Nor is it a difficult concept to realize that power in the hands of a corporation is more desirable than power in the hands of a government which holds the reins - political, military, social, AND economic.
The idea is not to hand economic power over to the government. It's about the policing of that power (such things as regulations on employee rights, polution, GM trials etc). I think (or at least I hope) it's obvious why, in theory, it's better for regulation of this to be in the hands of an elected government, who's role should be to balance the needs of the whole country, rather than in the hands of corporations who's overriding interest is making profits rather than protecting workers/consumers.
The big problem with these corportations getting too large is that they can start to wield undue influence on national governments. When a few companies control the majority of world trade, they can threaten to boycott countries if that countries government has laws that the companies don't like (e.g. pollution laws) or if they refuse to sign up to such things as the WTO (or whatever they replace the MAI with).
It's clear that's what he meant. Of course you test your own code.
So never obviously means always? Oh, how stupid of me:-). I have actually come across programmers that do believe that you don't need to test your own code at all. Thankfully, they've never been on my teams.
Do you understand what unit test means?
From Extreme Programing Explained Unit test - A test written from the perspective of the programmer.What do you think it is?
As far as I know, I wasn't arguing about the definition of unit testing, just when it should be done. The point that I was trying to make was that it's always useful to have a piece of code that just runs through the bit that you are in the process of writing, as you can make sure that this bit works on its own correctly. And if you're writing this piece of code anyway, you may as well make it a unit test.
Of course that's all you'd have to change. And if you'd written the units before the tests, you wouldn't have to go back and change anything.
But how could you be sure that the changes that you made to those little bits didn't break anything else in your code?
I have worked in much that way since I joined the industry - golden rules are never test your own code
I'm glad I don't work with you. Always test your own code. That way you're less likely to look stupid when you hand your code over to the testing department. The golden rule you're probably thinking of is always get someone else to test your code. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't as well.
But I wouldn't want to do the test unit before the real unit
Why not? I always do. It's always useful to have something that runs the bit of code that you are writing, in isolation, so that you can easily see what is going on in that bit without worrying about the rest of the system. It also helps to focus you on exactly what the function that you are testing should actually be doing.
Say you find out that VB and VC++ don't represent booleans in the same way (could never happen, of course, but just suppose) and you've got to change your code, then all your unit tests have to be updated.
Why? Only the ones that are testing the bit of code that returns your boolean to VB, surely. And the rest of the tests will be useful to make sure that you haven't broken anything when you altered the type.
Or, a simpler example: management change the spec and say "no we don't want remote access after all cos the consultant just said it would be a security risk".. what to do with all your remote access unit tests...?
You get rid of them along with your remote access class, but again the other unit tests (if written properly) make sure that the remote access classes that you have just removed have not taken some vital functionality for the rest of the system with them.
Design is essential to insure the viability of the development effort
Surely, a prototype does that for you.
documentation is essential to insure the survivability of the implementation.
I don't know about your experiences, but I've yet to work on a project that is more than a year old where the documentation bears any useful relation to the code.
Who insures that objects with state transitions are able to negotiate transitions forwards and backwards (or that they can''t when they shouldn't?)
The developers who wrote the objects, by writing unit test. This is the point of unit tests, that even a year down the line, when new developers come along and tinker with that object, they don't have to go looking through reams of documentation to find the state transition diagram for the class and make sure that they aren't violating anything. They do the changes that they need to do, and if they have broken any state change rules, the unit tests will tell them.
Of course this does rely on someone writing the unit tests properly in the first place, but otherwise you are relying on someone having documented it correctly in the first place, and I'm inclined to believe that most programmers are better at coding than documenting.
The clients will come back and ask for those very features when they see the system in operation.
