Replace "video game" with "masturbation" throughout this piece and you might be on to something. Good Lord, man! Video games are boredom killing machines. They make television look positively benevolent. Just imagine what wonders the youth of the world might be making if they weren't sitting slack-jawed in front of televisions sets, virtually kicking the shit out of BEM's. Maybe that is the cultural heritage of video games. Passivity and amusement. Frankly, I'd rather they were masturbating. I can see some value in that.
My point is these tools grew out of the *nix world and its overall design philosphopy. You would not have them at all without *nix. Linux, per se, doesn't enter into it, since these tools all antedate Linux.
Your Windows box makes a pretty good *nix box if you install cygwin. My point was talking about "out-of-the-box" functionality. These are computers. You can make them do anything if you learn how to program (and if Palladium doesn't prevent you from wiring software for your own computer, don't get me started), but what your system does out of the box does matter. Why else would MS have bundled IE?
This is absurd. Suppose you have a collection of web pages, all of which contain a link to some site, say, http://slashdot.org/, and then let's say they change their url to say, http://colonslash.org. You've got 150 links in 110 pages to change.
Which is faster:
Double click on each file to open it in notepad or Netscape editor or, heaven forfend, Frontpage, where you do a find-and-replace on each URL.
Obviously, the second one requires a bit more knowledge, but how many such tasks does it take to pay back the knowledge investment? "Do it faster in Windows," my ass. Why do you think *nix hangs on? It hasn't been because of its intuitiveness. It's been because of its utility.
Make an OS so simple that idiots can use it, and it will be an OS for idiots. If you want to write e-mail and play games, Windows is an OK OS. If you want to get some work done, it lacks some important features.
You are being a bit pedantic. We have a democratic republic. It is possible to have a non-democratic republic. The "indirection" of a representative system improves the effectiveness of legislation. All you have to do is take a look at referendum states to see what kind of a mess direct citizen legislation can cause. It is the democratic nature of our republic that cuases the constant expansion of government influence, so my original remark stands as far as I am concerned.
Okay, I'm metooing just so there is one thing on record saying something positive about MS. This poster is completely correct. Sega died well before anyone was taking the X-box seriously (is anyone taking the X-box seriously?). Sega's death was too many players in a highly competitive market. The Xbox (XBox Ex-Box?) will be around for a while because the parent company can afford to lose money on it for a long, long time. Sega couldn't.
I don't confuse Libertarianism with anarchy. I'm just saying that the expansion of government power came about through an expansion of the greivances the people petitioned the government to address. I'm suggesting that even if through some divine intervention we became a Libertarian government today, we would be back at a system very similar to the present one in a couple of generations because it was the democratic process that got us here, not some sort of government conspiracy.
This is the base fact that is continually ignored.
Oh, I agree with you that one of the ways in which money distorts the equality of citizens is through the lobbyist industry, but nothing they do prevents your voice from being heard. I had a friend who worked in a congressman's office in his home state. Do you know how many letters on a subject it took for the congressman to want to be told about them? Five. Five letters.
There a handful of issues (gun laws, abortion, etc.) that always generate thousands of letters. Most legilation that really affects our lives (telco deregulation, DMCA, etc.) get passed without any direct input from the public at all.
So, I agree with you that the lobbyists are magnifying the interests of the few, but they are not diminishing your influence at all.
I want to amplify a bit here. Let's go a little further with the Libertarian system of roads. Suppose you had a major landowner who owned substantial land between two urban centers, say Minneapolis and St. Paul. Suppose this person one day decided he wasn't going to let any Catholics use his roads. To whom would area Catholics appeal? Merchants have the right to refuse service to anyone. Such a landowner would be within his rights.
Now lets expand this. How well do you think Libertarianism would have served an uneducated black man in Mississippi in 1870? I guess what I'm saying is that the "free market" isn't a guarantee of any kind of social equity or justice. If we agree that are such things as "freedom," "justice," and "fairness," some sort of law and some guarantee of access to redress is required.
Without enough law to make and enforce contracts, there is no possibility but brigandism. You can get more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word. I do not want to live in such a world. Yes, autonomy is a natural state. Self sovereignty is a natural state. But we give up some of those rights to the collective entity (society, expressed in the form of a government). In return the power of the collective entity backs up our remaining soverignty and autonomy against other less scrupulous individuals.
This is an old tension, but realize that while everybody hates taxes, not everobody even realizes all the good things that government does. I'm reminded of the bit from Monty Python's the Life of Brian:
"They took our land. They've beaten and repressed us for years. And what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Pause.
"The Aquaduct?"
"What?"
"The Aquaduct?"
"Oh, yeah, well they did do that. But apart from that, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
"Sanitation."
"Irrigation." "Housing." "The wine?" "The courts"
"Oh yeah, the courts! Remember what the streets used to be like? They're probably the only people who could keep order in a place like this!"
"Alright! Alright! But apart from irrigation, sanitation, agriculture, viniculture, roads, public housing and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Of course, under the DMCA I'm sure I'm in trouble for that long paraphrased quote. Yes, government makes bad and excessive law sometimes.
Libertarians constantly remind me of the Judean People's Front...
Yes, I would say you are spouting Libertarian certainty. I fundamentally disagree withe every single one of your positions. I'm even happy to pay my income tax (well, maybe not happy, but I understand that it is good for the economy to have excess savings spent on capital investment, and that sometimes the private sector fails to to this, leading to economic contraction).
I'm not Libertarian at all. I believe that we have "unalienable rights" and that to "secure these rights, governments are instituted among men" and that such governments "derive their just powers from the consent of governed."
