A translated note

While putting things in order on my recently crashed OS (caused by a dying SATA controller on a motherboard - the shortest lived one so far, only 16 months), I found this note that I wrote on [2007-09-19 00:09:03]. Yes, that's the date format I keep internally, that's the ANSI date. American Standard Date, believe it or not. Actually, only the Japanese and the Hungarians use it, because that's how they pronounce dates.

Back to the matter. Here goes, without any editing or attempts to make it look nice, the translation of that note, as literal as I can make it.

Typical of the western common-law way of thinking is also that that (in Fox, and it seems elsewhere in Windowses too) horizontal menus have "pads" (hygienic?), while vertical have "bars" (pretzels or chocolate?). Although logically it's perfectly the same, no, these are separate cases and merit syntax of their own etc etc.

It is possible that in the essence of that legal system lies the root of the western unused-to-ness to abstract and/or axiomatic thinking. Nothing follows from the general, nothing can be deduced by itself, everything has to be introduced inductively, based on a sufficient number of similar cases. What with prescribing lists of what is similar and what is not.

For example, there is none of that a law would hold for legal persons and we're done, or for physical persons, or for minors and we can sit in peace. Practically every time the set of those who are subject to a law and who are not is defined, and lists of exceptions are, ahem, no exception.