Again, in my experience, users tend to come back and ask for everything but the changes that you (and they) thought they would. I've lost track of the months (probably years) wasted designing and implementing flexible systems that allow us to easily add features in the areas that they think they will be changing in the next six months, only to find that in six months time the business is heading off in a different direction, and they never ask for that area. For example, I once spent six months taking a system that processed credit applications by applying business rules in a fixed order. Someone wanted to apply some of them in a different order. We could have taken what we had, and extended it to allow them to do it this new way as well. It would have taken a few weeks, but instead it was decided that it would be a really good idea to implement a fully flexible flow with a pretty graphical UI so that it would be really easy for users to add new business processes whenever they wanted. We spent six months making the system as flexible as possible. Everyone liked it, but no one used it. As far as I know in the 6 years since it was written, there was not one system built using a different flow (and I think it was actually dropped from subsiquent versions, because no one wanted it).
So, when the inevitable feature request comes along, the 'extreme programmer' spends the next week rewriting previous code to handle the new feature, while the rest of us just stick the button in there, add a function here and there, and reuse a lot of the functions we've already written, thus we finish it in a matter of hours rather than days.
Why would the non-XP code already have these functions in place, but the XP code wouldn't? If there was a previous requirement to do similar tasks then the code would be in place in XP. If there wasn't a previous requirement, why did you waste time adding it, rather than shipping what they needed earlier? How much other code is in your software that you don't need yet?
It's possible that the functions were more tightly bound into specific objects rather than in nice class hierachies in the XP version, but if the unit tests are in place for the original functions, it shouldn't take too long to refactor the design to make it more generic (by abstacting out the functions that you are actually going to be using in two places rather than ones that you think might be needed in the future). This may sometimes take longer than the equivilent change in a system that has had major design done up front, but in my experience, the that's more than balanced out by the huge savings in upfront design time and writing these functions that someone might use in the future (but usually don't).
But in any case, even if it didn't result in loss of sales CDs, it would still be theft - for one thing there is lost sales from legal mp3s - this is just the same as vinyl->cd, and the market is currently nonexistent event though by rights their should be a market.
Technically it may be theft. But just because it's law doesn't mean that the law is correct. I'm not claiming that theft is good, I'm saying that this isn't what theft law was meant to be about.
Theft law was created in a time when to take something that wasn't yours automatically removed the rightful owner of the item. The rightful owner was obviously harmed by this. Yo apply it to your baker, if I walk into a baker's and take a loaf of bread without paying for it, then the baker has lost the ability to sell this loaf of bread to anyone else. He has clearly lost something. If I take a copy of a track on Napster, then if I was not planning on buying it anyway, who is harmed by this? I am not taking anything away from the original owner. They still have the tracks and the ability to sell it to someone else. I am not taking away their ability to sell to me, because I wasn't going to buy it anyway. And if I download a track off of an album that I wasn't planning on buying, but I like it and go and buy the album, who is harmed by this?
In my younger days, I had hundreds of pirated computer games, but every single one that I played for more than a couple of hours, I went out and bought, including many that I would not have bought otherwise. I treated the pirate games in the same way that I treat demos that I get on the front of mags or off the internet these days - a chance to try before I buy. The games industry definitely got more money out of me than it would have if I hadn't pirated games.
I'm not attempting to claim that everyone who downloads music from Napster treats it this way. I am reasonably certain that there are plenty of people out there who are downloading albums that they would have otherwise bought. They are, in the spirit of the law, stealing that sale from the record company as they are depriving them of something, but plenty of people aren't depriving them of anything, and so even if technically they aren't stealing, morally they aren't doing anything wrong.
Don't just look at the law, look at the reason for it, and what it is there to protect.
To turn this into a "us vs. shareholders" thing is not really the point. You're probably already a shareholder.
It's not us v the shareholder. It's us v the BIG shareholders - the few huge financial houses that control almost all of the share trading. It's these big investors that cause the problems. They don't care about the success of the companies that they are investing in. They only care about the money that can be made out of them. If that coincides with helping the company succeed, then fine. But if it involves sacking half the workforce, or (to keep this vaguely on topic) dropping the artists then the large shareholders will be just as happy.
Sure. You probably ARE a shareholder through you pension scheme, but I suspect that you don't know who the shares are with, or even if you do, that the companies would listen to you if you begged them not to drop your favourite singer.
What good does it do for a program to be stable, if it adds together 2+2, and gets 5
This is what getting proper test cases and writing unit and functional tests to check these cases is all about. Good unit tests don't just check that it doesn't crash. They have defined inputs and defined results. Admittedly, this doesn't help if you can't get the user to tell you what they want the program to do, but then they deserve to get non-working software!
