That's just because Philosopher like to think about a lot of things, and some of those seem to be about the concrete world. The moment the guy does this he's switching from Philosophy to Science.
Just because Chemistry is used to develop new gastronomical compounds there's no reason to say that every chemist is a cook, or that Chemistry and Cooking are one and the same thing, or that Cooking is just Chemistry made into practice. Points of contact aren't the same as identity.
Yes, you can think of String Theory as a field of Mathematics, much like Mathematics is a field of Logic. And in this sense I can agree. But string theorists are struggling to identify observable physical entities or, at least, observable physical relations. I'd prefer then to say that whatever mathematical advancements string theorists are developing are a colateral effect of what they're doing, not the main thing. As such, these mathematical developments cannot be taken as being the main subject of the field. Also please note that other fields of Physics have also contributed to mathematics, and that didn't make them anymore philosophy than before.
Wrong. All religions are testable. The question is: which scientist is willing to give up 20 years of their life to check whether practicing the ascetic disciplines actually provides the results the religion says they'll provide?
Please note I'm not talking about "miracles". These are secondary and ultimately irrelevant.
I don't think string theory is a set of ontological claims. But much like the other sciences, it can be inserted into ontological frameworks, be it the scientistic ontology, the thomist one, or any other.
These frameworks, by the way, cannot be proved either. But that's a "non-provability" in the same sense of logic: they offer the framework upon which you construct the provable. Remove all of them and science becomes the realm of pure instrumentalism, where no scientific finding is ever a description of reality, because either the term "reality" has no meaning, or the finding is understood as a mere practical description of sensory perceptions and nothing more, or both.
People who ask for "proofs" of philosophical claims clearly don't understand neither what Philosophy is, nor what a proof is. They're talking about words, not about things.
PS.: Specific evolutionary studies are science, but Evolution in itself isn't "a" science. It's an ontological framework too. And one must take care when dealing with this because logical errors are easy to come by. Rudimentary evolutionary studies, for instance, can be found in Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, thus they don't go by themselves against thomist ontology. The Evolutionary framework, on the other hand, is incompatible with it, because both compete in being the ultimate explanation of reality. Interestingly enough, the kantian anti-ontological framework, which is the basis for most of current science methodology, explicitly denies the possibility of any kind of evolutionary study, something most neo-kantians dismiss as soon as they discover this to be the case.
Mr. Glashow can be a genious in the field of Physics, but I doubt he's also so much of a genious in the fields of History, Philosophy and (yes) Theology to be able to make such an absurd statement. No matter how much he dislikes religion and related subjects, there's a difference between stating a personal taste and talking meaningfully about something you don't know about.
Do you "prove" logic by testing it, or testing anything is to apply logic to the issue?
When something "becomes" science, that's because it never was philosophy. Philosophy is that discipline that provides you the tools with which you build science. Not the other way around.
(...) they claim that the purchasing power of money cannot be established. In a series of three transactions, one dollar is exchanged for a loaf of bread, half a kg of potatoes, and a kg of sugar. Then the claim is that an average value of a dollar cannot be established because the three goods aren't commensurable. But my take is that the acts of the transactions does make them commensurable. Ie, the amounts of the three goods in the amounts above are to the best of our knowledg worth one dollar each. The transactions are measurements in an economic sense.
What actually happens is that for each pair of "transactors" (sorry if this word doesn't exist, English isn't my primary language), what the other obtained has more value than that which he gave up. For example: A has a loaf of bread. B has one dollar. They exchange. Why they did so? Because for A, the one dollar that B had was more valuable than keeping his loaf of bread, while for B, the loaf of bread that A had was more valuable than keeping his one dollar. If the loaf of bread and the one dollar had the exact same value for both, then the exchange wouldn't have happened, because act of exchanging both wouldn't be worth the trouble.
