Wikipedia is using up and throwing away good editors because of its silly belief that a Wiki open to everyone means putting up with fuckwits to the nth degree (note: open is good... wide open bad).
What's your solution, out of interest? (Requiring an account, as people often suggest, won't work against "systematic destruction".)
When you grow up a bit you might have lived enough to realise that some of the points of view of the DM are shared by a majority of the british
I know. And it scares me.
(and I mean people who were born in the country, not bought citizenship for convenience or fell off a lorry at dover) population.
Ah yes, the classic sign of the typical Daily Mail reader. "I am a True British person, so what I say is right and everyone else is wrong".
By the way, I'm born and bred British. And I still despise it. Whether the paper's swung between right and left or not since the 30s, the Daily Mail today is right back to being racist.
Had the children not been white, the story would be more like "Young foreign hooligans destroy our British countryside; have to be detained at the taxpayer's expense!"
What absolute and utter horseshit. Wikipedia has enjoyed a very long grace period so far, with criticism only coming in small doses -- if you think any different, then you've pbviously never worked in a controversial organization. It's only recently that it has started, due to its growth, to come under real sustained media examination. Your problems haven't even started yet.
I'm not sure how that counters my point. The "long grace period" was only when Wikipedia wasn't known about, and was ignored by the mainstream. I never claimed it hadn't recently started - whenever it started, it seems we both agree that the criticism exists now. From the mainstream media sources that are falling over themselves to ridicule Wikipedia, to the endless supply of comments on Slashdot that post their "My pet theory of why Wikipedia can't work, without any reference to the evidence of how things work in practice"; the criticism exists far more so than most other sites.
And "never worked in a controversial organization" - well that's just it; the idea that an encyclopedia is compared to "controversial organisations" proves my point.
Why? What people like you don't realise is that Wikipedia vandalism isn't just about adding "Fuck you" to a page. It's more organized and systematic these days.
I don't see what that has to do with my point either. Whilst I'm sure people who like to perform subtle vandalism for years on end exist, I'm not convinced there are that many of them.
Here's a thought: what if tomorrow a report comes out showing that African elephants have increased 50% over the last three years... what will the Wikipedia moderators do? How much faith can we put in the moderators for due diligence in fact checking, particularly when I'm pretty sure there will be at least a few people out there trying to fabricate such a report (maybe Steven's staff writers...). Would we ever end up with an entry noting the increase in population, but without speculation on whether or not it is true?
If someone cites the report, then yes it can get in there, and it would probably be phrased "Such and such study showed", unless several studies had confirmed this. But if there were sources showing it as flawed or a hoax, it probably wouldn't get in there. Also, there's a question of notability - not every study that claims some random thing necessarily should be included.
I don't see what's so hard to understand about this.
*sigh* I do wish people would try to learn a bit about Wikipedia works, before spouting off misguided criticisms.
So what happens if somebody makes a truthful edit, but the moderators don't actually believe that it's true? How many of your moderators actually researched to determine that the elephant populations really hadn't tripled recently?
First, there's no disambiguation - since JEDI is also an acronym for the Joint Expeditionary Digital Information system and for the Joint Enterprise DoDIIS Infrastructure you would think that there's be mention of something besides the fiction. According to Wikipedia, the only Jedi is the fake one.
So Wikipedia doesn't have a page on every single thing in existence - give it time! And yes, there is disambiguation. It's just that no one has written a page for the alternative JEDI meanings.
Second, sometime after the first reference to fictional characters, the article goes into full authoritative mode with passages like "The Force is an incorporeal energy field that is generated by all living organisms and permeates the universe and all things within."
I think this is difficult to avoid. When you're discussing some concept, whether it's entirely fictional, or a set of beliefs, there's only so many times you can stick "In the fictional world of..." or "Certain people believe that" before it gets ridiculous. Overall, I don't think I would read the Jedi article as protraying fiction as fact.
That section ends with "This life-force is known in China as qi or chi; in India, prana and in Japan as Ki. A belief in a life-force is most commonly seen in the East, practised by Buddhists, Taoists, Confucianists, and Hindus." Terrific. A billion or so people just got told that their beliefs are equated with George Lucas' fantasies.
You've taken that out of context. It doesn't say "The Force is known...", instead the previous paragraph is talking about how The Force (i.e., fiction) was influenced by real world concepts of a life-force. And this life-force has certain names in China and so on.
