Not if he placed those specific rights (if not the entire post) into the public domain.
You are, per your sig, a lawyer, so you probably know better than I do... but I thought the whole reason for things like the CC0 license was that saying "this is now in the public domain" doesn't have any legal standing. (At least in some jurisdictions). As far as the law is concerned, you still own the copyrights until your copyrights expire, and the best you can do is just grant the broadest imaginable license permitting people to do whatever they want with it.
When I want to do such a thing, the language I usually use is to grant "an unlimited, perpetual license to copy, modify, and distribute as you see fit." Which seems to be more or less what the CC0 license does.
The problem is, under copyright law (US at least), your post is automatically copyrighted by you, and I'm not allowed to redistribute it without your permission. Giving that permission (usually with qualifications) is what a license does. So without a license, what you say below is false:
You are free to copy it, edit it, distribute it, delete it, mod it up, mod it down, etc.
Is this is true, then you have licensed me (and the rest of Slashdot) to do all these things, and what you said above (that it is not covered under any license) is false.
You *did* see the "perhaps" part of my statement, didn't you? It isn't "she is either a shill or she's stupid". It's, "she's either a shill, or she isn't, and if that's the case, she may or may not be wrong." Or are you suddenly an expert in determining the danger of nascent monopolies such that you can reliably second-guess her judgment?
I don't have to be an expert on nascent monopolies to know that Microsoft is a problem, because Microsoft's monopoly is anything but nascent. Whether or not she is right to be concerned about Google, she is clueless (or a shill) if she thinks MS is magically not an abusive monopoly anymore just because the calendar rolled over a bunch of zeroes a few years ago. Just because a problem has been around a while doesn't make it not a problem anymore.
Oh hell no. The value of the dollar is based on supply and demand. A 0% interest rate means that you can borrow dollars at no cost. So if the rate hit 0%, more banks would borrow more money. No reason not to right? This would flood the market with dollars, increasing supply, and so decreasing the value of the dollar. Low interest rates = inflation.
This is only true if it is possible to produce more dollars. If we were talking about, say, corn instead of dollars, and there were some way for corn growers to produce a ton of more corn for free (or at least, on 0% interest credit), then suddenly a whole lot more corn will be produced, flooding the market, increasing supply, and so decreasing the value of corn. But for a commodity with a fixed supply - like say, antique Roman coins, genuine articles of which cannot be produced today - there is no way that readily available 0% credit can result in a flood of product on the market.
But can help to draw the product to the places it is most valued, in this case by enabling Roman coin collectors to purchase the coins they want on credit now rather than having to save up more and buy it later. If our dollars wre of fixed supply - that is, if we weren't printing new money all the time - then low interest rates could not spur the production of more dollars, leading to inflation. It could only serve to draw dollars out of reserve and into productive use where they are more valuable. Thus, the root of the problem of inflation is not low interest rates; it is the production of new money.
Homophobia is having negative reactions towards other people who are gay. Not being comfortable with gayness for yourself, though, is perfectly acceptable. Why choose such a negative-laced word?
Homophobia is the fear of (or more neutrally phrased, "aversion to") homosexuality simpliciter - no reference to whether it's in others or yourself. If you're afraid (worried, concerned, uncomfortable with the idea) that you might be gay, that's a form of homophobia.
A man not being attracted to other men is perfectly fine; nobody is saying you have to be gay. But say a man is attracted to a woman and it turns out that the woman used to be a man, but you couldn't tell unless someone told you, like our Ghost in the Shell example here; and that makes him uncomfortable... why? Because "that's gay"? What's wrong with that? (This is different from, say, being attracted to someone who you thought was a woman, but then you find out "she" has a cock, and you're not into the cock; that's just an honest reaction, nothing wrong with that, and little different from being turned on by a girl and then being turned off to find she's on her period).
What I'm basically saying is that while you're free to have or not have whatever attractions to whoever you want, if you want to not want someone, you're passing judgment (on yourself, but still) about wanting that someone. If that judgment is that it is bad to be gay, then that's a form of homophobia... just directed at oneself in particular.
When I was in school they taught us there were two theories of evolution: Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest, and some nutcase's theory that creatures adapt to their environment and pass those changes down to their children. For example, giraffes stretched their necks to reach food and because they stretched their necks that characteristic was passed down to their children. Sure, the school was just trying to discredit Darwin, but now you're telling me that nutcase's theory has merit?
