Rubbish. Businesses very often have an incentive to lie - to increase future profits.
I didn't say they didn't -- the discussion was about people, not organizations.
Making moral judgements about people based solely on their chosen professions or job titles ("businessman vs. beauracrat") is foolish.
If it wasn't, then we could all be assured that beauracrats never lie, environmental scientists never falsify data, and priests never molest post-pubescent boys.
What battiness "libertarianism" produces!
Freedom is battiness? Hmm. (I'm not a Libertarian, by the way, but clearly you associate advocacy on behalf of individual choice versus government regulation with "battiness" and "nuttiness".)
IBM and the German government are getting together
Man, 30 years ago I would not have believed a statement beginning this way would imply victory for the little guy!!
Re:Change the data: change the conclusion
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Rememeber, at the end of the day, a civil servant is there to serve us. A business man serves the almighty dollar and the stockholders of his/her business.
Or, put another way: remember, at the end of the day, a business man, having made his profit, will have no further incentive to lie to the public. A civil servant, on the other hand, dependent on convincing the public to fund him and his beauracracy by assuring us that he and it are "serving" us, will never tire of lying to us, no matter how much money and power he extracts from us by force.
(That is, in essence, a paraphrase of some quote I can't quite recall, having to do with the distinction between a tyrant trying to satiate his base desires and one who is trying to satisfy his "sense" of doing good; the point of the quote being, the latter is far more dangerous, for he is never satisfied, there never being enough "goodness" in the world by his reckoning.)
Don't forget egcs... that wasn't a strictly GNU effort
Not sure what your point is here. EGCS was primarily a distinct (from GCC) approach to project management, not really a distinct product.
So, if you mean EGCS was/is another C compiler that can compile the Linux kernel, well, yes, that's true, but EGCS always was the GNU C compiler, project-managed outside of the strict GNU sphere for a time, but not really "another C compiler" in a sense that's sufficiently pertinent to my earlier post.
Put another way: for most intents and purposes, EGCS was never anything but the GNU C compiler with contributions from GNU people to make it distinct from GCC based on different assumptions about what was important at the time -- different from the assumptions made by the FSF-appointed GCC project leader, who is, if I understand the situation correctly (having been out of the "biz" of working on GCC for awhile), making substantial contributions to GCC (which is, today, more derived from the EGCS branch than the old GCC 2.8 branch, I think).
Certainly EGCS is nowhere near to being an example of a successful attempt at creating a Linux-kernel-compatible, non-GNU C compiler, since it "fails" at being the latter -- it was the GNU C code base from the beginning, and became GNU C itself not long after.
Anyone believing GNU Hurd should be re-prioritized could, of course, do what the EGCS people did: start their own project using the same code base, and project-lead it their way, perhaps ultimating in their variant being anointed by the FSF as the "official" one, as happened when EGCS became official GCC. (And, yes, take the risk that, for whatever reason, the FSF might never be willing to take that step, and be prepared to engage in the sort of diplomacy that minimizes that risk. Though my memory is a bit hazy, I think it's safe to say the world is a better place because I wasn't in charge of that sort of "diplomacy" when it came to the EGCS->GCC transition negotiations -- else we'd probably still have a resource-wasting split on our hands.;-)
Similarly, someone wishing to augment or ultimately replace GCC as "the" compiler for Linux is welcome to try, and they can start with GCC as the code base if they like (if they aren't doing it to create a non-GPL'ed alternative, for example).
A key thing to remember: convincing enough people to use your alternative rather than the "mainstream" product (GCC, Linux, whatever) requires more than just one-upping the mainstream.
That'll get a few people to switch, but to get enough to switch to build the kind of development and maintenance momentum behind your variant necessary to make it an independent entity in the way that Linux, GCC, Apache are pretty much independent of one or even a few developers, you'll have to N-up the mainstream, where N is some combination of a few really important improvements and many less-important ones.
I believe that happened for EGCS because that project did not represent so much a splintering of resources away from GCC at the time as a stampede. While maintaining g77 for both forks for a time, GCC struck me as more of the "splinter" in terms of size and vitality, EGCS as more of the "mainstream", so EGCS had a lot of momentum from the get-go and, almost overnight, achieved a pretty hefty value for N.
Yet, IIRC, there was still a substantial audience insisting on using GCC rather than EGCS even as the FSF was anointing EGCS as the official GCC going forward. (Can't quantify that audience, sorry, but it would be interesting to see a case study of that whole episode of a free-software-development fork and subsequent join; seems like much could be learned from having some hard data on how it went down, both internally and in terms of outside perceptions and usage of the software.)
This is like saying 'this is out bridge, because we built the handrails'. Linus did the hard bit, the bit you couldn't do;
No, it's the bit he didn't do soon enough, because his focus was putting together a widely portable operating system, mainly focusing on tools, that could (and did and still does) run on a variety of kernels, most of which were (at the time), sadly, proprietary.
Another way to view it: from RMS' point of view circa 1989, a "free" kernel was a lot like a "free" device driver, only bigger and more complicated, in that it enabled use of free software on certain hardware (CPUs). Compare that to writing more free OS utilities, which would be portable to all hardware that could support GNU software (regardless of kernel), and you can see why he might have made the choices he did at the time.
Now, did Hurd, once he focused GNU resources on creating it, prove to be an overly ambitious ivory-tower-type project? IMO, yes. In the meantime, Linus and others scratched an itch by evolving (moreso than designing a la Hurd) a kernel for a specific CPU family, which meant that the resources GNU might have used for such a project were used for other, more portable or widely useful, GNU tools -- or, at least, that was a plausible likelihood.
How do I know all this?
Because, in 1988 or 1989, I volunteered my "talents" to RMS for GNU, and specifically asked him if he wanted me to take over the job of writing the OS kernel for GNU, something that was dead-center down my area of expertise. (I'd been doing OS kernel and related work since, oh, about 16 years of age, in a professional sense anyway; since earlier as an "amateur hacker".)
He declined the offer and asked me if I knew anything about Fortran. Since I'd recently learned some things about compilers, specifically Fortran compilers, I said yes, and the upshot was that I wrote GNU Fortran (g77).
RMS's main point at the time was that he believed he'd be able to get some existing portable kernel "freed" for use with GNU, so why throw sparse resources trying to create a free copy out of whole cloth?
Now, you can argue that he should have had me write the kernel instead, and, personally, I would have loved doing that, especially since I'd have been an actual end user of the product (compared to g77, which I don't use). I wouldn't have been nearly as successful at Torvalds when it came to project management though, as can be easily verified from studying g77's history. But my kernel wouldn't have been the ivory-tower-style Hurd, either, and I probably knew more about OS kernel design and implementation as of 1988 than did Linus as of 1991, if technical competency is an important issue. (Not so much a boast as a natural result of having been born so much earlier that I'd had about a two-decade head-start getting into kernel development.)
But, had I undertaken that task, what role might Linus and the others have played? Would they have written g77? I don't think so. They might have scratched some other itch, of course, but, in the end, I think the results are better the way they actually worked out than if I'd been the author of the GNU kernel.
As to your other claims: I agree with most of them, except you do seem to be unaware of the fact that, unlike with Apache, KDE, even BSD components, there is, today, no such thing as a GNU-free Linux kernel, given the kernel's (IMO overly-aggressive) dependency on GNU-specific extensions to the C language.
Linux developed, and remains, much more like a potted plant with GNU as its soil than like a mere partner that happens to use GNU.
Indeed, without that plant, few people would be interested in the "special" soil that is GNU. It's the plant that makes the whole thing worth having, to most people anyway. But GNU soil had been, and continues to be, widely and portably used without a shred of Linux code involved, whereas there is no Linux system without GNU.
(I use "Linux system" to mean a Linux kernel running an OS that provides the means to change the kernel code and recompile the kernel, since that's an important aspect of what makes Linux special. I assume the Linux kernel itself can boot up and run on a given CPU with no GNU code present, but it can't, or at least couldn't, be compiled in the first place without GNU C.)
And, in case anybody's wondering, if it's simply a "small matter of programming" (aka SMOP) to replace the GNU components with some other, thus "demonstrating" that GNU/Linux is really just Linux with a lot of other stuff including GNU, then, by all means, try it.
But, also for the record, there has been, to my knowledge, no shortage of technically competent people who have declared publically that they will write a replacement for GCC that isn't a) GPL-licensed (say, public domain instead) and b) considered a GNU project.
These "threats", as some might view them, go back to maybe 1992 or so -- well before the "GNU/Linux", or "lignux", debacle started by RMS -- yet, last I knew, nobody had actually converted their anger at RMS, the GPL, the GNU project, whatever, into actual code that provides a usable GNU-free Linux.
If and when somebody does write a useful replacement for GNU (for licensing and/or political reasons), that'll be all the more reason to distinguish their Linux variant from the current one, which I have already gotten into the habit of calling GNU/Linux partly in breathless anticipation of that long-awaited event!
My AT&T Broadband was recently experiencing lots of downtime, so the second day into it I called.
After going through the usual hired-hand tech support BS (had to reboot my GNU/Linux system, like that'd fix it, right?), they made an appointment to send someone out a couple of days later.
The guy showed up about 15 minutes early, and quickly diagnosed the problem. No, it wasn't my cable modem, it was the low signal coming in, which he verified was a problem before it even came into the house (although two or three splitters upstream of my cable modem might be a bit much; I might eliminate one of them if I run into more problems). He said it'd be fixed, probably the next day, and, sure enough, the connectivity has been much better since then.
So, though I had a few nightmares about the potential hassles involved in dealing with a tech who might harangue me for not running Windows on their system, what actually happened was a much more positive experience.
Having gotten the $7-increase email (which will really not take effect for another six months), I'll have to take some time to reevaluate my household's Internet-access policies. Stick with consumer-level Broadband? Upgrade to the commercial service they introduced a few months ago? Look into whether some kind of DSL has become possible from my location since the last time I asked, when we were just out of range? Go back to dial-up, which wasn't that bad?
But with at least one reasonable "service experience" with attbi under my belt, there's less incentive to get off their system.
The point to all of this is that any belief system based on faith, rather than reasoning and logic, eventually falls into ridicule.
I mostly agree, with the following caveat: it is possible that there exists one or more belief systems based on faith that prove to be groundable in reason and logic, i.e. that stand the test of time, with its corresonding improvement in methods of science. In such cases, those systems would not, in and of themselves, fall into ridicule, although the means by which they became accepted might be regarded as, at least, rather amazing to those accustomed to subjecting all belief systems to the scientific method.
Another "big question", of course, is whether belief in reason and logic is itself a form of faith. Being raised a Christian Scientist, a religion in which three of the seven fundamental definitions, or synonyms, of "God" are "Truth", "Mind", and "Principle", I consider my assumptions based on the predictive capability of reason and logic to, themselves, be projections of faith -- faith that the universe, as I experience it, won't suddenly change (that 2+2 won't suddenly start equaling 3, to pick an absurd example).
As you might expect, this gives me a somewhat unique view of the atheism vs. religion debate. It strikes me as nonsensical that atheists would, informed of my definition of God, steadfastly disavow the existence of any Truth, Principle, or Mind that is necessary to support their very reliance on principles, truths, and a mind to contain and process them when they make their denials, along with the logic they use to support those denials.
Therefore, I tend to view atheism as, roughly, the rejection of the more "mystical" elements of what certain religious traditions claim equal God. (These might include the other four synonyms for "God": "Love", "Spirit", "Soul", and "Life", in which case an atheistic denial constitutes only a denial of some attributes of what I consider to be "God".)
In that sense, I don't find atheism to be, generally, a rejection of God so much as a rejection of certain qualities we experience as being fundamental properties, versus emergent properties, of the universe. (Those emergent properties would include the existence of a species, such as Homo Sapiens, that merely imagines it experiences them, labels them, writes poetry about them, and so on.)
But this perspective also gives me much amusement when atheists pronounce, as they tend to do, that all religion, or at least all Christian religion, is entirely false, is based on nonscientific reasoning, and so on, when their claims demonstrate ignorance of a substantial component of Christian theology and tradition that is, largely, rational, scientific, and tested. (This component extends well beyond, and historically precedes, the Christian Science "sect", of course.)
And the reason I find that amusing should be obvious: if atheists are so prone to making pronouncements that demonstrate ignorance of widely-documented and widely-accepted Christian beliefs, how in the world do they expect me to believe their outright statement that God does not exist?
In that sense, atheism itself may one day be viewed as a "belief system based on faith" that fell into ridicule.
(Which raises a related question: what is the survival rate and typical historical fate of atheistic civilizations throughout history, given that this thread has already covered religious civilizations?)
The farce of grassroots Republicanism is that the core of the Republican establishment is not aligned with the "dittohead caucus", and in fact disdains the common Republican.
Perhaps -- Rush certainly talks about "Rockefeller Republicans" in ways that sound strikingly similar to the ones you describe.
Sounds like we agree in large part regarding the pursuit of power and the various guises it takes.
The Democrats who form the comparable constituency to the dittohead-type (pro-freedom, anti-regulation) Republican also have little actual representation among the elites in the Democrat party.
It's worth observing that, while such Democrats have often found it worthwhile to cross over and vote for Republican candidates (Reagan and, to a lesser extent, Bush43), rarely have Republicans abandoned their party in order to vote for someone seen as embodying their principles, though I think Bush41 v. Clinton in 1992 might be, to a limited degree, a counterexample (Bush41 having shown some "flexibility" on stated principles; even I was considering Clinton my likely choice for President through sometime in August 1992, until I learned just how principled he had proven to be in his past).
There may indeed be little difference between the parties in terms of internal machinations and the character of the men who choose to become the elite ringleaders of those machinations, but if you compare the public rhetoric of the past one, two, or three instances of each party's President, it's obvious, to me, that one party is more vigorous when it comes to nominating and electing someone who inspires and celebrates the yearning of individual Americans for their freedom, their willingness to defend it for themselves and others, and that freedom's inherent, superior ability to serve as the basis for humanity's progress compared to any other system of government invented by man.
