Republicans traditionally favored government at the state level while democrats have favored governemt at the federal level. I could be wrong, but that's the way I have always understood it.
That is one of the theoretical historical positions. Unfortunately it isn't very firmly rooted in fact. This particular myth came about during the anti-segregationist movements of the 1960's. The national Democratic Party split from its members in the south and pushed (successfully) for anti-segration laws on a national level. And I thank them for it, because otherwise it'd be a crime here in Texas for me go go out with my girlfriend.
A look at recent issues shows that the idea of the Republican Party standing strong in favor of "State's Rights" is just not true. Republicans in all branches of government have been actively involved in getting federal overthrow of California's medical marijuana laws, Oregon's assisted suicide laws, and Vermont's civil unions law.
"State's Rights" haven't been a real issue since the 1800s. No party today really supports the idea, they only pretend to when it supports their particular agenda. Otherwise they're perfectly willing to use Federal power as it suits them.
The money that doesn't get spent gets put into some sort of financial instrument, which then is put back into the economy in the form of money that can be used as capital. It certainly doesn't just 'dissapear' unless the owner keeps it all in larg bills under their mattress.
Absolutely correct, to a point. Unfortunately, after that point your argument falls apart. The key word here is "invests". The highly paid person does not simply give this money to a "financial instrument", he expects to get more money back out. Where does that money come from? If you said "the economy" you're correct.
The stock market is an ideal example of this. The only real contribution the stock market makes to the economy is during an IPO, or other stock sales by a company. Those are the only times when money flows out of the stock market, and into the economy. Other than these rare instances, the stock market is a money sink; a genuine zero sum game. The *only* way you can make money buying and selling stocks is if someone else looses money. Generally it will be the smaller, less skilled and powerful, players who loose money. So Mike Eisner, who can hire good stock gamblers, wins, while Effe Mae, day trader, looses. Money flowing out of the economy, and into a non-spending person's pockets.
The supply of money is finite. It is expanding, yes, but unfortunately the rate of expansion seems to be slightly smaller than the rate of absorbsion. If this year there are X dollars in the economy, and the upper 1% controls 35% of those dollars, and next year there are X+1 dollars, but the upper 1% controls 36% of those dollars we still have a recession despite the fact that the total number of dollars is increasing.
Companies are even outsourcing to India where labor is even cheaper. The number of qualified CEOs is significantly less, which is why they demand such salaries.
Friend, I'll guarantee you that the combination of skills and talents necessary to run a company aren't scarce. Uncommon, possibly, but no more so than programming ability is uncommon. It is not a matter of supply and demand. Tens of thousands of people graduate from business schools every year. Hundreds of thousands acquire skill in managing business. Yet, out of this quite large pool of talent (I find it difficult to believe that anyone could have done *worse* than Eisner) we have a self-selecting body of overpaid do-littles.
Bear in mind that many corporations hire a body of CEO's of other corporations to decide a) who gets hired, and b) what he will make. The market is not a factor in this process.
I'm inclined to agree with you. Airline pilots are highly skilled, and do work where a single screw up can kill people... $250,000/year puts them into the upper 1% of Americans (according to the US census). I'd argue that they're some of the few people in that income bracket who actually do work worthy of that much money.
What staggered me about the list was that CEO's as a body weren't included. Yes, the CEO's of underperforming companies are horribly overpaid, but you can't tell me that Michael Eisner actually did work equal in value to $700 *million*. Honestly, I rather doubt that its possible for anyone to do work worth 700 million... Eisner is on the high side, but all corporate executives tend to earn well beyond what they are worth.
You want to know why were in a recession? Its simple, really. The people earning that money don't spend it. Not because they're malicious, but because you *can't* spend $700M, not unless you're buying solid gold toilets every day, or something equally silly. Since the money doesn't get spent, it simply vanishes from the economy. The truth is that trickle down would work, if the upper 1% spent all (or even most) of their money. Since they can't, trickle down is doomed to fail, as is the economy unless money starts flowing *out* of Eisner et al, and into the general economy...
While I'm not really in favor of this sort of BS, it isn't entirely bad. Had they gone with some sort of encryption technique it would have been harder to get around. As it is, you can probably get a mod chip for your TV/DVD/VCR/Whatever and then your TIVO can time shift HDTV as well.
A simple flag system sounds like it will be *much* easier to get around than the more complex systems; as my multi-region DVD player (to get around the preposterous DVD flag system) can attest.
And naturally, though the word "viral" didn't actually appear in the article, they did bring up the dread "oooh, the GPL is viral" line of crap.
