This has been of course the religious mantra of the "Free Market Cures All" deity worshippers. The truth however is that outside of over-simplistic religious market-fundamentalist scriptures, "free market" has historically devolved into corrupt set of oligopolies every time it has been tried in the real world. There is a historical and repeatedly demonstrable correlation between market liberalization and ascension of mega-conglomerates, oligopolies and outright monopolies.
This is so because like Marxism, which sounds appealing and reasonable on paper, dog-eat-dog capitalism is also outwardly well reasoned, while internally riddled with devastating inconsistencies and instabilities, which are only too keen to present themselves when the dogma meets the reality.
It seems that most of our "systems" are only functional in accordance with their theory only on very small scale and fall apart as the scale changes from village/commune level to nation or global one. Communism works quite well in religious communes, which to this day are quite successful, in their own way, and capitalism works well when applied to small scale businesses dealing with well understood everyday items, like potatoes, pots and blankets. On the large scale however, communism becomes essentially unworkable, which is why all of the so-called "communist" states in fact practised State Monopoly (i.e. the state had the monopoly on all production), and similarly every so-called Capitalist state has in fact practised some convoluted scheme centred around a pseudo-Feudal economic order. It would appear that corrupt, unjust, oppressive variations of Statism or Feudalism are the point into all of the attempts at improvement eventually "stabilize" at.
Britain is at this point a bona-fide Police State, with all the trappings. Police is above the law. Even if they hunt you down on a whim, throw you to the ground, put a gun to your head and pull the trigger 7 times. No consequences to speak of (£175,000 fine, paid to another branch of government). Your family will have no recourse.
Ugh. Next you are going to insist that Thatcher was all for raves....
The fact that the law was passed four years after her departure does not mean that the anti-rave hysteria was not initiated during her reign and that it was quite compatible with Thatcherite ideology, whereby anything involving large numbers of people coordinating for some common elite-unsanctioned (and/or unprofitable for the elites) goal was to be immediately terminated with extreme prejudice. Her sentiments were quite obvious. See also under: "poll tax".
The fact that the subsequent governments perpetuated the core elements of her ideology and kept descending ever more deeply into the filth that is the "neo-liberal" ideology, finally culminating with the UK turning into the Elite-friendly Police Surveillance State it is now, never you mind the Iraq fiasco, does not take away from her leading involvement in the matter.
I and may I point out that the "Godwin law" is a wholly made up tripe, the very trotting out of which in a thread about idiotic, arbitrary "laws" and some people's inexplicable desperate desire to adhere to any and all "rules" someone else made up, irrespective of logic, justification or internal consistency of these "rules", is truly superb irony.
This "Godwin" thing has become a wholly cosmic stupidity in its own right. And its superbly ironic that you would bring in a fake, wholly made up "law", and try to apply it with no regard to any sort of logical justification to the very thread where I was pointing out the idiocy of some people who wish to adhere to any and all "laws" or "rules" irrespective of justness, truthfulness, applicability or logical consistency of those "laws" or "rules", just because someone made up that "law" and "laws... uuuuh... gotta be obeyed... duuuh.... [copious amount of drooling]".
Thank you for demonstrating so poignantly that herd mentality of which even sheep would be abashed is so alive and well in the likes of you.
The case you are obviously going for is that the grandmother is in the moral "right".
I think you are trying to address the post parent to mine, since it was its poster who attempted the classic "grandmother" vs "big bad evil hairy Ruffians" propaganda ploy....
Hate them - love them - or be indifferent - but they won a lawsuit and they should get what they are owed...and in this case its about 3.2 million.
The central flaw in any such "legalistic" arguments is an unspoken assumption that winning a lawsuit makes one "right" by definition. Well then, instead of your biased substitution of a "grandmother" for the RIAA, let's try some others:
"The NAZIs accused a man of being a "subversive" Jew, a NAZI court agreed (yes they did have "lawsuits" in some of these cases), NAZIs won (no surprise there), NAZIs want their Jew before he runs off to somewhere they can't get him and all of his possessions..." or try this, closer to home: "A slave escaped a Southern plantation and manages to make his way to Canada, the plantation owner finds out that his escape was helped by someone with US holdings, he sues that person, he wins, and now wants his money before the person in question tries to run off with the money...."
I could go on, but this should be enough to show you the basic truth: "legal" and "right" are not necessarily (and in recent years, increasingly ever more rarely) the same.
Great, yet another thing to add to the looooong list of contortions and byzantine twists of the "logic" the peddlers of the "intellectual property" scam offer. So in the spirit of these new heady revelations as to the nature of copyright and public domain, lets consider this little wee scenario:
Gain access to a picture in public domain.
Photograph the original so that accuracy of your copy approaches the original to the point of being practically unmeasurable (the technology for this exists using slow, high precision scanning methods).
Copyright your copy.
Since your copy is for all practical purposes indistinguishable from any practical image of the original, sue everybody with any copy (including those of equal precision made after yours) for "copyright violations".
No practical defence exists for this in this new brave realm of "intellectual property" assholery. This is so because any photograph of a differing quality and resolution can theoretically be a derivative of yours, which is at the highest level of technology, as there are demonstrably digital manipulation technologies available which can produce any such "derivative" from a high precision original.
Profit, as you have now effectively (in all practical terms that count) acquired ownership of the item, previously in the public domain.
But then again, I expect such funky implications to keep multiplying as the pathetic efforts of the "intellectual property" crowd of con-men continue to ever more desperately try to legislate the fundamental properties of information away.
I think that a surcharge on distribution is rapidly becoming unworkable.
That is only partially correct. The full answer is: a surcharge on distribution is rapidly becoming unworkable in an even partially free society. And this is a key difference. You see, in an authoritarian society, even one paying lip service to "freedom", the authorities can control, to a significant degree, distribution of all information, and so it is possible to institute a totalitarian-power-backed surcharge on distribution. Simply because such control of information is the very foundation of authoritarian societies.
And this is the reason for which the "intellectual property" forces are natural allies of all those who seek to take over and rule our societies under the guise of "law and order" or "crime fighting" or "war on..." (fill in your blanks here). This is also the very reason for which many of us oppose the "intellectual property" nonsense in general. Because we see that a victory for that camp of short-sighted greed-motivated mental midgets will also, inevitably, mean a victory for those far more dangerous individuals who seek to essentially enslave most of humanity.
And for that reason, I think they're inevitably going to lose this fight.
While this might prove ultimately true on the historical scale, given the above link between the peddlers of "intellectual property" and totalitarians, the real question is how many broken lives, how much pain and misery, and quite likely how many dead and maimed people will that victory cost.
This is what you get when a country is overrun by truly obscene parasites called "lawyers" and eventually virtually becomes run by them, to their own benefit. Also note that the witch-hunter-in-chief, Beth Buchanan has a long history of ideologically-motivated abuses of her office and is probably the most obscene individual in this whole fucking sorry affair.
