The mechanism that the GPL uses to enforce this is the copyright owned by the original creator of the work. If copyright were abolished, it would be legally OK if I took the source code to Firefox, created and released a derivative web browser, and refused to release any of the modified source to anyone.
True, but it would be pointless anyway. No law would exist preventing you from decompiling their binary and using the decompiled code directly. Sure, it would lack comments and directly understandable variable names, but that's a minor annoyance compared to what we have nowadays. A compatibility layer such as Wine, for instance, would be MUCH simpler to develop if all you had to do to accomplish it was to replace Windows' kernel with a layer that called Linux' one, then add on top of it Windows' own remaining binaries, without any legal worry whatsoever.
you think so-called "freedome" you understand is always righteous?
In one word: yes. As a matter of principle, my own position on this is that, if the majority of the population on any given piece of land want to become an independent nation, they have the right to, period. The right of secession should be an human right. No group should have the obligation of being the "property" of a certain nation.
Now, of course history shows that almost no country accepts this right. USA, for instance, had a civil war 150 years ago to prevent secession; here in Brazil (I'm Brazilian) we had our fair share of small wars in the 19th century to prevent pieces of the country from becoming independent; nowadays Spain, England, Russia and probably others still have trouble with secession terrorists in a fight that never stops; and so on and so forth. Thus, I'm pretty sure China arguments against the independence of Tibet are far from unheard off elsewhere.
But do you know what? I don't care. If someone doesn't want to be friends with you, you have no right to force him to fake it. This is valid for individuals and it should be also valid for nations.
Subpixel rendering doesn't "blur" the fonts, it does the opposite. It uses the vertical (or sometimes horizontal) divisions between the red, green and blue elements of each pixel on a TFT to render the fonts at a 3x higher resolution (on one axis).
I don't know about you, but having red, green and blue dots scattered around black characters feels blurred to me, in the specific sense of something out of focus. Those dots would be alright if they were black, but a "rainbow glow" intermixed with my text isn't something I appreciate.
Not still using a CRT are you?;)
In fact, yes, I am. I prefer CRTs because I like the flexibility of having many resolutions available, something LCDs can only emulate, and quite badly at that, always introducing all kinds of distortions.
What doesn't mean I was referring to CRTs, as I know pretty well subpixel isn't designed for them. On notebooks I have no option but using LCDs, and I always disable font blurring on them.
I'd have liked ME if MS hadn't disabled real mode driver support for no better reason than "just because". I had lots of hardware at the time that required stuff to be loaded from CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, and none worked in ME, not to mention having to boot from a floppy to play DOS games.
Other than this, it seemed to be a 98SE with better icons, and I'd have enjoyed using it if it had been at all possible.
If I already have corefonts installed, do I need or want these? I've tried the Liberation fonts some months ago, but went back to mscorefonts.
My reason was that, while Liberation seem to look as "good" as MS' ones with font blurring enabled (that subpixel-something I hate, also the reason I put "good" between quotes), once you disable the blurring they become a set of disconnected lines and dots that only slightly resemble the alphabet. MS fonts, on the other hand, look beautifully, sharp and crisp, on blurless mode. Now, I don't know whether Liberation has improved its blurless support since then, but I doubt it. It seems nowadays everything is designed for blur-only operation.
So, if you're also an anti-blur old timer like me, I'd say no, you don't need or want these, quite the opposite, you'll want as much distance from them as possible.
If, on the other hand, you do like blurred fonts, then they're a good replacement, I guess.
Hobbes was an idiot who believed that mankind is so inherently bad and violent that only a totalitarian government can keep it from a state of "war of all against all". No, not really. People who read him superficially get moved by his hyperboles on the first chapters of "Leviathan" and then go around believing this is his whole take on the subject. There's the whole remaining of the book however, and there things get way more interesting.
Sure. Conversely then, Hobbs shouldn't be stating in "no uncertain terms" like it is the result of a lab experiment. That was kind of my point..o. Well, you can see it just as a presentation style, as it would become pretty boring pretty fast for one to write a lot of "it seems", "I noticed that" etc.
