Lack of information does lead to mistakes, and it should be illegal for one side to mislead the other. But, I see no reason that any contract should be illegal so long as each party understands what they are getting into, and does so willingly. I don't see how greed enters the equation. If one side is too greedy, the other will simply refuse the exchange.
If you get to an accident at a lonely road late some night, and I happen to pass by and agree to call an ambulance if and only if you sign a contract giving me all your property - and if we're going with total contractual freedom, selling yourself to slavery to me too - in exchange for this service, should the contract be enforced ? You did enter it willingly, and does fill all the requirements of a contract (you pay me, I perform a service calling the ambulance on your behalf); your other choice was to bleed to death, but that was no fault of mine.
And if the above contract shouldn't be enforced, should I be forced to pay the bill for food I bought on credit - after all, I can't survive without food, so I only entered that particular contract on pain of death ?
Total contractual freedom sounds good on paper, but has far too much potential for abuse to work in the real world.
I have yet to hear a convincing argument why Babbage's engine, which uses physical mechanical gears to implement an algorithm, is inherently more patentable than the same algorithm in software.
Because Babbage's engine implements an algorithm, while the software is the algorithm.
If Babbage builds and patents his engine, Dilbert is free to build an electric machine which does the same thing. However, if Darl later comes and claims that the algorithm is copied from patented pieces of Unix code, every possible implementation - including Babbage's and Dilbert's machines - falls under the patent.
Allowing software patents removes any chance of making an improved version and competing. This stifles innovation and leads to monopolies. It is even more obvious with file format and protocol patents.
France has actually a very tough Physical Education program with tough benchmarks to achieve
Do they do lots of arm raising exercises in preparation for their military service?
Thank you for demonstrating one of the fundamental problems of making kids compete: when you are obsessed with winning, and can't do so by your own merit, dismerit the competition so you'll look better in comparison.
Children, being not legally responsible for their actions (for example libel) and facing huge pressure to succeed at any cost from the very people - their parents - they know perfectly well they are utterly dependent on, are especially vulnerable to the temptation of using such tactics, but it can overcome adults as well, especially if they've been taught as kids that they have to be best or that being mediocre is insufficient and shameful - a ridiculous claim, since "mediocre" simply means "ordinary", but one that has come up on this thread already.
First of all... It's been suggested that Da Vinci produced a number of variations of the Mona Lisa. Meaning an on-going creative process not purely motivated by income.
Produce a piece of crap painting and you won't get paid, nor will you get any further commissions, so striving to do good work hardly disqualifies the profit motive. Besides, games don't just appear fully formed on their creator's minds, but are often changed before and during production.
Secondly, even if he were commissioned to produce the work, as many artists were, he was still commissioned to produce art.
He was not commissioned to produce "art". He was commissioned to produce a painting. This is only different from commissioning a video game designer to produce a game if one accepts the preconception that paintings are art and games are not.
It's very different from a company making a decision to develop a movie or a game.
You still haven't explained why. You've simply asserted that this is so.
But tell me: what does this make of Nethack, which was and is being developed for free and not by a company ?
Secondly, I have no clue where you get the idea that I've said that art is a nonsensical concept. I have no idea what you're trying to say.
What I meant is that your claims reduce art into a nonsensical concept: "It can't be art unless it was made for free, unless it was made a long time ago".
A game developer doesn't produce a game to create art. They're in the business of making money. An artist may be trying to earn a living, but first and foremost they're creating art. It may be art for profit, but it's art.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever for this claim ?
And please read again what you wrote: A game developer can't be producing art, because games are not art, so he must be in it for money, and something done for money can't be art, so games aren't art; but an artist making makes art for arts sake so whatever he produces is art, even if he does it for money's sake.
Isn't that circular logic ?
The involvement of money has nothing to do with whether or not something is art and I never made that argument. I was merely discussing the creative process.
If the involvement of money has nothing to do with the subject, then why did you bring up the presumed profit motive of game developers ?
I don't understand how my points could be misconstrued as elitist.
Because your arguments boil down to "games aren't art because they aren't art, and BTW making money from your art is bad unless you're doing REAL art (not games)".
I'm not going to designate something as art merely because it makes some people feel good or it makes them think what they do is somehow more relevant culturally.
