Since almost all programming work is undertaken by in house programmers who do not have their work distributed, programmers can still earn a living writing software that is neither free, nor proprietory.
As for paying for university education by publishing software, the problem there is that the US doesn't have proper publicly funded education. You cant complain that fixing one problem you have ruins the half-arsed fix to another problem you have. Most professions don't do their own career to pay for education. Doctors sure don't perform heart bypasses on the side to supplement their education. Civil engineers don't design building on their weekends either either.
The reason that your wedding photo analogy is poor is no one is stopping you from doing anything. If you want digital copies pay someone to take digital copies. Or better yet for $1000+ dollars buy your own high quality digital camera and take the darn things yourself. No one is holding stuff hostage, unless the terms of the agreement were not made clear to you when you negotiated the contract. If the terms of your agreement with the photographer were not clearly spelled out then you have a case.
However your inability to negotiate a deal with a wedding photographer, or the aforementioned ripping you off by not specifying the contract is not a curtailment of your freedom by government. One is not a curtailment of freedom at all, the other might be an example of a contract entered into without consideration, meaning an individual ripped you off (i.e. a curtailment of your freedom by an individual, I guess the freedom infringed upon is the freedom to enter into reasonable contracts). There is no law which says you cant hire someone who will give you the digital originals. It is however a curtailment of freedom that proprietary software enjoys practically infinite copyright with 0 probability of the source code entering the public domain. That material was published, that means that the public owns it, and if we cant do things with stuff we own then our freedoms are curtailed.
As to which is greater. I've no idea what the economic impact of effectively infinite copyright terms are, but if you couple that cost with the cultural costs I suspect that monetarily it is more than the wedding photo industries costs of a few thousand per person. I'm sure your wedding photos are very important to you, but how important should they be compared with the health of the American economy, or protecting Western culture (in the having the culture in the public domain sense rather than the go and shoot fascists sense)?
Font appearance is a personal taste issue, although I cant tell the difference. How are you measuring RAM usage? Because it isn't the amount of RAM in the task manager you want to worry about. What you need to find out is what do the applications do when the system is low on resources. If firefox is a good little application and surrenders that RAM when the system needs it, then it doesn't matter if it is 'using' it at other times.
I'm going to make the rash assumption that you are a physicists or at least have a degree in the subject. Then I'm going to guess you are either American or American educated. Two reasons, firstly it is statistically likely due to the population breakdown of the internet. Secondly you were taught Newtons second law in symbolic form before you choose your major. If you were British you wouldn't be taught Newtons second law in symbolic form anywhere (pre-university) other than A level math classes, where you certainly wouldn't be tested on your ability to memorise it. Thankfully, not everyone had the same education you did. That being the case perhaps you might entertain the idea that the first place most physicists in the UK encounter Newtons second law is in an A-level mechanics paper or module. Since the British teach calculus a little earlier that our former colonial friends, we have the advantage of being able to study Newton's laws by example. If the first line of the 50 or so problems I do to prepare for a mechanics finals is "Given F=ma", sitting down and writing it 20 times to ram in into my head seems somewhat superfluous. Given the above facts you might also entertain the notion that I, also being British, would know no other individual who has learnt Newtons second law by rote, seeing as most of my close colleagues would also be British, or at least educated in the UK. If you are suggesting that somehow I do know of such an individual perhaps you wouldn't mind returning whatever piece of white matter it is you stole containing said information so that I too could recall them again.
I can think of no piece of physics requiring anything as/more complicated than calculus which I have memorised by rote. I would like to think that given I'm now completing the third year of a PhD in the subject, and am nothing particularly special, that my experiences are typical.
Your post fails on other accounts though, given that I gave plenty of examples of formulas that no one learns by rote, specifically I mentioned the form of the Ricci tensor. The GP brought up Newtons second law, I did not, and if you had any semblance of reasoning ability you would infer from the fact that I brought up other examples without prompting that I was aware that certain education systems do sit children down and have them memorise pointlessly formulas which they have no idea how to use. I can think of little other reason (other than overt repetition of the point) to bring up the aforementioned additional examples. That you chose to ignore this suggests to me that either you lack the the most basic of reasoning ability or you care more about being right and less about actually presenting a reasonable counterpoint.
As to your somewhat juvenile quip about the misspelling, I should point out two things. Firstly I spelt the word correctly in other places in the post, making this a substitution error rather than a problem with my ability to memorise the spelling of the word (or some inability to operate a dictionary). Secondly I have dyslexia, a condition which has as a symptom precisely the aforementioned. As ego inflating as I'm sure it is for you to engage in poking fun at someone with a learning impairment, perhaps you would do better to stick to the matter at hand.
No physicist learns F=ma by wrote. They learn it by applying it. Your other situations all have time criticality. I don't want a surgeon looking stuff up mid op because it takes longer. I don't want a pilot looking up how to extend the landing gear mid landing because he should be paying attention to the ILS.
