I disagree with the premise that people have a "right" to an education, precisely because such a so-called right implies that someone must be forced to provide the education.
if by someone than you mean the "society collectively" then yes.
There can be no "rights" that enslave the people who must, in turn, provide those "rights".
That is an abuse of the word "enslave". If you feel being part of society is 'enslavement' remove yourself from it. No one forces you to be a citizen or to live here. Last I checked, slaves didn't have the right to leave their masters at will.
Guess what? Thousands of small businesses in Kansas City area fail every year. Is that wrong?
Not at all. What happens to them after they fail now? What happens to them after they fail in a Rand society?
Being successful is not easy - it requires that people are effective thinkers, self-motivated, and hard workers.
So what? They'll still invevitably fail.
No social/economic/political system can stop people from failing.
Agreed. WHAT HAPPENS TO THEM IN A RAND SOCIETY? You keep refusing to address this.
The only difference is: do you punish the successful, in the name of rewarding the failures?
Take a reality check. The "successful" are not suffering, and the "failures" are not dancing in the street with their rewards. Your choice of words renders your argument as nonsense.
When I set my life's goals, is it to achieve my personal and family happiness? Or should I work hard in order to support the failures in life?
False dichotomy. The way the system is structured you effectively do both.
Rewarding failures at the expense of the successful only encourages more failure, and discourages success.
Nonsense. Are you still working? Why haven't you become a failure and claimed the reward? The reward for being successful is still so much greater than the reward for being a failure, that you aren't really all that motivated to fail after all. Know many failures who are living "your life's goals"?
History does not back this statement up. The closest the world has come to Capitalism ("a Rand society") is from the founding of the U.S.A to the very early 1900's, which saw the most dramatic rise of life expectancy, reduction of work week, and improvement in quality of life of any other place and time in human history.
The fact that it coincided with stuff like the discovery of the germ theory of disease, or the dawn of industry had nothing to do with it, right? And which countries today have the highest education? The best quality of life? From your argument, I can suppose that the purest capitalisms will be on top of the list? Hmmm... no...They aren't. Canada, Norway, Sweden etc top the charts. These aren't the purest capitalisms in the world by a long shot.
Ok.. well...maybe the purest capitalisms aren't on top, but surely the most capitalist countries are the ones that are 'improving at the highest rates'... hmmm... no... they aren't. China... India... etc. Countries that are currently experiencing their own industrialization are the ones making the improvements.
However, I can't get over your "extrapolation". You keep saying, in effect: "when people are free from physical coercion, and deal with one another voluntarily, they will eventually eat garbage".
Play a game of monopoly to the end. That is how a pure capitalism that starts where "everyone is free from physical coercion and deals with one another voluntarily" ends. Go on, play a game. Find the brightest, and best, and most motivated players you can find. It doesn't matter who plays, whether they are dimwits or ubermensch. The game ends the same no matter who plays, everyone bankrupt and destitute but the winner.
What prevents an unchecked Rand society from reaching the same conclusion. I ask you to answer that.
You only have to look at history to see. Nobody but the winner wants to live in that society. The rest of society will inevitably take back from the winner... by legislation or by revolution.
It was a hard lesson, but I realized, if I am focused on making money and running a business, I make more money that when I'm focused on killing orcs and playing games. Seriously.
But are you having more fun?
If so, then carry on.
If not, then why are you doing it? If making more money isn't making you happier, then you are wasting your time.
As someone with an iPod Touch, a dictionary app is useful for the many times I'm not within range of a wifi network.
I had an ipod touch long before I got an iphone. And while its true there were MANY time's I wasn't within range of a wifi network, the number of times I needed (to the point that it would have been worth paying for) access to a dictionary was: Zero.
Seriously, what is the scenario you envision where you'd have paid money for access to a dictionary rather than just wait until you were back in range of a wifi network or a computer with internet access or a paper dictionary?
So in your view, hard-working people, trying to be successful, cause death and destruction
Oh. Do you really think the likes of Dick Cheney, Bernie Madoff, Bill Clinton, are "hard working people" just "trying to be successful"?
And I didn't 'damn profits'. I said nothing of the sort. You've constructed a strawman there, and then spend most of your time whacking at it, which really doesn't further your argument, and just makes you look silly.
Profit means: producing more than you consume. Damning profit is the same as damning the hard work that people must to do be successful.
Your first whack at the strawman. I didn't damn profits.
You seem to think that if people live in a society where force is abolished from all human relationships, and where people deal with each other voluntarily...
No, that sounds terrific. But if you think a Rand society represents that ideal you are delusional.
Look at how Rand affects each strata of society.
All Rand does is 'abolish force' from the top. The poor are coerced, as always, by basic needs to make involuntary economic choices. Rand doesn't address this at all, and actually exacerbates it.
Without knowing more about you, I would say that you sound afraid of self-responsibility
You weren't satisfied with one strawman? You had to construct a 2nd one? Perhaps you should try harder to actually understand the nature of the of criticism I am levelling against Rand instead of constructing silly strawmen that are easy to poke holes in.
The reality is that, like profit, I'm quite content with a great deal of self responsibility.
But again I only take it so far. I think your personal 'innovativeness' and 'entrepreneurial ability' should decide how much you make... whether you live in the big house on the right side of the tracks or an apartment on the wrong side, whether you eat steak and caviar or hamburger helper, whether you vacation in St Kitts or go car camping. I have no problem with how free market capitalism generally serves the upper and middle strata of society.
But no, I don't think your 'business sense' or how much the 'market' values your skills should decide whether your kids get to go to school, or whether the police will investigate when you get raped, or whether you get to "voluntarily" choose to work in a coal mine 22 hours a day because the alternative is starvation.
Rand's ideal society doesn't work, and would be uglier than the one we have now.
A free market is competitive with winners and losers. A pure market is like a game of monopoly, at the beginning its balanced, all parties have choices. But over time through chance or error the game divides into winners and losers, with the winners running the show and the losers getting wiped out. Its inescapable. So a core question a society that embraces a free market must grapple with is "What happens when when you lose?"
You can't dodge the question with bullshit like "take personal responsibility". As time progresses, almost everyone involved is going to lose. What are you going to do with them?
Our existing system, while flawed, strives to put a bottom on it, and it does so, inevitably, by putting a drag on the top to pay for it.
