The words "Piracy" and "Stealing" are both ill-descriptive of "copyright infringement."

Neither the terms, nor the legal definitions, nor the economic impact, nor the moral analysis are the same.

Thanks for getting me.

"When I was a little boy and told people I was going to be a comedian, everyone laughed at me. Well, no one's laughing now." -- The Joker

I recently read somewhere that Apple charges outrageously high prices for replacement parts.

I wonder if that is related somehow....

Well, there are a few things that I need to do, but can't do on Linux, but can do on Mac or Windows.

So, who do I hate more?

Microsoft. Microsoft is the one I hate the most. Microsoft is one of the greatest evils our species has ever produced. Apple is no saint, but once I get my hands on a machine and start using it, Apple treats me much better than Microsoft. Apple even gave me free technical support on a free service of theirs before I even bought any of their hardware, and it was with a living breathing human being!

So, Apple gets my money, even though they are greedy bastards.

I just wanted to throw in my $0.02 on the philosophical issues.

A "person" includes a (complete) brain, which is built out of billions of neurons. The neurons must operate together "in concert" in order for the person to be functional. For someone to have a single coherent thought, many neurons must fire correctly, in response to their inputs, while many other neurons abstain from firing (equally correctly).

So, if neurons had "free will," they could just fire (or not fire) whenever they felt like it, with no concern over the rules that normally govern their firing. If neurons did this, a person's mind would just be pure static. They would sit around catatonic and periodically convulse. They would not be functional.

So, before a person can be free, they must be functional. And in order for a person to be functional, their neurons must not be free. And this applies to the lower layers of physics as well. They must behave consistently in order for these emergent phenomenon to happen, which means they must not be "free." (In the case of quantum randomness, the individual events are random but the likelihoods are not, and the raw numbers of interacting elements generate a statistical effect of consistent behavior which lacks any qualities of freedom).

Therefore, I think that the quest to find the building-blocks of free will in quantum effects, or really anything as-small-or-smaller than a neuron, is misguided. We would not expect those things to be free, because we need them to not be free, in order for us to exist at all (let alone think rationally). "Free will," whatever it may be, is a concept that can only logically apply to a neural cluster (or maybe an entire functioning brain).

Answering the question of whether or not free-will is real requires a very in-depth analysis on what we really mean by it, and THAT winds up being a wild ride unto itself. But whatever we decide it means, we can safely state that quantum particle/waves don't have it.

Oh, and about he question "is reality non-local." The answer there is: yes.

Maybe because most people, including managers, only do their jobs because they are paid. If the job was something that naturally made people feel enthusiastic, involved, and engaged, then plenty of people would do it for free.

Yeah, he thought VR would be the next Big Thing, and it wasn't. Somebody had to make that mistake, and it looks like it was Zukerberg.

So now he thinks AI will be the next Big Thing. And, I suspect he is right this time, though it isn't going to be what he is promising, and probably not on the timeline he is suggesting. He's just saying what he must in order to attract talent and investor funding to pay the absurd salaries AI technicians are pulling.

This nice-sounding idea of "oh it won't do our jobs, it will make our jobs easier and make our lives better!" is an obvious fairy-tale. Reducing employment costs is the #1 driver of the enormous investment that the industry is making in AI. Even if Zukerberg tries to keep it focused on "personal assistant/life coach" with added ability to do a lot of your work for you, the net effect will be that one knowledge worker with AI can produce much more work than many without it. And the market impact will be identical: far fewer employed knowledge workers. The gulf between the rich and poor will grow ever wider, and everything will get worse for anyone who isn't already at the top.

I suspect though that this scenario is not so immediate. I think the pace of improvement is not what he is suggesting, and it will take quite a lot longer to get to the kind of job-market-ruining superintelligence that he is aiming for (if ever). I mean, I don't know, I don't work for him, I don't see what he sees, but I DO know that this is exactly what he would say if he were making no progress and needed more money.

This is why cartels are bad.

In a healthy economy, there would be more than two major credit cards and plenty of payment processors, so that they must compete against each other for business. That gives them the right incentives and many would choose to allow processing of porn content because they need the money just like everyone else.

All markets tend towards cartel dominance, so you need government interference to prevent that. Clearly, this is an area where the government has fallen down on the job.

Well I don't understand you now. I have no influence over your level of freedom. And whether or not you listen to reason is your choice.

Your individual experience does not negate the stats. Medicine gets good results for most people most of the time, in accordance with the details of their condition. And I said before that everyone is different and no principle of human behavior is universal, which is why video games never appealed to you.

You aren't presenting sound arguments against my positions. You are asking easily-answerable questions as if they were rhetorical.

And I put scientific knowledge before religious teachings, because science is based on better methods (observation and experimentation vs whatever somebody made up a long time ago). So I am sticking with that.

