The Higgs (...) boson gives fermions and several bosons (including itself) their intrinsic mass.
The Higgs boson does not give itself or anything else mass.
Interaction with the Higgs field gives fundamental particles, including the Higgs boson, their intrinsic mass. A Higgs boson is just an excitation of the Higgs field that is interesting to us only because it evinces the existence of the field.
There aren't Higgs bosons all over the universe giving everything mass; it takes a hell of a lot of effort to bring a Higgs boson into a brief existence, which is why we need these huge high-energy colliders. In fact it takes so much energy to make a Higgs boson that the Higgs boson has a much higher mass than many of the fundamental particles (mass is just energy, rest mass is just total energy minus kinetic energy), so it wouldn't make any sense for really heavy Higgs bosons to give really light particles their mass.
The Higgs boson isn't even responsible for all or even most intrinsic mass. Most of the mass of ordinary matter is found in the binding energies holding fundamental particles together into the compound particles that most ordinary matter is made up out of. Every time a particle interacts with a field, it loses some of its kinetic energy and gains rest mass. Rest mass comes from interactions between what would otherwise be massless particles moving at light speed. Mass is just energy; when kinetic energy is "lost" in an interaction, and not just transferred to something else, it is converted to rest-mass. Most of the mass of the matter we're familiar with is accounted for by the three known electronuclear interactions (the electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces).
What the Higgs field explains is why, after we have accounted for interactions with all known fields, many of the fundamental particles, all by themselves not apparently interacting with anything, still exhibit rest mass and move slower than light. If they weren't interacting with any fields at all, everything should be massless and moving at lightspeed. The Higgs field is the proposed field which massive fundamental particles are interacting with, which slows them down and gives them mass.
(Rather, it's the field with which the truly fundamental particles interact, causing them to manifest as the massive "fundamental" particles we are familiar with. Our familiar fundamental particles aren't "made of" these other particles, like an atom is made of protons and neutrons, so much as in the absence of a Higgs field there would be fundamental particles with completely different properties in the universe, and the presence of a Higgs field forces the ones we end up seeing as massive to behave differently from their constant interaction with it, appearing as the massive fundamental particles with the properties we are familiar with).
Addendum for a personal comment: I think all of the confusion about this could have been avoided if only the ninth and tenth amendments had been included as a preface to the whole constitution, so that that list at the end of the previous post read:
The government may not pass laws governing who may do what in any matters unless we allow it. It may only pass laws governing who may do what in those matters in those matters we allow it. It may pass laws governing who may do what in these specific matters. It may not pass laws governing who may do what in these other specific matters.
So we establish right off the bat: the government is powerless except for the powers we grant it, and only has those powers that we grant it (redundant, I know, but emphasis here is important). Then we grant it these specific powers. It should be clear enough already that it doesn't have any others we haven't granted, but just to be safe: among all those others it doesn't have, it especially doesn't have these ones.
That's what the text of the constitution amounts to already, it's just apparently too obscurely put for people to understand that.
To elaborate on this (more for others than you for CrimsonAvenger):
A "right", in the sense used in the constitution, is either a claim against others requiring action or inaction on their part, or a liberty to act or not on your part (which is in turn equivalent to the absence of any claim against you).
A "power" is a kind of second-order right, a right about changes in ordinary first-order rights, together with "immunities". A power is a liberty to alter first-order rights, to make different things obligatory, permissible, or impermissible, than were before; the liberty to make laws, essentially. An immunity is a claim against such action; a limitation on ability of others to pass laws governing you.
The US Constitution is formulated in a framework where by default the people have maximal immunities -- where people have whatever rights they have by nature (which are not explicitly enumerated in the original constitution), and nobody can change what rights anybody else has, i.e. nobody has any power to make laws. By the Constitution, the people of the US formally grant the US government certain limited powers to change who has what rights; to make some things forbidden or obligatory, etc.
The Bill of Rights in turn explicitly lists some specific immunities retained by the people, in the process enumerating some of the rights people are presumed to have by nature. And to cap it off it emphasizes that people still have immunities against modification of any rights not enumerated, and that the government doesn't have any powers to modify anyone's rights besides those that have been explicitly granted to it.
Together they say, in effect: The government may pass laws governing who may do what in these specific matters. (Original constitution). It explicitly may not pass laws governing who may do what in these other specific matters. (First eight amendments). It may not pass laws governing who may do what in any other matters, even those not in that second list. (Ninth amendment). It may only pass laws governing who may do what in those matters in that first list. (Tenth amendment).
It's all quite beautiful in theory. Too bad even the people responsible for implementing it don't bother to read it, or if they do, don't understand a word of it.
I may be misunderstanding you but your response seems like a non-sequitur to the question it's a response to.
Obfuscant asked if the same reasoning -- the First Amendment just lists the right to free speech with no caveats or prerequisites, so any caveats or prerequisites would be prima facie unconstitutional -- should apply to the Second Amendment, which likewise lists no caveats of prerequisites to the right to bear arms (though it does list a rationale). If the same reasoning applies, then caveats or prerequisites to the right to bear arms should, by that reasoning, be prima facie unconstitutional.
You reply that some caveats and prerequisites to the right to bear arms have been found constitutional, while no such caveats and prerequisites to the first amendment have. But nobody's asking what has been found which way, they're asking what, by the line of reasoning applied to the first amendment, should be found regarding the second amendment. Or rather, they're implying the obvious answer to that question and then asking if you do apply that same line of reasoning; and presumably, if not, why not.