Usability is a different issue. Unfortunatly, there is no way to objectively measure usability. The only thing you can do is get users involved during prototyping and let them play with any part of the UI as soon as you can, so that you can get early feedback.
So they see my pictures of my dog, a letter to a girlfriend and some poetry I've written.
And your bank account details in a finance program, your business plan, and when you're going to be on holiday so your house, who's address they've also found, will be empty.
You might say, "then don't store these things on your computer", but you're talking about Joe User, who does store this kind of stuff.
Again, the only people who need absolute security are those who have something to hide. Namely drug cartels, terroist groups and kiddie porners.
Or businesses, or doctors, or people paying for things etc. Do you honestly believe that things like industrial espionage don't happen?
I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned the alleged turning away of Haitian voters who were told that there were no ballot papers left, in Miami. Or the discovery of an unopened ballot box in an African-American church, also in Miami. Or the (again) alleged illegal extension of the opening hours of a polling booth in St Louis.
Isn't it this kind of stuff that the USA (and the rest of the world) was condemming Yugoslavia for, and demanding the election results be ignored, about a month ago?
A libertarian society distributes power to those who possess property.
Everyone possesses property. At a minimum, each person owns their own mind, their own body, and what they produce with these resources. Hence, you are effectively claiming a libertarian society distributes power to everyone. With which I would agree.
However, it also gives more power to people with more property.
In a libertarian society if you can prove somebody else is damaging your property -- say, by releasing toxic sludge that leaks onto it -- you have a legal claim against that somebody.
However, the proving of damage depends on having the resources to gather the proof. The more money that you have, the better laywers you can afford, and the easier it is for you to state your case, so the rich are more likely to have their say.
Certainly this isn't a perfect system for reducing pollution or conflict, but neither is the current system perfect.
Who sues if you pollute common property (eg oil spills into the sea, or car pollution)?
I say, Ralph Nader, you are a totalitarian elitist in support of socialism
Huh?
totalitarian
Of, relating to, being, or imposing a form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life, the individual is subordinated to the state, and opposing political and cultural expression is suppressed
socialism
A social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively and political power is exercised by the whole community.
Totalitarianism is the exact opposite of socialism - the control by an elite vs control by everyone.
Don't get fooled into believing that the Stalinist policital system in the USSR bore any relationship to real socialism, any more than the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was a model democratic country.
They are also the people that control the news that you see/hear/read. Do you believe that CNN/NYT etc give impartial news coverage?
Most people base their vote on what they have heard through the media, so corporations do tend to tell people who to vote for.
After the last election in the UK, "Britain's Most Popular Newspaper"(sic), the Sun, proudly shouted about the influence that it had in the election - "It's the Sun wot won it" was their headline the next day.
Corporations are simply collections of people who decide to do things as a unit. No. They are collectives. A corporation tends to be an organisation that is told what to do as a unit by the directors, usually acting for the good of their shareholders.
Re: Nader is a Communist (offtopic)
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Is UNIX An OS?
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No. True communism is the exact opposite. People having direct control over the decisions that affect them (cf the workers collectives in Spain in the mid 1930s), not managers (or shareholders, these days) running companies for their own profit, or kings fighting wars for their own personal glory.
The "Communist Party" system originally adopted in Russia and China was meant to a temporary system that the Leninists believed was a necessary evil, as they believed that the people were not ready to govern themselves, because the current system had kept the masses from being educated to a state where they could make informed decissions. Once the structures of a more anarchist (in the real sense - no central government, not chaos) system, such as universal education, workers collectives etc were in place, the party was meant to dissolve itself.
Unfortunately, with the party system that was assembled, it was very easy for a dictator (eg Stalin) to take power and hold on to it.
If you really want to find out about "real" socialism, do a search for people like Bakunin or Durutti. Quite a good starting place is Anarchism in action
Spinoff: The Psychic Advertisers Network- the banner ads act the same way as the item icons above.
