If you want to contribute to an encyclopedia, accept that not all contributions will make it.
That's a question of reasons. Was my contribution badly written, unsubstantiated, violated some copyright or there simply was a better one by someone else? I'll accept all those as valid reasons. Though most of them are subject for improvement and editing, not for deleting.
But deletion for "notability"? Why should I accept that as a reason for deletion, especially in an encyclopedia, doubly so in one that claims for itself to accumulate the knowledge of the world?
But long term, assuming I'm not trying to put some material in violation of Wikipedia's policies, and the article has independent references, there should be no worry about the article being deleted.
Should. The fact that there's an entire wiki dedicated to preserving these cases, and it has tens of thousands of articles in it proves you wrong. If you ever read through the "articles for deletion" page you also know you're wrong. At least half of the articles up for deletion at any given time do not violate any policy except "notability", have independent references, are usually of at least average quality, and fairly often have been online for months or sometimes years before some deletionist noticed them.
Would people complain that they're not going to contribute to open source, because at some later date somebody else might rewrite their code or decide it's no longer needed? Of course not. Wikipedia is a group effort, and part of working as a group is accepting that not everything is down to your say.
Software and encyclopedias do not work the same and the comparison is flawed. Most specifically, an encyclopedia is better the more information it contains, while software is better the more focussed on its purpose it is.
You should read up on Ekman. The guy is one of the top authorities on the subject. He has written a few books. Read one or two and check what his claims really are and how much substance and research he can put behind them.
In short: He doesn't claim he can read thoughts, he claims that emotions show up on your face. He also claims to have identified a short list of universal (world-wide, culture-independent) expressions that belong to specific emotions. He's travelled pretty much everywhere on the globe, from western society to primitive jungle tribes and made many thousands of photographs showing those expressions. And yes, the books describe in detail how the emotions were roused so they could be reasonably sure they got the proper one.
Like all mainstream media, the article simplifies things quite a lot. That doesn't mean the science behind it isn't correct.
Wikipedia rocks. It's too bad so many people are dedicated to pissing all over it.
The concept rocks.
The actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired. The simple fact that Deletionism has been a hot subject for debate for at least two years (probably longer) and they still haven't implemented a solution, where it took other wikis (say, Citizendium) about three months to do so, is testament to that.
I stand by my journal entry. As long as any random fucktard can come over and get my article, and thus possibly hours of work, deleted for no good reason, I see no reason to contribute those hours.
This kind of archive should be - and should have been from the start - an integral part of Wikipedia.
You just can't have any amount of deletions on a wiki and still call it a wiki. Deletes are everything that a wiki isn't - they are not undoable, they are not visible, transparent, attributable and they don't have a history. "Delete" on a wiki is originally a hack to solve technical problems. It should have been removed a long time ago, and replaced with something like "move to archive" or even "move to trashcan", as long as it stays and is still available for those who know where to look.
That would solve the whole deletionism war.
Well, the rational part of it. A lot of what that's really about is power and feeling important.
Yes, we could elaborate on that point. Of course Google doesn't simply count links. But it does not - to the best of my knowledge - do any semantic analysis. What I mean is that it does not check whether I link to your site because I say "look, here's a good site that says the same" or because I say "contrary to what [link] claims..."
And that's what you'd need in a "truth" rating system.
Actually, I think that careful one-minute fade-in of the startup screen might be smooth on that configuration, but it's not the kind of "smooth" I had in mind.
Except that Google doesn't do any content ranking, only popularity. What you'd need is meta-data that essentially tells you why or how this site is linked/cited - does my link to your site support your content or do I make a counterpoint?
Actually, I get "fast", but I see where the misunderstanding comes from. I only explained the "good" - the "fast" would be the "oh, I can hack that up with 50 lines of Perl, come back in an hour". Which causes business people all kinds of shivers - at least the good ones, the ones who know you'll probably not be around anymore in five years, when the hack breaks (because they never replaced it with something good).
Oh please. This really isn't "news for nerds". Maybe news for fools, but all of us here have known for months that this would be coming. I mean, what else can you imagine that would run Vista smoothly?
Tim thinks deeper than most/. posters. From the article:
He went on to say that he didn't think "a simple number like an IQ rating" is a good idea: "I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways".