Then when A, with his new shinning one dollar bill goes and exchanges it for a kg of potatoes with C, the same applies. And this further complicates the matter. From the point of view of A, potatoes is more valuable than one dollar, which is more valuable than a loaf of bread. From the point of view of C, the dollar is more valuable than the potatoes, and we still have no idea what he thinks about loafs of bread. Samewise, we have no idea what B thinks of potatoes. What if B thinks his loaf of bread is more valuable than potatoes?
The whole point is that an exchange medium has no actual value outside an actual exchange. Outside an exchange, the exchange medium has a potential value which is wholly subjective and full of uncertainties. It's something akin to the quantum analogue: once you put the exchange medium to work, then its broad range of potential valuations colapse into one, and even so still with a certain weak level of reality, but as soon as the exchange ends it goes back to fuzzy status.
This characteristic of exchange mediums make it very uncertain that the amount of goods purchaseable by one dollar, in your example, would change in the way you suggest. That might happen, yes, but other outcomes are possible, all of them depending on the status of the subjectives valuations of the exchanging subjects at the exact moment of the transaction.
The misesian theory on money is very interesting because it strongly avoids abstracting the human element from its analyzes. Actually, it deals so much with this aspect that it's also called "subjective theory of value", in opposition to all the other theories that see valuation as an objective entity. If you're interested I'd suggest you download the free ebooks by Ludwig von Mises in the website. I've read some of them and they offer a very strong reasoning. His main work is this one: The Human Action.
I don't know if I agree or disagree with your reasoning. But I noticed you mentioning the concept of "velocity of money", and I thought you might be interested in this Mises Institute article which tries to show it's a bogus concept: Is Velocity Like Magic?. A pretty interesting reading.
An ad placed in a random place inside an arbitrarily-sized transparent PNG, which in turn would be CSS-positioned (embedded unnamed CSS via the "style=" element, mind you) for the visible image to appear where it should, would avoid this.
Another solution would be to slice the ad, as well as all other images in the site, into small pieces with arbitrary sizes, and aggregate them into something visible with CSS. It would be a nightmare to figure out which of those dozens or hundreds of GIFs, JPGs and PNGs are or aren't pieces of ads.
It's relatively easy to work around ad-blocking plugins: simply make your ads be static images, never in flash or animated gifs, with slightly variable height and width, random names, in random paths, loading from the same server the main page is served, and from the exact same directory, never surrounding it by any specially-named frame, and never putting it into the exact same place inside a page. Doing these things would pretty much defeat Firefox's AdBlock addon as well as any size-based ad-blocker. They'll also work agains most, if not all, bayesian ad-blockers (if they exist, I'm not sure they do) if you don't forget to follow the exact same rules for all non-ad images in your web site.
If major ad-filled sites aren't following these trivial tricks, I'm pretty sure they don't see adblocking as a big problem. They probably think those 1% or 2% of geek visitors who block ads aren't statistically significant.
But if most people started using ad-blocked, be sure the above tricks would start being applied in a lot of places. And as a result ad-blocking development would become a field of research as much complicated, if not more, than spam blocking. It would reach a point where you would have to train a lot a filter for working in a given site, and deal with false positives and negative for a good amount of time, until that site you want ad-free was working as expected.
This would be a good thing if they fought against all ideologies. But this, of course, won't be the case. Ideologues never acknowledge their unfounded beliefs are ideology. For them, only what "the others" (those who don't share their worldview) believe is ideology.
I agree. If this device becomes popular the guys at Motricity will probably release a compatible eReader for it. Either this, or I also won't purchase Sony's new toy. Reading in my Palm Zire is good enough for my needs.
Either way, it's likely that devices like this one will be available from other manufacturers. So, even if Sony doesn't open it to 3rd party applications, others will.
One point people usually don't notice: more CO2 means bigger crops, and vegetables, and trees etc. So, yeah, maybe coastal cities will end up underwater and many areas will be a little more desertified, but food will become more plenty, and areas currently unusable because they're frozen will be able to hold human life. I'm not sure the net effect of all these changes, when we look at them as a whole, is negative. Maybe it is, but that's not clear.
