Sure I can, and did. That's what the foundational platform I posted was for. It's more or less common knowledge in Libertarian circles that up until the 2006 convention the libertarian party platform had 61 planks that while reworded for clarification over the years remained intact. So, if the platform was mostly consistent from 1972 to 2006 and Paul ran for president in 1988, the platform from any of those election years will be a lot like the one under which he ran.
There are a lot of conflicts between libertarians and Libertarians. I voted for Harry Brown when I was 18 so I'm sympathetic. The US Libertarian party is full of minarchists and anacro-capitalists who have hijacked the name. Most only pay lip service to federalism and use it as an excuse for social darwinism. It used to be that libertarian was a code word for anarchist because that word was scary. Now some small el libertarians are starting to self-identify as anarchists so as to not be confused with the Libertarians.
He'd just be more opposed to the federal governent doing anything to ban them. In libertarian ideology there is no public property, no "commons."
There weren't a lot of changes in the Libertarian platform between the founding of the party in 1972 and a couple years ago when they finaly decided that electability was more important than insanity and dropped stuff like the bit about child labor laws being the cause of poverty in America.
Here's that 1972 foundational platform. It's a lot like what Paul ran on in 1988. I can't find his 1988 platform on the web anywhere. It's been scoured.
What's going to be really unfair is all the teleco employees who are out of a job because of executives who set their companies up for trillians of dollars in liability in exchange for political favors.
The sections of FISA law dealing with violations and penalties is some of the most clearly written sections of federal code that I've ever read. Without congressional intervention of some kind, either immunity or huge bailout, this could well bankrupt the whole industry. Google and Qwest would snap up a lot of the rubble but it would still be pretty ugly for the whole tech industry for a while.
An aggrieved person, other than a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, as defined in section 1801 (a) or (b)(1)(A) of this title, respectively, who has been subjected to an electronic surveillance or about whom information obtained by electronic surveillance of such person has been disclosed or used in violation of section 1809 of this title shall have a cause of action against any person who committed such violation and shall be entitled to recover-- (a) actual damages, but not less than liquidated damages of $1,000 or $100 per day for each day of violation, whichever is greater; (b) punitive damages; and (c) reasonable attorney's fees and other investigation and litigation costs reasonably incurred.
OK. Let's do some math here. It was the goal of the NSA to make records of every phone call made within the US and who it was to and from. Let's be conservative and say they only succeeded in recording the phone logs of 10% of the population and were in violation for 4 years.
(300000000/10)((4)365)(100) = $4,380,000,000,000.
Over four trillion dollars in civil liability, and that's being conservative. Even AT&T can't absorb that much. Think about what would happen if AT&T, Verizon and South Central Bell all went bankrupt at once. Think about the stock market. Think about the mutual funds which presently hold telecom stock and all the pension funds and non-profit endowments that are currently invested in them. Think about trying to get a job in the tech sector when you're competing with all the unemployed telecom workers. Think about broadband deployment in unserved areas for sure.
Knocking out communications infrastructure is something invading forces do. It's not something that governments are supposed to let happen.
There are some executives who need to have their heads on pikes, but the industry itself needs protection.
Seriously. The whole point of Ubuntu is to be a bleeding edge distro. Every six months they take debian sid, aka unstable, throw in some bleeding edge Gnome, kernel and X patches from their respective development repositories, and do a blitzkrieg stabilization effort effort. There is very little time for testing. The breakneck release schedule means that unlike sid, ubuntu development branches are often broken to the point of being unsuitable for normal day to day use so the developers are really the only ones running the unstable branch and testing it. An RC is put out which users are encouraged to test and a few weeks later there's a release. Whatever bugs can't be fixed in that tiny window are left broken until the next release.
This is all fine and good. My issue comes with marketing a broken by design distro as newbie friendly. Newbies can't tell the difference between a bug and when they screwed something up. Ubuntu devs can idiot proof the GUI until the sky turns green and it won't do a damn thing about kernel and X bugs. I'll still be getting phone calls from newbies in crisis at 1 AM because I'm the one who gave them the Ubuntu CD. Never again. I've been hooking newbies up with PCLinuxOS for a while now.
If by "fully functional" you mean "it works but only if you use it the same way as the developers and don't want to configure anything." Since a key functionality of of KDE is its configuriblity, indeed it's why many people use it, you can't really call it "fully functional" if you're stuck with the godawful default desktop that nobody who uses their computer for anything serious would tolerate for longer than it takes to change it. I really hope the Serenity style gets fully ported. It's the first original KDE style that hasn't looked like somebody put Deviant Art in a blender. I'll take a blocky win9x style over the monstrosity that was Keramik any day. Plastic was tolerable but there were no decent light but low contrast color schemes that worked well with it. Polyester is just frightening and has so many rendering errors it's unusable.