That sounds a lot like a Credence-like system. There isn't "one truth", there are many truths. I would personally value the science truth more and the biblical "truth" less, but someone else might make a different decision.
As I see it, he is looking more for a kind of citation system. If your website cites others as sources, and is cited by others in return, then what you say has a higher confidence value than if you're an island on the web and make up things, as far as anyone is concerned.
You can't seperate these two, really. The problem with software patents is the prior art thing. Software is like LEGO - you build new and cool things out of old and boring pieces. Except that in Software, your final result then becomes another LEGO piece for the next guy.
Patents break the way that software evolves through and because of prior art. That's why they are bad.
Good, fast, cheap - pick any two (you can't have all three)
As techies our instinct goes to "good and fast". Almost without thinking. Business people, on the other hand, really are the exact opposite: "cheap" is the fixed value for them, and then they pick either good or fast depending on the specific project.
The most common scenario is that the techie builds something, but isn't happy with it, rebuilds it, improves it, tests it, fixes bugs, continues on and on and on. You can see that very well in security. Techies hold entire conferences about which obscure, rarely encountered problems could under which very special circumstances provide a small chance that technology X could be circumvented. For business people "does the job" is all they need. If there's a 0.1% chance that a hypothetical attack can go straight through, say, your firewall, a techie will consider it broken. A business person thinks "let's get an insurance, at that failure rate the premium will be very affordable".
And that's why CS will not "stand the test of time".
It was wildly popular for a while, mostly because there was no serious competition, it was new, and the hardware requirements were so low that a lot of people could play it. Oh, and also because it was popular, never underestimate the self-reinforcing aspect of multiplayer games.
I used to play a lot of CS. I was pretty good. Not one of the top-players, but always in the top 5 or so scorers. But if you ask me today what I remember, it's exactly what you described: To be "good" at CS meant to know the map, the important places and the timings to reach them. All the popular CS maps had their choke points, sniper locations, etc. and the most important skill was to know where they were and whether you or the other guy would be there first.
That's mechanical rote knowledge and simply doesn't make good memories. Our memory system is built to trigger on stuff that it recognizes. So if I play those maps again today, I'll have all the routes and points back in active memory after one round. But those memories won't be triggered by anything else, because they're so specific.
That's why CS will be forgotten, but Warcraft or Starcraft will stay - because the things that you learnt to play those games are repeated again in every other RTS. It's no the Zerg, but you still have rushes, and the basic mechanics (pump out as many as possible as early as possible and go berserk) is the same.
Games today are very different from games 10, 20 years ago. Not all of them, but a good part of the AAA titles.
It's a question of size. You simply couldn't do games with the complexity and content of a current, say, MMORPG before. You could do tricks with procedural content (Elite comes to mind), but even then you were limited by the available code size.
"Old" games were built like chess, or Go, or card games or any other non-computer game that mankind invented. They have a fairly simple set of rules and goals, of pieces and moves. Strategies could get complicated (see Go), but the game "as a whole" was within view. Sure, you could have 100 levels, but aside from layout and details they were essentially the same - you didn't move in totally different ways on each level, for example.
Many of todays games aren't really a single game anymore, they are a collection of games tied together in a hierarchy where the result of one game gives you advantages in the next higher up. Take the dice poker from The Witcher - a self-contained dice game built into another game, and winning at it would progress one branch of the storyline for you. Your average MMORPG probably contains dozens of games, if you think about it, all linked together through some common elements (money, your character's stats, inventory, etc.). There's the crafting game, the adventure and exploring game, the questing game, the combat game, often a seperate PvP game, you can buy houses and furniture and play around with that, and so on. Back on the C64 or early PCs, each of those would have been a seperate game.
That's what's really new and different. We start emulating life in our games, as you can view life as a collection of (serious) games - the love game, the work game, the sports game, etc. - all self-contained but linked together through shared ressources and participants.
I agree with them as far as the "historic significance" goes. For the more recent ones, I'm not so sure. Maybe that's because most of those who actually did it first weren't caught. But the most important trends at this time are stuff like organized crime, spam (and the connection between the two) and extortion. The singular trend behind all these is that those early guys were curious people who did things "because they can", as the article states. But they're dinosaurs today. Money is the reason these days, not curiosity. To miss that one vital trend is to miss everything that's happened in security for the past years.
