Dagnabbit, I was just about to mention this, and somebody's beaten me to it..:-)
The drug in question is, as I recall, "Melanocyte Stimulating Hormone", which evidently is showing in trials that it improves libido for both men and women. It seemingly acts in the brain rather than the genitals (and as any marriage/sex councelor should tell you, the brain is the most important sex organ after all) and so works in a completely different way from viagra and such.
Wonder how hard it is to get hold of stock in this company....whether it's OFFICIALLY released for anything other than a tanning-aid, you just KNOW that the, ahem, "off-label" uses of it will make it awfully popular....
(I find it hilarious to see increased libido listed as an unwanted side-effect...:-) )
Re:Thankfully, this is no democracy
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Bear in mind that MUCH of the "minimal government" aspect of libertarianism is focussed on "minimal FEDERAL government".
The basic premise of libertarianism, as I understand it, is that government authority should move down to the most local level where it is feasible (keeping in mind that this hierarchy includes the most local level of all - the individual).
Bear in mind also that it is government that CREATES corporations. Without a government declaration that the fictional legal entity of a Corporation exists, companies would be groups of individuals working together in business. "Ending Corporate Welfare" is a strong aspect of Libertarian philosophy, though this doesn't seem to get noticed much.
I add to this my PERSONAL speculation/opinion that the bigger a government entity is, the less "Socialist" it can be while still truly serving the public interest as best it can (and vice-versa). A "family" is, in effect, a governmental arrangement (with the parents in charge, often with one or the other with 'veto' power over the other) that tends to be very "socialistic", and works quite well that way, even if little Billy ends up having to do without a Playstation because Dictator Dad wants to "abuse" his power to use the family funds to buy some new golf clubs instead - Billy still gets to eat breakfast and have clothes to wear. Blown up to a government with the size and authority of the US (or the Soviet Union) it would not end up being able to to hold together so well. (Somewhere in the middle - if California, for example, were to completely secede from the US, they could PROBABLY be moderately successful if they wanted to implement a European-socialist-type government. It's arguable whether they'd be worse or better off than they are now, but I think they'd be able to maintain an "acceptable" standard of living for most of their citizens).
Part of the overall problem is that people have gotten USED to thinking "well, government will protect me". As a result, it'd probably be rather hard on the country if the government of the US were to SUDDENLY transition to a seriously libertarian structure. If it were done slowly, with a program of making sure people started thinking critically again, thinking about their purchases and what they're doing, and so on, I tend to think it could work. Once people got USED to putting out the small amount of effort to avoid buying from companies whose products they feel are substandard or whose business practices they don't want to support, and once companies could no longer hide behind government-granted, multilayered shells of "corporation" entities when they get hauled into court for fraud (Even outright extremist Libertarian viewpoints - you know, the ones who want ALL publically-owned property sold off to private entities TOMORROW - leave the punishment of fraud well within normal governmental power), I think things would be able to work out.
Basically, the way I see it, taking current laws concerning certain recreational drugs as an example, a fairly standard libertarian view seems to be:
The Federal Government MUST NOT prohibit, e.g. marijuana.
A STATE Government MAY prohibit marijuana, but it'd be a bad thing.
A County government COULD prohibit marijuana, but they probably shouldn't.
A City government might prohibit marijuana, but that wouldn't be so bad since those who want it can relatively easily move to the city next door...
I'm sure that's a gross oversimplification, and I'm not sure how well that matches "real" libertarian views on the subject, but it's my understanding of it [which I happen to tend to agree with].
Ignore that legislature behind the curtain...
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Want Freedom?
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I don't much like the current executive administration myself - I do think they are likely to commit abuses of the powers they have been given.
However, while everyone has GWB under a metaphorical microscope, Congress is getting away with it...
Brief review of basic US federal government structure: There are 3 branches. The fun-to-hate President is in charge of the Executive branch. As a single individual, he's an easy target to take scrutiny off of the other two branches, the legislature, and the judicial branch.
The legislature is the branch that decides what powers the government has, not the executive. Everything the executive branch is allowed to do, has had the power given to it by rules written and agreed on by the legislature (with the exception of a few that the Judicial branch has overruled.). The legislature has the power to declare limitations on what the government can do at any time, to revoke existing powers, and even to COMPLETELY REMOVE the fun-to-hate president from office if they so choose.
For example, it was recently reported that the current executive administration, after much consultation with its lawyers [YIKES! The laws in this country are so screwed up even OUR OWN GOVERNMENT isn't sure what they mean!] has decided that it doesn't need congress' permission to wage war on Iraq. They may even be correct...but congress can fix this at ANY TIME by creating a new law that A)explicitly declares the "war powers act" of 1991(?) no longer in force and B)firmly declares that the president MUST obtain approval from congress to wage war...and if the president gives them too much grief over it, they can impeach him if they want.
Government spending in the tech sector? The budget is CONGRESS' job, not GWB's. He can make suggestions and requests, and he can even veto, but congress can do whatever they want with his suggestions and requests, and can override his veto if they choose to.
The "Patriot" act? Congress. Amendment to allow federal criminalization of 'flag desecration?' Congress. The RIAA/MPAA taking away our rights? That's CONGRESS' job. Fritz Hollings (Disneycrat - SC) is not on the presidents cabinet. He's in Congress. The people who approved the DMCA were not on the president's cabinet. They are Congress. Sonny Bono was not acting on behalf of the President (Clinton at the time, remember) when he passed the 'Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act', he was in CONGRESS....and as frighteningly eager as Ashcroft and company seem to be about heavy-handed interpretation and enforcement of all of these laws, it is still not his fault if "Eldred vs. Ashcroft" finds in his favor - that's up to the judicial branch to decide (and, of course, Congress has the power to REPEAL or amend [i.e. they could, for example, at least remove the 'retroactive' portion of the extension] at any time, regardless of the outcome of Eldred vs. Ashcroft). If Ashcroft starts flinging kids in jail for trading Metallica songs in violation of copyright, it's CONGRESS' fault for saying "Go get 'em!"
