But don't kid yourself that it's not "evil" to use
advertising dollars to influence editorial content.
Nonsense. I do not know your political views, so I cannot give a more concrete example, but do you buy products from companies which support causes you disagree with? It's not evil to refrain from support someone with whom one disagrees; it's intelligent. It's called taking one's business elsewhere, much as we do with Linux. It may not be the greatest desktop OS, but It's Not Windows.
Voting with one's dollars is an intelligent and a useful thing. Why should a company be forced to support a competitor (in this case, a competitor in the surprising-news market)? Apple have no duty to support any web site at all.
The hostile KDE reaction to this completely baffled me. Had they not read the article? Don't they see, RMS has a point where he saw
legal problems with their licenses? Don't they see the article said: 'Let's put that behind us now'? Have they lost all reason?
It's quite simple really. They--rightly or wrongly--never recognised Stallman as having a valid complaint. Thus his point is (in their view) invalid and his forgiveness unneeded at best and pompous at worst.
I hereby forgive the Aleuts for stealing my chocolate chip cookies, and extend to you personnally my forgiveness for burning my bushes.
Only prob. is, if you and the Aleuts have never done those things, my forgiveness is a bit presumptuous and silly. Likewise, if one does not accept Stallman's premises--among which is that dynamic linking is creating a derivative work; beware this as it could bite us--then one need not accept his conclusions.
My own take on it is that while I love the GPL--I release my work under it where I can--I do not believe that it reaches as far as the FSF thinks. If we let it do that then we must let those godawful EULAs reach as far as they like too. Nein dankeschön.
Consumers being charged a *minimum*
price per good would be more realistic. Expecting this price to be >= the present price would be even more realistic.
Were there a single company selling goods, this would be true. But when there are many (not a few--oligopolies have problems similar to monopolies), the effect of competition means that each customer can find prices within the range he is willing to pay and each seller can find prices within the range he is willing to pay. No, you'll never get the minimum you wish to pay because the minimum is $0.00! But you will prob. not have to pay the maximum either.
In a traditional haggling-based market the effect is even more pronounced. Fixed prices make the market much less elastic. The magic words `I can get this for less at Joe's' can work wonders.
The reason that this is needed is that when an employee sends an email, he sends it not as himself but as a representative of his company. In fact, some companies (I believe certain ones dealing with stocks & finances) have a legal responsibility to track and audit all communications. There are very good reasons for much of this.
Third-party decryption keys are a good thing; however, they should never have been implemented as they were, in a fashion which lead to the ability for anyone to subvert a key and read mail encrypted for it. Fortunately, it appears that this problem has been fixed.
When sending email on company time to company contacts regarding company business, one has no right to expect privacy. Indeed, one has a duty to make one's communications visible--one's superiors have a definite right to audit one's performance and business dealings. It's no different from calling a customer after the salesman has left and conducting a satisfaction survey.
Linux has the advantage of being largely compatible with Windows--they speak the same language (TCP/IP) and can do many of the same things. Don't forget that Linux os Just Another Unix. I enjoy using it--I am posting from my Linux box and primary machine--but let us remember that Linux is not the best of the Unices.
Esperanto is an entirely new language, vaguely related to the Romance languages. It does not have an established group of people ready & able to take advantage of it. And let's not forget that languages are a tad more important to us than computing platforms.'
I am fairly certain that Esperanto will never amount to much. It's possible that it will, but it's not bloody likely.
Let me support this. Nothing rude, not at all. Just be polite, and enquire after the nature of the patentability of something which, on the face of it, is predated by approx. 1 hillion jillion grillion examples of prior art. Perhaps he actually had a unique idea. Doubtful, but possible.
Nothing like slashdotting a mailbox. Just like protesters sending nasty things to senators and congressmen. We could even write scripts to do this sort of thing; go to www.slashdot.com/protest, fill out thy name and hit `Complain where complaints are needed.' Nothing like a constant daily mailbombing to deny service legitimately. 'Course anyone intelligent would simply blacklist the server sending the mail. But how intelligent are most of these people?
The problem is that there is no real freedom of contract in this case. Due to the fact that copyright has been unconscionably extended, it is a monopoly situation, and thus breaks a free market. By the time the geological epoch of a copyright expires, a book is no longer very useful, save as an historical curiosity. Were copyrights 7 or 14 years, this would not be nearly as big a deal. Sure, the author (or, more likely, his publisher) could extort huge sums for awhile, but at the end of the time period he'd have to reform or be sunk. Books are not currently commodities for which we may freely negotiate. This must be changed.
