pjdorrell

I would agree, and say more.

What looks pretty in data visualization is not the same as what is informative. Even though "pretty" is what gets you noticed in geeky social media websites.

The pictures do not tell us anything interesting about e, pi or phi. Possibly they tell us something interesting about random sequences of decimal digits.

One thing even sillier than graphics generated from the digits of e and pi is "music" generated from the digits of e and pi.

I think the concept of "patent troll" is doing us more harm than good. The implication of this expression is that the badness is in the "trollish" aspect, and not in the "patent" aspect of it.

Patent trolls are what happens when the patent system is taken to its logical conclusion. So if patent trolls are evil, then the patent system itself is evil.

The fact that some or even many patent holders _aren't_ evil is beside the point.

Imagine, for example, that there was a law which gave husbands permission to rape their wives. Presumably only _some_ husbands would take advantage of this law. So one might conclude that the law isn't bad, it's just that society has to find some way to deal with those bad husbands, the so-called "marital sex trolls", who take advantage of such a law.

And the bad husbands would say something like: "Morally, I think husbands deserve some reward for the benefits that they bring to a marriage."

"When is a simulation the same as the thing being simulated?" I wrote a detailed analysis of this question in 2005 at http://thinkinghard.com/blog/WhenIsASimulation.html.

My article is a refutation of John Searle's argument that a mechanical simulation of a person who "understands" Chinese is not itself a thing that "understands" Chinese, i.e. a simulation of "understanding" Chinese is distinct from actually understanding Chinese.

Panu is repeating John Searle's argument, but replacing "understand Chinese" with "feel pain".

And the answer I found to my question is: a simulation is the same as the thing being simulated _if_ the thing being simulated is an information processing system. For example, a simulation of a washing machine is not a washing machine. But, a simulation of a calculator _is_ a calculator. A realistic simulation of a calculator would look just like one of those calculator programs you have on your computer or your mobile phone. And those programs actually _are_ calculators - because we use them to do calculations for us just like we used to use real calculators to do calculations for us.

The question of whether simulated pain is the same as actual pain is equivalent to the question of whether pain is an aspect of an information processing system (which I think it is), or whether it is something else.

An information processing system that "feels pain", will be less and less inclined to do something that is "painful". This will be part of the decision making process of that system. If the system is somehow able to "ignore" its own painful feelings, it will end up making bad decisions - just like a person who can't feel pain ends up making bad decisions. Typically people who don't feel pain suffer accumulated injuries and generally fail to look after themselves, even when they intellectually know that their insensitivity to pain puts them at risk, and as a result they become disabled and die at a younger age than those of us who suffer pain in the normal manner.

Misleading headline alert: the hinted particle is two quarks and two anti-quarks, which is not quite the same thing as "four quarks" (which would be _very_ surprising because four is not a multiple of three).

It's more likely that my life will be ruined by a drunk driver than by a terrorist.

Also, it's more likely that my life will be ruined because I ran my own email server using FSF-provided software and it broke and I lost all my mail data, or because my email server got hacked and someone spammed all my business contacts, than because I put my email in the cloud and Google sent all my emails to the NSA.

James Altucher tells us: "For each single person you worry about, deduct 1% in quality from your writing."

List of people to worry about: parents, wife, children, ... an indeterminate list of possible future employers ...

Conclusion: the blogs written to "get a job" will be less interesting than those other blogs that were written for no particular reason.

It's true that Rick Falkvinge is "preaching to the converted". But his preaching is slightly more coherent than the excesses of Fox News, and his target audience is an intellectual audience.

I don't know what it is about Hacker News that guarantees a front page appearance for every article written by Falkvinge, but he is obviously getting the required votes. Perhaps many Hacker News readers are members of "the converted". Perhaps the moderators of Hacker News are among the converted.

I would recommend against "censoring" Falkvinge. But his writings do deserve to be carefully analysed and refuted, line by line if necessary.

I would like to start with the term "Copyright Monopoly". There is no Copyright Monopoly. Each copyright is one monopoly, so there are many "copyright monopolies" (and economically, those monopolies are a bad thing). But there is no "Copyright Monopoly".

There is a recognisable "Copyright Industry", and perhaps also a "Copyright Enforcement Industry", and there are various political lobbyists and interest groups associated with those "industries". But not actually a single "monopoly" in the technical economic sense of the word.

Doctor Falkvinge has diagnosed "Mass Psychosis". I would like to present a different "diagnosis" - the copyright wars are not a psychosis, they are the result of tension between two distinct moral justifications.

The first moral justification is that copyright serves the public interest. Under this justification, the ideal form of copyright law may change as circumstances change. For example, the public might conclude that maximum benefit is achieved by having no legal restrictions on the copying of digital music, because the benefit of freely available music would exceed any consequent reduction in the production of new music.

The second justification is that the creators of digital content deserve to "own" their content, even after they have published it. Under this justification, there is no reason ever to change the form of copyright, and the issue of public benefit is irrelevant. Reducing copyright on music so that everyone could have more music for less money would just be "stealing", that is, changing the law would itself be an act of "theft", and therefore immoral.

I discuss this diagnosis at length in http://thinkinghard.com/blog/ThereAreTwoDistinctJustificatio... .

http://thinkinghard.com/ip/PublicGood.html (Published digital information is a public good: the case for voted compensation)

On slide 97: the number of bitcoins is not equal to the number of bitcoin _users_.

Correctly measuring the number of bitcoin users is non-trivial, or maybe even impossible.