I can think of two situations when one might memorise material by rote. The first is when it is time critical. The second is when for the forseable tasks one intends to undertake it is faster to memorise the material than repeatedly look it up. In the case of Feynman and the biologists, Feynman is correct because he was able to do actual interesting biology without needing to memorise the material, catching up four years of real biology in no time. It is the equivilant of a physics degree comprising in no small part of memorising the lagrangians of condensed matter systems. Physics, certainly. Useful, sure. The most productive use of a students time, hell no!
The reason your retort to Feynman is specious is that Feynman would have no problem with you looking up Newtons laws, or the formula for the Ricci Tensor, or any other formula (heck I study quantum gravity and I don't know what the formula for the Ricci tensor is) like that the first 20 or so times. After you use a formula that often you will memorise it anyway. You might get a complaint if you don't know what the Ricci tensor is, or what a force is, because knowing what concepts are and how to use them is more important than knowing their precise form. It is the difference between knowing what the kidneys do, and knowing what each individual part of a kidney cell looks like under a microscope.
In reference to the article, I cant remember my own phone number, heck I forget how to spell my own middle name. These facts are not useful or relevant, so I don't bother to learn then. Not to mention they are stored somewhere else. The learn by rote generation is just pissed because mass storage has rendered most of the stuff they spent ages memorising obsolete.
Thanks for the correction per the missing 'unique' in that sentence. It makes no sense otherwise.
It is certainly true that group theory is not an 'easier' branch of mathematics per say. What I mean is that some parts of group theory are far easier (in terms of their actual maths content) than number theory, or fields, or whatever you want to classify the 'mathematics' we teach children pre-University.
As a place to start introducing students to mathematics (as in actually constructing proofs rather than algebraic hocus pocus) I cant think of a better place to start that Group Theory. If you can I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
Things like X+7=15 involve incredibly complex concepts. X is in a field, which is a pretty advanced concept. We should be teaching elementary group theory to students at that age, not giving them a half assed algebra and fields classes.
Group theory is easy (mathematics wise) compared with fields. Things like, prove that every element of a group has an inverse. Heck we try to teach the above just assuming people will realise they are working with an algebra with two binary operations with associative, commutative and distributive properties.
The problem is we don't try to teach maths to students, we teach 'how to work with money' to students. That is all well and good if you don't want to actually learn mathematics, but is useless for someone who intends to take a physics, chemistry or maths degree.
"There are some musical recordings that are very expensive to make and take much longer that 14 years to recover costs on, let alone make a profit on. IIRC, a lot of classical orchestral recordings are like this."
True, an in part this is because they are made inefficiently, in part this is because few people want them. That is called the free market. If you want to make exceptions for this kind of work, you do it via public grants or patronage. Not via copyright, because copyright should be to encourage creation of as much work as possible.
As for:
"And, speaking only for myself, having copyright on my work is not about making money, but about retaining some degree of control over what I write."
You go right on ahead and don't publish it then. No one can change your work if you don't publish it. Keep it to yourself and blam, you have total control.
"A little bit back on topic, is anyone else disturbed that unwavering belief in the theory of evolution has become a litmus test for intelligence?"
I often tell my biologist friends that they are lucky that evolution came before a well developed theory of statistical mechanics. Evolution is a direct consequence of border line cast iron assumptions made in statistical mechanics. And statistical mechanics is so reliable no one questions it's assumptions. I wouldn't even call evolution a theory, it borders on a tautology because it is so obviously true. It isn't like Newtonian Gravity, or Quantum Mechanics, or even special relativity, it is unique. I say that as a physicists who wishes it was a physical theory rather than a biological one. Evolution is special in science because it is one of those theories that no matter what we discover we will always call the process of how life went from the single cell to it's current form evolution, unless the very foundations of science itself are destroyed. It borders on a mathematical proof because the assumptions made arriving at it are few and so well tested.
That is why no one in science of any credibility questions the central tenets of evolutionary theory. That is why anyone who does not has their credibility questioned.
The problem you just described is the job of an apointed second house. The lower house reflects the will of the people, the upper house prevents the peoples representatives from doing something really stupid because it is packed with the necessary experts (lawyers, scientists, engineers, artists, sociologists, leading moral figures, etc) who don't have to worry about re-election. They also only have power to slow government, not direct it.
You're correct I'm not talking the U.S. I'm from Britian. Of course what I say readily transfers to the U.S. with the slight modification that the U.S. right wing is the equivilant of the British ultra-right, while the American 'left' is basically the equivilant of the British right wing.
To answer your question, what I want is an upper house which can deal with making laws legally sound, and a lower house that reflects the will of the people. As such I don't care much about the skills set comprising the lower house so long as each member can claim to represent their constituents. The upper house on the other hand needs to be skills heavy, representation light.
For a classic example of how stupid not seperating these two concepts are look at the role of the US president as commander-in-chief. Every four year the US debates if this candidate would make a good commander-in-chief or not. He is the head of the civilian government. He should be telling the military who to bomb, not how to bomb. It's absolutely crazy and invites military involvement in the civilian government because the public will have a harder time electing anyone who has not served in the military.
Look at Bush, as much as I hate the guy the fact that his military record is used to suggest he is not a good commander-in-chief counted against him when it shouldn't have, at least not in the way it did.