A free market requires many things. A monopoly or other market failure can occur when any of these conditions no longer holds. When we grant a monopoly (as with copyright), we do so in hopes of some positive return. In this case, the negative outweighs the positive. Copyright must therefore be shortened accordingly.
The fundamental problem with Esperanto as a universal language is that I am more likely to meet a Norwegian in Mexico than an Esperanto-speaker. It is thus a useless language, in that I am rather unlikely to actually use it, as opposed to toy with it. This is not a bad thing; I write my poetry in Tengwar, partly to keep anyone from reading it (it's pretty awful and doesn't scan at all well), partly because it's pretty and partly for fun. There is nothing wrong with a toy language. And perhaps tomorrow everyone will be speaking Esperanto, and it will be useful. But not today.
The usefulness of a lingua franca is a function of two factors. The first factor is how much that language has spread. Mandarin loses on this point; it is concentrated extremely heavily in one region, and slightly dispersed elsewhere. On a map it would be one giant blotch with little splats everywhere else. The second factor is the number of speakers. Esperanto loses here; it is widely dispersed, but too widely dispersed. On a map it would be an invisible layer.
An ideal lingua franca should be both wide-spread and common. On a map it would look like a uniform greyness. But there's one more thing to consider: this map is a weighted map. The language of the plebians is not as important (in this context) as the language of the patricians. So we must weight this map by the importance of the individual speaker. Remarkably, English in this era, like French in another, Imperial Chinese in another, Latin in another and Greek in yet another, is in this position at the moment. The educated classes of the world speak it. In fact, one could argue that to be an educated non-native speaker of English is to have learned it.
The fact is that the majority of the speakers of Chinese and Hindi are lower-class on the global scale. The same holds, to a somewhat lesser extent, for Spanish. The cultured classes will not give up their lingua franca for a new one spoken by the poor. And they will definitely not trade it for one spoken by no-one.
English is the language of the global culture. It is the language of science. It is the language of art. It is the language of diplomacy (well, French still persists a tad, as Latin does in law). It is even displacing native tongues; I work with two native Indians, both who have spent almost their entire lives in India. They speak little more than pidgin Hindi, but near-perfect English.
Of course, English will one day go the way of every other language. Many learn French still. Latin is studied by another bunch--generally a bit weird (I say this having taken years of it; anyone who has taken Latin can understand my meaning, I think--we're a strange fraternity). Greek is barely known nowadays, outside church, archaeological and linguistic circles (and I say this having gone to Greek Orthodox church most all of my life). English too will fade. Some day it will be a language of study, then of curiosity. And, I imagine, one day it will be forgotten. But that day is far off, and is not now.
Esperanto has some neat features. But it will IMHO never be a common tongue.
It may not be a good idea, but they will end up replacing all those heavyweight, stable systems with worse but snazzier ones. You should listen to old SWOs[1] go on about the old Mark 5 gun turret. Beautiful piece of work, did an excellent job and could be worked manually by sailors on handcranks if all else failed. The newer one is supposed to be somewhat less useful.
[1]Surface Warfare Officer, i.e. the most numerous branch of Naval officers
I have a brother in the Naval Academy, and many friends and relatives in the Navy and the Marines. All I can say that if any of them should die due to some stupid Windows insecurity or instability, a lot of heads are going to be on the block, starting with the company who made the bid[1], the OS team and Bill Gates.
[1] The reason that the Navy used NT was that federal law states that they must go with the lowest bidder. They had specified POSIX-compliant, because they wanted a Unix system. Well, NT is technically POSIX-compliant, so some !^#*$ company put in the low bid with NT as the underlying OS. If this ever causes any problem in battle, I'd like to see every single one of them shot. What sort of inept moron would put NT on a piece of vital equipment?
I think that you may perhaps have missed the point of Brave New World. The idea--as I understand it, both from the book itself and from Huxley's subsequent collection of essays--was that everyone in the happy society was living a second-rate life. The nightmare was that it was really and truly inescapable. At least in 1984 one could theoretically hope to break free. But no-one had any incentive to break out of the mediocre horror that was the brave new world.
The relevance to technology issues is that Huxley warned us that if the vast majority are content then anything is justifiable. In other words, if the majority are satisfied that it is fair to prevent us from playing DVDs we own, or that we should not be allowed to reverse engineer (engineering is good, so reverse engineering must be bad, like hacking!), or that we should not own but lease our software, then it will happen. The majority rules, but it ain't necessarily right.
