Those Foxconn employees chose to work there because, to them, it's much better than working in the alternative business, namely, very dirty and very poor 4th world level farming. If big companies all around started refusing to work with Foxconn, it'd shrink, laying all that people off, back to the farms, to die of diseases they currently don't. So, even if the current situation is currently "bad" (from our perspective), the alternative is worse.
There's no magic trick. The only real solution for poor working conditions is to increase demand for labor more than the net growth of the workforce. Higher demand coupled with lower offer equals higher prices (in this case, higher wages). Once the demand over there is so high that companies start competing among themselves for workers, so that workers can start choosing were to work, a choice which usually includes considerations on working conditions, these companies will all find themselves compelled to improve working conditions, or start losing their best workers, then the average ones, and finally even the bad ones. Not being dumb, they'll follow the improvement path simply because there'll be no alternative.
All of which means, counter-intuitively as it seems, that people should actually do the opposite of what you suggested.
Hehe. Google tells me it's actually nicknamed OOCOBOL, but yeah, maybe COBOL++ would be better, given that Wikipedia tells me it (the ISO/ANSI COBOL 2002 standard) includes pointers and memory management functions, and there's support to work within/compile to.NET and Java. Quoting:
The language continues to evolve today. In the early 1990s it was decided to add object-orientation in the next full revision of COBOL. (...) The 2002 (4th revision) of COBOL included many other features beyond object-orientation. These included (but are not limited to):
National Language support (including but not limited to Unicode support)
I would suggest you avoid Cobol programmer, though. I had to learn that godforsaken son-of-a-whore language in college and would rather eat glass while being raped by an angry Mike Tyson on top of a pyre of burning feces than to ever have to deal with it again. But some seem to find it a somewhat less suicide-inducing-please-god-give-me-the-strength-to-pull-this-trigger-and-end-it-all prospect than I.
I have a friend who works for IBM programming mainframes with COBOL. He absolutely loves the job, and the language. I asked him how that was possible, given how COBOL is usually seen out there. His answer was something along these lines: "People look at how COBOL was in the past and believe it's still like that. It isn't. The language has evolved and incorporated modern programming paradigms and techniques. It's still verbose, but no more than Java, and with the advantage that, thanks to decades of debugging, libraries and reusable code are practically bug-free. It's a joy to work with."
Well, I never worked with COBOL, so I have no opinion on the matter. But it's interesting to see how diametrically opposed opinions on this language are. I wonder if there's someone out there who, knowing COBOL, neither hates nor loves it, but thinks of it merely as another language, good for some things, bad at others. Maybe there isn't.:-)
In Portuguese the word "bomba" can mean "bomb", "pump" or "eclair", so you infer the meaning from context. Now, guess what happened to a not-quite-fluent-in-English Brazilian businessman when, passing through US customs a few years ago with a pump, and asked by the customs officer what that were, he replied with an epic mistranslated "a water bomb"?
the lack of a mail server/client on par with Exchange/Outlook
Other than opening Outlook once or twice in computers with Office, I haven't ever used it, much less with Exchange, so I don't know what it provides that's different from other e-mail and calendaring programs. I'm familiar with Gmail, Thunderbird, Eudora and a few others, plus the standard feature set of IMAP/POP3/SMTP, but that's about it. Could you provide a short list of the specific features corporations particularly like, specially when it comes to integration with other Microsoft solutions, that isn't available (or as easily available) in alternative solutions?
Not trolling, just curious.
(By the way, I use, and like, MS Office 2010, but it's a home installation, not a corporate-integrated one.)
That's the problem - different individuals are operating under different constraints.
True enough. But then, that's also why free market advocates defend a state/judicial system which deals only with preserving order by preventing one individual from interfering into another's liberty, so that each one can do whatever they like as long as it isn't damaging to 3rd parties, and with enforcing contracts. Anything else is conducive to all kinds of distortions, including those you mention. For instance, large corporation can become so large to the point of tilting the knowledge factor precisely because they have the backing of governments, which grant them special status and privileges so that they become more than the simple aggregate of individuals they should be. Add to this all the special rights, also government-granted, that only big corporations can actually employ effectively, such as copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets, as well as laws that make it impossible for small competitors to enter a market, such as the many regulatory/safety/anti-this-or-that/etc. laws, and you have a recipe for the total imbalance, with the end result being what you describe.
One of the principles of a free market is that people have perfect information and act rationally on it.
No, it's not. The concept of perfect information is a straw-man anti-free-market theorists use to easily dismiss actual free market theories without the need to actually engage them. On the contrary, contemporaneous free market theorist such as Mises, Hayek and others have written extensively on how one of the main characteristics of the free market is the lack of perfect information (and many times of any information at all) and the fact that people act non-rationally most of the time, then explaining why, counter-intuitively as it might sound, this works better than the alternative. The key is in the free market's lack of centralization, which results in, to use a modern analogy, a strongly optimized neural network in which each node (each individual or, more precisely, each individual at each atomic economic transaction in which he engages) is doing the best it can, input-output-wise, given the constraints under which it operates. This neural-network-like behavior, whose study Mises called "praxeology", the study of human action, is free market' actual central principle. It's a concept that goes against mainstream economics' macroeconomic ones, specially that which considers it possible to understand anything economic without reference to actual humans doing actual economic transactions powered at every instant by their own ordinal subjective valuations. To try to disprove it by modeling it into operations upon cardinal units such as money, amount of knowledge, game theory etc., then refuting such model, is to entirely miss the target, not to mention the point.