You can circumvent your second problem by preventing those kinds of contractual agreements using a 'no profiting from illegal activity' style law.
You can then up the hurt on the lawyers clients by incorporating a sliding scale of fines, so a fine which would banrupt an individual also banrupts a company. In the end no one is able to sue frivilously, or nearly frivilously, which is preferable to what we have now. At present we have a legal system which is little better than an arm of our corporate government. If buying the best lawyers doesn't work, then companies just buy laws and lawmakers. The only time that doesn't work is when another company stands up to them. At least if no one can sue, then the corrupt laws are harder to use.
As for politicians often being lawyers, well not much I can see that can be done about that. Both professions are essentially professional liars. Campaign reform (banning political donations and political parties) may help though, if politics could be entered by someone other than the well connected and the wealthy that might cut down the single professions (lawyers, union leaders, sons of rich industrialists (modern aristocrats)).
Yeah, I can summarise the important ones like this: Be a good little bitch for the establishment, and maybe one day you will get to ask the people who sit in the biggest, warmest, most impressive chairs inane questions and think you are important.
Can I get a link to the story you mention? I must have missed that one and cant form an opinion just yet.
Until the entity which undertakes to fix prices is as powerful as a goverment...
At the end of the day government is the biggest gang of the lot, and in the West, it tends to be the least efficient, least capable gang. However, it is also the gang that is supposed to represent the people, and do so without prejudice against an individual based on their wealth. Now it fails at this task, but not the same degree that corporate entities do. When corporations become little governments unto themselves then it is preferable that the peoples gang give them a smack down, than become obselete.
Smith was right in how he identified the problem, but wrong in how he derived the solution. Or alternatively, he was right in his solution, and since corporations like Walmart or Microsoft are essentially the new guilds we should disband them because they exist by corporate charter handed to them by government. You claim that these are different, but illegal and coercive means are used by both these companies in a manner which is similar to how the guilds used to operate. The difference is that while failure to pay a guild due might result in your legs needing a splint, failure to pay a corporate monopoly will leave you without a legal leg to stand on.
Now if you were to remove the legal recourse of the likes of Microsoft then I agree the problem would go away. Remove any barrier to reverse engineering protocols and Microsoft is dead in the water in under 10 years. Properly enforce union regulations, remove farming subsidies, slash copyright and patent protections and most monopolies are in dead water. If that is what you are suggesting then I agree with you, but since government is a for sale entity, that is not going to happen, and our next best option are populist anti-trust laws.
I think you underestimate the value of a constitutional monarchy. In some sense, the monarchy is fast becoming Britain's last hope. Our house of Lords are about to become democratically elected, probably by PR which will be almost as big a disaster as when the US senate became elected. At least the Monarchy can provoke a constitutional crisis and with the aid of the military restore Britain to a rights based republic, if the situation is ever that dire.
In the West we have become obsessed with democracy, as in mob rule democracy. Even worse, the mob doesn't have to be 50:50, just have 50% of the votes in 50% of the constituencies. We are fast falling to a tyranny of the people.
Because in the US most positions are elected or appointed by elected representatives your government is fast falling to the tyranny of the Christian South. A democratic crusader country is not far off if the US is not more careful.
"Obviously artists need to get paid for what they do."
One does not have a right to make a profit from what one does, even if it produces useful outcomes. If I go around mending everyone on my streets fences I am not entitled to compensation for doing so.
If you cant think of a way to make a profit out of music, then live with the markets decision. Copyright is artists welfare, which we allow the recording industry to abuse.
Parent means 'Rights based Republic' not 'Republic as in not Monarchy'. In some sense on paper England is also a rights based republic (essentially since the Magna Carta). Of course being one on paper and being one in practice are entirely different. For rights based republics which include the democratic process part of being a rights based republic is the recognition of both the idea that the governing class has to have the consent of the people, and reflect the will of the people. These are rights the people retain, but they do not supercede most other rights. For example free speach is in some sense more important than the will of the people in traditional American culture.
Hence the distinction. Democracy is not really an important concept in Ye Olde American culture (compared with free speech or consent of the people). It is more a means to an end. It is only recently that democratic feaver has gripped the nation.
You are failing to see my point. The law should not protect the worthless. At the moment the police offer me no protection. People can harrass me, steal from me, heck even kill me and will probably get away with it. I on the other hand can do none of these things. Why? Because the circumstances under which I wish to do these things constitute taking the law into my own hands, and if there is one thing the police hate, it is people busting in on thier monopoly.
For example, I've had several bikes stolen from me, I've been beaten up in the street. Nothing has been done. I've had companies take money from me that wasn't thier's to take. But if I were to defend myself from an attack and kill my would be assailant, you cant bet your arse I'd be in trouble.
Now school is just imposing the law by proxy. Only in school it is even worse because the rules effectively target the well meaning well behaved children. I think the perfect system in a school would be one that is just. But we cant have that, so lets have the next best thing. Lets ensure that those children who will actually grow up to be useful members of society are the leaders. Lets crush those who are ignorant, lets put them in their place. Why? Because the only alternative we seem to have so far is to let the violent, the worthless and the ignorant rule the roost, and that results in chaos.