You're thinking of Lamarckian evolution, which is completely unrelated to Wallace's conjecture discussed in the article and remains well-refuted to this day. Lamarckism was supplanted by Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Well, in my experience, 90% of all people are idiots. And that's true for all races, sexes, religions and whatnot. 90% fucking idiots. That's rather depressing...
You want depressing? Try this. Think of an average person. Now note that by definition, half of all people are dumber than that. (Assuming a normal, gaussian distribution of intelligence). The other 40% of the idiots out there only look like idiots to those of us in the 90-something percentile; to the rest of the world, thems is smart peoples.
Apparently I was baptized Catholic, and despite never having set foot in a Catholic church since I started remembering things (with the exception of a couple weddings and funerals), and being an avowed... er... pan-auto-atheo-agnostic-ist?*... an avowed definite-not-a-Christian for many years now, the Church still considers me Catholic anyway.
*(My beliefs about God are not easily categorized. I believe that "God" as a thing beyond the universe is a pure nonsense concept, not even intelligible, and that "gods" as powerful [meta]physical beings could, but probably do not in fact, exist, though we can't be absolutely sure, but we have no reason to think they do, and they wouldn't count as legitimate gods even if they did. However, "God" in a pantheistic sense would be a legitimate God, and could exist, but at this point in time apparently does not, and maybe never will, but truth and goodness can be properly defined in terms of what such a pantheistic deity would say if it were around, and as such people with epistemic and deontological virtue act as autotheistic deities in a sense, taking the role of God upon themselves).
their landing page is titled NEW PAGE 1 and was made with FrontPage 5.0
I'd have to say I like this better than a situation where city hall spends half a million on some stupid hip web design agency who does nothing more than creating a Flash site.
The sane compromise would be to spend a few hundred (or a very few thousand) on a local community college multimedia arts major who can actually put together something simple and decent in valid XHTML/CSS.
Because it's bloated as a single app, but less bloated then opening up a new process (or more than one!) for every single web page loaded. Until every computer in use has multi-gigabyte memory, including handheld devices, there will be a need for something lighter than webkit
I know the singular of data is not anecdote, but having been using both Safari and Firefox since their respective inceptions (all on Macs of various vintages with various OS X versions), Safari pretty much always seems significantly faster than Firefox. Maybe the experience is different on other platforms, but on the Mac side at least it certainly feels like Webkit is much lighter than Gecko.
I don't see us running out of thorium anytime soon
This raises another good point, regarding the 'scarcity' of nuclear fuels alluded to a few level up in this thread. All the radioactive material we could be using to turn water into steam to power electrical generators is already sitting there burning at the same rate underground right now, it's just heating the surrounding rocks in a more diffuse spread than if it was all stuck into a reactor together.
We will run out of nuclear fuels at the same point in time whether we're using them or not, cause by their very natures, radioactive materials are always sitting there radiating. It's just a question of whether we take advantage of that energy while it's there, or just let it warm a lot of rocks a little bit until it all burns out.
Somehow being a greedy criminal is OK as long as you're dumb enough to wind up as the victim in the attempt.
Say two guys outside a bar get in an argument and one of them moves toward the other, chest out and arm on it's way into a punch - clear to any bystander that he's trying to assault the other guy - but he's so drunk he trips on his shoelaces and breaks his nose, so the other guy just walks away. Should he be tried for assault, just because he clearly intended to commit it but was too drunk to succeed at it?
Flip a fair coin an infinite number of times. What fraction of the time does it come up heads? Half. Granted, that's still an infinite number of times, but it's also still half the number of times flipped. Transfinite math is weird: multiples and fractions of infinity are still infinity, but that doesn't mean you can't do multiplication and division with them.
Hell, there's an even easier example than that one. How many positive integers are there? Infinite. How many of those are even? Half. So how many even numbers are there? Infinite.
One of my favorite little pseudo-philosophical thoughts related to this, more on subject: as any fraction of infinity, no matter how small, is still infinity, if there are an infinite number of different universes, then anything that is possible, no matter how improbable, so long as it has any probability at all greater than zero, will occur an infinite number of times. Likewise if space or time are infinite. (For the purposes of this post, "infinite" assumes non-repeating, as a repeating infinite structure is indistinguishable from a finite looped structure).
Proponents of the Anthropic Principle do not claim that universes which cannot support life are rare, or commonplace, or anything of the sort.