What I've never understood is how people can object to the "viral" GPL, yet have no objection to propriatary licenses, which are equally viral. Linksys needed an OS for their router. They could have paid SCO huge bux for the rights to the Unix source. Presumably MS has its source available for embedded apps, also at high prices. Had they chosen to use SCO's Unix they not only could have kept their changes secret, the license would have required that they do so. So the secrecy license scheme is also "viral".
Modifying GPLed code is an exchange, just as much as using non-GPLed code is. With non-GPL stuff, you exchange money for code. With the GPL you exchange access to your changes for code. What is with this pathetic whining: "But we wanted to keep our changes secret." If you want to keep your changes secret either build your own damn OS, or license one of the propriatary ones by paying lots of money. The FSF is about exchanging access to code for access to code, not about giving away code
More to the point, of course the FSF sues people who violate their license, just as MS and SCO sue those who violate their license. Likewise, the FSF thinks that its system is superior and would like to see it supplant the propriatary system. Why is this bad? MS and SCO certainly would like to see their system prevail. Apparently, Forbes can't stand to see actual competition...
Just auto respond to everyone who is not in your email white-list with a challenge/response. If someone I don't know wants to contact me they can take the five seconds it will take to respond.
A good enough idea, for those techie enough to comprehend the responsibility. The responsibility, of course, is that when you sign up for automated email of any sort you must whitelist the automated mail server yourself. Otherwise the yahoo group, or whatever, will quickly find itself faced with a barage of mail...
The other problem with whitelists is that some addresses simply must be put onto the list to avoid clogging systems, and otherwise causing problems. If the all mail deamons aren't universally whitelisted than you'll never get a bounce notice if you send mail to the wrong address. The hassle with universarally whitelisting mail deamons is that the spammers will simply take to forging their headers so they look like they come from the mail deamon (actually, I've already gotten spam designed to look like a bounced message).
I'm not saying that whitelists are a bad idea, I'm just saying that they aren't a universal cure all. I tend to think that the only real solution is a mixture of several techno-fixes. Along with education to try and let people know that buying from spammers is a very bad idea. You'd be surprised how many non-geeks have no problem buying from spammers.
Any language that allows for someone making a living pointing out everything one shouldn't do needs more than a face-lift.
Cute, but meaningless. Any language has features that are easily overused or abused. One of the things a programming teacher has to do with any beginning class is explain what you shouldn't do. Or at least he should be spending time on that.
C++ has problems, yes; pretty unavoidable since it was the first real object oriented language. Java has a different set of problems since it was the first language that was OO from the ground up. I'd say its time to learn from the mistakes of both, scrap 'em, and build a language with the pitfalls of neither. 'Course that's a bundle of work, and you can get along well enough in either of them, so people tend to try and patch rather than start from scratch.
The funny thing is that C still stands out as an excellent general purpose programming language. Possibly a bit akward for use in writing GUI's, but overall it still works after all these years. K&R deserve more praise than they've been getting.
You know, not to nitpick, but that "Top Gun stunt" was nothing more than following regs. You get into the cockpit of that plane, you are going to wear a flight suit. Period.
True 'nuff, but the "Top Gun Stunt" wasn't wearing the flight suit, it was pretending that he was a pilot and flying the plane at all. Then lying about why he did it (remember, he claimed that the carrier was too far away for him to have done what his aids did and taken a helicoptor. In fact the plane was less than 20 miles off the coast of California.)
This is not true in OSS. The GPL, I believe, allows a member of society to take code. modify it, and use it for his or her own benefit. Am I not correct in assuming that as long as the binaries are distributed, the code can be kept secret
Um. No actually, you aren't correct. The GPL allows you to take the code, modify the code, sell the code, but you cannot keep code secret if you distribute. Its kinda one of the central parts of the whole philosophy of the FSF: source code is not secret.
Which is why selling GPLed software is difficult. Let's say that you write program "Foo" and put it under the GPL. To use the GPL you must distribute the source as well as the binary. You can sell it, or give it away, but you can't keep other people from redistributing at whatever price they choose to. So, you could sell program Foo to me for $50, and I could then put it on the web for free, all quite legally. The GPL doesn't forbid the sale of GPLed programs, it just makes it kinda pointless.
RMS originally sold the GCC on tape, as well as making it freely available via FTP.
Absolutely not. Without ideology GNU is no different then MS or SCO. Besides all things are political today.
