There is absolutely no doubt that Apple shot themselves in the foot multiple times on this one. As you say, it probably would be smart to show the product to the salespeople. However, that they didn't do the smart thing doesn't mean that those salespeople then should take it upon themselves to peek.
If they were getting questions about Leopard, what they should have done was one of three things:
1. Been honest to the customer and said 'I dunno.'
2. Sold the customer up on the 'super-secretness' of the software and how that indicates its awesomeness, or some equivalent sales crap (that's what they get paid to do)
3. Tell Apple Corporate (probably through their bosses) that they are getting XYZ questions about Leopard and need answers to give people, in lieu of having personal experience with the software.
Instead they selected 'none of the above' and went for some lone wolf shit. Your bosses being idiots does not give you leave to disobey them; after all, the contractual obligations that an employee has to an employer generally includes their having to listen to the employer. That is, primarily, why you get the green (or in other countries, multi-colored) stuff. Only when the employer is doing something either illegal or unethical does this cease to be true.
Personally, I think they should have gotten a cookie on the way out the door they were being kicked out of. That way they could feel good for their honesty by being rewarded but also get what was undoubtedly their contractually obligatory comeuppance. Yes, it is a good policy to reward honesty. No, you'd have to be brain-dead to believe that copying unreleased software isn't an offense for which any software corp. on the planet wouldn't fire you and proabaly shoot your dog/cat/ferret/first-born child. As another poster pointed out, the stealing and the coming clean about the stealing are essentially unrelated actions and should be treated separately. Besides, there are limits to the list of which sanctions a company can choose from when deciding to penalize an employee, so for serious infractions it is generally unreasonable to assume they can do anything appropriate other than fire the transgressors.
The power of a good cookie to soften the blow should not be undersold, as well. Remember the Matrix:
(Oracle) Hey, your new best buddy and mentor is going to die. Have a cookie.
(Neo) Oh, OK.
See? Right as rain.
Yes, the first sentence of this post ended with a preposition; syntax and grammar nazis can blow me.
For example, Asshat has gun. Asshat points gun at cute child (tm). Asshat threatens cute child (tm) with gun unless you give him all your money. You comply. Therefore, YOU are an Asshat, too!
Now, I know this hypothetical (but not unreasonable) example is far from the current situation (Walmart is not a cute child, nor cares about cute children, and no cute children had to be threatened for it to fold like a cheap envelope. Secretly, it wanted to fold like a cheap envelope and all it needed was a strong brute man to give it an excuse...[ahem!]), but the point is, nutshell morality like your statement is unworkable. Sometimes, concessions to evil, while unfortunate and distatsteful, can prevent or mitigate greater potential evils.
I'm curious where you are from. I'm only curious because, dollars to doughnuts (ahhh, American Idioms), it's a country that has had periods of idiocy comparable to ours. Probably, if it is a nation of any decent age, a period of idiocy that undoubtedly makes ours seem in comparison puny and historically insignificant, sort of like a mental hiccough. Can you think of one that hasn't? Even Switzerland had Calvin.
On a less flippant note, the reason why the people are played and not players is essentially because they are manipulated by their passions and by their lack of information. Fear is a very potent distractor, and I think it extremely unbecoming (not to mention rude) to behave as if you could judge a person for voting based on the information they have and the things they worry about in the best way they know how. Pointedly, since you speak as not an American, you probably don't have the singular pleasure of being misinformed by the US media (which is a whole different type and level of disinformation than, say, the BBC) and so you have no earthly idea how that would affect you.
It does have its bright sides, I'll admit. But, aside from the admittedly robust legal protections dividing religion from state in most circumstances, the tolerance you speak of is an unintended consequence of most who hold power right now in America; I find no great love for the value of tolerance expressed amongst the Relgious Right in America, any more than any other extremists, secular or sectarian, that one might study. I also, I must say, doubt that the correlation of scientific stuntedness with those types of success we listed is one that can be sustainably maintained; eventually, the bottom would fall out, and the US would be eclipsed in those areas by other powers (for real, not just pretend, like the example [elsewhere in the thread] of the EU collectively having a larger economy than the US without having any sort of cultural or political unity).