It also seems to me the Republican party, base, and "media" is fairly honest about its own past deceptions (Bush41's "no new taxes" pledge is frequently recalled, especially recently vis-a-vis Bush43's signing of Campaign Finance Reform). I rarely see such honest self-examination among Democrats in the media.
Similarly, among friends and family, the Republicans are far quicker to castigate their own (Bush41 on taxes and other things, Ashcroft on his supposed "abysmal record on women") than are the Democrats. Can't recall a single Democrat friend or relative who has "taken back" their high-sounding prose regarding the positive "change" that would be brought to the nation as a result of electing Clinton in 1992 -- this despite the spectacle of so many inner-circle Clintonians testifying under oath that their questionable campaign-finance dealings must have been okay because "Reagan and Bush did the same stuff".
And I guess that's one of the key things that really bugs me about the left. It's not the mistakes, it's not the unquenchable thirst for power, it's not the self-delusion that "if only my way were implemented, everything would be better" -- that's shared in spades among pretty much everyone seeking political power (which ultimately includes anyone willing to go to the polls and vote, though at a low level per individual).
What bugs me most is the apparently steadfast refusal to honestly confront and reconsider those mistakes, those quests, those self-delusions, and the all-out assaults on freedoms, on individual people's integrity (Ken Starr, for one, comes to mind), perpetrated by those in the Democrat party and on the left in general.
While the left celebrates its murderers, for example (Castro, Lenin, even, by the assessment of some, Reno), and castigates comparatively mild sinners on the right (Pinochet, Reagan, Ashcroft), the right quietly buries, if not outright distancing itself, from its murderers (McVeigh, Hitler -- though not actually right-wing by any stretch of the rational imagination) and keeps its castigation of left-wing sinners comparatively in some kind of moral perspective. (You don't hear right-wing celebrities make nearly as many, or as severe, odious comparisons between politically unpopular figures and actual murderers, the way that, e.g., the Hollywood left has compared Bill O'Reilly, a fairly neutral commentator on Fox News, to Usama bin Laden.)
Sure, 2001-09-11 seems to have stimulated such reconsideration among many on the left (from plenty of callers in to Rush's show to Rosie O'Donnell), but that's a grassroots movement that's undercutting, rather than being honestly promoted by, the Democrat party.
So, while both sides make plenty of mistakes (to put it mildly), one side seems, to me, noticeably more willing to engage in rational behavior in terms of looking at its own track record. I think that's ultimately more important, in the same sense that a child getting C's in 4th grade yet enthusiastic about learning has, perhaps, more potential to do good in the world than a classmate getting straight A's because he does whatever his parents tell him to do.
One way I look at Democrats vs. Republicans, as parties and in terms of their comparable bases, is as two "pillars" supporting a bell curve representing the distribution of political thought, energy, and population across a given axis, or spectrum, on single issues, as well as on the overall political spectrum.
That is, on specific issues, specific graphs can be drawn that shows, generally, bell-curve-like distributions of belief going from left to right in terms of specific solutions. (Hardly comprehensive views of reality, but it's how people look at things.)
While, on most economic issues, Republicans "support" (position themselves and advocate for movement towards) the "freedom" side of the graph and Democrats support the "government oversight" side, adding in the mix of social, cultural, and other issues presents a far-less-clear picture regarding who best represents freedom.
In the "overall" graph, though, which, for my purposes, includes vigorous campaigning for the nation's direction based on stated principles, the Republican party tends to set up at the center, or more typically somewhat to the right (towards "freedom"), of the peak of the bell curve as it perceives it, while the Democrats center themselves somewhat to the left (towards "government") of that same peak, though their perceptions of where that peak is actually located tend to differ. (The left-wing media tends to portray it as being to the left, for example.)
And since they're battling each other, their rhetoric naturally tends to emphasize differences, which has the effect of promoting, on the national stage anyway, the extremes -- more freedom and less government, or less freedom and more government.
Does that mean there's lots of actual difference between the parties? Well, depends on how you look at the differences between points just to the right or left of the middle of a bell curve.
But it does seem like Democrats choose, when it comes to running their party, their campaigns, their political-advocacy groups, and so on, individuals who come from the extremes of their party, while Republicans generally prefer to stick with those "squarely" in the bell curve.
E.g. compare Al Gore, as VP, telling an audience of African-Americans "Republicans don't want to count you in the census!!", or his campaign manager, Donna Brazile, in any of plenty of similar racist comments she made, to recent Republican candidates, in terms of similarly-charged politics. (That is, I don't know of Bush telling a bunch of 2nd-amendment types "Democrats want to take away all your guns!!" or his campaign manager saying things like "I'm not going to let a bunch of colored folk pick our next President", which would be, roughly, equivalents to what the Democrat's side is on-record as saying.)
Still, these are mere data points in the whole picture. None of them are, to me, particularly persuasive, and, even given the whole picture as I perceive it, I wouldn't assure anyone that I'll vote Republican or anti-Democrat for any particular office. (In fact, in 2000, I didn't vote Republican for President, though that was a tactical decision -- I live in Massachusetts, where it simply wasn't a race between Bush and Gore.)
What gets me about this discussion we're having has nothing to do with convincing you that Republicanism is "right" after all. It's that you seem so interested in thinking through the issues, doing some research, making choices for yourself, considering exactly what is meant by proposals candidates (or whoever) might float, that you've been so willing to engage me in debate on this without resorting to name-calling or other forms of personal attack -- a trend I've begun, finally, to notice, after some 20+ years of "online political advocacy", for lack of a better phrase.
That, not mindlessly pulling the "Republican" lever or getting behind any cause that seems "pro-business" (e.g. becoming a "Gates sycophant"), is the best hope for the future, as far as I'm concerned.
Rush Limbaugh is an unflagging sycophant of Bill Gates. He consistently compares him to the giants of industry; a pioneer of a brave new frontier who invented the Internet. In fact, finding out that Rush and those like him equate wealth with morality was one of the first things to "bust my bubble".
Maybe that's true of the others, but I've listened to Rush very closely on this issue in particular, and I disagree with your assessment. However, I can't claim your assessment is spectacularly flawed -- anyone listening only in fits and starts, or failing to pay very close attention to Rush's arguments on the issue, might easily come to that conclusion. (It's not nearly as idiotic as a leap from hearing Rush rail against government-mandated "affirmative action" programs to the conclusion "Rush is a racist".)
Note that I'm in a bit of a hurry, and feel you deserve a response before sometime this weekend, so I'll give you the gist of what distinguishes Rush's stance, as I've heard it expressed, from what you've expressed:
Bill Gates is rich because, by and large, people and corporations
chose to pay him for the products he (and his corporation) created. Whether those entities made the best choice (and I, Rush, might agree they haven't, since I, Rush, choose to use and promote the Apple Macintosh product line, since it's a superior product in most every respect), it was their choice, and that's the basis of our capitalistic system. Had the Clinton administration not chosen to go after Microsoft -- probably because of a paucity of contributions to the DNC -- the NASDAQ tumble might not have occurred when it did, or might have been softened, because that action convinced the market that the choices it might offer consumers could quite easily be constrained or outlined by the federal government, rather than by the consumers themselves.
Note that I don't quite agree with all of this (especially his claims, which I haven't actually heard him make in awhile, regarding the NASDAQ crash being due to the attack on the MSFT stock), but I have not heard him make claims that, in my book, make him a "Gates sycophant". (Me, I run GNU/Linux, so if I'm biased, it's in the "correct" direction to make this particular assessment. Yes, my sister works for MS -- again; she also was Lead PM for IE5 -- but if you ask her, she probably won't claim I'm prone to ignore Gates sycophanty.;-)
Yes it does, and yes it would. Ken Lay is living the high life on the money of those who invested in Enron as part of their retirement plans. Of course it would further the Ken Lays of the world to be able to tap Social Security monies in scams like Enron.
The only thing that I can figure out that fits your response is the (Bush-promoted, I believe) plan to allow individual choice in investing a small portion of one's Social Security funds.
But you don't appear to be making an important distinction between the way a given corporation, like Enron, might be able to "tap in" to this windfall of available investments, and how Congress already "taps in" to it.
So, I'll say it again, as I already have: the difference is individual choice. If you don't like how a company is run, or even don't like how the company they've chosen to audit their books is run, you can choose to not invest in it.
If you don't like how the federal government is run, you have no choice, to anything like a comparable level, when it comes to "investing" the money that you send to it at gunpoint.
Your concern seems therefore to boil down to the belief that your fellow-citizens are not smart enough to invest wisely, so you'd prefer Congress to make the choices for them, and you'll back up your preferences with the use of force.
In fact, I am pretty much disenchanted with the core of the capitalist system in general. That is - capital.
That's nothing. I'm pretty much disenchanted with the core of the material universe -- that is, the three laws of thermodynamics -- but I'm learning to live with them.
That's sarcasm, but the point is, capital is merely the abstract term we use to describe the accumulation of wealth by a person or organization. The only way to eliminate the concept of capital is to exterminate humans, along with any other critter that accumulates wealth -- e.g. squirrels, who "unfairly" accumulate nuts at the expense of other, often poorer, squirrels.
Now, if you want to claim that "wealth" or "capital" is purely relative to the market (other people) as a whole, go ahead -- at that point, your complaint boils down to "I don't like the fact that people think [make value judgements] for themselves".
Sorry, there's little you can do about that except lead the way by making demonstrably better value judgements. The market is, collectively, constantly on the lookout for such improved opportunities; you don't have to hold a gun to its head to get it to see what is going on, the way the government does to get you to do what it wants.
The rest of your explanation in that paragraph is, frankly, typical of the sort of left-wing propaganda that makes me laugh out loud. If the risk of the investors is so low compared to the employees, then why do they work there? Well, duh -- because they choose to take that risk. Why is the risk lower for the investors anyway? Well, it really isn't -- if the company fails, they lose what they invested as well. Oh, they are still rich, you say? Then they didn't invest all they had. Oh, but the employees risked it all and lost? Then they made that choice.
You'll find plenty of people who chose to not jump on the high-tech bandwagon in the late 1990s simply because they weren't willing to take such risks. E.g. they weren't willing to take lower salaries in return for stock options with expectations they considered inflated. They were rewarded by having more in savings when they layoffs hit -- if they hit their sector at all.
In short, no matter how you slice it, people will choose for themselves what to value, how much to value it, for reasons you can't always outline, and they'll make their own choices regarding risks, security, payoffs, effort, and so on.
It's the collection of such little choices that is generally referred to as "the market" -- at least in freedom-loving countries. In other countries, it's sometimes called "the black market", "what those folk in the Gulag go on about", "evil corporate America", etc.
And, again, no matter how much you go on about it, if you complain about big corporations, then you had better have a ready explanation to accommodate the fact that big governments exist, and do far more damage to the commonweal than do corporations. That's not surprising, since the governments operate, day in and day out, on the basis of the use of force, while corporations, though notionally and structurally supported by governments, operate on the basis of consumer choice.
That's why corporations -- all kinds, small, medium, and large -- go bankrupt at a fairly high frequency, yet governments rarely fail.
And the fact that the US government's use of force is comparatively limited by Constitutional and other restrictions has not only allowed US citizens to incrementally change the government, thus avoiding a spectacular failure of the kind that tends to afflict other nations when their governments get changed, but, from what I can tell, has something fairly important to do with the fact that, when even big corporations (like Enron) fail, it's not that big a disaster for the nation as a whole.
The problem is, based on my experience, that there seems to be no responsibility on the part of those who control capital
Whether you know it or not, you're indicting yourself, your neighbor, the small-business owner up the street, and so on, because they are the ones who "control capital" in America.
And even if you limit your criticism to the few mega-rich (which is, economically speaking, rather futile, since they control such a small percentage of capital in America and the world), I still end up with the fact that it is you who are making unsubstantiated allegations of their taking "no responsibility".
Excuse me, but a big part of why they ended up rich is, typically, precisely because they are responsible, and provably so, with other people's capital, such that they were entrusted with more and more over time, taking their cut along the way.
[Our capitalist system] has worked toward the accumulation and protection of wealth (as opposed to the distrubition and creation of it)
The system works towards nothing, any more than a GNU/Linux system "works" towards downloading Perl code as opposed to creating and distributing it.
Can you point to any nation -- especially one run more by left-wing principles than ours -- that, in the same time frame, did a better job of distributing and creating capital than the USA?
Until you get into concrete examples, your complaint sounds rather childish. (Yes, I know you're playing devil's advocate, so take my comments accordingly.) "They aren't playing as fair as I want."
Compared to many other nations, here in the USA, nothing prevents you from accumulating and protecting, then distributing and creating, capital for yourself, as you see fit. If you think you can do it better, go for it. You might want to learn about how other people, who are very rich, do it -- there are many who devote their lives to distributing and creating capital, who you presently choose, or seem, to ignore.
And, again, you have yet to address the fundamental issue of with what system will you replace capitalism, that will cure all these ills, that will address all your complaints?
The left certainly hasn't put forth one. And its history shows that when it tries, it succeeds at destroying capital on a nearly universal basis.
(More precisely, it concentrates the capital that inevitably exists, as well as the right to trade it comparatively freely, in the hands of even fewer -- those in government. Compare the present state of Cuba, or of the 1980s-era Soviet Union, to the pre-Communist days, in terms of capital disbursement among all the living, breathing people, and I think you'll find that your, and leftist, complaints about our "rich" look rather silly.)
It is the panicked scream over a cellphone to a stock broker: "dump the tech sector!"
Yet the tech sector has not been "dumped", if you compare its treatment in the West to how left-leaning governments like China and Cuba have treated it. (Did you know that Cuba recently banned sales of PCs? You might have if/. had approved the Wired story I submitted to the "Your Rights Online" forum a couple of weeks ago.)
So, you're upset that someone told his broker to "dump the tech sector". What effect did that have on the stocks? Nearly nil. Oh, but you say lots of people did that, and it hurt the sector? Well, then that means lots of people felt the sector was overvalued.
