Taken as a whole, though, Congress somewhat dilutes the power of large states and somewhat increases the power of small states.
So you admit that Congress is unfair to the people of large states. Good. Now, would you care to defend this unfairness? (Appealing to history won't suffice!)
Anyway, like I said, take a civics class. Or read some scholarly books on the subject. These ideas were really quite well discussed and thought out. They didn't just pop out of nowhere.
Just because something was exhaustively discussed doesn't mean it's right! None of the reasons for unequal representation that applied in 1777 hold true today.
I'm fully aware of the history. The bicameral legislative arrangement was created to both slow down drastic changes (good) and to give low-population states a boost in power (bad). Those low-population states included both geographically small places, and also states whose low population was effectively further reduced by their refusal to emancipate and enfranchise slaves.
New England (all 6 states combined) couldn't counter act a simple majority in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Hell, they could barely contend with Florida alone.
Good! Why should New England be disproportionally influential in choosing the president? Today, they have more power because their boundary-lines were drawn from small chartered colonies, rather than from large allocated states. (This might be part of the reason why Massachusetts is able to pull in absurd levels of federal highway funds for local transit projects)
It's unfair for the west coast to have only 3 states, while the the east coast gets 15. That's a difference of (15-3)*2=12 bonus electoral votes given to easterners, just because of their boundary-lines.
The midwest, however, would be completely left out in the cold. Who would go to the Dakotas or Wyoming or even Iowa?
Good! If there aren't enough people to matter, then they shouldn't matter!
the main concern was that the Federal goverment be representative of the state and not the citizens directly.
Such concerns were expediencies of the time; virtual bribes given to entice the joining of low population states. The goal of the US founders was fairness for all men: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.
But in the precarious new government, it wasn't possible to reach that ideal immediately. Not everyone would agree to put aside their own advantages to serve the ideal; compromises had to be made. The founders understood that those compromises would be removed in time. The 3/5ths slavery compromise was of course obliterated, as it was by far a greater offense to the equality of men.
But I tell you today that the state-based allocation of presidential votes is another form of inequality, as has just been abundantly demonstrated (as even it's defenders concede).
Sadly, I don't have time to refute every little moron who repeats that idiocy. (Short conclusion: "Democracy" and "Republic" are not contradictory terms. The USA is a democracy and a republic. The UK is a non-republic democracy. China is a non-democratic republic. Iran is neither)
But if you're so certain that democracy is a bad thing, why don't you try explaining this to President Bush? He's sending 100s of soldiers to their deaths to bring Iraq the gift of democracy.
This helps us illustrate why the situation can never be changed by the states. (This is obvious, but I'll type it out anyhow)
Theoretically, any individual state could declare that it won't give all its electoral votes to the majority winner, and instead assign them proportionally. Making that change would increase the national influence of any state which is strongly biased towards one party.
For example, Utah and Massachusetts are firmly Red/Blue states, so no canditate bothers to campaign there, because the outcome is predetermined. But if they used proportional electoral votes, then the difference between winning Utah by 1% and 30% could become significant. Thus canditates would be attracted to pay attention to the state, make promises for regional support, etc.
(Some states, which are more evenly split between the parties, would see their influence reduced. A 3% difference would be enormously important in New York, because it'll shift the entire state's electoral votes. But I'm only considering the nonbalanced states here)
So, it would be in the best interest of non-balanced states to use proportional assignment of electoral votes, as this will increase their importance to national elections. However, no state will make this change. Why? For the same reason jerrymandering will never be outlawed: because making the change will result in a near-term weakness for the dominant party.
So long as the Democrats run a state's legislature, they will never switch to proportionality, because the change would hurt their party's candidate in the next presidential contest.
Of course we know what the aims were- they were to create or perpetuate unfairness! It was to reassure slaveholders that their property wouldn't be liberated just because a nationwide popular vote went for emancipation.
