He's demonstrated the ability to deal with concepts in varying degrees, and to understand the difference between a *political* objection, and a doctrinal one.
I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture [...] I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves:
They explicitly threatened to burn him alive if he did not recant, specifically because his theories contradicted the official interpretation of scripture (that's the official justification as set out in the documents, including the letter above). Under what definition of "suppress" does this not count as "suppressing science"?
Even though he may publicly laud free inquiry and study, he simply dismisses any source which disagrees with his predisposed notions of the world.
I would like to point to a similar story. In France the town of Rochechouart [france-for-visitors.com] sits on a meteor crater. The name of the town, dating back centuries, literally means 'Fallen rock'.
Actually it doesn't. There is no plausible etymology from choir ("to fall", from latin cadere) to "chouart". Rather, the term "Rochechouart" comes from "Cavardus' rock", referring to the man who built a fort in the area.
When an editor broke with the unwritten rule the warmers had the offending editor removed. Another journal allowed a few doubting papers in, the warmers are writing about organizing to not publish in, cite from and generally shun the heretical journal.
It's difficult to be sure since you don't provide any references, but apparently you are referring to the publication of a bogus review paper by the Climate Research journal, and the resulting debacle.
Just to let you know, in the real world, no editor was "removed". Half the editors, including the hastily appointed editor-in-chief, resigned in disgust. The reason why people were upset is that an obviously flawed paper was published by exploiting a non-standard review process. If the Time Cube guy managed to publish an article in some journal, you bet people would become wary of being associated with it. Wait, no, actually you would regard this as an obvious conspiracy by the entire scientific community to suppress the very real cubicity of the universe.
See, that's one reason why people call you "denialists" instead of "skeptics". When faced with a difficult problem that they don't fully understand, real skeptics will look for more information, rather than just confabulate their conspiracy fantasies into an alternate reality.
If one completely ignores any of the above data sets (whether they be direct measurements or proxies), there exist many disparate observations of global warming ranging from the rise in sea level which threatens various nations' lands...which has been either minimal or non-detectable, as opposed to what the AGW fans have been telling us. Not exactly a good point.
You should also note that if you go back to the beginning of serious AGW science (during the late 1980s), most of their predictions have already been falsified. The globe should be at least a half-degree warmer than observed (check the "Hockey Stick" graph in its earlier incarnations), the oceans should be at least a foot deeper (up to five feet higher today, according to some predictions), and storms should be much, much more severe (they're not). None of these things have happened over the last twenty years, therefore THEY WERE WRONG.
Let us assume that what you say is true. You are basically telling us that we should dismiss climate change research, because (according to you) some of the early papers got it wrong. Can you see the problem with your "reasoning"?
Seriously, this whole "climategate" debacle tends to run like this:
1- Deniers exhume some e-mail / piece of code which they don't understand, but assume is definite proof of evil scheming on the part of the great academic conspiracy ("Trick!" "Hide the decline!" OMGconspiracy send teh copz!!) .
2- Scientists post explanation, showing the deniers' allegations to be baseless (The "hidden" decline in tree ring growth was published a decade ago - see Nature link above; in this very publication, it was shown to diverge from the actual instrumental record after 1960; so for the post-1960 period we basically replace tree rings with the actual instrumental data, because we trust thermometers more than tree rings when the two fail to agree; we cited the relevant articles in the caption for the graph just to be sure).
3- Deniers completely ignore scientists' explanation, and keep fantasising about their glorious victory over evil scheming scientists. See GP for an illustration.
Rinse. Repeat.
To GP and all the folks who keep harping about this "VERY ARTIFICIAL" correction code: the code in question is a one-time code for temporarily re-calibrating the tree ring data. The reason, and the coefficients, are ultimately derived from the Nature article I linked to above. For an interesting hypothesis concerning the source of this code, see comment #147 and linked manuscript on this thread.
The current cell phone oligopoly needs to be broken the same way the Bell system was busted. There was a time when you could only buy your land line phone from Bell, there was only one directory (Free -white pages, advertised - yellow pages), and they owned the system from handset to handset. Costs were high, service was slow, and innovation was non-existent.
Except for discovering / inventing information theory, the transistor, the cosmic radiowave background, Unix and the C programming language. Among other trifling, Nobel-prize winning discoveries.