As to "rebooting" America, good luck with that. History teaches us that these things do not happen. And pretty much everyone who paid any attention whatsoever over the last few decades can see that in fact all the parts of Western civilization that were born in the Enlightenment, when reason and humanism triumphed over the superstitions and blind acceptance of societal "oder" of the Dark Ages, are now in decline. The "America" that you bemoan being lost was a part of that progress, its Founding Fathers' ideas being born in that Enlightenment. And so we get the misfortune to live our days in this long twilight of yet another era, to be replaced by an epoch of authoritarianism, fascist-like ideologies and ruled by limitless greed. A new Dark Age is upon us.
The good news, although not for our generation, is that history is a never ending cycle of booms and busts, and so after these Dark Ages, another Enlightenment will come. Although this knowledge will be of little comfort to those who are yet to die in Iraq-style wars of Imperial Conquest, or as victims of never-ending "wars" on "drugs", "porn", "ill manners", "religious views incompatible with the state religion" and whatever other calamities are to come during the thrashing of dying throes of this epoch's Enlightenment.
You are wrong on loaning or giving a book to a friend. Once you purchase a book you are free to do with it as you please other than copying it. You can loan it; you can give it away; you can sell it. All of that is legal.
Certainly that is not the case with e-books or audio-books. And as the technology marches on, it is inevitable that electronic formats will replace paper sheets. One has only to glance at the current activities of the "intellectual property" crowd to see what their plan for our future is. A hint: if they could get their way, a public library would be seen as a den of thievery, preferably punishable by death. And they are, slowly but surely, on the way to getting their way by utilizing their already privileged position as "gatekeepers of information" to corrupt law, politics and public discourse in general, as evidenced by countless Slashdot articles on the subject. Only those "copyright infringes" and "freeloaders" and "pinko-commie-kumbaya-singing sharers" stand in the way of total takeover of our culture and in the end of our civilization by the corporate crooks with deranged delusions of power.
You are spreading FUD on copyright.
Given your glaring oversight of the obvious trend in book publishing moving toward contents controlled via draconian DRM "protections", which I described above, I get to wonder who is really spreading FUD around here...
First, those people need somewhere to work, so that requires having a studio. Having a studio means you need to by some land (expense), pay all the construction people (expense), pay taxes (expense), have utilities (expense), have a staff to maintain the building (expense), etc. Then you need some instruments to play (expense). How about some professional recording gear (expense).
Cost of which is shared amongst tens, if not hundreds, of productions. This is like trying to include the cost of the limos used to ferry the "super stars" from their over-priced hotels in the cost of making of the CD. None of the costs you mentioned are essential. We know this because many other artists simply rent time at a recording studio or, these days far more often due to the progress of technology, have their own in their house. The times when a "studio" consisted of a whole floor filled with racks of equipment are long gone. Personal computers changed all that. Even mass duplication CD machinery is now so cheap that many a mid-sized city has a studio complete with a fabrication plant where artists can produce their own CDs at pennies per unit.
How did you find the artists in the first place? Staff (expense).
And which is outside the scope of costs of "intellectual property" as these are only the costs of producing it, not what the fuck are planning to do with it after it was "made". And of course the same expense is incurred by nearly every business out there, pretty much all of them having an HR department.
Who is running the business (expense).
See above. Not a core part of any "IP" "manufacturing" costs. At the outside one could include the management costs directly related to the management of the recording process itself, which are a tiny fraction of overall management costs at gigantic mega-media conglomerates.
Who is promoting the product (expense).
Now you are making me laugh. So promotion is now part of the cost of the R&D of the product? With mindless shills and apologists like you around, its no wonder that pharmaceuticals are trying to sneak their TV ads expenses into the "life-saving research" column of their lobbying propaganda handouts.
Who is protecting your legal interests (expense).
Well, if your entire business is based on legal shenanigans, no wonder then that you would try to include lawyers as part of your R&D. The word "pathetic" describes that effort rather accurately.
It can be fairly said that the sorry state of music (and journalism) today is that people are too freaking cheap to pay for anything better, so they get what they deserve.
This is beyond ridiculous. You mean to tell me that hundred-million dollar budget "movies" that are shown in the theatres today are of higher quality and of longer lasting appeal then those produced several decades ago at fraction of the cost (yes, adjusted for inflation)? Or are you insinuating that expense in "art" has any relationship whatsoever to the artistic outcome?
Your entire post just reeks of out-of-control greed, upon which you seem to have centered your entire world-view.
The lower the price of production gets, the more valuable IP gets.
Except all of this is bullshit. I will skip for the moment the entire discussion of the fact that no such thing as "Intellectual Property" exists, merely a gaggle of half-assed, perverted "laws" intended to create artificial scarcity of information. I will just focus on your assertion of "costs" of this "IP", pretending for the sake of discussion that it is a logical and coherent concept, which it is not.
You see, the cost of this "IP" is a tiny fraction of all of the manufacturing, distribution and promotion (which constitute the lion share in many cases) of the expenses in real products (i.e. the physical world kind), even for the pharmaceuticals, where the "marketing" costs alone outrank the R&D costs by an order of magnitude.
In case of pure information "products", like music, what is the exact cost to disgorge an over-produced, industrial product called an "album", versus the revenue? A team of perhaps 20 (on the outside, including the band members and sound engineers) working for, say, 6 months, versus 500,000 units (an album going "gold") at $20 retail. And that is only the beginning, as the songs are expected, due to the perversions of the "copyright" assholerism, to be sold for the life time of an author + 70 years or so. The actual expected sales to production costs ratio of the "IP" is clearly expected to approach as close to infinity as possible over its useful lifetime. But that is an extreme case of costs of an industrial "product", meant to baffle brains of masses of witless teenagers by mass promotion endlessly-looped playback on corporate radio networks, which is not the case with over 99% of songs produced, the cost of which is that of a several individuals in a home-computer-centered "studio" producing for distribution over the Internet. The total cost of most of this "IP" is measured in pizzas and beer and the quality, these days, quite comparable to the industrial "product".
But the costs of "IP", being a never ending excuse and rallying cry of all sorts of crooks and thieves, are indeed extravagant in the case of Hollywood-produced kitsch, which is not surprising when a vapid actress can command $45 million dollars for the dubious privilege of her oh-so-precious "intellectual" property of her layers of makeup, tits and ass being filmed for the "adoring audience". But that is only because the appropriate technological revolution is only just starting in this area. Fortunately the every-day-closer notion of 100% computer generated movies, the means to manufacture which will within a decade be withing a grasp of every amateur, will quite surely put an end to that "IP" "industry" too. May it rest in peace.
All of this is happens because you forgot that the technology not only lowered the costs of distribution of information to its natural state of zero (or as near zero as be practically indistinguishable), but it also drastically reduced the cost of producing the "IP". Whereby before you had hundreds of engineers slaving over pen and pencil drawn diagrams duplicated via blue-print machine (in actual blue) you now have CAD/CAM workstations which automate a vast majority of mundane engineering tasks. Whereby before you had to hire a symphonic orchestra, you now can get a home computer to synthesize it digitally. And so on and on and on.