You've not tried KDE4 yet, obviously. It seems like the ability to configure the panel is a feature that has not yet made it into the so called "release candidate."
It's looking like I'm going to be using KDE 3.5.x until debian gets rid of it in five or ten years.
I guess it might be time to check in on Enlightenment and Afterstep again as well.
Left to its own devices, the free market will most surely turn the earth to Venus with coal. The continued survival of the human race just doesn't make good economic sense on paper.
I'm a former Earth Firster and am still pretty hardcore about enviornmental issues. The fact of the matter is that once upon a time we assumed that nuclear was worse than coal. We now know that we were wrong.
As someone with a fair sized network running in a one bedroom apartment, I also know that power is too important to me professionaly for me to want to mess with anything off grid.
Well, if NASA were to be privatized, there would need to be a new military space program. National security interests aren't always profitable and are too important to be left to the whims of things like market forces.
Before the Haliburtin debacle, I'd have had no problem with the defense department taking over control of NASA entirely. Between the air force and DARPA there's a fair bit of crossover anyway. The pure research stuff could be turned over to public universities in a manner similar to how the DOE handles nuclear research.
This whole privatization of government thing has been such a boondoggle. Particularly when it comes to technology there is simply no motive to innovate. For example, we get power form coal and 1960s era nuclear reactors because continuing to do the same thing costs less in the short run than investing in finding better ways to do it.
Have you given serious thought to how the opponents might also be right?
Nobody rational would ever think that. Nobody is knowingly wrong, so everyone thinks they are right. If two people disagree, the only possibilities are a) they are both wrong and b) one is wrong and one is right. They can't both be right and still disagree. The law of excluded middle pretty much rules that out.
99.9% of the world does not make that distinction.
If that's a claim you frequently make online, you can be sure you're on a watchlist. All it takes is a single person submitting a report to the FBI in the webform they have set up for that kind of thing. They say "this person at [url] says he's a pedophile" and it there is a good chance of it landing in the lap of the webmaster of [url].
The problem is that he's able to speak fluent WP:WTF where others aren't. It's not that they don't understand and follow the spirit of wikipedia policy. It's that over the years policy and bureaucracy have sprawled into something out of Brazil. Maybe a young Robert De Niro show show up and help people.
There are two different classes of editors: those who come to wikipedia in order to contribute to specific articles related to their areas of expertise and those who treat wikipedia like myspace and edit articles while they are there. Those in the later group have much stronger WP:FU and are thus able to bully people.
When I see it mentioned that someone has made edits on 1000 different articles, my first thought is that they probably had no buisness on at least 950 of those. People just go around burping crap into random articles. The phrase "The Encyclopedia that Anyone can Edit" should not imply that everyone should.
Seriously, the jargon proliferation is beyond absurd, with acronyms and abbreviations freely redirecting to each other. It makes military jargon look intelligible. For all the emphasis wikipedia puts on keeping articles relevant to laymen, WP:SOUP has rendered wikipedia process inaccessible to all but those who are experts in wikipedia.
Um. I run a fairly small online community. Here's why I'd have banned you. Regardless of if I were to fight or comply when the FBI asks for logs of everything from a specific user, it's a huge pain in the ass. There are a lot of cases where I'd be willing to go the ground to protect the privacy of a user, but anyone stupid enough to publicly self-identify as a pedo or terrorist in the current authoritarian legal climate is not worth the legal hassle they would cause me.
Sooner or later some bullshit like this is going pass:
You don't have to pay people. Just draft them. People with a sense of social responsibility will do it for the right reasons. Anyone who seems eager help should be disqualified. Either their motivations are suspect or they have no idea how tedious and thankless the real work of administering a user generated content site is.
Lots of times a person will insist on making wikipedia match their conception of reality without bothering to wonder if maybe the existing article is right and they are wrong. They cite Fox news and scream NPOV when someone points out Anne Coulter isn't an expert on anything other than the sound of her own voice.
Almost as frightening is when someone decides to learn more a topic by working on the wikipedia article. They come in after seeing something on TV about a topic or touching on it in a class. The first book or article they read goes right into wikipedia. There is no familiarizing themselves with the body of work on the topic, there is no understanding of its history. It's just them, a handful of sources they have skimmed and a topic they don't know jack shit about.
In such cases the body of professional literature is usually small and known to all experts in the field. In some cases the experts in the field all know each other personally. It's pretty easy to shake out the dilettantes.
This attitude kills so many articles. People with an academic background in a topic will work on something for months and then some punk wikipedia cultist with maybe an undergrad degree will crap all over it and scream NPOV when someone tries to repair the damage. This results in the people who normally get paid to write about the topic at hand being run off in favor of idiots.
