Rephrase: We take great pains to protect the rights of someof the accused.
The poor and minorities don't get much protection. Neither do those harboring attitudes about government actions that the government doesn't like. There may be some other similarly abused categories.
If you are rich enough that hiring a good lawyer isn't a problem, or you are supported by a powerful organization then you can generally expect your rights to be protected by due process. But it requires much more than just being accused. And even if you are "protected by due process", you can expect to spend months-to-years of your life sitting in a courtroom. Which, for some reason, isn't considered punishment.
Security has multiple meanings. This kind of security says that someone without the proper authority can't get access to it. The kind I'm most interested says that I *can* get access to *my* stuff. This doesn't seem to address that at all.
P.S.: My network occasionally goes down. If I don't know where my stuff is, how to I access it then?
The current internet handles this by saying "Your stuff on your computer will stay on your computer" (Don't tell me about that recent Wired reporter getting hacked. Fire and earthquakes can also keep you from accessing locally stored data. That's why remote backups are a good idea.)
I'm probably going off half-cocked because I only read the summary, but it sounds like such a *bad* idea, and so many people are using "the cloud" and doing essentially the thing I'm understanding this as being, without even the "nobody else can read it" security that he's proposing.
I still think that China *could* do it, if they chose. You are right that it would mean that all external commercial activity would need to be done by special agents, that were authorized to connect to the regular internet. They might even need to have offices outside of China.
OTOH, it doesn't mean going back to fax machines. It just means using slightly different internet protocols. And a system that made roman letters as complicated to use as Chinese characters. (Note this is only a barrier, not a block. The blockage would come at the telecommunications interface.)
This could be done, by China. I doubt that any other country could manage it. I also doubt that China would really *want* to do this, which makes my belief untestable. But it wouldn't mean going back to old technology. Just slightly modifying the new technology in incompatible ways. Many companies have tried this in an attempt to build "walled gardens" that their customers couldn't escape from. They all failed, not for technical reasons, but for commercial ones. But China is large enough that they could probably do it. Think a version of AOL, but with more modern technology, a MUCH larger captive market, and no internal gateways to the rest of the internet. (But China is large enough that it's quite likely that it's network would be nearly as large as the rest of the internet combined.) I'll agree that there are lots of ways of doing this that wouldn't work. But they just need to avoid those, and it's not a really difficult problem if you have a government sponsoring you. Probably even Iran could manage it. But a net the size of Iran wouldn't be very worthwhile.
P.S.: Were China to do this, I expect that they would use a variant of IPv6, with guaranteed unique identifiers. Along with the characteristics that I don't like about this, I don't see anything making it infeasible, merely dangerous and unpleasant. And remember the system doesn't need to be perfect. Only good enough, and able to be improved.
The thing is, setting up information barriers slows scientific and technical progress. This results in the country being less powerful.
China can probably get away with this. They are a large enough country that they can probably keep up with the rest of the world on their own. For anyone else, including the US, which is SMALL compared to the world, this is unlikely to work. And even China would suffer...note that their "Great Firewall" tries to be specific about what kinds of information it censors. They KNOW that the don't want to pay the price of a total break.
Saying "The chance of a massive solar storm is about 12% for every decade." is misleading. Sometimes it's more likely than others. Yes, the chance, based on our knowledge, may average 12%/decade, but the chance in the next five years is not in proportion.
If you had said "The chance of a massive solar storm is about 12% for every solar activity cycle" things would have been clearer, but the current estimate is that there's a higher than usual chance this time. We don't (well, *I* don't) know enough to say that major solar storms head for the earth with any particular regularity. (After all, it's not just whether the solar storm occurs, it's also whether it emits in our direction.) The danger is definitely there, but I certainly can't estimate how serious it is.
OTOH, the previous times this has happened, we didn't have a massive electrical infrastructure in place. The next time will be a lot more devastating, even if we were to adequately prepare, a thing which we don't have a history of doing.
That's certainly a major component. I wouldn't say it's a sole determinant, though. A foreign war can calm things down, especially is people believe that the war is in defense of the country. All the medium aggressive types then join the military. That leaves only the extreme cases, and they are more easily dealt with.
N.B.: This is NOT an original observation. It was a tactic used by both the Romans, and before them by the Greeks. I doubt that the Greeks originated it.
You can argue that particular cases were enemy combatants. My understanding, however, is that the president of the US has signed legislation permitting him to order people, including citizens, killed with no evidence or trial. And that it did not specify that they must be enemy combatants. Just that the president had to decide to do it. (I wonder if he's allowed to delegate that authority? If he weren't, then it *might* not be *too* bad a law. But generally this kind of thing is interpreted as "since he has the right, he has the right to delegate that right".
