Unfortunately, your definition of liberal and that provided by the encyclopedia you quoted are not what is in use-- by conservatives, or by liberals.
When I say it was redefined, I mean it was redefiend when what is modern day liberals took that word.
Everything that liberals agree with that libertarians disagree with is a place where liberals took a word and lied about what they believe.
When liberals stop calling for gun control, then I'll believe they actually support human rights. By your statements, you want me to believe that liberals by defintion oppose gun control, and I find that hard to believe. Even more, the right to keep and bear arms is part of the Bill of Rights.
If liberals, as a group, supported the Bill of Rights (All of it) then I would not have a problem with it, but they all oppose it. They argue for affirmative action, which violates the bill of rights. Tehy argue for Unions support which-- while unions themselves don't violate it, the laws that support unions do violate the bill of rights.
Etc.
This might be interesting: List the top 5 positions you consider to be core of liberalism and I'll explain how they violate human rights (if they do, maybe they won't.)
Yes liberal is a word that has its meaning changed-- but it wasn't the conservatives who did it-- that's recent history. It was done by liberals sometime between the 1800s and the mid 1900s.
Given that you posted pointers to "benchmarks" that only measure clock speed and not performance, I think you have made my point. (Which was a claim about what people like you think performance is.)
Sure, all modern processors are superscalar. That doesn't mean a lot of them sit idle a lot of the time due to poor architectural decisions, forced upon the designers by the requirement that they maintain backwards compatibility going all the way back to the 4004. Not 4004 instruction compatibility, but the compatiblity-compromise-chain goes that far back.
An Athlon 2200+ costs $220 Canadian here, and puts you in the upper realm of CPUs.
Thats the problem with all these discussions. When you get right down to it, Intel and AMD fans really do believe that the performance rating of the CPU is its clock rate.
What's the Athlon's performance with 8 watts of power? Will it even run with 8 watts? How can you have a laptop otherwise? How many clock cycles go by on average before it executes an instruction? 20? 30?
Since OS X was built using GCC, ships with emacs, etc, etc, why arent' they telling apple to rename it from Mac OS X to GNU OS X? And Solaris and Irix need to be renamed as well!
Shame on these companies exploiting free software without even giving them the credit they deserve! (I'm being sarcastic.)
I'm using the GNU compiler to build my product. This isn't by choice, it was simply the compiler that Apple ships. I'm certainly not going to call my product GNU/product. They provided a compiler. There are other ones. If they hadn't provided it and there wasn't an open source one made to fill the gap, I would have bought one. I've never called a product CodeWarrior Foo. Its always Foo, cause nobody cares what product compiled it.
I waited a long time for the GNU OS to be released. I kept hearing how it was coming soon. Well, they had the ball and dropped it. Thanks to Linus for running with it, and that people chose to call his OS Linux is fair game. Its not like GNU didn't have years where they could have released a free OS and then it WOULD have been called GNU. (These attempts to rewrite history after the fact on their part are amusing.)
Here's the deal: You make a product (open sourced or not) YOU get to name it. Within the bounds of trademark law, its your choice. You bundle other products with your product (Say a compiler) that doesn't change the nature of YOUR product.
This does seem desprate on GNUs part. OF course they would say "everyone's asking us why its not called GNU Linux" cause they're not honest enough to say "We're bitter that this kid beat us when we had a genius grant and 5 years to do it, and he did it in a couple months.".
Not surprisingly your position is based on some false assumptions, probably told to you, and that you did not have the necessary information to discard.
First-- the wealthy did not get their money by theft. This is the cry of those who think all property is theft and want a repressive brutal dictatorship in the guise of a "Workers paradise". It is, objectively, a false statement. There are people who have stolen money, but in order to make this claim in the broad, a significant portion of the rich people would have had to steal their money. And THAt is plain false.
Secondly- you ignore the fact that those who inhereit wealth often squander it.
Thirdly- you have not provided reason to believe that given correct information people won't act rationally. I think they will.
Fourth- you are false in the assumption that Objectivism or Libertarianism only "works" if people act rationally- it doesn't. These systems model the REAL WORLD and the REAL WORLD exists whether people act rationally or not. They only say that governments should not take away the rights of rational people because the irrational people want them.
This is literally, and exactly, the same as saying that a majority of white people should not be allowed to take away the rights of the minority of black people. You know taking those rights away is wrong, yet you still support the majority of irrational poor people taking away the rights of the rational rich people?
The foundation of libertarianism is that the only purpose of government is to protect human rights. That some people are irrational is not a reason to avoid libertarianism-- it is the reason that we should have it.
Encoding irrationality into law, as you advocate, is not an acceptable alternative.
Nothing in Libertarianism or Objectivism requires all people to act rationally for it to work. Actually, the contrary-- these systems point out how the real world works. It is the alternative, republican-democratism that pretends the world works in a way that is impossible: Notice the social security pyramid scheme. They think they can just spend money they don't have forever.
This idea that the rich have power over the less rich is only true as long as we have the fundamentally corrupt government that you advocate. In a libertarian or objectivist government the rich would have NO power over the less rich. For we would eliminate the use of violence to compel people to work against their interests that the current system employs.
Sorry, you don't get to redefine liberal. ITs already been done.
Actually "Liberal" is what is now known as libertarian. But since so many anti-rights people started calling themselves liberal, libertarians chose a more precise term, and libertarianism is often called classical liberalism.
Liberalism today DOES mean giving away fish rather than teaching people to fish. That is their ideology and in running into them (and having been one in the past) that ideology is consistant. Generally they are morons, or more precisely, uneducated and ignorant about economics and market forces.
You want to say liberal has some specific definition, then fine: I'm willing to hear it. The list of wasteful government programs you listed does not give a specific definition, just the implication is that liberalism is about government spending. Which is certainly a correlation, but liberalism is about why liberals support government spending: They are ignorant of the poor use of money that governments make.