I guess this is where we fundamentally disagree. I find the conscious liar far more dangerous than he who is simply mistaken, because the one who is consciously manipulating his statements contrary to the truth has an agenda (whatever that may be),and so usually cannot be reasoned with apart from that agenda. When a falsity is declared, it is only dangerous (at all) if it is important; i.e. a person can believe a tomato is not a fruit, and unless that person is a botant that error is really inconsequential (unless he or she is playing cutthroat Trivial Pursuit or something similarly demented). It is more consequential if a botanist went around telling people that a tomato is not a fruit when he or she was well aware that it is.
On some very few matters, a mistake is every way as damaging as a lie...but they don't happen in a high school science class; idiocy there learned can be unlearned. I find 'intelligent design' and 'creation science' far more distasteful than mere 'creationism' (the young earth versions of which I also find completely ridiculous) because it is an intentional falsity regading the character of the doctrine being pushed. But there are metaphysical assertions, such as positing a deity (or not) that can hold a belief that rests beyond the touch of evidence; zealousness in metaphysics is an entirely different problem and one that has nothing to do with induction or 'denial of truth' in any sense that we can know it.
AIDS is primarily a problem of education. As for child porn, as far as quantitatively, there are more crimes of violence than there are of lust (even, I'm betting, if you included adultery as a 'crime'), the number of assaults and murders together is vastly higher than all sex crimes put together. Since all humans possess the capacity for both wrath and lust (except, I suppose, eunuchs) it seems to indicate that the impulse toward wrath is stronger vis a vis overriding the conscious will than lust, generally speaking. 'Horny' may make longer-term consequential decisions that end up being negative because of a lack of foresight, but 'angry' more immediately overrides control of the will. Thus, anger mitigates culpability and lust aggravates it, because our system of law (which was what the conversation was originally about) regards the free decision making capability of the individual as one of the key markers of legal responsibility.
First off, and I don't think you read very carefully, I am not a relativist, nor asserting that the truth content of an age is indeterminate is in any sense a relativist position. There are not independent standards for truth *that we have access to* outside of the current inductive rubric, including such things as theories of observation. Thus, what is really *meaningless* is any assertion that we could know, as you put it, that 'mankind in general is become (sic) less wrong in degree and frequency since we could only know this if we presuppose our current inductive methodology is already correct. That's begging the question. Arguments from pragmatism fail as well, because 'what works' is in no way necessarily correlated with 'what is true'. A doctor can have a cure, and find a new cure that seems to work better, and 'discover' it through a methodology that it may turn out is flawed, and yet the cure still works 'better'.
Incidentally, I don't see how my fellow countrymen's fetishism regarding 'traditional' values in any sense is an ushering in of a global (or quite honestly, even local) reversal of the *seeming* trend you propose is true. The scientific world, including in the US, is proceeding more or less oblivious to the church next door and their insistance of fighting a basically non-existent battle between two epistemologies. Is creationism in the schools a greater setback to evolutionary biology than Bohr's mdoel is to physics? It takes physics students a little while to flush out all the crap they learned in high school physics, and yet not many people complain about the ridiculously outdated and flat-out wrong (so far as our episteme indicates) theory that we insist on teahing about the structure of atoms. A physics student friend of mind described learningphysics in teh curent school system as learning the whole damn subject over again every year, from grade school straight throgh univeristy, with each year further afield than the last, and he could not for the life of him see the utility in using a physics class to essentially teach the history of physics, rather than current understanding. And yet somehow, there are still Quantum Physicists graduating from universities, and that number hasn't trended downwards. Biology, likewise, will get over the idiocy of politicians and even the people who support them.
Attempted rape is prosecuted differently (and carries a lesser sentence) than rape does, as is usually the case in American criminal law where a failed attempt is usually punished less harshly than a successfully executed crime. You are quite right that most rapes are not mechanically succesful; some believe for psychological reasons, but I believe that a more relevant effect is that most violent crimes (including rape) have alcohol as an aggravating factor, and alcohol intoxication impedes the male ability to maintain an erection. On the other point, are you seriously saying that as a teen you had as little control of your actions due to being horny as if you were 'seeing-red' angry? I cannot believe that, and for me, the teenage years weren't all that long ago.