I wonder what that metric should look for a fighting game. Samurai Shodown IV, for instance, had a timer: if you beat the last boss in under 10 minutes, you got to see the special ending. So, should the box read: "15 minutes of game play!"?
On the other hand, I'm a slow player by nature. My Final Fantasy VIII play time surpassed the game's internal clock, which stopped, if I remember correctly, at 99:59:59. I really like it when a game can take that much to finish. It means lots, and lots, and lots of exploration. Nowadays, the complete lack of ending in World of Warcraft is, for me, kinda Heaven on Earth.:)
The idea of equal treatment under the law appears to have predated western civilization by a millenium or two.
Please note that this isn't the same thing. The text you linked makes this clear: "persons who are situated similarly ought to be treated similarly before the law." Meaning: two priest must be treated equally, as well as two land lords, or two slaves. But a priest wouldn't be treated the same as a land lord, nor a land lord treated the same as a slave. Justice, in this situation, is for a priest act in the way a priest must act, a slave act in the way a slave must act etc. This violates the modern concept of equanimity, but not that of social adjustment, because if a priest does act in the way a priest must act etc., social harmony is indeed preserved. The concept is entirely related to social functions, not to what we would see as individual needs and desires. "The individual", in this case, is just one social function among others, and is far from being the main or central one.
Sorry. English isn't my primary language and I sometimes err with some words.
Of course, this is the very reason why capital punishment is seldom used, and often is in debate.
It is in debate and seldom used in societies who think it is a serious thing. On others it's used with a lot of liberality. Why? Because they think it's not a big deal.
Specifics aside, I don't believe you can call a law just or unjust simply based on the number of people who agree or disagree with it. The purpose of law is not to enforce the will of the majority (although it is sometimes misused to that end, even today), but to ensure the equal and impartial treatment of everyone, no matter whether they are part of a majority group or a minority group (although you could certainly argue that some laws are unfairly biased towards certain groups **cough**RIAA**cough**)
This isn't accurate. On modern Western societies there's an usual belief that justice and equanimity are for the most part one and the same thing. But the actual meaning of justice isn't that of treating everyone equally. Justice is to "adjust" things, to make them "fit" the whole, so that each and everyone know what they must and must not do so that harmony arises.
The majority matters only in that it's self-developed adjustment and harmony cannot be violated by the law, otherwise they'll diverge and the law itself, and thus justice, will end up in the losing position. The current state of affairs in IP law is an example: the Justice system take people that no one thinks of as criminals, and treat them as criminals, while at the same time treating those who are thought by the majority as unjust as if they were an example of probity, undeservedly profiting and gathering power from the whole situation that they shouldn't have.
This divergence weakens the authority of the Justice system, and ultimately of its claim of authority. People simply stop trusting official justice, because it has began to be seen as unjust in itself.
So if everyone ignores IP laws, it shouldn't be a law anymore? Just like how everyone's drinking and smoking under the legal age, so we should get rid of that too, etc etc?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: Laws are usually, and must continue to be, only a formal expression of the uses and customs of a society. Why is murder unfawful? Because it's intrinsically wrong? No. Because most members of society don't want some random group of people murdering them by whatever random reason they might have. So much, actually, that in some specific cases muder is allowed. Which cases? Those that society thinks are okay. For example: killing convicted murders after they've been through a just trial. Same thing goes for the reason criminals are thrown into jail. Is it because criminal must be "reeducated"? No! It's because by throwing them on jail we takes them away from society.
Any law that goes against the uses and customs of a society, against something most of their members think is perfectly okay, is by definition an unjust law. And any group of people who try to advance their own minoritary beliefs over what the majority thinks as okay is thus damaging society, it doesn't matter whether the group is the Republicans, the Democrats, the Greens, ACLU, RIAA or whomever.
