens to be factually accurate, and wouldn't even count as tactless if he hadn't made the aforesaid dumb remark). This is unjustifiable and I'm mildly shocked to see anyone other than the monosyllabic perpetrators fighting Mirecki over this.
More, I'm deeply worried by the chilling effect this will have on other courses similarly critical of Intelligent Design and Creationism. Evolutionary biologists critique evolution every day - why should ID and 'scientific creationism' be exempt merely by dint of being scientifically vacuous?
Actually I think the GP is onto something here (or at least it's the first even remotely plausible definition for Web 2.0 I've heard). The answers to your question would presumably be:
Those games (assuming you're talking about java games here) are indeed Web 2.0-ish, but they're enclosed parts of the site. Sufficiently active (can't think of a better word) Flash sites also count, except that Flash is evil (standards? We don't need no stinkin' standards!). But we'll know that Web 2.0 for games is here when we start seeing things like this all over (link requires Firefox 1.5 or similarly stupidly advanced browser).
Most of the websites I've seen just present you with a few (hundred) pages of magazine substitute and an order form substitute. Personalised, yes, but not really anything without print-based substitutes. A shop that let you browse virtual shelves or (seamlessly) fire questions at shopping assistants would probably be worthy of the Web 2.0 label.
If I recall correctly, there's some debate about whether the formatting process itself constitutes a circumvention measure. Ah, what a wonderful world we live in.
They'll definitely be in the fourth ring of hell, reserved for the prodigal (I have no idea what this means in context) and avaricious. It's just after the Styx, iirc/
Slashdot Mirror
If I recall correctly, the age given for the Mount St Helens lava was "1 million years, plus or minus a couple of mill". This suggests that the dating is in no way wrong, just not sufficiently fine-grained. When you consider that that's the same dating we use to trace backwards for billions of years, this is not surprising. And it's not the same dating as is used for the majority of fossil record stuff (I think).
Well, that depends how you define species. The standard scientific definition of distinction between species is of two populations that can't produce fertile offspring (or any offspring, for a slightly stricter version). My dad (who used to be a biochemist) has personally observed speciation of fruitflies in the lab, by putting them in different environments.
Problem is that, when something like this is pointed out to religious folk, they just respond with "ah, but that's still small-scale stuff. We're looking at the large scale". Not unsurprisingly, I have never seen "large scale" defined in any way more rigorous than "whatever would take too long to duplicate in the lab".
Actually, as it stands, ID is a dodgy mathematical theorem masquerading as a scientific hypothesis. It is not just theistic evolution - that says that God might have done some of the grunt work, whereas ID says that God (or alternative all-powerful entity) must have chipped in because it's mathematically impossible for certain structures to evolve.
I haven't looked too deeply into the maths yet (although as a maths student I'll probably check it out eventually), but the wikipedia summary suggests that Dembski et al are making some extremely dodgy assumptions.
Sadly it's maths based on some rather dodgy premises (google "Shallit and Elsberry" for more info) so it can't be taught in a maths class either.
Did a student just get visited by the feds for requestion Mao's Red Book from the university library? Did a toddler just get refused access to a plane on the basis that their name was on the ultrasecret no-fly list? Did my favourite guitar tab site just drop offline thanks to the unprecedented powers being granted to Big Business?
I wouldn't call Bush a fascist because I don't think he's bad enough for it not to be a waste of a good label, but I can see how other people could disagree.
Not really. It's comparatively rare that policemen have to handle anything that Kevlar can't take. The military, on the other hand, get hit by all sorts - shaped charges, for example. When was the last time a police car got hit by a shaped charge?
How about the curious? There's still a massive great big country out there of which a decent number base their life on that little red book. As far as chinese Communists are concerned (and I don't believe Communism is illegal in the US any more) that book is the Bible. Although it probably has marginally less brutality in than the Good Book.
Are you saying that companies should be treated as people when it comes to morality? The whole point of treating corporations as people in the first place was (iirc) economic - I'd say the same applies to our means of legal control over them.