Unfortunately, doubleclick seems to have beaten you to that one. I use visto for my email and one of their doubleclick banner ads has a window pop up when you move your mouse over the ad.
As I believe that it needs telephone access, and calls over here are not free, very few choose to use the service.
The telephone connection is only for certain parts of the service (e.g. email, making a purchace etc). Most of the service is connection free. The interactive football offers quite a lot more than just different camera angles (which are all pretty pointless anyway - especially the "follow one player round the pitch instead of watching the game" option). The most useful feature that I find is the highlights option. This allows you to see all of the highlights of the game so far at any point during the match. This is especially useful for matches that I'm only have a passing interest in (e.g. other teams in my division, recent England matches).
Sky News also has quite a handy interactive section, which allows you to see the main news reports/weather etc at any time.
The actual Open service, which is a separate service, not associated with any channel, is pretty rubish. It's painfully slow, and the three times that I've tried to order anything on it, it's either refused to accept my credit card number, or it's just crashed, but the channel specific stuff is quite handy.
The truth is often irrelevant in libel allegations. If you made a statement, however factual, about a multinational corporation, and they threatened to sue you for libel if you didn't retract it, would you be prepared to spend years, and large sums of money, single handledly attempting to prove the allegations against the full force of their lawyers, and facing huge fines if you lost? Or would you just quietly give in?
And could you guarantee to be able to PROVE that everything that you said was true? In a libel case, it's up to you to prove that they are true, not for the prosecution to prove that they are false. In the McLibel case, many of the original statements made by the defendant were proved to be true (as far as the judge was concerned), and non of the others were proved to false. Yet they lost the case.
If you don't want to get sued, the best strategy is normally to not say anything bad, truthful or not, about anyone with more money than you.
I get fed up with people who want to web-enable everything in your entire house. Is it too much trouble to flip a god damn switch!?
The Internet. Pretty stupid idea. Is it too much trouble to to down to your library to look up some info, or to go to the post box and post a letter to people?
Yeah, sure, some technology is totally pointless, but there are loads of uses for a fully wired house. Of course, you can do pretty much everything manually, but it's sometime a lot more convenient to get technology to give you a hand.
and thus give all those kiddie h4xxors the ability to spoil peoples' food...
Do you think that we should stop developing new technology because h4xxors might break it? Do you not own a TV in case burglars break in and steal it? Crime/vandalism has always been around, and hasn't put people off producing better and shinier things for people to steal/break.
Most people who are using mobile phones are getting benefits out them, or at least most of the ones that I know (although I can't say the same for WAP phone users at the moment), and many find SMS messaging handy, and I suspect that if their phone crashed occasionally they would find it annoying but not enough for them to ditch their phones. That these bugs are highlighted is good (so long as it leads to them being fixed), but it isn't a reason to say that the technology is useless.
how many of us would swap to another phone if it was running a Free Flashable OS?, or if it incorporated a 128Mb mp3 man
You CAN get one with mp3 (Virgin are selling the Samsung M100). However it's currently £350.
It's not really 'poor' web site design. Between them IE and Netscape make up 90-95% of the hits on the average web site (based on stats that I have seen on several commercial web site logs, and on industry research stats). Opera makes up most of the rest. All of these support Javascript (admittedly not consistantly, but nor do they support html consistantly).
When designing a site, people will tend to spend most of their time making the site look nice on the majority of browsers. There is little cost-justification to spending time redesigning your site to work with the small amount of browsers that it won't work with. There are plenty of badly designed sites out there, but just because the site doesn't work on (insert chosen minority browser name here) doesn't make it 'bad'. I'm reasonably sure that there isn't a site of any great complexity out there that doesn't break at least one browser.
There are several dialects, but they all use the same characters, so the symbol for man would look the same in all dialects, but could be pronounced totally differently (in the same way as 1 is the same in all western writing, but not in speech). So if you can read/write English/Chinese then you can probably communicate with most people (assuming that they can write).
Slashdot Mirror
Nor is it a difficult concept to realize that power in the hands of a corporation is more desirable than power in the hands of a government which holds the reins - political, military, social, AND economic.