What do you mean by menus being in the wrong places? Wrong as in not where a Windows user would expect them or wrong from a UI point of view? The former may not be wrong at all, whereas the latter is awful.
My own perspective is that GNOME is a snail on my 'putrer, but KDE is a glacier. I use fvwm2 and am ecstatic with it; all the power this boy needs.
The statistic I keep hearing is that gun owners are 40+ times more likely to shoot yourself or a family member by accident than shoot an
intruder.
I've heard that stat as well. Don't know if I believe it. If it is true, it is likely because one's odds of being attacked are so low that the odds of a mishap are greater. OTOH, a large number of well-conducted studies have shwn that when attacked attempting to use a gun is your best defense, followed by non-resistance, followed by every other form of resistance.
om reading this thread, I get the impression that Americans can shoot anyone who breaks into their home, at least in some states. Is
this correct? Last year, whilst lashed I walked into the wrong house. If this was in the USA, could I have been shot?
It's not impossible. The shooter would have to have given you fair warning--one cannot, in most states at least, simply shoot someone in the back. He would have had to have reason to believe that you were attacking him (were you significantly drunk, this would have been much easier to demonstrate). And he would almost definitely go to trial after the shooting in order to defend his actions. If he was judged wrong in his actions, he could be founf guilty of as high an offense as second-degree murder.
The lesson? Don't go into people's houses:-) I've been plenty drunk in the past, but I've managed not to do that sort of thing. Going to school in Texas prob. helped--we don't take kindly to burglars and thieves down there.
In the US we have all sorts of laws which do exactly that. It's one of the reasons that we always have a large number of empty handicapped spots in front of stores--I believe that reasoning is that a handicapped convention may decide to descend upon the local drycleaner's any day now;-P
Obv. the handicapped need access. But if a private business does not serve them, they can just go to the next guy, who will. The first business loses money and the second makes money. What's unfair about that?
Actually, speed limits are set by the `community'; that is, by the elected representatives of the teeming masses. Said representatives then set low limits in order to make money to pay for the massive programmes the teeming masses want so badly. We're voting ourselves bread and circuses, my friends; somebody has to foot the bill.
If an employer discriminates unjustly then he hurts his competitiveness in the market. He will no longer have the best employees and the best customers. So he will suffer for his sins. If someone would rather not hire me due to my skin colour, sex or religion then that is his business. I don't want to work with him.
And I have been discriminated against and lost opportunities because of my sex and colour. My anger regarding those is due to the fact that they were publicly funded. Private organisations can be as benightedly stupid as they wish to be; public institutions should be scrupulously fair.
The argument against Germany is a libertarian argument, not an authoritarian one. The democrat would allow Hitler his way; the majority supported him (actually, they did not, but that's another subject). The libertarian points out the evil bastard's nasty way of depriving people of such liberties as life and limb.
My secular obligation to my fellow man is to keep him free, to preserve his free well. It is not to buckle his seatbelt and tuck him in at night. As a Christian, my religious duty is to help him out if he asks for assistance and to give him such advice as will be effective (i.e. not advice which will turn him away from the right path). At no point do I force him to do what I believe is right.
Good point. Indeed, libertarianism could be said to be the only philosophy which does not expect a utopia, and does nto expect members of a libertarian society to be perfect. Man is a nasty critter; he generally does as much harm as he can get away with in order to improve his own lot. A libertarian realises this and tries to ensure no man, not an individual, a majority or a ruling elite, can do very much harm to others. It's a difficult task. But it has a greater chance of succeeding than one which allows the mob to give itself more of whatever it wants.
Actually, I don't care about the deterrent effect of punishment. If that were the important thing, we could condemn innocent men whom the populace were convinced were gulty. What I care about is justice. It is just an right to murder a murderer; that is why we have execution. It is just and right to imprison a thief and force him to return the stolen goods. It is just and right to make someone pay for breaking a window. It is neither just nor right to make a man pay a day or two's wages for going 80 on an empty highway.
Why trample on someone if he has done naught wrong? The fellow going at 120 mph is innocent of any natural crime. Only after he kills the family is he guilty of a crime. Thus I say we prosecute him to the fullest extent. Execute him; he made a decision and screwed up, thereby murdering others. C'est la vie.
What gave a majority of the mob (the demos) the right to confiscate 40% of my income? I'm willing to pay taxes. I'm unwilling to pay unjust taxes at unjust rates.
