Sorry, but posts like this drive me mad. Your complaint could be applied to most things we fund by taxation. For example: "why should I pay for public health care when I don't get sick?"or "Why should I have to pay tax to fund schools when I don't have any children or I want to home school mine?"
What you are assuming here is that only those who use the service should pay for it, just like a normal market transaction. Where you go wrong is that schemes like these are instituted because markets fail to produce efficient outcomes (this is Economics 101: anyone who denies it is an idiot like those free market fundamentalists). Asking for it to be run like a market is just asking for an inefficient outcome. Coercive taxation is the most common solution to market failures. Everyone pays, and society as a whole is better off. Of course, some individuals end up slightly worse off, but why should the whole of society put up with massive inefficiencies just for you? In a society afflicted by market failures (i.e. all of them) everyone ends up paying for things that they don't like. But other people end up paying for things you like. That's just the price you pay for living in an efficient society, because the alternative, where everyone pays for what they use, would lead to massive market failure and inefficiency. This is, in essence, why Libertarianism will never work (and it's why Canada consistently maintains a better standard of living than the US, despite not being as rich). And all of this because some people cannot understand that private choice sometimes leads to suboptimal outcomes.
In this case, a new distribution mechanism has made it impossible to charge people money for music. Punishing people for downloading music will simply cost too much and won't make a sizeable dent in the problem. In other words, the market is no longer a useful mechanism for producing and distributing music. But we knew this already, since music levies have existed for years in other contexts (like radio). If everyone who has an internet connection pays $5 a month for an absolutely unlimited subscription that never runs out (note how much cheaper this is than what the commercial companies are offering), then it would be the best thing ever to happen for music lovers in Canada. Everyone would be happy. The artists would get paid and people would have the freedom to consume as much music as they wanted... forever.
Yeah right. This is easily falsified. I imagine that very few people in this thread are anywhere near as talented as the engineers who worked on the space program in the 50s and 60s, or the astronauts who flew the missions they enabled. You know, they weren't paid anywhere near as much as some of the primadonnas these days, but I bet you anything they were more motivated.
If you are motivated solely by money in a job that requires talent, dedication and application, no sane employer should ever hire you. People who whine about "not getting their due" should perhaps look at their forebears who were capable of shutting up and getting on with their jobs. At least they did something worthwhile with their labour, instead of contributing to our current facile society.
The idea that all people can simply leave their jobs is ridiculous. Workers have mortgages and other commitments and there is often a shortage of suitable employment. Because of this, most employees have a stake in the firm they work for.
Unions aren't suitable for every kind of industry, but they can do a lot of good for employees and employers in many circumstances. Collective bargaining is simply that: bargaining. Unions don't always get what they want and neither do employers, but that's what happens when you bargain. Of course the state has to set the employment laws which provide the context for collective bargaining, and that is usually where the problems arise. Poorly written employment laws can either give unions too much power or too little, and problems will arise in both cases. Collective agreements are actually pretty useful, since they give people on both sides a specific time frame to bargain, and then the rest of the time they can shut up and get on with working.
With the multitouch functionality in the new MacBook Air probably coming to the next iteration of Apple laptops, I think that the second button issue will become an anachronism. People will get used to the trackpad finger dance, and buttons will start to seem pointless.
I already want to kill whenever I can't two finger scroll on other brands of laptop. The forward/back functionality and pinch on the new Apple machines looks like it will be a keeper as well. I honestly think than in a year or so, there will be no point in using a mouse with your Apple laptop.
It's a game changing device, same as the original iPod was. There were mp3 players before the iPod, but they weren't the sort of thing the ordinary person would buy. The vast majority of users like the iPod/iTunes combo because it takes about 10 minutes to learn almost all of the features. The iPhone is the same for smartphones. I have a Samsung smartphone. I live in Korea, so it does TV and everything else, but the manual is over half an inch thick. Anyone who watches Apple's 15 minute iPhone movie already knows how to use it. How many people have a PDA or a smartphone? Not that many, and the main reason is that the learning curve is too much for many people.
The most important thing is that the iPhone isn't primarily a phone. It's a Newton that happens to have phone capabilities, and solves a lot of the problems with the original Newton devices (like input).
Unless you've seen a jailbroken iPhone/iPod, it's hard to appreciate how much potential it has as a portable computer and gaming device. Some of the jailbroken stuff is cool (like the etch a sketch simulator). The SDK is the equivalent of releasing iTunes for Windows. It's the thing that will put the iPhone over the top. For example, the touch screen and accelerometer will make for some awesome games. Apple should really hire Nintendo to write some, owing to their success with the DS and their ability to make cool games for it.
Jobs made the right bet on the interface. The versatility of a portable device is proportional to the flexibility of its interface. While people are correct that it is slightly easier to type on a proper keyboard, the versatility more than makes up for that. My PSP is a great device, but it is never going to be as versatile as my iPod Touch. I can't wait to see what 3rd party developers will do with it.
Of course, the iPhone won't suit everyone, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons for not using one, or for waiting for the 3G version/software updates, or waiting for a rival product, but that doesn't stop it from being a game changing device. I seriously doubt that in 5 years it will be easy to find a portable smart device that doesn't have a multitouch interface.
"First, and most importantly, this position is inherently false because it is self-refuting. It is a serious and far-reaching claim, requiring justification. However, the claim itself falls outside the limitations of science. It cannot meet its own standard of justification. To state that "Only scientific claims are knowable" is equivalent to stating, "Only ten-word sentences are true."
No it isn't. For a start, one is demonstrably false, the other is at least plausible.
Similarly, we could claim that "only scientific claims are knowable" is a conceptual truth, in which case it is self evident once you understand how the term "know" is used in ordinary language.
But I don't want to do that.
