Whilst that sounds like a good idea, the actual decision is so political and cultural that it would probably need far more people than the RFC process can easily handle, and the whole debate would very likely produce more heat than light.
That said, it would be nice if there was some sane and widely used standard for providing bibliographic information which could be readily embedded into most if not all document formats, so that, say, a new cite [X]HTML tag could cause user-agents to pull in and summarise in a suitable, user- or agent-defined manner.
The Institute of Physics's magazine/Physics World/ did an article on his trial last year (IIRC, it may have been earlier). He was tried for heresy, but the reason he was tried was not for heliocentric theory, but rather for insulting the Pope (who had been interested in his theories) about an unrelated (somewhat political) matter instead of answering his questions. IOW, he was killed not for arguing against the church but for publicly insulting the man with the power to have him killed, which is generally regarded as a bad idea.
What I was taught was that any idea or principle which is well-known doesn't need to be cited, just referenced by its own name (for example one would just say "using Newton's 3rd law" or "by the second law of thermodynamics"), or in a computing context, something like quicksort or mergesort can just be used, because everyone knows them, but if you copied the function from somewhere (rather than using a library call to a standard library), then you should acknowledge it.
In terms of a presentation or the like, what was expected was that only important or less widely-known points would need to be cited in the speech, the rest could merely be referenced against a list distributed with whatever printed notes are given out, unless teh material was a direct quotation or something liek a graph taken from someone else's data.
There's nothing wrong with a hereditary nobility, since there is usually no effective difference between an aristocrat and a commoner with the same amount of money, and at least a society with an aristocracy is honest enough to admit that some people are wealthier and more powerful than others (and I say this as a person who has no realistic prospect of getting so much as a CBE, let alone a hereditary title). (Of course, if you are a far-socialist or a communist, then your problem is no so much with the titles and honours as the money and power, which is a separate issue entirely.)
However, my objection to long copyrights is not about the benefit to heirs of the owner, but that it is not beneficial to society, either artistically or financially.
The passage of text relating to that was being discussed a few months back made it look like using WEP and posting the password on the wall would be enough to get around the restrictions, at least as far as cafes with internet access and so on are concerned.
Love letters are still worthwhile. Phone calls (or equivalent) are good, and video chat is better, but there is something about a proper letter which is good too, especially in long-distance relationships across a time-zone barrier and when differing timetables become a real nuisance (so getting a decent block of uninterrupted time to talk is a PITA except late at night).
Also, only RFC2549 seems like a suitable way of sending rose petals embedded in messages using the internet.
We need one of the 1-digiters to come in now, and then for CmdrTaco to top (bottom?) them all.
Now, if I was running this site, I'd have a script which watches for any poster with 3 or fewer digits replying to anyone with a higher UID and mentioning the string "UID", just so I can jump in and trump them.
On 21 December 2009, Tornado rescued about 100 people who were stranded by bad weather at London Victoria station. On that day, a number of electric trains, which picked up their power from the third rail, were unable to run because of snow and ice on the line. Tornado was to haul a 'Cathedrals Express' lunchtime special service from Victoria; a number of booked passengers had been unable to get there due to the conditions, and so there were spare seats; the train's operators decided to offer these seats to commuters whose trains had been cancelled. Tornado also had an evening 'Cathedrals Express' dining train, and the same offer was again made.
There were quite a number of amusing stories of locomotive failure on British steam excursions, especially in the '90s, where the locomotive that failed was not the steam loco, but the diesel which was required by the operating authorities in case the steam loco broke down (and often to provide air braking and sometimes electric heating). I believe this has become less common now.
You mean, if the list is made even broader, it will increase the chance of having all terrorists on it, so we will have no airborne terrorism? Perhaps we should make the list larger until we have, say, 100% certainty of including all terrorists, and to hell with the disruption to all innocent travellers included on the list.
The right to travel by air is an intrinsic right, which can only *legitimately* be removed for the greater good of others, and only with clear evidence that both the greater good of others is in fact real and that the removal of that right is the least intrusive means of protecting that greater good. However, this does not require anyone else to carry them, and does not mean that we cannot, for example, forbid untrained people flying aeroplanes, because that s very likely to be unsafe.
