The God in all Abrahamic religions, including Christianity and Islam, transcends reason. He can do literally anything he wants, and be just and merciful at the same time, simply by definition.
Must... resist... theological... debate... oh I give up.
It is certainly possible that God transcends reason, however: if you claim that God transcends reason, you also lose the ability to say anything about God, since you most certainly do not transcend reason. This makes this entire debate, as well as religion in general, pointless; after all, as you correctly noted above, transcending reason gives the ability to simultaneously incorporate conflicting qualities, which in turn means that both you and the grandparent are right: God can and cannot grant mercy.
Nonsensical ? Of course it is. It is impossible to have a reasonable debate about something which transcends reason, after all:). So either assume that God will act within reason and the laws of logic in his dealings with humanity, either because he has to or because he wants to, or accept that you cannot talk about God in any non-nonsensical way.
Btw2. According to my translator koeaika: noviciate, parole, probation, qualifying period, trial period
Koeaika is trial period. According to dictionary.com, probation can refer to a type of punishment for a crime, while koeaika can not (the term for that is "ehdonalainen").
Basically, probation can have negative connotations, while koeaika is simply a period for showing your abilities - an extended interview, in a way.
The USSRs rejection of religion no doubt had scientific advantages, too.
Did the USSR reject religion, thought ? What was built around Stalin was called a cult of personality for a reason, after all.
In fact I'd go so far as to call all ideologues religions. Their adherents tend to explain away or flat-out ignore any evidence that the ideology doesn't work, they tend to promote ideological purity (preventing any deviation from the dogma), and they tend to impose a value system on the world around them and paint anyone not following them as evil or stupid. Just look at what Marxism ("imperialist oppressor of working class"), libertarianism ("weakling busily sucking money stolen from me through the teat of the nanny state"), or hard-line atheism ("an intellectually flabby coward itching to impose his murderous arbitrary rules on everyone") said about their presumed enemies (in parenthesis).
There will always be religions, and there will always be religious fanatics, because it is human nature to come up with value systems, and it is also human nature to become so attached to them that any perceived opponent starts seeming like a demon from the pits of Hell. And since the material world nor any part of it doesn't have any inherent value, any such system will be more or less a matter of personal preference, and those vary; consequently people will disagree with one another, giving opportunity for various ruthless individuals to play them against one another.
No, it is when search -- the practice long accepted as a legitimate law-enforcement tool -- is not enough.
If we allow police to search houses (including safes -- demanding keys, when needed), it is only logical to allow them to also decrypt data (demanding keys, when needed).
I was unaware that you are required to help the police to search your house. Tell me, does someone accused of murder get a heavier sentence if he refuses to tell where the murder weapon is ?
I hate jumping in shooters. If the game allows you to jump, it needs to limit the height to about 18 inches, and make it impossible to shoot while jumping.
You know, I spend most of my free time on the computer and eating snacks, and am exactly as overweight and out of shape as you'd expect from that, and I don't have any trouble jumping 18 inches straight up; so why the heck couldn't a presumably physically fit super macho main character top that ?
If you can't jump over 18 inches straight up, then go see a doctor. Seriously. It's not even half a meter, for fuck's sake.
xp funnel into abilities, not just raw levels. Instead of randomly skilling up when you use abilities, you have to funnel a portion of your XP torwards. The more you funnel, the better you get (the less goes to actual leveling, player level). and the more damage you can do at lower levels. You can then strike a balance between speed of leveling and how much damage you put out. You could then make the system totally de-classed and have different pools to dump XP into, by picking the right ratios then existing classes will naturally arise.
The problem with this is that such a system can and will lead to unplayable characters, which lead to dissatisfied customers, which lead to revenue loss.
From purely technical side, the more free the system is, the harder it is to balance. There are bound to be some killer skill combos, and with millions of people playing the game, they will be found. At that point you face a decision: will you balance the game difficulty against these combos, making it essentially unplayable without very careful character planning, or will you balance it against Joe Average, making these combos essentially cheat codes ?
xp loss on death. You break it you buy it.
This will make the above problem even worse.
Then again, if we'd take the "XP as commodity" thought to its logical end result and allowed the players to re-assign the XP at anytime... that might work. Something like the skill system in FF9, where you had to assign jewels (which you got from leveling) to make your skills and abilities active.
Hmm.. so it comes down to large numbers of people either running around mindlessly, or running around pretending there's a higher purpose behind it. Sounds like something else I've heard of... ah, right.. life! Funny "escapes", RPGs.