Actually, MS and SCO have ideology. Its not so readily apparent because its the dominant ideology. "Business is good, propriatary code is good. Sale for profit is the only sensable way to live." Its odd to see it spelled out because it is usually simply part of the background...
RMS' ideology stands out because its different. So different that people can't really place it easily. Some people who quite obviously haven't given the matter any thought at all call it "communist" because it is definately not in line with taditioal capitalist ideology. But there are more options than just communist and capitalist. The idea of Free Software is patently not communist. It is different though. And, as you say, it needs constant statement simply because without constant restatement it would fade away due to the background ideology.
the problem with the screen size being too big, is referred to as virtual desktop. use the xfree setup and, make sure your desktop and virtual desktop are the same size, or that virtual desktop is disabled. this varies depending on the tool you are using to configure X.
Actually, I tried that. For whatever reason the "disable virtual desktop" option did not, in fact, disable the virtual desktop. Dunno why.
Not that it was too difficult to tweak the file by hand. Actually, I've been learning more about how to properly setup a Linux box since I got Gentoo than I ever knew before, so its not really a bad thing that I had to learn how to manually configure X.
Another reason is variety, right now one of MS's biggest advantage is people don't have experience with variety. If they get used to a utilitarian WM without the flashy features they may start to wonder if it wouldn't be easy for someone other then MS to make a good WM and start looking around.
This is actually a good point. MS, by promoting a ruthlessly standardized desktop environment, has managed to get large numbers of people quite used to doing things one way (the MS way, that is). It really is a struggle for some of the more ossified types to even change to another browser simply because the buttons have slightly different icons from IE.
By eleminating diversity, the MS designers have quite neatly gotten a psychological lock into the minds of many people. Gamers tend to switch more easily because games don't follow the MS standard interface, but non-gamers are very used to/addicted to the MS look and feel.
Not, mind you, that standardization doesn't have its place. When every program makes the scrollbars look and behave differently even the most flexible of mind can get a bit worn out. I wonder if there's a happy medium between over-compliance with a standard UI, and over-diversity in UI look and feel?
Where your monitor seems to be a moveable window on a workspace that is bigger than the monitor's viewable area? This feature is the one thing that's kept me with fvwm all this time. I don't like seperate desktops.
Just goes to show, I suppose. I can't stand having a workspace bigger than my monitor. I have to be too careful moving to the "edge" when I want to use a scroll bar. Which is the best thing about Linux, you can have what you want, and I can have what I want.
Though, I did have to manually tweak my XF86Config file after I installed Gentoo, for whatever reason it defaulted to a screen bigger than my monitor. Dunno why.
And, of course ( here comes Godwin's Law), Hitler was voted dictator for life in a democratic election.
Well, yes and no. Hitler was voted dictator in a democratic election where armed thugs kept things going smoothly for him. Same as Mussolini was. It's one of the halmarks of facism: elecitons that are controled by threat of violence.
So, I'll have to disagree with your conclusion that too much democracy was what allowed Hitler to become a power.
Of course it needs to be aired publicly. Its a potential threat to the very basis of our government. The reason why it isn't is quite simple: corporate ownership.
CEO's are a quite tight group of people. Generally a person who sits on the board of one company sits on the board of up to ten other companies as well. Do you really think that MSNBC, CNN, FOX, ABC, etc, don't a) own stock in Diebold and other voting machine companies, and b) have board members who sit on Diebold's board as well?
Walden O'Dell, President of Diebold is also a board member of Lenox (yes, the heating and air conditioning company). This has nothing to do with media ownership, but demonstrates the amount of spread involved in corporate ownership.
Sure, you can have double-counts and triple-counts, but in a land where the campaign costs almost as much as budget of the office-holder, you can also double-bribe and triple-bribe.
That's why the security of these automated systems is so important... they *must* be more secure than a bunch of volunteers hand-counting.
The problem with this line of argument is that with machine count it becomes a matter of bribing one person: the one in charge of the machine...
This is why transparency is important. It really doesn't matter whether the ballots are counted by people, machines, or trained chimps, as long as the process can be viewed, verified, and checked by any concerned party (including individual voters) it will work quite well. When only a select few are allowed to see, verify, etc, the process than those select few can, and will, be corrupted.
An open source system, which produces paper receipts, looks like the only real option.
Feh. And other words of disgust. One of the main purposes of the constitution, and the bill of rights, is to avoid the problem of "tyrany of the majority", while simultaniously allowing free and democratic government.