More probably because the 2nd amendment doesn't do much to empower the citizen against the government or the corporate state. But does make it easy to attack other citizens from ambush.
Now if you want to argue that the second amendment gives you the right to own tanks and anti-tank missiles... 1) That's not the way it's usually interpreted. 2) Who can afford that kind of weaponry? FWIW, I suspect that a corporation could own any weaponry it chose to acquire, but they generally find it easier and cheaper to just bribe the legislators.
That is a gross oversimplification. It's involved, but not at all straightforwards.
E.g. the US revolutionary war (1776 et seq.) was lead by some of the wealthiest individuals in the colonies. And was opposed by some of the wealthiest individuals in the colonies. Poverty wasn't *the* cause, though a fight for economic advantage was certainly one of the main contributors.
From what I've heard, most successful revolutions are lead by individuals who were of the upper classes before the revolution. They may well not live *through* the revolution, but they are dominant at least until it's been largely successful. (See "Reign of Terror".)
Calling Stalin's government "Jewish" is a bit weird. I have really no idea as to what the ethnic background of the Soviet leaders, but they definitely weren't religiously Jewish. AFAIK, they were from a mixture of backgrounds, though I doubt that there were many Ukrainians among them.
As for "slave traders", this depends a lot on exactly which period of time you are looking at. The Teutonic Knights used to find the slavic slave trade quite profitable, and they weren't exactly Jewish. I'll admit that I don't know if the slave traders were ever predominantly Jewish, so at some points they may have been. But a lot of the time the Jews were much to oppressed to engage in anything like that.
Given the number and variety of individuals and organizations that engaged in the slavic slave trade, from the early Greeks, through the Romans, up until slavery was rejected in most of Europe, it doesn't seem plausible to single out any one groups as most blame-worthy. It seems a fairly wide-spread human vileness.
As for the situation in current Palestine... what would you expect? The logic of action and reaction through history is pretty clear, with each group oppressing the other as it was alternately in power. When the Arabs declared that they wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than the destruction of Israel, how do you expect the Israelis to respond? No, they aren't being kind or civilized. But they (both sides) are in a life or death struggle. People from outside saying "Now play nice!" wouldn't be enough to clam things, but more often the external forces seem to be agitating from an increased level of combat, even the ones that *claim* that they're trying to promote peace. You want to claim that the Palestinians are being treated unfairly? But what's fair? The Palestinians hide among their populace people whose avowed goal is to kill as many Israelis as they can. But who can blame them when the Israelis treat them so abusively? But how could the Israelis treat them in any other way, when they shelter murders and terrorists? I don't see any answer, but blaming one side or the other doesn't seem to be of any benefit.
While I agree with your criticism of derivative trading, this doesn't make the "free market" a good idea. Free markets inevitably tend towards either monopolies or oligopolies unless regulated to prevent this, and monopolies and oligopolies inevitably tend towards abuse of power. Subtly if they must, blatantly if it's safe.
As a result I feel that the obvious solution is to set the tax level based on the percentage of the market owned. For anything over 1/5th of the market, the tax rate should be exorbitant. For a total monopoly, it should be 100% of sales. And ownership should be cumulative, i.e., if two companies are more than 1/3 owned by another company, then the tax rate on those companies should be the same as if their market share were combined.
The obvious problem with this scheme is that there is no reliable definition of what a market is. If a company sells condoms, is the market only condoms, or does it include other birth control mechanisms? Other medical devices? Still, even an imperfect answer would be better than relying on "the free market" to correct the problem.
N.B.: This same potential for abuse operates in every area subject to monopoly. Thus local police frequently abuse their monopoly over the right to use force, etc.
Do note, however, that this principle has serious problems in application. Any entity able to apply coercive force in an area, say over a monopoly, is itself likely to have monopoly power in that area, and thus to be likely to abuse it's power. I don't believe I've seen a plausible solution to this problem that has humans in the decision role. And the plausible solutions are not currently technically possible. (Plus, getting from the current situation to a desirable state that does not experience these problems does not look trivial. It probably would involve a long transition where the human administrators of the system became more and more figureheads, and the real decisions were made by the nominally subservient non-human intelligences. But many different end-states could be reached through that same transition, not all of them, perhaps not the majority of them, desirable.)