Third, as a reflection of our culture, it's way out of whack with what we hold important.
Yes, and? I've often heard this as a criticism of Wikipedia, but I fail to see how. If you don't like the Jedi pages, don't read them. If you criticise that there isn't enough on academic/non-fiction/"important" stuff, then well, it takes time for people to write this stuff. I don't see how the ratios are an issue. What is Wikipedia supposed to do - delete all "non-important" material?
Wikipedia provides tools for reversal of entries, period. I've seen many articles where the first version was *way* better than the crapfest that emerged after a few teenagers had been at it, and if you try to correct the information the teenagers just edit it back again.
You know, you don't have to argue with 12 year olds or get into an edit war - if you're outnumbered, take it up on Requests For Comment or Village Pump.
Oh nice. Ignore his points and turn it around, making out it's him that's the problem.
He didn't ignore his points, he addressed them. The OP tried to lend extra weight to his criticisms of Wikipedia with an "And then I quit!" - the response is quite correct; that is not in itself a problem with Wikipedia.
I've noticed this whenever anyone criticizes Wikipedia. Dude, get over it
I think it's because Wikipedia seems to attract far more criticism than many other things, for no good reason. So yeah, dude get over it - it's getting tiring.
There is a limited supply of good editors who follow the rules, and an endless supply of bad ones
So far at least, the good ones far outweigh the bad ones. I suspect that even if good editors give up after a few months or years, vandals give up far quicker. I mean, come on, I can see people finding it a bit amusing to vandalise for a while, but I find it hard to believe people would persistently do so for months or years on end.
But in practice, do you know the individual writers of say Britannica, and all their individual biases?
And I could see your system making things worse - a biased "expert" could mark thinks unfairly and in a bias fashion, and there would be no way to undo that.
Only children and simpletons believe in Santa Claus or collectivist economic theory. It takes far more intellectual sophistication to realize the inherent superiority and inevitable supremacy of free-market capitalism than it does to hold on to the phantasmic dream of socialism.
It's not so black and white. The USA has elements of socialism - and it is not truely free market capitalism. Meanwhile, socialism isn't the same as communism.
Anyhow, you miss the point: I think communism is a bad economic system, but that doesn't make it evil, not does it mean we should be dropping nuclear weapons on countries that choose such a system.
I think you meant "double-clicking an executable and then clicking through three to twelve installation screens". So yes, in my experience "installing" an application on Mac OS X is much simpler than a typical application installation procedure on Windows.
The installation screens are there to ask the user questions about what and how he wants it installed. How does the Mac installation process ask these questions? I do hope it's not the same old case of trying to be "easier" by not asking those questions at all.
In cases where Windows applications do not need to (or want to) ask qustions, it's as simple as doubleclicking. So yes, in a fair test with all things being equal, it sounds like the Windows method is simpler after all.
How many times have you browsed through the applications folder and low and behold there is still a program folder containing files for a program you installed two weeks ago?
Everytime I've seen this, it's because there's user preferences left there, or other user data such as logs. Overall I feel this is more useful than a problem - indeed, I would consider it extremely bad and dangerous if doing a complete delete of the folder occurred when uninstalling (though it would be nice to be given the option of deleting user preference data when uninstalling).
As I said: It was an unusable ugly piece of trash.
As opposed to MacOS, which had the same ugliness, only in black and white?
What makes an OS usable are the small things, like the exponential acceleration of the mouse cursor on Macs, or the fact that a pixel is actually one pixel in size and square,
The non-square pixel was a hardware limitation, not an OS one (until the ECS chipset, square pixels meant a choice between 320x256 which was rather low, or 640x512 which had interlace flicker). Yes, annoying, though if we're comparing graphics hardware, the Amiga beat the Mac in other ways (e.g., number of colours).
Of course the small things matter, but the AmigaOS had its own small but important advantages too (e.g., I found non-proportional scrollbars annoying on the Mac). The Amiga did have a mouse acceleration option, but I don't know if it was present in AmigaOS 1.0. I don't see how it's more DOS-like than MacOS of the same time.
Thankfully I never had to use Macs for anything serious, and it certainly didn't do games well, but it was good enough for Classic Daleks at least.
Not at all. I'm sure we could find many legal documents that contain the word purpose if we tried. Just one example is the GPL which contains the word purpose 4 times, and is a legal document.