The idea is not to hand economic power over to the government. It's about the policing of that power (such things as regulations on employee rights, polution, GM trials etc). I think (or at least I hope) it's obvious why, in theory, it's better for regulation of this to be in the hands of an elected government, who's role should be to balance the needs of the whole country, rather than in the hands of corporations who's overriding interest is making profits rather than protecting workers/consumers.
The big problem with these corportations getting too large is that they can start to wield undue influence on national governments. When a few companies control the majority of world trade, they can threaten to boycott countries if that countries government has laws that the companies don't like (e.g. pollution laws) or if they refuse to sign up to such things as the WTO (or whatever they replace the MAI with).
golden rules are never test your own code
:-). I have actually come across programmers that do believe that you don't need to test your own code at all. Thankfully, they've never been on my teams.
It's clear that's what he meant. Of course you test your own code.
So never obviously means always? Oh, how stupid of me
Do you understand what unit test means?
From Extreme Programing Explained Unit test - A test written from the perspective of the programmer.What do you think it is?
As far as I know, I wasn't arguing about the definition of unit testing, just when it should be done. The point that I was trying to make was that it's always useful to have a piece of code that just runs through the bit that you are in the process of writing, as you can make sure that this bit works on its own correctly. And if you're writing this piece of code anyway, you may as well make it a unit test.
Of course that's all you'd have to change. And if you'd written the units before the tests, you wouldn't have to go back and change anything.
But how could you be sure that the changes that you made to those little bits didn't break anything else in your code?
I have worked in much that way since I joined the industry - golden rules are never test your own code
I'm glad I don't work with you. Always test your own code. That way you're less likely to look stupid when you hand your code over to the testing department. The golden rule you're probably thinking of is always get someone else to test your code. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't as well.
But I wouldn't want to do the test unit before the real unit
Why not? I always do. It's always useful to have something that runs the bit of code that you are writing, in isolation, so that you can easily see what is going on in that bit without worrying about the rest of the system. It also helps to focus you on exactly what the function that you are testing should actually be doing.
Say you find out that VB and VC++ don't represent booleans in the same way (could never happen, of course, but just suppose) and you've got to change your code, then all your unit tests have to be updated.
Why? Only the ones that are testing the bit of code that returns your boolean to VB, surely. And the rest of the tests will be useful to make sure that you haven't broken anything when you altered the type.
Or, a simpler example: management change the spec and say "no we don't want remote access after all cos the consultant just said it would be a security risk".. what to do with all your remote access unit tests...?
You get rid of them along with your remote access class, but again the other unit tests (if written properly) make sure that the remote access classes that you have just removed have not taken some vital functionality for the rest of the system with them.
Design is essential to insure the viability of the development effort
Surely, a prototype does that for you.
documentation is essential to insure the survivability of the implementation.
I don't know about your experiences, but I've yet to work on a project that is more than a year old where the documentation bears any useful relation to the code. Who insures that objects with state transitions are able to negotiate transitions forwards and backwards (or that they can''t when they shouldn't?)
The developers who wrote the objects, by writing unit test. This is the point of unit tests, that even a year down the line, when new developers come along and tinker with that object, they don't have to go looking through reams of documentation to find the state transition diagram for the class and make sure that they aren't violating anything. They do the changes that they need to do, and if they have broken any state change rules, the unit tests will tell them.
Of course this does rely on someone writing the unit tests properly in the first place, but otherwise you are relying on someone having documented it correctly in the first place, and I'm inclined to believe that most programmers are better at coding than documenting.
The clients will come back and ask for those very features when they see the system in operation.
Again, in my experience, users tend to come back and ask for everything but the changes that you (and they) thought they would. I've lost track of the months (probably years) wasted designing and implementing flexible systems that allow us to easily add features in the areas that they think they will be changing in the next six months, only to find that in six months time the business is heading off in a different direction, and they never ask for that area. For example, I once spent six months taking a system that processed credit applications by applying business rules in a fixed order. Someone wanted to apply some of them in a different order. We could have taken what we had, and extended it to allow them to do it this new way as well. It would have taken a few weeks, but instead it was decided that it would be a really good idea to implement a fully flexible flow with a pretty graphical UI so that it would be really easy for users to add new business processes whenever they wanted. We spent six months making the system as flexible as possible. Everyone liked it, but no one used it. As far as I know in the 6 years since it was written, there was not one system built using a different flow (and I think it was actually dropped from subsiquent versions, because no one wanted it).