I don't need to shadow a teacher, I've been to school, I know schools are hell on Earth. The difference is instead of saying "gee, thats hard, what to do", I'm saying "lets do something useful". I know the law is an ass, but I also know that most teachers are incompetant. Out of 16 teachers through high school I would say 2 were actually able to do the job. Most of my teachers were stupider than the top 5% of the students.
Now I'm not saying I would do a better job. I would never become a teacher precisely because I would be crap at it (well I do teach, but at university which is a whole other ball game, there you are an educator, not a baby sitter). However, that doesn't excuse the half arsed job most teachers do. Besides which, I'm saying we need to change the law.
If we cant fix the system to make it fair, lets fix the system to make it useful, and to ensure useful people aren't damaged by the useless.
Finally, I will call people who are worthless exactly that. People who make no contribution to society have no worth. About 5% of children in school fall into this catagory, yet they make life unpleasant for 50-60% of other students at one point or another. The system ensures that it is the most violent, the ones with the least to lose, who get away with their crimes, while ordinary decent kids suffer. I say if we cant fix the system, we at least make it work for society instead of against it.
There is an obvious flaw in your logic. Puppies are superior to robots. Puppies, while simple beings, have (in my opinion) some natural rights, in the same way that I have some natural rights. Now they don't have all the rights I have because they are not sentient. But they have some rights because of what they can do. They can suffer and they have a right not to suffer. Now this is not to say that I'm some PETA nut, far from it (I wholly support animal testing). But I als recognise that animals are not our play thing to do with as we wish. It however, has nothing to do with them being alive and everything to do with what they can do.
It is interesting you mention robots. If I create a robot that can walk and talk and play piano and feel pain, do we not give it the same rights as a human?
Just because everything is made out of the same material does not mean that special configurations of that material do not acquire properties that I choose to protect. I believe either you are being disingenuous with your arguement, or you are making an arguement so obvious as to contribute very little. A society which allows the rape of babies is obviously bad. However, that does not mean that from a physical perspective everything isn't essentially the same stuff. What makes 'living' stuff special is what it can do. This is why killing bacteria is fine, but stomping on puppies is bad.
I must admit I really don't get the point you are trying to make.
Of course the problem is that most teachers are incompetant when it comes to matters of discipline. We barstardise the justice system in school and punish the useful children because they have something to lose.
Until the way school's approach discipline reflects the desirable characteristics of children rather than a half arsed effort to be fair you will always have this problem. Can you imagine being the parent of a smart child, who is bullied at school and told not to hit back? When they get detention for beating a child shitless to ensure the other children know thier place, what would you do?
Ender's Game gives a clear picture of the mental processes of a mature child. In order for useful children to survive school, they have to become the ring leaders, and that can only happen if schools turn a blind eye to their ascension, the way that a blind eye is turn to the ascension of the rich parents children, or the big children.
We have to pick which children we want emerging as leaders. At the moment, we pick the worthless.
Did you even read the rest of the post? Copyright is an artificial right. If leaving the burden of proof with the rights holders still provides sufficient incentive, then that is good enough. They do not have to be able to police the entire internet, just enough to encourage sales so that there is an incentive to create.
Assuming you are right, how long do you think it is going to be before YouTube (and by proxy) Google loses a court case on this, and decides to turn around to the government and buy a law like the parent describes?
People forget that if the media companies can buy laws, then so can search engines, and Google ($143.88B) has a bigger market capitalisation that Time-Warner (83.75B).
Corruption works both ways and it is reaching the point where Google can just as easily end a political career as Fox can.
Burglary is a criminal offence which the police exist to investigate, and the criminal justice system is designed to punish.
Copyright infringement is a civil offence, which includes different penalties, and different rules.
Repeat 100x
Copyright infringement != Burglary
The burden of preventing copyright infringement lies with the rights holder. They have certain actions they can compel others to take with regard to their copyrighted material, and legal recourse if those actions are not taken. This does not extend to bringing the full weight of the criminal justice system to bear against copyright infringers. This is fair because a copyright is not physical property, and copyright itself is a social contract between creators and the public. It is already very unfair on the public due to the Berne convention, and does not serve the purpose it was originally intended for (enriching the public domain). Are you suggesting it should be made more unfair?
In that case I'm sure DRM does increase value to the consumer. And I have no problem with special disk being released which you can rent with the DRMed content on them, under the precondition that there are non-DRMed sales as well, with equivilant market penetration to ensure that when the time comes the content enters the public domain, and to protect fair use rights.
What you are describing is unjust enrichment. That is entirely different. If I accidentally over pay for good, then the person I overpay is unjustly enriched, if it is different from the agreed contract price. If I agree to pay over the odds, then there is diddly squat I can do about it. Amazon were not unjustly enriched, they just agreed to a stupid transaction. As such if they try to claim the money they were originally intending to charge before settling on a price of $0.00 they are commiting fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
Since almost all programming work is undertaken by in house programmers who do not have their work distributed, programmers can still earn a living writing software that is neither free, nor proprietory.