Chief among them that states with large populations would not be able to use those large populations to unduly influence elections and legislation to the deteriment of sparsely populated states.
That's a circular argument. It begs the question "What is undue influence?". If you claim that "1 adult = 1 vote" is "undue", then the burden is on you to prove otherwise. But you haven't shown any reason why 2 small states should be more influential than one large one.
Without the Electoral College a few things would happen..... Carrying Virginia would completely invalidate losses in all of those states.
If there was no electoral college, he couldn't "carry Virginia". To "carry a state" means to win all its votes, which only happens as a consequence of winner-take-all Electoral College.
very rarely lose their home state.
Again, you are somehow assuming that winner-takes-all would still be practiced without EC. But elminating that practice would be the most important result of abolishing EC! (Yes, that practice could be removed while keeping the EC, as two states have already demonstrated)
In reality, removing the Electoral College would mean that canditates don't campaign by state anymore, but by region. They'd aim for big cities. Rhode Island is small but dense, so it'd be visited. Virginia has large cities which would attract attention, but the rural parts would be ignored.
It's not much, but ultimately the EC makes things a little fairer for the smaller states, which is exactly why it was created.
Wrongo. The real reason the EC was created is that the logistics of counting 50 million nationwide votes in a short time was unmanagable in 1776. They needed to do things hierarchally.
(The reason you give, "fairness to smaller states", is why Senators are nonproportional)
Bullshit. What about "copies of everything somewhere else" is different from making backups of the repository every day?
There's a big difference! As long as you have a backup of the most recent version of a CVS repository, you're fine.
The allegation against VSS is that it frequently corrupts its own database. A backup copy of the corrupted data is no good. Even if you keep multiple historical backups, its still no fun to restore each of those from tape to search for the last non-corrupted copy.
Some people even claim that VSS (in whatever configs they use) is so unstable that the MTBF is too fast for a daily backup to protect against.
As long as you don't try to be clever and try to coax it into doing something it was not designed to do.
Any CM system which requires you to "lock" or "check out" a file before editing it is flawed by design.
Idea 1: Get RoboHelp fixed. A software tool shouldn't blindly erase subdirectories that it doesn't recognize.
Idea 2: Since you probably can't really change RoboHelp, work around it. Don't let there be a CVS directory present when RoboHelp runs. Basically, create a script which creates a new temporary subdir, copies your input files there, runs robohelp on them, and then copies everything back out to where they really belong.
I guess Doug Englebart and "The Mother of all Demos" in the mid sixties was just an LSD induced mass hullucination.
No. That was great demo, but it wasn't GUI. It was all text. They had a mouse cursor (called a "bug") moving above the text, but that's all. It wasn't what someone today would call a "GUI", by the popular definition.
(The popular definition is arguably wrong, since onscreen text is actually a subset of graphics)
Completely wrong. Apple had a GUI long before they were at all common on UNIX. (Prehaps there were isolated experimental GUI programs on UNIX, but they were not the inspiration for Apple or MS)
Maybe you're confusing the Xerox Alto with UNIX?
Or our modern wordprocessors, which are all (poor) copies of WordPerfect.
That's so far wrong, I don't need to explain why. To anyone who's seen WordPerfect, this will be obvious.
Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.
That's plainly wrong. Even if it's easier to get Windows to use soundcards, just try to get WindowsXP to run on a PowerPC, StrongARM, or Alpha CPU, and then tell me if it has broader hardware support than Linux.
However, there is a major flaw in Linux's sound-card support that this author doesn't mention. In my experience, it's reasonably easy to get Linux+ALSA to recognize common modern sound cards. But due to the design of the sound-card interface, the performance from then on is inadequate. Mainstream linux programs that need to output audio write to the/dev/dsp pseudo-file directly, rather than passing their requests through some user-space program. This means that contention for the device can cause unpredictable failures in multiple applications. (Where by "failure" I mostly mean one program is totally hung until another quits)
Compare this with the video card situation on Linux: only oddball applications would consider writing to the VGA card directly. All normal programs write either to X11 or the console "stdout", which allows a user-space program to handle the distributing those visual needs to the graphics card in a fair manner.
