Sure, but once you're there, you cannot legally get a job.
You will be able to if your skills are in demand.
Free movement of people is not the same as free movement of their labor.
It's a fairly significant part of it, however. Until relatively recently, for most people, the biggest difficulty was getting there. You can't have "free movement of labour" without first having free movement of people.
I think the problem is that nobody has seen truly free movement of labor for centuries.
Say what ? There's never been a time in history when the workforce was more mobile than it is today. You can fly to the other side of the world in a day for a few week's average wage. People routinely live and work in places that would have, until relatively recently, taken *a day or more* to travel between.
I hate to break it to you, but people will read the size the "Operating System" reports and act accordingly. Complaining bitterly when the OS tells them they are being ripped off by the manufacturer. Obviously care should be taken by all involved to ensure that the customer is neither deceived nor their resources wasted.
Yet you don't seem to be railing on the hard disk manufacturers to present their capacity in MiB.
Especially when it is often done on purpose to drive the next upgrade cycle, to create patentable incompatibilities that reduce performance for the customer but for which licences can be charged and being just to cheap to fix it, even when it might cost them only tens of thousands of dollars while it costs the rest of human society hundreds of millions of dollars of waste.
What was, was, it does not mean it has to continue or that it should be tolerated. Sometimes the behaviour within the computer industry is deplorable, for a expectation of buggy products on the initial release, to lies and gross exaggerations, falsified performance testing and of course trolls all over the internet.
What the hell are you blathering about ?
Just to be clear I do have a very low opinion of M$.
No, you have a foaming-at-the-mouth, mindless, childish hatred of Microsoft.
My point, was more or less, that we'll need to RETHINK how we define things. SSD will become more of an extension of the Operating Space we call "RAM".
The point is going to be Moot here really shortly. The whole idea of sectoring and block sizes and such is going to go the way of the DODO in a few short years as we move from Magnetic Media to Solid State.
I don't know what you consider "short" in this context, but current methods of addressing storage sure as hell aren't going anywhere for at least the next 15 years, and more likely 25.
We're already starting to see the end of Magnetic Media. I would suspect that in 4 or 5 years, magnetic drives will be mostly gone.
Not going to happen. 10-15 years, maybe. SSDs just aren't going to increase in $/GB fast enough for a shorter timeframe to be practical. A "cheap" 500GB SSD costs $1700ish today. A 2TB drive costs $150ish.
Another example: contemporary SANs are still primarily magnetic disk, and that certainly doesn't look to be changing any time soon (ie: within 18 months). Any SAN investment of significance will be used for *at least* 3-5 years after purchase.
It's also worth noting that this is Microsoft's fault. Other OS's are doing it properly. Microsoft only does it properly when it benefits them. HDD manufacturers have faced numerous lawsuits simply because Microsoft is using the wrong prefix, so people feel cheated out of space.
I hate to rain on your anti-Microsoft parade, but back when hard disk manufactures realised they could make their hard disks look bigger than they really were, capacities were still being measured in 10s of MB, and *all* OSes were using power-of-two prefixes.
Who said they'd be unrelated? Given you regularly use 30 windows, I'm sure you can easily think of a scenario where you could have 5-7 related windows. "alt tab" only helps for 2 active windows, maybe even 4, but after that it stops helping.
That's why I have 3 screens to put them on. If I have a bunch of related windows I need to look at simultaenously, it's far more efficient to actually look at them in parallel, rather than serially.
That's not really the point. The point is to not be impeded by the GUI more than you have to be. Stuff doesn't have to be so crap.
But I'm not impeded. At all. I can switch between a small number of tasks quickly and easily with alt+TAB, or a larger number with the Taskbar. In all cases the bottleneck is how quickly my mind can productively switch between things, not the machine. This is as true today as it was fifteen years ago.
I can understand when my legs take a while to move me from one point to another. But why should switching amongst 9 windows be slower than switching between two windows? I see no good reason for that. Especially when Desktop GUI developers have enough time to spend on "features" like "wobbly windows" and "shake window to show desktop". It's clear a lot of them are clueless[1].
