It is pretty much impossible to get a technical job that doesn't have such an agreement.
I think you've been fed a line of bullshit.
I've only had one job where I had to sign an NDA (and it was perfectly reasonable, IMO), and I've never even seen a non-compete or one of those "we own anything you invent" clauses. The idea that it's impossible to find technical work without signing such an agreement must be a meme spread by the few asshole companies that require them.
That said, feeling that you will never be able to work in your industry without signing such an agreement is clearly duress, which would invalidate said agreement.
It's a great saying, but unfortunately it's wrong. To be paranoid, by definition, you must be delusional. If they really are out to get you, then you are not delusional, and therefor not paranoid.
The "civil" in "civil disobedience" refers to the behavior of the protestors, not the type of law they are protesting. In order for it to be "civil disobidience" the protestors must act in a civil manner, i.e. non-violently, such as sitting somewhere they aren't supposed to and refusing to move.
Your point still stands, though not for the reason you think it does. Any act of physical violence, even against an inanimate object, is by definition uncivil.
If that were the case, nearly everyone that touches the voting system would have to be in on the corruption. With the current system of outsourcing, it would take cooperation between gvt employees of both parties, as well as a private entity in a conspiracy that would have to be hundreds of people to pull that off
Actually, it would only require one corrupt person with technical expertise, and for the rest of those hundreds of people to not have the expertise to catch what they've done. Think that's impossible?
And, as I said, I've thought of other simple ways to do the same thing. I've proven the impossible can be done. All that means to me is that the people that claim it is impossible are quite incompetent. Thus, all the people currently implementing electronic voting are incompetent, as are all the people against it. Since that's just about everyone, I'm really depressed. Absolutely everyone involved in the voting system is incompetent. And they wonder why voter apathy keeps increasing.
Actually, there is a fatal flaw in your system: you should never, ever give a reciept to the voter that can be used to verify their vote. It's called "coersion".
Say someone offers them money to vote a certain way, or maybe threatens harm to them or their family. This sort of coersion is only viable when a person can be linked to a particular vote, like for example with the reciept you propose.
Hardcopy of the voting record is good, even necessary in my opinion, but it should NEVER EVER EVER be given, or tracable, to the individual voter.
I won't join the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party, because that would mean I endorse their stranglehold on the American election system...I won't vote for one of the two major parties, and the two major parties will make absolutely certain that they are the only viable options.
No, it's not the two major parties that ensure they are the only viable options; it's dumbasses like you who disagree with them but refuse to support any of the alternatives.
Look into the other 6 or 7 parties that regularly put up candidates for various offices, I'm sure one of them is pretty close to representing your beliefs.
So tell me again: How can my vote (any vote!) have weight?
Easy: when all the people who think like you get off your lazy, whining asses and fucking vote. Do you honestly think that wouldn't make a difference?
YaST is already open-sourced. Has been for quite some time now.
Yeah it's been open-source, but under a license which said you couldn't charge anyone money for it. It was recently announced that Yast would be GPLed, but I don't know if that's actually happened yet.
OTOH. Jonathan Schwartz's comment compareing the situation to Microsoft explains a lot about why Sun has pissed away its market position. Their officers are obviously delusional.
Well, stuck in the past, anyway. Being IBM's OS provider doesn't mean what it did when Microsoft started out.
IBM is deeply in bed with both RedHat and SUSE. As with any multi-vendor deal, IBM plays them off each other to make sure neither demand too much.
A hostile SUSE wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would cost IBM significant money and (more importantly) time.
Last time I checked (and, admitedly, it's been a while) IBM primarily offered Red Hat, and there were 5 or 6 alternative distros available. SuSE could probably have been considered their secondary provider, but then SuSE is pretty much the #2 distro for the professional market anyway, so that only makes sense.
A SuSE hostile to IBM's interests is likely to be hostile to a large portion of the Linux market, and I think another distro would step in to fill the void pretty quickly. All in all, I don't think it would really be very damaging to IBM at all, at least no more so then it would be damaging to the Linux community as a whole.
I'm a SuSE guy myself, and my first thought was the horror of SuSE being owned by Sun. I'm worried enough about Novell, I think Sun would just destroy it.
On the bright side, though, didn't Novell GPL Yast not to long ago? At least we'd still have that.