As long as Linux programs continue to access sound directly, they will be inadequate with much audio hardware. But there's still little movement towards adopting an accepted alternative sound interface. There are multiple competitors for the role- primarily esound, artsd, and JACKS- but none of those appears close to universal acceptance. (And they all have problems that might keep them from ever winning the standardization race)
or the original manufactures that went out of business 10 years ago and took the specs with them
You seem to be claiming that Linux's problem with sound cards is primarily caused by obselete hardware. That is not true.
The main source of the problem today is the onboard audio chips included with many (most?) new motherboards. Linux is usually able to play sound through them, but not acceptably.
Yes, clearly it would be complete lunacy to write video games in garbage-collected LISP, like Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank and so on.
It is a misrepresentation to claim that those games were "written in LISP".
One can say that the "behavioral and game logic" processing was written in LISP, but that's a minor part of the overall software work- especially if you count it in terms of percentage of CPU usage. (Which, since you're talking about performance, is what actually matters)
Games have used LISP to control higher-level flow since the 80s, but to claim that they're written in LISP is no more accurate than saying Mozilla was written in XUL.
And those massive overheads ensure that we'll never see NASA using LISP to control space probes.
Another misrepresentation. Actually reading that article plainly says that the performance-critical elements of the space-probe were written in C.
Furthermore, you cannot use LISP as an example to defend all GC. LISP programs naturally give the compiler more information, allowing it to make better optimizations. Frequently it can eliminate the need to actually execute much of the GC at runtime (converting it into logically static or stack allocations). But with an imperative language like Java, the overall code is less analyzable, so the GC can't reach the same heights of performance.
If our society has sunk to the point where people think they have the right to force people off the roads, civilisation has long gone.
Offering an incentive is not "force". "Force" would be authorizing police to shoot out your tires- a solution both faster and cheaper than building a maglev.
Oh yes it is. Petroleum is subdized to the tune of 2% of the national GDP.
Those subsidies primarily take the form of military operations in the Middle East to secure the petroleum supply.
Just add up all the costs of the first and second Iraq war, a decade of bases in Saudi Arabia and enforcing a "no-fly zone". Then of course the ongoing current occupation. (Factoring in the deaths incurred could bring it a lot higher).
it's a self-sustaining empire all its own.
No. If the oil companies had to pay for those services the Pentagon provides for free, the US price-per-gallon would more than triple.
The real subsidies that affect the US preference for cars as opposed to trains are socialized roadbuilding.
You said usability testing wasn't being done, I showed you that indeed it was.
The word "being" is a progessive verb. It indicates an action that is ongoing- not one that terminated 3 years ago!
Usability testing is being done for Microsoft and Apple. Is there any done for Gnome?
The only way I can see truth in the claim that either Gnome or KDE has much formal usability testing is insofar as they duplicate ideas already tested in a commercial GUI.
are there more native Americans today than before the manifest destiny
That's true, no matter how you interpret "native American".
If you use the word correctly, then it applies to each person born in North or South America. (Native means "born in"). Obviously, the America's population has been relentlessly increasing for centuries.
The popular incorrect usage of the term is as a replacement for the older "American Indian" (which itself is obviously wrong). People descended from humans living in America prior to the European colonization should strictly be called aboriginal Americans. (Of course, popular misconception ties "aboriginal" to Australia, so using the right words will get you misunderstood too)
Anyhow, the population of aboriginal Americans has in fact increased each year since 1550, and continues to slowly climb. The occasional massacres and other brutal treatment from European settlers was never enough to put a dent in the raw population numbers.