I think our instutions are doing just fine at requiring the consent of the governed. I think Libertarians delude themselves that the unpopularity of taxes equals support for the gutting of government. I think they are wrong. Ask anyone "Do you like to pay taxes?" and of course almost everyone will say "No." Ask them if they would rather pay taxes and have public roads, or would they rather all roads were built privately and privately owned and you had to pay a toll to use each separate private road, and they might not say yes. You might, but I would not.
Roads are, in fact, one of the ways we got to the present size of government. Roads were highly in demand, but private enterprise was building very few of them. We talked about third parties? Are you aware that the largest 3rd party movement in 20th century history was the "Good Roads Party?" Yep. The people demanded that government get into the road building business. The construction of such roads has had immense secondary economic effects. You can argue that the roads would have been built eventually. I do not agree, and I have no way to prove such an assertion. But I would contest the notion that the expansion of government was done by "the government" for selfish or nefarious reasons. It was, in each case, responding to the democratic will.
I, for one, believe that it is vital to have a major economic actor that views each citizen equally, rather than in proportion to his wallet (no, I'm not naieve enough to believe that the wallet doesn't still get in there and pervert things a bit).
Perhaps some of the "selfish and shallow" are just not completely ignorant of macroeconomics.
I would argue that your claim "most people are basically Libertarian, but only as far as it benefits them" means that most people are simply not Libertarian. I don't know why Libertarians refuse to see this. This is precisely what I was talking about.
All that said, certainly there is plenty of room for debate about the limits of government power, about what amount of government involvement in the economy is the "right" amount, about which sorts of infrastructure are appropriate government functions. I just plain don't agree with you that the answers are "total, none, and none."
I also think there's plenty of room for talking about how we are and how we should be taxed. I'm very much in favor of moving to fees for service and consumption taxes and away from income taxes and property taxes. I'm also in favor of more spending on roads and education. I'm in favor of subsidies for broadband expansion into rural areas (similar to the rural elctrification act), and other "big government, tax and spend" programs.
This is not meant as a flame, but has the possibility occurred to you that the majority does not agree with Libertarianism? I know that I do not. I've never met a single Libertarian willing to concede the possibility, however. As a rule, Libertarians are the most certain people I meet. The Libertarians have a famous "questionnaire" which has questions couched in such a manner that Karl Marx would probably come out a Libertarian.
I will tell you how I sympathize with Libertarians, however. One of the fundmental beliefs of Libertarianism is a fairly strict Adam Smith economic view coupled with a pretty hardline John Locke view of property. Minimum law, minimum government, minimum taxation, etc. In theory, the modern Republican party espouses the same line. At the same time, Republicans seem to want to pass the most legislation controlling behavior and government exploded in size under the Reagan and Bush adminsitrations. A Libertarian's theoretical alignment with the Republican party doesn't work out that way.
Believe me, I have similar problems with the Democrats.
Oh, and the media didn't exclude your party (at least from the Pres. & V.P. debates). The two parties did. This began when the "debate comission" was set up instead of debates sponsored by the League of Women Voters. Since that time, debates have become a pathetic joke.
That aside, kudos to you for being active. These things take time. Republicanism took forty years to get anywhere (longer, if you count the rise of abolitionism as the beginning of Republican philosophy), and it took a Civil War to get them established as a permanent political force (the Republican party would probably not have become so thoroughly entrenched in the postwar North had not the South rebelled at the election of a Republican President). You have to make a committment to change that might not even come in your lifetime. The question is are you in it for the life of the nation and the betterment of the future, or are you in it because you want something now?
I'd say you're on the right track. Keep going. No offense, but I hope you don't make it!;-)
Uh, in the Constitution, where it is specifically forbidden for the government to limit the people's right to petition the government for the redress of greivances. In Article III which allows you to petition the judiciary. In Article I which vests all legislative powers in an elected body.
If the government is tilting away from you, you become politically active. I've started writing what I think to my congressman (James Oberstar, D-MN) and to my senators (Mark Dayton, D-MN, and Paul Wellstone, D-MN). I've decided to put my money into a special interest that works on issues I care about: The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
It is not the responsbility of the parties to be ideologically at odds. It is your responsibility to get your ideology into a political party. The parties have been similarly mushy because people have been generally content with the status quo. Sure, we all like to complain, but nothing has really motivated the electorate to give the parties a shock. . (Well, my state has, but we've always been political freaks up here in the tundra. Our Democrats are members of a party called the DFL: the Democratic Farmer-Labor party. We elected one of the first nearly socialist governors in the Union from the Farmer-Labor party, a 3rd party movement that eventually merged with the Minnesota Democratic party. We also gave a big shock to both the R's and the D's by electing a third party governor, and former pro-wrestler. We've always been a little bit "anally progressive," which is to say strongly liberal with a bit of uptight Lutheranism thrown in.)
I know my original post sounded complacent, but that wasn't my intent. My intent was to remind people that the system has gone out of whack in the past and the people have brought it back in line. I'm sure the people will again. So, what I really was suggesting was that people get off their dead asses, put down the game controllers, and make some noise. Write. Contribute. Go to you caucuses. Make a noise. If you keep waiting for a white knight, he might be wearing a white sheet. To paraphrase the Bard, the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.
The separation of powers is between the office and the people. The people control who gets the office. All the money in the world can't change the fact that it is the people who ultimately decide. Meet your neighbors. Discuss the issues. Persuade. Cajole. Then stop talking and vote. Have faith that people will consider your arguments when that curtain is drawn. Have faith that most people are of good conscience and want to do the right thing. Have faith, also, that if the election doesn't go your way, that wasn't the way most of us wanted to go. It's messy. It's clumsy. But it beats just about every alternative I know.