The point is, everyone busy yelling and screaming and pointing at the convenient target of GWB as the cause of all of our problems is only making the problems worse, by perpetuating the lack of focus on Congress. The executive branches job is to ENFORCE the laws - in other words, "to do what Congress says."
I sometimes wonder if the "Hate George Bush" craze is itself a conspiracy to perpetuate the problem....
[...]there is an effective lobby against "The First Amendment", and that, when the freedoms are disassociated from "The First Amendment", Americans are rabidly supportive of their First Amendment rights.][...]
Hmmm, interesting. I get a slightly different impression from that, though - basically, I would interpret this to mean that MOST people think that MOST of the rights in the first amendment are important, but MANY feel that one or more of them are "going to far" - but that they all disagree on which of those rights are in that category
So, in other words, JoeSchmoe might think that HIS right to free speech is really important, but those meddling propaganda-mongers of The Press should be controlled, while BobbyJoe thinks that The Press is a vital source of information for the public, but his whacky, unqualified neighbor BillyBob ought to have his ravings curtailed, while BillyBob thinks that both individuals AND the press ought to be able to talk about almost anything, EXCEPT things that disparage BillyBob's religion or involve desecrating flags, while BobbySue thinks that speech is all well and good, but not just everybody should be allowed to actually associate with each other unwatched because that's how gangs and mobs and terrorist cells get started.....you get the idea.
The bad part is, the "distributed" nature of what people consider "redundant" rights, while it should hinder any MAJOR trampling of 1st amendment rights all at once, it does leave the door open to "incremental" limitations, provided Congress sneaks in the limitations a bit at a time, as particular current events allow public opinion to waver in opposition to them. In other words, it could end up being a sort of "slippery slope" situation. Currently, "right to privacy" seems to be the one that the most people can be persuaded is unimportant, because, after all, only BAD people have something to hide, right? Individual laws and precedents allowing certain things observed during violation of privacy could easily follow [starting with less-obviously-bad things like 'if a meter reader happens to sneak a look into a basement window of a house and spots a cache of stinger missiles and launchers, that will now be considered 'probable cause' for a raid without a warrant, and admissable evidence in court', and progressing from there to various forms of "suspicious materials" to "suspicious activities", in small, slow steps...]
Re:amending the Constitution to prohibit flag burn
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I agree, ESPECIALLY since there are, in an indirect way, legal precedents/laws that restrict "desecration of the flag" in certain contexts - look up the legal concept of "fighting words"...
This means that if you "desecrate" a flag in a reasonable manner, it's fine. If you show up at, say, a convention for war veterans and take a dump on a flag, and the veterans beat you senseless, it's your own fault (okay, this is a gross oversimplification, but you get the idea)...and taxpayers don't even need to pay 10's of 1000's of dollars to deal with flinging people in jail over it.
While I think flag-burning is a childish and stupid form of protest, personally, that's still A)my opinion and B) NOT adequate grounds for making the act outright criminal. It still is, and should remain, a form of "protected [by the 1st amendment] political speech".
Going through the effort of a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT just to permit criminalization of this SPECIFIC form speech seems like a gross abuse of power. What's next, a constitutional amendment to permit federal criminalization of lewd acts with bladed kitchen appliances?....
(On the other hand, though, it should be pointed out that the amendment PERMITS congress to criminalize it, if they want - even if the amendment goes through, 'desecrating' a flag will still be otherwise legal until congress passes a separate law to criminalize it.)
Re:Can I Renounce My Citizenship?
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I haven't given up to this extent yet, though. I agree that there are disgusting abuses of governmental power going on right now, but it's still technically possible to effect change in the system. It'll take some serious effort (certainly more effort that showing up at a foreign consulate and expatriating yourself), but I think there's still a chance to save the US if we can get the metaphorical pendulum to start swinging back in the other direction...
You haven't been to DC latly have you??? That is all you see various companies diggin up the streets...
Heh...no, I didn't know that. Kind of funny, the implication that in D.C. there isn't government-granted monopoly on this sort of thing. Senators probably want the competition to keep access to their hardcore porn and disney video sharing broadband affordable:-)
My "take" on this bill is similar to yours - the "up front" implications aren't really all that bad (It just requires one year of "military training", basically ensures the equivalent of a GED and so on). Also, if I remember from the text, the inductee actually gets to choose which branch they go to, if they qualify (this is from memory, though - I haven't gone back to re-read the bill).
This would hardly have even registered in my mind at all, if it weren't for the current US hysteria over the "need" to "profile" and "monitor" people who may be "suspicious", and certainly, a year of tightly-controlled government service enables the building of such records. (Thanks, though, to the person who mentioned the lack of psychological evaluation in the Air Force [and presumably other branches] at the moment - I had assumed such a thing was normal practice in evaluating a new recruit. Guess I was wrong...
If a company burns millions of dollars to roll out fiber optic cable in a city, is that infrastructure a "public resource?"
No, but the streets and such that they need to block off and dig up to lay the cable are. Since the government that owns the streets in question probably doesn't want to have lots of companies taking turns digging up the streets to run cables, they pick one and give them a monopoly...
Therein lies the problem - at that point, the public (by proxy through their government) has given away a resource (path/land to lay cable and permission to block traffic temporarily in the process) to a single company. Other companies might be willing to compete, but are not allowed to lay their own cables.
Laws requiring the granted monopoly to share their cables in exchange for the use of public space to run their cables is intended as a sort of "patch" to make up for this. It seems kind of kludgy to me, but I can't think of a better solution in the circumstances. This is why it upsets people when the granted monopoly is allowed to exclude competitors.