No private company has given more to the world than Bell. Bell Labs defined the Golden Age of American science and engineering. Reading that there was "no innovation" at Bell in a/. comment is pretty depressing.
Some encryption algorithms that were predicted to take forever to crack with today's technology, may in the long run end up taking the logarithm of forever.
Why was this modded funny? Taking the logarithm of something is enough to take it from "practically forever" to "actually quite feasible".
The log-10 of 100 is just 2. The log-10 of 1000 is 3. The log-10 of one billion is 9. Etc. Logarithms essentially negate the exponential explosions that are the source of practical impossibilities.
If someone found a way to logarithmically reduce the cracking time of a given algorithm, this algorithm would become essentially useless.
Man, I agree with all you said, but... TEN FSCKING DOLLARS.
No amount of government fiat is going to make even a screen+wifi+storage fit into $10.
Unless, of course, they massively subsidise each single unit. So the real cost would be in the high tens, or even a hundred, but Auntie Sonia and Manmohan Chachoo foot 80-90% of the bill, so it's $10 at the point of sale, not in production costs.
> There will be people who want to keep credit for their work, people who want to make money off of their work, and they do not want to make money supporting their software.
Each and everyone of the above is possible with Free software too.
Pentium? Microsoft advertised that 3.1 would run on a 386 with 16 meg of RAM
Windows 3.1 could run on a 386 with 2 megs of ram. So did Word for Windows 2.0, If you were ready to wait for a full minute before the damn thing would launch.
And yes, I know this from personal experience.
While the thing was often painfully slow, I still find it amazing that my current laptop with 512 megs of RAM is just as painfully slow today, running "modern" software.
I wonder why nobody has set out to create a free clone of Windows 2000 + Office 97. The functionality is sufficient for > 99.99% of all office tasks, and it runs at relativistic speeds on modern hardware. Instead, we get the bloated crash-happy monstrosities that are OpenOffice and Firefox 3.
1. They might be 'hard' but France has been operating one for years.
Uh, no. We stopped operating it ten years ago when we realised the damn thing would just not work (unless your definition of "work" is "leak sodium by the bucket").
They started out as pictures and morphed into the the written language they have today.
So did the Western alphabet, which is ultimately based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. A bunch of Semitic workers realised that it would be much easier to use hieroglyphs as phonetic symbols rather than as full-fledged ideograms.
The funny thing is, the Japanese actually did something similar with their hiragana/katakana characters. Unfortunately, for some reason they forgot to ditch the Chinese ideograms. So now they carry two alphabets plus a couple thousand ideograms. Tough luck.
Paraphrasing Churchill, the best argument against cultural anarchism is a five-minutes conversation with the average cultural anarchist.
Wrong. Entertainment is a luxury. It's a luxury very few people in mainland China can afford. Fewer than in India, that has the largest film industry in the world?
If you've got some romantic notion that bottled water actually comes from a glacier or some natural spring, then I've got a bridge to sell you. Evian, Volvic, Vittel, Perrier (and generally all French "mineral waters" and "source waters") come from a glacier or natural spring. By law.
Popular culture is not very popular because Chinese culture comes from tradition. That's why you can't find pirate DVDs of every single Hollywood film for ~$5 anywhere in China. Oh wait...
But why bother to spend money on R&D when other people are doing it, and you can just piggyback off their work? *blinks* That's the whole point! If you let people piggyback on each other's work, who's going to front the money for the initial R&D?
R&D will produce no extra revenue so long as there's no brand recognition. How can there be "brand recognition" if you're allowed to put your competitor's logo on other products??
Life also started in water, that shields out the most harmful radiations. Life on land has to wait until the ozone layer was strong enough.
if a bacterium has its DNA badly injured by a radiative event, it's less likely to survive than an animal with a million cells.
The single bacterium is less likely to survive. The population of billions of bacteria isn't. Also bacteria are independent (to a point): they don't need to be nice to each other to survive, at least not to the degree multicell bodies do. If just one of your cell goes awry, your whole body goes to the dogs. We call that "cancer". Bacteria don't have it.
My friends the PhD's go so far as to claim that the reason that the seven counties in the US with the longest average lifespan are all on the Continental Divide in Colorado where the radiation levels are highest because of the elevation. (Sorry I can't find a better link for the Eight Americas dataset: you have to download an Excel spreadsheet to get the raw data.)