The Anthropic Principle merely says that we should not be surprised to find the universe conductive to our existence, even if such conditions are highly improbable, because the fact of our existence logically necessitates that we exist in a universe conductive to it.
1st amendment (which protects _political speech_ and no other type)
I see this assertion on Slashdot here now and again, and while I'll certainly agree that political speech was probably the type of speech which the Founders were most concerned with protecting, I see no basis for the assertion that that was all the First Amendment is meant to protect. Quoth the Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The No True Scotsman fallacy is only a fallacy when your "no P is a Q" is a synthetic proposition, rather than an analytic one. If one were to say "no bachelor is married", and then someone stood up and said "I'm a married bachelor!", the first speaker would be perfectly correct in replying "if you are married, then you are not a true bachelor, despite what you may call yourself".
Of course, that's not incredibly helpful for us here because most of the qualities people take to be inherent in anyone rightly labeled "conservative" are actually synthetic rather than analytic qualities. About the only true "no true conservative..." sentence is "no true conservative favors rapid change", since the meaning of "conservative" is "opposed to rapid change". It just so happens that western societies and governments have recently (for the past century or two) been moving away from a very libertarian, capitalist model, and so those in favor of slowing or reversing that change get called "conservatives". But there's an even older flavor of "conservative" who was never happy with the move to that libertarian model in the first place, who are still trying to put a stop to the so-called "moral decadence" that it brought about. Two very different viewpoints, both calling themselves, and getting called, "conservative" - so who are the true conservatives then?
You can be a "true conservative" and support just about anything position that has any presence in the present, as to be a "true conservative" is just to want to conserve such things they way they are. Calling any particular political platform (aside from "lets be cautious with the changes here") "conservative" is like a Vietnamese person calling a European atheist a "Christian" (because European = Christian in his mind), or a medieval European calling an Indian Buddhist a "Hindu" (because Indian = Hindu in his mind). It's a sloppy substitution based on an inaccurate correlation. "European" and "Christian" do not mean the same thing, even though many or most Europeans may be Christians, so they cannot be used as synonyms like that. If you tried to do so and use that in support of an argument - e.g. "Most Englishmen are Protestant -> no true Englishman is Catholic" - then you would be committing the No True Scotsman fallacy.
But coming back from that tangent, my point is that words have a sort of historical inertia of meaning that persists despite peoples' misuse of them. Just because a bunch of authoritarian radicals (a radical being an extreme progressive, someone who wants lots of change made very quickly, the very opposite of a conservative) call themselves "conservatives" does not mean that they are, in fact, conservative. People with similar ideologies may have been conservative in times past, but since that ideology is a world different from how things are today, such people are not conservatives but in fact radicals.
Avant-garde art is initially unpopular and can't turn a profit, necessitating state funding
I disagree, quite vehemently. Much of the greatest art is created because the artist wanted to create it and he could afford to create it. Great artists create art for art's sake, so the only consideration as to whether or not they create it is whether or not they can spare the the time and resources necessary to create it.
So in a world without intellectual property laws, a world where most of the current venues for commercialization of art were unfeasible, you would likely end up with a situation much like the pre-modern world: where only the very wealthy, or those sponsored by the very wealthy, could become great artists, because only those people had the leisure time and disposable income to practice their art.
You are suggesting that the state must step in to provide the funding necessary to provide artists with the time and resources they need to create their art, but I say that that's sidestepping a greater problem: why don't ordinary people have leisure time and disposable income sufficient enough for them to be artists in their spare time, if they so please? It could be because there is just so much real work to do that all of our society's resources and manpower must be devoted to doing that work. If that were so, then I would say the loss of the arts would be natural and acceptable, because there would be much more important things to focus our efforts on. But it doesn't not appear that that is so, for some people have plenty of disposable wealth and leisure time. I think the problem is the broader one is economic disparity and the related issue of economic (organizational) inefficiency. The technology is there for us all to share a leisurely society; it's the social organization we use that's gumming up the works.
In short, there is no need to provide a motive to create art art; art is its own motive. You need only to provide the means to create art, and rather than having a state-sponsored font of such means, I think we need to address the broader issue of seeing that everybody has the means to do things like art for their own sake.
...Protestants believing its the truth that Christ is the Messiah...
I don't see how anyone could doubt that, seeing as how "Christ" is just the Greek translation of the Hebrew term "Messiah" (both of which mean "anointed" or "chosen").
