He does have perspective. While OSS doesn't make rice grow faster, it can give poor nations a chance in the Information Age. Even if they had all the rice they needed, they would still be stuck with bloated, buggy, insecure, expensive software if it weren't for OSS. Electronic communication is more and more a central fact of life, and poor nations need it, too. The fact that it has qualitative differences from tangible products misses the point.
entheon is right, and here's why. Discontent (unrest, riots, revolutions) is not caused by absolute deprivation. If it were, the Bushmen of the Kalahari would be the leading terrorist group, instead of quiet folks who are quite happy to be left alone.
Instead, discontent is caused by relative deprivation, also known as rising expectations. If you see people around you who have cell phones and french fries while you're scrounging for anything edible, you're going to be discontented.
If you're a WASP, as entheon notes, you can channel that discontent into activities that will get you what you want. If not, however, you are forever denied (that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much). You constantly see good things around you, things you want, but you can't have them. At this point, you either give up and live a life of hopelessness and despondancy, or you get pissed off. You get pissed off at are the ones who stand between you and the things you want, and at the system that keeps them there.
What a bunch of arrogant crap. "You can't debate this, because it's right, and you'd obviously be wrong." As it happens, "Third-World" nations are in the state they are in, yes, because of us. Picture this: you are in debt. Not just a little bit of debt, but a lot of debt. You have to pay more on your debt than you do on rent, food, health, and your kids' college tuition... sometimes all of them combined. But wait, there's more. You didn't take out the loans you owe on! And not only that, you didn't even benefit from them! In fact, they paid for the cops who give you trumped-up tickets and sometimes beat up your neighbors. But YOU have to pay those loans.
That's the state of developing nations. Rich governments and banks extract more from many of them than they give in foreign aid. The countries can't even pay back the interest, let alone the principle. And it's not the rich, who arrange the loans, who pay them back. It's the poor.
I can't say that Cocoon is bad, not having used it, but I can say I'm thrilled with Zope. I talked my grad school (the School of Information at the University of Michigan) into using it, and just this past Saturday, convinced my ISP to begin using it as well, two hours into my three-hour presentation on it.
Please note that greenpartyus.org and gpus.org are the same thing. The "old party" is "old leftists," but there are many leftists in the GPUS as well. They're just non-traditional leftists.
I need to take issue with one of -cman-'s passing comments, and with the Related Links box. The Green Party that is recognized by the vast majority of capital-G Greens, as well the FEC, is the Green Party of the United States, and not the GPUSA. The differences between them are off-topic (and flame-bait in the right crowd), but it is important to distinguish between the two organizations.
Actually, you're wrong. That's not the platform Nader is running on at all. His actual platform is at http://www.gp.org. Go start over reading. You will find none of the ideas you oppose here in there. For those who say that Greens are for governmental control, notice that one of the Green Values is Grassroots Democracy. Another is Decentralization.
Furthermore, he is not "taking" votes from Gore. The only vote Gore owns is his own. If people say they're not going to vote for Gore, that's not Nader's fault. It's Gore's.
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He does have perspective. While OSS doesn't make rice grow faster, it can give poor nations a chance in the Information Age. Even if they had all the rice they needed, they would still be stuck with bloated, buggy, insecure, expensive software if it weren't for OSS. Electronic communication is more and more a central fact of life, and poor nations need it, too. The fact that it has qualitative differences from tangible products misses the point.
Instead, discontent is caused by relative deprivation, also known as rising expectations. If you see people around you who have cell phones and french fries while you're scrounging for anything edible, you're going to be discontented.
If you're a WASP, as entheon notes, you can channel that discontent into activities that will get you what you want. If not, however, you are forever denied (that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much). You constantly see good things around you, things you want, but you can't have them. At this point, you either give up and live a life of hopelessness and despondancy, or you get pissed off. You get pissed off at are the ones who stand between you and the things you want, and at the system that keeps them there.
That's the state of developing nations. Rich governments and banks extract more from many of them than they give in foreign aid. The countries can't even pay back the interest, let alone the principle. And it's not the rich, who arrange the loans, who pay them back. It's the poor.
I can't say that Cocoon is bad, not having used it, but I can say I'm thrilled with Zope. I talked my grad school (the School of Information at the University of Michigan) into using it, and just this past Saturday, convinced my ISP to begin using it as well, two hours into my three-hour presentation on it.
Please note that greenpartyus.org and gpus.org are the same thing. The "old party" is "old leftists," but there are many leftists in the GPUS as well. They're just non-traditional leftists.
I need to take issue with one of -cman-'s passing comments, and with the Related Links box. The Green Party that is recognized by the vast majority of capital-G Greens, as well the FEC, is the Green Party of the United States, and not the GPUSA. The differences between them are off-topic (and flame-bait in the right crowd), but it is important to distinguish between the two organizations.
Actually, you're wrong. That's not the platform Nader is running on at all. His actual platform is at http://www.gp.org. Go start over reading. You will find none of the ideas you oppose here in there. For those who say that Greens are for governmental control, notice that one of the Green Values is Grassroots Democracy. Another is Decentralization. Furthermore, he is not "taking" votes from Gore. The only vote Gore owns is his own. If people say they're not going to vote for Gore, that's not Nader's fault. It's Gore's.