Firstly, it's not slower in any meaningful sense of the word. Secondly, the reason the functionality you want doesn't really exist is because there's simple no demand for it. You still haven't identified any usage scenario - let alone a common one - where the ability to quickly and frequently switch between a large number of windows will improve productivity [and isn't better served with a different solution].
Current GUIs might not restrict naive users, but they do restrict users like you who can actually tolerate having 30 open windows (I've seen users who have to keep closing and reopening/relaunching windows/applications because they either can't cope with having more than a few windows open, or don't understand how it could work).
No, they don't. Windows (which I use) was - from a UI perspective - quite capable of the heavy multitasking I do when the Taskbar first appeared in 1995. Even OS X, which had awful multitasking (both from a UI and technical perspective) for many years, and remains heavily application-centric today, does not meaningfully impact my productivity.
Whether it takes me 1/5th of a second to switch between windows (best case keyboard-shortcut) or 2 seconds (worst-case finding and clicking a Taskbar button), that time is dwarfed by the 5-10 second "orientation period" needed after switching and (typically) minutes then spent looking at the window that was switched to. Being able to constantly switch tasks in, say, half a second, is not going to show any meaningful improvement in productivity, outside of corner cases. People just don't switch tasks that frequently when they're working, not even amongst the ADD generation.
With features like my proposal, a Desktop UI would allow such workers to operate multiple applications and multiple windows as quickly as if they were one application specific UI.
My question remains. What scenario are you envisaging where this requirement exists in the first place ? Why would anyone need to be flicking between - and interacting with - a large number of of unrelated windows every second or two ?
Try it yourself: switch amongst 4 different windows quickly, and try to immediately work with them the split second you switch to them. The four windows could be: email, documentation, editor, ssh to remote machine #1 (and even more related windows).
Yes, that's pretty typical of my workday (only with about 30 windows). The limiting factor is not how quickly the UI can shift me from one window to another, it's how quickly I can change my thought processes to start using the new applications. I can switch from one app to another in the blink of an eye, but I can't do anything useful with them for (relatively speaking) much longer because that's how long it takes before *I* can mentally change tasks.
You can do that with "screen" but that's a CLI interface. Then there are some tiling window managers that might allow you to do that, but this functionality can be in a "normal" GUI without affecting the beginner users.
I use screen every day. I fail to see how it offers me any quicker or more efficient task switching than Alt+TAB.
I'd rather waste time on Slashdot than waste it on my Desktop GUI.
If you really are wasting meaningful amounts of time waiting for your Desktop GUI, it's time to upgrade that 486.
Games are also proof that people, when sufficiently motivated to, can actually do far more than what these Desktop GUI makers assume. Very many actions per second. Keeping track of stuff. Learning of difficult combos. So where's the Desktop GUI that actually helps you to sustain a high "actions per second" average?
1. Most people don't play games.
2. Most human-computer interactions don't have any _need_ to "sustain a high "actions per second" average".
Seriously, what usage patterns are you envisaging here ? I'm a very heavy multitasker, and the proportion of time I feel limited in my productivity by the GUI is miniscule (and typically not the fault of the UI itself, but the underlying hardware, or something similar).
Not sure why this is moderated as interesting. The point of a spacial file browser is to use your spacial memory (which is big, and is the reason why you can find things all around the house or on a messy desk easily) to manage your files. Every time you open a folder, it opens in the same place on your screen. This lets you mentally associate screen locations with files.
That's not what defines a spatial file browser at all. It's a common feature, to be sure, but not one of the fundamental ones.
The purpose of a spatial file browser is to behave in the same fashion as the physical objects its metaphor is based on. The most obvious (and frustrating) way this manifests is that you cannot have more than one window displaying the same directory/folder.
The problem with spacial browsers is that they don't scale beyond a certain point. They were great on older machines where you'd only have a few hundred files, but managing a thousand files with a spacial UI will just confuse the user. A good compromise would be to use spacial mode for documents and an explorer for everything else.