None of this means people decided to abandon the Internet, to destroy it, or anything like that. All it means was, just like in the 1920s, a whole bunch of people suddenly realized they weren't exactly trading in capital anymore so much as in empty promises for future earnings based on business models that didn't seem to have any potential for actually earning anything.
It's called a "shakeout", it happens often, and it is one of the most important means of making sure the limited resources of this planet tend to be used in more, rather than less, productive ways, based not on the choices made by a handful of self-appointed elites, but on the collective, daily decisions made by billions of people around the world, via a system that is, on the whole, fairly agnostic, neutral, objective, measurable, and that rapidly communicates critical information while filtering out much that is noise -- namely, the price system. (Read Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" to get a better handle on this.)
In summary, all of your complaints boil down to resenting choices lots of people make in their daily lives, but you don't offer a single useful alternative to the system, which you criticize, that allows them to make those choices (largely without fear of violent reprisals, thanks to government protection of individual rights) in the first place.
I'll say it again in different words: the propaganda of the right, preached in sound-bite forae like television and radio, amounts to "lies to children", but the truth is far deeper, yet tends to better support their "lies to children" than the left's corresponding "lies to adults", which is why, generally, I tend to prefer the solutions, as well as the preaching, of the right to that of the left.
So I understand why someone like you might get upset at discovering the oversimplifications don't always work, just as people get upset when they discover Newtonian motion doesn't really exist.
But that doesn't justify assuming that the right was completely wrong the whole time, any more than discovering the Newtonian laws of motions you were taught as "physics" in grade school were wrong justifies claiming that "physicists everywhere have it all wrong".
I suggest you devote comparable energy to studying, and being willing to dismantle, the very (left-wing) counterarguments you're putting forth as you're putting into accepting them as indictments of the right's oversimplifications. In my experience, you'll find that not only does the left oversimplify, it lies, and its elite often know they're lying.
And in case you think the left and right lying makes for a moral equivalence, consider this case: Bill tells you the sky is green and the grass is blue, therefore you must do what he says, while Joe tells you birds swim and fish fly and therefore you are free to do whatever you choose and don't have to obey Bill.
Both are lying. Is it a moral equivalence? I'd say not, since I love freedom, so I am less upset by Joe's lie than Bill's. Joe is lying, or oversimplifying, in order to convince you of an underlying truth -- of your inherent freedom -- while Bill is lying, or oversimplifying, in order to convince you of an underlying falsehood -- that because he is smarter than you, you must obey him.
That is how I view most left vs. right arguments these days, especially in the socioeconomic arena. (There are cases where the roles are reversed, primarily on cultural issues.)
So, does the right oversimplify, even sometimes lie? Yes, but, usually, in order to convince you that you should remain free, and leave your neighbor to do the same. Does that sometimes benefit corporations? Yes, but the same freedoms threaten the worst behaviors corporations might wish to engage in. The left's prescriptions, by concentrating power in the hands of the few, supposedly at the expense of corporations, merely shift the playing field for them -- instead of catering primarily to well-informed customers, they need only cater to the overly powerful government that runs citizen's lives.
And I will say that the right's oversimplifications, or lies to children, do tend to do a great deal of damage on their own even absent left-wing interference. As a simple illustration, a right-winger might easily leap from the observation that a high DJIA means a sound economy to the conclusion that anything the government can do to inflate the DJIA will benefit the economy and the public. That's quite damaging (not in the sense of left-wing mass-murder of millions, though), because it almost inevitably means trying to obscure the prism through which the public -- the market -- sees the data telling it which investments are worthwhile and which aren't.
And maybe that's what you're getting at with Gates sycophantism. Since the right believes the free market works best in determining the wisest use of resources, they're more prone to claim that whoever is richest in a free market must necessarily be the best at what they do.
But that's not necessarily the case -- even if it was, that doesn't mean they'll be the best tomorrow, since the market's effect is to provide lessons for everyone else.
So, the more people reject the oversimplifications of the right, the more they'll be able to astutely invest in, and thus navigate, the free market, avoiding making knee-jerk investments only in those entities already seen as wildly successful (which are, naturally, more likely to be overvalued).
But the more they accept the lies of the left, the less freedom they'll have to invest in the free market in the first place.
I tried to hold on to my views on government regulation, but then the DMCA happened. Then SSSCA, etc. etc. etc.
What do you mean here -- that you were in favor of government regulation, until even more regulation, in the form of DMCA and (proposed) SSSCA/CBDTPA/whatever, you changed your mind?
That seems to contradict the rest of what you say, though perhaps you assumed that, even though the SSSCA/CBDTPA is primarily backed by Democrat Senator Fritz Hollings and railed against by the conservativeNational Review in "The Un-New Democrat" in its 2002-04-22 issue, since it "favors some businesses", it must necessarily reflect the capitalist approach to government.
If I get the gist of what you're trying to say, it's that you trusted the general "lie to children" that Republicanism/corporatism/capitalism, not Democratism/socialism/government, is the One True Way to Utopia, or some approximation thereof.
As a "lie to children", that's an overly simplified way of looking at things, though I tend to believe it's at least a bit safer than the reverse, if actual freedom is your bag.
In my view, the reality is that it is a human tendency to (among other things) attempt to direct others' lives, that the Republican/corporate/capitalist worldview has a much stronger historical record of taking that into account by favoring systems that resist the greater excesses of such tyrannical impulses than the other worldview, and that, even assuming I'm right up to now, the practice of resisting tyranny must be continually exercised even against those who preach the Republican/corporate/capitalist worldview.
In short, while any theology, orthodoxy, religion, or claptrap can and will be hijacked by those seeking to control the lives of those who believe in it as well as those who might be more easily controlled by such a hijacking despite their not believing in it, most of what modern American liberalism stands for is a wholesale embrace of the tyranny of a small elite over the rest of humanity. That's borne out by their choice of issues, almost all of which come with the explicit or implicit baggage of "here's how we'll fix it by increasing government size, regulatory oversight, etc.". Compare that to right-wing advocacy, e.g. Rush Limbaugh, who almost constantly preaches lowering taxes, reducing regulation, celebrating the ability of people to make their own choices. (Even the most individualistic element of leftism over the past decades -- "reproductive rights" -- became, inevitably, twisted into a government mandate to tax citizens so as to fund abortions not only within the US but abroad, not to mention the overreaching prohibitions sought against those trying to inform pregnant women of the actual effects of having an abortion.)
Sure, some leftists would, in their fantasies, eliminate corporations, businesses, etc., but make no mistake: they are perfectly willing to cater to such entities to acquire power, as has ever been the case with governments, and certainly their individual members who gain political office rarely turn up their noses at doing the bidding for a few businesses at the expense of the market as a whole (especially since such individuals rarely place the 100% wholesale elimination of corporations high on their personal list of "things to do before I die").
As one small example: much fuss has been made over Enron, but a) every American had a choice, on an ongoing basis, whether to work for them, invest in them, hire Arthur Andersen or believe what it says in its auditing, and the market has already punished many of the players far more quickly than any government oversight committee could imagine doing in its wildest fantasies, and b) it's hard to imagine any accounting gimmick employed by Enron that hasn't been, and continues to be, employed in the financing of Social Security, out of which we do not have a choice to opt, and which has a governing organization that can put off the inevitable bankruptcy of the system by simply changing the rules (increasing retirement age), increasing taxes, and so on, since, unlike Enron and most corporations, the federal government has the guns and repeatedly shows its willingness to use them to remind citizens of its power.
But do "liberals", who rail against "evil corporations", actively rally against the financial shenanigans, enforced at gunpoint, of the Social Security system? Does Congress focus its energy on freeing individual Americans to decide for themselves whether, how, and to what extent to invest in their own retirement, choices they had, and continue to have, when it comes to investing in corporations like Enron? Of course not, because neither activity would increase the power of the wannabe-tyrants over the people. So their "evil corporate giants" act is exposed for what it is: a fraud, carefully calculated to convince the public to exchange their freedom of choice regarding their investments and employment for increased, enforced, government mandates regarding investment and employment. And who will get to make those government choices? Why, the elites who are in power, of course -- not those "big evil corporate executives"; rather, something much, much worse.
None of this makes me a fan of Enron, Microsoft, or Cisco, but, then, I generally avoid MS products, didn't (to my direct knowledge) invest in Enron, and haven't bought Cisco products.
I have yet to discover any comparably easy way to avoid being targeted by the federal government to make up for its shortfalls in ethical, moral, financial, and legal practices past, present, and future.
So while I applaud your attentiveness to the hypocracies and oversimplifications of the "right", as well as your alertness to not be drawn into accepting solutions proposed by the "left" simply because you've suddenly discovered that the business world isn't rosy, I'd like to suggest one more little-talked-about fact.
That is, the business/corporate/capitalist world explicitly depends on widespread rational, critical, commentary on business, markets, investment strategies, and so on. While some capitalists seek to limit speech, they rarely do so when it comes to speech about a competitor's failings. They don't generally protect each other.
Whereas, pretty much to the extent any government takes up liberal/socialist/communist theology, it becomes hostage to the idea that "what the people don't know won't hurt them" and, further, often seeks to protect fellow left-leaning governments from suffering the effects of exposure of their own faults as well.
(Keep in mind that it's the left-wing media that has trouble distinguishing "terrorists" from "freedom fighters", and it's left-wing governments that have the clearer history of imprisoning people for simply pointing out failures of the government and its orthodoxy. To the left, someone who firebombs a ski lodge in the name of environmentalism is more likely to be named a "freedom fighter" than is someone who criticizes government regulation; for the latter, they use phrases like "right-wing zealot" to describe them, when they can't simply imprison them to shut them up like the Soviets used to.)
Similarly, even Congressional members at odds with each other politically will sometimes rally 'round each other, protecting the "public" from information that might embarrass "the assembly" -- that is, put their collective presumptive right to rule at risk in the public's view.
I've looked at it from an information-theory point of view and from an engineering point of view, as well as a Biblical point of view, and, as far as I can tell, the model of individual initiative, which allows for choosing your own profession, running your own business, with a minimum of government intervention, beats a highly-regulatory government hands down, when it comes to the long run and the population as a whole.
None of this means you are automatically protected, by having a Republican/corporate/capitalist world, against corrupt people in power, whether that power is the highly limited kind found in corporate boardrooms, or the firepower-enforced kind found in government.
What does protect you against corporate corruption is, mainly, competition and choice, something only a few governments have tended to do a good job at ensuring is maintained with a minimum of interference. (Given the vast array of practical choices I have here in the USA, I'd guess the US government has done one of the best jobs in the history, especially given all the other stuff its had to deal with, e.g. world wars and the like. But I haven't spent any time in Taiwan, for example; perhaps it could do better.)
What protects you against government corruption is political advocacy, the vote, and the right to keep and bear arms. The American Left (joined by "Republicans" such as Senator John McCain) explicitly attack your right to engage in (e.g. by funding) political advocacy in the form of Campaign Finance Reform, claim the second is a loss due to the Florida 2000 Presidential debacle, and have, as have all left-leaning governments in history I believe, been long engaged in the elimination of the third, in the form of gun control.
Since no corporation can be as menacing as a government without being, in effect, a government, it all comes down to choosing whether and how to vigorously oppose corruption in government, which includes opposing corrupting influences, including the human tendency to try to control, or regulate, other peoples' lives.
If you don't make good use of the first two methods (political advocacy and the vote) to accomplish this, you'll likely end up either losing your freedom, having to exercise the third option (take up arms), or having the third option exercised against you -- remember how poor right-wing Christians fared during the Clinton "anti-gun" era, e.g. Waco and little Elian Gonzalez, and try to figure out exactly what threats those situations posed to the government that required such extreme uses of force -- the kind of force the left rails against when it is exercised against left-wing terrorists, or militant Muslim terrorists who have long allied themselves with left-wing entities such as the Soviet Union and the claim that "poverty is the root cause of terrorism" -- and then try to reconcile that with the coddling of terrorists, including the early release of known, convicted left-wing terrorists, by that same Clinton administration.
Let's face it -- what the left chooses to use as political footballs (such as catchphrases) rarely pans out when the so-called reasoning it uses is applied to lots of obviously similar situations. As the old saying goes, "The problem with communism is communism; the problem with capitalism is capitalists"; in my experience, you have to fight the left's prescriptions, whereas you generally need only fight the right's implementations.
But you must always fight for freedom, and, in this world, while that sometimes seems to require violence, we're especially privileged (in the USA anyway) to be able to fight so effectively without engaging in violence or the imposition of our wills on others, thanks to the political system we have. No system of government (short of God's own government) can do the fighting for you, but history shows that some systems allow, even encourage, ordinary people to become extraordinary fighters for freedom more than others, and the Constitutionally-limited United States Government is, to my limited knowledge, unsurpassed in this regard.
I think that explicitly saying that the deaths of four cancer patients is a bigger tragedy than the loss of 28 soldiers is pretty sad.
But Byte didn't say that, according to your own emphasis on the quote you supplied!
Take another look at that. They said it was the most tragic instance "of death or injuries to human beings due to defective computer software".
The cancer patients died entirely due to defective computer software -- had the software been correct, they would have not died at that time.
The soldiers died entirely due to an Iraqi missile attack -- had the missile attack not been launched, they would have not died at that time.
Further, had the Patriot software been 100% correct, it is not assuredly the case that the soldiers would not have died, since that would not have implied 100% guaranteed success intercepting the Iraqi missile. (I'm basing this on the general truth that, in the real world, there is no such thing as a 100% guaranteed defense against such attacks -- I'm no expert on Iraqi scuds, Patriot missiles, or even BB guns.)
So, the Byte article, to the extent you quoted it (and I'm basing my comments entirely on your quotes), is correct. The cancer patients died due to software error, the soldiers died due to other causes that might have been prevented except for software error, and, in my book, that certainly makes the deaths of the former rate high as a "tragic incident" of that sort, while the latter rates as a "tragic incident" of a different sort.
