What exactly would an open source stock brokerage be? The source for their trading software is available for download off the web? Even if you could convince the exchanges to let you connect to them electronically I have my doubts as to whether the NASD and SEC would be too happy about it.
Somehow I have a feeling that simply having the source code "open" isn't what you meant. What did you mean?
The whole point of open source isn't to innovate. If you look at the FSF's essays (at least the early ones) Stallman specifically states the point of free software is create a level playing field. A level playing field means little or no innovation. Free software is about commoditizing software. When was the last time you heard about a break through innovation in any of the commodities?
How often does the proprietary software camp look at something free software has done and said, "Gee, I wish we'd done that." How often do you see posts saying, "We need an open source version of that software!"
Usually it seems that, no matter, what the article is about there are dozens of posts on/. from the neo-libertarians. The recent post office one springs to mind.
I find it funny that as soon as the question becomes "space exploration" (a question near and dear to the hearts of all geeks no doubt) the same people who were crying for government to stay out of licensing software professionals or taxing internet commerce or whatever suddenly turn into bleeding heart tax and spend liberals.
I mean, how do they justify the hypocrisy to themselves?
I agree with this anonymous coward. If private industry is better at technological innovation than government (which is what all those Silicon Valley execs are always telling us) then stop funding NASA completely and let private industry pick up the slack. Hooray for allocative efficiency!
sigh....the poster never explained why the liberty to not have all your information collected in one place is less important than my liberty to not hire blacks or women just because I don't like them. Or why I shouldn't have the liberty to own land in America but also be a sovereign power. Obviously not all liberties are essential. A minority's liberty to equal treatment is more important than my liberty to do whatever the hell I want with the company I own and run. Likewise, you do not have the liberty to sell yourself into slavery, even if it is a purely voluntary transaction.
Many of the things that were argued against for precendent alone currently make up the strongest economy the world has ever seen, which has created more wealth and distributed it more equally than any libertarian scheme. I think you will have a hard time convincing people that giving up those liberties was a bad idea. People aren't being asked to give up civil liberties just 'cause. They are being asked to give them up for something they value. Don't people have the liberty to give up their liberties? Apparently not, according to Franklin...such people don't deserve liberty. Franklin's quote is tantamount to saying that people who choose to make a different tradeoff than me don't deserve to live. Seems to me to be the antithesis to the libertarian live and let live.
If there is a slippery slope we put our first foot on it thousands of years ago. By the logic of the Slippery Slopists we should already all be living in fascist hell. After all, how long have we had a federal income tax, a social security number, a national government?
The existence of a slippery slope has also never been proven, only repeatedly asserted by those who apparently have a tenuous grasp of logic and rhetoric. I guess in your one liberal arts class they failed to mention that the slippery slope argument is a widely known common fallacy of rhetoric. Much like argumentum ex silentio, argumentum ad verecundiam, false dichotomy, reification fallacy, straw man, and post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
The slipperly slope may be a well understood concept, but so is white supremacy. Just because it is well understood doesn't mean it is accurate or valid. By saying this is a slippery slope you are requiring, but not defending, the premise that to accept a specific course of action would be to embrace a general principle that would apply equally well to other, plainly undesirable sorts of action. Hard core Slippery Slopists are like your third grade teacher who wouldn't let you bring your pet turtle to class because that meant she would have to let other people bring their pet elephants to class. The validity of slippery slopism in the civil liberties context has never been proven, much less scientifically investigated. Hell, telepathy has more scientific proof behind in than the existence of a slippery slope in civil liberties. You would think a bunch of engineers would understand the worthlessness of anecdotal evidence.
Finally, when someone asks you define all words longer than two syllables, I don't think saying "I shouldn't have to" is a good defense of your position. It makes it look like you can't even articulate one of your most closely held beliefs. Hardly the way to win others to your side. Of course, most such discussions seem geared more to alienate those who disagree with you rather than actually engage them in any kind of discourse.