While this is true, the simple fact is most users don't typically have to manage thousands - or even hundreds - of files. The only real exceptions are MP3 files, which are usually managed for them by some application (iTunes, iPhoto, Picasa, etc).
However, the NT line was derived from the OS/2 codebase by the DEC-VAX engineering team on the alpha processor and later ported to the i386.
NT was built from scratch to _replace_ OS/2. In no way was it "derived" from OS/2. A few minutes comparing architectural features should make that blatantly obvious.
I have read Guttman's analysis, I even was able to get and read the slides, and it wasn't.
Yes, it was, as evidenced by a) all of it done without ever even having used Vista, b) significant parts of it being flat-out wrong, and c) none of the sky-is-falling predictions ever eventuating.
DRM support in Vista (and Windows 7) is irrelevant if you don't have DRM-encumbered media, and nothing but helpful if you do.
But by the same logic, I could write a virus that hides itself in files called edb.chk and mail.log and keep the code that a virus scanner would find in there.
This virus brought to you by the Dept. of Redundancy Department.
True, but then OpenBSD was designed with security in mind from the ground up.
No, it's just really well audited and minimally configured to the point of uselessness by default.
If it was designed "with security in mind from the ground up", it wouldn't have a superuser and it sure as hell wouldn't be using the archaic user/group/other security model of traditional UNIX.
Which entirely defeats the point of having a laptop....
Huh ? It's *exactly* the point of having a laptop - so you can pick up whatever you're doing and take it with you when you need to, without being crippled by a tiny screen and cramped keyboard most of the time.
Okay, I'm having trouble with the Apple definitions of "full copy" and "upgrade".
Why ? It's the same as every other vendor's definition.
If you have a "Full Copy", you have license to install the software on anything you want and do not need a preexisting version of that, or some other qualifying, software. Apple does not sell this.
If you have an "Upgrade Copy", you have license to install the software only if you have a pre-existing version, or some other qualifying condition. This is what Apple sells. The retail MacOS X license explicitly states you must have Apple hardware (and therefore, by extension, a pre-existing MacOS license) to install it. That is why it is an "upgrade" and not a "full copy".
For reference, the "Full Copy" of Windows you buy in the store has no such conditions. You need no pre-existing copy of Windows, other software, or specific hardware.
I'm sorry that your main laptop is so ridiculously tiny. I'm far from being a person with big hands, but those keyboards are way too damn cramped to use.
That's what docking stations with a keyboard, mouse and a couple of 30" screens, are for.
I know of no tenet of Libertarianism which states that these things are forbidden. Some people who call themselves Libertarians may believe that these have no place in government, but you'd have to take it up with those people, for that is their personal interpretation of the concept.
I can confidently say I've never met anyone who identified themselves as Libertarian who would even *entertain* the idea of Healthcare being a legitimate service of Government. Heck, you're lucky to even get firefighters out of most of them, and about the only more basic government services than that is the army and police.
The only other thing I'll say is that if you study the works of folks like John Taylor Gatto, the assumption that government education is the only effective education is shown to be the farce that it is.
I'm not aware of anyone here suggesting "government education is the only effective education". The point of Government-funded education is so that everyone has *access* to education.
Gatto affirms that it takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and mathematics skills; from that point on, the person is capable of educating themselves.
No, they're not, because they're only going to "educate themselves" in things they're interested in. If you want to see where "educating themselves" leads to, look at Creationists.
In this era of personal helplessness and the decline of self-sufficiency, that sounds unreasonable, though this was the way things were done in the USA until right about the late 1800s.
Personally, I have zero interest in living in the 1800s.
To that I say: live within your means, spend less money than you make, and put away savings.
Sorry, born poor. Only young, so never had the chance to accumulate any meaningful savings, and the hospital bills already chewed through what little were there.
Anyone who does that won't be ruined by an illness or an accident.
Rubbish.
No massive social spending programs are necessary to achieve this. They only seem necessary when conspicuous consumption is our first priority and people refuse to live within their means.