So, when the inevitable feature request comes along, the 'extreme programmer' spends the next week rewriting previous code to handle the new feature, while the rest of us just stick the button in there, add a function here and there, and reuse a lot of the functions we've already written, thus we finish it in a matter of hours rather than days.
Why would the non-XP code already have these functions in place, but the XP code wouldn't? If there was a previous requirement to do similar tasks then the code would be in place in XP. If there wasn't a previous requirement, why did you waste time adding it, rather than shipping what they needed earlier? How much other code is in your software that you don't need yet?
It's possible that the functions were more tightly bound into specific objects rather than in nice class hierachies in the XP version, but if the unit tests are in place for the original functions, it shouldn't take too long to refactor the design to make it more generic (by abstacting out the functions that you are actually going to be using in two places rather than ones that you think might be needed in the future). This may sometimes take longer than the equivilent change in a system that has had major design done up front, but in my experience, the that's more than balanced out by the huge savings in upfront design time and writing these functions that someone might use in the future (but usually don't).
That's just the US soccer league. It's quite exciting in the rest of the world.
But in any case, even if it didn't result in loss of sales CDs, it would still be theft - for one thing there is lost sales from legal mp3s - this is just the same as vinyl->cd, and the market is currently nonexistent event though by rights their should be a market.
Technically it may be theft. But just because it's law doesn't mean that the law is correct. I'm not claiming that theft is good, I'm saying that this isn't what theft law was meant to be about.
Theft law was created in a time when to take something that wasn't yours automatically removed the rightful owner of the item. The rightful owner was obviously harmed by this. Yo apply it to your baker, if I walk into a baker's and take a loaf of bread without paying for it, then the baker has lost the ability to sell this loaf of bread to anyone else. He has clearly lost something. If I take a copy of a track on Napster, then if I was not planning on buying it anyway, who is harmed by this? I am not taking anything away from the original owner. They still have the tracks and the ability to sell it to someone else. I am not taking away their ability to sell to me, because I wasn't going to buy it anyway. And if I download a track off of an album that I wasn't planning on buying, but I like it and go and buy the album, who is harmed by this?
In my younger days, I had hundreds of pirated computer games, but every single one that I played for more than a couple of hours, I went out and bought, including many that I would not have bought otherwise. I treated the pirate games in the same way that I treat demos that I get on the front of mags or off the internet these days - a chance to try before I buy. The games industry definitely got more money out of me than it would have if I hadn't pirated games.
I'm not attempting to claim that everyone who downloads music from Napster treats it this way. I am reasonably certain that there are plenty of people out there who are downloading albums that they would have otherwise bought. They are, in the spirit of the law, stealing that sale from the record company as they are depriving them of something, but plenty of people aren't depriving them of anything, and so even if technically they aren't stealing, morally they aren't doing anything wrong.
Don't just look at the law, look at the reason for it, and what it is there to protect.
To turn this into a "us vs. shareholders" thing is not really the point. You're probably already a shareholder.
It's not us v the shareholder. It's us v the BIG shareholders - the few huge financial houses that control almost all of the share trading. It's these big investors that cause the problems. They don't care about the success of the companies that they are investing in. They only care about the money that can be made out of them. If that coincides with helping the company succeed, then fine. But if it involves sacking half the workforce, or (to keep this vaguely on topic) dropping the artists then the large shareholders will be just as happy.
Sure. You probably ARE a shareholder through you pension scheme, but I suspect that you don't know who the shares are with, or even if you do, that the companies would listen to you if you begged them not to drop your favourite singer.
What good does it do for a program to be stable, if it adds together 2+2, and gets 5
This is what getting proper test cases and writing unit and functional tests to check these cases is all about. Good unit tests don't just check that it doesn't crash. They have defined inputs and defined results. Admittedly, this doesn't help if you can't get the user to tell you what they want the program to do, but then they deserve to get non-working software!