You certainly don't get to claim that liberalism is about freedom and human rights when so many liberal organizations come down squarely in opposition to freedom and human rights. That doesn't clarify liberalism, that just repeats liberalism's Great Lie.
I met Tom Harkin once. He's a liberal for sure. He's pro union. He's an example that supports my statement, not a contrary one. That he lost to Clinton isn't exactly an indictment of the assertion that liberals support unions-- clinton was a union supporter.
Ok, I'm going to ignore the justifications given (as I'm sure everyone here knows they are false.)
Am I the only one here that sees this, especially given microsoft's current licensing practices, as a huge waste of money?
And whose money is being wasted? Taxpayers. If our government is flippantly blowing out cash in even the department of the interior then clearly they are getting too much money. Its time to cut taxes and stop letting the leeches live high on the hog.
MS Windows? Office? My god. What obscene spending!
We must cut taxes until our money is spent responsibly.
n a world (ours) where many people are rich only because their parents stole (literally, with force) resources from the original holders
Who are you talking about here? You use this as a broad indictment of objectivism, but I don't see it. Obviously objectivism would say theft is immoral and would authorize force to defend or prosecute it.
If by "many" you mean "most rich people stole their wealth" then you're going to have to make that case. Looking at the top 10 forbes list, some are walton's kin, and Sam Walton didn't steal his wealth, and most of the others are self created.
In fact, the majority-- vast majority- of millionaires in the US earned their money by working for it and saving their income prudently, or by starting their own business. A small percentage (%7 by recollection) received it by inheritance.
I'm interested in hearing the case that the rich stole their wealth-- I hear that a lot, but nobody ever wants to provide reason to believe it other than broad statements like "property is theft", and my investigation (made for other reasons) into the nature of wealth in the US has shown otherwise. I'm totally perplexed why so many people believe that people who are rich got that way by theft/fraud.
and where people irrationally pursue actions that hurt them as well in the end, I don't think we can rely on enlightened self interest
Now thats an odd conclusion. I concede that many people act against their best interest. Yet, I cannot see how that justifies taking rights away from anyone (them, or the people who don't act against their self interest.)
On the contrary-- taking the pain out of self mutilation (speaking figuratively here) only increases the likelihood that someone will engage in that behavior repeatedly. When the social safety net is one constructed of people voluntarily helping each other out, then those people can judge whether they are helping someone out or enabling someone's self destruction. The government doesn't distinguish between the two cases.
I can accept that there are "liberals" who do not support unions... but that puts you in a small minority. The democratic party, and every liberal institution and organization I know about supports unions and sees them as part of the "Governemnt will take care of everybody" agenda.
So, I don't think characterizing liberals in general as supporting unions is that unfair.
Note that I am not a conservative, I'm an ex-liberal who's come to become a libertarian. While this puts me at odds with conservatives, I find its rather easy to convince conservatives that social rights exist just like economic rights... but it seems much harder to convince liberals that economic rights are part of human rights.
If I misrepresented you by being overly general, I apologize.
Yep, liberals love to think that something being politically correct (ie: all liberals agree) makes it true or "generally accepted view".
I applaud SPLC to the extent that they fight hate groups. A criticize them to the extent that they too are a hate group-- much like most liberal organizations who's sole organizing purpose seems to be the prosecution of the rich (lately taking the form of campaigning for the idea that all companies are corrupt like Enron and that all property ownership is theft and that for anyone to get rich, other people have to be made poor, etc. etc.)
In my book, anyone who fights to instill slavery is advocating hate. And when the SPLC lobbies for higher taxes, that is exactly what they are doing.
Ironic, no? But the fact that its ironic does not make it false.
Yes, I agree that the issue is the USPTO. And you're right about them being synthetic crutches.
However, most of the anti-IP movement is people who are generally anti-property.
I'm perplexed where this idea that "property is theft" came from, and what does it have to say about "You own your own body"? Did you steal it from your parents?
I have read heinlein. I'd apply most people criticisms of AS to his work, actually. He writes ok stories and I enjoy them, but it isn't intellectually rigorous.
Atlas Shrugged does prove something. Just because its a novel doesn't mean that it can't have a logical proof stuck in the middle of it, it does.
Unfortunately most people skip it because its too dry, but it is there.
That 20 page pamplet you talk about would be Galts Speech.
Its a logical proof of the philosophy of objectivism.
And while I've had tussles with lots of people online over its logic (I'm still trying to make sure it is correct) most of the disagreements with it resolve down to them re-defining words to means something they don't mean (dictionary wise) and she didn't mean (context wise).
The people who want you not to read atlas shrugged are afraid of exposure to the ideas it presents -- because they blow away the lies that these same people tell everyone.
As a libertarian, you'd previously been exposed to the ideas and probably didn't have the misconceptions that needed blowing away.
But you take a random liberal, one who thinks he hates libertarians, but still has an open mind, and give him Atlas Shrugged, its the most dangerous thing you could do (to the liberal establishment).
I haven't read many libertarian books that are like that. I got interrupted in the middle of one of Harry Brownes books, and I'm open to others-- thinking I should pick up some L. Neil Smith. But AS provides an excellent, logical, proof for its philosophy.
This is why the Nissan plant in California went 5 years without unionizing. (I don't know if they are still union free, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.)
They offered their workers a great situation and they didn't vote union. course that didn't stop the union from using strong arm tatics, and violating worker and company rights to try and FORCE them to unionize.
ITs bullshit to say that without unions we wouldn't have health care. There was no union in most of the places I worked but they offered health care without it being asked for.
And you neglect the early history of unions where they used violence and force to get into places, not the free choice of the employees who wanted protection.
You say they only take two hours of your pay, fine. Well, my friend had to pay %15 of her pay. Different union, but your two hour example is not universal.
AND they guy a guy with a wife and kids to support fired for not joining the union. He could afford to pay, but he chose not to submit to their EXTORTION, and so they got him fired. I guess he should be grateful that they didn't also bust his kneecaps.
