Without arguing with your specific wording of "completely unambiguous and free of arbitrary cutoffs etc.", I think the implicit point you're making that a group of highly intelligent people couldn't sit down and come up with a significantly better new set of laws "from scratch" is wrong. I think they could, if that were their only aim, vastly improve laws and government with a noticeable improvement on average quality of life in the world. The obvious problems and the reason this won't likely happen soon are politics, power, trust, etc.
Re:Bitcoin app rejected by Apple
by sirclueless on Saturday May 07, 2011 @11:39PM
(#2525192)
I think the chances of finding a group of highly moral, highly impartial, highly intelligent to work together to set up a new system of laws "from scratch" with no other goals than to produce a better system of laws and improve the average quality of life is practically nil.
Although the US system is far from perfect, I think Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison did a pretty darn good job of all that.
Nah, they'd do an analysis and say that it ends at exactly 1 cm away from the end of one's nose or whatever.
Then people would complain that it wasn't fair, because they intended to stop at 1 cm, but actually stopped at 0.99 cm and that should be close enough. And then someone would try to drag relativity into play and question what reference frame we should be measuring that 1 cm in and things would go downhill from there.
Right, because while you and I are able to see absurdity of that, these super intelligent geeks you have in mind wouldn't be able to.
Re:Bitcoin app rejected by Apple
by true_religion on Sunday May 08, 2011 @07:04AM
(#2525693)
He's going with the "geeks are blind to common sense" fallacy.
"Precisely how far from the end of my nose does your right to swing a fist end?"