A big failing of Anderson and others (he's certainly not the first to play the "free is inevitable" game), is a failure to take into account the role of law in markets.
Sure, law has a "key" place in the "markets". I mean what would be the price of weed or crack cocaine if it were not for the "War on Drugs"?! I mean think of all those poor drug cartels and all of their hard earned profits just going "poof" and disappearing. Then there is all of that gigiantic machinery of the ATF, why with billion dollar budgets, its own airline and what not. All those
you're not informed either. RC batteries are Li-polymer, not Li-ion.
That is not true. RC models use all sorts of batteries, depending on type and application. Lithum-polymer is used pretty much exclusively in flying models, due to its energy density, where the additional expense and charging regime is an acceptable (to some people) compromise.
They are not sold "as-is" and I've never seen a definition of RC models as custom concoctions.
Flying RC models are custom by definition because they are all sold in the form of kits, where the electrical (and other) components can be swapped by the end user, drastically altering the characteristics of the device. Also there is no "standard" charger being made available for the device, modellers use a variety of chargers, some home-built. Subsequently no one can certify a battery for use with a particular combination of a charger and the motor, the controlling electronics etc.
... seems like your comments are concoctions mate.
See above.
Modellers charge their batteries using chargers that are far more sophisticated and intelligent than anything you'll find in your house. They are not overcharged.
A sweeping generalization, which you have no way of demonstrating.
They are designed to be charged at a 1C rating (ie. fully charged in 1 hour), and its not 'impatient' enthusiasts forcing batteries to be charged in record time. These things are MADE to be charged that quickly.
No, in case of lithium polymer batteries they are hoped (i.e. the catastrophic failure rate is deemed "low enough") to not explode when charged this fast. The same battery charged in 10 hours (with 1/10 of the current) has a few orders of magnitude lower chance of catastrophic overheating. That is a choice that R/C modellers (and the silly vendors supplying them) make. Since lithium polymer is not stable enough to be certified for mass use in consumer electronics, combined with risky "rapid charge" techniques employed, it's a wonder that R/C modellers do not require an approval from the local fire department and that most still have all their fingers.
Chemistry, not impatience!
Taking wild risks with unstable chemicals for the sake of satisfying their impatience in their "hobby" you mean....
It happens quite often, actually. Anyone who's been flying R/C aircraft for any length of time has either seen it or knows someone that it happened to. A friend of mine damn near burned down his house
once.
That is because a) R/C aircraft batteries are frequently overcharged in home-built chargers by impatient R/C enthusiasts who just can't wait to fly their toy again, b) they are, unlike cell-phone, laptop and other consumer device bound batteries, sold "as is" with no fitness to a particular device or charger being certified because R/C models are by definition custom concoctions.
None of this applies to consumer devices such as digital cameras which come with a specific set of requirements and an associated charger. That is why UL (and in Canada CSA) can test and certify the batteries for consumer devices as safe.
stop the evil-corporation conspiracy theory bullshit and do a little research.
There is no conspiracy involved here. Corporations do what corporations are meant to do: generate profit by any means they can get away with.
The Battery University is a good place to start.
The "university" is a shill site run by a partisan party, i.e. the Cadex company, which is heavily involved in supplying super-expensive battery chargers. Cadex simply wants to sell you their crap.
If you are trying to make a point using a website, it would do you good to pick one run by an impartial, uninvolved party without an axe to grind.
This is a real safety issue in which real people are being hurt.
Which, if true, would be the domain of UL or CSA or similar standard bodies which are in charge of consumer safety in electrical and electronic devices. Not some vendor vigilantes with dubious motives.
Yea, yea. That is why all those tens of millions of after-market batteries in use all around the world (in cell phones, laptops, mp3 players and what not) all explode, like, daily, no? Surely?
What exactly is the real-life "catch fire and explode" failure rate on lithium-ion batteries anyhow? Since the actual reported cases number in perhaps tens, compared to the actual number of the batteries out there the ratio must be something like 0.0000000001%. Walking to work is statistically more dangerous.
And then there are of course national standards bodies and ceritfication processes which most electrical and electronic components must undergo before being sold. And... Surprise! This also includes after-market batteries.
So please could you stop with all the bullshit? Go peddle greed as "safety" or "concern for the consumer" to some more gullible audience. "Concern for the contents of the consumer's wallet" is more like it.
Yes but that would require law to be treated like computer code, and thus be subject to the results of scientific discoveries dealing with information processing, modelling of complex processes, disambiguation of scientific language and all that other scientific riff-raff that is soooo beneath the Masters Of the Universe in their three-piece silk suits. And any actual application of which would put these High Lords out of business in no time flat. And we certainly can't have that, now, can we?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO! You couldn't be more wrong about this, and it shows you have a fundamental lack of understanding about how the legal system works. Your aversion to it is not surprising, as people have a tendency to deride things they cannot or will not understand.
Ah yes, but you forgot to jump up and down and wave your hands frantically. That would make you more knowledgeable and me more ignorant, surely. You could also try banging your head on the keyboard for an accelerated effect.
The two sides present the case in front of the jury. The judge and jury hear the case.
Translation: two sets of the members of the Anointed Priesthood, after a hefty fee, perform shamanic dances and an elaborate ceremonial charade in front of the High Priests in Charge, who arbitrarily decides on all aspects of the proceedings, in front of a befuddled and utterly confused bunch of sheepish commoner denizens of the Land Of Lawyers.
The JUDGE makes determinations of law, and for the purposes of the case, that is the law as far as the jury is concerned. When the parties are finished, the judge explains to the jury
Translation: the High Priest In Charge pulls out of his exalted ass arbitrary "interpretations" to his liking (which the poor sheep in the jury box are "unqualified" to judge - for "their own good") and instructs the dumbfounded sheeple to do as he exactly as he tells them, thus restricting any and all options they ever thought they had.
.... the judge explains to the jury the possible verdicts they can come back with in simple, straightforward terms much like you are proposing.
At which point, of course, it is up to the jury to figure out if the facts fit into one of these, anything but "simple" or "straighforward", multiple-choices. Over which they sweat, roll dice or just go with what the press is saying.
Look you can bullshit all you want but your fantasy has no relationship whatsoever to reality. One can easily test this by just looking at one of these "simple" instructions to the jury.
A typical instruction will be go basically like this...
Yes, yes, who are we to believe! I mean you, or our lying, cheating eyes... and this Google thing.
Clearly something is broken. How would you fix it?
I would put the same kind of effort (by the same kind of people) into writing law as we put into formulating scientific models. Many of the problems of complexity, management of changes, coverage of all cases etc apply as much to law as they do to science. And science (unlike lawyers it seems) has developed a myriad of methods do deal with these issues. Lawyers on the other hand seem to be mostly concerned with ensuring their own relevance and accumulation of societal power for their caste and have done no research whatsoever on the actual processes of law making, maintaining clarity of law, nor streamlining of laws. Which is understandable as any advancement in these areas would put a lot of lawyers out of business.