Which scientific method is that? Naive falsificationism? Popperian Falsificationism? Kuhnian Paradigms? Laudan's 'whatever makes shiny happy people shiny happy toys' justification methodology? Feyerabend's 'let's crash this car into that mountain, and hey those chemicals are really colorful and let's see what happens when we light everything on fire' anti-methodology?
I think you will find your 'God' slightly schizophrenic; neither scientists nor philosophers of science agree on what the 'Scientific Method' is, nevermind more important questions relating to your other article of faith, namely whether knowledge is even an ultimately progressive and accumulative process.
Incidentally, you will find that in all science, there are always statements that must be taken 'on faith'. Axioms, theories of observation, commensurability issues, etc.
it tells that most Americans are more likely to believe what they find desirable to believe, rather than the truth.
Hey, buddy, that's everyone. The only thing that changes are the idiosyncrasies, the individual blind spots, usually about the things that we personally or culturally choose to care about. That my fellow countrymen happen to believe a particularly embarrassing one is unfortunate, but in the grand scheme of things is hardly the ultimate sin against 'Truth'. It is a telling fact that in every stage of human history, a large portion of people believed that they had stumbled (by revelation or inductive practices or some combination thereof) onto the basic paradigm that accurately describes truth. They were all, every single one of them, wrong. Why do we believe we are different than them, that this age we are lucky enough to live in is somehow different than all those others? One need not believe in relative truth (and I don't) to believe that for the actual amount of truth that we can be honestly confident to presently hold, our current beliefs might as well be treated relatively.
I agree that it sucks for people who live in an age defined by the scientific enterprise to be lorded over militarily and economically by a scientifically stunted nation. But then so was Greece by Rome, and yet life (historically speaking) goes on.
P.S. Don't ever believe, in this age of media and relative concentration of power that the actions of the US are driven by the opinions of its citizens at large. It's very much the other way around; citizens are the played, not the players. That should be the far more terrifying realization than that rural Kansas doesn't know jack about Evolution.
Some jurisdictions recognize different degrees of sexual assault. That aside, I agree it seems like an odd anomaly...but I would submit to you that rage, for example, causes physiological changes (mostly involving very large amounts of adrenaline quickly introduced into the bloodstream) that are much harder to control than the hormones that control the immediate sexual response. Besides, sexual intercourse of any sort is more complicated than wrathful murder simply by virtue of the act requiring more deliberate and lengthier steps (generally speaking) and thus more opportunities to regain control of oneself; as you mentioned, it's much harder to accidentally rape someone than accidentally kill them, and most of those cases involve substance intoxication (and thus aggravating and mitigating factors of an entirely different sort). I believe that this unevenness you describe is a direct result of society's recognition that wrath and lust (to use moral language) are qualitatively different, to be sure, but also quantitatively different regarding their relative effect on the conscious mind and the ability of the afflicted individual to control that effect.
If you parse the original sentence, it is still technically correct (if a little odd); we often do not use the definite article 'the' to describe something like a language, but it is implicit, especially when making normative standards, that there is a definite object to compare. 'The English' refers to an objective standard; whether such an object even exists is another matter not even vaguely related to the question at hand, and irrelevant, since properly constructed statements may refer to virtual or non-sensical subject matter and still be syntactically well-formed. Interestingly, the difference between "the" and "that", while substantially changing the structure of the sentence, does not much change its content; it basically means the same thing!
It does only apply to trademarks, not copyrights, insofar as the ability to maintain its existence (i.e. if you fail substantially to defend a trademark, it ceases to exist as a legal protection.) But, if you fail to defend copyright, or selectively defend it, you have a serious problem when it comes time to identify damages; e.g. "if Jane Citizen is undertaking the same actions as me, then she is doing the same sort of damage as me; if you don't care about her damages, why do you care about mine?"
But you have to admit, the RIAA's position on the issue paints them into a corner that practically forces them to act in this manner (not that I'm in any way sympathetic!). Think about it; if your legal argument is essentially that a 'culture of piracy' is making devaluing your work product through unlicenced non-fair use copying culturally acceptable to the point where Joe and Jane Citizen don't think much of it, and piracy itself is almost trivially easy despite attempts at copy protection, what option do they have except to sue everyone?
