No, you can prove anything if your postulates are contradictory. "False" and "True" are words that don't apply to postulates. Is Euclid's parallel postulate true? How about Zorn's Lemma?
Sneaky. Most people don't know what Zorn's Lemma is, or how it is equivalent to AC, or even what AC is.
Oh well, at least you are right. The claim that "logic has no semantics" is utterly false. The whole point of logic is to bridge the syntactic constructs of formal systems with the semantic constructs of models via "interpretation functions". Not that I need to tell you that.;0)
Now, if you want legitimate arrogance, just look at those guys with their "string theory." It's been decades and they still haven't managed tho have a single testable hypothesis coincide with their ideas. A lot of things look good on paper as theory and then completely disintegrate when applied to the real world.
String theory is the mathematical/logical synthesis of theories. As such, it can only predict what the logical closure of its sub-theories predict.
String theory cannot make any new testable hypotheses, because any testable hypotheses will be a testable hypothesis of the old sub-theory. String theory is still falsifiable: it is as falsifiable as General Relativity, Quantum theory, and the rest. Because it is them, taken together, and expressed in a unified mathematical framework.
You're ignoring something important. The laws of conservation of matter and energy.
These are stars that went supernova, but for which the remaining gravitationally bound matter did not turn into a black hole. It takes a lot of matter for a star to nova, and it doesn't just disappear.
In short, they tripled the number of stars that were at one time on the order of 10 times more massive than average.
The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.
And all the government funded science in the world doesn't give you one piece of music that touches your soul, one piece of art which moves you, or one story you'll never forget.
And? I didn't say that the private entertainment industry should be abolished. All I said is that their rent seeking should be abolished. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking
Government funding certainly has its place, it allows for the creation of ideas which won't be profitable for decades if ever.
That is also the point of copyrights. But that is not what copyright represents, any longer. 70 years past the death of the author is clearly rent seeking. If you can't turn a profit on an investment by the time you are dead, you probably should not make that investment. There are exceptions to this general rule, but they are few and far between, and investing in them is potentially one of the government's roles.
Also note that government funding represents a fraction of what is spent on pure and applied science in America. Science suffers for the sake of a smaller (and less valuable, in real dollar terms -- the terms your Congressman will understand and care about) industry.
The internet would not exist if it had been left to private enterprise. That doesn't mean that science is everything that copyright is designed to promote, or that we'd be better off without it.
Rent seeking is bad, okay? Rent seekers don't want to have to work for a living. They want to recycle the same old movies, games, songs, books. And charge you through the nose for them. It was "bad enough", but tolerable, when they had a ~25 year monopoly. That gave them ~25 years to recoup their costs and turn a profit on a creative work. It is now 70 years after the death of the author. Or up to 120 years for works of "corporate authorship".
You see, in a competitive market, profits tend to zero. Which is why we all hate competitive markets. We all want the government to carve up the market so that it suits us. The entertainment industry has done this quite successfully. They have created a situation where they have a large amount of "scarcity rent". Without their scarcity rent, their profits would tend to zero in the long run, just like every competitive industry. Instead, they consistently post profits. This is a distortion of the market. I am willing to concede that some amount of scarcity rent is necessary to ensure that an entertainment business can remain solvent. But solvency is the most anybody should hope for in a competitive market.
Ouch, that sucks. I'd rather deal with a regulated monopoly than a natural monopoly with reselling rights.
Obviously, the natural monopoly will pass its costs to its resellers, who then add another administrative layer (with the associated costs). The natural monopoly gets to raise its prices even more than it naturally would since it is "competing" with firms with an extra layer of administrative overhead.
I agree that copyright law needs revising, but I have yet to see someone suggest a decent alternative that benefits both the consumer AND the producer of the consumed good.
A strong case can be made that copyright is just not working for its intended purpose.
Consider that the US Government alone spends 20+ billion dollars a year on pure science and scholarly research. And that copyright actually stifles the movement of the ideas these dollars are supposed to promote.
20+ billion dollars is worth 2000+ 100 million dollar movies. Hollywood doesn't make that many. If we're being generous, they spend about 3 billion on 300 "blockbusters".
17+ billion dollars is worth 17000 1M dollar (to produce!) albums. I only know of one "one million dollar album" (I'm sure there are a few out there...). But realistically, call it 170000 "100 thousand dollar albums". The music labels do not make 170000 albums in a year. Let's call it... 3000 albums a year. That's another billion dollars.
We have 14+ billion left. Television costs about 1000$ a minute to produce. That means that the remaining science budget is worth about 14000000 minutes of television. That's worth about 26.61 years of television, produced every year. How much of what is on cable is a re-run? How much is pretty much worthless after it first airs -- (Like the news)? The figures I've seen suggest that about 1.3 billion dollars were spent on producing new television in 2006. Lets call it 2 billion today.