In short, I think we need to take the dangerous toys out of the hands of the irresponsible children who have been playing with them to the detriment of us all and replace them with the scientific method coupled with modern information technology.
I disagree. They are popular for the same reason all religion is popular--they give meaning to the meaningless. It has nothing to do with wanting a set of laws that cover every situation.
I disagree. The "giving meaning to the meaningless" is just a different way of saying that religions bring order (i.e. simple and easy to remember rules that explain everything) to what seems like chaos of our Universe. It is just a re-phrasing of what I said earlier.
In point of fact, Jewish tradition does not prescribe a set of laws that must be meticulously followed. Rather, there are a few such laws--the commandments--and a set of guidelines for moral behavior.
Which commandments Christianity solidified (and which then Islam made harsher) and which are indirectly responsible for Christians outnumbering Jews by a factor of a 1000 to 1 or so (Islam having an even higher ratio). You should ponder this relationship.
Why? What is the job of the courts, if not to interpret the law? Under your proposal, there would be no need for judges, because laws would be clear and concise in every set of circumstances.
Simply to remove the possibility of conflict of interest. It is the desire of investigators to discover crime and that makes some of them to lose objectivity. That is why courts (or some similar mechanism) are still a good idea, irrespective of how clear the law gets. If the law said that you cannot have more than 2 apples on your person, no exceptions, and you were accused of having 3, the accuser (or an arresting officer or some other functionary) would have to prove to your peers (i.e. a jury) that you indeed had them 3 apples. Otherwise a mere accusation, backed up by a friendly co-worker would be enough. Note that this does not change at all if you were to be accused of having 3 apples in a 2-apple country or of committing mass murder with weapons of mass destruction.
Tell me the precise settled meaning of the Second Amendment, for example, and you will have answered your own question. The Constitution is a guideline establishing how the government should be run and what rights and responsibilities are held by the federal government, the states, and the people. It is not a precise code of laws that is not open to interpretation.
Neither are the religious commandments which you were snickering at. They are in fact exactly the same: poorly formulated code which is wide open to "interpretations" but which at the same time is considered to be the "final word". It was your own example that doomed your excuses.
Your argument falls apart when you realize that, no matter how carefully crafted and precise you think your laws are, somebody will always find an exception, a "but what if", a border case, or some other situation that is not directly covered by the law.
If they do, then the law has to be rethought. If the modification does not decrease clarity or conciseness, then it can be made. If the law keeps becoming more and more complicated instead, than it is a good indication that it was a wrong idea to begin with and has to be replaced with something that does not become a confused mass of "if then else", "exception to exception" cases.
The law therefore becomes more and more complex with time.
If it does, it was a wrong law to have to begin with. Otherwise it just becomes better, not more complex. Example: "You may have no more then 2 apples on your person at any time" can be confused by someone coming up with an apple-orange hybrid, or introducing sliced apples etc. Depending upon the intent of the law, in can be re-formulated as "You may have no more then 2 plant-matter objects on your person" or "you may have no more than 100g of plant matter on your person" etc. Not that the law does not get more complex, nor longer. It just becomes
b) you write longer laws to more precisely specify what exactly we want.
But that must be done in a way that does not remove clarity and conciseness! The moment you create laws too complex to be memorized by everyone, the whole concept of law fails. Utterly, completely, irrevocably. That is because if laws cannot be memorized and understood by every member of a society, and if laws are formulated so that there exist people who cannot follow them by any means other then either chance or paying up some priest to offer divinations, no one can reasonably expect any such members to follow them at all times! Period. End of story.
But...the longer law might end up requiring someone trained in the law to understand all the different
See above. The moment it happens, the law system becomes a failure and such society loses any pretence of "justice".
Do they have to have killed someone with their own hands? How about if they cause an avalanche which kills someone? If they put poison in the water? How about if they put poison in the water as part of poor waste disposal in their job at a company?
These are desperate attempts to create ambiguity where none exists. "Kill" is to terminate someone's life by your action (and again, this definition is but a crude example). The action in question is not important. It can be a remotely-controlled drone, a poison arrow, a bomb with a time detonator, a poison in a river, they are all inconsequential to the concept of "kill".
Or as I suggested in the "self-defense" exception...what does "self-defense" mean? How can we more precisely specify the conditions which constitute self defense?
I keep pointing out that the art of law-making is in defining things in such a way that any layman can figure out what the meaning is and yet the law remains concise enough to memorize. My definition of "self-defence" was simply an example, not a refined law. Someone else proposed others, the point remains however that irrespective of the final shape, the law must be: a) clear to laymen, b) concise, thus removing any need for voodoo-shamans, priests, tarrot card readers and other "lawyers" to "interpret" it for him. Otherwise the whole point of the "law" is moot.
But the truth is, they always need interpretation by *someone*. Simple statements are, in fact, not precise.
If that were true, science could not exist. The whole of scientific body is precisely that: simple, precise statements, strung together. There is no legitimate reason to treat human laws in any different way and to pretend that they are somehow "special".
The fact of the matter is that modern society is complex.
So are many other chaotic systems and yet their underlying rules are simple, sometimes down to a single equation.
More complex situations and interactions require more complex rules.
Err, no.
There are different kinds of complexity, and most of the complexity does not pertain to laws at all. The portion that does can be governed, like many other systems are, by a simple set of rules, and which despite their simplicity can yield vastly complex systems. See also under: chaos theory. Which goes back to my main point: laws and law making should be the domain of an appropriate science and scientific rules of conduct and not popularity contests between idiots, con-men and other assorted crooks.
And it is always good to look to simplify where it makes sense. However, I, for one, would much rather have a larger body of law which more precisely spells out my rights and responsibilities than a small body of law which entirely cedes that judgment to the administrators of the law.
The difference is actually that of a village shaman making pr
No, I did not. The two of us were merely talking (as opposed to making laws) about two different things. The difference between what we are doing here and formulating good laws is that of chit-chatting about space-flight over coffee in a cafeteria and writing fail-safe software for a reactor control system of a nuclear-powered space ship. In a chit chat we are allowed to be imprecise and make mistakes. It is not so in the other case. An equivalent of a poorly written law in this scenario is for an engineer and 5 technicians to be launched along with the reactor so that they can make panicky "adjustments" in flight, therefore correcting for any oversights the idiots designing the software made, and hope that they are fast enough before anyone gets hurt.
That is until they are caught breaking a law, whereupon their opinions of lawyers undergo a considerable revision.
No they don't, at least not amongst those who have any clue. That you are being made to hire a con-man to help you fend off other con-men, and even if you become pals with him in the process, does not change the fact that you are still being conned and used.
Err, no. Juries must decide if a law was broken or not. To do so they must not only find facts, but also compare them to the template of the law, which is where the process falls apart as the laws are so fucked up that juries have next to an impossible task of figuring out if the "law" was broken or not.
If what you say is true--and I don't think you have any basis whatsoever for claiming this about "most" juries--then it actually cuts against you.
See above.
When the facts themselves are so ambiguous as to leave juries conflicted about whether they have actually correctly decided what those facts are, how do you expect to create laws that apply fairly to facts that can't be determined to any degree of certainty?