Usability is a different issue. Unfortunatly, there is no way to objectively measure usability. The only thing you can do is get users involved during prototyping and let them play with any part of the UI as soon as you can, so that you can get early feedback.
So they see my pictures of my dog, a letter to a girlfriend and some poetry I've written.
And your bank account details in a finance program, your business plan, and when you're going to be on holiday so your house, who's address they've also found, will be empty.
You might say, "then don't store these things on your computer", but you're talking about Joe User, who does store this kind of stuff.
Again, the only people who need absolute security are those who have something to hide. Namely drug cartels, terroist groups and kiddie porners.
Or businesses, or doctors, or people paying for things etc. Do you honestly believe that things like industrial espionage don't happen?
Heroin got a lot of loosers hooked, should we display drugs in museums? I don't think so.
They do. There is a cannabis museum in Amsterdam. Very interesting it is too.
I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned the alleged turning away of Haitian voters who were told that there were no ballot papers left, in Miami. Or the discovery of an unopened ballot box in an African-American church, also in Miami. Or the (again) alleged illegal extension of the opening hours of a polling booth in St Louis.
Isn't it this kind of stuff that the USA (and the rest of the world) was condemming Yugoslavia for, and demanding the election results be ignored, about a month ago?
A libertarian society distributes power to those who possess property.
Everyone possesses property. At a minimum, each person owns their own mind, their own body, and what they produce with these resources. Hence, you are effectively claiming a libertarian society distributes power to everyone. With which I would agree.
However, it also gives more power to people with more property.
In a libertarian society if you can prove somebody else is damaging your property -- say, by releasing toxic sludge that leaks onto it -- you have a legal claim against that somebody.
However, the proving of damage depends on having the resources to gather the proof. The more money that you have, the better laywers you can afford, and the easier it is for you to state your case, so the rich are more likely to have their say.
Certainly this isn't a perfect system for reducing pollution or conflict, but neither is the current system perfect.
Who sues if you pollute common property (eg oil spills into the sea, or car pollution)?
I say, Ralph Nader, you are a totalitarian elitist in support of socialism
Huh?
totalitarian
Of, relating to, being, or imposing a form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life, the individual is subordinated to the state, and opposing political and cultural expression is suppressed
socialism
A social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively and political power is exercised by the whole community.
Totalitarianism is the exact opposite of socialism - the control by an elite vs control by everyone.
Don't get fooled into believing that the Stalinist policital system in the USSR bore any relationship to real socialism, any more than the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was a model democratic country.
They are also the people that control the news that you see/hear/read. Do you believe that CNN/NYT etc give impartial news coverage?
Most people base their vote on what they have heard through the media, so corporations do tend to tell people who to vote for.
After the last election in the UK, "Britain's Most Popular Newspaper"(sic), the Sun, proudly shouted about the influence that it had in the election - "It's the Sun wot won it" was their headline the next day.
Corporations are simply collections of people who decide to do things as a unit. No. They are collectives. A corporation tends to be an organisation that is told what to do as a unit by the directors, usually acting for the good of their shareholders.
No. True communism is the exact opposite. People having direct control over the decisions that affect them (cf the workers collectives in Spain in the mid 1930s), not managers (or shareholders, these days) running companies for their own profit, or kings fighting wars for their own personal glory.
The "Communist Party" system originally adopted in Russia and China was meant to a temporary system that the Leninists believed was a necessary evil, as they believed that the people were not ready to govern themselves, because the current system had kept the masses from being educated to a state where they could make informed decissions. Once the structures of a more anarchist (in the real sense - no central government, not chaos) system, such as universal education, workers collectives etc were in place, the party was meant to dissolve itself.
Unfortunately, with the party system that was assembled, it was very easy for a dictator (eg Stalin) to take power and hold on to it.
If you really want to find out about "real" socialism, do a search for people like Bakunin or Durutti. Quite a good starting place is Anarchism in action
Did you skip the pictures of the Napalm and the Rodney King beating? Hooray for western democracy :-)
Spinoff: The Psychic Advertisers Network- the banner ads act the same way as the item icons above.
