Well, in an "art as a service" world, anyone willing to enter the market would have to start by writing short stories published in anthologies and through this build a reputation as a good author, for only then to start being paid well enough to produce book-sized works as a full job.
But notice that the whole industry, from the perspective of publishers, would change too, as "no copyright laws" means that publishers themselves don't own the end result, only the first batch of prints, and thus that a good book that continues being requested for after that first print would end up published by many publishing houses. Authors could maybe leverage concepts such as having an "official" or "preferred" publisher (usually the one who paid them to produce the book in the first place, of course), and "denouncing" those that didn't compensate him back in some way by asking fans to not purchase from those, but that's it.
On the plus side, the world as a whole would benefit more promptly from said successes, as they would get into the hands of most, in the most languages, the fastest. The social dynamic would in fact be entirely other.
No, it couldn't, sorry. Explaining why would require a full Philosophy course, so I cannot provide the details here as needed to properly show you why this is so. Suffice it to say that all, rigorously all, devices developed in the ancient world that resemble what in Modernity became productive machines (vapor power, for example), were looked at as interesting natural anomalies, cool to interact with as a hobby but unworthy of serious intellectual pursuit. Why? Because intellectual pursuit proper, back then, was discovering and cataloging general properties.
As for the Enlightenment, it depends on Descartes and Hume, who in turn depended on Occam, who depended on the extreme developments in Logics that happened during the "Dark Ages" and until the end of the Middle Age (notice that the expression "Dark Ages" isn't used anymore among serious scholars of either History of Philosophy or History of Science, there were lots of developments in all intellectual fields in that period). Remove the Middle Age logicians, go back to Aristotelian and Stoic logics, and you won't have any of the advanced intellectual tools used by the 15th century folks to in turn develop the intellectual tools used by the 18th century ones to produce the Enlightenment.
Carl Sagan, not being an Historian of either Philosophy of Sciences, isn't a good reference in this regards. A good reference on this whole subject is actually Ernst Cassirer. He has a HUGE multi-volume book on the development of the modern scientific method (sorry, I don't remember its title right now), covering in minute details all the ground between the natural sciences of the Middle Ages to the physics of the first half of the 20th century. Try to find it. It's worth reading.
Artists make a product, they don't offer a service.
You nailed the very point where pro and anti-copyright advocates diverge. For the former, as is your case, artistic work is a production of goods. For the later, as is my case, it's a service.
Both camps agree that such work deserves payment, but while pro-copyright advocates consider it must be paid afterwards, through selling of "the product", anti-copyright advocates consider it must be paid for during its development and once completed cease being a source of income, meaning the artist should keep receiving his wages (yes, wages) for as long as he is actively making art (for the service of making it, not for the end result itself), and stop receiving his wages for as long as he isn't working on making more art, as happens with all other service providers.
The "art as a service" was the default concept for the whole human history until the invention of copyright law. Then the "art as a good" became the norm. Nowadays "art as a service" is coming back and is clashing with "art as a good". Which concept will win in the end isn't certain at all, but what we can see is that "art as a service" continues to be the clearly intuitive approach for the majority of the population, thus I'd bet in it winning. If not de jure, at least de facto, as the Internet shows every day.
Please notice that technological production, to happen, must first become a goal; that it can only become a goal when it's though feasible; and that it can be only thought as feasible when you believe that the natural world can be mathematically rationalized. This last assumption took complete form only with Galileo and Descartes. Thus, although what you say as far as arts go might be valid, you applying it to technology isn't.
Without the precedent set forth by Kepler (who inaugurated the whole thing of trying different mathematical models until one "fits" the data), with Galileo generalizing it to all physical phenomena, with Descartes transposing this generalization into what's nowadays known as "the scientific method", and with Newton afterwards perfecting it by removing Descartes approach of overexplaining things not entirely known so that they fitted the model no matter what (gravity didn't fit Descartes' mechanical model, no matter how hard Newton tried, so he gave up saying something in the line of "Look, I don't know 'how' attraction between distant bodies happens, but it happens, and it happens according this formula. If you want to hypothesize what the ultimate causes are, be my guest. I don't care anymore."), there would be no pursuit of technological progress at all.
That this sequence of intellectual developments happened was hardly more than a very nice historical accident, and it could very well never had happened. Were this the case, and we would be probably no better technologically than the 15th century was. It never happening in all other cultures, ancient and recent alike, is what caused Europe to go a different way.
which leads me to wonder how "interest" would be shown, would a publisher be required to keep a work in print and distribution to maintain copyright protection?
Hmm... in a time when "distribution" usually means uploading a copy to iTunes, I don't see that paragraph having any actual relevance. For all practical purposes, with very few exceptions, this law will be extending copyrights all over the board for 45 years, and that'll be it.