That's an interesting point - as far as I know, the religious prohibitions specify EATING "non-Kosher" critters as bad. Wonder how they'll come down on "non-foodular" uses of the critters...
Though given that I occasionally hear them referred to as "unclean" in this context, I suppose it's unlikely that organ transplants will be treated any better than food...
I think that hits the metaphorical nail on the metaphorical head. The alleged "mainstream" press still can't seem to wrap its mindset around the way open source/free software works...
While I personally dislike Red Hat's distribution and think RPM is a tool of The Devil(tm), it's still another choice, and I don't see any way that Red Hat could "get rid of" Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Mandrake, Suse, etc, and regardless of any dislike I may have for some of their practices (e.g. GCC 2.96, removing the "differences" between KDE and Gnome [since in my opinion, it is the differences between then that prompt people to choose one or the other - making them the same makes the choice difficult for those not already familiar with them - but it's STILL just a CHOICE], and so on) their presence as an additional choice of distribution can only be a good thing, from my perspective.
In short, we already HAVE a "winner" in the "linux wars": the users, who have a wide variety of choices available to them. The press seems to have gotten stuck on the "There Can Be Only One(tm)" concept from all those years of proprietary stuff...
If passed, this will mandate a year of military training for nearly all "selective service" age males (and any females for volunteer - is it just me or is this an amusing chauvenistic anachronism for a modern law?...).
It's far from being an outright "draft", but it holds a disturbing (and on-topic) implication.
I seem to recall that when someone begins US military service, that they are subjected to a variety of examinations, including, I assume, psychiatric ones. Of course, the military keeps records of the results.
Therefore...this bill is basically a convenient way to ensure that the US Federal Government would from that day forth be able to "profile" effectively every male US citizen as they hit voting age. It'd be a trivial matter, in a technical sense, to automate the "picking out" of any results that are deemed "worrisome" and the reports shared with law enforcement agencies everywhere...
I'm not certain that's the main PURPOSE of the bill, but I don't doubt that aspect of it would appeal to current AND FUTURE executive administrations in the US....
Better Commercials!. SOME commercials are actually done with the notion that they should also have some entertainment value. (A number of the "M&M's" commercials come to mind). Make the commercials WORTH watching and people won't skip them. The handful of unimaginative executives who have lost sight of this concept are the ones complaining about how horrible it is that people aren't strapped to their chairs and FORCED to watch the commercials ("What? You mean we can't just throw together any old crap with some half-naked bodies and the product and MAKE people watch it?!?!?...")
"Product Placement" isn't actually a bad idea either. If it's done "unobtrusively" (or in a comically blatant way on occasion) it merely makes the shows more "realistic", rather than distracting the viewer excessively from the show itself.
He's about as capital S socialist as she is capital L libertarian[...]
Somehow I don't think a "Capital-L Libertarian" would be supporting even the slightest government influence over companies' maternity leave policies (as her weblog shows she would).
As a staunch "little-l libertarian", I like her position on this. Her idea is to reward companies who offer substantial maternity leave benefits with reduced taxes (rather than to MANDATE maternity leave policies at the federal government level or to "punish" employers for NOT offering really nice maternity leave policies).
That position bespeaks of a fairly moderate but still libertarian outlook - recognition that a government entity CAN do things to improve society, but for best effect MUST do so with a MINIMUM of meddling...I think a true, hardcore "Capital L Libertarian" would be advocating that the government not take any position whatsoever on the matter, and let the pressures of the employee "market" set the level of benefits necessary to attract good employees.
Always remember that extremist libertarians may be the LOUDEST, but are far from being the most common. Libertarians who want to sell off ALL public/government owned land (for example) or abolish ALL environmental regulations and so on are really no more common than Ruperticans who want to mandate Christianity in the constitution as the State Religion or Disneycrats who want to turn the US into a tax-funded nationwide Socialist Worker's Paradise(tm).
I honestly believe that if you could get the majority of voters to stop being driven by fear of "the other party" (whichever party that may be) for a little while, and convince them to quit robotically voting "the party line", a large proportion of them might very well coalesce into a "moderate libertarian" voting block, ex-Ruperticans being attracted by the "fiscal freedoms" (i.e. engage in nearly any non-fraudulent, mutually agreeable buying or selling transaction) and direction and ex-Disneycrats attracted by the "personal freedoms" and "end corporate welfare" (Yes, this IS a 'plank' in the libertarian 'platform') direction, and BOTH being attracted by the "power should move back from the federal level down towards more local levels" aspects (which means BOTH that [to indulge in a ridiculously extreme set of examples to illustrate the point] Texas could mandate gun-safety training for all 6th-grade students while California could organize itself into almost a small socialist country with its own state-run health-care system and a ban on all firearms...[Hey, I SAID they'd be ridiculously extreme examples!])
But enough babbling from me. Suffice to say that the only reason Libertarianism sounds so extreme sometimes is that unlike the wide variety of Disneycrats and Ruperticans who get air-time on national news media (because they are already in positions of power and therefore "interesting"), the only libertarian viewpoints generally shown are "sensational" ones from relatively "radical" libertarians, since the more rational viewpoints from more moderate libertarians are too "boring" to waste precious broadcast time on (There can be a whole crowd of libertarians protesting drug policy on rational grounds of excessive laws and costs to society and disparity of punishment when compared with more traditional violent crimes, and the news media will invariably take a picture of the one guy there with a marijuana leaf painted on his face in a torn T-shirt yelling "DUDE! Toke for Peace!" or something of the sort)...
