Although I'm as wary of romanticizing the 'noble savage' as anyone, I have to say that ethnographic evidence bears this out. See for example the essay The Original Affluent Society, by Marshall Sahlins at the University of Chicago.
Anecdotal evidence aside, the anthropological evidence is that people in hunter-gatherer societies had much more leisure time than had previously been assumed. The !Kung-San (Kalahari bushmen) are a modern example of this: they work less than 20 hours a week, but have ample food.
[With conventional media,] somebody's got to take a truck or a car or DHL and get it to another country. There is a brutish kind of awkward distribution system. Not so on the Internet, where some obscure person sitting in a basement can throw up on the Internet a brand new motion picture, and with the click of a button have it go with the speed of light to 6 billion people around the world, instantaneously.
Do you realize that it's not necessary to break the encryption to distribute the contents of a DVD over the internet?
Um....
I don't know [how we'll stop 'pilfering']. All I know is that 18 months from now the technology today will seem very primitive. Technology is just baffling everyone in the celerity with which it's looping, so the answer is, I can't give you an answer. But by God, we're going to find one. We're devoting a lot of resources, with our kinsmen in the copyright arena.
We formed what is called a copyright assembly just two weeks ago...
Do you realize that it's logically impossible ever to have a digital media that's possible to playback but not record? That as long as the information has to pass through my hardware at any point, I can capture it losslessly, and no amount of resources or number of assemblies can change that?
Um....
And that therefore, since there's no way to prevent copies from being made if the users so choose, and there's no way to unmake the internet, that you're entrenching yourself more and more firmly into a completely untenable position from which you'll alienate most of your customers while not making a dime of profit, not to mention trampling on consumer rights that have been established by law?
You have some good points, but they all concern animal experimentation for medical purposes. Keep in mind that we're talking here about squirtguns, not medicine.
It's one thing that say that animal experimentation is sometimes necessary (when human lives are at stake, for example) and another to say that it should always be done. Sometimes, for example, animals are used instead of computer models that are just as good because animals are cheaper.
Even when animal testing is the only way to make sure something works, sometimes the end for which it's being done is pretty dubious. In the cosmetics industry, for example, there's a lot of rabbits being tortured to confirm the obvious proposition that yes, if you rub this stuff into your eyes and leave it in for 10 hours, you'll go blind.
No one disagrees that we should make sure our squirtguns don't maim our kids, but maybe if the only way we can be sure is by torturing animals, we should just go without our squirtguns. Many will want their squirtguns anyway, but you certainly don't have to have "brains [that are] addled" not to.
Boy, am I tired of the unfounded centrality the genome has in the public consciousness. Even most scientists, who should know better, talk as if the genome is the only essential component of life.
"Technically we would need to synthesise a genome and see if it led to a living organism."
Uh, a genome on its own, synthesized or not, will never lead to a living organism! It requires extremely complicated biological machinery to transcribe, process, and then translate the DNA into proteins. This is not a trivial matter. For all our advances in the field of cloning, for example, we still have to stick our manipulated DNA into a naturally produced egg. DNA is a very simple molecule; the rest of the fertilized egg is not be so easy to synthesize.
Being able to build DNA is great, but DNA on its own does nothing! Only when you have DNA wrapped in an elaborate package do you have the possibility of life. Focusing only on the DNA is like believing that once you have a blueprint, you don't need to know anything about tools to build a house.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I'm as wary of romanticizing the 'noble savage' as anyone, I have to say that ethnographic evidence bears this out. See for example the essay The Original Affluent Society, by Marshall Sahlins at the University of Chicago.
Anecdotal evidence aside, the anthropological evidence is that people in hunter-gatherer societies had much more leisure time than had previously been assumed. The !Kung-San (Kalahari bushmen) are a modern example of this: they work less than 20 hours a week, but have ample food.
[With conventional media,] somebody's got to take a truck or a car or DHL and get it to another country. There is a brutish kind of awkward distribution system. Not so on the Internet, where some obscure person sitting in a basement can throw up on the Internet a brand new motion picture, and with the click of a button have it go with the speed of light to 6 billion people around the world, instantaneously.
Do you realize that it's not necessary to break the encryption to distribute the contents of a DVD over the internet?
Um....
I don't know [how we'll stop 'pilfering']. All I know is that 18 months from now the technology today will seem very primitive. Technology is just baffling everyone in the celerity with which it's looping, so the answer is, I can't give you an answer. But by God, we're going to find one. We're devoting a lot of resources, with our kinsmen in the copyright arena.
We formed what is called a copyright assembly just two weeks ago...
Do you realize that it's logically impossible ever to have a digital media that's possible to playback but not record? That as long as the information has to pass through my hardware at any point, I can capture it losslessly, and no amount of resources or number of assemblies can change that?
Um....
And that therefore, since there's no way to prevent copies from being made if the users so choose, and there's no way to unmake the internet, that you're entrenching yourself more and more firmly into a completely untenable position from which you'll alienate most of your customers while not making a dime of profit, not to mention trampling on consumer rights that have been established by law?
Um....
You have some good points, but they all concern animal experimentation for medical purposes. Keep in mind that we're talking here about squirtguns, not medicine.
It's one thing that say that animal experimentation is sometimes necessary (when human lives are at stake, for example) and another to say that it should always be done. Sometimes, for example, animals are used instead of computer models that are just as good because animals are cheaper.
Even when animal testing is the only way to make sure something works, sometimes the end for which it's being done is pretty dubious. In the cosmetics industry, for example, there's a lot of rabbits being tortured to confirm the obvious proposition that yes, if you rub this stuff into your eyes and leave it in for 10 hours, you'll go blind.
No one disagrees that we should make sure our squirtguns don't maim our kids, but maybe if the only way we can be sure is by torturing animals, we should just go without our squirtguns. Many will want their squirtguns anyway, but you certainly don't have to have "brains [that are] addled" not to.
Boy, am I tired of the unfounded centrality the genome has in the public consciousness. Even most scientists, who should know better, talk as if the genome is the only essential component of life.
"Technically we would need to synthesise a genome and see if it led to a living organism."
Uh, a genome on its own, synthesized or not, will never lead to a living organism! It requires extremely complicated biological machinery to transcribe, process, and then translate the DNA into proteins. This is not a trivial matter. For all our advances in the field of cloning, for example, we still have to stick our manipulated DNA into a naturally produced egg. DNA is a very simple molecule; the rest of the fertilized egg is not be so easy to synthesize.
Being able to build DNA is great, but DNA on its own does nothing! Only when you have DNA wrapped in an elaborate package do you have the possibility of life. Focusing only on the DNA is like believing that once you have a blueprint, you don't need to know anything about tools to build a house.