The fact is that Linux installers leave it to you to CHOOSE whether you want to install the loader in the partition boot sector or the MBR, and will NOT do anything that you don't thus ask it to do.
This is VERY DIFFERENT from simply overwriting both without so much as asking or even providing a warning, which is what Windows does.
and i'm pretty sure most linux installers run straight over anything else that is in the mbr too
No, they don't.
There is a very good reason why nearly anyone installing a dual-boot from scratch partitions and installs Windows FIRST and Linux SECOND. It is because while Linux installers are happy to leave Windows in place and booting properly, the Windows installer will happily WIPE the boot sector/MBR and leave Linux inaccessible until you jump through hoops, in spite of the fact that there is little reason to do so.
Slightly OT but hopefully it doesn't get modded down, the entire line of Brother printers is well supported by desktop Linuxen.
Fedora Core (all versions, AFAIK) also supports the Brother lasers easily, clickety-click automatic via GUI, including things like configuring the toner-saving mode.
They're nice printers, too. Inexpensive, very fast, very small, very quiet, auto-sleep, etc.
The problem is that companies are run by people, and unless they are technology companies, they don't employe technology-savvy people.
Most people in most companies have a fundamental lack of understanding of what the security risks are and what their nature is, even after you explain it to them.
For any given security risk, high- and mid-level management expect to simply be able to buy one expensive product to fix it (not really even understanding what it means to "buy" a security product in the first place--that's IT's job). They don't even understand that there could possibly be anything more that needs to be done, and it's very difficult to get them to understand this.
And if there is no commercial product that advertises itself specifically as "the fix" to a given security risk, management often refuses to even conceive that the risk might exist, so trapped are they in the worldview that "if there's really a problem, someone will have made a product to fix it; if no-one sells a product to fix it, then it must not actually be a problem."
Things like changing the settings of a product or altering behaviors of employees or the topologies of network are simply beyond their understanding because they just don't have that deep a view of the technology-- the entire corporate network is just a pile of magic products to them and any product will either fix a problem, in which case it's a good product, or it won't, in which case (they believe) they bought the wrong product.
As far as they are capable of understanding, throw some IBM, some Cisco, and some Microsoft all into a cemement mixer and stir, and *boom*, corporate network and you have "instant 21st century!"
Um, I like "thin" and I don't find the Linux AA fonts to be "brittle and chintzy" which are certainly odd adjectives to use for a font (brittle? did you try to break your fonts by tapping them with a reflex hammer? chintzy? did you ask them for money?)
IMHO, the Cleartype fonts are just less readable than the subpixel AA fonts I see in, for example, KDE. I've spent tons of time trying to find a way to get Cleartype in XP to render Arial the same way that KDE does and as far as I can tell, it's not possible.
But in any case, I find the font rendering in Linux to be much more book-like. I find the unnecessary heavyness and color fringing (both adjectives, note, that actually say something about what I'm experiencing) of Windows fonts to be distracting and straining on the eyes.
You cannot legally/bindingly sell yourself into slavery, because there are some natural rights that are considered to be inviolable.
I'd suggest that cases like this begin to border on slavery. You are tied to one employer and one employer only in order to eat, and thus you are tied to his/her whims and conditions, whatever they may be, in order to survive.
Yes, but until degredation begins, CDs hold a perfect, perfectly reproducible, arbitrarily-quickly-accessible, quantity of information in data-friendly format, in a smaller package that can be played in places (i.e. cars, backpacks) where vinyl simply can't.
My point was not what they're made of but rather the superiority of one over another is completely dependent on what you measure. If I, for example, measure on the ability to archive digital photos, then CDs aren't just vastly superior to vinyl, they're the only choice.
Early LCD displays were bad, sure, but these days I use a CRT at work and a low-end 17" Advueu LCD display at home (on which I watch both TV and DVDs as well, in addition to gaming), and I can honestly say that the LCD's display quality--contrast, brightness, sharpness, lack of distortion--is far better than my Optiquest at work, and I haven't experienced anything even suggestive of a ghosting problem, whether while watching action films or playing FPS games.
Geesh. Better for WHAT? It all depends on what your intent is.
Otherwise,
paper holds ink with great integrity when you write on it, while when you write on the surface of water, you can't make out anything at all a second later. Therefore, paper is better than water, acid and deforestation and all.