Yeah, they were looking out after him, sure.
ITs a protection racket, always been, always will be. How many times have unions sold out their memberships to get a better deal with the company? A better deal for the UNION, not the employees?
How much control over unions to the members have verses the mob? I'd say, very little.
Oh, and as to the "Criminal CEOs making high pay" this is your standard socialist sob story-- they make more money than you so you attack them out of jealousy. Unions are like communism-- they want control over the means of production ostensibly so that profits are distributed "fairly" but somehow the profits never make it out of the head union office, or politburo as the case may be.
I'll support unions the day they allow people to freely choose whether to join them or not. But as long as they get state laws written so that they control whether you can work without their permission, they can go to hell.
Oh, and by the way, why is it "Right" for me to have to pay some idiot $75 to carry my computer into a trade show, when he drops it, and breaks it, and I'm not allowed to carry it in myself? Its a scam, like all union crap-- they got a deal with the people who own the trade show facility so they get to extort money from the companies that exhibit there. We have to pay their people absurd rates and aren't allowed to do it ourselves or have our employees do it. ITs total crap-- its criminal and it only exists because the local politicians are on the take.
I love the sopranos. Its entertaining, but I will never do business with a union, and I will exercise all my abilities to avoid it. That you're a sucker that thought you got a deal out of it isn't surprising- there are millions more just like you. But thinking you got a great deal doesn't make you less of a sucker. How much you think it would be worth it to the company to get the union off of its back? Alot. The only reason it won't happen is you guys can't go independant... you think they wouldn't boost your salary to get rid of the union? They woould. And you think they'd then cut salaries to the bone without union protection? No, they'd loose you all to other employers that were unionized-- the only way they could keep production going is to keep you happy.
You're a sucker and you're thinking your crumbs are a goldmine.
In the real world, however, there are many people and businesses who will use unethical methods or other means to gain profits..... She didn't write about these types of businesspeople,
The hell she didn't. Thats what makes me wonder if you really got the book. I'm not trying to be insulting, but I don't see how you could have missed this. One of the great examples of an unethical businessman is Orren Boyle trying to steal Reardon metal. She showed businesspeople that can be unethical as well. She never said that business people are somehow inherently ethical.
Who would you rather have influencing your life? A government elected by the people (as flawed as that may be) and accountable to the people? Or an edifice of a company answerable only to the shareholders and board of directors?
There is no question-- with businesses you are free to not do business with them. You are free to do business with their competition or start your own business in competition with them.
Businesses, generally, don't use guns to enforce their will on you.
Government, on the other hand, is completely unaccountable. Government uses guns to enforce their will on people. Government is not answerable to market forces.
All a politician has to do is keep the thin veneer of competence going and people will be mollified. but if you sell someone a defective car, they will go elsewhere.
You get your house blown up by a bunch of thugs serving a drug warrent that got the address wrong (never mind that the criminalization of drugs violates human rights to begin with) and you have NO RECOURSE.
You get screwed over by a business and you can sue them. The government? You can't generally sue, and you definitely can't sue the federal government.
This is why when you go to a business you get decent service-- competition is enough that if you don't provide decent service you go out of business.
But have you ever heard of the DMV being "Excellent" to deal with? Have you ever heard of the government providing decent service? Hell, we just lost $50 million in property here because the local fire department was not providing the coverage it should, and had KNOWN THIS FOR 5 years! What's your recourse?
IF you have an insurance company that doesn't pay its claims, you can sue them. You pay taxes for fire coverage but if you don't get it, you're SOL.
You go to a private company and they will sell you an annuity agreement. IF they don't keep up their end of the bargain they can be sued, furthermore they are watched and how they manage the money is watched so that if they mismanage it, they will be prevented from it.
But the social security program- which was sold as an annuity benefit- is managed in such a way that a private company doing so would have been sued out of existence for violating their fiduciary responsibility. The federal government just dips its hands in the till whenever funds are tight.
Social security is a great example-- there is a direct private comparison, and people have known about it for a long time.... yet they have not gotten financial responsibility from the government in that regard. IF you have more control over the government, why is the SS fund still mismanaged and going broke? When was the last time you heard of a major insurer going broke and leaving its customers empty handed? Its pretty rare.
I'm not an anarchist who wants to eliminate government, but government should be limited and ONLY uses where it is the BEST solution to a given problem. Not used for every situation. There is no reason the government needs to be mismanaging rail service with Amtrack or the USPS, or even dealing with Social Security.
As we have seen in Florida and many states before and since then, the election system is rigged- -hell its flat out obviously rigged as the two parties have set it up so that only their candidates can get on the ballot. We used to laugh at the USSR when they had voting but all the candidates were party choices-- yet that's exactly what we have here. The differences between the Democrats and Republicans are small enough to be tow halves of the same single party, and we only are allowed to vote for their candidates.
The answer is clear. There are businesses that act poorly or screw up, but they tend not to survive. Government fraud, waste and abuse goes on for decades... and you have no recourse.
You mean the good old days of Jimmy Hoffa firebombing your business, or striking workers taking out an entire cities telephone service?
I was there for the latter.
In a free society people deal with each other on a free basis- they make agreements with each other and discuss differences of issue. IF they can't agree they are free to cease doing business.
Unions in theory should work in this model, but unfortunately, they use violence to achieve their means.
Let me put it this way. There is free trade, which you oppose.
But the only alternative (by definition of the word free) is unfree trade.
Unfree trade means that you are forced to do something that you may or may not want to do. Unfree trade is coercive trade.
Now if you have a free trade situation and you don't like the outcome there are two possibilities: 1) You were a party to the trade and you choose to conduct your business differently later. 2) You are not a party to the trade and you seek to force it to be different the next time.
In the second case, you are an oppressor. You are attempting to force your will on other people who are otherwise free to reach a mutually beneficial agreement.