Current IP law is one such kind of unjust law. It should be completely revised to come into accordance with society's uses and customs. What most people think is wrong on the subject? What most people think is right? What most people think is indifferent? That should be the basis for a new IP law.
Same goes for underage drinking, smoking and "sexing". And, quite possibly, for the underage concept itself. If the majority of the population thinks a 16-year old is "adult enough", then he is. Otherwise, he isn't. And that's all there is to it.
This is extremely true. Here in Brazil a newspaper made a research some years ago and discovered that if you count the number of local, state and federal laws, norms, decrees etc. that the citizen is required to follow and cannot allege not knowing if he "misbehaves", most of them with multiple articles full of all sorts of specific requirements and special exceptions (which weren't included in the counting), the total adds up to an astounding 1,500,000 laws (yes, one-dot-five million).
Here're two small examples of what this absurdity means:
a) For a representative in our federal Congress to propose a single ammendment to the yearly budget, he must officialy know around 5,000 (yes, five thousand) laws. It would take the whole of their 4-year mandates for them to even read these laws, so they obviously just ignore all of it. And that, in turn, means that almost all of the budget is at some level or on some point illegal.
b) In an anecdotal case I know, a guy had a friend who's a public officer with knowledge in this field. The officer bet with his friend that he would find at least 20 wrongs in his house. As things turned out, he found 20 in under 5 minutes...
I don't know whether the US law system is so insane as ours, but from what I read here on Slashdot it doesn't seem to be that much better. It seems that the entire thing is made so that, no matter what you do, some law you're breaking, without even knowing it. For those in position to enforce (or not) the law this is perfect, for they're able to do what they want to whomever they want.
Or, as a popular saying goes around here: "For your friends, everything; for your enemies, the law."
Yes, I know that (I've been configuring the X-Window System since before either KDE or Gnome existed). I was talking specifically about a default installation of both systems, which a new user will find if purchasing a Linux box. When this default is compared to the default XP theme in a new Windows box is when we notice the difference in available screen space.
I really think MS got this right, probably because they had in mind that most of their users would be using Windows in budget hardware (my case), while Gnome and KDE developers set the default to look nice in their own CRTs and LCDs, which are, I wildly guess, above average in quality, size and resolution.
Actually, even at the time I used bare-bones X, things were big, probably due to those gigantic workstation CRTs that other, non-ia32 UNIXes, used at the time. Maybe X wasn't thought as something one would use in a 14" or 15" CRT...
What I really want to know is why, oh, WHY, both Gnome and KDE waste so much usefull screen space.
I'm serious. Now and then I install one or the other in a VM in my XP box, set to the same resolution as XP itself, and watch the state of the default menus, menu items distance, drop-downs, font sizes etc. For some reason I can't grasp, they're always bigger and more wastefull than what Microsoft made with XP. And as a result, I always feel my CRT had just lost one or two inches.
I wonder whether you all who use these system feel the same thing, but in reverse, with XP's screen objects seen as too small.
PS.: I've never tried MacOS, but that bar of big buttons I see in screenshots spells trouble for me. But if those who use it love it so much, then I guess that either my CRT is too small, I'm a screen-space maniac, or both. Who knows?:D
An example: some World of Warcraft players sometimes like to go back to Warcraft 3 to remember the small details of the fictional lore. They've already beaten the game, they only want to see that specific amazing history scene. So, they enable God Mode and in half-hour get to the point they want to review. That done, they close the game, go back to doing whatever they were doing in World of Warcraft, and that's it.
In the middle ages, and yet today in many cultures around the world, a male was/is considered an adult when he's around 13-years old, while a female was usually thought about as an adult somewhat earlier, around 12 or 11 years old. Even in USA's XIX century, a boy was considered just a small man, and taught to behave as an actual one from a very early age, having to use small but adult-looking clothes from as soon as 5-years old. Also, families took their children to watch criminals being hanged, or to learn the proper way to kill a cow, as a way to teach them what life was like. Were you to tell someone at the time that nowadays we would think of a 17.9-years old as a "minor" and he would laugh at you on such nonsense.