Certainly a free for all democracy, without any sort of "No, you can't use the government to do this" would cause problems. Democracy, in and of itself, is not sufficient. But we have more than just a democracy, and so does every other first world nation. By explicitly limiting the government's power, and by making those limits quite difficult to change, things work quite well.
What we need is more accountability, less secrecy, and greater transparency. A government of a few tyranical types tends to have a half-life of around 30 to 40 years, and when they collapse (and they always do) its not pretty. Look at the Soviet Union for an example of this.
Dave Berry successfully irritated one of the telemarketing firms by getting his readers to call them.
Let's slashdot the Direct Marketing Association. Their number is 1-800-969-6566. They PAY when people call their 800 number. Call them. Get ahold of a customer service rep, and ask to talk to their supervisor. Offer to sell them something (a beer can, a lawnmower, the DeCSS code, something). Every minute you talk to them they pay for it.
They've just said that they have the right to call us, so that naturally must mean we can call them, right? With any luck they'll be slashdotted before 3pm.
While this view maybe considered extreme, the author of the article certainly casts some doubt on the usefulness of complex word processing software. But then, I would not call vi particularly intuitive, but it does cut down on pointless formatting decisions that seem to endlessly arise.
Not too extreme, actually. I write, and I tend to use plaintext editors to do my initial writing. Vi, actually...
Which isn't to say that the complex word processing programs aren't useful. After I'm finished writing the text, I load it into OpenOffice.org and use it as a formatting/typesetting program. Its great in that role, but I've got to agree with the idea that doing writing in a typesetting program tends to be a time sink. As long as you see it as two separate processes: 1) writing, and 2) typesetting, it makes perfect sense.
What is it with their offer to route misspelled domain names that you hate so much?
Well, its a violation of the standards that make the whole bloody internet work, just to start with. More importantly, its keeping with their image as a sleezy company; which they are. A few whiles back they sent out millions of spam mails which were cleverly designed to appear as if the recipiant's registration was going to run out, and their only choice was to sign up again using VeriSign. Mind you, these were sent to people who had signed up with other, non-VeriSign services. Sleezy, see?
Give them some credit; they are only trying to make a buck and survive as a company.
Excuse me, but why should the fact that they are trying to make money have anything to do with their sleezyness, or the technical problems their sleezyness is causing? They are a company, and yes, companies exist to make money. This doesn't mean that I have to agree that its perfectly fine for them to do sleezy things to make money. Telemarketing companies are out to make money was well. With any luck at all the recetly enacted Do Not Call list will not only reduce the amount of money they make, but hopefuly put them completely out of business.
Capitalism means freedom to fail, among other things. I'm not obligated to approve of, nor support everything that people do to make money.
Very few of the so-called "no-pagans" actually worship any deity at all. They worship sex lives, their social standing in their chosen subculture, the 1960's, and a multitude of other things (including, sometimes, the neo-pagan subculture they belong to, which is often confused with the deity)
Yup. It sure could be. I didn't intend my post to be seen as an assault on Christianity, though apparently it has been viewed as such. I specified "Christian" because the earlier poster asked why Gaiman's book "American Gods" didn't list Jehovah.
Most people, whatever their professed religion, don't really seem to believe it much... Christians, Neo-Pegans, Jews, Hindu, whatever.
I'd say that people involved in truly fringe religious (like Christianity when it was just starting way back when, or in areas where its repressed today) are more dedicated simply because they had to choose to join and often suffer for their choice. People born into an established, and mostly accepted (if not virtually required) religion can be intellectually lazy about it.
Not, to ward off the dread "flamebait" mod, that I'm suggusting that you are lazy about it, or that any specific person is. Just observing that many people aren't truly dedicated to the religion they claim to belong to.
The most puzzling god that was almost completely missing from American Gods was the big one... you know, the guy that most midwesterners really worship.
Very few of the so-called "Christians" actually worship either Jehovah or Jesus. They worship money, their social standing, the 1950's, and a multitude of other things (including, sometimes, the church organization they belong to, which is often confused with the deity), but not the deity himself (themselves if you're into the Trinity thing).
The vast majority of those who call themselves Christian haven't even read the Bible, much less follow the teachings of Jesus. They are "Christian" because its the easiest path, not because they truly believe in it. If Baalism was the popular/respectable religion they'd all be pseudo-Baalists just as easily as they're all pseudo-Christians now.
Both the original and this completely beg the basic question -- in much of the 20th century people had a very vivid picture of The Future, accurate or inaccurate. Today, that sense has completely disappeared. Why?