Where is the moral justification for a third party to interfere with the freely chosen dealings of others?
Also, by definition if guns are involved, that's not free trade, thats coerced trade.
I don't think you can find any examples of "economic imperialism" that are the result of free trade.
do not exaggerate- she did consider herself infallible.
No you don't exaggerate, you lie.
Do you not understand that most people, seeing the words 'human rights', will think of SOCIETAL benefit
No I think that most people when they read the phrase human rights think it means the rights of humans. I don't assume that people are going to think some hypothetical non-sequiter thing about what I have said. I expect them to pay attention nto the words meanings and understand that I used them to mean exactly what I said.
Code words and doublespeak are the realm of those who wish to deceive, such as yourself:
'I get to do whatever I want' system in which 'human rights' means 'kill the unfit'?
Which is a flat out lie about what objectivism says.
But you can get away with such lies because your cronies don't really care about reality, they just want to believe what they want to believe and will believe what you say because its convenient. Even if you redefine objectivism to say something fraudulent. Socialism is not a realm of intellectual integrity, that's for sure.
Those of us who consider Ayn Rand was a dangerous loony can make a pretty good case for it, really.
As usual you slander, but never bother to make your case. I've hard lots of people compalin about Rand, but interestingly when pressed all the y can come up with is subjective opinions about how she constructed her novels. Yawn.
IF you can make this case, make it. You never do, because you know it is based on falsehoods and sophistry and that making it in front of a rational person will result in you being shown for the fraud that you are.
resisted by the more socially aware
Sure that's why the democrats oppose the war on drugs and oppose gun control, right?
Sheesh. You're yowling your angry head off, just as predicted by her:
"...just listen to anyprophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice-- run. Run faster than from the plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where' there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that its your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself-- that will be the man who's not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries." -- The Fountainhead
An excellent description of those, in general, who tell you not to read Atlas Shrugged. We know what you're afraid of.
Yeah, you didn't really pay attention to the book it seems.
There are 5 or so heros in the book because each one is different in an important way, philosophically. Rearden totally screws up when he gives up his metal to the thugs, etc. She shows errors and flaws in all of her heros. She also shows goodness and variations in thought in all of the bad guys. For instance, dagny's brother isn't evil, he's just incompetent.
I find it interesting that all of the criticism of atlas shrugged by apparently reasonable people (I'm excluding the christian fanatics and socialsits) focuses on how bad they thought the prose was-- completely subjectve stuff, as you concede. I liked the way it was written, and it is that long because she fully fleshes out the philosophy in detail AND explains why it is relevant to the real world.
The interesting thing is initially I thought the book was unrealistic, but by the end of it, and especially in the intervening years, I've come to see that all of the anti-human peoiple she illustrated exist in the real world. And other than some speculative science that hasn't come to pass and stuff like making colorado a rich oil state, she accurately represents the real world.
Hell its not uncommon for people on these very forums to quote the book without having ever read it because they are thinking and spouting the same falsehoods that characters in the book do.
If you are a libertarian, you can't say her philosophy doesn't work in the real world-- there is nothing anti-libertarian in her philosophy and most of modern libertarianism embraces it. Hell, at its core (ignoring peripheral issues) they are the same philosophy.
Yeah, you want it both ways-- you want people to get paid to invent things for others, but still retain all the rights to their invention.
Any external restriction on employment is removing the right of employee and employer to negotiate the relationship they choose to have.
You (And all the people on slashdot who continually make this claim) have not shown that there's anything wrong with IP laws. I hear a lot of complaining, and sometimes mistakes are made, but fundamentally they are sound and are working correctly.
I doubt that $162 is the sum total of what he was paid by the company. I also doubt that he individually is the one that came up with the idea and that no effort or money was spent by the company in getting it put in practice, or patented-- it costs a lot to get something to the point that it can be patented.
I remain unconvinced. Your anecdotal evidence doesn't really meet the standard of a scientific controlled comparison.
Its possible that IBM's VM is a bit faster than the Macs, but Suns is mostly a reference VM and the others aren't that great in my experience.
Apple's VM is very, very good, but more importantly, if it hasn't caught up with IBM yet, they are well on their way to possibly passing IBM and certainly giving them a run for the money.
Yeah, it was just a suggestion... yet there is a whole political party in this country that has the same "suggestion" and they are trying to take all the money they can from the rich.
By the way, I notice that you decided to list me as a foe.
And you talk about me taking it too seriously.
It unfortunate that there are so many people in this country who buy into bigotry and hatred, and let it blind them to reality. Really, the black man isn't out to rob you, but your local liberal is. And the average rich person EARNED the money.
You can't handle logic or facts and so you whine. Its Larry's money. Fuck you if you don't like it.
Yeah, but the problem debating the issues is most of the people put forth explanations that are meaningless-- and they debate them with the ferocity of someone repeating what they heard, rather than what they know.
For instance, pointing out that the government of Mexico does not allow foriegn entities to own land in Mexico pretty much destroys your argument about how US companies own all the farm land in Mexico. But I suspect you will just ignore that fact and continue to believe what you've been told.
Bottom line is this: Mexico has benefited greatly economically from its relationship with the US, especially since NAFTA with all the jobs that have been created just on the other side of the border.
You complain about subsistance salaries, but you neglect to admit that the previous salaries were lower.
Protectionism causes poverty, it doesn't prevent it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point: Using firewire you have the high performance of Firewire. Cat5 and you're back into ethernet space and packets.
Firewire supports sustained high bandwidth transfers between multiple drives and multiple computers.
I mean, if you don't need the performance of a SAN, then sure, use Cat5 and you have a fileserver.
But if you're looking for something between FCAL and Ethernet, then Firewire is likely a great midrange choice.
USB is really slow. USB2 I mean. Its theoretical top performance is 480mbps, but Firewire is actually 400mbps-- sustained.
You cannot sustain 480mbps over usb2.. Its really a very slow protocol. Especially if you plug in a 12mbps device into it.
