They can make branding something as Android subject to terms they see fit so it doesn't tarnish their reputation. Trademarks are enough to solve that problem, they don't have to go and close up the source code. That's incredibly short-sighted IMO.
First, one can not make a "specific machine" out of a "general machine" by adding functionality.
There is already established precedent that says you're wrong on this point. You're better off arguing that software and math are synonymous, and since the latter is unpatentable we have a contradiction: either certain types of math should be patentable subject to criteria X, or software is inherently unpatentable. Either outcome would be acceptable, because it would at least require someone to very specifically define *what types of math* are patentable, and we could stop living in constant fear of being sued for having an idea.
The account holders have "no Fourth Amendment privacy interest in their IP addresses," she said
Except when the IP can be used to identify your ISP and/or roughly geographical location, so they can hunt you down like a rabid animal. Oh yeah, suddenly I'm thinking people really are interested in the privacy of their IP addresses.
You don't threaten to delete an article when it requires improvement, you mark the article as requiring improvement. They have tags for exactly these purposes. Wikipedia has gone a little deletion-crazy recently, probably out of some misguided desire to become more "respectable".
If you have e-books selling for $9.99, those who don't really want it will just skip it, and those who really want it figure they can just download it for free somewhere. At $0.99 though, those who don't really want it may still buy it on a whim, and those who really want it recognize that they'll spend more than $0.99 of their time trying to find the book for free (and you may not even be able to considering it's so cheap, people may not even think it's worth it uploading).
As long as it's reasonably priced, people also prefer legal options, so I'm not too surprised by this data. Kudos to this author!
Or the recording industry can stop dicking around and provide a reasonable legal alternative to downloading. Sure, they might have to accept slimmer margins, and cut some fat, but better than no margins at all. Unfortunately, realistic business models are not part of the executive mindset in the industry.
Their Android OS upgrade policy is: you're not getting one, because it would compete with sales of future devices with the newer OS; if you want a newer OS, buy a newer device. Better still, I'll just never buy a Samsung product to begin with.
Java does not have buffer overflows unless the JVM has a bug, or you're calling out to unsafe code via JNI. The lack of such memory errors is the very definition of memory safety.
The Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is a legit possibility, and in fact, one of the more promising interpretations of quantum mechanics out there. Many people misunderstand it though, thinking every choice or possibility somehow "creates" a whole other somewhere that we can possibly travel to ala Star Trek with evil twins.
MWI is in fact much simpler than that. Think of the universe as a giant quantum computer. Quantum computers can perform many computations in parallel. In fact, MWI says nothing less than that each branching point triggers a new parallel computation, specifically, the universe exists entirely in a state of superposition each of which was triggered by a branch in the past. Metaphysically, there is nothing more and nothing less than the wavefunction.
That's pretty compelling IMO. It's probably metaphysically the interpretation of QM with the fewest assumptions, so by Occam's razor, it's preferable to most other interpretations.
Bandwidth caps are GOOD. [...] This means low-use consumers don't need to subsidize high-use consumers.
No, they aren't. They are literally a non-solution to a non-existent problem. If you want to charge users for how much bandwidth they use, then have a low fixed rate charge on the order of $0.10/GB, which is a 10 fold markup on the cost to provide service, on top of a nominal monthly connection fee. That would be a proper UBB implementation: bandwidth as a metered utility. Instead they decide to charge over a 1000x markup with a tiered pricing structure that makes absolutely no sense. It's a legislated price gouging, pure and simple.
What you seem to be forgetting is that bandwidth is cheap and getting exponentially cheaper every year. In that sort of market, the whole concept of caps is frankly ridiculous, and the justification that such low caps are somehow required due to congestion, is a blatant out and out lie. I am completely mystified that you would support legislation based on no verifiable facts.
Imagine these two situations: 1) You pay $40/month for an unlimited 10Mbps connection, but can only get 10Mbps at 2-4am in the morning. Other times, because of high network usage, you get an unstable connection that goes 3-5Mbps, or even slower during peak times. 2) You pay $40/month for a 10Mbps connection with a 100GB limit. Most of the time, your connection speed is around 10Mbps, but you just need to watch how much you download. There is a tool provided for you by the ISP to check your usage, updated daily.
