It is great to see that ICANN, despite all its attempts to stack the elections, has still opted for the instant runoff method. This is AFAIK the only method that doesn't force voters to vote 'strategically', basically, to express a preference they don't have just to avoid having their preference ignored altogether. It does not produce cyclical majorities and other oddities that make it easier for incumbents to steal elections legally.
The slow ascent of this election system is good news for democracy, and I really hope that American voters will take notice and start pushing for this system in local, state, and one day even federal elections. Imagine, you will have 10 candidates running for president and all with a real chance to win.
>The winner will either be Al Gore or George Bush, >period. Nader has zero chance. Buchanan has
> zero chance.
by voting only for people who have a chance of winning, you insure that people you would like to see winning will never have a chance. Bore and Gush are a product of this logic. New parties come up and change the status quo only because people are ready to fight losing battles.
Look around the world: It was the second general uprising, not the first, that ousted Milosovic in Belgrade. The Palestinians are now in the midst of their second intifada. They are losing, but as long as they are ready to keep losing, they will win eventually.
If you think Nader's a good platform, please overcome your desire to save calories and vote for him. It's a cause worth losing, and one day you will be proud of yourself.
I need a burst of bandwith at 9:00. You're DSL is idle at that time but you need a similar burst at
16:00 ( because you live in hawai ). So we trade, and in order to trade, we need a currency.
this is as much a pyramide scheme as hard money itself.
Corporations want to have employees of a certain kind, and these tend to veer towards cities that offer the kind of services that they consume. That is why Microsoft has not followed Nike to Malasya, And BMW cannot build cars in Bolivia. That is why New York City, San Francisco and London are booming with business despite the rocketing real estate prices and higher taxes.
But BMW board members are schmoozing with 'your' represntatives and helping them in all kind of ways, and 'your' representatives feel obliged to help back. Isn't that cozy? And they even got sold you a lemon for an economic theory. These people are oh so smart!
Planet earth to little green man. Corporation don't vote, they can do well enough by just picking up the candidates.
Did you ever wonder who made Bush a presidential contender ( hint, it wasn't Jane taxpayer) ? Did you ever wonder why no journalist ever asked Gore about his position on the AOL - Warner merger
( hint, journalists have bosses ).
You are damn right that government and politicians invest in deluding the public, but you may want one day to get one level up the evolutionary ladder and figure out who orders and pays for the manufacturing of these delusion, big time.
Tax is payed on revenue, so your statement makes no sense. If you produce for eight and sell for ten you earn 2 and say you pay one to the gov. you get 1 net income, now how exactly can you pass that taxation to the consumer?
Besides, you assume that a corporation will charge a lower price than the maximum the market will pay if only the taxes were lower. Problem is, that would be welfare and company executives are prohibited from doling out welfare cause it aint their money. A company that would do it would be sued by its shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty.
About nice fuzzy words like double: If I pay 20% taxes, isn't this double taxation ( calculate it as 11% on top of 10% ) already. In the present tax code capital is taxed in two stages, whereas labour is taxed once but at a higher level ( unless you factor sale taxes too ). Why call it double? It is nothing but a sound byte.
It would be nice ( and naive) if people who complain about 'double' taxation would offer to double the tax on shareholders in order to get rid of corporate tax. But they don't. What they really want is for labor to shoulder a larger part of financing the public budget. Prey explain to me why this is fair?
As a matter of public policy taxing capital at the corporate gate makes some very good sense:
tax revenues that would leave the country
give incentives for R&D, higher dividends and higher wages.
price usage of public resources, such as the civil legal system, which is 100% financed by the government and 90% used by corporations.
reward corporations for good citizenship, e.g. investment in green production etc.
reduce the transaction cost of taxation. ( Yes taxing $1 billion is much cheaper than taxing $1 a billion time, which is good both for the government and for the tax payer.
Microsoft and Cisco are not cheating Uncle Sam, and their deduction is well deserved, as many here have wisely explained.