Now, whether or not Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ/Messiah, that's something people might debate...
If they can then the next step will be Britain suing the US for return of the land that was "stolen" by that well known "terrorist" gang lead by George Washington. This may lead to the US government declaring itself a terrorist organization by its own laws and promptly disappearing in a puff of logic.
On the contrary, by contemporary US logic, anyone who "hates America" is a terrorist, so if anyone from the Revolutionary War period were to be retroactively declared terrorists by the US government, it would be George III and his redcoats. And they were probably commies too, pinko terrorist bastards; I mean, just look at the name! Redcoats!
The maximize button doesn't work properly (I've had this flame war on Mac boards before... bottom line is, I want to be able to click a button and have a window be fullscreen. Period.)
As a long time (and current) Mac user and former rabid Mac fan, I have to admit that this is one of the things that cured me of my fan-rabies.
In Mac OS pre-X, the "Zoom" button would always resize the window to be as large, and only as large, as necessary to show the complete contents of the window (clicking it again would go back to the previous size), and OPTION-clicking it always did something very similar to Windows' "Maximize" (making the window take up most of the screen - IIRC it left a strip about 48px wide on the right hand side of the primary display, so you could still easily get to the disk icons on the desktop).
Now in OS X, the stupid little plus button does different things in every application (grr especially iTunes), and almost never does the two things I might want to do with it: either resize-to-fit, or maximize.
This is a general complaint about OS X I've had since its release: Apple's greatest strong suite (IMO of course) used to be the strict consistency of interface across all applications on the system, Apple or not. The OS handled the windows' borders' appearance and function: the apps just passed along a title and some contents to display. Now, that consistency has pretty much gone out the window, even amongst Apple-developed applications...
Slashdot Mirror
Not if he placed those specific rights (if not the entire post) into the public domain.
You are, per your sig, a lawyer, so you probably know better than I do... but I thought the whole reason for things like the CC0 license was that saying "this is now in the public domain" doesn't have any legal standing. (At least in some jurisdictions). As far as the law is concerned, you still own the copyrights until your copyrights expire, and the best you can do is just grant the broadest imaginable license permitting people to do whatever they want with it.
When I want to do such a thing, the language I usually use is to grant "an unlimited, perpetual license to copy, modify, and distribute as you see fit." Which seems to be more or less what the CC0 license does.
This post is not covered under any license.
The problem is, under copyright law (US at least), your post is automatically copyrighted by you, and I'm not allowed to redistribute it without your permission. Giving that permission (usually with qualifications) is what a license does. So without a license, what you say below is false:
You are free to copy it, edit it, distribute it, delete it, mod it up, mod it down, etc.
Is this is true, then you have licensed me (and the rest of Slashdot) to do all these things, and what you said above (that it is not covered under any license) is false.
Free Tibet. Limit one per customer. While supplies last. Offer void in China.
You *did* see the "perhaps" part of my statement, didn't you? It isn't "she is either a shill or she's stupid". It's, "she's either a shill, or she isn't, and if that's the case, she may or may not be wrong." Or are you suddenly an expert in determining the danger of nascent monopolies such that you can reliably second-guess her judgment?
I don't have to be an expert on nascent monopolies to know that Microsoft is a problem, because Microsoft's monopoly is anything but nascent. Whether or not she is right to be concerned about Google, she is clueless (or a shill) if she thinks MS is magically not an abusive monopoly anymore just because the calendar rolled over a bunch of zeroes a few years ago. Just because a problem has been around a while doesn't make it not a problem anymore.
Or that maybe, just maybe, she's an independent thinker who believes (perhaps wrongly) Microsoft isn't a problem.
GP already said "Either that, or she is one of the most clueless people the Obama administration has to offer."
Cluelessness and wrongly believing things are kinda the same thing here...
People have suggested a "Science Court" with science-savy judges and officiers as a possibility.
They already tried a Science Court back in the late 90s but it proved unsuccessful and was canceled after only a year of operation.
Excellent! We can use their demise as yet another cautionary tale.
Ironically, it's more useful than the entire collection of blogs that they stored.
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
Oh hell no. The value of the dollar is based on supply and demand. A 0% interest rate means that you can borrow dollars at no cost. So if the rate hit 0%, more banks would borrow more money. No reason not to right? This would flood the market with dollars, increasing supply, and so decreasing the value of the dollar. Low interest rates = inflation.
