No, no, just ignore this. When Windows is being compromised that's cause for gleeful giggles and jokes on slashdot. When Linux is being compromised that's for social misfits to blush about and shamefacedly ignore.
When Windows is being compromised, that's cause for Microsoft to ignore, deny, and lie about the problem, and if that fails, spend a few billion dollars on PR. When Linux is being compromised, that's for knowledgeable programmers to study, work on, and fix the vulnerability.
You aren't going to be prosecuted for keeping logs of all your online chat sessions. That is not what is in question here. Only time it matters is if your chat log could somehow be admissible as evidence in a criminal or civil court case.
I also doubt you'd get in trouble for posting bits and pieces of a chat log on the web somewhere either.
Citizen # 4317980A, your faith that your government will play by the rules has been noted. And believe me, we appreciate it.
The author seems mainly concerned that the spreading of geek values will result in a mass retreat from the "real world." Well, the "real world" is whatever we choose to make it. I live a pretty geeky life -- I work as a DBA, study computational biology in school, read (and occasionally write) science fiction, listen to obscure music, and hang out primarily with other people who have similar interests. But guess what? There are a lot of those people -- and yes, half of them are women, and some pretty good-looking women at that. My academic studies may be incomprehensible to the monkeys who think an MBA constitutes higher education, but my research has the potential to change lives while they're shuffling papers. And my job is interesting, challenging, and pays me enough for a comfortable life. You don't get much more real than that.
My first reaction on reading this, like the Russian bigwigs', was "bullshit." A Mars mission for a signle percentile of the estimated cost, with funding from a TV show? It sounds like every bad sci-fi "masterpiece" ever written by an over-enthusiastic fourteen-year-old.
But... what if they know something NASA and the Russian equivalent don't know? I mean, just about every time some obscure group of private would-be genius inventors announces something great, it turns out to be vaporware. But every once in a while, these obscure people turn out to be the Wright brothers, or Goddard.
So, what if they pull it off? What actually happens then?
I think you misunderstand how the phrase "all but" is used in everyday speech. Its literal meaning is different from its commonly understood meaning. As used here, it's an intensifier.
C'mon, really, how many people know Eiffel as compared to Java or C#? Really?
Well, of course, taking that attitude to its extreme, no new language would ever catch on, and we'd all be coding in... I don't know, maybe the original FORTRAN or ALGOL 60, maybe machine code for whatever the most popular processor would be (and it wouldn't necessarily be x86, since everyone would have wanted to stick with "an architecture that people actually know.") New languages that offer an obvious and dramatic improvement over anything else that's available for the task at hand* ought to be adopted for widespread and long-term use.
That being said, of course there is a cost involved in adopting an obscure language, and it has to be measured against whatever benefits the language offers. This is particularly true for large projects. I may choose to develop one-off software of which I expect to maintain personal control for its entire life cycle in Erlang or Ruby or Dylan, but if I'm running a big project with lots of contributors, I owe it to developers and end users to weigh the costs and benefits carefully.
* As FORTRAN, and COBOL, and yes, damn it, C, all did. C++, maybe. We'll have to wait another decade or so to be sure about Perl, and another two to be sure about Java and PHP and Python, and longer than that for C#. I take the long view.
1. It's not diverting resources from other, more useful research -- the people doing research on toilet paper would probably not be doing research on any of the applications I mentioned if they weren't working on TP instead.
But surely it is - they could be working on something (presumably) more worthwhile.
Well, I'm not sure what that something would be. I know there's a fair amount of paper research going on, but (without knowing a whole lot about it) I have to assume that most of it is in the "convenience" area -- softer toilet paper, stronger paper towels, cheaper notebook paper, etc. -- rather than in the "Lifesaving Major Discovery!!!" area.
In any case, I'm not at all opposed to research on things that makes life more convenient for people -- I like my creature comforts as much as the next American. <g> What bothers me is when there is such a clear and direct diversion of resources from LMD!!! to convenience, and when that convenience is for the sake of such a small, generally well-off group of people who IMO already insulate themselves too much from nature anyway.