Instead, we could, like Quine did (and as I would do), deny that there is a real distinction between conceptual and empirical truth, but that would simply make my point for me, since Quine demonstrated that abandoning the distinction just makes the tradeoff between different theories one involving the most convenient explanation. There will be an infinite number of possible theories that fit the facts, and arguing over which one is true is thereby pointless, because they all are. In such cases the trade offs are on practical grounds of explanatory power, simplicity and coherence. The theory that we tend to call the "true" one is the one that best satisfies these commonplace constraints. For ancient people this involved explanations with reference to deities. For us deities have no explanatory power.
In this second case, we can establish that all knowledge is scientific by demonstrating that pragmatism is the only viable approach to knowledge. That is what I mean when I say that science has a much more humble notion of truth than religion. The proof is simply the elimination of alternatives and realization that Quine is right.
"This idea is a form of positivism."
It does not necessarily have to be. It can be a form of pragmatism. The two are distinct. Your post seems to completely ignore this alternative.
"Second, this position is also incidentally false. One could hold that a rational person shouldn't accept any non-scientific claim, even if that claim somehow happens to be correct. But no one actually does this. There are plenty of propositions that most of us accept, though they lie outside the limitations of science. The clearest example is the claim that the universe exists. Is that silly? Let me rephrase: the claim that the universe, rather than the Matrix, exists. By definition, this question can never be addressed scientifically."
Yes it can. We have a choice between two competing theories which equally explain the evidence we have, and we simply make the decision on the pragmatic grounds I mentioned above. What the pragmatists are trying to get the dogmatists to realize is that our own behaviour and our own use of words like "knowledge" are relentlessly pragmatic. Once we realize that an infinite number of theories will fit any evidence we have, then truth in the dogmatist sense becomes pointless, because there will be an infinite number of true theories.
"Even if it's possible to doubt some of the things I've mentioned, like an objective physical world, (1) there is no obligation to do so, and (2) no one actually does so, including full-fledged skeptics (as Hume himself admits). In a many cases, perhaps most cases, doubting has no epistemic superiority over not doubting."
But since any theory is underdetermined by evidence, doubt is part of the very structure of belief. This is why I can hypothesize that I am in the Matrix. But even though I can't decide between the Matrix and the physical world on grounds of evidence, I can decide on pragmatic grounds, but the real point is that I must always decide on pragmatic grounds and I always do.
Similarly, people can promote a God centered view of reality that is completely consistent with every piece of evidence. But in terms of explanatory power, coherence and simplicit
I don't think that can be right. The very first thing I noticed watching HD is that things like the facial stubble on male actors is noticeable in a way that it just isn't on SD. Similarly, I bought the Blu Ray edition of 2001, and it is a marvel. You can actually read all the text labels on the machines inside the Discovery. I have the SD version as well and it is really night and day between them.
I think it depends what you are looking at. Some things are going to make the difference more obvious.
The problem with the "public should be taught the limitations of science" model is that the limitations of science should be seen as the limitations of human knowledge.
There are a number of what I consider to be mistakes in the current debate. The first is to identify scientific truth with the kind of absolutist claims that are made by religion. Scientific truth is a much more humble concept. The second mistake is when people who understand the two are different, nevertheless believe that the religious conception of truth is viable. It isn't. We just need to face up to the fact that we appear to be epistemically limited creatures.
Justification by evidence isn't going to work, because science will just eat it up. Justification by faith is an oxymoron. The only sorts of proofs left are metaphysical arguments, and even if they work, they never result in the kind of god that anyone other than a Deist would want to believe in.
I don't have a moral problem with people believing in God. But that doesn't mean that their beliefs should not be challenged in public, and that they should not be called on to defend them (and likewise for the opposition). That's pretty much what we do on other topics. Someone makes a claim and people ask for reasons why we should believe it. It beats fighting about it. There are many reasons we should debate religion, but the best one is probably because we want to know whether its claims are true or not. That's really the value that underpins most of science.
The recent prominence of people like Dawkins is evidence that the prejudice against the critical discussion of religion in public is on the wane. That's a good thing. We also have public places where this sort of thing is debated formally: they are called philosophy classes.
I think you're taking it too far. What you say would indeed make the claim untestable. But on the other hand, it is testable given certain assumptions about the VR machine (that it does not engage in the blocking you describe, for example). While the test could not rule out all possibilities, it could conditionally rule out that we were living in that particular kind of VR world.
Where I think your argument fails is that no scientific theory can have the kind of certainty that would prove beyond doubt that we weren't living in any sort of VR machine, so no scientist qua scientist ought to be interested in that sort of test. On the other hand, a test that merely attempted to rule out that we were living in a VR machine that did not maliciously interfere with our experiments would be genuinely scientific, and we should grant the result the same status we would grant to any other scientific conclusion.
Part of the problem here is with misuse of the verb "to know". Plato claimed that to know was to have an infallible grasp of reality, and that definition actually makes sense in his peculiar philosophical system (I happen to think it doesn't make sense in any other), but unless you are a Platonist, you should treat that understanding of the term "knowledge" with suspicion. The problem is that it has seeped into our collective consciousness and caused us to talk a lot of nonsense, and it isn't just philosophers and scientists, ordinary people now demand ridiculous degrees of proof for all sorts of petty claims.
Perhaps we would be better off to listen to Wittgenstein, who argued that we should look at the way people actually use the word in non-philosophical contexts. In science, no sane person uses the Platonic definition of knowledge, because that's not the kind of knowledge that science yields. While philosophers are blamed for some of this ridiculous brain in a vat stuff, most philosophers I know are more inclined to the anti-Platonist approach. It really is unfair. Scientists berate contemporary philosophers for arguing in favour of Cartesian doubts, which is almost as accurate as philosophers accusing contemporary scientists of practicing alchemy.
On the other hand, much religious speculation seems tied to the Platonic definition (what's the point in supposing a God as a mere working hypothesis rather than an evidence transcedent metaphysical certainty), so the Wittgensteinian approach seems rather damaging to religious claims (although Witt. himself didn't think so IIRC).
