Condoms really suck at preventing even pregnancy, and that requires only blocking items of greater than cellular size, not viral. As far as I know, that statement has no statistical nor scientific backing. It is religious propaganda: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/oct/09/aids
The problem with condoms are that they may break, and then they don't even block dick-sized items. And most other birth control allows free flow of budily fluids, meaning there is no HIV protection whatsoever.
but ironically it's likely to happen if Africa continues to receive inadequate quantities of drugs The irony of nature is harsh and bitter:
An estimated 1 percent of people descended from Northern Europeans are virtually immune to AIDS infection, with Swedes the most likely to be protected. http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2005/01/66198:
I guess that in theory, you could track down some guy out of that 1%, set them up as sperm donors to kickstart an ADIS-resistant population where HIV is the most rampant. But evolution works on such massive timescales that the current civilization and political setting will either have been completely changed or collapsed entirely before you'd get an AIDS-resistant population so it's not realyl practical.
Use a rubber. Don't sleep with the cracked out looking girl you just met at the bar. Don't get born in Africa. Don't get raped by cracked out looking guy waiting behind the bushes.
Aiming for the mass market promote comfortable mediocrity.
So I'll toss and mix your post a bit and say that organized publishers care about selling to the masses, "promoting comfortable mediocrity". And individual artists/authors operate in "small words", and are more deeply concerned with outputting quality.
The future is filled with niches. Instead of 1 big thing, you'll have 100 small ones. And since you can easily google the 5 that are amazing for you, it does not matter if 95 are crap. (And really, they're not crap, just different. Taste is individual.)
Lets see what he says when his book ends up on Piratebay. He is giving away the book for free, right? Frankly, I don't expect him to care the slightest.
He's not giving away the book for free, he's making money on a handy paper version that looks nice in a bookshelf and is easy to bring on the train. At the same time, he is strengthening the Chris Anderson brand.
A good author will manage to get paid no matter how rampant piracy gets. JK Rowling sold a handwritten book for 1.95 million pounds.
Money is supposed to be a representation of personal bartering power, and it is also becoming increasingly abstracted from the physical medium it's used to represent. Money started out like easy-to-barter items like precious metals.
"becoming increasingly abstracted from the physical medium" and being a "representation of personal bartering power" go hand in hand. Increasingly abstract.
Personally, I consider money to represent "favor surplus". Bartering power is too related to an exchange of goods in these service-based times. The more money you have, the more favors can you call in from the world. If you're net worth is negative, you are owing favors to the world.
Mind you, this means I disagree with gold-backed currencies. An increasingly efficient (read: abstract) currency should not be bound to physical goods.
The obvious question would then be, that if all existence is cyclical, how many times has it been reset? An infinite number of times.
What kicked it off to begin with? Nothing. It has always been.
Religion doesn't help, at least not for me. (Where does God come from? Same thing.) You can't solve these questions thinking about the physical world. Think abstract. Car analogies are doomed. Maybe try math.
For how long have pi been pi? How many times has sinusoid function peaked and what started it? How may times has "2 + 2" equaled "4", and since when did it start doing so?
Exactly. When will huge multinational corporations stop forcing competition down people's throats and realize that what consumers want is monopolies, lack of choice and the resulting high prices! Exactly. If only different automobile industries had incompatible types of gasoline and used two competing road grids, one with left-side driving, the other right-side.
These are just two particular examples, but there are many more.. do some research on the renewable water table levels in Asia; you might be surprised how dry some of their mega-aquifers are. There's no point in trying to defend the "sustainability" of a fossil-fuel based society/economy. Even if the space program takes off and we fly to Titan to rape her resources, we're just prolonging the same situation: a dependence on a resource that is fundamentally limited in quantity. Actually, this is my definition of intelligent life: "Exploit limited resources to gain an advantage"
So, yeah. It's not just western civilization. As you write yourself, everything we are and everything we could be, the meaning of life itself. It all hinges on exploiting limited resources, until the heat death of the universe.
Now that we got that part out of the way, let's discuss at what RATE we should be consuming those resources. This, my friends, is the path to enlightenment.
Still, keep wishing if it makes you feel less guilty. Trust me on this. We will never live in a world where people want to pay for content, but cannot, because nobody have figured out how to collect their money.
I know we all love the car analogies, but it seems to me that to really make people understand this, you have to go even simpler:
Digital products, by definition, are represented by 1s and 0s. Because of this, it is no longer a physical product. It has become information.
By nature, information can be transferred. Also, you cannot prevent me from transfering some specific information unless you monitor all the information I send out. This means monitoring my mail, monitoring my holiday pictures, monitoring the video I took of my family during christmas. Unless you monitor ALL information, I will be able to transfer illegal information.