Never say never. No country, empire, religion, culture or government system is eternal. All of those that existed in the past are gone, even those which lasted thousands of years. Someday the current ones will also be little historical footnotes. It'll most probably happen beyond our life time, but who knows? If huge world wars or something equally catastrophic happens all over again in the next decades, we ourselves might manage to see very strange things happen. Just imagine what the 20th century had: the complete disappearance of the all-powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire, the reduction of the once almighty British Empire to the level of a small country, the rise and fall of Fascism, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. The USA being completely shattered and completely changing from what it is into something completely different isn't out of the realm of possibilities, it's just unlikely.
Not that such a change would be a change for the better. These things are never guaranteed, and the end result might either be a much worse one, or even the current system sustaining its own existence for 700 years. But that a change, any change, can happen, it can.
The future is always absolutely uncertain. No exceptions.
In evolutionary theory there's a principle call the "founder effect." It comes into play here.
Well, even if this has some effect, this can be said at best for the first generations. In the 5th or 6th generation the lack of original "pro-active motivation" is so far behind that everyone is just sharing the same culture: those who had great-grandparents with it saw it fade by now; those who hadn't great-grandparents with it saw the resulting drawbacks fade too. Two cases in point:
a) Most of today richest European nations were lands conquered by the Roman Empire, subjected to heavy taxations and almost complete lack of autonomy, plus hunting grounds for imperial slave traders;
b) More recently, Australia was a prison, with almost all people sent there lacking the "founder effect" and more.
Nowadays, IMHO, objective factors, such as amount of basic education, are certainly much stronger factors. And besides, if the "founder effect" is this much important, nothing prevents it being equally promoted through that very same basic education.
Yeah, and they make a mental note not to engage in such conversations with YOU any more.
Actually, this happened once in not such a "subjective" way. A colleague of mine, a few years ago, got to the point he told me he didn't want to talk about these subjects anymore, because (I quote): "Sorry Alex, but I cannot and don't want to hear anything more from someone who calls himself a classic liberal." I replied something like: "Hmm... Okay." Afterwards our conversations became limited to greeting.:P
The problem with your logic here is that "white" people don't have barriers to entry and advancement in the fields you're talking about. That's the whole point you and so many others are missing; it's not the relative proportions of ethnicities or the genders, it's the barriers.
Well, keep in mind I'm talking about more specifically about the academic field, where the barrier is usually one of academic merit alone. That's why I talked about better basic education. Provided blacks, whites, Latins etc. get in front of the college gate with roughly the same level of knowledge and roughly the same grades, they'll usually have the same chances of getting through it, into college proper. Thus, affirmative action in this field masks the actual problem: that they aren't getting at that point equally.
As for barriers in other fields, sure, they exist, but from studying the history of the Asian immigration to my country (Brazil), as well as some of its US counterpart, it seems to me those are grossly exaggerated. You see, in both countries the Japanese immigrants and their descendants, for example, were considered 3rd class citizens, were despised as inferior, were held in concentration camps during World War II (all the while losing most if not all their possessions), were considered in their entirety "our enemies", etc. And yet, they managed to overcome all these difficulties by such an extreme level that in many fields colleges and businessmen crave for them as employees.
Not to mention how this applied to Jews, who were even more despised, persecuted, deprived of their hard earned possessions, socially barred etc., and still managed to overcome all of these obstacles without any special governmental aid.
Same goes for the Irish that emigrated to USA, same goes for the Chinese, same goes for Hindus, and so on and so forth.
Thus, if logic, common sense, reversal rhetorics, and abundant historical examples appear all to show that affirmative action isn't needed, what is left in support of it? As hard as I try, I really cannot see anything clearly showing there's a need for it.
I cannot but agree with most of your message. I'd like only to point out that:
a) There are libertarians and not-quite-libertarians-but-sympathizers-nevertheless (my case) that do accept the need for external regulations prohibiting things such as false advertisement, threats, bribes, violence etc. This is all part of the "minimum state" advocated.
b) The most advanced economic theories in the classic liberal/libertarian filed have given up on any notion of perfect knowledge since many decades, thus criticisms targeting this idea aren't valid because it isn't there anymore. Actually, since Hayek's work the assumed principle is that of varying levels of mutual lack of knowledge in each, every and all transactions, plus absolute lack of knowledge of the future with at best good guesses. This theoretical framework is the basis upon which most classic liberal/libertarian thinking is built nowadays.
Thus, when I said "100% unregulated", I mean only as far as market proper is concerned, i.e., defining your area of actuation, the level of service provided, the price for it etc. Everything regulated by the ethical principles of responsibility and honesty plus, of course, by a sound civil and criminal legal system making unethical players pay for their unethical behavior, otherwise, by definition, there wouldn't be a "responsibility principle" in action.
I recall being, by far, a minority in Computer Science as a caucasian. All my classes at a state school were 2/3 or so Asian.
I'm in college and now and then discussions about racial equality and other kinds of affirmative action happen. I think the whole concept is silly, since the only actual solution for lack of qualification by any given ethnicity is, IMHO, to actually provide better basic education to its members, so that they reach a good level and can compete in equal conditions with the others.