Considering the influence of the ??AA and other media organizations on legislation these days, I'm pretty sure that the "D" and "R" actually refer to "Disneycrats" and "Ruperticans*"
Naturally, because the candidate in question is neither Disneycrat nor Rupertican, her chances of even having a major showing, let alone a win, are already dismissed in the article, which in my opinion is a sad reminder of one of the major "facilitating" aspects of the current problems in the existing system in the US...expect to see a lot of real-world replays of the Simpson's infamous "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos" disclaimer after then next round of elections regardless of who wins...
(For the few who may read this who aren't unredeemably convinced otherwise, I should mention that in my opinion, your personal vote for any "3rd party" candidate makes MORE difference than your vote for Disneycrats or Ruperticans. Consider that a "3rd party" only needs to make a substantial showing to "influence" political policy - if the Libertarians, for example, got 20% of the vote, they certainly wouldn't "win", but "the two parties" would almost certainly moderate their policies, at least in the open, in a "libertarian direction" in an attempt to "win back" some of that chunk...also consider that your one vote for the candidate who gets a total of 10,000 votes is 100 times more influential than your one vote for a candidate who gets 1,000,000...)
Lickable buttons? Wow! Does that mean we need to get touch-screens now, too?
Nah, it's just a bug. See, somebody accidentally entered a bunch of stuff as "_Candy" that should have read "Eye_Candy"...And since nobody told those crazy developers that there was no way to code an "XFlavor" interface, they went and did it anyway...
I expect they'll correct it back to "Eye_Candy" in Beta2, which is just as well, because all of the yellow buttons are banana flavored, and I hate banana, and the dog keeps leaving nasty dog-slobber marks all over my screen....
[...]in that sub-window there is a list of all the downloads, showing progress and speed for each one.[...]
Haven't played with it much yet myself, but look into kget (in the kdenetwork package). If you enable "integration with Konqueror" it also takes over downloads initiated by the browser.
I've only toyed with it a bit, but it appears that it works precisely as you ask, with all of the downloads in one window, at least as far as I can tell at this point.
Now if you don'd build up your econ and turtle then you will be defeated.
This usually isn't a problem for me. The occasions when I run into trouble are generally when I focus TOO MUCH on settlements and expansion and not enough on "having some basic troops around as backup". Or I get too wrapped up in exploring an area or 'getting rid of that #$@#$#@ Rhaksha hive' and I end up giving an opponent too long to amass some decent armies to swarm an unattended corner with...
Haven't tried playing online since Starcraft, so I haven't seen the internet games of Kohan...Just as well, since it's nice to be able to pause the game to go eat dinner, which is somewhat harder to arrange when playing with a bunch of people online...
While I don't necessarily agree with the harshness of the post you're replying to, they do have a point...
Those "GPL Hugging Fascists" you refer to certainly can't stop Transgaming from hosting a "patched WINE" CVS or set of files, whether they accept your patches or not. That's sort of what the GPL is all about, after all. For that matter, there's no reason Transgaming couldn't simply host the patches themselves, and let users apply them to winehq's source.
Perhaps they're worried that later Transgaming will come along and complain of copyright violations from the use of Transgaming's patches? Transgaming may have no intention of doing any such thing, but in the modern world, proprietary software companies seem to be encouraged to behave this way.
It also occurs to me that the details behind "WINE is too slow because they won't accept our patches" are something that a lot of people would be interested in hearing. Perhaps transgaming could put up a page online explaining the issues?...
it's just back to the old "build up and attack once you have enough units" game.
This is the main reason that "network compatability with Windows" doesn't really concern me - I rarely play online because this seems to be the only tactic that's allowed to work in most RTS games, and therefore that's how most online players play them. Not much fun, in my opinion.
On the other hand, Kohan has a fair selection of AI's with different strategies, and in addition to the built-in "campaign", they have a number of pre-built maps AND a very nice "random map generator", which I still call upon from time to time for a quick distraction.
The way you build and group your units DOES make a difference - my own play style is so conservative that I occasionally even get "mobbed" by an AI player, and I find that if I've set up a few defensive units in the area carefully, it can make a difference. Picking the right combination of "front line" units and support units, placing them in the correct terrain, and having one or two 'melee' units backed up by one or two 'ranged' units all make a big difference.
It still won't completely counter especially a "live" player with the "build a horde and rush like crazy" strategy perfected, but I find the disparity between "real strategy" and "rush" is not as extreme in Kohan as in some other games I've played....
Yes...and then got advertised on Slashdot. There's a chance that someone on Slashdot with a cable-modem or DSL will see it and decide to download and try one out. If so, we could theoretically see a review from an actual purchaser in the next couple of hours...
Provided, of course, that the game(s) don't turn out to be too good to stop playing long enough to post about them...
I was a bit dissapointed to see that the new Kohan's would be "WineX" based rather than native - I've been very pleased with the 'native' Kohan from Loki.
Anyone tried any of Transgamings Kohan offerings yet? If so, how do they run? I notice that the system requirements are still rather reasonable by modern standards (P-III 500, etc.)....
Considering actually plunking down the $30 for the download. It'd be nice to encourage more attention to Linux as a game platform, but not at the cost of buying something that may or may not work well. (It'd also give me something new to play with until the continued wait for NWN for linux is over.)
(Sorta-kinda OT) - GCC3 and GCC 2.95.3 coexist?
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GCC 3.2 Released
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Some time back, I decided to try out GCC 3.0.1 (I think it was). I downloaded the code and./configure'd it with what the configure script said was the option to add a suffix (with the notion that I'd end up with my 'default' compiler being "gcc" (GCC 2.95.3) but have the option of trying something with "CC=gcc3".
I did a "make bootstrap" and a "make install"...and ended up with two "gcc's" on the hard drive - no suffixes. It ended up causing a lot of odd problems due to compiled programs trying to link to both versions of the libraries and so on. Of course, there is no "make uninstall"...I finally managed to track down all the files GCC 3.0.1 had installed by hand and delete them, now my system works again...