Do you also oppose research on making softer toilet paper through the same line of reasoning?
Heh. No, for two reasons:
1. It's not diverting resources from other, more useful research -- the people doing research on toilet paper would probably not be doing research on any of the applications I mentioned if they weren't working on TP instead.
2. Most people don't play golf, but everybody has to wipe their ass.
I'm a lefty environmentalist, and I oppose this, but not for the reasons you might think. I also work in biotech, and unlike many of my fellow environmentalists, I believe strongly in the potential of genetically-modified plants. There are an enormous number of applications that could be of significant benefit to humanity:
crops with high values of specific nutrients to overcome common deficiencies, e.g. "yellow rice"
pest-resistant crops, and/or crops that can grow in hostile environments
plants (whether edible or not) which can produce or be easily converted into alternative fules such as ethanol and biodiesel
plants for bioremediation -- cleaning up polluted soil by binding the pollutants, or increase soil fertility
And instead they're concentrating on making golf courses greener? WTF? Golf courses will have weeds, and bare patches, and, you know, a little of bit of something that looks kind of natural. If you don't like it, fine, go play on Astroturf. I'm a lot more concerned about people being able to eat than I am about some rich guy's putting green.
Actually, like a lot of buzzwords, "paradigm shift" used to mean something. Real paradigm shifts are wondrous, exciting things. They also don't happen very often. I'd say only three have happened in computing in my lifetime: the switch from timesharing systems (mainframes and minis) to PC's as "what computers are" in the public eye, the change from CLI's to GUI's as the standard method of interacting with computers, and the way the Internet has subsumed the old hodgepodge of BBS's and proprietary online services. Everything else, as interesting (or not) as it may be, is just incremental change. And there's nothing wrong with that, because most of the time, incremental change is how things gets done. But everyone wants to be the guy who invented the Next Big Thing, not the guy who made last year's NBT a little bit better.
It occurs to me that I may soon be adding a fourth to my list -- the fall of proprietary software and the rise of F/OSS -- but it's too early to tell how that one will shake out.
And Finder blows... Damn I hate the way it works. It doesn't allow to see where you are in the filesystem very well. It's just awkward and slow to use.
Just out of curiosity, have you tried using it with the default set to Column view? (Cmd-3 to switch any Finder window.) That is, IMO, one of those small but incredibly cool features that makes the Mac OS X user experience such a joy. Certainly it's the fastest way I've ever seen to navigate through a deeply nested file system. One of my co-workers, who is generally as pro-Windows as they come, pronounced it "the best file view ever."
The 10.3 window manager is ugly by default, I agree. It took me a little tinkering to get things set just the way I want. <ob-Machead-remark> But even out of the box, it's a hell of a lot better than anything Microsoft ships. </ob-Machead-remark>
I really hope you're right, and I'm glad to hear that you're so impressed with OS X. The reason I'm gloomy about the anti-Apple prejudice going away is that honestly, I can't remember a time when the Mac OS wasn't better than the comparable Windows version available at the time. Yeah, OS 9 sucked, but Windows ME sucked ever so much harder, and with teeth. OS 8 was mediocre, but it was competing against Windows 98, for God's sake! System 7 was quite good, albeit rather bare-bones by modern standards -- but compared to Windows 3.1 and 95, it was a thing of beauty and a joy forever. (I think I have the timelines right; apologies if I'm forgetting something.) Etc.
And yet at every point in this history, the Mac was struggling against the dual prejudice of "M4XZ 5UX0RZ" from the script-kiddie brigade (and don't underestimate these people; even now, I suspect that Aunt Tillie is likely to go to her 17-year-old nephew for computer buying advice) and "Apple makes toys" from the suits. And even now, that the Mac OS has an industrial-strength Unix base and the hardware actually offers better price/performance than any comparable brand-name PC at all but the lowest of the low end, you still hear variants of these tired old prejudices trotted out every day.