You might have a legit complaint if a software error caused the Iraqi missiles to launch accidentally -- put more simply, if 28 soldiers died due to "friendly fire" stemming directly from a software bug, then I'd say it might be legit to question calling the deaths of 4 cancer patients "more tragic" than that. (Though, as someone else points out, at least the soldiers know and accept the risks of friendly fire to a greater degree than cancer patients; change the 28 victims to innocent civilians and you've really got a case -- a hypothetical one, of course.)
In short, you have provided no justification for your statement that they, the authors of the Byte article, "suck", since it is apparent, at least to me, that they were not comparing the deaths of the 4 to the deaths of the 28 in their "tragic incident" language. The world already has plenty of people who go emotionally overboard in the face of rational characterizations of historical events; I suggest you try a different approach, one less prone to aggravating tensions between people and organizations, especially the press.
(Not that I even read Byte, I just find it frustrating to see people publically bash others based on half-baked interpretations of pretty clearly written prose.)
No, since those who link to their site need not enter into a valid contractual relationship with them, they are not bound by the TOS, any more than if the TOS said "for every link to this site, you must send us $100". They've already implicitly granted permission for anyone on the web to link to their site, and anyone to read the materials so linked, by providing a server that fulfills such requests. If they wish their server to enter into contractual agreements before fulfilling such requests, they'll have to modify the technology accordingly -- perhaps by offering a facility to augment or replace the World Wide Web (say, as is done by those offering products for payment via credit-card numbers).
The simple fact is that the owners of the site themselves are the "proximate source of copying" of the materials they claim are being illegally copied. If they wish to stop the materials from being copied, it is entirely within their power to do so, and easily done -- simply removing the material from the site is just one possibility.
By the flow of the game I mean, depending on the squares your peices are on decides the possible moves the opponent has.
Oh, okay...I thought you meant something like, the collected "experience" the players gained, regarding each other's methods of attack and defense, based on moves earlier in the game.
If you have your peices on all the best squares with the best angles of attack
Well, yeah, the problem for someone like me being, how do I get into such a position in the first place?
Not having a brain capable of reliably performing that task, it's fun to think (fantasize?) about slam-dunking the problem via computer.
Well, I'd say second-most -- surely it's secondary to being able to checkmate your opponent (or at least secure a draw) in N moves, assuming you can prove that capability.
You can teach a computer to be perfect with problem solving and calculations, but to teach a computer to recognize good positions, and understand the flow of the board, thats VERY difficult.
And here you touch on the crux of the context of this debate. You're not talking with a bunch of chess experts.
You're talking with a bunch of geeks who are, if they're anything like me (and I'm guessing they are), inherently lazy and quite confident in the power of their tools -- specifically, computers.
If someone wants to explore the ins and outs of "mystical" issues like the "flow of the game" of chess, or board position/control, they'll surely seek forums other than/. -- chess-specific forums.
Even if they want to focus on computer learning as it applies to these issues -- also called "Artificial Intelligence" -- they'll probably choose to "live" somewhere other than/..
So, what you're left with are people who, confronted with the vast complexity of the "mere game" of chess -- "mere" in the sense that it has a very limited playing space, limited piece selection, limited movement, no random elements, etc. -- are much more likely to look for ways to "win" that don't involve actually having to devote decades of deep thought to the problem.
Instead, they'd rather consider how much easier the problem becomes once computing power reaches the point where all they need to do is type in the fundamental rules of chess (valid moves and such; not stuff like piece "values" though), glue on a few lines of Perl code, and be assured that the result will never lose.
And, it really is a SMOP -- "Small Matter of Programming" -- because chess is, basically, a game that allows for fairly easy programming of an automaton that cannot lose. (This is assuming that the game does not inherently put either player in a position where the opponent can force that player to lose, which most people believe, but, I gather from comments on this article, has not been proven.)
However, unlike other "classic" SMOPs, the challenge with chess, for geeks like us, is that the resources consumed by a straightforward automaton are projected to exceed that of the known universe. ("Classic" SMOPs tend to be difficult to program, but not necessarily resource-intensive once they're programmed, I believe.)
But we're hardy folk! Rather than admit defeat in the face of limited time, energy, and space in the universe and going on to attack the "problem" the way most everyone in the "real world" has by simply learning the game and becoming grand masters over a period of decades, we ask ourselves "is there some magic bullet that'll solve the problem of finite resources before we complete such an undertaking ourselves?". After all, we'd much rather play games and muck with other fun stuff than actually master just one game like chess.
Hence the excess of discussions here (compared to, I expect, typical forums on actually playing chess) invoking quantum-based computing, multiple universes, algorithm-based solutions, AI, and other still-mythical magical bullets.
In such discussions, there is, as you've discovered, little point in explaining that a player must learn "board position", "board control", "the flow of the game", whether that player is man or machine -- the people you're talking with have already considered that option and chosen to dump it. We do so for at least one good reason: the complexity of the "rule base" (in the expert-system sense) for doing well at chess presently vastly exceeds that of the "rule base" for playing the game correctly (that is, making valid, if not winning, moves). Further, the rule base of the former is ill-defined, and any version of it is likely to have bugs that are as easy to expose as the fatal flaw of the Death Star in the "Star Wars" movie(s), whereas the rule base of the latter is, presumably, rock-solid.
So we hold out hope that we can find some other set of rules that, in combination with increased computing power, will have a correctness/complexity ratio sufficiently in excess of that of the rule base of the sort you real players of chess must keep in mind that we can be assured of not losing to you anytime we play (with the assistance of our machines).
And while chess is still "out of reach" as far as this goes, compared to, say, tic-tac-toe (which a properly-programmed automaton will never lose at), it should be pretty easy to create a "simplified" form of chess that can be shown to be "perfectly playable" -- not losable -- by a present-day automaton. (Limit the size of the board and piece selection further, don't permit cycles, maybe a few other forms of reduction.) Playing that form of chess, there'll be no need for an automaton to care about board position or control, or the flow of the game -- that is, there'll be no code to do so in the automaton, though an observer might think there is -- it'll simply avoid losing every time, and, against many humans, it'll win most of the time.
In short, we're not interested in winning chess games. We're fascinated by the possibility of creating an automaton that can play for us and never lose, giving us that special quality that attracts not only chess groupies, but groupies from all the other similar sorts of games (Go, for example) that our automatons presumably would also excel at playing.
In chess, the first person to lose control of the board, loses the game most of the time when the game is between two very good players.
Indeed, but given a player that can fully enumerate all possible branches, there is simply no issue of "control of the board" for that player (assuming that you don't mean, by that, "has the next move", rather, something less precisely defined than move-making in chess). It is, assuming the player is "programmed" correctly, merely an issue of choosing, based on a given board position (pieces plus state information regarding castling and such), a move that leads to only win/draw results for that player for as long as that player can choose his moves (i.e., for as long as the rules of play are in effect).
Your statements about chess apply to the present, real-world situation where this is theoretically possible, but computationally impossible, or believed to be so.
Put another way: I am a terrible chess player. But given a computer whose hardware is capable of analyzing, say, 30 moves beyond a given position, and an initial chess position that is "balanced" and yet guarantees a win or draw for "my" side within 30 moves, I can, as a mere programmer, program that computer to avoid the moves that would lead to a loss against anyone, including yourself, "control of the board" being made irrelevant.
In this sense, chess indeed being a game of "perfect information", unlike, say, "Battleship", discussing the capability of a theoretically infinitely-powered Turing machine (that is, a "computer", a deterministic computing machine) playing chess is akin to discussing solving the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) -- for any given problem size, a solution can be assuredly found, it's mainly a question of whether we can actually, yet, build a machine that has the speed and memory to do it.
(And the answer to both questions is presently "no", constraints such as the size and longevity of the universe being as we presently understand them.)
Though I haven't looked at it yet, I assume GNU Chess is an example of a computer program worth looking at if you want to learn a bit about how computers play chess, including how they "limit" themselves to accommodate real-world limitations on time and memory. It comes free with source code, so, even if not the "best" chess player available for general-purpose computers these days, it might be more instructive than better programs that come as "black boxes", i.e. without source code.
Oh, the other interesting thing about all this is: from a computational perspective, your phrase "control of the board" is probably insufficiently precise. That is, you can't precisely define what you mean by it. To the extent you can, you can program a computer to seek it out, and that is of what most of the effort put into programming computers to play chess well consists -- mere move-computing and such being the "easy part" (or so I assume, since it'd be the easy part for me).
In that sense, defining "control of the board" to a given degree of precision can make the difference between winning and losing against an opponent that has its own degree of precision in understanding that phrase. (I'm assuming the accuracy of these definitions within their limits of precision.)
/. is not a "public forum"; it's a glorified, self-serving blog that strokes the ego's of the open-source community.
Looking at your web site, it seems you are a software consultant, as am I.
Gotta say, it seems strange that you spend any time or energy posting such vicious anti-free-software rhetoric on a "glorified, self-serving blog".
Since around 1990, I can't think of a single client I've had that hasn't chosen to base their business (commercial, educational, whatever) on a mix of both proprietary and free (GPL) software.
So, while I might use forums such as/. (and, historically, USENET) to clarify misconceptions regarding free software vis-a-vis proprietary software, I certainly would not take it upon myself to depict those who chose proprietary (or free) software for various reasons as idiots, fools, etc. -- which is what trashing the availability of options one side or the other offers amounts to, from the point of view of those who have chosen those options.
Assuming I even felt that way (which I don't), such depictions would amount to publically insulting my past, present, and potential future clients, something that might prove unwise should I find myself desperate for work in the future.
Nor would I use forums such as/. as a sandbox in which to publically attack the credibility of fellow software consultants, with whom I might be asked to work by potential future clients. They might find it difficult to convince those whom I have attacked to work harmoniously with me in the future, which would reduce my value to potential clients in the long run.
You might not think much of/. as a public forum, but are you so sure none of your past, present, or potential future clients read it to keep up on the free software they might have adopted, or be in the process of considering adopting, as a crucial component for their business? And do you really think it's wise to be so plainly on permanent, public record as impugning the credibility of fellow software consultants, with so little evidence on which to base your accusations?
Anyway...you sure have an interesting way of spending your free time. (Me, I sing in a chorus and have recently taken up figure skating -- I doubt any rational potential clients will find it necessary to cross me off their list for participating in these activities.)
...in the name of defense that we haven't already given up in the name of endangered species, redistribution of wealth, the war on drugs, the war on guns, the war on tobacco, the war on racism, the war on sexism, the environment, caring for the elderly, and so on?
I mean, hey, I'm glad so many people here are concerned about the government having fewer hoops to jump through to monitor our email, but when you collectively choose to elect legislators who'll intrude in other peoples' lives to implement your pet agenda, don't be surprised when their knee-jerk reaction to an atrocity like 2001-09-11 is to pass some laws making it easier to intrude in your lives to ease the fears of others who might care nothing about the privacy of email.
when my package arrived, so did a US customs official and at least four local cops. They questioned me for 20 minutes in my foyer.
Just wondering...how did they get into your foyer -- did you invite them in?
(I've heard/seen anecdotal "legal advice" to simply not permit cops into your home when they show up. Once you let them in, they have a much wider degree of latitude to look around, play with stuff, including asking to use your bathroom and then rifling through it.)
I've wondered, lately, whether, if a cop showed up at my door, even for a totally non-threatening reason, I'd take the advice to not let him in, or give into my "historical" tendency to welcome, and want to show respect for, authority figures.
Having had some distinctly different experiences with police officers (one lied to me outright after a traffic accident, for example; most of the others have been quite honest and decent), most in what I consider to be less-alarming situations than the one you describe, it's not an easy decision to make ahead of time.
You share the very same attitude that i've encountered a number of times when dealing with Open Source - people always saying "hey - it's free! What more do you want??", and then try to tell me that their crapware is so much better than the closed-source for-profit alternative. Screw that!
Perhaps what you run into is more the result of volunteers carefully considering the degree to which you'll actually value the efforts they make to help you -- which, apparently, is pretty close to zero.
Meanwhile, if you want reliable support, you have to pay for it, at least in this universe.
If, on the other hand, you believe you can get along with free, ad-hoc support, on the whole, it seems the free-software community at least equals, perhaps betters, the proprietary-software community.
Finally, if you want to be able to choose your own team to support the software you use, then you can pretty much write off using proprietary software entirely, since supporting software without access to its source code is a nightmare.
By the way, whether you pay for the software or get it for free is orthagonal to all of the above. You can get Internet Explorer for free, but, presumably, without source, which means you'll have no hope of improving it to fit your needs (beyond whatever hooks MS provides). And you can pay $$ to get Redhat Linux, and hire your own support staff (or just a consultant, whatever) to improve it however you see fit, since it's free software (in the gnu.org sense; it comes with source code).
The only point at which paying for software and ensuring reliable support intersect is where the cost of providing some degree of support for a limited period of time is incorporated in the price of a single distribution of that software.
With proprietary software, for a given product, whether you're forced to pay for both to get the software (and thereby limited to a single vendor for support) is entirely up to the distribuor.
With free software, for every single product, you can choose whether to: a) acquire the software for free and maintain it on your own dime; b) acquire the software for free and pay a fee to a support vendor of your choice to support it; c) buy a distribution of the software and maintain it on your own dime (which probably means the cost of the distribution does not incorporate the cost of support, e.g. a Cheapbytes CD); and d) buy a distribution of the software and employ the support of the seller of the distribution (assuming that's part of the deal).
All in all, it seems that you're complaining that free software offers choices a, b, and c, rather than forcing you, as is generally the case for proprietary software, to accept "choice" d.
(I'll only lightly touch on the fact that, while my purchased Redhat Linux 7.1 permits a presumably-limited number of systems registered for support in their data base for a limited time, the licensing for the system in no way limits me to a fixed number of systems on which I may choose to, in fact, install it. I can even hand it out to a neighbor and let them copy it onto their system. Legally. I can do none of this with Windows 98, and I won't even get into the fact that proprietary software is written with a mindset that the software serves the vendor rather than its user, which is almost never the case with free software -- e.g. MS Encarta refusing to let you print a picture from its data base because it's "copyrighted".)