Likewise, you have an inherent right to healthcare: in normal circumstances no-one may prevent others treating you if you desire it (if someone is sentenced to death, you obviously lose that right when the sentence is executed). What is under debate (and I'm not going to get into who is right, that's not important) is whether (a) ensuring that every person can get treatment without finacially crippling themselves and (b) what is the least intrusive way to do this.
Wasn't there a story here a couple of years ago that MS and some other large companies were charging a fee for all items sold, whether in a country which recognises the patent in question or not, as a condition of licensing it in any country which does recognise the patent.
Whilst any nutbags with ancient rules aer dangerous, most fundamentalist christians are far less active in support of the stupider rules: they care about some of the Ten Commandments, and Lev 18:22 (no gays), and a general repression of sex, gambling or anything too modern or fun (at least for everyone else), there are very few who call for stoning delinquent children, or banning shellfish or shaving, and none who are considered significant enough to feature on major news programmes. Ordinary Christian fundies also tend to be far more relaxed about the punishments to be imposed than those specified by the bible.
Fundamentalist Judaism isn't something I've come across, but it seems to be far more personal and, apart from the odd clothes worn by teh ultra-orthodox, not very public kind of fundamentalism. There is fundamentalist Zionism, but that's a different matter entirely.
Christian fundamentalists are bad, and should be kept out of power as much as possible, but fundamentalist Muslims are more extreme.
Where does this "right" come from? In a purely US-Centric view our "Rights" are ceded to us by our creator (whomever you believe him, it to be). Nowhere in Christian theology (upon which the United States laws are based) is the right of two people of the same sex to marry mantioned.
The right comes from one of the fundamental principles of English Common Law systems, which is that everyone has the right to do anything not explicitly forbidden, and from the basic concepts of a just, free, society, that no rights should be restricted except to protect others from a greater infringement of their safety or property and that any such impositions should be removed as soon as the evidence to justify the impositions becomes too weak.
The fact is that if secular society wants to recognise a lasting relationship between two people of any kind that's fine. What can not be expected is that churches should be forced to recognize non-traditional pairings as married nor mandated to perform such ceremonies. That is protected by a little thing called the first ammendment to the contitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
That's basically irrelevant: no-one with any sense would want to ask someone who is opposed to the couple's marriage to officiate at their wedding, except as a form of trolling. I don't see anyone asking for governments to require all marriage celebrants to marry any couple which asks them to. What people are asking for is to be able to be civilly married to their beloved, which would have very little implementation cost for society, since there is very little which assumes that either spouse is male or female. Personally, I think that is not a very good long-term goal, since I would prefer a system of n-ary partnerships established via contract law, but same sex marriages are simple, moderately effective in meeting the needs of the non-heterosexual community, and has no impact on heterosexual couples, so it would be a reasonable stop-gap solution.
Is there any way in which providing equal privileges to homosexual couples would be harmful to you as (presumably) either a single person or a member of a heterosexual couple?
If it's politically correct to say it or not the fact remains that homosexuality differs from the norm...
Unusual is not inherently bad. Besides that, various estimates have put the number of homosexuals in the USA at between 2% and 10%, and I suspect that underestimates the non-heterosexual population. In teh CS department at my university, last year some members of the subject club pooled their knowledge of the sexuality of the domestic students who were actively involved in the departmental culture (that is, they had near full lecture/tutorial attendance, attended the special lectures given by staff and outsiders on matters of general interest, and took part in official departmental events)and estimated that only about quarter of the males were definitively straight, and at most a third were either certainly or probably straight, and about a sixth[1] were bisexual[2] but in a long-term monogamous heterosexual relationship at the time. Approximately a third were homosexual, and a few (...and is, biologically speaking, of no use to furthering the human species. It is an inherrently selfish pursuit that leaves the notion of service to your fellow man (make jokes about that if you like!) completely out of the picture.
Is heterosexual sex without the intent to have a child any less biologically useless or inherently selfish (let's assume that, since you don;t want children, you are using some form of effective contraceptive). What about someone who doesn't have sex at all? (This ignores the points the SP brings up, although they are valid too, because this simpler argument is s
If those programs have advanced *at all* in 20 years, they're now comparing parse-trees.