As for paying for university education by publishing software, the problem there is that the US doesn't have proper publicly funded education. You cant complain that fixing one problem you have ruins the half-arsed fix to another problem you have. Most professions don't do their own career to pay for education. Doctors sure don't perform heart bypasses on the side to supplement their education. Civil engineers don't design building on their weekends either either.
The reason that your wedding photo analogy is poor is no one is stopping you from doing anything. If you want digital copies pay someone to take digital copies. Or better yet for $1000+ dollars buy your own high quality digital camera and take the darn things yourself. No one is holding stuff hostage, unless the terms of the agreement were not made clear to you when you negotiated the contract. If the terms of your agreement with the photographer were not clearly spelled out then you have a case.
However your inability to negotiate a deal with a wedding photographer, or the aforementioned ripping you off by not specifying the contract is not a curtailment of your freedom by government. One is not a curtailment of freedom at all, the other might be an example of a contract entered into without consideration, meaning an individual ripped you off (i.e. a curtailment of your freedom by an individual, I guess the freedom infringed upon is the freedom to enter into reasonable contracts). There is no law which says you cant hire someone who will give you the digital originals. It is however a curtailment of freedom that proprietary software enjoys practically infinite copyright with 0 probability of the source code entering the public domain. That material was published, that means that the public owns it, and if we cant do things with stuff we own then our freedoms are curtailed.
As to which is greater. I've no idea what the economic impact of effectively infinite copyright terms are, but if you couple that cost with the cultural costs I suspect that monetarily it is more than the wedding photo industries costs of a few thousand per person. I'm sure your wedding photos are very important to you, but how important should they be compared with the health of the American economy, or protecting Western culture (in the having the culture in the public domain sense rather than the go and shoot fascists sense)?
Font appearance is a personal taste issue, although I cant tell the difference. How are you measuring RAM usage? Because it isn't the amount of RAM in the task manager you want to worry about. What you need to find out is what do the applications do when the system is low on resources. If firefox is a good little application and surrenders that RAM when the system needs it, then it doesn't matter if it is 'using' it at other times.
Good point, I made the assumption that the poster knew what they were talking about, where as you clearly point out they might not.
I'm going to make the rash assumption that you are a physicists or at least have a degree in the subject. Then I'm going to guess you are either American or American educated. Two reasons, firstly it is statistically likely due to the population breakdown of the internet. Secondly you were taught Newtons second law in symbolic form before you choose your major. If you were British you wouldn't be taught Newtons second law in symbolic form anywhere (pre-university) other than A level math classes, where you certainly wouldn't be tested on your ability to memorise it. Thankfully, not everyone had the same education you did. That being the case perhaps you might entertain the idea that the first place most physicists in the UK encounter Newtons second law is in an A-level mechanics paper or module. Since the British teach calculus a little earlier that our former colonial friends, we have the advantage of being able to study Newton's laws by example. If the first line of the 50 or so problems I do to prepare for a mechanics finals is "Given F=ma", sitting down and writing it 20 times to ram in into my head seems somewhat superfluous. Given the above facts you might also entertain the notion that I, also being British, would know no other individual who has learnt Newtons second law by rote, seeing as most of my close colleagues would also be British, or at least educated in the UK. If you are suggesting that somehow I do know of such an individual perhaps you wouldn't mind returning whatever piece of white matter it is you stole containing said information so that I too could recall them again.
I can think of no piece of physics requiring anything as/more complicated than calculus which I have memorised by rote. I would like to think that given I'm now completing the third year of a PhD in the subject, and am nothing particularly special, that my experiences are typical.
Your post fails on other accounts though, given that I gave plenty of examples of formulas that no one learns by rote, specifically I mentioned the form of the Ricci tensor. The GP brought up Newtons second law, I did not, and if you had any semblance of reasoning ability you would infer from the fact that I brought up other examples without prompting that I was aware that certain education systems do sit children down and have them memorise pointlessly formulas which they have no idea how to use. I can think of little other reason (other than overt repetition of the point) to bring up the aforementioned additional examples. That you chose to ignore this suggests to me that either you lack the the most basic of reasoning ability or you care more about being right and less about actually presenting a reasonable counterpoint.
As to your somewhat juvenile quip about the misspelling, I should point out two things. Firstly I spelt the word correctly in other places in the post, making this a substitution error rather than a problem with my ability to memorise the spelling of the word (or some inability to operate a dictionary). Secondly I have dyslexia, a condition which has as a symptom precisely the aforementioned. As ego inflating as I'm sure it is for you to engage in poking fun at someone with a learning impairment, perhaps you would do better to stick to the matter at hand.
No physicist learns F=ma by wrote. They learn it by applying it. Your other situations all have time criticality. I don't want a surgeon looking stuff up mid op because it takes longer. I don't want a pilot looking up how to extend the landing gear mid landing because he should be paying attention to the ILS.
I can think of two situations when one might memorise material by rote. The first is when it is time critical. The second is when for the forseable tasks one intends to undertake it is faster to memorise the material than repeatedly look it up. In the case of Feynman and the biologists, Feynman is correct because he was able to do actual interesting biology without needing to memorise the material, catching up four years of real biology in no time. It is the equivilant of a physics degree comprising in no small part of memorising the lagrangians of condensed matter systems. Physics, certainly. Useful, sure. The most productive use of a students time, hell no!