On the other hand, let's not forget that a Physics lab report shows the same kind of "excessive certainty". When a physicist says that "experiment n has shown that foo behaves bar", that's a short form of the more precise: "experiment n caused what I perceive as the device m to present what I perceive as a screen showing what I perceive as numbers that seem to indicate that the abstract concept bar, developed using this and that subjective categories of understanding, has a strong resemblance with the hypothesized formal property foo, presuming, of course, that our perception of reality is at least at some level correlated with reality itself and that our abstract constructs upon it also correlate with the aspects of it outside our sensory reach".
When you take into consideration the extremely rigorous standards about what we know about our ability of knowing, as used in Philosophy of Science, that's roughly how lab report statements about any aspect of any exact science should read, and that's because I loosened a little the level of carefulness.
That's why I myself don't mind much the "loose language" used in some human sciences. Down to the core, the exact same thing happens at the exact sciences.
Thanks for this post. I've not seen this argument before, and it puts this discussion into an interesting context. Hehe, you're welcome.:-) A good starting point to understand this better would be Hobbe's main book, "Leviathan". Afterwards, reading both those who Hobbes is refuting, as well as those who came after him and refuted him, makes it all even more interesting, as lots of further points become much clearer.
By the way, a current author that analyzes the Iraq war and the many, many, many US errors in it, all under what appears to be a strong Hobbesian light, is William Lind. His main theory is that, when the US destructs a state, as it did in Iraq, without having the actual means of constructing another in its place, the whole thing result in a completely decentralized caos much like Hobbes' "state of nature". Then, instead of having one formal entity with which to deal ("the state"), you end up with 100, 200, 500, 1000 wannabe kings, dictators, warlords etc., each one a small power in itself and all ready to start one or more civil wars in pursuit of sovereignty over the whole mess. Win a "surge" against one, keep believing in the fiction that you stroke a blow against "al Qaeda" (when al Qaeda is actually just one group among those, and a small one at that), and you'll still have the other 999 to deal with, plus the five or six that'll appear to fill the void from the one you smashed, all of them independent from each other, all of them requiring a separate, independent "peace agreement". How do you win in such a situation? The answer is simply: you don't. You either leave, trying to keep face by "declaring victory" and not looking back, or you drag the thing until exhaustion and leave anyway. There's no positive outcome, just bad and less bad ones.
It's a pretty interesting set of texts if you start from the very first article (the one at the bottom of the list) and go reading upwards. It's well worth the effort.
I'd like to see the lab where he did all his scientific experiments on this stuff. There's a problem in your question.
The scientific method as used by Physics etc., requires, first, that the subject who does the study and the object under study to be different and independent (you're here, the particle accelerator is there); second, that the object be a formal mathematical abstraction (what an electron or a quark are doesn't matter, what matters is how they relate as equation parameters); third, that this abstraction be structured around unobservable entities fully distinct from the "thing" from which the abstraction is constructed (you do not study "this flower on top of this table", you study "leptons", "masses", "organic molecules", "space-time curvatures").
So, by definition thus methodology cannot be applied to human sciences, where the subject and the object are the same (human beings as human beings), objects aren't limited to their numeric parameters (you cannot quantify, say, customs), and the concepts are collectives of observables (a society, a class, a caste etc. as groups of concrete individuals, not as unobservable entities "of which" individuals "are made").
Now, that doesn't mean there aren't methods in human sciences. For instance, one basic logical requirement that applies for them but doesn't for exact sciences, where it surely wouldn't make sense, is that your hypothesis must be fully compatible with you yourself, i.e., you cannot be an exception to the general rule you're hypothesizing. But the point is that, no matter how hard you try, trying to "fit" human sciences under the methodologies of abstract sciences, or the other way around, just doesn't work. They're independent domains.
In short: asking for a lab experiment of something that cannot be lab-experimented is to completely miss the target. It just doesn't work that way.
Oh yeah, arming one group of people and giving them a monopoly on violence is the solution to interpersonal conflict. Well, Hobbes used to say that the advantage of governments isn't that violence itself ceases to exist, just that it switches level. Or, to be more precise, that outside a state you have violence at a personal level, with people shotting each other in the streets as the only way of being sure they won't be the next killed is by being the next killers, while with states, although you still have violence among them, at least people living inside them get some measure of peaceful coexistence. The difference, thus, isn't one of "good" versus "evil", but rather one of "bad" versus "worse".