This is only true if it is possible to produce more dollars. If we were talking about, say, corn instead of dollars, and there were some way for corn growers to produce a ton of more corn for free (or at least, on 0% interest credit), then suddenly a whole lot more corn will be produced, flooding the market, increasing supply, and so decreasing the value of corn. But for a commodity with a fixed supply - like say, antique Roman coins, genuine articles of which cannot be produced today - there is no way that readily available 0% credit can result in a flood of product on the market.
But can help to draw the product to the places it is most valued, in this case by enabling Roman coin collectors to purchase the coins they want on credit now rather than having to save up more and buy it later. If our dollars wre of fixed supply - that is, if we weren't printing new money all the time - then low interest rates could not spur the production of more dollars, leading to inflation. It could only serve to draw dollars out of reserve and into productive use where they are more valuable. Thus, the root of the problem of inflation is not low interest rates; it is the production of new money.
Homophobia is having negative reactions towards other people who are gay. Not being comfortable with gayness for yourself, though, is perfectly acceptable. Why choose such a negative-laced word?
Homophobia is the fear of (or more neutrally phrased, "aversion to") homosexuality simpliciter - no reference to whether it's in others or yourself. If you're afraid (worried, concerned, uncomfortable with the idea) that you might be gay, that's a form of homophobia.
A man not being attracted to other men is perfectly fine; nobody is saying you have to be gay. But say a man is attracted to a woman and it turns out that the woman used to be a man, but you couldn't tell unless someone told you, like our Ghost in the Shell example here; and that makes him uncomfortable... why? Because "that's gay"? What's wrong with that? (This is different from, say, being attracted to someone who you thought was a woman, but then you find out "she" has a cock, and you're not into the cock; that's just an honest reaction, nothing wrong with that, and little different from being turned on by a girl and then being turned off to find she's on her period).
What I'm basically saying is that while you're free to have or not have whatever attractions to whoever you want, if you want to not want someone, you're passing judgment (on yourself, but still) about wanting that someone. If that judgment is that it is bad to be gay, then that's a form of homophobia... just directed at oneself in particular.
When I was in school they taught us there were two theories of evolution: Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest, and some nutcase's theory that creatures adapt to their environment and pass those changes down to their children. For example, giraffes stretched their necks to reach food and because they stretched their necks that characteristic was passed down to their children. Sure, the school was just trying to discredit Darwin, but now you're telling me that nutcase's theory has merit?
You're thinking of Lamarckian evolution, which is completely unrelated to Wallace's conjecture discussed in the article and remains well-refuted to this day. Lamarckism was supplanted by Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Well, in my experience, 90% of all people are idiots. And that's true for all races, sexes, religions and whatnot. 90% fucking idiots. That's rather depressing...
You want depressing? Try this. Think of an average person. Now note that by definition, half of all people are dumber than that. (Assuming a normal, gaussian distribution of intelligence). The other 40% of the idiots out there only look like idiots to those of us in the 90-something percentile; to the rest of the world, thems is smart peoples.
Apparently I was baptized Catholic, and despite never having set foot in a Catholic church since I started remembering things (with the exception of a couple weddings and funerals), and being an avowed... er... pan-auto-atheo-agnostic-ist?*... an avowed definite-not-a-Christian for many years now, the Church still considers me Catholic anyway.
*(My beliefs about God are not easily categorized. I believe that "God" as a thing beyond the universe is a pure nonsense concept, not even intelligible, and that "gods" as powerful [meta]physical beings could, but probably do not in fact, exist, though we can't be absolutely sure, but we have no reason to think they do, and they wouldn't count as legitimate gods even if they did. However, "God" in a pantheistic sense would be a legitimate God, and could exist, but at this point in time apparently does not, and maybe never will, but truth and goodness can be properly defined in terms of what such a pantheistic deity would say if it were around, and as such people with epistemic and deontological virtue act as autotheistic deities in a sense, taking the role of God upon themselves).
their landing page is titled NEW PAGE 1 and was made with FrontPage 5.0
I'd have to say I like this better than a situation where city hall spends half a million on some stupid hip web design agency who does nothing more than creating a Flash site.
The sane compromise would be to spend a few hundred (or a very few thousand) on a local community college multimedia arts major who can actually put together something simple and decent in valid XHTML/CSS.