What on earth does the GPL have to do with anything? Yes, software and documents were created by humans for a purpose, but this doesn't mean that body parts, created by no one, have a purpose. They don't.
Well, try function then.
Function is a better word. A womb can function to keep fetuses, whilst an organ can function to keep someone alive, including in another body. Neither case do they have to function in that way - that's up to the person whose body it is. And by the way, nowhere did I say we're not allowed to use the word "purpose", I said that it doesn't apply in that context. So doing a grep of Darwin is pointless unless you show me the context of those usages. After all, I've used the word 3 times in my reply to you!
First is same as the organ donation case, it is not part of normal function, unlike pregnancy.
Who decides what is normal and what is not? Remember, you are comparing to a mother's legal responsibility to a child - surely if a child is ill, it is also the mother's legal responsibility to take that child to a doctor? I admit I'm not sure on the law here is - but I'd be surprised if "Oh, but artificial medical procedures aren't normal" would be a good defence to such neglect.
It is worth noting that unlike the case of a child falling sick, by far the majority of pregnancies are a result of consensual sex. The woman is usually pregnant as a result of actions she chose to take
And how did that sick child come about? By consensual sex. In all cases, the claim that a woman should live with the consequences and take responsibility because of what she chose applies just as much or as little. In fact, after birth the woman has made even more of a choice, as she had the option of adoption.
I'm a bit surprised that you would consider a comparison between a woman being forced to donate organs vs providing food/shelter in her body a closer comparison than a woman providing food/shelter in her body vs providing food/shelter outside her body.
A nice bit of emotive rewording there. Firstly, I consider being forced to give resources from your body to a child for 9 months closer to being forced to give resources from your body to a fetus for 9 months, compared with a legal obligation to feed a child, where you can opt out by giving it up for adoption.
As for organ donation, it's not about what is closer, it's that it comes under your logic of "legal responsibility to be forced to keep a child alive no matter what".
On the "thought experiments" as an ethical tool, I have never bothered a great deal with them.
They are good tools for weeding out what people's actual objections to something are.
If "thought experiments" are a valid tool to base law on, then so is the Quran, the Bible, Buddism, Confusius etc, etc.
Eh? You are confusing moral dilemmas (real or fantasy) with what evidence is used to base law on. Nowhere am I citing a thought experiment as evidence - that's nonsensical. If there are thought experiments in the Bible, then we can discuss those too if you prefer. But I fail to see how that's related to basing law on the Bible.
Windows 95 surely had some protected memory - as I understand it, application memory was protected, so bad pointers didn't crash the system, but some driver/system space wasn't, which caused crashes. That's certainly way better than nothing.
You're right it's unfair to criticise it for lack of multi-user support, and protected memory before '95, though there were other OSs that had pre-emptive multitasking, along with the easy to use GUI, not to mention a decent command line to use as an alternative.
Let's face it: the classic OS didn't hold up well against a preemptively multitasking Windows 95 or OS/2 2.x (with the OO GUI). But before 1992, it was king.
Well there were preemptive multitasking OSs before 1992. Try "before 1985, it was king".
It's interesting how people treat Mac OS X as just a continuation of classic MacOS, when it's a very different OS. I mean, OS X appears to be very popular here on Slashdot, and many of these people refer back to things like Mac beating Windows in the classic era. But I can't help wondering how many of them were actually classic MacOS advocates at the time, especially when you consider that many of the strengths of OS X that people talk about have no relevance to classic MacOS at all (e.g., anything related to UNIX).
First, it went up against crap like Windows 3.11 and Windows 95.
So, it was good if you compare it to something crap - oddly this seems to be the same way that people advocate Mac OS X today;) Except at least then, there were plenty of other alternatives to Windows, unlike now...
The example you gave of a mother looking after its child when it's been born is also an analogy! I was just providing one I felt was closer to pregnancy.
t would seem that the primary purpose of a womb is to incubate children. There is no organ in the body that has organ donation as it's primary purpose, therefore, it is reasonable for people to be able to use their organs for their primary purpose, and not reasonable to require them to donate them.
So you've switched your argument from legal responsibilty to purpose. Not being a creationist, I don't believe body parts have a purpose. Therefore, I disagree that a woman should be forced to use her womb for incubating any fetus she conceives.
