Both you and a previous poster with the same basic argument have succeeded brilliantly in completely missing my point; which was, the book's authors seem not to have accounted for many other social trends, not that the Earth is going to explode from over-population. My mistake in including the button phrase "Population Growth" when the important bit of the sentence was "urbanization". You've actually inadvertently pushed my point a bit, by pointing out that "...population growth is largely regulated by the stability of the government..." I am well aware that the growth rate in first world countries is falling. However, it is still high in third world areas (and selected other places, like China, despite their advances). You might expect this to continue until, as happened in the west, they tend to urbanize, and therefore require more, and more stable, government.
(Apologies in advance to those readers who are not subject to the US Constitution)
In some ways, I would tend to agree with you, but you've made a mistake in assuming that all governments are identical. Your central thesis is sound: Government exist to protect property (although not always of the governed). You speak of the government violating its charter without actually looking at that charter itself, which does not say exactly what you think it does.
Protecting some rights involves forfeiting others. What is protected and what is forfeit is specified in the charter and approved by the governed. Specifically, the 16th Amendment gives up your ability to take home all you earn, and instead ships it off to Washington, where your favorite legislator can use it to line his or her pork barrel to their hearts content. Now, you may be saying that I'm proving your point here, and to a certain extent I am--I don't think that our current system of taxation is equitable. But the real point is that we, the governed, consented to it when it was passed as an amendment to our basic charter.
We could have a whole different sort of charter with different sets of rules with more or less emphasis on certain rights, but we don't. There are degrees of trade-offs, and that is where they are specified.
For what it's worth, I personally do want to live in a country that has some sort of social support system. I detest the pork-barrel stuff, but I can't really fault the concept of the system. I don't see providing for the less able as thievery, but as a way of strengthening the country (when applied properly, which we don't). I think a straightforward, cutthroat, capitalist society would eventually eat itself. But that's another topic.
I think we have a long way to go before the 'net is all that you're making it out to be.
Although those of us who have computers tend to take them for granted, we're still a relatively small subset of the population. For the majority of people, it's probably still easier to get something published in print (via Kinko's, et al) than on the Internet.
And, of course, broadcast media are more powerful for their one-way nature. If the Internet were that great at gaining exposure for ideas, you can be sure that advertisers would be shelling out millions to get their 30 second spot up on Yahoo. AFAIK, this hasn't happened yet. More people will hear an idea that is presented on TV than on the net (although there is a certain leaching effect--a few days after I see something really interesting on the web, someone will mention it on the nightly news--the Survivor website leak, for instance).
You can publish something on the net, but you can't make people read it. You might say this is a good way of sorting the wheat from the chaff, but there are plenty of unattractive or unpopular things in this world that people should see. The Internet allows you to avoid things that don't interest you, and that's fine from an entertainment perspective. But it's not a very good way to stay informed or maintain a breadth of opinion.
The Internet may well come to be everything you say it is, but for most people, that is still in the future.
It drives me nuts when people come out with these grand predictions based on only one of many concurrent trends in society. Technological growth is not the only factor that will determine whether governments retain their power. Even if it were, the conclusions the authors draw from this (as quoted by Katz; I haven't read the book) are questionable even in that context.
For openers, technology as a liberating factor is still only relevant to a relatively small segment of Western population. Advanced technology in general is present throughout society, but the specific sorts of tech that might be considered liberating (Internet and desktop publishing come to mind) are really only available to an affluent few. Cell phones and pagers are widely available, but how liberating are they? How many people treat them as a leash instead? Certainly most sysadmins I know. And ultimately, how much control does an individual have over the technology he or she uses? Even the brightest are at the mercy of their ISP, telco, or manufacturer for service. It seems to me that the tendency of a technological infrastructure will not be to push control back to the people from government, but rather to large corporations from government.
And of course, that is supposing that technology is the only force currently driving social change. It isn't. As an example, take population growth and a related phenomenon, urbanization. As more and more people keep being packed into less and less space, the social pressures for more law and regulation will increase, not decrease. Government will be seen as more necessary, not less. This is a trend that pre-dates the Industrial Revolution and has continued through it and the Information Revolution both; yet it does not seem to have met with the authors' consideration.