Firstly, this is a false dichotomy. Constraining your problem such that your solution is the only possible outcome is a fallacy. The space of possibilities is very large. For instance:
3) They guarantee a minimum sustained bandwidth, with higher peak speeds of up to X when there's low congestion. They provide pricing tiers for higher minimum bandwidths for those who are interested, because bandwidth is the service being provided here.
Of all the alternatives, this is clearly the most sensible, as it requires no legislation, imposes no new fees or intervention or "management" on the user's part, and requires little to no investment in new equipment by ISPs who have already widely deployed QoS and deep packet inspection throughout their networks. I think you need to forget all the propaganda surrounding this issue and look at it purely from an engineering point of view. Technical solutions are always preferable to legislative solutions.
But I'll let you in on a not-secret: Rogers and Bell know that technical solutions won't solve their fundamental problem with cheap bandwidth, which is the real reason for UBB with these high prices: online content distribution and online services are cheaper than tradition content distribution and traditional telecommunications services, which are their major cash cows. So they tried to legislate a solution by bringing bandwidth costs in line with their traditional offerings, THEN they deploy bundles where their online offerings don't count towards your cap, so third parties are unfairly penalized. This is why UBB needs to be repealed.
To solve this situation, the government should NOT be repealing the UBB decision. Instead, they should either allow third-party ISPs to sell VDSL services, or mandate reasonable minimum bandwidth caps and reasonable maximum overage charges.
I agree, Bell would not have invested in that new infrastructure if it weren't attractive in its own right, even after being forced to share it with third-party ISPs. That doesn't change the fact that UBB is an anti-competitive regulation that benefited no one except Rogers, Bell and Shaw, who frankly need no help from the government to generate profit. So I disagree, UBB should be repealed, immediately.
Most businesses reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for almost any reason
Certain types of discrimination are illegal, so not all reasons are legit. Whether this situation qualifies depends on the outcome of this suit. That's how the law evolves.
Why order an exclusive collection and return? Why not offer the current user the option to buy? Make some money on the purchase, and save the cost associated with collecting and processing all those phones.
I understood your meaning, but perhaps I didn't explain myself well as to why the "science" and "philosophy of science" are the same.
Suppose we have an axiomatic formal system X. X must fully define what it means to be an entity within X, and the relations between all entities of X. So to speak of the "philosophy of X" seems like nonsense to me, because X is self-descriptive and self-contained. Any question you may wish to pose about X, is answered by X's definition.
The only exception are questions about how X may relate to other formal systems. So we may create a formal correspondence from X to Y, but this is an embedding of X within Y, so the domain of discourse is now Y. This is not then "the philosophy of X", but a theorem in Y [1].
No matter how you frame it, the domain of discourse is well-defined. A term like "philosophy of X" poses questions either already answered by the definition of X, or tries to interpret X in the context of some other domain which has not been specified by "philosophy of X". Thus "philosophy of X" is ill-defined at best.
This is how I see science and "philosophy of science". Either all such questions are answered by our current working definition of science, and so philosophy of science frames the discussion on its underpinnings as I used it, or the question is framed in an implicit context outside the domain of science, and so we are discussing something altogether different.
[1] This is how computer science works in the domain of logic and programming languages, arguably, the most rigourous fields of philosophical discourse.
I'm afraid I cannot accept your attempted distinction, or rather, I do not think the distinction is meaningful. Science is itself a sophisticated philosophy, so speaking of the "philosophy of a philosophy" is self-referential and rather meaningless. The definition of science is self-descriptive and sufficient to answer all questions about what it is, what it does, how it works and why, etc. (indeed, any philosophy covering metaphysics and epistemology must be so descriptive).
However, science's fundamental connection with philosophy is lost on most people, and so we speak of the "philosophy of science" to frame the discussion on the foundations of science, the epistemology and metaphysics, rather than the body of knowledge that science has produced.
Philosopher of science Paul K Feyerabend advanced the idea of epistemological anarchism, which holds that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science or the growth of knowledge, and that the idea that science can or should operate according to universal and fixed rules is unrealistic, pernicious and detrimental to science itself.[59] Feyerabend advocates treating science as an ideology alongside others such as religion, magic and mythology, and considers the dominance of science in society authoritarian and unjustified. [59] He also contended (along with Imre Lakatos) that the demarcation problem of distinguishing science from pseudoscience on objective grounds is not possible and thus fatal to the notion of science running according to fixed, universal rules.[59]
Simply because we have not yet devised an adequate set of fixed rules to classify science does not imply that there are cannot be any such set of rules. Science is full of "working definitions" that serve only as placeholders to further the discussion. At some point when the terminology itself is inhibiting progress, these working definitions must then be revised, generalized, or restricted. The original, imprecise definitions still have utility however, and to throw up our hands and call it all relative and meaningless because all knowledge is not self-evident or known a priori is the height of stupidity IMO.