My advice for the Linux desktop developers is: please, please, rip off everything you can from the OS X desktop. But don't never admit to anyone where you got the idea. We Apple geeks will know regardless, and sit back in our half-bitter, half-proud glory. We've got plenty of practice. [1/2 g]
Seriously, as an Apple user, I'm glad to see a Linux desktop system copying the MacOS instead of Windows. I've felt for some time that it is a huge mistake for KDE and GNOME to try so hard to make themselves look like Windows when, in OS X, there is a much better example of a Unix-based desktop. Why waste your time copying less than the best?
Yeah, yeah, user familiarity, etc. Look, folks, I guarantee you that if all you've ever used is Windows, if you sit down at a good OS X machine, it will take you about half an hour to get used to the differences and be up to speed -- and after that you'll be discovering new and better ways to do things and saying, "That's so cool! Why didn't Microsoft ever think of that?" If a Linux desktop can have some nifty non-Windows features too (and I really don't care if the developers rip them off from Apple or come up with them on their own) it will do a lot more to enhance Linux desktop growth than just coming up with a system that's "like Windows, only not exactly."
Next response I anticipate: "Yeah, well, if Mac OS X is so much better, how come it hasn't beat Windows in the marketplace?" The answer, of course, is that there is a lot of mindless anti-Apple prejudice, and regrettably I don't expect that to change any time soon. But anti-Linux prejudice is much milder, I think. A good Linux desktop with Mac OS X's best features (and maybe some of its own) especially if it were backed by IBM, could be the best shot at breaking the Windows stranglehold on the corporate desktop.
[shrug] I was responding to a post about capitalism vs. socialism, so those, and similar high-level examples, were the ones I chose to use. Obviously, economic models are fractal in their complexity. It wasn't so much a lack of imagination that kept me from breaking things down further, as a lack of desire to write a multi-screen post.
Feudalism is a political structure, yes; it is also an economic model, in which ownership is hierarchical, and the owner at each level owes taxes to the one above, all the way up to the king. The only real variation on this theme throughout history, which is by far the most common through time, is whether "ownership" applies at the lowest level -- the people at the bottom may be free peasants, serfs, or out-and-out slaves. (If you think this doesn't matter, contrast history of England with that of France.)
Fascism is purely an economic model, in which the government ties itself closely with a select group of large corporations. Like socialism, it tends to be found in conjunction with autocratic governments, but that doesn't make it a political structure in and of itself.
If your dictionary defines mercantilism as "mercantile practices or spirit, commercialism" then you need a better dictionary. Mercantilism is a very specific nationalist economic philosophy which holds that a nation's power is measured by the amount of specie -- hard currency, usually measured in silver or gold -- it holds in reserve. Specie may be accumulated by trade, by exploitation of a nation's own natural resources, or by stealing it from someone else. What sets mercantilism apart from other economic models such as capitalism is that in the mercantilist's view, it does not matter how specie is acquired, only that it is.
I'm with you. Grandparent says "the only alternative to capitalism is rationing" but of course this isn't true. There have been all kinds of economic systems throughout history, of which capitalism and socialism are only two examples, and recent ones at that. (Feudalism, mercantilism, fascism, the list goes on.) Capitalism is better than all the others, so far, but it's a long way from perfect, and there is no justification for an ideological attachment to capitalism for capitalism's sake -- especially if that attachment keeps us from tinkering to make improvements.
Fair enough; I was using "precedent" in a conversational sense, not a legal sense. I do understand that neither the Stewart nor the Kozlowski case sets a precedent that can be used in court against Gates or Ballmer. What I mean was pretty much what you said -- that the laws should be rewritten so that "executives who actually make the decisions for the corporation to engage in illegal behavior" pay criminal penalties themselves, rather than hiding behind their corporations' mountains of cash.
Re:From sSomeone who pitches those PHB's...
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 1
The zealots look different depending on which side of the divide they're on. Many (perhaps most) Linux zealots are the stereotypical geek-hippie types who make PHB's run in terror, and who are lacking in corporate social skills. The Windows variety, OTOH, are overwhelmingly suited drones who fit in perfectly with the corporate culture. But they're no less zealots.