You just started worrying? I started back when Trolltech was acquired. This only got worse when MS "acquired" Nokia. (And yes, I *do* know that officially that hasn't happened.) I will be quite worried about who they will find to sell it to. This is the more significant with the Gnome folk trashing their own libraries. It's enough to cause one to suspect outside influences.
For such a trivial amount that one could hardly say they lost. Most people didn't get anything, and those that did essentiially had to work for much less than minimum wage while repairing the damage done by the root-kit.
Also, if it's the case I'm thinking of, Sony never did restore the equipment to previously working condition. (But I may be confusing two different cases. In both Sony technically lost, but the decision was such that the real losers were Sony's customers.)
Why has it automatically "failed" simply because it's not on every Tom, Dick and Harry's desktop?
Because it's not on any.
You are wrong, and have been wrong (on this point) for over a decade.
Now if you were to say "it's not on many", you would have a point. But then we come to "Why does that count as failure?". FWIW, I've counted "Linux on the desktop" to be a success since it got good enough that I could install it on my wife's system. That means since Muse Score editing program and Inkscape svg editor got good enough. A couple or three years. Note that it was specific applications that made the difference. The basic desktop was "good enough" in the days of KDE2. (And if you have lots of problems with you Linux desktop, you are doing something very wrong. Or you've got flaky hardware. Or, possibly, you're using some "bleeding edge" distribution. [Or it might be one of the minor distributions that isn't well tested.] )
There *are* grounds for saying that Linux has failed on the desktop. One could say that if it hadn't failed, then MS wouldn't be able to push it's bootlocker program to the point that Red Hat and Ubuntu need to buy the right to run. That, however, is a very different basis for arguing. That gets into "Money == power", and "might makes right" territory.
NOBODY is ready to change their minds when it is against their basic beliefs. This isn't a party associated statement.
You can make a case that political conservatives tend to be more difficult to convince that the current situation needs to be changed, but that's what the word "conservative" is supposed to mean, so this is no surprise. Also, strangely enough, these same people tend to be those who benefit from the current state of affairs. So they've got real motives, in addition to psychological motives, to resist change. This doesn't mean that they aren't acting out of their genuine beliefs.
Accept that many of them are honest people that aren't going to change their minds given any amount of evidence that you consider reasonable. I guarantee that you have some beliefs of the same nature, even though I might not know what they are. Think of these as the Bayesian priors. (That's oversimplifying, but it's a decent model.) Given certain priors it's impossible to justify certain changes in belief. Identify what the priors are, and you can estimate what evidence will cause what changes in belief. Conservatives, in general, feel a stronger sense of bonding to authority figures. As such it makes a great deal of sense the mention that an authority figure that they respect backed a result that you want them to accept. So it makes a lot of sense to highlight the funding by the Koch brothers foundation.
You do realize that the official estimates were obtained by a process of averaging studies that included rejecting the more extreme claims for rising sea level, while accepting those that predicted little or no rise don't you? This was documented in the official reports.
Also Greenland, e.g., is melting a lot faster than any of the included studies predicted. I'm not sure how significant this is, but I wouldn't put any vast amount of trust that the sea-level won't rise a lot faster than the official projections.
Sorry, but there are people who actually believe that global warming is a scam. Some of them are well enough informed that they should be able to assess the probabilities more accurately. But people have an inbuilt bias against coming to conclusions that would be inconvenient. It takes a lot more evidence to convince them that is required to convince an almost neutral party, if you can do it at all. Bayesian logic theory shows that some sets of priors render it impossible to come to some conclusions no matter WHAT evidence is provided.
He didn't say civilization would survive. Only the species. That I'll agree with unless atomic of biological weapons start getting used too freely.
Problem with biological weapons is it's difficult to use them at all without using them too freely. They tend to reproduce and mutate in ways that you didn't predict. Second problem is that they're comparatively cheap, so someone who is poor and desperate may well opt to use them. Third problem is that they're sneaky. You can plan on using them without being caught.
OTOH, *most* biological weapons have a survival rate. So they probably wouldn't kill off the species. And they tend to target particular species, so the biosphere might well survive. You can't say that about atomic weapons.
KDE4 *LOOKS* quite nice. It even "sort of" works. But it slows the use of the system to a crawl.
N.B.: I'm not talking about reaction time or bugs or anything of that nature. I'm talking about the DESIGN of the GUI. I'm talking about the number of steps involved in selecting a commonly used application (though I'll admit the speed of the steps are also a problem, but I think this is a matter of my reaction time rather than KDEs). I'm talking about the effort to locate an alternative in the case that the most commonly used application of a particular type isn't the one I want for this particular job. Doing everything takes longer than it did, and I don't see ANY advantages over Gnome2, much less over KDE3.