Put another way, say they did find Jane Citizen downloaded two songs and say they decide not to sue, based on the 'let's be good corporate citizens' principle, or the alternative 'let's not be total dicks so that the PR dept. don't all kill themselves' principle. Then, they sue the aforementioned (and mostly fictitious) 'Pirate Kingpin'. If pirate kingpin's lawyer is not a moron, they will show cause to subpoena tons and tons of records of other 'pirates' that the RIAA have identified, and then ask pointedly why Jane Citizen wasn't sued. And ten seconds later, case dismissed w/ prejudice, and RIAA probably smacked around for selective defense of their copyright.
I think the overarching point is there already is a fantastically easy way to get Cocaine.
1. Drive up to any high school
2. Watch the kids outside for five minutes
3. Identify the drug dealer
4. ????
5. (Profit?!) Score some Cocaine.
There are other effective algorithms for obtaining Cocaine, most involve going to a seedy area and/or speaking with a junkie friend of a friend. Point of course is, if its illegal for kids to have cigarettes and alcohol, never mind 'da crack', why on earth do we believe that prohibition of these substances does anything except cycle the stupider/unluckier ones through the penal system?
Incidentally, the larger social costs of cocaine are threefold: increased crime due to substance's price (which is artifically high to deal with the risk fo being an illicit substance), overdose (usually due to impurity of product, again, because pharmacies aren't making the stuff), and the actual pharmacological effects of the drug in question, that is, how it alters mood, behavior, and health. I personally would rather get past problems 1 and 2 (which claim way more lives and money than the last one) and instead concentrate on the *actual* problem that drugs themselves produce.
You know (or ought to) that he was talking comparatively. He's saying, and considering Israel I would agree with him, that Israelis would indeed be way more irritated and concerned about their own military and police detaining israelis and killing them with impunity than they are irritated and concerned about terrorism. And he's right, to boot: a culture that sanctions violence against its own citizens is bound to be far less healthy and have a more terrified citizenry than one which is constantly the victim of terrorism. Compare, for example, Soviet Russia with present-day Israel.
My sarcasm was also uncalled for. Sorry about that. And I usually refrain from characterizing other people's arguments; I guess we were both having a 'silly' day.;)
I've read conflicting reports about Mozart's wealth and poverty. I suppose a great deal of the popular conception is framed by that very good but largely ficticious story "Amadeus", but I got the general sense that regardless of his wealth or poverty, he always got invited to all of the really cool parties...and that's worth more than all the money in Austria.
Actually, he might start playing for the other team. It's been proposed by many conservative commentators already. He's a DINO, anyway. His position would play just fine to Republicans if there was a convenient elephant symbol next to his name come November. It's happened before.
My only quibble with your post (and it doesn't undercut your point at all, hence a quibble) is that the race wasn't even remotely tight, particularly during the last two weeks; the polls had Lieberman getting pasted to the tune of 7-10 points. Exits showed a slightly tighter race (4-5 points) which isn't really tight at all in a primary, particular for an unknown vs. a long-time incumbent.
I was thinking about that myself. I'm no Luddite, but it seems to me the inexhorable march of advancement is fast outstripping any hope of catching up with social and cultural adaptation. Stuff like this makes me think "Why would anyone (legitimate) do this? Just to see if they could?" It seems like a stupid justification.
But then, isn't it stupendously better for this type of danger to show up in an academic paper, for all to see and think about how to counter, rather than spooks, foreign spooks, or some black hat with an attitude being able to use it surreptitiously for a long, long time because nobody else thought about it or publicized it?
Usable by the god-fearing tech-illiterate masses? Yes. And that's what matters. What good is privacy if only geeks who have crosshairs on them sixty ways from Sunday when the Revolution comes (you can SMELL them in a crowd. Yech.) have it?
[OT]By the way, I hate grammar Nazi's periods, too. LOL.[/OT]
I think it has very little to do with the wealth of the patron or the 'wilyness' of the artist. It rather comes down to one rather simple rule: Sturgeon's Law. 99.9% of everything (regardless of motive, genre, medium, culture, etc.) is CRAP. As you say, the remainder (usually) survives and can be enjoyed after the great filtering is done.
Speaking of lowbrow, I seem today to not be able to use 'its' and 'it's' properly. That middle part should read "...And it's not arrogance or condescention..."