I'd actually like to try out gcc 3.1.1, at least - any advice on getting it to coexist as an obvious, separate "option" from the default gcc, and will the same advice actually work for gcc 3.2?
Slashdot Mirror
Sheesh, how many times do I have to explain this... :-)
"D" is for "Disney", "R" is for "Rupert" (as in Murdoch, of the Fox Network)
So, Tauzin is a Rupertican, and Berman is a Disneycrat.
There, NOW we can discuss the issue with a better understanding of the political system here :-)
Dagnabbit, I was just about to mention this, and somebody's beaten me to it.. :-)
The drug in question is, as I recall, "Melanocyte Stimulating Hormone", which evidently is showing in trials that it improves libido for both men and women. It seemingly acts in the brain rather than the genitals (and as any marriage/sex councelor should tell you, the brain is the most important sex organ after all) and so works in a completely different way from viagra and such.
Wonder how hard it is to get hold of stock in this company....whether it's OFFICIALLY released for anything other than a tanning-aid, you just KNOW that the, ahem, "off-label" uses of it will make it awfully popular....
(I find it hilarious to see increased libido listed as an unwanted side-effect... :-) )
Bear in mind that MUCH of the "minimal government" aspect of libertarianism is focussed on "minimal FEDERAL government".
The basic premise of libertarianism, as I understand it, is that government authority should move down to the most local level where it is feasible (keeping in mind that this hierarchy includes the most local level of all - the individual).
Bear in mind also that it is government that CREATES corporations. Without a government declaration that the fictional legal entity of a Corporation exists, companies would be groups of individuals working together in business. "Ending Corporate Welfare" is a strong aspect of Libertarian philosophy, though this doesn't seem to get noticed much.
I add to this my PERSONAL speculation/opinion that the bigger a government entity is, the less "Socialist" it can be while still truly serving the public interest as best it can (and vice-versa). A "family" is, in effect, a governmental arrangement (with the parents in charge, often with one or the other with 'veto' power over the other) that tends to be very "socialistic", and works quite well that way, even if little Billy ends up having to do without a Playstation because Dictator Dad wants to "abuse" his power to use the family funds to buy some new golf clubs instead - Billy still gets to eat breakfast and have clothes to wear. Blown up to a government with the size and authority of the US (or the Soviet Union) it would not end up being able to to hold together so well. (Somewhere in the middle - if California, for example, were to completely secede from the US, they could PROBABLY be moderately successful if they wanted to implement a European-socialist-type government. It's arguable whether they'd be worse or better off than they are now, but I think they'd be able to maintain an "acceptable" standard of living for most of their citizens).
Part of the overall problem is that people have gotten USED to thinking "well, government will protect me". As a result, it'd probably be rather hard on the country if the government of the US were to SUDDENLY transition to a seriously libertarian structure. If it were done slowly, with a program of making sure people started thinking critically again, thinking about their purchases and what they're doing, and so on, I tend to think it could work. Once people got USED to putting out the small amount of effort to avoid buying from companies whose products they feel are substandard or whose business practices they don't want to support, and once companies could no longer hide behind government-granted, multilayered shells of "corporation" entities when they get hauled into court for fraud (Even outright extremist Libertarian viewpoints - you know, the ones who want ALL publically-owned property sold off to private entities TOMORROW - leave the punishment of fraud well within normal governmental power), I think things would be able to work out.
Basically, the way I see it, taking current laws concerning certain recreational drugs as an example, a fairly standard libertarian view seems to be:
I'm sure that's a gross oversimplification, and I'm not sure how well that matches "real" libertarian views on the subject, but it's my understanding of it [which I happen to tend to agree with].
I don't much like the current executive administration myself - I do think they are likely to commit abuses of the powers they have been given.
However, while everyone has GWB under a metaphorical microscope, Congress is getting away with it...
Brief review of basic US federal government structure: There are 3 branches. The fun-to-hate President is in charge of the Executive branch. As a single individual, he's an easy target to take scrutiny off of the other two branches, the legislature, and the judicial branch.
The legislature is the branch that decides what powers the government has, not the executive. Everything the executive branch is allowed to do, has had the power given to it by rules written and agreed on by the legislature (with the exception of a few that the Judicial branch has overruled.). The legislature has the power to declare limitations on what the government can do at any time, to revoke existing powers, and even to COMPLETELY REMOVE the fun-to-hate president from office if they so choose.
For example, it was recently reported that the current executive administration, after much consultation with its lawyers [YIKES! The laws in this country are so screwed up even OUR OWN GOVERNMENT isn't sure what they mean!] has decided that it doesn't need congress' permission to wage war on Iraq. They may even be correct...but congress can fix this at ANY TIME by creating a new law that A)explicitly declares the "war powers act" of 1991(?) no longer in force and B)firmly declares that the president MUST obtain approval from congress to wage war...and if the president gives them too much grief over it, they can impeach him if they want.
Government spending in the tech sector? The budget is CONGRESS' job, not GWB's. He can make suggestions and requests, and he can even veto, but congress can do whatever they want with his suggestions and requests, and can override his veto if they choose to.
The "Patriot" act? Congress. Amendment to allow federal criminalization of 'flag desecration?' Congress. The RIAA/MPAA taking away our rights? That's CONGRESS' job. Fritz Hollings (Disneycrat - SC) is not on the presidents cabinet. He's in Congress. The people who approved the DMCA were not on the president's cabinet. They are Congress. Sonny Bono was not acting on behalf of the President (Clinton at the time, remember) when he passed the 'Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act', he was in CONGRESS....and as frighteningly eager as Ashcroft and company seem to be about heavy-handed interpretation and enforcement of all of these laws, it is still not his fault if "Eldred vs. Ashcroft" finds in his favor - that's up to the judicial branch to decide (and, of course, Congress has the power to REPEAL or amend [i.e. they could, for example, at least remove the 'retroactive' portion of the extension] at any time, regardless of the outcome of Eldred vs. Ashcroft). If Ashcroft starts flinging kids in jail for trading Metallica songs in violation of copyright, it's CONGRESS' fault for saying "Go get 'em!"
