According to them, they aren't selling you a copy, only a copy of the license to watch it. Which you still have, whether you have the product to watch or not. They'll likely fix the issue and give out copies to those who can't view the movie, but they'll make it out to be a kindness. Which, in their eyes, it is. After all, you have a fully-working license, and it's the license you bought. Not their fault the freebie they threw in (the data) wasn't usable, and since it's a free gift, they aren't required to do anything.
I don't recall if anyone successfully sued Sony for selling disks with viruses on them, or any of the manufacturers who have sold disks that have actually killed disk drives. Even in the case of actual provable direct damage, I doubt consumers get so much as the time of day, let alone compensation for material goods and time wasted.
Mind you, as we're talking about Hollywood scripts, here, it's probably as well that "time wasted" isn't given too much weight.
Good. Then you can bring the truth of Megabrain to everyone. Seriously, the biggest strength of Open Source is that it is country-agnostic and affiliation-agnostic. Further, some things SHOULD be more international. The ISO fiasco demonstrates the perils of nationalist and corporatist protection. Obviously, you don't scale any more than Linus does, but surely that just means migrating from individual nations to power blocs where possible, still doing the same job but both increasing visibility AND increasing the target audience at the same time. You can't scale, but you CAN multicast.
NB: I will repeat that I am STILL saying that 100% of the guidelines and underlying rules and laws be applied. I am not suggesting evasion. What is required is what they see, and what they expect is what they get.
My point is that you can accomplish all of this in a way that doesn't cause you or the business harm, that avoiding following the rules is not only senseless but is also pointless. You can follow the rules AND get what you want, it's not one or the other.
I guess I have one other point: Those who believe that you cannot think when you are at work are fools. They are also the ones really responsible for failed businesses. Thinking should be mandatory at work, even if the results of that thinking involves finding ways to interpret the rules. Rules should always be obeyed, but in a manner that is intelligent and not blindly and incoherently.
No, you're only misleading them if you SAY it is a Windows PC.
If you are asked to bring in a computer so they can install stuff, and you bring it in and they install it, AND the end result is the end result that said IT staff want (and where they can verify that it is), THEN nobody has been misled and everyone can be happy.
The political needs are met, the actual LEGAL needs (which are valid) are also met, AND the needs of the user to have a computer that works are ALSO met. How is this a bad thing?
If the IT staff don't notice that it's a Linux PC, don't ask if it's running Windows, provide no means of informing them that it's Linux, and if they knew how to enable encryption would have enabled it in exactly the same way you have, then you're not liable for providing information.
If the IT staff can perform their work exactly as they would on any other PC, and after that work is complete, the results are what they want (an encrypted drive), their arses are covered.
Ultimately, if everyone from you, right up the chain to the top, have CYA, =and= there is no productivity hit =and= there is no political risk due to non-compliance, THEN there is no risk of liability.
Besides, it's no more "misleading" than all the corporate Linux installs that have taken place in server rooms globally (replacing defective Windows servers), where there is an "expectation" that those systems are running Windows but no actual formal requirement that they do so.
It is because people have done this that Linux is now actively supported by SGI, IBM and Oracle. It is because nobody really cares how the work is done provided it IS done AND is done in a way that confers no risk or liability to higher-ups that Linux is one of the most popular server OS' in existence.
The same is true in the desktop and laptop worlds. If your work requires Microsoft Exchange compatibility, Internet Exploder and the ability to read/write Microsoft Office documents, and also expects to see a Windows-like GUI, why the hell should you go out of your way to tell them it isn't actually Windows?
The devil/daemon/penguin is always in the details.
...I bet the encryption software is for Windows and MacOS only. Install Linux on a laptop, using a full disk encryption filesystem to be compliant. Install a copy of WINE and QVWM95 so that the IT staff see a Windows-like GUI that can run Windows software. Once they're done messing with the machine, you will still have Linux with all the capabilities of Linux and all the speed and reliability of Linux, with no risk of harm from the hospital software, and no risk of liability as (a) you let the software be installed, and (b) the machine is fully HIPPA-compliant at all points afterwards. Ok, it would be fully HIPPA-compliant before, too, but the hospital mandates the software, not the compliance.
This is not a suggestion for the purpose of evading their actual (and quite legitimate) aim of meeting regulatory requirements. Rather, it is a suggestion for independently meeting those same requirements, then letting them do what they need to do because of the way the policy is written.
Even if these issues could be solved, the existing attitudes at high levels of authority are so perverted and degenerate that they're rarely capable of actually "fixing" anything without making it worse.
Re-read this bit, read the posts where I talk about balance, then think about the logic again. I don't think it useful to either of us for me to say more until you're sure about what you're replying to.
Frankly, I don't think the Government has any business getting into the protection racket. Most "piracy" in the 1700s was Government-sponsored in the name of defense, as was most terrorism in the 20th century.
Government's role, IMHO, is not to actually DO anything, but rather to facilitate the nation system to do as much as possible as effectively as possible. In much the same way, nobody runs Snort as a kernel thread, they run it in userspace. The only defense anyone does at the kernel level is firewalling.