As organ donation is not legally required even after death (at least in Australia, I assume this is the case in the US) this is in line with current law.
And abortion is currently legal, so that's in line with current law.
as far as I am aware, this example is not only hypothetical but there is no case of this being suggested or even possible to happen.
Certainly it has been suggested - it's a well known thought experiment to get people to think about the ethics of abortion. Yes, it's hypothetical, obviously, and no it isn't necessary for thought experiments to be possible - that's the whole point of them. So, I'm still curious, would you say that a mother is obliged to give treatment? If not, why does her legal responsibility no longer apply?
Actually, proposals for mandatory voting aren't as crazy as they sound. All of the quasi-sane ones also put a "blank vote" on the ballot. That way, you can say "I don't support either candidate (or have any idea what's going on), but I want my vote to count".
This problem is solved by having a "blank vote", not by having mandatory voting. With mandatory voting, you can no longer tell which people genuinely oppose the candidates, and which people are apathetic.
As a result, the lines were extremely long, and many black individuals eventually gave up after literally HOURS of waiting in line.
So now people have to choose between waiting who knows how many hours, or getting fined for not doing so. Great system. Perhaps have more voting stations? (I don't think we have problems in the UK.)
Many people, especially those with multiple jobs, literally don't have the time to vote.
If they don't have the time to vote, then how will fining them help them?
Finally, we wouldn't be the first. After World War I, they lost over 60,000 citizens. They felt that the freedoms their soldiers fought for shouldn't be thrown away. As a result, they implemented mandatory voting, and it's worked well for them so far, not to mention the voter turnout increase from 59% to over 95%.
What about our freedom not to vote? Anyhow, that statistic is meaningless. The question is, why is low vote turnout bad? It is not the low number which is intrinsically a problem, but rather other factors such as people not caring. Forcing those people to vote does not fix those problems! Hence, you can't say it's worked well for them at all - for that, we need to look at how the distribution of votes has been affected (e.g., do the major 2 parties just get more votes, or is it more evenly spread?)
Now tell me - what's so insane about that?
If nothing else, there are better ways to fix the system before we even consider fining citizens whose only "crime" is to not vote. For starters, we should scrap the "first past the post" single vote, which is fundamentally broken for elections with more than 2 parties, and use something like Approval or Condorcet voting, so people can vote for 3rd parties without any risk of "wasting" their vote, and we don't have the problem of votes being split between similar parties. Secondly, consider some form of proportional representation.
And if we're going to fine people, perhaps we should fine the politicians who don't turn up to vote on matters? It's their job, after all! Maybe we should also fine parties who break manifesto promises too.
Lastly, it is not helpful to blame the people for not voting - if people are apathetic, perhaps the politicians should do more to appeal to them?
The UK is full of the biggest rip-off and con artist companies I have ever come across, and people over rhere just see this as a normal. Almost every company tried to overcharge, and you have to check your bills.
The OP was talking about having means to fight this other than getting a lawyer (and yes, it applies to the UK too). That's not the same thing as saying no one will rip you off in the first place.
Even the government wants to scam you. For council tax and tv license, I can't pay for six months, I have to pay the whole amount, and apply for a refund when I finish - even though I will have left the country.
How surprising; a government agency won't help you against the government. Anyhow, I'd like to see how hiring a lawyer means you can avoid paying tax in the US?
The 'looking after a child' is not an analogy, it's an example of how we legally see a mother's responsibility. Precedent if you will. It is generally accepted that the parent's responsibility is reduced as the childs age/capability increases. The parents could be charged with neglect for not feeding an infant.
What do you think of the other examples I raised - organ donation or other kind of medical life support - are those a legal responsibility? Just as with pregnancy, there may be no other way to save the child.
I haven't said we should or shouldn't. Even if there is not an exception for rape cases, it doesn't mean there should be no exceptions, and any exception would be difficult to implement. My point was that if it should be done, the fact that it is difficult is not a reason not to do it. If it is decided that an exception should be made but it's hard, then work hard to solve the problem instead of giving up.
All I mean is that these issues are things that should be considered at the same time as deciding whether abortion should be illegal or not, rather than hoping it'll work itself out later.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia is using up and throwing away good editors because of its silly belief that a Wiki open to everyone means putting up with fuckwits to the nth degree (note: open is good... wide open bad).