Agree completely. I hate those captchas. Especially lately as they have gotten even more obnoxious than they used to be. I complained to one company that used them and was very politely told "go pound sand."

Recently we had a story on slashdot about a different approach, involving serving up some javascript that did a complex calculation. The goal wasn't so much to determine whether the user was a bot as to make it too expensive for bots to traverse the pages (while having no noticeable impact on ordinary end users). I think companies should switch over to that and call it done.

I am very sad to hear about the deaths in your family. That kind of loss can cause terrible emotional trauma. If you have any support services available, like grief counseling or therapy, I hope that you can reach out. Sometimes we need help to heal from emotional wounds like that. Please don't face that pain alone if you don't have to.

Chemotherapy is an "imperfect solution." It usually works against cancer, but not always. The type of cancer matters a lot, and also how early it is detected matters a lot. Here is some info about that. So there are many reasons why it might not work for some people, and it depends a lot on the circumstances. It is still far more effective against cancer than a placebo, which usually doesn't work at all, and only in very rare cases has presented temporary improvements in symptoms.

Something similar can be said of the effect of antidepressant use on suicide risk. Brain chemistry is extremely complicated and we still have a whole lot to learn about it. The treatments we have for conditions like depression are also imperfect solutions. There are varied causes of depression and sometimes medicine simply isn't enough to fix it. Also, according to studies like this some antidepressants (like "SSRI" in particular) can actually increase the risk of suicide in teenagers (though it greatly reduces the risk in adults). So again there are reasons why medicine doesn't always work, even when it has been shown to work better than a placebo.

Humans are complex beings. Our brains are very flexible and our motivations are varied. So, there is never a single rule or principle that applies equally to everyone. Our violent instincts are no exception. For the most part, humans prefer to experience violence vicariously. We might enjoy watching a hero fight off a monster on the silver screen, so long as we are safe and sound in the movie theater. Or maybe we control a character in a video game, fighting bad guys in a storm of illusionary violence, while we are comfortably seated in front of a computer. Facing actual violence, head-on, is a different story. Most people would run away if such a threat emerges. But that won't stop them from wanting to watch the news to learn more about what happened.
There ARE people who are naturally aggressive, or at least very inclined to make a stand and fight back when a threat emerges. Often they find work in police or military service, and keep us all safe. So even then, when we might lament the unfortunate consequences of real-world violence, we still want people around who are good at it, if for no other reason than to keep us safe from it.
The same goes for things like meat processing, or scientific experimentation. Many people can't stand to do that kind of work, but still eat the processed meat and donate money to scientific research.
So, even in the presence of violent instincts, people can recognize that overall they don't want to face it, and even go so far as to build religions around the practice of avoiding it. That's why you get religions like Jainism among humans, even in the presence of our violent instincts.

As it turns out, most of what we do medically is not just placebo. In fact, the overwhelming majority of medical practice is not placebo, with elements of the placebo effect engaged only in very specific circumstances. This is for a few reasons, one being that the placebo effect isn't reliable as a form of medical treatment in most cases (even though it needs to be accounted-for in clinical testing). So, the animal testing is still needed to produce non-placebo treatments that are effective and reliable.

I will admit to liking violence though. Most people do. It is an instinct, you see, because we evolved to survive in a violent world. It's the reason why so much of popular entertainment includes violent themes. However, this is not the same thing as liking it when we torture lab animals. Most people who find violent movies or games entertaining still don't like the torture of animals, me included.

But, the educated among us understand the grim necessity. Based on what you have stated so far, it sounds like education may be the primary defecit.

The subsequent Cult of Serena is too much for me. I just use Linux (and for a few specific needs, Apple).

The issue is morally complex.

We need the scientific knowledge to save human lives, in potentially very large numbers. If we sit on our hands and just let them die, then we commit a moral sin of inaction.

But the only way to obtain the knowledge involves experimentation that brings suffering and death to a small number of animals. Imposing needless suffering and death on living beings is also a moral sin.

Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't.

The discriminating principle then becomes one of value. Human lives are considered more valuable than those of animals. And human suffering is considered more terrible. We also add some utilitarianism and say that the many humans who benefit from the knowledge morally outweigh the few animals that must suffer.

It's not a perfect resolution, but it is the best we can do given the grim circumstances we face. We did not ask to be born ignorant, yet we are. We would prefer to obtain the knowledge we need without inducing suffering and death, yet we cannot. So, we do what we must.

Google announced the phasing out of this service 7 years ago. I'd say we have had plenty of time to make adjustments.

I am NO fan of Google. I don't like their infamy over freezing email accounts and locking people out of their lives, with notoriously bad customer support. It's one reason I don't rely on their services.

But at the same time, the attitude of entitlement in the summary was a bit on the disgusting side. However big Google may be, it is still a profitable business, not a charity, and so it has no obligation to provide us with free services.