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There is absolutely no doubt that Apple shot themselves in the foot multiple times on this one. As you say, it probably would be smart to show the product to the salespeople. However, that they didn't do the smart thing doesn't mean that those salespeople then should take it upon themselves to peek.
If they were getting questions about Leopard, what they should have done was one of three things:
1. Been honest to the customer and said 'I dunno.'
2. Sold the customer up on the 'super-secretness' of the software and how that indicates its awesomeness, or some equivalent sales crap (that's what they get paid to do)
3. Tell Apple Corporate (probably through their bosses) that they are getting XYZ questions about Leopard and need answers to give people, in lieu of having personal experience with the software.
Instead they selected 'none of the above' and went for some lone wolf shit. Your bosses being idiots does not give you leave to disobey them; after all, the contractual obligations that an employee has to an employer generally includes their having to listen to the employer. That is, primarily, why you get the green (or in other countries, multi-colored) stuff. Only when the employer is doing something either illegal or unethical does this cease to be true.
Personally, I think they should have gotten a cookie on the way out the door they were being kicked out of. That way they could feel good for their honesty by being rewarded but also get what was undoubtedly their contractually obligatory comeuppance. Yes, it is a good policy to reward honesty. No, you'd have to be brain-dead to believe that copying unreleased software isn't an offense for which any software corp. on the planet wouldn't fire you and proabaly shoot your dog/cat/ferret/first-born child. As another poster pointed out, the stealing and the coming clean about the stealing are essentially unrelated actions and should be treated separately. Besides, there are limits to the list of which sanctions a company can choose from when deciding to penalize an employee, so for serious infractions it is generally unreasonable to assume they can do anything appropriate other than fire the transgressors.
The power of a good cookie to soften the blow should not be undersold, as well. Remember the Matrix:
(Oracle) Hey, your new best buddy and mentor is going to die. Have a cookie.
(Neo) Oh, OK.
See? Right as rain.
Yes, the first sentence of this post ended with a preposition; syntax and grammar nazis can blow me.
For example, Asshat has gun. Asshat points gun at cute child (tm). Asshat threatens cute child (tm) with gun unless you give him all your money. You comply. Therefore, YOU are an Asshat, too!
Now, I know this hypothetical (but not unreasonable) example is far from the current situation (Walmart is not a cute child, nor cares about cute children, and no cute children had to be threatened for it to fold like a cheap envelope. Secretly, it wanted to fold like a cheap envelope and all it needed was a strong brute man to give it an excuse...[ahem!]), but the point is, nutshell morality like your statement is unworkable. Sometimes, concessions to evil, while unfortunate and distatsteful, can prevent or mitigate greater potential evils.
I'm curious where you are from. I'm only curious because, dollars to doughnuts (ahhh, American Idioms), it's a country that has had periods of idiocy comparable to ours. Probably, if it is a nation of any decent age, a period of idiocy that undoubtedly makes ours seem in comparison puny and historically insignificant, sort of like a mental hiccough. Can you think of one that hasn't? Even Switzerland had Calvin.
On a less flippant note, the reason why the people are played and not players is essentially because they are manipulated by their passions and by their lack of information. Fear is a very potent distractor, and I think it extremely unbecoming (not to mention rude) to behave as if you could judge a person for voting based on the information they have and the things they worry about in the best way they know how. Pointedly, since you speak as not an American, you probably don't have the singular pleasure of being misinformed by the US media (which is a whole different type and level of disinformation than, say, the BBC) and so you have no earthly idea how that would affect you.
It does have its bright sides, I'll admit. But, aside from the admittedly robust legal protections dividing religion from state in most circumstances, the tolerance you speak of is an unintended consequence of most who hold power right now in America; I find no great love for the value of tolerance expressed amongst the Relgious Right in America, any more than any other extremists, secular or sectarian, that one might study. I also, I must say, doubt that the correlation of scientific stuntedness with those types of success we listed is one that can be sustainably maintained; eventually, the bottom would fall out, and the US would be eclipsed in those areas by other powers (for real, not just pretend, like the example [elsewhere in the thread] of the EU collectively having a larger economy than the US without having any sort of cultural or political unity).