Capitalism means to exploit the workers for the least amount possible. I don't know why people have such a hard time understanding that Capitalism working means the workers get screwed. it isn't useful to have happy employees.
You're partially correct. Actually, Capitalism means to get anything for the least amount possible. When you to shopping, and you have two sellers selling the exact same thing (let's say, cheese), with the exact same quality (insert everything you can think in this: brand, weight, environmental conscience, distance from your house, amount of sunlight, nice vista etc.), but priced differently, which one do you chose? The one where it's cheaper, or the one where it's more expensive? In the exact same way you don't usually ask, or care about, the expensive cheese vendor reasons in charging more, someone in need to buy "work" goes, other things being equal, for the cheap offer rather than the expensive one, also usually not asking, or caring about, the expensive "work vendor" reasons in charging more. You, me, and the ultra-capitalist over there aren't all that different when it comes to wanting to spend less: we all want more of our money left in our pockets so that we can purchase more, not less, things. And in both cases the end result -- that the one charging more gets screwed -- is the same.
One is not being paid for the effort to do the work, he is being paid for the value his work creates, which may extend beyond the actual effort.
Actually it's neither. One's paid what the other thinks the work is worth at the exact moment of the exchange. There's some background calculation going on on both sides based on previous valuations, but it's still all a subjective game of figuring out some middle ground between the maximum one's willing to pay and the minimum the other's willing to work for, effective at that very instant. Afterwards things can change, usually little, sometimes a lot.
Anyway, this isn't really related to what I was saying. In your food example, it's certainly proper for a meal to be paid for. Whether before or after or in installments is irrelevant, provided it's a price for an actual service. What isn't proper is for the lunch maker to be paid in again and again and again and again, for a single meal he prepared way back. Copyright is the literal equivalent of, using another example, a janitor charging a "passright" for every person who ever walk through a corridor he (once) cleaned, plus having the right to sue anyone who were to clean another corridor as much as he (once) cleaned his as well as anyone who merely looked at either of those corridors.
in your system there's no incentive whatsoever to put any piece of software on the market as nobody would pay for it.
How can you be on./ with such a low user number and don't know Linux etc.? Existing software is free while implementation, support, customization etc. are all paid work. What's true is that in my system huge software houses wouldn't exist, but there would be a lot more of the small ones, professional programming becoming basically a craft. And gaming, much like filming, would be a much smaller field, as there wouldn't be blockbuster-level budgets in it anymore.
That's not really extensible to most of those examples. When you loan money or invest in something, you're actively "working" the entire time that your money is out of your hands. If I loan you $1000, I'm "loaning" for the entire period of time that I don't have my $1000.
The problem with loaning and investing, as it's usually done, is that one's shielded from the consequences. At most one'd fear losing the amount invested/loaned, but that'd be it. Where one actually fully responsible, as a co-participant, in whatever that amount was being used for, then I'd agree with you. Alas, one can dump money somewhere based solely on a monetary-related values, remain blissfully ignorant about other concerns, and not care about anything other than the return on investment. Evident then the end result couldn't be other than, with rare exceptions, the amoral or even immoral mega-corporations of today. Things would be radically different if anyone, by merely investing $100 in a company, were held as liable for, let's say, deaths it caused while caring enough for environmental damages in a remote operation in Africa, as the person directly responsible, including jail time. Until things change, it's more ethical for one to use the money by directly becoming a partner in an actual business where one'll have actual responsibilities.
If I can get someone to agree to pay me under any terms, then I do deserve to get paid according to our agreement.
True, because then it's a matter of a contractual agreement, as two parties deciding on how to do things among themselves is perfectly fine. My answer was in regards to non-contractual relationships. In this case, a 3rd party C copying a work made by A for B, with no contractual relationship with either A or B, has no obligation to them. A got paid; B got the work. Whatever C does afterwards is of no concern to them, as C is neither depriving A from B's payment, nor B from A's work.
An anti-copyright activist will agree with this, while disagreeing with copyright itself, on the basis that, yes, people deserve do get paid for their work while they're working. Being paid for work they did, but aren't doing anymore, on the other hand, is by no means deserved, no. Hence, a programmer deserves to be paid while programming, not for previous programming; a singer while singing, not for previous singing; a painter while painting, not for previous paintings; a writer while writing, not for previous writings; and so on and so forth.
The counter argument to this is that under such a social arrangement much creative work that depends on consumers paying for it after it's been done wouldn't be done at all. To which an anti-copyright activist would answer thus: "So what?" After all, where's the ethics in getting paid for non-work? Unless one's disabled or otherwise unfit for work, nowhere.
Note that this reasoning can be extended to all kinds of payments for non-work: financial speculation; earning interest on loans; investing, unless you're there, actually doing something useful at the company you invested in; and so on and so forth. Which looks kinda socialistic, but isn't, as actual property, of the physical kind, remains fully private, and operating as expected.
STILL has. It's big here in Brazil and a few other countries, although, from what I hear, people are leaving it in droves for Facebook.