Not necessarily although the apps will have to be distributed through iTunes, if they are to reach a wider user base. But Apple already distributes masses of free podcasts through iTunes. My guess is that Apple wants some way of guaranteeing the safety of applications, so that users don't have their units bricked by bad software. It's in Apple's and every regular owner's interest to have that form of oversight.
My guess is that there was some internal dispute at Apple over how many people would actually want to put additional software on their iPods/iPhones, and whether it was worth the hassle of opening up the platform. That is: a dispute between those who saw these things as dedicated appliances, and those who saw them as the next great portable computing platform. In this respect, you are spot on about the potential of the iPhone/iPod Touch as a portable computing device. The quality of apps installed by jailbreaking and the really cool things you can do with multitouch make it inevitable that the platform argument is going to win, and obviously has won inside Apple due to the new SDK.
However, I doubt very much that Apple is going to be the only company selling apps for these devices. Apple hired EA and some other people to make the games for the regular iPods. No doubt there is some form of SDK used for that, but it has not been made widely available. Apple is going to make the new SDK one widely available. Personally, I'd expect a mix of paid and free apps from a variety of developers. Why would they announce it as an available SDK if only Apple was going to sell software.
Don't tell me that Apple will insist on being able to charge money for all apps sold through iTunes. That would massively depress development, since a lot of companies may well want to give stuff away for free (as it was with internet browsers). Similarly, the idea that there has to be a massive fee for the SDK would be stupid as it would deter independent programmers who are frankly better than more established companies at writing the kind of small, useful app that will feature on these devices.
I love speculating as much as the next person, but let's just wait and see what the SDK is like. Remember that the SDK is for both the iPhone (which I don't own) and the iPod Touch (which I own). I'm waiting to see what happens at Macworld in a couple of weeks before I jailbreak my Touch, but I've played around with a couple of jailbroken units and they are incredible. If you've seen one, you'll know what I mean: the iPod Touch isn't really an iPod in the traditional sense, but the next great ultra portable computer and probably gaming device (there's a roll ball game available that demonstrates the potential of the platform). My experiences with jailbroken iPods have convinced me that Apple is sitting on a goldmine. So are developers if Apple does the right thing.
But as someone else said, Apple will need to protect the non techie users who will go mental if a software upgrade breaks their unit. Moreover, if apps on these things are to become popular with the masses, then there will have to be integration with iTunes, since that is what most people use to manage their iPods. That means that iPod software installation will have to work like podcasts do: you can get them through iTunes with no hassle, and they won't harm your iPod or break with updates. There is really no alternative if it is to become mainstream. If it does, everyone is in for a treat. I'm hoping that excellent Mac shareware companies like Panic will write software for it (if you don't know who Panic are, then shame on you!).
There's no reason why Apple couldn't make the iPod Touch into the new Newton. I'm hoping they will, and the massive black space on the iPod's home screen makes me confident that they will. It already does almost everything you'd want a digital media player to do, so the space can only be taken up with radically extending the use of the device. It's crying out to become a PDA for regular people.
"If watermarking is "evil", then we should be similarly outraged about the license plates we're forced to display on our cars."
Aren't you? I've never understood why I should have to drive around with a public ID card. How is it any different from compulsory tattooing of your Social Security number on your forehead for everyone to see? All license plates do is make the cops' job easier at the expense of citizen privacy. I fail to see why the police, who are reasonably competent at catching criminals with only a vague physical description, should not be able to track down a car based on a similar description.
The usual answer is that people protect their privacy by revealing select information to different entities. For example, you'll tell your bank some stuff, the health system some other stuff, the welfare agency some other stuff, the stores where you have an account some other stuff and so on. In no case is there one entity that has all your personal information. This means two things. First, it means that if one of them is compromised (as has happened in Britain), the information about you that will be compromised is far from complete. Second, it means that any agency or company that has your personal information only has fragments of it and so has less power over you. Knowledge is power, and the ability to selectively reveal information about yourself to differing persons is necessary for the preservation of privacy.
There's a really good SF novel called "Shield" by Poul Anderson that explores this idea. Unlike a lot of SF novels, it actually has something profound to say.
Nice post. My own opinion is somewhat different. As an academic doing research, copyright is a continual pain in the ass. Every researcher really needs to have all the world's research at his or her fingertips in a searchable manner. It's a nuisance to have to pay 5 bucks to read an article (which might be useless) or jump through hoops to get others. It's better than it used to be, but it is still nowhere near good enough. In this case the solution is to digitize everything and then get universities to pay for access for all their faculty and students. This is starting to come to pass.
I think more taxpayer funded information repositories are the way to go. Thinking about copyright as producing a benefit ignores the massive benefits of freeing information. Music was so much better after Napster (I downloaded a lot, but my CD purchasing quadrupled at the same time, and I now use iTunes for all my downloads). The students are right: it seems absurd to think that massive freedom of information is a bad thing. That ought to be non-negotiable. What needs to be negotiated is the funding model. Either taxation, or subscriptions or something else. Whatever it is, it will be better than the current system.
The creators of copyrighted material just have to accept that people want to consume it where they want, and how they want, and on what device they want, and, most importantly, that they want it immediately. The best thing is that you cannot stop them. They now have the power, and they won't give it back. So either get with the program or go out of business. There is money in it. Apple has demonstrated that (I'm sometimes horrified at the amount I spend on iTunes).
As far as the Zune is concerned, that's true. When the iPod came out it didn't look or work like other mp3 players. It was a genuinely fresh approach. Now most mp3 players look a bit like an iPod. I guess Microsoft could have realized that doing that would get them not much further than Creative et al, but they didn't. Now it's Apple reinventing the form of the device with the iPhone/iPod Touch, and Microsoft's players look like old hat.
Add to that the brown colour, the pointless wireless and the "Welcome to the Social" slogan (which must be the most twattish slogan in the history of slogans with the possible exception of "We eat excrement"), and the thing is just a gigantic hunk of fail.