I'm not doubting this claim, but do you have a link to more information? Sounds like an interesting secret history of copyright. I had no idea there were "writer's guilds" of mere transcribers, much less that they were behind copyright.
You seem to be missing my original point which is that GPL doesn't just require that people act as though copyright didn't exist. I agree that the classical liberals are right, but I'm pointing out that the GPL is more like the socialists than them. They don't just say "I won't sue you for using this so long as you don't sue anyone for using your modifications". Something like that is the most publicized feature of it, but it's not the only feature; there are other requirements to the license besides just licensing your own modifications.
For an example that comes to mind: there's a GPL'd game engine out there. There are lots of people who make mods of a now-freeware game that use that engine. Those modders are largely not programmers but rather artists and designers and so wouldn't touch a line of source code in their lives; they just need the binary to run their modded game in content in. But they can't just bundle the binary with their mod. They also have to bundle the source, even if they themselves never downloaded the source and don't care to, and neither will most of their users. But they still have to, because the GPL is about benefiting end-users by making source code available to them (amongst other things), not about just not suing people for distributing copyrighted data.
If copyright didn't exist at all, that wouldn't be the case. If copyright didn't exist, everything would be licensed under the WTFPL: do whatever the fuck you want with it. GPL is more restrictive than that. It may be less restrictive than traditional proprietary licenses, but it's still more restrictive than doing away with copyright entirely. (Likewise, in socialist societies the people are generally more free than under an oppressive aristocracy, but that doesn't make it as free as a liberal society).
Yes, obviously, but the point is that it uses copyright in response to other uses of copyright.
I've been trying to avoid making a political analogy, but I think that's the only way this can be made clear:
Say you've got an old aristocratic society where state power is being used to the benefit of a group of elites.
Classical liberals shout "That's not fair! Nobody should have that kind of power!"
Socialists shout "That's not fair! That power should be used to benefit the common people!"
Both have a problem with the traditional use of state power, but the latter would keep the power around and just redistribute its benefits, while the former would abolish the power completely. I'm saying the GPL is like the latter, while copyright abolition would be like the former. The GPL leverages copyright to the benefit of the users instead of just the usual benefit to the authors, but it does not replicate a situation in which copyright didn't exist at all.
That was kind of my point. That GPL doesn't just do the same thing as lack of copyright, as the person I replied to claimed. GPL is more restrictive than no copyright would be.
If copyright went away, nobody could be required to distribute source code, of any of the other things the GPL requires for permission to use code thus licensed. (There wouldn't be much point in intentionally withholding things like source code without copyright, though). They would simply have no grounds to sue for copyright violation for their modifications to it. The GPL is not about restricting people from exercising legal powers they shouldn't have, it's about requiring people to do things to help the users of software, and it leverages those legal powers people shouldn't have to accomplish that.
A better viral copyleft license that would require people to behave exactly as if copyright didn't exist -- and consequently, would not lose any power if copyright really stopped existing -- would be one that said something like "you have permission to use, copy, modify and distribute copies of this software so long as you do not prosecute or litigate for copyright violations of any modifications you contribute". That would need a lot better wording of course, but the gist is "I'll pretend copyright doesn't exist and not sue you for copying this, so long as you do likewise and don't sue anyone else for copying your modifications of it. If you do sue anyone, then I'll sue you." If the grounds for such lawsuits went away, then it would simply become impossible to violate the license, and nothing would be lost.
Many people naively think that's all the GPL requires, but there's a lot of details that keep it from being quite so simple.
You believe there are conditions where the minority should rule over the majority? Then you don't believe in democracy. End of story.
The fallacy here is assuming that an exception to majority rule implies an instance of minority rule.
But the usual point being made by those objecting to majority rule is that there should be limitations to the rulers. That, in some cases, nobody should rule over anybody.
Saying "you all aren't the boss of me" is not equivalent to "I am the boss of you all". We might neither be the boss of anyone, but rather free and equal.
Things do not "naturally" move from a state of disorder to a more ordered state.
They sometimes do when you pump a lot of energy through them -- like, energy from the sun, which is then lost to space.
For a really simple example that's not even approaching something like life yet, just to demonstrate the principle: take a container of water and mercury, separated out into different volumes by their differing densities of course, and in thermal equilibrium with each other at 1C. Now shine a bright light on them until they're both at 99C. Now turn the light off. The mercury, having a much lower specific heat than the water, will drop in temperature much more quickly than the water will. Now you have hot water and cold mercury -- no longer in thermal equilibrium with each other, more ordered and less entropic than they were before, and all it took was some temporary exposure to light!
Heck, for an even simpler example: the water cycle. Shine light on some water for a while until a bunch of it evaporates. Then let it be dark again, let the water vapor condense... now you have water up high eager to run downhill, and capable of doing some useful work along the way You have an energy gradient, a state of lower energy, higher order! And all it took was one day and one night.
Almost every energy source which is available for us to use on the planet exists because having solar energy pump through the planet day after day after day tends to push many things out of equilibrium into a low-entropy state. If that weren't the case, then even if life was magically created here, it would have long ago run out of energy to use, and the Earth would just be a lukewarm soup of decayed organic compounds.
They do have one other out, which I think is the intent: "any proposed identity... shall be verifiable...". If no identity is proposed, that clause is satisfied. So they can only teach abiogenesis if they also teach intelligent design (which is their main intent), but they're not allowed to name the designer (unless it can be scientifically proven), thus it requires "just" intelligent design, but not creationism, and so doesn't fall afoul of the previously-established unconstitutionality of teaching the latter.