What I wonder is why Google still hasn't decided to merge Orkut back into G+. It'd seem a logical step, at least as a way to boost the total number of G+ users, specially given how Google is nowadays all about discontinuing its other social networks, just think Gmail's Buzz, GReader's nameless article-sharing one, GWave (which was more of a SN than other thing), that Twitter competitor they bought years ago whose name I don't remember, etc.
Not that merging Orkut into G+ would help stop the massive migration towards Facebook, mind you...
Science is no more an abstract concept than gravity or evolution are and none are religions, because none require faith to sustain them, only observation from the natural world.
Faith as a prerequisite of religion is a strongly monotheistic notion, and strongest of all in Christianity. Islam and Judaism don't really require much of it. And the remaining ones require almost zero, or literally zero (this is the case of several Buddhist branches) of it. So, lack of faith doesn't make it any less religious, at least from the perspective of the majority of religions out there, even if not from the majority of adherents. Besides, observation of the natural world is also in the root not only of religions, but also of magic. And not in the way Atheists usually consider it, as "god(s) of the gaps". I wrote more about this in my reply to the post above yours, so I take the liberty to ask you to please read it.
As for Science, gravity, evolution etc. not being abstract concepts, actually they are. They in fact do have non-abstract counterparts, but this isn't the same as they themselves not being abstract. For sciences, the concrete counterpart is engineering and craft, as these make things that work, that will continue working no matter how much the underlying scientific theories that try to explain their inner working change, and that even work despite the underlying theories that inspired their construction, as any engineer has experienced that all too common WTF moment when something that should works (according to theory) doesn't, requiring tweaks upon tweaks until it actually does. The same goes for gravity: the concrete aspect is the brute fact that things drop, gravity itself being but one possible explanation for this happening, even though a quite useful one (again, for engineering). And for evolution, it's the many medical and biological applications (both also engineerings). Were you to completely remove the abstract side of these and other pairs, the concrete one wouldn't be itself affected in the least. Sure, developing new things might take a lot more trial and error, as abstract concepts offer clear shortcuts in going from point A to B, but basically that'd be it.
The god of science - whether called Science or not - is distinct from science.
From an atheist perspective, sure, they certainly are, because of the analytical nature of atheist thinking. But from a polytheistic perspective there's no distinction at all. If you tell a polytheist there's no god of 'x', e.g., that there is no Sun god, he'll reply with something along the line of "of course there is, he's there" (points to the Sun). The same goes for an Earth god (points to the ground), of rain (the rain itself) etc.
In fact, the notion of gods as that which fills gaps of non-knowledge, which is one of the ways Atheism works the distinction between the thing and its divinity (or lack thereof), doesn't tackles the way a polytheist, of even a monotheist for that matter, actually interacts with the world. When scientific pursuit concludes the Sun to be a ball of hydrogen into permanent nuclear fusion, or weather to be a mechanical process of this interacting with that following huge equations etc., the theist (mono- or poly-) reaction isn't "damn, there goes the gap where I had fitted a god", but actually "nice, now I know a little more about (the) god".
Hence, better scientific methods are, additionally, also a better understanding of the Science god, *even if* Atheists don't care much about the second part of the equation. Believing or not, they work towards this goal, so it's all fine in the end, from both perspectives.
Science isn't a god, it's knowledge combined a method for increasing knowledge. Believers try to claim that it's a god, so that they can oppose it the way they oppose competitors for whatever god they adhere to.
Science, as any abstract concept, can be, and in many parts of the world currently is, worshiped as a god, yes.
Sure, you yourself, as well as most if not all of your peers, might not think of Science as a god. But that doesn't mean it isn't one, even if you consider such attribution absurd. In fact, there's plenty of evidence of this being the case. Hinduism, for instance, has a Science god, Hayagriva, and a Science goddess, Saraswati (also present in Buddhism). The Science god is also recognized in many Shamanic African religions, including modern derivatives such as Santeria and Voodoo, where he's called Oxossi, Oshosi, Ososi and variants. The old Egyptian religion called him Thot. The Greek-Roman paganism, for its part, had him too, and multiplied: there he was named Hermes/Mercury (Greek/Latin), the god of Science as a whole, plus the many Muses, each a goddess of a specific area of knowledge. And so on and so forth. Additionally, in all cases this god(dess)'s domain is precisely that of, as you say, "knowledge combined with a method for increasing knowledge", so that whoever follows this path is, from the perspective of a believer in the "godness" of Science, "doing his deed".
Please note, by the way, that I don't say this as criticism, quite the opposite! I'm a polytheist myself, and I have no problem in worshiping Science, whom, as a Shintoist, I call Tenjin. So there's that one, too.;-)
No it isn't morally ok, you are depriving the creator their choice in where and how their creation is distributed. Using P2P on files you don't have copyright on you are actively distributing someone else's creation without their permission.
Yes and no. This isn't usually brought into the discussion, but it's a basic moral and ethical principle that for every right there must be a corresponding duty. Hence, when those that detain a "right to copy" fail in fulfilling the corresponding "duty to copy" by, say, refusing to employ all the copy channels available and/or by discriminating against recipients on grounds of age, race, sex, religion, geography etc., it's a moral duty of all concerned to fulfill their copyduty role for them.