In the meantime, while I share many of the frustrations you express with the quality of software and support in the free/volunteer world (and probably have many more pet peeves of my own), I see no reason to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially in a public forum, especially by singling out "offenders" who refuse to cater to my every whim for free, as you seem prone to do.
The question about global warming is not weather the globe is, in fact, warming, but whether 1) mankind is the cause, 2) how much warming really matters, and 3) whether the earth has self-equilibrium processes that we don't understand.
Okay, you seem to have some strong views on the subject, so I'd like to ask you whether there's a fourth item that belongs on that list:
[whether] global treaties limiting emissions will have any generally positive effect on the global environment, especially compared to whatever negative effects they might have on the ability of mankind to flourish
It's that last question that makes me laugh out loud when people claim they're doing something, e.g. creating a new flavor of ice cream, to "reverse global warming" by "raising global consciousness" and "convincing Bush" to go along with Kyoto.
I mean, is there any organization anywhere on the world that has any semblance of a track record of success controlling the global environment?
Ultimately, if the question of success of the avenue of "fixing" the global climate as recommended by most Global-Warming adherents cannot be positively answered, supported by objective data, including global social, economic, and political computer models that are independently reviewed, then, IMO, it doesn't matter one whit what the answers to the other questions are, when it comes to evaluating the utility of things like the Kyoto Protocols.
Am I missing something here? (Aside from the usual answer that, somehow, I'm missing the fact that the Global Warming adherents mean well, and so I should accept their desire to exert some degree of control over all mankind, in the hopes that their good intentions will win out over any rational assessment of the likelihood of their success.)
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I didn't say they didn't -- the discussion was about people, not organizations.
Making moral judgements about people based solely on their chosen professions or job titles ("businessman vs. beauracrat") is foolish.
If it wasn't, then we could all be assured that beauracrats never lie, environmental scientists never falsify data, and priests never molest post-pubescent boys.
Freedom is battiness? Hmm. (I'm not a Libertarian, by the way, but clearly you associate advocacy on behalf of individual choice versus government regulation with "battiness" and "nuttiness".)
Man, 30 years ago I would not have believed a statement beginning this way would imply victory for the little guy!!
Or, put another way: remember, at the end of the day, a business man, having made his profit, will have no further incentive to lie to the public. A civil servant, on the other hand, dependent on convincing the public to fund him and his beauracracy by assuring us that he and it are "serving" us, will never tire of lying to us, no matter how much money and power he extracts from us by force.
(That is, in essence, a paraphrase of some quote I can't quite recall, having to do with the distinction between a tyrant trying to satiate his base desires and one who is trying to satisfy his "sense" of doing good; the point of the quote being, the latter is far more dangerous, for he is never satisfied, there never being enough "goodness" in the world by his reckoning.)
Not sure what your point is here. EGCS was primarily a distinct (from GCC) approach to project management, not really a distinct product.
So, if you mean EGCS was/is another C compiler that can compile the Linux kernel, well, yes, that's true, but EGCS always was the GNU C compiler, project-managed outside of the strict GNU sphere for a time, but not really "another C compiler" in a sense that's sufficiently pertinent to my earlier post.
Put another way: for most intents and purposes, EGCS was never anything but the GNU C compiler with contributions from GNU people to make it distinct from GCC based on different assumptions about what was important at the time -- different from the assumptions made by the FSF-appointed GCC project leader, who is, if I understand the situation correctly (having been out of the "biz" of working on GCC for awhile), making substantial contributions to GCC (which is, today, more derived from the EGCS branch than the old GCC 2.8 branch, I think).
Certainly EGCS is nowhere near to being an example of a successful attempt at creating a Linux-kernel-compatible, non-GNU C compiler, since it "fails" at being the latter -- it was the GNU C code base from the beginning, and became GNU C itself not long after.
Anyone believing GNU Hurd should be re-prioritized could, of course, do what the EGCS people did: start their own project using the same code base, and project-lead it their way, perhaps ultimating in their variant being anointed by the FSF as the "official" one, as happened when EGCS became official GCC. (And, yes, take the risk that, for whatever reason, the FSF might never be willing to take that step, and be prepared to engage in the sort of diplomacy that minimizes that risk. Though my memory is a bit hazy, I think it's safe to say the world is a better place because I wasn't in charge of that sort of "diplomacy" when it came to the EGCS->GCC transition negotiations -- else we'd probably still have a resource-wasting split on our hands. ;-)
Similarly, someone wishing to augment or ultimately replace GCC as "the" compiler for Linux is welcome to try, and they can start with GCC as the code base if they like (if they aren't doing it to create a non-GPL'ed alternative, for example).
A key thing to remember: convincing enough people to use your alternative rather than the "mainstream" product (GCC, Linux, whatever) requires more than just one-upping the mainstream.
That'll get a few people to switch, but to get enough to switch to build the kind of development and maintenance momentum behind your variant necessary to make it an independent entity in the way that Linux, GCC, Apache are pretty much independent of one or even a few developers, you'll have to N-up the mainstream, where N is some combination of a few really important improvements and many less-important ones.
I believe that happened for EGCS because that project did not represent so much a splintering of resources away from GCC at the time as a stampede. While maintaining g77 for both forks for a time, GCC struck me as more of the "splinter" in terms of size and vitality, EGCS as more of the "mainstream", so EGCS had a lot of momentum from the get-go and, almost overnight, achieved a pretty hefty value for N.
Yet, IIRC, there was still a substantial audience insisting on using GCC rather than EGCS even as the FSF was anointing EGCS as the official GCC going forward. (Can't quantify that audience, sorry, but it would be interesting to see a case study of that whole episode of a free-software-development fork and subsequent join; seems like much could be learned from having some hard data on how it went down, both internally and in terms of outside perceptions and usage of the software.)
No, it's the bit he didn't do soon enough, because his focus was putting together a widely portable operating system, mainly focusing on tools, that could (and did and still does) run on a variety of kernels, most of which were (at the time), sadly, proprietary.
Another way to view it: from RMS' point of view circa 1989, a "free" kernel was a lot like a "free" device driver, only bigger and more complicated, in that it enabled use of free software on certain hardware (CPUs). Compare that to writing more free OS utilities, which would be portable to all hardware that could support GNU software (regardless of kernel), and you can see why he might have made the choices he did at the time.
Now, did Hurd, once he focused GNU resources on creating it, prove to be an overly ambitious ivory-tower-type project? IMO, yes. In the meantime, Linus and others scratched an itch by evolving (moreso than designing a la Hurd) a kernel for a specific CPU family, which meant that the resources GNU might have used for such a project were used for other, more portable or widely useful, GNU tools -- or, at least, that was a plausible likelihood.
How do I know all this?
Because, in 1988 or 1989, I volunteered my "talents" to RMS for GNU, and specifically asked him if he wanted me to take over the job of writing the OS kernel for GNU, something that was dead-center down my area of expertise. (I'd been doing OS kernel and related work since, oh, about 16 years of age, in a professional sense anyway; since earlier as an "amateur hacker".)
He declined the offer and asked me if I knew anything about Fortran. Since I'd recently learned some things about compilers, specifically Fortran compilers, I said yes, and the upshot was that I wrote GNU Fortran (g77).
RMS's main point at the time was that he believed he'd be able to get some existing portable kernel "freed" for use with GNU, so why throw sparse resources trying to create a free copy out of whole cloth?
Now, you can argue that he should have had me write the kernel instead, and, personally, I would have loved doing that, especially since I'd have been an actual end user of the product (compared to g77, which I don't use). I wouldn't have been nearly as successful at Torvalds when it came to project management though, as can be easily verified from studying g77's history. But my kernel wouldn't have been the ivory-tower-style Hurd, either, and I probably knew more about OS kernel design and implementation as of 1988 than did Linus as of 1991, if technical competency is an important issue. (Not so much a boast as a natural result of having been born so much earlier that I'd had about a two-decade head-start getting into kernel development.)
But, had I undertaken that task, what role might Linus and the others have played? Would they have written g77? I don't think so. They might have scratched some other itch, of course, but, in the end, I think the results are better the way they actually worked out than if I'd been the author of the GNU kernel.
As to your other claims: I agree with most of them, except you do seem to be unaware of the fact that, unlike with Apache, KDE, even BSD components, there is, today, no such thing as a GNU-free Linux kernel, given the kernel's (IMO overly-aggressive) dependency on GNU-specific extensions to the C language.
Linux developed, and remains, much more like a potted plant with GNU as its soil than like a mere partner that happens to use GNU.
Indeed, without that plant, few people would be interested in the "special" soil that is GNU. It's the plant that makes the whole thing worth having, to most people anyway. But GNU soil had been, and continues to be, widely and portably used without a shred of Linux code involved, whereas there is no Linux system without GNU.
(I use "Linux system" to mean a Linux kernel running an OS that provides the means to change the kernel code and recompile the kernel, since that's an important aspect of what makes Linux special. I assume the Linux kernel itself can boot up and run on a given CPU with no GNU code present, but it can't, or at least couldn't, be compiled in the first place without GNU C.)
And, in case anybody's wondering, if it's simply a "small matter of programming" (aka SMOP) to replace the GNU components with some other, thus "demonstrating" that GNU/Linux is really just Linux with a lot of other stuff including GNU, then, by all means, try it.
But, also for the record, there has been, to my knowledge, no shortage of technically competent people who have declared publically that they will write a replacement for GCC that isn't a) GPL-licensed (say, public domain instead) and b) considered a GNU project.
These "threats", as some might view them, go back to maybe 1992 or so -- well before the "GNU/Linux", or "lignux", debacle started by RMS -- yet, last I knew, nobody had actually converted their anger at RMS, the GPL, the GNU project, whatever, into actual code that provides a usable GNU-free Linux.
If and when somebody does write a useful replacement for GNU (for licensing and/or political reasons), that'll be all the more reason to distinguish their Linux variant from the current one, which I have already gotten into the habit of calling GNU/Linux partly in breathless anticipation of that long-awaited event!
After going through the usual hired-hand tech support BS (had to reboot my GNU/Linux system, like that'd fix it, right?), they made an appointment to send someone out a couple of days later.
The guy showed up about 15 minutes early, and quickly diagnosed the problem. No, it wasn't my cable modem, it was the low signal coming in, which he verified was a problem before it even came into the house (although two or three splitters upstream of my cable modem might be a bit much; I might eliminate one of them if I run into more problems). He said it'd be fixed, probably the next day, and, sure enough, the connectivity has been much better since then.
So, though I had a few nightmares about the potential hassles involved in dealing with a tech who might harangue me for not running Windows on their system, what actually happened was a much more positive experience.
Having gotten the $7-increase email (which will really not take effect for another six months), I'll have to take some time to reevaluate my household's Internet-access policies. Stick with consumer-level Broadband? Upgrade to the commercial service they introduced a few months ago? Look into whether some kind of DSL has become possible from my location since the last time I asked, when we were just out of range? Go back to dial-up, which wasn't that bad?
But with at least one reasonable "service experience" with attbi under my belt, there's less incentive to get off their system.
No he doesn't. Where did you get that idea?
I mostly agree, with the following caveat: it is possible that there exists one or more belief systems based on faith that prove to be groundable in reason and logic, i.e. that stand the test of time, with its corresonding improvement in methods of science. In such cases, those systems would not, in and of themselves, fall into ridicule, although the means by which they became accepted might be regarded as, at least, rather amazing to those accustomed to subjecting all belief systems to the scientific method.
Another "big question", of course, is whether belief in reason and logic is itself a form of faith. Being raised a Christian Scientist, a religion in which three of the seven fundamental definitions, or synonyms, of "God" are "Truth", "Mind", and "Principle", I consider my assumptions based on the predictive capability of reason and logic to, themselves, be projections of faith -- faith that the universe, as I experience it, won't suddenly change (that 2+2 won't suddenly start equaling 3, to pick an absurd example).
As you might expect, this gives me a somewhat unique view of the atheism vs. religion debate. It strikes me as nonsensical that atheists would, informed of my definition of God, steadfastly disavow the existence of any Truth, Principle, or Mind that is necessary to support their very reliance on principles, truths, and a mind to contain and process them when they make their denials, along with the logic they use to support those denials.
Therefore, I tend to view atheism as, roughly, the rejection of the more "mystical" elements of what certain religious traditions claim equal God. (These might include the other four synonyms for "God": "Love", "Spirit", "Soul", and "Life", in which case an atheistic denial constitutes only a denial of some attributes of what I consider to be "God".)
In that sense, I don't find atheism to be, generally, a rejection of God so much as a rejection of certain qualities we experience as being fundamental properties, versus emergent properties, of the universe. (Those emergent properties would include the existence of a species, such as Homo Sapiens, that merely imagines it experiences them, labels them, writes poetry about them, and so on.)
But this perspective also gives me much amusement when atheists pronounce, as they tend to do, that all religion, or at least all Christian religion, is entirely false, is based on nonscientific reasoning, and so on, when their claims demonstrate ignorance of a substantial component of Christian theology and tradition that is, largely, rational, scientific, and tested. (This component extends well beyond, and historically precedes, the Christian Science "sect", of course.)
And the reason I find that amusing should be obvious: if atheists are so prone to making pronouncements that demonstrate ignorance of widely-documented and widely-accepted Christian beliefs, how in the world do they expect me to believe their outright statement that God does not exist?
In that sense, atheism itself may one day be viewed as a "belief system based on faith" that fell into ridicule.
(Which raises a related question: what is the survival rate and typical historical fate of atheistic civilizations throughout history, given that this thread has already covered religious civilizations?)
Hmm, didn't they look on others as foolish, too?
If so, doesn't that suggest that the holding of others' views as foolish is, in and of itself, foolish?
(At least I think it might be foolish, except insofar as such a perspective is, itself, foolish. ;-)
That's a nuclear-scientist-geek bumper-sticker just waiting to happen.
Couldn't it be somewhat of an all-or-nothing proposition?