Frequently, however, many of my colleagues don't get the reasoning, so I switch to a "shocking analogy" that makes the rational argument understandable. Basically, I play with the racial terms without changing the concepts. And one typical example I use is this one, about Asians.
So, I take the typical phrase, say, "There must be quotas so that there are proportionally to the population as many blacks in college as whites, as it isn't just that they're underrepresented. If this means so many whites that would be able to enter college don't, so be it.", and with the most straight face I can manage to make I turn it into: "True, you are right. But notice that this will cause whites to become underrepresented, since we'll have a disproportionate amount of Asians taking the place of whites. So, I propose we include a second quota system so that there are proportionally to the population as many whites in college as Asians. If this means so many Asians that would be able to enter college don't, so be it."
My colleagues look at me with utter horror, as if I were some nut follower of David Duke, what I most surely am not. Then I say: "See why this is silly? I used your exact phrase, only switching the subjects."
Then they stop, think, and, what proves all isn't lost, some of them turn and reply: "Yeah, there's some truth in what you said."
Affirmative action isn't the solution, it's just a palliative. Better basic education is the solution.
Well, it happens, but people get very unsatisfied very fast under such a scenario, what develops into other forms of political pressure.
Besides, we're simplifying the whole subject. In reality, most of the time at least, there aren't huge groups on clearly delineated camps going for massive and mutually conflicting projects. It's more a matter of an immense amount of small disputes, each one developing into a solution that tries to appease to the majority. It might not reach perfect results, but it produces something that is, for all practical purposes, "good enough".
If you consider that radical conservatism ("Let's change NOTHING! Everything must stay as it is, even what's wrong!") is one extreme, and radical progressism ("Let's change EVERYTHING! Nothing must stay as it is, even what works!") is another, then the middle ground between these two conflicting positions is precisely keeping what works and changing what doesn't.
By the way, terms such as "conservative" and "progressive" are relative. When a progressive manages to change something, he then switches from the "changing mindset" to one of keeping things are they have become. The old conservative, on the other hand, is now the one pursuing changes to the (new) status quo. What this means, in the end, is that every conservative is a progressive, and every progressive is a conservative, and you're one or the other accidentally, not essentially.
I think you're reading in my text more than what I wrote. For the record, I don't believe in that "rational egoism" idiocy. Objectivism isn't a reference for me. And anyone who tries to reduce human complexity to a single factor, as right-wingers and left-wingers alike do all the time, is utterly clueless.
That put, each case is a case. What you say might or might not happen, as what I say. Politics is all about finding the middle ground between conflicting positions. The bad thing is that people forget this and try to push it all the way in one direction or all the way in the other. Pure silliness.
Market forces only work if 100% unregulated. If anyone with, say, a bus, can start driving people around in a town, and they're allowed to charge whatever they want for the service, and to drive from and to wherever they want, over time you'll have different bus companies competing over the same or similar lines on both quality and price.
If however there's regulation, barriers to entry, standards to be fulfilled etc., then it's "market forces" on appearance only, not in fact. To be precise, a heavily regulated market is pretty much a state bureaucracy, only done by private-in-name-only parties. Everything else continues to work the same or, yes, even worse.
This isn't to mean that everything should be done by private entities. There are activities that clearly belong to the state. But one should make sure those, and only those, are being handled by the government. If you have the state taking care of something that should be in the hands of the market, or the other way around, disaster happens.
A state that does only that which only a state can do, and nothing more, is the exact definition of the "minimum state" as defended by libertarians and classic liberals. It must do that. Nothing more and, more important, nothing less.
IANAL, but from what I read this seems now a possibility, but of course only if the software manufacturer specify it's forbidden.
For example, remember Microsoft stating in the license of some versions of Vista that it cannot be run virtualized? Technically, until now Microsoft might revoke your license to run that copy of Vista if they discovered you were doing it, but that's it. Not that I think they ever did this to someone, but as you can see, the "possible damage" was quite minimal.
Now however, after this decision, and supposing it's upheld by higher courts, these kind of EULA clauses could come with this warning attached: "Violators might be punishable by the full extent of national and international copyright laws".
Now, if the manufacturer doesn't forbid the usage of its software under emulation, or at least under "generic" emulation that doesn't block this or that functionality of said software, then its unlikely that you could be punished for copyright violation.
Case in point: Blizzard itself doesn't mind people running World of Warcraft under Wine in Linux. I myself do this. And I remember at one point, two years ago (I think), when their anti-cheat detection system went kaput, flagging Wine users as cheaters and banning their accounts. Warned this was happening, Blizzard reverted the bans and fixed the system to not flag Wine-usage as cheating anymore.
In any case, this is an ever greater argument for free software usage. GPL, BSD etc. code doesn't include EULAs, allowing for unrestricted usage. That's one less legal risk of running free software under a free OS.