A critical quesiton I agree. I won't pretend to know the whole answer, but I think I know part of it. I think that Daniel Quinn (Ishmael, Story of B, My Ishmael) is partially right. Back in the 1950's we had a clear cultural vision: the world was made for man, and man was made to conquer the world. Today it is increasingly obvious that that cultural vision is broken. Much of fantasy tends to be backward looking, showing a time when the cultural vision worked. SF, by its nature forward looking, can't really keep that vision without looking dated (see many of Heinlein's books, especially "Tunnel in the Sky" for an example of this).
I think another contributing factor is that we've been in a technological plateau period for the past 50 years or so. Technological advance has been mostly the evolutionary type, that is, improving on existing technology, rather than building truly new things. During the first 50 years of the 20th centrury technological advance was revolutionary (from "heavier than air flight is impossible" to "heavier than air flight is commonplace" for example).
Since 50 years counts as "forever" for most folks, people today tend to think that the current period of evolutionary, slow, technological advance will continue "forever". This means that, as has been pointed out, most people writing SF today are not writing about new orders of technology, but about incremental advances of existing technology. Which isn't nearly as exciting...
I think that we will soon (10-15 years) be moving off the plateau and into another period of technological revolution, which will doubtless spur a new era of SF.
The biggest problem with the US Space Program is that ever since we got to the moon they've been thinking small. Nothing really works well, or does much for you, until you scale it up to a decent level. Imagine if post-Columbus the various European nations had sent out a couple of row boats every few years...
As with so much in life an investment is necessary to get the returns. To really benefit from space we must spend tens of billions on basic infrastructure. The ROI will be worth it. Big projects. A catapult for bulk loads would be a good start and possible with off the shelf technology.
Even better would be a genuine attempt to build a space plane. All the half-assed three or four million dollar projects to date were nothing more than a waste of time.
Best would be to immediately begin work on an elevator. Current best estimates say that an elevator could be built in about ten years, with a budget of six billion. Considering that the US is spending more than $8 billion per month in Iraq, I'd say we obviously have $6 Billion to spend over the course of ten years...
When you think small, you get small results. I don't care if its NASA, or a private corporation, or a group of various space agencies and corporations, but we must begin thinking big or else nothing will ever happen.
Slashdot Mirror
That is one of the theoretical historical positions. Unfortunately it isn't very firmly rooted in fact. This particular myth came about during the anti-segregationist movements of the 1960's. The national Democratic Party split from its members in the south and pushed (successfully) for anti-segration laws on a national level. And I thank them for it, because otherwise it'd be a crime here in Texas for me go go out with my girlfriend.
A look at recent issues shows that the idea of the Republican Party standing strong in favor of "State's Rights" is just not true. Republicans in all branches of government have been actively involved in getting federal overthrow of California's medical marijuana laws, Oregon's assisted suicide laws, and Vermont's civil unions law.
"State's Rights" haven't been a real issue since the 1800s. No party today really supports the idea, they only pretend to when it supports their particular agenda. Otherwise they're perfectly willing to use Federal power as it suits them.
Absolutely correct, to a point. Unfortunately, after that point your argument falls apart. The key word here is "invests". The highly paid person does not simply give this money to a "financial instrument", he expects to get more money back out. Where does that money come from? If you said "the economy" you're correct.
The stock market is an ideal example of this. The only real contribution the stock market makes to the economy is during an IPO, or other stock sales by a company. Those are the only times when money flows out of the stock market, and into the economy. Other than these rare instances, the stock market is a money sink; a genuine zero sum game. The *only* way you can make money buying and selling stocks is if someone else looses money. Generally it will be the smaller, less skilled and powerful, players who loose money. So Mike Eisner, who can hire good stock gamblers, wins, while Effe Mae, day trader, looses. Money flowing out of the economy, and into a non-spending person's pockets.
The supply of money is finite. It is expanding, yes, but unfortunately the rate of expansion seems to be slightly smaller than the rate of absorbsion. If this year there are X dollars in the economy, and the upper 1% controls 35% of those dollars, and next year there are X+1 dollars, but the upper 1% controls 36% of those dollars we still have a recession despite the fact that the total number of dollars is increasing.
Bear in mind that many corporations hire a body of CEO's of other corporations to decide a) who gets hired, and b) what he will make. The market is not a factor in this process.
What staggered me about the list was that CEO's as a body weren't included. Yes, the CEO's of underperforming companies are horribly overpaid, but you can't tell me that Michael Eisner actually did work equal in value to $700 *million*. Honestly, I rather doubt that its possible for anyone to do work worth 700 million... Eisner is on the high side, but all corporate executives tend to earn well beyond what they are worth.