In a Rand society eventually the vast majority of participants, even if they started out as equals will eventually be little more than serfs scrounging scraps in the garbage. This isn't speculation, its mathematical certainty. And this won't just happen to the 'un-motivated' or the 'un-innovative' so you can abandon that line of defense. It will happen to almost everybody. The smart and the motivated will generally last longer, but they too will gradually lose.
So how do you think an ideal Rand society copes with this?
yep...and the rest of your post reads right from her playbook.
Sorry. No. I don't want to live in a Rand society, where if person's house catches fire whether or not it gets put out is decided by how much they'll pay, where if a person's liver fails there bank account decides if they die.
I don't want the school's and hospitals and fire departments to be built for the expectation of economic profit. Where children are denied or provided an education based on a factor they can't control -- the economic circumstance of their parents. Where they couldn't go to school even if they sacrificed a health and fire insurance because no one built one in their neighborhood because it was more profitable to build one somewhere else instead.
I don't care one iota whether or not it would be more 'economically efficient'. I am not an accountant nor a utilitarian, and I place value upon things independently of whether or not their is a buck to be made.
I outright reject that as a society in which I want to live.
Our current society is flawed, and likely cannot ever be perfected. But I prefer it infinitely, warts and all, to the monstrosities Ayn Rand conceived.
Suffice it to say, we should probably agree to disagree.
Also... to illustrate my position:
Here's a simple way to get to Mars at no cost to the taxpayer: The first person to Mars, owns it.
Why should I care that it not cost the taxpayer anything. Why should I place any sort of value on that? I think its a worthy pursuit for the taxpayer to be involved in. And I think all of society should reap some of the fruits of that endeavour not just some elite wealthy who could expand their personal empires. So, no, I see no value whatsoever in handing it to the first person there.
I'd rather we do it as a society even if it takes longer and costs more. There is more to life of value than just economic efficiency.
That is why we need a separation of state and economics, just as we have a separation of church and state - and for the same reason
Er.. So the government would have a mandate to maintain a standing army to defend us, but have no means to fund it? How do schools and roads get built? How do fires get put out? How do crimes get solved? How do we get a mission to Mars?
Because programs vetted by Apple are likely to be accurately described, genuinely useful, and fully compatible with your phone.
accurately described - ok. fully compatible - sure... they still can crash, but its not like the situation on palm or windows mobile.
genuinely useful - er... say what now? take a look at the app store sometime. most of the paid ones are a waste of time and money, and most of the free ones are a waste of time. Lets see we have "Virtual Girl" who dances on your screen, and iFart which makes farting noises, and some bikini-girl-a-day gallery (ranked #1 in entertainment apps)... 426 apps that all make your screen white called 'flashlight' or some variation (although in practice just pulling up the general settings app is about the same brightness, or a blank page in safari...)
ooo a dictionary... because a dictionary.com bookmark is too much effort... ah but this resides on your phone so it works even when you have no service.... seriously... do you often need to look up the spelling or meaning of words while in a dead zone? Does this really happen to people enough to make it worth it? Hell... I ony lookup works once or twice a month... and I suspect that's well above average.
Unless, of course, you make the antivirus itself pop up a simple "Yes/No" dialog when its attempted to be uninstalled, warning that malware could be the one behind it. That's what Avast! did last time I uninstalled it, its simple, efficient, and the antivirus app doesn't get classified by *me* as malware unlike dear old Norton.
Right. because there is no way malware could click 'yes'. Hate to break it to you, but there is all kinds of software out there to do this.
Its one of the reasons Vista's UAC prompts are so 'intrusive', because it tries to shunt the dialog box into a 'secure safe mode'... specifically so that other programs, services, etc can't send windows messages, keystrokes, etc to the dialog box and press "allow" for you.
That's all beside the point. The damages awarded were statutory damages as set by the law.
Correct.
However, statutory damages are supposed to be a reasonable substitute for actual damages when actual damages are difficult to compute. So its fair to point out that the 'statutory damages' are not only out of line, but are out of line for any case in this 'class' (of noncommercial p2p infringement), and that they are so out of line that that the statute itself is defective, even unconstitutional.
On the first glance it seems that $80K per song is too high but then I don't know the technical argument for it.
There is no technical argument for it. The statute was written to address and punish people who created and sold counterfeit copies of books, movies, records, etc.
P2p internet sharing didn't exist. At the time to do any serious infringement, you needed replication equipment, and blank media, and so on... it would be time consuming and expensive. The people doing it would have to be deliberately engaged in this, and would almost invariably be charging money to cover their costs. It would almost have to a fairly large scale commercial enterprise to be of significant scale.
The idea that a barely computer literate person could commit "massive unauthorized distribution infringement" on the same scale, at no cost whatsoever, as essentially a "side effect" of obtaining a few songs for their own personal noncommercial use, via a simple computer program and a few mouse clicks was simply unimagined by the statute authors.
Doesn't it mean that she is admitting that harm occurred and only challenging the amount? It seems like her main argument is at odds with her unwillingness to accept any guilt or settle for any amount.
Admitting harm occurred is not the same as admitting personal culpability for the harm.
Suppose you came over to my house, twisted your ankle on the front step, and then sued me.
I'm going to deny that I'm responsible. My front step is well maintained, with a solid railing, and a non-slip mat. It is level, clear of toys and other hazards. I refuse to accept guilt or settle. I have done nothing wrong.
But that's not to say I'm going to deny you were harmed. Your ankle was twisted. I accept that.
So you sue me, and the jury sides with you. So be it, that's life. Then the court awards you 20,000,000 dollars.
And I'm in the same position as Jammie. I maintain I did nothing wrong, I agree you twisted your ankle, and am disputing the amount of the award.
The government is behind all of those problems: "Too big to fail", laws favoring business over individuals, and persecution of successful businesses.
Blame the government? Ok.
So, your saying we the people elected representatives to represent our interests by passing 'too big to fail' laws... that doesn't really add up.
But who is behind these "too big to fail laws" and "laws favoring business over individuals"? Why would the government we elected to represent us be behind that, unless, -gasp- the corporations are behind the election, propping up people in their pocket and effectively ensuring that 'we the people' elect from groups of people who really represent the corporations first.
So the government is behind all the problems with 'corporations'. And corporations are behind the problems with 'government'.
What is the primary purpose of the company itself?