Which is my problem with most books/articles/diatribes like "The Sovereign Individual." They are written in the same manner as most science fiction--extrapolate a single technology and imagine what will happen with society as a result--but presented as well thought predictions. Essentially, it's wishful thinking, which I'm not opposed to in general, but I find it a little frightening that some people will take for granted that all of these new things are good things. We should not reject new technology out of hand, but neither should we necessarily embrace it without more careful consideration than Katz and pals seem to have.
Only place around here (Pacific Northwest) that even has full service anymore is Oregon, where it's compulsory. There, I don't tip as a means of protest. This is America, goddammit! A man should be able to stand on his own two feet and pump his own damn gas, for christ's sake.
Right, well, it's certainly more difficult to verify the backend DB, and I know a lot of sites that use Oracle behind IIS. But the article did specify Apache, which was what I was trying to confirm, or not.
Cringely didn't check around too much; a quick buzz by Netcraft shows that, at least for the site index pages, all of the M$ owned sites he mentions are running IIS5.0 over W2K. It wouldn't be too difficult to check a little deeper to see if the rest of their farm is as well. Personally, I don't care enough about it to do it, but if I was going to pretend to be a responsible journalist, I sure would.
At first I read this and I thought "Dead on, mate." Totally agreed with it. Then I read some of the responses.
I can't say I completely agree with some of the rebuttals to this argument, but they have some excellent points; I think the most important is that the pursuit of one freedom in no way diminishes the struggle for another. I think that, unintuitively, the attitude that it does is more dangerous than otherwise. Why? It leads to a slippery slope of compromise on what at first are lesser issues. Over-focusing on the big deals can lose you the little ones, which lead back to the big ones. Consider domestic surveillance--small price to pay if we can save lives, right? Privacy isn't as big a deal as a single human life, is it? But eventually, when you lose your privacy, it may be easier to lose your life--one abuse leads to another.
I'm not so confused as to think that the Open Source movement will cure world hunger and lead to peace among men, like some respondents seem to be. But neither do I think that it detracts from what the original poster calls the "real fight for freedom and democracy." His mistake is presuming that this is a fight that has already been won in the First World. In reality, as our founding fathers understood (I'm thinking of a tired Jefferson quote that I won't subject you to directly here) it's a fight that continues forever and is fought on the smaller battlegrounds of personal freedoms.
That's assuming that the $300 linux install doesn't eat up $4,700 in lost time and technical fees because no one at the non-profit knows how to manage it. I've worked for a couple non-profits, and consulted for a few more, and it's pretty rare to find one that has anyone on staff with any interest in or skill with computers. I'm sure some are different; but most can't afford a top-notch sysadmin in today's market. NT, for all its problems, is point and click out of the box, and most non-profits are more comfortable with that. Plus, here in the Northwest anyway, MS will donate pretty much all the software for free--OS, productivity, the works. Because of this, I have yet to encounter an established non-profit around here that runs linux.
I think that the real idea behind a representative democracy is slightly, but meaningfully, different than what you think it is.
It's not that the people should elect experts on the issues. Even in ancient times, I doubt that this was possible. For one thing, it's impossible to know what all the issues are going to be during a politician's tenure. For another, there are just too many issues for each representative to be an expert in all of them.
No, rather than electing experts, people are supposed to elect representatives whose judgement they trust. You are selecting someone to represent your interests at a governing body--but you don't always know exactly how each of those interests will present itself. You don't really want an expert in there, whose personal views you may or may not trust... instead, you want someone who you can rely on to make decisions in your stead. Think of representatives more as proxies than as managers. That's all they are supposed to be.
I'm not saying it works that way now--you're spot on when it comes to special interests and other observations--but that's how it was originally intended. And that's the problem with advocating a technocracy. Frankly, there is too much involved in governance which simply comes down to a matter of personal opinion rather than expert technical decision. Experts cannot help much with such decisions. The ephemeral 'will of the people' is not subject to a technical decision. People are not always, or even often, logical.
Even though this is already pretty far off-topic, I thought I would throw in my two cents on Heinlein...
I agree with pretty much everything you say, but I think Heinlein's point (at least in the context of "Starship Troopers") was not that you had to be an intellectual genius in order to be qualified to vote, but rather that you had to prove that you were willing to assume the responsibility for the greater good before you should be allowed to vote. He goes out of his way to talk about how even less than qualified, or disabled, people could become citizens and gain the vote if they really wanted it. It was the volunteering for service that was important, not the quality of the service.
