Shakespear was published under a regime of perpetual copyright.

From here.

* Conservative: David Cameron (prime minister), William Hague (foreign secretary), Jeremy Hunt (culture secretary), Philip Hammond (transport secretary), David Willetts (universities minister), Sir George Young (leader of the Commons)
* Lib Dem: Danny Alexander (chief secretary to the Treasury), Chris Huhne (energy and climate change secretary)
* Labour: Ed Balls, David Miliband, Ed Miliband (leadership candidates), Lord Mandelson (former business secretary), Jacqui Smith (former home secretary), Ruth Kelly (former transport secretary), James Purnell (former work and pensions secretary)

All of whom studied the same course (politics, philosophy and economics) at Oxford.

heh, not just pirates. A couple of hundred years back the Royal Navy issued half a pint of spirits per man per day.

You either design out the opportunity to cheat, or you enter an arse kicking contest against a monster with sixteen legs and no arse. There really is no middle ground.

How to you design out a map hack? My computer knows where his units are, therefore there is always going to be a way for me to find that out.

The only way I can see would be to have the players' machines as simply dumb terminals, with the actual game being played on Blizzard's server. I don't know if that is possible in terms of maintaining acceptable performance. I'm absolutely bloody positive that it would involve a monthly subscription fee to make it viable.

So no, I don't think it is a "spazz-move". They'll never be able to stamp out cheating, but I'm glad to see they are doing their best to keep in under control.

If a criminal justice system truly did not acknowledge the right of the victim to retribution, what purpose would it serve? How can the law exist - a system where a third party is responsible for redressing private wrongs - if it ignores this most fundamental human instinct?

The Rule of Law is not a given; other systems are possible, those of clan and blood feud. If the law abdicates its ability to give justice to those who are wronged, how can it expect to survive?

We, in our enlightened times, rightly consider many other aspects when sentencing a criminal. But ultimately for every crime there is a victim, and they have given up their right of private revenge to this thing called Law. It is both right and sensible that judges consider this when passing sentence.

You missed retribution...

So, I mess with your package, and I get sprayed with a florescent liquid containing DNA.

I hope they don't try to patent this, as I think there may be prior art.

I think you should maybe see a doctor... :P

"We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?"

Chairman Sheng-ji Yang
Dynamics of Mind

Oh really? Fears Grow as Fox Spotted on Top of a Horse.

:)

Suggest you change your preferences to sort by highest scores first. By no means perfect, but it improves slashdot readability by an order of magnitude. Really should be the default option IMO.

Do you really think the Chinese workers will stand up for their rights? Hell, the idea of human rights in general is a purely Western concept.

We aren't talking about human rights in general, but the inevitable fact that as labour gets more scarce, workers' power increases. This is very much happenening now in China - interesting article from the Economist: The rising power of the Chinese worker.

Well, if you claim I am wrong point out the exact act of Parliament which enshrined this basic right as fundamental so it cannot be encroached by further legislation

This makes no sense in British terms - Parliament is sovereign and cannot be bound.

That said, the centuries old common law presumption of innocence was enshrined in positive law in the Human Rights Act, 1998.

It is _NOT_ a fundamental, nonrevocable and unalienable right as it is in any other civilised country.

I can't figure out if you are American with a Blair fixation, or British but enamoured of the concept of a written constitution. In either case I think you are misguided:

A written constitution is not "fundamental, nonrevocable and unalienable" since it can be amended, the procedure is just a little more involved than normal legislation. And you only need to look at Prohibition in the US to see that this is no bar to stupid laws that restrict freedom. It also makes them a lot harder to get rid of. Ultimately the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance either way; a citizenry that is either complacent or uncaring of their liberties will lose them in any system, whether or not you have the speed bump of a written constitution or not.

A link I found on the civfanatics forum here (legal).

This is the peace and war music for different nations which, I think, is used when speaking to them diplomatically. The England peace music is fantastic, it is (and I've cribbed this from the forum) a section of Holst's Jupiter from The Planets, which was written by Holst to go with the song I Vow to Thee, My Country.

Sorry, I wasn't really arguing against your comments, simply explaining my own atheism.

I read a book once about "cultural evolution" which I think is similar to what you are saying and it is an interesting idea. I would say that while it makes for a good argument that religions have become better (in an evolutionary sense) over time, I'm not sure that you can infer that it gives evidence that any particular religion is better than atheism. Simply because widespread atheism is a pretty new phenomenon; there probably hasn't been enough time for evolutionary factors to come into play. You assume that the placebo effect means that it is beneficial, and that certainly makes sense, I don't have a counter argument. But might there not be some non-obvious factors that work in the other direction?

Like most social science theories, religious or cultural evolution does suffer a little from a lack of hard evidence. It sounds reasonable, but how exactly does one prove it?

An interesting post, thank-you!

I do actually agree with a fair amount of what you said, I do tended to lump religions, nationalism, the big 20th century ideologies, and I suppose football teams (well maybe not) into one basket. Not as a direct comparison, but there is a similarity in that they are all big overarching ideologies, and they do have the potential to inspire their followers to do terrible things in the pursuit of some distant but glorious goal. They provide ends, I suppose, and people being people this can lead to some pretty nasty means being employed.

Considered like that religions are much more benign than secular ideologies. Simply due to their longevity, and the number of very smart people who have been working on their theology over centuries, most of the rough edges get smoothed off. It is considerably more difficult to justify killing someone to please the God of Love than it is to ensure the triumph of True Socialism In Our Lifetime. Both do have the potential for it though. (One of my favourite Onion stories is on this issue: here)

I'm afraid I'm going to paraphrase Richard Dawkins when it comes to your arguments about the placebo benefits of religion. Just because believing something provides benefits, it doesn't mean it is actually true!

This is the thing about atheism. It isn't a religion no matter what some religious people like to say. It is the absence of religion, it is not meant to achieve anything since it isn't anything so defined as that. Atheism is simply taking an objective look at the world and at the various contradictory religions, poking around for any sort of evidence to support any of them, and after failing to find any deciding to reserve judgement until some appears.

That said I can see why the comparisons of atheism to religion are made, in particular as there often seems to be articles of the 'faith'. Chief among them being that religion is harmful, and that removing religion would make the world a better place. Like you I'm sceptical along those lines, it may be true certainly, but the case is hardly proved. While it may remove certain tensions between religious groups, I suspect people can find other reasons to hate each other without too many problems. And I agree the change to our societies and psyches is profound. But I'm not an atheist for the benefits package, I'm an atheist because it is the only logical position to take.

I bow to your knowledge on scripture re: homosexuality. I've been watching the Anglican church in the UK tear itself apart on this issue with some interest, and I assumed that the traditionalist side must have some scriptural backing for their position (and not just Leviticus).