We still have 12+ billion left. How many books is that worth? Writers are notoriously poorly paid, at about 5c a word. Lets triple that, to pay editors and publishers' administrative staff. That comes to 80 BILLION words a year. An average book is about 120,000 words, which means that the remaining science budget comes to 2 million books a year. Publishers don't put out anywhere near that many books, and a large number of the books they do put out is paid for out of the science budget anyway. Let's call it 100,000 books a year. That's 1.8 billion dollars a year.
We still have 10+ billion dollars left in the science budget. Of course, there are many other kinds of productions. And yet, these largest four or five dwarf them.
Clearly, science costs DWARF the entertainment industry's production costs. And yet we are tying the hands of the people we have chosen to promote for the sake of the minority, few of which have anything to do with "useful arts and sciences" anyway.
Copyright is rent seeking, and should be abolished (or at least curtailed) as such.
The most important lesson to learn from the rise of the Cloud is to virtualize. Even if they decide to keep their servers in house, they should virtualize to make full use of their hardware while providing some extra layers of security and ease of use. Of course, modern operating systems provide a time sharing model, but they are not so great with separation of concerns. Virtualization solves both issues at the same time, for a secure (assuming you don't leave any holes in the client operating system prototypes), modular, easy to test and deploy solution. Just make sure your prototype systems are closed up, up-to-date, etc.
For example, my "IT infrastructure" consists of a crappy little router, a desktop I built, and dozens of nearly identical virtual machines running the software I need. One is a mail server. Another is a DHCP server. Another is a software development machine. Another is an internal documentation/wiki server. I can migrate to better hardware when I need to. (I am taking care of backing up, just in case -- and I have made sure the backups work). I can clone machines by typing a "clone" command. I can script adding clones to my DHCP server by MAC address. And so on. The Cloud makes most of this easier, to be sure. But not all of it.
A moderate says "I'm reasonable. You must compromise. Put a.22 bullet through anyone who violates our arbitrary rules.
No, a moderate says, "I'm reasonable. Even people who trade honestly must bear all the costs they impose on the rest of us." Have you not heard of "externalities"?
There would have to be a region of space where the matter and anti-matter interfaced, which would produce significant amounts of gamma radiation. We don't see any such interface in the visible universe
Background microwave radiation. The interface is all around us, in the depths of distance. The big bang is all around us, billions of lightyears away.
Neither. Localized concentrations of either kind of *-matter would annihilate the other "contained" kind, leaving a pure region of one kind or the other.
The answer to this question is to study the remnants of the big bang -- background microwave radiation.
Mathematics is the language of quantification. Philosophy attempts to provide interpretations for languages. They are not subsets of each other, but they are intimately related. There's a Galois connection between them.
Except that larger businesses have lower costs of capital, and can produce more widgets than the competition at the same price. Markets tend to monopolies if a firm is already much larger than the others.
And that's where you're wrong, since a monopoly does not represent an efficient outcome. In particular, a monopoly has price setting power, and will set prices above its marginal cost of production.
If a market does not produce an efficient outcome, it has failed. That is the definition of a market failure.
It is government that is the organization holding the special right to employ coercion as a means, not "market forces". No private group can possibly hold that right; otherwise, they wouldn't be private at all, but an arm of government.
This is only partly true.
The Mafia uses force, and is not a part of government. Admittedly, they do not have a "legitimate" right to use force. But this isn't a question of legitimacy. It is a question of money and power.
The idea is that to make a higher profit, to be more efficient, one has to serve the demands of the customer to gain the business required to make a higher profit.
This is not what economic efficiency means.
And the idea is wrong.
A monopoly will be economically inefficient, specifically because it maximizes profits, and is in a position to control prices. That means that the prices it sets will be greater than the marginal cost of production.
In a competitive market, the marginal cost of production equals the marginal benefit equals the price. No one firm has the ability to set prices, because others will eat their lunches. On the other hand, a larger business can easily grind away smaller businesses by providing exactly the same quality of service and price on a large scale, because its cost of capital will typically be lower. This means that markets tend toward monopolies.
A market isn't functioning, let alone "free", if there is a monopoly player in it. A monopoly is a market failure, and cannot be solved by the market. This is because the market for a monopoly product is a monopoly and its consumers.
You should study economics instead of Libertarianism. The differences are vast.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you can prove anything if your postulates are contradictory. "False" and "True" are words that don't apply to postulates. Is Euclid's parallel postulate true? How about Zorn's Lemma?
Sneaky. Most people don't know what Zorn's Lemma is, or how it is equivalent to AC, or even what AC is.