This link gives county-by-county life expectancy (near the end of the article). That's interesting data, but low pollution + semi-rural lifestyle + OK incomes + low crime = lots of alternative explanations.
Popular Science already investigated this: Basically we don't have any materials that could do the job and withstand the beating and corrosive power of salt water.
Schools should have a backbone and tell the RIAA to fuck off.
Yay ! State-sponsored universities should spend bazillions of tax dollars in courts to protect our God-given "right" to download Britney's latest tripe for free (and saturate their bandwidth in the process) ! For great justice !!11!!
Oh, wait, perhaps they shouldn't. Perhaps instead it would be better for everybody if students, like, you know, did NOT use the university's network to break the law in the first place ? Uh ?
Seriously, I know this is/., where freeloaders will take the moral high ground... but man, do you ever win the prize!
Sure, human selfishness isn't natural. That's why you never see it "in the wild".
Dude, humans are a gregarious species. As far as humans are concerned, society (which almost always involves at least some degree of altruism and coopearation) IS "the wild".
The principle or practice of unselfish concern for or devotion to the welfare of others.
That's the intuitive, philosophical definition, but it has the drawback of opening several cans of worms. Imagine that I enjoy helping others - if I'm doing something that I enjoy doing, am I really being "unselfish" ? Am I not just an "altruism junkie" or something ?
I prefer the evolutionary definition: "performing actions that improve the chances of survival and reproduction of others, while decreasing your own". It's clear and unambiguous. It also allows you to look for the real causes of altruism, which, just like any other "Why is there X ?" question in biology, are evolutionary. In particular, there are many ways in which "altruistic genes" can thrive and propagate thoughout an evolving population (e.g. kin selection, reciprocal altruism, group selection, etc.)
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813
Jefferson had a stable income from the land he owned (and the slaves who worked it). He could devote himself to intellectual pursuits without fretting about who's going to pay the bills. Similarly, the ancient Athenians relied on slavery and (non-citizen) artisans and workmen to ensure their standards of living while they indulged in philosophy, politics and sports.
This is the "culture is only for the rich" model. There are two other models of cultural production. The first one is sponsorhip - by the state, by the church, or by the upper classes. That's how we got most of European culture before the French revolution and the 19th century. Admittedly an impressive corpus - except for the fact that the majority of the population (up to 90% in agrarian countries such as France) were simply cut off from it.
The other alternative is copyright. If you want to enjoy my work, well, pay up - so I can keep producing more work instead of flipping burgers.
By rehashing the Jefferson quote, you are essentially suggesting we go back to the "rich artists only" model.
Not so. It seems that you have not properly considered prior probabilities. I'm afraid we need a bit more precision here.
Google is (correlated with) Good if P(Good | Google) > P(Good) - or, equivalently, if P(Good AND Google) > P(Good) * P(Google). This simply means that "Good is more likely to be present when Google is involved". Similarly, Google is (correlated with) Evil if P(Evil | Google) > P(Evil).
Note that the two are not mutually incompatible: Google can certainly be (correlated with) both Good and Evil.
Unfortunately we cannot compute the conditional probabilities, because we do not know N - the number of all web pages, which is necessary. However, we can compare the following ratios: P(Good | Google) / P(Good) and P(Evil | Google) / P(Evil), so we can tell whether Google is more (correlated with) Good than (with) Evil.
Using your figures and basic conditional probability formulae, it is easy to see that:
P(Good | Google) / P(Good) = P(Good AND Google) / [ P(Good) * P(Google) ] = [341M / N ] / [ (1150M * 766M) / (N*N) ] = N * 341M / 880900M ~=.00039 * N
Therefore, we see that P(Evil | Google) / P(Evil) > P(Good | Google) > P(Good). It follows that Google is mathematically more (correlated with) Evil than Good. The numbers have spoken. Now where's my torch ?...
Slashdot Mirror
He's demonstrated the ability to deal with concepts in varying degrees, and to understand the difference between a *political* objection, and a doctrinal one.
From Galileo's recantation letter:
I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture [...] I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves:
Also, for some reason you fail to discuss the prelude to the whole debacle, when the Church officially condemned the Copernician doctrine, and notified Galileo of the fact.
Does the Church suppress science?
They explicitly threatened to burn him alive if he did not recant, specifically because his theories contradicted the official interpretation of scripture (that's the official justification as set out in the documents, including the letter above). Under what definition of "suppress" does this not count as "suppressing science"?