Yes, we agree on age regulations. I would find age suggestions useful, non-binding indicators for parents whether or not that movie is "good" for their kids and such.
Which, btw., is mostly what the stuff is, at least here in Germany, because most age restrictions are void if you are with your parents (e.g. parents can take their 10 year old kid into a 12+ movie).
But if you have age restrictions, then obviously you need to enforce them. If that means not sending stuff by mail unless you checked age first - then so be it.
btw: All places that I know are happy with a fax of your passport, nobody has ever asked for post-ident.
Actually, I'd like to send a second reply, to clear something up:
I do think that the government shouldn't interfere in markets that work. There's absolutely no reason for any government to start a, say, chain of fast food restaurants.
I do also think that there are some markets that need either regulation or publicly-owned monopoly companies. Economists agree with me. It's called "natural monopoly" - in some situations, it is unthinkable that a market would work. If you're a small island country, the market would not be large enough to support two companies that build dams. And you don't need to build those very often, either, even one company might be challenged after the initial round. A market economy will, in such a situation, create a short and fierce competition that ends with one and only one company surviving. If the market has large natural barriers to entry - as large construction does - that company will remain alone, even if it starts to realize monopoly rents, as long as the monopoly rents stay below the entrance costs.
Third, I believe there are public services that private companies can not provide in the way we want them (in 2008). Do you want privately owned police forces, that respond to 911 calls based on economic analysis? I know I don't. When I call 911 I want a cop car here ASAP and everyone involved should think about stuff like who's going to pay for this afterwards, because people might be dying otherwise. There are some things that we, as a society, have agreed upon to not evaluate in monetary terms. That's an artificial restriction, because you can. It is possible to express your, mine or anyone's elses life, well-being or happiness in money. It's mostly unpractical because it's very complicated, but it's not impossible and one could give it a shot. But we've agreed that we don't want to know. For things that we can not or do not want to express in money, a market mechanism can very obviously not work, because there's no price.
Finally, I think that government is required to ensure that the market works. In economy, the market itself is taken as given, but it's far from that. We need money and that's gotta be defined and produced somewhere. It's hard to think of money in market terms because then you're either going round in circles of recursion, or off into the infinity of meta-levels. Like the axioms of mathematics, some basic facts simply have to be set, otherwise you can't do anything because there's nowhere to start from.
The right to life being a right to survive and pursue the fulfillment of your goals, which means the right to the fruit of your labor. Denying that any of my property is mine is a denial that I have a right to my productivity, which is a denial that I should be able to pursue the fulfillment of my goals, and that I do not have a right to survive of my own free will. I cannot prepare for the possibility of an emergency, whether it be emergency medical treatment or an emergency food shortage, etc, and my survival becomes entire dependent on the whims of government officials.
I also challenge that "life" is a right. It's a condition, one that we all instinctively wish to preserve, but that alone doesn't make it a "right". A right is still an arbitrary construct, no matter how you put it. Your definition is good and convincing. Nevertheless I can create a definition of a "right to life" that excludes property and would work, e.g. for slaves.
In addition, property - a bit like life - is a multi-generation game. Some of your property is inherited, it is not something you worked for.
Individual rights exist even when you're a lone individual on a desert island. It is right for you to survive, to pursue your goals, and to exploit the resources around you in that pursuit.
That depends a lot on words, namely on what exactly you mean by "right". I don't think it's "right", I'd just say it's natural, pre-programmed, instinctive, whatever.
Only by voluntary trade to mutual benefit can you have what they have. Mutual benefit means you have what they want, and they have what you want. If it is not true, then it is not a voluntary trade.
And that is true for the general agreement, even if in the individual case I individually would like to void it, right? The agreement "don't kill each other" is valid even when I hate that guy over there so much I'd love to smash his head in. Is it?
If so, then the voluntary trade to mutual benefit that we call "taxation" is also valid because society has agreed on it, even though you, individually disagree.
One way or the other.:-)
You're simply sidestepping the question of what should be a moral society. Rather than discuss the possibility, you claim the entire pursuit is futile, and you cling to historical examples as evidence to support your position. How exactly do examples of what is imply that it is futile to think about what should be?
