Yes, applications and the wide reaching realisation of the relevance of Information Theory has broadened, but I don’t think it’s fair to say the core of it has changed(most of which can be found in Claude Shannon’s original paper viewable for free online) . That’s why the above is a good introduction in my opinion since it actually makes a good effort to define the scope of the subject, and does a less eclectic job of this than the wikipedia link.
Also, most of Information theory still concerns data compression, transmission and cryptography. These are relevant and represent problems where information is “scarce”, yet this has nothing to do with replicating information that has been transmitted or received already, which is I guess what you are trying to draw a parallel with.
Needless to say there are not many good introductory books on the subject( I made a presentation on information theory last year).
the labour applied to the cutting of hair is ‘consumed’ as in, both used ‘utilised’ and ‘used up’ (consumed!). the barber had been misled on the offer of a dollar to expend his labour. his labour is rivalrous. that labour has gone. perhaps it constitutes what has been lost? (the physical manipulation of bone and muscle, the expending of calories etc. etc. lost lost)
information on the contrary, is ‘consumed’ as in, used ‘utilised’ but not ‘used up’ (consumed!). it remains. the cd is a cd.
World Records: Pi decimals recited from memory to 20,013 places.
on the other hand:
we have beautiful poems by wonderful authors/poets such as Richard Brautigan:
Lint by Richard Brautigan
I’m haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.
I’ve been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.
well, you can drop characters and the stories are still ‘uncompressible’ and can lead to the same knowledge.
Kim Peek
Kim Peek is a savant who was the model for the character Raymond Babbitt (played by Dustin Hoffman) in the film Rain Man. Kim Peek has memorized more than 7,600 books, knows the zip codes of every location in America, and the highways leading to any city or town in America. He is able to name the day of the week for any date, but does not otherwise have extraordinary calculating ability, unlike the Raymond Babbitt character in the film Rain Man. He and other savants are described in a Scientific American article on savant syndrome, and on the author’s web site.
properly speaking a specific performance like the cutting of hair would not be enforcable. hence the practice of barbers would be to be paid before endeavouring to cut hair.
Though I disagree with much of your post, it is very well put together and your arguments are clear. I’ll only respond to two “fallacies” specifically, though.
This blatantly disregards the very libertarian principal of innocent until proven guilty, as in this scenario, the accused must prove his innocence. The owner of the stolen car must prove that the car is his.
This demonstrates complete unfamiliarity with open source software. You are describing some, most likely only one, the GPL, open source licenses, but certainly not all. Below, you reference an open source license (BSD) which does not “require those who utilize it to share their changes”, an obvious contradiction. One one hand you say, “Open source software is a collection of software platforms licensed under agreements that require those who utilize it to share their changes,” and on the other, claiming an open source license has a clause “explicitly allowing for the privatisation [of code].”
This, in essence, is a claim that improvements in capital goods do not affect consumer goods. If a software producer writes a piece of software, for himself, that allows him to produce consumer software more easily/efficiently/etc., that certainly is a benefit to consumers, in much the same way that Ford’s assembly lines improved the quality of automobiles. It further assumes that those who purchase capital goods are not consumers of those capital goods.
This is is worded rather poorly. It assumes that for every open source product, there exists only one closed source competitor. This is clearly false. Next, it assumes that even if an open source product has surpassed a closed source product in market share, that the closed source product was not “superior”. The open source Mozilla Firefox browser has a much larger market share than Opera browser, which is a closed source “counterpart produced by capitalist software industries”. Google’s open source Android operating system dominates Windows Mobile in market share. Ubuntu Linux has a much larger market share than the closed source Solaris.
If, however, you mean the dominant market share, Apache springs to mind. There is no closed source software that even approaches its market share. In fact, in terms of market share, it surpasses all of its counterparts combined, and by a very large margin. However, it’s debatable that there even is a “superior counterpart”. That is branching into capital goods, though, and as far as capital goods go, open source products dominate. 440+ of the 500 most powerful computers in the world run open source operating systems, including all of the top ten. In the world of distributed high performance computing, used for research and development as well as in engineering production, open source operating systems again dominate the market share, and by a huge margin.