The contemporaneous problem isn't that childhood is diminishing. Quite the opposite. We're now watching the phenomenon of "adultescence", where people stay acting and thinking as teens way after their 20th anniversary, sometimes even into their 30th's. For me this seems a necessary consequence of making 14 through 17-year olds to "be childrens", not the adults they should naturally be. The more we make this distortion reproduce itself, the more its effects will expand into later ages. After all, haven't some politicians tried enacting laws prohibiting things to people below 25-years of age? It's just a matter of time until they succeed.
Here in Brazil many broadband ISPs guarantee you a MAXIMUM of 10% of the bandwidth you contracted. Meaning: you get something that's announced as 2 Mbps connection and that usually works at that speed, but which could drop to 200 kbps (in peak hours, for example, or for whatever reason the provider thinks is deserved), and the ISP wouldn't be required to improve the situation at all. Nice guys, eh?
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Wikipedia and a dictionary. That's what I call scholarship.
Please understand one thing: "what reality is?" and "is this real?" are two different questions. Also, read my other answers in this sub-thread.
That's just because Philosopher like to think about a lot of things, and some of those seem to be about the concrete world. The moment the guy does this he's switching from Philosophy to Science.
Just because Chemistry is used to develop new gastronomical compounds there's no reason to say that every chemist is a cook, or that Chemistry and Cooking are one and the same thing, or that Cooking is just Chemistry made into practice. Points of contact aren't the same as identity.
Yes, you can think of String Theory as a field of Mathematics, much like Mathematics is a field of Logic. And in this sense I can agree. But string theorists are struggling to identify observable physical entities or, at least, observable physical relations. I'd prefer then to say that whatever mathematical advancements string theorists are developing are a colateral effect of what they're doing, not the main thing. As such, these mathematical developments cannot be taken as being the main subject of the field. Also please note that other fields of Physics have also contributed to mathematics, and that didn't make them anymore philosophy than before.
Wrong. All religions are testable. The question is: which scientist is willing to give up 20 years of their life to check whether practicing the ascetic disciplines actually provides the results the religion says they'll provide?
Please note I'm not talking about "miracles". These are secondary and ultimately irrelevant.
I don't think string theory is a set of ontological claims. But much like the other sciences, it can be inserted into ontological frameworks, be it the scientistic ontology, the thomist one, or any other.
These frameworks, by the way, cannot be proved either. But that's a "non-provability" in the same sense of logic: they offer the framework upon which you construct the provable. Remove all of them and science becomes the realm of pure instrumentalism, where no scientific finding is ever a description of reality, because either the term "reality" has no meaning, or the finding is understood as a mere practical description of sensory perceptions and nothing more, or both.
People who ask for "proofs" of philosophical claims clearly don't understand neither what Philosophy is, nor what a proof is. They're talking about words, not about things.
PS.: Specific evolutionary studies are science, but Evolution in itself isn't "a" science. It's an ontological framework too. And one must take care when dealing with this because logical errors are easy to come by. Rudimentary evolutionary studies, for instance, can be found in Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, thus they don't go by themselves against thomist ontology. The Evolutionary framework, on the other hand, is incompatible with it, because both compete in being the ultimate explanation of reality. Interestingly enough, the kantian anti-ontological framework, which is the basis for most of current science methodology, explicitly denies the possibility of any kind of evolutionary study, something most neo-kantians dismiss as soon as they discover this to be the case.
Mr. Glashow can be a genious in the field of Physics, but I doubt he's also so much of a genious in the fields of History, Philosophy and (yes) Theology to be able to make such an absurd statement. No matter how much he dislikes religion and related subjects, there's a difference between stating a personal taste and talking meaningfully about something you don't know about.
You, sir, have no idea what Philosophy is.