The Xbox 360 is OK though. The Xbox Live service is pretty good, although it should be free like the PSN. At least Microsoft brought something new to that aspect of the market and it does have its own charm, once you get past the hordes of castrati calling you a fag for beating them at Halo.
Apparently in an attempt to make it harder to bribe people, the highest denomination banknote here is 10,000 won, which is about ten dollars (a 50,000 won note is in the works). I bought a mac with cash, and it was like trying to buy a loaf of bread in Germany in 1929. I almost needed a wheelbarrow to transport the full amount.
I live in Korea. Bribery is a way of life in business here. It used to be far worse. Lee Myung Bak, the conservative candidate for the upcoming presidential election is being hounded for corrupt business practices from decades ago. I don't like the guy, but this is unfair, since you simply couldn't be in business at the time without engaging in massive bribery. To its credit the government has essentially declared war on graft, but old habits die hard. A few companies have apparently sworn to avoid it as well, since they understand, as the government does, that it doesn't work particularly well when you are doing business deals with foreigners.
One explanation I have heard is that it is because Korea is a Confucian society. Personal relationships and personal loyalty are extremely important here (I'm told that corporate executives were shamed when they were forced to restructure and make employees redundant, because the expectation of loyalty ran both ways). Of course, when your ethical code emphasizes personal relationships, it seems odd to think of one having a personal relationship with an abstract entity like the law, and hence bribery isn't seen as that bad.
On the other hand, it must be difficult for foreigners who tried to do business here in the early days. Koreans have a great love for drink and hookers (Google what "Barber Shop" means in Korea - a clue: if you go to one for a haircut, you will receive a surprise). It was customary, among with other gifts, to ply one's prospective business partner with alcohol and women.
Please don't think that I am bashing the place. I really like it here. The people are lovely and the food is great, and you can watch Starcraft tournaments 24/7 on one of the many TV channels that broadcast them.
"Madonna was taking off her clothes on stage while Britney Spears was in diapers."
That's nothing dude, Alice Cooper was wearing diapers on stage while Madonna was in diapers.
This is a fair comment. But, while not letting him off and continuing to remain eternally vigilant, perhaps we should salute him for admitting he was wrong, or at least beginning to admit he was wrong. Lord knows it's hard to get any of these people to do it. Barracking them unmercifully may give one a sense of self-righteous please (I know I feel that way), but it probably won't make things better and might make them worse.
If he's prepared to admit that the industry was wrong in this case, then perhaps there will be DRM free music in the near future. Apple is already selling a ton of it, and customers need to encourage the other majors to get on board (and to offer more flexible formats as well). It's been obvious to thinking people from the beginning that DRM was a dead end.
The music labels are slowly waking up to what the rest of us know. That is that it is worth tolerating a certain amount of illegal file sharing in order to give legitimate customers more reason to buy their products. I could have pirated the thousand bucks worth of music I've bought from iTunes (most of it now DRM free), but it was easier and cheaper just to pay Apple for it a bit at a time. And I haven't stopped buying CDs at all.
That's probably the best option. I'm a strong advocate of privacy myself, but I don't see Blizzard's actions as being particularly unreasonable. You aren't being compelled to play the game, and it's up to each individual to decide how much they trust Blizzard with this. If you don't trust them, don't play. It's quite common for people to be asked to reveal personal information in a voluntary exchange (like when you apply for a job or a bank account) and there is always the possibility that this information could be misused or abused, or that the power you give another person to access such information could be misused or abused. But these types of transactions are always voluntary, and it's really a case of caveat emptor. If you don't trust the company, then don't give them your money and your privacy will remain intact.
Having said that, people like the author of TFA are free to object to Blizzard's policy and to attempt to persuade them to change it (like they did with the issue of gay-friendly guilds a while back). If it annoys enough of the playerbase, then it will go.
I'm a recovering WoWaholic myself, and although I loved the game, the one thing that really bothered me (other than warlocks) was cheaters. I worked hard at the game, spent a lot of time grinding and crafting, and spent inordinate amounts of time learning the game and getting to know good people so that I could join a decent guild and progress. If cheating isn't aggressively policed, it ruins the sense of achievement for legitimate players by allowing others to free ride. I'd personally be willing to risk it to have less cheaters in the game, but YMMV.
Yeah, just wait until the revolution in military affairs is complete (completely computerizing war information) and the world's armies realize that a decent RTS player has a much better grasp of strategy than your average general.
This is the future of war: two Korean teens fighting it out for world supremacy.
Markets aren't perfect. Occasionally it will be in the interest of a seller to discount their goods below the market clearing price. This often occurs when the seller's long term interest will be better served by discounting than by selling at the market clearing price.
Video game consoles are a good example. Nintendo (and please don't mod me up just for mentioning the Wii, thank you very much) could probably make an absolute killing if they priced the Wii at the market clearing price, but then the Wii would get a reputation as an "expensive" console (like the PS3 - again don't mod me down for bashing, I have one, and a 360 as well). Once the word gets out that the Wii is "expensive", it is bad publicity and would hurt future sales.
Sports teams face the same problems. It's much better for every spectator if you go to a game that is a sellout, but it's hard to guarantee a sellout unless you discount the tickets heavily. That's why sports teams do it: discounted tickets = full stadiums = happier customers who will come back. Moreover, sometimes teams do badly. Hardcore fans have a long term investment in the team. They are the ones who keep your team solvent by paying good money to watch crap when your team is not doing well. Raising prices when the team is doing well would be an abuse of their loyalty and would make them less likely to hang around once you are crap again.
There's all sorts of other legitimate business reasons for discounting goods below the market clearing price. That means there are legitimate business reasons to want scalping banned, since it harms both the seller and the consumer in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but posts like this drive me mad. Your complaint could be applied to most things we fund by taxation. For example: "why should I pay for public health care when I don't get sick?"or "Why should I have to pay tax to fund schools when I don't have any children or I want to home school mine?"