Facilitating, IMHO, includes education, health care, knowledge storage/retrieval and the prevention of harm of one part of the system by another. Having the political leader also be the commander in chief means that there's absolutely no checks and balances on the abuse of that power. That's insanity and the cause of the current global crisis.
In the same way that thread pre-emption is a slow simulation of idealized parallel hardware, governmental pre-emption should create the simulation of an idealized society, even if that means things are slower than the ideal.
If Government could not pre-empt threads, then since much of society is serialized, you would get things being blocked. Priorities would never get handled. A debate on the State moustache shape could not be stopped to carry out an emergency evacuation in the event of a hurricane or other disaster.
No, we do not have the ability to freely associate. We never have had. Or did you think you could wander into the White House uninvited?
Actually, people ARE pre-programmed entities that are supposed to do a certain task. This is why you study for a specific, departmentalized degree rather than have a holistic education. I am remarkably specialized, but I'm infinitely closer to the theoretical Homo Universalis than 98% (or more) of people in the US.
Even if you look at it neurologically, the brain stops growing around the age of 18-22, and starts to die back. The insulation around nerves starts to degenerate shortly after, but this doesn't seriously impact brain performance until the age of around 40.
However, it is brain growth that determines what you can learn and how well you can adapt. If you have no significant brain growth, if new connections do not form at any significant rate, you can learn, but only very very slowly and with intense effort. (Adult brains do form new connections, but at something like 0.1% the rate of adolescent brains. They lose connections a lot faster than they gain them, too.)
So, yes, after you're 22, you're locked-in. You may be able to pick up a little more knowledge, but nothing like the same quantity. If you've not learned by that time a skill that requires intense precision (flint knapping, motor racing, etc) then you probably aren't capable of picking it up later. Exceptions exist, but they're rare.
Humans are nothing more than Turing Machines. Powerful, parallel, and protein-based, but Turing Machines nonetheless.
If Joe puts too many hamburgers in his mouth, it doesn't make his descendants get fat.
Actually, it does. (This is purely on the genetics level, I'm not even going to discuss the family system dynamics issue - you're more than welcome to read Bradshaw, Charles Whitfield, Scott Peck or any of the other experts on that side of things.)
But you're now defining two types of restriction of action - those which increase your freedom and those which decrease your freedom. Since freedom is an abstract concept, which you yourself define, you end up with nothing any different from anyone else, it's merely optimized for you personally, which means it won't be optimized for anyone else.
How is having you define your personal optimum as the norm "freer" than having the optimal balance point between individuality and society as the norm? In the end, it's still someone defining a point as the ideal centre and defining all things in relation to it.
However, your "absolute minimum laws required" is itself changing the laws so that I'm forced to live in a fashion that you find acceptable.
Which doesn't really solve anything.
Elsewhere, I've likened the Government to an OS kernel. An "absolute minimum kernel" in the purest sense possible would be DOS or OSKit. An "absolute minimum useful kernel" would be something like FreeRTOS or Adeos.
Chances are, you don't use any of the above at all or, if you do, only as a component of a much more complex system (eg: Linux over Adeos using RTAI).
It's a fair bet that you're willing to sacrifice a lot of convenience (for the app writers and even for yourself) for the flexibility of something that is actually far more than the absolute minimum, providing functionality you don't actually "need" the OS to provide, but which you benefit from to the point where you don't give a damn.
Same is probably true of the filesystem you're using. FAT is "absolute minimum", but it's also useless for most things. Ext2 is absolute minimum that's useful (and I use it extensively for partitions where speed is more important than reliability, such as for/tmp). However, my guess is you use something that's far heavier, does far more than the minimum, and sacrifices resources for convenience.
My bet is that similar arguments can be applied to everything else in your life, from your car to your TV to your cell phone to your digital camera to your choice of restaurant. Possibly even applies to how you decide where to apply to work.
I'm not saying you shouldn't make these choices, but rather that if the choices were actually any good, why are they only good for you and not for, say, the President?
It would be absurd to have the President have absolute freedom and power, so clearly it is NOT good for the President to be unconstrained to that degree. There is therefore some balance point where the Government has "enough" freedom and you have "enough" freedom. It's probably going to be balanced more towards the individual, but there will be an ideal point and it won't be at any extreme.
We're never going to find that ideal point, but we can find a "comfort zone" that must include that idea point, where all points in the "comfort zone" are acceptable to individuals and Governments alike and where any negative impact on society is minimal and very manageable.
Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass how big that "comfort zone" is defined, so long as it meets the needs of both individuals and the society they are a part of. That's the only constraint I put on any of this. It has to be fair to different levels of the system. If you can do that and meet your "minimum laws" requirement, that's fine with me, but the OS examples suggest that this isn't really what you would want if you had it, since you COULD have it elsewhere in your life and choose not to.
As for everyone wanting to decide, I have no problem with that. If everyone had adequate education, enabling reasoned discussion and debate, then having everyone involved would be quite useful. A distributed.net for solving the issues of political science. If everyone does not have adequate education, it's like distributed processing using buggy CPUs.