Simpler and more cleverly formulated the laws, easier it is to determine if the facts fit their definitions. More convoluted and arcane they get, more difficult the process becomes. While some facts can be ambiguous at times, it is the laws that are at fault for applying the wrong measurement criteria, not the facts. An incorrectly formulated law will introduce ambiguity where none exists in the facts. For example, a law that decides guilt based upon a "mental state" as opposed on physical evidence is bound to create vast ambiguity where none was present before, simply because we have no means at all to reliably determine a "mental state", never you mind that the state in question would have occurred in the past. This one example alone illustrates a difference between a bullshit "law" and a real one.
We should eliminate the need for lawyers by moving to a religious law system like they have in Middle Eastern countries. It's pretty straightforward. There's one text that we all follow--not too much for the average person to memorize.
You should ponder upon why Judeo-Christian religions (of which Islam is an off-shoot) are so vastly popular. And if you do, you will find that it is an average person's deep-seated desire for a concise, clear set of rules to govern society that is at the very heart of it. Mock that desire it at your own peril.
Laws are interpreted by those doing the enforcing, so in most cases we wouldn't even need a court system.
You always need an arbitration process to prevent abuse.
Disputes are settled by consulting the book, and the authority of said book is final.
And that is different from, say, the US constitution, how exactly?
The difference between law and religion is that laws are man-made, and subject to alteration by men, religions are supposedly handed down from a deity and as such unalterable by men. They do not differ however when it comes to the method of application: both operate based on a set of rules, all of which are final (but in the case of laws of men, subject to change in the course of history).
And we wouldn't ever want to update the book, because that would lead to the kind of instability and uncertainty you're objecting to.
Bullshit. Well designed laws, even though they can be changed, require less and less modifications as more refined they become. Bullshit, byzantine, intellectual diarrhoea "laws" are in a state of constant chaotic flux and become more and more confused and voluminous as the time passes, because confusion and chaos are their very purpose.
If your case doesn't fall under one of the predefined situations, we just find the closest one and go with that.
Again, bullshit. Religions do that because they have no mechanism to correct their "commandments". Human laws do. But that does not mean that a correction must always be uniformly in the direction of more complexity. In fact the whole art of law-making is to go in the precisely the opposite direction, to formulate simple laws in such a way as to cover all cases.
This is the only way to create a uniform system that is applied fairly in all situations.
Total nonsense, as I already pointed out.
You're absolutely correct that the problem is not that individuals may find themselves in differing situations and thus need the law applied differently to reach a reasonable result, but that judges and lawyers have too long been allowed to permit such vague concepts as subtlety and nuance to cloud the issue.
This has nothing to do with "subtlety" and "nuance". It has to do with byzantine, arcane, sets of incomprehensible to an average citizen rules, purposefully formulated so in a special religious language so that he or she has no chance ever being able to deal with them without assistance of a special priest.
The true "subtlety" and "nuance" are part of law making, whereby the law has to be formulated in such a clever way as to maintain total clarity and to prevent the need for any arcane "interpretations" at the time of its application.
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This has been of course the religious mantra of the "Free Market Cures All" deity worshippers. The truth however is that outside of over-simplistic religious market-fundamentalist scriptures, "free market" has historically devolved into corrupt set of oligopolies every time it has been tried in the real world. There is a historical and repeatedly demonstrable correlation between market liberalization and ascension of mega-conglomerates, oligopolies and outright monopolies.
This is so because like Marxism, which sounds appealing and reasonable on paper, dog-eat-dog capitalism is also outwardly well reasoned, while internally riddled with devastating inconsistencies and instabilities, which are only too keen to present themselves when the dogma meets the reality.
It seems that most of our "systems" are only functional in accordance with their theory only on very small scale and fall apart as the scale changes from village/commune level to nation or global one. Communism works quite well in religious communes, which to this day are quite successful, in their own way, and capitalism works well when applied to small scale businesses dealing with well understood everyday items, like potatoes, pots and blankets. On the large scale however, communism becomes essentially unworkable, which is why all of the so-called "communist" states in fact practised State Monopoly (i.e. the state had the monopoly on all production), and similarly every so-called Capitalist state has in fact practised some convoluted scheme centred around a pseudo-Feudal economic order. It would appear that corrupt, unjust, oppressive variations of Statism or Feudalism are the point into all of the attempts at improvement eventually "stabilize" at.
Until the next revolution that is.
No.
At least in practise.
Britain is at this point a bona-fide Police State, with all the trappings. Police is above the law. Even if they hunt you down on a whim, throw you to the ground, put a gun to your head and pull the trigger 7 times. No consequences to speak of (£175,000 fine, paid to another branch of government). Your family will have no recourse.
Ugh. Next you are going to insist that Thatcher was all for raves ....
The fact that the law was passed four years after her departure does not mean that the anti-rave hysteria was not initiated during her reign and that it was quite compatible with Thatcherite ideology, whereby anything involving large numbers of people coordinating for some common elite-unsanctioned (and/or unprofitable for the elites) goal was to be immediately terminated with extreme prejudice. Her sentiments were quite obvious. See also under: "poll tax".
The fact that the subsequent governments perpetuated the core elements of her ideology and kept descending ever more deeply into the filth that is the "neo-liberal" ideology, finally culminating with the UK turning into the Elite-friendly Police Surveillance State it is now, never you mind the Iraq fiasco, does not take away from her leading involvement in the matter.
I and may I point out that the "Godwin law" is a wholly made up tripe, the very trotting out of which in a thread about idiotic, arbitrary "laws" and some people's inexplicable desperate desire to adhere to any and all "rules" someone else made up, irrespective of logic, justification or internal consistency of these "rules", is truly superb irony.
This "Godwin" thing has become a wholly cosmic stupidity in its own right. And its superbly ironic that you would bring in a fake, wholly made up "law", and try to apply it with no regard to any sort of logical justification to the very thread where I was pointing out the idiocy of some people who wish to adhere to any and all "laws" or "rules" irrespective of justness, truthfulness, applicability or logical consistency of those "laws" or "rules", just because someone made up that "law" and "laws ... uuuuh ... gotta be obeyed ... duuuh .... [copious amount of drooling]".
Thank you for demonstrating so poignantly that herd mentality of which even sheep would be abashed is so alive and well in the likes of you.
I think you are trying to address the post parent to mine, since it was its poster who attempted the classic "grandmother" vs "big bad evil hairy Ruffians" propaganda ploy....
The central flaw in any such "legalistic" arguments is an unspoken assumption that winning a lawsuit makes one "right" by definition. Well then, instead of your biased substitution of a "grandmother" for the RIAA, let's try some others:
"The NAZIs accused a man of being a "subversive" Jew, a NAZI court agreed (yes they did have "lawsuits" in some of these cases), NAZIs won (no surprise there), NAZIs want their Jew before he runs off to somewhere they can't get him and all of his possessions ..." or try this, closer to home: "A slave escaped a Southern plantation and manages to make his way to Canada, the plantation owner finds out that his escape was helped by someone with US holdings, he sues that person, he wins, and now wants his money before the person in question tries to run off with the money...."