You want to know why were in a recession? Its simple, really. The people earning that money don't spend it. Not because they're malicious, but because you *can't* spend $700M, not unless you're buying solid gold toilets every day, or something equally silly. Since the money doesn't get spent, it simply vanishes from the economy. The truth is that trickle down would work, if the upper 1% spent all (or even most) of their money. Since they can't, trickle down is doomed to fail, as is the economy unless money starts flowing *out* of Eisner et al, and into the general economy...
A simple flag system sounds like it will be *much* easier to get around than the more complex systems; as my multi-region DVD player (to get around the preposterous DVD flag system) can attest.
What I've never understood is how people can object to the "viral" GPL, yet have no objection to propriatary licenses, which are equally viral. Linksys needed an OS for their router. They could have paid SCO huge bux for the rights to the Unix source. Presumably MS has its source available for embedded apps, also at high prices. Had they chosen to use SCO's Unix they not only could have kept their changes secret, the license would have required that they do so. So the secrecy license scheme is also "viral".
Modifying GPLed code is an exchange, just as much as using non-GPLed code is. With non-GPL stuff, you exchange money for code. With the GPL you exchange access to your changes for code. What is with this pathetic whining: "But we wanted to keep our changes secret." If you want to keep your changes secret either build your own damn OS, or license one of the propriatary ones by paying lots of money. The FSF is about exchanging access to code for access to code, not about giving away code
More to the point, of course the FSF sues people who violate their license, just as MS and SCO sue those who violate their license. Likewise, the FSF thinks that its system is superior and would like to see it supplant the propriatary system. Why is this bad? MS and SCO certainly would like to see their system prevail. Apparently, Forbes can't stand to see actual competition...
A good enough idea, for those techie enough to comprehend the responsibility. The responsibility, of course, is that when you sign up for automated email of any sort you must whitelist the automated mail server yourself. Otherwise the yahoo group, or whatever, will quickly find itself faced with a barage of mail...
The other problem with whitelists is that some addresses simply must be put onto the list to avoid clogging systems, and otherwise causing problems. If the all mail deamons aren't universally whitelisted than you'll never get a bounce notice if you send mail to the wrong address. The hassle with universarally whitelisting mail deamons is that the spammers will simply take to forging their headers so they look like they come from the mail deamon (actually, I've already gotten spam designed to look like a bounced message).
I'm not saying that whitelists are a bad idea, I'm just saying that they aren't a universal cure all. I tend to think that the only real solution is a mixture of several techno-fixes. Along with education to try and let people know that buying from spammers is a very bad idea. You'd be surprised how many non-geeks have no problem buying from spammers.
Cute, but meaningless. Any language has features that are easily overused or abused. One of the things a programming teacher has to do with any beginning class is explain what you shouldn't do. Or at least he should be spending time on that.
C++ has problems, yes; pretty unavoidable since it was the first real object oriented language. Java has a different set of problems since it was the first language that was OO from the ground up. I'd say its time to learn from the mistakes of both, scrap 'em, and build a language with the pitfalls of neither. 'Course that's a bundle of work, and you can get along well enough in either of them, so people tend to try and patch rather than start from scratch.
The funny thing is that C still stands out as an excellent general purpose programming language. Possibly a bit akward for use in writing GUI's, but overall it still works after all these years. K&R deserve more praise than they've been getting.
True 'nuff, but the "Top Gun Stunt" wasn't wearing the flight suit, it was pretending that he was a pilot and flying the plane at all. Then lying about why he did it (remember, he claimed that the carrier was too far away for him to have done what his aids did and taken a helicoptor. In fact the plane was less than 20 miles off the coast of California.)
Um. No actually, you aren't correct. The GPL allows you to take the code, modify the code, sell the code, but you cannot keep code secret if you distribute. Its kinda one of the central parts of the whole philosophy of the FSF: source code is not secret.
Which is why selling GPLed software is difficult. Let's say that you write program "Foo" and put it under the GPL. To use the GPL you must distribute the source as well as the binary. You can sell it, or give it away, but you can't keep other people from redistributing at whatever price they choose to. So, you could sell program Foo to me for $50, and I could then put it on the web for free, all quite legally. The GPL doesn't forbid the sale of GPLed programs, it just makes it kinda pointless.
RMS originally sold the GCC on tape, as well as making it freely available via FTP.