They're basically saying "Don't teach about the origin of life unless you teach intelligent design, but be careful not to say 'God' or we'll get in trouble... I mean, unless you can prove it of course, hahah, then they'd have to let us."
I'm not going to defend Evangelicals, but explain to me how the doctrine of transsubstantiation is a parable, or that of the trinity, or any of the other metaphysical "facts" claimed to be true.
If there were a mainstream Christian religion which took the entire Bible as just parables with no actual claims of fact to it, I might still be a Christian today. The New Testament has a lot of nice stories in it (the Old one not so much), good food for thought, and a decent role model in that Jesus character. But to take it as any more historical or factual, whether those be claims about physical or metaphysical things, than you would take something like Star Wars, that crosses a line.
There are people who find moral lessons in Star Wars. (It's not unusual in that regard, every good story should provide food for thought like that, but I single it out because of the Jedi census phenomenon). That's all fine and good. But the moment they start thinking there really was an Obi-Wan Kenobi and that he really lives on to this day as a Force Ghost sometimes speaking into the minds of unwary padawans straying from the path, they've gone from finding a moral lesson in a story to cloudcuckoolanders. The same is true for Christians of any stripe who read the Bible as anything other than fiction with a moral to it.
Or describing some kind of unobservable metaphysical part of reality. Transsubstantiation for example: they wholly admit that the matter of the wafers and wine served in communion continues to have all and only the observable properties of normal ones, but they deny that the blood-and-flesh thing is just a metaphor and say it is really, truly transformed in its deepest inner substance, in its essence, and just happens to keep all the "accidents" of the material things they initially were.
That kind of "observable reality is actually less real than the unobservable stories we're telling and using to justify our authority" than someone being merely factually wrong. Someone who is factually wrong and just too stupid or ignorant to understand where they are wrong and what the evidence is deserve more intellectual respect in my opinion than someone who hand-waves any possible evidence away and says "yes yes of course it all looks exactly like you say, but that's the trivial trappings of material creation and doesn't really matter at all".
It's a logical deduction from clues modelling what maybe did happen, as opposed to something about what maybe should have happened. The first of those is a descriptive issue, a tentative answer about what is; the latter is a prescriptive issue, about what ought to be. The "maybe" isn't the point; the "did" vs "should have" is.
Someone died yesterday who shouldn't have. Evolution might give us clues as to why he did die, but it is silent on the question of whether or not he should have.
And where do you get the premise that optimizing survival of the species takes precedence over all other considerations? That's a moral principle you're starting with, and the theory of evolution is at most telling you about possible means of achieving that end. It doesn't tell you you should; you imported that from elsewhere yourself.
Science isn't attempting to answer the question "Is there a creator?" because such a question is essentially unanswerable.
That is an incorrect statement. Philosophy tries to answer that question
Philosophy is much, much bigger than answering that question. Philosophy can try to answer that question, but then philosophy can try to answer everything, as it's pretty much universal in scope. And that's a rather small, specific question to ask compared to some of the bind-bogglingly broad and general questions it asks, the likes of which you'd need to answer first before you could even start to properly ask that question and understand what you were asking and what an answer would look like if you found it, never mind how to go about finding it.
Philosophy is science. Philosophy even does a very nice job of it if you care to investigate. What happens next is that people will claim that Philosophy is not science, so let me skip ahead a bit. Philosophical rules define science, including "the scientific method".
That doesn't mean philosophy is a science. That means science is a philosophy. The correct philosophy (for its domain), too.
Science requires the same amount of faith in something as a creator.
Science requires that you assume there are answers to be found and that we can eventually know what they are through diligent, rigorous, and open-minded criticism of alternate possibilities. Faith of the religious variety is assuming that this is the answer (for some value of "this") and that you know it for sure, because, uh... because I do! Faith! Don't ask questions! Nyah!
Jumping to and then clinging to a particular conclusion is a much bigger leap of faith than what little it takes to get up and look around for a tentative conclusion rather than assuming there is none (which would be just as much an assumption as the opposite).
It is quite possible that we can never prove an answer to the question of a creator. That is my belief after decades of study. Not having proof does is not the same as invalidating a question. We can't prove what causes gravity and we continue to ask
We haven't proven* a full explanation for gravity yet. That's different from saying we can't, like that we never will. If you could show that, then yeah, all those physicists should go quit their jobs because they're wasting time looking for an answer they can never find. Likewise, if you define "God" in such a way that he's necessarily beyond falsification (as many modern theists do), then there's no point in asking the question, because you know from the start that you will never have an answer. That's very different from not knowing when you will find the answer, which is all science has to face.
*("Proof" used here very loosely as you cannot strictly speaking prove anything in science, but you can come up with adequate explanations which satisfy all the data at hand, and that's as good as you could possibly want... until you find new data and it's not good enough anymore, but until then....)
The RCC's doesn't include the requirement that believers take every word of scripture as "the one true and unerring word of god".
Actually, they technically do. Their doctrine is that the Bible is wholly and completely true AND that science is discovering God's work in creation, and if you think one contradicts the other, you're misinterpreting at least one and should reinterpret them as necessary until they agree.
It's nice that they don't go shouting down (or imprisoning or killing) scientists (anymore), but it's still a pretty big stinking pile of intellectual dishonesty. It's almost tantamount to flat out saying "The Bible is unfalsifiable. If you think you've falsified part of it, you're wrong. Now figure out where you're wrong."