Even if you don't it really isn't up to speed for talking to more than one disk drive.
Well good for you.
Unfortunately, your definition of liberal and that provided by the encyclopedia you quoted are not what is in use-- by conservatives, or by liberals.
When I say it was redefined, I mean it was redefiend when what is modern day liberals took that word.
Everything that liberals agree with that libertarians disagree with is a place where liberals took a word and lied about what they believe.
When liberals stop calling for gun control, then I'll believe they actually support human rights. By your statements, you want me to believe that liberals by defintion oppose gun control, and I find that hard to believe. Even more, the right to keep and bear arms is part of the Bill of Rights.
If liberals, as a group, supported the Bill of Rights (All of it) then I would not have a problem with it, but they all oppose it. They argue for affirmative action, which violates the bill of rights. Tehy argue for Unions support which-- while unions themselves don't violate it, the laws that support unions do violate the bill of rights.
Etc.
This might be interesting: List the top 5 positions you consider to be core of liberalism and I'll explain how they violate human rights (if they do, maybe they won't.)
Yes liberal is a word that has its meaning changed-- but it wasn't the conservatives who did it-- that's recent history. It was done by liberals sometime between the 1800s and the mid 1900s.
Given that you posted pointers to "benchmarks" that only measure clock speed and not performance, I think you have made my point. (Which was a claim about what people like you think performance is.)
Sure, all modern processors are superscalar. That doesn't mean a lot of them sit idle a lot of the time due to poor architectural decisions, forced upon the designers by the requirement that they maintain backwards compatibility going all the way back to the 4004. Not 4004 instruction compatibility, but the compatiblity-compromise-chain goes that far back.
An Athlon 2200+ costs $220 Canadian here, and puts you in the upper realm of CPUs.
Thats the problem with all these discussions. When you get right down to it, Intel and AMD fans really do believe that the performance rating of the CPU is its clock rate.
What's the Athlon's performance with 8 watts of power? Will it even run with 8 watts? How can you have a laptop otherwise? How many clock cycles go by on average before it executes an instruction? 20? 30?
Since OS X was built using GCC, ships with emacs, etc, etc, why arent' they telling apple to rename it from Mac OS X to GNU OS X? And Solaris and Irix need to be renamed as well!
Shame on these companies exploiting free software without even giving them the credit they deserve! (I'm being sarcastic.)
I'm using the GNU compiler to build my product. This isn't by choice, it was simply the compiler that Apple ships. I'm certainly not going to call my product GNU/product. They provided a compiler. There are other ones. If they hadn't provided it and there wasn't an open source one made to fill the gap, I would have bought one. I've never called a product CodeWarrior Foo. Its always Foo, cause nobody cares what product compiled it.
I waited a long time for the GNU OS to be released. I kept hearing how it was coming soon. Well, they had the ball and dropped it. Thanks to Linus for running with it, and that people chose to call his OS Linux is fair game. Its not like GNU didn't have years where they could have released a free OS and then it WOULD have been called GNU. (These attempts to rewrite history after the fact on their part are amusing.)
Here's the deal: You make a product (open sourced or not) YOU get to name it. Within the bounds of trademark law, its your choice. You bundle other products with your product (Say a compiler) that doesn't change the nature of YOUR product.
This does seem desprate on GNUs part. OF course they would say "everyone's asking us why its not called GNU Linux" cause they're not honest enough to say "We're bitter that this kid beat us when we had a genius grant and 5 years to do it, and he did it in a couple months.".
Not surprisingly your position is based on some false assumptions, probably told to you, and that you did not have the necessary information to discard.
First-- the wealthy did not get their money by theft. This is the cry of those who think all property is theft and want a repressive brutal dictatorship in the guise of a "Workers paradise". It is, objectively, a false statement. There are people who have stolen money, but in order to make this claim in the broad, a significant portion of the rich people would have had to steal their money. And THAt is plain false.
Secondly- you ignore the fact that those who inhereit wealth often squander it.
Thirdly- you have not provided reason to believe that given correct information people won't act rationally. I think they will.
Fourth- you are false in the assumption that Objectivism or Libertarianism only "works" if people act rationally- it doesn't. These systems model the REAL WORLD and the REAL WORLD exists whether people act rationally or not. They only say that governments should not take away the rights of rational people because the irrational people want them.
This is literally, and exactly, the same as saying that a majority of white people should not be allowed to take away the rights of the minority of black people. You know taking those rights away is wrong, yet you still support the majority of irrational poor people taking away the rights of the rational rich people?
The foundation of libertarianism is that the only purpose of government is to protect human rights. That some people are irrational is not a reason to avoid libertarianism-- it is the reason that we should have it.
Encoding irrationality into law, as you advocate, is not an acceptable alternative.
Nothing in Libertarianism or Objectivism requires all people to act rationally for it to work. Actually, the contrary-- these systems point out how the real world works. It is the alternative, republican-democratism that pretends the world works in a way that is impossible: Notice the social security pyramid scheme. They think they can just spend money they don't have forever.
This idea that the rich have power over the less rich is only true as long as we have the fundamentally corrupt government that you advocate. In a libertarian or objectivist government the rich would have NO power over the less rich. For we would eliminate the use of violence to compel people to work against their interests that the current system employs.
Sorry, you don't get to redefine liberal. ITs already been done.
Actually "Liberal" is what is now known as libertarian. But since so many anti-rights people started calling themselves liberal, libertarians chose a more precise term, and libertarianism is often called classical liberalism.
Liberalism today DOES mean giving away fish rather than teaching people to fish. That is their ideology and in running into them (and having been one in the past) that ideology is consistant. Generally they are morons, or more precisely, uneducated and ignorant about economics and market forces.
You want to say liberal has some specific definition, then fine: I'm willing to hear it. The list of wasteful government programs you listed does not give a specific definition, just the implication is that liberalism is about government spending. Which is certainly a correlation, but liberalism is about why liberals support government spending: They are ignorant of the poor use of money that governments make.