Ad hominem attacks really don't work very well when you have no clue who I am or what my education is. For all you know I have master's degree in liberal arts. Of course, you probably are assuming that I'm a college aged (or recently graduated) white, male, computer science major.
What's more, when someone makes a claim (such as copying Franklin's quote) I feel it is up to the poster, rather than the reader, to supply the rationalization for why it is appropriate. Otherwise they are shirking their job. I think libertarians call that free riding in other contexts.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Every time something like this comes up I see this same stupid Ben Franklin quote. Every time the poster completely and absolutely fails to explain why this is an essential liberty or why it is a little temporary safety
To do that you'd have to explain what it is essential in relation to. And you'd have to quantify both little and temporary. Much better to leave it as nifty sounding rhetoric than fill it in with a real argument, I guess
What's more, I thought that our philosophy of natural rights of Men taught that people deserved these things simply because they exist, not because of a philosophy the person espouses. Making liberty and safety contigent on philosophical and political beliefs strikes me as decidedly fascist.
I agree that there is nothing that makes the "two times" law inherently good. However, it seems that the only way private industry can create a more reliable post office and still offer decent returns to stock holders is by charging twice as much. Even then, I would question whether the reliability is worth the price you are paying for it.
There are currently no incentives for FedEx and UPS to avoid cost cutting and efficiency seeking. On the contrary, as they compete with many companies, including each other, there seems to be every incentive to do so. That they are still, in the face of this competition, unable to create a cost structure capable of carrying the post office's rates is disheartening.
You seem to be saying that there is currently no competition and removing these laws would introduce it. I feel that there is competition and it has proven itself unable to be as efficient as the government entity doing the same job.
The main reason I would oppose removing these laws isn't so much because I believe these laws are inherently right, but more because I have little faith that our current marketizing jihad wouldn't end up destroying the post office entirely rather than settle on a happy medium. In the end, I think that would leave us with outlying communities that are not serviced by for-profit mail companies, in much the same way that for-profit HMOs are deselecting the less healthy patients.
My personal belief is that the social gains (which I believe are indirectly translated into economic gains) of a national postal system outweigh the relatively minor economic efficiencies that might be realized by marketizing.
because I guarantee that otherwise, businesses would spring up to deliver local mail for a fraction of the 33c per letter we pay now.
[Note: your guarantee does not count as a fact.]
What kind of guarantee are you offering? If private businesses charge 34c per letter are you personally going to reimburse the letter senders of America one billion dollars? Or are you offering the same guarantees that accompanied the other deregulations and mergers that have thus far failed to pass along any cost savings to customers (i.e. none whatsoever)? Doesn't sound like much of a guarantee to me.
It's because private business cannot, by law, charge anything less than twice the USPS rate for comparable package delivery service.
[Note: that prices might come down and other companies might enter the market is also not a fact.]
Looking at FedEx's 1998 Annual report they had a total revenue of $15,873,000,000 and total operating costs of $14,862,150. The revenue from domestic express deliveries was $9,300,000,000. Since that figure is doubled what they really should have made (if I'm understanding your correctly) is $4,650,000,000 in revenues. Unfortunately, with the new, lower revenue from domestic express deliveries, instead of an operating income of $1 billion they instead find themselves with an operating loss of $3.5 billion.
Doesn't sound profitable to me, but I'm not an economist so what do I know?
From looking at their corporate report it seems like the only reason FedEx is still is business is because of the "two-times" rule. They aren't efficient enough to operate with the same cost structure as the USPS, apparently.
Besides, where would this "profit" go?
I think they are called retained earnings. You don't distribute them to share holders via dividends. Most publicly traded companies don't distribute to shareholders every penny of their profits, either. In any case, I thought shared of USPS stock were usually called Treasury Bills or Government Bonds or somesuch. But I'm not an accountant so I could be wrong.
It is not worth your salary to suffer under Outlook, knowing that your mail is stored locally (and on the server) in a closed, proprietary format.