I could go on, but this should be enough to show you the basic truth: "legal" and "right" are not necessarily (and in recent years, increasingly ever more rarely) the same.
Great, yet another thing to add to the looooong list of contortions and byzantine twists of the "logic" the peddlers of the "intellectual property" scam offer. So in the spirit of these new heady revelations as to the nature of copyright and public domain, lets consider this little wee scenario:
But then again, I expect such funky implications to keep multiplying as the pathetic efforts of the "intellectual property" crowd of con-men continue to ever more desperately try to legislate the fundamental properties of information away.
That is only partially correct. The full answer is: a surcharge on distribution is rapidly becoming unworkable in an even partially free society. And this is a key difference. You see, in an authoritarian society, even one paying lip service to "freedom", the authorities can control, to a significant degree, distribution of all information, and so it is possible to institute a totalitarian-power-backed surcharge on distribution. Simply because such control of information is the very foundation of authoritarian societies.
And this is the reason for which the "intellectual property" forces are natural allies of all those who seek to take over and rule our societies under the guise of "law and order" or "crime fighting" or "war on ..." (fill in your blanks here). This is also the very reason for which many of us oppose the "intellectual property" nonsense in general. Because we see that a victory for that camp of short-sighted greed-motivated mental midgets will also, inevitably, mean a victory for those far more dangerous individuals who seek to essentially enslave most of humanity.
While this might prove ultimately true on the historical scale, given the above link between the peddlers of "intellectual property" and totalitarians, the real question is how many broken lives, how much pain and misery, and quite likely how many dead and maimed people will that victory cost.
This is what you get when a country is overrun by truly obscene parasites called "lawyers" and eventually virtually becomes run by them, to their own benefit. Also note that the witch-hunter-in-chief, Beth Buchanan has a long history of ideologically-motivated abuses of her office and is probably the most obscene individual in this whole fucking sorry affair.
As to "rebooting" America, good luck with that. History teaches us that these things do not happen. And pretty much everyone who paid any attention whatsoever over the last few decades can see that in fact all the parts of Western civilization that were born in the Enlightenment, when reason and humanism triumphed over the superstitions and blind acceptance of societal "oder" of the Dark Ages, are now in decline. The "America" that you bemoan being lost was a part of that progress, its Founding Fathers' ideas being born in that Enlightenment. And so we get the misfortune to live our days in this long twilight of yet another era, to be replaced by an epoch of authoritarianism, fascist-like ideologies and ruled by limitless greed. A new Dark Age is upon us.
The good news, although not for our generation, is that history is a never ending cycle of booms and busts, and so after these Dark Ages, another Enlightenment will come. Although this knowledge will be of little comfort to those who are yet to die in Iraq-style wars of Imperial Conquest, or as victims of never-ending "wars" on "drugs", "porn", "ill manners", "religious views incompatible with the state religion" and whatever other calamities are to come during the thrashing of dying throes of this epoch's Enlightenment.
It is enough to get one quite depressed.
Certainly that is not the case with e-books or audio-books. And as the technology marches on, it is inevitable that electronic formats will replace paper sheets. One has only to glance at the current activities of the "intellectual property" crowd to see what their plan for our future is. A hint: if they could get their way, a public library would be seen as a den of thievery, preferably punishable by death. And they are, slowly but surely, on the way to getting their way by utilizing their already privileged position as "gatekeepers of information" to corrupt law, politics and public discourse in general, as evidenced by countless Slashdot articles on the subject. Only those "copyright infringes" and "freeloaders" and "pinko-commie-kumbaya-singing sharers" stand in the way of total takeover of our culture and in the end of our civilization by the corporate crooks with deranged delusions of power.
Given your glaring oversight of the obvious trend in book publishing moving toward contents controlled via draconian DRM "protections", which I described above, I get to wonder who is really spreading FUD around here...
Cost of which is shared amongst tens, if not hundreds, of productions. This is like trying to include the cost of the limos used to ferry the "super stars" from their over-priced hotels in the cost of making of the CD. None of the costs you mentioned are essential. We know this because many other artists simply rent time at a recording studio or, these days far more often due to the progress of technology, have their own in their house. The times when a "studio" consisted of a whole floor filled with racks of equipment are long gone. Personal computers changed all that. Even mass duplication CD machinery is now so cheap that many a mid-sized city has a studio complete with a fabrication plant where artists can produce their own CDs at pennies per unit.
And which is outside the scope of costs of "intellectual property" as these are only the costs of producing it, not what the fuck are planning to do with it after it was "made". And of course the same expense is incurred by nearly every business out there, pretty much all of them having an HR department.
See above. Not a core part of any "IP" "manufacturing" costs. At the outside one could include the management costs directly related to the management of the recording process itself, which are a tiny fraction of overall management costs at gigantic mega-media conglomerates.
Now you are making me laugh. So promotion is now part of the cost of the R&D of the product? With mindless shills and apologists like you around, its no wonder that pharmaceuticals are trying to sneak their TV ads expenses into the "life-saving research" column of their lobbying propaganda handouts.
Well, if your entire business is based on legal shenanigans, no wonder then that you would try to include lawyers as part of your R&D. The word "pathetic" describes that effort rather accurately.
This is beyond ridiculous. You mean to tell me that hundred-million dollar budget "movies" that are shown in the theatres today are of higher quality and of longer lasting appeal then those produced several decades ago at fraction of the cost (yes, adjusted for inflation)? Or are you insinuating that expense in "art" has any relationship whatsoever to the artistic outcome?
Your entire post just reeks of out-of-control greed, upon which you seem to have centered your entire world-view.
Except all of this is bullshit. I will skip for the moment the entire discussion of the fact that no such thing as "Intellectual Property" exists, merely a gaggle of half-assed, perverted "laws" intended to create artificial scarcity of information. I will just focus on your assertion of "costs" of this "IP", pretending for the sake of discussion that it is a logical and coherent concept, which it is not.
You see, the cost of this "IP" is a tiny fraction of all of the manufacturing, distribution and promotion (which constitute the lion share in many cases) of the expenses in real products (i.e. the physical world kind), even for the pharmaceuticals, where the "marketing" costs alone outrank the R&D costs by an order of magnitude.
In case of pure information "products", like music, what is the exact cost to disgorge an over-produced, industrial product called an "album", versus the revenue? A team of perhaps 20 (on the outside, including the band members and sound engineers) working for, say, 6 months, versus 500,000 units (an album going "gold") at $20 retail. And that is only the beginning, as the songs are expected, due to the perversions of the "copyright" assholerism, to be sold for the life time of an author + 70 years or so. The actual expected sales to production costs ratio of the "IP" is clearly expected to approach as close to infinity as possible over its useful lifetime. But that is an extreme case of costs of an industrial "product", meant to baffle brains of masses of witless teenagers by mass promotion endlessly-looped playback on corporate radio networks, which is not the case with over 99% of songs produced, the cost of which is that of a several individuals in a home-computer-centered "studio" producing for distribution over the Internet. The total cost of most of this "IP" is measured in pizzas and beer and the quality, these days, quite comparable to the industrial "product".