That's easy: advertising.
And that's normally a type of company I avoid like the plague. I tolerate google to a limited extent because its search is good and its ads bearable, but I'd really rather deal with Microsoft.
At least with Microsoft I am the customer. With google I'm the product.
A toolbar that started out as a search box addon for web browsers back when the browsers didn't have them built in - obvious intent.
Its primary purpose was to redirect users from their existing search, and drive their eyeballs to google ads, while tacitly gaining permission to sit on all your web surfing to generate even more profile information on your habits for google and its ads. Yes, I can't imagine how we lived without that.
But it got away with it because the search was genuinely good, the ads bearable, and the profiling nice and unobtrusive.
And as they expanded it, they always dangled another carrot so that it feels like a feature. Most of google tool bars 'features' benefit google as much as you. Bookmark sync? That's primarily an excuse for them to add your bookmarks to your online profile... I could go on.
When you install Windows **Search** Helper - how does that in any way suggest you're going to have your **search** engine preference changed.
Connect the dots. That said, there is no actual evidence in the article beyond baseless conjecture that windows search actually was responsible for what happened.
Furthermore, MSN, Windows Live, and now Bing, have LONG been the online extension of the Windows OS. Whining about OS updates relating to that is just silly.
If Apple rebrands.mac to mobileme does anyone scream that the OSX and Safari integration is patched to use the new branding and updated features? Oh wait... they did just that. And the answer: Of course nobody complained.
The point is they did something without permission.
Right. They modified the settings of a product they make upon the installation of a 2nd product they make that really isn't a standalone product tat has some integration with the first product (and othe products too, like outlook). And further you requested both products be installed. Hmmm... where exactly was the without permission thing again?
Next you'll be saying that when you install adobe reader and it changes itself to be the default pdf viewer, modifying the OS settings, and effectively disabling the users previous preference for foxit, that adobe has done great evil? Or when installing the google toolbar sets itself up as the default search.... gasp... google's doing this too.
You're deliberately installing the google search bar
Its its "google toolbar" not "google search toolbar". Maybe I'm installing it for autofill, or bookmark synchronization, or pagerange...? Its not like I need google toolbar for search. Both Firefox and IE7/8 let me search google directly without it.
Windows Search Helper...
And "Google Desktop" is no different. Actually, I'm wrong. Google desktop is worse. You can't choose not to use google's search engine on the web, and it wants to hook into your gmail, and uploads a bunch of data to google to work properly... but hey... we're supposed to be bashing "Windows Search Helper" here right?
I wonder what he'd say if the shoe was on the other foot.
This quote in particular annoyed me:
"I was relieved that Google prevented the change, but I couldn't recall asking the company to do so."
If he'd installed the google toolbar (which by default sets your search to google), would he have been so similiarly "relieved" if Microsoft had popped up a warning message that "An attempt has been made to switch your default search away from Microsoft Search"?
Somehow I doubt it.
Instead I suspect we'd see a rant about Microsoft putting up scary warnings if you try to use an alternative search. But I'm just speculating on that... but the facts are just as bad:
He doesn't actually know what caused the search engine change attempt. All he did was approximately coincide the warning popup with his event manager stating that the windows search service started. But this all happened within a short time frame of 'booting his PC up' so he doesn't know. (Gee Windows Search Service started up a short time after the PC started... big surprise... and then this popup... it must be connected. Yeah, because its not like EVERYTHING ELSE in his computer wasn't going off at that point in time... much of it not leaving traces in the event log either.
And, Hell, because google blocked the change, (to his great relief) I doubt he actually even KNOWs what it was going to be changed to. So really, I doubt he even knows it was going to be set to Bing.
I'm not saying it wasn't going to be Bing. And if it was the first time he'd booted his PC after installing Windows search, then yeah, I could see it happening more or less as he described. Although by the act of installing Windows search, aren't you implicitly requesting to, you know, use Microsoft search... so this is hardly 'evil'.
In any case, I've had windows search for a long time and its never surreptitiously tried changing my default search engine. (And it would have gotten away with it too since I don't give google the run of my system either.)
It's really a shame that after our party completed that really fun adventure module that all copies of it in existence spontaneously combusted and all electronic copies deleted themselves so that no one else could ever be the ones to save that village.
Not quite, but the adventure is over within the framework of the world you are playing.
You aren't going to wander back to the village after rescueing the girl fom the infamous goblin captain grog -- whom you personally slew, separate from your companions, only to be immediately invited to join a group to rescue the girl from Grog again.
You aren't going to ever have a conversation like... "What are you up to? I'mrescuing the girl from grog. Oh, yeah, that was fun, he drops a nice breast plate; I had to do it 5 times though to get one for me and my alt...oh hey, when he gets down to half health he spawns 3 minions. Just kill the caster and tank the other 2 until grog is dead."
Its hard to get a sense of 'I've done something that mattered in this world' when you are constantly confronted with this.
And even compared to single player crpgs... which are better by far than mmogs at keeping the player in the ceter... but even so if you get stuck there is a walkthru with the location of all the secrets etc.
With PnP, even if I downloaded a copy of the module and read it cover to cover, I know it wouldn't help THAT much, especially if the DM knew or suspected that we'd read or played the module previously.
I have to wonder if the shift toward online multiplayer (such as in the FPS genre) is at least in some small part due to people wanting to find the difficulty and challenge that no longer exists in most single-player games.
Maybe. But they aren't finding it. FPS Multiplayer games aren't hard. They are short, simple, incredibly repetitive, and there are no real consequences.
MMORPG competitive multiplayer for the most part isn't any better. The consequences are minimal with a few notable exceptions.
And even one of those games that is an exception... that has consequences... such as eve. Its not challenging personally; its only challenging at the massive group level.
In Eve, like a soldier in a war, the VAST MAJORITY of individuals are just there forming part of the mass, and don't meaningfully contribute to the overall success or loss.
You login and find your corporation captured a station while you were sleeping.
An hour later you fight a heroic battle absolutely maximizing every element of combat perfectly, and are still pod killed in nothing flat because because their reinforcements arrived before yours did.
Six hours later your corporation suffers a serious blow because the leadership defected to a rival corp taking a bunch of assets with them.
There are lots of 'challenges' in something like Eve, but many of them are far beyond the control or even influence of the individual player that it ceases to be fun on that level at all.