You certainly don't get to claim that liberalism is about freedom and human rights when so many liberal organizations come down squarely in opposition to freedom and human rights. That doesn't clarify liberalism, that just repeats liberalism's Great Lie.
I met Tom Harkin once. He's a liberal for sure. He's pro union. He's an example that supports my statement, not a contrary one. That he lost to Clinton isn't exactly an indictment of the assertion that liberals support unions-- clinton was a union supporter.
Ok, I'm going to ignore the justifications given (as I'm sure everyone here knows they are false.)
Am I the only one here that sees this, especially given microsoft's current licensing practices, as a huge waste of money?
And whose money is being wasted? Taxpayers. If our government is flippantly blowing out cash in even the department of the interior then clearly they are getting too much money. Its time to cut taxes and stop letting the leeches live high on the hog.
MS Windows? Office? My god. What obscene spending!
We must cut taxes until our money is spent responsibly.
n a world (ours) where many people are rich only because their parents stole (literally, with force) resources from the original holders
Who are you talking about here? You use this as a broad indictment of objectivism, but I don't see it. Obviously objectivism would say theft is immoral and would authorize force to defend or prosecute it.
If by "many" you mean "most rich people stole their wealth" then you're going to have to make that case. Looking at the top 10 forbes list, some are walton's kin, and Sam Walton didn't steal his wealth, and most of the others are self created.
In fact, the majority-- vast majority- of millionaires in the US earned their money by working for it and saving their income prudently, or by starting their own business. A small percentage (%7 by recollection) received it by inheritance.
I'm interested in hearing the case that the rich stole their wealth-- I hear that a lot, but nobody ever wants to provide reason to believe it other than broad statements like "property is theft", and my investigation (made for other reasons) into the nature of wealth in the US has shown otherwise. I'm totally perplexed why so many people believe that people who are rich got that way by theft/fraud.
and where people irrationally pursue actions that hurt them as well in the end, I don't think we can rely on enlightened self interest
Now thats an odd conclusion. I concede that many people act against their best interest. Yet, I cannot see how that justifies taking rights away from anyone (them, or the people who don't act against their self interest.)
On the contrary-- taking the pain out of self mutilation (speaking figuratively here) only increases the likelihood that someone will engage in that behavior repeatedly. When the social safety net is one constructed of people voluntarily helping each other out, then those people can judge whether they are helping someone out or enabling someone's self destruction. The government doesn't distinguish between the two cases.
I can accept that there are "liberals" who do not support unions... but that puts you in a small minority. The democratic party, and every liberal institution and organization I know about supports unions and sees them as part of the "Governemnt will take care of everybody" agenda.
So, I don't think characterizing liberals in general as supporting unions is that unfair.
Note that I am not a conservative, I'm an ex-liberal who's come to become a libertarian. While this puts me at odds with conservatives, I find its rather easy to convince conservatives that social rights exist just like economic rights... but it seems much harder to convince liberals that economic rights are part of human rights.
If I misrepresented you by being overly general, I apologize.
Yep, liberals love to think that something being politically correct (ie: all liberals agree) makes it true or "generally accepted view".
I applaud SPLC to the extent that they fight hate groups. A criticize them to the extent that they too are a hate group-- much like most liberal organizations who's sole organizing purpose seems to be the prosecution of the rich (lately taking the form of campaigning for the idea that all companies are corrupt like Enron and that all property ownership is theft and that for anyone to get rich, other people have to be made poor, etc. etc.)
In my book, anyone who fights to instill slavery is advocating hate. And when the SPLC lobbies for higher taxes, that is exactly what they are doing.
Ironic, no? But the fact that its ironic does not make it false.
Yes, I agree that the issue is the USPTO. And you're right about them being synthetic crutches.
However, most of the anti-IP movement is people who are generally anti-property.
I'm perplexed where this idea that "property is theft" came from, and what does it have to say about "You own your own body"? Did you steal it from your parents?
I have read heinlein. I'd apply most people criticisms of AS to his work, actually. He writes ok stories and I enjoy them, but it isn't intellectually rigorous.
Atlas Shrugged does prove something. Just because its a novel doesn't mean that it can't have a logical proof stuck in the middle of it, it does.
Unfortunately most people skip it because its too dry, but it is there.
That 20 page pamplet you talk about would be Galts Speech.
Its a logical proof of the philosophy of objectivism.
And while I've had tussles with lots of people online over its logic (I'm still trying to make sure it is correct) most of the disagreements with it resolve down to them re-defining words to means something they don't mean (dictionary wise) and she didn't mean (context wise).
The people who want you not to read atlas shrugged are afraid of exposure to the ideas it presents -- because they blow away the lies that these same people tell everyone.
As a libertarian, you'd previously been exposed to the ideas and probably didn't have the misconceptions that needed blowing away.
But you take a random liberal, one who thinks he hates libertarians, but still has an open mind, and give him Atlas Shrugged, its the most dangerous thing you could do (to the liberal establishment).
I haven't read many libertarian books that are like that. I got interrupted in the middle of one of Harry Brownes books, and I'm open to others-- thinking I should pick up some L. Neil Smith. But AS provides an excellent, logical, proof for its philosophy.
This is why the Nissan plant in California went 5 years without unionizing. (I don't know if they are still union free, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.)
They offered their workers a great situation and they didn't vote union. course that didn't stop the union from using strong arm tatics, and violating worker and company rights to try and FORCE them to unionize.
ITs bullshit to say that without unions we wouldn't have health care. There was no union in most of the places I worked but they offered health care without it being asked for.
And you neglect the early history of unions where they used violence and force to get into places, not the free choice of the employees who wanted protection.
You say they only take two hours of your pay, fine. Well, my friend had to pay %15 of her pay. Different union, but your two hour example is not universal.