I know plenty of people for whom "conspicuous consumption" is an anathema, and the only reason they (and their children) are even alive is because of "massive social spending programs". Thanks to those, they can actually live some semblence of a normal life, rather than being begging out of a cardboard box in the street, or dead.
People who do this really would need a government to come along and bail them out of their poor financial decision-making.
Most poor people are poor because of someone else's poor financial decision making, not theirs.
The perfect implementation of Libertarianism would include a government that is at least strong enough to provide effective law enforcement, as this is viewed as a basic and legitimate function of government.
There are a helluva lot of people out there who also consider things like education, firefighting, healthcare, and provision of basic needs like food and shelter as a "basic and legitimate function of government" as well.
The state would only use its law-enforcement powers to curtail activities that use force, fraud, or the threat of force to coerce others. Such an implementation would lead to the average person having both more freedom and more security than they have now.
"Security" in what sense of the word ? Many would argue that being in a position where an unexpected illness, an accident, or an episode of gullibility could permanently ruin a life is substantially less "security" than they have now.
And that would *never* do... fancy having to be *responsible* for your own children !!! What is the world coming to ???
Not all children do what their parents tell them to do all the time (or ever).
"Make the parents responsible" is standard populist rubbish. Sounds good on talkback radio, but it only takes a few seconds of actual thought to see how ridiculously unfair and unworkable it would be in the real world.
So what? That's like excusing someone who kills a guy in a bar fight because he's not a serial killer who keeps his victim's head in the fridge. The difference is only a matter of degrees.
Actually, the difference in that example is highly likely to be intent - and intent is a non-trivial differentiator.
Back to the original discussion, there's also the fundamental difference between consensual acts between adults, and child abuse - not just differences of "degree".
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but once you're there, you cannot legally get a job.
You will be able to if your skills are in demand.
Free movement of people is not the same as free movement of their labor.
It's a fairly significant part of it, however. Until relatively recently, for most people, the biggest difficulty was getting there. You can't have "free movement of labour" without first having free movement of people.
I think the problem is that nobody has seen truly free movement of labor for centuries.
Say what ? There's never been a time in history when the workforce was more mobile than it is today. You can fly to the other side of the world in a day for a few week's average wage. People routinely live and work in places that would have, until relatively recently, taken *a day or more* to travel between.
I hate to break it to you, but people will read the size the "Operating System" reports and act accordingly. Complaining bitterly when the OS tells them they are being ripped off by the manufacturer. Obviously care should be taken by all involved to ensure that the customer is neither deceived nor their resources wasted.
Yet you don't seem to be railing on the hard disk manufacturers to present their capacity in MiB.
Especially when it is often done on purpose to drive the next upgrade cycle, to create patentable incompatibilities that reduce performance for the customer but for which licences can be charged and being just to cheap to fix it, even when it might cost them only tens of thousands of dollars while it costs the rest of human society hundreds of millions of dollars of waste.
What was, was, it does not mean it has to continue or that it should be tolerated. Sometimes the behaviour within the computer industry is deplorable, for a expectation of buggy products on the initial release, to lies and gross exaggerations, falsified performance testing and of course trolls all over the internet.
What the hell are you blathering about ?
Just to be clear I do have a very low opinion of M$.
No, you have a foaming-at-the-mouth, mindless, childish hatred of Microsoft.
My point, was more or less, that we'll need to RETHINK how we define things. SSD will become more of an extension of the Operating Space we call "RAM".
No, it won't, it's too slow.
The point is going to be Moot here really shortly. The whole idea of sectoring and block sizes and such is going to go the way of the DODO in a few short years as we move from Magnetic Media to Solid State.
I don't know what you consider "short" in this context, but current methods of addressing storage sure as hell aren't going anywhere for at least the next 15 years, and more likely 25.
We're already starting to see the end of Magnetic Media. I would suspect that in 4 or 5 years, magnetic drives will be mostly gone.
Not going to happen. 10-15 years, maybe. SSDs just aren't going to increase in $/GB fast enough for a shorter timeframe to be practical. A "cheap" 500GB SSD costs $1700ish today. A 2TB drive costs $150ish.