People seem to forget that while we have more or less always been a two party system, the two parties in question are not the same today as in the past. The Republicans were an upstart and fairly radical third party. They're one of the two now. Things change. And the good thing is the only way a "white knight" with a cause can effect change is to get a whole bunch of people to go along with it. This helps protect us from that bane of history, the charismatic tyrant. We've had a few try. Some have done some serious damage. But we remain a nation of free individuals. The only power that can take that freedom away is ourselves, if we let it erode and slip away. Don't. Stop complaining and start organizing, talking, writing, petitioning, joining, contributing, building, changing the world. That's not a power government gives, it is immane. It is yours, according to Enlightenment thinking, by nature. Take it.
It is particularly ironic, since one of the events that drove the first wave of British colonials to the "New World" was the Catholic/Protestant civil wars in England and the resulting requirement of "loyalty oaths."
I guess the theory was that it was okay to require a Pledge of Allegience to a "flag" and to "the Republic for which it stands." That's not the same as requiring a pledge to a specific sovereign. As an American, I still never liked it. I hold the superiority of a system of civil liberty "to be self-evident." If your freedom doesn't sell itself, maybe it isn;t freedom.
I think we have a pretty good system, but like any soceity, we have teetered between liberty and authority. From the J. Edgar Hoover era to Joe McCarthy, we had some very repressive and scary times. The main reason I have hope (and still very much love the system in my country) is that we have a terribly inefficient government. I hear conservatives saying we need efficient government. I disagree. An efficient government is a repressive government. The separation of powers does a pretty good job of bringing our system back into line.
Not that both liberal forces and conservative forces haven't messed with it. From Democrat F.D.Roosevelt attempting to pack the Supreme Court to Republican R.M.Nixon covering up a felony commited to further his reelection, we've had plenty of attempts to tilt the scales, but somehow it comes back.
Right now, I think we are heading into a rough patch. Between the pressure of big money getting legislation passed for wealthy special interests (Hollywood, anyone?) and the understandable but lamentable reverses to liberty and privacy in the name of security following 9/11, we are going to have plenty to wrangle with in the system. That the system will bring us back to equilibrium, however, I am confident.
I think this was a very good decision and almost clears the bad taste in my mouth from the attempts to get a flag burning amendment passed.
My favorite bug isn't actually a bug, but I do consider it something they should have addressed when they did the ANSI standards work on C.
The failing program contained a fragment like this:
switch (someResultCode) {
case SOMECODE_01: ... ...
break;
case SOMEOTHERCODE: ... ...
break;
otherwise:
fprintf(stderr, "Unknown blamnitz in the framitz\n");
break; }
Do you see the problem with this yet? Four well experienced C programmers (including myself) were given this fragment by a C newbie who couldn't figure out why he was getting funny results (the cases actually did calculations, not ellipses and an fprintf).
We stared at the code for hours. It compiled cleanly, no errors no warnings (from our compiler -- some do flag this with a warning these days).
The problem is the newbie wrote "otherwise" instead of "default." We all read what he meant, not what he typed. I think we all also assumed you would get a compiler error if you misspelled this keyword in a switch. The trouble is the C grammar merrily accepts this error as a label (the target of a goto. You know, those things they tell you never to use?). So we have a block of code with an "otherwise" label, but the switch has no "default" case.
Personally, I wish ANSI had required that labels be declared. It wasn't that radical a departure from what had come before in the evolution of C, and it would have flagged this kind of error right away ("Undeclared label "otherwise" at line XXX").
Does anyone know if the (was it the X3J11 committee? That rings a bell anyways) ANSI C committee ever considered this, and if they did, why they rejected it? Other than breaking old code, what good reasons exist for NOT requiring the declaration of labels?
So, my compiler bug isn't really a compiler bug, but I think it should be!
The article is misinformed, but it is nowhere near the hatchet job implied by the lead. I wonder if posting an exaggeration like that does more harm than good, not only in some loss of credibility, but in giving the original article the inflamed click-throughs of/. readers? This article would not have been read by nearly so many people if the lead here were not so, how to put it? Inflammitory. Does this in itself hurt the Free Software/open source cause?
I don't think we know what all Palladium will do. If you combine digitally signed code with the provisions of the DMCA that allow for the remote disabling of code, including the ability to have code disable itself if you DON'T connect the machine to a network, one can easily imagine that Palladium will be used to "check up on me."
I don't think this is paranoia. Gates in his famous letter to hoobyists from the 80's makes it clear how thoroughly he believes that the only value software has lies in its "semi-encrypted" nature. They will be going one step further here with code that is genuinely encrypted AND hardware that can check that code against a license database anywhere on the net. Each time you execute a program, it may go out over the net and check the key.
This is any code. At all.
This is pure evil. Pure, pure evil. This is "checking up on you."
The intent to do this is implicit in their claims of Palladium's use as a Digital Rights Management tool.
Lessig makes this point in his writing on these issues. He too dislikes the term intellectual property when it is used outside the group of "legal cognoscenti" for the same reason you dislike the term. "Intellectual Property" means something ovebroad in common parlance. It implies the permanence we both know it should lack.
What are we coming to? Obviously no one has a right to steal "intellectual property," but when did intellectual property, which is handled differently in the Constitution itself -- distinct from other forms of property in that the rights to it are mandated to expire -- become real estate?
I am deeply worried about the present legislative climate. We are turning intellectual property slowly into real property, which IMHO defeats the entire purpose of enshrining intellectual property in law in the first place. We didn't have intellectual property until the 18th Century and somehow plays got written and music made.
These various proposed laws (and the scary enacted ones like the DMCA) require organized confrontation. I'm not affiliated with them, but I'd like to plug the Electronic Frontier Foundation here. They fight these things. They could use the help.
I'm also frightened by the proposed Palladium system from our favorite software monopoly. The notion that machines I buy for my own purposes will be "checking up on me" to make sure I'm honest is profoundly disturbing.
If I may throw some blame in the other direction, think about these developments the next time you violate someone's copyright. If weren't doing that, the motivation behind a lot of these "Big Brother" technologies would go away. Your crime is not victimless.