It can still be 'fun' but not really the same way defeating a single player game is, where everything is always centered on you and what you are doing. Where victory or defeat hinge on how well you play the game.
In Eve winning or losing a conflict is more often decided by which side you are on rather than anything to do with what you actually do during the conflict.
In Ontario, it is an offense under the highway traffic act to open your door in a manner to obstruct moving vehicles on the road. And a bicycle is classified as a vehicle on the road.
That's great, but wouldn't it make more sense for cyclists to ride further away from car doors in the first place? (And for roads and rules etc to be designed to enable this.)
After all, in Ontario, you can be pulled over for dangerous driving if your driving your vehicle at speed just inches from parked cars.... and a bicycle is a classified as a vehicle on the road.
So if they are cruising along at full speed a foot away from parked cars, they are driving dangerously.
Just last week I saw a cyclist hit a left-turning car - tboned the car in the passenger door, because of the 3 lanes, the two driving lanes were fully stopped, and the 3rd lane was parked cars... and the bike came whipping out through in the space between the parked cars and stopped cars into the intersection at easily 30-40km/h.
Sure the cyclist had a green light... and 'right of way'. But in my opinion the cyclist was completely at fault. The left turning car had no way to see him, and more importantly, the left turning car had verified that ALL 3 lanes were safe before turning left Stopped cars. Stopped cars. Parked cars. Really what more could he have done?
Could somebody rephrase that in a way that people like me, who aren't cryptography specialists can understand what they're talking about?
Sure I'll rephrase it for you. "Don't worry."
What? You wanted something deeper without having to know anything? Ok...so AES was thought to require 2^128 time units to brute force. So 2^119 time complexity means essentially that the new algorithm takes 2^119 units of time to complete which is a lot better, and they think it might be able to optimize it down to 2^110 units of time.
What a 'unit of time is' is a computing science hand-wave because it doesn't really matter what it is. When comparing algorithms for large problems you are interested in how it compares relative to other algorithms, not how much absolute time it will take on a Commodore 64 or Intel i7 or whether its programmed in Smalltalk vs C. Those details while important in their own right aren't really relevant to the comparison of the algorithms themselves.
A 2^110 algorithm is significantly better than a 2^119 algorithm for 'large problems' regardless of what we set the unit of time to be, and in turn 2^119 is much better than 2^128.
In practice the unit of time is rooted in how long it takes a computer to do 'an operation'. So it might be milliseconds or nanoseconds, or whatever. And the upshot is that even 2^110 is STILL gazillion years even if its programmed in C on an i7 and every i7 on the planet is contributing to the effort...
Hence... "Don't worry."
Its mathematically very interesting, but for the moment, its nothing to "worry" about.
It is a bad thing in my opinion. At the very least its certainly not to your benefit.
I'm willing to let Google use my historical data, as long as I'm also allowed to use it. I don't have to worry about whether I saw something at home or at work, on a PC or my iPhone, on my current hardware or on a VM that only lived three weeks two years ago; as long as I was logged into Google, it's all in the same data store and I can search it from any device with a web browser.
You realize that there is no techical reason in the world that you couldn't have all this and also have it private... at the same time. That's what I want.
my browser's stealth mode not only keeps my search history out of my local cache, it also keeps it out of Google's
That just keeps it out of the data they show you. Its shockingly easy to track 'not-logged-in-users' even in 'stealth mode'. Sure they can't know absolutely that its you they are tracking, but its surprisingly easy to get a high enough confidence level that they can add the data to your profile for profiling and data mining.
Almost every car you see on America's highways have exploding engines.
Heh. Nice try to save it. But no, no they don't.
There is an important semantic difference between 'exploding engine' and 'internal combustion engine'. Just man up and admit it.
Besides the real point of my argument was that suggesting to use greasemonkey and adblock and noscript etc in order to make igoogle palatable to use is essentially admitting igoogle is anti-user. The smart thing to do is patronize services that aren't so offensive in the first place. And your attempted rebuttal REALLY doesn't address this, the real issue, at all.
The fact that you can beat igoogle into submission is beside the point. It still rewards google for its abusive strategy by depriving its competitors of marketshare for their less abusive strategies.
This is the exact same issue Microsoft competitors often face. People will pirate ("infringe the copyright of") [insert microsoft product] rather than use an alternative. They'll point at keygens and hacks etc and whatnot, and microsoft gets to stamp around and bitch about piracy but the REAL losers are the alternative options that provide good software at a fair price that don't even get a shake. Even foss alternatives lose out to this pattern.
Bottom line, if a vendor doesn't offer a product you want at the price you want with the terms and conditions you want you shouldn't use it. Using it and violating the terms, or hacking its functionality, or whatever ultimately does more damage to the products competitors than the product maker.
Enlightened people can be logged into iGoogle, and still block adsense and all the other crap they disapprove of.
You sound like the sort of person who would by a car with an exploding engine and rationalize it by saying that as an enlightened person with a fire extinguisher and tool box you can keep it running the way you like.
An enlightened person would buy a car that works the way it ought to without constantly having to keep fighting fires.
The class for "Weaponized Bronze" will be right after "Safer Spearchucking"
With the free bonus of having everything you do tracked for someone elses profit.
You see what I like about firefox extensions is that they are really and truly working for me, they don't exist for the sole purpose of coaxing data out me for someone else.
Either way, there's a big difference between making a new word to describe something new, and changing the meaning of an existing word.
Not really. New words are rooted in old ones one way or another, and old words shift their meaning. Its all the same process.
Awful once meant to be "full of awe" instead of meaing 'really bad'? Artificial once meant something made by master craftsmen (something artificial requires artifice). Naughty used to simply mean 'having nothing' instead of 'misbehaving'. And punk? At one time it meant prostitute at another it simply meant apprentice... today prostitute is labeled 'archaic use', and apprentice is moving down the list as the word shifts to new meanings it never had before.
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I disagree with the premise that people have a "right" to an education, precisely because such a so-called right implies that someone must be forced to provide the education.
if by someone than you mean the "society collectively" then yes.
There can be no "rights" that enslave the people who must, in turn, provide those "rights".
That is an abuse of the word "enslave". If you feel being part of society is 'enslavement' remove yourself from it. No one forces you to be a citizen or to live here. Last I checked, slaves didn't have the right to leave their masters at will.