And pray that nobody ever finds a way to monitor and prevent ALL illegal information. If that ever happens, free speech will become illegal, and all your information is already monitored.
Good old paper mail is the best analogy still. You cannot prevent people from mailing song texts to eachother unless you monitor ALL their mail. This does not happen. (But don't tell the record companies, or they will get fuming over such a loophole...)
Since I would like to salvage some semblance of "I was right" in this thread As an unbiased observer, I think it's too late. Next time, read up on digital watermarking and encryption before mocking any implementation.
My cat has a smaller brain than I. I'm pretty sure he considers me his intellectual equal. Optimist.
Your cat's point of view is that you're barely intelligent at all. You completely fail to understand that he would like to have fresh tuna 4 times a day, lukewarm cream and be groomed more often.
Western culture today is a mixed bag when you look at the divorce rate, two-parent families, and the declining birth-rate in north america. The only reason divorce is considered a bad thing is your culture. How do you know if this really is "decay" or merely "change"?
I'm from Scandinavia. I and my girlfriend plan to marry, but that's becoming increasingly unusual around here. Maybe when my kids grow up, they'll be writing books about how bad it is to be raised in a two-parent family and why multi-parent, flexible families are so much better. I'm not saying "divorced", because you can't have a divorce if people don't marry in the first place.
And birth rate? We're 6.6 billion people! Humanity's only hope for the future is that we can reduce that number. Having a high birth rate only means we'll have to kill eachother for resources some day. Keep in mind China, where low birth rate is the law, and be happy that you're from a country that doesn't have the same problem.
Damn, you just posted with the level of thought of a 14 year old and got +5 insightful. Bravo.
He's very close to the key point about religion. It controls the masses.
This is not a bad thing. Religion serves as a coordinating force, organizing a society. It may be outdated today, but this was extremely beneficial to past civilizations. Summarized, religion is "This is the way things work, this is good, this is bad. Period." With religion, a huge number of people could be organized into supporting eachother.
Key point: Religion supports a strong warrior class. People willing to fight and die for their group. Good for war. Civilizations that are good at war tends to destroy other civilizations and spread.
As civilizations spread, they start to differ slightly. When they grow too big they fraction into different civilizations. Sooner or later, the stronger of those might conquer the weaker. Survival of the fittest, on a civilization scale.
Speculation: An alternative explanation would be that the two curves were of different diameter, and the driver intended to take the larger-diameter one, traveling at a speed too high for the sharper curve the tram ended up taking. Tram lines sometimes take pretty sharp turns. How to derail a train passing over a switch:
1. Wait for first set of wheels to pass over switch. 2. Activate switch (before last set of wheels have passed). 3. Observe different parts of the same train travel in 2 different directions. 4. ??? 5. Jail time!
When I speed I don't think I'm doing something wrong. I'm not very aggressive, I just speed with the flow of traffic...probably going slower would be more likely to cause an accident. I'm confident in my moral superiority, that clearly the road was built for higher speeds than the limit indicates, and the law is silly, or limit too low for realistic expectations of society. (...) Exactly the same in my view. Would society be better off without speed limits? Would you support anyone attempting to legalize 200-mph-driving anywhere anyone feels like it? Unlimited speed would cause a huge increase in traffic acidents, injuries and deaths.
Driving is legal. You're having issues with how fast you can drive. Piracy is not legal, and this is not a discussion on how fast we should be allowed to download. And note that piracy don't cause teenagers to die bloody deaths, which speeding ocationaly does.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to remove that waste heat before it burns the chip to a cinder, then yes, you probably want some degree of efficiency.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/oct/09/aids
The problem with condoms are that they may break, and then they don't even block dick-sized items. And most other birth control allows free flow of budily fluids, meaning there is no HIV protection whatsoever.
I guess that in theory, you could track down some guy out of that 1%, set them up as sperm donors to kickstart an ADIS-resistant population where HIV is the most rampant. But evolution works on such massive timescales that the current civilization and political setting will either have been completely changed or collapsed entirely before you'd get an AIDS-resistant population so it's not realyl practical.
Not everything is a choice.
Aiming for the mass market promote comfortable mediocrity.
So I'll toss and mix your post a bit and say that organized publishers care about selling to the masses, "promoting comfortable mediocrity". And individual artists/authors operate in "small words", and are more deeply concerned with outputting quality.
The future is filled with niches. Instead of 1 big thing, you'll have 100 small ones. And since you can easily google the 5 that are amazing for you, it does not matter if 95 are crap. (And really, they're not crap, just different. Taste is individual.)