What you are assuming here is that only those who use the service should pay for it, just like a normal market transaction. Where you go wrong is that schemes like these are instituted because markets fail to produce efficient outcomes (this is Economics 101: anyone who denies it is an idiot like those free market fundamentalists). Asking for it to be run like a market is just asking for an inefficient outcome. Coercive taxation is the most common solution to market failures. Everyone pays, and society as a whole is better off. Of course, some individuals end up slightly worse off, but why should the whole of society put up with massive inefficiencies just for you? In a society afflicted by market failures (i.e. all of them) everyone ends up paying for things that they don't like. But other people end up paying for things you like. That's just the price you pay for living in an efficient society, because the alternative, where everyone pays for what they use, would lead to massive market failure and inefficiency. This is, in essence, why Libertarianism will never work (and it's why Canada consistently maintains a better standard of living than the US, despite not being as rich). And all of this because some people cannot understand that private choice sometimes leads to suboptimal outcomes.
In this case, a new distribution mechanism has made it impossible to charge people money for music. Punishing people for downloading music will simply cost too much and won't make a sizeable dent in the problem. In other words, the market is no longer a useful mechanism for producing and distributing music. But we knew this already, since music levies have existed for years in other contexts (like radio). If everyone who has an internet connection pays $5 a month for an absolutely unlimited subscription that never runs out (note how much cheaper this is than what the commercial companies are offering), then it would be the best thing ever to happen for music lovers in Canada. Everyone would be happy. The artists would get paid and people would have the freedom to consume as much music as they wanted... forever.
Yeah right. This is easily falsified. I imagine that very few people in this thread are anywhere near as talented as the engineers who worked on the space program in the 50s and 60s, or the astronauts who flew the missions they enabled. You know, they weren't paid anywhere near as much as some of the primadonnas these days, but I bet you anything they were more motivated.
If you are motivated solely by money in a job that requires talent, dedication and application, no sane employer should ever hire you. People who whine about "not getting their due" should perhaps look at their forebears who were capable of shutting up and getting on with their jobs. At least they did something worthwhile with their labour, instead of contributing to our current facile society.
The idea that all people can simply leave their jobs is ridiculous. Workers have mortgages and other commitments and there is often a shortage of suitable employment. Because of this, most employees have a stake in the firm they work for. Unions aren't suitable for every kind of industry, but they can do a lot of good for employees and employers in many circumstances. Collective bargaining is simply that: bargaining. Unions don't always get what they want and neither do employers, but that's what happens when you bargain. Of course the state has to set the employment laws which provide the context for collective bargaining, and that is usually where the problems arise. Poorly written employment laws can either give unions too much power or too little, and problems will arise in both cases. Collective agreements are actually pretty useful, since they give people on both sides a specific time frame to bargain, and then the rest of the time they can shut up and get on with working.
With the multitouch functionality in the new MacBook Air probably coming to the next iteration of Apple laptops, I think that the second button issue will become an anachronism. People will get used to the trackpad finger dance, and buttons will start to seem pointless.
I already want to kill whenever I can't two finger scroll on other brands of laptop. The forward/back functionality and pinch on the new Apple machines looks like it will be a keeper as well. I honestly think than in a year or so, there will be no point in using a mouse with your Apple laptop.
It's a game changing device, same as the original iPod was. There were mp3 players before the iPod, but they weren't the sort of thing the ordinary person would buy. The vast majority of users like the iPod/iTunes combo because it takes about 10 minutes to learn almost all of the features. The iPhone is the same for smartphones. I have a Samsung smartphone. I live in Korea, so it does TV and everything else, but the manual is over half an inch thick. Anyone who watches Apple's 15 minute iPhone movie already knows how to use it. How many people have a PDA or a smartphone? Not that many, and the main reason is that the learning curve is too much for many people.
The most important thing is that the iPhone isn't primarily a phone. It's a Newton that happens to have phone capabilities, and solves a lot of the problems with the original Newton devices (like input).
Unless you've seen a jailbroken iPhone/iPod, it's hard to appreciate how much potential it has as a portable computer and gaming device. Some of the jailbroken stuff is cool (like the etch a sketch simulator). The SDK is the equivalent of releasing iTunes for Windows. It's the thing that will put the iPhone over the top. For example, the touch screen and accelerometer will make for some awesome games. Apple should really hire Nintendo to write some, owing to their success with the DS and their ability to make cool games for it.
Jobs made the right bet on the interface. The versatility of a portable device is proportional to the flexibility of its interface. While people are correct that it is slightly easier to type on a proper keyboard, the versatility more than makes up for that. My PSP is a great device, but it is never going to be as versatile as my iPod Touch. I can't wait to see what 3rd party developers will do with it.
Of course, the iPhone won't suit everyone, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons for not using one, or for waiting for the 3G version/software updates, or waiting for a rival product, but that doesn't stop it from being a game changing device. I seriously doubt that in 5 years it will be easy to find a portable smart device that doesn't have a multitouch interface.
It's kind of weird. Since Jimbo Wales is a dedicated Ayn Randian, I always think of him as being just like that Andrew Ryan Dude in Bioshock.
;)
The fact that Wikipedia is a lot like Rapture helps.
Thanks for your reply.
"First, and most importantly, this position is inherently false because it is self-refuting. It is a serious and far-reaching claim, requiring justification. However, the claim itself falls outside the limitations of science. It cannot meet its own standard of justification. To state that "Only scientific claims are knowable" is equivalent to stating, "Only ten-word sentences are true."
No it isn't. For a start, one is demonstrably false, the other is at least plausible.
Similarly, we could claim that "only scientific claims are knowable" is a conceptual truth, in which case it is self evident once you understand how the term "know" is used in ordinary language.
But I don't want to do that.