Write and fight or lose your rights. (Sorry for the jingoism). Express these concerns in your own words to your Congressional delegation and to both of your Senators.
For those of you outside the US, use whatever means you have to influence instituions in your own states, because if these technolgies become mandated, they will show up in your equipment too.
Let me turn the question around. Microsoft claims to innovate. Name me one Microsoft innovation. Cite references.
If it makes you feel better, I do not keep track of Microsoft's corporate communications. I do not have a specific claim of theirs. I must be completely wrong. Microsoft is clearly acting in my best interests after all.
Theyy are master integrators, not innovators. They are only able to do what they do because they have a monopoly power over the OS. No one ever said that a monopoly MUST harm consumers. The market would be fragment and less compatible without the Microsoft monopoly. That doesn't mean it should continue.
Longhorn appears to contain a lot of good ideas (two or three paragraphs in a Fortune magazine article is hardly a product specification, so don't pretend we know what it will be), but my worries are primarily about privacy and digital rights management, combined with their track record on security. Longhorn (which I assume will contain Palladium) is going to have the ability to remotely disable programs. It is going to keep track of every place you visit, everything you do. Now ask youself, is MS the company to trust in designing these things securely? I do not.
I'm not sure I would trust ANYBODY to design these things securely. I think any company would be insane to grant this kind of potential control over their systems to outside parties.
Finally, the goal is to make money, not to improve Windows. If they could make money by not working on Longhorn, they would. So would I.
As many advatages as the Free Software model has in development, this ability to direct huge resources in a single direction is not one of them. If Microsoft were not anti-competitive, I would not hate them. I might still irrationally dislike their products, but it is their anti-competetive behavior that earns my animosity.
For what it is worth, I am well aware that my personal animosity is a fart in a funnel-cloud to Microsoft.
Leaving the OS Wars aside (I run Linux, yes, but I also run FreeBSD, and I would run OpenBSD if they would just get unanal about bootable iso's): Okay, swell. 3.3 has a hole.
How far BACK does this hole extend? Does my 3.1 have it? Does EVERY copy of OpenSSH since the dawn of time have it? Can someone make this clear to me? Is it only versions that have privledge separation? Where is the boundary of this bug?
I formed my opinions prior to the AFI lists, thank you very much. Very few good movies have been made in the last thirty five years, but I believe my list contains several: Fearless, Witness, and Network being just the first ones that leap to my mind.
Many many very pretty movies have been made in the last ten years. Even several I have enjoyed (MIB, The Big Lebowski, etc.) Very few of them have anything actually human in them. Any alien looking at the media output of the last twenty years would think the primary mode of human social interaction is exploding or showering one another in a hail of bullets. Maybe that is even becoming true (viz. planes flying into buildings, school shootings). It isn't my primary mode of interacting. I actually talk to people. More of the crises in my life have been illness and death of loved ones, difficult relationships, lost jobs, while there have been relatively few cloned extinct monsters, evil computer programs, and meglomaniacal supervillians.
I don't have a problem with the odd movie like this (heck, I enjoyed Jurassic Park and Batman. I even liked Die Hard), but every goddamned movie? I'll take a "Glengarry Glen Ross" or a "Fearless" over another brass-shell-casings-fall-in-slow-motion-while-peop le-in-beautiful-clothes-do-backflips movie.
Also, for the record, I tossed off my little list after about 45 seconds of thought. The fact that most of the movies I love are old doesn't mean that I don't like any new movies. Just about anything the Coen brothers have done has impressed me. Every once in a while a "Roger and Me" or a "Boys Don't Cry" gets made. And every once in a while a purely commercial and totally entertainment piece is done so well that I actually sit back and enjoy myself (Men In Black leaps to mind).
I hope this clarifies it for you a bit. And I hope it doesn't hurt as badly the next time I don't like something you like.
I completely agree with the paranoid possibilities put forward multiple times by multiple people on this discussion. One key question (forgive the pun_ I have is what about programs developed by businesses for businesses? I've worked for five companies in my career writing software. Only one of them is a software house, producing software for sale. The rest were all internal applications. How will these run? Will I have the power to sign software for distribution in-house? Will I have a to pay a fortune for a key? Will this key let Microsoft read my code? Will I have to submit my code (which I might consider a trade secret -- a more legit IP protection for software, IMHO, than copyright or patent) to someone to get it signed? This is madness. Utter madness. And the first OEM or chip maker that tries to sell one of these should be handed their proverbial heads.
CTO's: Think about this before you say "good idea." Ask youself what kind of power over your company you are about to give away when you bring in the first machine thus equipped.
If you can beat SHA, MD4, or MD5 you are indeed the world's greatest programmer. Send me the proof and I will hire you at once. I'll also believe you that a signed certificate is "easy" to spoof. Call when you get a clue.
It is ALL packaging. Moby. Eminem. Metallica. The Rolling Stones. The Beatles. Elvis. It is the fame machine. Ars gratia artis (art for art's sake) ended with the emergence of recorded music. It has been marketing ever since. It continues to amaze me that people think they have taste in music! Music tastes are a manufactured product. Sure, your personal feeling enter into it somewhat, but the music you know, the music of your parents that you hate (and the music of your parent's that you like -- admit it, there is some!), your whole "palette" from which new music is pulled and sold is a manufactured product.
I've always despised the talk about "That's commercial," "That's just pop," and my personal favorite "He/She/They sold out!" Come on! It was all sold before you ever heard it. "All you Need is Love" my ass! Money! Money! Money! Moby! Money!
