Re: begging the question

[Barak Pearlmutter <barak@cs.may.ie>]

Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> writes:

> Your thesis contains two contradictory points. Branden has responded
> to one of them, citing the other, and pointed out the
> contradiction. That is the entire point of his question.
> 
> The two points that are in conflict are:
> 
> 1) These works were intentially included in Debian as a result of
>    conscious choice on the part of developers
> 2) Identifying these works in order to remove them would be
>    prohibitively expensive in its use of time.

These are not in the least contradictory.  Let me make an analogy.
Let's say we have a barrel of oats with some chocolate sprinkles mixed
in.  Sifting through and removing all the chocolate sprinkles would be
a lot of work.  But knowing that there are some chocolate sprinkles in
there (that no one ever worried about or had any problems with) is not
a lot of work.  This is especially true when the barrel of oats was
created by pouring together hundreds of bags of oats created by others
and many of those upstream bags contained chocolate sprinkles.