Perhaps -- Rush certainly talks about "Rockefeller Republicans" in ways that sound strikingly similar to the ones you describe.
Sounds like we agree in large part regarding the pursuit of power and the various guises it takes.
The Democrats who form the comparable constituency to the dittohead-type (pro-freedom, anti-regulation) Republican also have little actual representation among the elites in the Democrat party.
It's worth observing that, while such Democrats have often found it worthwhile to cross over and vote for Republican candidates (Reagan and, to a lesser extent, Bush43), rarely have Republicans abandoned their party in order to vote for someone seen as embodying their principles, though I think Bush41 v. Clinton in 1992 might be, to a limited degree, a counterexample (Bush41 having shown some "flexibility" on stated principles; even I was considering Clinton my likely choice for President through sometime in August 1992, until I learned just how principled he had proven to be in his past).
There may indeed be little difference between the parties in terms of internal machinations and the character of the men who choose to become the elite ringleaders of those machinations, but if you compare the public rhetoric of the past one, two, or three instances of each party's President, it's obvious, to me, that one party is more vigorous when it comes to nominating and electing someone who inspires and celebrates the yearning of individual Americans for their freedom, their willingness to defend it for themselves and others, and that freedom's inherent, superior ability to serve as the basis for humanity's progress compared to any other system of government invented by man.
It also seems to me the Republican party, base, and "media" is fairly honest about its own past deceptions (Bush41's "no new taxes" pledge is frequently recalled, especially recently vis-a-vis Bush43's signing of Campaign Finance Reform). I rarely see such honest self-examination among Democrats in the media.
Similarly, among friends and family, the Republicans are far quicker to castigate their own (Bush41 on taxes and other things, Ashcroft on his supposed "abysmal record on women") than are the Democrats. Can't recall a single Democrat friend or relative who has "taken back" their high-sounding prose regarding the positive "change" that would be brought to the nation as a result of electing Clinton in 1992 -- this despite the spectacle of so many inner-circle Clintonians testifying under oath that their questionable campaign-finance dealings must have been okay because "Reagan and Bush did the same stuff".
And I guess that's one of the key things that really bugs me about the left. It's not the mistakes, it's not the unquenchable thirst for power, it's not the self-delusion that "if only my way were implemented, everything would be better" -- that's shared in spades among pretty much everyone seeking political power (which ultimately includes anyone willing to go to the polls and vote, though at a low level per individual).
What bugs me most is the apparently steadfast refusal to honestly confront and reconsider those mistakes, those quests, those self-delusions, and the all-out assaults on freedoms, on individual people's integrity (Ken Starr, for one, comes to mind), perpetrated by those in the Democrat party and on the left in general.
While the left celebrates its murderers, for example (Castro, Lenin, even, by the assessment of some, Reno), and castigates comparatively mild sinners on the right (Pinochet, Reagan, Ashcroft), the right quietly buries, if not outright distancing itself, from its murderers (McVeigh, Hitler -- though not actually right-wing by any stretch of the rational imagination) and keeps its castigation of left-wing sinners comparatively in some kind of moral perspective. (You don't hear right-wing celebrities make nearly as many, or as severe, odious comparisons between politically unpopular figures and actual murderers, the way that, e.g., the Hollywood left has compared Bill O'Reilly, a fairly neutral commentator on Fox News, to Usama bin Laden.)
Sure, 2001-09-11 seems to have stimulated such reconsideration among many on the left (from plenty of callers in to Rush's show to Rosie O'Donnell), but that's a grassroots movement that's undercutting, rather than being honestly promoted by, the Democrat party.
So, while both sides make plenty of mistakes (to put it mildly), one side seems, to me, noticeably more willing to engage in rational behavior in terms of looking at its own track record. I think that's ultimately more important, in the same sense that a child getting C's in 4th grade yet enthusiastic about learning has, perhaps, more potential to do good in the world than a classmate getting straight A's because he does whatever his parents tell him to do.
One way I look at Democrats vs. Republicans, as parties and in terms of their comparable bases, is as two "pillars" supporting a bell curve representing the distribution of political thought, energy, and population across a given axis, or spectrum, on single issues, as well as on the overall political spectrum.
That is, on specific issues, specific graphs can be drawn that shows, generally, bell-curve-like distributions of belief going from left to right in terms of specific solutions. (Hardly comprehensive views of reality, but it's how people look at things.)
While, on most economic issues, Republicans "support" (position themselves and advocate for movement towards) the "freedom" side of the graph and Democrats support the "government oversight" side, adding in the mix of social, cultural, and other issues presents a far-less-clear picture regarding who best represents freedom.
In the "overall" graph, though, which, for my purposes, includes vigorous campaigning for the nation's direction based on stated principles, the Republican party tends to set up at the center, or more typically somewhat to the right (towards "freedom"), of the peak of the bell curve as it perceives it, while the Democrats center themselves somewhat to the left (towards "government") of that same peak, though their perceptions of where that peak is actually located tend to differ. (The left-wing media tends to portray it as being to the left, for example.)
And since they're battling each other, their rhetoric naturally tends to emphasize differences, which has the effect of promoting, on the national stage anyway, the extremes -- more freedom and less government, or less freedom and more government.
Does that mean there's lots of actual difference between the parties? Well, depends on how you look at the differences between points just to the right or left of the middle of a bell curve.
But it does seem like Democrats choose, when it comes to running their party, their campaigns, their political-advocacy groups, and so on, individuals who come from the extremes of their party, while Republicans generally prefer to stick with those "squarely" in the bell curve.
E.g. compare Al Gore, as VP, telling an audience of African-Americans "Republicans don't want to count you in the census!!", or his campaign manager, Donna Brazile, in any of plenty of similar racist comments she made, to recent Republican candidates, in terms of similarly-charged politics. (That is, I don't know of Bush telling a bunch of 2nd-amendment types "Democrats want to take away all your guns!!" or his campaign manager saying things like "I'm not going to let a bunch of colored folk pick our next President", which would be, roughly, equivalents to what the Democrat's side is on-record as saying.)
Still, these are mere data points in the whole picture. None of them are, to me, particularly persuasive, and, even given the whole picture as I perceive it, I wouldn't assure anyone that I'll vote Republican or anti-Democrat for any particular office. (In fact, in 2000, I didn't vote Republican for President, though that was a tactical decision -- I live in Massachusetts, where it simply wasn't a race between Bush and Gore.)
What gets me about this discussion we're having has nothing to do with convincing you that Republicanism is "right" after all. It's that you seem so interested in thinking through the issues, doing some research, making choices for yourself, considering exactly what is meant by proposals candidates (or whoever) might float, that you've been so willing to engage me in debate on this without resorting to name-calling or other forms of personal attack -- a trend I've begun, finally, to notice, after some 20+ years of "online political advocacy", for lack of a better phrase.
That, not mindlessly pulling the "Republican" lever or getting behind any cause that seems "pro-business" (e.g. becoming a "Gates sycophant"), is the best hope for the future, as far as I'm concerned.
Yup.
Maybe that's true of the others, but I've listened to Rush very closely on this issue in particular, and I disagree with your assessment. However, I can't claim your assessment is spectacularly flawed -- anyone listening only in fits and starts, or failing to pay very close attention to Rush's arguments on the issue, might easily come to that conclusion. (It's not nearly as idiotic as a leap from hearing Rush rail against government-mandated "affirmative action" programs to the conclusion "Rush is a racist".)
Note that I'm in a bit of a hurry, and feel you deserve a response before sometime this weekend, so I'll give you the gist of what distinguishes Rush's stance, as I've heard it expressed, from what you've expressed:
Note that I don't quite agree with all of this (especially his claims, which I haven't actually heard him make in awhile, regarding the NASDAQ crash being due to the attack on the MSFT stock), but I have not heard him make claims that, in my book, make him a "Gates sycophant". (Me, I run GNU/Linux, so if I'm biased, it's in the "correct" direction to make this particular assessment. Yes, my sister works for MS -- again; she also was Lead PM for IE5 -- but if you ask her, she probably won't claim I'm prone to ignore Gates sycophanty. ;-)
The only thing that I can figure out that fits your response is the (Bush-promoted, I believe) plan to allow individual choice in investing a small portion of one's Social Security funds.
But you don't appear to be making an important distinction between the way a given corporation, like Enron, might be able to "tap in" to this windfall of available investments, and how Congress already "taps in" to it.
So, I'll say it again, as I already have: the difference is individual choice. If you don't like how a company is run, or even don't like how the company they've chosen to audit their books is run, you can choose to not invest in it.
If you don't like how the federal government is run, you have no choice, to anything like a comparable level, when it comes to "investing" the money that you send to it at gunpoint.
Your concern seems therefore to boil down to the belief that your fellow-citizens are not smart enough to invest wisely, so you'd prefer Congress to make the choices for them, and you'll back up your preferences with the use of force.
That's nothing. I'm pretty much disenchanted with the core of the material universe -- that is, the three laws of thermodynamics -- but I'm learning to live with them.
That's sarcasm, but the point is, capital is merely the abstract term we use to describe the accumulation of wealth by a person or organization. The only way to eliminate the concept of capital is to exterminate humans, along with any other critter that accumulates wealth -- e.g. squirrels, who "unfairly" accumulate nuts at the expense of other, often poorer, squirrels.
Now, if you want to claim that "wealth" or "capital" is purely relative to the market (other people) as a whole, go ahead -- at that point, your complaint boils down to "I don't like the fact that people think [make value judgements] for themselves".
Sorry, there's little you can do about that except lead the way by making demonstrably better value judgements. The market is, collectively, constantly on the lookout for such improved opportunities; you don't have to hold a gun to its head to get it to see what is going on, the way the government does to get you to do what it wants.
The rest of your explanation in that paragraph is, frankly, typical of the sort of left-wing propaganda that makes me laugh out loud. If the risk of the investors is so low compared to the employees, then why do they work there? Well, duh -- because they choose to take that risk. Why is the risk lower for the investors anyway? Well, it really isn't -- if the company fails, they lose what they invested as well. Oh, they are still rich, you say? Then they didn't invest all they had. Oh, but the employees risked it all and lost? Then they made that choice.
You'll find plenty of people who chose to not jump on the high-tech bandwagon in the late 1990s simply because they weren't willing to take such risks. E.g. they weren't willing to take lower salaries in return for stock options with expectations they considered inflated. They were rewarded by having more in savings when they layoffs hit -- if they hit their sector at all.
In short, no matter how you slice it, people will choose for themselves what to value, how much to value it, for reasons you can't always outline, and they'll make their own choices regarding risks, security, payoffs, effort, and so on.
It's the collection of such little choices that is generally referred to as "the market" -- at least in freedom-loving countries. In other countries, it's sometimes called "the black market", "what those folk in the Gulag go on about", "evil corporate America", etc.
And, again, no matter how much you go on about it, if you complain about big corporations, then you had better have a ready explanation to accommodate the fact that big governments exist, and do far more damage to the commonweal than do corporations. That's not surprising, since the governments operate, day in and day out, on the basis of the use of force, while corporations, though notionally and structurally supported by governments, operate on the basis of consumer choice.
That's why corporations -- all kinds, small, medium, and large -- go bankrupt at a fairly high frequency, yet governments rarely fail.
And the fact that the US government's use of force is comparatively limited by Constitutional and other restrictions has not only allowed US citizens to incrementally change the government, thus avoiding a spectacular failure of the kind that tends to afflict other nations when their governments get changed, but, from what I can tell, has something fairly important to do with the fact that, when even big corporations (like Enron) fail, it's not that big a disaster for the nation as a whole.
Whether you know it or not, you're indicting yourself, your neighbor, the small-business owner up the street, and so on, because they are the ones who "control capital" in America.
And even if you limit your criticism to the few mega-rich (which is, economically speaking, rather futile, since they control such a small percentage of capital in America and the world), I still end up with the fact that it is you who are making unsubstantiated allegations of their taking "no responsibility".
Excuse me, but a big part of why they ended up rich is, typically, precisely because they are responsible, and provably so, with other people's capital, such that they were entrusted with more and more over time, taking their cut along the way.
The system works towards nothing, any more than a GNU/Linux system "works" towards downloading Perl code as opposed to creating and distributing it.
Can you point to any nation -- especially one run more by left-wing principles than ours -- that, in the same time frame, did a better job of distributing and creating capital than the USA?
Until you get into concrete examples, your complaint sounds rather childish. (Yes, I know you're playing devil's advocate, so take my comments accordingly.) "They aren't playing as fair as I want."
Compared to many other nations, here in the USA, nothing prevents you from accumulating and protecting, then distributing and creating, capital for yourself, as you see fit. If you think you can do it better, go for it. You might want to learn about how other people, who are very rich, do it -- there are many who devote their lives to distributing and creating capital, who you presently choose, or seem, to ignore.
And, again, you have yet to address the fundamental issue of with what system will you replace capitalism, that will cure all these ills, that will address all your complaints?
The left certainly hasn't put forth one. And its history shows that when it tries, it succeeds at destroying capital on a nearly universal basis.
(More precisely, it concentrates the capital that inevitably exists, as well as the right to trade it comparatively freely, in the hands of even fewer -- those in government. Compare the present state of Cuba, or of the 1980s-era Soviet Union, to the pre-Communist days, in terms of capital disbursement among all the living, breathing people, and I think you'll find that your, and leftist, complaints about our "rich" look rather silly.)
Yet the tech sector has not been "dumped", if you compare its treatment in the West to how left-leaning governments like China and Cuba have treated it. (Did you know that Cuba recently banned sales of PCs? You might have if /. had approved the Wired story I submitted to the "Your Rights Online" forum a couple of weeks ago.)
So, you're upset that someone told his broker to "dump the tech sector". What effect did that have on the stocks? Nearly nil. Oh, but you say lots of people did that, and it hurt the sector? Well, then that means lots of people felt the sector was overvalued.
None of this means people decided to abandon the Internet, to destroy it, or anything like that. All it means was, just like in the 1920s, a whole bunch of people suddenly realized they weren't exactly trading in capital anymore so much as in empty promises for future earnings based on business models that didn't seem to have any potential for actually earning anything.