That is the paradox that Governments and political philosophers have tried to solve since time immemorial. The entire book "The Republic" by Plato ultimately reduces to how to get people to take responsibility.
Ultimately, Plato determined that the best you can do is educate people and hope that reason is sufficient. I'm not completely confident that reason is sufficient, but it seems to be by far the best tool that exists at this time.
If people were better enabled to use reason, then (in principle) they would be less likely to abuse responsibility, thus solving at least some of the problem.
Beyond that point, you have to bring out the heavy-hitters, laws that prohibit behaviour that is generally accepted as destructive to others, along with repercussions that reduce the chances of such behaviours persisting.
However, legislation and Government intervention should be a last resort, once all methods of getting people to behave maturely have failed, and should be as light as possible whilst doing the job. ("Doing the job" should reflect the needs of society to survive and prosper, within reason. Excessive optimization is bad for a system, as is insufficient optimization.)
Indeed, the Government should be there to optimize, to play the role of a well-balanced kernel, balancing all the competing needs to get the most out of the whole system without generating housekeeping overheads so great that they overwhelm the benefits of the optimization.
A problem doesn't mysteriously vanish because it's ignored. It obeys the same conservation laws as everything else in physics. It can persist, it can diffuse, but it won't go away. Unfortunately, it not only obeys the same conservation laws, it is an attractive force. Problems draw in other problems, creating larger problems.
If a problem is not solved, it will persist forever. A person does not persist forever, therefore no problem is truly personal in the long-term.
If a problem is not solved, it will cause collateral damage. Thus, even when it persists in an individual, it is still not a personal problem.
I don't give a damn how such problems are solved, but you've only two choices - solve them or suffer them. There is no other choice. And since the suffering will rapidly spread (much like any other disease), the suffering can't persist indefinitely, which means somebody will have to solve the problem eventually.
If you don't solve your own "personal problems", you are expecting your descendants to do it for you. So it's still an outsider solving them and it is still a consequence of you not taking responsibility for your own actions. Delaying the solution merely allows you to play-pretend that you aren't handing that control to outsiders. Doesn't change the fact that you're handing control to outsiders.
The difference in having one outsider fix the problem rather than another is not one of it being an outsider, obviously, as much as you might want to claim it is. Rather, the difference is that if an outsider cleans up the mess when you are there, you get to see what damage you did.
It's much harder to lie to yourself and others, when the evidence is held up in plain sight. If you weren't lying to yourself, then why so keen on outsiders fixing your crap after you're dead? What don't you want to see?
If the Government's job was not to protect the people from themselves, we wouldn't need a Government at all. We'd be able to exist quite happily without the overheads.
In the same way, if the job of an OS was not to protect applications from their own crappy memory management and scheduling, we'd only need cooperative multitasking and no memory restrictions. We'd also be happily using a direct descendant of Windows 2. Why waste memory and CPU power with all the checks and switches if you don't need them?
Chances are, you'd never accept an OS that was utterly cooperative, no matter how many times the app writers told you that their personal choices shouldn't affect you. How.... odd that your argument for freedom applies only to you, never to anyone else.
Inaction is an action. It is merely an action of zero scalar value. I believe Western mathematics has included zero in the number line for a while now.
Gasp! Actually, I hear Totalitarian Dictators everywhere also obey the second law of thermodynamics. Except in those areas where entropy is now infinite.
If you want absolute freedom, live on a desert island. If you want to live amongst other individuals, you are limited to having balanced freedom. I don't have to know what the balance point is, it is merely an immutable law of nature that there be one.
Since you have to have balanced freedom if you wish to be in a society, why not have a balance that both you and everyone else can live with?
I have no problem with you (or anyone else) buying large pizzas or anything else. Nor do I believe in defining what is good for you or in micromanaging.
What I do believe in is that the net amount of control in a closed society is fixed and that if you don't control yourself, you are implicitly giving that control to others. So if you don't want to be micromanaged, don't give control away. It's very simple.
What I also believe is that many (not all, but many) unhealthy behaviours (including eating disorders) are a consequence of control disorders and, in turn, have consequences on others - including, but not restricted to, expense and yet more control disorders.
Nobody is "perfect" and nobody knows what this "perfect" thing is anyway, but if you have a reasonable level of self-control, you will have a reasonable level of health, you will (within reasonable margins of error) maximize what you get out of life for what you put in, and you will maximize (also within reasonable margins of error) maximize the benefit to society you have to offer -- though how much of that benefit is ever seen is, itself, another choice.
Is a person gratuitously buying fatty foods a "bad" thing? No. Actually, the British diet (which is mostly fat) is far more nutritious than a lot of the "healthy" diets in the US because it's better-balanced and has far better ratios of healthy fats, healthy cholesterol, etc.
Ok, so is a person gratuitously buying a specifically unhealthy fatty food a bad thing? Not necessarily. If you've a healthy state of mind, you will tend to steer towards the food that your body needs, whether or not it is technically "unhealthy" according to any given standard. If your mind is unhealthy, you well tend to steer towards the food that will damage or destroy your body, whether or not it is technically "healthy" by any other standard.