Even though he may publicly laud free inquiry and study, he simply dismisses any source which disagrees with his predisposed notions of the world.
That describes you to a T.
I would like to point to a similar story. In France the town of Rochechouart [france-for-visitors.com] sits on a meteor crater. The name of the town, dating back centuries, literally means 'Fallen rock'.
Actually it doesn't. There is no plausible etymology from choir ("to fall", from latin cadere) to "chouart". Rather, the term "Rochechouart" comes from "Cavardus' rock", referring to the man who built a fort in the area.
When an editor broke with the unwritten rule the warmers had the offending editor removed. Another journal allowed a few doubting papers in, the warmers are writing about organizing to not publish in, cite from and generally shun the heretical journal.
It's difficult to be sure since you don't provide any references, but apparently you are referring to the publication of a bogus review paper by the Climate Research journal, and the resulting debacle.
Just to let you know, in the real world, no editor was "removed". Half the editors, including the hastily appointed editor-in-chief, resigned in disgust. The reason why people were upset is that an obviously flawed paper was published by exploiting a non-standard review process. If the Time Cube guy managed to publish an article in some journal, you bet people would become wary of being associated with it. Wait, no, actually you would regard this as an obvious conspiracy by the entire scientific community to suppress the very real cubicity of the universe.
See, that's one reason why people call you "denialists" instead of "skeptics". When faced with a difficult problem that they don't fully understand, real skeptics will look for more information, rather than just confabulate their conspiracy fantasies into an alternate reality.
There's no bias against women in the vast majority of workplaces or academics.
The advantage of pulling stuff out of your ass is that you can post quickly.
The problem with pulling stuff out of your ass is that you often end up being wrong.
If one completely ignores any of the above data sets (whether they be direct measurements or proxies), there exist many disparate observations of global warming ranging from the rise in sea level which threatens various nations' lands ...which has been either minimal or non-detectable, as opposed to what the AGW fans have been telling us. Not exactly a good point.
Sea level changes from 1970 to 2009, compared with IPCC predictions. (from the Copenhagen Diagnosis, via Tim Lambert on Scienceblogs).
You should also note that if you go back to the beginning of serious AGW science (during the late 1980s), most of their predictions have already been falsified. The globe should be at least a half-degree warmer than observed (check the "Hockey Stick" graph in its earlier incarnations), the oceans should be at least a foot deeper (up to five feet higher today, according to some predictions), and storms should be much, much more severe (they're not). None of these things have happened over the last twenty years, therefore THEY WERE WRONG.
Let us assume that what you say is true. You are basically telling us that we should dismiss climate change research, because (according to you) some of the early papers got it wrong. Can you see the problem with your "reasoning"?
I will, however, admit that the researchers should have noted the issues with the tree-ring data in question.
Good thing they did, then. Only ten years ago, mind you.
Seriously, this whole "climategate" debacle tends to run like this:
1- Deniers exhume some e-mail / piece of code which they don't understand, but assume is definite proof of evil scheming on the part of the great academic conspiracy ("Trick!" "Hide the decline!" OMGconspiracy send teh copz!!) .
2- Scientists post explanation, showing the deniers' allegations to be baseless (The "hidden" decline in tree ring growth was published a decade ago - see Nature link above; in this very publication, it was shown to diverge from the actual instrumental record after 1960; so for the post-1960 period we basically replace tree rings with the actual instrumental data, because we trust thermometers more than tree rings when the two fail to agree; we cited the relevant articles in the caption for the graph just to be sure).
3- Deniers completely ignore scientists' explanation, and keep fantasising about their glorious victory over evil scheming scientists. See GP for an illustration.
Rinse. Repeat.
To GP and all the folks who keep harping about this "VERY ARTIFICIAL" correction code: the code in question is a one-time code for temporarily re-calibrating the tree ring data. The reason, and the coefficients, are ultimately derived from the Nature article I linked to above. For an interesting hypothesis concerning the source of this code, see comment #147 and linked manuscript on this thread.
The current cell phone oligopoly needs to be broken the same way the Bell system was busted. There was a time when you could only buy your land line phone from Bell, there was only one directory (Free -white pages, advertised - yellow pages), and they owned the system from handset to handset. Costs were high, service was slow, and innovation was non-existent.