Slashdot Mirror
Replace "video game" with "masturbation" throughout this piece and you might be on to something. Good Lord, man! Video games are boredom killing machines. They make television look positively benevolent. Just imagine what wonders the youth of the world might be making if they weren't sitting slack-jawed in front of televisions sets, virtually kicking the shit out of BEM's. Maybe that is the cultural heritage of video games. Passivity and amusement. Frankly, I'd rather they were masturbating. I can see some value in that.
My point is these tools grew out of the *nix world and its overall design philosphopy. You would not have them at all without *nix. Linux, per se, doesn't enter into it, since these tools all antedate Linux.
Your Windows box makes a pretty good *nix box if you install cygwin. My point was talking about "out-of-the-box" functionality. These are computers. You can make them do anything if you learn how to program (and if Palladium doesn't prevent you from wiring software for your own computer, don't get me started), but what your system does out of the box does matter. Why else would MS have bundled IE?
This is absurd. Suppose you have a collection of web pages, all of which contain a link to some site, say, http://slashdot.org/, and then let's say they change their url to say, http://colonslash.org. You've got 150 links in 110 pages to change.
Which is faster:
Double click on each file to open it in notepad or Netscape editor or, heaven forfend, Frontpage, where you do a find-and-replace on each URL.
Type:
perl -e 's,http://slashdot,http://colonslash,gi' -p -i.bak *.html
Obviously, the second one requires a bit more knowledge, but how many such tasks does it take to pay back the knowledge investment? "Do it faster in Windows," my ass. Why do you think *nix hangs on? It hasn't been because of its intuitiveness. It's been because of its utility.
Make an OS so simple that idiots can use it, and it will be an OS for idiots. If you want to write e-mail and play games, Windows is an OK OS. If you want to get some work done, it lacks some important features.
You are being a bit pedantic. We have a democratic republic. It is possible to have a non-democratic republic. The "indirection" of a representative system improves the effectiveness of legislation. All you have to do is take a look at referendum states to see what kind of a mess direct citizen legislation can cause. It is the democratic nature of our republic that cuases the constant expansion of government influence, so my original remark stands as far as I am concerned.
Okay, I'm metooing just so there is one thing on record saying something positive about MS. This poster is completely correct. Sega died well before anyone was taking the X-box seriously (is anyone taking the X-box seriously?). Sega's death was too many players in a highly competitive market. The Xbox (XBox Ex-Box?) will be around for a while because the parent company can afford to lose money on it for a long, long time. Sega couldn't.
I don't confuse Libertarianism with anarchy. I'm just saying that the expansion of government power came about through an expansion of the greivances the people petitioned the government to address. I'm suggesting that even if through some divine intervention we became a Libertarian government today, we would be back at a system very similar to the present one in a couple of generations because it was the democratic process that got us here, not some sort of government conspiracy.
This is the base fact that is continually ignored.
Oh, I agree with you that one of the ways in which money distorts the equality of citizens is through the lobbyist industry, but nothing they do prevents your voice from being heard. I had a friend who worked in a congressman's office in his home state. Do you know how many letters on a subject it took for the congressman to want to be told about them? Five. Five letters.
There a handful of issues (gun laws, abortion, etc.) that always generate thousands of letters. Most legilation that really affects our lives (telco deregulation, DMCA, etc.) get passed without any direct input from the public at all.
So, I agree with you that the lobbyists are magnifying the interests of the few, but they are not diminishing your influence at all.
I want to amplify a bit here. Let's go a little further with the Libertarian system of roads. Suppose you had a major landowner who owned substantial land between two urban centers, say Minneapolis and St. Paul. Suppose this person one day decided he wasn't going to let any Catholics use his roads. To whom would area Catholics appeal? Merchants have the right to refuse service to anyone. Such a landowner would be within his rights.
Now lets expand this. How well do you think Libertarianism would have served an uneducated black man in Mississippi in 1870? I guess what I'm saying is that the "free market" isn't a guarantee of any kind of social equity or justice. If we agree that are such things as "freedom," "justice," and "fairness," some sort of law and some guarantee of access to redress is required.
Without enough law to make and enforce contracts, there is no possibility but brigandism. You can get more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word. I do not want to live in such a world. Yes, autonomy is a natural state. Self sovereignty is a natural state. But we give up some of those rights to the collective entity (society, expressed in the form of a government). In return the power of the collective entity backs up our remaining soverignty and autonomy against other less scrupulous individuals.
This is an old tension, but realize that while everybody hates taxes, not everobody even realizes all the good things that government does. I'm reminded of the bit from Monty Python's the Life of Brian:
"They took our land. They've beaten and repressed us for years. And what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Pause.
"The Aquaduct?"
"What?"
"The Aquaduct?"
"Oh, yeah, well they did do that. But apart from that, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
"Sanitation."
"Irrigation." "Housing." "The wine?" "The courts"
"Oh yeah, the courts! Remember what the streets used to be like? They're probably the only people who could keep order in a place like this!"
"Alright! Alright! But apart from irrigation, sanitation, agriculture, viniculture, roads, public housing and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Of course, under the DMCA I'm sure I'm in trouble for that long paraphrased quote. Yes, government makes bad and excessive law sometimes.
Libertarians constantly remind me of the Judean People's Front...
Yes, I would say you are spouting Libertarian certainty. I fundamentally disagree withe every single one of your positions. I'm even happy to pay my income tax (well, maybe not happy, but I understand that it is good for the economy to have excess savings spent on capital investment, and that sometimes the private sector fails to to this, leading to economic contraction).
I'm not Libertarian at all. I believe that we have "unalienable rights" and that to "secure these rights, governments are instituted among men" and that such governments "derive their just powers from the consent of governed."
I think our instutions are doing just fine at requiring the consent of the governed. I think Libertarians delude themselves that the unpopularity of taxes equals support for the gutting of government. I think they are wrong. Ask anyone "Do you like to pay taxes?" and of course almost everyone will say "No." Ask them if they would rather pay taxes and have public roads, or would they rather all roads were built privately and privately owned and you had to pay a toll to use each separate private road, and they might not say yes. You might, but I would not.