How do you measure cultural relevancy ? Games are already past movies in economic impact, the US army uses games as recruiting tools, they are used in political propaganda, and there's an ongoing debate about if and how much they influence their player's behavior. There have even been laws passed in several countries just because of games. They seem to be having quite an impact on culture.
Just because you obviously had difficulty understanding my point doesn't make what I said elitist.
The fact that you fail to make any point not backed up by circular logic or unproven assumptions, however, does.
The reason most of us got to be Linux users in the first place was fussiness: we didn't like what commercial OS vendors did with their stuff so we went to open source so we could improve upon it any time we wanted.
I switched to Linux from Win98 because the latter was unstable when browsing the Web; it had to be restarted every hour or so, especially if many browser windows were kept open at the same time. I also considered XP, but decided to go Linux instead since:
Red Hat Linux 9 was free, Windows XP was not, so it made sense to check RH first.
Microsoft had failed to deliver with Win95 and Win98 (and Win3.1 too, of course, but that was never presented as anything but a shell over DOS to me), so I found it unlikely it would get it right with XP either.
After a week or so I decided I could live with Linux, and have been using that same RH9 installation ever since, updating it one component at a time after official support stopped.
So, what I'm saying, is that some of us got into Linux not because of any drive to improve things, or any commitment to open source back then, but because Microsoft delivered such horrendous quality that the pain of using the POS overcame the change resistance.
Microsoft made me a Linux user - how ironic is that ?
I think there tends to be a confusion regarding whether or not something qualifies as art. Just because something is artistic doesn't mean it's art. Just because something exudes style doesn't mean it's art. It's the same reason design isn't really art.
And this reason is ?...
To me, something can only qualify as art if the primary motivation behind the creative process was to create art.
The primary motivation behind creating most things that are commonly considered art - Mona Lisa, for example - was the artist's desire to get money for food. Besides, your assertation means that "art" is actually a nonsensical concept; it is not a quality of the thing in question, nor the effect it has on viewer, and in fact cannot be determined without cross-examining the creator.
Certainly there are special conditions, for example when we look back on the work of ancient civilizations. But I think in that case we're so removed from the culture that work is being viewed out of its original context, with a sense of detachment. In that case we're free to create our own impressions.
So basically, if I bury a Coke bottle on my backyard today, and an archeologist digs it up 2000 years from now, it has turned from junk to art in the meantime, without any human intervention ?
However, with nearly all games and movies what is the overriding motivation for creation? Money, perhaps to tell a story, to provide an entertaining experience. The creation of art isn't the driving force. Artistic concepts and creative design are simply a part of that process.
Yeah, because no artist of old ever asked for money for their art.
Anyway, I'm starting to think that the word "art" shouldn't be used in discussion, since it has no commonly accepted meaning, and when pressed people come up with nonsensical elitistical crap like this.
Ironically, the only thing that manages layout flawlessly and respects font size prefs is Eclipse's SWT toolkit. MS stuff is absolutely nowhere.
This is hardly surprising, after all, SWT has been made to be cross-platform so there's less assumptions it can make about the underlaying system and more things it needs to query the system for. It is also immediately obvious when it makes such assumptions, since it will break on some supported platform, so the bugs can't accumulate over time. I'd imagine Swing, Qt and GTK should also work well for the same reason.
On the other hand, MS stuff is about as non-flexible as can be, since it has never had any kind of evolutionary pressure towards flexibility.
I honestly hate hearing these armchairs strategists who have absolutely no idea of the ground reality over there.
Yeah, I guess it would suck. So tell us: is fatigue a significant problem in Iraq ?
Do you think soldiers just blindly take their gadgets out to the field? If we have a gadget that's a piece of shit, we don't use it.
In my experience "piece of shit" is pretty much the definition of army equipment. Of course that was Finnish army, so YMMV.
Modern warfare relies on better equipped soldiers in addition to language skills or cultural knowledge or whatever. So please, before you knock on these new ideas, consider what soldiers actually think.
The question is what happens after the opposing army has been defeated. An occupational force has exactly two options: the iron-fisted rule-by-fear way - the one the Nazi army used when occupying Europe - and the "you don't have to like us but you can live with us" somewhat civilized way. The latter absolutely requires the occupational force to know local language and customs to avoid making any more mortal enemies than they have to.