The point is, everyone busy yelling and screaming and pointing at the convenient target of GWB as the cause of all of our problems is only making the problems worse, by perpetuating the lack of focus on Congress. The executive branches job is to ENFORCE the laws - in other words, "to do what Congress says."
I sometimes wonder if the "Hate George Bush" craze is itself a conspiracy to perpetuate the problem....
Hmmm, interesting. I get a slightly different impression from that, though - basically, I would interpret this to mean that MOST people think that MOST of the rights in the first amendment are important, but MANY feel that one or more of them are "going to far" - but that they all disagree on which of those rights are in that category
So, in other words, JoeSchmoe might think that HIS right to free speech is really important, but those meddling propaganda-mongers of The Press should be controlled, while BobbyJoe thinks that The Press is a vital source of information for the public, but his whacky, unqualified neighbor BillyBob ought to have his ravings curtailed, while BillyBob thinks that both individuals AND the press ought to be able to talk about almost anything, EXCEPT things that disparage BillyBob's religion or involve desecrating flags, while BobbySue thinks that speech is all well and good, but not just everybody should be allowed to actually associate with each other unwatched because that's how gangs and mobs and terrorist cells get started.....you get the idea.
The bad part is, the "distributed" nature of what people consider "redundant" rights, while it should hinder any MAJOR trampling of 1st amendment rights all at once, it does leave the door open to "incremental" limitations, provided Congress sneaks in the limitations a bit at a time, as particular current events allow public opinion to waver in opposition to them. In other words, it could end up being a sort of "slippery slope" situation. Currently, "right to privacy" seems to be the one that the most people can be persuaded is unimportant, because, after all, only BAD people have something to hide, right? Individual laws and precedents allowing certain things observed during violation of privacy could easily follow [starting with less-obviously-bad things like 'if a meter reader happens to sneak a look into a basement window of a house and spots a cache of stinger missiles and launchers, that will now be considered 'probable cause' for a raid without a warrant, and admissable evidence in court', and progressing from there to various forms of "suspicious materials" to "suspicious activities", in small, slow steps...]
I agree, ESPECIALLY since there are, in an indirect way, legal precedents/laws that restrict "desecration of the flag" in certain contexts - look up the legal concept of "fighting words"...
This means that if you "desecrate" a flag in a reasonable manner, it's fine. If you show up at, say, a convention for war veterans and take a dump on a flag, and the veterans beat you senseless, it's your own fault (okay, this is a gross oversimplification, but you get the idea)...and taxpayers don't even need to pay 10's of 1000's of dollars to deal with flinging people in jail over it.
While I think flag-burning is a childish and stupid form of protest, personally, that's still A)my opinion and B) NOT adequate grounds for making the act outright criminal. It still is, and should remain, a form of "protected [by the 1st amendment] political speech".
Going through the effort of a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT just to permit criminalization of this SPECIFIC form speech seems like a gross abuse of power. What's next, a constitutional amendment to permit federal criminalization of lewd acts with bladed kitchen appliances?....
(On the other hand, though, it should be pointed out that the amendment PERMITS congress to criminalize it, if they want - even if the amendment goes through, 'desecrating' a flag will still be otherwise legal until congress passes a separate law to criminalize it.)
I haven't given up to this extent yet, though. I agree that there are disgusting abuses of governmental power going on right now, but it's still technically possible to effect change in the system. It'll take some serious effort (certainly more effort that showing up at a foreign consulate and expatriating yourself), but I think there's still a chance to save the US if we can get the metaphorical pendulum to start swinging back in the other direction...
Heh...no, I didn't know that. Kind of funny, the implication that in D.C. there isn't government-granted monopoly on this sort of thing. Senators probably want the competition to keep access to their hardcore porn and disney video sharing broadband affordable :-)
My "take" on this bill is similar to yours - the "up front" implications aren't really all that bad (It just requires one year of "military training", basically ensures the equivalent of a GED and so on). Also, if I remember from the text, the inductee actually gets to choose which branch they go to, if they qualify (this is from memory, though - I haven't gone back to re-read the bill).
This would hardly have even registered in my mind at all, if it weren't for the current US hysteria over the "need" to "profile" and "monitor" people who may be "suspicious", and certainly, a year of tightly-controlled government service enables the building of such records. (Thanks, though, to the person who mentioned the lack of psychological evaluation in the Air Force [and presumably other branches] at the moment - I had assumed such a thing was normal practice in evaluating a new recruit. Guess I was wrong...
No, but the streets and such that they need to block off and dig up to lay the cable are. Since the government that owns the streets in question probably doesn't want to have lots of companies taking turns digging up the streets to run cables, they pick one and give them a monopoly...
Therein lies the problem - at that point, the public (by proxy through their government) has given away a resource (path/land to lay cable and permission to block traffic temporarily in the process) to a single company. Other companies might be willing to compete, but are not allowed to lay their own cables.
Laws requiring the granted monopoly to share their cables in exchange for the use of public space to run their cables is intended as a sort of "patch" to make up for this. It seems kind of kludgy to me, but I can't think of a better solution in the circumstances. This is why it upsets people when the granted monopoly is allowed to exclude competitors.
That's an interesting point - as far as I know, the religious prohibitions specify EATING "non-Kosher" critters as bad. Wonder how they'll come down on "non-foodular" uses of the critters...