It's called a "shakeout", it happens often, and it is one of the most important means of making sure the limited resources of this planet tend to be used in more, rather than less, productive ways, based not on the choices made by a handful of self-appointed elites, but on the collective, daily decisions made by billions of people around the world, via a system that is, on the whole, fairly agnostic, neutral, objective, measurable, and that rapidly communicates critical information while filtering out much that is noise -- namely, the price system. (Read Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" to get a better handle on this.)
In summary, all of your complaints boil down to resenting choices lots of people make in their daily lives, but you don't offer a single useful alternative to the system, which you criticize, that allows them to make those choices (largely without fear of violent reprisals, thanks to government protection of individual rights) in the first place.
I'll say it again in different words: the propaganda of the right, preached in sound-bite forae like television and radio, amounts to "lies to children", but the truth is far deeper, yet tends to better support their "lies to children" than the left's corresponding "lies to adults", which is why, generally, I tend to prefer the solutions, as well as the preaching, of the right to that of the left.
So I understand why someone like you might get upset at discovering the oversimplifications don't always work, just as people get upset when they discover Newtonian motion doesn't really exist.
But that doesn't justify assuming that the right was completely wrong the whole time, any more than discovering the Newtonian laws of motions you were taught as "physics" in grade school were wrong justifies claiming that "physicists everywhere have it all wrong".
I suggest you devote comparable energy to studying, and being willing to dismantle, the very (left-wing) counterarguments you're putting forth as you're putting into accepting them as indictments of the right's oversimplifications. In my experience, you'll find that not only does the left oversimplify, it lies, and its elite often know they're lying.
And in case you think the left and right lying makes for a moral equivalence, consider this case: Bill tells you the sky is green and the grass is blue, therefore you must do what he says, while Joe tells you birds swim and fish fly and therefore you are free to do whatever you choose and don't have to obey Bill.
Both are lying. Is it a moral equivalence? I'd say not, since I love freedom, so I am less upset by Joe's lie than Bill's. Joe is lying, or oversimplifying, in order to convince you of an underlying truth -- of your inherent freedom -- while Bill is lying, or oversimplifying, in order to convince you of an underlying falsehood -- that because he is smarter than you, you must obey him.
That is how I view most left vs. right arguments these days, especially in the socioeconomic arena. (There are cases where the roles are reversed, primarily on cultural issues.)
So, does the right oversimplify, even sometimes lie? Yes, but, usually, in order to convince you that you should remain free, and leave your neighbor to do the same. Does that sometimes benefit corporations? Yes, but the same freedoms threaten the worst behaviors corporations might wish to engage in. The left's prescriptions, by concentrating power in the hands of the few, supposedly at the expense of corporations, merely shift the playing field for them -- instead of catering primarily to well-informed customers, they need only cater to the overly powerful government that runs citizen's lives.
And I will say that the right's oversimplifications, or lies to children, do tend to do a great deal of damage on their own even absent left-wing interference. As a simple illustration, a right-winger might easily leap from the observation that a high DJIA means a sound economy to the conclusion that anything the government can do to inflate the DJIA will benefit the economy and the public. That's quite damaging (not in the sense of left-wing mass-murder of millions, though), because it almost inevitably means trying to obscure the prism through which the public -- the market -- sees the data telling it which investments are worthwhile and which aren't.
And maybe that's what you're getting at with Gates sycophantism. Since the right believes the free market works best in determining the wisest use of resources, they're more prone to claim that whoever is richest in a free market must necessarily be the best at what they do.
But that's not necessarily the case -- even if it was, that doesn't mean they'll be the best tomorrow, since the market's effect is to provide lessons for everyone else.
So, the more people reject the oversimplifications of the right, the more they'll be able to astutely invest in, and thus navigate, the free market, avoiding making knee-jerk investments only in those entities already seen as wildly successful (which are, naturally, more likely to be overvalued).
But the more they accept the lies of the left, the less freedom they'll have to invest in the free market in the first place.
What do you mean here -- that you were in favor of government regulation, until even more regulation, in the form of DMCA and (proposed) SSSCA/CBDTPA/whatever, you changed your mind?
That seems to contradict the rest of what you say, though perhaps you assumed that, even though the SSSCA/CBDTPA is primarily backed by Democrat Senator Fritz Hollings and railed against by the conservative National Review in "The Un-New Democrat" in its 2002-04-22 issue, since it "favors some businesses", it must necessarily reflect the capitalist approach to government.
If I get the gist of what you're trying to say, it's that you trusted the general "lie to children" that Republicanism/corporatism/capitalism, not Democratism/socialism/government, is the One True Way to Utopia, or some approximation thereof.
As a "lie to children", that's an overly simplified way of looking at things, though I tend to believe it's at least a bit safer than the reverse, if actual freedom is your bag.
In my view, the reality is that it is a human tendency to (among other things) attempt to direct others' lives, that the Republican/corporate/capitalist worldview has a much stronger historical record of taking that into account by favoring systems that resist the greater excesses of such tyrannical impulses than the other worldview, and that, even assuming I'm right up to now, the practice of resisting tyranny must be continually exercised even against those who preach the Republican/corporate/capitalist worldview.
In short, while any theology, orthodoxy, religion, or claptrap can and will be hijacked by those seeking to control the lives of those who believe in it as well as those who might be more easily controlled by such a hijacking despite their not believing in it, most of what modern American liberalism stands for is a wholesale embrace of the tyranny of a small elite over the rest of humanity. That's borne out by their choice of issues, almost all of which come with the explicit or implicit baggage of "here's how we'll fix it by increasing government size, regulatory oversight, etc.". Compare that to right-wing advocacy, e.g. Rush Limbaugh, who almost constantly preaches lowering taxes, reducing regulation, celebrating the ability of people to make their own choices. (Even the most individualistic element of leftism over the past decades -- "reproductive rights" -- became, inevitably, twisted into a government mandate to tax citizens so as to fund abortions not only within the US but abroad, not to mention the overreaching prohibitions sought against those trying to inform pregnant women of the actual effects of having an abortion.)
Sure, some leftists would, in their fantasies, eliminate corporations, businesses, etc., but make no mistake: they are perfectly willing to cater to such entities to acquire power, as has ever been the case with governments, and certainly their individual members who gain political office rarely turn up their noses at doing the bidding for a few businesses at the expense of the market as a whole (especially since such individuals rarely place the 100% wholesale elimination of corporations high on their personal list of "things to do before I die").
As one small example: much fuss has been made over Enron, but a) every American had a choice, on an ongoing basis, whether to work for them, invest in them, hire Arthur Andersen or believe what it says in its auditing, and the market has already punished many of the players far more quickly than any government oversight committee could imagine doing in its wildest fantasies, and b) it's hard to imagine any accounting gimmick employed by Enron that hasn't been, and continues to be, employed in the financing of Social Security, out of which we do not have a choice to opt, and which has a governing organization that can put off the inevitable bankruptcy of the system by simply changing the rules (increasing retirement age), increasing taxes, and so on, since, unlike Enron and most corporations, the federal government has the guns and repeatedly shows its willingness to use them to remind citizens of its power.
But do "liberals", who rail against "evil corporations", actively rally against the financial shenanigans, enforced at gunpoint, of the Social Security system? Does Congress focus its energy on freeing individual Americans to decide for themselves whether, how, and to what extent to invest in their own retirement, choices they had, and continue to have, when it comes to investing in corporations like Enron? Of course not, because neither activity would increase the power of the wannabe-tyrants over the people. So their "evil corporate giants" act is exposed for what it is: a fraud, carefully calculated to convince the public to exchange their freedom of choice regarding their investments and employment for increased, enforced, government mandates regarding investment and employment. And who will get to make those government choices? Why, the elites who are in power, of course -- not those "big evil corporate executives"; rather, something much, much worse.
None of this makes me a fan of Enron, Microsoft, or Cisco, but, then, I generally avoid MS products, didn't (to my direct knowledge) invest in Enron, and haven't bought Cisco products.
I have yet to discover any comparably easy way to avoid being targeted by the federal government to make up for its shortfalls in ethical, moral, financial, and legal practices past, present, and future.
So while I applaud your attentiveness to the hypocracies and oversimplifications of the "right", as well as your alertness to not be drawn into accepting solutions proposed by the "left" simply because you've suddenly discovered that the business world isn't rosy, I'd like to suggest one more little-talked-about fact.
That is, the business/corporate/capitalist world explicitly depends on widespread rational, critical, commentary on business, markets, investment strategies, and so on. While some capitalists seek to limit speech, they rarely do so when it comes to speech about a competitor's failings. They don't generally protect each other.
Whereas, pretty much to the extent any government takes up liberal/socialist/communist theology, it becomes hostage to the idea that "what the people don't know won't hurt them" and, further, often seeks to protect fellow left-leaning governments from suffering the effects of exposure of their own faults as well.
(Keep in mind that it's the left-wing media that has trouble distinguishing "terrorists" from "freedom fighters", and it's left-wing governments that have the clearer history of imprisoning people for simply pointing out failures of the government and its orthodoxy. To the left, someone who firebombs a ski lodge in the name of environmentalism is more likely to be named a "freedom fighter" than is someone who criticizes government regulation; for the latter, they use phrases like "right-wing zealot" to describe them, when they can't simply imprison them to shut them up like the Soviets used to.)
Similarly, even Congressional members at odds with each other politically will sometimes rally 'round each other, protecting the "public" from information that might embarrass "the assembly" -- that is, put their collective presumptive right to rule at risk in the public's view.
I've looked at it from an information-theory point of view and from an engineering point of view, as well as a Biblical point of view, and, as far as I can tell, the model of individual initiative, which allows for choosing your own profession, running your own business, with a minimum of government intervention, beats a highly-regulatory government hands down, when it comes to the long run and the population as a whole.
None of this means you are automatically protected, by having a Republican/corporate/capitalist world, against corrupt people in power, whether that power is the highly limited kind found in corporate boardrooms, or the firepower-enforced kind found in government.
What does protect you against corporate corruption is, mainly, competition and choice, something only a few governments have tended to do a good job at ensuring is maintained with a minimum of interference. (Given the vast array of practical choices I have here in the USA, I'd guess the US government has done one of the best jobs in the history, especially given all the other stuff its had to deal with, e.g. world wars and the like. But I haven't spent any time in Taiwan, for example; perhaps it could do better.)
What protects you against government corruption is political advocacy, the vote, and the right to keep and bear arms. The American Left (joined by "Republicans" such as Senator John McCain) explicitly attack your right to engage in (e.g. by funding) political advocacy in the form of Campaign Finance Reform, claim the second is a loss due to the Florida 2000 Presidential debacle, and have, as have all left-leaning governments in history I believe, been long engaged in the elimination of the third, in the form of gun control.
Since no corporation can be as menacing as a government without being, in effect, a government, it all comes down to choosing whether and how to vigorously oppose corruption in government, which includes opposing corrupting influences, including the human tendency to try to control, or regulate, other peoples' lives.
If you don't make good use of the first two methods (political advocacy and the vote) to accomplish this, you'll likely end up either losing your freedom, having to exercise the third option (take up arms), or having the third option exercised against you -- remember how poor right-wing Christians fared during the Clinton "anti-gun" era, e.g. Waco and little Elian Gonzalez, and try to figure out exactly what threats those situations posed to the government that required such extreme uses of force -- the kind of force the left rails against when it is exercised against left-wing terrorists, or militant Muslim terrorists who have long allied themselves with left-wing entities such as the Soviet Union and the claim that "poverty is the root cause of terrorism" -- and then try to reconcile that with the coddling of terrorists, including the early release of known, convicted left-wing terrorists, by that same Clinton administration.
Let's face it -- what the left chooses to use as political footballs (such as catchphrases) rarely pans out when the so-called reasoning it uses is applied to lots of obviously similar situations. As the old saying goes, "The problem with communism is communism; the problem with capitalism is capitalists"; in my experience, you have to fight the left's prescriptions, whereas you generally need only fight the right's implementations.
But you must always fight for freedom, and, in this world, while that sometimes seems to require violence, we're especially privileged (in the USA anyway) to be able to fight so effectively without engaging in violence or the imposition of our wills on others, thanks to the political system we have. No system of government (short of God's own government) can do the fighting for you, but history shows that some systems allow, even encourage, ordinary people to become extraordinary fighters for freedom more than others, and the Constitutionally-limited United States Government is, to my limited knowledge, unsurpassed in this regard.
But Byte didn't say that, according to your own emphasis on the quote you supplied!
Take another look at that. They said it was the most tragic instance "of death or injuries to human beings due to defective computer software".
The cancer patients died entirely due to defective computer software -- had the software been correct, they would have not died at that time.
The soldiers died entirely due to an Iraqi missile attack -- had the missile attack not been launched, they would have not died at that time.
Further, had the Patriot software been 100% correct, it is not assuredly the case that the soldiers would not have died, since that would not have implied 100% guaranteed success intercepting the Iraqi missile. (I'm basing this on the general truth that, in the real world, there is no such thing as a 100% guaranteed defense against such attacks -- I'm no expert on Iraqi scuds, Patriot missiles, or even BB guns.)
So, the Byte article, to the extent you quoted it (and I'm basing my comments entirely on your quotes), is correct. The cancer patients died due to software error, the soldiers died due to other causes that might have been prevented except for software error, and, in my book, that certainly makes the deaths of the former rate high as a "tragic incident" of that sort, while the latter rates as a "tragic incident" of a different sort.
You might have a legit complaint if a software error caused the Iraqi missiles to launch accidentally -- put more simply, if 28 soldiers died due to "friendly fire" stemming directly from a software bug, then I'd say it might be legit to question calling the deaths of 4 cancer patients "more tragic" than that. (Though, as someone else points out, at least the soldiers know and accept the risks of friendly fire to a greater degree than cancer patients; change the 28 victims to innocent civilians and you've really got a case -- a hypothetical one, of course.)