For instance, I love to watch anime, and use streaming services for this. But now and then I found an anime whose copyrighter, filled with geographist bigotry, refuses his copyduty to stream to my country. Now, since they dismissed their copyduty, I don't feel a duty myself to respect their copyright, and thus I pirate. Were they to correctly follow their copyduties, and I would never pirate. And, I bet, that's also true for most pirates out there.
Sites like the Pirate Bay exist and thrive only in those instances in which copyrighters willingly decouple themselves from their copyduties, hoping we wouldn't notice such a distortion in the social contract. These sites are, quite literally, copyduty enforces. As for those copyrighters who do fulfill their copyduties, they have nothing to worry. In their case, the societal balance is already established, and working as intended.
PS.: "Intended by whom", you ask? Why, by society itself, of course, in its intuitive understanding of what "is" (clearly feels) right and what "is" (clearly feels) wrong. The above, much like sane laws, is but an explicit exposition, in logical clothing, of the inner logic behind such intuitions of right and wrong. No one is against content makers earning a living from their work, but there's a baseline human understanding on how it should happen. And "copydutyless copyright" is something that clearly doesn't fit it.
I know qubits can be very useful at encryption/decryption/cracking and such, but I'm curious: what else would they be useful for? I mean, is there something that a typical desktop/workstation does today that could be improved by adding some qubit-based magic behind the scenes, similar to how GPUs (and FPUs before them) resulted in improved GUIs, games, CAD/CAM etc.? Or is this the kind of thing that's most probably going to remain restricted to specific fields, with very specific needs, for the foreseeable future?
And who, exactly, gets to decide what a "normal" human being is, and what this mythical alleged "normal" human being would consider "offensive" or "non-offensive"?
Weeell, we usually understand this word as meaning the common, usual, average etc., but there's another, less know meaning that works quite well in this context: "normal" as that which adheres to a "norm". I doubt this politician used it in this way though. But if he did, he could answer with: "Why, ${BELIEF_SYSTEM}'s normative specialists, evidently!"
At which point you'd reply: "Good enough, yes, except for the fact that, according to ${MY_BELIEF_SYSTEM}, it's ${BELIEF_SYSTEM} that's abnormal."
Rinse, repeat, and watch the whole thing eventually collapsing in a puff of logic.
So do I, but keep in mind he might be a non-native writer.
Which is indeed the case. I'm a native Portuguese speaker, where the word is "automatizado/a". But it's nice that people are complaining only about this, as it means they took me for a native English speaker, even if one who commits hilarious errors. Considering I'm an autodidact English learner, and that I was sleepy when I wrote, that's an incredible compliment!:)
This system probably solves spam the same way Freenet managed to eliminate it from its boards: by adopting a(n anonymous) Web Of Trust model. In practice, you'll only see results coming from those you trust directly or indirectly. The fake results will be there, but buried.
And even if they currently don't do that due to the smallness of the network, at some point they will. It's unavoidable.
Although the problem then might become you only seeing what you like because your friends/trusted nodes all think more or less the same, hence basically shielding yourself from different views. But then, mainstream search engines already do something like this, so it won't be that different from what we already have.
The main point is "so what?" Suppose detailed research actually shows that open source software is killing jobs, are we going to do anything about it? No. Open source software is here to stay and if it kills jobs, too bad.
True enough. In fact, technology in general, not only OSS, is all about automating what previously was manual labor. What means unemploying people. Every. Single. Technology. IT, paid or not, isn't different. If what one does can be automatized, even if only conceivably given the current technological level, then at some point it *will* be automatized. And the thing is: this isn't bad. It means there are even more surplus available, thus that even (comparatively) lower wages and/or social status can have more than they would have were the social reality different and dying jobs preserved. Weren't it so, and poor persons in present-day "almost-everywhere" (including most of the 3rd world) wouldn't have a much higher standard of living than even a medieval king had.
But it someone disagrees, answer this: how many witch doctors lost their jobs due to the invention of the aspirin?;)
The fundamental impediment has been fighting a fossil fuel corporate monolith which has hijacked our government. Its time for us to take back our future.
Actually, since a few years the fossil fuel corporate monolith has seen itself more as an energy corporate monolith than specifically a fossil fuel one. They expect the post-peak oil world to be quite bad for business after a while (specially when it becomes "post-oil" due to oil simply ending), so they're already moving into other energy-related endeavors as a way to continue being the exact same powerhouses (pun intended) they currently are, only with different kinds of power behind their backs. Search around and you'll find that lots, and I mean lots, of research into alternative energy sources is currently financed by them. After all, first to arrive, and to sweetly, sweetly patent for 20 years (or more, with extensions), is the surest way to get ahead and continue dominating.
What doesn't mean they won't continue to milk the oil bandwagon for as long as they realistically can.
Way past the distant memory of peak oil and even "post oil"? Not to mention peak- and post- almost everything else industrially useful.
But that's an incorrect historical take on the matter. To blossom a contemporaneous-like science requires, among other things, an extremely solid logical and mathematical foundation, way past what had been developed back in Ancient Greece, plus a very specific kind of world view that only developed once, under a very specific historical context. The first two aspects were advanced to the point of usefulness only during the three later centuries of (what we now call) the Middle Ages, while the third aspect required two more centuries, building upon the first two aspects. These three simply weren't available at the time.
What doesn't mean considering the possibility isn't fun. There are some quite nice alternate history fiction on the subject out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that 10% really worth it?