Most people don't vote for lower taxes because they want to line their own pockets. Big business and sports teams want their tax breaks (which must be made up from other sources); the aged want their Social Security & Medicare; government employees want to keep their jobs; public school teachers want to stay employes. Bread and circuses. This demonstrates my point about government power. When an entity or small affiliated group of entities control over one half of the resources of a nation they have an incredible amount of power to influence the economy. This is turn works out to an amazing influence on events.
The revolutionary war was fought because Americans wanted autonomy...
Nonsense. We had autonomy. We were allowed self-rule to an unprecedented extent. But we balked at paying for the war which saved us from the French & Indian menace. We were acting like selfish children. Not that the Brits helped much. It amazes me how a people so brilliant can be so incredibly incompetent at times.
The taxes were the reason and the basis for everything else. Our civil rights were violated due to civil unrest caused by taxation to pay for the recent war. `No taxation without representation!' was our cry (nevermind that we were represented). In large part it was due to the selfish New Englanders of that day who--like their Puritan ancestors and carpetbagger descendants--couldn't stand the thought of losing any of their precious money.
The point is that we disagree on what `necessary governmental action' is. Some people seem to think that it is necessary to teach schoolchildren Baptist prayers (I'm a devout Christian, but I don't want my children being taught someone else's method of prayer). Others think it necessary `for people's own good' to make them wear seatbelts in cars and helmets on motorcycles. Others like to disarm people in order to cut down violent crime (doesn't work, but they think it will).
The libertarian point of view is that if one is not harming another, one should be free to act as one will. Demonstrate harm, and then we can talk. Pollution is harming others. Murder is harming others. Bearing a weapon or riding a bike with naught but a baseball cap harm no-one.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. I do not know your political views, so I cannot give a more concrete example, but do you buy products from companies which support causes you disagree with? It's not evil to refrain from support someone with whom one disagrees; it's intelligent. It's called taking one's business elsewhere, much as we do with Linux. It may not be the greatest desktop OS, but It's Not Windows.
Voting with one's dollars is an intelligent and a useful thing. Why should a company be forced to support a competitor (in this case, a competitor in the surprising-news market)? Apple have no duty to support any web site at all.
It's quite simple really. They--rightly or wrongly--never recognised Stallman as having a valid complaint. Thus his point is (in their view) invalid and his forgiveness unneeded at best and pompous at worst.
I hereby forgive the Aleuts for stealing my chocolate chip cookies, and extend to you personnally my forgiveness for burning my bushes.
Only prob. is, if you and the Aleuts have never done those things, my forgiveness is a bit presumptuous and silly. Likewise, if one does not accept Stallman's premises--among which is that dynamic linking is creating a derivative work; beware this as it could bite us--then one need not accept his conclusions.
My own take on it is that while I love the GPL--I release my work under it where I can--I do not believe that it reaches as far as the FSF thinks. If we let it do that then we must let those godawful EULAs reach as far as they like too. Nein dankeschön.
Were there a single company selling goods, this would be true. But when there are many (not a few--oligopolies have problems similar to monopolies), the effect of competition means that each customer can find prices within the range he is willing to pay and each seller can find prices within the range he is willing to pay. No, you'll never get the minimum you wish to pay because the minimum is $0.00! But you will prob. not have to pay the maximum either.
In a traditional haggling-based market the effect is even more pronounced. Fixed prices make the market much less elastic. The magic words `I can get this for less at Joe's' can work wonders.
No, where I come from we shoot people like that. It has a wonderful effect on the intelligence of our discourse... ;-)
Third-party decryption keys are a good thing; however, they should never have been implemented as they were, in a fashion which lead to the ability for anyone to subvert a key and read mail encrypted for it. Fortunately, it appears that this problem has been fixed.
When sending email on company time to company contacts regarding company business, one has no right to expect privacy. Indeed, one has a duty to make one's communications visible--one's superiors have a definite right to audit one's performance and business dealings. It's no different from calling a customer after the salesman has left and conducting a satisfaction survey.
Esperanto is an entirely new language, vaguely related to the Romance languages. It does not have an established group of people ready & able to take advantage of it. And let's not forget that languages are a tad more important to us than computing platforms.'
I am fairly certain that Esperanto will never amount to much. It's possible that it will, but it's not bloody likely.
Nothing like slashdotting a mailbox. Just like protesters sending nasty things to senators and congressmen. We could even write scripts to do this sort of thing; go to www.slashdot.com/protest, fill out thy name and hit `Complain where complaints are needed.' Nothing like a constant daily mailbombing to deny service legitimately. 'Course anyone intelligent would simply blacklist the server sending the mail. But how intelligent are most of these people?
