At the end of the day, a guy that says he hates to see someone with a flat tire is not nearly as useful to me as someone that actually has a either a jack or a spare.
This whole issue of "it is more complicated than that" really smacks of moral escapism. It's "too complicated", people say, because they are afraid of admitting the consequences of their actions. People are afraid to choose.
Yes, does going after Saddam, did this war, mean the death of innocents? Yes, it did. From that the confused might say, well, that must mean you are in favor of killing innocent people. The evasive answer is, "no, I am not, but it happens, or there is nothing I can do", but, the honest answer must be yes, you are in favor of killing innocent people. If you were in favor of this war, then surely you knew that innocent people would die. If you were against this war, then, the sanctions would not have ended, and then, more innocent people would die.
I think at some point every issue has to be distilled to black and white and you have to call people to either take a stand with you or against you. I think it was GOOD that Bush did this and forced the world's powers to declare where they stood. At least now we know where the nations of the world stand. At least now we know who our real allies are, who is willing to take up the sword in the cause of freedom versus those who merely lament oppression as if the weather.
IF you aren't part of the solution, then you either don't give a shit, or are a part of the problem.
What I'm saying is that opinions without action are worthless? Why is it so hard to come down off your tree of piety and admit that you don't give a shit about something? But oh no, you have to at least "SAY" something, to be counted among the politically correct.
Until you admit that you don't give a shit about ebola, then you are a moral fraud.:-)
The point that I am trying to make is that when it comes to the lives of people, talk is cheap. Yes, speech is important and necessary, but, at the end of the day, the actions we take have far more impact and gravity than the words we say.
In my mind, I see people that say "I don't like Saddam, Saddam is evil, but", in the same boat as those who say "well, SUVs are bad, we should defend the earth, but, I got a lot of stuff to haul."
It's as if we have a culture that seems to think it is morally right by simply saying the right things, rather than doing them. Like, we white people say that we are not racist because we do not say nigger, but, who among us actively supports local businesses owned by black people? We talk about valuing local culture, but by imported goods en mass from walmart because they appeal to a shlockified view of America. we talk about peace when we practice war and we talk about war when we practice peace.
we are a society that says entirely one thing and does another. I'm not angry at you personally for doing this, I'm angry at all of us, myself included, for living in a world where we talk about how much the power of speech is, when our word means nothing.
You can whatever you want, but, if you are not willing to back it up, then you are full of s--t. Free speech is only speech, and few dictators will fall because of words against them.
I will NOT retract my statement. By the actions of both the United States and Europe, we are in favor of North Korea, african dictators, disease, famine and pestilence and oppression. We may not "like" what we've chosen, and we may not "like" the sequence of events that has unfolded, but, there is no escaping from the moral consequences of having chosen them.
So yes, I am, for the moment, in favor of African dictators and all the other brutalities that you suggest, and, you are too, and you can take your pseudo humanitarian posturing and shove it up that bottom part attached to your useless excuse for a spine.
That's the aweful truth. By our choice to trade with China, and to engage them, we have decided that we are in favor of the Chinese oppressive police state.
So, suck it up, because we are all commies and dictator supporting thugs. We've decided that avoiding a world war is more important than a dictatorial system over a billion people, that, cashing in on them as a form of a American corporate slave labor will someday liberate them. We are not against it, we participate it in, and therefor, we are in favor of it.
You can't say you are against something unless you are willing to do something about it. If you haven't done anything about it, you were by force of action in favor of it.
You cannot be anti-invasion and anti-Saddam, because, by opposing the invasion, Saddam stays in power. So, you could certainly dog on Bush for a lot of things, but, at the end of the day, Bush comes out on top because he was in favor of having one less dictator than you and willing to act on it.
Clearly the world's financial markets need a rollback mechanism. Literature abounds with tales of chaos that would ensue because of a set of erroneous or malignant trades rippling through the economy.
Large corporations are increasingly going to be less likely to do in house development. I work at several, and, given the choice between make or buy, they will invariably choose buy. If they decide to make, they will invariably choose an outside firm. Even for small in house projects, they will generally get second and third opinions from outside consulting firms.