Except for discovering / inventing information theory, the transistor, the cosmic radiowave background, Unix and the C programming language. Among other trifling, Nobel-prize winning discoveries. /. comment is pretty depressing.
No private company has given more to the world than Bell. Bell Labs defined the Golden Age of American science and engineering. Reading that there was "no innovation" at Bell in a
Some encryption algorithms that were predicted to take forever to crack with today's technology, may in the long run end up taking the logarithm of forever.
Why was this modded funny? Taking the logarithm of something is enough to take it from "practically forever" to "actually quite feasible".
The log-10 of 100 is just 2. The log-10 of 1000 is 3. The log-10 of one billion is 9. Etc. Logarithms essentially negate the exponential explosions that are the source of practical impossibilities.
If someone found a way to logarithmically reduce the cracking time of a given algorithm, this algorithm would become essentially useless.
Man, I agree with all you said, but... TEN FSCKING DOLLARS.
No amount of government fiat is going to make even a screen+wifi+storage fit into $10.
Unless, of course, they massively subsidise each single unit. So the real cost would be in the high tens, or even a hundred, but Auntie Sonia and Manmohan Chachoo foot 80-90% of the bill, so it's $10 at the point of sale, not in production costs.
I suspect that's what they really mean.
> There will be people who want to keep credit for their work, people who want to make money off of their work, and they do not want to make money supporting their software.
Each and everyone of the above is possible with Free software too.
Just not simultaneously.
Pentium? Microsoft advertised that 3.1 would run on a 386 with 16 meg of RAM
Windows 3.1 could run on a 386 with 2 megs of ram. So did Word for Windows 2.0, If you were ready to wait for a full minute before the damn thing would launch.
And yes, I know this from personal experience.
While the thing was often painfully slow, I still find it amazing that my current laptop with 512 megs of RAM is just as painfully slow today, running "modern" software.
I wonder why nobody has set out to create a free clone of Windows 2000 + Office 97. The functionality is sufficient for > 99.99% of all office tasks, and it runs at relativistic speeds on modern hardware. Instead, we get the bloated crash-happy monstrosities that are OpenOffice and Firefox 3.
1. They might be 'hard' but France has been operating one for years.
Uh, no. We stopped operating it ten years ago when we realised the damn thing would just not work (unless your definition of "work" is "leak sodium by the bucket").
They started out as pictures and morphed into the the written language they have today.
So did the Western alphabet, which is ultimately based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. A bunch of Semitic workers realised that it would be much easier to use hieroglyphs as phonetic symbols rather than as full-fledged ideograms.
The funny thing is, the Japanese actually did something similar with their hiragana/katakana characters. Unfortunately, for some reason they forgot to ditch the Chinese ideograms. So now they carry two alphabets plus a couple thousand ideograms. Tough luck.
Why should there be any consequences? Their modified genetic material has invaded your crop. You haven't stolen anything.
*sigh* If a money transport van crashes into your garden, is the money yours?
Stop posting crap, you're going to alert the karma police.
Feeling a bit paranoid, android?
but of course the church of the flying spaghetti monster isn't bunk
Of course not - it's durum wheat!
Paraphrasing Churchill, the best argument against cultural anarchism is a five-minutes conversation with the average cultural anarchist.
Wrong. Entertainment is a luxury. It's a luxury very few people in mainland China can afford. Fewer than in India, that has the largest film industry in the world?
If you've got some romantic notion that bottled water actually comes from a glacier or some natural spring, then I've got a bridge to sell you. Evian, Volvic, Vittel, Perrier (and generally all French "mineral waters" and "source waters") come from a glacier or natural spring. By law.
Popular culture is not very popular because Chinese culture comes from tradition. That's why you can't find pirate DVDs of every single Hollywood film for ~$5 anywhere in China. Oh wait...
But why bother to spend money on R&D when other people are doing it, and you can just piggyback off their work? *blinks* That's the whole point! If you let people piggyback on each other's work, who's going to front the money for the initial R&D?
R&D will produce no extra revenue so long as there's no brand recognition. How can there be "brand recognition" if you're allowed to put your competitor's logo on other products??
life started when there was a lot more radiation,
Life also started in water, that shields out the most harmful radiations. Life on land has to wait until the ozone layer was strong enough.
if a bacterium has its DNA badly injured by a radiative event, it's less likely to survive than an animal with a million cells.