Instead, we could, like Quine did (and as I would do), deny that there is a real distinction between conceptual and empirical truth, but that would simply make my point for me, since Quine demonstrated that abandoning the distinction just makes the tradeoff between different theories one involving the most convenient explanation. There will be an infinite number of possible theories that fit the facts, and arguing over which one is true is thereby pointless, because they all are. In such cases the trade offs are on practical grounds of explanatory power, simplicity and coherence. The theory that we tend to call the "true" one is the one that best satisfies these commonplace constraints. For ancient people this involved explanations with reference to deities. For us deities have no explanatory power.
In this second case, we can establish that all knowledge is scientific by demonstrating that pragmatism is the only viable approach to knowledge. That is what I mean when I say that science has a much more humble notion of truth than religion. The proof is simply the elimination of alternatives and realization that Quine is right.
"This idea is a form of positivism."
It does not necessarily have to be. It can be a form of pragmatism. The two are distinct. Your post seems to completely ignore this alternative.
"Second, this position is also incidentally false. One could hold that a rational person shouldn't accept any non-scientific claim, even if that claim somehow happens to be correct. But no one actually does this. There are plenty of propositions that most of us accept, though they lie outside the limitations of science. The clearest example is the claim that the universe exists. Is that silly? Let me rephrase: the claim that the universe, rather than the Matrix, exists. By definition, this question can never be addressed scientifically."
Yes it can. We have a choice between two competing theories which equally explain the evidence we have, and we simply make the decision on the pragmatic grounds I mentioned above. What the pragmatists are trying to get the dogmatists to realize is that our own behaviour and our own use of words like "knowledge" are relentlessly pragmatic. Once we realize that an infinite number of theories will fit any evidence we have, then truth in the dogmatist sense becomes pointless, because there will be an infinite number of true theories.
"Even if it's possible to doubt some of the things I've mentioned, like an objective physical world, (1) there is no obligation to do so, and (2) no one actually does so, including full-fledged skeptics (as Hume himself admits). In a many cases, perhaps most cases, doubting has no epistemic superiority over not doubting."
But since any theory is underdetermined by evidence, doubt is part of the very structure of belief. This is why I can hypothesize that I am in the Matrix. But even though I can't decide between the Matrix and the physical world on grounds of evidence, I can decide on pragmatic grounds, but the real point is that I must always decide on pragmatic grounds and I always do.
Similarly, people can promote a God centered view of reality that is completely consistent with every piece of evidence. But in terms of explanatory power, coherence and simplicit
I don't think that can be right. The very first thing I noticed watching HD is that things like the facial stubble on male actors is noticeable in a way that it just isn't on SD. Similarly, I bought the Blu Ray edition of 2001, and it is a marvel. You can actually read all the text labels on the machines inside the Discovery. I have the SD version as well and it is really night and day between them.
I think it depends what you are looking at. Some things are going to make the difference more obvious.
The problem with the "public should be taught the limitations of science" model is that the limitations of science should be seen as the limitations of human knowledge.
There are a number of what I consider to be mistakes in the current debate. The first is to identify scientific truth with the kind of absolutist claims that are made by religion. Scientific truth is a much more humble concept. The second mistake is when people who understand the two are different, nevertheless believe that the religious conception of truth is viable. It isn't. We just need to face up to the fact that we appear to be epistemically limited creatures.
Justification by evidence isn't going to work, because science will just eat it up. Justification by faith is an oxymoron. The only sorts of proofs left are metaphysical arguments, and even if they work, they never result in the kind of god that anyone other than a Deist would want to believe in.
I don't have a moral problem with people believing in God. But that doesn't mean that their beliefs should not be challenged in public, and that they should not be called on to defend them (and likewise for the opposition). That's pretty much what we do on other topics. Someone makes a claim and people ask for reasons why we should believe it. It beats fighting about it. There are many reasons we should debate religion, but the best one is probably because we want to know whether its claims are true or not. That's really the value that underpins most of science.
The recent prominence of people like Dawkins is evidence that the prejudice against the critical discussion of religion in public is on the wane. That's a good thing. We also have public places where this sort of thing is debated formally: they are called philosophy classes.
I think you're taking it too far. What you say would indeed make the claim untestable. But on the other hand, it is testable given certain assumptions about the VR machine (that it does not engage in the blocking you describe, for example). While the test could not rule out all possibilities, it could conditionally rule out that we were living in that particular kind of VR world.
Where I think your argument fails is that no scientific theory can have the kind of certainty that would prove beyond doubt that we weren't living in any sort of VR machine, so no scientist qua scientist ought to be interested in that sort of test. On the other hand, a test that merely attempted to rule out that we were living in a VR machine that did not maliciously interfere with our experiments would be genuinely scientific, and we should grant the result the same status we would grant to any other scientific conclusion.
Part of the problem here is with misuse of the verb "to know". Plato claimed that to know was to have an infallible grasp of reality, and that definition actually makes sense in his peculiar philosophical system (I happen to think it doesn't make sense in any other), but unless you are a Platonist, you should treat that understanding of the term "knowledge" with suspicion. The problem is that it has seeped into our collective consciousness and caused us to talk a lot of nonsense, and it isn't just philosophers and scientists, ordinary people now demand ridiculous degrees of proof for all sorts of petty claims.
Perhaps we would be better off to listen to Wittgenstein, who argued that we should look at the way people actually use the word in non-philosophical contexts. In science, no sane person uses the Platonic definition of knowledge, because that's not the kind of knowledge that science yields. While philosophers are blamed for some of this ridiculous brain in a vat stuff, most philosophers I know are more inclined to the anti-Platonist approach. It really is unfair. Scientists berate contemporary philosophers for arguing in favour of Cartesian doubts, which is almost as accurate as philosophers accusing contemporary scientists of practicing alchemy.
On the other hand, much religious speculation seems tied to the Platonic definition (what's the point in supposing a God as a mere working hypothesis rather than an evidence transcedent metaphysical certainty), so the Wittgensteinian approach seems rather damaging to religious claims (although Witt. himself didn't think so IIRC).
Fair enough.