The issue here is risk and politics. In an in house job, there's only one market for a product, the firm itself. Many of those people are not market savvy, and projects tend to get bogged down in politics. If it is an outside job, then, the firm gets the solution but avoids a lot of the internal tensions. So, managers and administrators will invariably choose outside software.
What does this mean for the Open Source movement? If corporations do not want to internal development, then, the notion of developing common open systems via the consultancy model can take a hit. On the other hand, open source can lower the costs of developing vertical market applications for smaller companies.
For me, its an interesting problem because I have a system that I probably would like to open source, but, because it is vertical market, the open source community at large won't be receptive to it. On the other hand, a proprietary solution carries with it the problems of propreitary software. Not only do I have to write everything, I have to test it to, and the closed source product is not nearly as good as what a peer reviewed open source system could be.
I think that the next phase of the open source world is to go after vertical markets. To do that, there need to be open source places on a by industry basis, and people willing to participate. That way, the advantages of open source can be fully leveraged. Companies otherwise afraid to take risks can be assured that their own risk is much smaller. Vertical market open source solutions would force vertical market standards.
The question is, where to start? I dunno. If I were to open source my commodity server and GPL the whole thing, where would I put it in such a way that other open source people in my industry could see it? If such a place existed, no doubt I would do it today. But putting stuff on source forge is too general (not organized by industry), and, even getting money for a CVS service seems difficult. I just don't even know where to start!
Sorry, but slavish attention to a company is a lie and anyone that believes in company loyalty is a lie. If you want to go and be loyal to your company or the state, go right ahead Adolph, but I seem to remember that the last time we lazy Americans took on the hard working Germans we flattened country, kicked your ass, and then sat back and the watched the Russians deservedly rape all of your women.
The biggest problem with third parties is that they have to go for state legislatures first, and they don't. They always go for the federal seats and you can't hang onto that unless you control the states.
Look at what the Republicans did. Yeah, Reagan won in 1980 and he was able to change the mindset of the country to the right a bit by using the presidency as a bully pulpit, but, real Republican dominance did not come until Republicans methodolically took control of many state legislatures, then governorships, and then, reworked districting laws in their favor, and then won the congress. Barring any disasters, they should hold the congress for the next decade.
Against such a well coordinated plan, you have Green Party people like Ralph Nader that aren't really interested in winning for their party as much as they are about trying to get power for themselves. Really, my Republican Party is successful because not everyone wants to be president, and, we are willing to "take one for the team", in order to get our overall agenda passed.
You don't see that kind of sacrifice on the left, where everyone wants to be a best seller, a pundit, or a president, and that is why you lose.
The green party and the libertarian party will never be successful until it has people that are willing to be elected to state legislatures on local, practical, issues.
Yeah, but like Americans, you reach a certain point of perfection and then piss it all away in stupid wars. Look at where Europe was before World War I, and after.
I have woken up. There are simply too many forces at work against the EU for it to succeed. Europe's issues are the same as they have been for the last thousand years, and Europe is destined to screw it up again.
1. The only reason the Franco - German alliance is working right now is because Schroeder is giving away the store. Were it not for Bush driving France and Germany to unite, the EU would have broken down already. Schroeders reforms are seen as a joke and France's economy is a joke.
2. Europe's rosey picture must be tempered by some very hard and very real demographic realities. The european birth rate is not nearly enough to sustain any meaningful economic growth. Germany's population will be half of what it was some 50 years from now, and France will not be so far behind. In the long run, the vision of the United Europe leading the world (instead of the United States), fails because there will not be any Europeans left!
3. Russia vs Germany + France for economic dominance. A Europe of the future is a Europe dominated by Russia. Given that the French and the Germans have spent the better part of 300 years viewing Eastern Europe in general and Russia in particular as "lesser", it seems unlikly to me that such an ascension will come without tension.
4. The bomb. Right now Europe is living under the threat of an American nuclear counterattack against anyone that would threaten it. But, without the United States (if the US withdrew from NATO), Germany, Poland, etc, all would need to acquire their own nuclear deterrent. Certainly the EU would have to have its own arms program.