Unfortunately, doubleclick seems to have beaten you to that one. I use visto for my email and one of their doubleclick banner ads has a window pop up when you move your mouse over the ad.
As I believe that it needs telephone access, and calls over here are not free, very few choose to use the service.
The telephone connection is only for certain parts of the service (e.g. email, making a purchace etc). Most of the service is connection free. The interactive football offers quite a lot more than just different camera angles (which are all pretty pointless anyway - especially the "follow one player round the pitch instead of watching the game" option). The most useful feature that I find is the highlights option. This allows you to see all of the highlights of the game so far at any point during the match. This is especially useful for matches that I'm only have a passing interest in (e.g. other teams in my division, recent England matches).
Sky News also has quite a handy interactive section, which allows you to see the main news reports/weather etc at any time.
The actual Open service, which is a separate service, not associated with any channel, is pretty rubish. It's painfully slow, and the three times that I've tried to order anything on it, it's either refused to accept my credit card number, or it's just crashed, but the channel specific stuff is quite handy.
Of course, the best strategy is to always speak the truth.
Is it?
Have you heard about the McLibel case?
The truth is often irrelevant in libel allegations. If you made a statement, however factual, about a multinational corporation, and they threatened to sue you for libel if you didn't retract it, would you be prepared to spend years, and large sums of money, single handledly attempting to prove the allegations against the full force of their lawyers, and facing huge fines if you lost? Or would you just quietly give in?
And could you guarantee to be able to PROVE that everything that you said was true? In a libel case, it's up to you to prove that they are true, not for the prosecution to prove that they are false. In the McLibel case, many of the original statements made by the defendant were proved to be true (as far as the judge was concerned), and non of the others were proved to false. Yet they lost the case.
If you don't want to get sued, the best strategy is normally to not say anything bad, truthful or not, about anyone with more money than you.
Just one question. Why is the ST under 8 bit hardware?
I get fed up with people who want to web-enable everything in your entire house. Is it too much trouble to flip a god damn switch!?
The Internet. Pretty stupid idea. Is it too much trouble to to down to your library to look up some info, or to go to the post box and post a letter to people?
Yeah, sure, some technology is totally pointless, but there are loads of uses for a fully wired house. Of course, you can do pretty much everything manually, but it's sometime a lot more convenient to get technology to give you a hand.
and thus give all those kiddie h4xxors the ability to spoil peoples' food...
Do you think that we should stop developing new technology because h4xxors might break it? Do you not own a TV in case burglars break in and steal it? Crime/vandalism has always been around, and hasn't put people off producing better and shinier things for people to steal/break.
Most people who are using mobile phones are getting benefits out them, or at least most of the ones that I know (although I can't say the same for WAP phone users at the moment), and many find SMS messaging handy, and I suspect that if their phone crashed occasionally they would find it annoying but not enough for them to ditch their phones. That these bugs are highlighted is good (so long as it leads to them being fixed), but it isn't a reason to say that the technology is useless.
how many of us would swap to another phone if it was running a Free Flashable OS?, or if it incorporated a 128Mb mp3 man You CAN get one with mp3 (Virgin are selling the Samsung M100). However it's currently £350.
It's not really 'poor' web site design. Between them IE and Netscape make up 90-95% of the hits on the average web site (based on stats that I have seen on several commercial web site logs, and on industry research stats). Opera makes up most of the rest. All of these support Javascript (admittedly not consistantly, but nor do they support html consistantly).
When designing a site, people will tend to spend most of their time making the site look nice on the majority of browsers. There is little cost-justification to spending time redesigning your site to work with the small amount of browsers that it won't work with. There are plenty of badly designed sites out there, but just because the site doesn't work on (insert chosen minority browser name here) doesn't make it 'bad'. I'm reasonably sure that there isn't a site of any great complexity out there that doesn't break at least one browser.
There are several dialects, but they all use the same characters, so the symbol for man would look the same in all dialects, but could be pronounced totally differently (in the same way as 1 is the same in all western writing, but not in speech). So if you can read/write English/Chinese then you can probably communicate with most people (assuming that they can write).