I don't understand this sentence. Yes, the mail is stored on the server in a closed, proprietary format. Who cares what particular database they used to store messages on the server? All that matters to the end user is how they access the messages. I think computer people call that an abstract data type.
How the mail is stored locally depends on what your local client is. Since you can access you Exchange account via POP3 or IMAP4 there are a plethora of options. Personally, I used mutt and stored them in maildir format.
In other words, if you are an outlook & exchange user you have *no* unmitigated access to your data (other than through untrusted executables, ie outlook & exchange).
If you are an Exchange user and the administrator has set it up properly then you can use any POP3 or IMAP4 client you want. Does that count as "mitigated access to your data"?
I'm also confused as to why you are upset at having to use a proprietary client to access proprietary features.
Article VI, paragraph 2, makes treaties the supreme law of the land on the same footing with acts of Congress. By this supremacy clause, both statutes and treaties "are declared...to be the supreme law of the land, and no superior efficacy is given to either over the other." As statutes may be held void because they contravene the Constitution, it should follow that treaties may be held void, the Constitution being superior to both. And indeed the Court has numerous times so stated. It does not appear that the Court has ever held a treaty unconstitutional, although there are examples in which decision was seemingly based on a reading compelled by constitutional considerations.
I only know of one genocide treaty, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The US ratified it during the early 80s under Reagan's administration. The only acts made punishable by the Convention are genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide. Genocide is defined as killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, forcibly transferring children, imposing measures intended to prevent births, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction in whole or part.
IANAL, but I hardly see how making a racial joke could in any way be construed as "direct and public incitement to commit genocide".
Try to get a clue next time you post something inflammatory.
tobacco is a cash crop
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For the same amount you would spend on floppy disks to copy emacs ("easily duplicated software") you could feed a family of four for a month.
Food can't be easily duplicated but it can be grown cheaply. But software can't be duplicated for free either... you have to pay for the media to store it on if nothing else. I think you overestimate how much food costs and underestimate how much the infrastructure for getting your "free" software costs.
And, my point stands: Free Food is beneficial to most people. It is only a threat to the minority of businesses that rely on proprietary food sales.
The problem with free software is that no one would produce food under those circumstances, so no software would exist.
I may not be right, but your argument is flawed. Why can't food be free but people charge for the "service" of making sure it has low levels of pesticide or for packaging it in convenient ways? Aren't those the same arguments that free software advocates use? Don't they say that you have to think outside to box a little to understand how money can be made on free software?
And I think you are going to have a much better chance convincing people of the Right To Have Food than the Right to Look at Source Code.
Anyway, my real question was "What is your point". The point seems to have been, "It is okay to force some companies out of business because lots of others will benefit by getting something for free." Just saying that would have been a lot clearer. Unfortunately, as far as I can see that same argument applies to every business on the planet earth.
Making any given thing free is only a threat to the minority of businesses that rely on the sale of it. To everyone and everything else it is a great boon.
So why should software be free but food not?
their model is broken
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Red Hat isn't making money. I don't know about VA Linux, but I doubt you really do either. I think Suse actually turns a profit...but then again their value-added installer isn't open source so I don't think that's a great leg to be standing on.
Just because a company hasn't gone out of business yet doesn't mean their business model is valid.
Re:Companies and Software
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1. Most people don't grow food. 2. Of the companies that do grow food, most don't sell it directly. 3. Most people, however, eat food. For these people, Free Food increases their profits since they need not buy groceries.
Yes and I'm sure her people elected a fifteen year old girl because she had a great platform, tons of experience in public office, was a great debater, and her advisors wrote some really kick ass speeches about how she was going to balance the budget and stimulate trade with the Free Bulgorg Confederation even though she's never had a date or been off planet. And they decided to call her Queen cause it sounds cuter than President or Prime Minister.
I do agree that we shouldn't stretch things to fit the Nazi comparison though.
I'm confused what you think is stretching. Hitler committed genocide. Darth Vader committed genocide (twice, once against the Jedi and once against the inhabitants of Alderaan).