Of course you can also have solve the problem with translators, but I'm not sure that is any more const-effective, and it gives any resistance a weak spot to hit in order to make dealing with locals more difficult.
Finally, this gadget costs money. Even if it helps soldiers, the question - hard as it may sound - is: is it worth the price, or could the money be better used elsewhere ?
Venus doesn't have a significant magnetic field, is closer to the sun than Earth, and seems to be able to hang on to a high-pressure atmosphere just fine.
Well, if you were laying on the goddess of love, would you get off just because of solar wind ?-)
Seriously, thought, it is entirely possible that Venus is capable of keeping atmosphere through sheer gravity even if buffeted by solar wind, but Mars, being smaller, can't but could if the wind was blocked by a magnetic field. It is also possible that Mars lost it atmosphere in a large asteroid impact or other such freak accident and never got around to replacing it due to lack of volcanic activity, and could keep an atmosphere just fine under normal conditions. This needs to be determined before any terraforming may be attempted.
I am too lazy to look it up or do the math... What would gravity be like on the surface of a (standard, earth-orbit) Dyson sphere? Are we talking about.1G or.0001G?
0.005899755 m/s^2, or about 0.0005G, for radius of 150 000 000 kilometers (Earth's average distance from Sun). The radius needed for 10m/s^2 surface gravity (1G) is 3 643 411 km. Heating costs are likely to go down:)...
That's fine up to a point, but there should be a way around these limitations.
No. If there's a way around these limitations, then most programmers will simply turn them off because they are experts and know what they're doing. And then the user has to suffer the consequences of the expert's ego and laziness.
No, bounds checking needs to be mandatory, not voluntary; otherwise it goes unused and the problems continue.
In C, it's all too easy to screw things up with null pointers etc., but if we didn't have those low-level features, a lot of important software would be impossible to write.
Null pointers aren't really a problem, since trying to dereference one will fail cleanly and immediately with a segmentation fault, altought I personally like Java-style "exception propagates up through the stack" error handling better. It's the ability reference arbitrary memory locations with pointers, as well as use tables without automatic bounds checking, which causes C to be such a source of problems.
I'm not saying that Javascript should ENCOURAGE low-level access to the document, but to flatly deny those things is to falsely limit a language. Languages, after all, are supposed to allow you to express ANYTHING.
Any valid document state can be reached by inserting and removing tags with appripriate functions; the only thing that can't be done that way is creating invalid documents.
There is no reason why a programming language should be able to express a way to an invalid state. Being unable to fuck up the document is not a limitation by any sensible definition of the word.
Except that the programmer might know what they're doing. But I guess we're getting past the point of trusting people more than machines;)
Based on all the segfaults, blue screens of death, X-Window crashes, Firefox crashes, code insertion bugs et cetera I've seen, I'd say that no, in general programmers don't know what they're doing, and certainly shouldn't be trusted to not fuck it up. The less raw access to any resource - be it memory or document stream - they are given, the better.
That's fucking ridiculous. They couldn't do that because it is imprisoning those people in the middle.
And they did it without using any force or coercion - indeed, without rising a single finger - which makes it perfectly moral for a libertarian. Which is the problem of libertarian ethics: "Use no coercion" is simply not sufficient morality.
If I built a wall around your house and told you you couldn't trespass over it then I have imprisoned you, it is the same thing with a wall around a town.
So you have. And again, since you haven't coerced me with force, that's okay according to libertarian morality.
This fictitious, fantasy guy who builds walls around towns isn't going to be any worse than government anyway.
Actually, the government hasn't built any walls around my house, it has built roads instead. So I'd say that the government is much better than this libertarian guy.
Even if there is just one road to a town it would cost a lot to travel on it, which is a signal to other people: if they wanna make money open a competing road.
Where do you build those competing roads ? There's no way out of the town which wouldn't cross the highwayman's land. The only way you could build those roads would be to take his property from him, and that's against libertarian ethics.
Secular (for example a court) or religious (for example a priest) authority. Civil or church (of whatever religion) wedding, respectively. That's what I meant by "official" marriage, as opposed to the "unofficial" kind where people simply live together and form a stable couple without any kind of legal paperwork or religious ceremonies.