However, they are fleecing their small shareholders ( all those about to retire baby boomers who got intoxicated with the stock exchange and think NASDAQ will take care of them when they are old and frail ).
That is because the real losses born by options are not deducted from their earning statements, which fuel their stock share price.
The reality behind is that it costs Cisco and Microsoft so much to retain talent that they have Zero revenues, and if enough people figured that out, their stock would sell at around 5 rather than around 50.
Now, Microsoft is a leader of high tech companies that don't distribute dividends in principle. The whole value of their stock lies in its speculative potential. So the well hidden fact that they don't make money should be twice as damaging to shareholder interest.
At bottom, the stock market has become a rather socialist beast, and of a particularly amusing nature. Think of it, in High Tech, a large group of employees, well placed, but still employees, is using the market to fleece the so called 'capitalists' who are mostly other workers dreaming of early retirement. I'd say it is pretty cool.
Chief scofflaw Rehnquist began his career on the high bench with an almost certain lie: He told the senate under oath that he hasn't discussed Roe vs. Wade, a supreme court ruling that took place while he was a law student at Yale.
Since then he has consistenty done as much as he could to gut the legal protections afforded to the less well padded among us. His tenure was marked with an assault on habeas corpus, miranda, the right to sue, civil rights gained by minorities, gender equality, immigrants rights, native american religion, etc.
In addition, He also presided with gusto over lowering the bar for contorted and incoherent legal arguments. And he proved to be a master of disdainful ethical insensitivity. As he said in this case, he has the power to affect his son's career, but hey, what's our beef, isn't this the job of the chief justice?
Taking him to task is ridiculous. He is not biased--he can't be. Like the pope, he is Truth incarnate.
There is no need for armchair psychology since there has been some research about it. It seems that not only vandals, but actually most people are deterred by the probability of being caught and usually unimpressed by stiffer penalties. Hence increasing the penalty for everything that scares people is worthless public policy and just serves to make the US the world leader in incarceration rate. An enlightened justice system would persue particularly problematic crime by turning on the heat of enforcement and increasing the probability of getting caught, leaving penalties to be dermined by other criteria ( damage, moral obrobium, etc.)
( If anybody finds such a justice system please call the White House )
The penalty should be inversly proportional to probability of getting caught only when the penalty is a fine, since then every offender will pay the same amount over time.
( I got to replies and I am trying to answear both)
first thanks for the references.
Commercial attempts to create unofficial TLDs are moderately interesting. They solve a technical problem but the real problem is gaining critical mass, which is a political issue.
This is a stint that the open source community could probably succeed in far better. The experience is there, the political will is there, the informal and formal channels ( the road for world domination ) are there.
I took a look at open-rsc.org. They seem well intentionned but they make themselves irrelevant by promising to play nice. (plus the site seems old)
Seems to me the time for being cooperative should be over. Creating an unofficial TLD system based on the energy of the open source model. (i.e-- just doing things better and passing the news from techie to techie) seems now a much better way to scare ICANN into cooperate with us.
I believe the critical mass problem can be solved by people offering links to alt TLDs ( with explanation how to configure the DNS client to get there.) Once we get www.ICANN-sucks.mydomain into google and altavista, the game is over.
Instead of bitching about ICANN, why not make them see the light ( with a gentle arm twisting).
All you need is a top dns that people can refer to.
The major problem is getting people to know that there is something out there, enough to be bothered with reconfiguring their DNS. This can be achieved by a few redirectors that would get pages from the new domain into the search engines.
OK, what about th IP numbers? does anyone have an idea.
While 86% is impressive, does anybody know how is this broken down between versions? Except for intranets, web designers will probably avoid cutting of 14% of potential customers, but they will certainly avoid using features that even a sizeable chunk of IE users cannot see. I assume this gives some breathing space to Mozzilla and the justice department.