... haven't even used Windows since 85 or 98, so they don't even know what they're really up against with XP or 2003Server, and they're so busy railing about how evil MS is, that they never bother to take a look at what their products are like...
I can guarantee you that just about every [Linux|BSD|OS X] advocate (of the sane variety or not) has used Windows much more recently than almost any Windows advocate has used [Linux|BSD|OS X]. The charge of ignorance may be fair within the Unix world (Linux vs. BSD vs. OS X vs. Solaris vs. AIX, etc.) but when talking about Windows vs. anything, on the "anything" side it's hardly ever true.
This is why we need criminal penalties for the people, not the companies, who commit antitrust crimes. Microsoft isn't hurt at all -- but Gates or Ballmer would certainly be hurt by a prison term, regardless of how much money they have.
And oh yeah, they should be in jail until their cases are decided, just like defendants in a murder trial. Let's see how much they try to delay things then.
There's a certain amount of precedent. Martha Stewart is almost certainly going to prison, and Dennis Kozlowski will probably be in the same boat once the trial finally happens right. ('Course, if you're a corrupt executive who's good buddies with Bush&Co., you're safe... but that's a whole 'nother argument.) We send executives to prison for enormously complex financial crimes that most people don't even understand -- it seems to me quite obvious that we should do the same to those who violate laws whose meaning and intent is entirely clear.
Re:From sSomeone who pitches those PHB's...
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Although we certainly see plenty of that kind of Linux zealotry on/., I really doubt that's what's going on in the corporate IS world. I'm one of the success stories -- I was able to convince my boss to go with a FOSS solution for our corporate database setup -- and I did it by preparing a calm, reasoned cost-benefit analysis with lots of references. But the primary reason it worked, IMO, is that we're a small company, and my boss, one of the founders of the company, is a scientist rather than a B-school grad.
For every Linux (or BSD, or OS X) zealot, there are a hundred Windows zealots, the majority of them suits who have never had any real education in the evaluation of competing software, and who will reject out of hand any non-Windows solutions because that's how they were trained and because Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft... and I do believe that many of them are the way they are because they're the projects of the kind of "education" the article describes.
Parent post is not flamebait. It is an accurate and insightful account of the systematic destruction of what was once genuinely one of the best educational systems in the country. I swear to God, there's a group of right-wingers on/. who spend all their mod points on hunting and moderating down any post that dares to criticize their Glorious Leader.
There are absolutely NO dictatorial countries in which the growth is rapid.
Given what the article says about Laos, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and other authoritarian nations throughout SE Asia and the Middle East -- and the explosion of internet usage in China, especially in the coastal cities, which is well-documented here and elsewhere -- I really don't see how you can say that. Your vision of tyrannies as necessarily technologically backwards may be comforting, but unfortunately, it's not accurate.
And, I assure, if some country gets a rapid growth, the dictator will pull the plugs soon enough.
But again, as the article says, that's not what's happening. They're not pulling the plug; instead, depressingly, they're finding ways to control the content which the (large, and growing) population of internet users in their countries can access.
Did you RTFA? The major point is that although internet usage is growing rapidly in dictatorial countries, it's not making the difference that early prophets of the internet's potential as a force for freedom had hoped. Which is really too bad. I confess that I was one of those who believed that the internet would be as revolutionary in spreading "dangerous ideas" as the printing press was.
Of course, it's early days yet. IIRC, the press was generally under the control of The Authorities until a couple of centuries after it came into existence. So things might get better. we can hope.
Einstein wrote it. I beleive it. You should too. No need to test it.
Oh wait, I've confused Science with religion, again.