Because it's bloated as a single app, but less bloated then opening up a new process (or more than one!) for every single web page loaded. Until every computer in use has multi-gigabyte memory, including handheld devices, there will be a need for something lighter than webkit
I know the singular of data is not anecdote, but having been using both Safari and Firefox since their respective inceptions (all on Macs of various vintages with various OS X versions), Safari pretty much always seems significantly faster than Firefox. Maybe the experience is different on other platforms, but on the Mac side at least it certainly feels like Webkit is much lighter than Gecko.
Bungie had an abusively funny Letters to the Webmaster section as far back as 1994 or 1995. This is nothing new at all.
I don't see us running out of thorium anytime soon
This raises another good point, regarding the 'scarcity' of nuclear fuels alluded to a few level up in this thread. All the radioactive material we could be using to turn water into steam to power electrical generators is already sitting there burning at the same rate underground right now, it's just heating the surrounding rocks in a more diffuse spread than if it was all stuck into a reactor together.
We will run out of nuclear fuels at the same point in time whether we're using them or not, cause by their very natures, radioactive materials are always sitting there radiating. It's just a question of whether we take advantage of that energy while it's there, or just let it warm a lot of rocks a little bit until it all burns out.
Somehow being a greedy criminal is OK as long as you're dumb enough to wind up as the victim in the attempt.
Say two guys outside a bar get in an argument and one of them moves toward the other, chest out and arm on it's way into a punch - clear to any bystander that he's trying to assault the other guy - but he's so drunk he trips on his shoelaces and breaks his nose, so the other guy just walks away. Should he be tried for assault, just because he clearly intended to commit it but was too drunk to succeed at it?
Flip a fair coin an infinite number of times. What fraction of the time does it come up heads? Half. Granted, that's still an infinite number of times, but it's also still half the number of times flipped. Transfinite math is weird: multiples and fractions of infinity are still infinity, but that doesn't mean you can't do multiplication and division with them.
Hell, there's an even easier example than that one. How many positive integers are there? Infinite. How many of those are even? Half. So how many even numbers are there? Infinite.
One of my favorite little pseudo-philosophical thoughts related to this, more on subject: as any fraction of infinity, no matter how small, is still infinity, if there are an infinite number of different universes, then anything that is possible, no matter how improbable, so long as it has any probability at all greater than zero, will occur an infinite number of times. Likewise if space or time are infinite. (For the purposes of this post, "infinite" assumes non-repeating, as a repeating infinite structure is indistinguishable from a finite looped structure).
Proponents of the Anthropic Principle do not claim that universes which cannot support life are rare, or commonplace, or anything of the sort.
The Anthropic Principle merely says that we should not be surprised to find the universe conductive to our existence, even if such conditions are highly improbable, because the fact of our existence logically necessitates that we exist in a universe conductive to it.
1st amendment (which protects _political speech_ and no other type)
I see this assertion on Slashdot here now and again, and while I'll certainly agree that political speech was probably the type of speech which the Founders were most concerned with protecting, I see no basis for the assertion that that was all the First Amendment is meant to protect. Quoth the Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Seems pretty broad and universal to me.
The No True Scotsman fallacy is only a fallacy when your "no P is a Q" is a synthetic proposition, rather than an analytic one. If one were to say "no bachelor is married", and then someone stood up and said "I'm a married bachelor!", the first speaker would be perfectly correct in replying "if you are married, then you are not a true bachelor, despite what you may call yourself".
Of course, that's not incredibly helpful for us here because most of the qualities people take to be inherent in anyone rightly labeled "conservative" are actually synthetic rather than analytic qualities. About the only true "no true conservative..." sentence is "no true conservative favors rapid change", since the meaning of "conservative" is "opposed to rapid change". It just so happens that western societies and governments have recently (for the past century or two) been moving away from a very libertarian, capitalist model, and so those in favor of slowing or reversing that change get called "conservatives". But there's an even older flavor of "conservative" who was never happy with the move to that libertarian model in the first place, who are still trying to put a stop to the so-called "moral decadence" that it brought about. Two very different viewpoints, both calling themselves, and getting called, "conservative" - so who are the true conservatives then?