Incomplete knowledge does not imply the absence of any knowledge. Working definitions are merely reflective of incomplete knowledge, not the absence of knowledge as Feyerabend implies.
The CMRRA then set up an agreement that allowed the recording companies to use a work and pay for it later. Which they never did.
I don't know what the CMRRA is. This case is about the Copyright Recording Industry Association (CRIA) in Canada. See Michael Geist's coverage of the story. I'll quote:
The claims arise from a longstanding practice of the recording industry in Canada, described in the lawsuit as "exploit now, pay later if at all." It involves the use of works that are often included in compilation CDs (ie. the top dance tracks of 2009) or live recordings. The record labels create, press, distribute, and sell the CDs, but do not obtain the necessary copyright licences.
I don't think you're giving her nearly enough credit, which is pretty typical these days. She had many interesting debates with contemporary philosophers. Certainly she had many flaws which ruined her credibility, but she did rationally address legitimate objections to her arguments.
And by "Public Goods" we mean essentially tax-funded state-owned things of any kind, eg., socialism?
See the article on private goods, which links to all the other kinds of goods. Public goods are things like the environment and national defense. They must be managed by some central authority or process to avoid a "tragedy of the commons", which is another term you should search.
The state owns the network backbone, for example, and the last mile is leased out to private companies.
Right, where the backbone is basically like the roads: paid for by taxes and managed by the government. So your government considers the network backbone a public good which cannot be provided by private interests.
I think that situation is the opposite how it should be because of the situation here in Canada: we have lots of private network backbones, but the last mile to the home is an oligopoly (essentially, a monopoly of two or more) that collude to gouge customers. The last mile is always the most expensive, and that network used to belong to the state, but they sold it off decades ago, and we're now paying the price. Literally.
Regarding hospitals and such, public goods can be provided by private interests, as long as they are managed by some well-defined authority or process to prevent abuse. The tragedy of the commons is inevitable if it's not managed correctly. So the government can contract with companies to provide those services, but the government is still the one controlling how they're used.
Socialism is taking this approach to the extreme and making all means of production, and all goods publicly owned. Unfortunately, socialism in the domain of private goods is doomed to fail because the central managing authority can never have enough information to plan production optimally beyond a certain scale. There are simply too many variables, and the bureaucracy is not nimble enough to respond to changing circumstances.
By contrast, production in capitalist markets is self-regulating in this regard, because there are many short feedback loops.
Then you would know it's not correct when testing it empirically, either in other system of logic, or in the real world. And if you flip all those switches perfectly, every time all the time, then the world really does work that way doesn't it?
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They can make branding something as Android subject to terms they see fit so it doesn't tarnish their reputation. Trademarks are enough to solve that problem, they don't have to go and close up the source code. That's incredibly short-sighted IMO.
There is already established precedent that says you're wrong on this point. You're better off arguing that software and math are synonymous, and since the latter is unpatentable we have a contradiction: either certain types of math should be patentable subject to criteria X, or software is inherently unpatentable. Either outcome would be acceptable, because it would at least require someone to very specifically define *what types of math* are patentable, and we could stop living in constant fear of being sued for having an idea.
It's not hard to piss off big patent holders. Just use their patents to make money without paying them. Works like a charm every time.
They should have bought everything with "crooks" in it too.
RISC did change everything. CISC architectures went to a RISC-like core with compiled micro-ops because of the advantages RISC brought to the table.
Except when the IP can be used to identify your ISP and/or roughly geographical location, so they can hunt you down like a rabid animal. Oh yeah, suddenly I'm thinking people really are interested in the privacy of their IP addresses.
You don't threaten to delete an article when it requires improvement, you mark the article as requiring improvement. They have tags for exactly these purposes. Wikipedia has gone a little deletion-crazy recently, probably out of some misguided desire to become more "respectable".
If you have e-books selling for $9.99, those who don't really want it will just skip it, and those who really want it figure they can just download it for free somewhere. At $0.99 though, those who don't really want it may still buy it on a whim, and those who really want it recognize that they'll spend more than $0.99 of their time trying to find the book for free (and you may not even be able to considering it's so cheap, people may not even think it's worth it uploading).