AND they guy a guy with a wife and kids to support fired for not joining the union. He could afford to pay, but he chose not to submit to their EXTORTION, and so they got him fired. I guess he should be grateful that they didn't also bust his kneecaps.
Yeah, they were looking out after him, sure.
ITs a protection racket, always been, always will be. How many times have unions sold out their memberships to get a better deal with the company? A better deal for the UNION, not the employees?
How much control over unions to the members have verses the mob? I'd say, very little.
Oh, and as to the "Criminal CEOs making high pay" this is your standard socialist sob story-- they make more money than you so you attack them out of jealousy. Unions are like communism-- they want control over the means of production ostensibly so that profits are distributed "fairly" but somehow the profits never make it out of the head union office, or politburo as the case may be.
I'll support unions the day they allow people to freely choose whether to join them or not. But as long as they get state laws written so that they control whether you can work without their permission, they can go to hell.
Oh, and by the way, why is it "Right" for me to have to pay some idiot $75 to carry my computer into a trade show, when he drops it, and breaks it, and I'm not allowed to carry it in myself? Its a scam, like all union crap-- they got a deal with the people who own the trade show facility so they get to extort money from the companies that exhibit there. We have to pay their people absurd rates and aren't allowed to do it ourselves or have our employees do it. ITs total crap-- its criminal and it only exists because the local politicians are on the take.
I love the sopranos. Its entertaining, but I will never do business with a union, and I will exercise all my abilities to avoid it. That you're a sucker that thought you got a deal out of it isn't surprising- there are millions more just like you. But thinking you got a great deal doesn't make you less of a sucker. How much you think it would be worth it to the company to get the union off of its back? Alot. The only reason it won't happen is you guys can't go independant... you think they wouldn't boost your salary to get rid of the union? They woould. And you think they'd then cut salaries to the bone without union protection? No, they'd loose you all to other employers that were unionized-- the only way they could keep production going is to keep you happy.
You're a sucker and you're thinking your crumbs are a goldmine.
In the real world, however, there are many people and businesses who will use unethical methods or other means to gain profits. ....
She didn't write about these types of businesspeople,
The hell she didn't. Thats what makes me wonder if you really got the book. I'm not trying to be insulting, but I don't see how you could have missed this. One of the great examples of an unethical businessman is Orren Boyle trying to steal Reardon metal. She showed businesspeople that can be unethical as well. She never said that business people are somehow inherently ethical.
Who would you rather have influencing your life? A government elected by the people (as flawed as that may be) and accountable to the people? Or an edifice of a company answerable only to the shareholders and board of directors?
There is no question-- with businesses you are free to not do business with them. You are free to do business with their competition or start your own business in competition with them.
Businesses, generally, don't use guns to enforce their will on you.
Government, on the other hand, is completely unaccountable. Government uses guns to enforce their will on people. Government is not answerable to market forces.
All a politician has to do is keep the thin veneer of competence going and people will be mollified. but if you sell someone a defective car, they will go elsewhere.
You get your house blown up by a bunch of thugs serving a drug warrent that got the address wrong (never mind that the criminalization of drugs violates human rights to begin with) and you have NO RECOURSE.
You get screwed over by a business and you can sue them. The government? You can't generally sue, and you definitely can't sue the federal government.
This is why when you go to a business you get decent service-- competition is enough that if you don't provide decent service you go out of business.
But have you ever heard of the DMV being "Excellent" to deal with? Have you ever heard of the government providing decent service? Hell, we just lost $50 million in property here because the local fire department was not providing the coverage it should, and had KNOWN THIS FOR 5 years! What's your recourse?
IF you have an insurance company that doesn't pay its claims, you can sue them. You pay taxes for fire coverage but if you don't get it, you're SOL.
You go to a private company and they will sell you an annuity agreement. IF they don't keep up their end of the bargain they can be sued, furthermore they are watched and how they manage the money is watched so that if they mismanage it, they will be prevented from it.
But the social security program- which was sold as an annuity benefit- is managed in such a way that a private company doing so would have been sued out of existence for violating their fiduciary responsibility. The federal government just dips its hands in the till whenever funds are tight.
Social security is a great example-- there is a direct private comparison, and people have known about it for a long time.... yet they have not gotten financial responsibility from the government in that regard. IF you have more control over the government, why is the SS fund still mismanaged and going broke? When was the last time you heard of a major insurer going broke and leaving its customers empty handed? Its pretty rare.
I'm not an anarchist who wants to eliminate government, but government should be limited and ONLY uses where it is the BEST solution to a given problem. Not used for every situation. There is no reason the government needs to be mismanaging rail service with Amtrack or the USPS, or even dealing with Social Security.
As we have seen in Florida and many states before and since then, the election system is rigged- -hell its flat out obviously rigged as the two parties have set it up so that only their candidates can get on the ballot. We used to laugh at the USSR when they had voting but all the candidates were party choices-- yet that's exactly what we have here. The differences between the Democrats and Republicans are small enough to be tow halves of the same single party, and we only are allowed to vote for their candidates.
The answer is clear. There are businesses that act poorly or screw up, but they tend not to survive. Government fraud, waste and abuse goes on for decades... and you have no recourse.
You mean the good old days of Jimmy Hoffa firebombing your business, or striking workers taking out an entire cities telephone service?
I was there for the latter.
In a free society people deal with each other on a free basis- they make agreements with each other and discuss differences of issue. IF they can't agree they are free to cease doing business.
Unions in theory should work in this model, but unfortunately, they use violence to achieve their means.
Government regulation IS coercive. It is using force to interfere with the free exercise of human rights between individuals.
Fair trade organizations, just like other socialists, want to use violence to interfere with people exercising their human rights.
Now, if they are advocating BOYCOTTS, then that is fine-- you are free to choose who you do business with.
But when governments impose regulations, backed by their army, that is coercive trade.
You don't like the word coercive, but when you use force, that is what you are doing.