I'm sure it was fun to design that "sideways sliding menu", but it's a real pain to use.
I've got other complaints, too. Because of them KDE4 would not only need to be as good as the alternatives (currently Gnome2) it would need to be a lot better. Applications that don't work properly in that environment, etc. Nothing really important, but lots of little things add up.
O, yes. And I *don't* like a noisy background to my work. Every piece of flash that you put in is a detriment. Even static icons that are designed to be eye-catching are a nuisance. (I always prefer to disable most desktop animation, with the single exception of resizing windows.)
Simply put, LXDE is better than KDE4, and that other one whose name I can never remember but which starts with "x" ("xfce"?) is even better. I suspect that fvwm is better than KDE4, but I haven't used it in awhile, so I can't be sure. And NONE of these, not one, are as good as KDE2.x, much less KDE3.
If KDE4 weren't so terrible, I'd agree with you. Fortunately there are other choices. Unfortunately, they think the problem with Gnome and KDE is that they aren't lightweight. That's NOT the major problem. Not in my environment. The problem is that they are nigh unusable. KDE3 was the best desktop for usability that I've ever seen. It's not particularly lightweight. But I'll pick fwvm over KDE4 *or* Gnome3. It may be lightweight, but at least is't sort of usable. (Actually I'd probably pick something else, but I haven't decided on what, because I can still run Gnome2.)
The problem is that we don't have a decent voting system. This guarantees that the majority won't be satisfied by the candidate selected unless there are only two choices. This can be solved by either Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) or Condorcet voting. I prefer Condorcet, but IRV is easier to explain. And IRV ensures that the majority voted for the candidate that got elected. Perhaps as their 4th or 5th choice, but still not at the bottom.
It has been mathematically proven that there is no perfect voting system. But the current system, plurality rules, is the worst likely system to choose. (The only ones worse are things like Minority Rules, where the candidate with the fewest votes gets elected.)
FWIW, I think that campaigning is an equally culpable fault in the system, so I really favor selection of the candidates by lottery, rather than by primary. And every eligible voter should be entered into the lottery by default., Combine selecting 5 candidates for each office by lottery with voting for the candidates by IRV and limiting the campaigns to one month, two at the most, and we would have an effective governmental reform that would drastically reduce corruption. And probably be a lot more efficient and effective than the current government. (Unless, of course, the actual goals of the government are ones that they would never admit, in which case it's possible that the current government is effective, if not efficient.)
That's a rather interesting point that I hadn't thought of before...but not in the way you mean.
Look into genetics, specifically how genes emerge. Mammalian color vision (varies slightly between species that have it) if created by genes that doubles, and then evolved differently. I'm not sure that two copies of MySQL are useful. That's more like doubling a chromosome. But two copies of libstdc++ might, over time, evolve to handle different jobs. The key part, of course, is over time. Most such mutations are a loss, and so disappear over time, but some are the very stuff out of which evolution happens (well, strictly speaking the disappearance of the versions that don't work is also evolution in action).
Now if you look at bacteria, they usually have only one variant of any particular gene, even though they have a poor (compared to mammals) copying-fidelity when the DNA is duplicated. They is because in their lifestyle they MUST be efficient. These may be compared to embedded systems. So what should desktops be compared with? Nematodes? Plants? Each way of life imposes certain constraints on what will be successful. Similarly each systems environment imposes particular constraints. Often these days it isn't minimal amount of code, but closer to optimal performance, which can be quite different. Mobile platforms have another set of constraints.
Don't expect code to have evolved into anything approaching optimal in the short period of time it's been being built. And don't expect the same code to be optimal for wildly different environments. Sometimes it happens, and that's very good. Quicksort is hard to improve on no matter what your environment. But such things aren't to be expected, though they are, of course, to be hoped for. But consider the way hash-tables have been moving in on the space originally occupied by AVL-trees. The replacement can look radically different (and because of that difference, there can be places where the original maintains dominance, say if you want to retreive a sorted list of keys).
OTOH, Gnome appears to me to be dying. I wish they same thing weren't happening to KDE. For my purposes KDE3 was the best desktop Linux ever came up with. Gnome2 was a reasonable replacement. But neither KDE4 nor Gnome3 is even usable. (So I'm disagreeing with the original blurb. I *can* say that Gnome3 is worse.)
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Rephrase:
We take great pains to protect the rights of some of the accused.