But be polite.
A free market requires many things. A monopoly or other market failure can occur when any of these conditions no longer holds. When we grant a monopoly (as with copyright), we do so in hopes of some positive return. In this case, the negative outweighs the positive. Copyright must therefore be shortened accordingly.
The usefulness of a lingua franca is a function of two factors. The first factor is how much that language has spread. Mandarin loses on this point; it is concentrated extremely heavily in one region, and slightly dispersed elsewhere. On a map it would be one giant blotch with little splats everywhere else. The second factor is the number of speakers. Esperanto loses here; it is widely dispersed, but too widely dispersed. On a map it would be an invisible layer.
An ideal lingua franca should be both wide-spread and common. On a map it would look like a uniform greyness. But there's one more thing to consider: this map is a weighted map. The language of the plebians is not as important (in this context) as the language of the patricians. So we must weight this map by the importance of the individual speaker. Remarkably, English in this era, like French in another, Imperial Chinese in another, Latin in another and Greek in yet another, is in this position at the moment. The educated classes of the world speak it. In fact, one could argue that to be an educated non-native speaker of English is to have learned it.
The fact is that the majority of the speakers of Chinese and Hindi are lower-class on the global scale. The same holds, to a somewhat lesser extent, for Spanish. The cultured classes will not give up their lingua franca for a new one spoken by the poor. And they will definitely not trade it for one spoken by no-one.
English is the language of the global culture. It is the language of science. It is the language of art. It is the language of diplomacy (well, French still persists a tad, as Latin does in law). It is even displacing native tongues; I work with two native Indians, both who have spent almost their entire lives in India. They speak little more than pidgin Hindi, but near-perfect English.
Of course, English will one day go the way of every other language. Many learn French still. Latin is studied by another bunch--generally a bit weird (I say this having taken years of it; anyone who has taken Latin can understand my meaning, I think--we're a strange fraternity). Greek is barely known nowadays, outside church, archaeological and linguistic circles (and I say this having gone to Greek Orthodox church most all of my life). English too will fade. Some day it will be a language of study, then of curiosity. And, I imagine, one day it will be forgotten. But that day is far off, and is not now.
Esperanto has some neat features. But it will IMHO never be a common tongue.
[1]Surface Warfare Officer, i.e. the most numerous branch of Naval officers
[1] The reason that the Navy used NT was that federal law states that they must go with the lowest bidder. They had specified POSIX-compliant, because they wanted a Unix system. Well, NT is technically POSIX-compliant, so some !^#*$ company put in the low bid with NT as the underlying OS. If this ever causes any problem in battle, I'd like to see every single one of them shot. What sort of inept moron would put NT on a piece of vital equipment?
Hell, we don't even allow NT in our DMZ...
The relevance to technology issues is that Huxley warned us that if the vast majority are content then anything is justifiable. In other words, if the majority are satisfied that it is fair to prevent us from playing DVDs we own, or that we should not be allowed to reverse engineer (engineering is good, so reverse engineering must be bad, like hacking!), or that we should not own but lease our software, then it will happen. The majority rules, but it ain't necessarily right.
What do you mean by menus being in the wrong places? Wrong as in not where a Windows user would expect them or wrong from a UI point of view? The former may not be wrong at all, whereas the latter is awful.
My own perspective is that GNOME is a snail on my 'putrer, but KDE is a glacier. I use fvwm2 and am ecstatic with it; all the power this boy needs.
The statistic I keep hearing is that gun owners are 40+ times more likely to shoot yourself or a family member by accident than shoot an intruder.
I've heard that stat as well. Don't know if I believe it. If it is true, it is likely because one's odds of being attacked are so low that the odds of a mishap are greater. OTOH, a large number of well-conducted studies have shwn that when attacked attempting to use a gun is your best defense, followed by non-resistance, followed by every other form of resistance.
om reading this thread, I get the impression that Americans can shoot anyone who breaks into their home, at least in some states. Is this correct? Last year, whilst lashed I walked into the wrong house. If this was in the USA, could I have been shot?
It's not impossible. The shooter would have to have given you fair warning--one cannot, in most states at least, simply shoot someone in the back. He would have had to have reason to believe that you were attacking him (were you significantly drunk, this would have been much easier to demonstrate). And he would almost definitely go to trial after the shooting in order to defend his actions. If he was judged wrong in his actions, he could be founf guilty of as high an offense as second-degree murder.