Provided, of course, computer's BIOS' EULAs don't start forbidding the usage of anything other than Windows. Hmm...:(
an auction site would have a time limit for the bids to be increased. not some arbitrary deadline where the last person to enter a bid before the cutoff "wins".
I don't see a problem with this system. People who follow this pattern you describe are trying to game the system to somehow get the item for less than what they're willing to pay. If you yourself refuse to play the game and approach these auctions differently, it doesn't cause you any trouble.
For example, when I bid on something, I ask myself:
"How much is this thing worth to me? Would I pay $100 for it? Yes. Would I pay $110? Yes. Would I pay $120? Hmm... yes. Would I pay $130? No! $125? No! $124? Hmm... no. $123? Hmm... yeah, I guess it's worth $123."
Then, now that I know how much I'm REALLY willing to pay, I simply fill "$123" and let the auto-bidding thing play on itself.
If later I discover I won the auction at $110, hey, great! I got the item and saved $13 from what I was willing to pay!
If I win at exactly $123, great too! It was exactly what I was willing to pay!
And if I lose because it sold at $140, hey, this is also great! Why? Because I already knew I didn't value that thing over $123.
Thus, the trick is simple: fill the box with what you are willing to pay, not a cent more. Then let it run. What you won, you won. What you didn't, you're not missing it at all.
But if you are missing it and thinking "I should have bid $x instead.", it was your error, because you didn't bid what you were REALLY willing to pay for it. Be always absolutely honest with yourself and the "guilty factor" will never happen.
I wonder what kind of Internet my daughter will have when she grows up.
Maybe the open Internet will have been all but destroyed by then, but on the other hand this will come with the exponential growth of darknets.
For example, I remember running Freenet 0.5 some years ago and finding it almost unusable: slow, slow, SLOW. However, this weekend I tried again with the newer Freenet 0.7, running under a much improved JRE than the one available back then, and I was amazed at how much it improved performance-wise! Sure, it's still far slower than regular Internet, with much less content, but it's becoming more and more usable with each passing day.
Thus, I wouldn't worry too much. The Internet as we know it won't disappear. It will live, even if "hidden" under strong cryptography inside the (by then) nominal one. And anyone wishing to access it will be able to with minimal effort.
I bet most of us can remember the day you loaded 3.11.... and said "you gotta be kidding me"!
Hmm... I remember that, at the time I "discovered" Windows in a store for the first time (I was used to having 286s running DOS 4.1 and Turbo Pascal in school, and to an Apple IIe at home), it was at version 3.11. I saw Paintbrush running at blazing speed in a 386 machine and immediately fell in love with the whole thing.
Nowadays I'm an Ubuntu user, but not having had contact with a Mac or Amiga before Windows, it was like heaven compared to what I knew. This only goes to show that the reaction one has really depends on his background, eh?
I prefer the term "stealing games" myself. It fits well, does away with the positive connotations that the term "piracy" has gained in some circles, and -perhaps most important- it really makes the pirates mad.
I have a better term: "conservatism". Because, you see, this whole copyright thing is pretty recent, having at most 400 years, and roughly 200 years in its current form.
The problem with calling this conservatism, though, is that nowadays we call "conservatives" the people who defend ideas merely a few decades old. This in USA. In Europe, "conservatism" goes some more back, to roughly 200 years. But even that conservatism is, from the perspective of the pre-copyright status quo, 100% progressive hippie pot smokers with their crazy notions of treating ideas as property.
So, maybe we could set for the term "paleoconservatism", or even "pre-copyrightist paleoconservatism". And it also has the advantage (if you think of it as such) of making pirates mad, at least those who think of themselves as progressive.
Me? I'm a paleoconservative in everything, not only anti-copyrightism.
I have an HDD fan fixed to it. It's always at a comfortable temperature when I touch it, and checking the SMART fields tells me it's usually in the 25-35ÂC (75-95ÂF) range. So, I don't think it's temperature related.
On the other hand, the 40GB HDD I had before the 80GB one went working without any problem for 5 years or so, I don't remember well. It was my best HDD, and it's possible I've just been unlucky since then.
You're lucky. I have to replace my HDD roughly every year.
In fact, three weeks ago I purchased a new 160GB to use in my computer because my previous 250GB one has gone kaput. And I had purchased that one circa one year ago after my previous 250GB one broke. And that one after an 80GB one went to the grave. A 12 to 18 months average.
Why 160GB instead of 250GB? Well, I simply realized I don't need that much space, so why spend more? After all, it'll break anyway. "Permanent storage", for me, means DVD-R's, Gmail and Amazon S3. Mechanical, spinning, magnetic HDDs, have no place in the list.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in an "art as a service" world, anyone willing to enter the market would have to start by writing short stories published in anthologies and through this build a reputation as a good author, for only then to start being paid well enough to produce book-sized works as a full job.