From what I've heard from a friend who read Lucas' treatment of the story, Naboo is important. Supposedly it is the only place in the whole galaxy that has cloning technology. (Hence the queen tulpa thing.) Lucas neglected to mention this to his audience. I can only imagine because he thought it would be a bigger revelation that way. If that is indeed the case I think it just goes to show he's a crap story teller. Imagine if Agatha Christie never introduced the murderer in her book. Wouldn't you feel cheated?
I'm sure someone somewhere is wondering the same thing about you. Microsoft makes money. Duh.
And no, Java for Windows only doesn't defeat the ENTIRE purpose of Java. Some people like the language for reasons other than cross-platform propaganda.
Cross platform was only one of the boons of Java. There are others. Maybe they don't want to program in C++ because they like garbage collection or the Java class libraries or Swing or something else entirely.
Not all experiments are designed to disprove a theory. I recall reading a study done by two sociologists who had discovered that priests used disconfirmatory methods more often than scientists. I always thought that was pretty scary.
I really can't think of any good reason why people wouldn't being that tax deductible basically means that you get to donate for free (up to a point and with certain restrictions of course).
How does tax deductible mean you get to donate for free? I am not an accountant but I thought tax deductible meant the amount you contribute gets taken off of your taxable income.
If I make $60,000 and get taxed at 33% then normally I would pay $19,800 in taxes. But if I made a $1000 donation to SPI I get taxed on $59,000 at 33%, paying $19.470.
I save $330 on taxes but spend $1000 out of pocket. Rather than it being free I spent $670. That doesn't strike me as free.
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What exactly would an open source stock brokerage be? The source for their trading software is available for download off the web? Even if you could convince the exchanges to let you connect to them electronically I have my doubts as to whether the NASD and SEC would be too happy about it.
Somehow I have a feeling that simply having the source code "open" isn't what you meant. What did you mean?
I suppose they could write an open source version of SQL Server in their now copious amounts of free time. :-)
The whole point of open source isn't to innovate. If you look at the FSF's essays (at least the early ones) Stallman specifically states the point of free software is create a level playing field. A level playing field means little or no innovation. Free software is about commoditizing software. When was the last time you heard about a break through innovation in any of the commodities?
How often does the proprietary software camp look at something free software has done and said, "Gee, I wish we'd done that." How often do you see posts saying, "We need an open source version of that software!"
Usually it seems that, no matter, what the article is about there are dozens of posts on /. from the neo-libertarians. The recent post office one springs to mind.
I find it funny that as soon as the question becomes "space exploration" (a question near and dear to the hearts of all geeks no doubt) the same people who were crying for government to stay out of licensing software professionals or taxing internet commerce or whatever suddenly turn into bleeding heart tax and spend liberals.
I mean, how do they justify the hypocrisy to themselves?
I agree with this anonymous coward. If private industry is better at technological innovation than government (which is what all those Silicon Valley execs are always telling us) then stop funding NASA completely and let private industry pick up the slack. Hooray for allocative efficiency!
sigh....the poster never explained why the liberty to not have all your information collected in one place is less important than my liberty to not hire blacks or women just because I don't like them. Or why I shouldn't have the liberty to own land in America but also be a sovereign power. Obviously not all liberties are essential. A minority's liberty to equal treatment is more important than my liberty to do whatever the hell I want with the company I own and run. Likewise, you do not have the liberty to sell yourself into slavery, even if it is a purely voluntary transaction.
Many of the things that were argued against for precendent alone currently make up the strongest economy the world has ever seen, which has created more wealth and distributed it more equally than any libertarian scheme. I think you will have a hard time convincing people that giving up those liberties was a bad idea. People aren't being asked to give up civil liberties just 'cause. They are being asked to give them up for something they value. Don't people have the liberty to give up their liberties? Apparently not, according to Franklin...such people don't deserve liberty. Franklin's quote is tantamount to saying that people who choose to make a different tradeoff than me don't deserve to live. Seems to me to be the antithesis to the libertarian live and let live.