Please, I have been posting very anti-Linux messages for some time now
What is this need to be anti-linux? Did your boss/teacher/girlfriend force you to use this crappy OS against you will? rebel! use Microsoft!
dear unrequitted troll.
here is some food for thought.
you really need to get your terms straight before you go around posting your misinformed views. 1. Anarchy and Libertarians are not opposites.
Libertarianism champions absolute property rights which requires either a strong legal system with a strong government to jail robbers and protect robber barons, or a 'wild west system' where people buy defense on the free market. The first is the opposite or anarchism because anarchism stems from the idea that government is bad because it protects excessive property rights. The second can be streched to seem congruent with Anarchism in principle. The problem is that a) it is incoheret--property rights don't exist if you must buy a gun to protect them. Plus, there is no real shared moral ground: Libertarianism talks of self-interest, economic benefits, maximizing utility, negative freedom, etc. whereas Anarchism talks of common humanity, sharing the world, and positive freedom.
obvious reason for that is because MS is better than the rest
If being better is defined by winning, you are right. That is the Darwinian definition of 'better'. But Capitalism is different from evolution because it has rules. Bill Gates can destroy Oracle by sponsering a contract on Allison. If Capitalist competition where Darwinian that would be OK. It isn't because it isn't. Capitalist competition, unlike evolutionary cometition, is not a dumb natural system, it is a set of rules devised for a certain socially wide goal--growth, innovation, prosperity, you name it. Hence, what is better is judged extrinsically in reference to the rules of the system, and these rules are also subject to judgement through reference to how well they promote the system's goals. Given that, the question whether Microsoft is better is not at all obvious because it must be determined empirically by careful evaluation of events and facts. A majority of people in this forum (IMHO), on average quite knowledgeable, believes that Microsoft is NOT better and its victory is due to bending of existent rules as well as to previously unknown phenomena such as 'the network effect' that require an adjustment in the rules in order to protects the goals of capitalism. Many experts had endorsed this position and they have managed to convinced a Judge. They may all be wrong, but refuting them requires more than shouting that microsoft is obviously better because consumers love it.
'let the best one win'How can you believe in that statement, yet your for the government's intervention?!?
I can because I believe a better tennis player is someone and only someone who wins while obeying the rules of tennis and promoting the values of sportmanship. I don't think for example that a player who bribes the judge, or has cyborgical implants is a 'better' player even if he or she wins.
Plus, Governments are essential aspects of society and I suggest that if they agree on the purpose of government ( as China and the US presently do) we should let competition here to. Enforcing one form of government on all countries is bad from the same reason that having a single airline or telephone company is bad.
PS. While I am neither an anarchist nor a libertarian, Anarchist philosophy inspired thousands of young men and women to volunteer to sail to a foreign land and sacrifice their lives fighting Franco's thugs. Libertarianism can at best inspire someone to buy stocks or express malformed opinions on slashdot. I don't know which is better but I sure know which earns my respect.
Re:Systemised defects.. not on same rack
on
Linux And Beijing
·
· Score: 1
>In China.. You have no crime
1. Despite common conservative propaganda, being tough on liberty doesn't reduce crime, it just transfers a larger pepcentage of the crime to the government.
>.. you have no life..
2. one must be incredibly narrow minded to believe that a billion people don't have a life because they don't live your kind of life. Prescribe yourself some travel, you really need it.
> like having my own life... suck or no suck... at least it's MINE!!!
A catchy metaphor with little content. In what sense your life is yours more or less. can you legally terminate it in the US? Can you sell it?
To be nitpicky, ( and for ol time sake) your life isn't yours. unless you are one of the lucky few, the only thing that's yours is your labor. You sell it, and with the proceedings you buy yourself a life that is pretty much an off-the-shelf commodity, plus some minor customizations.
In China it's all completely different, instead of selling your labor you mostly give it when you are told to. And the life you receive in return is a patchy handcrafted low-tech job.