That's not the right question. That question has a simple answer. Nothing grabs it, or pushes it, and the hammer doesn't "roll down" a curvature of space-time. The hammer just continues in a straight line the way it was already moving. Space-time just happens to be bent around the Earth in such a way that straight lines passing near it converge toward its center.
The right question is, why does space-time distort in the presence of mass-energy?
Just because things are OK for me now doesn't mean they've always been. I've had times in my life where my home was a car, or where I had to decide whether I could afford to eat plain sourdough for my daily meals this week, or if I should to stick to cheapo white bread to hold out a little bit longer. And I've been lucky compared to others I know, who have had to beg for change and sleep on benches and in trees. People who work, when they can find work, at shitty jobs with shitty pay for part-time hours and can't even save up for a security deposit on a shitty room in someone else's house. People with no family, or whose choices are to either live at home and get beaten by dad while mom drinks her tears away, or try miserably to make it on their own.
I'm lucky. My parents are just poor, not abusive, or dead. I'm unusually intelligent and could bootstrap my way into decent entry-level administrative and technical jobs with the skills I picked up on the internet before my whole family's finances collapsed, and keep good enough grades to get a basic higher education paid for by the wonderful California school system without which I might very well be on the street too. I'm managing to slowly crawl my way up out of poverty. But home ownership is still a distant, impossible-looking dream, and if I found myself one of the long-term unemployed -- a position I've also been in, thankfully before I was living on my own, when my father still had a mobile home with a tool shed I could sleep in -- all of the wonderful apparently-middle-class life I've built up over the past decade or so would wash away within a year and I'd be on the streets just like other people.
I live in California, and if I don't pay my rent I get a three-day pay-or-quit notice, meaning if I don't pay I forfeit my lease. It would then take a couple months to actually evict me, but it would eventually happen with no long delay. My father, in brighter days, rented rooms of our house out to other people to help us pay our mortgage, and in some cases had to follow this procedure, so I know first hand how it works. I also have friends who have suffered through it and ended up living on the streets, literally begging for change. Just last December I let some temporarily sleep on my couch during the rain, when I found them trying to sleep in a tree near my house. (I'm technically not allowed to do that, but for short periods I can get away with it).
And you are assuming people have family who can take care of them, or who have family who are able to take care of them. My mom rents a room smaller than mine and couldn't sublet even if there was room for me, and my dad is selling off the trailer he lives in to camp (like outdoors) on a friend's farmland in the nearby countryside because he can't make his mortgage anymore. None of my aunts or uncles have room to take me in, they're all busy enough supporting my maternal grandma who has nowhere but their various couches to sleep. My maternal grandpa has a huge house, but he is senile and his evil new wife (my step-grandmother) controls all of his fortune and won't give a penny to help any of his blood family, only her own. My paternal grandparents are dead.
And I'm still young, with living family at all. I was thinking of old people, the kind of people who would have money in the kind of investments that the banking scandals ruined, planning to use it to live off of when they're old. Their families are all long dead, and you can't always assume they have kids of their own, or that those kids would step up to the plate to take care of them, or even could. (I couldn't support my mom if I had to; I could get evicted for letting her move into my bedroom and sleep on my floor just the same as she could if she did that to me).
Of course all of this would be unproblematic is it was actually feasible for average people to climb out of the cycle of rent and own their own property. That way, all else failing, there's at least the family home to fall back on. But then half of the whole banking fiasco had to do with the seriously fucked up housing market, so that's really the locus of the whole problem anyway.
Spoken like someone who's never had to wonder where the next month's rent was coming from; someone who's never had to choose between eating this week and keeping a roof over your head.
It's being unable to pay the rent when your body and mind give out in your old age and you're unable to work, leaving you dying cold and alone in the streets.
Perhaps I should clarify, I didn't mean that I think that existing self-employed people are going to come and save the day, but rather that I think that that class is what a society which has solved its class conflict should look like. Everyone having their own little bit of capital and laboring with it themselves, instead of a few people owning all the capital and everyone else laboring for them; and instead of Marx's solution of everyone jointly owning all the capital and everyone working for the monopoly which would then be The Public.
Or as Chesterton put it, "The problem with capitalism is not too many capitalists, but too few", although the "capitalists" he envisions would not be so in Marx's sense since they would not be exploiting their capital-owning position to extract surplus value from capital-less laborers, but merely laboring on their own capitol. It would be more accurately put "the problem with capitalism is not that there are too many owners of means of production, but too few", but that's not as catchy. The problem is that some people are excluded from ownership, and so forced into subservience to those who achieve ownership. And the solution is to ensure that labor is properly rewarded with capital, so that laborers naturally become capital-owners and are not forever beholden to the whims of the exclusive capitalists' club.
(More specifically, the problem I see is that we recognize debts incurred through the mere use of capital -- rent, including interest -- and so those with capital can acquire more capital in exchange for nothing, and those without capital can never acquire it as any they earn through labor must be paid back again for the use of capital they need to continue laboring. If we stopped recognizing rent as a valid contract, those who have more than they can personally use would have no benefit from it except to sell it, and they could not sell it except on terms that those who need more than they have could afford, so the option in the capitalists' best self-interest would then become to sell their excess capital to the laborers at a price the laborers can earn from their labor, in effect "forcing" the entirely voluntary trade of capital for labor and distributing capital ownership across the labor force, accomplishing the socialist goal of the laborers owning the capital, without abolishing a free market -- in fact, by making it freer).
Slashdot Mirror
The Higgs (...) boson gives fermions and several bosons (including itself) their intrinsic mass.