The poor and minorities don't get much protection. Neither do those harboring attitudes about government actions that the government doesn't like. There may be some other similarly abused categories.
If you are rich enough that hiring a good lawyer isn't a problem, or you are supported by a powerful organization then you can generally expect your rights to be protected by due process. But it requires much more than just being accused. And even if you are "protected by due process", you can expect to spend months-to-years of your life sitting in a courtroom. Which, for some reason, isn't considered punishment.
Security has multiple meanings. This kind of security says that someone without the proper authority can't get access to it. The kind I'm most interested says that I *can* get access to *my* stuff. This doesn't seem to address that at all.
P.S.: My network occasionally goes down. If I don't know where my stuff is, how to I access it then?
The current internet handles this by saying "Your stuff on your computer will stay on your computer" (Don't tell me about that recent Wired reporter getting hacked. Fire and earthquakes can also keep you from accessing locally stored data. That's why remote backups are a good idea.)
I'm probably going off half-cocked because I only read the summary, but it sounds like such a *bad* idea, and so many people are using "the cloud" and doing essentially the thing I'm understanding this as being, without even the "nobody else can read it" security that he's proposing.
I still think that China *could* do it, if they chose. You are right that it would mean that all external commercial activity would need to be done by special agents, that were authorized to connect to the regular internet. They might even need to have offices outside of China.
OTOH, it doesn't mean going back to fax machines. It just means using slightly different internet protocols. And a system that made roman letters as complicated to use as Chinese characters. (Note this is only a barrier, not a block. The blockage would come at the telecommunications interface.)
This could be done, by China. I doubt that any other country could manage it. I also doubt that China would really *want* to do this, which makes my belief untestable. But it wouldn't mean going back to old technology. Just slightly modifying the new technology in incompatible ways. Many companies have tried this in an attempt to build "walled gardens" that their customers couldn't escape from. They all failed, not for technical reasons, but for commercial ones. But China is large enough that they could probably do it. Think a version of AOL, but with more modern technology, a MUCH larger captive market, and no internal gateways to the rest of the internet. (But China is large enough that it's quite likely that it's network would be nearly as large as the rest of the internet combined.) I'll agree that there are lots of ways of doing this that wouldn't work. But they just need to avoid those, and it's not a really difficult problem if you have a government sponsoring you. Probably even Iran could manage it. But a net the size of Iran wouldn't be very worthwhile.
P.S.: Were China to do this, I expect that they would use a variant of IPv6, with guaranteed unique identifiers. Along with the characteristics that I don't like about this, I don't see anything making it infeasible, merely dangerous and unpleasant. And remember the system doesn't need to be perfect. Only good enough, and able to be improved.
The thing is, setting up information barriers slows scientific and technical progress. This results in the country being less powerful.
China can probably get away with this. They are a large enough country that they can probably keep up with the rest of the world on their own. For anyone else, including the US, which is SMALL compared to the world, this is unlikely to work. And even China would suffer...note that their "Great Firewall" tries to be specific about what kinds of information it censors. They KNOW that the don't want to pay the price of a total break.
Saying "The chance of a massive solar storm is about 12% for every decade." is misleading. Sometimes it's more likely than others. Yes, the chance, based on our knowledge, may average 12%/decade, but the chance in the next five years is not in proportion.
If you had said "The chance of a massive solar storm is about 12% for every solar activity cycle" things would have been clearer, but the current estimate is that there's a higher than usual chance this time. We don't (well, *I* don't) know enough to say that major solar storms head for the earth with any particular regularity. (After all, it's not just whether the solar storm occurs, it's also whether it emits in our direction.) The danger is definitely there, but I certainly can't estimate how serious it is.
OTOH, the previous times this has happened, we didn't have a massive electrical infrastructure in place. The next time will be a lot more devastating, even if we were to adequately prepare, a thing which we don't have a history of doing.
That's certainly a major component. I wouldn't say it's a sole determinant, though. A foreign war can calm things down, especially is people believe that the war is in defense of the country. All the medium aggressive types then join the military. That leaves only the extreme cases, and they are more easily dealt with.
N.B.: This is NOT an original observation. It was a tactic used by both the Romans, and before them by the Greeks. I doubt that the Greeks originated it.
You can argue that particular cases were enemy combatants. My understanding, however, is that the president of the US has signed legislation permitting him to order people, including citizens, killed with no evidence or trial. And that it did not specify that they must be enemy combatants. Just that the president had to decide to do it. (I wonder if he's allowed to delegate that authority? If he weren't, then it *might* not be *too* bad a law. But generally this kind of thing is interpreted as "since he has the right, he has the right to delegate that right".