Worse than that. I claim that morals are just as arbitrary as anything else we, as a society, agree upon. Some societies found nothing wrong with slavery, we do. Some societies see nothing wrong with the death penalty, some do. Some societies worship strength and personal power, others equality and justice. I'm fairly sure that for every single moral commandment you can find at least one society in history that didn't share it or even had an opposite one.
So, I claim, since morals are arbitrary, we should stop discussing in absolutes and start discussing in benefits. I don't care if you think X is evil because your god says so, since I think your god is imaginary anyways. And that's true for any god, and for any other non-theistic replacement like "golden rule", "common sense" or whatever. The discussion on rights, property, taxation and other rules of society should be "which rule is agreeable by everyone because it provides us all with a benefit?".
You suggest that there's only one possible answer to this question, and you imply that a social agreement is one in which everyone agrees with the result. I do not agree with it, but what choice do I have but to move away? Rather than leave the problem behind, I'd rather persuade members of society to eventually bring about candidates willing to uphold individual rights, and then elect those candidates to help reduce the government to its proper roles.
Germany doesn't have a problem with boobies, but hardcore porn is indexed by default, so freedom when it comes to "sex" isn't exactly there either.
Come visit me one day. I live in Germany and within walking distance from a street where you have a dozen sex shops right next to each other and can walk in and buy your hardcore porn with no more trouble than buying milk in a supermarket - as long as you're over 18. I find it hard to imagine how much more "freedom when it comes to "sex"" you could want, unless we're talking about abolishing age ratings alltogether.
the purpose is to stop the rights violations that occur with forced taxation.
Now we get deep. You assume that "property" is a right. What is that right based on, if I may ask? I challenge that assumption. I say that all rights are agreements of a society. Such agreements are entirely arbitrary. Some societies agree on slavery as a form of commerce, some agree on freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as primary goals, some societies (well, ok, most) recognize property, but then again a few do not.
Your "right to property and life" is no more or less basic, natural or absolute than taxation, which is also an agreement of society - namely the agreed upon answer on "how do we pay for the things that we need to support the rights of property, life, etc. ?".
Property is meaningless if others do not respect it, or in other words: If you can not enforce it. Enforcement doesn't come free. Taxation is one way to pay for it. Certainly not the only one, but the one that our society has (grudingly, mostly) agreed upon. You can challenge that agreement, but then you also open up the agreement "property" to challenge.
Finally, I'd like to point out that money is also such an agreement. Your US$ is legal tender because the US government says it is. Isn't it a bit odd to take the good part (money) and refuse the bad part (taxation) ?
Frankly, I think that's a publicity stunt with the "banned" - for the lack of details.
What exactly do they mean? Makes a world of difference, and they don't tell. Germany does have age ratings, and it does have something they call "indexing", which sounds like "banning", but really isn't. It's just one step up from "18+" in that you also can't display it openly in the store. You absolutely can buy it, legally, with age verification, and quite a few brutal computer games are in that area. Americans: Think "sex" instead of "violence" and you'll understand. Germans don't mind nude models on magazines, but they do mind blood and gore, i.e. the exact opposite of what the US morals are.
Very few games are actually "banned", and almost all of them because they break a law against the use of Nazi symbols. A law, I should add, that the Allies forced on the newly founded Germany after WW2.
Note that I wrote "stuff like" - that was not an exclusive risk. And if someone seriously discusses roads, he needs to study history. No one since the romans has tried privatized roads successfully. Oh, and speaking about the romans: They are the reasons that firefighters are a public service, too. They tried private fire fighters. Research it, it's fascinating.
I doubt GP meant that. "basic services" is stuff like the courts, police and the rest of the legal system - which in sum total allow something we call the rule of law. The thing that makes your employment contract a meaningful document and means you can go to work without arms and armour because you can be reasonably sure that you are not going to be attacked and robbed.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's not your article.
Correct. But it was my time, so the point stands.
If you want to contribute to an encyclopedia, accept that not all contributions will make it.
That's a question of reasons.
Was my contribution badly written, unsubstantiated, violated some copyright or there simply was a better one by someone else? I'll accept all those as valid reasons. Though most of them are subject for improvement and editing, not for deleting.