The Higgs boson does not give itself or anything else mass.
Interaction with the Higgs field gives fundamental particles, including the Higgs boson, their intrinsic mass. A Higgs boson is just an excitation of the Higgs field that is interesting to us only because it evinces the existence of the field.
There aren't Higgs bosons all over the universe giving everything mass; it takes a hell of a lot of effort to bring a Higgs boson into a brief existence, which is why we need these huge high-energy colliders. In fact it takes so much energy to make a Higgs boson that the Higgs boson has a much higher mass than many of the fundamental particles (mass is just energy, rest mass is just total energy minus kinetic energy), so it wouldn't make any sense for really heavy Higgs bosons to give really light particles their mass.
The Higgs boson isn't even responsible for all or even most intrinsic mass. Most of the mass of ordinary matter is found in the binding energies holding fundamental particles together into the compound particles that most ordinary matter is made up out of. Every time a particle interacts with a field, it loses some of its kinetic energy and gains rest mass. Rest mass comes from interactions between what would otherwise be massless particles moving at light speed. Mass is just energy; when kinetic energy is "lost" in an interaction, and not just transferred to something else, it is converted to rest-mass. Most of the mass of the matter we're familiar with is accounted for by the three known electronuclear interactions (the electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces).
What the Higgs field explains is why, after we have accounted for interactions with all known fields, many of the fundamental particles, all by themselves not apparently interacting with anything, still exhibit rest mass and move slower than light. If they weren't interacting with any fields at all, everything should be massless and moving at lightspeed. The Higgs field is the proposed field which massive fundamental particles are interacting with, which slows them down and gives them mass.
(Rather, it's the field with which the truly fundamental particles interact, causing them to manifest as the massive "fundamental" particles we are familiar with. Our familiar fundamental particles aren't "made of" these other particles, like an atom is made of protons and neutrons, so much as in the absence of a Higgs field there would be fundamental particles with completely different properties in the universe, and the presence of a Higgs field forces the ones we end up seeing as massive to behave differently from their constant interaction with it, appearing as the massive fundamental particles with the properties we are familiar with).
Addendum for a personal comment: I think all of the confusion about this could have been avoided if only the ninth and tenth amendments had been included as a preface to the whole constitution, so that that list at the end of the previous post read:
The government may not pass laws governing who may do what in any matters unless we allow it.
It may only pass laws governing who may do what in those matters in those matters we allow it.
It may pass laws governing who may do what in these specific matters.
It may not pass laws governing who may do what in these other specific matters.
So we establish right off the bat: the government is powerless except for the powers we grant it, and only has those powers that we grant it (redundant, I know, but emphasis here is important). Then we grant it these specific powers. It should be clear enough already that it doesn't have any others we haven't granted, but just to be safe: among all those others it doesn't have, it especially doesn't have these ones.
That's what the text of the constitution amounts to already, it's just apparently too obscurely put for people to understand that.
To elaborate on this (more for others than you for CrimsonAvenger):
A "right", in the sense used in the constitution, is either a claim against others requiring action or inaction on their part, or a liberty to act or not on your part (which is in turn equivalent to the absence of any claim against you).
A "power" is a kind of second-order right, a right about changes in ordinary first-order rights, together with "immunities". A power is a liberty to alter first-order rights, to make different things obligatory, permissible, or impermissible, than were before; the liberty to make laws, essentially. An immunity is a claim against such action; a limitation on ability of others to pass laws governing you.
The US Constitution is formulated in a framework where by default the people have maximal immunities -- where people have whatever rights they have by nature (which are not explicitly enumerated in the original constitution), and nobody can change what rights anybody else has, i.e. nobody has any power to make laws. By the Constitution, the people of the US formally grant the US government certain limited powers to change who has what rights; to make some things forbidden or obligatory, etc.
The Bill of Rights in turn explicitly lists some specific immunities retained by the people, in the process enumerating some of the rights people are presumed to have by nature. And to cap it off it emphasizes that people still have immunities against modification of any rights not enumerated, and that the government doesn't have any powers to modify anyone's rights besides those that have been explicitly granted to it.
Together they say, in effect:
The government may pass laws governing who may do what in these specific matters. (Original constitution).
It explicitly may not pass laws governing who may do what in these other specific matters. (First eight amendments).
It may not pass laws governing who may do what in any other matters, even those not in that second list. (Ninth amendment).
It may only pass laws governing who may do what in those matters in that first list. (Tenth amendment).
It's all quite beautiful in theory. Too bad even the people responsible for implementing it don't bother to read it, or if they do, don't understand a word of it.
I may be misunderstanding you but your response seems like a non-sequitur to the question it's a response to.
Obfuscant asked if the same reasoning -- the First Amendment just lists the right to free speech with no caveats or prerequisites, so any caveats or prerequisites would be prima facie unconstitutional -- should apply to the Second Amendment, which likewise lists no caveats of prerequisites to the right to bear arms (though it does list a rationale). If the same reasoning applies, then caveats or prerequisites to the right to bear arms should, by that reasoning, be prima facie unconstitutional.
You reply that some caveats and prerequisites to the right to bear arms have been found constitutional, while no such caveats and prerequisites to the first amendment have. But nobody's asking what has been found which way, they're asking what, by the line of reasoning applied to the first amendment, should be found regarding the second amendment. Or rather, they're implying the obvious answer to that question and then asking if you do apply that same line of reasoning; and presumably, if not, why not.