Roads are, in fact, one of the ways we got to the present size of government. Roads were highly in demand, but private enterprise was building very few of them. We talked about third parties? Are you aware that the largest 3rd party movement in 20th century history was the "Good Roads Party?" Yep. The people demanded that government get into the road building business. The construction of such roads has had immense secondary economic effects. You can argue that the roads would have been built eventually. I do not agree, and I have no way to prove such an assertion. But I would contest the notion that the expansion of government was done by "the government" for selfish or nefarious reasons. It was, in each case, responding to the democratic will.
I, for one, believe that it is vital to have a major economic actor that views each citizen equally, rather than in proportion to his wallet (no, I'm not naieve enough to believe that the wallet doesn't still get in there and pervert things a bit).
Perhaps some of the "selfish and shallow" are just not completely ignorant of macroeconomics.
I would argue that your claim "most people are basically Libertarian, but only as far as it benefits them" means that most people are simply not Libertarian. I don't know why Libertarians refuse to see this. This is precisely what I was talking about.
All that said, certainly there is plenty of room for debate about the limits of government power, about what amount of government involvement in the economy is the "right" amount, about which sorts of infrastructure are appropriate government functions. I just plain don't agree with you that the answers are "total, none, and none."
I also think there's plenty of room for talking about how we are and how we should be taxed. I'm very much in favor of moving to fees for service and consumption taxes and away from income taxes and property taxes. I'm also in favor of more spending on roads and education. I'm in favor of subsidies for broadband expansion into rural areas (similar to the rural elctrification act), and other "big government, tax and spend" programs.
And I don't mind paying taxes to do it.
This is not meant as a flame, but has the possibility occurred to you that the majority does not agree with Libertarianism? I know that I do not. I've never met a single Libertarian willing to concede the possibility, however. As a rule, Libertarians are the most certain people I meet. The Libertarians have a famous "questionnaire" which has questions couched in such a manner that Karl Marx would probably come out a Libertarian.
;-)
I will tell you how I sympathize with Libertarians, however. One of the fundmental beliefs of Libertarianism is a fairly strict Adam Smith economic view coupled with a pretty hardline John Locke view of property. Minimum law, minimum government, minimum taxation, etc. In theory, the modern Republican party espouses the same line. At the same time, Republicans seem to want to pass the most legislation controlling behavior and government exploded in size under the Reagan and Bush adminsitrations. A Libertarian's theoretical alignment with the Republican party doesn't work out that way.
Believe me, I have similar problems with the Democrats.
Oh, and the media didn't exclude your party (at least from the Pres. & V.P. debates). The two parties did. This began when the "debate comission" was set up instead of debates sponsored by the League of Women Voters. Since that time, debates have become a pathetic joke.
That aside, kudos to you for being active. These things take time. Republicanism took forty years to get anywhere (longer, if you count the rise of abolitionism as the beginning of Republican philosophy), and it took a Civil War to get them established as a permanent political force (the Republican party would probably not have become so thoroughly entrenched in the postwar North had not the South rebelled at the election of a Republican President). You have to make a committment to change that might not even come in your lifetime. The question is are you in it for the life of the nation and the betterment of the future, or are you in it because you want something now?
I'd say you're on the right track. Keep going. No offense, but I hope you don't make it!
Uh, in the Constitution, where it is specifically forbidden for the government to limit the people's right to petition the government for the redress of greivances. In Article III which allows you to petition the judiciary. In Article I which vests all legislative powers in an elected body.
If the government is tilting away from you, you become politically active. I've started writing what I think to my congressman (James Oberstar, D-MN) and to my senators (Mark Dayton, D-MN, and Paul Wellstone, D-MN). I've decided to put my money into a special interest that works on issues I care about: The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
It is not the responsbility of the parties to be ideologically at odds. It is your responsibility to get your ideology into a political party. The parties have been similarly mushy because people have been generally content with the status quo. Sure, we all like to complain, but nothing has really motivated the electorate to give the parties a shock. . (Well, my state has, but we've always been political freaks up here in the tundra. Our Democrats are members of a party called the DFL: the Democratic Farmer-Labor party. We elected one of the first nearly socialist governors in the Union from the Farmer-Labor party, a 3rd party movement that eventually merged with the Minnesota Democratic party. We also gave a big shock to both the R's and the D's by electing a third party governor, and former pro-wrestler. We've always been a little bit "anally progressive," which is to say strongly liberal with a bit of uptight Lutheranism thrown in.)
I know my original post sounded complacent, but that wasn't my intent. My intent was to remind people that the system has gone out of whack in the past and the people have brought it back in line. I'm sure the people will again. So, what I really was suggesting was that people get off their dead asses, put down the game controllers, and make some noise. Write. Contribute. Go to you caucuses. Make a noise. If you keep waiting for a white knight, he might be wearing a white sheet. To paraphrase the Bard, the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.
The separation of powers is between the office and the people. The people control who gets the office. All the money in the world can't change the fact that it is the people who ultimately decide. Meet your neighbors. Discuss the issues. Persuade. Cajole. Then stop talking and vote. Have faith that people will consider your arguments when that curtain is drawn. Have faith that most people are of good conscience and want to do the right thing. Have faith, also, that if the election doesn't go your way, that wasn't the way most of us wanted to go. It's messy. It's clumsy. But it beats just about every alternative I know.