Re:communists need to be butchered!!
on
Linux And Beijing
·
· Score: 1
Why is it that people who say stupid things often can't spell a single complete sentence correctly?
Sorry boy. Left and right are just bad terms. If you read here you know that people here have a huge array of views, ranging from left anarchism to right libertarian and all the way in between.
A lot have a problem with corporatism and some even criticize corporatism from a capitalist perspective.
Now what's your beef? don't you believe in competition? You have the Microsoft model and you have the linux model, you have the US gov view of technological progress and you have the Chinese gov view of the progress. How about "let the best one win" instead of assuming that what you happen to believe in must be right.
One effect that has to be factored in is mindshare and competition. companies engage in lots of activities that bring zero revenues but without which revenues would soon be zero.
This seems like a paradox but is actually a logical outcome of competing on a limited resource.
Imaging a market of delivery services that use stagecoaches on the day the first car is invented. Transforming a coach service to a car service is going to very expensive and will probably not be worth it in the long run, because all your competitors will do the same and you will probably end up with exactly the same market share and revenues. Yet you will convert your services, because if you don't you will be wiped out.
Consider News providers. The global amount of news consumption is limited by the number of people and the fact that most of them most also work sometimes. However, market share can be stolen from competitors by all kinds of tricks. A website with free information increases the producer's mindshare, hence its apparent importance as a forum and may thus make the paper more attractive to advertisers and readers. However, sooner or later all news producers realize that. At that moment, a free website offers no longer any competitive advantage. Yet because a free website has become a standard element that defines a respectable news provider, providers who scrap their free web page risk losing a lot--respectability, faith in their future, mindshare and eventually revenues.
This is the beauty (or perversity) of technological advancement in a competitive industry. It is an offer companies can't refuse, even though they will gain little from it.
So I believe we are likely to see expensive informtion being provided for free by companies who prefer that you get the information from them rather than from anyone else. Add to that information owned by non for profit organization, including governments, and the goodwill of publically minded citizens, and the prospect of free information surviving banner ads ( I assume you mean that big JUNKBUSTER sign at the top of my screen;-| ) seem quite bright.
Of course monopolists are not bound by that logic. The WSJ has a unique niche for the moment, so it can charge fees. If the web ends up carved up by a number of niched monopolies, than the story ends badly. And that one is up to "our" government to decide.
This case is so exceptional that it proves its own opposite.
Assume M$ is broken. What do we have? A company that everyone who new something new was predatory a decade ago ( at least since Wordperfect went belly up ) is given its just deserve. But under what circumstances?
1. 10 years delay. 2. A shoot-yourself-in-the-foot defense team. 3. A prosecution leader that is so good the government cannot afford. 4. A very exceptional judge.
Essentially, if you aren't as heinous as M$, and you hire a decent law firm, and you have an average judge, you can get away with enough predatory behaviour to make a pack of wolves blush.
Not only has he been incredibly tourough and acute. But he seems to be one of the rare judges that still distinguish between the public good and the corporate good.
>communism failed, facism failed, >anarchy definately failed, feudalism failed, >monarchy failed, and benevolent dictators are all >but impossible to find.
and you failed to mention that we fail too, and die.
Your solution, democracy in a static, small, like minded community is akin to fighting death by deep freeze. You don't die, but I won't call it life either.
Why not accept, say even welcome, the fact that life, personal and political, is a moving target? that all solutions are temporary and it's a good thing too?
Monarchy failed? Yes, but boy I wish I had such failures on my record.
Communism failed? Yes, but most of what Westerners take for granted, public access to medicine, decent retirement pensions, education, living wages, would not have come to be without it.
Fashism failed? To the extent that it did, I am grateful, but Fashism's most important discovery was that politics with a mass audience calls for a massive spectacle. To the extent that we live politics as a well PRed wrestling match we are all living Fashism's enduring success.
Benevolent dictators are hard to find? On the contrary, they are aplenty. Do you know how many tears Pinochet had shed in the dark after he gave his gruesome orders to the death squads, out of sheer necessity?