What's your solution, out of interest? (Requiring an account, as people often suggest, won't work against "systematic destruction".)
When you grow up a bit you might have lived enough to realise that some of the points of view of the DM are shared by a majority of the british
I know. And it scares me.
(and I mean people who were born in the country, not bought citizenship for convenience or fell off a lorry at dover) population.
Ah yes, the classic sign of the typical Daily Mail reader. "I am a True British person, so what I say is right and everyone else is wrong".
By the way, I'm born and bred British. And I still despise it. Whether the paper's swung between right and left or not since the 30s, the Daily Mail today is right back to being racist.
Had the children not been white, the story would be more like "Young foreign hooligans destroy our British countryside; have to be detained at the taxpayer's expense!"
What absolute and utter horseshit. Wikipedia has enjoyed a very long grace period so far, with criticism only coming in small doses -- if you think any different, then you've pbviously never worked in a controversial organization. It's only recently that it has started, due to its growth, to come under real sustained media examination. Your problems haven't even started yet.
I'm not sure how that counters my point. The "long grace period" was only when Wikipedia wasn't known about, and was ignored by the mainstream. I never claimed it hadn't recently started - whenever it started, it seems we both agree that the criticism exists now. From the mainstream media sources that are falling over themselves to ridicule Wikipedia, to the endless supply of comments on Slashdot that post their "My pet theory of why Wikipedia can't work, without any reference to the evidence of how things work in practice"; the criticism exists far more so than most other sites.
And "never worked in a controversial organization" - well that's just it; the idea that an encyclopedia is compared to "controversial organisations" proves my point.
Why? What people like you don't realise is that Wikipedia vandalism isn't just about adding "Fuck you" to a page. It's more organized and systematic these days.
I don't see what that has to do with my point either. Whilst I'm sure people who like to perform subtle vandalism for years on end exist, I'm not convinced there are that many of them.
Here's a thought: what if tomorrow a report comes out showing that African elephants have increased 50% over the last three years... what will the Wikipedia moderators do? How much faith can we put in the moderators for due diligence in fact checking, particularly when I'm pretty sure there will be at least a few people out there trying to fabricate such a report (maybe Steven's staff writers...). Would we ever end up with an entry noting the increase in population, but without speculation on whether or not it is true?
If someone cites the report, then yes it can get in there, and it would probably be phrased "Such and such study showed", unless several studies had confirmed this. But if there were sources showing it as flawed or a hoax, it probably wouldn't get in there. Also, there's a question of notability - not every study that claims some random thing necessarily should be included.
I don't see what's so hard to understand about this.
*sigh* I do wish people would try to learn a bit about Wikipedia works, before spouting off misguided criticisms.
So what happens if somebody makes a truthful edit, but the moderators don't actually believe that it's true? How many of your moderators actually researched to determine that the elephant populations really hadn't tripled recently?
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. So if someone wants something in there, it's up to them to provide the reliable verifiable source.
First, there's no disambiguation - since JEDI is also an acronym for the Joint Expeditionary Digital Information system and for the Joint Enterprise DoDIIS Infrastructure you would think that there's be mention of something besides the fiction. According to Wikipedia, the only Jedi is the fake one.
..." or "Certain people believe that" before it gets ridiculous. Overall, I don't think I would read the Jedi article as protraying fiction as fact.
So Wikipedia doesn't have a page on every single thing in existence - give it time! And yes, there is disambiguation. It's just that no one has written a page for the alternative JEDI meanings.
Second, sometime after the first reference to fictional characters, the article goes into full authoritative mode with passages like "The Force is an incorporeal energy field that is generated by all living organisms and permeates the universe and all things within."
I think this is difficult to avoid. When you're discussing some concept, whether it's entirely fictional, or a set of beliefs, there's only so many times you can stick "In the fictional world of
That section ends with "This life-force is known in China as qi or chi; in India, prana and in Japan as Ki. A belief in a life-force is most commonly seen in the East, practised by Buddhists, Taoists, Confucianists, and Hindus." Terrific. A billion or so people just got told that their beliefs are equated with George Lucas' fantasies.
You've taken that out of context. It doesn't say "The Force is known...", instead the previous paragraph is talking about how The Force (i.e., fiction) was influenced by real world concepts of a life-force. And this life-force has certain names in China and so on.
Third, as a reflection of our culture, it's way out of whack with what we hold important.