The reason your retort to Feynman is specious is that Feynman would have no problem with you looking up Newtons laws, or the formula for the Ricci Tensor, or any other formula (heck I study quantum gravity and I don't know what the formula for the Ricci tensor is) like that the first 20 or so times. After you use a formula that often you will memorise it anyway. You might get a complaint if you don't know what the Ricci tensor is, or what a force is, because knowing what concepts are and how to use them is more important than knowing their precise form. It is the difference between knowing what the kidneys do, and knowing what each individual part of a kidney cell looks like under a microscope.
In reference to the article, I cant remember my own phone number, heck I forget how to spell my own middle name. These facts are not useful or relevant, so I don't bother to learn then. Not to mention they are stored somewhere else. The learn by rote generation is just pissed because mass storage has rendered most of the stuff they spent ages memorising obsolete.
Thanks for the correction per the missing 'unique' in that sentence. It makes no sense otherwise.
It is certainly true that group theory is not an 'easier' branch of mathematics per say. What I mean is that some parts of group theory are far easier (in terms of their actual maths content) than number theory, or fields, or whatever you want to classify the 'mathematics' we teach children pre-University.
As a place to start introducing students to mathematics (as in actually constructing proofs rather than algebraic hocus pocus) I cant think of a better place to start that Group Theory. If you can I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
Things like X+7=15 involve incredibly complex concepts. X is in a field, which is a pretty advanced concept. We should be teaching elementary group theory to students at that age, not giving them a half assed algebra and fields classes.
Group theory is easy (mathematics wise) compared with fields. Things like, prove that every element of a group has an inverse. Heck we try to teach the above just assuming people will realise they are working with an algebra with two binary operations with associative, commutative and distributive properties.
The problem is we don't try to teach maths to students, we teach 'how to work with money' to students. That is all well and good if you don't want to actually learn mathematics, but is useless for someone who intends to take a physics, chemistry or maths degree.
"There are some musical recordings that are very expensive to make and take much longer that 14 years to recover costs on, let alone make a profit on. IIRC, a lot of classical orchestral recordings are like this."
True, an in part this is because they are made inefficiently, in part this is because few people want them. That is called the free market. If you want to make exceptions for this kind of work, you do it via public grants or patronage. Not via copyright, because copyright should be to encourage creation of as much work as possible.
As for:
"And, speaking only for myself, having copyright on my work is not about making money, but about retaining some degree of control over what I write."
You go right on ahead and don't publish it then. No one can change your work if you don't publish it. Keep it to yourself and blam, you have total control.
"A little bit back on topic, is anyone else disturbed that unwavering belief in the theory of evolution has become a litmus test for intelligence?"
I often tell my biologist friends that they are lucky that evolution came before a well developed theory of statistical mechanics. Evolution is a direct consequence of border line cast iron assumptions made in statistical mechanics. And statistical mechanics is so reliable no one questions it's assumptions. I wouldn't even call evolution a theory, it borders on a tautology because it is so obviously true. It isn't like Newtonian Gravity, or Quantum Mechanics, or even special relativity, it is unique. I say that as a physicists who wishes it was a physical theory rather than a biological one. Evolution is special in science because it is one of those theories that no matter what we discover we will always call the process of how life went from the single cell to it's current form evolution, unless the very foundations of science itself are destroyed. It borders on a mathematical proof because the assumptions made arriving at it are few and so well tested.
That is why no one in science of any credibility questions the central tenets of evolutionary theory. That is why anyone who does not has their credibility questioned.
Three words for you:
House of Lords.
The problem you just described is the job of an apointed second house. The lower house reflects the will of the people, the upper house prevents the peoples representatives from doing something really stupid because it is packed with the necessary experts (lawyers, scientists, engineers, artists, sociologists, leading moral figures, etc) who don't have to worry about re-election. They also only have power to slow government, not direct it.
You're correct I'm not talking the U.S. I'm from Britian. Of course what I say readily transfers to the U.S. with the slight modification that the U.S. right wing is the equivilant of the British ultra-right, while the American 'left' is basically the equivilant of the British right wing.
To answer your question, what I want is an upper house which can deal with making laws legally sound, and a lower house that reflects the will of the people. As such I don't care much about the skills set comprising the lower house so long as each member can claim to represent their constituents. The upper house on the other hand needs to be skills heavy, representation light.
For a classic example of how stupid not seperating these two concepts are look at the role of the US president as commander-in-chief. Every four year the US debates if this candidate would make a good commander-in-chief or not. He is the head of the civilian government. He should be telling the military who to bomb, not how to bomb. It's absolutely crazy and invites military involvement in the civilian government because the public will have a harder time electing anyone who has not served in the military.
Look at Bush, as much as I hate the guy the fact that his military record is used to suggest he is not a good commander-in-chief counted against him when it shouldn't have, at least not in the way it did.