I know of at least one program which does this, and uses tree manipulation to find the largest possible matches after each move, and giver a higher value to matching tree segments with fewer changes. It was a spare-time project by one of the profs at my university, based on the GCC parse tree so it can be used for C, C++, and Java (students in the advanced subjects with Lisp, prolog and so on were more trusted, on the basis that cheating wouldn't allow them to pass anyway).
Apart from the counting sort which the SP mentioned, which is very handy if you have a dense range of discrete values, or an enumerated list of values, there are also radix and American flag sorts, which are both O(nm), where there are n values of length m, which are suitable for short data types (good for integers, terrible for strings, basically useless for anything with arbitrary length elements). In principle you can use them for floats, butt hey would lose their elegant simplicity and I really wouldn't like to try to debug an such an implementation.
You have a shell which can only handle 2 running jobs, but daemons don't count. Chewing gum, and often listening to music, can be handled fine by daemons, and only take up one of your user processes when you need to specifically interact with them (for example, to change the piece of gum), just like the print daemon can sit there looking at the spool and printing whatever it sees, but you still need to run lpr if you want it to print anything.
Maybe a reasonable small step towards such a system would be to provide a public defender for anyone who wants one if they are sued, whom you only have to pay if you lose. The problem with loser pays without some fairness rules is that a big business could hire a large team of expensive barristers, safe in the knowledge that if they win, they won;t have to pay them, and any poor defendant won't risk a trial even if the actual damages sought are tiny, because they would get hammered by the lawyers fees. To make it fair, the legal costs should be limited to, say, the same as the damages sought, or perhaps some sub-linear function of the damages, with some minimum value to make small claims still worthwhile.
You know, this might be one of those rare occasions where GNAA copypasta is actually almost relevant. If the parent had posted his comment in reply to the GGP instead of the GP, and had left off the bottom half, he might have got himself a +2 or +3 Funny. OTOH, I suppose if he was intelligent, he wouldn't be in the GNAA.
Personally, I think that the right way to deal with the employee health aspect would be to declare a maximum permissible exposure (in terms of amount averaged over time, since many are used in cleaners and so on) of the various harmful chemicals, and then state that this applies to the whole workplace, including beer gardens, office lawns and so on. In my state, we have smoking bans which only prohibit smoking in enclosed spaces, but that definition has massive loopholes in it, so it is effectively worthless from the point of view of staff health.
If the owner wants to allow smoking, he would have to provide appropriate safety equipment, whether it be forced ventilation, respirators, or something else.
This took me a while to answer, because of the service outages, but here geos:
Well the second group also has a tendency to only pay attention to tangible things, which causes a problem.
This is essentially the argument over legalized drugs (the intelligent one, not the one where "we can tax a $100 trillion industry!" that's going to be a $50 million industry when the shit's legal). One side says these are evil, harmful, addictive things that destroy lives; the other says (get this-- it's great) people will manage themselves fine while addicted to crack, and will get professional help and have doctors write prescriptions, and use their drugs responsibly.
Except the sane ones on that side generally say "ecstasy, pot, NO2 and so on should be legal and sold like alcohol, heroin, crack and so on can stay illegal," with or without medical care for those on hard drugs.
The reality comes in two stages. First, people will get prescribed 40mg twice a day of something like Ecstacy (or probably something more recreational, life-taylored, like "okay, take ONE of these on Saturday Night at the club"). They will then proceed to abuse their prescriptions (people do this already with prescription meds) to get high... well, higher. Then they'll get locked out because of abuse as their doctor refuses to write more prescription. Then they'll hit the street for illegal drugs... again....
Except they won't under the alcohol-model system, because they'll be able to get as much as they like once they're 18 (or whatever the age is where you are, I'm guessing the USA, so 21), legitimately, and it will probably become slightly harder for children to get drugs illegally, assuming the tax rules are sane (I'll talk about that later), because they would have to buy it at a questionable bar or lazy bottle shop, rather than some guy who risks nothing more by selling to them.