Let me put it this way. There is free trade, which you oppose.
But the only alternative (by definition of the word free) is unfree trade.
Unfree trade means that you are forced to do something that you may or may not want to do. Unfree trade is coercive trade.
Now if you have a free trade situation and you don't like the outcome there are two possibilities:
1) You were a party to the trade and you choose to conduct your business differently later.
2) You are not a party to the trade and you seek to force it to be different the next time.
In the second case, you are an oppressor. You are attempting to force your will on other people who are otherwise free to reach a mutually beneficial agreement.
Where is the moral justification for a third party to interfere with the freely chosen dealings of others?
Also, by definition if guns are involved, that's not free trade, thats coerced trade.
I don't think you can find any examples of "economic imperialism" that are the result of free trade.
do not exaggerate- she did consider herself infallible.
No you don't exaggerate, you lie.
Do you not understand that most people, seeing the words 'human rights', will think of SOCIETAL benefit
No I think that most people when they read the phrase human rights think it means the rights of humans. I don't assume that people are going to think some hypothetical non-sequiter thing about what I have said. I expect them to pay attention nto the words meanings and understand that I used them to mean exactly what I said.
Code words and doublespeak are the realm of those who wish to deceive, such as yourself:
'I get to do whatever I want' system in which 'human rights' means 'kill the unfit'?
Which is a flat out lie about what objectivism says.
But you can get away with such lies because your cronies don't really care about reality, they just want to believe what they want to believe and will believe what you say because its convenient. Even if you redefine objectivism to say something fraudulent. Socialism is not a realm of intellectual integrity, that's for sure.
Those of us who consider Ayn Rand was a dangerous loony can make a pretty good case for it, really.
As usual you slander, but never bother to make your case. I've hard lots of people compalin about Rand, but interestingly when pressed all the y can come up with is subjective opinions about how she constructed her novels. Yawn.
IF you can make this case, make it. You never do, because you know it is based on falsehoods and sophistry and that making it in front of a rational person will result in you being shown for the fraud that you are.
resisted by the more socially aware
Sure that's why the democrats oppose the war on drugs and oppose gun control, right?
Sheesh. You're yowling your angry head off, just as predicted by her:
"...just listen to anyprophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice-- run. Run faster than from the plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where' there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that its your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself-- that will be the man who's not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries." -- The Fountainhead
An excellent description of those, in general, who tell you not to read Atlas Shrugged. We know what you're afraid of.
Yeah, you didn't really pay attention to the book it seems.
There are 5 or so heros in the book because each one is different in an important way, philosophically. Rearden totally screws up when he gives up his metal to the thugs, etc. She shows errors and flaws in all of her heros. She also shows goodness and variations in thought in all of the bad guys. For instance, dagny's brother isn't evil, he's just incompetent.
I find it interesting that all of the criticism of atlas shrugged by apparently reasonable people (I'm excluding the christian fanatics and socialsits) focuses on how bad they thought the prose was-- completely subjectve stuff, as you concede. I liked the way it was written, and it is that long because she fully fleshes out the philosophy in detail AND explains why it is relevant to the real world.
The interesting thing is initially I thought the book was unrealistic, but by the end of it, and especially in the intervening years, I've come to see that all of the anti-human peoiple she illustrated exist in the real world. And other than some speculative science that hasn't come to pass and stuff like making colorado a rich oil state, she accurately represents the real world.
Hell its not uncommon for people on these very forums to quote the book without having ever read it because they are thinking and spouting the same falsehoods that characters in the book do.
If you are a libertarian, you can't say her philosophy doesn't work in the real world-- there is nothing anti-libertarian in her philosophy and most of modern libertarianism embraces it. Hell, at its core (ignoring peripheral issues) they are the same philosophy.
Yeah, you want it both ways-- you want people to get paid to invent things for others, but still retain all the rights to their invention.
Any external restriction on employment is removing the right of employee and employer to negotiate the relationship they choose to have.
You (And all the people on slashdot who continually make this claim) have not shown that there's anything wrong with IP laws. I hear a lot of complaining, and sometimes mistakes are made, but fundamentally they are sound and are working correctly.
I doubt that $162 is the sum total of what he was paid by the company. I also doubt that he individually is the one that came up with the idea and that no effort or money was spent by the company in getting it put in practice, or patented-- it costs a lot to get something to the point that it can be patented.
I remain unconvinced. Your anecdotal evidence doesn't really meet the standard of a scientific controlled comparison.
Its possible that IBM's VM is a bit faster than the Macs, but Suns is mostly a reference VM and the others aren't that great in my experience.
Apple's VM is very, very good, but more importantly, if it hasn't caught up with IBM yet, they are well on their way to possibly passing IBM and certainly giving them a run for the money.
Yeah, it was just a suggestion... yet there is a whole political party in this country that has the same "suggestion" and they are trying to take all the money they can from the rich.
By the way, I notice that you decided to list me as a foe.
And you talk about me taking it too seriously.
It unfortunate that there are so many people in this country who buy into bigotry and hatred, and let it blind them to reality. Really, the black man isn't out to rob you, but your local liberal is. And the average rich person EARNED the money.
You can't handle logic or facts and so you whine. Its Larry's money. Fuck you if you don't like it.
Go get a job.
Yeah, but the problem debating the issues is most of the people put forth explanations that are meaningless-- and they debate them with the ferocity of someone repeating what they heard, rather than what they know.
For instance, pointing out that the government of Mexico does not allow foriegn entities to own land in Mexico pretty much destroys your argument about how US companies own all the farm land in Mexico. But I suspect you will just ignore that fact and continue to believe what you've been told.
Bottom line is this: Mexico has benefited greatly economically from its relationship with the US, especially since NAFTA with all the jobs that have been created just on the other side of the border.
You complain about subsistance salaries, but you neglect to admit that the previous salaries were lower.
Protectionism causes poverty, it doesn't prevent it.