Anyway, a similar principle applies with human beings. If someone has power, we try to ensure that it's balanced. Police and other public servants have oversight committees. Presidents can be impeached. Abusive parents get their kids taken away. None of this applies to people who aren't police, presidents or parents but, once they put themselves into a position where the balance of power is heavily weighted towards them, a counterweight is essential.
The situation is exactly the same with Microsoft. It has exceptional power over the industry, so it's perfectly reasonable to impose exceptional limits on its behaviour to ensure that it can't abuse that power. If it can't maintain its dominant position subject to those controls then competition will flourish and we won't have to apply those controls any more. Everyone wins but Microsoft. If it can maintain its dominant position then we'll know it really deserves to be there - it must be innovative, efficient and all that good stuff. Everyone wins, including Microsoft.
* For example, IE 7 is finally coming out, and has cool new (to Microsoft anyway) features, now that they have Firefox to compete with.
Equality under the law (as applied to companies, at least) is a means to an end. That end is a healthy marketplace - in the majority of cases, discrimination does no-one any good in the long term. By contrast, in the case of de jure or de facto monopolies (since its investment in patents began, MS is both), discrimination is absolutely necessary to give other companies even the slightest chance.
This goes double since the computer industry, like many others, is naturally inclined to monopoly. There would be no such worry in, say, the vacuum cleaner market, but traps such as proprietary file formats and protocols make entry into the market inordinately difficult for newcomers. In this case, Microsoft is leveraging that natural blockage - it makes it absolutely essential to computer vendors that they be able to install Windows on computers, and Microsoft can use that to deny them the ability to also install other operating systems. This does no-one other than Microsoft any good, and in fact massively harms the IT industry by allowing Microsoft to systematically obliterate their competition.
History shows quite strongly that market breakdown must be compensated for by government. This is a textbook example of that situation.
Yes it is. They all have agreements with Microsoft which means they lose discounts if they sell systems without Windows on.
You would not believe how hard it is these days to get a laptop without an operating system preinstalled. There are precisely two companies doing this in the whole of the UK, compared to several hundred (rough estimate) laptop+windows vendors/resellers.
You wouldn't be able to do it on hosted webspace - those things usually only allow you to use the http daemon provided. You'd need to actually rent a server, which is usually quite expensive.
For SSL proxying, you'd need to use something like this - never set one up, but it looks about right. Of course, the server would need to be outside the UK to avoid getting logged. If you don't want to go to the trouble of setting up your own, you could try something like FreeNet*, Tor*, JAP** or just a random anonymous SSL proxy (Proxomitron or MultiProxy might prove useful here). If you're a little less paranoid, you could use a CGI proxy.
* Warning: using these systems may mean that child porn is passing through your system, iirc.
** I know that at one point this system was discovered to have a government backdoor in it, but I think they cleaned up their act.
Sadly, in the UK, we have a nice little law (with lots of nice little holes in it) that basically says "give us your password. And your private key. And any session keys you may have used. What, you don't have that information any more? OK, see you in two years when you get out of jail". Fun.
Yes, the error you spotted was indeed a third error - a transitional fossil from when I realised that maybe CD prices had gone down since I bought my last non-magnatune.com* one For the record, the other two that I noticed were: 1) the assumption that "ethical" downloaders would download as many albums per capita as unethical downloaders. If this is not the case it throws the 5 percents off slightly. 2) the assumption that "ethical" labels would charge as much as unethical labels. If this is not the case, the 1500% is probably wrong. * Yes I am mentioning these guys a lot. No I'm not an astroturfer, I just like their motto.
True, there are a number of people with the "gimme" mentality. However, there are a few other factors to consider:
:)
1) Would these misers have been willing to splash out for the product anyway? Probably not. For example, a copyright infringer with 1,000 albums on his/her hard drive would never have been able to afford more than a couple of percent of that. In fact, being miserly, they probably wouldn't have bought more than five albums, if that, coming to a grand total of $15*5 = $75 lost sales at absolute maximum. Of course, the RIAA would count this as $15*1,000 = £15,000 of lost sales.