People seem to forget that while we have more or less always been a two party system, the two parties in question are not the same today as in the past. The Republicans were an upstart and fairly radical third party. They're one of the two now. Things change. And the good thing is the only way a "white knight" with a cause can effect change is to get a whole bunch of people to go along with it. This helps protect us from that bane of history, the charismatic tyrant. We've had a few try. Some have done some serious damage. But we remain a nation of free individuals. The only power that can take that freedom away is ourselves, if we let it erode and slip away. Don't. Stop complaining and start organizing, talking, writing, petitioning, joining, contributing, building, changing the world. That's not a power government gives, it is immane. It is yours, according to Enlightenment thinking, by nature. Take it.
It is particularly ironic, since one of the events that drove the first wave of British colonials to the "New World" was the Catholic/Protestant civil wars in England and the resulting requirement of "loyalty oaths."
I guess the theory was that it was okay to require a Pledge of Allegience to a "flag" and to "the Republic for which it stands." That's not the same as requiring a pledge to a specific sovereign. As an American, I still never liked it. I hold the superiority of a system of civil liberty "to be self-evident." If your freedom doesn't sell itself, maybe it isn;t freedom.
I think we have a pretty good system, but like any soceity, we have teetered between liberty and authority. From the J. Edgar Hoover era to Joe McCarthy, we had some very repressive and scary times. The main reason I have hope (and still very much love the system in my country) is that we have a terribly inefficient government. I hear conservatives saying we need efficient government. I disagree. An efficient government is a repressive government. The separation of powers does a pretty good job of bringing our system back into line.
Not that both liberal forces and conservative forces haven't messed with it. From Democrat F.D.Roosevelt attempting to pack the Supreme Court to Republican R.M.Nixon covering up a felony commited to further his reelection, we've had plenty of attempts to tilt the scales, but somehow it comes back.
Right now, I think we are heading into a rough patch. Between the pressure of big money getting legislation passed for wealthy special interests (Hollywood, anyone?) and the understandable but lamentable reverses to liberty and privacy in the name of security following 9/11, we are going to have plenty to wrangle with in the system. That the system will bring us back to equilibrium, however, I am confident.
I think this was a very good decision and almost clears the bad taste in my mouth from the attempts to get a flag burning amendment passed.
My favorite bug isn't actually a bug, but I do consider it something they should have addressed when they did the ANSI standards work on C.
...
...
...
...
The failing program contained a fragment like this:
switch (someResultCode) {
case SOMECODE_01:
break;
case SOMEOTHERCODE:
break;
otherwise:
fprintf(stderr, "Unknown blamnitz in the framitz\n");
break;
}
Do you see the problem with this yet? Four well experienced C programmers (including myself) were given this fragment by a C newbie who couldn't figure out why he was getting funny results (the cases actually did calculations, not ellipses and an fprintf).
We stared at the code for hours. It compiled cleanly, no errors no warnings (from our compiler -- some do flag this with a warning these days).
The problem is the newbie wrote "otherwise" instead of "default." We all read what he meant, not what he typed. I think we all also assumed you would get a compiler error if you misspelled this keyword in a switch. The trouble is the C grammar merrily accepts this error as a label (the target of a goto. You know, those things they tell you never to use?). So we have a block of code with an "otherwise" label, but the switch has no "default" case.
Personally, I wish ANSI had required that labels be declared. It wasn't that radical a departure from what had come before in the evolution of C, and it would have flagged this kind of error right away ("Undeclared label "otherwise" at line XXX").
Does anyone know if the (was it the X3J11 committee? That rings a bell anyways) ANSI C committee ever considered this, and if they did, why they rejected it? Other than breaking old code, what good reasons exist for NOT requiring the declaration of labels?
So, my compiler bug isn't really a compiler bug, but I think it should be!
The article is misinformed, but it is nowhere near the hatchet job implied by the lead. I wonder if posting an exaggeration like that does more harm than good, not only in some loss of credibility, but in giving the original article the inflamed click-throughs of /. readers? This article would not have been read by nearly so many people if the lead here were not so, how to put it? Inflammitory. Does this in itself hurt the Free Software/open source cause?
That was a rhetorical question...
Palladium doesn't check up on you.
I don't think we know what all Palladium will do. If you combine digitally signed code with the provisions of the DMCA that allow for the remote disabling of code, including the ability to have code disable itself if you DON'T connect the machine to a network, one can easily imagine that Palladium will be used to "check up on me."
I don't think this is paranoia. Gates in his famous letter to hoobyists from the 80's makes it clear how thoroughly he believes that the only value software has lies in its "semi-encrypted" nature. They will be going one step further here with code that is genuinely encrypted AND hardware that can check that code against a license database anywhere on the net. Each time you execute a program, it may go out over the net and check the key.
This is any code. At all.
This is pure evil. Pure, pure evil. This is "checking up on you."
The intent to do this is implicit in their claims of Palladium's use as a Digital Rights Management tool.
Lessig makes this point in his writing on these issues. He too dislikes the term intellectual property when it is used outside the group of "legal cognoscenti" for the same reason you dislike the term. "Intellectual Property" means something ovebroad in common parlance. It implies the permanence we both know it should lack.
What are we coming to? Obviously no one has a right to steal "intellectual property," but when did intellectual property, which is handled differently in the Constitution itself -- distinct from other forms of property in that the rights to it are mandated to expire -- become real estate?
I am deeply worried about the present legislative climate. We are turning intellectual property slowly into real property, which IMHO defeats the entire purpose of enshrining intellectual property in law in the first place. We didn't have intellectual property until the 18th Century and somehow plays got written and music made.
These various proposed laws (and the scary enacted ones like the DMCA) require organized confrontation. I'm not affiliated with them, but I'd like to plug the Electronic Frontier Foundation here. They fight these things. They could use the help.
I'm also frightened by the proposed Palladium system from our favorite software monopoly. The notion that machines I buy for my own purposes will be "checking up on me" to make sure I'm honest is profoundly disturbing.