Do you "prove" logic by testing it, or testing anything is to apply logic to the issue?
When something "becomes" science, that's because it never was philosophy. Philosophy is that discipline that provides you the tools with which you build science. Not the other way around.
Then when A, with his new shinning one dollar bill goes and exchanges it for a kg of potatoes with C, the same applies. And this further complicates the matter. From the point of view of A, potatoes is more valuable than one dollar, which is more valuable than a loaf of bread. From the point of view of C, the dollar is more valuable than the potatoes, and we still have no idea what he thinks about loafs of bread. Samewise, we have no idea what B thinks of potatoes. What if B thinks his loaf of bread is more valuable than potatoes?
The whole point is that an exchange medium has no actual value outside an actual exchange. Outside an exchange, the exchange medium has a potential value which is wholly subjective and full of uncertainties. It's something akin to the quantum analogue: once you put the exchange medium to work, then its broad range of potential valuations colapse into one, and even so still with a certain weak level of reality, but as soon as the exchange ends it goes back to fuzzy status.
This characteristic of exchange mediums make it very uncertain that the amount of goods purchaseable by one dollar, in your example, would change in the way you suggest. That might happen, yes, but other outcomes are possible, all of them depending on the status of the subjectives valuations of the exchanging subjects at the exact moment of the transaction.
The misesian theory on money is very interesting because it strongly avoids abstracting the human element from its analyzes. Actually, it deals so much with this aspect that it's also called "subjective theory of value", in opposition to all the other theories that see valuation as an objective entity. If you're interested I'd suggest you download the free ebooks by Ludwig von Mises in the website. I've read some of them and they offer a very strong reasoning. His main work is this one: The Human Action.
I don't know if I agree or disagree with your reasoning. But I noticed you mentioning the concept of "velocity of money", and I thought you might be interested in this Mises Institute article which tries to show it's a bogus concept: Is Velocity Like Magic?. A pretty interesting reading.
An ad placed in a random place inside an arbitrarily-sized transparent PNG, which in turn would be CSS-positioned (embedded unnamed CSS via the "style=" element, mind you) for the visible image to appear where it should, would avoid this.
Another solution would be to slice the ad, as well as all other images in the site, into small pieces with arbitrary sizes, and aggregate them into something visible with CSS. It would be a nightmare to figure out which of those dozens or hundreds of GIFs, JPGs and PNGs are or aren't pieces of ads.
Even so, it was better than living in rural areas. Were it not and people simply wouldn't go to cities to work in the industry.
It's relatively easy to work around ad-blocking plugins: simply make your ads be static images, never in flash or animated gifs, with slightly variable height and width, random names, in random paths, loading from the same server the main page is served, and from the exact same directory, never surrounding it by any specially-named frame, and never putting it into the exact same place inside a page. Doing these things would pretty much defeat Firefox's AdBlock addon as well as any size-based ad-blocker. They'll also work agains most, if not all, bayesian ad-blockers (if they exist, I'm not sure they do) if you don't forget to follow the exact same rules for all non-ad images in your web site.
If major ad-filled sites aren't following these trivial tricks, I'm pretty sure they don't see adblocking as a big problem. They probably think those 1% or 2% of geek visitors who block ads aren't statistically significant.
But if most people started using ad-blocked, be sure the above tricks would start being applied in a lot of places. And as a result ad-blocking development would become a field of research as much complicated, if not more, than spam blocking. It would reach a point where you would have to train a lot a filter for working in a given site, and deal with false positives and negative for a good amount of time, until that site you want ad-free was working as expected.
This would be a good thing if they fought against all ideologies. But this, of course, won't be the case. Ideologues never acknowledge their unfounded beliefs are ideology. For them, only what "the others" (those who don't share their worldview) believe is ideology.
I agree. If this device becomes popular the guys at Motricity will probably release a compatible eReader for it. Either this, or I also won't purchase Sony's new toy. Reading in my Palm Zire is good enough for my needs.