If there is a slippery slope we put our first foot on it thousands of years ago. By the logic of the Slippery Slopists we should already all be living in fascist hell. After all, how long have we had a federal income tax, a social security number, a national government?
The existence of a slippery slope has also never been proven, only repeatedly asserted by those who apparently have a tenuous grasp of logic and rhetoric. I guess in your one liberal arts class they failed to mention that the slippery slope argument is a widely known common fallacy of rhetoric. Much like argumentum ex silentio, argumentum ad verecundiam, false dichotomy, reification fallacy, straw man, and post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
The slipperly slope may be a well understood concept, but so is white supremacy. Just because it is well understood doesn't mean it is accurate or valid. By saying this is a slippery slope you are requiring, but not defending, the premise that to accept a specific course of action would be to embrace a general principle that would apply equally well to other, plainly undesirable sorts of action. Hard core Slippery Slopists are like your third grade teacher who wouldn't let you bring your pet turtle to class because that meant she would have to let other people bring their pet elephants to class. The validity of slippery slopism in the civil liberties context has never been proven, much less scientifically investigated. Hell, telepathy has more scientific proof behind in than the existence of a slippery slope in civil liberties. You would think a bunch of engineers would understand the worthlessness of anecdotal evidence.
Finally, when someone asks you define all words longer than two syllables, I don't think saying "I shouldn't have to" is a good defense of your position. It makes it look like you can't even articulate one of your most closely held beliefs. Hardly the way to win others to your side. Of course, most such discussions seem geared more to alienate those who disagree with you rather than actually engage them in any kind of discourse.
Ad hominem attacks really don't work very well when you have no clue who I am or what my education is. For all you know I have master's degree in liberal arts. Of course, you probably are assuming that I'm a college aged (or recently graduated) white, male, computer science major.
What's more, when someone makes a claim (such as copying Franklin's quote) I feel it is up to the poster, rather than the reader, to supply the rationalization for why it is appropriate. Otherwise they are shirking their job. I think libertarians call that free riding in other contexts.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Every time something like this comes up I see this same stupid Ben Franklin quote. Every time the poster completely and absolutely fails to explain why this is an essential liberty or why it is a little temporary safety
To do that you'd have to explain what it is essential in relation to. And you'd have to quantify both little and temporary. Much better to leave it as nifty sounding rhetoric than fill it in with a real argument, I guess
What's more, I thought that our philosophy of natural rights of Men taught that people deserved these things simply because they exist, not because of a philosophy the person espouses. Making liberty and safety contigent on philosophical and political beliefs strikes me as decidedly fascist.
I agree that there is nothing that makes the "two times" law inherently good. However, it seems that the only way private industry can create a more reliable post office and still offer decent returns to stock holders is by charging twice as much. Even then, I would question whether the reliability is worth the price you are paying for it.
There are currently no incentives for FedEx and UPS to avoid cost cutting and efficiency seeking. On the contrary, as they compete with many companies, including each other, there seems to be every incentive to do so. That they are still, in the face of this competition, unable to create a cost structure capable of carrying the post office's rates is disheartening.
You seem to be saying that there is currently no competition and removing these laws would introduce it. I feel that there is competition and it has proven itself unable to be as efficient as the government entity doing the same job.
The main reason I would oppose removing these laws isn't so much because I believe these laws are inherently right, but more because I have little faith that our current marketizing jihad wouldn't end up destroying the post office entirely rather than settle on a happy medium. In the end, I think that would leave us with outlying communities that are not serviced by for-profit mail companies, in much the same way that for-profit HMOs are deselecting the less healthy patients.
My personal belief is that the social gains (which I believe are indirectly translated into economic gains) of a national postal system outweigh the relatively minor economic efficiencies that might be realized by marketizing.
because I guarantee that otherwise, businesses would spring up to deliver local mail for a fraction of the 33c per letter we pay now.
[Note: your guarantee does not count as a fact.]