But deletion for "notability"? Why should I accept that as a reason for deletion, especially in an encyclopedia, doubly so in one that claims for itself to accumulate the knowledge of the world?
But long term, assuming I'm not trying to put some material in violation of Wikipedia's policies, and the article has independent references, there should be no worry about the article being deleted.
Should. The fact that there's an entire wiki dedicated to preserving these cases, and it has tens of thousands of articles in it proves you wrong. If you ever read through the "articles for deletion" page you also know you're wrong. At least half of the articles up for deletion at any given time do not violate any policy except "notability", have independent references, are usually of at least average quality, and fairly often have been online for months or sometimes years before some deletionist noticed them.
Would people complain that they're not going to contribute to open source, because at some later date somebody else might rewrite their code or decide it's no longer needed? Of course not. Wikipedia is a group effort, and part of working as a group is accepting that not everything is down to your say.
Software and encyclopedias do not work the same and the comparison is flawed. Most specifically, an encyclopedia is better the more information it contains, while software is better the more focussed on its purpose it is.
You should read up on Ekman. The guy is one of the top authorities on the subject. He has written a few books. Read one or two and check what his claims really are and how much substance and research he can put behind them.
In short: He doesn't claim he can read thoughts, he claims that emotions show up on your face. He also claims to have identified a short list of universal (world-wide, culture-independent) expressions that belong to specific emotions. He's travelled pretty much everywhere on the globe, from western society to primitive jungle tribes and made many thousands of photographs showing those expressions. And yes, the books describe in detail how the emotions were roused so they could be reasonably sure they got the proper one.
Like all mainstream media, the article simplifies things quite a lot. That doesn't mean the science behind it isn't correct.
Wikipedia rocks. It's too bad so many people are dedicated to pissing all over it.
The concept rocks.
The actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired. The simple fact that Deletionism has been a hot subject for debate for at least two years (probably longer) and they still haven't implemented a solution, where it took other wikis (say, Citizendium) about three months to do so, is testament to that.
I stand by my journal entry. As long as any random fucktard can come over and get my article, and thus possibly hours of work, deleted for no good reason, I see no reason to contribute those hours.
This kind of archive should be - and should have been from the start - an integral part of Wikipedia.
You just can't have any amount of deletions on a wiki and still call it a wiki. Deletes are everything that a wiki isn't - they are not undoable, they are not visible, transparent, attributable and they don't have a history. "Delete" on a wiki is originally a hack to solve technical problems. It should have been removed a long time ago, and replaced with something like "move to archive" or even "move to trashcan", as long as it stays and is still available for those who know where to look.
That would solve the whole deletionism war.
Well, the rational part of it. A lot of what that's really about is power and feeling important.
Yes, we could elaborate on that point. Of course Google doesn't simply count links. But it does not - to the best of my knowledge - do any semantic analysis. What I mean is that it does not check whether I link to your site because I say "look, here's a good site that says the same" or because I say "contrary to what [link] claims..."
And that's what you'd need in a "truth" rating system.
Oh, could be nothing. Maybe the russian mafia cracker who owns your machine cleaned it up because he needs some performance for the spam-sending. :-)
Actually, I think that careful one-minute fade-in of the startup screen might be smooth on that configuration, but it's not the kind of "smooth" I had in mind.
Except that Google doesn't do any content ranking, only popularity. What you'd need is meta-data that essentially tells you why or how this site is linked/cited - does my link to your site support your content or do I make a counterpoint?
Actually, I get "fast", but I see where the misunderstanding comes from. I only explained the "good" - the "fast" would be the "oh, I can hack that up with 50 lines of Perl, come back in an hour". Which causes business people all kinds of shivers - at least the good ones, the ones who know you'll probably not be around anymore in five years, when the hack breaks (because they never replaced it with something good).
Oh please. This really isn't "news for nerds". Maybe news for fools, but all of us here have known for months that this would be coming. I mean, what else can you imagine that would run Vista smoothly?
Exactly.
Tim thinks deeper than most /. posters. From the article:
He went on to say that he didn't think "a simple number like an IQ rating" is a good idea: "I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways".
