Viewing profile — sabbatic13

Socrates' ideas, or rather Plato's representations thereof, belong to a cultural context radically different from our own and have absolutely no relevance. Greece was undergoing a …

"Sturdy roads, aqueducts, buildings, and military equipment are basically the things you want to have in order to consolidate and maintain power over a large area for a long period…

Nice. When lawsuits are directed _against_ the content giants, she's all for the letter of the law and due process: http://www.wired.com/2008/03/riaa-racketeeri/ I feel so much bet…

That was covered in the article. Disrupting the default order allows you to put emphasis on certain words, in your case, you'd want the color adjective to stand out. The other opti…

OP described exactly how the author began his article. Your apologetics are tendentious. I hate to break this to you, but the author you have gone out of your way to praise is a ve…

Keep mind that Google was initially installed as the default search engine years ago, because FF users voted for it to be so. Only after Google saw how many search referrals they t…

Perpetuating the illusion that there are innumerable grave threats that require resource-intensive responses is a useful tool for ensuring that more anti-terrorism money from the f…

Please let it be car dealerships and mattress salespersons. (crosses fingers)

It seems to me that if someone is just honestly interested in meeting people and hearing whatever about them, then they are by nature rather social and extroverted and scarcely nee…

And what exactly do you think you mean by "I think we're reaching the limits of the English language with that one."? The semantic "limit" of the 3rd person plural pronoun is that …

I'm sorry, but you generalized about the same billion people and even offered a completely imaginary 90% statistic to boot. And I'm not an outsider, not to the industry, not to web…

"indispensably useful tool" is way too strong. They find it a service that is hard, or at least usually undesirable, to do without.

Rules like these aren't really good guide to style though. They are the sort of guidelines suited to curing teenagers of bad habits. That's the problem I have with articles like th…

How do you handle "fairly"? It is similarly polyvalent.

There's a difference in meaning between "he ran home" and "he was running home." Most people aren't aware enough of the language they use to avoid overusing certain things, but mec…

I found this article rather superficial. It touched on a few (very few) points of comparison and ignored a huge number of factors affecting entrepreneurship in Europe. Rather than …

And? He was paraphrasing what he'd like to see, not drafting legislation verbatim.

Excellent links.

Umm, documentary fallacy much? That and pretending like hundreds of scripts written by dozens of hands somehow cohere. Oh, yes, and that thing about people not living according to …

Well, in his defense, your Bundy and Armstrong examples are just awful, and the bit about whether X is moral or Y is moral is even worse. You've begged the question of what defines…

The problem with most libertarian beliefs is that they are very high-level and most attempts to apply and create a coherent system fail miserably. At their most useful, they can in…

I wouldn't write off mockery as unproductive. It's been an element of perfectly productive political discourse since the beginning of recorded political discourse. If done well and…

I'm afraid your knowledge of history is almost completely inaccurate. The "Goths" were just a few dozens Germanic tribes who moved West and conquered territory which was already oc…

And your dad's alternative would be what? To balkanize science and engineering? To create dozens of separate islands of knowledge? To slow the spread of knowledge, because everythi…

But the Queen's Guard is dependent on the Canadians for the bear skins they need to make those giant grenadier hats. If we invade Canada and put that vital commodity in jeopardy, t…