Second, now that we're back where we started, we have to change the assumptions: prescription/doctors were for SALE, but you're legally allowed to ACQUIRE AND USE whatever you want. So stage 2 starts. Society drifts. Everyone is always impaired. Moral and ethical bases shift. This has a real impact on the effectiveness of the work force, on education, on everything.
People can drink any time they like, but there are laws against drink driving, any sane labour laws would allow sacking for repeated drunkenness. You don't see that everyone is slightly tipsy, do you?
But this is all very fuzzy; importantly, it's just as fuzzy as "everything will be fine." Read this again: the hypothesis that legalizing drugs will result in a Utopian Paradise or even in a complete null operation (i.e. no change) is JUST AS CRAZY as assuming the whole world will slowly fall apart, if not more so (because we know drugs are addictive and make your behavior less rational, so this is more likely a bad thing in the long run). Those arguing for legalized drugs universally like to ignore ALL of this, since it's all (by definition) conjecture (yes, even if it's 100% accurate; you have to PROVE it first, scientifically, for it to be a valid known-factual argument).
No, a restriction of people's freedoms, no matter how trivial, needs to be justified. A relaxation of those restrictions should take place as soon as there is no overwhelming balance of evidence to justify the restrictions. Yes, the argument that legalising *everything* will be fine is somewhat ridiculous, but there is a middle way.
Alcohol is addictive and harmful when misused, but people have been drinking it for so long, and so many people enjoy it, that our society considers anyone in favour of banning it at least slightly odd. Yet these same people consider any one in favour of easing restrictions on drugs which are approximately equally harmful to be even odder.
The argument over sex is actually more interesting. If you don't have d
Wow. Either they should be coming out of high school with what we would consider bachelor-level qualifications, they don't specialise in any sane way, or there is something very broken about their pedagogy.
Slashdot Mirror
Whilst that sounds like a good idea, the actual decision is so political and cultural that it would probably need far more people than the RFC process can easily handle, and the whole debate would very likely produce more heat than light.
That said, it would be nice if there was some sane and widely used standard for providing bibliographic information which could be readily embedded into most if not all document formats, so that, say, a new cite [X]HTML tag could cause user-agents to pull in and summarise in a suitable, user- or agent-defined manner.
The Institute of Physics's magazine /Physics World/ did an article on his trial last year (IIRC, it may have been earlier). He was tried for heresy, but the reason he was tried was not for heliocentric theory, but rather for insulting the Pope (who had been interested in his theories) about an unrelated (somewhat political) matter instead of answering his questions. IOW, he was killed not for arguing against the church but for publicly insulting the man with the power to have him killed, which is generally regarded as a bad idea.
What I was taught was that any idea or principle which is well-known doesn't need to be cited, just referenced by its own name (for example one would just say "using Newton's 3rd law" or "by the second law of thermodynamics"), or in a computing context, something like quicksort or mergesort can just be used, because everyone knows them, but if you copied the function from somewhere (rather than using a library call to a standard library), then you should acknowledge it.
In terms of a presentation or the like, what was expected was that only important or less widely-known points would need to be cited in the speech, the rest could merely be referenced against a list distributed with whatever printed notes are given out, unless teh material was a direct quotation or something liek a graph taken from someone else's data.
There's nothing wrong with a hereditary nobility, since there is usually no effective difference between an aristocrat and a commoner with the same amount of money, and at least a society with an aristocracy is honest enough to admit that some people are wealthier and more powerful than others (and I say this as a person who has no realistic prospect of getting so much as a CBE, let alone a hereditary title). (Of course, if you are a far-socialist or a communist, then your problem is no so much with the titles and honours as the money and power, which is a separate issue entirely.)
However, my objection to long copyrights is not about the benefit to heirs of the owner, but that it is not beneficial to society, either artistically or financially.
The passage of text relating to that was being discussed a few months back made it look like using WEP and posting the password on the wall would be enough to get around the restrictions, at least as far as cafes with internet access and so on are concerned.
Love letters are still worthwhile. Phone calls (or equivalent) are good, and video chat is better, but there is something about a proper letter which is good too, especially in long-distance relationships across a time-zone barrier and when differing timetables become a real nuisance (so getting a decent block of uninterrupted time to talk is a PITA except late at night).