What does that mean, do we have an official religion in our government?
How should I know what you have in your government ?
The concept of marriage (culturally and/or religiously) can live outside the domain of government, your objects not withstanding, quite easily. There are other culturally accepted and defined relationships that exist without the endorsement of government, after all (e.g. engagement).
If you don't care about the government or whatever religion making your marriage "official", then what is the problem here ? No law I know of in any civilized country forbids adults living together, so simply do so and consider yourself married.
And I'm not claiming that the concept of marriage couldn't exist outside legal definition; however, since any legal ban on gay marriage would only ban the "official" kind, the kind which has laws concerning it, I assumed we were talking about the kind of marriage that involves filing documents.
No matter what ESR (or anyone) says, making a product that could be charged for (and, by capitalist ethics, should - since the time you spent making it is not free) and then giving it away for free is nonsensical.
Not neccessarily. It is entirely possible to get better return of investment by giving the product away for free. For example, suppose you wish to sell stuff on the Web, and need software for a webstore; however, there is no software fit for that purpose available, so you'll have to write your own. The initial version is quickly done and up, and your web store starts making profits.
Should you open-source this software ? After all, it was done quick, so you can't ask much for it even if you don't (since if you do, the other people will simply write their own). On the other hand, if you do open-source it, and it gets wide adoption, the burden of maintenance (bug fixes, scaling and new features) will get distributed too. And if it doesn't get wide adoption, then the chances are that it would get even less if sold for profit, meaning very low sales and income as well as potential liability issues if it's a bad enough program.
Obviously this is a bad example, since web stores are already widespread, but it should still show my point: selling for profit is not neccessarily the best possible move.
Allowing same-sex marriage is the first step in getting the government out of the marriage business. As long as there is some religious ownership of the marriage idea regulated by the government, marriage will stay in the domain of the government.
I don't really see how marriage could ever leave the domain of government, since it is by definition an officially (by secular or religious authority) regocnized relationship, as opposed to non-official relationship. Unless, of course, you meant that you want the institution to be completely ended ?
Done long ago. Prohibit coërcion. That means those "self-centred greedy fucks" have to offer you something you actually want in order to get your money.
Or they could just build a wall around the only source of fresh water and coerce me with threats of resource starvation rather than threats of force. Either way works just as well.
Hell, a self-centered greedy fuck could simply buy a one-meter wide area of land which completely surrounds a town, and then forbid anyone from crossing this land (therefore effectively preventing them from entering or leaving the town) without giving him a toll. Perfectly moral by libertarian standards, highway robbery by any other.
Suddenly greed is a good thing, it drives greedy people to work for the common good. That's libertarianism in a nutshell.
No. Greedy people will find ways to screw others for their own benefit, just as in every other system. If anything, libertarianism makes this easier than most other systems, since the only constraint is that the greedy pigs can't directly physically harm other people.
Libertarianism is a very simple ideologue, and like most simple ideologues, it sounds good on paper but gets twisted into a vicious mockery of itself once it comes into contact with human evil which permeates the real world.
Being able to hit the "Window" key, start typing and hit enter when I know it's enough to hit the item I want out of the start menu is a massive time-saver.
So basically, Windows UI finally catches up to Bash and GNU Getline.
Why not? This country survived its formative years not because some special interest group was pursuing every opportunity to coddle different classes of people people for various reasons, but because people realized - it was quite literally, do or die. Kids were every bit as much a part of this as the adults - everyone had their share of the work that had to be done. Ironically, school was often a luxury- it was viable only when it didn't interfere with other activities, like bringing in the harvest. *This* was work.
You had it easy. In my youth here in Finland we walked to school uphill both ways in a blizzard and our teacher was a polar bear who would devour one of us for lunch every day. Huge wolfpacks would chase us to and from school and we had to carry iron balls chained to our ankles to make it more challenging. Once we reached 6th grade we were allowed to build a school building from our own frozen pee so we didn't need to sit on snow at -40 degree Celsius anymore.
Contrast that with today...kids have "social lives," they go to school, sit on their butts for six hours, "socialize," worrying about what new article of clothing so-and-so just bought, and then whine about homework. What a rough life they must have.