When is a mind unhealthy? Hard to say, but one common symptom is grabbing inappropriate control from others, and rejecting appropriate control from oneself.
Thus, if you have appropriate control, the odds are you will eat what is right for you at that moment, no matter how it is labeled by others. In which case, the label is immaterial and restrictions become stupid and naive.
If you have inappropriate control, you will be destructive towards yourself and your family. I regard insanity less as the inability to tell right and wrong apart and more as the inability to act on whatever it is you do know. By this understanding, inappropriate control is insanity and I can see nothing wrong with outsiders stepping in and restricting the damage the insane can do.
What happens if nobody steps in? As I've said elsewhere, that's been tried. Historically, if nobody accepts control of their own lives, you get someone stepping in and accepting that control on their behalf. That is very very bad juju. I do not recommend it.
The problem is, in the US people take the attitude that they don't want anyone to step in when needed, but they ALSO don't want to accept any personal responsibility or any personal control. THAT is the reason why America keeps ending up with dodgy Government officials. It has nothing to do with whether Government is big or small.
(IMHO, ideally, Government would be so big that everyone had the power to make a difference. Small Government, to me, means too much power is being given to too few people. In Somalia, for example, absolute power is in the hands of a few dozen warlords. You can't get a smaller Government than that.)
How is saying that I want others to control themselves being a control freak? And who are these mysterious "they"? Ahhh, I get it. You're a looney.
Seriously, my post says nothing about me (or anyone else) controlling others. It says control - like momentum - cannot be created nor destroyed, only transferred. The sum total is a constant. If you have no desire to understand that this says nothing about how that total is distributed, that is your problem, not mine.
If doing nothing is what causes the totalitarian dictatorships in the first place, then you have mis-identified which is the cause and which is the effect.
I made no claims as to the merit of the effect, merely that it is the only effect that is tenable given the cause.
If you don't like that effect, then quit with the causing of it. I don't see the problem. Even Hitler could not have risen to power if his countrymen had not manufactured an environment in which dictatorship worked and democracy did not.
If individuals took it upon themselves to educate themselves and their children, ensure they and their children had a reasonable level of nutrition, and minimize malnutrition-related disease and decay, then nothing need be done.
I don't see that happening. What I see happening is resentment at the idea that what you eat affects not only you but everything you do and (by extension) everyone you interact with, the value of the work you do and the advancement of society. Most people consider these to be "somebody else's problem".
The reason for dictatorships is that if EVERYTHING is "somebody else's problem" for EVERYONE, then society will generate (by necessity) that someone who now has responsibility (and therefore power) over everything.
Dictatorship cannot be advocated for. It happens when apathy exceeds the capacity for society to function. It is a construct of society in an effort to eliminate that apathy, in much the same way that antigens are manufactured to fight disease. Unfortunately, dictatorship is a malformed antigen that consumes the body that hosts it. It is itself a disease, albeit genetic and of the immune response.
If you wish to avoid dictatorships, you must either work on maintaining a healthy social body AND/OR fix the immune system so that it does not destroy the host. I'd actually recommend both.
However, immune response diseases can be controlled. If the body dies utterly because no immune response happens at all, then you have ultimately failed, no matter how "free" your self-destruction may have been. On any scale, then, self-mutilation is better than self-destruction, but self-discipline would have been better than either.
My argument is not that self-mutilation is good, only that it's the best option left if you will not accept any other. Why not just accept other solutions and have done with it? Then there's no problem. History shows, though, that America will always choose self-mutilation over and above living better.
Sure. The solution, of course, is for people TO own their responsibility rather than to leave it for the Government to pick up. If all responsibility were appropriately owned, it cannot be re-owned by others and therefore cannot be misused by others.
It is clear, on examining Revelation, that it is a sanitized description of an attempt by a Great Old One to seize power and be foiled, ultimately to be banished into the Darkness. That they are denied of flight between the worlds shows a being of still greater power exists, for none else could deprive them of such powers.
The confinement of Cthulhu behind the Elder Sign is well-known to have happened on occasion, but which power on Earth could do such a thing? Not one of the beings of which we know has any desire to perform such a confinement. Indeed, did not Nyarlothotep urge the release of the Great Old Ones from a dream-prison?
SCO's lack of focus and energy, opting instead to drain both from its victims, is surely a hallmark of the evils that dwell beneath Wales, the Lloigor, for chaos creatures such as the Hounds of Tindalos or great Cthulhu himself are more energetic in their destruction.
From this, one must conclude that the Beast is a Great Old One who has allied himself with the Lloigor for the purpose of causing universal decay and entropy, whose crimes become so great that the larger forces of the Universe are not content with his imprisonment on Earth but confine him in all perpetuity.
It is no coincidence that Lloigor and Lawyer sound so much alike, for this is how they are operating, draining the lifeblood of the industry as they have drained the energy of so many.