However, the reason the population was able to climb so much post-1550 is that between 1495-1550, the large majority of aboriginal Americans died from imported diseases. So by the times the Europeans got around to exploring the continent, they found it less inhabited than it had been a few decades earlier, because influenza spreads faster than settlers.
Crimes (in the traditional sense) REQUIRE an INJURED PARTY. If there's NO INJURED PARTY, THERE'S NO CRIME.
It sounds like a good idea, but that's not traditional. Victimless crimes have be prosecuted in traditional law-systems for centuries. Prostitution, gambling, sodomy... the list could go on.
Laws to protect "public morality" were a major feature of ancient codes.
3. One who makes use of or reproduces the work of another without authorization.
When enough people get a word wrong, dictionaries change to follow them. Disconnect. Decimate. Those who remember the old usage always resent the newcomers. And with reason: "software piracy" is an Orwellian attempt to restrict the way people can think by redefining the language they use to communicate.
However, in the case of "software piracy", there is another important reason to call "pirate" inaccurate: it is legally wrong, and this is a law-related topic.
No court can ever charge someone for "piracy", "theft", or "stealing" because she infringed on copyright. Those are all different, specific crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Taken as a whole, though, Congress somewhat dilutes the power of large states and somewhat increases the power of small states.
So you admit that Congress is unfair to the people of large states. Good. Now, would you care to defend this unfairness? (Appealing to history won't suffice!)
Anyway, like I said, take a civics class. Or read some scholarly books on the subject. These ideas were really quite well discussed and thought out. They didn't just pop out of nowhere.
Just because something was exhaustively discussed doesn't mean it's right! None of the reasons for unequal representation that applied in 1777 hold true today.
I'm fully aware of the history. The bicameral legislative arrangement was created to both slow down drastic changes (good) and to give low-population states a boost in power (bad). Those low-population states included both geographically small places, and also states whose low population was effectively further reduced by their refusal to emancipate and enfranchise slaves.
New England (all 6 states combined) couldn't counter act a simple majority in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Hell, they could barely contend with Florida alone.
Good! Why should New England be disproportionally influential in choosing the president? Today, they have more power because their boundary-lines were drawn from small chartered colonies, rather than from large allocated states. (This might be part of the reason why Massachusetts is able to pull in absurd levels of federal highway funds for local transit projects)
It's unfair for the west coast to have only 3 states, while the the east coast gets 15. That's a difference of (15-3)*2=12 bonus electoral votes given to easterners, just because of their boundary-lines.
The midwest, however, would be completely left out in the cold. Who would go to the Dakotas or Wyoming or even Iowa?
Good! If there aren't enough people to matter, then they shouldn't matter!
the main concern was that the Federal goverment be representative of the state and not the citizens directly.
Such concerns were expediencies of the time; virtual bribes given to entice the joining of low population states. The goal of the US founders was fairness for all men: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.
But in the precarious new government, it wasn't possible to reach that ideal immediately. Not everyone would agree to put aside their own advantages to serve the ideal; compromises had to be made. The founders understood that those compromises would be removed in time. The 3/5ths slavery compromise was of course obliterated, as it was by far a greater offense to the equality of men.
But I tell you today that the state-based allocation of presidential votes is another form of inequality, as has just been abundantly demonstrated (as even it's defenders concede).
EXCEPT WE ARENT A DEMOCRACY.
Sadly, I don't have time to refute every little moron who repeats that idiocy. (Short conclusion: "Democracy" and "Republic" are not contradictory terms. The USA is a democracy and a republic. The UK is a non-republic democracy. China is a non-democratic republic. Iran is neither)
But if you're so certain that democracy is a bad thing, why don't you try explaining this to President Bush? He's sending 100s of soldiers to their deaths to bring Iraq the gift of democracy.
No, they were establishing a republic of federated states.
A principle which Abraham Lincoln thoroughly demolished. Moving right along...
It's just the other group that wouldn't want to.