Guess what? Thousands of small businesses in Kansas City area fail every year. Is that wrong?
Not at all. What happens to them after they fail now? What happens to them after they fail in a Rand society?
Being successful is not easy - it requires that people are effective thinkers, self-motivated, and hard workers.
So what? They'll still invevitably fail.
No social/economic/political system can stop people from failing.
Agreed. WHAT HAPPENS TO THEM IN A RAND SOCIETY? You keep refusing to address this.
The only difference is: do you punish the successful, in the name of rewarding the failures?
Take a reality check. The "successful" are not suffering, and the "failures" are not dancing in the street with their rewards. Your choice of words renders your argument as nonsense.
When I set my life's goals, is it to achieve my personal and family happiness? Or should I work hard in order to support the failures in life?
False dichotomy. The way the system is structured you effectively do both.
Rewarding failures at the expense of the successful only encourages more failure, and discourages success.
Nonsense. Are you still working? Why haven't you become a failure and claimed the reward? The reward for being successful is still so much greater than the reward for being a failure, that you aren't really all that motivated to fail after all. Know many failures who are living "your life's goals"?
History does not back this statement up. The closest the world has come to Capitalism ("a Rand society") is from the founding of the U.S.A to the very early 1900's, which saw the most dramatic rise of life expectancy, reduction of work week, and improvement in quality of life of any other place and time in human history.
The fact that it coincided with stuff like the discovery of the germ theory of disease, or the dawn of industry had nothing to do with it, right? And which countries today have the highest education? The best quality of life? From your argument, I can suppose that the purest capitalisms will be on top of the list? Hmmm... no...They aren't. Canada, Norway, Sweden etc top the charts. These aren't the purest capitalisms in the world by a long shot.
Ok.. well...maybe the purest capitalisms aren't on top, but surely the most capitalist countries are the ones that are 'improving at the highest rates'... hmmm... no... they aren't. China... India... etc. Countries that are currently experiencing their own industrialization are the ones making the improvements.
However, I can't get over your "extrapolation". You keep saying, in effect: "when people are free from physical coercion, and deal with one another voluntarily, they will eventually eat garbage".
Play a game of monopoly to the end. That is how a pure capitalism that starts where "everyone is free from physical coercion and deals with one another voluntarily" ends. Go on, play a game. Find the brightest, and best, and most motivated players you can find. It doesn't matter who plays, whether they are dimwits or ubermensch. The game ends the same no matter who plays, everyone bankrupt and destitute but the winner.
What prevents an unchecked Rand society from reaching the same conclusion. I ask you to answer that.
You only have to look at history to see. Nobody but the winner wants to live in that society. The rest of society will inevitably take back from the winner... by legislation or by revolution.
But, if I don't make enough money to pay my ISP, how can I play my online games?
Then you aren't having "more fun" and that's clearly not a good strategy either.
The point is you need to work enough to maximize your fun. Working more than that lowers your quality of life. As does working less.
It was a hard lesson, but I realized, if I am focused on making money and running a business, I make more money that when I'm focused on killing orcs and playing games. Seriously.
But are you having more fun?
If so, then carry on.
If not, then why are you doing it? If making more money isn't making you happier, then you are wasting your time.
As someone with an iPod Touch, a dictionary app is useful for the many times I'm not within range of a wifi network.
I had an ipod touch long before I got an iphone. And while its true there were MANY time's I wasn't within range of a wifi network, the number of times I needed (to the point that it would have been worth paying for) access to a dictionary was: Zero.
Seriously, what is the scenario you envision where you'd have paid money for access to a dictionary rather than just wait until you were back in range of a wifi network or a computer with internet access or a paper dictionary?
So in your view, hard-working people, trying to be successful, cause death and destruction
Oh. Do you really think the likes of Dick Cheney, Bernie Madoff, Bill Clinton, are "hard working people" just "trying to be successful"?
And I didn't 'damn profits'. I said nothing of the sort. You've constructed a strawman there, and then spend most of your time whacking at it, which really doesn't further your argument, and just makes you look silly.
Profit means: producing more than you consume. Damning profit is the same as damning the hard work that people must to do be successful.
Your first whack at the strawman. I didn't damn profits.
You seem to think that if people live in a society where force is abolished from all human relationships, and where people deal with each other voluntarily...
No, that sounds terrific. But if you think a Rand society represents that ideal you are delusional.
Look at how Rand affects each strata of society.
All Rand does is 'abolish force' from the top. The poor are coerced, as always, by basic needs to make involuntary economic choices. Rand doesn't address this at all, and actually exacerbates it.
Without knowing more about you, I would say that you sound afraid of self-responsibility
You weren't satisfied with one strawman? You had to construct a 2nd one? Perhaps you should try harder to actually understand the nature of the of criticism I am levelling against Rand instead of constructing silly strawmen that are easy to poke holes in.
The reality is that, like profit, I'm quite content with a great deal of self responsibility.
But again I only take it so far. I think your personal 'innovativeness' and 'entrepreneurial ability' should decide how much you make... whether you live in the big house on the right side of the tracks or an apartment on the wrong side, whether you eat steak and caviar or hamburger helper, whether you vacation in St Kitts or go car camping. I have no problem with how free market capitalism generally serves the upper and middle strata of society.
But no, I don't think your 'business sense' or how much the 'market' values your skills should decide whether your kids get to go to school, or whether the police will investigate when you get raped, or whether you get to "voluntarily" choose to work in a coal mine 22 hours a day because the alternative is starvation.
Rand's ideal society doesn't work, and would be uglier than the one we have now.
A free market is competitive with winners and losers. A pure market is like a game of monopoly, at the beginning its balanced, all parties have choices. But over time through chance or error the game divides into winners and losers, with the winners running the show and the losers getting wiped out. Its inescapable. So a core question a society that embraces a free market must grapple with is "What happens when when you lose?"
You can't dodge the question with bullshit like "take personal responsibility". As time progresses, almost everyone involved is going to lose. What are you going to do with them?
Our existing system, while flawed, strives to put a bottom on it, and it does so, inevitably, by putting a drag on the top to pay for it.
In a Rand society eventually the vast majority of participants, even if they started out as equals will eventually be little more than serfs scrounging scraps in the garbage. This isn't speculation, its mathematical certainty. And this won't just happen to the 'un-motivated' or the 'un-innovative' so you can abandon that line of defense. It will happen to almost everybody. The smart and the motivated will generally last longer, but they too will gradually lose.