I know you're joking, but you bring up an interesting point: experiments like this are an excellent example of the difference between science and religion, and a refutation of those who argue that science is a religion. Einstein is (rightly) revered, a figure whose importance to physics is equivalent to the status of, if not Jesus or Mohammed, at least a Christian Apostle or a major prophet in Judaism or Islam. So what are the physicists doing? They're not praying to his ghost; they're saying, "He was a really smart guy who was right about a lot of things, but we're pretty sure he was wrong about a lot of things too, and we're going to find out exactly how he was wrong and by how much." Bravo, sez I.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, just ignore this. When Windows is being compromised that's cause for gleeful giggles and jokes on slashdot. When Linux is being compromised that's for social misfits to blush about and shamefacedly ignore.
When Windows is being compromised, that's cause for Microsoft to ignore, deny, and lie about the problem, and if that fails, spend a few billion dollars on PR. When Linux is being compromised, that's for knowledgeable programmers to study, work on, and fix the vulnerability.
You aren't going to be prosecuted for keeping logs of all your online chat sessions. That is not what is in question here. Only time it matters is if your chat log could somehow be admissible as evidence in a criminal or civil court case.
I also doubt you'd get in trouble for posting bits and pieces of a chat log on the web somewhere either.
Citizen # 4317980A, your faith that your government will play by the rules has been noted. And believe me, we appreciate it.
If geek becomes mainstream, then what becomes the new geek?
Football players.
Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
Excellent point.
The author seems mainly concerned that the spreading of geek values will result in a mass retreat from the "real world." Well, the "real world" is whatever we choose to make it. I live a pretty geeky life -- I work as a DBA, study computational biology in school, read (and occasionally write) science fiction, listen to obscure music, and hang out primarily with other people who have similar interests. But guess what? There are a lot of those people -- and yes, half of them are women, and some pretty good-looking women at that. My academic studies may be incomprehensible to the monkeys who think an MBA constitutes higher education, but my research has the potential to change lives while they're shuffling papers. And my job is interesting, challenging, and pays me enough for a comfortable life. You don't get much more real than that.
My first reaction on reading this, like the Russian bigwigs', was "bullshit." A Mars mission for a signle percentile of the estimated cost, with funding from a TV show? It sounds like every bad sci-fi "masterpiece" ever written by an over-enthusiastic fourteen-year-old.
... what if they know something NASA and the Russian equivalent don't know? I mean, just about every time some obscure group of private would-be genius inventors announces something great, it turns out to be vaporware. But every once in a while, these obscure people turn out to be the Wright brothers, or Goddard.
But
So, what if they pull it off? What actually happens then?
I think you misunderstand how the phrase "all but" is used in everyday speech. Its literal meaning is different from its commonly understood meaning. As used here, it's an intensifier.
How about a language that people actually know?
... I don't know, maybe the original FORTRAN or ALGOL 60, maybe machine code for whatever the most popular processor would be (and it wouldn't necessarily be x86, since everyone would have wanted to stick with "an architecture that people actually know.") New languages that offer an obvious and dramatic improvement over anything else that's available for the task at hand* ought to be adopted for widespread and long-term use.
C'mon, really, how many people know Eiffel as compared to Java or C#? Really?
Well, of course, taking that attitude to its extreme, no new language would ever catch on, and we'd all be coding in
That being said, of course there is a cost involved in adopting an obscure language, and it has to be measured against whatever benefits the language offers. This is particularly true for large projects. I may choose to develop one-off software of which I expect to maintain personal control for its entire life cycle in Erlang or Ruby or Dylan, but if I'm running a big project with lots of contributors, I owe it to developers and end users to weigh the costs and benefits carefully.
* As FORTRAN, and COBOL, and yes, damn it, C, all did. C++, maybe. We'll have to wait another decade or so to be sure about Perl, and another two to be sure about Java and PHP and Python, and longer than that for C#. I take the long view.
Well, I'm not sure what that something would be. I know there's a fair amount of paper research going on, but (without knowing a whole lot about it) I have to assume that most of it is in the "convenience" area -- softer toilet paper, stronger paper towels, cheaper notebook paper, etc. -- rather than in the "Lifesaving Major Discovery!!!" area.