This helps us illustrate why the situation can never be changed by the states. (This is obvious, but I'll type it out anyhow)
Theoretically, any individual state could declare that it won't give all its electoral votes to the majority winner, and instead assign them proportionally. Making that change would increase the national influence of any state which is strongly biased towards one party.
For example, Utah and Massachusetts are firmly Red/Blue states, so no canditate bothers to campaign there, because the outcome is predetermined. But if they used proportional electoral votes, then the difference between winning Utah by 1% and 30% could become significant. Thus canditates would be attracted to pay attention to the state, make promises for regional support, etc.
(Some states, which are more evenly split between the parties, would see their influence reduced. A 3% difference would be enormously important in New York, because it'll shift the entire state's electoral votes. But I'm only considering the nonbalanced states here)
So, it would be in the best interest of non-balanced states to use proportional assignment of electoral votes, as this will increase their importance to national elections. However, no state will make this change. Why? For the same reason jerrymandering will never be outlawed: because making the change will result in a near-term weakness for the dominant party.
So long as the Democrats run a state's legislature, they will never switch to proportionality, because the change would hurt their party's candidate in the next presidential contest.
Both were set up with particular aims in mind
Of course we know what the aims were- they were to create or perpetuate unfairness! It was to reassure slaveholders that their property wouldn't be liberated just because a nationwide popular vote went for emancipation.
Chief among them that states with large populations would not be able to use those large populations to unduly influence elections and legislation to the deteriment of sparsely populated states.
That's a circular argument. It begs the question "What is undue influence?". If you claim that "1 adult = 1 vote" is "undue", then the burden is on you to prove otherwise. But you haven't shown any reason why 2 small states should be more influential than one large one.
That post is internally inconsistent.
.... Carrying Virginia would completely invalidate losses in all of those states.
Without the Electoral College a few things would happen.
If there was no electoral college, he couldn't "carry Virginia". To "carry a state" means to win all its votes, which only happens as a consequence of winner-take-all Electoral College.
very rarely lose their home state.
Again, you are somehow assuming that winner-takes-all would still be practiced without EC. But elminating that practice would be the most important result of abolishing EC! (Yes, that practice could be removed while keeping the EC, as two states have already demonstrated)
In reality, removing the Electoral College would mean that canditates don't campaign by state anymore, but by region. They'd aim for big cities. Rhode Island is small but dense, so it'd be visited. Virginia has large cities which would attract attention, but the rural parts would be ignored.
It's not much, but ultimately the EC makes things a little fairer for the smaller states, which is exactly why it was created.
Wrongo. The real reason the EC was created is that the logistics of counting 50 million nationwide votes in a short time was unmanagable in 1776. They needed to do things hierarchally.
(The reason you give, "fairness to smaller states", is why Senators are nonproportional)
It gives undue influence to large population centers.
"Undue influence to large population"? Just what's wrong about people having power? That's what democracy is supposed to be about.
This is why the Senate has 2 members per state.
Which was to entice the slave-holding states to join the Union. Not a ringing endorsement.
It keeps big population centers from running over little ones.
Conversely, it allows uninhabited desert to run over bustling cities.
Any system which makes one citizen's vote more powerful than another's is unfair. Dirt shouldn't vote! (Coincidentally, dirt always goes Republican)
Bullshit. What about "copies of everything somewhere else" is different from making backups of the repository every day?
There's a big difference! As long as you have a backup of the most recent version of a CVS repository, you're fine.
The allegation against VSS is that it frequently corrupts its own database. A backup copy of the corrupted data is no good. Even if you keep multiple historical backups, its still no fun to restore each of those from tape to search for the last non-corrupted copy.
Some people even claim that VSS (in whatever configs they use) is so unstable that the MTBF is too fast for a daily backup to protect against.
As long as you don't try to be clever and try to coax it into doing something it was not designed to do.
Any CM system which requires you to "lock" or "check out" a file before editing it is flawed by design.