I guess this is where we fundamentally disagree. I find the conscious liar far more dangerous than he who is simply mistaken, because the one who is consciously manipulating his statements contrary to the truth has an agenda (whatever that may be),and so usually cannot be reasoned with apart from that agenda. When a falsity is declared, it is only dangerous (at all) if it is important; i.e. a person can believe a tomato is not a fruit, and unless that person is a botant that error is really inconsequential (unless he or she is playing cutthroat Trivial Pursuit or something similarly demented). It is more consequential if a botanist went around telling people that a tomato is not a fruit when he or she was well aware that it is.
On some very few matters, a mistake is every way as damaging as a lie...but they don't happen in a high school science class; idiocy there learned can be unlearned. I find 'intelligent design' and 'creation science' far more distasteful than mere 'creationism' (the young earth versions of which I also find completely ridiculous) because it is an intentional falsity regading the character of the doctrine being pushed. But there are metaphysical assertions, such as positing a deity (or not) that can hold a belief that rests beyond the touch of evidence; zealousness in metaphysics is an entirely different problem and one that has nothing to do with induction or 'denial of truth' in any sense that we can know it.
AIDS is primarily a problem of education. As for child porn, as far as quantitatively, there are more crimes of violence than there are of lust (even, I'm betting, if you included adultery as a 'crime'), the number of assaults and murders together is vastly higher than all sex crimes put together. Since all humans possess the capacity for both wrath and lust (except, I suppose, eunuchs) it seems to indicate that the impulse toward wrath is stronger vis a vis overriding the conscious will than lust, generally speaking. 'Horny' may make longer-term consequential decisions that end up being negative because of a lack of foresight, but 'angry' more immediately overrides control of the will. Thus, anger mitigates culpability and lust aggravates it, because our system of law (which was what the conversation was originally about) regards the free decision making capability of the individual as one of the key markers of legal responsibility.
First off, and I don't think you read very carefully, I am not a relativist, nor asserting that the truth content of an age is indeterminate is in any sense a relativist position. There are not independent standards for truth *that we have access to* outside of the current inductive rubric, including such things as theories of observation. Thus, what is really *meaningless* is any assertion that we could know, as you put it, that 'mankind in general is become (sic) less wrong in degree and frequency since we could only know this if we presuppose our current inductive methodology is already correct. That's begging the question. Arguments from pragmatism fail as well, because 'what works' is in no way necessarily correlated with 'what is true'. A doctor can have a cure, and find a new cure that seems to work better, and 'discover' it through a methodology that it may turn out is flawed, and yet the cure still works 'better'.
Incidentally, I don't see how my fellow countrymen's fetishism regarding 'traditional' values in any sense is an ushering in of a global (or quite honestly, even local) reversal of the *seeming* trend you propose is true. The scientific world, including in the US, is proceeding more or less oblivious to the church next door and their insistance of fighting a basically non-existent battle between two epistemologies. Is creationism in the schools a greater setback to evolutionary biology than Bohr's mdoel is to physics? It takes physics students a little while to flush out all the crap they learned in high school physics, and yet not many people complain about the ridiculously outdated and flat-out wrong (so far as our episteme indicates) theory that we insist on teahing about the structure of atoms. A physics student friend of mind described learningphysics in teh curent school system as learning the whole damn subject over again every year, from grade school straight throgh univeristy, with each year further afield than the last, and he could not for the life of him see the utility in using a physics class to essentially teach the history of physics, rather than current understanding. And yet somehow, there are still Quantum Physicists graduating from universities, and that number hasn't trended downwards. Biology, likewise, will get over the idiocy of politicians and even the people who support them.
Attempted rape is prosecuted differently (and carries a lesser sentence) than rape does, as is usually the case in American criminal law where a failed attempt is usually punished less harshly than a successfully executed crime. You are quite right that most rapes are not mechanically succesful; some believe for psychological reasons, but I believe that a more relevant effect is that most violent crimes (including rape) have alcohol as an aggravating factor, and alcohol intoxication impedes the male ability to maintain an erection. On the other point, are you seriously saying that as a teen you had as little control of your actions due to being horny as if you were 'seeing-red' angry? I cannot believe that, and for me, the teenage years weren't all that long ago.