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According to them, they aren't selling you a copy, only a copy of the license to watch it. Which you still have, whether you have the product to watch or not. They'll likely fix the issue and give out copies to those who can't view the movie, but they'll make it out to be a kindness. Which, in their eyes, it is. After all, you have a fully-working license, and it's the license you bought. Not their fault the freebie they threw in (the data) wasn't usable, and since it's a free gift, they aren't required to do anything.
I don't recall if anyone successfully sued Sony for selling disks with viruses on them, or any of the manufacturers who have sold disks that have actually killed disk drives. Even in the case of actual provable direct damage, I doubt consumers get so much as the time of day, let alone compensation for material goods and time wasted.
Mind you, as we're talking about Hollywood scripts, here, it's probably as well that "time wasted" isn't given too much weight.
Good. Then you can bring the truth of Megabrain to everyone. Seriously, the biggest strength of Open Source is that it is country-agnostic and affiliation-agnostic. Further, some things SHOULD be more international. The ISO fiasco demonstrates the perils of nationalist and corporatist protection. Obviously, you don't scale any more than Linus does, but surely that just means migrating from individual nations to power blocs where possible, still doing the same job but both increasing visibility AND increasing the target audience at the same time. You can't scale, but you CAN multicast.
NB: I will repeat that I am STILL saying that 100% of the guidelines and underlying rules and laws be applied. I am not suggesting evasion. What is required is what they see, and what they expect is what they get.
My point is that you can accomplish all of this in a way that doesn't cause you or the business harm, that avoiding following the rules is not only senseless but is also pointless. You can follow the rules AND get what you want, it's not one or the other.
I guess I have one other point: Those who believe that you cannot think when you are at work are fools. They are also the ones really responsible for failed businesses. Thinking should be mandatory at work, even if the results of that thinking involves finding ways to interpret the rules. Rules should always be obeyed, but in a manner that is intelligent and not blindly and incoherently.
No, you're only misleading them if you SAY it is a Windows PC.
If you are asked to bring in a computer so they can install stuff, and you bring it in and they install it, AND the end result is the end result that said IT staff want (and where they can verify that it is), THEN nobody has been misled and everyone can be happy.
The political needs are met, the actual LEGAL needs (which are valid) are also met, AND the needs of the user to have a computer that works are ALSO met. How is this a bad thing?
If the IT staff don't notice that it's a Linux PC, don't ask if it's running Windows, provide no means of informing them that it's Linux, and if they knew how to enable encryption would have enabled it in exactly the same way you have, then you're not liable for providing information.
If the IT staff can perform their work exactly as they would on any other PC, and after that work is complete, the results are what they want (an encrypted drive), their arses are covered.
Ultimately, if everyone from you, right up the chain to the top, have CYA, =and= there is no productivity hit =and= there is no political risk due to non-compliance, THEN there is no risk of liability.
Besides, it's no more "misleading" than all the corporate Linux installs that have taken place in server rooms globally (replacing defective Windows servers), where there is an "expectation" that those systems are running Windows but no actual formal requirement that they do so.
It is because people have done this that Linux is now actively supported by SGI, IBM and Oracle. It is because nobody really cares how the work is done provided it IS done AND is done in a way that confers no risk or liability to higher-ups that Linux is one of the most popular server OS' in existence.
The same is true in the desktop and laptop worlds. If your work requires Microsoft Exchange compatibility, Internet Exploder and the ability to read/write Microsoft Office documents, and also expects to see a Windows-like GUI, why the hell should you go out of your way to tell them it isn't actually Windows?
The devil/daemon/penguin is always in the details.
...I bet the encryption software is for Windows and MacOS only. Install Linux on a laptop, using a full disk encryption filesystem to be compliant. Install a copy of WINE and QVWM95 so that the IT staff see a Windows-like GUI that can run Windows software. Once they're done messing with the machine, you will still have Linux with all the capabilities of Linux and all the speed and reliability of Linux, with no risk of harm from the hospital software, and no risk of liability as (a) you let the software be installed, and (b) the machine is fully HIPPA-compliant at all points afterwards. Ok, it would be fully HIPPA-compliant before, too, but the hospital mandates the software, not the compliance.
This is not a suggestion for the purpose of evading their actual (and quite legitimate) aim of meeting regulatory requirements. Rather, it is a suggestion for independently meeting those same requirements, then letting them do what they need to do because of the way the policy is written.
But that means you'll have to load the PowerPuff kernel mod!
Sure, and after Z, they can use AA (Aardvaark), but where do they go from there?
"Left Boot" and "Right Boot" qualifies as two distinct boot detection?
In astronomy, time dilation even affects the data formats.
Even if these issues could be solved, the existing attitudes at high levels of authority are so perverted and degenerate that they're rarely capable of actually "fixing" anything without making it worse.
Re-read this bit, read the posts where I talk about balance, then think about the logic again. I don't think it useful to either of us for me to say more until you're sure about what you're replying to.
Frankly, I don't think the Government has any business getting into the protection racket. Most "piracy" in the 1700s was Government-sponsored in the name of defense, as was most terrorism in the 20th century.
Government's role, IMHO, is not to actually DO anything, but rather to facilitate the nation system to do as much as possible as effectively as possible. In much the same way, nobody runs Snort as a kernel thread, they run it in userspace. The only defense anyone does at the kernel level is firewalling.