As a result of this reasoning, his take on the subject was that, for people to be able to accomplish anything better than having to live in an eternal struggle for today's food (where anyone can come and take from you what you made, no one bothers to produce anything, much less any surplus), the very first thing they need is a state strong enough to both make other states afraid of messing with them and to make the people under its umbrella afraid of messing with each other. Once you have this established, no matter how (and at this point a totalitarian tyranny is okay for him), you have peace enough for surplus production to develop. And once you have a functional society, then you can start pursuing other goals, such as, say, freedom of belief, freedom of speech, democracy, individual rights etc. (which, contrary to common belief, he pretty much preferred).
So, yes, arming one group of people and giving them a monopoly on violence is indeed the solution to interpersonal conflict. Even if it leads, in the worst case scenario, to the monopolist becoming an absolute totalitarian hereditary monarch and everyone else becoming his personal slaves, as in this case interpersonal conflicts are also few. But, and this is important, it's a solution only to interpersonal conflicts. Everything else requires, of course, much more than this.
A monopoly in violence, thus, is just the very first step required in solving human problems, as it solves our very first problem. But it's never the solution to all of our problems.
Thats why almost everyone railing against the government seems to come off as or is viewed by the public as a kook or some sort of nutbag. True enough. People who just say the government is evil do an extreme disservice by using such hyperbolic rhetorics.
I myself use an approach that doesn't sound so "cool" as a shouting slogan is, but which people accept much more easily: I actually explain what the issue with government is. I tell them basically this: that any group, by being a collective of individuals, has a collective "moral level" that is at best the average of the "moral level" of each individual that's part of it. Thus, government being a collective group composed of all the people in government, you just have to ask yourself what's the typical politician's morals. If you can answer that, you can answer what's the average moral level of government itself. Compare that to the average moral level of the population as a whole, and it becomes pretty clear that government is almost by definition "just worse".
By switching from a "good vs. evil" discourse to one of relative scales where neither "us" nor "them" are at either extreme, but we both are in the middle, "they" just a little below than "us", those with whom I talk recognize that yes, we actually must watch government carefully so that they don't drop "too much".
Longer, but truer. And by being truer, it just works.
If we consider engineering to be the broad field of people who take scattered pieces of very specific knowledge (pieces that all by themselves are pretty useless, even though interesting), then mix and merge those with the objective of getting at something that does something, then yes, Software Engineering is engineering.
It's really not that much different from, say, the mechanical engineer who takes some Newtonian mechanics, pieces from fluid dynamics, some bits from materials science, some core electrical concepts, certain math procedures etc., and end up with an automobile, i.e., a real object that, by mixing and matching all of the above, becomes a functional whole. The difference is only that the "things" software engineers want to produce merge, by their own nature, a bigger amount of logical disciplines than other types of engineering. But the physical is still there, in the form of the machinery components in which the software will run.
Being devout muslims I doubt they are that keen on it regardless of the whole sect differences etc. Not really. Contrary to the traditional versions of Islam, the branch followed by the Saudi princes, called Wahhabism, is one that appeared in the 18th century claiming that it's the only correct version of Islam, that all the others have been corrupted by human traditions (that's why they regularly destroy ancient Islamic shrines, such as Muhammad's house, old mosques etc.), that the only path for a true believer is a "return" (they believe it's a return, others obviously disagree) to a fundamentalist, literalist, "sola scriptura"-style understanding of the Koran, that thus all other Muslims are infidels and must be dealt with as infidels, etc.
So, whatever bad things happens to non-Wahhabi Muslims isn't of much concern to them. Rather, they most probably see this whole mess as a good opportunity to spread Wahhabism even more, since it fits much better with anti-US sentiments than the older, more reasonable branches do.
If I lend my house to some idiot, and there is a report of someone having brought stolen property into my house, that doesn't make me a thief Unfortunately, it can make you lose your house anyway: Asset forfeiture.