Actually, MS and SCO have ideology. Its not so readily apparent because its the dominant ideology. "Business is good, propriatary code is good. Sale for profit is the only sensable way to live." Its odd to see it spelled out because it is usually simply part of the background...
RMS' ideology stands out because its different. So different that people can't really place it easily. Some people who quite obviously haven't given the matter any thought at all call it "communist" because it is definately not in line with taditioal capitalist ideology. But there are more options than just communist and capitalist. The idea of Free Software is patently not communist. It is different though. And, as you say, it needs constant statement simply because without constant restatement it would fade away due to the background ideology.
Actually, I tried that. For whatever reason the "disable virtual desktop" option did not, in fact, disable the virtual desktop. Dunno why.
Not that it was too difficult to tweak the file by hand. Actually, I've been learning more about how to properly setup a Linux box since I got Gentoo than I ever knew before, so its not really a bad thing that I had to learn how to manually configure X.
This is actually a good point. MS, by promoting a ruthlessly standardized desktop environment, has managed to get large numbers of people quite used to doing things one way (the MS way, that is). It really is a struggle for some of the more ossified types to even change to another browser simply because the buttons have slightly different icons from IE.
By eleminating diversity, the MS designers have quite neatly gotten a psychological lock into the minds of many people. Gamers tend to switch more easily because games don't follow the MS standard interface, but non-gamers are very used to/addicted to the MS look and feel.
Not, mind you, that standardization doesn't have its place. When every program makes the scrollbars look and behave differently even the most flexible of mind can get a bit worn out. I wonder if there's a happy medium between over-compliance with a standard UI, and over-diversity in UI look and feel?
Just goes to show, I suppose. I can't stand having a workspace bigger than my monitor. I have to be too careful moving to the "edge" when I want to use a scroll bar. Which is the best thing about Linux, you can have what you want, and I can have what I want.
Though, I did have to manually tweak my XF86Config file after I installed Gentoo, for whatever reason it defaulted to a screen bigger than my monitor. Dunno why.
Well, yes and no. Hitler was voted dictator in a democratic election where armed thugs kept things going smoothly for him. Same as Mussolini was. It's one of the halmarks of facism: elecitons that are controled by threat of violence.
So, I'll have to disagree with your conclusion that too much democracy was what allowed Hitler to become a power.
CEO's are a quite tight group of people. Generally a person who sits on the board of one company sits on the board of up to ten other companies as well. Do you really think that MSNBC, CNN, FOX, ABC, etc, don't a) own stock in Diebold and other voting machine companies, and b) have board members who sit on Diebold's board as well?
Walden O'Dell, President of Diebold is also a board member of Lenox (yes, the heating and air conditioning company). This has nothing to do with media ownership, but demonstrates the amount of spread involved in corporate ownership.
The problem with this line of argument is that with machine count it becomes a matter of bribing one person: the one in charge of the machine...
This is why transparency is important. It really doesn't matter whether the ballots are counted by people, machines, or trained chimps, as long as the process can be viewed, verified, and checked by any concerned party (including individual voters) it will work quite well. When only a select few are allowed to see, verify, etc, the process than those select few can, and will, be corrupted.
An open source system, which produces paper receipts, looks like the only real option.
Feh. And other words of disgust. One of the main purposes of the constitution, and the bill of rights, is to avoid the problem of "tyrany of the majority", while simultaniously allowing free and democratic government.
Certainly a free for all democracy, without any sort of "No, you can't use the government to do this" would cause problems. Democracy, in and of itself, is not sufficient. But we have more than just a democracy, and so does every other first world nation. By explicitly limiting the government's power, and by making those limits quite difficult to change, things work quite well.
What we need is more accountability, less secrecy, and greater transparency. A government of a few tyranical types tends to have a half-life of around 30 to 40 years, and when they collapse (and they always do) its not pretty. Look at the Soviet Union for an example of this.
Let's slashdot the Direct Marketing Association. Their number is 1-800-969-6566. They PAY when people call their 800 number. Call them. Get ahold of a customer service rep, and ask to talk to their supervisor. Offer to sell them something (a beer can, a lawnmower, the DeCSS code, something). Every minute you talk to them they pay for it.
They've just said that they have the right to call us, so that naturally must mean we can call them, right? With any luck they'll be slashdotted before 3pm.
Not too extreme, actually. I write, and I tend to use plaintext editors to do my initial writing. Vi, actually...