So how do you think an ideal Rand society copes with this?
for philosophy: Ayn Rand
yep...and the rest of your post reads right from her playbook.
Sorry. No. I don't want to live in a Rand society, where if person's house catches fire whether or not it gets put out is decided by how much they'll pay, where if a person's liver fails there bank account decides if they die.
I don't want the school's and hospitals and fire departments to be built for the expectation of economic profit. Where children are denied or provided an education based on a factor they can't control -- the economic circumstance of their parents. Where they couldn't go to school even if they sacrificed a health and fire insurance because no one built one in their neighborhood because it was more profitable to build one somewhere else instead.
I don't care one iota whether or not it would be more 'economically efficient'. I am not an accountant nor a utilitarian, and I place value upon things independently of whether or not their is a buck to be made.
I outright reject that as a society in which I want to live.
Our current society is flawed, and likely cannot ever be perfected. But I prefer it infinitely, warts and all, to the monstrosities Ayn Rand conceived.
Suffice it to say, we should probably agree to disagree.
Also... to illustrate my position:
Here's a simple way to get to Mars at no cost to the taxpayer: The first person to Mars, owns it.
Why should I care that it not cost the taxpayer anything. Why should I place any sort of value on that? I think its a worthy pursuit for the taxpayer to be involved in. And I think all of society should reap some of the fruits of that endeavour not just some elite wealthy who could expand their personal empires. So, no, I see no value whatsoever in handing it to the first person there.
I'd rather we do it as a society even if it takes longer and costs more. There is more to life of value than just economic efficiency.
That is why we need a separation of state and economics, just as we have a separation of church and state - and for the same reason
Er.. So the government would have a mandate to maintain a standing army to defend us, but have no means to fund it? How do schools and roads get built? How do fires get put out? How do crimes get solved? How do we get a mission to Mars?
How exactly does this work?
Because programs vetted by Apple are likely to be accurately described, genuinely useful, and fully compatible with your phone.
accurately described - ok.
fully compatible - sure... they still can crash, but its not like the situation on palm or windows mobile.
genuinely useful - er... say what now? take a look at the app store sometime. most of the paid ones are a waste of time and money, and most of the free ones are a waste of time. Lets see we have "Virtual Girl" who dances on your screen, and iFart which makes farting noises, and some bikini-girl-a-day gallery (ranked #1 in entertainment apps)... 426 apps that all make your screen white called 'flashlight' or some variation (although in practice just pulling up the general settings app is about the same brightness, or a blank page in safari...)
ooo a dictionary... because a dictionary.com bookmark is too much effort... ah but this resides on your phone so it works even when you have no service.... seriously... do you often need to look up the spelling or meaning of words while in a dead zone? Does this really happen to people enough to make it worth it? Hell... I ony lookup works once or twice a month... and I suspect that's well above average.
etc... etc...
Unless, of course, you make the antivirus itself pop up a simple "Yes/No" dialog when its attempted to be uninstalled, warning that malware could be the one behind it. That's what Avast! did last time I uninstalled it, its simple, efficient, and the antivirus app doesn't get classified by *me* as malware unlike dear old Norton.
Right. because there is no way malware could click 'yes'. Hate to break it to you, but there is all kinds of software out there to do this.
Its one of the reasons Vista's UAC prompts are so 'intrusive', because it tries to shunt the dialog box into a 'secure safe mode'... specifically so that other programs, services, etc can't send windows messages, keystrokes, etc to the dialog box and press "allow" for you.
That's all beside the point. The damages awarded were statutory damages as set by the law.
Correct.
However, statutory damages are supposed to be a reasonable substitute for actual damages when actual damages are difficult to compute. So its fair to point out that the 'statutory damages' are not only out of line, but are out of line for any case in this 'class' (of noncommercial p2p infringement), and that they are so out of line that that the statute itself is defective, even unconstitutional.
On the first glance it seems that $80K per song is too high but then I don't know the technical argument for it.
There is no technical argument for it. The statute was written to address and punish people who created and sold counterfeit copies of books, movies, records, etc.
P2p internet sharing didn't exist. At the time to do any serious infringement, you needed replication equipment, and blank media, and so on... it would be time consuming and expensive. The people doing it would have to be deliberately engaged in this, and would almost invariably be charging money to cover their costs. It would almost have to a fairly large scale commercial enterprise to be of significant scale.
The idea that a barely computer literate person could commit "massive unauthorized distribution infringement" on the same scale, at no cost whatsoever, as essentially a "side effect" of obtaining a few songs for their own personal noncommercial use, via a simple computer program and a few mouse clicks was simply unimagined by the statute authors.
Doesn't it mean that she is admitting that harm occurred and only challenging the amount? It seems like her main argument is at odds with her unwillingness to accept any guilt or settle for any amount.
Admitting harm occurred is not the same as admitting personal culpability for the harm.
Suppose you came over to my house, twisted your ankle on the front step, and then sued me.
I'm going to deny that I'm responsible. My front step is well maintained, with a solid railing, and a non-slip mat. It is level, clear of toys and other hazards. I refuse to accept guilt or settle. I have done nothing wrong.
But that's not to say I'm going to deny you were harmed. Your ankle was twisted. I accept that.
So you sue me, and the jury sides with you. So be it, that's life. Then the court awards you 20,000,000 dollars.
And I'm in the same position as Jammie. I maintain I did nothing wrong, I agree you twisted your ankle, and am disputing the amount of the award.
The government is behind all of those problems: "Too big to fail", laws favoring business over individuals, and persecution of successful businesses.
Blame the government? Ok.
So, your saying we the people elected representatives to represent our interests by passing 'too big to fail' laws... that doesn't really add up.
But who is behind these "too big to fail laws" and "laws favoring business over individuals"? Why would the government we elected to represent us be behind that, unless, -gasp- the corporations are behind the election, propping up people in their pocket and effectively ensuring that 'we the people' elect from groups of people who really represent the corporations first.
So the government is behind all the problems with 'corporations'.
And corporations are behind the problems with 'government'.
We seem to have gone full circle here. Now what?
What is the primary purpose of the company itself?
That's easy: advertising.
