Re: Question About GNU General Public License

[telford]

Rui Miguel Seabra <rms@1407.org> wrote:

> One thing is duplication. In the digital world, you achieve 100%
> duplication WITHTOUT any loss of the original. Like ideas, because it's
> just as immaterial.

OK, lets focus on duplication, bacteria duplicate without information loss.

> To duplicate you may have to spend some energy, but you have not done so
> at the cost of the original.

Yup, bacteria require input energy to be able to reproduce. After reproduction
the resulting bacteria are fully functional and undamaged.

> The original is 100% intact.

Completely true of bacteria as well.

I believe that the actual "Joule per bit duplicated" efficiency of bacteria
is probably better than the average hard drive.

> If you don't have any arguments for this, please stop trying to convince
> us that the cloudless sky is pitch black by day.

Day and night are only different when you have a mechanism for measuring
the difference. Real physical observations are a requirement to even starting
to understand the world. Your mind/matter distinction is not based on any
physical measurement.

I bring up a bunch of examples that don't fit your classification system and
you just wave them away or ignore them -- as long as you just wave your hands
and get the answer you feel like your classification system will always work,
but only for you. If you don't feel that consistency is important then OK,
you can get any result that you want. This is probably OK for legal stuff
but it does not work in the physical sciences.

        - Tel