I'd buy it, if it were available for Linux, and especially if it had a campaign mode. Something along the lines of Escape Velocity would be cool, especially with the ability to design your own ship.
This is all excellent advice for someone in the US, but the origional poster is in Japan, and I suspect the laws are different there.
Also, one thing that musicians, who are notoriously poor, used to do is mail themselves a copy and then leave the envelope unopened. IIRC the timestamp in the postmark is admissable in court.
You're point was about the value of being first. Red Hat wasn't first, and as you just pointed out, they got much bigger than their predecessors.
Branding is certainly important, but the first to market are almost never the ones who end up with it. You tried to use Red Hat as a counter-example, but it fails since they weren't first. In fact, looking at the real timeline actually backs up the point you were arguing against.
Pointing out a critical flaw in your arguement is hardly what I'd call nit-picking.
Second test I did was using Konqueror in KDE. The sidebars are nice, finally they have added "drives", media automounting etc to default settings. However, it all was fine until I attempted to download and install a piece of software using it.
Works just fine in SuSE, in fact that's how I normally install stuff (that's not included in the distro, anyway). Just download the RPM, browse to it in Konqueror, click on it, then click on the "Install using Yast" button that automagically appears.
You can still have dependency issues, though. Yast does a good job of trying to resolve them for you, but if SuSE doesn't include something it can get messy (to be fair, I've only seen this once. It was LZO compression, needed by mplayer, and I couldn't find an RPM for it anywhere).
If you still have doubts, try to use your linux desktop for a few days WITHOUT opening up a console window ever. Be sure to see if you can get software installed, updates downloaded, media played and whatever else you do.
I have in fact done this, since my wife is one of those users. I haven't had any problems on the more recent versions of SuSE, with the exception of mplayer, which I downloaded and compiled myself, so I can't blame SuSE for that one.
But remember - average Joe does not type 400 chars/minute - he does 50-100, and he's afraid of mouse (and keyboard, for that matter).
For the record, I hunt-n-peck at about 35wpm, and while I overcame my fear of the mouse long before I discovered Linux, I was still a bit afraid of the keyboard, that is until I discovered the power of an actually useful CLI (bash, though even sh qualifies in comparison to DOS).
I don't use the CLI because I have to, I use it because, for many tasks, it's simply better, and will continue to be better until someone manages to hack together a GUI equivalent to |.
I see this complaint a lot, but I haven't noticed any behavior that has caused me to say "ah, that's what they're talking about." Perhaps you could provide some examples?
FWIW, I've been using SuSE, with both KDE and WindowMaker, for almost 5 years now, and I ditched Windows completely (at home anyway) about 2 years ago.
But there is always value in being first and developing a brand and a reputation. This is why Red Hat is successful. They were cutting Linux CDs long before anyone else, and they developed a reputation and a brand that worked for them.
The problem is, it's often the feedback that's least useful.
What I mean is, those are the users who are going to give feedback like "You're app sucks. If you don't fix it I'm going back to Microsoft." How is that at all useful?
Yeah, these are the users whose opinions probably matter most (assuming your goal is world domination), but the vast majority of the time they're totally incapable of expressing it. If you respond to the above with questions about what is wrong with the app and what needs to be improved or changed, they typically have no answer other than, perhaps, more flames.
I'm not totally dismissing your point, but I think you're making a mistake thinking that the developers are ignoring feedback from the masses out of arrogance. Honestly, what else should they do with feeback that's basically useless?
HP high end servers DO in fact use redundant systems to check every calculation and every data transaction. Every calculation is done by two cpu's and if the results aren't identical it is run again, if they still aren't the same both CPU's are taken offline and the thread is migrated to another part of the system. Likewise all data path's are redundant and ECC'd. This costs LOTS of money, but if you are paranoid about data corruption/loss then that's what you pay for.
Interesting. That's a little beyond the scope of the kind of RAIDs we're talking about here, though.
Btw controllers going crazy isn't all that uncommon, every field tech I've met has at least one story of a crazy RAID controller necessitating going to tape, often from weeks before the repair call since the controller had been silently failing for some time before the corruption was noticed.
I'm sure all of our field service guys have a story like that, too. Trouble is, I'm the one they send those bad cards to for failure analysis, and I've never seen one do that. In my experience the data corruption has always happened elswhere in the system, like on the codec card (these are video servers).