But the costs of "IP", being a never ending excuse and rallying cry of all sorts of crooks and thieves, are indeed extravagant in the case of Hollywood-produced kitsch, which is not surprising when a vapid actress can command $45 million dollars for the dubious privilege of her oh-so-precious "intellectual" property of her layers of makeup, tits and ass being filmed for the "adoring audience". But that is only because the appropriate technological revolution is only just starting in this area. Fortunately the every-day-closer notion of 100% computer generated movies, the means to manufacture which will within a decade be withing a grasp of every amateur, will quite surely put an end to that "IP" "industry" too. May it rest in peace.
All of this is happens because you forgot that the technology not only lowered the costs of distribution of information to its natural state of zero (or as near zero as be practically indistinguishable), but it also drastically reduced the cost of producing the "IP". Whereby before you had hundreds of engineers slaving over pen and pencil drawn diagrams duplicated via blue-print machine (in actual blue) you now have CAD/CAM workstations which automate a vast majority of mundane engineering tasks. Whereby before you had to hire a symphonic orchestra, you now can get a home computer to synthesize it digitally. And so on and on and on.
Sure, law has a "key" place in the "markets". I mean what would be the price of weed or crack cocaine if it were not for the "War on Drugs"?! I mean think of all those poor drug cartels and all of their hard earned profits just going "poof" and disappearing. Then there is all of that gigiantic machinery of the ATF, why with billion dollar budgets, its own airline and what not. All those
That is not true. RC models use all sorts of batteries, depending on type and application. Lithum-polymer is used pretty much exclusively in flying models, due to its energy density, where the additional expense and charging regime is an acceptable (to some people) compromise.
Flying RC models are custom by definition because they are all sold in the form of kits, where the electrical (and other) components can be swapped by the end user, drastically altering the characteristics of the device. Also there is no "standard" charger being made available for the device, modellers use a variety of chargers, some home-built. Subsequently no one can certify a battery for use with a particular combination of a charger and the motor, the controlling electronics etc.
See above.
A sweeping generalization, which you have no way of demonstrating.
No, in case of lithium polymer batteries they are hoped (i.e. the catastrophic failure rate is deemed "low enough") to not explode when charged this fast. The same battery charged in 10 hours (with 1/10 of the current) has a few orders of magnitude lower chance of catastrophic overheating. That is a choice that R/C modellers (and the silly vendors supplying them) make. Since lithium polymer is not stable enough to be certified for mass use in consumer electronics, combined with risky "rapid charge" techniques employed, it's a wonder that R/C modellers do not require an approval from the local fire department and that most still have all their fingers.
Taking wild risks with unstable chemicals for the sake of satisfying their impatience in their "hobby" you mean....
That is because a) R/C aircraft batteries are frequently overcharged in home-built chargers by impatient R/C enthusiasts who just can't wait to fly their toy again, b) they are, unlike cell-phone, laptop and other consumer device bound batteries, sold "as is" with no fitness to a particular device or charger being certified because R/C models are by definition custom concoctions.
None of this applies to consumer devices such as digital cameras which come with a specific set of requirements and an associated charger. That is why UL (and in Canada CSA) can test and certify the batteries for consumer devices as safe.
There is no conspiracy involved here. Corporations do what corporations are meant to do: generate profit by any means they can get away with.
The "university" is a shill site run by a partisan party, i.e. the Cadex company, which is heavily involved in supplying super-expensive battery chargers. Cadex simply wants to sell you their crap.
If you are trying to make a point using a website, it would do you good to pick one run by an impartial, uninvolved party without an axe to grind.
Which, if true, would be the domain of UL or CSA or similar standard bodies which are in charge of consumer safety in electrical and electronic devices. Not some vendor vigilantes with dubious motives.
Yea, yea. That is why all those tens of millions of after-market batteries in use all around the world (in cell phones, laptops, mp3 players and what not) all explode, like, daily, no? Surely?
What exactly is the real-life "catch fire and explode" failure rate on lithium-ion batteries anyhow? Since the actual reported cases number in perhaps tens, compared to the actual number of the batteries out there the ratio must be something like 0.0000000001%. Walking to work is statistically more dangerous.
And then there are of course national standards bodies and ceritfication processes which most electrical and electronic components must undergo before being sold. And ... Surprise! This also includes after-market batteries.
So please could you stop with all the bullshit? Go peddle greed as "safety" or "concern for the consumer" to some more gullible audience. "Concern for the contents of the consumer's wallet" is more like it.
Yes but that would require law to be treated like computer code, and thus be subject to the results of scientific discoveries dealing with information processing, modelling of complex processes, disambiguation of scientific language and all that other scientific riff-raff that is soooo beneath the Masters Of the Universe in their three-piece silk suits. And any actual application of which would put these High Lords out of business in no time flat. And we certainly can't have that, now, can we?
Ah yes, but you forgot to jump up and down and wave your hands frantically. That would make you more knowledgeable and me more ignorant, surely. You could also try banging your head on the keyboard for an accelerated effect.
Translation: two sets of the members of the Anointed Priesthood, after a hefty fee, perform shamanic dances and an elaborate ceremonial charade in front of the High Priests in Charge, who arbitrarily decides on all aspects of the proceedings, in front of a befuddled and utterly confused bunch of sheepish commoner denizens of the Land Of Lawyers.
Translation: the High Priest In Charge pulls out of his exalted ass arbitrary "interpretations" to his liking (which the poor sheep in the jury box are "unqualified" to judge - for "their own good") and instructs the dumbfounded sheeple to do as he exactly as he tells them, thus restricting any and all options they ever thought they had.
At which point, of course, it is up to the jury to figure out if the facts fit into one of these, anything but "simple" or "straighforward", multiple-choices. Over which they sweat, roll dice or just go with what the press is saying.
Look you can bullshit all you want but your fantasy has no relationship whatsoever to reality. One can easily test this by just looking at one of these "simple" instructions to the jury.
Yes, yes, who are we to believe! I mean you, or our lying, cheating eyes ... and this Google thing.
I would put the same kind of effort (by the same kind of people) into writing law as we put into formulating scientific models. Many of the problems of complexity, management of changes, coverage of all cases etc apply as much to law as they do to science. And science (unlike lawyers it seems) has developed a myriad of methods do deal with these issues. Lawyers on the other hand seem to be mostly concerned with ensuring their own relevance and accumulation of societal power for their caste and have done no research whatsoever on the actual processes of law making, maintaining clarity of law, nor streamlining of laws. Which is understandable as any advancement in these areas would put a lot of lawyers out of business.
In short, I think we need to take the dangerous toys out of the hands of the irresponsible children who have been playing with them to the detriment of us all and replace them with the scientific method coupled with modern information technology.