Though given that I occasionally hear them referred to as "unclean" in this context, I suppose it's unlikely that organ transplants will be treated any better than food...
I think that hits the metaphorical nail on the metaphorical head. The alleged "mainstream" press still can't seem to wrap its mindset around the way open source/free software works...
While I personally dislike Red Hat's distribution and think RPM is a tool of The Devil(tm), it's still another choice, and I don't see any way that Red Hat could "get rid of" Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Mandrake, Suse, etc, and regardless of any dislike I may have for some of their practices (e.g. GCC 2.96, removing the "differences" between KDE and Gnome [since in my opinion, it is the differences between then that prompt people to choose one or the other - making them the same makes the choice difficult for those not already familiar with them - but it's STILL just a CHOICE], and so on) their presence as an additional choice of distribution can only be a good thing, from my perspective.
In short, we already HAVE a "winner" in the "linux wars": the users, who have a wide variety of choices available to them. The press seems to have gotten stuck on the "There Can Be Only One(tm)" concept from all those years of proprietary stuff...
Consider This bill...
If passed, this will mandate a year of military training for nearly all "selective service" age males (and any females for volunteer - is it just me or is this an amusing chauvenistic anachronism for a modern law?...).
It's far from being an outright "draft", but it holds a disturbing (and on-topic) implication.
I seem to recall that when someone begins US military service, that they are subjected to a variety of examinations, including, I assume, psychiatric ones. Of course, the military keeps records of the results.
Therefore...this bill is basically a convenient way to ensure that the US Federal Government would from that day forth be able to "profile" effectively every male US citizen as they hit voting age. It'd be a trivial matter, in a technical sense, to automate the "picking out" of any results that are deemed "worrisome" and the reports shared with law enforcement agencies everywhere...
I'm not certain that's the main PURPOSE of the bill, but I don't doubt that aspect of it would appeal to current AND FUTURE executive administrations in the US....
Better Commercials!. SOME commercials are actually done with the notion that they should also have some entertainment value. (A number of the "M&M's" commercials come to mind). Make the commercials WORTH watching and people won't skip them. The handful of unimaginative executives who have lost sight of this concept are the ones complaining about how horrible it is that people aren't strapped to their chairs and FORCED to watch the commercials ("What? You mean we can't just throw together any old crap with some half-naked bodies and the product and MAKE people watch it?!?!?...")
"Product Placement" isn't actually a bad idea either. If it's done "unobtrusively" (or in a comically blatant way on occasion) it merely makes the shows more "realistic", rather than distracting the viewer excessively from the show itself.
Somehow I don't think a "Capital-L Libertarian" would be supporting even the slightest government influence over companies' maternity leave policies (as her weblog shows she would).
As a staunch "little-l libertarian", I like her position on this. Her idea is to reward companies who offer substantial maternity leave benefits with reduced taxes (rather than to MANDATE maternity leave policies at the federal government level or to "punish" employers for NOT offering really nice maternity leave policies).
That position bespeaks of a fairly moderate but still libertarian outlook - recognition that a government entity CAN do things to improve society, but for best effect MUST do so with a MINIMUM of meddling...I think a true, hardcore "Capital L Libertarian" would be advocating that the government not take any position whatsoever on the matter, and let the pressures of the employee "market" set the level of benefits necessary to attract good employees.
Always remember that extremist libertarians may be the LOUDEST, but are far from being the most common. Libertarians who want to sell off ALL public/government owned land (for example) or abolish ALL environmental regulations and so on are really no more common than Ruperticans who want to mandate Christianity in the constitution as the State Religion or Disneycrats who want to turn the US into a tax-funded nationwide Socialist Worker's Paradise(tm).
I honestly believe that if you could get the majority of voters to stop being driven by fear of "the other party" (whichever party that may be) for a little while, and convince them to quit robotically voting "the party line", a large proportion of them might very well coalesce into a "moderate libertarian" voting block, ex-Ruperticans being attracted by the "fiscal freedoms" (i.e. engage in nearly any non-fraudulent, mutually agreeable buying or selling transaction) and direction and ex-Disneycrats attracted by the "personal freedoms" and "end corporate welfare" (Yes, this IS a 'plank' in the libertarian 'platform') direction, and BOTH being attracted by the "power should move back from the federal level down towards more local levels" aspects (which means BOTH that [to indulge in a ridiculously extreme set of examples to illustrate the point] Texas could mandate gun-safety training for all 6th-grade students while California could organize itself into almost a small socialist country with its own state-run health-care system and a ban on all firearms...[Hey, I SAID they'd be ridiculously extreme examples!])
But enough babbling from me. Suffice to say that the only reason Libertarianism sounds so extreme sometimes is that unlike the wide variety of Disneycrats and Ruperticans who get air-time on national news media (because they are already in positions of power and therefore "interesting"), the only libertarian viewpoints generally shown are "sensational" ones from relatively "radical" libertarians, since the more rational viewpoints from more moderate libertarians are too "boring" to waste precious broadcast time on (There can be a whole crowd of libertarians protesting drug policy on rational grounds of excessive laws and costs to society and disparity of punishment when compared with more traditional violent crimes, and the news media will invariably take a picture of the one guy there with a marijuana leaf painted on his face in a torn T-shirt yelling "DUDE! Toke for Peace!" or something of the sort)...
Considering the influence of the ??AA and other media organizations on legislation these days, I'm pretty sure that the "D" and "R" actually refer to "Disneycrats" and "Ruperticans*"
Naturally, because the candidate in question is neither Disneycrat nor Rupertican, her chances of even having a major showing, let alone a win, are already dismissed in the article, which in my opinion is a sad reminder of one of the major "facilitating" aspects of the current problems in the existing system in the US...expect to see a lot of real-world replays of the Simpson's infamous "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos" disclaimer after then next round of elections regardless of who wins...