If people ran around more, summertime would be more aesthetically pleasing. But instead they drive around in cars, polluting the environment and collecting fat. Not that I should speak, sitting down writing this message instead of being at the gym, but still...
Do your civic duty and run around for real to get firm buttocks so your fellows can ogle them come summer and short skirts - or shorts, if that is your preference - instead of running around in WoW accomplishing nothing.
the Lich King will take your soul for pubbing silly asides that have nothing to do with WoW
So put your soul into a phylactery and the phylactery into a bank vault of a Swiss bank. As a nice side effect you'll lose weight, your voice will get lower and sexier, and your looks will improve, increasing your sex appeal - at least if you're a typical Slashdotter.
There's not that much different between your parent's basement and a crypt, you know.
Java falsely claims that you don't have to worry about releasing resources any more because the garbage collector will get it in the end. That claim only holds for resources such as memory, that are so plentiful that you don't need to immediately return them to the system.
The reason the garbage collector works for memory is that the failure to allocate sufficient memory is what triggers garbage collector, rather than any abundance of memory.
Even if I had closed the inputstream just before it went out of scope, an exception (or a badly placed return or continue) would bring us out of the scope before the Close() function was called.
That particular problem can be solved easily with the try {} finally {} construct. FileInputStream file = null; try { file = new FileInputStream("crash.java "); } finally { if (file != null) file.close();}
But yes, this is a problem. I'm not sure there is a clean solution for it, however.
RAII gaurantees that resources are cleaned up no matter how you exit the scope.
Well, the finally block will be executed no matter how the try block is exited, so such things can be arranged; however, it is a needless hassle to set up and certainly something a novice programmer - or even a senior one - could easily forget. I'm not sure there is a good solution, thought; even RAII is not applicable for every use (specifically, it can't be used for files which need to be kept open, like database files).
A bandaid might be to trigger garbage collection when the system runs out of file descriptors (since garbage-collecting an object representing an open file causes the underlaying file to be closed in Java), but that is not a general solution.
Of course, the ultimate reason for all of these troubles is that most current operating systems were written in C or C++, making them the "native" languages of the system. Writing the entire system from the kernel up with an object-oriented, type-safe, bounds-checked language would solve the whole problem. After all, a file descriptor is simply an integer, used as a token to identify an open file, which in turn is a kernel data structure; the number of open files is not inherently limited by anything but memory, so making the entire system a single garbage-collected entity would mean that any "open file" data structures no longer referenced by anyone would be cleaned up with the rest of the rubbish. After all, the only reason a file needs to be specifically closed in current systems is that the system has no way of otherwise knowing you won't be using it anymore (and because most runtime libraries, including C ones, buffer writes to files due to the high overhead of system calls).
As an added benefit, given the above constraints on memory and resource access, there would be no need to run the user code in a separate processor ring as the kernel; in fact there would be no need to run anything in a separate virtual memory context. This could potentially mean a huge recuction in the cost of system calls, interprocess communication, and context switches. It would also make Hurd-like microkernel architechtures a lot more viable.
C and Unix were born together, and the former still pretty much defines the latter (and all the imitators); maybe it is time to start building the next generation of operating systems, based on new object-oriented bounds-checked garbage-collected programming languages. Or perhaps even LispOS:).
It's a freakin' time zone file change. Time zone files are a known quantity. People know how they behave when changed. They're not executable code.
Neither are images, but there has been ones that either crash your browser or use some buffer overflow to execute arbitrary code encoded in the image data.
That works well if your language has words for "throw" and "window", but you'd have a hard time translating it into a language with no concept of either one.
"Pushing out through an opening in a wall meant to let in light but not for passage", or in finnish, "seinänvaloasisäänpäästämäänmutteikulkuuntarkoitetustareiästäulostyöntäminen". The latter is meant to be a single word, but the Slashcode will propably slash it in two.
Not that anyone would actually use a monster like that, but it is technically legal in finnish. Besides, since defenestration has connotations of political dissent, the correct finnish term might be "paskantaminen", which is a vulgar term for emptying ones bowels - very appropriate, considering the quality of politicians here.
In some ways, it's a good idea, I think. At least they probably never get those "if the King James version was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" types.
And instead it gets people who believe every word their local demagogue tells them comes straight from God's mouth, since they have no way of checking for themselves, not having the time or means to learn Arabic sufficiently well to read the Koran with any level of comprehension.