And to follow up these two already excellent points, here is another observation:
The American system of government inevitably results in a glut of legal code.
Why? Because being a legislator is a full-time job. We keep electing all these people and putting them in office for x number of years with a job description that basically says 'Pass laws.' And because they need to be seen, for the next election, as having done their job, they come up with all kinds of ridiculous, complex, and over-focused codes to put on the books. Take a look at what's on the docket for this Congress sometime:
http://thomas.loc.gov/home/c106bills.html
There are more than 5000 bills listed for the House alone. Go in; pick a few at random. How much of it looks useful to you? Think you could remember all of it to make sure you're not violating any Federal laws next time you leave the house? Multiply that by past congressional sessions and then add in whatever your state and local legislators have been up to (which will be the majority of what concerns you anyway). This will happen every year for the rest of your life.
It's not just that there are some people out there who want to make things complicated for their own benefit--the system itself will inadvertently make things complicated, even with the best intentions. This was not as much of a problem when it was designed; if you had to travel for a month just to assemble the legislature, and then get home to supervise the harvest, you tended to get to the important business at hand and leave the fluff aside. But today, legislative sessions last longer then ever, and under the constant eye of the media, legislators put in long hours coming up with complicated ways to impress special interest groups and their constituencies. And it will only get worse.
Access and SQL Server are two very different animals, the MS connection notwithstanding. There's no real relation between the two, and frankly, anyone trying to run 30+ simultaneous users off Access was asking for trouble in the first place.
As a minor technical point, your statement about public domain as it relates to free access for everyone, is incorrect. Department stores, malls, and other nominally public yet privately owned areas regularly prohibit certain individuals from entering their site. "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" ring a bell? Or even more individually, known shoplifters and other troublemakers are routinely warned off individually, and arrested for criminal trespass if they return. I'm not saying this should be an allowable precedent for e-bay's situation, but it's perfectly legal to bar certain individuals from privately held public domain areas.
Slashdot Mirror
Both you and a previous poster with the same basic argument have succeeded brilliantly in completely missing my point; which was, the book's authors seem not to have accounted for many other social trends, not that the Earth is going to explode from over-population. My mistake in including the button phrase "Population Growth" when the important bit of the sentence was "urbanization". You've actually inadvertently pushed my point a bit, by pointing out that "...population growth is largely regulated by the stability of the government..." I am well aware that the growth rate in first world countries is falling. However, it is still high in third world areas (and selected other places, like China, despite their advances). You might expect this to continue until, as happened in the west, they tend to urbanize, and therefore require more, and more stable, government.
(Apologies in advance to those readers who are not subject to the US Constitution)
In some ways, I would tend to agree with you, but you've made a mistake in assuming that all governments are identical. Your central thesis is sound: Government exist to protect property (although not always of the governed). You speak of the government violating its charter without actually looking at that charter itself, which does not say exactly what you think it does.
Protecting some rights involves forfeiting others. What is protected and what is forfeit is specified in the charter and approved by the governed. Specifically, the 16th Amendment gives up your ability to take home all you earn, and instead ships it off to Washington, where your favorite legislator can use it to line his or her pork barrel to their hearts content. Now, you may be saying that I'm proving your point here, and to a certain extent I am--I don't think that our current system of taxation is equitable. But the real point is that we, the governed, consented to it when it was passed as an amendment to our basic charter.
We could have a whole different sort of charter with different sets of rules with more or less emphasis on certain rights, but we don't. There are degrees of trade-offs, and that is where they are specified.
For what it's worth, I personally do want to live in a country that has some sort of social support system. I detest the pork-barrel stuff, but I can't really fault the concept of the system. I don't see providing for the less able as thievery, but as a way of strengthening the country (when applied properly, which we don't). I think a straightforward, cutthroat, capitalist society would eventually eat itself. But that's another topic.
I think we have a long way to go before the 'net is all that you're making it out to be.
Although those of us who have computers tend to take them for granted, we're still a relatively small subset of the population. For the majority of people, it's probably still easier to get something published in print (via Kinko's, et al) than on the Internet.