More probably because the 2nd amendment doesn't do much to empower the citizen against the government or the corporate state. But does make it easy to attack other citizens from ambush.
Now if you want to argue that the second amendment gives you the right to own tanks and anti-tank missiles...
1) That's not the way it's usually interpreted.
2) Who can afford that kind of weaponry?
FWIW, I suspect that a corporation could own any weaponry it chose to acquire, but they generally find it easier and cheaper to just bribe the legislators.
That is a gross oversimplification. It's involved, but not at all straightforwards.
E.g. the US revolutionary war (1776 et seq.) was lead by some of the wealthiest individuals in the colonies. And was opposed by some of the wealthiest individuals in the colonies. Poverty wasn't *the* cause, though a fight for economic advantage was certainly one of the main contributors.
From what I've heard, most successful revolutions are lead by individuals who were of the upper classes before the revolution. They may well not live *through* the revolution, but they are dominant at least until it's been largely successful. (See "Reign of Terror".)
Calling Stalin's government "Jewish" is a bit weird. I have really no idea as to what the ethnic background of the Soviet leaders, but they definitely weren't religiously Jewish. AFAIK, they were from a mixture of backgrounds, though I doubt that there were many Ukrainians among them.
As for "slave traders", this depends a lot on exactly which period of time you are looking at. The Teutonic Knights used to find the slavic slave trade quite profitable, and they weren't exactly Jewish. I'll admit that I don't know if the slave traders were ever predominantly Jewish, so at some points they may have been. But a lot of the time the Jews were much to oppressed to engage in anything like that.
Given the number and variety of individuals and organizations that engaged in the slavic slave trade, from the early Greeks, through the Romans, up until slavery was rejected in most of Europe, it doesn't seem plausible to single out any one groups as most blame-worthy. It seems a fairly wide-spread human vileness.
As for the situation in current Palestine... what would you expect? The logic of action and reaction through history is pretty clear, with each group oppressing the other as it was alternately in power. When the Arabs declared that they wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than the destruction of Israel, how do you expect the Israelis to respond? No, they aren't being kind or civilized. But they (both sides) are in a life or death struggle. People from outside saying "Now play nice!" wouldn't be enough to clam things, but more often the external forces seem to be agitating from an increased level of combat, even the ones that *claim* that they're trying to promote peace. You want to claim that the Palestinians are being treated unfairly? But what's fair? The Palestinians hide among their populace people whose avowed goal is to kill as many Israelis as they can. But who can blame them when the Israelis treat them so abusively? But how could the Israelis treat them in any other way, when they shelter murders and terrorists? I don't see any answer, but blaming one side or the other doesn't seem to be of any benefit.
Well, you could wait a year or two. Given the current management there'll be lots of companies that will be able to buy it at that point.
It was willful before the TSA was set up.
While I agree with your criticism of derivative trading, this doesn't make the "free market" a good idea. Free markets inevitably tend towards either monopolies or oligopolies unless regulated to prevent this, and monopolies and oligopolies inevitably tend towards abuse of power. Subtly if they must, blatantly if it's safe.
As a result I feel that the obvious solution is to set the tax level based on the percentage of the market owned. For anything over 1/5th of the market, the tax rate should be exorbitant. For a total monopoly, it should be 100% of sales. And ownership should be cumulative, i.e., if two companies are more than 1/3 owned by another company, then the tax rate on those companies should be the same as if their market share were combined.
The obvious problem with this scheme is that there is no reliable definition of what a market is. If a company sells condoms, is the market only condoms, or does it include other birth control mechanisms? Other medical devices? Still, even an imperfect answer would be better than relying on "the free market" to correct the problem.
N.B.: This same potential for abuse operates in every area subject to monopoly. Thus local police frequently abuse their monopoly over the right to use force, etc.
Do note, however, that this principle has serious problems in application. Any entity able to apply coercive force in an area, say over a monopoly, is itself likely to have monopoly power in that area, and thus to be likely to abuse it's power. I don't believe I've seen a plausible solution to this problem that has humans in the decision role. And the plausible solutions are not currently technically possible. (Plus, getting from the current situation to a desirable state that does not experience these problems does not look trivial. It probably would involve a long transition where the human administrators of the system became more and more figureheads, and the real decisions were made by the nominally subservient non-human intelligences. But many different end-states could be reached through that same transition, not all of them, perhaps not the majority of them, desirable.)