Also, only RFC2549 seems like a suitable way of sending rose petals embedded in messages using the internet.
We need one of the 1-digiters to come in now, and then for CmdrTaco to top (bottom?) them all.
Now, if I was running this site, I'd have a script which watches for any poster with 3 or fewer digits replying to anyone with a higher UID and mentioning the string "UID", just so I can jump in and trump them.
I find this little snippet to be amusing as hell:
On 21 December 2009, Tornado rescued about 100 people who were stranded by bad weather at London Victoria station. On that day, a number of electric trains, which picked up their power from the third rail, were unable to run because of snow and ice on the line. Tornado was to haul a 'Cathedrals Express' lunchtime special service from Victoria; a number of booked passengers had been unable to get there due to the conditions, and so there were spare seats; the train's operators decided to offer these seats to commuters whose trains had been cancelled. Tornado also had an evening 'Cathedrals Express' dining train, and the same offer was again made.
There were quite a number of amusing stories of locomotive failure on British steam excursions, especially in the '90s, where the locomotive that failed was not the steam loco, but the diesel which was required by the operating authorities in case the steam loco broke down (and often to provide air braking and sometimes electric heating). I believe this has become less common now.
You mean, if the list is made even broader, it will increase the chance of having all terrorists on it, so we will have no airborne terrorism? Perhaps we should make the list larger until we have, say, 100% certainty of including all terrorists, and to hell with the disruption to all innocent travellers included on the list.
The right to travel by air is an intrinsic right, which can only *legitimately* be removed for the greater good of others, and only with clear evidence that both the greater good of others is in fact real and that the removal of that right is the least intrusive means of protecting that greater good. However, this does not require anyone else to carry them, and does not mean that we cannot, for example, forbid untrained people flying aeroplanes, because that s very likely to be unsafe.
Likewise, you have an inherent right to healthcare: in normal circumstances no-one may prevent others treating you if you desire it (if someone is sentenced to death, you obviously lose that right when the sentence is executed). What is under debate (and I'm not going to get into who is right, that's not important) is whether (a) ensuring that every person can get treatment without finacially crippling themselves and (b) what is the least intrusive way to do this.
Wasn't there a story here a couple of years ago that MS and some other large companies were charging a fee for all items sold, whether in a country which recognises the patent in question or not, as a condition of licensing it in any country which does recognise the patent.
gays being hung,
I think they would, on the whole, like that. Hanged, on the other hand, not so much.:)
Whilst any nutbags with ancient rules aer dangerous, most fundamentalist christians are far less active in support of the stupider rules: they care about some of the Ten Commandments, and Lev 18:22 (no gays), and a general repression of sex, gambling or anything too modern or fun (at least for everyone else), there are very few who call for stoning delinquent children, or banning shellfish or shaving, and none who are considered significant enough to feature on major news programmes. Ordinary Christian fundies also tend to be far more relaxed about the punishments to be imposed than those specified by the bible.
Fundamentalist Judaism isn't something I've come across, but it seems to be far more personal and, apart from the odd clothes worn by teh ultra-orthodox, not very public kind of fundamentalism. There is fundamentalist Zionism, but that's a different matter entirely.
Christian fundamentalists are bad, and should be kept out of power as much as possible, but fundamentalist Muslims are more extreme.
remove the rights of same sex people to marry
Where does this "right" come from? In a purely US-Centric view our "Rights" are ceded to us by our creator (whomever you believe him, it to be). Nowhere in Christian theology (upon which the United States laws are based) is the right of two people of the same sex to marry mantioned.
The right comes from one of the fundamental principles of English Common Law systems, which is that everyone has the right to do anything not explicitly forbidden, and from the basic concepts of a just, free, society, that no rights should be restricted except to protect others from a greater infringement of their safety or property and that any such impositions should be removed as soon as the evidence to justify the impositions becomes too weak.