(For the few who may read this who aren't unredeemably convinced otherwise, I should mention that in my opinion, your personal vote for any "3rd party" candidate makes MORE difference than your vote for Disneycrats or Ruperticans. Consider that a "3rd party" only needs to make a substantial showing to "influence" political policy - if the Libertarians, for example, got 20% of the vote, they certainly wouldn't "win", but "the two parties" would almost certainly moderate their policies, at least in the open, in a "libertarian direction" in an attempt to "win back" some of that chunk...also consider that your one vote for the candidate who gets a total of 10,000 votes is 100 times more influential than your one vote for a candidate who gets 1,000,000...)
*-referring to Rupert Murdoch, of course...
Nah, it's just a bug. See, somebody accidentally entered a bunch of stuff as "_Candy" that should have read "Eye_Candy"...And since nobody told those crazy developers that there was no way to code an "XFlavor" interface, they went and did it anyway...
I expect they'll correct it back to "Eye_Candy" in Beta2, which is just as well, because all of the yellow buttons are banana flavored, and I hate banana, and the dog keeps leaving nasty dog-slobber marks all over my screen....
Haven't played with it much yet myself, but look into kget (in the kdenetwork package). If you enable "integration with Konqueror" it also takes over downloads initiated by the browser.
I've only toyed with it a bit, but it appears that it works precisely as you ask, with all of the downloads in one window, at least as far as I can tell at this point.
This usually isn't a problem for me. The occasions when I run into trouble are generally when I focus TOO MUCH on settlements and expansion and not enough on "having some basic troops around as backup". Or I get too wrapped up in exploring an area or 'getting rid of that #$@#$#@ Rhaksha hive' and I end up giving an opponent too long to amass some decent armies to swarm an unattended corner with...
Haven't tried playing online since Starcraft, so I haven't seen the internet games of Kohan...Just as well, since it's nice to be able to pause the game to go eat dinner, which is somewhat harder to arrange when playing with a bunch of people online...
While I don't necessarily agree with the harshness of the post you're replying to, they do have a point...
Those "GPL Hugging Fascists" you refer to certainly can't stop Transgaming from hosting a "patched WINE" CVS or set of files, whether they accept your patches or not. That's sort of what the GPL is all about, after all. For that matter, there's no reason Transgaming couldn't simply host the patches themselves, and let users apply them to winehq's source.
Perhaps they're worried that later Transgaming will come along and complain of copyright violations from the use of Transgaming's patches? Transgaming may have no intention of doing any such thing, but in the modern world, proprietary software companies seem to be encouraged to behave this way.
It also occurs to me that the details behind "WINE is too slow because they won't accept our patches" are something that a lot of people would be interested in hearing. Perhaps transgaming could put up a page online explaining the issues?...
This is the main reason that "network compatability with Windows" doesn't really concern me - I rarely play online because this seems to be the only tactic that's allowed to work in most RTS games, and therefore that's how most online players play them. Not much fun, in my opinion.
On the other hand, Kohan has a fair selection of AI's with different strategies, and in addition to the built-in "campaign", they have a number of pre-built maps AND a very nice "random map generator", which I still call upon from time to time for a quick distraction.
The way you build and group your units DOES make a difference - my own play style is so conservative that I occasionally even get "mobbed" by an AI player, and I find that if I've set up a few defensive units in the area carefully, it can make a difference. Picking the right combination of "front line" units and support units, placing them in the correct terrain, and having one or two 'melee' units backed up by one or two 'ranged' units all make a big difference.
It still won't completely counter especially a "live" player with the "build a horde and rush like crazy" strategy perfected, but I find the disparity between "real strategy" and "rush" is not as extreme in Kohan as in some other games I've played....
I'd be willing to bet it's overhead from WineX, which basically amounts to running a windows layer over the top of Linux and X...
Did you have access to the old port?Yup, bought it from Loki. I still play with it occasionally. 'course, I'm on an Athlon 1.2GHz now, so I don't know how much difference I'd notice...
Personally, I've no intention of re-buying the original Kohan, but if it turns out Ahriman's Gift runs well over WineX, then I'll likely buy it.
Yes...and then got advertised on Slashdot. There's a chance that someone on Slashdot with a cable-modem or DSL will see it and decide to download and try one out. If so, we could theoretically see a review from an actual purchaser in the next couple of hours...
Provided, of course, that the game(s) don't turn out to be too good to stop playing long enough to post about them...
I was a bit dissapointed to see that the new Kohan's would be "WineX" based rather than native - I've been very pleased with the 'native' Kohan from Loki.
Anyone tried any of Transgamings Kohan offerings yet? If so, how do they run? I notice that the system requirements are still rather reasonable by modern standards (P-III 500, etc.)....
Considering actually plunking down the $30 for the download. It'd be nice to encourage more attention to Linux as a game platform, but not at the cost of buying something that may or may not work well. (It'd also give me something new to play with until the continued wait for NWN for linux is over.)
Some time back, I decided to try out GCC 3.0.1 (I think it was). I downloaded the code and ./configure'd it with what the configure script said was the option to add a suffix (with the notion that I'd end up with my 'default' compiler being "gcc" (GCC 2.95.3) but have the option of trying something with "CC=gcc3".
I did a "make bootstrap" and a "make install"...and ended up with two "gcc's" on the hard drive - no suffixes. It ended up causing a lot of odd problems due to compiled programs trying to link to both versions of the libraries and so on. Of course, there is no "make uninstall"...I finally managed to track down all the files GCC 3.0.1 had installed by hand and delete them, now my system works again...
I'd actually like to try out gcc 3.1.1, at least - any advice on getting it to coexist as an obvious, separate "option" from the default gcc, and will the same advice actually work for gcc 3.2?