2) To what extent is this countered by the increased exposure of the target demographic to the product? Say the above miserly copyright infringer uploads 2,000 copies of assorted albums to other people. Now say just 5% of recipients are honest (probably a low figure), and go out and buy just 5% of the albums they receive. The money spent is then $15*2,000*0.05*0.05 = $75 - cancelling out the original "loss" to the copyright holder. (No I didn't fudge my numbers, it was just a flukey estimate)
3) (This one applies to music) How much of this actually goes to the artist? Since the misers who are forced to buy albums if the filesharing networks close aren't exactly publically-minded citizens, they'll just get their albums from the stores. By Courtney Love's arithmetic, the record label gets about $50 profit from the $75 spent, whilst the artists get a total of $2.38 profit. Now, if the albums are downloaded and then paid for, the recipients are likely to be individuals who are sympathetic to the plight of musicians, and hence will often donate via a band's site or buy from an ethical label, as I did just last night (despite being a poor student). Result: the artist is likely to get at least 1/2 the loot, a 1500% increase over the other system
4) (This one applies to software) What happens when people want to use a superb tool like Lightwave in a professional context? They have to license it, or recommend that it be licensed. So, by not shooting down the bored teenage downloader who'd never be able to afford this $800 software, Newtek is able to sell several copies to the company he/she ends up working for. It's like farming only not.
In conclusion, the positive side-effects of wide-ranging copyright infringement will often outweigh the negative side-effects, especially in industries where the content producers are getting shafted or where the product is most lucratively licensed in a professional context. There's probably an equivalent argument for films but my brain's dead.
Speaking of ruptured braincells, there's at least two errors in the above calculations. I'm too tired to figure out how to correct them, so I'll just say: please give bonus points to anyone who finds three mistakes
My understanding is that most of the bloat is inherited from StarOffice, and that the open source volunteers (who have carte blanche to explore the entire codebase, and can thus recognise how bad it is) have been desperately trying to hack it away. Turning an overgrown code jungle into something that not just a mother could love is no joke.
This understanding could indeed be wrong - it's been a while since this issue came up - so I'd appreciate it if anyone with personal experience of the project could comment.
I would have downmodded the parent (yay! Mod points!) but sadly there isn't actually a moderation option for 'bollocks'. You'll note that, of the parent's links, one is just Mirecki refusing to speak to a fundamentalist journalist (this is what we call "following the lawyer's advice", and from the tone of the subsequent interview I can only say that I would have done the same). The second is a Conservative activist incisively pointing out that not all information on brutal beatings is immediately made available to the public (or it would be incisive if that's what he realised he was doing) and suggesting that the request for Mirecki's resignation (which iirc occurred before the beating) indicates he's a shifty sort of fellow.
This is complete trash. It barely even suggests that Mirecki lied, let alone naturally pointing towards that conclusion. There are no inconsistencies. There is no need for double-quotes round the word 'beating'. There is only a respected member of the academic community, who planned a controversial course (and then made a stupid comment about it on an obscure mailing list), getting beaten up by two punks and a heavy object for suggesting that their beloved Creationism might, just possibly, be classed as a 'myth' in Religious Studies circles (which happens to be factually accurate, and wouldn't even count as tactless if he hadn't made the aforesaid dumb remark). This is unjustifiable and I'm mildly shocked to see anyone other than the monosyllabic perpetrators fighting Mirecki over this.
More, I'm deeply worried by the chilling effect this will have on other courses similarly critical of Intelligent Design and Creationism. Evolutionary biologists critique evolution every day - why should ID and 'scientific creationism' be exempt merely by dint of being scientifically vacuous?
If I recall correctly, there's some debate about whether the formatting process itself constitutes a circumvention measure. Ah, what a wonderful world we live in.
They'll definitely be in the fourth ring of hell, reserved for the prodigal (I have no idea what this means in context) and avaricious. It's just after the Styx, iirc/