You just started worrying? I started back when Trolltech was acquired. This only got worse when MS "acquired" Nokia. (And yes, I *do* know that officially that hasn't happened.) I will be quite worried about who they will find to sell it to. This is the more significant with the Gnome folk trashing their own libraries. It's enough to cause one to suspect outside influences.
For such a trivial amount that one could hardly say they lost. Most people didn't get anything, and those that did essentiially had to work for much less than minimum wage while repairing the damage done by the root-kit.
Also, if it's the case I'm thinking of, Sony never did restore the equipment to previously working condition. (But I may be confusing two different cases. In both Sony technically lost, but the decision was such that the real losers were Sony's customers.)
Why has it automatically "failed" simply because it's not on every Tom, Dick and Harry's desktop?
Because it's not on any.
You are wrong, and have been wrong (on this point) for over a decade.
Now if you were to say "it's not on many", you would have a point. But then we come to "Why does that count as failure?". FWIW, I've counted "Linux on the desktop" to be a success since it got good enough that I could install it on my wife's system. That means since Muse Score editing program and Inkscape svg editor got good enough. A couple or three years. Note that it was specific applications that made the difference. The basic desktop was "good enough" in the days of KDE2. (And if you have lots of problems with you Linux desktop, you are doing something very wrong. Or you've got flaky hardware. Or, possibly, you're using some "bleeding edge" distribution. [Or it might be one of the minor distributions that isn't well tested.] )
There *are* grounds for saying that Linux has failed on the desktop. One could say that if it hadn't failed, then MS wouldn't be able to push it's bootlocker program to the point that Red Hat and Ubuntu need to buy the right to run. That, however, is a very different basis for arguing. That gets into "Money == power", and "might makes right" territory.
NOBODY is ready to change their minds when it is against their basic beliefs. This isn't a party associated statement.
You can make a case that political conservatives tend to be more difficult to convince that the current situation needs to be changed, but that's what the word "conservative" is supposed to mean, so this is no surprise. Also, strangely enough, these same people tend to be those who benefit from the current state of affairs. So they've got real motives, in addition to psychological motives, to resist change. This doesn't mean that they aren't acting out of their genuine beliefs.
Accept that many of them are honest people that aren't going to change their minds given any amount of evidence that you consider reasonable. I guarantee that you have some beliefs of the same nature, even though I might not know what they are. Think of these as the Bayesian priors. (That's oversimplifying, but it's a decent model.) Given certain priors it's impossible to justify certain changes in belief. Identify what the priors are, and you can estimate what evidence will cause what changes in belief. Conservatives, in general, feel a stronger sense of bonding to authority figures. As such it makes a great deal of sense the mention that an authority figure that they respect backed a result that you want them to accept. So it makes a lot of sense to highlight the funding by the Koch brothers foundation.
You do realize that the official estimates were obtained by a process of averaging studies that included rejecting the more extreme claims for rising sea level, while accepting those that predicted little or no rise don't you? This was documented in the official reports.
Also Greenland, e.g., is melting a lot faster than any of the included studies predicted. I'm not sure how significant this is, but I wouldn't put any vast amount of trust that the sea-level won't rise a lot faster than the official projections.
Sorry, but there are people who actually believe that global warming is a scam. Some of them are well enough informed that they should be able to assess the probabilities more accurately. But people have an inbuilt bias against coming to conclusions that would be inconvenient. It takes a lot more evidence to convince them that is required to convince an almost neutral party, if you can do it at all. Bayesian logic theory shows that some sets of priors render it impossible to come to some conclusions no matter WHAT evidence is provided.
He didn't say civilization would survive. Only the species. That I'll agree with unless atomic of biological weapons start getting used too freely.
Problem with biological weapons is it's difficult to use them at all without using them too freely. They tend to reproduce and mutate in ways that you didn't predict. Second problem is that they're comparatively cheap, so someone who is poor and desperate may well opt to use them. Third problem is that they're sneaky. You can plan on using them without being caught.
OTOH, *most* biological weapons have a survival rate. So they probably wouldn't kill off the species. And they tend to target particular species, so the biosphere might well survive. You can't say that about atomic weapons.
KDE4 *LOOKS* quite nice. It even "sort of" works. But it slows the use of the system to a crawl.
N.B.: I'm not talking about reaction time or bugs or anything of that nature. I'm talking about the DESIGN of the GUI. I'm talking about the number of steps involved in selecting a commonly used application (though I'll admit the speed of the steps are also a problem, but I think this is a matter of my reaction time rather than KDEs). I'm talking about the effort to locate an alternative in the case that the most commonly used application of a particular type isn't the one I want for this particular job. Doing everything takes longer than it did, and I don't see ANY advantages over Gnome2, much less over KDE3.