5. A rising EU will help the USA more than it will help the Euro. That's right.
6. Turkey is a security powderkeg waiting to happen. Imagine a life some 50 years down the road with a nuclear armed islamic empire banging on the doorsteps of southern europe and the mediterranean.
It seems like a lot of developers have great ideas for programs that will make "lots" of money if they only had about 10 million to develop them.
My bet with my own shareware company is to start small and hang in there. Right now it is just a job for when I come home, but eventually, hopefully, it will build up to something.
I know a few guys that run brick and mortar and web based businesses, and there whole secret is persistence. Just, start small, then, hang in there. Look how long Linux hung in at the hobbiest level before it really took off? How was 1994, 1995, etc, for Linux? Really? Those were some lean years.
Start small, keep building, then, hang in there. Either you will make it or you won't.
Despite the present ill feeling between the US and Europe, let's not forget some basic facts.
a) It is the US Navy that makes world trade possible. American domination of the deep blue sea is ultimately the engine driving containerships everywhere.
We take free trade for granted but really free trade and free travel across the oceans is because the oceans are essentially American, and, under American rule, travel across the oceans are not taxed or restricted.
There's no guarantee that a patchwork of powers would do anything different or better. Certainly the Europeans historically were a lot worse.
Maybe the British could share with the Germans the same way they did in 1870-1914.
b) It is the US Army and US Air Force that provide stability in Europe. What happens in Europe if the US pulls out? How long do France and Germany remain cozy? Or, better still, what is Europe like if Germany has the bomb, or what about Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, etc?
Yes, the Europeans may not like Americans that much, and, Americans may not like the Europeans that much, but, fundamentally, the reasons and advantages of maintaining the transatlantic alliance remain sound.
Ultimately, the rising muslim and anti-semetic populations in europe, coupled with an overall decline in population, will demand an american break from that old continent.
If I as a developer could allocate a perfectly safe and secure trusted section on my computer, then, I would have an ideal place to stash MP3's recorded via hi fidelity analog means.
If I as a developer can have a truly secure and safe connection between multiple machines, then, I could trade those files and never be caught!
Screw the usual conspiracy theory jokes. How about, "we'll have your service up once we send the ship out." I can't imagine anything that says "wait a long time" more.
Saying that because english is not standardized does not address the problem. What we really need to do is have a world wide standard language. Esperanto sucks, but, something english like could gain considerable traction.
Some principals of this language:
a) a phonetic language. a symbol in writing should represent a sound produced by humans.
b) one sound, one symbol. I agree that the relationship between phonemes and graphemes is a complete mess. Many to many relations between the two cause needless confusion.
If all we did was to have a single set of characters represent a single set of sounds, we would be infinately farther along then we are now. I think UNICODE solves the wrong problem.
We argue of favor of standards for all levels of human work - suggestions that some other protocol than http be carried on the web are oft met with derision, that some other database language than SQL ought to be introduced decried as heresy, and often cultural arguments for technology are dismissed as laziness. But, those same arguments can be applied to human language, and arguably, they should carry greater weight, as, what's the point of any standard if half the world cannot read, or if, cultural differences in languages render meanings subtley different?
The problem with general frameworks is that they are often too general. The wave of the future is going to be business specific application / database servers that are stitched together with open messaging schemes.
So, instead of having one general framework with a middle tier in some webish / code combination talking to a SQL server, you'll have a messaging bus that stitches together various domain specific database servers.
If http can be a standard, xml can be a standard, posix can be a standard, why stop there? Why not have english be the standard too? If developers have to wade through the confused bable that is the W3C recommendations, then certainly the rest of the world can drop their own native languages just as surely as we drop our own native implementations of rendering and networking engines.
English as the world language is surely as efficient as a single standards based unix as a world operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
What if they just sent back a swastika?
Or a bunch of random made up stuff just to screw with the people in the past?
At the end of the day, a guy that says he hates to see someone with a flat tire is not nearly as useful to me as someone that actually has a either a jack or a spare.
This whole issue of "it is more complicated than that" really smacks of moral escapism. It's "too complicated", people say, because they are afraid of admitting the consequences of their actions. People are afraid to choose.