Democracy failed? Hard to say, it hasn't been tried yet.
Slashdot Mirror
It is great to see that ICANN, despite all its attempts to stack the elections, has still opted for the instant runoff method. This is AFAIK the only method that doesn't force voters to vote 'strategically', basically, to express a preference they don't have just to avoid having their preference ignored altogether. It does not produce cyclical majorities and other oddities that make it easier for incumbents to steal elections legally.
The slow ascent of this election system is good news for democracy, and I really hope that American voters will take notice and start pushing for this system in local, state, and one day even federal elections. Imagine, you will have 10 candidates running for president and all with a real chance to win.
>The winner will either be Al Gore or George Bush, >period. Nader has zero chance. Buchanan has
> zero chance.
by voting only for people who have a chance of winning, you insure that people you would like to see winning will never have a chance. Bore and Gush are a product of this logic. New parties come up and change the status quo only because people are ready to fight losing battles.
Look around the world: It was the second general uprising, not the first, that ousted Milosovic in Belgrade. The Palestinians are now in the midst of their second intifada. They are losing, but as long as they are ready to keep losing, they will win eventually.
If you think Nader's a good platform, please overcome your desire to save calories and vote for him. It's a cause worth losing, and one day you will be proud of yourself.
Yes You are missing this.
I need a burst of bandwith at 9:00. You're DSL is idle at that time but you need a similar burst at
16:00 ( because you live in hawai ). So we trade, and in order to trade, we need a currency.
this is as much a pyramide scheme as hard money itself.
OK sometimes a headline is just that!
The joke is on you pall.
Corporations want to have employees of a certain kind, and these tend to veer towards cities that offer the kind of services that they consume. That is why Microsoft has not followed Nike to Malasya, And BMW cannot build cars in Bolivia. That is why New York City, San Francisco and London are booming with business despite the rocketing real estate prices and higher taxes.
But BMW board members are schmoozing with 'your' represntatives and helping them in all kind of ways, and 'your' representatives feel obliged to help back. Isn't that cozy? And they even got sold you a lemon for an economic theory. These people are oh so smart!
> because corporations can't vote.
Planet earth to little green man. Corporation don't vote, they can do well enough by just picking up the candidates.
Did you ever wonder who made Bush a presidential contender ( hint, it wasn't Jane taxpayer) ? Did you ever wonder why no journalist ever asked Gore about his position on the AOL - Warner merger
( hint, journalists have bosses ).
You are damn right that government and politicians invest in deluding the public, but you may want one day to get one level up the evolutionary ladder and figure out who orders and pays for the manufacturing of these delusion, big time.
Besides, you assume that a corporation will charge a lower price than the maximum the market will pay if only the taxes were lower. Problem is, that would be welfare and company executives are prohibited from doling out welfare cause it aint their money. A company that would do it would be sued by its shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty.
About nice fuzzy words like double: If I pay 20% taxes, isn't this double taxation ( calculate it as 11% on top of 10% ) already. In the present tax code capital is taxed in two stages, whereas labour is taxed once but at a higher level ( unless you factor sale taxes too ). Why call it double? It is nothing but a sound byte.
It would be nice ( and naive) if people who complain about 'double' taxation would offer to double the tax on shareholders in order to get rid of corporate tax. But they don't. What they really want is for labor to shoulder a larger part of financing the public budget. Prey explain to me why this is fair?
As a matter of public policy taxing capital at the corporate gate makes some very good sense:
etc.
Microsoft and Cisco are not cheating Uncle Sam, and their deduction is well deserved, as many here have wisely explained.
However, they are fleecing their small shareholders ( all those about to retire baby boomers who got intoxicated with the stock exchange and think NASDAQ will take care of them when they are old and frail ).
That is because the real losses born by options are not deducted from their earning statements, which fuel their stock share price.