It's even more complicated than this. Historically, things worked more or less thus:
First, you had the Old Regime, where society is divided into hierarchical castes, each with its own social role. The Enlightenment went against this with a proposal of dismissing the whole notion of social hierarchy. So, you had on one hand the "pro-hierarchy", and on the other "anti-hierarchy".
The "anti-hierarchy" guys, the left of the time, were united around the slogan "equality, fraternity, liberty" (from French Revolution fame). But as things happen, once you obliterate your opposition, the internal divergences rise to the foreground and things get messy again.
So, inside the Enlightenment guys a new division developed: on one side, you had the guys who believed in a non-hierarchical way of organizing society around the notion of everyone being "a citizen". On the other, the guys who believed in a non-hierarchical way of organizing society around the notion of everyone being "an individual". You could say that from the three-pole "equality, fraternity, freedom", the first group went with the "equality and fraternity", while the second went with the "freedom".
The "freedom first" group called themselves liberals. The other went by a lot of names, but both were clearly opposed to the old regime "conservatives". But as the conservatives disappeared, the liberals, who were already thought of as the right of the left, were more and more seen as the de new right. And somehow the term "conservatives" ended up applied to them, what it shouldn't.
Anyway, as time went by, another split happened, this time among the folks of the "equality and fraternity", a.k.a. "citizens, not individuals" field. On one side, the communists, anarchists and other groups that went against the whole of social structure in pursuit of complete "equality". On the other, the "fraternity" guys, who preached a society built around some kind of shared quality as a means of integration and driving force, who later become the fascists.
That's why we find so many similarities between, first, fascism and communism. And second, fascism/communism and "capitalism" (classical liberalism). It because they are all sons of the same father.
A radical divergence from the three can only be observed when you insert the old regime conservatism in the equation. That's where you find something in clear contra-distinction with them all.
The issue is that in so doing, you destroy the merchantability of the work in question. Not really. You just change it. Instead of making an economic calculation based on how many people wanting your intellectual production might see themselves obliged to pay for it, you'll do it based on how many people wanting your intellectual production are willing to voluntarily pay you for it. There will still be paying people, just in a somewhat smaller amount, and under a different distribution. The end result will be a changed market, not a non-existent one. But it's not possible to predict in which way it'll change.
Where can I buy some of these robots? (I assume you're talking about robots more advanced than a Roomba.) No, for now it's about the Roomba and its slightly more advanced (and expensive) cousins, plus lots and lots and lots of house automation. There just isn't (yet) AI and freedom of movement enough in these tools for them to be able to fully replace an human being, even at such repetitive tasks. With what exists, rather than have them adapting to the way you live, you'd have to adjust your house (and living) to the robots limitations for them do to more than the very, very basic, and the fact that Japanese houses are usually tiny and things such as beds aren't used much there probably also helps a lot in this area. But I know that seniors Japanese, since they're the persons more need of care (not to mention the ones with the bigger savings accounts), are also the ones getting additional options faster, such as robots that can carry medication around and not let them forget to take them, or who help them walk around. It'll still be some years (or decades, more probably) before these machines are ready for wide scale usage.
Europe is becoming "more" Slavic and Latin? You seem to be confusing Germanic with European. Hehe, yeah, sorry for that. What I mean is many things, so let me be more specific para separating them.
By "Slavic" I mean that nowadays Western Europe "invites", by way of forming a single entity with them, the people from Eastern Europe to emigrate to their are. Being that they were satellites of Russia for decades, they're much poorer than their neighbors, so they go. Of course this happens first to the rich member countries nearest to Eastern Europe, but over time they'll spread all over Western Europe. So, Europe as a whole will end up seeing lots more of both Slavs and Slavic cultures.
And for "Latin", I meant people from Latin America. Sure, their (our actually, as I'm Brazilian) culture came originally from Southwestern Europe and all, but it's undeniable that over time the culture of Spain, Portugal etc. diverged from that of Latin American countries. Thus, by "more Latin" I mean the "coming back" of a different strand of Latin culture, similar sure, but not quite the same as that of the old continent.
The Japanese aren't interested in bringing foreigners into the country. They prefer Japan to have its culture preserved no matter what the price. Thus, to compensate for the shortage of people due to the population becoming old and having less and less children, they prefer to invest strongly in robotics. Nowadays there are personal robots over there to do things, such as house cleaning and other unpleasant jobs, that in countries which opt for immigration are left to immigrants.