Any ideas how to resolve this?
Idea 1: Get RoboHelp fixed. A software tool shouldn't blindly erase subdirectories that it doesn't recognize.
Idea 2: Since you probably can't really change RoboHelp, work around it. Don't let there be a CVS directory present when RoboHelp runs. Basically, create a script which creates a new temporary subdir, copies your input files there, runs robohelp on them, and then copies everything back out to where they really belong.
I guess Doug Englebart and "The Mother of all Demos" in the mid sixties was just an LSD induced mass hullucination.
No. That was great demo, but it wasn't GUI. It was all text. They had a mouse cursor (called a "bug") moving above the text, but that's all. It wasn't what someone today would call a "GUI", by the popular definition.
(The popular definition is arguably wrong, since onscreen text is actually a subset of graphics)
At least I have never seen it before.
Look at the AMD 64 ("Opteron", etc) CPU. Linux support is here, but native versions of Microsoft Windows are still yet to be released.
After all, the product they were pirating was developed in academia, not at Xerox, and was published under an open-source license.
What in the world are you blabbering about? What is "the product"?
Are you anachronistically refering to the X Window System, or something like that?
Timeline:
1973: Xerox's Alto runs the first "GUI"
1984: Apple's GUI Macintosh achieves huge sales
1986: UNIX's X Window System is released
they stole it from UNIX in the first place
Completely wrong. Apple had a GUI long before they were at all common on UNIX. (Prehaps there were isolated experimental GUI programs on UNIX, but they were not the inspiration for Apple or MS)
Maybe you're confusing the Xerox Alto with UNIX?
Or our modern wordprocessors, which are all (poor) copies of WordPerfect.
That's so far wrong, I don't need to explain why. To anyone who's seen WordPerfect, this will be obvious.
The last line of the article is:
/dev/dsp pseudo-file directly, rather than passing their requests through some user-space program. This means that contention for the device can cause unpredictable failures in multiple applications. (Where by "failure" I mostly mean one program is totally hung until another quits)
Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.
That's plainly wrong. Even if it's easier to get Windows to use soundcards, just try to get WindowsXP to run on a PowerPC, StrongARM, or Alpha CPU, and then tell me if it has broader hardware support than Linux.
However, there is a major flaw in Linux's sound-card support that this author doesn't mention. In my experience, it's reasonably easy to get Linux+ALSA to recognize common modern sound cards. But due to the design of the sound-card interface, the performance from then on is inadequate. Mainstream linux programs that need to output audio write to the
Compare this with the video card situation on Linux: only oddball applications would consider writing to the VGA card directly. All normal programs write either to X11 or the console "stdout", which allows a user-space program to handle the distributing those visual needs to the graphics card in a fair manner.
As long as Linux programs continue to access sound directly, they will be inadequate with much audio hardware. But there's still little movement towards adopting an accepted alternative sound interface. There are multiple competitors for the role- primarily esound, artsd, and JACKS- but none of those appears close to universal acceptance. (And they all have problems that might keep them from ever winning the standardization race)
or the original manufactures that went out of business 10 years ago and took the specs with them
You seem to be claiming that Linux's problem with sound cards is primarily caused by obselete hardware. That is not true.
The main source of the problem today is the onboard audio chips included with many (most?) new motherboards. Linux is usually able to play sound through them, but not acceptably.
Yes, clearly it would be complete lunacy to write video games in garbage-collected LISP, like Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank and so on.
It is a misrepresentation to claim that those games were "written in LISP".
One can say that the "behavioral and game logic" processing was written in LISP, but that's a minor part of the overall software work- especially if you count it in terms of percentage of CPU usage. (Which, since you're talking about performance, is what actually matters)
Games have used LISP to control higher-level flow since the 80s, but to claim that they're written in LISP is no more accurate than saying Mozilla was written in XUL.
And those massive overheads ensure that we'll never see NASA using LISP to control space probes.
