This is how it works: in school or at work, day after day, they make you repeat what the newspapers say. Originality is bad for you, thinking is bad for you, reasoning is bad for you. Parroting it back with every show of enthusiasm is good for you.
I hate to break it to you, but this applies to us as much as it does them. The difference is that in the West, we've perfected it to such an extent that our population are almost completely unaware.
Got nothing better to do? Of all the threats to the world order, I think North Korea sits pretty close to the bottom. How about we uncover some of the hundreds of secret & illegal US & Israeli prisons, nuclear sites, etc? Sure, I know the answer already... because these are 35,000 idiots we're talking about, and they all believe that North Korea is out to get them, and that the US and Israel are bastions of peace and democracy. Of course, in our secret prisons, no-one is tortured to death. And our secret nuclear bases would never actually launch an attack on another country... in fact these are better thought of as peace bases, and are only secret because our enemies want to attack our peace!
a) Obama is a liar, sure... but: b) Bush is too stupid to be evil. He just had evil people pulling his strings
But more generally, I think you're on the right track. The similarity between Obama's and Bush's policies demonstrates that the US has yet to achieve anything even remotely democratic, and further, that it doesn't appear to matter who becomes president or which party wins government... the same shit keeps happening.
Time to organise outside the political establishment.
Agreed. The original story makes it sound like a deviation from the current would be bad. I think pretty much anything would be better. In particular, more actual substance... more discussion... more grouping of people of similar interests. This isn't "subversion". It's just discussion. God forbid people actually have a fucking clue what they're voting on before the fact...
There's quite a difference between a government organisation doing research and securing patents, and a private company doing the same thing. In the case of a government organisation, the benefits will actually trickle-down to everyone, whereas with a private company, they just hoard and profit.
Those bastards have been allowed to monopolise the food supply, polluting the Earth with their GM madness for far too long. They even want a monopoly over water! The Monsanto / GM appologists will tell me how much 'better' off we all are when eating roundup-riddled, petro-chemical-fertilised GM foods, but I allege they are full of shit.
Time to protect our food supply from both GM and patents. First step is a Monsanto boycott.
You're conveniently side-stepping the arguement. It's no good thumping your chest ( is it wrapping in an American flag, by any chance? ) and claiming that you're the 'top of the food chain' and so 'anything goes'.
We are omnivorous and don't really care what we eat, where it comes from and how it died. We just want it in order to survive.
Actually that's quite a disingenious arguement. We only very recently started eating meat, and are still horribly equipped for it. Have you tried eating raw meat? Go on... and then tell me we're "supposed to eat meat" and it's natural. When you're done vomiting, consider that eating meat has been statistically proven to lower your life expectancy by at least 15% - it increases the risk of all sorts of cancers and heart disease - the list goes on. So the term 'omnivore' is used quite liberally when applied to humans. We're herbivores who have figured out how to burn animals to the point where eating them at least doesn't make us instantly sick.
I'm all praise for Miro. After discovering it, my TV viewing dropped considerably. Channels like 'The Real News' provide unbiased, in-depth coverage of world events. Channels like Submedia / It's the End of the World as we Know it provide some nice activist news with a health sprinkling of comedy. Then there are some pretty nice documentaries. Oh, and then there's that tech babe with gadget reviews ( can't remember the name of the channel for the moment ). But anyway, both the quality and the quantity of Miro channels runs rings around what's available via free-to-air stuff AND pay TV. And there are no ads!
That's the point exactly. One of the driving factors for us was that our legacy Access system was starting to become wildly unstable and very slow. I'm of course of the opinion that my solution is far better than Access.
I did some extensive testing of Base a little while back. It's OK for very limited use, but let's be brutally honest... you don't create solid, complex systems on Base.
But people still want to create database front-ends on Linux, and have to use God-aweful web-based UIs.