I'm not saying they're right or wrong, it's just the way they want it to be, and it's different from the way chosen by Europe or the USA. But one thing is certain: by pursuing this policy Japan has no "risk" of becoming "less Japanese" over time, while Europe is slowly becoming more Slavic, Arabic, Latin etc. each day. Whether "going international" is ultimately good or bad for Europe on the long term, or whether "going ethnic" is ultimately good or bad for Japan on the long term, is something we'll only discover when that long term is over.
It's all this confusion of terminology that serves to confuse the end user even more when they think about jumping on board with a new operating system.
I agree, but you have to consider that it's somewhat of a stretch to think a certain technological field (the whole of it), such as that of the Unix clones, must adopt the terminology used by another, when they developed independently and, worse, the one using the "wrong" terminology came first.
Most Linux advocates have an engineering mindset. They prefer to stick to the precise definitions of technical terms rather than adopting the looser versions adopted by PR departments. An "operating system", in the proper, classical meaning of the expression, are the pieces of software that directly controls the hardware itself, what usually means the kernel and very few additional pieces of software (sometimes just the kernel). Whatever else you run on top of it, such as a graphical windowing system, isn't the OS properly, but something else. Thus, this something else they prefer to call a "distribution", as it's in fact just an easy way to distributed pre-compiled software packages around, one of them being a kernel.
On the other hand, manufacturers of distributions that target common people, such as Canonical (who makes Ubuntu), are aware that sticking to this strongly technical approach isn't going to help adoption among people who use these words in a much loosely way. So, in the material they use to present Ubuntu to people who usually have no idea whatsoever that something other than Windows can run in a computer, Canonical calls Ubuntu an operating system, not a distribution, and they don't emphasize the fact it runs on top of Linux, preferring to leave this information either in the small print, or even completely out. See, for example, here, here and here: in neither of these pages the word "Linux" even appears. You'll find it in the main page, but only once, without emphasis and in a matter of fact way.
I myself have also adopted this approach. When talking about what OS I use by non-technically minded people, I don't say "Linux", I say "Ubuntu". And some even answer: "Ah! I've heard about that."
Slashdot Mirror
An order of magnitude over XML? So is, well, just about anything.
Well, let's also not forget that the meaning of the expression "an order of magnitude" depends strongly from the numeric base you're using.
True, but it would be pointless anyway. No law would exist preventing you from decompiling their binary and using the decompiled code directly. Sure, it would lack comments and directly understandable variable names, but that's a minor annoyance compared to what we have nowadays. A compatibility layer such as Wine, for instance, would be MUCH simpler to develop if all you had to do to accomplish it was to replace Windows' kernel with a layer that called Linux' one, then add on top of it Windows' own remaining binaries, without any legal worry whatsoever.
In one word: yes. As a matter of principle, my own position on this is that, if the majority of the population on any given piece of land want to become an independent nation, they have the right to, period. The right of secession should be an human right. No group should have the obligation of being the "property" of a certain nation.
Now, of course history shows that almost no country accepts this right. USA, for instance, had a civil war 150 years ago to prevent secession; here in Brazil (I'm Brazilian) we had our fair share of small wars in the 19th century to prevent pieces of the country from becoming independent; nowadays Spain, England, Russia and probably others still have trouble with secession terrorists in a fight that never stops; and so on and so forth. Thus, I'm pretty sure China arguments against the independence of Tibet are far from unheard off elsewhere.
But do you know what? I don't care. If someone doesn't want to be friends with you, you have no right to force him to fake it. This is valid for individuals and it should be also valid for nations.
I don't know about you, but having red, green and blue dots scattered around black characters feels blurred to me, in the specific sense of something out of focus. Those dots would be alright if they were black, but a "rainbow glow" intermixed with my text isn't something I appreciate.
In fact, yes, I am. I prefer CRTs because I like the flexibility of having many resolutions available, something LCDs can only emulate, and quite badly at that, always introducing all kinds of distortions.
What doesn't mean I was referring to CRTs, as I know pretty well subpixel isn't designed for them. On notebooks I have no option but using LCDs, and I always disable font blurring on them.