Oh well, at least you are right. The claim that "logic has no semantics" is utterly false. The whole point of logic is to bridge the syntactic constructs of formal systems with the semantic constructs of models via "interpretation functions". Not that I need to tell you that. ;0)
Dare I say it?
slashdot = stagnated
Now, if you want legitimate arrogance, just look at those guys with their "string theory." It's been decades and they still haven't managed tho have a single testable hypothesis coincide with their ideas. A lot of things look good on paper as theory and then completely disintegrate when applied to the real world.
String theory is the mathematical/logical synthesis of theories. As such, it can only predict what the logical closure of its sub-theories predict.
String theory cannot make any new testable hypotheses, because any testable hypotheses will be a testable hypothesis of the old sub-theory. String theory is still falsifiable: it is as falsifiable as General Relativity, Quantum theory, and the rest. Because it is them, taken together, and expressed in a unified mathematical framework.
Nevermind, I'm wrong about red dwarves.
You're ignoring something important. The laws of conservation of matter and energy.
These are stars that went supernova, but for which the remaining gravitationally bound matter did not turn into a black hole. It takes a lot of matter for a star to nova, and it doesn't just disappear.
In short, they tripled the number of stars that were at one time on the order of 10 times more massive than average.
Is your every post
a topical haiku? Yes:
It's time to move on.
The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.
And all the government funded science in the world doesn't give you one piece of music that touches your soul, one piece of art which moves you, or one story you'll never forget.
And? I didn't say that the private entertainment industry should be abolished. All I said is that their rent seeking should be abolished. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking
Government funding certainly has its place, it allows for the creation of ideas which won't be profitable for decades if ever.
That is also the point of copyrights. But that is not what copyright represents, any longer. 70 years past the death of the author is clearly rent seeking. If you can't turn a profit on an investment by the time you are dead, you probably should not make that investment. There are exceptions to this general rule, but they are few and far between, and investing in them is potentially one of the government's roles.
Also note that government funding represents a fraction of what is spent on pure and applied science in America. Science suffers for the sake of a smaller (and less valuable, in real dollar terms -- the terms your Congressman will understand and care about) industry.
The internet would not exist if it had been left to private enterprise. That doesn't mean that science is everything that copyright is designed to promote, or that we'd be better off without it.
Rent seeking is bad, okay? Rent seekers don't want to have to work for a living. They want to recycle the same old movies, games, songs, books. And charge you through the nose for them. It was "bad enough", but tolerable, when they had a ~25 year monopoly. That gave them ~25 years to recoup their costs and turn a profit on a creative work. It is now 70 years after the death of the author. Or up to 120 years for works of "corporate authorship".
You see, in a competitive market, profits tend to zero. Which is why we all hate competitive markets. We all want the government to carve up the market so that it suits us. The entertainment industry has done this quite successfully. They have created a situation where they have a large amount of "scarcity rent". Without their scarcity rent, their profits would tend to zero in the long run, just like every competitive industry. Instead, they consistently post profits. This is a distortion of the market. I am willing to concede that some amount of scarcity rent is necessary to ensure that an entertainment business can remain solvent. But solvency is the most anybody should hope for in a competitive market.
Ouch, that sucks. I'd rather deal with a regulated monopoly than a natural monopoly with reselling rights.
Obviously, the natural monopoly will pass its costs to its resellers, who then add another administrative layer (with the associated costs). The natural monopoly gets to raise its prices even more than it naturally would since it is "competing" with firms with an extra layer of administrative overhead.
I agree that copyright law needs revising, but I have yet to see someone suggest a decent alternative that benefits both the consumer AND the producer of the consumed good.
A strong case can be made that copyright is just not working for its intended purpose.
Consider that the US Government alone spends 20+ billion dollars a year on pure science and scholarly research. And that copyright actually stifles the movement of the ideas these dollars are supposed to promote.
20+ billion dollars is worth 2000+ 100 million dollar movies. Hollywood doesn't make that many. If we're being generous, they spend about 3 billion on 300 "blockbusters".
17+ billion dollars is worth 17000 1M dollar (to produce!) albums. I only know of one "one million dollar album" (I'm sure there are a few out there...). But realistically, call it 170000 "100 thousand dollar albums". The music labels do not make 170000 albums in a year. Let's call it... 3000 albums a year. That's another billion dollars.
We have 14+ billion left. Television costs about 1000$ a minute to produce. That means that the remaining science budget is worth about 14000000 minutes of television. That's worth about 26.61 years of television, produced every year. How much of what is on cable is a re-run? How much is pretty much worthless after it first airs -- (Like the news)? The figures I've seen suggest that about 1.3 billion dollars were spent on producing new television in 2006. Lets call it 2 billion today.