Those Foxconn employees chose to work there because, to them, it's much better than working in the alternative business, namely, very dirty and very poor 4th world level farming. If big companies all around started refusing to work with Foxconn, it'd shrink, laying all that people off, back to the farms, to die of diseases they currently don't. So, even if the current situation is currently "bad" (from our perspective), the alternative is worse.
There's no magic trick. The only real solution for poor working conditions is to increase demand for labor more than the net growth of the workforce. Higher demand coupled with lower offer equals higher prices (in this case, higher wages). Once the demand over there is so high that companies start competing among themselves for workers, so that workers can start choosing were to work, a choice which usually includes considerations on working conditions, these companies will all find themselves compelled to improve working conditions, or start losing their best workers, then the average ones, and finally even the bad ones. Not being dumb, they'll follow the improvement path simply because there'll be no alternative.
All of which means, counter-intuitively as it seems, that people should actually do the opposite of what you suggested.
Dear God they've created COBOL++
Hehe. Google tells me it's actually nicknamed OOCOBOL, but yeah, maybe COBOL++ would be better, given that Wikipedia tells me it (the ISO/ANSI COBOL 2002 standard) includes pointers and memory management functions, and there's support to work within/compile to .NET and Java. Quoting:
The language continues to evolve today. In the early 1990s it was decided to add object-orientation in the next full revision of COBOL. (...) The 2002 (4th revision) of COBOL included many other features beyond object-orientation. These included (but are not limited to):
I would suggest you avoid Cobol programmer, though. I had to learn that godforsaken son-of-a-whore language in college and would rather eat glass while being raped by an angry Mike Tyson on top of a pyre of burning feces than to ever have to deal with it again. But some seem to find it a somewhat less suicide-inducing-please-god-give-me-the-strength-to-pull-this-trigger-and-end-it-all prospect than I.
I have a friend who works for IBM programming mainframes with COBOL. He absolutely loves the job, and the language. I asked him how that was possible, given how COBOL is usually seen out there. His answer was something along these lines: "People look at how COBOL was in the past and believe it's still like that. It isn't. The language has evolved and incorporated modern programming paradigms and techniques. It's still verbose, but no more than Java, and with the advantage that, thanks to decades of debugging, libraries and reusable code are practically bug-free. It's a joy to work with."
Well, I never worked with COBOL, so I have no opinion on the matter. But it's interesting to see how diametrically opposed opinions on this language are. I wonder if there's someone out there who, knowing COBOL, neither hates nor loves it, but thinks of it merely as another language, good for some things, bad at others. Maybe there isn't. :-)
Is this out of a terrorist handbook?
In Portuguese the word "bomba" can mean "bomb", "pump" or "eclair", so you infer the meaning from context. Now, guess what happened to a not-quite-fluent-in-English Brazilian businessman when, passing through US customs a few years ago with a pump, and asked by the customs officer what that were, he replied with an epic mistranslated "a water bomb"?
the lack of a mail server/client on par with Exchange/Outlook
Other than opening Outlook once or twice in computers with Office, I haven't ever used it, much less with Exchange, so I don't know what it provides that's different from other e-mail and calendaring programs. I'm familiar with Gmail, Thunderbird, Eudora and a few others, plus the standard feature set of IMAP/POP3/SMTP, but that's about it. Could you provide a short list of the specific features corporations particularly like, specially when it comes to integration with other Microsoft solutions, that isn't available (or as easily available) in alternative solutions?
Not trolling, just curious.
(By the way, I use, and like, MS Office 2010, but it's a home installation, not a corporate-integrated one.)
That's the problem - different individuals are operating under different constraints.
True enough. But then, that's also why free market advocates defend a state/judicial system which deals only with preserving order by preventing one individual from interfering into another's liberty, so that each one can do whatever they like as long as it isn't damaging to 3rd parties, and with enforcing contracts. Anything else is conducive to all kinds of distortions, including those you mention. For instance, large corporation can become so large to the point of tilting the knowledge factor precisely because they have the backing of governments, which grant them special status and privileges so that they become more than the simple aggregate of individuals they should be. Add to this all the special rights, also government-granted, that only big corporations can actually employ effectively, such as copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets, as well as laws that make it impossible for small competitors to enter a market, such as the many regulatory/safety/anti-this-or-that/etc. laws, and you have a recipe for the total imbalance, with the end result being what you describe.
One of the principles of a free market is that people have perfect information and act rationally on it.
No, it's not. The concept of perfect information is a straw-man anti-free-market theorists use to easily dismiss actual free market theories without the need to actually engage them. On the contrary, contemporaneous free market theorist such as Mises, Hayek and others have written extensively on how one of the main characteristics of the free market is the lack of perfect information (and many times of any information at all) and the fact that people act non-rationally most of the time, then explaining why, counter-intuitively as it might sound, this works better than the alternative. The key is in the free market's lack of centralization, which results in, to use a modern analogy, a strongly optimized neural network in which each node (each individual or, more precisely, each individual at each atomic economic transaction in which he engages) is doing the best it can, input-output-wise, given the constraints under which it operates. This neural-network-like behavior, whose study Mises called "praxeology", the study of human action, is free market' actual central principle. It's a concept that goes against mainstream economics' macroeconomic ones, specially that which considers it possible to understand anything economic without reference to actual humans doing actual economic transactions powered at every instant by their own ordinal subjective valuations. To try to disprove it by modeling it into operations upon cardinal units such as money, amount of knowledge, game theory etc., then refuting such model, is to entirely miss the target, not to mention the point.