Another example: contemporary SANs are still primarily magnetic disk, and that certainly doesn't look to be changing any time soon (ie: within 18 months). Any SAN investment of significance will be used for *at least* 3-5 years after purchase.
It's also worth noting that this is Microsoft's fault. Other OS's are doing it properly. Microsoft only does it properly when it benefits them. HDD manufacturers have faced numerous lawsuits simply because Microsoft is using the wrong prefix, so people feel cheated out of space.
I hate to rain on your anti-Microsoft parade, but back when hard disk manufactures realised they could make their hard disks look bigger than they really were, capacities were still being measured in 10s of MB, and *all* OSes were using power-of-two prefixes.
The rest of your rant is about as accurate.
Who said they'd be unrelated? Given you regularly use 30 windows, I'm sure you can easily think of a scenario where you could have 5-7 related windows. "alt tab" only helps for 2 active windows, maybe even 4, but after that it stops helping.
That's why I have 3 screens to put them on. If I have a bunch of related windows I need to look at simultaenously, it's far more efficient to actually look at them in parallel, rather than serially.
That's not really the point. The point is to not be impeded by the GUI more than you have to be. Stuff doesn't have to be so crap.
But I'm not impeded. At all. I can switch between a small number of tasks quickly and easily with alt+TAB, or a larger number with the Taskbar. In all cases the bottleneck is how quickly my mind can productively switch between things, not the machine. This is as true today as it was fifteen years ago.
I can understand when my legs take a while to move me from one point to another. But why should switching amongst 9 windows be slower than switching between two windows? I see no good reason for that. Especially when Desktop GUI developers have enough time to spend on "features" like "wobbly windows" and "shake window to show desktop". It's clear a lot of them are clueless[1].
Firstly, it's not slower in any meaningful sense of the word. Secondly, the reason the functionality you want doesn't really exist is because there's simple no demand for it. You still haven't identified any usage scenario - let alone a common one - where the ability to quickly and frequently switch between a large number of windows will improve productivity [and isn't better served with a different solution].
Current GUIs might not restrict naive users, but they do restrict users like you who can actually tolerate having 30 open windows (I've seen users who have to keep closing and reopening/relaunching windows/applications because they either can't cope with having more than a few windows open, or don't understand how it could work).
No, they don't. Windows (which I use) was - from a UI perspective - quite capable of the heavy multitasking I do when the Taskbar first appeared in 1995. Even OS X, which had awful multitasking (both from a UI and technical perspective) for many years, and remains heavily application-centric today, does not meaningfully impact my productivity.
Whether it takes me 1/5th of a second to switch between windows (best case keyboard-shortcut) or 2 seconds (worst-case finding and clicking a Taskbar button), that time is dwarfed by the 5-10 second "orientation period" needed after switching and (typically) minutes then spent looking at the window that was switched to. Being able to constantly switch tasks in, say, half a second, is not going to show any meaningful improvement in productivity, outside of corner cases. People just don't switch tasks that frequently when they're working, not even amongst the ADD generation.
With features like my proposal, a Desktop UI would allow such workers to operate multiple applications and multiple windows as quickly as if they were one application specific UI.
My question remains. What scenario are you envisaging where this requirement exists in the first place ? Why would anyone need to be flicking between - and interacting with - a large number of of unrelated windows every second or two ?
Try it yourself: switch amongst 4 different windows quickly, and try to immediately work with them the split second you switch to them. The four windows could be: email, documentation, editor, ssh to remote machine #1 (and even more related windows).
Yes, that's pretty typical of my workday (only with about 30 windows). The limiting factor is not how quickly the UI can shift me from one window to another, it's how quickly I can change my thought processes to start using the new applications. I can switch from one app to another in the blink of an eye, but I can't do anything useful with them for (relatively speaking) much longer because that's how long it takes before *I* can mentally change tasks.
You can do that with "screen" but that's a CLI interface. Then there are some tiling window managers that might allow you to do that, but this functionality can be in a "normal" GUI without affecting the beginner users.
I use screen every day. I fail to see how it offers me any quicker or more efficient task switching than Alt+TAB.