What kind of guarantee are you offering? If private businesses charge 34c per letter are you personally going to reimburse the letter senders of America one billion dollars? Or are you offering the same guarantees that accompanied the other deregulations and mergers that have thus far failed to pass along any cost savings to customers (i.e. none whatsoever)? Doesn't sound like much of a guarantee to me.
It's because private business cannot, by law, charge anything less than twice the USPS rate for comparable package delivery service.
[Note: that prices might come down and other companies might enter the market is also not a fact.]
Looking at FedEx's 1998 Annual report they had a total revenue of $15,873,000,000 and total operating costs of $14,862,150. The revenue from domestic express deliveries was $9,300,000,000. Since that figure is doubled what they really should have made (if I'm understanding your correctly) is $4,650,000,000 in revenues. Unfortunately, with the new, lower revenue from domestic express deliveries, instead of an operating income of $1 billion they instead find themselves with an operating loss of $3.5 billion.
Doesn't sound profitable to me, but I'm not an economist so what do I know?
From looking at their corporate report it seems like the only reason FedEx is still is business is because of the "two-times" rule. They aren't efficient enough to operate with the same cost structure as the USPS, apparently.
Besides, where would this "profit" go?
I think they are called retained earnings. You don't distribute them to share holders via dividends. Most publicly traded companies don't distribute to shareholders every penny of their profits, either. In any case, I thought shared of USPS stock were usually called Treasury Bills or Government Bonds or somesuch. But I'm not an accountant so I could be wrong.
It is not worth your salary to suffer under Outlook, knowing that your mail is stored locally (and on the server) in a closed, proprietary format.
I don't understand this sentence. Yes, the mail is stored on the server in a closed, proprietary format. Who cares what particular database they used to store messages on the server? All that matters to the end user is how they access the messages. I think computer people call that an abstract data type.
How the mail is stored locally depends on what your local client is. Since you can access you Exchange account via POP3 or IMAP4 there are a plethora of options. Personally, I used mutt and stored them in maildir format.
In other words, if you are an outlook & exchange user you have *no* unmitigated access to your data (other than through untrusted executables, ie outlook & exchange).
If you are an Exchange user and the administrator has set it up properly then you can use any POP3 or IMAP4 client you want. Does that count as "mitigated access to your data"?
I'm also confused as to why you are upset at having to use a proprietary client to access proprietary features.
It's the standard Free Software definition of Free:
;-)
Time is free because we have nothing better to do with it.
Hardware is free because government grants paid for them.
It's the philosophy the FSF is based on!
Article VI, paragraph 2, makes treaties the supreme law of the land on the same footing with acts of Congress. By this supremacy clause, both statutes and treaties "are declared...to be the supreme law of the land, and no superior efficacy is given to either over the other." As statutes may be held void because they contravene the Constitution, it should follow that treaties may be held void, the Constitution being superior to both. And indeed the Court has numerous times so stated. It does not appear that the Court has ever held a treaty unconstitutional, although there are examples in which decision was seemingly based on a reading compelled by constitutional considerations.
I only know of one genocide treaty, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The US ratified it during the early 80s under Reagan's administration. The only acts made punishable by the Convention are genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide. Genocide is defined as killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, forcibly transferring children, imposing measures intended to prevent births, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction in whole or part.
IANAL, but I hardly see how making a racial joke could in any way be construed as "direct and public incitement to commit genocide".
Try to get a clue next time you post something inflammatory.
For the same amount you would spend on floppy disks to copy emacs ("easily duplicated software") you could feed a family of four for a month.
... you have to pay for the media to store it on if nothing else. I think you overestimate how much food costs and underestimate how much the infrastructure for getting your "free" software costs.
Food can't be easily duplicated but it can be grown cheaply. But software can't be duplicated for free either
And, my point stands: Free Food is beneficial to most people. It is only a threat to the minority of businesses that rely on proprietary food sales.
The problem with free software is that no one would produce food under those circumstances, so no software would exist.