Despair no longer - I have created a cross-platform, open-source framework to implement 'forms', 'dataasheets' and 'reports'. I'm even part-way ( 30% or so ) through creating a GUI builder to tie everything together. But the libraries are already complete and in production ( heavy use, I might add ). To download / view screenshots or just check out what's going on, it's all on my website: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis/
As mentioned in my blog, I think if politicians are so keen to 'clean up the internet', they should start closer to home, in their own PCs. How many times have we seen Australian politicians in various compromising positions... 'chair-sniffing', kiddie-porn scandals, and of course Prime Minister Rudd can't even remember his night out in Vagas where he had lap dances etc paid for by the Aussie taxpayer.
Of course this is less Labor's fault than fucking Family First, that bunch of ultra-conservative freaks who openly admit they want to turn Australia into a fundamentalist hell-hole, dissolving the separation between religion and state, and enforce their own sexually perverted vision on 'the right way' down everyone else's throats. Their backers include the Assembly of God nut-cases, who are outright hostile to democracy, prevent their own members from reading any non-God-related material, force their children into slave labour for the church, spread vicious lies about progressive political candidates, and support terrorist attacks on abortion clinics. They're a real piece of work! But on the other hand, it's enlightening to see Labor - the so-called 'alternative' party ( inside the 2-party system of course ) backing this lunacy.
You're missing the point. MySQL was developed to give Postgres fan-boys such as yourself something to troll about. See how happy it makes you? Now pull your pants up and run along...
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid your neighbors paychecks, and give you their money.
Most people get raided by their employer, not by the government. The whole idea of income redistribution is that you chop off the shockingly excessive incomes of the top couple of percent, and share it around slightly more equitably. Every single person I've talked to finds fat-cat pay excessive and offensive. You know the types. Big multi-million-dollar CEOs, share market speculators, and let's not forget merchant bankers. Income redistribution is merely a mild reformist solution to put a friendlier face on capitalism and it's outrageous inequalities.
Left-wing? Ha! All US politicians are so far to the right it's truly frightening. You think Obama, who wholeheartedly supported the trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Streat, and who has been beating the war drums to attack Pakistan for *ages* is left-wing? Sure, he's left-wing compared to Bush. But we're splitting hairs here. They're both waaaaaaaaaaaaay to the right.
And as for dictatorship, I think that's what you've got right now, isn't it? You know, Commander-In-Chief, blanket-immunity-from-illegal-activities, we'll-torture-if-we-want-to Dubya?
I don't want the government taking my money and giving it to others
This carries a number of dangerous assumptions, mainly that some people are worth more than others, and are therefore entitled to a greater share of aggregate production. In simple examples, this greater share is portayed as a positive thing... it's held up as a demonstration of the value of incentives.
The problem is that it doesn't scale well at all. In particular, it doesn't address the emergence of power that money provides as the system scales up. Our current system - far from a simple example - demonstrates this aptly. Who can say that the likes of Rupert Murdock, Bill Gates, etc, have the same input into our supposedely 'democratic' system as someone on minimum wage. We of course *need* to have these minimum-wage jobs filled - they're essential jobs in production, distribution, and day-to-day nuts-and-bolts tasks that society wouldn't function without. But of course people who fill these jobs are very much second-class citizens with no democratic voice at all when compared to the like of those who... say... are responsible for the current world financial crisis.
The federal and state governments should create incentives for local philanthropic efforts, rather than take more of my money just to filter through a slow, inefficient bureaucracy and then redistribute it to people who have no effect on my local economy.
No. We shouldn't waste our time trying to convince the rich to give us money out of the goodness of theirs hearts. They won't give us a dime, and they certainly don't give a fuck about people in 3rd world countries working in sweat-shops to make our everyday goods. This last issue is incredibly important and can't be separated from the discussion. Capitalism doesn't just affect you and me in the west - it affects everyone the world over, including those who don't get to vote for one idiot over another dickhead every couple of years.
What we should do is ask ourselves: if our governments are so ineffecient, bureaucratic, etc, then WHY is it so. You live in a democracy? Then YOU are responsible for this inefficiency. If they're getting away with bullshit, it's on YOUR watch. Governments are not somehow inescapably doomed to inefficiency. But of course if you have an uneducated, disinterested bunch of idiots making up a large proportion of your voting base, then what do you expect?