Yes, and? I've often heard this as a criticism of Wikipedia, but I fail to see how. If you don't like the Jedi pages, don't read them. If you criticise that there isn't enough on academic/non-fiction/"important" stuff, then well, it takes time for people to write this stuff. I don't see how the ratios are an issue. What is Wikipedia supposed to do - delete all "non-important" material?
Yeah, we can't trust Wikipedia, but let's trust an Anonymous Coward posting on Slashdot!
Wikipedia provides tools for reversal of entries, period. I've seen many articles where the first version was *way* better than the crapfest that emerged after a few teenagers had been at it, and if you try to correct the information the teenagers just edit it back again.
You know, you don't have to argue with 12 year olds or get into an edit war - if you're outnumbered, take it up on Requests For Comment or Village Pump.
Oh nice. Ignore his points and turn it around, making out it's him that's the problem.
He didn't ignore his points, he addressed them. The OP tried to lend extra weight to his criticisms of Wikipedia with an "And then I quit!" - the response is quite correct; that is not in itself a problem with Wikipedia.
I've noticed this whenever anyone criticizes Wikipedia. Dude, get over it
I think it's because Wikipedia seems to attract far more criticism than many other things, for no good reason. So yeah, dude get over it - it's getting tiring.
There is a limited supply of good editors who follow the rules, and an endless supply of bad ones
So far at least, the good ones far outweigh the bad ones. I suspect that even if good editors give up after a few months or years, vandals give up far quicker. I mean, come on, I can see people finding it a bit amusing to vandalise for a while, but I find it hard to believe people would persistently do so for months or years on end.
But in practice, do you know the individual writers of say Britannica, and all their individual biases?
And I could see your system making things worse - a biased "expert" could mark thinks unfairly and in a bias fashion, and there would be no way to undo that.
Only children and simpletons believe in Santa Claus or collectivist economic theory. It takes far more intellectual sophistication to realize the inherent superiority and inevitable supremacy of free-market capitalism than it does to hold on to the phantasmic dream of socialism.
It's not so black and white. The USA has elements of socialism - and it is not truely free market capitalism. Meanwhile, socialism isn't the same as communism.
Anyhow, you miss the point: I think communism is a bad economic system, but that doesn't make it evil, not does it mean we should be dropping nuclear weapons on countries that choose such a system.
I think you meant "double-clicking an executable and then clicking through three to twelve installation screens". So yes, in my experience "installing" an application on Mac OS X is much simpler than a typical application installation procedure on Windows.
The installation screens are there to ask the user questions about what and how he wants it installed. How does the Mac installation process ask these questions? I do hope it's not the same old case of trying to be "easier" by not asking those questions at all.
In cases where Windows applications do not need to (or want to) ask qustions, it's as simple as doubleclicking. So yes, in a fair test with all things being equal, it sounds like the Windows method is simpler after all.
How many times have you browsed through the applications folder and low and behold there is still a program folder containing files for a program you installed two weeks ago?
Everytime I've seen this, it's because there's user preferences left there, or other user data such as logs. Overall I feel this is more useful than a problem - indeed, I would consider it extremely bad and dangerous if doing a complete delete of the folder occurred when uninstalling (though it would be nice to be given the option of deleting user preference data when uninstalling).
As I said: It was an unusable ugly piece of trash.
As opposed to MacOS, which had the same ugliness, only in black and white?
What makes an OS usable are the small things, like the exponential acceleration of the mouse cursor on Macs, or the fact that a pixel is actually one pixel in size and square,
The non-square pixel was a hardware limitation, not an OS one (until the ECS chipset, square pixels meant a choice between 320x256 which was rather low, or 640x512 which had interlace flicker). Yes, annoying, though if we're comparing graphics hardware, the Amiga beat the Mac in other ways (e.g., number of colours).
Of course the small things matter, but the AmigaOS had its own small but important advantages too (e.g., I found non-proportional scrollbars annoying on the Mac). The Amiga did have a mouse acceleration option, but I don't know if it was present in AmigaOS 1.0. I don't see how it's more DOS-like than MacOS of the same time.
Thankfully I never had to use Macs for anything serious, and it certainly didn't do games well, but it was good enough for Classic Daleks at least.
Not at all. I'm sure we could find many legal documents that contain the word purpose if we tried. Just one example is the GPL which contains the word purpose 4 times, and is a legal document.