You know what they say: against stupidity gods themselves contend in vain. Very appropriate for this context, and depressingly true even as a monotheistic version.
But seriously you might never even have thought that bears are evil had you not encountered that language (even if at 2nd hand).
Then how did the people who first invented that language come up with the concept of bears being evil ?
I think Wittgenstein said it best -
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
Wittgenstein was wrong, then. Or else how do you think a child learns the word for "soft", if the concept is beyond him before learning the word (and associating it with the concept) ? In fact, how is anyone able to learn anything ?
Your thoughts are shaped remarkably by the language you express them in - if that language lacks certain idioms or grammatical forms, it will affect what thoughts you're likely to have.
No it doesn't. I do my thinking mostly nonverbally, and only bother with words when I'm trying to put my thoughts into communicable form; and when I do, I can come up with new words on the spot, as shown above, or simply go the long road and say: "the type of evil associated with bears".
If you consider all the phrases that you use in everyday life, you'll likely find that most of them you have heard at least once before - none of them are unique, they're almost entirely learned combinations of words, none of your thoughts are unique (well, virtually none)!
So, who made you memorize that particular sentence ? Anyway, it is obvious that the majority of sentences you utter in any paricular day are likely to be similar to the sentences you say most other days, for the simple reason that days tend to be similar and contain similar events, which require similar reactions - including communications - from you. What is this supposed to prove, exactly speaking, beyond the presumption that most people have boring lives ?
And, if my thoughts are nonunique, then perhaps you could kindly tell me who I'm plagiarizing currently, and who was he plagiarizing, and so on ? That is, who is the original thinker who's thoughts we nonunique ones are merely imitating ?
Thus losing unique languages, which contain unique concepts, without at least having a record of them is a serious business.
And yet, strangely enough, it seems quite possible to translate text from German to English, from Japan to Finnish, and from English or German to Finnish. Is this because the mysterious hypnotic messages the translators embed in the translated text force my poor mind to adopt any concepts my own language lacks but the original language has as I read, or could it be that the underlaying concepts are not different from one language to another ?
Sure, my native language, finnish, doesn't have a single-word equivalent for the english concept of "defenestration", but I can still understand the concept of throwing someone out of the window just fine - so well, in fact, that I can come up with a new descriptive word at the spot: "ikkunastaheitto". Hey... my native language supports this kind of word-creation, so if language defines cognitive capabilities of the one speaking it, then bow before my linquistically-enabled superiority as I begin to rule the world !
Anyone who has a vision can pick up a pencil and paper and write the Great American Novel. Why shouldn't it be the same for anyone with a vision for an animation or film?
It is. That pencil draws cartoon characters just as well as letters. Sure, drawing 216 000 animation frames by hand (30 fps * 120 min) is a lot of work, but you can do it.
But seriously, yes, computer 3D programs are horrible. Not just Blender, but every last one of them. They have a learning curve which makes Himalaya seem flat, require absurd amounts of computing power, and the Linux version of Maya, for example, crashes if you right-click when the program doesn't expect it. Not fun, not at all.
It tells something that Pov-Ray has the best 3D interface I've ever used, that interface being text files. While you have to know your math and have a high degree of abstract reasoning to get anything done, since you're essentially working blind, at least you don't have to fight the interface, and Vi supports syntax highlighting for Pov-Ray scene description files.
Then again, even 2D programs like Gimp and Inkscape still have pretty horrible interfaces, so maybe expecting 3D ones to have good ones is unreasonable.
A call center representative is paid to have the ability to communicate effectively
I was under the impression that a call center representative is paid to confuse and delay callers long enough that the warranty runs out. Effective communication would seem contrary to this goal, unless of course the particular company is pursuing the alternative strategy of convincing the caller that he has to buy lots of extra stuff to make things work.
because everyone have to learn Arabic to read the Qu'ran
No they don't. I, for example, have the options of either not reading the Koran, or reading a translation. Neither of these require learning ancient Arabic.
Besides, someone who is barely a novice in Arabic but insists on reading the Koran in that is far less likely to comprehend it than someone reading a translation made by a professional translator in his native language.
A bigoted joke where one group of people, ignorantly belittles another group of people, is in fact racist.
So the numerous comments on every Slashdot story about programming languages claiming that Java users aren't man enough to use C, because only sissies need garbage collection, are racist ?-)
How did we acquire the idea that languages have some values of their own?