Capitalism means to exploit the workers for the least amount possible. I don't know why people have such a hard time understanding that Capitalism working means the workers get screwed. it isn't useful to have happy employees.
You're partially correct. Actually, Capitalism means to get anything for the least amount possible. When you to shopping, and you have two sellers selling the exact same thing (let's say, cheese), with the exact same quality (insert everything you can think in this: brand, weight, environmental conscience, distance from your house, amount of sunlight, nice vista etc.), but priced differently, which one do you chose? The one where it's cheaper, or the one where it's more expensive? In the exact same way you don't usually ask, or care about, the expensive cheese vendor reasons in charging more, someone in need to buy "work" goes, other things being equal, for the cheap offer rather than the expensive one, also usually not asking, or caring about, the expensive "work vendor" reasons in charging more. You, me, and the ultra-capitalist over there aren't all that different when it comes to wanting to spend less: we all want more of our money left in our pockets so that we can purchase more, not less, things. And in both cases the end result -- that the one charging more gets screwed -- is the same.
One is not being paid for the effort to do the work, he is being paid for the value his work creates, which may extend beyond the actual effort.
Actually it's neither. One's paid what the other thinks the work is worth at the exact moment of the exchange. There's some background calculation going on on both sides based on previous valuations, but it's still all a subjective game of figuring out some middle ground between the maximum one's willing to pay and the minimum the other's willing to work for, effective at that very instant. Afterwards things can change, usually little, sometimes a lot.
Anyway, this isn't really related to what I was saying. In your food example, it's certainly proper for a meal to be paid for. Whether before or after or in installments is irrelevant, provided it's a price for an actual service. What isn't proper is for the lunch maker to be paid in again and again and again and again, for a single meal he prepared way back. Copyright is the literal equivalent of, using another example, a janitor charging a "passright" for every person who ever walk through a corridor he (once) cleaned, plus having the right to sue anyone who were to clean another corridor as much as he (once) cleaned his as well as anyone who merely looked at either of those corridors.
in your system there's no incentive whatsoever to put any piece of software on the market as nobody would pay for it.
How can you be on ./ with such a low user number and don't know Linux etc.? Existing software is free while implementation, support, customization etc. are all paid work. What's true is that in my system huge software houses wouldn't exist, but there would be a lot more of the small ones, professional programming becoming basically a craft. And gaming, much like filming, would be a much smaller field, as there wouldn't be blockbuster-level budgets in it anymore.
That's not really extensible to most of those examples. When you loan money or invest in something, you're actively "working" the entire time that your money is out of your hands. If I loan you $1000, I'm "loaning" for the entire period of time that I don't have my $1000.
The problem with loaning and investing, as it's usually done, is that one's shielded from the consequences. At most one'd fear losing the amount invested/loaned, but that'd be it. Where one actually fully responsible, as a co-participant, in whatever that amount was being used for, then I'd agree with you. Alas, one can dump money somewhere based solely on a monetary-related values, remain blissfully ignorant about other concerns, and not care about anything other than the return on investment. Evident then the end result couldn't be other than, with rare exceptions, the amoral or even immoral mega-corporations of today. Things would be radically different if anyone, by merely investing $100 in a company, were held as liable for, let's say, deaths it caused while caring enough for environmental damages in a remote operation in Africa, as the person directly responsible, including jail time. Until things change, it's more ethical for one to use the money by directly becoming a partner in an actual business where one'll have actual responsibilities.
If I can get someone to agree to pay me under any terms, then I do deserve to get paid according to our agreement.
True, because then it's a matter of a contractual agreement, as two parties deciding on how to do things among themselves is perfectly fine. My answer was in regards to non-contractual relationships. In this case, a 3rd party C copying a work made by A for B, with no contractual relationship with either A or B, has no obligation to them. A got paid; B got the work. Whatever C does afterwards is of no concern to them, as C is neither depriving A from B's payment, nor B from A's work.
People deserve to get paid for their work.
An anti-copyright activist will agree with this, while disagreeing with copyright itself, on the basis that, yes, people deserve do get paid for their work while they're working. Being paid for work they did, but aren't doing anymore, on the other hand, is by no means deserved, no. Hence, a programmer deserves to be paid while programming, not for previous programming; a singer while singing, not for previous singing; a painter while painting, not for previous paintings; a writer while writing, not for previous writings; and so on and so forth.
The counter argument to this is that under such a social arrangement much creative work that depends on consumers paying for it after it's been done wouldn't be done at all. To which an anti-copyright activist would answer thus: "So what?" After all, where's the ethics in getting paid for non-work? Unless one's disabled or otherwise unfit for work, nowhere.
Note that this reasoning can be extended to all kinds of payments for non-work: financial speculation; earning interest on loans; investing, unless you're there, actually doing something useful at the company you invested in; and so on and so forth. Which looks kinda socialistic, but isn't, as actual property, of the physical kind, remains fully private, and operating as expected.
google had its SN before, orkut.
STILL has. It's big here in Brazil and a few other countries, although, from what I hear, people are leaving it in droves for Facebook.