If you have to do research to understand what the topic even is, leave it the fuck alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure I can, and did. That's what the foundational platform I posted was for. It's more or less common knowledge in Libertarian circles that up until the 2006 convention the libertarian party platform had 61 planks that while reworded for clarification over the years remained intact. So, if the platform was mostly consistent from 1972 to 2006 and Paul ran for president in 1988, the platform from any of those election years will be a lot like the one under which he ran.
There are a lot of conflicts between libertarians and Libertarians. I voted for Harry Brown when I was 18 so I'm sympathetic. The US Libertarian party is full of minarchists and anacro-capitalists who have hijacked the name. Most only pay lip service to federalism and use it as an excuse for social darwinism. It used to be that libertarian was a code word for anarchist because that word was scary. Now some small el libertarians are starting to self-identify as anarchists so as to not be confused with the Libertarians.
He'd be opposed to those to.
He'd just be more opposed to the federal governent doing anything to ban them. In libertarian ideology there is no public property, no "commons."
There weren't a lot of changes in the Libertarian platform between the founding of the party in 1972 and a couple years ago when they finaly decided that electability was more important than insanity and dropped stuff like the bit about child labor laws being the cause of poverty in America.
Here's that 1972 foundational platform. It's a lot like what Paul ran on in 1988. I can't find his 1988 platform on the web anywhere. It's been scoured.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29615
What's going to be really unfair is all the teleco employees who are out of a job because of executives who set their companies up for trillians of dollars in liability in exchange for political favors.
The sections of FISA law dealing with violations and penalties is some of the most clearly written sections of federal code that I've ever read. Without congressional intervention of some kind, either immunity or huge bailout, this could well bankrupt the whole industry. Google and Qwest would snap up a lot of the rubble but it would still be pretty ugly for the whole tech industry for a while.
Yeah, but he's also opposed to publicly funded sidewalks.
OK. Let's do some math here. It was the goal of the NSA to make records of every phone call made within the US and who it was to and from. Let's be conservative and say they only succeeded in recording the phone logs of 10% of the population and were in violation for 4 years.
(300000000/10)((4)365)(100) = $4,380,000,000,000.
Over four trillion dollars in civil liability, and that's being conservative. Even AT&T can't absorb that much. Think about what would happen if AT&T, Verizon and South Central Bell all went bankrupt at once. Think about the stock market. Think about the mutual funds which presently hold telecom stock and all the pension funds and non-profit endowments that are currently invested in them. Think about trying to get a job in the tech sector when you're competing with all the unemployed telecom workers. Think about broadband deployment in unserved areas for sure.
Knocking out communications infrastructure is something invading forces do. It's not something that governments are supposed to let happen.
There are some executives who need to have their heads on pikes, but the industry itself needs protection.
Or maybe even Ubuntu = !stable
Seriously. The whole point of Ubuntu is to be a bleeding edge distro. Every six months they take debian sid, aka unstable, throw in some bleeding edge Gnome, kernel and X patches from their respective development repositories, and do a blitzkrieg stabilization effort effort. There is very little time for testing. The breakneck release schedule means that unlike sid, ubuntu development branches are often broken to the point of being unsuitable for normal day to day use so the developers are really the only ones running the unstable branch and testing it. An RC is put out which users are encouraged to test and a few weeks later there's a release. Whatever bugs can't be fixed in that tiny window are left broken until the next release.
This is all fine and good. My issue comes with marketing a broken by design distro as newbie friendly. Newbies can't tell the difference between a bug and when they screwed something up. Ubuntu devs can idiot proof the GUI until the sky turns green and it won't do a damn thing about kernel and X bugs. I'll still be getting phone calls from newbies in crisis at 1 AM because I'm the one who gave them the Ubuntu CD. Never again. I've been hooking newbies up with PCLinuxOS for a while now.
In KDE land RC means "Pw0ned! We just tricked you into beta testing on your work machine!"
If by "fully functional" you mean "it works but only if you use it the same way as the developers and don't want to configure anything." Since a key functionality of of KDE is its configuriblity, indeed it's why many people use it, you can't really call it "fully functional" if you're stuck with the godawful default desktop that nobody who uses their computer for anything serious would tolerate for longer than it takes to change it. I really hope the Serenity style gets fully ported. It's the first original KDE style that hasn't looked like somebody put Deviant Art in a blender. I'll take a blocky win9x style over the monstrosity that was Keramik any day. Plastic was tolerable but there were no decent light but low contrast color schemes that worked well with it. Polyester is just frightening and has so many rendering errors it's unusable.
You've not tried KDE4 yet, obviously. It seems like the ability to configure the panel is a feature that has not yet made it into the so called "release candidate."
It's looking like I'm going to be using KDE 3.5.x until debian gets rid of it in five or ten years.