In fact, poorer people are more likely to buy China-made crap at the dollar store, so my money - which I would have spent on American goods - get reduced by 75% on its way through Washington and the rest buys goods manufactured in Asia.
This is a good point. This is one example of the damage that 'free trade' does. We should NOT trade when in an asymetric relationship. Clearly it damages both sides - workers in 3rd world slave labour camps are pushed down by greedy capitalists in their own country, and people on the other side of the relationship ( ie consumers here ) are forced via economic pressures to complete the cycle and keep buying dheaper products, over locally produced products.
What we should do about this is throw out the neo-conservative bullshit about free trade, and place import duties on all items, to the extent that they undercut locally produced productsm until wages are normalised. This supports 3rd-world workers in increasing their wages, and also supports locally produced products ( ie local jobs ). I have no problem with trading with countries where people are employed under decent conditions, with decent wages. But I strongly object to the current situation where the cheapest, and often only option is to buy from slave labour producers. I think any decent person would agree. Some might disagree with my plan to fix things, but all would agree with the description of the problem.
I agree it's cool that E17 runs on cellphones. Whether it's as cool as the UI of my HTC Touch is another matter.
But more to the point is the question of what's been sacrificed in order for this to happen. I think I've got the answer...
Raster has been pushing in this direction for years now. Even before his year-long stint at OpenMoko, he's been devoting much time and effort to get E17 running respectably on very lean hardware. But at the same time, he's flatly refused to support compositing, and in particular, opengl compositing, ala texture_from_pixmap. The argument was that it's "not ready for prime time". But of course many people disagree with this and run Compiz on top of Gnome, KDE and XFCE. There have been a number of aborted attempts to get compiz ported to E17. Bang!, Egloo, Ecomorph projects come to mind, all of which at one point worked pretty well, but required changes to/e17/apps/e that weren't allowed at the time, and alas these projects have now all been abandoned.
As a result, Enlightenment has morphed from a project that pushed the envelope on linux desktops, to a project that just keeps up on cellphones. Sure it still runs on linux desktops, but so do other window managers that take better advantage of hardware and technology available this decade.
Raster says that compositing is 'back on the table' for an E18 release, which judging by current release timings, will be able 2015. Until then we get a half-arse hack of xcompmgr. I can't help feeling that all the users and developers after some bling have already moved to compiz, which is a pitty, as E17's infrastructure is still far better than the competition.
Theoretically, yes you can fork the code. But there are broader issues than the legal ability to fork.
This has put a huge question-mark over MySQL's long-term viability. For a fork to be viable, you need a critical mass of developers. But we've seen 2 key ( founding ) developers leave, and Oracle buy InnoDB.
If Sun bought MySQL to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?
If Oracle bought InnoDB to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?
Of course you could argue that neither company is obliged to do anything. But alternatively you could argue that both companies have behaved in an explicitly anti-competitive way. This is itself is of course no surprise to anyone other than the US justice department.
As far as I know, and as far as Wikipedia thinks, it has to do with a free price system. That's in contrast to a planned economy, where a central authority sets prices.
Actually Wikipedia says exactly the same as me:
Free markets contrast sharply with controlled markets or regulated markets, in which governments directly or indirectly regulate prices or supplies, distorting (according to free market theory) market signals
Price is only one consideration. And regulation is the only method ( other than a 'free' market ) to set prices. Why would you want to set prices centrally? Look at our current energy problems. Those who came before us burned all the cheap energy, leaving us the expensive remains ( not to mention environmental issues ). Renewable energy is not yet competitive on a price basis. So why not bump up the price of non-renewable and use the difference to subsidize renewables? That's not a very radical suggestion. In fact it's a prudent one. What's more, if this decision was taken earlier, we could have smoothed our transition into renewable energy sources, instead of being faced with steeply rising costs now. That's called planning. That's not radical. It's sensible.
It's ( the market is ) to maximize efficient allocation of resources
No. It's there to maximize profits. Efficiency of resource use never comes into the equation. Under a free market, whatever will maximize profits is exactly what people will do. If that means horrific waste of resources, then that's what will happen.