That sounds a lot like a Credence-like system. There isn't "one truth", there are many truths. I would personally value the science truth more and the biblical "truth" less, but someone else might make a different decision.
As I see it, he is looking more for a kind of citation system. If your website cites others as sources, and is cited by others in return, then what you say has a higher confidence value than if you're an island on the web and make up things, as far as anyone is concerned.
Strawman
You can't seperate these two, really. The problem with software patents is the prior art thing. Software is like LEGO - you build new and cool things out of old and boring pieces. Except that in Software, your final result then becomes another LEGO piece for the next guy.
Patents break the way that software evolves through and because of prior art. That's why they are bad.
Your answer is in RFC 1925, point (2) 7a:
Good, fast, cheap - pick any two (you can't have all three)
As techies our instinct goes to "good and fast". Almost without thinking. Business people, on the other hand, really are the exact opposite: "cheap" is the fixed value for them, and then they pick either good or fast depending on the specific project.
The most common scenario is that the techie builds something, but isn't happy with it, rebuilds it, improves it, tests it, fixes bugs, continues on and on and on. You can see that very well in security. Techies hold entire conferences about which obscure, rarely encountered problems could under which very special circumstances provide a small chance that technology X could be circumvented.
For business people "does the job" is all they need. If there's a 0.1% chance that a hypothetical attack can go straight through, say, your firewall, a techie will consider it broken. A business person thinks "let's get an insurance, at that failure rate the premium will be very affordable".
And that's why CS will not "stand the test of time".
It was wildly popular for a while, mostly because there was no serious competition, it was new, and the hardware requirements were so low that a lot of people could play it. Oh, and also because it was popular, never underestimate the self-reinforcing aspect of multiplayer games.
I used to play a lot of CS. I was pretty good. Not one of the top-players, but always in the top 5 or so scorers. But if you ask me today what I remember, it's exactly what you described: To be "good" at CS meant to know the map, the important places and the timings to reach them. All the popular CS maps had their choke points, sniper locations, etc. and the most important skill was to know where they were and whether you or the other guy would be there first.
That's mechanical rote knowledge and simply doesn't make good memories. Our memory system is built to trigger on stuff that it recognizes. So if I play those maps again today, I'll have all the routes and points back in active memory after one round. But those memories won't be triggered by anything else, because they're so specific.
That's why CS will be forgotten, but Warcraft or Starcraft will stay - because the things that you learnt to play those games are repeated again in every other RTS. It's no the Zerg, but you still have rushes, and the basic mechanics (pump out as many as possible as early as possible and go berserk) is the same.
Games today are very different from games 10, 20 years ago. Not all of them, but a good part of the AAA titles.
It's a question of size. You simply couldn't do games with the complexity and content of a current, say, MMORPG before. You could do tricks with procedural content (Elite comes to mind), but even then you were limited by the available code size.
"Old" games were built like chess, or Go, or card games or any other non-computer game that mankind invented. They have a fairly simple set of rules and goals, of pieces and moves. Strategies could get complicated (see Go), but the game "as a whole" was within view. Sure, you could have 100 levels, but aside from layout and details they were essentially the same - you didn't move in totally different ways on each level, for example.
Many of todays games aren't really a single game anymore, they are a collection of games tied together in a hierarchy where the result of one game gives you advantages in the next higher up. Take the dice poker from The Witcher - a self-contained dice game built into another game, and winning at it would progress one branch of the storyline for you.
Your average MMORPG probably contains dozens of games, if you think about it, all linked together through some common elements (money, your character's stats, inventory, etc.). There's the crafting game, the adventure and exploring game, the questing game, the combat game, often a seperate PvP game, you can buy houses and furniture and play around with that, and so on.
Back on the C64 or early PCs, each of those would have been a seperate game.
That's what's really new and different. We start emulating life in our games, as you can view life as a collection of (serious) games - the love game, the work game, the sports game, etc. - all self-contained but linked together through shared ressources and participants.
I agree with them as far as the "historic significance" goes. For the more recent ones, I'm not so sure. Maybe that's because most of those who actually did it first weren't caught. But the most important trends at this time are stuff like organized crime, spam (and the connection between the two) and extortion. The singular trend behind all these is that those early guys were curious people who did things "because they can", as the article states. But they're dinosaurs today. Money is the reason these days, not curiosity. To miss that one vital trend is to miss everything that's happened in security for the past years.