But notice that the whole industry, from the perspective of publishers, would change too, as "no copyright laws" means that publishers themselves don't own the end result, only the first batch of prints, and thus that a good book that continues being requested for after that first print would end up published by many publishing houses. Authors could maybe leverage concepts such as having an "official" or "preferred" publisher (usually the one who paid them to produce the book in the first place, of course), and "denouncing" those that didn't compensate him back in some way by asking fans to not purchase from those, but that's it.
On the plus side, the world as a whole would benefit more promptly from said successes, as they would get into the hands of most, in the most languages, the fastest. The social dynamic would in fact be entirely other.
No, it couldn't, sorry. Explaining why would require a full Philosophy course, so I cannot provide the details here as needed to properly show you why this is so. Suffice it to say that all, rigorously all, devices developed in the ancient world that resemble what in Modernity became productive machines (vapor power, for example), were looked at as interesting natural anomalies, cool to interact with as a hobby but unworthy of serious intellectual pursuit. Why? Because intellectual pursuit proper, back then, was discovering and cataloging general properties.
As for the Enlightenment, it depends on Descartes and Hume, who in turn depended on Occam, who depended on the extreme developments in Logics that happened during the "Dark Ages" and until the end of the Middle Age (notice that the expression "Dark Ages" isn't used anymore among serious scholars of either History of Philosophy or History of Science, there were lots of developments in all intellectual fields in that period). Remove the Middle Age logicians, go back to Aristotelian and Stoic logics, and you won't have any of the advanced intellectual tools used by the 15th century folks to in turn develop the intellectual tools used by the 18th century ones to produce the Enlightenment.
Carl Sagan, not being an Historian of either Philosophy of Sciences, isn't a good reference in this regards. A good reference on this whole subject is actually Ernst Cassirer. He has a HUGE multi-volume book on the development of the modern scientific method (sorry, I don't remember its title right now), covering in minute details all the ground between the natural sciences of the Middle Ages to the physics of the first half of the 20th century. Try to find it. It's worth reading.
Artists make a product, they don't offer a service.
You nailed the very point where pro and anti-copyright advocates diverge. For the former, as is your case, artistic work is a production of goods. For the later, as is my case, it's a service.
Both camps agree that such work deserves payment, but while pro-copyright advocates consider it must be paid afterwards, through selling of "the product", anti-copyright advocates consider it must be paid for during its development and once completed cease being a source of income, meaning the artist should keep receiving his wages (yes, wages) for as long as he is actively making art (for the service of making it, not for the end result itself), and stop receiving his wages for as long as he isn't working on making more art, as happens with all other service providers.
The "art as a service" was the default concept for the whole human history until the invention of copyright law. Then the "art as a good" became the norm. Nowadays "art as a service" is coming back and is clashing with "art as a good". Which concept will win in the end isn't certain at all, but what we can see is that "art as a service" continues to be the clearly intuitive approach for the majority of the population, thus I'd bet in it winning. If not de jure, at least de facto, as the Internet shows every day.
Please notice that technological production, to happen, must first become a goal; that it can only become a goal when it's though feasible; and that it can be only thought as feasible when you believe that the natural world can be mathematically rationalized. This last assumption took complete form only with Galileo and Descartes. Thus, although what you say as far as arts go might be valid, you applying it to technology isn't.
Without the precedent set forth by Kepler (who inaugurated the whole thing of trying different mathematical models until one "fits" the data), with Galileo generalizing it to all physical phenomena, with Descartes transposing this generalization into what's nowadays known as "the scientific method", and with Newton afterwards perfecting it by removing Descartes approach of overexplaining things not entirely known so that they fitted the model no matter what (gravity didn't fit Descartes' mechanical model, no matter how hard Newton tried, so he gave up saying something in the line of "Look, I don't know 'how' attraction between distant bodies happens, but it happens, and it happens according this formula. If you want to hypothesize what the ultimate causes are, be my guest. I don't care anymore."), there would be no pursuit of technological progress at all.
That this sequence of intellectual developments happened was hardly more than a very nice historical accident, and it could very well never had happened. Were this the case, and we would be probably no better technologically than the 15th century was. It never happening in all other cultures, ancient and recent alike, is what caused Europe to go a different way.
which leads me to wonder how "interest" would be shown, would a publisher be required to keep a work in print and distribution to maintain copyright protection?
Hmm... in a time when "distribution" usually means uploading a copy to iTunes, I don't see that paragraph having any actual relevance. For all practical purposes, with very few exceptions, this law will be extending copyrights all over the board for 45 years, and that'll be it.
But it will never happen
Never say never. No country, empire, religion, culture or government system is eternal. All of those that existed in the past are gone, even those which lasted thousands of years. Someday the current ones will also be little historical footnotes. It'll most probably happen beyond our life time, but who knows? If huge world wars or something equally catastrophic happens all over again in the next decades, we ourselves might manage to see very strange things happen. Just imagine what the 20th century had: the complete disappearance of the all-powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire, the reduction of the once almighty British Empire to the level of a small country, the rise and fall of Fascism, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. The USA being completely shattered and completely changing from what it is into something completely different isn't out of the realm of possibilities, it's just unlikely.