Either way, it's likely that devices like this one will be available from other manufacturers. So, even if Sony doesn't open it to 3rd party applications, others will.
One point people usually don't notice: more CO2 means bigger crops, and vegetables, and trees etc. So, yeah, maybe coastal cities will end up underwater and many areas will be a little more desertified, but food will become more plenty, and areas currently unusable because they're frozen will be able to hold human life. I'm not sure the net effect of all these changes, when we look at them as a whole, is negative. Maybe it is, but that's not clear.
I wonder what that metric should look for a fighting game. Samurai Shodown IV, for instance, had a timer: if you beat the last boss in under 10 minutes, you got to see the special ending. So, should the box read: "15 minutes of game play!"?
:)
On the other hand, I'm a slow player by nature. My Final Fantasy VIII play time surpassed the game's internal clock, which stopped, if I remember correctly, at 99:59:59. I really like it when a game can take that much to finish. It means lots, and lots, and lots of exploration. Nowadays, the complete lack of ending in World of Warcraft is, for me, kinda Heaven on Earth.
It is in debate and seldom used in societies who think it is a serious thing. On others it's used with a lot of liberality. Why? Because they think it's not a big deal.
This isn't accurate. On modern Western societies there's an usual belief that justice and equanimity are for the most part one and the same thing. But the actual meaning of justice isn't that of treating everyone equally. Justice is to "adjust" things, to make them "fit" the whole, so that each and everyone know what they must and must not do so that harmony arises.
The majority matters only in that it's self-developed adjustment and harmony cannot be violated by the law, otherwise they'll diverge and the law itself, and thus justice, will end up in the losing position. The current state of affairs in IP law is an example: the Justice system take people that no one thinks of as criminals, and treat them as criminals, while at the same time treating those who are thought by the majority as unjust as if they were an example of probity, undeservedly profiting and gathering power from the whole situation that they shouldn't have.
This divergence weakens the authority of the Justice system, and ultimately of its claim of authority. People simply stop trusting official justice, because it has began to be seen as unjust in itself.
Long answer: Laws are usually, and must continue to be, only a formal expression of the uses and customs of a society. Why is murder unfawful? Because it's intrinsically wrong? No. Because most members of society don't want some random group of people murdering them by whatever random reason they might have. So much, actually, that in some specific cases muder is allowed. Which cases? Those that society thinks are okay. For example: killing convicted murders after they've been through a just trial. Same thing goes for the reason criminals are thrown into jail. Is it because criminal must be "reeducated"? No! It's because by throwing them on jail we takes them away from society.
Any law that goes against the uses and customs of a society, against something most of their members think is perfectly okay, is by definition an unjust law. And any group of people who try to advance their own minoritary beliefs over what the majority thinks as okay is thus damaging society, it doesn't matter whether the group is the Republicans, the Democrats, the Greens, ACLU, RIAA or whomever.
Current IP law is one such kind of unjust law. It should be completely revised to come into accordance with society's uses and customs. What most people think is wrong on the subject? What most people think is right? What most people think is indifferent? That should be the basis for a new IP law.
Same goes for underage drinking, smoking and "sexing". And, quite possibly, for the underage concept itself. If the majority of the population thinks a 16-year old is "adult enough", then he is. Otherwise, he isn't. And that's all there is to it.
This is extremely true. Here in Brazil a newspaper made a research some years ago and discovered that if you count the number of local, state and federal laws, norms, decrees etc. that the citizen is required to follow and cannot allege not knowing if he "misbehaves", most of them with multiple articles full of all sorts of specific requirements and special exceptions (which weren't included in the counting), the total adds up to an astounding 1,500,000 laws (yes, one-dot-five million).