I'd have liked ME if MS hadn't disabled real mode driver support for no better reason than "just because". I had lots of hardware at the time that required stuff to be loaded from CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, and none worked in ME, not to mention having to boot from a floppy to play DOS games.
Other than this, it seemed to be a 98SE with better icons, and I'd have enjoyed using it if it had been at all possible.
My reason was that, while Liberation seem to look as "good" as MS' ones with font blurring enabled (that subpixel-something I hate, also the reason I put "good" between quotes), once you disable the blurring they become a set of disconnected lines and dots that only slightly resemble the alphabet. MS fonts, on the other hand, look beautifully, sharp and crisp, on blurless mode. Now, I don't know whether Liberation has improved its blurless support since then, but I doubt it. It seems nowadays everything is designed for blur-only operation.
So, if you're also an anti-blur old timer like me, I'd say no, you don't need or want these, quite the opposite, you'll want as much distance from them as possible.
If, on the other hand, you do like blurred fonts, then they're a good replacement, I guess.
On the other hand, let's not forget that a Physics lab report shows the same kind of "excessive certainty". When a physicist says that "experiment n has shown that foo behaves bar", that's a short form of the more precise: "experiment n caused what I perceive as the device m to present what I perceive as a screen showing what I perceive as numbers that seem to indicate that the abstract concept bar, developed using this and that subjective categories of understanding, has a strong resemblance with the hypothesized formal property foo, presuming, of course, that our perception of reality is at least at some level correlated with reality itself and that our abstract constructs upon it also correlate with the aspects of it outside our sensory reach".
When you take into consideration the extremely rigorous standards about what we know about our ability of knowing, as used in Philosophy of Science, that's roughly how lab report statements about any aspect of any exact science should read, and that's because I loosened a little the level of carefulness.
That's why I myself don't mind much the "loose language" used in some human sciences. Down to the core, the exact same thing happens at the exact sciences.
By the way, a current author that analyzes the Iraq war and the many, many, many US errors in it, all under what appears to be a strong Hobbesian light, is William Lind. His main theory is that, when the US destructs a state, as it did in Iraq, without having the actual means of constructing another in its place, the whole thing result in a completely decentralized caos much like Hobbes' "state of nature". Then, instead of having one formal entity with which to deal ("the state"), you end up with 100, 200, 500, 1000 wannabe kings, dictators, warlords etc., each one a small power in itself and all ready to start one or more civil wars in pursuit of sovereignty over the whole mess. Win a "surge" against one, keep believing in the fiction that you stroke a blow against "al Qaeda" (when al Qaeda is actually just one group among those, and a small one at that), and you'll still have the other 999 to deal with, plus the five or six that'll appear to fill the void from the one you smashed, all of them independent from each other, all of them requiring a separate, independent "peace agreement". How do you win in such a situation? The answer is simply: you don't. You either leave, trying to keep face by "declaring victory" and not looking back, or you drag the thing until exhaustion and leave anyway. There's no positive outcome, just bad and less bad ones.
It's a pretty interesting set of texts if you start from the very first article (the one at the bottom of the list) and go reading upwards. It's well worth the effort.
The scientific method as used by Physics etc., requires, first, that the subject who does the study and the object under study to be different and independent (you're here, the particle accelerator is there); second, that the object be a formal mathematical abstraction (what an electron or a quark are doesn't matter, what matters is how they relate as equation parameters); third, that this abstraction be structured around unobservable entities fully distinct from the "thing" from which the abstraction is constructed (you do not study "this flower on top of this table", you study "leptons", "masses", "organic molecules", "space-time curvatures").
So, by definition thus methodology cannot be applied to human sciences, where the subject and the object are the same (human beings as human beings), objects aren't limited to their numeric parameters (you cannot quantify, say, customs), and the concepts are collectives of observables (a society, a class, a caste etc. as groups of concrete individuals, not as unobservable entities "of which" individuals "are made").