Speculators are valuable in a variety of ways. The biggest one is through increasing liquidity
This argument only makes sense under the assumption of a capitalist market. Under a planned economy, there is no need for speculation - the concept of liquidity doesn't exist. I realise this offends capitalist apologists. The point is that the liquidity argument won't phase a socialist at all.
All of those aid in smooth economic functioning.
No. All of those aid in fine-tuning the market to produce the maximum profit. Not in smoothing economic functioning. In fact, it's exact the opposite. Speculation wildly increases market fluctuations, leading to spectacular crashes, as all speculators take their cues from each other, and all decide to sell at the same time. In particular those who borrow and are forced into selling when their stocks drop by X percent - which often happens.
Did you expect it to? That's not what it's good at, and it's not what you should use it for. There are other mechanisms that are much better at that, like progressive taxation, and spending that on opportunity-increasing activities, like education, small business loans, and aid to people who for whatever reason can't keep up.
These are all good short-term improvements on capitalism, yes... in particular in theory. But in practice, try actually achieving them in a capitalist society. You'll find massive resistance. If you still manage to push ahead, you'll find business fleeing the country to pursue more 'productive' environments.
The reason to intervene in the markets now isn't for the bankers; they can go fuck themselves. It's to prevent a systemic collapse that would devastate the economy for years to come.
Sure. But how do we intervene? Do we give them a trillion dollars and a pat on the back? Do we buy all their shit investments and let them keep all the good ones? Or do we actually invest in them... ie nationalize them? If it's my money going into it, I want a share in it. I don't see any valid reason to not nationalize failed industries ( or non-failed industries... but that's a slightly different topic ).
free markets are very effective tools in the right circumstances, especially when well regulated
You are confused about what the 'free' in 'free market' refers to. It refers to regulation, or lack thereof. In reality, there is no such thing as a 'free' market - everyone has tariffs and barriers ( or bariffs and terriers as Dubya puts it ), and rightly so. The question is how much do you regulate. The current example clearly demonstrates the answer: not enough at this point.
But this leads to another more broad question about the role of the 'market'. Is it there to maximize profits? Are there more fundamental reasons for it to be there? Are there better ways of achieving these goals? Clearly speculation does nothing to increase real production. And clearly the market doesn't distribute equitably. Here's an example...
There are a hell of a lot of Americans who have already lost everything, or are about to lose everything. This is a market solution. It's absolutely devastating, but it's the best the market can do. But a more organised way of doing things would be for the government to nationalise the banks. This would largely solve the current crisis ( or at least prevent it from happening again ). But more importantly, the government would be in the position to give people a fair go when they fall behind in their mortgage payments. I think it's interesting ( and worrying ) that Wall Street demands a bail-out when they fail at their own game, but when workers can't pay their monthly payments ( through no fault of their own, mind you ), there is no bail-out. Why does big business get to go directly against their own non-interventionist 'free market' ideology, yet individuals must bear the full brunt of the collapse, with no bail-out of their mortages?
You're not paying attention to the answer I've given on this plenty of times now. People would use email because it would be exactly the same as it is now, only there would be no spam. Would YOU charge your friends who send you email, or would you refund the amount charged into their ISP's account? In truth, you'd probably have something set up to automatically refund all your friends' account right away.
Legitimate senders have plenty to worry if they're businesses
No they don't. They're have a small initial cost, which would be quickly refunded. If they're really business contacts, them they'll make plenty more back out of their relationship to you than this initial cost ( which, again, gets refunded ).
Adding a cost is just going to discourage using SMTP
It's not a cost if it gets refunded.
Company's can require using another system entirely and there is nothing the consumer can do other than not use it - if people want something, they will do it.
What are you talking about now? Look. I don't care if companies want to go and start their own messaging service - they're free to do this, but it won't catch on if they allow anyone to send anything they want to anyone and everyone en masse. That's the whole point. And extending your logic of "if people want XXX they'll just do it", then consider this... if I want to charge people who send me email, then I'll just do it... which I'm seriously considering doing anyway ( for spammers only of course ). Don't worry though - I'll keep letting people like you respond to me, as long as you don't try to sell me anything.
