Somehow it is strange that the avaerage libriral is against fire arms but for anyhthing that is allowed under law.

What about child porn?

When I grew up the thread of a third world war always gloomeh darkly. Every day I half and half expected the newsman to anounce the end of the world. no longer. Still, sometimes I think that later-day historians will write that the third world war started around 1992 or so in West Africa, Zaire and Afghanistan. As the difference between rich and poor increases on a global scale, it becomes harder and harder for the poorest to believe in the global system as a way to escape their current missery. No wonder they increasingly turn to alternatives. Migration is one option. An ideologicalless civil war of everybody against everybody is another.
When all faith in society has gone and social institutions have desintegrated, to fend for one self is all that is left. In a way this is exactly what happened in Sierra Legne and Liberia and this could easily spread around to other African nations or even slum neighbourhoods in western cities. It would be hard to stop such a global civil war by the west, without offering an alternative for the poor huddled masses.

Simpleness as virtue might strike some people as somewhat weird. Afterall, simpleness doesn't make the world a better place for other people and that is often what is understood as virtue.
For a programmer or indeed any engineer, simpleness is intrisic good. Simple things are easier to understand and predict. In a way engineering is the art of building complex things from simple things.
It is the same with life.

Formalization of number theory usually starts out with two rules:
1. there is a number zero
2. every number has a successor
then follow lots of rules that define concepts like adding, sudstraction and multiplication in terms of these and then it is shown that the whole of mathematics can be worked out based on this.
The thing about this to note is that this operation is a rather arbitrarily construction. Any truth proven within this construction is only true within the system, within the arbitrarily chosen rules.
In this sense mathematics no longer has platonic truth, but only is a model of a pcatonic ideal world- tjust like the rest o( this unhermoon world.
Anyone proposing a rule for such a construction can therefore be asked why and would have to answer: because the ensuing model of number theory would be closer to what my inner eye sees as the platonic world of numbers. That makes fundamental mathematics empirical: you choose the rules, work out the model and see if you like it, never to be sure if not tomorrow someone comes along with a set of rules that produces a model closer to your platonic ideal.
One rule that seems shaky is the second one: there is always a next number. In reality there isn't. numbers are for counting and in every count there is a maximum. So why suppose that there is always a next number?

One thing about developing aplications for the palm is that there is going to be a whole new ecosystem of programs. Not only because so many programs have not been written for the Palm, but also because portabikity offers new ideas for programs. One of the more obvious program families would be programs for travellers. One could imagine a sort of travellers office. Some examples might be:
Mapping
Guidebooks
Health information
Universal time
Currency converter
Language guides (especially if sound is supported)
Some play stuff might be a world map, with the CIA factbook as popup.

The first time I heard about Sun Tsu, the art of war I was made to understand that this four thousand year old chinese book could be read in many ways. The most obvious way to read it, is of course, to read it as a book abput warfare. The art of war, how to succesfully wage war in the Chinese middle ages.
On a deeper level, of course, the art of war is about strategy in general and supoaedly, many of the strategic lessons of the book are applicable outside the context of the chinese middle ages and even outside the context of warfare. Some business schools use the text.
However the first time I heard about the multi levelness of The art of war, I understood this in a different way. I thought that it was a feature of the Chinese way of writing that was cleverly exploitet by master Sun or his disciples. That you could map the characters in the text to a different set of meanings and thereby changing the meaning of the text, but not the meaning of the underlying wisdom.

Another book to write. the mind of the engineer. Engineers play an important role in our society, but are not very well understood by society at large, maincy for two reasons. 1. yoh almost have to be an engineer to understand how an engineer thinks. 2 they have a value system that is rather peculAr.

The God of the engineers exists. Logically speaking there is usually only one best way of doing things. This means that the work of an engineer can be read by another engineer.
The first engineer would only have done certain things in a certain way if that would be logical. So the second engineer can know things that seem unknowable. When asked how he knows a certain thing he could answer: the god of the engineers told me, because the first and the second engineer have the same value system.

Should museums charge an entrance fee? In the UK they don't and that is of course as a tourist pleasant. Much in answering this question depends on whether the gouvernment sustantially finances the museum.
If the gouvernment sees museums as just another form of amusement for the masses (or indeed a few), than there is no call for subsidy. If however it is believed that museums are a place for education, then probablx the state pays for them to a smaller or larger extend. In the seconh case, charging an entrance fee is not a good idea. It only makes it less attractive for people to congume something that basically already has been paid for.

In the nineteenth century. a peculiar stateordering came into being in the Netherlands: the verzuiling. Five largely autononomous groups. mostly build around religions implemented duplicate versions of a great deal of the institutions that make society. in effect creating competing statelets within the state.
This could be an interesting model for the state of the future. One of the reasons europe worked and overpowered the other great civilisations, was that the european states competed with each other.