Not that such a change would be a change for the better. These things are never guaranteed, and the end result might either be a much worse one, or even the current system sustaining its own existence for 700 years. But that a change, any change, can happen, it can.
The future is always absolutely uncertain. No exceptions.
In evolutionary theory there's a principle call the "founder effect." It comes into play here.
Well, even if this has some effect, this can be said at best for the first generations. In the 5th or 6th generation the lack of original "pro-active motivation" is so far behind that everyone is just sharing the same culture: those who had great-grandparents with it saw it fade by now; those who hadn't great-grandparents with it saw the resulting drawbacks fade too. Two cases in point:
a) Most of today richest European nations were lands conquered by the Roman Empire, subjected to heavy taxations and almost complete lack of autonomy, plus hunting grounds for imperial slave traders;
b) More recently, Australia was a prison, with almost all people sent there lacking the "founder effect" and more.
Nowadays, IMHO, objective factors, such as amount of basic education, are certainly much stronger factors. And besides, if the "founder effect" is this much important, nothing prevents it being equally promoted through that very same basic education.
Yeah, and they make a mental note not to engage in such conversations with YOU any more.
Actually, this happened once in not such a "subjective" way. A colleague of mine, a few years ago, got to the point he told me he didn't want to talk about these subjects anymore, because (I quote): "Sorry Alex, but I cannot and don't want to hear anything more from someone who calls himself a classic liberal." I replied something like: "Hmm... Okay." Afterwards our conversations became limited to greeting. :P
The problem with your logic here is that "white" people don't have barriers to entry and advancement in the fields you're talking about. That's the whole point you and so many others are missing; it's not the relative proportions of ethnicities or the genders, it's the barriers.
Well, keep in mind I'm talking about more specifically about the academic field, where the barrier is usually one of academic merit alone. That's why I talked about better basic education. Provided blacks, whites, Latins etc. get in front of the college gate with roughly the same level of knowledge and roughly the same grades, they'll usually have the same chances of getting through it, into college proper. Thus, affirmative action in this field masks the actual problem: that they aren't getting at that point equally.
As for barriers in other fields, sure, they exist, but from studying the history of the Asian immigration to my country (Brazil), as well as some of its US counterpart, it seems to me those are grossly exaggerated. You see, in both countries the Japanese immigrants and their descendants, for example, were considered 3rd class citizens, were despised as inferior, were held in concentration camps during World War II (all the while losing most if not all their possessions), were considered in their entirety "our enemies", etc. And yet, they managed to overcome all these difficulties by such an extreme level that in many fields colleges and businessmen crave for them as employees.
Not to mention how this applied to Jews, who were even more despised, persecuted, deprived of their hard earned possessions, socially barred etc., and still managed to overcome all of these obstacles without any special governmental aid.
Same goes for the Irish that emigrated to USA, same goes for the Chinese, same goes for Hindus, and so on and so forth.
Thus, if logic, common sense, reversal rhetorics, and abundant historical examples appear all to show that affirmative action isn't needed, what is left in support of it? As hard as I try, I really cannot see anything clearly showing there's a need for it.
I cannot but agree with most of your message. I'd like only to point out that:
a) There are libertarians and not-quite-libertarians-but-sympathizers-nevertheless (my case) that do accept the need for external regulations prohibiting things such as false advertisement, threats, bribes, violence etc. This is all part of the "minimum state" advocated.
b) The most advanced economic theories in the classic liberal/libertarian filed have given up on any notion of perfect knowledge since many decades, thus criticisms targeting this idea aren't valid because it isn't there anymore. Actually, since Hayek's work the assumed principle is that of varying levels of mutual lack of knowledge in each, every and all transactions, plus absolute lack of knowledge of the future with at best good guesses. This theoretical framework is the basis upon which most classic liberal/libertarian thinking is built nowadays.
Thus, when I said "100% unregulated", I mean only as far as market proper is concerned, i.e., defining your area of actuation, the level of service provided, the price for it etc. Everything regulated by the ethical principles of responsibility and honesty plus, of course, by a sound civil and criminal legal system making unethical players pay for their unethical behavior, otherwise, by definition, there wouldn't be a "responsibility principle" in action.
I'm in no way an anarcho-capitalist.
I recall being, by far, a minority in Computer Science as a caucasian. All my classes at a state school were 2/3 or so Asian.
I'm in college and now and then discussions about racial equality and other kinds of affirmative action happen. I think the whole concept is silly, since the only actual solution for lack of qualification by any given ethnicity is, IMHO, to actually provide better basic education to its members, so that they reach a good level and can compete in equal conditions with the others.
Frequently, however, many of my colleagues don't get the reasoning, so I switch to a "shocking analogy" that makes the rational argument understandable. Basically, I play with the racial terms without changing the concepts. And one typical example I use is this one, about Asians.