I'm sure it was fun to design that "sideways sliding menu", but it's a real pain to use.
I've got other complaints, too. Because of them KDE4 would not only need to be as good as the alternatives (currently Gnome2) it would need to be a lot better. Applications that don't work properly in that environment, etc. Nothing really important, but lots of little things add up.
O, yes. And I *don't* like a noisy background to my work. Every piece of flash that you put in is a detriment. Even static icons that are designed to be eye-catching are a nuisance. (I always prefer to disable most desktop animation, with the single exception of resizing windows.)
Simply put, LXDE is better than KDE4, and that other one whose name I can never remember but which starts with "x" ("xfce"?) is even better. I suspect that fvwm is better than KDE4, but I haven't used it in awhile, so I can't be sure. And NONE of these, not one, are as good as KDE2.x, much less KDE3.
If KDE4 weren't so terrible, I'd agree with you. Fortunately there are other choices. Unfortunately, they think the problem with Gnome and KDE is that they aren't lightweight. That's NOT the major problem. Not in my environment. The problem is that they are nigh unusable. KDE3 was the best desktop for usability that I've ever seen. It's not particularly lightweight. But I'll pick fwvm over KDE4 *or* Gnome3. It may be lightweight, but at least is't sort of usable. (Actually I'd probably pick something else, but I haven't decided on what, because I can still run Gnome2.)
The problem is that we don't have a decent voting system. This guarantees that the majority won't be satisfied by the candidate selected unless there are only two choices. This can be solved by either Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) or Condorcet voting. I prefer Condorcet, but IRV is easier to explain. And IRV ensures that the majority voted for the candidate that got elected. Perhaps as their 4th or 5th choice, but still not at the bottom.
It has been mathematically proven that there is no perfect voting system. But the current system, plurality rules, is the worst likely system to choose. (The only ones worse are things like Minority Rules, where the candidate with the fewest votes gets elected.)
FWIW, I think that campaigning is an equally culpable fault in the system, so I really favor selection of the candidates by lottery, rather than by primary. And every eligible voter should be entered into the lottery by default., Combine selecting 5 candidates for each office by lottery with voting for the candidates by IRV and limiting the campaigns to one month, two at the most, and we would have an effective governmental reform that would drastically reduce corruption. And probably be a lot more efficient and effective than the current government. (Unless, of course, the actual goals of the government are ones that they would never admit, in which case it's possible that the current government is effective, if not efficient.)
You might check your US history books for 1861-1865. For more details see the period directly following 1865.
That's a rather interesting point that I hadn't thought of before...but not in the way you mean.
Look into genetics, specifically how genes emerge. Mammalian color vision (varies slightly between species that have it) if created by genes that doubles, and then evolved differently. I'm not sure that two copies of MySQL are useful. That's more like doubling a chromosome. But two copies of libstdc++ might, over time, evolve to handle different jobs. The key part, of course, is over time. Most such mutations are a loss, and so disappear over time, but some are the very stuff out of which evolution happens (well, strictly speaking the disappearance of the versions that don't work is also evolution in action).
Now if you look at bacteria, they usually have only one variant of any particular gene, even though they have a poor (compared to mammals) copying-fidelity when the DNA is duplicated. They is because in their lifestyle they MUST be efficient. These may be compared to embedded systems. So what should desktops be compared with? Nematodes? Plants? Each way of life imposes certain constraints on what will be successful. Similarly each systems environment imposes particular constraints. Often these days it isn't minimal amount of code, but closer to optimal performance, which can be quite different. Mobile platforms have another set of constraints.
Don't expect code to have evolved into anything approaching optimal in the short period of time it's been being built. And don't expect the same code to be optimal for wildly different environments. Sometimes it happens, and that's very good. Quicksort is hard to improve on no matter what your environment. But such things aren't to be expected, though they are, of course, to be hoped for. But consider the way hash-tables have been moving in on the space originally occupied by AVL-trees. The replacement can look radically different (and because of that difference, there can be places where the original maintains dominance, say if you want to retreive a sorted list of keys).
OTOH, Gnome appears to me to be dying. I wish they same thing weren't happening to KDE. For my purposes KDE3 was the best desktop Linux ever came up with. Gnome2 was a reasonable replacement. But neither KDE4 nor Gnome3 is even usable. (So I'm disagreeing with the original blurb. I *can* say that Gnome3 is worse.)