Yeah. So tell me: how comes you are wasting time socializing here on Slashdot and whining about kids instead of working your ass out to make your country great ?
The relevent criminal behavior of Pete isn't violating copyright, it's stealing the key.
Actually to be exact Pete is not stealing the key or even copying it, he's guessing it for the purposes of circumventing an effective access-control device and therefore violating the DMCA. What a filthy criminal.
At which point the federal government will respond with force and, having a larger army at its disposal, win. The same way it happened the last time.
The time when US was a loose federation are long past. With modern communication and transport methods, not to mention information technology, there are no empires so large they couldn't be centrally controlled effectively. Better forget fantasies about matching central government with force and instead trying to affect it from the inside, by trying to get people selected there who will losen the reins.
Slashdot Mirror
If you get to an accident at a lonely road late some night, and I happen to pass by and agree to call an ambulance if and only if you sign a contract giving me all your property - and if we're going with total contractual freedom, selling yourself to slavery to me too - in exchange for this service, should the contract be enforced ? You did enter it willingly, and does fill all the requirements of a contract (you pay me, I perform a service calling the ambulance on your behalf); your other choice was to bleed to death, but that was no fault of mine.
And if the above contract shouldn't be enforced, should I be forced to pay the bill for food I bought on credit - after all, I can't survive without food, so I only entered that particular contract on pain of death ?
Total contractual freedom sounds good on paper, but has far too much potential for abuse to work in the real world.
Because Babbage's engine implements an algorithm, while the software is the algorithm.
If Babbage builds and patents his engine, Dilbert is free to build an electric machine which does the same thing. However, if Darl later comes and claims that the algorithm is copied from patented pieces of Unix code, every possible implementation - including Babbage's and Dilbert's machines - falls under the patent.
Allowing software patents removes any chance of making an improved version and competing. This stifles innovation and leads to monopolies. It is even more obvious with file format and protocol patents.
Thank you for demonstrating one of the fundamental problems of making kids compete: when you are obsessed with winning, and can't do so by your own merit, dismerit the competition so you'll look better in comparison.
Children, being not legally responsible for their actions (for example libel) and facing huge pressure to succeed at any cost from the very people - their parents - they know perfectly well they are utterly dependent on, are especially vulnerable to the temptation of using such tactics, but it can overcome adults as well, especially if they've been taught as kids that they have to be best or that being mediocre is insufficient and shameful - a ridiculous claim, since "mediocre" simply means "ordinary", but one that has come up on this thread already.
Produce a piece of crap painting and you won't get paid, nor will you get any further commissions, so striving to do good work hardly disqualifies the profit motive. Besides, games don't just appear fully formed on their creator's minds, but are often changed before and during production.
He was not commissioned to produce "art". He was commissioned to produce a painting. This is only different from commissioning a video game designer to produce a game if one accepts the preconception that paintings are art and games are not.
You still haven't explained why. You've simply asserted that this is so.
But tell me: what does this make of Nethack, which was and is being developed for free and not by a company ?
What I meant is that your claims reduce art into a nonsensical concept: "It can't be art unless it was made for free, unless it was made a long time ago".
Do you have any evidence whatsoever for this claim ?
And please read again what you wrote: A game developer can't be producing art, because games are not art, so he must be in it for money, and something done for money can't be art, so games aren't art; but an artist making makes art for arts sake so whatever he produces is art, even if he does it for money's sake.
Isn't that circular logic ?
If the involvement of money has nothing to do with the subject, then why did you bring up the presumed profit motive of game developers ?
Because your arguments boil down to "games aren't art because they aren't art, and BTW making money from your art is bad unless you're doing REAL art (not games)".
How do you measure cultural relevancy ? Games are already past movies in economic impact, the US army uses games as recruiting tools, they are used in political propaganda, and there's an ongoing debate about if and how much they influence their player's behavior. There have even been laws passed in several countries just because of games. They seem to be having quite an impact on culture.
The fact that you fail to make any point not backed up by circular logic or unproven assumptions, however, does.