I'm not doubting this claim, but do you have a link to more information? Sounds like an interesting secret history of copyright. I had no idea there were "writer's guilds" of mere transcribers, much less that they were behind copyright.
You seem to be missing my original point which is that GPL doesn't just require that people act as though copyright didn't exist. I agree that the classical liberals are right, but I'm pointing out that the GPL is more like the socialists than them. They don't just say "I won't sue you for using this so long as you don't sue anyone for using your modifications". Something like that is the most publicized feature of it, but it's not the only feature; there are other requirements to the license besides just licensing your own modifications.
For an example that comes to mind: there's a GPL'd game engine out there. There are lots of people who make mods of a now-freeware game that use that engine. Those modders are largely not programmers but rather artists and designers and so wouldn't touch a line of source code in their lives; they just need the binary to run their modded game in content in. But they can't just bundle the binary with their mod. They also have to bundle the source, even if they themselves never downloaded the source and don't care to, and neither will most of their users. But they still have to, because the GPL is about benefiting end-users by making source code available to them (amongst other things), not about just not suing people for distributing copyrighted data.
If copyright didn't exist at all, that wouldn't be the case. If copyright didn't exist, everything would be licensed under the WTFPL: do whatever the fuck you want with it. GPL is more restrictive than that. It may be less restrictive than traditional proprietary licenses, but it's still more restrictive than doing away with copyright entirely. (Likewise, in socialist societies the people are generally more free than under an oppressive aristocracy, but that doesn't make it as free as a liberal society).
Yes, obviously, but the point is that it uses copyright in response to other uses of copyright.
I've been trying to avoid making a political analogy, but I think that's the only way this can be made clear:
Say you've got an old aristocratic society where state power is being used to the benefit of a group of elites.
Classical liberals shout "That's not fair! Nobody should have that kind of power!"
Socialists shout "That's not fair! That power should be used to benefit the common people!"
Both have a problem with the traditional use of state power, but the latter would keep the power around and just redistribute its benefits, while the former would abolish the power completely. I'm saying the GPL is like the latter, while copyright abolition would be like the former. The GPL leverages copyright to the benefit of the users instead of just the usual benefit to the authors, but it does not replicate a situation in which copyright didn't exist at all.
Fun fact: The etymological meaning of "meritocracy" is almost identical to that of "aristocracy". An aristocracy is literally "rule by the best".
That was kind of my point. That GPL doesn't just do the same thing as lack of copyright, as the person I replied to claimed. GPL is more restrictive than no copyright would be.
If copyright went away, nobody could be required to distribute source code, of any of the other things the GPL requires for permission to use code thus licensed. (There wouldn't be much point in intentionally withholding things like source code without copyright, though). They would simply have no grounds to sue for copyright violation for their modifications to it. The GPL is not about restricting people from exercising legal powers they shouldn't have, it's about requiring people to do things to help the users of software, and it leverages those legal powers people shouldn't have to accomplish that.
A better viral copyleft license that would require people to behave exactly as if copyright didn't exist -- and consequently, would not lose any power if copyright really stopped existing -- would be one that said something like "you have permission to use, copy, modify and distribute copies of this software so long as you do not prosecute or litigate for copyright violations of any modifications you contribute". That would need a lot better wording of course, but the gist is "I'll pretend copyright doesn't exist and not sue you for copying this, so long as you do likewise and don't sue anyone else for copying your modifications of it. If you do sue anyone, then I'll sue you." If the grounds for such lawsuits went away, then it would simply become impossible to violate the license, and nothing would be lost.
Many people naively think that's all the GPL requires, but there's a lot of details that keep it from being quite so simple.
You believe there are conditions where the minority should rule over the majority? Then you don't believe in democracy. End of story.
The fallacy here is assuming that an exception to majority rule implies an instance of minority rule.
But the usual point being made by those objecting to majority rule is that there should be limitations to the rulers. That, in some cases, nobody should rule over anybody.
Saying "you all aren't the boss of me" is not equivalent to "I am the boss of you all". We might neither be the boss of anyone, but rather free and equal.
Things do not "naturally" move from a state of disorder to a more ordered state.
They sometimes do when you pump a lot of energy through them -- like, energy from the sun, which is then lost to space.
For a really simple example that's not even approaching something like life yet, just to demonstrate the principle: take a container of water and mercury, separated out into different volumes by their differing densities of course, and in thermal equilibrium with each other at 1C. Now shine a bright light on them until they're both at 99C. Now turn the light off. The mercury, having a much lower specific heat than the water, will drop in temperature much more quickly than the water will. Now you have hot water and cold mercury -- no longer in thermal equilibrium with each other, more ordered and less entropic than they were before, and all it took was some temporary exposure to light!
Heck, for an even simpler example: the water cycle. Shine light on some water for a while until a bunch of it evaporates. Then let it be dark again, let the water vapor condense... now you have water up high eager to run downhill, and capable of doing some useful work along the way You have an energy gradient, a state of lower energy, higher order! And all it took was one day and one night.
Almost every energy source which is available for us to use on the planet exists because having solar energy pump through the planet day after day after day tends to push many things out of equilibrium into a low-entropy state. If that weren't the case, then even if life was magically created here, it would have long ago run out of energy to use, and the Earth would just be a lukewarm soup of decayed organic compounds.
They do have one other out, which I think is the intent: "any proposed identity ... shall be verifiable...". If no identity is proposed, that clause is satisfied. So they can only teach abiogenesis if they also teach intelligent design (which is their main intent), but they're not allowed to name the designer (unless it can be scientifically proven), thus it requires "just" intelligent design, but not creationism, and so doesn't fall afoul of the previously-established unconstitutionality of teaching the latter.