We still have 12+ billion left. How many books is that worth? Writers are notoriously poorly paid, at about 5c a word. Lets triple that, to pay editors and publishers' administrative staff. That comes to 80 BILLION words a year. An average book is about 120,000 words, which means that the remaining science budget comes to 2 million books a year. Publishers don't put out anywhere near that many books, and a large number of the books they do put out is paid for out of the science budget anyway. Let's call it 100,000 books a year. That's 1.8 billion dollars a year.
We still have 10+ billion dollars left in the science budget. Of course, there are many other kinds of productions. And yet, these largest four or five dwarf them.
Clearly, science costs DWARF the entertainment industry's production costs. And yet we are tying the hands of the people we have chosen to promote for the sake of the minority, few of which have anything to do with "useful arts and sciences" anyway.
Copyright is rent seeking, and should be abolished (or at least curtailed) as such.
The most important lesson to learn from the rise of the Cloud is to virtualize. Even if they decide to keep their servers in house, they should virtualize to make full use of their hardware while providing some extra layers of security and ease of use. Of course, modern operating systems provide a time sharing model, but they are not so great with separation of concerns. Virtualization solves both issues at the same time, for a secure (assuming you don't leave any holes in the client operating system prototypes), modular, easy to test and deploy solution. Just make sure your prototype systems are closed up, up-to-date, etc.
For example, my "IT infrastructure" consists of a crappy little router, a desktop I built, and dozens of nearly identical virtual machines running the software I need. One is a mail server. Another is a DHCP server. Another is a software development machine. Another is an internal documentation/wiki server. I can migrate to better hardware when I need to. (I am taking care of backing up, just in case -- and I have made sure the backups work). I can clone machines by typing a "clone" command. I can script adding clones to my DHCP server by MAC address. And so on. The Cloud makes most of this easier, to be sure. But not all of it.
A moderate says "I'm reasonable. You must compromise. Put a .22 bullet through anyone who violates our arbitrary rules.
No, a moderate says, "I'm reasonable. Even people who trade honestly must bear all the costs they impose on the rest of us." Have you not heard of "externalities"?
The local power company? They're a regulated monopoly, yes. Only because they would do much worse damage as an unregulated natural monopoly.
Look, I'm an American, and you can't fucking tell me what to do. Hypocrite.
There would have to be a region of space where the matter and anti-matter interfaced, which would produce significant amounts of gamma radiation. We don't see any such interface in the visible universe
Background microwave radiation. The interface is all around us, in the depths of distance. The big bang is all around us, billions of lightyears away.
Neither. Localized concentrations of either kind of *-matter would annihilate the other "contained" kind, leaving a pure region of one kind or the other.
The answer to this question is to study the remnants of the big bang -- background microwave radiation.
Then how come a significant proportion of the support for libertarian movements is from the lower, weaker classes?
A significant portion of "near zero" is "near zero".
Mathematics is the language of quantification. Philosophy attempts to provide interpretations for languages. They are not subsets of each other, but they are intimately related. There's a Galois connection between them.
Except that larger businesses have lower costs of capital, and can produce more widgets than the competition at the same price. Markets tend to monopolies if a firm is already much larger than the others.
Disagreed that it's necessarily a market failure.
And that's where you're wrong, since a monopoly does not represent an efficient outcome. In particular, a monopoly has price setting power, and will set prices above its marginal cost of production.
If a market does not produce an efficient outcome, it has failed. That is the definition of a market failure.
It is government that is the organization holding the special right to employ coercion as a means, not "market forces". No private group can possibly hold that right; otherwise, they wouldn't be private at all, but an arm of government.
This is only partly true.
The Mafia uses force, and is not a part of government. Admittedly, they do not have a "legitimate" right to use force. But this isn't a question of legitimacy. It is a question of money and power.
Terrible. Substitute "incumbent" with "newcomer".
If you can name an industry where an incumbent will have a lower cost of capital than the monopoly, I will call myself a Marxist. That is a BIG if.
The idea is that to make a higher profit, to be more efficient, one has to serve the demands of the customer to gain the business required to make a higher profit.
This is not what economic efficiency means.
And the idea is wrong.
A monopoly will be economically inefficient, specifically because it maximizes profits, and is in a position to control prices. That means that the prices it sets will be greater than the marginal cost of production.
In a competitive market, the marginal cost of production equals the marginal benefit equals the price. No one firm has the ability to set prices, because others will eat their lunches. On the other hand, a larger business can easily grind away smaller businesses by providing exactly the same quality of service and price on a large scale, because its cost of capital will typically be lower. This means that markets tend toward monopolies.
A market isn't functioning, let alone "free", if there is a monopoly player in it. A monopoly is a market failure, and cannot be solved by the market. This is because the market for a monopoly product is a monopoly and its consumers.
You should study economics instead of Libertarianism. The differences are vast.