Facilitating, IMHO, includes education, health care, knowledge storage/retrieval and the prevention of harm of one part of the system by another. Having the political leader also be the commander in chief means that there's absolutely no checks and balances on the abuse of that power. That's insanity and the cause of the current global crisis.
In the same way that thread pre-emption is a slow simulation of idealized parallel hardware, governmental pre-emption should create the simulation of an idealized society, even if that means things are slower than the ideal.
If Government could not pre-empt threads, then since much of society is serialized, you would get things being blocked. Priorities would never get handled. A debate on the State moustache shape could not be stopped to carry out an emergency evacuation in the event of a hurricane or other disaster.
No, we do not have the ability to freely associate. We never have had. Or did you think you could wander into the White House uninvited?
Actually, people ARE pre-programmed entities that are supposed to do a certain task. This is why you study for a specific, departmentalized degree rather than have a holistic education. I am remarkably specialized, but I'm infinitely closer to the theoretical Homo Universalis than 98% (or more) of people in the US.
Even if you look at it neurologically, the brain stops growing around the age of 18-22, and starts to die back. The insulation around nerves starts to degenerate shortly after, but this doesn't seriously impact brain performance until the age of around 40.
However, it is brain growth that determines what you can learn and how well you can adapt. If you have no significant brain growth, if new connections do not form at any significant rate, you can learn, but only very very slowly and with intense effort. (Adult brains do form new connections, but at something like 0.1% the rate of adolescent brains. They lose connections a lot faster than they gain them, too.)
So, yes, after you're 22, you're locked-in. You may be able to pick up a little more knowledge, but nothing like the same quantity. If you've not learned by that time a skill that requires intense precision (flint knapping, motor racing, etc) then you probably aren't capable of picking it up later. Exceptions exist, but they're rare.
Humans are nothing more than Turing Machines. Powerful, parallel, and protein-based, but Turing Machines nonetheless.
If Joe puts too many hamburgers in his mouth, it doesn't make his descendants get fat.
Actually, it does. (This is purely on the genetics level, I'm not even going to discuss the family system dynamics issue - you're more than welcome to read Bradshaw, Charles Whitfield, Scott Peck or any of the other experts on that side of things.)
But you're now defining two types of restriction of action - those which increase your freedom and those which decrease your freedom. Since freedom is an abstract concept, which you yourself define, you end up with nothing any different from anyone else, it's merely optimized for you personally, which means it won't be optimized for anyone else.
How is having you define your personal optimum as the norm "freer" than having the optimal balance point between individuality and society as the norm? In the end, it's still someone defining a point as the ideal centre and defining all things in relation to it.
However, your "absolute minimum laws required" is itself changing the laws so that I'm forced to live in a fashion that you find acceptable.
Which doesn't really solve anything.
Elsewhere, I've likened the Government to an OS kernel. An "absolute minimum kernel" in the purest sense possible would be DOS or OSKit. An "absolute minimum useful kernel" would be something like FreeRTOS or Adeos.
Chances are, you don't use any of the above at all or, if you do, only as a component of a much more complex system (eg: Linux over Adeos using RTAI).
It's a fair bet that you're willing to sacrifice a lot of convenience (for the app writers and even for yourself) for the flexibility of something that is actually far more than the absolute minimum, providing functionality you don't actually "need" the OS to provide, but which you benefit from to the point where you don't give a damn.
Same is probably true of the filesystem you're using. FAT is "absolute minimum", but it's also useless for most things. Ext2 is absolute minimum that's useful (and I use it extensively for partitions where speed is more important than reliability, such as for /tmp). However, my guess is you use something that's far heavier, does far more than the minimum, and sacrifices resources for convenience.
My bet is that similar arguments can be applied to everything else in your life, from your car to your TV to your cell phone to your digital camera to your choice of restaurant. Possibly even applies to how you decide where to apply to work.
I'm not saying you shouldn't make these choices, but rather that if the choices were actually any good, why are they only good for you and not for, say, the President?
It would be absurd to have the President have absolute freedom and power, so clearly it is NOT good for the President to be unconstrained to that degree. There is therefore some balance point where the Government has "enough" freedom and you have "enough" freedom. It's probably going to be balanced more towards the individual, but there will be an ideal point and it won't be at any extreme.
We're never going to find that ideal point, but we can find a "comfort zone" that must include that idea point, where all points in the "comfort zone" are acceptable to individuals and Governments alike and where any negative impact on society is minimal and very manageable.
Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass how big that "comfort zone" is defined, so long as it meets the needs of both individuals and the society they are a part of. That's the only constraint I put on any of this. It has to be fair to different levels of the system. If you can do that and meet your "minimum laws" requirement, that's fine with me, but the OS examples suggest that this isn't really what you would want if you had it, since you COULD have it elsewhere in your life and choose not to.
As for everyone wanting to decide, I have no problem with that. If everyone had adequate education, enabling reasoned discussion and debate, then having everyone involved would be quite useful. A distributed.net for solving the issues of political science. If everyone does not have adequate education, it's like distributed processing using buggy CPUs.