What I wonder is why Google still hasn't decided to merge Orkut back into G+. It'd seem a logical step, at least as a way to boost the total number of G+ users, specially given how Google is nowadays all about discontinuing its other social networks, just think Gmail's Buzz, GReader's nameless article-sharing one, GWave (which was more of a SN than other thing), that Twitter competitor they bought years ago whose name I don't remember, etc.
Not that merging Orkut into G+ would help stop the massive migration towards Facebook, mind you...
Science is no more an abstract concept than gravity or evolution are and none are religions, because none require faith to sustain them, only observation from the natural world.
Faith as a prerequisite of religion is a strongly monotheistic notion, and strongest of all in Christianity. Islam and Judaism don't really require much of it. And the remaining ones require almost zero, or literally zero (this is the case of several Buddhist branches) of it. So, lack of faith doesn't make it any less religious, at least from the perspective of the majority of religions out there, even if not from the majority of adherents. Besides, observation of the natural world is also in the root not only of religions, but also of magic. And not in the way Atheists usually consider it, as "god(s) of the gaps". I wrote more about this in my reply to the post above yours, so I take the liberty to ask you to please read it.
As for Science, gravity, evolution etc. not being abstract concepts, actually they are. They in fact do have non-abstract counterparts, but this isn't the same as they themselves not being abstract. For sciences, the concrete counterpart is engineering and craft, as these make things that work, that will continue working no matter how much the underlying scientific theories that try to explain their inner working change, and that even work despite the underlying theories that inspired their construction, as any engineer has experienced that all too common WTF moment when something that should works (according to theory) doesn't, requiring tweaks upon tweaks until it actually does. The same goes for gravity: the concrete aspect is the brute fact that things drop, gravity itself being but one possible explanation for this happening, even though a quite useful one (again, for engineering). And for evolution, it's the many medical and biological applications (both also engineerings). Were you to completely remove the abstract side of these and other pairs, the concrete one wouldn't be itself affected in the least. Sure, developing new things might take a lot more trial and error, as abstract concepts offer clear shortcuts in going from point A to B, but basically that'd be it.
The god of science - whether called Science or not - is distinct from science.
From an atheist perspective, sure, they certainly are, because of the analytical nature of atheist thinking. But from a polytheistic perspective there's no distinction at all. If you tell a polytheist there's no god of 'x', e.g., that there is no Sun god, he'll reply with something along the line of "of course there is, he's there" (points to the Sun). The same goes for an Earth god (points to the ground), of rain (the rain itself) etc.
In fact, the notion of gods as that which fills gaps of non-knowledge, which is one of the ways Atheism works the distinction between the thing and its divinity (or lack thereof), doesn't tackles the way a polytheist, of even a monotheist for that matter, actually interacts with the world. When scientific pursuit concludes the Sun to be a ball of hydrogen into permanent nuclear fusion, or weather to be a mechanical process of this interacting with that following huge equations etc., the theist (mono- or poly-) reaction isn't "damn, there goes the gap where I had fitted a god", but actually "nice, now I know a little more about (the) god".
Hence, better scientific methods are, additionally, also a better understanding of the Science god, *even if* Atheists don't care much about the second part of the equation. Believing or not, they work towards this goal, so it's all fine in the end, from both perspectives.
Science isn't a god, it's knowledge combined a method for increasing knowledge. Believers try to claim that it's a god, so that they can oppose it the way they oppose competitors for whatever god they adhere to.
Science, as any abstract concept, can be, and in many parts of the world currently is, worshiped as a god, yes.
Sure, you yourself, as well as most if not all of your peers, might not think of Science as a god. But that doesn't mean it isn't one, even if you consider such attribution absurd. In fact, there's plenty of evidence of this being the case. Hinduism, for instance, has a Science god, Hayagriva, and a Science goddess, Saraswati (also present in Buddhism). The Science god is also recognized in many Shamanic African religions, including modern derivatives such as Santeria and Voodoo, where he's called Oxossi, Oshosi, Ososi and variants. The old Egyptian religion called him Thot. The Greek-Roman paganism, for its part, had him too, and multiplied: there he was named Hermes/Mercury (Greek/Latin), the god of Science as a whole, plus the many Muses, each a goddess of a specific area of knowledge. And so on and so forth. Additionally, in all cases this god(dess)'s domain is precisely that of, as you say, "knowledge combined with a method for increasing knowledge", so that whoever follows this path is, from the perspective of a believer in the "godness" of Science, "doing his deed".
Please note, by the way, that I don't say this as criticism, quite the opposite! I'm a polytheist myself, and I have no problem in worshiping Science, whom, as a Shintoist, I call Tenjin. So there's that one, too. ;-)
No it isn't morally ok, you are depriving the creator their choice in where and how their creation is distributed. Using P2P on files you don't have copyright on you are actively distributing someone else's creation without their permission.
Yes and no. This isn't usually brought into the discussion, but it's a basic moral and ethical principle that for every right there must be a corresponding duty. Hence, when those that detain a "right to copy" fail in fulfilling the corresponding "duty to copy" by, say, refusing to employ all the copy channels available and/or by discriminating against recipients on grounds of age, race, sex, religion, geography etc., it's a moral duty of all concerned to fulfill their copyduty role for them.