Yes, we agree on age regulations. I would find age suggestions useful, non-binding indicators for parents whether or not that movie is "good" for their kids and such.
Which, btw., is mostly what the stuff is, at least here in Germany, because most age restrictions are void if you are with your parents (e.g. parents can take their 10 year old kid into a 12+ movie).
But if you have age restrictions, then obviously you need to enforce them. If that means not sending stuff by mail unless you checked age first - then so be it.
btw: All places that I know are happy with a fax of your passport, nobody has ever asked for post-ident.
Actually, I'd like to send a second reply, to clear something up:
I do think that the government shouldn't interfere in markets that work. There's absolutely no reason for any government to start a, say, chain of fast food restaurants.
I do also think that there are some markets that need either regulation or publicly-owned monopoly companies. Economists agree with me. It's called "natural monopoly" - in some situations, it is unthinkable that a market would work. If you're a small island country, the market would not be large enough to support two companies that build dams. And you don't need to build those very often, either, even one company might be challenged after the initial round. A market economy will, in such a situation, create a short and fierce competition that ends with one and only one company surviving. If the market has large natural barriers to entry - as large construction does - that company will remain alone, even if it starts to realize monopoly rents, as long as the monopoly rents stay below the entrance costs.
Third, I believe there are public services that private companies can not provide in the way we want them (in 2008). Do you want privately owned police forces, that respond to 911 calls based on economic analysis? I know I don't. When I call 911 I want a cop car here ASAP and everyone involved should think about stuff like who's going to pay for this afterwards, because people might be dying otherwise.
There are some things that we, as a society, have agreed upon to not evaluate in monetary terms. That's an artificial restriction, because you can. It is possible to express your, mine or anyone's elses life, well-being or happiness in money. It's mostly unpractical because it's very complicated, but it's not impossible and one could give it a shot. But we've agreed that we don't want to know. For things that we can not or do not want to express in money, a market mechanism can very obviously not work, because there's no price.
Finally, I think that government is required to ensure that the market works. In economy, the market itself is taken as given, but it's far from that. We need money and that's gotta be defined and produced somewhere. It's hard to think of money in market terms because then you're either going round in circles of recursion, or off into the infinity of meta-levels. Like the axioms of mathematics, some basic facts simply have to be set, otherwise you can't do anything because there's nowhere to start from.
The right to life being a right to survive and pursue the fulfillment of your goals, which means the right to the fruit of your labor. Denying that any of my property is mine is a denial that I have a right to my productivity, which is a denial that I should be able to pursue the fulfillment of my goals, and that I do not have a right to survive of my own free will. I cannot prepare for the possibility of an emergency, whether it be emergency medical treatment or an emergency food shortage, etc, and my survival becomes entire dependent on the whims of government officials.
I also challenge that "life" is a right. It's a condition, one that we all instinctively wish to preserve, but that alone doesn't make it a "right". A right is still an arbitrary construct, no matter how you put it. Your definition is good and convincing. Nevertheless I can create a definition of a "right to life" that excludes property and would work, e.g. for slaves.
In addition, property - a bit like life - is a multi-generation game. Some of your property is inherited, it is not something you worked for.
Individual rights exist even when you're a lone individual on a desert island. It is right for you to survive, to pursue your goals, and to exploit the resources around you in that pursuit.
That depends a lot on words, namely on what exactly you mean by "right". I don't think it's "right", I'd just say it's natural, pre-programmed, instinctive, whatever.
Only by voluntary trade to mutual benefit can you have what they have. Mutual benefit means you have what they want, and they have what you want. If it is not true, then it is not a voluntary trade.
And that is true for the general agreement, even if in the individual case I individually would like to void it, right? The agreement "don't kill each other" is valid even when I hate that guy over there so much I'd love to smash his head in. Is it?
If so, then the voluntary trade to mutual benefit that we call "taxation" is also valid because society has agreed on it, even though you, individually disagree.