That is the paradox that Governments and political philosophers have tried to solve since time immemorial. The entire book "The Republic" by Plato ultimately reduces to how to get people to take responsibility.
Ultimately, Plato determined that the best you can do is educate people and hope that reason is sufficient. I'm not completely confident that reason is sufficient, but it seems to be by far the best tool that exists at this time.
If people were better enabled to use reason, then (in principle) they would be less likely to abuse responsibility, thus solving at least some of the problem.
Beyond that point, you have to bring out the heavy-hitters, laws that prohibit behaviour that is generally accepted as destructive to others, along with repercussions that reduce the chances of such behaviours persisting.
However, legislation and Government intervention should be a last resort, once all methods of getting people to behave maturely have failed, and should be as light as possible whilst doing the job. ("Doing the job" should reflect the needs of society to survive and prosper, within reason. Excessive optimization is bad for a system, as is insufficient optimization.)
Indeed, the Government should be there to optimize, to play the role of a well-balanced kernel, balancing all the competing needs to get the most out of the whole system without generating housekeeping overheads so great that they overwhelm the benefits of the optimization.
Because a stitch in time saves nine.
A problem doesn't mysteriously vanish because it's ignored. It obeys the same conservation laws as everything else in physics. It can persist, it can diffuse, but it won't go away. Unfortunately, it not only obeys the same conservation laws, it is an attractive force. Problems draw in other problems, creating larger problems.
If a problem is not solved, it will persist forever. A person does not persist forever, therefore no problem is truly personal in the long-term.
If a problem is not solved, it will cause collateral damage. Thus, even when it persists in an individual, it is still not a personal problem.
I don't give a damn how such problems are solved, but you've only two choices - solve them or suffer them. There is no other choice. And since the suffering will rapidly spread (much like any other disease), the suffering can't persist indefinitely, which means somebody will have to solve the problem eventually.
If you don't solve your own "personal problems", you are expecting your descendants to do it for you. So it's still an outsider solving them and it is still a consequence of you not taking responsibility for your own actions. Delaying the solution merely allows you to play-pretend that you aren't handing that control to outsiders. Doesn't change the fact that you're handing control to outsiders.
The difference in having one outsider fix the problem rather than another is not one of it being an outsider, obviously, as much as you might want to claim it is. Rather, the difference is that if an outsider cleans up the mess when you are there, you get to see what damage you did.
It's much harder to lie to yourself and others, when the evidence is held up in plain sight. If you weren't lying to yourself, then why so keen on outsiders fixing your crap after you're dead? What don't you want to see?
If the Government's job was not to protect the people from themselves, we wouldn't need a Government at all. We'd be able to exist quite happily without the overheads.
In the same way, if the job of an OS was not to protect applications from their own crappy memory management and scheduling, we'd only need cooperative multitasking and no memory restrictions. We'd also be happily using a direct descendant of Windows 2. Why waste memory and CPU power with all the checks and switches if you don't need them?
Chances are, you'd never accept an OS that was utterly cooperative, no matter how many times the app writers told you that their personal choices shouldn't affect you. How.... odd that your argument for freedom applies only to you, never to anyone else.
Inaction is an action. It is merely an action of zero scalar value. I believe Western mathematics has included zero in the number line for a while now.
Gasp! Actually, I hear Totalitarian Dictators everywhere also obey the second law of thermodynamics. Except in those areas where entropy is now infinite.
If you want absolute freedom, live on a desert island. If you want to live amongst other individuals, you are limited to having balanced freedom. I don't have to know what the balance point is, it is merely an immutable law of nature that there be one.
Since you have to have balanced freedom if you wish to be in a society, why not have a balance that both you and everyone else can live with?
I have no problem with you (or anyone else) buying large pizzas or anything else. Nor do I believe in defining what is good for you or in micromanaging.
What I do believe in is that the net amount of control in a closed society is fixed and that if you don't control yourself, you are implicitly giving that control to others. So if you don't want to be micromanaged, don't give control away. It's very simple.
What I also believe is that many (not all, but many) unhealthy behaviours (including eating disorders) are a consequence of control disorders and, in turn, have consequences on others - including, but not restricted to, expense and yet more control disorders.
Nobody is "perfect" and nobody knows what this "perfect" thing is anyway, but if you have a reasonable level of self-control, you will have a reasonable level of health, you will (within reasonable margins of error) maximize what you get out of life for what you put in, and you will maximize (also within reasonable margins of error) maximize the benefit to society you have to offer -- though how much of that benefit is ever seen is, itself, another choice.
Is a person gratuitously buying fatty foods a "bad" thing? No. Actually, the British diet (which is mostly fat) is far more nutritious than a lot of the "healthy" diets in the US because it's better-balanced and has far better ratios of healthy fats, healthy cholesterol, etc.