The reality behind is that it costs Cisco and Microsoft so much to retain talent that they have Zero revenues, and if enough people figured that out, their stock would sell at around 5 rather than around 50.
Now, Microsoft is a leader of high tech companies that don't distribute dividends in principle. The whole value of their stock lies in its speculative potential. So the well hidden fact that they don't make money should be twice as damaging to shareholder interest.
At bottom, the stock market has become a rather socialist beast, and of a particularly amusing nature. Think of it, in High Tech, a large group of employees, well placed, but still employees, is using the market to fleece the so called 'capitalists' who are mostly other workers dreaming of early retirement. I'd say it is pretty cool.
And when exactly was your last visit to scandinavia?
Chief scofflaw Rehnquist began his career on the high bench with an almost certain lie: He told the senate under oath that he hasn't discussed Roe vs. Wade, a supreme court ruling that took place while he was a law student at Yale.
Since then he has consistenty done as much as he could to gut the legal protections afforded to the less well padded among us. His tenure was marked with an assault on habeas corpus, miranda, the right to sue, civil rights gained by minorities, gender equality, immigrants rights, native american religion, etc.
In addition, He also presided with gusto over lowering the bar for contorted and incoherent legal arguments. And he proved to be a master of disdainful ethical insensitivity. As he said in this case, he has the power to affect his son's career, but hey, what's our beef, isn't this the job of the chief justice?
Taking him to task is ridiculous. He is not biased--he can't be. Like the pope, he is Truth incarnate.
There is no need for armchair psychology since there has been some research about it. It seems that not only vandals, but actually most people are deterred by the probability of being caught and usually unimpressed by stiffer penalties. Hence increasing the penalty for everything that scares people is worthless public policy and just serves to make the US the world leader in incarceration rate. An enlightened justice system would persue particularly problematic crime by turning on the heat of enforcement and increasing the probability of getting caught, leaving penalties to be dermined by other criteria ( damage, moral obrobium, etc.)
( If anybody finds such a justice system please call the White House )
The penalty should be inversly proportional to probability of getting caught only when the penalty is a fine, since then every offender will pay the same amount over time.
( I got to replies and I am trying to answear both)
first thanks for the references.
Commercial attempts to create unofficial TLDs are moderately interesting. They solve a technical problem but the real problem is gaining critical mass, which is a political issue.
This is a stint that the open source community could probably succeed in far better. The experience is there, the political will is there, the informal and formal channels ( the road for world domination ) are there.
I took a look at open-rsc.org. They seem well intentionned but they make themselves irrelevant by promising to play nice. (plus the site seems old)
Seems to me the time for being cooperative should be over. Creating an unofficial TLD system based on the energy of the open source model. (i.e-- just doing things better and passing the news from techie to techie) seems now a much better way to scare ICANN into cooperate with us.
I believe the critical mass problem can be solved by people offering links to alt TLDs ( with explanation how to configure the DNS client to get there.) Once we get www.ICANN-sucks.mydomain into google and altavista, the game is over.
Instead of bitching about ICANN, why not make them see the light ( with a gentle arm twisting).
Why not start un unofficial TLD?
All you need is a top dns that people can refer to.
The major problem is getting people to know that there is something out there, enough to be bothered with reconfiguring their DNS. This can be achieved by a few redirectors that would get pages from the new domain into the search engines.
OK, what about th IP numbers? does anyone have an idea.
While 86% is impressive, does anybody know how is this broken down between versions? Except for intranets, web designers will probably avoid cutting of 14% of potential customers, but they will certainly avoid using features that even a sizeable chunk of IE users cannot see. I assume this gives some breathing space to Mozzilla and the justice department.
Please, I have been posting very anti-Linux messages for some time now
What is this need to be anti-linux? Did your boss/teacher/girlfriend force you to use this crappy OS against you will? rebel! use Microsoft!
dear unrequitted troll.
here is some food for thought.
you really need to get your terms straight before you go around posting your misinformed views. 1. Anarchy and Libertarians are not opposites.