So, I take the typical phrase, say, "There must be quotas so that there are proportionally to the population as many blacks in college as whites, as it isn't just that they're underrepresented. If this means so many whites that would be able to enter college don't, so be it.", and with the most straight face I can manage to make I turn it into: "True, you are right. But notice that this will cause whites to become underrepresented, since we'll have a disproportionate amount of Asians taking the place of whites. So, I propose we include a second quota system so that there are proportionally to the population as many whites in college as Asians. If this means so many Asians that would be able to enter college don't, so be it."
My colleagues look at me with utter horror, as if I were some nut follower of David Duke, what I most surely am not. Then I say: "See why this is silly? I used your exact phrase, only switching the subjects."
Then they stop, think, and, what proves all isn't lost, some of them turn and reply: "Yeah, there's some truth in what you said."
Affirmative action isn't the solution, it's just a palliative. Better basic education is the solution.
Well, it happens, but people get very unsatisfied very fast under such a scenario, what develops into other forms of political pressure.
Besides, we're simplifying the whole subject. In reality, most of the time at least, there aren't huge groups on clearly delineated camps going for massive and mutually conflicting projects. It's more a matter of an immense amount of small disputes, each one developing into a solution that tries to appease to the majority. It might not reach perfect results, but it produces something that is, for all practical purposes, "good enough".
If you consider that radical conservatism ("Let's change NOTHING! Everything must stay as it is, even what's wrong!") is one extreme, and radical progressism ("Let's change EVERYTHING! Nothing must stay as it is, even what works!") is another, then the middle ground between these two conflicting positions is precisely keeping what works and changing what doesn't.
By the way, terms such as "conservative" and "progressive" are relative. When a progressive manages to change something, he then switches from the "changing mindset" to one of keeping things are they have become. The old conservative, on the other hand, is now the one pursuing changes to the (new) status quo. What this means, in the end, is that every conservative is a progressive, and every progressive is a conservative, and you're one or the other accidentally, not essentially.
Matter for thought, eh? :-)
I think you're reading in my text more than what I wrote. For the record, I don't believe in that "rational egoism" idiocy. Objectivism isn't a reference for me. And anyone who tries to reduce human complexity to a single factor, as right-wingers and left-wingers alike do all the time, is utterly clueless.
That put, each case is a case. What you say might or might not happen, as what I say. Politics is all about finding the middle ground between conflicting positions. The bad thing is that people forget this and try to push it all the way in one direction or all the way in the other. Pure silliness.
Market forces only work if 100% unregulated. If anyone with, say, a bus, can start driving people around in a town, and they're allowed to charge whatever they want for the service, and to drive from and to wherever they want, over time you'll have different bus companies competing over the same or similar lines on both quality and price.
If however there's regulation, barriers to entry, standards to be fulfilled etc., then it's "market forces" on appearance only, not in fact. To be precise, a heavily regulated market is pretty much a state bureaucracy, only done by private-in-name-only parties. Everything else continues to work the same or, yes, even worse.
This isn't to mean that everything should be done by private entities. There are activities that clearly belong to the state. But one should make sure those, and only those, are being handled by the government. If you have the state taking care of something that should be in the hands of the market, or the other way around, disaster happens.
A state that does only that which only a state can do, and nothing more, is the exact definition of the "minimum state" as defended by libertarians and classic liberals. It must do that. Nothing more and, more important, nothing less.
What do you recommend they do next time, use a crystal ball or ouija board to predict who's going to pull such a stunt?
Minority Report for system administration activities? Sweet! ;-)
So what? VM/Wine users will be sued, too?
IANAL, but from what I read this seems now a possibility, but of course only if the software manufacturer specify it's forbidden.
For example, remember Microsoft stating in the license of some versions of Vista that it cannot be run virtualized? Technically, until now Microsoft might revoke your license to run that copy of Vista if they discovered you were doing it, but that's it. Not that I think they ever did this to someone, but as you can see, the "possible damage" was quite minimal.
Now however, after this decision, and supposing it's upheld by higher courts, these kind of EULA clauses could come with this warning attached: "Violators might be punishable by the full extent of national and international copyright laws".
Now, if the manufacturer doesn't forbid the usage of its software under emulation, or at least under "generic" emulation that doesn't block this or that functionality of said software, then its unlikely that you could be punished for copyright violation.
Case in point: Blizzard itself doesn't mind people running World of Warcraft under Wine in Linux. I myself do this. And I remember at one point, two years ago (I think), when their anti-cheat detection system went kaput, flagging Wine users as cheaters and banning their accounts. Warned this was happening, Blizzard reverted the bans and fixed the system to not flag Wine-usage as cheating anymore.
In any case, this is an ever greater argument for free software usage. GPL, BSD etc. code doesn't include EULAs, allowing for unrestricted usage. That's one less legal risk of running free software under a free OS.
Provided, of course, computer's BIOS' EULAs don't start forbidding the usage of anything other than Windows. Hmm... :(
an auction site would have a time limit for the bids to be increased. not some arbitrary deadline where the last person to enter a bid before the cutoff "wins".