Simple: linquistically oriented people are betterr able to argue the importance of their interests than the mathemathically inclined, despite the latter having a far better case (as evidenced by the effects of the industrial revolution and continuing impact of natural sciences to everyone's everyday lives).
It's all in the marketing, and so we have to keep suffering the attempts to force us to waste our time in linquistic pursuits; for example, here in Finland, everyone has to learn swedish in elementary school, despite the native swedish-speaking population being a whopping 5%. Then again, Finland is a former colony of Sweden, so I guess it's understandable that we still haven't quite shaken off all the chains of our old slave-masters; I have hopes that the situation will change and future generations be freed from this unneccessary and unreasonable burden.
The Nunavut language has a special word that means "bears are evil", for which there is no English equivalent, as we have no special word that refers specifically to the type of evil that can only be associated with a bear.
Bearvil.
As soon as there is a concept which someone needs to express, they will come up with a word for it. See "haxor", "0wned", "automagical", etc.
An "advanced" society will have people who have internalized the law -- they don't need others to interpret it for them. Do YOU need a law against killing? Of course not -- you know better.
I do, however, need a law which says that you should drive on the right side of the road. I also need the laws which regulate who goes first at crossroads, the meaning of traffick signals, etc. While I'm not a businessman, I'd imagine that it is largely the same with trade-related laws.
The thing is, complex systems need guidelines on their operation. A complex system - such as an advanced society - is very likely to need more complex guidelines than can be reasonably memorized by one person who isn't specializing on them. That is why lawyers are needed.
The same problem would probably affect equipment used to bore down into the red-hot lower parts of the crust. The drill bit would soften and lose its shape.
It would need a cooling system, obviously. Perhaps liquid nitrogen, pumped down inside the drillshaft and poured out from small holes in the drill ? And of course the rock too is softer when red hot than in room temperature.
Slashdot Mirror
Must... resist... theological... debate... oh I give up.
It is certainly possible that God transcends reason, however: if you claim that God transcends reason, you also lose the ability to say anything about God, since you most certainly do not transcend reason. This makes this entire debate, as well as religion in general, pointless; after all, as you correctly noted above, transcending reason gives the ability to simultaneously incorporate conflicting qualities, which in turn means that both you and the grandparent are right: God can and cannot grant mercy.
Nonsensical ? Of course it is. It is impossible to have a reasonable debate about something which transcends reason, after all :). So either assume that God will act within reason and the laws of logic in his dealings with humanity, either because he has to or because he wants to, or accept that you cannot talk about God in any non-nonsensical way.
Koeaika is trial period. According to dictionary.com, probation can refer to a type of punishment for a crime, while koeaika can not (the term for that is "ehdonalainen").
Basically, probation can have negative connotations, while koeaika is simply a period for showing your abilities - an extended interview, in a way.
Did the USSR reject religion, thought ? What was built around Stalin was called a cult of personality for a reason, after all.
In fact I'd go so far as to call all ideologues religions. Their adherents tend to explain away or flat-out ignore any evidence that the ideology doesn't work, they tend to promote ideological purity (preventing any deviation from the dogma), and they tend to impose a value system on the world around them and paint anyone not following them as evil or stupid. Just look at what Marxism ("imperialist oppressor of working class"), libertarianism ("weakling busily sucking money stolen from me through the teat of the nanny state"), or hard-line atheism ("an intellectually flabby coward itching to impose his murderous arbitrary rules on everyone") said about their presumed enemies (in parenthesis).
There will always be religions, and there will always be religious fanatics, because it is human nature to come up with value systems, and it is also human nature to become so attached to them that any perceived opponent starts seeming like a demon from the pits of Hell. And since the material world nor any part of it doesn't have any inherent value, any such system will be more or less a matter of personal preference, and those vary; consequently people will disagree with one another, giving opportunity for various ruthless individuals to play them against one another.
I was unaware that you are required to help the police to search your house. Tell me, does someone accused of murder get a heavier sentence if he refuses to tell where the murder weapon is ?
Freedom numerals.
You know, I spend most of my free time on the computer and eating snacks, and am exactly as overweight and out of shape as you'd expect from that, and I don't have any trouble jumping 18 inches straight up; so why the heck couldn't a presumably physically fit super macho main character top that ?
If you can't jump over 18 inches straight up, then go see a doctor. Seriously. It's not even half a meter, for fuck's sake.