Of course, I've also seen field service guys swap out entire RAIDs trying to solve a problem that could not possibly have been caused by the RAID, so I don't put a lot of stock in the stories of field service guys.
That's true, but then that isn't a problem that's going to be solved with redundancy[1], which was what the grandparent was griping about the lack of.
Also, while this is theoretically possible, I've never seen it happen. I troubleshoot RAIDs for a living, and I probably average about a controller a day between my various fixtures (several different chassis from several different manufacturers) over the last 2 years, so I don't think that's due to lack of exposure. In my experience, controllers either work or they don't, though it may be that they only fail under a very specific set of circumstances. I've seen controllers do some wierd stuff, but I've never seen them write bad data (and yes, my tests would definately pick that up).
[1] I suppose you could add some ECC as part of the failover system. Maybe they do, and I've just never seen it come into play. Failover is typically the last thing I check for, and then only on units we intend to ship to a customer. The bulk of my testing is done without redundancy. Graceful failures are harder to isolate.
My company was offering 180GB SCSI drives in one of our RAID products, but we had to stop due to reliability issues. There was a huge difference in reliability between the 180GB and 146GB drives (which we still offer).
There's really not much you can do about having only one backplane. Most RAID manufacturers deal with this by not putting stuff that really matters on the backplane, they're typically just pass-through with maybe some passive filters.
However, every RAID unit I've dealt with has at least had a slot for a redundant controller. Of course, these are SCSI RAIDs. I guess now you know what the price difference is all about.
That said, unless there's something extremely screwed up about the design of your RAIDs, there's no reason you should lose data from the failure of a part that isn't a drive. You should be able to replace a faulty controller or even backplane, and as long as the drives get put back in the same slots, everything should be back to normal when you bring it back up. I strongly suspect that either you weren't careful about keeping the drives in the same order, or you remade your filesystem unecessarily.
Of course we remember, and that's exactly why so many of us are saying "Please don't repeat those mistakes with 2.6!"
Really, they should have started 2.5 to play with the different VM stuff and see what worked best. If it was really such a big deal they could have had that be the major feature of 2.5, and instead of swapping out major chunks of code in a stable branch, just had 2.6 be 2.4-with-new-VM.
I think most people consider the 2.4 VM situation to be a monumentally stupid fiasco. Now, apparantly, the core kernel developers want to make that business as usual.
To be fair, I don't really have a problem with them adding new features to the "stable" branch, I just think that the right way to do it is to build and test them in a seperate developement branch, and then backport the ones that are important and have reach a certain level of stability.
Active developement = new features = new bugs = no worky
For people who care about reliability, "active developement" and "no worky" are the same thing. Since Linux's traditional strength is on servers, and server people tend to care about reliability above anything else, this is a really stupid idea.
You don't cannabalize your core market to get into another one. Companies that try to do so tend to end up with no market, and I see no reason why it would be different for Linux.
I understand the concerns about the pace at which new features are added to the stable branch, but that's no reason to do away with the stable branch. Develope the new feature in a developement branch, and if it's something that's really needed by a lot of people, backport it once it's stable. That's how it's been done for years (with a few notable exceptions) and it has worked very well.
The current grand master of propoganda is Michael Moore, an American (unfortunately). He could teach a class called, "Propoganda 101, The Big Lie Through Creative Editing".
I love how you conservatives keep harping about this like it hasn't been your bread and butter for the last 10+ years. You've had the likes of Rush Limaugh spewing the same kind of rhetoric for years and it was great, but now that someone on the liberal side has finally stooped to your level you get all offended? Suck it up, bitch! Turn about is fair play.
Having a keyboard attached to a system is not always an advantage. In fact, for a HEADLESS system, which is what the article writer wants, having a keyboard attached is a huge liability with zero benefits.
The point is not to be cheap. The point is to prevent local access.
You get to choose who assigns your tasks, and that person may or may not be your exploiter. Perhaps you aren't aware that people in Soviet Russia were able to make essentially the same choice. And what a choice it is! "Would you rather be whacked upside the head with a baseball bat or a frying pan?"
I'm in a sour mood tonight, so I'll be blunt: I think you are a blind fool who has spent too much time listening to economics professors and corporate shills, and not enough time observing how things play out in the real world. As such, I see no point in further wasting my time with this discussion.
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It is pretty much impossible to get a technical job that doesn't have such an agreement.
I think you've been fed a line of bullshit.