As long as it's reasonably priced, people also prefer legal options, so I'm not too surprised by this data. Kudos to this author!
Or the recording industry can stop dicking around and provide a reasonable legal alternative to downloading. Sure, they might have to accept slimmer margins, and cut some fat, but better than no margins at all. Unfortunately, realistic business models are not part of the executive mindset in the industry.
Their Android OS upgrade policy is: you're not getting one, because it would compete with sales of future devices with the newer OS; if you want a newer OS, buy a newer device. Better still, I'll just never buy a Samsung product to begin with.
Java does not have buffer overflows unless the JVM has a bug, or you're calling out to unsafe code via JNI. The lack of such memory errors is the very definition of memory safety.
The Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is a legit possibility, and in fact, one of the more promising interpretations of quantum mechanics out there. Many people misunderstand it though, thinking every choice or possibility somehow "creates" a whole other somewhere that we can possibly travel to ala Star Trek with evil twins.
MWI is in fact much simpler than that. Think of the universe as a giant quantum computer. Quantum computers can perform many computations in parallel. In fact, MWI says nothing less than that each branching point triggers a new parallel computation, specifically, the universe exists entirely in a state of superposition each of which was triggered by a branch in the past. Metaphysically, there is nothing more and nothing less than the wavefunction.
That's pretty compelling IMO. It's probably metaphysically the interpretation of QM with the fewest assumptions, so by Occam's razor, it's preferable to most other interpretations.
No, they aren't. They are literally a non-solution to a non-existent problem. If you want to charge users for how much bandwidth they use, then have a low fixed rate charge on the order of $0.10/GB, which is a 10 fold markup on the cost to provide service, on top of a nominal monthly connection fee. That would be a proper UBB implementation: bandwidth as a metered utility. Instead they decide to charge over a 1000x markup with a tiered pricing structure that makes absolutely no sense. It's a legislated price gouging, pure and simple.
What you seem to be forgetting is that bandwidth is cheap and getting exponentially cheaper every year. In that sort of market, the whole concept of caps is frankly ridiculous, and the justification that such low caps are somehow required due to congestion, is a blatant out and out lie. I am completely mystified that you would support legislation based on no verifiable facts.
Firstly, this is a false dichotomy. Constraining your problem such that your solution is the only possible outcome is a fallacy. The space of possibilities is very large. For instance:
3) They guarantee a minimum sustained bandwidth, with higher peak speeds of up to X when there's low congestion. They provide pricing tiers for higher minimum bandwidths for those who are interested, because bandwidth is the service being provided here.
Of all the alternatives, this is clearly the most sensible, as it requires no legislation, imposes no new fees or intervention or "management" on the user's part, and requires little to no investment in new equipment by ISPs who have already widely deployed QoS and deep packet inspection throughout their networks. I think you need to forget all the propaganda surrounding this issue and look at it purely from an engineering point of view. Technical solutions are always preferable to legislative solutions.
But I'll let you in on a not-secret: Rogers and Bell know that technical solutions won't solve their fundamental problem with cheap bandwidth, which is the real reason for UBB with these high prices: online content distribution and online services are cheaper than tradition content distribution and traditional telecommunications services, which are their major cash cows. So they tried to legislate a solution by bringing bandwidth costs in line with their traditional offerings, THEN they deploy bundles where their online offerings don't count towards your cap, so third parties are unfairly penalized. This is why UBB needs to be repealed.
I agree, Bell would not have invested in that new infrastructure if it weren't attractive in its own right, even after being forced to share it with third-party ISPs. That doesn't change the fact that UBB is an anti-competitive regulation that benefited no one except Rogers, Bell and Shaw, who frankly need no help from the government to generate profit. So I disagree, UBB should be repealed, immediately.
Certain types of discrimination are illegal, so not all reasons are legit. Whether this situation qualifies depends on the outcome of this suit. That's how the law evolves.
I'm pretty sure this is where the justice comes in.
Why order an exclusive collection and return? Why not offer the current user the option to buy? Make some money on the purchase, and save the cost associated with collecting and processing all those phones.
If he wants to pay Chrome's licensing fees for H.264, then he can have his support back.
I understood your meaning, but perhaps I didn't explain myself well as to why the "science" and "philosophy of science" are the same.