Blaming the Internet for spam is like blaming roads for drunk drivers.
The problem with this is that such a system can and will lead to unplayable characters, which lead to dissatisfied customers, which lead to revenue loss.
From purely technical side, the more free the system is, the harder it is to balance. There are bound to be some killer skill combos, and with millions of people playing the game, they will be found. At that point you face a decision: will you balance the game difficulty against these combos, making it essentially unplayable without very careful character planning, or will you balance it against Joe Average, making these combos essentially cheat codes ?
This will make the above problem even worse.
Then again, if we'd take the "XP as commodity" thought to its logical end result and allowed the players to re-assign the XP at anytime... that might work. Something like the skill system in FF9, where you had to assign jewels (which you got from leveling) to make your skills and abilities active.
If people ran around more, summertime would be more aesthetically pleasing. But instead they drive around in cars, polluting the environment and collecting fat. Not that I should speak, sitting down writing this message instead of being at the gym, but still...
Do your civic duty and run around for real to get firm buttocks so your fellows can ogle them come summer and short skirts - or shorts, if that is your preference - instead of running around in WoW accomplishing nothing.
So put your soul into a phylactery and the phylactery into a bank vault of a Swiss bank. As a nice side effect you'll lose weight, your voice will get lower and sexier, and your looks will improve, increasing your sex appeal - at least if you're a typical Slashdotter.
There's not that much different between your parent's basement and a crypt, you know.
The reason the garbage collector works for memory is that the failure to allocate sufficient memory is what triggers garbage collector, rather than any abundance of memory.
That particular problem can be solved easily with the try {} finally {} construct. FileInputStream file = null; try { file = new FileInputStream("crash.java "); } finally { if (file != null) file.close();}
But yes, this is a problem. I'm not sure there is a clean solution for it, however.
Well, the finally block will be executed no matter how the try block is exited, so such things can be arranged; however, it is a needless hassle to set up and certainly something a novice programmer - or even a senior one - could easily forget. I'm not sure there is a good solution, thought; even RAII is not applicable for every use (specifically, it can't be used for files which need to be kept open, like database files).
A bandaid might be to trigger garbage collection when the system runs out of file descriptors (since garbage-collecting an object representing an open file causes the underlaying file to be closed in Java), but that is not a general solution.
Of course, the ultimate reason for all of these troubles is that most current operating systems were written in C or C++, making them the "native" languages of the system. Writing the entire system from the kernel up with an object-oriented, type-safe, bounds-checked language would solve the whole problem. After all, a file descriptor is simply an integer, used as a token to identify an open file, which in turn is a kernel data structure; the number of open files is not inherently limited by anything but memory, so making the entire system a single garbage-collected entity would mean that any "open file" data structures no longer referenced by anyone would be cleaned up with the rest of the rubbish. After all, the only reason a file needs to be specifically closed in current systems is that the system has no way of otherwise knowing you won't be using it anymore (and because most runtime libraries, including C ones, buffer writes to files due to the high overhead of system calls).
As an added benefit, given the above constraints on memory and resource access, there would be no need to run the user code in a separate processor ring as the kernel; in fact there would be no need to run anything in a separate virtual memory context. This could potentially mean a huge recuction in the cost of system calls, interprocess communication, and context switches. It would also make Hurd-like microkernel architechtures a lot more viable.
C and Unix were born together, and the former still pretty much defines the latter (and all the imitators); maybe it is time to start building the next generation of operating systems, based on new object-oriented bounds-checked garbage-collected programming languages. Or perhaps even LispOS :).
Neither are images, but there has been ones that either crash your browser or use some buffer overflow to execute arbitrary code encoded in the image data.
"Pushing out through an opening in a wall meant to let in light but not for passage", or in finnish, "seinänvaloasisäänpäästämäänmutteikulkuuntarkoitetustareiästäulostyöntäminen". The latter is meant to be a single word, but the Slashcode will propably slash it in two.
Not that anyone would actually use a monster like that, but it is technically legal in finnish. Besides, since defenestration has connotations of political dissent, the correct finnish term might be "paskantaminen", which is a vulgar term for emptying ones bowels - very appropriate, considering the quality of politicians here.
I already know one word: "Zool", which means: "You are so dead!"
And instead it gets people who believe every word their local demagogue tells them comes straight from God's mouth, since they have no way of checking for themselves, not having the time or means to learn Arabic sufficiently well to read the Koran with any level of comprehension.