Not necessarily although the apps will have to be distributed through iTunes, if they are to reach a wider user base. But Apple already distributes masses of free podcasts through iTunes. My guess is that Apple wants some way of guaranteeing the safety of applications, so that users don't have their units bricked by bad software. It's in Apple's and every regular owner's interest to have that form of oversight.
My guess is that there was some internal dispute at Apple over how many people would actually want to put additional software on their iPods/iPhones, and whether it was worth the hassle of opening up the platform. That is: a dispute between those who saw these things as dedicated appliances, and those who saw them as the next great portable computing platform. In this respect, you are spot on about the potential of the iPhone/iPod Touch as a portable computing device. The quality of apps installed by jailbreaking and the really cool things you can do with multitouch make it inevitable that the platform argument is going to win, and obviously has won inside Apple due to the new SDK.
However, I doubt very much that Apple is going to be the only company selling apps for these devices. Apple hired EA and some other people to make the games for the regular iPods. No doubt there is some form of SDK used for that, but it has not been made widely available. Apple is going to make the new SDK one widely available. Personally, I'd expect a mix of paid and free apps from a variety of developers. Why would they announce it as an available SDK if only Apple was going to sell software.
Don't tell me that Apple will insist on being able to charge money for all apps sold through iTunes. That would massively depress development, since a lot of companies may well want to give stuff away for free (as it was with internet browsers). Similarly, the idea that there has to be a massive fee for the SDK would be stupid as it would deter independent programmers who are frankly better than more established companies at writing the kind of small, useful app that will feature on these devices.
I think we'll be pleasantly surprised.
I love speculating as much as the next person, but let's just wait and see what the SDK is like. Remember that the SDK is for both the iPhone (which I don't own) and the iPod Touch (which I own). I'm waiting to see what happens at Macworld in a couple of weeks before I jailbreak my Touch, but I've played around with a couple of jailbroken units and they are incredible. If you've seen one, you'll know what I mean: the iPod Touch isn't really an iPod in the traditional sense, but the next great ultra portable computer and probably gaming device (there's a roll ball game available that demonstrates the potential of the platform). My experiences with jailbroken iPods have convinced me that Apple is sitting on a goldmine. So are developers if Apple does the right thing.
But as someone else said, Apple will need to protect the non techie users who will go mental if a software upgrade breaks their unit. Moreover, if apps on these things are to become popular with the masses, then there will have to be integration with iTunes, since that is what most people use to manage their iPods. That means that iPod software installation will have to work like podcasts do: you can get them through iTunes with no hassle, and they won't harm your iPod or break with updates. There is really no alternative if it is to become mainstream. If it does, everyone is in for a treat. I'm hoping that excellent Mac shareware companies like Panic will write software for it (if you don't know who Panic are, then shame on you!).
There's no reason why Apple couldn't make the iPod Touch into the new Newton. I'm hoping they will, and the massive black space on the iPod's home screen makes me confident that they will. It already does almost everything you'd want a digital media player to do, so the space can only be taken up with radically extending the use of the device. It's crying out to become a PDA for regular people.
"If watermarking is "evil", then we should be similarly outraged about the license plates we're forced to display on our cars."
Aren't you? I've never understood why I should have to drive around with a public ID card. How is it any different from compulsory tattooing of your Social Security number on your forehead for everyone to see? All license plates do is make the cops' job easier at the expense of citizen privacy. I fail to see why the police, who are reasonably competent at catching criminals with only a vague physical description, should not be able to track down a car based on a similar description.
The usual answer is that people protect their privacy by revealing select information to different entities. For example, you'll tell your bank some stuff, the health system some other stuff, the welfare agency some other stuff, the stores where you have an account some other stuff and so on. In no case is there one entity that has all your personal information. This means two things. First, it means that if one of them is compromised (as has happened in Britain), the information about you that will be compromised is far from complete. Second, it means that any agency or company that has your personal information only has fragments of it and so has less power over you. Knowledge is power, and the ability to selectively reveal information about yourself to differing persons is necessary for the preservation of privacy.
There's a really good SF novel called "Shield" by Poul Anderson that explores this idea. Unlike a lot of SF novels, it actually has something profound to say.
Nice post. My own opinion is somewhat different. As an academic doing research, copyright is a continual pain in the ass. Every researcher really needs to have all the world's research at his or her fingertips in a searchable manner. It's a nuisance to have to pay 5 bucks to read an article (which might be useless) or jump through hoops to get others. It's better than it used to be, but it is still nowhere near good enough. In this case the solution is to digitize everything and then get universities to pay for access for all their faculty and students. This is starting to come to pass.
I think more taxpayer funded information repositories are the way to go. Thinking about copyright as producing a benefit ignores the massive benefits of freeing information. Music was so much better after Napster (I downloaded a lot, but my CD purchasing quadrupled at the same time, and I now use iTunes for all my downloads). The students are right: it seems absurd to think that massive freedom of information is a bad thing. That ought to be non-negotiable. What needs to be negotiated is the funding model. Either taxation, or subscriptions or something else. Whatever it is, it will be better than the current system.
The creators of copyrighted material just have to accept that people want to consume it where they want, and how they want, and on what device they want, and, most importantly, that they want it immediately. The best thing is that you cannot stop them. They now have the power, and they won't give it back. So either get with the program or go out of business. There is money in it. Apple has demonstrated that (I'm sometimes horrified at the amount I spend on iTunes).
As far as the Zune is concerned, that's true. When the iPod came out it didn't look or work like other mp3 players. It was a genuinely fresh approach. Now most mp3 players look a bit like an iPod. I guess Microsoft could have realized that doing that would get them not much further than Creative et al, but they didn't. Now it's Apple reinventing the form of the device with the iPhone/iPod Touch, and Microsoft's players look like old hat.
Add to that the brown colour, the pointless wireless and the "Welcome to the Social" slogan (which must be the most twattish slogan in the history of slogans with the possible exception of "We eat excrement"), and the thing is just a gigantic hunk of fail.