Libertarianism champions absolute property rights which requires either a strong legal system with a strong government to jail robbers and protect robber barons, or a 'wild west system' where people buy defense on the free market. The first is the opposite or anarchism because anarchism stems from the idea that government is bad because it protects excessive property rights. The second can be streched to seem congruent with Anarchism in principle. The problem is that a) it is incoheret--property rights don't exist if you must buy a gun to protect them. Plus, there is no real shared moral ground: Libertarianism talks of self-interest, economic benefits, maximizing utility, negative freedom, etc. whereas Anarchism talks of common humanity, sharing the world, and positive freedom.
obvious reason for that is because MS is better than the rest
If being better is defined by winning, you are right. That is the Darwinian definition of 'better'. But Capitalism is different from evolution because it has rules. Bill Gates can destroy Oracle by sponsering a contract on Allison. If Capitalist competition where Darwinian that would be OK. It isn't because it isn't. Capitalist competition, unlike evolutionary cometition, is not a dumb natural system, it is a set of rules devised for a certain socially wide goal--growth, innovation, prosperity, you name it. Hence, what is better is judged extrinsically in reference to the rules of the system, and these rules are also subject to judgement through reference to how well they promote the system's goals. Given that, the question whether Microsoft is better is not at all obvious because it must be determined empirically by careful evaluation of events and facts. A majority of people in this forum (IMHO), on average quite knowledgeable, believes that Microsoft is NOT better and its victory is due to bending of existent rules as well as to previously unknown phenomena such as 'the network effect' that require an adjustment in the rules in order to protects the goals of capitalism. Many experts had endorsed this position and they have managed to convinced a Judge. They may all be wrong, but refuting them requires more than shouting that microsoft is obviously better because consumers love it.
'let the best one win'How can you believe in that statement, yet your for the government's intervention?!?
I can because I believe a better tennis player is someone and only someone who wins while obeying the rules of tennis and promoting the values of sportmanship. I don't think for example that a player who bribes the judge, or has cyborgical implants is a 'better' player even if he or she wins.
Plus, Governments are essential aspects of society and I suggest that if they agree on the purpose of government ( as China and the US presently do) we should let competition here to. Enforcing one form of government on all countries is bad from the same reason that having a single airline or telephone company is bad.
PS.
While I am neither an anarchist nor a libertarian, Anarchist philosophy inspired thousands of young men and women to volunteer to sail to a foreign land and sacrifice their lives fighting Franco's thugs. Libertarianism can at best inspire someone to buy stocks or express malformed opinions on slashdot. I don't know which is better but I sure know which earns my respect.
Thanks for the tip. I am now evaluating telephony cards. Can you elaborate a little on alternatives to Dialogic?
>Your all a bunch of racist!
Welocme to the US
>In China.. You have no crime
1. Despite common conservative propaganda, being tough on liberty doesn't reduce crime, it just transfers a larger pepcentage of the crime to the government.
>.. you have no life..
2. one must be incredibly narrow minded to believe that a billion people don't have a life because they don't live your kind of life. Prescribe yourself some travel, you really need it.
> like having my own life... suck or no suck... at least it's MINE!!!
A catchy metaphor with little content. In what sense your life is yours more or less. can you legally terminate it in the US? Can you sell it?
To be nitpicky, ( and for ol time sake) your life isn't yours. unless you are one of the lucky few, the only thing that's yours is your labor. You sell it, and with the proceedings you buy yourself a life that is pretty much an off-the-shelf commodity, plus some minor customizations.
In China it's all completely different, instead of selling your labor you mostly give it when you are told to. And the life you receive in return is a patchy handcrafted low-tech job.
Why is it that people who say stupid things
often can't spell a single complete sentence correctly?
Sorry boy. Left and right are just bad terms. If you read here you know that people here have a huge array of views, ranging from left anarchism to right libertarian and all the way in between.