Here're two small examples of what this absurdity means:
a) For a representative in our federal Congress to propose a single ammendment to the yearly budget, he must officialy know around 5,000 (yes, five thousand) laws. It would take the whole of their 4-year mandates for them to even read these laws, so they obviously just ignore all of it. And that, in turn, means that almost all of the budget is at some level or on some point illegal.
b) In an anecdotal case I know, a guy had a friend who's a public officer with knowledge in this field. The officer bet with his friend that he would find at least 20 wrongs in his house. As things turned out, he found 20 in under 5 minutes...
I don't know whether the US law system is so insane as ours, but from what I read here on Slashdot it doesn't seem to be that much better. It seems that the entire thing is made so that, no matter what you do, some law you're breaking, without even knowing it. For those in position to enforce (or not) the law this is perfect, for they're able to do what they want to whomever they want.
Or, as a popular saying goes around here: "For your friends, everything; for your enemies, the law."
Yes, I know that (I've been configuring the X-Window System since before either KDE or Gnome existed). I was talking specifically about a default installation of both systems, which a new user will find if purchasing a Linux box. When this default is compared to the default XP theme in a new Windows box is when we notice the difference in available screen space.
I really think MS got this right, probably because they had in mind that most of their users would be using Windows in budget hardware (my case), while Gnome and KDE developers set the default to look nice in their own CRTs and LCDs, which are, I wildly guess, above average in quality, size and resolution.
Actually, even at the time I used bare-bones X, things were big, probably due to those gigantic workstation CRTs that other, non-ia32 UNIXes, used at the time. Maybe X wasn't thought as something one would use in a 14" or 15" CRT...
What I really want to know is why, oh, WHY, both Gnome and KDE waste so much usefull screen space.
:D
I'm serious. Now and then I install one or the other in a VM in my XP box, set to the same resolution as XP itself, and watch the state of the default menus, menu items distance, drop-downs, font sizes etc. For some reason I can't grasp, they're always bigger and more wastefull than what Microsoft made with XP. And as a result, I always feel my CRT had just lost one or two inches.
I wonder whether you all who use these system feel the same thing, but in reverse, with XP's screen objects seen as too small.
PS.: I've never tried MacOS, but that bar of big buttons I see in screenshots spells trouble for me. But if those who use it love it so much, then I guess that either my CRT is too small, I'm a screen-space maniac, or both. Who knows?
An example: some World of Warcraft players sometimes like to go back to Warcraft 3 to remember the small details of the fictional lore. They've already beaten the game, they only want to see that specific amazing history scene. So, they enable God Mode and in half-hour get to the point they want to review. That done, they close the game, go back to doing whatever they were doing in World of Warcraft, and that's it.
In the middle ages, and yet today in many cultures around the world, a male was/is considered an adult when he's around 13-years old, while a female was usually thought about as an adult somewhat earlier, around 12 or 11 years old. Even in USA's XIX century, a boy was considered just a small man, and taught to behave as an actual one from a very early age, having to use small but adult-looking clothes from as soon as 5-years old. Also, families took their children to watch criminals being hanged, or to learn the proper way to kill a cow, as a way to teach them what life was like. Were you to tell someone at the time that nowadays we would think of a 17.9-years old as a "minor" and he would laugh at you on such nonsense.
The contemporaneous problem isn't that childhood is diminishing. Quite the opposite. We're now watching the phenomenon of "adultescence", where people stay acting and thinking as teens way after their 20th anniversary, sometimes even into their 30th's. For me this seems a necessary consequence of making 14 through 17-year olds to "be childrens", not the adults they should naturally be. The more we make this distortion reproduce itself, the more its effects will expand into later ages. After all, haven't some politicians tried enacting laws prohibiting things to people below 25-years of age? It's just a matter of time until they succeed.
Here in Brazil many broadband ISPs guarantee you a MAXIMUM of 10% of the bandwidth you contracted. Meaning: you get something that's announced as 2 Mbps connection and that usually works at that speed, but which could drop to 200 kbps (in peak hours, for example, or for whatever reason the provider thinks is deserved), and the ISP wouldn't be required to improve the situation at all. Nice guys, eh?