For instance, I love to watch anime, and use streaming services for this. But now and then I found an anime whose copyrighter, filled with geographist bigotry, refuses his copyduty to stream to my country. Now, since they dismissed their copyduty, I don't feel a duty myself to respect their copyright, and thus I pirate. Were they to correctly follow their copyduties, and I would never pirate. And, I bet, that's also true for most pirates out there.
Sites like the Pirate Bay exist and thrive only in those instances in which copyrighters willingly decouple themselves from their copyduties, hoping we wouldn't notice such a distortion in the social contract. These sites are, quite literally, copyduty enforces. As for those copyrighters who do fulfill their copyduties, they have nothing to worry. In their case, the societal balance is already established, and working as intended.
PS.: "Intended by whom", you ask? Why, by society itself, of course, in its intuitive understanding of what "is" (clearly feels) right and what "is" (clearly feels) wrong. The above, much like sane laws, is but an explicit exposition, in logical clothing, of the inner logic behind such intuitions of right and wrong. No one is against content makers earning a living from their work, but there's a baseline human understanding on how it should happen. And "copydutyless copyright" is something that clearly doesn't fit it.
I know qubits can be very useful at encryption/decryption/cracking and such, but I'm curious: what else would they be useful for? I mean, is there something that a typical desktop/workstation does today that could be improved by adding some qubit-based magic behind the scenes, similar to how GPUs (and FPUs before them) resulted in improved GUIs, games, CAD/CAM etc.? Or is this the kind of thing that's most probably going to remain restricted to specific fields, with very specific needs, for the foreseeable future?
And who, exactly, gets to decide what a "normal" human being is, and what this mythical alleged "normal" human being would consider "offensive" or "non-offensive"?
Weeell, we usually understand this word as meaning the common, usual, average etc., but there's another, less know meaning that works quite well in this context: "normal" as that which adheres to a "norm". I doubt this politician used it in this way though. But if he did, he could answer with: "Why, ${BELIEF_SYSTEM}'s normative specialists, evidently!"
At which point you'd reply: "Good enough, yes, except for the fact that, according to ${MY_BELIEF_SYSTEM}, it's ${BELIEF_SYSTEM} that's abnormal."
Rinse, repeat, and watch the whole thing eventually collapsing in a puff of logic.
So do I, but keep in mind he might be a non-native writer.
Which is indeed the case. I'm a native Portuguese speaker, where the word is "automatizado/a". But it's nice that people are complaining only about this, as it means they took me for a native English speaker, even if one who commits hilarious errors. Considering I'm an autodidact English learner, and that I was sleepy when I wrote, that's an incredible compliment! :)
This system probably solves spam the same way Freenet managed to eliminate it from its boards: by adopting a(n anonymous) Web Of Trust model. In practice, you'll only see results coming from those you trust directly or indirectly. The fake results will be there, but buried.
And even if they currently don't do that due to the smallness of the network, at some point they will. It's unavoidable.
Although the problem then might become you only seeing what you like because your friends/trusted nodes all think more or less the same, hence basically shielding yourself from different views. But then, mainstream search engines already do something like this, so it won't be that different from what we already have.
The main point is "so what?" Suppose detailed research actually shows that open source software is killing jobs, are we going to do anything about it? No. Open source software is here to stay and if it kills jobs, too bad.
True enough. In fact, technology in general, not only OSS, is all about automating what previously was manual labor. What means unemploying people. Every. Single. Technology. IT, paid or not, isn't different. If what one does can be automatized, even if only conceivably given the current technological level, then at some point it *will* be automatized. And the thing is: this isn't bad. It means there are even more surplus available, thus that even (comparatively) lower wages and/or social status can have more than they would have were the social reality different and dying jobs preserved. Weren't it so, and poor persons in present-day "almost-everywhere" (including most of the 3rd world) wouldn't have a much higher standard of living than even a medieval king had.
But it someone disagrees, answer this: how many witch doctors lost their jobs due to the invention of the aspirin? ;)
The fundamental impediment has been fighting a fossil fuel corporate monolith which has hijacked our government. Its time for us to take back our future.
Actually, since a few years the fossil fuel corporate monolith has seen itself more as an energy corporate monolith than specifically a fossil fuel one. They expect the post-peak oil world to be quite bad for business after a while (specially when it becomes "post-oil" due to oil simply ending), so they're already moving into other energy-related endeavors as a way to continue being the exact same powerhouses (pun intended) they currently are, only with different kinds of power behind their backs. Search around and you'll find that lots, and I mean lots, of research into alternative energy sources is currently financed by them. After all, first to arrive, and to sweetly, sweetly patent for 20 years (or more, with extensions), is the surest way to get ahead and continue dominating.
What doesn't mean they won't continue to milk the oil bandwagon for as long as they realistically can.
Way past the distant memory of peak oil and even "post oil"? Not to mention peak- and post- almost everything else industrially useful.
But that's an incorrect historical take on the matter. To blossom a contemporaneous-like science requires, among other things, an extremely solid logical and mathematical foundation, way past what had been developed back in Ancient Greece, plus a very specific kind of world view that only developed once, under a very specific historical context. The first two aspects were advanced to the point of usefulness only during the three later centuries of (what we now call) the Middle Ages, while the third aspect required two more centuries, building upon the first two aspects. These three simply weren't available at the time.
What doesn't mean considering the possibility isn't fun. There are some quite nice alternate history fiction on the subject out there.