A lot have a problem with corporatism and some even criticize corporatism from a capitalist perspective.
Now what's your beef? don't you believe in competition? You have the Microsoft model and you have the linux model, you have the US gov view of technological progress and you have the Chinese gov view of the progress. How about "let the best one win" instead of assuming that what you happen to believe in must be right.
One effect that has to be factored in is mindshare and competition. companies engage in lots of activities that bring zero revenues but without which revenues would soon be zero.
;-| ) seem quite bright.
This seems like a paradox but is actually a logical outcome of competing on a limited resource.
Imaging a market of delivery services that use stagecoaches on the day the first car is invented. Transforming a coach service to a car service is going to very expensive and will probably not be worth it in the long run, because all your competitors will do the same and you will probably end up with exactly the same market share and revenues. Yet you will convert your services, because if you don't you will be wiped out.
Consider News providers. The global amount of news consumption is limited by the number of people and the fact that most of them most also work sometimes. However, market share can be stolen from competitors by all kinds of tricks. A website with free information increases the producer's mindshare, hence its apparent importance as a forum and may thus make the paper more attractive to advertisers and readers. However, sooner or later all news producers realize that. At that moment, a free website offers no longer any competitive advantage. Yet because a free website has become a standard element that defines a respectable news provider, providers who scrap their free web page risk losing a lot--respectability, faith in their future, mindshare and eventually revenues.
This is the beauty (or perversity) of technological advancement in a competitive industry. It is an offer companies can't refuse, even though they will gain little from it.
So I believe we are likely to see expensive informtion being provided for free by companies who prefer that you get the information from them rather than from anyone else. Add to that information owned by non for profit organization, including governments, and the goodwill of publically minded citizens, and the prospect of free information surviving banner ads ( I assume you mean that big JUNKBUSTER sign at the top of my screen
Of course monopolists are not bound by that logic. The WSJ has a unique niche for the moment, so it can charge fees. If the web ends up carved up by a number of niched monopolies, than the story ends badly. And that one is up to "our" government to decide.
This case is so exceptional that it proves its own opposite.
Assume M$ is broken. What do we have? A company that everyone who new something new was predatory a decade ago ( at least since Wordperfect went belly up ) is given its just deserve. But under what circumstances?
1. 10 years delay.
2. A shoot-yourself-in-the-foot defense team.
3. A prosecution leader that is so good the government cannot afford.
4. A very exceptional judge.
Essentially, if you aren't as heinous as M$, and you hire a decent law firm, and you have an average judge, you can get away with enough predatory behaviour to make a pack of wolves blush.
The header says it all.
Not only has he been incredibly tourough and acute. But he seems to be one of the rare judges that still distinguish between the public good and the corporate good.
For most speakers, anarchy means a system in which they are not in charge.
>communism failed, facism failed,
>anarchy definately failed, feudalism failed, >monarchy failed, and benevolent dictators are all >but impossible to find.
and you failed to mention that we fail too, and die.
Your solution, democracy in a static, small, like minded community is akin to fighting death by deep freeze. You don't die, but I won't call it life either.
Why not accept, say even welcome, the fact that life, personal and political, is a moving target? that all solutions are temporary and it's a good thing too?
Monarchy failed? Yes, but boy I wish I had such failures on my record.
Communism failed? Yes, but most of what Westerners take for granted, public access to medicine, decent retirement pensions, education, living wages, would not have come to be without it.
Fashism failed? To the extent that it did, I am grateful, but Fashism's most important discovery was that politics with a mass audience calls for a massive spectacle. To the extent that we live politics as a well PRed wrestling match we are all living Fashism's enduring success.
Benevolent dictators are hard to find? On the contrary, they are aplenty. Do you know how many tears Pinochet had shed in the dark after he gave his gruesome orders to the death squads, out of sheer necessity?
Democracy failed? Hard to say, it hasn't been tried yet.