I've only had one job where I had to sign an NDA (and it was perfectly reasonable, IMO), and I've never even seen a non-compete or one of those "we own anything you invent" clauses. The idea that it's impossible to find technical work without signing such an agreement must be a meme spread by the few asshole companies that require them.
That said, feeling that you will never be able to work in your industry without signing such an agreement is clearly duress, which would invalidate said agreement.
It's a great saying, but unfortunately it's wrong. To be paranoid, by definition, you must be delusional. If they really are out to get you, then you are not delusional, and therefor not paranoid.
The "civil" in "civil disobedience" refers to the behavior of the protestors, not the type of law they are protesting. In order for it to be "civil disobidience" the protestors must act in a civil manner, i.e. non-violently, such as sitting somewhere they aren't supposed to and refusing to move.
Your point still stands, though not for the reason you think it does. Any act of physical violence, even against an inanimate object, is by definition uncivil.
If that were the case, nearly everyone that touches the voting system would have to be in on the corruption. With the current system of outsourcing, it would take cooperation between gvt employees of both parties, as well as a private entity in a conspiracy that would have to be hundreds of people to pull that off
Actually, it would only require one corrupt person with technical expertise, and for the rest of those hundreds of people to not have the expertise to catch what they've done. Think that's impossible?
And, as I said, I've thought of other simple ways to do the same thing. I've proven the impossible can be done. All that means to me is that the people that claim it is impossible are quite incompetent. Thus, all the people currently implementing electronic voting are incompetent, as are all the people against it. Since that's just about everyone, I'm really depressed. Absolutely everyone involved in the voting system is incompetent. And they wonder why voter apathy keeps increasing.
Actually, there is a fatal flaw in your system: you should never, ever give a reciept to the voter that can be used to verify their vote. It's called "coersion".
Say someone offers them money to vote a certain way, or maybe threatens harm to them or their family. This sort of coersion is only viable when a person can be linked to a particular vote, like for example with the reciept you propose.
Hardcopy of the voting record is good, even necessary in my opinion, but it should NEVER EVER EVER be given, or tracable, to the individual voter.
Not in California. My wife has been voting absentee for years for no reason other than that's how she prefers to do it.
You should find the person who told you this and punch them in the face for lying to you.
I won't join the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party, because that would mean I endorse their stranglehold on the American election system...I won't vote for one of the two major parties, and the two major parties will make absolutely certain that they are the only viable options.
No, it's not the two major parties that ensure they are the only viable options; it's dumbasses like you who disagree with them but refuse to support any of the alternatives.
Look into the other 6 or 7 parties that regularly put up candidates for various offices, I'm sure one of them is pretty close to representing your beliefs.
So tell me again: How can my vote (any vote!) have weight?
Easy: when all the people who think like you get off your lazy, whining asses and fucking vote. Do you honestly think that wouldn't make a difference?
YaST is already open-sourced. Has been for quite some time now.
Yeah it's been open-source, but under a license which said you couldn't charge anyone money for it. It was recently announced that Yast would be GPLed, but I don't know if that's actually happened yet.
OTOH. Jonathan Schwartz's comment compareing the situation to Microsoft explains a lot about why Sun has pissed away its market position. Their officers are obviously delusional.
Well, stuck in the past, anyway. Being IBM's OS provider doesn't mean what it did when Microsoft started out.
IBM is deeply in bed with both RedHat and SUSE. As with any multi-vendor deal, IBM plays them off each other to make sure neither demand too much.
A hostile SUSE wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would cost IBM significant money and (more importantly) time.
Last time I checked (and, admitedly, it's been a while) IBM primarily offered Red Hat, and there were 5 or 6 alternative distros available. SuSE could probably have been considered their secondary provider, but then SuSE is pretty much the #2 distro for the professional market anyway, so that only makes sense.
A SuSE hostile to IBM's interests is likely to be hostile to a large portion of the Linux market, and I think another distro would step in to fill the void pretty quickly. All in all, I don't think it would really be very damaging to IBM at all, at least no more so then it would be damaging to the Linux community as a whole.
I'm a SuSE guy myself, and my first thought was the horror of SuSE being owned by Sun. I'm worried enough about Novell, I think Sun would just destroy it.
On the bright side, though, didn't Novell GPL Yast not to long ago? At least we'd still have that.