I'd rather waste time on Slashdot than waste it on my Desktop GUI.
If you really are wasting meaningful amounts of time waiting for your Desktop GUI, it's time to upgrade that 486.
So... what *is* the reasoning for spatial view?
It behaves pretty much identically to the physical objects its metaphor is based on, thus making it relatively intuitive.
Additionally, most people have few files[0] and simple directory structures, so the limitations aren't really significant.
[0]Not counting things like MP3s and pictures, which are typically managed by applications like iTunes, iPhoto, etc.
Games are also proof that people, when sufficiently motivated to, can actually do far more than what these Desktop GUI makers assume. Very many actions per second. Keeping track of stuff. Learning of difficult combos. So where's the Desktop GUI that actually helps you to sustain a high "actions per second" average?
1. Most people don't play games.
2. Most human-computer interactions don't have any _need_ to "sustain a high "actions per second" average".
Seriously, what usage patterns are you envisaging here ? I'm a very heavy multitasker, and the proportion of time I feel limited in my productivity by the GUI is miniscule (and typically not the fault of the UI itself, but the underlying hardware, or something similar).
Not sure why this is moderated as interesting. The point of a spacial file browser is to use your spacial memory (which is big, and is the reason why you can find things all around the house or on a messy desk easily) to manage your files. Every time you open a folder, it opens in the same place on your screen. This lets you mentally associate screen locations with files.
That's not what defines a spatial file browser at all. It's a common feature, to be sure, but not one of the fundamental ones.
The purpose of a spatial file browser is to behave in the same fashion as the physical objects its metaphor is based on. The most obvious (and frustrating) way this manifests is that you cannot have more than one window displaying the same directory/folder.
The problem with spacial browsers is that they don't scale beyond a certain point. They were great on older machines where you'd only have a few hundred files, but managing a thousand files with a spacial UI will just confuse the user. A good compromise would be to use spacial mode for documents and an explorer for everything else.
While this is true, the simple fact is most users don't typically have to manage thousands - or even hundreds - of files. The only real exceptions are MP3 files, which are usually managed for them by some application (iTunes, iPhoto, Picasa, etc).
How does DRM help the BBC provide their services to the taxpayer, better ?
However, the NT line was derived from the OS/2 codebase by the DEC-VAX engineering team on the alpha processor and later ported to the i386.
NT was built from scratch to _replace_ OS/2. In no way was it "derived" from OS/2. A few minutes comparing architectural features should make that blatantly obvious.
I have read Guttman's analysis, I even was able to get and read the slides, and it wasn't.
Yes, it was, as evidenced by a) all of it done without ever even having used Vista, b) significant parts of it being flat-out wrong, and c) none of the sky-is-falling predictions ever eventuating.
DRM support in Vista (and Windows 7) is irrelevant if you don't have DRM-encumbered media, and nothing but helpful if you do.
But by the same logic, I could write a virus that hides itself in files called edb.chk and mail.log and keep the code that a virus scanner would find in there.
This virus brought to you by the Dept. of Redundancy Department.
True, but then OpenBSD was designed with security in mind from the ground up.
No, it's just really well audited and minimally configured to the point of uselessness by default.
If it was designed "with security in mind from the ground up", it wouldn't have a superuser and it sure as hell wouldn't be using the archaic user/group/other security model of traditional UNIX.
Which entirely defeats the point of having a laptop....
Huh ? It's *exactly* the point of having a laptop - so you can pick up whatever you're doing and take it with you when you need to, without being crippled by a tiny screen and cramped keyboard most of the time.
Okay, I'm having trouble with the Apple definitions of "full copy" and "upgrade".
Why ? It's the same as every other vendor's definition.
If you have a "Full Copy", you have license to install the software on anything you want and do not need a preexisting version of that, or some other qualifying, software. Apple does not sell this.
If you have an "Upgrade Copy", you have license to install the software only if you have a pre-existing version, or some other qualifying condition. This is what Apple sells. The retail MacOS X license explicitly states you must have Apple hardware (and therefore, by extension, a pre-existing MacOS license) to install it. That is why it is an "upgrade" and not a "full copy".