And, of course, broadcast media are more powerful for their one-way nature. If the Internet were that great at gaining exposure for ideas, you can be sure that advertisers would be shelling out millions to get their 30 second spot up on Yahoo. AFAIK, this hasn't happened yet. More people will hear an idea that is presented on TV than on the net (although there is a certain leaching effect--a few days after I see something really interesting on the web, someone will mention it on the nightly news--the Survivor website leak, for instance).
You can publish something on the net, but you can't make people read it. You might say this is a good way of sorting the wheat from the chaff, but there are plenty of unattractive or unpopular things in this world that people should see. The Internet allows you to avoid things that don't interest you, and that's fine from an entertainment perspective. But it's not a very good way to stay informed or maintain a breadth of opinion.
The Internet may well come to be everything you say it is, but for most people, that is still in the future.
It drives me nuts when people come out with these grand predictions based on only one of many concurrent trends in society. Technological growth is not the only factor that will determine whether governments retain their power. Even if it were, the conclusions the authors draw from this (as quoted by Katz; I haven't read the book) are questionable even in that context.
For openers, technology as a liberating factor is still only relevant to a relatively small segment of Western population. Advanced technology in general is present throughout society, but the specific sorts of tech that might be considered liberating (Internet and desktop publishing come to mind) are really only available to an affluent few. Cell phones and pagers are widely available, but how liberating are they? How many people treat them as a leash instead? Certainly most sysadmins I know. And ultimately, how much control does an individual have over the technology he or she uses? Even the brightest are at the mercy of their ISP, telco, or manufacturer for service. It seems to me that the tendency of a technological infrastructure will not be to push control back to the people from government, but rather to large corporations from government.
And of course, that is supposing that technology is the only force currently driving social change. It isn't. As an example, take population growth and a related phenomenon, urbanization. As more and more people keep being packed into less and less space, the social pressures for more law and regulation will increase, not decrease. Government will be seen as more necessary, not less. This is a trend that pre-dates the Industrial Revolution and has continued through it and the Information Revolution both; yet it does not seem to have met with the authors' consideration.
Which is my problem with most books/articles/diatribes like "The Sovereign Individual." They are written in the same manner as most science fiction--extrapolate a single technology and imagine what will happen with society as a result--but presented as well thought predictions. Essentially, it's wishful thinking, which I'm not opposed to in general, but I find it a little frightening that some people will take for granted that all of these new things are good things. We should not reject new technology out of hand, but neither should we necessarily embrace it without more careful consideration than Katz and pals seem to have.
Only place around here (Pacific Northwest) that even has full service anymore is Oregon, where it's compulsory. There, I don't tip as a means of protest. This is America, goddammit! A man should be able to stand on his own two feet and pump his own damn gas, for christ's sake.
Interestingly devious observation. I don't know. That's a good question.
Right, well, it's certainly more difficult to verify the backend DB, and I know a lot of sites that use Oracle behind IIS. But the article did specify Apache, which was what I was trying to confirm, or not.
Cringely didn't check around too much; a quick buzz by Netcraft shows that, at least for the site index pages, all of the M$ owned sites he mentions are running IIS5.0 over W2K. It wouldn't be too difficult to check a little deeper to see if the rest of their farm is as well. Personally, I don't care enough about it to do it, but if I was going to pretend to be a responsible journalist, I sure would.
Huh. Well, it sounds like gandi.net is in breach of contract to anyone registered through them, eh?
At first I read this and I thought "Dead on, mate." Totally agreed with it. Then I read some of the responses.
I can't say I completely agree with some of the rebuttals to this argument, but they have some excellent points; I think the most important is that the pursuit of one freedom in no way diminishes the struggle for another. I think that, unintuitively, the attitude that it does is more dangerous than otherwise. Why? It leads to a slippery slope of compromise on what at first are lesser issues. Over-focusing on the big deals can lose you the little ones, which lead back to the big ones. Consider domestic surveillance--small price to pay if we can save lives, right? Privacy isn't as big a deal as a single human life, is it? But eventually, when you lose your privacy, it may be easier to lose your life--one abuse leads to another.
I'm not so confused as to think that the Open Source movement will cure world hunger and lead to peace among men, like some respondents seem to be. But neither do I think that it detracts from what the original poster calls the "real fight for freedom and democracy." His mistake is presuming that this is a fight that has already been won in the First World. In reality, as our founding fathers understood (I'm thinking of a tired Jefferson quote that I won't subject you to directly here) it's a fight that continues forever and is fought on the smaller battlegrounds of personal freedoms.