The lesson? Don't go into people's houses:-) I've been plenty drunk in the past, but I've managed not to do that sort of thing. Going to school in Texas prob. helped--we don't take kindly to burglars and thieves down there.
Amateurs (true amateurs, who pay with their own money and have no sponsors) do it for the love of their sport. Professional athletes do it for money.
Obv. the handicapped need access. But if a private business does not serve them, they can just go to the next guy, who will. The first business loses money and the second makes money. What's unfair about that?
Actually, speed limits are set by the `community'; that is, by the elected representatives of the teeming masses. Said representatives then set low limits in order to make money to pay for the massive programmes the teeming masses want so badly. We're voting ourselves bread and circuses, my friends; somebody has to foot the bill.
And I have been discriminated against and lost opportunities because of my sex and colour. My anger regarding those is due to the fact that they were publicly funded. Private organisations can be as benightedly stupid as they wish to be; public institutions should be scrupulously fair.
The argument against Germany is a libertarian argument, not an authoritarian one. The democrat would allow Hitler his way; the majority supported him (actually, they did not, but that's another subject). The libertarian points out the evil bastard's nasty way of depriving people of such liberties as life and limb.
My secular obligation to my fellow man is to keep him free, to preserve his free well. It is not to buckle his seatbelt and tuck him in at night. As a Christian, my religious duty is to help him out if he asks for assistance and to give him such advice as will be effective (i.e. not advice which will turn him away from the right path). At no point do I force him to do what I believe is right.
Good point. Indeed, libertarianism could be said to be the only philosophy which does not expect a utopia, and does nto expect members of a libertarian society to be perfect. Man is a nasty critter; he generally does as much harm as he can get away with in order to improve his own lot. A libertarian realises this and tries to ensure no man, not an individual, a majority or a ruling elite, can do very much harm to others. It's a difficult task. But it has a greater chance of succeeding than one which allows the mob to give itself more of whatever it wants.
Good question. The answer is, not much. But it is not so much a bias against legislation as a bias for freedom. That's the key point.
Actually, I don't care about the deterrent effect of punishment. If that were the important thing, we could condemn innocent men whom the populace were convinced were gulty. What I care about is justice. It is just an right to murder a murderer; that is why we have execution. It is just and right to imprison a thief and force him to return the stolen goods. It is just and right to make someone pay for breaking a window. It is neither just nor right to make a man pay a day or two's wages for going 80 on an empty highway.
Why trample on someone if he has done naught wrong? The fellow going at 120 mph is innocent of any natural crime. Only after he kills the family is he guilty of a crime. Thus I say we prosecute him to the fullest extent. Execute him; he made a decision and screwed up, thereby murdering others. C'est la vie.
The government is mandated by the people.
What gave a majority of the mob (the demos) the right to confiscate 40% of my income? I'm willing to pay taxes. I'm unwilling to pay unjust taxes at unjust rates.
Most people don't vote for lower taxes because they want to line their own pockets. Big business and sports teams want their tax breaks (which must be made up from other sources); the aged want their Social Security & Medicare; government employees want to keep their jobs; public school teachers want to stay employes. Bread and circuses. This demonstrates my point about government power. When an entity or small affiliated group of entities control over one half of the resources of a nation they have an incredible amount of power to influence the economy. This is turn works out to an amazing influence on events.
The revolutionary war was fought because Americans wanted autonomy...
Nonsense. We had autonomy. We were allowed self-rule to an unprecedented extent. But we balked at paying for the war which saved us from the French & Indian menace. We were acting like selfish children. Not that the Brits helped much. It amazes me how a people so brilliant can be so incredibly incompetent at times.
The taxes were the reason and the basis for everything else. Our civil rights were violated due to civil unrest caused by taxation to pay for the recent war. `No taxation without representation!' was our cry (nevermind that we were represented). In large part it was due to the selfish New Englanders of that day who--like their Puritan ancestors and carpetbagger descendants--couldn't stand the thought of losing any of their precious money.
The point is that we disagree on what `necessary governmental action' is. Some people seem to think that it is necessary to teach schoolchildren Baptist prayers (I'm a devout Christian, but I don't want my children being taught someone else's method of prayer). Others think it necessary `for people's own good' to make them wear seatbelts in cars and helmets on motorcycles. Others like to disarm people in order to cut down violent crime (doesn't work, but they think it will).
The libertarian point of view is that if one is not harming another, one should be free to act as one will. Demonstrate harm, and then we can talk. Pollution is harming others. Murder is harming others. Bearing a weapon or riding a bike with naught but a baseball cap harm no-one.