I guess it might be time to check in on Enlightenment and Afterstep again as well.
to give to the Iraqis.
It's now in the Cayman Islands.
when the clouds are positioned for coverage around the globe . . .
checkmate
Left to its own devices, the free market will most surely turn the earth to Venus with coal. The continued survival of the human race just doesn't make good economic sense on paper.
I'm a former Earth Firster and am still pretty hardcore about enviornmental issues. The fact of the matter is that once upon a time we assumed that nuclear was worse than coal. We now know that we were wrong.
As someone with a fair sized network running in a one bedroom apartment, I also know that power is too important to me professionaly for me to want to mess with anything off grid.
Well, if NASA were to be privatized, there would need to be a new military space program. National security interests aren't always profitable and are too important to be left to the whims of things like market forces.
Before the Haliburtin debacle, I'd have had no problem with the defense department taking over control of NASA entirely. Between the air force and DARPA there's a fair bit of crossover anyway. The pure research stuff could be turned over to public universities in a manner similar to how the DOE handles nuclear research.
Pigs...... In.......... Space....!
This whole privatization of government thing has been such a boondoggle. Particularly when it comes to technology there is simply no motive to innovate. For example, we get power form coal and 1960s era nuclear reactors because continuing to do the same thing costs less in the short run than investing in finding better ways to do it.
In that case they are not both right. They are talking about two different things.
Nobody rational would ever think that. Nobody is knowingly wrong, so everyone thinks they are right. If two people disagree, the only possibilities are a) they are both wrong and b) one is wrong and one is right. They can't both be right and still disagree. The law of excluded middle pretty much rules that out.
99.9% of the world does not make that distinction.
If that's a claim you frequently make online, you can be sure you're on a watchlist. All it takes is a single person submitting a report to the FBI in the webform they have set up for that kind of thing. They say "this person at [url] says he's a pedophile" and it there is a good chance of it landing in the lap of the webmaster of [url].
The problem is that he's able to speak fluent WP:WTF where others aren't. It's not that they don't understand and follow the spirit of wikipedia policy. It's that over the years policy and bureaucracy have sprawled into something out of Brazil. Maybe a young Robert De Niro show show up and help people.
There are two different classes of editors: those who come to wikipedia in order to contribute to specific articles related to their areas of expertise and those who treat wikipedia like myspace and edit articles while they are there. Those in the later group have much stronger WP:FU and are thus able to bully people.
When I see it mentioned that someone has made edits on 1000 different articles, my first thought is that they probably had no buisness on at least 950 of those. People just go around burping crap into random articles. The phrase "The Encyclopedia that Anyone can Edit" should not imply that everyone should.
Seriously, the jargon proliferation is beyond absurd, with acronyms and abbreviations freely redirecting to each other. It makes military jargon look intelligible. For all the emphasis wikipedia puts on keeping articles relevant to laymen, WP:SOUP has rendered wikipedia process inaccessible to all but those who are experts in wikipedia.
This may be better worse, depending on if you think wikipedia need more or fewer anarchists.
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page
Um. I run a fairly small online community. Here's why I'd have banned you. Regardless of if I were to fight or comply when the FBI asks for logs of everything from a specific user, it's a huge pain in the ass. There are a lot of cases where I'd be willing to go the ground to protect the privacy of a user, but anyone stupid enough to publicly self-identify as a pedo or terrorist in the current authoritarian legal climate is not worth the legal hassle they would cause me.
Sooner or later some bullshit like this is going pass:
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/12/13/mccain-war-on-blogs/
You don't have to pay people. Just draft them. People with a sense of social responsibility will do it for the right reasons. Anyone who seems eager help should be disqualified. Either their motivations are suspect or they have no idea how tedious and thankless the real work of administering a user generated content site is.
Lots of times a person will insist on making wikipedia match their conception of reality without bothering to wonder if maybe the existing article is right and they are wrong. They cite Fox news and scream NPOV when someone points out Anne Coulter isn't an expert on anything other than the sound of her own voice.
Almost as frightening is when someone decides to learn more a topic by working on the wikipedia article. They come in after seeing something on TV about a topic or touching on it in a class. The first book or article they read goes right into wikipedia. There is no familiarizing themselves with the body of work on the topic, there is no understanding of its history. It's just them, a handful of sources they have skimmed and a topic they don't know jack shit about.
In such cases the body of professional literature is usually small and known to all experts in the field. In some cases the experts in the field all know each other personally. It's pretty easy to shake out the dilettantes.
This attitude kills so many articles. People with an academic background in a topic will work on something for months and then some punk wikipedia cultist with maybe an undergrad degree will crap all over it and scream NPOV when someone tries to repair the damage. This results in the people who normally get paid to write about the topic at hand being run off in favor of idiots.
If you have to do research to understand what the topic even is, leave it the fuck alone.