And that's normally a type of company I avoid like the plague. I tolerate google to a limited extent because its search is good and its ads bearable, but I'd really rather deal with Microsoft.
At least with Microsoft I am the customer. With google I'm the product.
A toolbar that started out as a search box addon for web browsers back when the browsers didn't have them built in - obvious intent.
Its primary purpose was to redirect users from their existing search, and drive their eyeballs to google ads, while tacitly gaining permission to sit on all your web surfing to generate even more profile information on your habits for google and its ads. Yes, I can't imagine how we lived without that.
But it got away with it because the search was genuinely good, the ads bearable, and the profiling nice and unobtrusive.
And as they expanded it, they always dangled another carrot so that it feels like a feature. Most of google tool bars 'features' benefit google as much as you. Bookmark sync? That's primarily an excuse for them to add your bookmarks to your online profile... I could go on.
When you install Windows **Search** Helper - how does that in any way suggest you're going to have your **search** engine preference changed.
Connect the dots. That said, there is no actual evidence in the article beyond baseless conjecture that windows search actually was responsible for what happened.
Furthermore, MSN, Windows Live, and now Bing, have LONG been the online extension of the Windows OS. Whining about OS updates relating to that is just silly.
If Apple rebrands .mac to mobileme does anyone scream that the OSX and Safari integration is patched to use the new branding and updated features? Oh wait... they did just that. And the answer: Of course nobody complained.
The point is they did something without permission.
Right. They modified the settings of a product they make upon the installation of a 2nd product they make that really isn't a standalone product tat has some integration with the first product (and othe products too, like outlook). And further you requested both products be installed. Hmmm... where exactly was the without permission thing again?
Next you'll be saying that when you install adobe reader and it changes itself to be the default pdf viewer, modifying the OS settings, and effectively disabling the users previous preference for foxit, that adobe has done great evil? Or when installing the google toolbar sets itself up as the default search.... gasp... google's doing this too.
I don't buy it.
You're deliberately installing the google search bar
Its its "google toolbar" not "google search toolbar". Maybe I'm installing it for autofill, or bookmark synchronization, or pagerange...? Its not like I need google toolbar for search. Both Firefox and IE7/8 let me search google directly without it.
Windows Search Helper...
And "Google Desktop" is no different. Actually, I'm wrong. Google desktop is worse. You can't choose not to use google's search engine on the web, and it wants to hook into your gmail, and uploads a bunch of data to google to work properly... but hey... we're supposed to be bashing "Windows Search Helper" here right?
I wonder what he'd say if the shoe was on the other foot.
This quote in particular annoyed me:
"I was relieved that Google prevented the change, but I couldn't recall asking the company to do so."
If he'd installed the google toolbar (which by default sets your search to google), would he have been so similiarly "relieved" if Microsoft had popped up a warning message that "An attempt has been made to switch your default search away from Microsoft Search"?
Somehow I doubt it.
Instead I suspect we'd see a rant about Microsoft putting up scary warnings if you try to use an alternative search. But I'm just speculating on that... but the facts are just as bad:
He doesn't actually know what caused the search engine change attempt. All he did was approximately coincide the warning popup with his event manager stating that the windows search service started. But this all happened within a short time frame of 'booting his PC up' so he doesn't know. (Gee Windows Search Service started up a short time after the PC started... big surprise... and then this popup... it must be connected. Yeah, because its not like EVERYTHING ELSE in his computer wasn't going off at that point in time... much of it not leaving traces in the event log either.
And, Hell, because google blocked the change, (to his great relief) I doubt he actually even KNOWs what it was going to be changed to. So really, I doubt he even knows it was going to be set to Bing.
I'm not saying it wasn't going to be Bing. And if it was the first time he'd booted his PC after installing Windows search, then yeah, I could see it happening more or less as he described. Although by the act of installing Windows search, aren't you implicitly requesting to, you know, use Microsoft search... so this is hardly 'evil'.
In any case, I've had windows search for a long time and its never surreptitiously tried changing my default search engine. (And it would have gotten away with it too since I don't give google the run of my system either.)
It's really a shame that after our party completed that really fun adventure module that all copies of it in existence spontaneously combusted and all electronic copies deleted themselves so that no one else could ever be the ones to save that village.
Not quite, but the adventure is over within the framework of the world you are playing.
You aren't going to wander back to the village after rescueing the girl fom the infamous goblin captain grog -- whom you personally slew, separate from your companions, only to be immediately invited to join a group to rescue the girl from Grog again.
You aren't going to ever have a conversation like... "What are you up to? I'mrescuing the girl from grog. Oh, yeah, that was fun, he drops a nice breast plate; I had to do it 5 times though to get one for me and my alt...oh hey, when he gets down to half health he spawns 3 minions. Just kill the caster and tank the other 2 until grog is dead."
Its hard to get a sense of 'I've done something that mattered in this world' when you are constantly confronted with this.
And even compared to single player crpgs... which are better by far than mmogs at keeping the player in the ceter... but even so if you get stuck there is a walkthru with the location of all the secrets etc.
With PnP, even if I downloaded a copy of the module and read it cover to cover, I know it wouldn't help THAT much, especially if the DM knew or suspected that we'd read or played the module previously.
I have to wonder if the shift toward online multiplayer (such as in the FPS genre) is at least in some small part due to people wanting to find the difficulty and challenge that no longer exists in most single-player games.
Maybe. But they aren't finding it. FPS Multiplayer games aren't hard. They are short, simple, incredibly repetitive, and there are no real consequences.
MMORPG competitive multiplayer for the most part isn't any better. The consequences are minimal with a few notable exceptions.
And even one of those games that is an exception... that has consequences... such as eve. Its not challenging personally; its only challenging at the massive group level.
In Eve, like a soldier in a war, the VAST MAJORITY of individuals are just there forming part of the mass, and don't meaningfully contribute to the overall success or loss.
You login and find your corporation captured a station while you were sleeping.
An hour later you fight a heroic battle absolutely maximizing every element of combat perfectly, and are still pod killed in nothing flat because because their reinforcements arrived before yours did.
Six hours later your corporation suffers a serious blow because the leadership defected to a rival corp taking a bunch of assets with them.
There are lots of 'challenges' in something like Eve, but many of them are far beyond the control or even influence of the individual player that it ceases to be fun on that level at all.