One way or the other. :-)
You're simply sidestepping the question of what should be a moral society. Rather than discuss the possibility, you claim the entire pursuit is futile, and you cling to historical examples as evidence to support your position. How exactly do examples of what is imply that it is futile to think about what should be?
Worse than that. I claim that morals are just as arbitrary as anything else we, as a society, agree upon. Some societies found nothing wrong with slavery, we do. Some societies see nothing wrong with the death penalty, some do. Some societies worship strength and personal power, others equality and justice. I'm fairly sure that for every single moral commandment you can find at least one society in history that didn't share it or even had an opposite one.
So, I claim, since morals are arbitrary, we should stop discussing in absolutes and start discussing in benefits. I don't care if you think X is evil because your god says so, since I think your god is imaginary anyways. And that's true for any god, and for any other non-theistic replacement like "golden rule", "common sense" or whatever.
The discussion on rights, property, taxation and other rules of society should be "which rule is agreeable by everyone because it provides us all with a benefit?".
You suggest that there's only one possible answer to this question, and you imply that a social agreement is one in which everyone agrees with the result. I do not agree with it, but what choice do I have but to move away? Rather than leave the problem behind, I'd rather persuade members of society to eventually bring about candidates willing to uphold individual rights, and then elect those candidates to help reduce the government to its proper roles.
And I'm fine
Germany doesn't have a problem with boobies, but hardcore porn is indexed by default, so freedom when it comes to "sex" isn't exactly there either.
Come visit me one day. I live in Germany and within walking distance from a street where you have a dozen sex shops right next to each other and can walk in and buy your hardcore porn with no more trouble than buying milk in a supermarket - as long as you're over 18.
I find it hard to imagine how much more "freedom when it comes to "sex"" you could want, unless we're talking about abolishing age ratings alltogether.
the purpose is to stop the rights violations that occur with forced taxation.
Now we get deep. You assume that "property" is a right. What is that right based on, if I may ask? I challenge that assumption. I say that all rights are agreements of a society. Such agreements are entirely arbitrary. Some societies agree on slavery as a form of commerce, some agree on freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as primary goals, some societies (well, ok, most) recognize property, but then again a few do not.
Your "right to property and life" is no more or less basic, natural or absolute than taxation, which is also an agreement of society - namely the agreed upon answer on "how do we pay for the things that we need to support the rights of property, life, etc. ?".
Property is meaningless if others do not respect it, or in other words: If you can not enforce it. Enforcement doesn't come free. Taxation is one way to pay for it. Certainly not the only one, but the one that our society has (grudingly, mostly) agreed upon. You can challenge that agreement, but then you also open up the agreement "property" to challenge.
Finally, I'd like to point out that money is also such an agreement. Your US$ is legal tender because the US government says it is. Isn't it a bit odd to take the good part (money) and refuse the bad part (taxation) ?
Frankly, I think that's a publicity stunt with the "banned" - for the lack of details.
What exactly do they mean? Makes a world of difference, and they don't tell. Germany does have age ratings, and it does have something they call "indexing", which sounds like "banning", but really isn't. It's just one step up from "18+" in that you also can't display it openly in the store. You absolutely can buy it, legally, with age verification, and quite a few brutal computer games are in that area.
Americans: Think "sex" instead of "violence" and you'll understand. Germans don't mind nude models on magazines, but they do mind blood and gore, i.e. the exact opposite of what the US morals are.
Very few games are actually "banned", and almost all of them because they break a law against the use of Nazi symbols. A law, I should add, that the Allies forced on the newly founded Germany after WW2.
Note that I wrote "stuff like" - that was not an exclusive risk. And if someone seriously discusses roads, he needs to study history. No one since the romans has tried privatized roads successfully. Oh, and speaking about the romans: They are the reasons that firefighters are a public service, too. They tried private fire fighters. Research it, it's fascinating.
I haven't grown up on Social Security.
I doubt GP meant that. "basic services" is stuff like the courts, police and the rest of the legal system - which in sum total allow something we call the rule of law. The thing that makes your employment contract a meaningful document and means you can go to work without arms and armour because you can be reasonably sure that you are not going to be attacked and robbed.
When I dial 911, I do not want to be connected to a call center in fucking India.
Why was parent modded "flamebait" ?
This is exactly what it's about. Some services need to be optimized for other things than profit.