I don't see a problem with this system. People who follow this pattern you describe are trying to game the system to somehow get the item for less than what they're willing to pay. If you yourself refuse to play the game and approach these auctions differently, it doesn't cause you any trouble.
For example, when I bid on something, I ask myself:
"How much is this thing worth to me? Would I pay $100 for it? Yes. Would I pay $110? Yes. Would I pay $120? Hmm... yes. Would I pay $130? No! $125? No! $124? Hmm... no. $123? Hmm... yeah, I guess it's worth $123."
Then, now that I know how much I'm REALLY willing to pay, I simply fill "$123" and let the auto-bidding thing play on itself.
If later I discover I won the auction at $110, hey, great! I got the item and saved $13 from what I was willing to pay!
If I win at exactly $123, great too! It was exactly what I was willing to pay!
And if I lose because it sold at $140, hey, this is also great! Why? Because I already knew I didn't value that thing over $123.
Thus, the trick is simple: fill the box with what you are willing to pay, not a cent more. Then let it run. What you won, you won. What you didn't, you're not missing it at all.
But if you are missing it and thinking "I should have bid $x instead.", it was your error, because you didn't bid what you were REALLY willing to pay for it. Be always absolutely honest with yourself and the "guilty factor" will never happen.
I wonder what kind of Internet my daughter will have when she grows up.
Maybe the open Internet will have been all but destroyed by then, but on the other hand this will come with the exponential growth of darknets.
For example, I remember running Freenet 0.5 some years ago and finding it almost unusable: slow, slow, SLOW. However, this weekend I tried again with the newer Freenet 0.7, running under a much improved JRE than the one available back then, and I was amazed at how much it improved performance-wise! Sure, it's still far slower than regular Internet, with much less content, but it's becoming more and more usable with each passing day.
Thus, I wouldn't worry too much. The Internet as we know it won't disappear. It will live, even if "hidden" under strong cryptography inside the (by then) nominal one. And anyone wishing to access it will be able to with minimal effort.
Thanks! I'll look into both things.
I bet most of us can remember the day you loaded 3.11.... and said "you gotta be kidding me"!
Hmm... I remember that, at the time I "discovered" Windows in a store for the first time (I was used to having 286s running DOS 4.1 and Turbo Pascal in school, and to an Apple IIe at home), it was at version 3.11. I saw Paintbrush running at blazing speed in a 386 machine and immediately fell in love with the whole thing.
Nowadays I'm an Ubuntu user, but not having had contact with a Mac or Amiga before Windows, it was like heaven compared to what I knew. This only goes to show that the reaction one has really depends on his background, eh?
What sort of PSU is in your PC? I bet it's cheap crap or else your power is crappy in other ways.
Might be the power line, since it has no ground, but it surely isn't the PSU, a very good Seventeam one.
Any suggestion on how to improve the energy that enters the computer? Preferably one that doesn't includes destroying the walls to add a ground.
I prefer the term "stealing games" myself. It fits well, does away with the positive connotations that the term "piracy" has gained in some circles, and -perhaps most important- it really makes the pirates mad.
I have a better term: "conservatism". Because, you see, this whole copyright thing is pretty recent, having at most 400 years, and roughly 200 years in its current form.
The problem with calling this conservatism, though, is that nowadays we call "conservatives" the people who defend ideas merely a few decades old. This in USA. In Europe, "conservatism" goes some more back, to roughly 200 years. But even that conservatism is, from the perspective of the pre-copyright status quo, 100% progressive hippie pot smokers with their crazy notions of treating ideas as property.
So, maybe we could set for the term "paleoconservatism", or even "pre-copyrightist paleoconservatism". And it also has the advantage (if you think of it as such) of making pirates mad, at least those who think of themselves as progressive.
Me? I'm a paleoconservative in everything, not only anti-copyrightism.
Just wondering, how hot do your drives run?
I have an HDD fan fixed to it. It's always at a comfortable temperature when I touch it, and checking the SMART fields tells me it's usually in the 25-35ÂC (75-95ÂF) range. So, I don't think it's temperature related.
On the other hand, the 40GB HDD I had before the 80GB one went working without any problem for 5 years or so, I don't remember well. It was my best HDD, and it's possible I've just been unlucky since then.
NONE of my harddisks have failed me.
You're lucky. I have to replace my HDD roughly every year.
In fact, three weeks ago I purchased a new 160GB to use in my computer because my previous 250GB one has gone kaput. And I had purchased that one circa one year ago after my previous 250GB one broke. And that one after an 80GB one went to the grave. A 12 to 18 months average.
Why 160GB instead of 250GB? Well, I simply realized I don't need that much space, so why spend more? After all, it'll break anyway. "Permanent storage", for me, means DVD-R's, Gmail and Amazon S3. Mechanical, spinning, magnetic HDDs, have no place in the list.