The single bacterium is less likely to survive. The population of billions of bacteria isn't. Also bacteria are independent (to a point): they don't need to be nice to each other to survive, at least not to the degree multicell bodies do. If just one of your cell goes awry, your whole body goes to the dogs. We call that "cancer". Bacteria don't have it.
My friends the PhD's go so far as to claim that the reason that the seven counties in the US with the longest average lifespan are all on the Continental Divide in Colorado where the radiation levels are highest because of the elevation. (Sorry I can't find a better link for the Eight Americas dataset: you have to download an Excel spreadsheet to get the raw data.)
This link gives county-by-county life expectancy (near the end of the article). That's interesting data, but low pollution + semi-rural lifestyle + OK incomes + low crime = lots of alternative explanations.
Popular Science already investigated this: Basically we don't have any materials that could do the job and withstand the beating and corrosive power of salt water.
Oh yeah?
NB: It's been built 40 years, it's still operating, it's profitable and cheaper than nuclear. So yeah, tidal power can work.
Schools should have a backbone and tell the RIAA to fuck off.
/., where freeloaders will take the moral high ground... but man, do you ever win the prize!
Yay ! State-sponsored universities should spend bazillions of tax dollars in courts to protect our God-given "right" to download Britney's latest tripe for free (and saturate their bandwidth in the process) ! For great justice !!11!!
Oh, wait, perhaps they shouldn't. Perhaps instead it would be better for everybody if students, like, you know, did NOT use the university's network to break the law in the first place ? Uh ?
Seriously, I know this is
Frankly, I'm very comfortable with my place in the food chain.
Great Cthulhu approves of your enthusiasm.
Sure, human selfishness isn't natural. That's why you never see it "in the wild".
Dude, humans are a gregarious species. As far as humans are concerned, society (which almost always involves at least some degree of altruism and coopearation) IS "the wild".
The principle or practice of unselfish concern for or devotion to the welfare of others.
That's the intuitive, philosophical definition, but it has the drawback of opening several cans of worms. Imagine that I enjoy helping others - if I'm doing something that I enjoy doing, am I really being "unselfish" ? Am I not just an "altruism junkie" or something ?
I prefer the evolutionary definition: "performing actions that improve the chances of survival and reproduction of others, while decreasing your own". It's clear and unambiguous. It also allows you to look for the real causes of altruism, which, just like any other "Why is there X ?" question in biology, are evolutionary. In particular, there are many ways in which "altruistic genes" can thrive and propagate thoughout an evolving population (e.g. kin selection, reciprocal altruism, group selection, etc.)
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813
Jefferson had a stable income from the land he owned (and the slaves who worked it). He could devote himself to intellectual pursuits without fretting about who's going to pay the bills. Similarly, the ancient Athenians relied on slavery and (non-citizen) artisans and workmen to ensure their standards of living while they indulged in philosophy, politics and sports.
This is the "culture is only for the rich" model. There are two other models of cultural production. The first one is sponsorhip - by the state, by the church, or by the upper classes. That's how we got most of European culture before the French revolution and the 19th century. Admittedly an impressive corpus - except for the fact that the majority of the population (up to 90% in agrarian countries such as France) were simply cut off from it.
The other alternative is copyright. If you want to enjoy my work, well, pay up - so I can keep producing more work instead of flipping burgers.
By rehashing the Jefferson quote, you are essentially suggesting we go back to the "rich artists only" model.
Not so. It seems that you have not properly considered prior probabilities. I'm afraid we need a bit more precision here.
Google is (correlated with) Good if P(Good | Google) > P(Good) - or, equivalently, if P(Good AND Google) > P(Good) * P(Google). This simply means that "Good is more likely to be present when Google is involved". Similarly, Google is (correlated with) Evil if P(Evil | Google) > P(Evil).
Note that the two are not mutually incompatible: Google can certainly be (correlated with) both Good and Evil.
Unfortunately we cannot compute the conditional probabilities, because we do not know N - the number of all web pages, which is necessary. However, we can compare the following ratios: P(Good | Google) / P(Good) and P(Evil | Google) / P(Evil), so we can tell whether Google is more (correlated with) Good than (with) Evil.
Using your figures and basic conditional probability formulae, it is easy to see that: Therefore, we see that P(Evil | Google) / P(Evil) > P(Good | Google) > P(Good). It follows that Google is mathematically more (correlated with) Evil than Good. The numbers have spoken. Now where's my torch ?...