They're free to do this, and deal with the spam. Legitimate senders would have no worries. For example, why would one of my friends worry about sending me an email? The answer is that they wouldn't. But a spammer would worry a lot...
My approach isn't necessarily a top-down approach. It's just a simple change in the way people think about email. It doesn't have to be IMPLEMENTED across the board for it to work. In fact I would suggest that all parties play a 'wait and see' approach, as long as you've got the legal framework in place for me to charge people who I receive email from IF I WANT. This means that all legitimate email will just keep happening, and there will be an initial flurry of people charging spammers for receiving their junk, followed by all spammers going broke. It wouldn't be a permanent situation - just a legal framework to charge people if need be.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to break it to you, but this applies to us as much as it does them. The difference is that in the West, we've perfected it to such an extent that our population are almost completely unaware.
Got nothing better to do? Of all the threats to the world order, I think North Korea sits pretty close to the bottom. How about we uncover some of the hundreds of secret & illegal US & Israeli prisons, nuclear sites, etc? Sure, I know the answer already ... because these are 35,000 idiots we're talking about, and they all believe that North Korea is out to get them, and that the US and Israel are bastions of peace and democracy. Of course, in our secret prisons, no-one is tortured to death. And our secret nuclear bases would never actually launch an attack on another country ... in fact these are better thought of as peace bases, and are only secret because our enemies want to attack our peace!
Actually I would say:
a) Obama is a liar, sure ... but:
b) Bush is too stupid to be evil. He just had evil people pulling his strings
But more generally, I think you're on the right track. The similarity between Obama's and Bush's policies demonstrates that the US has yet to achieve anything even remotely democratic, and further, that it doesn't appear to matter who becomes president or which party wins government ... the same shit keeps happening.
Time to organise outside the political establishment.
Agreed. The original story makes it sound like a deviation from the current would be bad. I think pretty much anything would be better. In particular, more actual substance ... more discussion ... more grouping of people of similar interests. This isn't "subversion". It's just discussion. God forbid people actually have a fucking clue what they're voting on before the fact ...
There's quite a difference between a government organisation doing research and securing patents, and a private company doing the same thing. In the case of a government organisation, the benefits will actually trickle-down to everyone, whereas with a private company, they just hoard and profit.
Those bastards have been allowed to monopolise the food supply, polluting the Earth with their GM madness for far too long. They even want a monopoly over water! The Monsanto / GM appologists will tell me how much 'better' off we all are when eating roundup-riddled, petro-chemical-fertilised GM foods, but I allege they are full of shit.
Time to protect our food supply from both GM and patents. First step is a Monsanto boycott.
You're conveniently side-stepping the arguement. It's no good thumping your chest ( is it wrapping in an American flag, by any chance? ) and claiming that you're the 'top of the food chain' and so 'anything goes'.
Actually that's quite a disingenious arguement. We only very recently started eating meat, and are still horribly equipped for it. Have you tried eating raw meat? Go on ... and then tell me we're "supposed to eat meat" and it's natural. When you're done vomiting, consider that eating meat has been statistically proven to lower your life expectancy by at least 15% - it increases the risk of all sorts of cancers and heart disease - the list goes on. So the term 'omnivore' is used quite liberally when applied to humans. We're herbivores who have figured out how to burn animals to the point where eating them at least doesn't make us instantly sick.
I'm all praise for Miro. After discovering it, my TV viewing dropped considerably. Channels like 'The Real News' provide unbiased, in-depth coverage of world events. Channels like Submedia / It's the End of the World as we Know it provide some nice activist news with a health sprinkling of comedy. Then there are some pretty nice documentaries. Oh, and then there's that tech babe with gadget reviews ( can't remember the name of the channel for the moment ). But anyway, both the quality and the quantity of Miro channels runs rings around what's available via free-to-air stuff AND pay TV. And there are no ads!
That's the point exactly. One of the driving factors for us was that our legacy Access system was starting to become wildly unstable and very slow. I'm of course of the opinion that my solution is far better than Access.
Hi. Yes I'm Dan. I assume I know you. Real name?
And yes, up to this point I've done it all myself. I'm trying to recruit some friends - we'll see how it goes.