Which scientific method is that? Naive falsificationism? Popperian Falsificationism? Kuhnian Paradigms? Laudan's 'whatever makes shiny happy people shiny happy toys' justification methodology? Feyerabend's 'let's crash this car into that mountain, and hey those chemicals are really colorful and let's see what happens when we light everything on fire' anti-methodology?
I think you will find your 'God' slightly schizophrenic; neither scientists nor philosophers of science agree on what the 'Scientific Method' is, nevermind more important questions relating to your other article of faith, namely whether knowledge is even an ultimately progressive and accumulative process.
Incidentally, you will find that in all science, there are always statements that must be taken 'on faith'. Axioms, theories of observation, commensurability issues, etc.
it tells that most Americans are more likely to believe what they find desirable to believe, rather than the truth.
Hey, buddy, that's everyone. The only thing that changes are the idiosyncrasies, the individual blind spots, usually about the things that we personally or culturally choose to care about. That my fellow countrymen happen to believe a particularly embarrassing one is unfortunate, but in the grand scheme of things is hardly the ultimate sin against 'Truth'. It is a telling fact that in every stage of human history, a large portion of people believed that they had stumbled (by revelation or inductive practices or some combination thereof) onto the basic paradigm that accurately describes truth. They were all, every single one of them, wrong. Why do we believe we are different than them, that this age we are lucky enough to live in is somehow different than all those others? One need not believe in relative truth (and I don't) to believe that for the actual amount of truth that we can be honestly confident to presently hold, our current beliefs might as well be treated relatively.
I agree that it sucks for people who live in an age defined by the scientific enterprise to be lorded over militarily and economically by a scientifically stunted nation. But then so was Greece by Rome, and yet life (historically speaking) goes on.
P.S. Don't ever believe, in this age of media and relative concentration of power that the actions of the US are driven by the opinions of its citizens at large. It's very much the other way around; citizens are the played, not the players. That should be the far more terrifying realization than that rural Kansas doesn't know jack about Evolution.
Some jurisdictions recognize different degrees of sexual assault. That aside, I agree it seems like an odd anomaly...but I would submit to you that rage, for example, causes physiological changes (mostly involving very large amounts of adrenaline quickly introduced into the bloodstream) that are much harder to control than the hormones that control the immediate sexual response. Besides, sexual intercourse of any sort is more complicated than wrathful murder simply by virtue of the act requiring more deliberate and lengthier steps (generally speaking) and thus more opportunities to regain control of oneself; as you mentioned, it's much harder to accidentally rape someone than accidentally kill them, and most of those cases involve substance intoxication (and thus aggravating and mitigating factors of an entirely different sort). I believe that this unevenness you describe is a direct result of society's recognition that wrath and lust (to use moral language) are qualitatively different, to be sure, but also quantitatively different regarding their relative effect on the conscious mind and the ability of the afflicted individual to control that effect.
If you parse the original sentence, it is still technically correct (if a little odd); we often do not use the definite article 'the' to describe something like a language, but it is implicit, especially when making normative standards, that there is a definite object to compare. 'The English' refers to an objective standard; whether such an object even exists is another matter not even vaguely related to the question at hand, and irrelevant, since properly constructed statements may refer to virtual or non-sensical subject matter and still be syntactically well-formed. Interestingly, the difference between "the" and "that", while substantially changing the structure of the sentence, does not much change its content; it basically means the same thing!
It does only apply to trademarks, not copyrights, insofar as the ability to maintain its existence (i.e. if you fail substantially to defend a trademark, it ceases to exist as a legal protection.) But, if you fail to defend copyright, or selectively defend it, you have a serious problem when it comes time to identify damages; e.g. "if Jane Citizen is undertaking the same actions as me, then she is doing the same sort of damage as me; if you don't care about her damages, why do you care about mine?"
But you have to admit, the RIAA's position on the issue paints them into a corner that practically forces them to act in this manner (not that I'm in any way sympathetic!). Think about it; if your legal argument is essentially that a 'culture of piracy' is making devaluing your work product through unlicenced non-fair use copying culturally acceptable to the point where Joe and Jane Citizen don't think much of it, and piracy itself is almost trivially easy despite attempts at copy protection, what option do they have except to sue everyone?