Yes, does going after Saddam, did this war, mean the death of innocents? Yes, it did. From that the confused might say, well, that must mean you are in favor of killing innocent people. The evasive answer is, "no, I am not, but it happens, or there is nothing I can do", but, the honest answer must be yes, you are in favor of killing innocent people. If you were in favor of this war, then surely you knew that innocent people would die. If you were against this war, then, the sanctions would not have ended, and then, more innocent people would die.
I think at some point every issue has to be distilled to black and white and you have to call people to either take a stand with you or against you. I think it was GOOD that Bush did this and forced the world's powers to declare where they stood. At least now we know where the nations of the world stand. At least now we know who our real allies are, who is willing to take up the sword in the cause of freedom versus those who merely lament oppression as if the weather.
Go USA. Go UK.
IF you aren't part of the solution, then you either don't give a shit, or are a part of the problem.
:-)
What I'm saying is that opinions without action are worthless? Why is it so hard to come down off your tree of piety and admit that you don't give a shit about something? But oh no, you have to at least "SAY" something, to be counted among the politically correct.
Until you admit that you don't give a shit about ebola, then you are a moral fraud.
The point that I am trying to make is that when it comes to the lives of people, talk is cheap. Yes, speech is important and necessary, but, at the end of the day, the actions we take have far more impact and gravity than the words we say.
In my mind, I see people that say "I don't like Saddam, Saddam is evil, but", in the same boat as those who say "well, SUVs are bad, we should defend the earth, but, I got a lot of stuff to haul."
It's as if we have a culture that seems to think it is morally right by simply saying the right things, rather than doing them. Like, we white people say that we are not racist because we do not say nigger, but, who among us actively supports local businesses owned by black people? We talk about valuing local culture, but by imported goods en mass from walmart because they appeal to a shlockified view of America. we talk about peace when we practice war and we talk about war when we practice peace.
we are a society that says entirely one thing and does another. I'm not angry at you personally for doing this, I'm angry at all of us, myself included, for living in a world where we talk about how much the power of speech is, when our word means nothing.
You go hopping around from 0G to 1.5G. Basically, this super efficient ride is also a super way to make passengers yak.
I'd spend 50 billion to develop this --- not.
You can whatever you want, but, if you are not willing to back it up, then you are full of s--t. Free speech is only speech, and few dictators will fall because of words against them.
I will NOT retract my statement. By the actions of both the United States and Europe, we are in favor of North Korea, african dictators, disease, famine and pestilence and oppression. We may not "like" what we've chosen, and we may not "like" the sequence of events that has unfolded, but, there is no escaping from the moral consequences of having chosen them.
So yes, I am, for the moment, in favor of African dictators and all the other brutalities that you suggest, and, you are too, and you can take your pseudo humanitarian posturing and shove it up that bottom part attached to your useless excuse for a spine.
That's the aweful truth. By our choice to trade with China, and to engage them, we have decided that we are in favor of the Chinese oppressive police state.
So, suck it up, because we are all commies and dictator supporting thugs. We've decided that avoiding a world war is more important than a dictatorial system over a billion people, that, cashing in on them as a form of a American corporate slave labor will someday liberate them. We are not against it, we participate it in, and therefor, we are in favor of it.
You can't say you are against something unless you are willing to do something about it. If you haven't done anything about it, you were by force of action in favor of it.
You cannot be anti-invasion and anti-Saddam, because, by opposing the invasion, Saddam stays in power. So, you could certainly dog on Bush for a lot of things, but, at the end of the day, Bush comes out on top because he was in favor of having one less dictator than you and willing to act on it.
Suddenly the June exit from Iraq plan is looking better all the time.
really, replace step 1 with Gov't instead of employer. That saves the employers lots of money, does it not?
Clearly the world's financial markets need a rollback mechanism. Literature abounds with tales of chaos that would ensue because of a set of erroneous or malignant trades rippling through the economy.
Large corporations are increasingly going to be less likely to do in house development. I work at several, and, given the choice between make or buy, they will invariably choose buy. If they decide to make, they will invariably choose an outside firm. Even for small in house projects, they will generally get second and third opinions from outside consulting firms.