I switched to Linux from Win98 because the latter was unstable when browsing the Web; it had to be restarted every hour or so, especially if many browser windows were kept open at the same time. I also considered XP, but decided to go Linux instead since:
After a week or so I decided I could live with Linux, and have been using that same RH9 installation ever since, updating it one component at a time after official support stopped.
So, what I'm saying, is that some of us got into Linux not because of any drive to improve things, or any commitment to open source back then, but because Microsoft delivered such horrendous quality that the pain of using the POS overcame the change resistance.
Microsoft made me a Linux user - how ironic is that ?
And this reason is ?...
The primary motivation behind creating most things that are commonly considered art - Mona Lisa, for example - was the artist's desire to get money for food. Besides, your assertation means that "art" is actually a nonsensical concept; it is not a quality of the thing in question, nor the effect it has on viewer, and in fact cannot be determined without cross-examining the creator.
So basically, if I bury a Coke bottle on my backyard today, and an archeologist digs it up 2000 years from now, it has turned from junk to art in the meantime, without any human intervention ?
Yeah, because no artist of old ever asked for money for their art.
Anyway, I'm starting to think that the word "art" shouldn't be used in discussion, since it has no commonly accepted meaning, and when pressed people come up with nonsensical elitistical crap like this.
So basically Yellowstone is the real-life equivalent of Orodruin ?
This is hardly surprising, after all, SWT has been made to be cross-platform so there's less assumptions it can make about the underlaying system and more things it needs to query the system for. It is also immediately obvious when it makes such assumptions, since it will break on some supported platform, so the bugs can't accumulate over time. I'd imagine Swing, Qt and GTK should also work well for the same reason.
On the other hand, MS stuff is about as non-flexible as can be, since it has never had any kind of evolutionary pressure towards flexibility.
Yeah, I guess it would suck. So tell us: is fatigue a significant problem in Iraq ?
In my experience "piece of shit" is pretty much the definition of army equipment. Of course that was Finnish army, so YMMV.
The question is what happens after the opposing army has been defeated. An occupational force has exactly two options: the iron-fisted rule-by-fear way - the one the Nazi army used when occupying Europe - and the "you don't have to like us but you can live with us" somewhat civilized way. The latter absolutely requires the occupational force to know local language and customs to avoid making any more mortal enemies than they have to.
Of course you can also have solve the problem with translators, but I'm not sure that is any more const-effective, and it gives any resistance a weak spot to hit in order to make dealing with locals more difficult.
Finally, this gadget costs money. Even if it helps soldiers, the question - hard as it may sound - is: is it worth the price, or could the money be better used elsewhere ?
Getting ready for the War on Werewolves, I see.
Well, if you were laying on the goddess of love, would you get off just because of solar wind ?-)
Seriously, thought, it is entirely possible that Venus is capable of keeping atmosphere through sheer gravity even if buffeted by solar wind, but Mars, being smaller, can't but could if the wind was blocked by a magnetic field. It is also possible that Mars lost it atmosphere in a large asteroid impact or other such freak accident and never got around to replacing it due to lack of volcanic activity, and could keep an atmosphere just fine under normal conditions. This needs to be determined before any terraforming may be attempted.
0.005899755 m/s^2, or about 0.0005G, for radius of 150 000 000 kilometers (Earth's average distance from Sun). The radius needed for 10m/s^2 surface gravity (1G) is 3 643 411 km. Heating costs are likely to go down :)...
Even if Pluto was downgraded from "planet" into "big rock", wouldn't it still be called Pluto ? It is Pluto's status that is in question, not name.
No. If there's a way around these limitations, then most programmers will simply turn them off because they are experts and know what they're doing. And then the user has to suffer the consequences of the expert's ego and laziness.
No, bounds checking needs to be mandatory, not voluntary; otherwise it goes unused and the problems continue.
Null pointers aren't really a problem, since trying to dereference one will fail cleanly and immediately with a segmentation fault, altought I personally like Java-style "exception propagates up through the stack" error handling better. It's the ability reference arbitrary memory locations with pointers, as well as use tables without automatic bounds checking, which causes C to be such a source of problems.
Any valid document state can be reached by inserting and removing tags with appripriate functions; the only thing that can't be done that way is creating invalid documents.
There is no reason why a programming language should be able to express a way to an invalid state. Being unable to fuck up the document is not a limitation by any sensible definition of the word.