Another misrepresentation. Actually reading that article plainly says that the performance-critical elements of the space-probe were written in C.
Furthermore, you cannot use LISP as an example to defend all GC. LISP programs naturally give the compiler more information, allowing it to make better optimizations. Frequently it can eliminate the need to actually execute much of the GC at runtime (converting it into logically static or stack allocations). But with an imperative language like Java, the overall code is less analyzable, so the GC can't reach the same heights of performance.
Abuse was another commercial game written in Lisp.
Wrong. Abuse is now GPL, so anybody can see the source code. It consists of 157 C++ files.
If our society has sunk to the point where people think they have the right to force people off the roads, civilisation has long gone.
Offering an incentive is not "force". "Force" would be authorizing police to shoot out your tires- a solution both faster and cheaper than building a maglev.
Fuel isn't subsidized in the US
Oh yes it is. Petroleum is subdized to the tune of 2% of the national GDP.
Those subsidies primarily take the form of military operations in the Middle East to secure the petroleum supply.
Just add up all the costs of the first and second Iraq war, a decade of bases in Saudi Arabia and enforcing a "no-fly zone". Then of course the ongoing current occupation. (Factoring in the deaths incurred could bring it a lot higher).
it's a self-sustaining empire all its own.
No. If the oil companies had to pay for those services the Pentagon provides for free, the US price-per-gallon would more than triple.
The real subsidies that affect the US preference for cars as opposed to trains are socialized roadbuilding.
That's another important factor, though.
You said usability testing wasn't being done, I showed you that indeed it was.
The word "being" is a progessive verb. It indicates an action that is ongoing- not one that terminated 3 years ago!
Usability testing is being done for Microsoft and Apple. Is there any done for Gnome?
The only way I can see truth in the claim that either Gnome or KDE has much formal usability testing is insofar as they duplicate ideas already tested in a commercial GUI.
are there more native Americans today than before the manifest destiny
That's true, no matter how you interpret "native American".
If you use the word correctly, then it applies to each person born in North or South America. (Native means "born in"). Obviously, the America's population has been relentlessly increasing for centuries.
The popular incorrect usage of the term is as a replacement for the older "American Indian" (which itself is obviously wrong). People descended from humans living in America prior to the European colonization should strictly be called aboriginal Americans. (Of course, popular misconception ties "aboriginal" to Australia, so using the right words will get you misunderstood too)
Anyhow, the population of aboriginal Americans has in fact increased each year since 1550, and continues to slowly climb. The occasional massacres and other brutal treatment from European settlers was never enough to put a dent in the raw population numbers.
However, the reason the population was able to climb so much post-1550 is that between 1495-1550, the large majority of aboriginal Americans died from imported diseases. So by the times the Europeans got around to exploring the continent, they found it less inhabited than it had been a few decades earlier, because influenza spreads faster than settlers.
Crimes (in the traditional sense) REQUIRE an INJURED PARTY. If there's NO INJURED PARTY, THERE'S NO CRIME.
It sounds like a good idea, but that's not traditional. Victimless crimes have be prosecuted in traditional law-systems for centuries. Prostitution, gambling, sodomy... the list could go on.
Laws to protect "public morality" were a major feature of ancient codes.
most people DO agree that it should be illegal because of copyright violation
Within 7 or so years, trends indicate that a majority of US citizens will have downloaded music from P2P.
3. One who makes use of or reproduces the work of another without authorization.
When enough people get a word wrong, dictionaries change to follow them. Disconnect. Decimate. Those who remember the old usage always resent the newcomers. And with reason: "software piracy" is an Orwellian attempt to restrict the way people can think by redefining the language they use to communicate.
However, in the case of "software piracy", there is another important reason to call "pirate" inaccurate: it is legally wrong, and this is a law-related topic.
No court can ever charge someone for "piracy", "theft", or "stealing" because she infringed on copyright. Those are all different, specific crimes.