The issue here is risk and politics. In an in house job, there's only one market for a product, the firm itself. Many of those people are not market savvy, and projects tend to get bogged down in politics. If it is an outside job, then, the firm gets the solution but avoids a lot of the internal tensions. So, managers and administrators will invariably choose outside software.
What does this mean for the Open Source movement? If corporations do not want to internal development, then, the notion of developing common open systems via the consultancy model can take a hit. On the other hand, open source can lower the costs of developing vertical market applications for smaller companies.
For me, its an interesting problem because I have a system that I probably would like to open source, but, because it is vertical market, the open source community at large won't be receptive to it. On the other hand, a proprietary solution carries with it the problems of propreitary software. Not only do I have to write everything, I have to test it to, and the closed source product is not nearly as good as what a peer reviewed open source system could be.
I think that the next phase of the open source world is to go after vertical markets. To do that, there need to be open source places on a by industry basis, and people willing to participate. That way, the advantages of open source can be fully leveraged. Companies otherwise afraid to take risks can be assured that their own risk is much smaller. Vertical market open source solutions would force vertical market standards.
The question is, where to start? I dunno. If I were to open source my commodity server and GPL the whole thing, where would I put it in such a way that other open source people in my industry could see it? If such a place existed, no doubt I would do it today. But putting stuff on source forge is too general (not organized by industry), and, even getting money for a CVS service seems difficult. I just don't even know where to start!
Sorry, but slavish attention to a company is a lie and anyone that believes in company loyalty is a lie. If you want to go and be loyal to your company or the state, go right ahead Adolph, but I seem to remember that the last time we lazy Americans took on the hard working Germans we flattened country, kicked your ass, and then sat back and the watched the Russians deservedly rape all of your women.
The biggest problem with third parties is that they have to go for state legislatures first, and they don't. They always go for the federal seats and you can't hang onto that unless you control the states.
Look at what the Republicans did. Yeah, Reagan won in 1980 and he was able to change the mindset of the country to the right a bit by using the presidency as a bully pulpit, but, real Republican dominance did not come until Republicans methodolically took control of many state legislatures, then governorships, and then, reworked districting laws in their favor, and then won the congress. Barring any disasters, they should hold the congress for the next decade.
Against such a well coordinated plan, you have Green Party people like Ralph Nader that aren't really interested in winning for their party as much as they are about trying to get power for themselves. Really, my Republican Party is successful because not everyone wants to be president, and, we are willing to "take one for the team", in order to get our overall agenda passed.
You don't see that kind of sacrifice on the left, where everyone wants to be a best seller, a pundit, or a president, and that is why you lose.
The green party and the libertarian party will never be successful until it has people that are willing to be elected to state legislatures on local, practical, issues.
Yeah, but like Americans, you reach a certain point of perfection and then piss it all away in stupid wars. Look at where Europe was before World War I, and after.
I have woken up. There are simply too many forces at work against the EU for it to succeed. Europe's issues are the same as they have been for the last thousand years, and Europe is destined to screw it up again.
1. The only reason the Franco - German alliance is working right now is because Schroeder is giving away the store. Were it not for Bush driving France and Germany to unite, the EU would have broken down already. Schroeders reforms are seen as a joke and France's economy is a joke.
2. Europe's rosey picture must be tempered by some very hard and very real demographic realities. The european birth rate is not nearly enough to sustain any meaningful economic growth. Germany's population will be half of what it was some 50 years from now, and France will not be so far behind. In the long run, the vision of the United Europe leading the world (instead of the United States), fails because there will not be any Europeans left!
3. Russia vs Germany + France for economic dominance. A Europe of the future is a Europe dominated by Russia. Given that the French and the Germans have spent the better part of 300 years viewing Eastern Europe in general and Russia in particular as "lesser", it seems unlikly to me that such an ascension will come without tension.
4. The bomb. Right now Europe is living under the threat of an American nuclear counterattack against anyone that would threaten it. But, without the United States (if the US withdrew from NATO), Germany, Poland, etc, all would need to acquire their own nuclear deterrent. Certainly the EU would have to have its own arms program.