What on earth does the GPL have to do with anything? Yes, software and documents were created by humans for a purpose, but this doesn't mean that body parts, created by no one, have a purpose. They don't.
Well, try function then.
Function is a better word. A womb can function to keep fetuses, whilst an organ can function to keep someone alive, including in another body. Neither case do they have to function in that way - that's up to the person whose body it is. And by the way, nowhere did I say we're not allowed to use the word "purpose", I said that it doesn't apply in that context. So doing a grep of Darwin is pointless unless you show me the context of those usages. After all, I've used the word 3 times in my reply to you!
First is same as the organ donation case, it is not part of normal function, unlike pregnancy.
Who decides what is normal and what is not? Remember, you are comparing to a mother's legal responsibility to a child - surely if a child is ill, it is also the mother's legal responsibility to take that child to a doctor? I admit I'm not sure on the law here is - but I'd be surprised if "Oh, but artificial medical procedures aren't normal" would be a good defence to such neglect.
It is worth noting that unlike the case of a child falling sick, by far the majority of pregnancies are a result of consensual sex. The woman is usually pregnant as a result of actions she chose to take
And how did that sick child come about? By consensual sex. In all cases, the claim that a woman should live with the consequences and take responsibility because of what she chose applies just as much or as little. In fact, after birth the woman has made even more of a choice, as she had the option of adoption.
I'm a bit surprised that you would consider a comparison between a woman being forced to donate organs vs providing food/shelter in her body a closer comparison than a woman providing food/shelter in her body vs providing food/shelter outside her body.
A nice bit of emotive rewording there. Firstly, I consider being forced to give resources from your body to a child for 9 months closer to being forced to give resources from your body to a fetus for 9 months, compared with a legal obligation to feed a child, where you can opt out by giving it up for adoption.
As for organ donation, it's not about what is closer, it's that it comes under your logic of "legal responsibility to be forced to keep a child alive no matter what".
On the "thought experiments" as an ethical tool, I have never bothered a great deal with them.
They are good tools for weeding out what people's actual objections to something are.
If "thought experiments" are a valid tool to base law on, then so is the Quran, the Bible, Buddism, Confusius etc, etc.
Eh? You are confusing moral dilemmas (real or fantasy) with what evidence is used to base law on. Nowhere am I citing a thought experiment as evidence - that's nonsensical. If there are thought experiments in the Bible, then we can discuss those too if you prefer. But I fail to see how that's related to basing law on the Bible.
Windows 95 surely had some protected memory - as I understand it, application memory was protected, so bad pointers didn't crash the system, but some driver/system space wasn't, which caused crashes. That's certainly way better than nothing.
You're right it's unfair to criticise it for lack of multi-user support, and protected memory before '95, though there were other OSs that had pre-emptive multitasking, along with the easy to use GUI, not to mention a decent command line to use as an alternative.
I'm curious as to your reasons why the OS "sucked balls"?
Let's face it: the classic OS didn't hold up well against a preemptively multitasking Windows 95 or OS/2 2.x (with the OO GUI). But before 1992, it was king.
Well there were preemptive multitasking OSs before 1992. Try "before 1985, it was king".
It's interesting how people treat Mac OS X as just a continuation of classic MacOS, when it's a very different OS. I mean, OS X appears to be very popular here on Slashdot, and many of these people refer back to things like Mac beating Windows in the classic era. But I can't help wondering how many of them were actually classic MacOS advocates at the time, especially when you consider that many of the strengths of OS X that people talk about have no relevance to classic MacOS at all (e.g., anything related to UNIX).
First, it went up against crap like Windows 3.11 and Windows 95.
;) Except at least then, there were plenty of other alternatives to Windows, unlike now...
So, it was good if you compare it to something crap - oddly this seems to be the same way that people advocate Mac OS X today
The examples you gave are analogies.
The example you gave of a mother looking after its child when it's been born is also an analogy! I was just providing one I felt was closer to pregnancy.
t would seem that the primary purpose of a womb is to incubate children. There is no organ in the body that has organ donation as it's primary purpose, therefore, it is reasonable for people to be able to use their organs for their primary purpose, and not reasonable to require them to donate them.
So you've switched your argument from legal responsibilty to purpose. Not being a creationist, I don't believe body parts have a purpose. Therefore, I disagree that a woman should be forced to use her womb for incubating any fetus she conceives.