I disagree. The "giving meaning to the meaningless" is just a different way of saying that religions bring order (i.e. simple and easy to remember rules that explain everything) to what seems like chaos of our Universe. It is just a re-phrasing of what I said earlier.
Which commandments Christianity solidified (and which then Islam made harsher) and which are indirectly responsible for Christians outnumbering Jews by a factor of a 1000 to 1 or so (Islam having an even higher ratio). You should ponder this relationship.
Simply to remove the possibility of conflict of interest. It is the desire of investigators to discover crime and that makes some of them to lose objectivity. That is why courts (or some similar mechanism) are still a good idea, irrespective of how clear the law gets. If the law said that you cannot have more than 2 apples on your person, no exceptions, and you were accused of having 3, the accuser (or an arresting officer or some other functionary) would have to prove to your peers (i.e. a jury) that you indeed had them 3 apples. Otherwise a mere accusation, backed up by a friendly co-worker would be enough. Note that this does not change at all if you were to be accused of having 3 apples in a 2-apple country or of committing mass murder with weapons of mass destruction.
Neither are the religious commandments which you were snickering at. They are in fact exactly the same: poorly formulated code which is wide open to "interpretations" but which at the same time is considered to be the "final word". It was your own example that doomed your excuses.
If they do, then the law has to be rethought. If the modification does not decrease clarity or conciseness, then it can be made. If the law keeps becoming more and more complicated instead, than it is a good indication that it was a wrong idea to begin with and has to be replaced with something that does not become a confused mass of "if then else", "exception to exception" cases.
If it does, it was a wrong law to have to begin with. Otherwise it just becomes better, not more complex. Example: "You may have no more then 2 apples on your person at any time" can be confused by someone coming up with an apple-orange hybrid, or introducing sliced apples etc. Depending upon the intent of the law, in can be re-formulated as "You may have no more then 2 plant-matter objects on your person" or "you may have no more than 100g of plant matter on your person" etc. Not that the law does not get more complex, nor longer. It just becomes
But that must be done in a way that does not remove clarity and conciseness! The moment you create laws too complex to be memorized by everyone, the whole concept of law fails. Utterly, completely, irrevocably. That is because if laws cannot be memorized and understood by every member of a society, and if laws are formulated so that there exist people who cannot follow them by any means other then either chance or paying up some priest to offer divinations, no one can reasonably expect any such members to follow them at all times! Period. End of story.
See above. The moment it happens, the law system becomes a failure and such society loses any pretence of "justice".
These are desperate attempts to create ambiguity where none exists. "Kill" is to terminate someone's life by your action (and again, this definition is but a crude example). The action in question is not important. It can be a remotely-controlled drone, a poison arrow, a bomb with a time detonator, a poison in a river, they are all inconsequential to the concept of "kill".
I keep pointing out that the art of law-making is in defining things in such a way that any layman can figure out what the meaning is and yet the law remains concise enough to memorize. My definition of "self-defence" was simply an example, not a refined law. Someone else proposed others, the point remains however that irrespective of the final shape, the law must be: a) clear to laymen, b) concise, thus removing any need for voodoo-shamans, priests, tarrot card readers and other "lawyers" to "interpret" it for him. Otherwise the whole point of the "law" is moot.
If that were true, science could not exist. The whole of scientific body is precisely that: simple, precise statements, strung together. There is no legitimate reason to treat human laws in any different way and to pretend that they are somehow "special".
So are many other chaotic systems and yet their underlying rules are simple, sometimes down to a single equation.
Err, no.
There are different kinds of complexity, and most of the complexity does not pertain to laws at all. The portion that does can be governed, like many other systems are, by a simple set of rules, and which despite their simplicity can yield vastly complex systems. See also under: chaos theory. Which goes back to my main point: laws and law making should be the domain of an appropriate science and scientific rules of conduct and not popularity contests between idiots, con-men and other assorted crooks.
The difference is actually that of a village shaman making pr
No, I did not. The two of us were merely talking (as opposed to making laws) about two different things. The difference between what we are doing here and formulating good laws is that of chit-chatting about space-flight over coffee in a cafeteria and writing fail-safe software for a reactor control system of a nuclear-powered space ship. In a chit chat we are allowed to be imprecise and make mistakes. It is not so in the other case. An equivalent of a poorly written law in this scenario is for an engineer and 5 technicians to be launched along with the reactor so that they can make panicky "adjustments" in flight, therefore correcting for any oversights the idiots designing the software made, and hope that they are fast enough before anyone gets hurt.
No they don't, at least not amongst those who have any clue. That you are being made to hire a con-man to help you fend off other con-men, and even if you become pals with him in the process, does not change the fact that you are still being conned and used.
Err, no. Juries must decide if a law was broken or not. To do so they must not only find facts, but also compare them to the template of the law, which is where the process falls apart as the laws are so fucked up that juries have next to an impossible task of figuring out if the "law" was broken or not.
See above.
Simpler and more cleverly formulated the laws, easier it is to determine if the facts fit their definitions. More convoluted and arcane they get, more difficult the process becomes. While some facts can be ambiguous at times, it is the laws that are at fault for applying the wrong measurement criteria, not the facts. An incorrectly formulated law will introduce ambiguity where none exists in the facts. For example, a law that decides guilt based upon a "mental state" as opposed on physical evidence is bound to create vast ambiguity where none was present before, simply because we have no means at all to reliably determine a "mental state", never you mind that the state in question would have occurred in the past. This one example alone illustrates a difference between a bullshit "law" and a real one.
You should ponder upon why Judeo-Christian religions (of which Islam is an off-shoot) are so vastly popular. And if you do, you will find that it is an average person's deep-seated desire for a concise, clear set of rules to govern society that is at the very heart of it. Mock that desire it at your own peril.
You always need an arbitration process to prevent abuse.
And that is different from, say, the US constitution, how exactly?
The difference between law and religion is that laws are man-made, and subject to alteration by men, religions are supposedly handed down from a deity and as such unalterable by men. They do not differ however when it comes to the method of application: both operate based on a set of rules, all of which are final (but in the case of laws of men, subject to change in the course of history).
Bullshit. Well designed laws, even though they can be changed, require less and less modifications as more refined they become. Bullshit, byzantine, intellectual diarrhoea "laws" are in a state of constant chaotic flux and become more and more confused and voluminous as the time passes, because confusion and chaos are their very purpose.
Again, bullshit. Religions do that because they have no mechanism to correct their "commandments". Human laws do. But that does not mean that a correction must always be uniformly in the direction of more complexity. In fact the whole art of law-making is to go in the precisely the opposite direction, to formulate simple laws in such a way as to cover all cases.
Total nonsense, as I already pointed out.
This has nothing to do with "subtlety" and "nuance". It has to do with byzantine, arcane, sets of incomprehensible to an average citizen rules, purposefully formulated so in a special religious language so that he or she has no chance ever being able to deal with them without assistance of a special priest.
The true "subtlety" and "nuance" are part of law making, whereby the law has to be formulated in such a clever way as to maintain total clarity and to prevent the need for any arcane "interpretations" at the time of its application.