For reference, the "Full Copy" of Windows you buy in the store has no such conditions. You need no pre-existing copy of Windows, other software, or specific hardware.
I'm sorry that your main laptop is so ridiculously tiny. I'm far from being a person with big hands, but those keyboards are way too damn cramped to use.
That's what docking stations with a keyboard, mouse and a couple of 30" screens, are for.
I know of no tenet of Libertarianism which states that these things are forbidden. Some people who call themselves Libertarians may believe that these have no place in government, but you'd have to take it up with those people, for that is their personal interpretation of the concept.
I can confidently say I've never met anyone who identified themselves as Libertarian who would even *entertain* the idea of Healthcare being a legitimate service of Government. Heck, you're lucky to even get firefighters out of most of them, and about the only more basic government services than that is the army and police.
The only other thing I'll say is that if you study the works of folks like John Taylor Gatto, the assumption that government education is the only effective education is shown to be the farce that it is.
I'm not aware of anyone here suggesting "government education is the only effective education". The point of Government-funded education is so that everyone has *access* to education.
Gatto affirms that it takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and mathematics skills; from that point on, the person is capable of educating themselves.
No, they're not, because they're only going to "educate themselves" in things they're interested in. If you want to see where "educating themselves" leads to, look at Creationists.
In this era of personal helplessness and the decline of self-sufficiency, that sounds unreasonable, though this was the way things were done in the USA until right about the late 1800s.
Personally, I have zero interest in living in the 1800s.
To that I say: live within your means, spend less money than you make, and put away savings.
Sorry, born poor. Only young, so never had the chance to accumulate any meaningful savings, and the hospital bills already chewed through what little were there.
Anyone who does that won't be ruined by an illness or an accident.
Rubbish.
No massive social spending programs are necessary to achieve this. They only seem necessary when conspicuous consumption is our first priority and people refuse to live within their means.
I know plenty of people for whom "conspicuous consumption" is an anathema, and the only reason they (and their children) are even alive is because of "massive social spending programs". Thanks to those, they can actually live some semblence of a normal life, rather than being begging out of a cardboard box in the street, or dead.
People who do this really would need a government to come along and bail them out of their poor financial decision-making.
Most poor people are poor because of someone else's poor financial decision making, not theirs.
The perfect implementation of Libertarianism would include a government that is at least strong enough to provide effective law enforcement, as this is viewed as a basic and legitimate function of government.
There are a helluva lot of people out there who also consider things like education, firefighting, healthcare, and provision of basic needs like food and shelter as a "basic and legitimate function of government" as well.
The state would only use its law-enforcement powers to curtail activities that use force, fraud, or the threat of force to coerce others. Such an implementation would lead to the average person having both more freedom and more security than they have now.
"Security" in what sense of the word ? Many would argue that being in a position where an unexpected illness, an accident, or an episode of gullibility could permanently ruin a life is substantially less "security" than they have now.
Well it seemed to work quite well from the year 0 up until about 1985.
What law(s) changed in 1985 ?
And that would *never* do ... fancy having to be *responsible* for your own children !!! What is the world coming to ???
Not all children do what their parents tell them to do all the time (or ever).
"Make the parents responsible" is standard populist rubbish. Sounds good on talkback radio, but it only takes a few seconds of actual thought to see how ridiculously unfair and unworkable it would be in the real world.
Sentences should be given for deterrence or containment. Not retribution.
Arguably, they shouldn't even be given for deterrence. Containment or _rehabilitation_ should be the goals of the justice system.
If you need punishment to deter people from breaking a law, chances are pretty high it's a bad law.
So what? That's like excusing someone who kills a guy in a bar fight because he's not a serial killer who keeps his victim's head in the fridge. The difference is only a matter of degrees.
Actually, the difference in that example is highly likely to be intent - and intent is a non-trivial differentiator.
Back to the original discussion, there's also the fundamental difference between consensual acts between adults, and child abuse - not just differences of "degree".