I may not be right, but your argument is flawed. Why can't food be free but people charge for the "service" of making sure it has low levels of pesticide or for packaging it in convenient ways? Aren't those the same arguments that free software advocates use? Don't they say that you have to think outside to box a little to understand how money can be made on free software?
And I think you are going to have a much better chance convincing people of the Right To Have Food than the Right to Look at Source Code.
Anyway, my real question was "What is your point". The point seems to have been, "It is okay to force some companies out of business because lots of others will benefit by getting something for free." Just saying that would have been a lot clearer. Unfortunately, as far as I can see that same argument applies to every business on the planet earth.
Making any given thing free is only a threat to the minority of businesses that rely on the sale of it. To everyone and everything else it is a great boon.
So why should software be free but food not?
Red Hat isn't making money. I don't know about VA Linux, but I doubt you really do either. I think Suse actually turns a profit...but then again their value-added installer isn't open source so I don't think that's a great leg to be standing on.
Just because a company hasn't gone out of business yet doesn't mean their business model is valid.
1. Most people don't grow food.
2. Of the companies that do grow food, most don't sell it directly.
3. Most people, however, eat food. For these people, Free Food increases their profits since they need not buy groceries.
Your point, again?
It means low performance when everyone else can saturate even higher bandwidth connections.
I'm wondering why exactly compiler portability matters? If I write standards compliant C/C++/FORTRAN/Ada code it doesn't matter what compiler I use.
Of course, gcc seems further behind on standards compliance than the proprietary compilers I've used.
Yes and I'm sure her people elected a fifteen year old girl because she had a great platform, tons of experience in public office, was a great debater, and her advisors wrote some really kick ass speeches about how she was going to balance the budget and stimulate trade with the Free Bulgorg Confederation even though she's never had a date or been off planet. And they decided to call her Queen cause it sounds cuter than President or Prime Minister.
I do agree that we shouldn't stretch things to fit the Nazi comparison though.
I'm confused what you think is stretching. Hitler committed genocide. Darth Vader committed genocide (twice, once against the Jedi and once against the inhabitants of Alderaan).
Why isn't Hitler then a valid comparison to make?
Yes, anonymous posters can spread scandalous, libellious drivel - but who listens to them? A few people perhaps, but not many.
Doesn't the National Enquirer have the largest circulation of any weekly paper in America? Apparently a lot of people listen.
From what I've heard from a friend who read Lucas' treatment of the story, Naboo is important. Supposedly it is the only place in the whole galaxy that has cloning technology. (Hence the queen tulpa thing.) Lucas neglected to mention this to his audience. I can only imagine because he thought it would be a bigger revelation that way. If that is indeed the case I think it just goes to show he's a crap story teller. Imagine if Agatha Christie never introduced the murderer in her book. Wouldn't you feel cheated?
Why is it that M$ is allowed to continue?
I'm sure someone somewhere is wondering the same thing about you. Microsoft makes money. Duh.
And no, Java for Windows only doesn't defeat the ENTIRE purpose of Java. Some people like the language for reasons other than cross-platform propaganda.
Cross platform was only one of the boons of Java. There are others. Maybe they don't want to program in C++ because they like garbage collection or the Java class libraries or Swing or something else entirely.
Experiments are designed to disprove a theory.
Not all experiments are designed to disprove a theory. I recall reading a study done by two sociologists who had discovered that priests used disconfirmatory methods more often than scientists. I always thought that was pretty scary.
I really can't think of any good reason why people wouldn't being that tax deductible basically means that you get to donate for free (up to a point and with certain restrictions of course).
How does tax deductible mean you get to donate for free? I am not an accountant but I thought tax deductible meant the amount you contribute gets taken off of your taxable income.
If I make $60,000 and get taxed at 33% then normally I would pay $19,800 in taxes. But if I made a $1000 donation to SPI I get taxed on $59,000 at 33%, paying $19.470.
I save $330 on taxes but spend $1000 out of pocket. Rather than it being free I spent $670. That doesn't strike me as free.