The fact is that if secular society wants to recognise a lasting relationship between two people of any kind that's fine. What can not be expected is that churches should be forced to recognize non-traditional pairings as married nor mandated to perform such ceremonies. That is protected by a little thing called the first ammendment to the contitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
That's basically irrelevant: no-one with any sense would want to ask someone who is opposed to the couple's marriage to officiate at their wedding, except as a form of trolling. I don't see anyone asking for governments to require all marriage celebrants to marry any couple which asks them to. What people are asking for is to be able to be civilly married to their beloved, which would have very little implementation cost for society, since there is very little which assumes that either spouse is male or female. Personally, I think that is not a very good long-term goal, since I would prefer a system of n-ary partnerships established via contract law, but same sex marriages are simple, moderately effective in meeting the needs of the non-heterosexual community, and has no impact on heterosexual couples, so it would be a reasonable stop-gap solution.
Is there any way in which providing equal privileges to homosexual couples would be harmful to you as (presumably) either a single person or a member of a heterosexual couple?
If it's politically correct to say it or not the fact remains that homosexuality differs from the norm...
Unusual is not inherently bad. Besides that, various estimates have put the number of homosexuals in the USA at between 2% and 10%, and I suspect that underestimates the non-heterosexual population. In teh CS department at my university, last year some members of the subject club pooled their knowledge of the sexuality of the domestic students who were actively involved in the departmental culture (that is, they had near full lecture/tutorial attendance, attended the special lectures given by staff and outsiders on matters of general interest, and took part in official departmental events)and estimated that only about quarter of the males were definitively straight, and at most a third were either certainly or probably straight, and about a sixth[1] were bisexual[2] but in a long-term monogamous heterosexual relationship at the time. Approximately a third were homosexual, and a few (...and is, biologically speaking, of no use to furthering the human species. It is an inherrently selfish pursuit that leaves the notion of service to your fellow man (make jokes about that if you like!) completely out of the picture.
Is heterosexual sex without the intent to have a child any less biologically useless or inherently selfish (let's assume that, since you don;t want children, you are using some form of effective contraceptive). What about someone who doesn't have sex at all? (This ignores the points the SP brings up, although they are valid too, because this simpler argument is s
If those programs have advanced *at all* in 20 years, they're now comparing parse-trees.
I know of at least one program which does this, and uses tree manipulation to find the largest possible matches after each move, and giver a higher value to matching tree segments with fewer changes. It was a spare-time project by one of the profs at my university, based on the GCC parse tree so it can be used for C, C++, and Java (students in the advanced subjects with Lisp, prolog and so on were more trusted, on the basis that cheating wouldn't allow them to pass anyway).
Apart from the counting sort which the SP mentioned, which is very handy if you have a dense range of discrete values, or an enumerated list of values, there are also radix and American flag sorts, which are both O(nm), where there are n values of length m, which are suitable for short data types (good for integers, terrible for strings, basically useless for anything with arbitrary length elements). In principle you can use them for floats, butt hey would lose their elegant simplicity and I really wouldn't like to try to debug an such an implementation.
You're on /., there's no right millennium for those like us. :)
You have a shell which can only handle 2 running jobs, but daemons don't count. Chewing gum, and often listening to music, can be handled fine by daemons, and only take up one of your user processes when you need to specifically interact with them (for example, to change the piece of gum), just like the print daemon can sit there looking at the spool and printing whatever it sees, but you still need to run lpr if you want it to print anything.
Of course you're only at "1" -- I had to browse at lowest level even to see you.
Of course you're only at "-1" -- I had to browse at lowest level even to see you.
You must be new here (of course, I actually have everything below 4 abbreviated, not hidden, but that isn't the default)
Maybe a reasonable small step towards such a system would be to provide a public defender for anyone who wants one if they are sued, whom you only have to pay if you lose. The problem with loser pays without some fairness rules is that a big business could hire a large team of expensive barristers, safe in the knowledge that if they win, they won;t have to pay them, and any poor defendant won't risk a trial even if the actual damages sought are tiny, because they would get hammered by the lawyers fees. To make it fair, the legal costs should be limited to, say, the same as the damages sought, or perhaps some sub-linear function of the damages, with some minimum value to make small claims still worthwhile.
african subcontinent
ITYmightM sub-Saharan Africa, or the African continent (in which case, why not just say Africa?)
I don't normally pick on people for small errors like that, but sometimes one has to wonder what the logic behind it was.