Now, that doesn't mean there aren't methods in human sciences. For instance, one basic logical requirement that applies for them but doesn't for exact sciences, where it surely wouldn't make sense, is that your hypothesis must be fully compatible with you yourself, i.e., you cannot be an exception to the general rule you're hypothesizing. But the point is that, no matter how hard you try, trying to "fit" human sciences under the methodologies of abstract sciences, or the other way around, just doesn't work. They're independent domains.
In short: asking for a lab experiment of something that cannot be lab-experimented is to completely miss the target. It just doesn't work that way.
As a result of this reasoning, his take on the subject was that, for people to be able to accomplish anything better than having to live in an eternal struggle for today's food (where anyone can come and take from you what you made, no one bothers to produce anything, much less any surplus), the very first thing they need is a state strong enough to both make other states afraid of messing with them and to make the people under its umbrella afraid of messing with each other. Once you have this established, no matter how (and at this point a totalitarian tyranny is okay for him), you have peace enough for surplus production to develop. And once you have a functional society, then you can start pursuing other goals, such as, say, freedom of belief, freedom of speech, democracy, individual rights etc. (which, contrary to common belief, he pretty much preferred).
So, yes, arming one group of people and giving them a monopoly on violence is indeed the solution to interpersonal conflict. Even if it leads, in the worst case scenario, to the monopolist becoming an absolute totalitarian hereditary monarch and everyone else becoming his personal slaves, as in this case interpersonal conflicts are also few. But, and this is important, it's a solution only to interpersonal conflicts. Everything else requires, of course, much more than this.
A monopoly in violence, thus, is just the very first step required in solving human problems, as it solves our very first problem. But it's never the solution to all of our problems.
I myself use an approach that doesn't sound so "cool" as a shouting slogan is, but which people accept much more easily: I actually explain what the issue with government is. I tell them basically this: that any group, by being a collective of individuals, has a collective "moral level" that is at best the average of the "moral level" of each individual that's part of it. Thus, government being a collective group composed of all the people in government, you just have to ask yourself what's the typical politician's morals. If you can answer that, you can answer what's the average moral level of government itself. Compare that to the average moral level of the population as a whole, and it becomes pretty clear that government is almost by definition "just worse".
By switching from a "good vs. evil" discourse to one of relative scales where neither "us" nor "them" are at either extreme, but we both are in the middle, "they" just a little below than "us", those with whom I talk recognize that yes, we actually must watch government carefully so that they don't drop "too much".
Longer, but truer. And by being truer, it just works.
I'd like to see something like this for Wikipedia...
If we consider engineering to be the broad field of people who take scattered pieces of very specific knowledge (pieces that all by themselves are pretty useless, even though interesting), then mix and merge those with the objective of getting at something that does something, then yes, Software Engineering is engineering.
It's really not that much different from, say, the mechanical engineer who takes some Newtonian mechanics, pieces from fluid dynamics, some bits from materials science, some core electrical concepts, certain math procedures etc., and end up with an automobile, i.e., a real object that, by mixing and matching all of the above, becomes a functional whole. The difference is only that the "things" software engineers want to produce merge, by their own nature, a bigger amount of logical disciplines than other types of engineering. But the physical is still there, in the form of the machinery components in which the software will run.
So, whatever bad things happens to non-Wahhabi Muslims isn't of much concern to them. Rather, they most probably see this whole mess as a good opportunity to spread Wahhabism even more, since it fits much better with anti-US sentiments than the older, more reasonable branches do.
There is ONE divine principle, and Plato is Its Prophet!
It's even more complicated than this. Historically, things worked more or less thus:
First, you had the Old Regime, where society is divided into hierarchical castes, each with its own social role. The Enlightenment went against this with a proposal of dismissing the whole notion of social hierarchy. So, you had on one hand the "pro-hierarchy", and on the other "anti-hierarchy".
The "anti-hierarchy" guys, the left of the time, were united around the slogan "equality, fraternity, liberty" (from French Revolution fame). But as things happen, once you obliterate your opposition, the internal divergences rise to the foreground and things get messy again.
So, inside the Enlightenment guys a new division developed: on one side, you had the guys who believed in a non-hierarchical way of organizing society around the notion of everyone being "a citizen". On the other, the guys who believed in a non-hierarchical way of organizing society around the notion of everyone being "an individual". You could say that from the three-pole "equality, fraternity, freedom", the first group went with the "equality and fraternity", while the second went with the "freedom".