If I may throw some blame in the other direction, think about these developments the next time you violate someone's copyright. If weren't doing that, the motivation behind a lot of these "Big Brother" technologies would go away. Your crime is not victimless.
Write and fight or lose your rights. (Sorry for the jingoism). Express these concerns in your own words to your Congressional delegation and to both of your Senators.
For those of you outside the US, use whatever means you have to influence instituions in your own states, because if these technolgies become mandated, they will show up in your equipment too.
Let me turn the question around. Microsoft claims to innovate. Name me one Microsoft innovation. Cite references.
If it makes you feel better, I do not keep track of Microsoft's corporate communications. I do not have a specific claim of theirs. I must be completely wrong. Microsoft is clearly acting in my best interests after all.
Palladium: Security and authentication. See PKI.
Theyy are master integrators, not innovators. They are only able to do what they do because they have a monopoly power over the OS. No one ever said that a monopoly MUST harm consumers. The market would be fragment and less compatible without the Microsoft monopoly. That doesn't mean it should continue.
Longhorn appears to contain a lot of good ideas (two or three paragraphs in a Fortune magazine article is hardly a product specification, so don't pretend we know what it will be), but my worries are primarily about privacy and digital rights management, combined with their track record on security. Longhorn (which I assume will contain Palladium) is going to have the ability to remotely disable programs. It is going to keep track of every place you visit, everything you do. Now ask youself, is MS the company to trust in designing these things securely? I do not.
I'm not sure I would trust ANYBODY to design these things securely. I think any company would be insane to grant this kind of potential control over their systems to outside parties.
Finally, the goal is to make money, not to improve Windows. If they could make money by not working on Longhorn, they would. So would I.
As many advatages as the Free Software model has in development, this ability to direct huge resources in a single direction is not one of them. If Microsoft were not anti-competitive, I would not hate them. I might still irrationally dislike their products, but it is their anti-competetive behavior that earns my animosity.
For what it is worth, I am well aware that my personal animosity is a fart in a funnel-cloud to Microsoft.
The GUI. See GEM, MacOS, Xerox PARC.
Leaving the OS Wars aside (I run Linux, yes, but I also run FreeBSD, and I would run OpenBSD if they would just get unanal about bootable iso's): Okay, swell. 3.3 has a hole.
How far BACK does this hole extend? Does my 3.1 have it? Does EVERY copy of OpenSSH since the dawn of time have it? Can someone make this clear to me? Is it only versions that have privledge separation? Where is the boundary of this bug?
I formed my opinions prior to the AFI lists, thank you very much. Very few good movies have been made in the last thirty five years, but I believe my list contains several: Fearless, Witness, and Network being just the first ones that leap to my mind.
p le-in-beautiful-clothes-do-backflips movie.
Many many very pretty movies have been made in the last ten years. Even several I have enjoyed (MIB, The Big Lebowski, etc.) Very few of them have anything actually human in them. Any alien looking at the media output of the last twenty years would think the primary mode of human social interaction is exploding or showering one another in a hail of bullets. Maybe that is even becoming true (viz. planes flying into buildings, school shootings). It isn't my primary mode of interacting. I actually talk to people. More of the crises in my life have been illness and death of loved ones, difficult relationships, lost jobs, while there have been relatively few cloned extinct monsters, evil computer programs, and meglomaniacal supervillians.
I don't have a problem with the odd movie like this (heck, I enjoyed Jurassic Park and Batman. I even liked Die Hard), but every goddamned movie? I'll take a "Glengarry Glen Ross" or a "Fearless" over another brass-shell-casings-fall-in-slow-motion-while-peo
Also, for the record, I tossed off my little list after about 45 seconds of thought. The fact that most of the movies I love are old doesn't mean that I don't like any new movies. Just about anything the Coen brothers have done has impressed me. Every once in a while a "Roger and Me" or a "Boys Don't Cry" gets made. And every once in a while a purely commercial and totally entertainment piece is done so well that I actually sit back and enjoy myself (Men In Black leaps to mind).
I hope this clarifies it for you a bit. And I hope it doesn't hurt as badly the next time I don't like something you like.
I completely agree with the paranoid possibilities put forward multiple times by multiple people on this discussion. One key question (forgive the pun_ I have is what about programs developed by businesses for businesses? I've worked for five companies in my career writing software. Only one of them is a software house, producing software for sale. The rest were all internal applications. How will these run? Will I have the power to sign software for distribution in-house? Will I have a to pay a fortune for a key? Will this key let Microsoft read my code? Will I have to submit my code (which I might consider a trade secret -- a more legit IP protection for software, IMHO, than copyright or patent) to someone to get it signed? This is madness. Utter madness. And the first OEM or chip maker that tries to sell one of these should be handed their proverbial heads.
CTO's: Think about this before you say "good idea." Ask youself what kind of power over your company you are about to give away when you bring in the first machine thus equipped.
If you can beat SHA, MD4, or MD5 you are indeed the world's greatest programmer. Send me the proof and I will hire you at once. I'll also believe you that a signed certificate is "easy" to spoof. Call when you get a clue.
It is ALL packaging. Moby. Eminem. Metallica. The Rolling Stones. The Beatles. Elvis. It is the fame machine. Ars gratia artis (art for art's sake) ended with the emergence of recorded music. It has been marketing ever since. It continues to amaze me that people think they have taste in music! Music tastes are a manufactured product. Sure, your personal feeling enter into it somewhat, but the music you know, the music of your parents that you hate (and the music of your parent's that you like -- admit it, there is some!), your whole "palette" from which new music is pulled and sold is a manufactured product.
I've always despised the talk about "That's commercial," "That's just pop," and my personal favorite "He/She/They sold out!" Come on! It was all sold before you ever heard it. "All you Need is Love" my ass! Money! Money! Money! Moby! Money!