You know, this might be one of those rare occasions where GNAA copypasta is actually almost relevant. If the parent had posted his comment in reply to the GGP instead of the GP, and had left off the bottom half, he might have got himself a +2 or +3 Funny. OTOH, I suppose if he was intelligent, he wouldn't be in the GNAA.
Personally, I think that the right way to deal with the employee health aspect would be to declare a maximum permissible exposure (in terms of amount averaged over time, since many are used in cleaners and so on) of the various harmful chemicals, and then state that this applies to the whole workplace, including beer gardens, office lawns and so on. In my state, we have smoking bans which only prohibit smoking in enclosed spaces, but that definition has massive loopholes in it, so it is effectively worthless from the point of view of staff health.
If the owner wants to allow smoking, he would have to provide appropriate safety equipment, whether it be forced ventilation, respirators, or something else.
This took me a while to answer, because of the service outages, but here geos:
Well the second group also has a tendency to only pay attention to tangible things, which causes a problem.
This is essentially the argument over legalized drugs (the intelligent one, not the one where "we can tax a $100 trillion industry!" that's going to be a $50 million industry when the shit's legal). One side says these are evil, harmful, addictive things that destroy lives; the other says (get this-- it's great) people will manage themselves fine while addicted to crack, and will get professional help and have doctors write prescriptions, and use their drugs responsibly.
Except the sane ones on that side generally say "ecstasy, pot, NO2 and so on should be legal and sold like alcohol, heroin, crack and so on can stay illegal," with or without medical care for those on hard drugs.
The reality comes in two stages. First, people will get prescribed 40mg twice a day of something like Ecstacy (or probably something more recreational, life-taylored, like "okay, take ONE of these on Saturday Night at the club"). They will then proceed to abuse their prescriptions (people do this already with prescription meds) to get high... well, higher. Then they'll get locked out because of abuse as their doctor refuses to write more prescription. Then they'll hit the street for illegal drugs... again....
Except they won't under the alcohol-model system, because they'll be able to get as much as they like once they're 18 (or whatever the age is where you are, I'm guessing the USA, so 21), legitimately, and it will probably become slightly harder for children to get drugs illegally, assuming the tax rules are sane (I'll talk about that later), because they would have to buy it at a questionable bar or lazy bottle shop, rather than some guy who risks nothing more by selling to them.
Second, now that we're back where we started, we have to change the assumptions: prescription/doctors were for SALE, but you're legally allowed to ACQUIRE AND USE whatever you want. So stage 2 starts. Society drifts. Everyone is always impaired. Moral and ethical bases shift. This has a real impact on the effectiveness of the work force, on education, on everything.
People can drink any time they like, but there are laws against drink driving, any sane labour laws would allow sacking for repeated drunkenness. You don't see that everyone is slightly tipsy, do you?
But this is all very fuzzy; importantly, it's just as fuzzy as "everything will be fine." Read this again: the hypothesis that legalizing drugs will result in a Utopian Paradise or even in a complete null operation (i.e. no change) is JUST AS CRAZY as assuming the whole world will slowly fall apart, if not more so (because we know drugs are addictive and make your behavior less rational, so this is more likely a bad thing in the long run). Those arguing for legalized drugs universally like to ignore ALL of this, since it's all (by definition) conjecture (yes, even if it's 100% accurate; you have to PROVE it first, scientifically, for it to be a valid known-factual argument).
No, a restriction of people's freedoms, no matter how trivial, needs to be justified. A relaxation of those restrictions should take place as soon as there is no overwhelming balance of evidence to justify the restrictions. Yes, the argument that legalising *everything* will be fine is somewhat ridiculous, but there is a middle way.
Alcohol is addictive and harmful when misused, but people have been drinking it for so long, and so many people enjoy it, that our society considers anyone in favour of banning it at least slightly odd. Yet these same people consider any one in favour of easing restrictions on drugs which are approximately equally harmful to be even odder.
The argument over sex is actually more interesting. If you don't have d
Wow. Either they should be coming out of high school with what we would consider bachelor-level qualifications, they don't specialise in any sane way, or there is something very broken about their pedagogy.