You can circumvent your second problem by preventing those kinds of contractual agreements using a 'no profiting from illegal activity' style law.
You can then up the hurt on the lawyers clients by incorporating a sliding scale of fines, so a fine which would banrupt an individual also banrupts a company. In the end no one is able to sue frivilously, or nearly frivilously, which is preferable to what we have now. At present we have a legal system which is little better than an arm of our corporate government. If buying the best lawyers doesn't work, then companies just buy laws and lawmakers. The only time that doesn't work is when another company stands up to them. At least if no one can sue, then the corrupt laws are harder to use.
As for politicians often being lawyers, well not much I can see that can be done about that. Both professions are essentially professional liars. Campaign reform (banning political donations and political parties) may help though, if politics could be entered by someone other than the well connected and the wealthy that might cut down the single professions (lawyers, union leaders, sons of rich industrialists (modern aristocrats)).
"Journalists have rules to follow"
Yeah, I can summarise the important ones like this:
Be a good little bitch for the establishment, and maybe one day you will get to ask the people who sit in the biggest, warmest, most impressive chairs inane questions and think you are important.
Can I get a link to the story you mention? I must have missed that one and cant form an opinion just yet.
Until the entity which undertakes to fix prices is as powerful as a goverment...
At the end of the day government is the biggest gang of the lot, and in the West, it tends to be the least efficient, least capable gang. However, it is also the gang that is supposed to represent the people, and do so without prejudice against an individual based on their wealth. Now it fails at this task, but not the same degree that corporate entities do. When corporations become little governments unto themselves then it is preferable that the peoples gang give them a smack down, than become obselete.
Smith was right in how he identified the problem, but wrong in how he derived the solution. Or alternatively, he was right in his solution, and since corporations like Walmart or Microsoft are essentially the new guilds we should disband them because they exist by corporate charter handed to them by government. You claim that these are different, but illegal and coercive means are used by both these companies in a manner which is similar to how the guilds used to operate. The difference is that while failure to pay a guild due might result in your legs needing a splint, failure to pay a corporate monopoly will leave you without a legal leg to stand on.
Now if you were to remove the legal recourse of the likes of Microsoft then I agree the problem would go away. Remove any barrier to reverse engineering protocols and Microsoft is dead in the water in under 10 years. Properly enforce union regulations, remove farming subsidies, slash copyright and patent protections and most monopolies are in dead water. If that is what you are suggesting then I agree with you, but since government is a for sale entity, that is not going to happen, and our next best option are populist anti-trust laws.
I think you underestimate the value of a constitutional monarchy. In some sense, the monarchy is fast becoming Britain's last hope. Our house of Lords are about to become democratically elected, probably by PR which will be almost as big a disaster as when the US senate became elected. At least the Monarchy can provoke a constitutional crisis and with the aid of the military restore Britain to a rights based republic, if the situation is ever that dire.
In the West we have become obsessed with democracy, as in mob rule democracy. Even worse, the mob doesn't have to be 50:50, just have 50% of the votes in 50% of the constituencies. We are fast falling to a tyranny of the people.
Because in the US most positions are elected or appointed by elected representatives your government is fast falling to the tyranny of the Christian South. A democratic crusader country is not far off if the US is not more careful.
"Obviously artists need to get paid for what they do."
One does not have a right to make a profit from what one does, even if it produces useful outcomes. If I go around mending everyone on my streets fences I am not entitled to compensation for doing so.
If you cant think of a way to make a profit out of music, then live with the markets decision. Copyright is artists welfare, which we allow the recording industry to abuse.
Parent means 'Rights based Republic' not 'Republic as in not Monarchy'. In some sense on paper England is also a rights based republic (essentially since the Magna Carta). Of course being one on paper and being one in practice are entirely different. For rights based republics which include the democratic process part of being a rights based republic is the recognition of both the idea that the governing class has to have the consent of the people, and reflect the will of the people. These are rights the people retain, but they do not supercede most other rights. For example free speach is in some sense more important than the will of the people in traditional American culture.
Hence the distinction. Democracy is not really an important concept in Ye Olde American culture (compared with free speech or consent of the people). It is more a means to an end. It is only recently that democratic feaver has gripped the nation.
You are failing to see my point. The law should not protect the worthless. At the moment the police offer me no protection. People can harrass me, steal from me, heck even kill me and will probably get away with it. I on the other hand can do none of these things. Why? Because the circumstances under which I wish to do these things constitute taking the law into my own hands, and if there is one thing the police hate, it is people busting in on thier monopoly.
For example, I've had several bikes stolen from me, I've been beaten up in the street. Nothing has been done. I've had companies take money from me that wasn't thier's to take. But if I were to defend myself from an attack and kill my would be assailant, you cant bet your arse I'd be in trouble.
Now school is just imposing the law by proxy. Only in school it is even worse because the rules effectively target the well meaning well behaved children. I think the perfect system in a school would be one that is just. But we cant have that, so lets have the next best thing. Lets ensure that those children who will actually grow up to be useful members of society are the leaders. Lets crush those who are ignorant, lets put them in their place. Why? Because the only alternative we seem to have so far is to let the violent, the worthless and the ignorant rule the roost, and that results in chaos.