Ok, so is a person gratuitously buying a specifically unhealthy fatty food a bad thing? Not necessarily. If you've a healthy state of mind, you will tend to steer towards the food that your body needs, whether or not it is technically "unhealthy" according to any given standard. If your mind is unhealthy, you well tend to steer towards the food that will damage or destroy your body, whether or not it is technically "healthy" by any other standard.
When is a mind unhealthy? Hard to say, but one common symptom is grabbing inappropriate control from others, and rejecting appropriate control from oneself.
Thus, if you have appropriate control, the odds are you will eat what is right for you at that moment, no matter how it is labeled by others. In which case, the label is immaterial and restrictions become stupid and naive.
If you have inappropriate control, you will be destructive towards yourself and your family. I regard insanity less as the inability to tell right and wrong apart and more as the inability to act on whatever it is you do know. By this understanding, inappropriate control is insanity and I can see nothing wrong with outsiders stepping in and restricting the damage the insane can do.
What happens if nobody steps in? As I've said elsewhere, that's been tried. Historically, if nobody accepts control of their own lives, you get someone stepping in and accepting that control on their behalf. That is very very bad juju. I do not recommend it.
The problem is, in the US people take the attitude that they don't want anyone to step in when needed, but they ALSO don't want to accept any personal responsibility or any personal control. THAT is the reason why America keeps ending up with dodgy Government officials. It has nothing to do with whether Government is big or small.
(IMHO, ideally, Government would be so big that everyone had the power to make a difference. Small Government, to me, means too much power is being given to too few people. In Somalia, for example, absolute power is in the hands of a few dozen warlords. You can't get a smaller Government than that.)
How is saying that I want others to control themselves being a control freak? And who are these mysterious "they"? Ahhh, I get it. You're a looney.
Seriously, my post says nothing about me (or anyone else) controlling others. It says control - like momentum - cannot be created nor destroyed, only transferred. The sum total is a constant. If you have no desire to understand that this says nothing about how that total is distributed, that is your problem, not mine.
If doing nothing is what causes the totalitarian dictatorships in the first place, then you have mis-identified which is the cause and which is the effect.
I made no claims as to the merit of the effect, merely that it is the only effect that is tenable given the cause.
If you don't like that effect, then quit with the causing of it. I don't see the problem. Even Hitler could not have risen to power if his countrymen had not manufactured an environment in which dictatorship worked and democracy did not.
If individuals took it upon themselves to educate themselves and their children, ensure they and their children had a reasonable level of nutrition, and minimize malnutrition-related disease and decay, then nothing need be done.
I don't see that happening. What I see happening is resentment at the idea that what you eat affects not only you but everything you do and (by extension) everyone you interact with, the value of the work you do and the advancement of society. Most people consider these to be "somebody else's problem".
The reason for dictatorships is that if EVERYTHING is "somebody else's problem" for EVERYONE, then society will generate (by necessity) that someone who now has responsibility (and therefore power) over everything.
Dictatorship cannot be advocated for. It happens when apathy exceeds the capacity for society to function. It is a construct of society in an effort to eliminate that apathy, in much the same way that antigens are manufactured to fight disease. Unfortunately, dictatorship is a malformed antigen that consumes the body that hosts it. It is itself a disease, albeit genetic and of the immune response.
If you wish to avoid dictatorships, you must either work on maintaining a healthy social body AND/OR fix the immune system so that it does not destroy the host. I'd actually recommend both.
However, immune response diseases can be controlled. If the body dies utterly because no immune response happens at all, then you have ultimately failed, no matter how "free" your self-destruction may have been. On any scale, then, self-mutilation is better than self-destruction, but self-discipline would have been better than either.
My argument is not that self-mutilation is good, only that it's the best option left if you will not accept any other. Why not just accept other solutions and have done with it? Then there's no problem. History shows, though, that America will always choose self-mutilation over and above living better.
Sure. The solution, of course, is for people TO own their responsibility rather than to leave it for the Government to pick up. If all responsibility were appropriately owned, it cannot be re-owned by others and therefore cannot be misused by others.
It is clear, on examining Revelation, that it is a sanitized description of an attempt by a Great Old One to seize power and be foiled, ultimately to be banished into the Darkness. That they are denied of flight between the worlds shows a being of still greater power exists, for none else could deprive them of such powers.
The confinement of Cthulhu behind the Elder Sign is well-known to have happened on occasion, but which power on Earth could do such a thing? Not one of the beings of which we know has any desire to perform such a confinement. Indeed, did not Nyarlothotep urge the release of the Great Old Ones from a dream-prison?
SCO's lack of focus and energy, opting instead to drain both from its victims, is surely a hallmark of the evils that dwell beneath Wales, the Lloigor, for chaos creatures such as the Hounds of Tindalos or great Cthulhu himself are more energetic in their destruction.
From this, one must conclude that the Beast is a Great Old One who has allied himself with the Lloigor for the purpose of causing universal decay and entropy, whose crimes become so great that the larger forces of the Universe are not content with his imprisonment on Earth but confine him in all perpetuity.
It is no coincidence that Lloigor and Lawyer sound so much alike, for this is how they are operating, draining the lifeblood of the industry as they have drained the energy of so many.
Timeline of actual SCO events