Based on all the segfaults, blue screens of death, X-Window crashes, Firefox crashes, code insertion bugs et cetera I've seen, I'd say that no, in general programmers don't know what they're doing, and certainly shouldn't be trusted to not fuck it up. The less raw access to any resource - be it memory or document stream - they are given, the better.
And they did it without using any force or coercion - indeed, without rising a single finger - which makes it perfectly moral for a libertarian. Which is the problem of libertarian ethics: "Use no coercion" is simply not sufficient morality.
So you have. And again, since you haven't coerced me with force, that's okay according to libertarian morality.
Actually, the government hasn't built any walls around my house, it has built roads instead. So I'd say that the government is much better than this libertarian guy.
Where do you build those competing roads ? There's no way out of the town which wouldn't cross the highwayman's land. The only way you could build those roads would be to take his property from him, and that's against libertarian ethics.
Secular (for example a court) or religious (for example a priest) authority. Civil or church (of whatever religion) wedding, respectively. That's what I meant by "official" marriage, as opposed to the "unofficial" kind where people simply live together and form a stable couple without any kind of legal paperwork or religious ceremonies.
How should I know what you have in your government ?
If you don't care about the government or whatever religion making your marriage "official", then what is the problem here ? No law I know of in any civilized country forbids adults living together, so simply do so and consider yourself married.
And I'm not claiming that the concept of marriage couldn't exist outside legal definition; however, since any legal ban on gay marriage would only ban the "official" kind, the kind which has laws concerning it, I assumed we were talking about the kind of marriage that involves filing documents.
Not neccessarily. It is entirely possible to get better return of investment by giving the product away for free. For example, suppose you wish to sell stuff on the Web, and need software for a webstore; however, there is no software fit for that purpose available, so you'll have to write your own. The initial version is quickly done and up, and your web store starts making profits.
Should you open-source this software ? After all, it was done quick, so you can't ask much for it even if you don't (since if you do, the other people will simply write their own). On the other hand, if you do open-source it, and it gets wide adoption, the burden of maintenance (bug fixes, scaling and new features) will get distributed too. And if it doesn't get wide adoption, then the chances are that it would get even less if sold for profit, meaning very low sales and income as well as potential liability issues if it's a bad enough program.
Obviously this is a bad example, since web stores are already widespread, but it should still show my point: selling for profit is not neccessarily the best possible move.
I don't really see how marriage could ever leave the domain of government, since it is by definition an officially (by secular or religious authority) regocnized relationship, as opposed to non-official relationship. Unless, of course, you meant that you want the institution to be completely ended ?
Or they could just build a wall around the only source of fresh water and coerce me with threats of resource starvation rather than threats of force. Either way works just as well.
Hell, a self-centered greedy fuck could simply buy a one-meter wide area of land which completely surrounds a town, and then forbid anyone from crossing this land (therefore effectively preventing them from entering or leaving the town) without giving him a toll. Perfectly moral by libertarian standards, highway robbery by any other.
No. Greedy people will find ways to screw others for their own benefit, just as in every other system. If anything, libertarianism makes this easier than most other systems, since the only constraint is that the greedy pigs can't directly physically harm other people.
Libertarianism is a very simple ideologue, and like most simple ideologues, it sounds good on paper but gets twisted into a vicious mockery of itself once it comes into contact with human evil which permeates the real world.
Finland already did a computer simulation (warning: finnish language) of this, and the projected result was that the Earth turned into a paradise.
So basically, Windows UI finally catches up to Bash and GNU Getline.
Yeah. So tell me: how comes you are wasting time socializing here on Slashdot and whining about kids instead of working your ass out to make your country great ?
Actually to be exact Pete is not stealing the key or even copying it, he's guessing it for the purposes of circumventing an effective access-control device and therefore violating the DMCA. What a filthy criminal.
At which point the federal government will respond with force and, having a larger army at its disposal, win. The same way it happened the last time.
The time when US was a loose federation are long past. With modern communication and transport methods, not to mention information technology, there are no empires so large they couldn't be centrally controlled effectively. Better forget fantasies about matching central government with force and instead trying to affect it from the inside, by trying to get people selected there who will losen the reins.