5. A rising EU will help the USA more than it will help the Euro. That's right.
6. Turkey is a security powderkeg waiting to happen. Imagine a life some 50 years down the road with a nuclear armed islamic empire banging on the doorsteps of southern europe and the mediterranean.
It seems like a lot of developers have great ideas for programs that will make "lots" of money if they only had about 10 million to develop them.
My bet with my own shareware company is to start small and hang in there. Right now it is just a job for when I come home, but eventually, hopefully, it will build up to something.
I know a few guys that run brick and mortar and web based businesses, and there whole secret is persistence. Just, start small, then, hang in there. Look how long Linux hung in at the hobbiest level before it really took off? How was 1994, 1995, etc, for Linux? Really? Those were some lean years.
Start small, keep building, then, hang in there. Either you will make it or you won't.
This statement could be made about everything.
should not be freely available to everyone.
should be available only to those who can prove that they are capable of handling them responsibly.
Do the same with the vote, and then perhaps we can talk.
Despite the present ill feeling between the US and Europe, let's not forget some basic facts.
a) It is the US Navy that makes world trade possible. American domination of the deep blue sea is ultimately the engine driving containerships everywhere.
We take free trade for granted but really free trade and free travel across the oceans is because the oceans are essentially American, and, under American rule, travel across the oceans are not taxed or restricted.
There's no guarantee that a patchwork of powers would do anything different or better. Certainly the Europeans historically were a lot worse.
Maybe the British could share with the Germans the same way they did in 1870-1914.
b) It is the US Army and US Air Force that provide stability in Europe. What happens in Europe if the US pulls out? How long do France and Germany remain cozy? Or, better still, what is Europe like if Germany has the bomb, or what about Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, etc?
Yes, the Europeans may not like Americans that much, and, Americans may not like the Europeans that much, but, fundamentally, the reasons and advantages of maintaining the transatlantic alliance remain sound.
Ultimately, the rising muslim and anti-semetic populations in europe, coupled with an overall decline in population, will demand an american break from that old continent.
But, until that time, NATO stands.
You can talk to someone in Bangladesh but can't get the football game commentary on WIP? What's up with that!
If I as a developer could allocate a perfectly safe and secure trusted section on my computer, then, I would have an ideal place to stash MP3's recorded via hi fidelity analog means.
If I as a developer can have a truly secure and safe connection between multiple machines, then, I could trade those files and never be caught!
Screw the usual conspiracy theory jokes. How about, "we'll have your service up once we send the ship out." I can't imagine anything that says "wait a long time" more.
Saying that because english is not standardized does not address the problem. What we really need to do is have a world wide standard language. Esperanto sucks, but, something english like could gain considerable traction.
Some principals of this language:
a) a phonetic language. a symbol in writing should represent a sound produced by humans.
b) one sound, one symbol. I agree that the relationship between phonemes and graphemes is a complete mess. Many to many relations between the two cause needless confusion.
If all we did was to have a single set of characters represent a single set of sounds, we would be infinately farther along then we are now. I think UNICODE solves the wrong problem.
We argue of favor of standards for all levels of human work - suggestions that some other protocol than http be carried on the web are oft met with derision, that some other database language than SQL ought to be introduced decried as heresy, and often cultural arguments for technology are dismissed as laziness. But, those same arguments can be applied to human language, and arguably, they should carry greater weight, as, what's the point of any standard if half the world cannot read, or if, cultural differences in languages render meanings subtley different?
One World == One Language.
Everything else is unimportant.
The problem with general frameworks is that they are often too general. The wave of the future is going to be business specific application / database servers that are stitched together with open messaging schemes.
So, instead of having one general framework with a middle tier in some webish / code combination talking to a SQL server, you'll have a messaging bus that stitches together various domain specific database servers.
If http can be a standard, xml can be a standard, posix can be a standard, why stop there? Why not have english be the standard too? If developers have to wade through the confused bable that is the W3C recommendations, then certainly the rest of the world can drop their own native languages just as surely as we drop our own native implementations of rendering and networking engines.
English as the world language is surely as efficient as a single standards based unix as a world operating system.