I don't need to shadow a teacher, I've been to school, I know schools are hell on Earth. The difference is instead of saying "gee, thats hard, what to do", I'm saying "lets do something useful". I know the law is an ass, but I also know that most teachers are incompetant. Out of 16 teachers through high school I would say 2 were actually able to do the job. Most of my teachers were stupider than the top 5% of the students.
Now I'm not saying I would do a better job. I would never become a teacher precisely because I would be crap at it (well I do teach, but at university which is a whole other ball game, there you are an educator, not a baby sitter). However, that doesn't excuse the half arsed job most teachers do. Besides which, I'm saying we need to change the law.
If we cant fix the system to make it fair, lets fix the system to make it useful, and to ensure useful people aren't damaged by the useless.
Finally, I will call people who are worthless exactly that. People who make no contribution to society have no worth. About 5% of children in school fall into this catagory, yet they make life unpleasant for 50-60% of other students at one point or another. The system ensures that it is the most violent, the ones with the least to lose, who get away with their crimes, while ordinary decent kids suffer. I say if we cant fix the system, we at least make it work for society instead of against it.
There is an obvious flaw in your logic. Puppies are superior to robots. Puppies, while simple beings, have (in my opinion) some natural rights, in the same way that I have some natural rights. Now they don't have all the rights I have because they are not sentient. But they have some rights because of what they can do. They can suffer and they have a right not to suffer. Now this is not to say that I'm some PETA nut, far from it (I wholly support animal testing). But I als recognise that animals are not our play thing to do with as we wish.
It however, has nothing to do with them being alive and everything to do with what they can do.
It is interesting you mention robots. If I create a robot that can walk and talk and play piano and feel pain, do we not give it the same rights as a human?
Just because everything is made out of the same material does not mean that special configurations of that material do not acquire properties that I choose to protect. I believe either you are being disingenuous with your arguement, or you are making an arguement so obvious as to contribute very little. A society which allows the rape of babies is obviously bad. However, that does not mean that from a physical perspective everything isn't essentially the same stuff. What makes 'living' stuff special is what it can do. This is why killing bacteria is fine, but stomping on puppies is bad.
I must admit I really don't get the point you are trying to make.
Of course the problem is that most teachers are incompetant when it comes to matters of discipline. We barstardise the justice system in school and punish the useful children because they have something to lose.
Until the way school's approach discipline reflects the desirable characteristics of children rather than a half arsed effort to be fair you will always have this problem. Can you imagine being the parent of a smart child, who is bullied at school and told not to hit back? When they get detention for beating a child shitless to ensure the other children know thier place, what would you do?
Ender's Game gives a clear picture of the mental processes of a mature child. In order for useful children to survive school, they have to become the ring leaders, and that can only happen if schools turn a blind eye to their ascension, the way that a blind eye is turn to the ascension of the rich parents children, or the big children.
We have to pick which children we want emerging as leaders. At the moment, we pick the worthless.
Did you even read the rest of the post? Copyright is an artificial right. If leaving the burden of proof with the rights holders still provides sufficient incentive, then that is good enough. They do not have to be able to police the entire internet, just enough to encourage sales so that there is an incentive to create.
Assuming you are right, how long do you think it is going to be before YouTube (and by proxy) Google loses a court case on this, and decides to turn around to the government and buy a law like the parent describes?
People forget that if the media companies can buy laws, then so can search engines, and Google ($143.88B) has a bigger market capitalisation that Time-Warner (83.75B).
Corruption works both ways and it is reaching the point where Google can just as easily end a political career as Fox can.
Burglary is a criminal offence which the police exist to investigate, and the criminal justice system is designed to punish.
Copyright infringement is a civil offence, which includes different penalties, and different rules.
Repeat 100x
Copyright infringement != Burglary
The burden of preventing copyright infringement lies with the rights holder. They have certain actions they can compel others to take with regard to their copyrighted material, and legal recourse if those actions are not taken. This does not extend to bringing the full weight of the criminal justice system to bear against copyright infringers. This is fair because a copyright is not physical property, and copyright itself is a social contract between creators and the public. It is already very unfair on the public due to the Berne convention, and does not serve the purpose it was originally intended for (enriching the public domain). Are you suggesting it should be made more unfair?
In that case I'm sure DRM does increase value to the consumer. And I have no problem with special disk being released which you can rent with the DRMed content on them, under the precondition that there are non-DRMed sales as well, with equivilant market penetration to ensure that when the time comes the content enters the public domain, and to protect fair use rights.
What you are describing is unjust enrichment. That is entirely different. If I accidentally over pay for good, then the person I overpay is unjustly enriched, if it is different from the agreed contract price. If I agree to pay over the odds, then there is diddly squat I can do about it. Amazon were not unjustly enriched, they just agreed to a stupid transaction. As such if they try to claim the money they were originally intending to charge before settling on a price of $0.00 they are commiting fraud.
Actually, they were charged, $0.00. It is as if the cashier had said to them:
"This item costs $0.00 is this an acceptable price? Thank you have a nice day."