Macro support in Base? Hmmm.
I did some extensive testing of Base a little while back. It's OK for very limited use, but let's be brutally honest ... you don't create solid, complex systems on Base.
But people still want to create database front-ends on Linux, and have to use God-aweful web-based UIs.
Despair no longer - I have created a cross-platform, open-source framework to implement 'forms', 'dataasheets' and 'reports'. I'm even part-way ( 30% or so ) through creating a GUI builder to tie everything together. But the libraries are already complete and in production ( heavy use, I might add ). To download / view screenshots or just check out what's going on, it's all on my website: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis/
You don't understand politics, do you?
As mentioned in my blog, I think if politicians are so keen to 'clean up the internet', they should start closer to home, in their own PCs. How many times have we seen Australian politicians in various compromising positions ... 'chair-sniffing', kiddie-porn scandals, and of course Prime Minister Rudd can't even remember his night out in Vagas where he had lap dances etc paid for by the Aussie taxpayer.
Of course this is less Labor's fault than fucking Family First, that bunch of ultra-conservative freaks who openly admit they want to turn Australia into a fundamentalist hell-hole, dissolving the separation between religion and state, and enforce their own sexually perverted vision on 'the right way' down everyone else's throats. Their backers include the Assembly of God nut-cases, who are outright hostile to democracy, prevent their own members from reading any non-God-related material, force their children into slave labour for the church, spread vicious lies about progressive political candidates, and support terrorist attacks on abortion clinics. They're a real piece of work! But on the other hand, it's enlightening to see Labor - the so-called 'alternative' party ( inside the 2-party system of course ) backing this lunacy.
You're missing the point. MySQL was developed to give Postgres fan-boys such as yourself something to troll about. See how happy it makes you? Now pull your pants up and run along ...
Most people get raided by their employer, not by the government. The whole idea of income redistribution is that you chop off the shockingly excessive incomes of the top couple of percent, and share it around slightly more equitably. Every single person I've talked to finds fat-cat pay excessive and offensive. You know the types. Big multi-million-dollar CEOs, share market speculators, and let's not forget merchant bankers. Income redistribution is merely a mild reformist solution to put a friendlier face on capitalism and it's outrageous inequalities.
Left-wing? Ha! All US politicians are so far to the right it's truly frightening. You think Obama, who wholeheartedly supported the trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Streat, and who has been beating the war drums to attack Pakistan for *ages* is left-wing? Sure, he's left-wing compared to Bush. But we're splitting hairs here. They're both waaaaaaaaaaaaay to the right.
And as for dictatorship, I think that's what you've got right now, isn't it? You know, Commander-In-Chief, blanket-immunity-from-illegal-activities, we'll-torture-if-we-want-to Dubya?
Jesus Christ, you need some perspective.
This carries a number of dangerous assumptions, mainly that some people are worth more than others, and are therefore entitled to a greater share of aggregate production. In simple examples, this greater share is portayed as a positive thing ... it's held up as a demonstration of the value of incentives.
The problem is that it doesn't scale well at all. In particular, it doesn't address the emergence of power that money provides as the system scales up. Our current system - far from a simple example - demonstrates this aptly. Who can say that the likes of Rupert Murdock, Bill Gates, etc, have the same input into our supposedely 'democratic' system as someone on minimum wage. We of course *need* to have these minimum-wage jobs filled - they're essential jobs in production, distribution, and day-to-day nuts-and-bolts tasks that society wouldn't function without. But of course people who fill these jobs are very much second-class citizens with no democratic voice at all when compared to the like of those who ... say ... are responsible for the current world financial crisis.
No. We shouldn't waste our time trying to convince the rich to give us money out of the goodness of theirs hearts. They won't give us a dime, and they certainly don't give a fuck about people in 3rd world countries working in sweat-shops to make our everyday goods. This last issue is incredibly important and can't be separated from the discussion. Capitalism doesn't just affect you and me in the west - it affects everyone the world over, including those who don't get to vote for one idiot over another dickhead every couple of years.