In any case, I'm not at all opposed to research on things that makes life more convenient for people -- I like my creature comforts as much as the next American. <g> What bothers me is when there is such a clear and direct diversion of resources from LMD!!! to convenience, and when that convenience is for the sake of such a small, generally well-off group of people who IMO already insulate themselves too much from nature anyway.
Do you also oppose research on making softer toilet paper through the same line of reasoning?
Heh. No, for two reasons:
1. It's not diverting resources from other, more useful research -- the people doing research on toilet paper would probably not be doing research on any of the applications I mentioned if they weren't working on TP instead.
2. Most people don't play golf, but everybody has to wipe their ass.
I'm a lefty environmentalist, and I oppose this, but not for the reasons you might think. I also work in biotech, and unlike many of my fellow environmentalists, I believe strongly in the potential of genetically-modified plants. There are an enormous number of applications that could be of significant benefit to humanity:
And instead they're concentrating on making golf courses greener? WTF? Golf courses will have weeds, and bare patches, and, you know, a little of bit of something that looks kind of natural. If you don't like it, fine, go play on Astroturf. I'm a lot more concerned about people being able to eat than I am about some rich guy's putting green.
Nope, stupid buzzwords never die.
Actually, like a lot of buzzwords, "paradigm shift" used to mean something. Real paradigm shifts are wondrous, exciting things. They also don't happen very often. I'd say only three have happened in computing in my lifetime: the switch from timesharing systems (mainframes and minis) to PC's as "what computers are" in the public eye, the change from CLI's to GUI's as the standard method of interacting with computers, and the way the Internet has subsumed the old hodgepodge of BBS's and proprietary online services. Everything else, as interesting (or not) as it may be, is just incremental change. And there's nothing wrong with that, because most of the time, incremental change is how things gets done. But everyone wants to be the guy who invented the Next Big Thing, not the guy who made last year's NBT a little bit better.
It occurs to me that I may soon be adding a fourth to my list -- the fall of proprietary software and the rise of F/OSS -- but it's too early to tell how that one will shake out.
And Finder blows... Damn I hate the way it works. It doesn't allow to see where you are in the filesystem very well. It's just awkward and slow to use.
Just out of curiosity, have you tried using it with the default set to Column view? (Cmd-3 to switch any Finder window.) That is, IMO, one of those small but incredibly cool features that makes the Mac OS X user experience such a joy. Certainly it's the fastest way I've ever seen to navigate through a deeply nested file system. One of my co-workers, who is generally as pro-Windows as they come, pronounced it "the best file view ever."
The 10.3 window manager is ugly by default, I agree. It took me a little tinkering to get things set just the way I want. <ob-Machead-remark> But even out of the box, it's a hell of a lot better than anything Microsoft ships. </ob-Machead-remark>
I really hope you're right, and I'm glad to hear that you're so impressed with OS X. The reason I'm gloomy about the anti-Apple prejudice going away is that honestly, I can't remember a time when the Mac OS wasn't better than the comparable Windows version available at the time. Yeah, OS 9 sucked, but Windows ME sucked ever so much harder, and with teeth. OS 8 was mediocre, but it was competing against Windows 98, for God's sake! System 7 was quite good, albeit rather bare-bones by modern standards -- but compared to Windows 3.1 and 95, it was a thing of beauty and a joy forever. (I think I have the timelines right; apologies if I'm forgetting something.) Etc.
And yet at every point in this history, the Mac was struggling against the dual prejudice of "M4XZ 5UX0RZ" from the script-kiddie brigade (and don't underestimate these people; even now, I suspect that Aunt Tillie is likely to go to her 17-year-old nephew for computer buying advice) and "Apple makes toys" from the suits. And even now, that the Mac OS has an industrial-strength Unix base and the hardware actually offers better price/performance than any comparable brand-name PC at all but the lowest of the low end, you still hear variants of these tired old prejudices trotted out every day.