They're basically saying "Don't teach about the origin of life unless you teach intelligent design, but be careful not to say 'God' or we'll get in trouble... I mean, unless you can prove it of course, hahah, then they'd have to let us."
I'm not going to defend Evangelicals, but explain to me how the doctrine of transsubstantiation is a parable, or that of the trinity, or any of the other metaphysical "facts" claimed to be true.
If there were a mainstream Christian religion which took the entire Bible as just parables with no actual claims of fact to it, I might still be a Christian today. The New Testament has a lot of nice stories in it (the Old one not so much), good food for thought, and a decent role model in that Jesus character. But to take it as any more historical or factual, whether those be claims about physical or metaphysical things, than you would take something like Star Wars, that crosses a line.
There are people who find moral lessons in Star Wars. (It's not unusual in that regard, every good story should provide food for thought like that, but I single it out because of the Jedi census phenomenon). That's all fine and good. But the moment they start thinking there really was an Obi-Wan Kenobi and that he really lives on to this day as a Force Ghost sometimes speaking into the minds of unwary padawans straying from the path, they've gone from finding a moral lesson in a story to cloudcuckoolanders. The same is true for Christians of any stripe who read the Bible as anything other than fiction with a moral to it.
Or describing some kind of unobservable metaphysical part of reality. Transsubstantiation for example: they wholly admit that the matter of the wafers and wine served in communion continues to have all and only the observable properties of normal ones, but they deny that the blood-and-flesh thing is just a metaphor and say it is really, truly transformed in its deepest inner substance, in its essence, and just happens to keep all the "accidents" of the material things they initially were.
That kind of "observable reality is actually less real than the unobservable stories we're telling and using to justify our authority" than someone being merely factually wrong. Someone who is factually wrong and just too stupid or ignorant to understand where they are wrong and what the evidence is deserve more intellectual respect in my opinion than someone who hand-waves any possible evidence away and says "yes yes of course it all looks exactly like you say, but that's the trivial trappings of material creation and doesn't really matter at all".
It's a logical deduction from clues modelling what maybe did happen, as opposed to something about what maybe should have happened. The first of those is a descriptive issue, a tentative answer about what is; the latter is a prescriptive issue, about what ought to be. The "maybe" isn't the point; the "did" vs "should have" is.
Someone died yesterday who shouldn't have. Evolution might give us clues as to why he did die, but it is silent on the question of whether or not he should have.
And where do you get the premise that optimizing survival of the species takes precedence over all other considerations? That's a moral principle you're starting with, and the theory of evolution is at most telling you about possible means of achieving that end. It doesn't tell you you should; you imported that from elsewhere yourself.
Science isn't attempting to answer the question "Is there a creator?" because such a question is essentially unanswerable.
That is an incorrect statement. Philosophy tries to answer that question
Philosophy is much, much bigger than answering that question. Philosophy can try to answer that question, but then philosophy can try to answer everything, as it's pretty much universal in scope. And that's a rather small, specific question to ask compared to some of the bind-bogglingly broad and general questions it asks, the likes of which you'd need to answer first before you could even start to properly ask that question and understand what you were asking and what an answer would look like if you found it, never mind how to go about finding it.
Philosophy is science. Philosophy even does a very nice job of it if you care to investigate. What happens next is that people will claim that Philosophy is not science, so let me skip ahead a bit. Philosophical rules define science, including "the scientific method".
That doesn't mean philosophy is a science. That means science is a philosophy. The correct philosophy (for its domain), too.
Science requires the same amount of faith in something as a creator.
Science requires that you assume there are answers to be found and that we can eventually know what they are through diligent, rigorous, and open-minded criticism of alternate possibilities. Faith of the religious variety is assuming that this is the answer (for some value of "this") and that you know it for sure, because, uh... because I do! Faith! Don't ask questions! Nyah!
Jumping to and then clinging to a particular conclusion is a much bigger leap of faith than what little it takes to get up and look around for a tentative conclusion rather than assuming there is none (which would be just as much an assumption as the opposite).
It is quite possible that we can never prove an answer to the question of a creator. That is my belief after decades of study. Not having proof does is not the same as invalidating a question. We can't prove what causes gravity and we continue to ask
We haven't proven* a full explanation for gravity yet. That's different from saying we can't, like that we never will. If you could show that, then yeah, all those physicists should go quit their jobs because they're wasting time looking for an answer they can never find. Likewise, if you define "God" in such a way that he's necessarily beyond falsification (as many modern theists do), then there's no point in asking the question, because you know from the start that you will never have an answer. That's very different from not knowing when you will find the answer, which is all science has to face.
*("Proof" used here very loosely as you cannot strictly speaking prove anything in science, but you can come up with adequate explanations which satisfy all the data at hand, and that's as good as you could possibly want... until you find new data and it's not good enough anymore, but until then....)
The RCC's doesn't include the requirement that believers take every word of scripture as "the one true and unerring word of god".
Actually, they technically do. Their doctrine is that the Bible is wholly and completely true AND that science is discovering God's work in creation, and if you think one contradicts the other, you're misinterpreting at least one and should reinterpret them as necessary until they agree.
It's nice that they don't go shouting down (or imprisoning or killing) scientists (anymore), but it's still a pretty big stinking pile of intellectual dishonesty. It's almost tantamount to flat out saying "The Bible is unfalsifiable. If you think you've falsified part of it, you're wrong. Now figure out where you're wrong."