It can still be 'fun' but not really the same way defeating a single player game is, where everything is always centered on you and what you are doing. Where victory or defeat hinge on how well you play the game.
In Eve winning or losing a conflict is more often decided by which side you are on rather than anything to do with what you actually do during the conflict.
In Ontario, it is an offense under the highway traffic act to open your door in a manner to obstruct moving vehicles on the road. And a bicycle is classified as a vehicle on the road.
That's great, but wouldn't it make more sense for cyclists to ride further away from car doors in the first place? (And for roads and rules etc to be designed to enable this.)
After all, in Ontario, you can be pulled over for dangerous driving if your driving your vehicle at speed just inches from parked cars. ... and a bicycle is a classified as a vehicle on the road.
So if they are cruising along at full speed a foot away from parked cars, they are driving dangerously.
Just last week I saw a cyclist hit a left-turning car - tboned the car in the passenger door, because of the 3 lanes, the two driving lanes were fully stopped, and the 3rd lane was parked cars... and the bike came whipping out through in the space between the parked cars and stopped cars into the intersection at easily 30-40km/h.
Sure the cyclist had a green light... and 'right of way'. But in my opinion the cyclist was completely at fault. The left turning car had no way to see him, and more importantly, the left turning car had verified that ALL 3 lanes were safe before turning left Stopped cars. Stopped cars. Parked cars. Really what more could he have done?
Either one could be given a bowling ball in an empty room...and 5 minutes later come out with a bucket full of pieces.
The truly amazing thing isn't that they can destroy a bowling ball in under 5 minutes. It's that they were able to craft a bucket using the pieces.
Could somebody rephrase that in a way that people like me, who aren't cryptography specialists can understand what they're talking about?
Sure I'll rephrase it for you. "Don't worry."
What? You wanted something deeper without having to know anything? Ok...so AES was thought to require 2^128 time units to brute force. So 2^119 time complexity means essentially that the new algorithm takes 2^119 units of time to complete which is a lot better, and they think it might be able to optimize it down to 2^110 units of time.
What a 'unit of time is' is a computing science hand-wave because it doesn't really matter what it is. When comparing algorithms for large problems you are interested in how it compares relative to other algorithms, not how much absolute time it will take on a Commodore 64 or Intel i7 or whether its programmed in Smalltalk vs C. Those details while important in their own right aren't really relevant to the comparison of the algorithms themselves.
A 2^110 algorithm is significantly better than a 2^119 algorithm for 'large problems' regardless of what we set the unit of time to be, and in turn 2^119 is much better than 2^128.
In practice the unit of time is rooted in how long it takes a computer to do 'an operation'. So it might be milliseconds or nanoseconds, or whatever. And the upshot is that even 2^110 is STILL gazillion years even if its programmed in C on an i7 and every i7 on the planet is contributing to the effort...
Hence... "Don't worry."
Its mathematically very interesting, but for the moment, its nothing to "worry" about.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
It is a bad thing in my opinion. At the very least its certainly not to your benefit.
I'm willing to let Google use my historical data, as long as I'm also allowed to use it. I don't have to worry about whether I saw something at home or at work, on a PC or my iPhone, on my current hardware or on a VM that only lived three weeks two years ago; as long as I was logged into Google, it's all in the same data store and I can search it from any device with a web browser.
You realize that there is no techical reason in the world that you couldn't have all this and also have it private... at the same time. That's what I want.
my browser's stealth mode not only keeps my search history out of my local cache, it also keeps it out of Google's
That just keeps it out of the data they show you. Its shockingly easy to track 'not-logged-in-users' even in 'stealth mode'. Sure they can't know absolutely that its you they are tracking, but its surprisingly easy to get a high enough confidence level that they can add the data to your profile for profiling and data mining.
Almost every car you see on America's highways have exploding engines.
Heh. Nice try to save it. But no, no they don't.
There is an important semantic difference between 'exploding engine' and 'internal combustion engine'. Just man up and admit it.
Besides the real point of my argument was that suggesting to use greasemonkey and adblock and noscript etc in order to make igoogle palatable to use is essentially admitting igoogle is anti-user. The smart thing to do is patronize services that aren't so offensive in the first place. And your attempted rebuttal REALLY doesn't address this, the real issue, at all.
The fact that you can beat igoogle into submission is beside the point. It still rewards google for its abusive strategy by depriving its competitors of marketshare for their less abusive strategies.
This is the exact same issue Microsoft competitors often face. People will pirate ("infringe the copyright of") [insert microsoft product] rather than use an alternative. They'll point at keygens and hacks etc and whatnot, and microsoft gets to stamp around and bitch about piracy but the REAL losers are the alternative options that provide good software at a fair price that don't even get a shake. Even foss alternatives lose out to this pattern.
Bottom line, if a vendor doesn't offer a product you want at the price you want with the terms and conditions you want you shouldn't use it. Using it and violating the terms, or hacking its functionality, or whatever ultimately does more damage to the products competitors than the product maker.
Enlightened people can be logged into iGoogle, and still block adsense and all the other crap they disapprove of.
You sound like the sort of person who would by a car with an exploding engine and rationalize it by saying that as an enlightened person with a fire extinguisher and tool box you can keep it running the way you like.
An enlightened person would buy a car that works the way it ought to without constantly having to keep fighting fires.
The class for "Weaponized Bronze" will be right after "Safer Spearchucking"
I'd hate for you to be late.
igoogle is kind of the Firefox of search engines
With the free bonus of having everything you do tracked for someone elses profit.
You see what I like about firefox extensions is that they are really and truly working for me, they don't exist for the sole purpose of coaxing data out me for someone else.
It's an acronym.
It was an acronym. Its a word now.
Fridge is not a word, it's an abbreviation.
It was an an abbreviation. Its a word now.
etc for the rest of the list. deal with it.
Either way, there's a big difference between making a new word to describe something new, and changing the meaning of an existing word.
Not really. New words are rooted in old ones one way or another, and old words shift their meaning. Its all the same process.
Awful once meant to be "full of awe" instead of meaing 'really bad'? Artificial once meant something made by master craftsmen (something artificial requires artifice). Naughty used to simply mean 'having nothing' instead of 'misbehaving'. And punk? At one time it meant prostitute at another it simply meant apprentice... today prostitute is labeled 'archaic use', and apprentice is moving down the list as the word shifts to new meanings it never had before.