He's not giving away the book for free, he's making money on a handy paper version that looks nice in a bookshelf and is easy to bring on the train. At the same time, he is strengthening the Chris Anderson brand.
A good author will manage to get paid no matter how rampant piracy gets. JK Rowling sold a handwritten book for 1.95 million pounds.
Even though you were modded funny, I resized my browser window to 3x3 pixels and donned safety goggles before clicking.
"becoming increasingly abstracted from the physical medium" and being a "representation of personal bartering power" go hand in hand. Increasingly abstract.
Personally, I consider money to represent "favor surplus". Bartering power is too related to an exchange of goods in these service-based times. The more money you have, the more favors can you call in from the world. If you're net worth is negative, you are owing favors to the world.
Mind you, this means I disagree with gold-backed currencies. An increasingly efficient (read: abstract) currency should not be bound to physical goods.
Religion doesn't help, at least not for me. (Where does God come from? Same thing.) You can't solve these questions thinking about the physical world. Think abstract. Car analogies are doomed. Maybe try math.
For how long have pi been pi? How many times has sinusoid function peaked and what started it? How may times has "2 + 2" equaled "4", and since when did it start doing so?
You're basically describing how life got started on earth.
Sure, there are many others (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Origin_of_life), but I think that is the most commonly accepted one.
Standards? Bah, humbug!
So, yeah. It's not just western civilization. As you write yourself, everything we are and everything we could be, the meaning of life itself. It all hinges on exploiting limited resources, until the heat death of the universe.
Now that we got that part out of the way, let's discuss at what RATE we should be consuming those resources. This, my friends, is the path to enlightenment.
I know we all love the car analogies, but it seems to me that to really make people understand this, you have to go even simpler:
Digital products, by definition, are represented by 1s and 0s. Because of this, it is no longer a physical product. It has become information.
By nature, information can be transferred. Also, you cannot prevent me from transfering some specific information unless you monitor all the information I send out. This means monitoring my mail, monitoring my holiday pictures, monitoring the video I took of my family during christmas. Unless you monitor ALL information, I will be able to transfer illegal information.
And pray that nobody ever finds a way to monitor and prevent ALL illegal information. If that ever happens, free speech will become illegal, and all your information is already monitored.
Good old paper mail is the best analogy still. You cannot prevent people from mailing song texts to eachother unless you monitor ALL their mail. This does not happen. (But don't tell the record companies, or they will get fuming over such a loophole...)
Some people can create works. Some people are willing to pay for works. There is money to be made.
Someone will come up with a great business idea. This is what disruptive technology is about. So relax, and watch the show.
Your cat's point of view is that you're barely intelligent at all. You completely fail to understand that he would like to have fresh tuna 4 times a day, lukewarm cream and be groomed more often.
I'm from Scandinavia. I and my girlfriend plan to marry, but that's becoming increasingly unusual around here. Maybe when my kids grow up, they'll be writing books about how bad it is to be raised in a two-parent family and why multi-parent, flexible families are so much better. I'm not saying "divorced", because you can't have a divorce if people don't marry in the first place.
And birth rate? We're 6.6 billion people! Humanity's only hope for the future is that we can reduce that number. Having a high birth rate only means we'll have to kill eachother for resources some day. Keep in mind China, where low birth rate is the law, and be happy that you're from a country that doesn't have the same problem.
This is not a bad thing. Religion serves as a coordinating force, organizing a society. It may be outdated today, but this was extremely beneficial to past civilizations. Summarized, religion is "This is the way things work, this is good, this is bad. Period." With religion, a huge number of people could be organized into supporting eachother.
Key point: Religion supports a strong warrior class. People willing to fight and die for their group. Good for war. Civilizations that are good at war tends to destroy other civilizations and spread.
As civilizations spread, they start to differ slightly. When they grow too big they fraction into different civilizations. Sooner or later, the stronger of those might conquer the weaker. Survival of the fittest, on a civilization scale.
Religion is also a product of evolution.
You stand up on your desk and shout "BINGO!"
I love it!
1. Wait for first set of wheels to pass over switch.
2. Activate switch (before last set of wheels have passed).
3. Observe different parts of the same train travel in 2 different directions.
4. ???
5. Jail time!
(...)
Exactly the same in my view. Would society be better off without speed limits? Would you support anyone attempting to legalize 200-mph-driving anywhere anyone feels like it? Unlimited speed would cause a huge increase in traffic acidents, injuries and deaths.
Driving is legal. You're having issues with how fast you can drive. Piracy is not legal, and this is not a discussion on how fast we should be allowed to download. And note that piracy don't cause teenagers to die bloody deaths, which speeding ocationaly does.
I hereby revoke your car analogy membership card.