My advice for the Linux desktop developers is: please, please, rip off everything you can from the OS X desktop. But don't never admit to anyone where you got the idea. We Apple geeks will know regardless, and sit back in our half-bitter, half-proud glory. We've got plenty of practice. [1/2 g]
[snicker]
Seriously, as an Apple user, I'm glad to see a Linux desktop system copying the MacOS instead of Windows. I've felt for some time that it is a huge mistake for KDE and GNOME to try so hard to make themselves look like Windows when, in OS X, there is a much better example of a Unix-based desktop. Why waste your time copying less than the best?
Yeah, yeah, user familiarity, etc. Look, folks, I guarantee you that if all you've ever used is Windows, if you sit down at a good OS X machine, it will take you about half an hour to get used to the differences and be up to speed -- and after that you'll be discovering new and better ways to do things and saying, "That's so cool! Why didn't Microsoft ever think of that?" If a Linux desktop can have some nifty non-Windows features too (and I really don't care if the developers rip them off from Apple or come up with them on their own) it will do a lot more to enhance Linux desktop growth than just coming up with a system that's "like Windows, only not exactly."
Next response I anticipate: "Yeah, well, if Mac OS X is so much better, how come it hasn't beat Windows in the marketplace?" The answer, of course, is that there is a lot of mindless anti-Apple prejudice, and regrettably I don't expect that to change any time soon. But anti-Linux prejudice is much milder, I think. A good Linux desktop with Mac OS X's best features (and maybe some of its own) especially if it were backed by IBM, could be the best shot at breaking the Windows stranglehold on the corporate desktop.
[shrug] I was responding to a post about capitalism vs. socialism, so those, and similar high-level examples, were the ones I chose to use. Obviously, economic models are fractal in their complexity. It wasn't so much a lack of imagination that kept me from breaking things down further, as a lack of desire to write a multi-screen post.
Feudalism is a political structure, yes; it is also an economic model, in which ownership is hierarchical, and the owner at each level owes taxes to the one above, all the way up to the king. The only real variation on this theme throughout history, which is by far the most common through time, is whether "ownership" applies at the lowest level -- the people at the bottom may be free peasants, serfs, or out-and-out slaves. (If you think this doesn't matter, contrast history of England with that of France.)
Fascism is purely an economic model, in which the government ties itself closely with a select group of large corporations. Like socialism, it tends to be found in conjunction with autocratic governments, but that doesn't make it a political structure in and of itself.
If your dictionary defines mercantilism as "mercantile practices or spirit, commercialism" then you need a better dictionary. Mercantilism is a very specific nationalist economic philosophy which holds that a nation's power is measured by the amount of specie -- hard currency, usually measured in silver or gold -- it holds in reserve. Specie may be accumulated by trade, by exploitation of a nation's own natural resources, or by stealing it from someone else. What sets mercantilism apart from other economic models such as capitalism is that in the mercantilist's view, it does not matter how specie is acquired, only that it is.
Here endeth the lesson.
I'm with you. Grandparent says "the only alternative to capitalism is rationing" but of course this isn't true. There have been all kinds of economic systems throughout history, of which capitalism and socialism are only two examples, and recent ones at that. (Feudalism, mercantilism, fascism, the list goes on.) Capitalism is better than all the others, so far, but it's a long way from perfect, and there is no justification for an ideological attachment to capitalism for capitalism's sake -- especially if that attachment keeps us from tinkering to make improvements.
Fair enough; I was using "precedent" in a conversational sense, not a legal sense. I do understand that neither the Stewart nor the Kozlowski case sets a precedent that can be used in court against Gates or Ballmer. What I mean was pretty much what you said -- that the laws should be rewritten so that "executives who actually make the decisions for the corporation to engage in illegal behavior" pay criminal penalties themselves, rather than hiding behind their corporations' mountains of cash.
The zealots look different depending on which side of the divide they're on. Many (perhaps most) Linux zealots are the stereotypical geek-hippie types who make PHB's run in terror, and who are lacking in corporate social skills. The Windows variety, OTOH, are overwhelmingly suited drones who fit in perfectly with the corporate culture. But they're no less zealots.