(Of course brownie points do go to Mary & Liang for including Bitcoin in the report at all.)

"Scientists find woman who sees one more dimension of color than others"

No, actually any proof that supplies a bound must also have some least bound that can be derived from that proof. It could be a calculation that starts from the bound, or it could be some calculation with a result that tells you what the bound is. To me it seems very unlikely that the actual bound was exactly 70000000 in either case.

It _could_ be that some super-expensive calculation is required for each candidate bound, and Zhang guessed 70000000 as a starting point and did the calculation for that number, which succeeded, but he didn't bother repeating it for any smaller numbers because it would cost him too much. But if that was the case, that would be interesting in itself.

Is the bound achieved by his proof actually 70000000? That looks like a suspiciously round number. Why can't they tell us the exact bound that he achieved? (Presumably some slightly smaller number?)

Any one of us can work out x by x plus y by y plus z by z less c by t by t where x and y and z and t are each part of how to get from one "here and now" to a 2nd "here and now". I can try to tell you what c is or we can just say that it is one (i.e. c by t by t is just t by t). And the math that we do will work out the same if I work it out from what I see or if you work it out from what you see, even if I do not move at the same rate as you.

This is the "hyperdeflation" argument that we've already heard elsewhere. The thing about deflation is that eventually it has to stop, because there is a limit to how much value all the people of the world can hold in any currency. People are buying bitcoins now and holding on to them, because they expect Bitcoin to be a useable currency in the future. It will become a useable currency when the deflation stops. (It is somewhat useable now for buying and selling, but taking taking out a loan in bitcoins is extremely ill-advised.)

There may be some bouncing up and down before the value of bitcoins settles down to a somewhat stable final value. But it will eventually reach some type of equilibrium between the desire to hold it as a combination of desired savings (no longer held in expectation of constant hyperdeflation) and desired liquid "cash" holdings, and the desire to spend it, because sometimes there are things you want to buy.

All this holds whether or not Bitcoin replaces all other currencies (which it probably won't).

Whether of not Bitcoin hyperdeflation is bad for the world economy for some Keynesian reason is separate from the question of whether Bitcoin will continue to have value for its users.

If Rick Falkvinge stopped saying "the copyright monopoly" and instead just said "copyright", then everything he said would make more sense, and more people might understand it more quickly, and he would be less frustrated. There is no such thing as "the copyright monopoly". Each individual copyright is a monopoly. But that's "monopolies", not one "monopoly".

There is perhaps a "copyright industry", consisting of companies and institutions that have a financial interest in the maximal copyright and maximal copyright enforcement. But those companies and institutions don't particularly have a monopoly on anything, other than their individivual copyrighted works.

For a clear statement of how copyright relates to the interests of the general public, read "Misinterpreting Copyright—A Series of Errors" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html) by Richard Stallman, which, unlike much of what Falkvinge writes, actually makes sense all the way through.

On a similar theme: "Voted Compensation" - http://thinkinghard.com/ip/PublicGood.html

Basically, a government/taxation-funded prize scheme, where everyone gets to vote on who should get prizes. Like nationalized crowd-funding, but strictly after-the-fact (unlike Kickstarter, which is very much before-the-fact).

It doesn't really matter what the purpose of copyright was in the first place. History is interesting, but it doesn't determine our understanding in the present of what is moral and what is not moral.

Also, copyright is world-wide, so what it says in the US Constitution isn't all that interesting to anyone not in the US.

And when I say "irrelevant", I mean it is irrelevant to public debate. The copyright industry's side of the debate about copyright enforcement is mostly the following, based on what I called the "moral model":

* We created something * We own what we created * Someone is stealing it

This message can just be repeated over and over and over again. Someone's report that internet piracy might not reduce cinema takings completely fails to address the above moral claim.

So the report can be ignored, and the moral claim can be repeated again. And again.

So you're not asking the question "What are the strongest moral arguments against piracy?", you're asking the question "What are the strongest moral arguments against piracy, if we all pretend to agree that a country which produces no art is bad, and we should therefore protect incentives for people to produce it?"

Firstly, that's a lot of assumptions to make, and to anyone who disagrees with them, any further discussion may be uninteresting.

Secondly, the assumptions are somewhat confused or ambiguous. "A country which produces no art is bad". What do you mean by "bad"? (And is there ever going to be any circumstance where a "country" never produces any art at all?) And what precisely do you mean by "art"? "We should therefore protect incentives?" Protect which "incentives"? Incentives provided by copyright laws as they exist right now? Natural incentives, like "I like painting"? Incentives like "200,000,000 people downloaded my art on the internet, which makes me happy to know they they all like my art, even though no one paid me"?

And if we can decide which incentives it is that need protecting, and that we _should_ protect them, are we agreed on _how_ we are going to protect them, or to what lengths we should go to protect them?

Conclusion: we will need to spend a lot of time discussing the premises of the question before we ever get to the point of answering the question itself.

People talk about the "business model" of the film and music industries.

But they have a "moral model", which is to present copyright itself as a moral proposition. Everything about why it is hard for us to stop the never-ending creation of new laws and international treaties that attack freedoms of computer use and internet use is due to this moral model.

It follows that empirical studies proving the "harmlessness" of piracy are largely irrelevant.

This is a very leading question. "Piracy" is immoral within the context of copyright. But if the copyright system itself is immoral (because, for example, the successful enforcement of copyright is in total conflict with important digital freedoms), then we should get rid of copyright. Or maybe reduce it in some way. In which case the term "piracy" will lose meaning, and we will just call it "copying".