You know what they say: against stupidity gods themselves contend in vain. Very appropriate for this context, and depressingly true even as a monotheistic version.
Then how did the people who first invented that language come up with the concept of bears being evil ?
Wittgenstein was wrong, then. Or else how do you think a child learns the word for "soft", if the concept is beyond him before learning the word (and associating it with the concept) ? In fact, how is anyone able to learn anything ?
No it doesn't. I do my thinking mostly nonverbally, and only bother with words when I'm trying to put my thoughts into communicable form; and when I do, I can come up with new words on the spot, as shown above, or simply go the long road and say: "the type of evil associated with bears".
So, who made you memorize that particular sentence ? Anyway, it is obvious that the majority of sentences you utter in any paricular day are likely to be similar to the sentences you say most other days, for the simple reason that days tend to be similar and contain similar events, which require similar reactions - including communications - from you. What is this supposed to prove, exactly speaking, beyond the presumption that most people have boring lives ?
And, if my thoughts are nonunique, then perhaps you could kindly tell me who I'm plagiarizing currently, and who was he plagiarizing, and so on ? That is, who is the original thinker who's thoughts we nonunique ones are merely imitating ?
And yet, strangely enough, it seems quite possible to translate text from German to English, from Japan to Finnish, and from English or German to Finnish. Is this because the mysterious hypnotic messages the translators embed in the translated text force my poor mind to adopt any concepts my own language lacks but the original language has as I read, or could it be that the underlaying concepts are not different from one language to another ?
Sure, my native language, finnish, doesn't have a single-word equivalent for the english concept of "defenestration", but I can still understand the concept of throwing someone out of the window just fine - so well, in fact, that I can come up with a new descriptive word at the spot: "ikkunastaheitto". Hey... my native language supports this kind of word-creation, so if language defines cognitive capabilities of the one speaking it, then bow before my linquistically-enabled superiority as I begin to rule the world !
Muahahahaaa!
It is. That pencil draws cartoon characters just as well as letters. Sure, drawing 216 000 animation frames by hand (30 fps * 120 min) is a lot of work, but you can do it.
But seriously, yes, computer 3D programs are horrible. Not just Blender, but every last one of them. They have a learning curve which makes Himalaya seem flat, require absurd amounts of computing power, and the Linux version of Maya, for example, crashes if you right-click when the program doesn't expect it. Not fun, not at all.
It tells something that Pov-Ray has the best 3D interface I've ever used, that interface being text files. While you have to know your math and have a high degree of abstract reasoning to get anything done, since you're essentially working blind, at least you don't have to fight the interface, and Vi supports syntax highlighting for Pov-Ray scene description files.
Then again, even 2D programs like Gimp and Inkscape still have pretty horrible interfaces, so maybe expecting 3D ones to have good ones is unreasonable.
I was under the impression that a call center representative is paid to confuse and delay callers long enough that the warranty runs out. Effective communication would seem contrary to this goal, unless of course the particular company is pursuing the alternative strategy of convincing the caller that he has to buy lots of extra stuff to make things work.
No they don't. I, for example, have the options of either not reading the Koran, or reading a translation. Neither of these require learning ancient Arabic.
Besides, someone who is barely a novice in Arabic but insists on reading the Koran in that is far less likely to comprehend it than someone reading a translation made by a professional translator in his native language.
So the numerous comments on every Slashdot story about programming languages claiming that Java users aren't man enough to use C, because only sissies need garbage collection, are racist ?-)
Fuck you, you stupid piece of goat garbage, you small-minded worthless pile of rotting foetid cat feces.
The scary thing is that, as an extension to the rule #34, there is likely to be a Web page dedicated to this particular fetish.
Bearvil.
As soon as there is a concept which someone needs to express, they will come up with a word for it. See "haxor", "0wned", "automagical", etc.
I do, however, need a law which says that you should drive on the right side of the road. I also need the laws which regulate who goes first at crossroads, the meaning of traffick signals, etc. While I'm not a businessman, I'd imagine that it is largely the same with trade-related laws.
The thing is, complex systems need guidelines on their operation. A complex system - such as an advanced society - is very likely to need more complex guidelines than can be reasonably memorized by one person who isn't specializing on them. That is why lawyers are needed.
It would need a cooling system, obviously. Perhaps liquid nitrogen, pumped down inside the drillshaft and poured out from small holes in the drill ? And of course the rock too is softer when red hot than in room temperature.