The Xbox 360 is OK though. The Xbox Live service is pretty good, although it should be free like the PSN. At least Microsoft brought something new to that aspect of the market and it does have its own charm, once you get past the hordes of castrati calling you a fag for beating them at Halo.
Believe me, it isn't.
Apparently in an attempt to make it harder to bribe people, the highest denomination banknote here is 10,000 won, which is about ten dollars (a 50,000 won note is in the works). I bought a mac with cash, and it was like trying to buy a loaf of bread in Germany in 1929. I almost needed a wheelbarrow to transport the full amount.
I live in Korea. Bribery is a way of life in business here. It used to be far worse. Lee Myung Bak, the conservative candidate for the upcoming presidential election is being hounded for corrupt business practices from decades ago. I don't like the guy, but this is unfair, since you simply couldn't be in business at the time without engaging in massive bribery. To its credit the government has essentially declared war on graft, but old habits die hard. A few companies have apparently sworn to avoid it as well, since they understand, as the government does, that it doesn't work particularly well when you are doing business deals with foreigners.
One explanation I have heard is that it is because Korea is a Confucian society. Personal relationships and personal loyalty are extremely important here (I'm told that corporate executives were shamed when they were forced to restructure and make employees redundant, because the expectation of loyalty ran both ways). Of course, when your ethical code emphasizes personal relationships, it seems odd to think of one having a personal relationship with an abstract entity like the law, and hence bribery isn't seen as that bad.
On the other hand, it must be difficult for foreigners who tried to do business here in the early days. Koreans have a great love for drink and hookers (Google what "Barber Shop" means in Korea - a clue: if you go to one for a haircut, you will receive a surprise). It was customary, among with other gifts, to ply one's prospective business partner with alcohol and women.
Please don't think that I am bashing the place. I really like it here. The people are lovely and the food is great, and you can watch Starcraft tournaments 24/7 on one of the many TV channels that broadcast them.
"Madonna was taking off her clothes on stage while Britney Spears was in diapers." That's nothing dude, Alice Cooper was wearing diapers on stage while Madonna was in diapers.
This is a fair comment. But, while not letting him off and continuing to remain eternally vigilant, perhaps we should salute him for admitting he was wrong, or at least beginning to admit he was wrong. Lord knows it's hard to get any of these people to do it. Barracking them unmercifully may give one a sense of self-righteous please (I know I feel that way), but it probably won't make things better and might make them worse.
If he's prepared to admit that the industry was wrong in this case, then perhaps there will be DRM free music in the near future. Apple is already selling a ton of it, and customers need to encourage the other majors to get on board (and to offer more flexible formats as well). It's been obvious to thinking people from the beginning that DRM was a dead end.
The music labels are slowly waking up to what the rest of us know. That is that it is worth tolerating a certain amount of illegal file sharing in order to give legitimate customers more reason to buy their products. I could have pirated the thousand bucks worth of music I've bought from iTunes (most of it now DRM free), but it was easier and cheaper just to pay Apple for it a bit at a time. And I haven't stopped buying CDs at all.
Haha. You aren't the only one. The first thing I thought of was this classic Arthur C. Clarke short story: The 9 Billion Names of God.
http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/9billion_clarke.html
That's probably the best option. I'm a strong advocate of privacy myself, but I don't see Blizzard's actions as being particularly unreasonable. You aren't being compelled to play the game, and it's up to each individual to decide how much they trust Blizzard with this. If you don't trust them, don't play. It's quite common for people to be asked to reveal personal information in a voluntary exchange (like when you apply for a job or a bank account) and there is always the possibility that this information could be misused or abused, or that the power you give another person to access such information could be misused or abused. But these types of transactions are always voluntary, and it's really a case of caveat emptor. If you don't trust the company, then don't give them your money and your privacy will remain intact.
Having said that, people like the author of TFA are free to object to Blizzard's policy and to attempt to persuade them to change it (like they did with the issue of gay-friendly guilds a while back). If it annoys enough of the playerbase, then it will go.
I'm a recovering WoWaholic myself, and although I loved the game, the one thing that really bothered me (other than warlocks) was cheaters. I worked hard at the game, spent a lot of time grinding and crafting, and spent inordinate amounts of time learning the game and getting to know good people so that I could join a decent guild and progress. If cheating isn't aggressively policed, it ruins the sense of achievement for legitimate players by allowing others to free ride. I'd personally be willing to risk it to have less cheaters in the game, but YMMV.
Yeah, just wait until the revolution in military affairs is complete (completely computerizing war information) and the world's armies realize that a decent RTS player has a much better grasp of strategy than your average general.
This is the future of war: two Korean teens fighting it out for world supremacy.
Because you are harming the seller.
Markets aren't perfect. Occasionally it will be in the interest of a seller to discount their goods below the market clearing price. This often occurs when the seller's long term interest will be better served by discounting than by selling at the market clearing price.
Video game consoles are a good example. Nintendo (and please don't mod me up just for mentioning the Wii, thank you very much) could probably make an absolute killing if they priced the Wii at the market clearing price, but then the Wii would get a reputation as an "expensive" console (like the PS3 - again don't mod me down for bashing, I have one, and a 360 as well). Once the word gets out that the Wii is "expensive", it is bad publicity and would hurt future sales.
Sports teams face the same problems. It's much better for every spectator if you go to a game that is a sellout, but it's hard to guarantee a sellout unless you discount the tickets heavily. That's why sports teams do it: discounted tickets = full stadiums = happier customers who will come back. Moreover, sometimes teams do badly. Hardcore fans have a long term investment in the team. They are the ones who keep your team solvent by paying good money to watch crap when your team is not doing well. Raising prices when the team is doing well would be an abuse of their loyalty and would make them less likely to hang around once you are crap again.
There's all sorts of other legitimate business reasons for discounting goods below the market clearing price. That means there are legitimate business reasons to want scalping banned, since it harms both the seller and the consumer in the long run.