I'd buy it, if it were available for Linux, and especially if it had a campaign mode. Something along the lines of Escape Velocity would be cool, especially with the ability to design your own ship.
This is all excellent advice for someone in the US, but the origional poster is in Japan, and I suspect the laws are different there.
Also, one thing that musicians, who are notoriously poor, used to do is mail themselves a copy and then leave the envelope unopened. IIRC the timestamp in the postmark is admissable in court.
You're point was about the value of being first. Red Hat wasn't first, and as you just pointed out, they got much bigger than their predecessors.
Branding is certainly important, but the first to market are almost never the ones who end up with it. You tried to use Red Hat as a counter-example, but it fails since they weren't first. In fact, looking at the real timeline actually backs up the point you were arguing against.
Pointing out a critical flaw in your arguement is hardly what I'd call nit-picking.
Second test I did was using Konqueror in KDE. The sidebars are nice, finally they have added "drives", media automounting etc to default settings. However, it all was fine until I attempted to download and install a piece of software using it.
Works just fine in SuSE, in fact that's how I normally install stuff (that's not included in the distro, anyway). Just download the RPM, browse to it in Konqueror, click on it, then click on the "Install using Yast" button that automagically appears.
You can still have dependency issues, though. Yast does a good job of trying to resolve them for you, but if SuSE doesn't include something it can get messy (to be fair, I've only seen this once. It was LZO compression, needed by mplayer, and I couldn't find an RPM for it anywhere).
If you still have doubts, try to use your linux desktop for a few days WITHOUT opening up a console window ever. Be sure to see if you can get software installed, updates downloaded, media played and whatever else you do.
I have in fact done this, since my wife is one of those users. I haven't had any problems on the more recent versions of SuSE, with the exception of mplayer, which I downloaded and compiled myself, so I can't blame SuSE for that one.
But remember - average Joe does not type 400 chars/minute - he does 50-100, and he's afraid of mouse (and keyboard, for that matter).
For the record, I hunt-n-peck at about 35wpm, and while I overcame my fear of the mouse long before I discovered Linux, I was still a bit afraid of the keyboard, that is until I discovered the power of an actually useful CLI (bash, though even sh qualifies in comparison to DOS).
I don't use the CLI because I have to, I use it because, for many tasks, it's simply better, and will continue to be better until someone manages to hack together a GUI equivalent to |.
I see this complaint a lot, but I haven't noticed any behavior that has caused me to say "ah, that's what they're talking about." Perhaps you could provide some examples?
FWIW, I've been using SuSE, with both KDE and WindowMaker, for almost 5 years now, and I ditched Windows completely (at home anyway) about 2 years ago.
But there is always value in being first and developing a brand and a reputation. This is why Red Hat is successful. They were cutting Linux CDs long before anyone else, and they developed a reputation and a brand that worked for them.
Wrong. SuSE and Slackware both predate Red Hat.
The problem is, it's often the feedback that's least useful.
What I mean is, those are the users who are going to give feedback like "You're app sucks. If you don't fix it I'm going back to Microsoft." How is that at all useful?
Yeah, these are the users whose opinions probably matter most (assuming your goal is world domination), but the vast majority of the time they're totally incapable of expressing it. If you respond to the above with questions about what is wrong with the app and what needs to be improved or changed, they typically have no answer other than, perhaps, more flames.
I'm not totally dismissing your point, but I think you're making a mistake thinking that the developers are ignoring feedback from the masses out of arrogance. Honestly, what else should they do with feeback that's basically useless?
HP high end servers DO in fact use redundant systems to check every calculation and every data transaction. Every calculation is done by two cpu's and if the results aren't identical it is run again, if they still aren't the same both CPU's are taken offline and the thread is migrated to another part of the system. Likewise all data path's are redundant and ECC'd. This costs LOTS of money, but if you are paranoid about data corruption/loss then that's what you pay for.
Interesting. That's a little beyond the scope of the kind of RAIDs we're talking about here, though.
Btw controllers going crazy isn't all that uncommon, every field tech I've met has at least one story of a crazy RAID controller necessitating going to tape, often from weeks before the repair call since the controller had been silently failing for some time before the corruption was noticed.
I'm sure all of our field service guys have a story like that, too. Trouble is, I'm the one they send those bad cards to for failure analysis, and I've never seen one do that. In my experience the data corruption has always happened elswhere in the system, like on the codec card (these are video servers).