I can guarantee you that just about every [Linux|BSD|OS X] advocate (of the sane variety or not) has used Windows much more recently than almost any Windows advocate has used [Linux|BSD|OS X]. The charge of ignorance may be fair within the Unix world (Linux vs. BSD vs. OS X vs. Solaris vs. AIX, etc.) but when talking about Windows vs. anything, on the "anything" side it's hardly ever true.
This is why we need criminal penalties for the people, not the companies, who commit antitrust crimes. Microsoft isn't hurt at all -- but Gates or Ballmer would certainly be hurt by a prison term, regardless of how much money they have.
... but that's a whole 'nother argument.) We send executives to prison for enormously complex financial crimes that most people don't even understand -- it seems to me quite obvious that we should do the same to those who violate laws whose meaning and intent is entirely clear.
And oh yeah, they should be in jail until their cases are decided, just like defendants in a murder trial. Let's see how much they try to delay things then.
There's a certain amount of precedent. Martha Stewart is almost certainly going to prison, and Dennis Kozlowski will probably be in the same boat once the trial finally happens right. ('Course, if you're a corrupt executive who's good buddies with Bush&Co., you're safe
Although we certainly see plenty of that kind of Linux zealotry on /., I really doubt that's what's going on in the corporate IS world. I'm one of the success stories -- I was able to convince my boss to go with a FOSS solution for our corporate database setup -- and I did it by preparing a calm, reasoned cost-benefit analysis with lots of references. But the primary reason it worked, IMO, is that we're a small company, and my boss, one of the founders of the company, is a scientist rather than a B-school grad.
... and I do believe that many of them are the way they are because they're the projects of the kind of "education" the article describes.
For every Linux (or BSD, or OS X) zealot, there are a hundred Windows zealots, the majority of them suits who have never had any real education in the evaluation of competing software, and who will reject out of hand any non-Windows solutions because that's how they were trained and because Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft
Parent post is not flamebait. It is an accurate and insightful account of the systematic destruction of what was once genuinely one of the best educational systems in the country. I swear to God, there's a group of right-wingers on /. who spend all their mod points on hunting and moderating down any post that dares to criticize their Glorious Leader.
There are absolutely NO dictatorial countries in which the growth is rapid.
Given what the article says about Laos, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and other authoritarian nations throughout SE Asia and the Middle East -- and the explosion of internet usage in China, especially in the coastal cities, which is well-documented here and elsewhere -- I really don't see how you can say that. Your vision of tyrannies as necessarily technologically backwards may be comforting, but unfortunately, it's not accurate.
And, I assure, if some country gets a rapid growth, the dictator will pull the plugs soon enough.
But again, as the article says, that's not what's happening. They're not pulling the plug; instead, depressingly, they're finding ways to control the content which the (large, and growing) population of internet users in their countries can access.
Did you RTFA? The major point is that although internet usage is growing rapidly in dictatorial countries, it's not making the difference that early prophets of the internet's potential as a force for freedom had hoped. Which is really too bad. I confess that I was one of those who believed that the internet would be as revolutionary in spreading "dangerous ideas" as the printing press was.
Of course, it's early days yet. IIRC, the press was generally under the control of The Authorities until a couple of centuries after it came into existence. So things might get better. we can hope.
Einstein wrote it. I beleive it. You should too. No need to test it.
Oh wait, I've confused Science with religion, again.
I know you're joking, but you bring up an interesting point: experiments like this are an excellent example of the difference between science and religion, and a refutation of those who argue that science is a religion. Einstein is (rightly) revered, a figure whose importance to physics is equivalent to the status of, if not Jesus or Mohammed, at least a Christian Apostle or a major prophet in Judaism or Islam. So what are the physicists doing? They're not praying to his ghost; they're saying, "He was a really smart guy who was right about a lot of things, but we're pretty sure he was wrong about a lot of things too, and we're going to find out exactly how he was wrong and by how much." Bravo, sez I.