In short, you have provided no justification for your statement that they, the authors of the Byte article, "suck", since it is apparent, at least to me, that they were not comparing the deaths of the 4 to the deaths of the 28 in their "tragic incident" language. The world already has plenty of people who go emotionally overboard in the face of rational characterizations of historical events; I suggest you try a different approach, one less prone to aggravating tensions between people and organizations, especially the press.
(Not that I even read Byte, I just find it frustrating to see people publically bash others based on half-baked interpretations of pretty clearly written prose.)
No, since those who link to their site need not enter into a valid contractual relationship with them, they are not bound by the TOS, any more than if the TOS said "for every link to this site, you must send us $100". They've already implicitly granted permission for anyone on the web to link to their site, and anyone to read the materials so linked, by providing a server that fulfills such requests. If they wish their server to enter into contractual agreements before fulfilling such requests, they'll have to modify the technology accordingly -- perhaps by offering a facility to augment or replace the World Wide Web (say, as is done by those offering products for payment via credit-card numbers).
The simple fact is that the owners of the site themselves are the "proximate source of copying" of the materials they claim are being illegally copied. If they wish to stop the materials from being copied, it is entirely within their power to do so, and easily done -- simply removing the material from the site is just one possibility.
Therefore, they have no case.
Oh, okay...I thought you meant something like, the collected "experience" the players gained, regarding each other's methods of attack and defense, based on moves earlier in the game.
Well, yeah, the problem for someone like me being, how do I get into such a position in the first place?
Not having a brain capable of reliably performing that task, it's fun to think (fantasize?) about slam-dunking the problem via computer.
Well, I'd say second-most -- surely it's secondary to being able to checkmate your opponent (or at least secure a draw) in N moves, assuming you can prove that capability.
And here you touch on the crux of the context of this debate. You're not talking with a bunch of chess experts.
You're talking with a bunch of geeks who are, if they're anything like me (and I'm guessing they are), inherently lazy and quite confident in the power of their tools -- specifically, computers.
If someone wants to explore the ins and outs of "mystical" issues like the "flow of the game" of chess, or board position/control, they'll surely seek forums other than /. -- chess-specific forums.
Even if they want to focus on computer learning as it applies to these issues -- also called "Artificial Intelligence" -- they'll probably choose to "live" somewhere other than /..
So, what you're left with are people who, confronted with the vast complexity of the "mere game" of chess -- "mere" in the sense that it has a very limited playing space, limited piece selection, limited movement, no random elements, etc. -- are much more likely to look for ways to "win" that don't involve actually having to devote decades of deep thought to the problem.
Instead, they'd rather consider how much easier the problem becomes once computing power reaches the point where all they need to do is type in the fundamental rules of chess (valid moves and such; not stuff like piece "values" though), glue on a few lines of Perl code, and be assured that the result will never lose.
And, it really is a SMOP -- "Small Matter of Programming" -- because chess is, basically, a game that allows for fairly easy programming of an automaton that cannot lose. (This is assuming that the game does not inherently put either player in a position where the opponent can force that player to lose, which most people believe, but, I gather from comments on this article, has not been proven.)
However, unlike other "classic" SMOPs, the challenge with chess, for geeks like us, is that the resources consumed by a straightforward automaton are projected to exceed that of the known universe. ("Classic" SMOPs tend to be difficult to program, but not necessarily resource-intensive once they're programmed, I believe.)
But we're hardy folk! Rather than admit defeat in the face of limited time, energy, and space in the universe and going on to attack the "problem" the way most everyone in the "real world" has by simply learning the game and becoming grand masters over a period of decades, we ask ourselves "is there some magic bullet that'll solve the problem of finite resources before we complete such an undertaking ourselves?". After all, we'd much rather play games and muck with other fun stuff than actually master just one game like chess.
Hence the excess of discussions here (compared to, I expect, typical forums on actually playing chess) invoking quantum-based computing, multiple universes, algorithm-based solutions, AI, and other still-mythical magical bullets.
In such discussions, there is, as you've discovered, little point in explaining that a player must learn "board position", "board control", "the flow of the game", whether that player is man or machine -- the people you're talking with have already considered that option and chosen to dump it. We do so for at least one good reason: the complexity of the "rule base" (in the expert-system sense) for doing well at chess presently vastly exceeds that of the "rule base" for playing the game correctly (that is, making valid, if not winning, moves). Further, the rule base of the former is ill-defined, and any version of it is likely to have bugs that are as easy to expose as the fatal flaw of the Death Star in the "Star Wars" movie(s), whereas the rule base of the latter is, presumably, rock-solid.
So we hold out hope that we can find some other set of rules that, in combination with increased computing power, will have a correctness/complexity ratio sufficiently in excess of that of the rule base of the sort you real players of chess must keep in mind that we can be assured of not losing to you anytime we play (with the assistance of our machines).
And while chess is still "out of reach" as far as this goes, compared to, say, tic-tac-toe (which a properly-programmed automaton will never lose at), it should be pretty easy to create a "simplified" form of chess that can be shown to be "perfectly playable" -- not losable -- by a present-day automaton. (Limit the size of the board and piece selection further, don't permit cycles, maybe a few other forms of reduction.) Playing that form of chess, there'll be no need for an automaton to care about board position or control, or the flow of the game -- that is, there'll be no code to do so in the automaton, though an observer might think there is -- it'll simply avoid losing every time, and, against many humans, it'll win most of the time.
In short, we're not interested in winning chess games. We're fascinated by the possibility of creating an automaton that can play for us and never lose, giving us that special quality that attracts not only chess groupies, but groupies from all the other similar sorts of games (Go, for example) that our automatons presumably would also excel at playing.
Indeed, but given a player that can fully enumerate all possible branches, there is simply no issue of "control of the board" for that player (assuming that you don't mean, by that, "has the next move", rather, something less precisely defined than move-making in chess). It is, assuming the player is "programmed" correctly, merely an issue of choosing, based on a given board position (pieces plus state information regarding castling and such), a move that leads to only win/draw results for that player for as long as that player can choose his moves (i.e., for as long as the rules of play are in effect).
Your statements about chess apply to the present, real-world situation where this is theoretically possible, but computationally impossible, or believed to be so.
Put another way: I am a terrible chess player. But given a computer whose hardware is capable of analyzing, say, 30 moves beyond a given position, and an initial chess position that is "balanced" and yet guarantees a win or draw for "my" side within 30 moves, I can, as a mere programmer, program that computer to avoid the moves that would lead to a loss against anyone, including yourself, "control of the board" being made irrelevant.
In this sense, chess indeed being a game of "perfect information", unlike, say, "Battleship", discussing the capability of a theoretically infinitely-powered Turing machine (that is, a "computer", a deterministic computing machine) playing chess is akin to discussing solving the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) -- for any given problem size, a solution can be assuredly found, it's mainly a question of whether we can actually, yet, build a machine that has the speed and memory to do it.
(And the answer to both questions is presently "no", constraints such as the size and longevity of the universe being as we presently understand them.)
Though I haven't looked at it yet, I assume GNU Chess is an example of a computer program worth looking at if you want to learn a bit about how computers play chess, including how they "limit" themselves to accommodate real-world limitations on time and memory. It comes free with source code, so, even if not the "best" chess player available for general-purpose computers these days, it might be more instructive than better programs that come as "black boxes", i.e. without source code.
Oh, the other interesting thing about all this is: from a computational perspective, your phrase "control of the board" is probably insufficiently precise. That is, you can't precisely define what you mean by it. To the extent you can, you can program a computer to seek it out, and that is of what most of the effort put into programming computers to play chess well consists -- mere move-computing and such being the "easy part" (or so I assume, since it'd be the easy part for me).
In that sense, defining "control of the board" to a given degree of precision can make the difference between winning and losing against an opponent that has its own degree of precision in understanding that phrase. (I'm assuming the accuracy of these definitions within their limits of precision.)
However, I find this item rather interesting:
Looking at your web site, it seems you are a software consultant, as am I.
Gotta say, it seems strange that you spend any time or energy posting such vicious anti-free-software rhetoric on a "glorified, self-serving blog".
Since around 1990, I can't think of a single client I've had that hasn't chosen to base their business (commercial, educational, whatever) on a mix of both proprietary and free (GPL) software.
So, while I might use forums such as /. (and, historically, USENET) to clarify misconceptions regarding free software vis-a-vis proprietary software, I certainly would not take it upon myself to depict those who chose proprietary (or free) software for various reasons as idiots, fools, etc. -- which is what trashing the availability of options one side or the other offers amounts to, from the point of view of those who have chosen those options.
Assuming I even felt that way (which I don't), such depictions would amount to publically insulting my past, present, and potential future clients, something that might prove unwise should I find myself desperate for work in the future.
Nor would I use forums such as /. as a sandbox in which to publically attack the credibility of fellow software consultants, with whom I might be asked to work by potential future clients. They might find it difficult to convince those whom I have attacked to work harmoniously with me in the future, which would reduce my value to potential clients in the long run.
You might not think much of /. as a public forum, but are you so sure none of your past, present, or potential future clients read it to keep up on the free software they might have adopted, or be in the process of considering adopting, as a crucial component for their business? And do you really think it's wise to be so plainly on permanent, public record as impugning the credibility of fellow software consultants, with so little evidence on which to base your accusations?
Anyway...you sure have an interesting way of spending your free time. (Me, I sing in a chorus and have recently taken up figure skating -- I doubt any rational potential clients will find it necessary to cross me off their list for participating in these activities.)
I mean, hey, I'm glad so many people here are concerned about the government having fewer hoops to jump through to monitor our email, but when you collectively choose to elect legislators who'll intrude in other peoples' lives to implement your pet agenda, don't be surprised when their knee-jerk reaction to an atrocity like 2001-09-11 is to pass some laws making it easier to intrude in your lives to ease the fears of others who might care nothing about the privacy of email.
Just wondering...how did they get into your foyer -- did you invite them in?
(I've heard/seen anecdotal "legal advice" to simply not permit cops into your home when they show up. Once you let them in, they have a much wider degree of latitude to look around, play with stuff, including asking to use your bathroom and then rifling through it.)
I've wondered, lately, whether, if a cop showed up at my door, even for a totally non-threatening reason, I'd take the advice to not let him in, or give into my "historical" tendency to welcome, and want to show respect for, authority figures.
Having had some distinctly different experiences with police officers (one lied to me outright after a traffic accident, for example; most of the others have been quite honest and decent), most in what I consider to be less-alarming situations than the one you describe, it's not an easy decision to make ahead of time.
Perhaps what you run into is more the result of volunteers carefully considering the degree to which you'll actually value the efforts they make to help you -- which, apparently, is pretty close to zero.
Meanwhile, if you want reliable support, you have to pay for it, at least in this universe.
If, on the other hand, you believe you can get along with free, ad-hoc support, on the whole, it seems the free-software community at least equals, perhaps betters, the proprietary-software community.
Finally, if you want to be able to choose your own team to support the software you use, then you can pretty much write off using proprietary software entirely, since supporting software without access to its source code is a nightmare.
By the way, whether you pay for the software or get it for free is orthagonal to all of the above. You can get Internet Explorer for free, but, presumably, without source, which means you'll have no hope of improving it to fit your needs (beyond whatever hooks MS provides). And you can pay $$ to get Redhat Linux, and hire your own support staff (or just a consultant, whatever) to improve it however you see fit, since it's free software (in the gnu.org sense; it comes with source code).
The only point at which paying for software and ensuring reliable support intersect is where the cost of providing some degree of support for a limited period of time is incorporated in the price of a single distribution of that software.
With proprietary software, for a given product, whether you're forced to pay for both to get the software (and thereby limited to a single vendor for support) is entirely up to the distribuor.
With free software, for every single product, you can choose whether to: a) acquire the software for free and maintain it on your own dime; b) acquire the software for free and pay a fee to a support vendor of your choice to support it; c) buy a distribution of the software and maintain it on your own dime (which probably means the cost of the distribution does not incorporate the cost of support, e.g. a Cheapbytes CD); and d) buy a distribution of the software and employ the support of the seller of the distribution (assuming that's part of the deal).
All in all, it seems that you're complaining that free software offers choices a, b, and c, rather than forcing you, as is generally the case for proprietary software, to accept "choice" d.
(I'll only lightly touch on the fact that, while my purchased Redhat Linux 7.1 permits a presumably-limited number of systems registered for support in their data base for a limited time, the licensing for the system in no way limits me to a fixed number of systems on which I may choose to, in fact, install it. I can even hand it out to a neighbor and let them copy it onto their system. Legally. I can do none of this with Windows 98, and I won't even get into the fact that proprietary software is written with a mindset that the software serves the vendor rather than its user, which is almost never the case with free software -- e.g. MS Encarta refusing to let you print a picture from its data base because it's "copyrighted".)
In the meantime, while I share many of the frustrations you express with the quality of software and support in the free/volunteer world (and probably have many more pet peeves of my own), I see no reason to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially in a public forum, especially by singling out "offenders" who refuse to cater to my every whim for free, as you seem prone to do.
Okay, you seem to have some strong views on the subject, so I'd like to ask you whether there's a fourth item that belongs on that list:
It's that last question that makes me laugh out loud when people claim they're doing something, e.g. creating a new flavor of ice cream, to "reverse global warming" by "raising global consciousness" and "convincing Bush" to go along with Kyoto.
I mean, is there any organization anywhere on the world that has any semblance of a track record of success controlling the global environment?
Ultimately, if the question of success of the avenue of "fixing" the global climate as recommended by most Global-Warming adherents cannot be positively answered, supported by objective data, including global social, economic, and political computer models that are independently reviewed, then, IMO, it doesn't matter one whit what the answers to the other questions are, when it comes to evaluating the utility of things like the Kyoto Protocols.
Am I missing something here? (Aside from the usual answer that, somehow, I'm missing the fact that the Global Warming adherents mean well, and so I should accept their desire to exert some degree of control over all mankind, in the hopes that their good intentions will win out over any rational assessment of the likelihood of their success.)