That's assuming that the $300 linux install doesn't eat up $4,700 in lost time and technical fees because no one at the non-profit knows how to manage it. I've worked for a couple non-profits, and consulted for a few more, and it's pretty rare to find one that has anyone on staff with any interest in or skill with computers. I'm sure some are different; but most can't afford a top-notch sysadmin in today's market. NT, for all its problems, is point and click out of the box, and most non-profits are more comfortable with that. Plus, here in the Northwest anyway, MS will donate pretty much all the software for free--OS, productivity, the works. Because of this, I have yet to encounter an established non-profit around here that runs linux.
It's not that the people should elect experts on the issues. Even in ancient times, I doubt that this was possible. For one thing, it's impossible to know what all the issues are going to be during a politician's tenure. For another, there are just too many issues for each representative to be an expert in all of them.
No, rather than electing experts, people are supposed to elect representatives whose judgement they trust. You are selecting someone to represent your interests at a governing body--but you don't always know exactly how each of those interests will present itself. You don't really want an expert in there, whose personal views you may or may not trust... instead, you want someone who you can rely on to make decisions in your stead. Think of representatives more as proxies than as managers. That's all they are supposed to be.
I'm not saying it works that way now--you're spot on when it comes to special interests and other observations--but that's how it was originally intended. And that's the problem with advocating a technocracy. Frankly, there is too much involved in governance which simply comes down to a matter of personal opinion rather than expert technical decision. Experts cannot help much with such decisions. The ephemeral 'will of the people' is not subject to a technical decision. People are not always, or even often, logical.
Even though this is already pretty far off-topic, I thought I would throw in my two cents on Heinlein...
I agree with pretty much everything you say, but I think Heinlein's point (at least in the context of "Starship Troopers") was not that you had to be an intellectual genius in order to be qualified to vote, but rather that you had to prove that you were willing to assume the responsibility for the greater good before you should be allowed to vote. He goes out of his way to talk about how even less than qualified, or disabled, people could become citizens and gain the vote if they really wanted it. It was the volunteering for service that was important, not the quality of the service.
Well, either Ralph is moving forward rapidly with his agenda, or he didn't look very hard for on-line voting records:
Senate Roll Call votes
House Roll Call votes
Don't let Mapplethorpe (or any other artist regarding their own work, for that matter) hear you saying his work doesn't have any effect.
>
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And to follow up these two already excellent points, here is another observation: The American system of government inevitably results in a glut of legal code. Why? Because being a legislator is a full-time job. We keep electing all these people and putting them in office for x number of years with a job description that basically says 'Pass laws.' And because they need to be seen, for the next election, as having done their job, they come up with all kinds of ridiculous, complex, and over-focused codes to put on the books. Take a look at what's on the docket for this Congress sometime: http://thomas.loc.gov/home/c106bills.html There are more than 5000 bills listed for the House alone. Go in; pick a few at random. How much of it looks useful to you? Think you could remember all of it to make sure you're not violating any Federal laws next time you leave the house? Multiply that by past congressional sessions and then add in whatever your state and local legislators have been up to (which will be the majority of what concerns you anyway). This will happen every year for the rest of your life. It's not just that there are some people out there who want to make things complicated for their own benefit--the system itself will inadvertently make things complicated, even with the best intentions. This was not as much of a problem when it was designed; if you had to travel for a month just to assemble the legislature, and then get home to supervise the harvest, you tended to get to the important business at hand and leave the fluff aside. But today, legislative sessions last longer then ever, and under the constant eye of the media, legislators put in long hours coming up with complicated ways to impress special interest groups and their constituencies. And it will only get worse.
Access and SQL Server are two very different animals, the MS connection notwithstanding. There's no real relation between the two, and frankly, anyone trying to run 30+ simultaneous users off Access was asking for trouble in the first place.
As a minor technical point, your statement about public domain as it relates to free access for everyone, is incorrect. Department stores, malls, and other nominally public yet privately owned areas regularly prohibit certain individuals from entering their site. "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" ring a bell? Or even more individually, known shoplifters and other troublemakers are routinely warned off individually, and arrested for criminal trespass if they return. I'm not saying this should be an allowable precedent for e-bay's situation, but it's perfectly legal to bar certain individuals from privately held public domain areas.