Which isn't to say that the complex word processing programs aren't useful. After I'm finished writing the text, I load it into OpenOffice.org and use it as a formatting/typesetting program. Its great in that role, but I've got to agree with the idea that doing writing in a typesetting program tends to be a time sink. As long as you see it as two separate processes: 1) writing, and 2) typesetting, it makes perfect sense.
Well, its a violation of the standards that make the whole bloody internet work, just to start with. More importantly, its keeping with their image as a sleezy company; which they are. A few whiles back they sent out millions of spam mails which were cleverly designed to appear as if the recipiant's registration was going to run out, and their only choice was to sign up again using VeriSign. Mind you, these were sent to people who had signed up with other, non-VeriSign services. Sleezy, see?
Excuse me, but why should the fact that they are trying to make money have anything to do with their sleezyness, or the technical problems their sleezyness is causing? They are a company, and yes, companies exist to make money. This doesn't mean that I have to agree that its perfectly fine for them to do sleezy things to make money. Telemarketing companies are out to make money was well. With any luck at all the recetly enacted Do Not Call list will not only reduce the amount of money they make, but hopefuly put them completely out of business.
Capitalism means freedom to fail, among other things. I'm not obligated to approve of, nor support everything that people do to make money.
Yup. It sure could be. I didn't intend my post to be seen as an assault on Christianity, though apparently it has been viewed as such. I specified "Christian" because the earlier poster asked why Gaiman's book "American Gods" didn't list Jehovah.
Most people, whatever their professed religion, don't really seem to believe it much... Christians, Neo-Pegans, Jews, Hindu, whatever.
I'd say that people involved in truly fringe religious (like Christianity when it was just starting way back when, or in areas where its repressed today) are more dedicated simply because they had to choose to join and often suffer for their choice. People born into an established, and mostly accepted (if not virtually required) religion can be intellectually lazy about it.
Not, to ward off the dread "flamebait" mod, that I'm suggusting that you are lazy about it, or that any specific person is. Just observing that many people aren't truly dedicated to the religion they claim to belong to.
Very few of the so-called "Christians" actually worship either Jehovah or Jesus. They worship money, their social standing, the 1950's, and a multitude of other things (including, sometimes, the church organization they belong to, which is often confused with the deity), but not the deity himself (themselves if you're into the Trinity thing).
The vast majority of those who call themselves Christian haven't even read the Bible, much less follow the teachings of Jesus. They are "Christian" because its the easiest path, not because they truly believe in it. If Baalism was the popular/respectable religion they'd all be pseudo-Baalists just as easily as they're all pseudo-Christians now.
A critical quesiton I agree. I won't pretend to know the whole answer, but I think I know part of it. I think that Daniel Quinn (Ishmael, Story of B, My Ishmael) is partially right. Back in the 1950's we had a clear cultural vision: the world was made for man, and man was made to conquer the world. Today it is increasingly obvious that that cultural vision is broken. Much of fantasy tends to be backward looking, showing a time when the cultural vision worked. SF, by its nature forward looking, can't really keep that vision without looking dated (see many of Heinlein's books, especially "Tunnel in the Sky" for an example of this).
I think another contributing factor is that we've been in a technological plateau period for the past 50 years or so. Technological advance has been mostly the evolutionary type, that is, improving on existing technology, rather than building truly new things. During the first 50 years of the 20th centrury technological advance was revolutionary (from "heavier than air flight is impossible" to "heavier than air flight is commonplace" for example).
Since 50 years counts as "forever" for most folks, people today tend to think that the current period of evolutionary, slow, technological advance will continue "forever". This means that, as has been pointed out, most people writing SF today are not writing about new orders of technology, but about incremental advances of existing technology. Which isn't nearly as exciting...
I think that we will soon (10-15 years) be moving off the plateau and into another period of technological revolution, which will doubtless spur a new era of SF.
As with so much in life an investment is necessary to get the returns. To really benefit from space we must spend tens of billions on basic infrastructure. The ROI will be worth it. Big projects. A catapult for bulk loads would be a good start and possible with off the shelf technology.
Even better would be a genuine attempt to build a space plane. All the half-assed three or four million dollar projects to date were nothing more than a waste of time.
Best would be to immediately begin work on an elevator. Current best estimates say that an elevator could be built in about ten years, with a budget of six billion. Considering that the US is spending more than $8 billion per month in Iraq, I'd say we obviously have $6 Billion to spend over the course of ten years...
When you think small, you get small results. I don't care if its NASA, or a private corporation, or a group of various space agencies and corporations, but we must begin thinking big or else nothing will ever happen.