What we should do is ask ourselves: if our governments are so ineffecient, bureaucratic, etc, then WHY is it so. You live in a democracy? Then YOU are responsible for this inefficiency. If they're getting away with bullshit, it's on YOUR watch. Governments are not somehow inescapably doomed to inefficiency. But of course if you have an uneducated, disinterested bunch of idiots making up a large proportion of your voting base, then what do you expect?
This is a good point. This is one example of the damage that 'free trade' does. We should NOT trade when in an asymetric relationship. Clearly it damages both sides - workers in 3rd world slave labour camps are pushed down by greedy capitalists in their own country, and people on the other side of the relationship ( ie consumers here ) are forced via economic pressures to complete the cycle and keep buying dheaper products, over locally produced products.
What we should do about this is throw out the neo-conservative bullshit about free trade, and place import duties on all items, to the extent that they undercut locally produced productsm until wages are normalised. This supports 3rd-world workers in increasing their wages, and also supports locally produced products ( ie local jobs ). I have no problem with trading with countries where people are employed under decent conditions, with decent wages. But I strongly object to the current situation where the cheapest, and often only option is to buy from slave labour producers. I think any decent person would agree. Some might disagree with my plan to fix things, but all would agree with the description of the problem.
1) Both these ( USSR, Eastern Europe ) are examples of state capitalism, which collapsed due to massive corruption.
2) Simply pointing to one example of central planning that failed in no way proves that all incarnations of central planning will fail.
I agree it's cool that E17 runs on cellphones. Whether it's as cool as the UI of my HTC Touch is another matter.
But more to the point is the question of what's been sacrificed in order for this to happen. I think I've got the answer ...
Raster has been pushing in this direction for years now. Even before his year-long stint at OpenMoko, he's been devoting much time and effort to get E17 running respectably on very lean hardware. But at the same time, he's flatly refused to support compositing, and in particular, opengl compositing, ala texture_from_pixmap. The argument was that it's "not ready for prime time". But of course many people disagree with this and run Compiz on top of Gnome, KDE and XFCE. There have been a number of aborted attempts to get compiz ported to E17. Bang!, Egloo, Ecomorph projects come to mind, all of which at one point worked pretty well, but required changes to /e17/apps/e that weren't allowed at the time, and alas these projects have now all been abandoned.
As a result, Enlightenment has morphed from a project that pushed the envelope on linux desktops, to a project that just keeps up on cellphones. Sure it still runs on linux desktops, but so do other window managers that take better advantage of hardware and technology available this decade.
Raster says that compositing is 'back on the table' for an E18 release, which judging by current release timings, will be able 2015. Until then we get a half-arse hack of xcompmgr. I can't help feeling that all the users and developers after some bling have already moved to compiz, which is a pitty, as E17's infrastructure is still far better than the competition.
Theoretically, yes you can fork the code. But there are broader issues than the legal ability to fork.
This has put a huge question-mark over MySQL's long-term viability. For a fork to be viable, you need a critical mass of developers. But we've seen 2 key ( founding ) developers leave, and Oracle buy InnoDB.
If Sun bought MySQL to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?
If Oracle bought InnoDB to further the project, then where is the evidence that this is happening?
Of course you could argue that neither company is obliged to do anything. But alternatively you could argue that both companies have behaved in an explicitly anti-competitive way. This is itself is of course no surprise to anyone other than the US justice department.
Actually Wikipedia says exactly the same as me:
Price is only one consideration. And regulation is the only method ( other than a 'free' market ) to set prices. Why would you want to set prices centrally? Look at our current energy problems. Those who came before us burned all the cheap energy, leaving us the expensive remains ( not to mention environmental issues ). Renewable energy is not yet competitive on a price basis. So why not bump up the price of non-renewable and use the difference to subsidize renewables? That's not a very radical suggestion. In fact it's a prudent one. What's more, if this decision was taken earlier, we could have smoothed our transition into renewable energy sources, instead of being faced with steeply rising costs now. That's called planning. That's not radical. It's sensible.
No. It's there to maximize profits. Efficiency of resource use never comes into the equation. Under a free market, whatever will maximize profits is exactly what people will do. If that means horrific waste of resources, then that's what will happen.
