Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 12:19:58 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: terry@lambert.org, nate@mt.sri.com, jehamby@lightside.com, jsigmon@www.hsc.wvu.edu, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.2.x release question Message-ID: <199610171919.MAA06386@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <4748.845578894@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Oct 17, 96 12:01:34 pm
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > If only we were a nation of laws. > > > > ...wait a minute! We are! > > Now I *know* you've gone off the deep end. You'll be dragging out > Norman Rockwell pictures of a smiling mom holding an apple pie and > posing in front of a tractor next, if this inexplicable attack of 50's > regress doesn't release you from its grip. > > A nation of laws! Ha ha! These crazy kids! Where they get such > idealistic notions from, I just don't know. Read most everything by John Locke, and Rosseau's "The Social Contract". Any volunteer organization invokes and instantiates a "private law" system. The United States is a "volunteer organization", where the members of the society volunteer to be governed by its laws. Despite recent attempts to export US laws to other countries, US law remains a "private law" system, by virtue of its non-universality. "Govenments derive their right to govern from the governed"... one of the "truths we hold to be self-evident". The society of FreeBSD hackers or (its subset, the society of FreeBSD core team members) is still a society, no less so for its size. I can describe "games theory" and "the need for fun" and how those philosophies interact to form societies consisting of members who are voluntary participants only. If you like, I can start your education with an analysis of team sports, and why a universally acknowledged and uniformly enforced rules set promotes individual participation. People play games *because* the rules are not as arbitrary as those they face in "real life". Everyone knows when a rules violation occurs, and everyone enforces against violations. It is a private law system which promotes predictability -- and allows us to significantly prune the number of things we must worry about. This reduction in complexity, in turn, results in a reduction of stress. Stress avoidance. In other words, "fun". Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199610171919.MAA06386>