As organ donation is not legally required even after death (at least in Australia, I assume this is the case in the US) this is in line with current law.
And abortion is currently legal, so that's in line with current law.
as far as I am aware, this example is not only hypothetical but there is no case of this being suggested or even possible to happen.
Certainly it has been suggested - it's a well known thought experiment to get people to think about the ethics of abortion. Yes, it's hypothetical, obviously, and no it isn't necessary for thought experiments to be possible - that's the whole point of them. So, I'm still curious, would you say that a mother is obliged to give treatment? If not, why does her legal responsibility no longer apply?
Actually, proposals for mandatory voting aren't as crazy as they sound. All of the quasi-sane ones also put a "blank vote" on the ballot. That way, you can say "I don't support either candidate (or have any idea what's going on), but I want my vote to count".
This problem is solved by having a "blank vote", not by having mandatory voting. With mandatory voting, you can no longer tell which people genuinely oppose the candidates, and which people are apathetic.
As a result, the lines were extremely long, and many black individuals eventually gave up after literally HOURS of waiting in line.
So now people have to choose between waiting who knows how many hours, or getting fined for not doing so. Great system. Perhaps have more voting stations? (I don't think we have problems in the UK.)
Many people, especially those with multiple jobs, literally don't have the time to vote.
If they don't have the time to vote, then how will fining them help them?
Finally, we wouldn't be the first. After World War I, they lost over 60,000 citizens. They felt that the freedoms their soldiers fought for shouldn't be thrown away. As a result, they implemented mandatory voting, and it's worked well for them so far, not to mention the voter turnout increase from 59% to over 95%.
What about our freedom not to vote? Anyhow, that statistic is meaningless. The question is, why is low vote turnout bad? It is not the low number which is intrinsically a problem, but rather other factors such as people not caring. Forcing those people to vote does not fix those problems! Hence, you can't say it's worked well for them at all - for that, we need to look at how the distribution of votes has been affected (e.g., do the major 2 parties just get more votes, or is it more evenly spread?)
Now tell me - what's so insane about that?
If nothing else, there are better ways to fix the system before we even consider fining citizens whose only "crime" is to not vote. For starters, we should scrap the "first past the post" single vote, which is fundamentally broken for elections with more than 2 parties, and use something like Approval or Condorcet voting, so people can vote for 3rd parties without any risk of "wasting" their vote, and we don't have the problem of votes being split between similar parties. Secondly, consider some form of proportional representation.
And if we're going to fine people, perhaps we should fine the politicians who don't turn up to vote on matters? It's their job, after all! Maybe we should also fine parties who break manifesto promises too.
Lastly, it is not helpful to blame the people for not voting - if people are apathetic, perhaps the politicians should do more to appeal to them?
The point is that what rights you have is defined by the copyright laws, and not by the terms of some EULA.
The UK is full of the biggest rip-off and con artist companies I have ever come across, and people over rhere just see this as a normal. Almost every company tried to overcharge, and you have to check your bills.
The OP was talking about having means to fight this other than getting a lawyer (and yes, it applies to the UK too). That's not the same thing as saying no one will rip you off in the first place.
Even the government wants to scam you. For council tax and tv license, I can't pay for six months, I have to pay the whole amount, and apply for a refund when I finish - even though I will have left the country.
How surprising; a government agency won't help you against the government. Anyhow, I'd like to see how hiring a lawyer means you can avoid paying tax in the US?
The 'looking after a child' is not an analogy, it's an example of how we legally see a mother's responsibility. Precedent if you will. It is generally accepted that the parent's responsibility is reduced as the childs age/capability increases. The parents could be charged with neglect for not feeding an infant.
What do you think of the other examples I raised - organ donation or other kind of medical life support - are those a legal responsibility? Just as with pregnancy, there may be no other way to save the child.
I haven't said we should or shouldn't. Even if there is not an exception for rape cases, it doesn't mean there should be no exceptions, and any exception would be difficult to implement. My point was that if it should be done, the fact that it is difficult is not a reason not to do it. If it is decided that an exception should be made but it's hard, then work hard to solve the problem instead of giving up.
All I mean is that these issues are things that should be considered at the same time as deciding whether abortion should be illegal or not, rather than hoping it'll work itself out later.