This argument only makes sense under the assumption of a capitalist market. Under a planned economy, there is no need for speculation - the concept of liquidity doesn't exist. I realise this offends capitalist apologists. The point is that the liquidity argument won't phase a socialist at all.
No. All of those aid in fine-tuning the market to produce the maximum profit. Not in smoothing economic functioning. In fact, it's exact the opposite. Speculation wildly increases market fluctuations, leading to spectacular crashes, as all speculators take their cues from each other, and all decide to sell at the same time. In particular those who borrow and are forced into selling when their stocks drop by X percent - which often happens.
These are all good short-term improvements on capitalism, yes ... in particular in theory. But in practice, try actually achieving them in a capitalist society. You'll find massive resistance. If you still manage to push ahead, you'll find business fleeing the country to pursue more 'productive' environments.
Sure. But how do we intervene? Do we give them a trillion dollars and a pat on the back? Do we buy all their shit investments and let them keep all the good ones? Or do we actually invest in them ... ie nationalize them? If it's my money going into it, I want a share in it. I don't see any valid reason to not nationalize failed industries ( or non-failed industries ... but that's a slightly different topic ).
You are confused about what the 'free' in 'free market' refers to. It refers to regulation, or lack thereof. In reality, there is no such thing as a 'free' market - everyone has tariffs and barriers ( or bariffs and terriers as Dubya puts it ), and rightly so. The question is how much do you regulate. The current example clearly demonstrates the answer: not enough at this point.
But this leads to another more broad question about the role of the 'market'. Is it there to maximize profits? Are there more fundamental reasons for it to be there? Are there better ways of achieving these goals? Clearly speculation does nothing to increase real production. And clearly the market doesn't distribute equitably. Here's an example ...
There are a hell of a lot of Americans who have already lost everything, or are about to lose everything. This is a market solution. It's absolutely devastating, but it's the best the market can do. But a more organised way of doing things would be for the government to nationalise the banks. This would largely solve the current crisis ( or at least prevent it from happening again ). But more importantly, the government would be in the position to give people a fair go when they fall behind in their mortgage payments. I think it's interesting ( and worrying ) that Wall Street demands a bail-out when they fail at their own game, but when workers can't pay their monthly payments ( through no fault of their own, mind you ), there is no bail-out. Why does big business get to go directly against their own non-interventionist 'free market' ideology, yet individuals must bear the full brunt of the collapse, with no bail-out of their mortages?
You're not paying attention to the answer I've given on this plenty of times now. People would use email because it would be exactly the same as it is now, only there would be no spam. Would YOU charge your friends who send you email, or would you refund the amount charged into their ISP's account? In truth, you'd probably have something set up to automatically refund all your friends' account right away.
No they don't. They're have a small initial cost, which would be quickly refunded. If they're really business contacts, them they'll make plenty more back out of their relationship to you than this initial cost ( which, again, gets refunded ).
It's not a cost if it gets refunded.
What are you talking about now? Look. I don't care if companies want to go and start their own messaging service - they're free to do this, but it won't catch on if they allow anyone to send anything they want to anyone and everyone en masse. That's the whole point. And extending your logic of "if people want XXX they'll just do it", then consider this ... if I want to charge people who send me email, then I'll just do it ... which I'm seriously considering doing anyway ( for spammers only of course ). Don't worry though - I'll keep letting people like you respond to me, as long as you don't try to sell me anything.
They're free to do this, and deal with the spam. Legitimate senders would have no worries. For example, why would one of my friends worry about sending me an email? The answer is that they wouldn't. But a spammer would worry a lot ...
My approach isn't necessarily a top-down approach. It's just a simple change in the way people think about email. It doesn't have to be IMPLEMENTED across the board for it to work. In fact I would suggest that all parties play a 'wait and see' approach, as long as you've got the legal framework in place for me to charge people who I receive email from IF I WANT. This means that all legitimate email will just keep happening, and there will be an initial flurry of people charging spammers for receiving their junk, followed by all spammers going broke. It wouldn't be a permanent situation - just a legal framework to charge people if need be.