No one forced Apple to use open source software as a base, nor was did Apple have to reject a Linux core. They chose to release their new operating system with closed source code, and that choice led to a rejection of a platform based on Gnu software (due to copyright, by the way). Obviously they found something beneficial in open source software, however. They dumped 15+ years of MacOS’s code in favor of a complete rewrite using BSD code. Was this because the the open source BSD code was superior to MacOS, which was “produced by capitalist software industries”? Those making the decisions at Apple seemed to think so.
Windows uses BSD code, too, by the way. If you dig around in a Windows directory tree, you’ll find a copy of the BSD license.
Microsoft, Oracle, Mathworks, Ansys and Siemens all produce closed source software. In some cases, the software is extremely complex, either by the sheer magnitude of variety of tasks the software can perform, or by the complexity of the tasks the software was written to solve. They all sell support. Microsoft releases patches regularly, at least partly based on defects reported by customers seeking support.
This is just silly. I deal with vendor support on a daily basis. 99% of the support sold by open source vendors, or by closed source vendors for that matter, is break-fix in nature. “Your software does not work as expected in these particular conditions or on this particular hardware platform,” or something similar. In the case of many open source vendors, customers often pay for additional features to be added.
Hans Reiser sold (and may still sell, but I think he’s busy in prison at the moment) support for the open source file system he wrote. There is nothing complex in the file system’s use. Rather, he offered to include additional features for a fee.
On another note, I still fail to see how the brain is not just another type of physical media. The argument’s presented seem to hold arbitrary distinctions between the two. There are some limitations in capacities of brains vs other types of physical media and vice versa. All competing media types have their own limitations of varying degrees. For example there is a time when Flash is preferred to RAM, or RAM to HDD, or HDD to audio waves, or audio waves to written text, and finally written text to value’s held in the brain. This could go on ofcoarse in any order needed. Information is only as scarce as there is limited capacity in storage media of the whole media network.
In other words, strictly speaking from a physics point of view, information is only as scarce as is the media it is housed on. That capacity grows exponentially every day with new media types and existing media types supporting larger capacities.
Read this article and feel free to guess how many yottabyte’s exists globally in disk space. This doesn’t reflect the amount of information stored in other formats like paper text ect…
My problem with intellectual property is that for it to be recognised, the concept of ownership would have to be disconnected from objective reality. IMO Ownership needs to define what at a physical level it constitutes. IP doesnt do that, it only constitutes how something needs to be interpreted to fall under it. That makes ownership from subjective interpretation of objective reality to subjective interpretation of subjective reality. The definition of what will be interpreted will change from objective to subjective, a distinctive definition of the object of ownership will be lost.
I do not follow why that passage explains any phenomenon besides that the medium itself often is not free. I do not understand why it implies that, if I buy a medium of some idea, I should be disallowed to manipulate that medium in certain ways, in my house, on my own property, via my own tools.
I also still want to know the answer to whether, if you are reading your own writing, which you consider to be your “intellectual property”, you suppose that you “own” each ray of light which reflects off it, whether or not each of those rays of light remain among your other property or not. If not, again, I do not understand why you suppose the harvest of those rays of light to be some sort of crime.
This is actually rather trivial since information is a unique event in the lifetime of the universe. Any copy is necessarily rooted in the original recording.
My claim is that open source works to the extent that it is limited to producer goods (goods producers produce for themselves in autarky). Of course it can make their production process more efficient, however that still does not change the fact that they have no incentive to make any consumer goods unless these can be privatized. This is why Apple went with BSD.
And in a capitalist production model, features are added in advance of the customer’s need because of the speculative foresight of the capitalist. Their cost is spread out over many customers, and thus much more sophisticated software platforms are available.
You have named a long list of producer goods here (browsers and cell phone OSes are producer goods). You have yet to name a video game, or medical account processing system, that is open source. The reason is that it is impossible to produce in common.
There is no such thing as a medium of ideas. Fallacy 2.
The limits on media are not limits of the physical behavior of light, but limits on your actions. It doesn’t matter through what means this action is done, if your act has been copying, it is a violation of rights.