Of course, I've also seen field service guys swap out entire RAIDs trying to solve a problem that could not possibly have been caused by the RAID, so I don't put a lot of stock in the stories of field service guys.
That's true, but then that isn't a problem that's going to be solved with redundancy[1], which was what the grandparent was griping about the lack of.
Also, while this is theoretically possible, I've never seen it happen. I troubleshoot RAIDs for a living, and I probably average about a controller a day between my various fixtures (several different chassis from several different manufacturers) over the last 2 years, so I don't think that's due to lack of exposure. In my experience, controllers either work or they don't, though it may be that they only fail under a very specific set of circumstances. I've seen controllers do some wierd stuff, but I've never seen them write bad data (and yes, my tests would definately pick that up).
[1] I suppose you could add some ECC as part of the failover system. Maybe they do, and I've just never seen it come into play. Failover is typically the last thing I check for, and then only on units we intend to ship to a customer. The bulk of my testing is done without redundancy. Graceful failures are harder to isolate.
My company was offering 180GB SCSI drives in one of our RAID products, but we had to stop due to reliability issues. There was a huge difference in reliability between the 180GB and 146GB drives (which we still offer).
There's really not much you can do about having only one backplane. Most RAID manufacturers deal with this by not putting stuff that really matters on the backplane, they're typically just pass-through with maybe some passive filters.
However, every RAID unit I've dealt with has at least had a slot for a redundant controller. Of course, these are SCSI RAIDs. I guess now you know what the price difference is all about.
That said, unless there's something extremely screwed up about the design of your RAIDs, there's no reason you should lose data from the failure of a part that isn't a drive. You should be able to replace a faulty controller or even backplane, and as long as the drives get put back in the same slots, everything should be back to normal when you bring it back up. I strongly suspect that either you weren't careful about keeping the drives in the same order, or you remade your filesystem unecessarily.
Remember the VM changes around 2.4.10?
Of course we remember, and that's exactly why so many of us are saying "Please don't repeat those mistakes with 2.6!"
Really, they should have started 2.5 to play with the different VM stuff and see what worked best. If it was really such a big deal they could have had that be the major feature of 2.5, and instead of swapping out major chunks of code in a stable branch, just had 2.6 be 2.4-with-new-VM.
I think most people consider the 2.4 VM situation to be a monumentally stupid fiasco. Now, apparantly, the core kernel developers want to make that business as usual.
To be fair, I don't really have a problem with them adding new features to the "stable" branch, I just think that the right way to do it is to build and test them in a seperate developement branch, and then backport the ones that are important and have reach a certain level of stability.
Active developement = new features = new bugs = no worky
For people who care about reliability, "active developement" and "no worky" are the same thing. Since Linux's traditional strength is on servers, and server people tend to care about reliability above anything else, this is a really stupid idea.
You don't cannabalize your core market to get into another one. Companies that try to do so tend to end up with no market, and I see no reason why it would be different for Linux.
I understand the concerns about the pace at which new features are added to the stable branch, but that's no reason to do away with the stable branch. Develope the new feature in a developement branch, and if it's something that's really needed by a lot of people, backport it once it's stable. That's how it's been done for years (with a few notable exceptions) and it has worked very well.
The current grand master of propoganda is Michael Moore, an American (unfortunately). He could teach a class called, "Propoganda 101, The Big Lie Through Creative Editing".
I love how you conservatives keep harping about this like it hasn't been your bread and butter for the last 10+ years. You've had the likes of Rush Limaugh spewing the same kind of rhetoric for years and it was great, but now that someone on the liberal side has finally stooped to your level you get all offended? Suck it up, bitch! Turn about is fair play.
Having a keyboard attached to a system is not always an advantage. In fact, for a HEADLESS system, which is what the article writer wants, having a keyboard attached is a huge liability with zero benefits.
The point is not to be cheap. The point is to prevent local access.
You get to choose who assigns your tasks, and that person may or may not be your exploiter. Perhaps you aren't aware that people in Soviet Russia were able to make essentially the same choice. And what a choice it is! "Would you rather be whacked upside the head with a baseball bat or a frying pan?"
I'm in a sour mood tonight, so I'll be blunt: I think you are a blind fool who has spent too much time listening to economics professors and corporate shills, and not enough time observing how things play out in the real world. As such, I see no point in further wasting my time with this discussion.