You can be a "true conservative" and support just about anything position that has any presence in the present, as to be a "true conservative" is just to want to conserve such things they way they are. Calling any particular political platform (aside from "lets be cautious with the changes here") "conservative" is like a Vietnamese person calling a European atheist a "Christian" (because European = Christian in his mind), or a medieval European calling an Indian Buddhist a "Hindu" (because Indian = Hindu in his mind). It's a sloppy substitution based on an inaccurate correlation. "European" and "Christian" do not mean the same thing, even though many or most Europeans may be Christians, so they cannot be used as synonyms like that. If you tried to do so and use that in support of an argument - e.g. "Most Englishmen are Protestant -> no true Englishman is Catholic" - then you would be committing the No True Scotsman fallacy.
But coming back from that tangent, my point is that words have a sort of historical inertia of meaning that persists despite peoples' misuse of them. Just because a bunch of authoritarian radicals (a radical being an extreme progressive, someone who wants lots of change made very quickly, the very opposite of a conservative) call themselves "conservatives" does not mean that they are, in fact, conservative. People with similar ideologies may have been conservative in times past, but since that ideology is a world different from how things are today, such people are not conservatives but in fact radicals.
Avant-garde art is initially unpopular and can't turn a profit, necessitating state funding
I disagree, quite vehemently. Much of the greatest art is created because the artist wanted to create it and he could afford to create it. Great artists create art for art's sake, so the only consideration as to whether or not they create it is whether or not they can spare the the time and resources necessary to create it.
So in a world without intellectual property laws, a world where most of the current venues for commercialization of art were unfeasible, you would likely end up with a situation much like the pre-modern world: where only the very wealthy, or those sponsored by the very wealthy, could become great artists, because only those people had the leisure time and disposable income to practice their art.
You are suggesting that the state must step in to provide the funding necessary to provide artists with the time and resources they need to create their art, but I say that that's sidestepping a greater problem: why don't ordinary people have leisure time and disposable income sufficient enough for them to be artists in their spare time, if they so please? It could be because there is just so much real work to do that all of our society's resources and manpower must be devoted to doing that work. If that were so, then I would say the loss of the arts would be natural and acceptable, because there would be much more important things to focus our efforts on. But it doesn't not appear that that is so, for some people have plenty of disposable wealth and leisure time. I think the problem is the broader one is economic disparity and the related issue of economic (organizational) inefficiency. The technology is there for us all to share a leisurely society; it's the social organization we use that's gumming up the works.
In short, there is no need to provide a motive to create art art; art is its own motive. You need only to provide the means to create art, and rather than having a state-sponsored font of such means, I think we need to address the broader issue of seeing that everybody has the means to do things like art for their own sake.
...Protestants believing its the truth that Christ is the Messiah...
I don't see how anyone could doubt that, seeing as how "Christ" is just the Greek translation of the Hebrew term "Messiah" (both of which mean "anointed" or "chosen").
Now, whether or not Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ/Messiah, that's something people might debate...
If they can then the next step will be Britain suing the US for return of the land that was "stolen" by that well known "terrorist" gang lead by George Washington. This may lead to the US government declaring itself a terrorist organization by its own laws and promptly disappearing in a puff of logic.
On the contrary, by contemporary US logic, anyone who "hates America" is a terrorist, so if anyone from the Revolutionary War period were to be retroactively declared terrorists by the US government, it would be George III and his redcoats. And they were probably commies too, pinko terrorist bastards; I mean, just look at the name! Redcoats!
The maximize button doesn't work properly (I've had this flame war on Mac boards before ... bottom line is, I want to be able to click a button and have a window be fullscreen. Period.)
As a long time (and current) Mac user and former rabid Mac fan, I have to admit that this is one of the things that cured me of my fan-rabies.
In Mac OS pre-X, the "Zoom" button would always resize the window to be as large, and only as large, as necessary to show the complete contents of the window (clicking it again would go back to the previous size), and OPTION-clicking it always did something very similar to Windows' "Maximize" (making the window take up most of the screen - IIRC it left a strip about 48px wide on the right hand side of the primary display, so you could still easily get to the disk icons on the desktop).
Now in OS X, the stupid little plus button does different things in every application (grr especially iTunes), and almost never does the two things I might want to do with it: either resize-to-fit, or maximize.
This is a general complaint about OS X I've had since its release: Apple's greatest strong suite (IMO of course) used to be the strict consistency of interface across all applications on the system, Apple or not. The OS handled the windows' borders' appearance and function: the apps just passed along a title and some contents to display. Now, that consistency has pretty much gone out the window, even amongst Apple-developed applications...