The "freedom first" group called themselves liberals. The other went by a lot of names, but both were clearly opposed to the old regime "conservatives". But as the conservatives disappeared, the liberals, who were already thought of as the right of the left, were more and more seen as the de new right. And somehow the term "conservatives" ended up applied to them, what it shouldn't.
Anyway, as time went by, another split happened, this time among the folks of the "equality and fraternity", a.k.a. "citizens, not individuals" field. On one side, the communists, anarchists and other groups that went against the whole of social structure in pursuit of complete "equality". On the other, the "fraternity" guys, who preached a society built around some kind of shared quality as a means of integration and driving force, who later become the fascists.
That's why we find so many similarities between, first, fascism and communism. And second, fascism/communism and "capitalism" (classical liberalism). It because they are all sons of the same father.
A radical divergence from the three can only be observed when you insert the old regime conservatism in the equation. That's where you find something in clear contra-distinction with them all.
Not if the DMCA DoS was sent from a country that has no extradition pact with the USA by an anonymous someone.
Exactly! That's why no one wrote books, made scientific discoveries, produced musics or did research and development before 1662!!!
Oh, wait...
By "Slavic" I mean that nowadays Western Europe "invites", by way of forming a single entity with them, the people from Eastern Europe to emigrate to their are. Being that they were satellites of Russia for decades, they're much poorer than their neighbors, so they go. Of course this happens first to the rich member countries nearest to Eastern Europe, but over time they'll spread all over Western Europe. So, Europe as a whole will end up seeing lots more of both Slavs and Slavic cultures.
And for "Latin", I meant people from Latin America. Sure, their (our actually, as I'm Brazilian) culture came originally from Southwestern Europe and all, but it's undeniable that over time the culture of Spain, Portugal etc. diverged from that of Latin American countries. Thus, by "more Latin" I mean the "coming back" of a different strand of Latin culture, similar sure, but not quite the same as that of the old continent.
That's it, basically.
The Japanese aren't interested in bringing foreigners into the country. They prefer Japan to have its culture preserved no matter what the price. Thus, to compensate for the shortage of people due to the population becoming old and having less and less children, they prefer to invest strongly in robotics. Nowadays there are personal robots over there to do things, such as house cleaning and other unpleasant jobs, that in countries which opt for immigration are left to immigrants.
I'm not saying they're right or wrong, it's just the way they want it to be, and it's different from the way chosen by Europe or the USA. But one thing is certain: by pursuing this policy Japan has no "risk" of becoming "less Japanese" over time, while Europe is slowly becoming more Slavic, Arabic, Latin etc. each day. Whether "going international" is ultimately good or bad for Europe on the long term, or whether "going ethnic" is ultimately good or bad for Japan on the long term, is something we'll only discover when that long term is over.
Most Linux advocates have an engineering mindset. They prefer to stick to the precise definitions of technical terms rather than adopting the looser versions adopted by PR departments. An "operating system", in the proper, classical meaning of the expression, are the pieces of software that directly controls the hardware itself, what usually means the kernel and very few additional pieces of software (sometimes just the kernel). Whatever else you run on top of it, such as a graphical windowing system, isn't the OS properly, but something else. Thus, this something else they prefer to call a "distribution", as it's in fact just an easy way to distributed pre-compiled software packages around, one of them being a kernel.
On the other hand, manufacturers of distributions that target common people, such as Canonical (who makes Ubuntu), are aware that sticking to this strongly technical approach isn't going to help adoption among people who use these words in a much loosely way. So, in the material they use to present Ubuntu to people who usually have no idea whatsoever that something other than Windows can run in a computer, Canonical calls Ubuntu an operating system, not a distribution, and they don't emphasize the fact it runs on top of Linux, preferring to leave this information either in the small print, or even completely out. See, for example, here, here and here: in neither of these pages the word "Linux" even appears. You'll find it in the main page, but only once, without emphasis and in a matter of fact way.
I myself have also adopted this approach. When talking about what OS I use by non-technically minded people, I don't say "Linux", I say "Ubuntu". And some even answer: "Ah! I've heard about that."
As you see, there's hope.