Put another way, say they did find Jane Citizen downloaded two songs and say they decide not to sue, based on the 'let's be good corporate citizens' principle, or the alternative 'let's not be total dicks so that the PR dept. don't all kill themselves' principle. Then, they sue the aforementioned (and mostly fictitious) 'Pirate Kingpin'. If pirate kingpin's lawyer is not a moron, they will show cause to subpoena tons and tons of records of other 'pirates' that the RIAA have identified, and then ask pointedly why Jane Citizen wasn't sued. And ten seconds later, case dismissed w/ prejudice, and RIAA probably smacked around for selective defense of their copyright.
I think the overarching point is there already is a fantastically easy way to get Cocaine.
1. Drive up to any high school
2. Watch the kids outside for five minutes
3. Identify the drug dealer
4. ????
5. (Profit?!) Score some Cocaine.
There are other effective algorithms for obtaining Cocaine, most involve going to a seedy area and/or speaking with a junkie friend of a friend. Point of course is, if its illegal for kids to have cigarettes and alcohol, never mind 'da crack', why on earth do we believe that prohibition of these substances does anything except cycle the stupider/unluckier ones through the penal system?
Incidentally, the larger social costs of cocaine are threefold: increased crime due to substance's price (which is artifically high to deal with the risk fo being an illicit substance), overdose (usually due to impurity of product, again, because pharmacies aren't making the stuff), and the actual pharmacological effects of the drug in question, that is, how it alters mood, behavior, and health. I personally would rather get past problems 1 and 2 (which claim way more lives and money than the last one) and instead concentrate on the *actual* problem that drugs themselves produce.
I don't know why I didn't think of that. You are absolutely right.
You know (or ought to) that he was talking comparatively. He's saying, and considering Israel I would agree with him, that Israelis would indeed be way more irritated and concerned about their own military and police detaining israelis and killing them with impunity than they are irritated and concerned about terrorism. And he's right, to boot: a culture that sanctions violence against its own citizens is bound to be far less healthy and have a more terrified citizenry than one which is constantly the victim of terrorism. Compare, for example, Soviet Russia with present-day Israel.
My sarcasm was also uncalled for. Sorry about that. And I usually refrain from characterizing other people's arguments; I guess we were both having a 'silly' day. ;)
I've read conflicting reports about Mozart's wealth and poverty. I suppose a great deal of the popular conception is framed by that very good but largely ficticious story "Amadeus", but I got the general sense that regardless of his wealth or poverty, he always got invited to all of the really cool parties...and that's worth more than all the money in Austria.
Actually, he might start playing for the other team. It's been proposed by many conservative commentators already. He's a DINO, anyway. His position would play just fine to Republicans if there was a convenient elephant symbol next to his name come November. It's happened before.
My only quibble with your post (and it doesn't undercut your point at all, hence a quibble) is that the race wasn't even remotely tight, particularly during the last two weeks; the polls had Lieberman getting pasted to the tune of 7-10 points. Exits showed a slightly tighter race (4-5 points) which isn't really tight at all in a primary, particular for an unknown vs. a long-time incumbent.
I was thinking about that myself. I'm no Luddite, but it seems to me the inexhorable march of advancement is fast outstripping any hope of catching up with social and cultural adaptation. Stuff like this makes me think "Why would anyone (legitimate) do this? Just to see if they could?" It seems like a stupid justification.
But then, isn't it stupendously better for this type of danger to show up in an academic paper, for all to see and think about how to counter, rather than spooks, foreign spooks, or some black hat with an attitude being able to use it surreptitiously for a long, long time because nobody else thought about it or publicized it?
Usable by the god-fearing tech-illiterate masses? Yes. And that's what matters. What good is privacy if only geeks who have crosshairs on them sixty ways from Sunday when the Revolution comes (you can SMELL them in a crowd. Yech.) have it?
[OT]By the way, I hate grammar Nazi's periods, too. LOL.[/OT]
I think it has very little to do with the wealth of the patron or the 'wilyness' of the artist. It rather comes down to one rather simple rule: Sturgeon's Law. 99.9% of everything (regardless of motive, genre, medium, culture, etc.) is CRAP. As you say, the remainder (usually) survives and can be enjoyed after the great filtering is done.
Speaking of lowbrow, I seem today to not be able to use 'its' and 'it's' properly. That middle part should read "...And it's not arrogance or condescention..."