That's not the right question. That question has a simple answer. Nothing grabs it, or pushes it, and the hammer doesn't "roll down" a curvature of space-time. The hammer just continues in a straight line the way it was already moving. Space-time just happens to be bent around the Earth in such a way that straight lines passing near it converge toward its center.
The right question is, why does space-time distort in the presence of mass-energy?
Just because things are OK for me now doesn't mean they've always been. I've had times in my life where my home was a car, or where I had to decide whether I could afford to eat plain sourdough for my daily meals this week, or if I should to stick to cheapo white bread to hold out a little bit longer. And I've been lucky compared to others I know, who have had to beg for change and sleep on benches and in trees. People who work, when they can find work, at shitty jobs with shitty pay for part-time hours and can't even save up for a security deposit on a shitty room in someone else's house. People with no family, or whose choices are to either live at home and get beaten by dad while mom drinks her tears away, or try miserably to make it on their own.
I'm lucky. My parents are just poor, not abusive, or dead. I'm unusually intelligent and could bootstrap my way into decent entry-level administrative and technical jobs with the skills I picked up on the internet before my whole family's finances collapsed, and keep good enough grades to get a basic higher education paid for by the wonderful California school system without which I might very well be on the street too. I'm managing to slowly crawl my way up out of poverty. But home ownership is still a distant, impossible-looking dream, and if I found myself one of the long-term unemployed -- a position I've also been in, thankfully before I was living on my own, when my father still had a mobile home with a tool shed I could sleep in -- all of the wonderful apparently-middle-class life I've built up over the past decade or so would wash away within a year and I'd be on the streets just like other people.
You're the one with absolutely no idea.
I live in California, and if I don't pay my rent I get a three-day pay-or-quit notice, meaning if I don't pay I forfeit my lease. It would then take a couple months to actually evict me, but it would eventually happen with no long delay. My father, in brighter days, rented rooms of our house out to other people to help us pay our mortgage, and in some cases had to follow this procedure, so I know first hand how it works. I also have friends who have suffered through it and ended up living on the streets, literally begging for change. Just last December I let some temporarily sleep on my couch during the rain, when I found them trying to sleep in a tree near my house. (I'm technically not allowed to do that, but for short periods I can get away with it).
And you are assuming people have family who can take care of them, or who have family who are able to take care of them. My mom rents a room smaller than mine and couldn't sublet even if there was room for me, and my dad is selling off the trailer he lives in to camp (like outdoors) on a friend's farmland in the nearby countryside because he can't make his mortgage anymore. None of my aunts or uncles have room to take me in, they're all busy enough supporting my maternal grandma who has nowhere but their various couches to sleep. My maternal grandpa has a huge house, but he is senile and his evil new wife (my step-grandmother) controls all of his fortune and won't give a penny to help any of his blood family, only her own. My paternal grandparents are dead.
And I'm still young, with living family at all. I was thinking of old people, the kind of people who would have money in the kind of investments that the banking scandals ruined, planning to use it to live off of when they're old. Their families are all long dead, and you can't always assume they have kids of their own, or that those kids would step up to the plate to take care of them, or even could. (I couldn't support my mom if I had to; I could get evicted for letting her move into my bedroom and sleep on my floor just the same as she could if she did that to me).
Of course all of this would be unproblematic is it was actually feasible for average people to climb out of the cycle of rent and own their own property. That way, all else failing, there's at least the family home to fall back on. But then half of the whole banking fiasco had to do with the seriously fucked up housing market, so that's really the locus of the whole problem anyway.
Spoken like someone who's never had to wonder where the next month's rent was coming from; someone who's never had to choose between eating this week and keeping a roof over your head.
It's being unable to pay the rent when your body and mind give out in your old age and you're unable to work, leaving you dying cold and alone in the streets.
Just money my ass.
Perhaps I should clarify, I didn't mean that I think that existing self-employed people are going to come and save the day, but rather that I think that that class is what a society which has solved its class conflict should look like. Everyone having their own little bit of capital and laboring with it themselves, instead of a few people owning all the capital and everyone else laboring for them; and instead of Marx's solution of everyone jointly owning all the capital and everyone working for the monopoly which would then be The Public.
Or as Chesterton put it, "The problem with capitalism is not too many capitalists, but too few", although the "capitalists" he envisions would not be so in Marx's sense since they would not be exploiting their capital-owning position to extract surplus value from capital-less laborers, but merely laboring on their own capitol. It would be more accurately put "the problem with capitalism is not that there are too many owners of means of production, but too few", but that's not as catchy. The problem is that some people are excluded from ownership, and so forced into subservience to those who achieve ownership. And the solution is to ensure that labor is properly rewarded with capital, so that laborers naturally become capital-owners and are not forever beholden to the whims of the exclusive capitalists' club.
(More specifically, the problem I see is that we recognize debts incurred through the mere use of capital -- rent, including interest -- and so those with capital can acquire more capital in exchange for nothing, and those without capital can never acquire it as any they earn through labor must be paid back again for the use of capital they need to continue laboring. If we stopped recognizing rent as a valid contract, those who have more than they can personally use would have no benefit from it except to sell it, and they could not sell it except on terms that those who need more than they have could afford, so the option in the capitalists' best self-interest would then become to sell their excess capital to the laborers at a price the laborers can earn from their labor, in effect "forcing" the entirely voluntary trade of capital for labor and distributing capital ownership across the labor force, accomplishing the socialist goal of the laborers owning the capital, without abolishing a free market -- in fact, by making it freer).