Suppose we have an axiomatic formal system X. X must fully define what it means to be an entity within X, and the relations between all entities of X. So to speak of the "philosophy of X" seems like nonsense to me, because X is self-descriptive and self-contained. Any question you may wish to pose about X, is answered by X's definition.
The only exception are questions about how X may relate to other formal systems. So we may create a formal correspondence from X to Y, but this is an embedding of X within Y, so the domain of discourse is now Y. This is not then "the philosophy of X", but a theorem in Y [1].
No matter how you frame it, the domain of discourse is well-defined. A term like "philosophy of X" poses questions either already answered by the definition of X, or tries to interpret X in the context of some other domain which has not been specified by "philosophy of X". Thus "philosophy of X" is ill-defined at best.
This is how I see science and "philosophy of science". Either all such questions are answered by our current working definition of science, and so philosophy of science frames the discussion on its underpinnings as I used it, or the question is framed in an implicit context outside the domain of science, and so we are discussing something altogether different.
[1] This is how computer science works in the domain of logic and programming languages, arguably, the most rigourous fields of philosophical discourse.
I'm afraid I cannot accept your attempted distinction, or rather, I do not think the distinction is meaningful. Science is itself a sophisticated philosophy, so speaking of the "philosophy of a philosophy" is self-referential and rather meaningless. The definition of science is self-descriptive and sufficient to answer all questions about what it is, what it does, how it works and why, etc. (indeed, any philosophy covering metaphysics and epistemology must be so descriptive).
However, science's fundamental connection with philosophy is lost on most people, and so we speak of the "philosophy of science" to frame the discussion on the foundations of science, the epistemology and metaphysics, rather than the body of knowledge that science has produced.
Incidentally, it turns out that Feyerabend really is an idiot:
Simply because we have not yet devised an adequate set of fixed rules to classify science does not imply that there are cannot be any such set of rules. Science is full of "working definitions" that serve only as placeholders to further the discussion. At some point when the terminology itself is inhibiting progress, these working definitions must then be revised, generalized, or restricted. The original, imprecise definitions still have utility however, and to throw up our hands and call it all relative and meaningless because all knowledge is not self-evident or known a priori is the height of stupidity IMO.
Incomplete knowledge does not imply the absence of any knowledge. Working definitions are merely reflective of incomplete knowledge, not the absence of knowledge as Feyerabend implies.
I don't know what the CMRRA is. This case is about the Copyright Recording Industry Association (CRIA) in Canada. See Michael Geist's coverage of the story. I'll quote:
This is plain-as-day copyright infringement.
This was in Canada, so not a usable precedent anywhere else. Still, good for us. :-)
I don't think you're giving her nearly enough credit, which is pretty typical these days. She had many interesting debates with contemporary philosophers. Certainly she had many flaws which ruined her credibility, but she did rationally address legitimate objections to her arguments.
And so begins the search for the causal factor of the change. Knowledge is a never-ending quest.
See the article on private goods, which links to all the other kinds of goods. Public goods are things like the environment and national defense. They must be managed by some central authority or process to avoid a "tragedy of the commons", which is another term you should search.
Right, where the backbone is basically like the roads: paid for by taxes and managed by the government. So your government considers the network backbone a public good which cannot be provided by private interests.
I think that situation is the opposite how it should be because of the situation here in Canada: we have lots of private network backbones, but the last mile to the home is an oligopoly (essentially, a monopoly of two or more) that collude to gouge customers. The last mile is always the most expensive, and that network used to belong to the state, but they sold it off decades ago, and we're now paying the price. Literally.
Regarding hospitals and such, public goods can be provided by private interests, as long as they are managed by some well-defined authority or process to prevent abuse. The tragedy of the commons is inevitable if it's not managed correctly. So the government can contract with companies to provide those services, but the government is still the one controlling how they're used.
Socialism is taking this approach to the extreme and making all means of production, and all goods publicly owned. Unfortunately, socialism in the domain of private goods is doomed to fail because the central managing authority can never have enough information to plan production optimally beyond a certain scale. There are simply too many variables, and the bureaucracy is not nimble enough to respond to changing circumstances.
By contrast, production in capitalist markets is self-regulating in this regard, because there are many short feedback loops.
Then you would know it's not correct when testing it empirically, either in other system of logic, or in the real world. And if you flip all those switches perfectly, every time all the time, then the world really does work that way doesn't it?