Call me a loser, but I love the interfaces of both bash and The GIMP.
I absolutely adore filename completion, arrow-navigatable history, the heavily customizable prompts, command-line editing, and other aspects of the bash interface.
I also absolutely adore the "per-image context menu" interface of The GIMP that makes it easy to have many image windows open and tiled at the same time in focus-follows-mouse mode without causing problems related to relating menus to images as would apply in the "one menu for the entire app, all images" interface in Photoshop.
Time zones are not so much for behavioral guidance as they are userful for communication--it's a kind of shorthand, a pre-made set of calculations.
Without a timezone, you can't say "I go to bed every night about 8:00 pm" on an Internet forum because any listed time is meaningless without also listing your latitude and logitude for everyone else, which most people don't know and fewer people will relate in any meaningful way to real time.
You could of course say "I got to bed every night about two hours after sundown" but then you'd need not only latitude and logitude but also altitude and other pieces of information.
But time zones give us a shorthand, pre-computed way for explaining to people across vast distances when things happen during the average day.
I ran a multiuser office from a Linux server all the way back in '92, using four VT100 terminals and a console on an i386DX/25 with 8MB RAM. And at home, I ran TWM on my Linux desktop along with NCSA Mosaic for World Wide Web access through term rather than slip which gave me TCP/IP through 7-bit shell dial-up, along with InterViews (which I later replaced with Andrew) both GUI WYSIWYG office suites on an accelerated full color desktop that were also free.
This is long before Be. And before Linux was Linux, its direct ancestors (sharing virtually the same user interface as today) were X and GNU applications on the hardware accelerated Unix desktop (mine was SunOS on an sbus Sparc) at 1152x900 full color with 32MB memory, which I was enjoying in the '80s when DOS users were still oohing and aaahing at Windows 3.0 (can you say 'no preemptive multitasking, 640k application limit') running 640x400 in 4-bit color on their 1MB machines.
BeOS wasn't even a sparkle in anyone's eye when Linux was already powering sites on the Internet. And to suggest that BeOS predates the Unix 'way' and the dominance of Unix and Unix desktop applications at the high end of microcomputing (including high-end graphics) through the '80s and '90s is very, very silly.
- Very narrow video, storage, and device driver support; you are unlikely to get it to run unless you shell out for compatible hardware in addition to the OS itself
- Very few applications of any kind; sure, it runs a smattering of applications from the open source world, but not really very many at all in comparison to the number of OSS apps out there, and there's little diversity, but precious little else unless you want to write it or port it yourself
You basically have to buy a PC with supported hardware just to run it, and once you do, there's little you can do with it that you couldn't also do with a web appliance or a Windows CE HPC--you're basically relegated to browsing, emailing, typing letters, and watching DVDs.
America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser.
The problem with this calculus is that there are no winners. EVERY HUMAN will ultimately end in total impoverishment (i.e. death).
There is no win or lose. There is only "suffer more" or "suffer less"--and the curve is logarithmic with respect to increases in wealth. Past a certain level of capitalization in an individual life, the inverse relationship between dollar quantities and suffering quantities is increasingly shallow, the opposite of what lies at the other end of the curve.
Or in simple terms, having $11 million instead of $10 million in a personal bank account makes only an infantesimally small difference in the suffering that such an account holder will endure before his/her unavoiadable death. The extra $1 million really doesn't bring the multi-millionaire much. HOWEVER, that same $1 million could relieve a vast quantity of suffering if divided among numerous people who have $0.00 in their personal bank accounts.
Seeing that all will lose--we are all in this mortality/existential hollowness game together--it is clearly an incredible waste of resources to dedicade so many billions worldwide to making unmeasurably tiny additional improvements to the lives of the already ultra-wealthy when those same billions could make truly massive, world-shattering improvements to the lives of the ultra-poor.
No, we shouldn't remove wealth from anyone to the point that they themselves are thrust into poverty. However, we should remove wealth to the extent that such redistribution is nominally unnoticable to the wealthy in relation to any day-to-day concern, when the gains at the other end of the spectrum that result from such redistribution are huge.
Absolutely correct. The rationality of the whole takes on a mythic intentionality that no single individual has the power to challenge or escape. Even those at the top don't enjoy pure benefit because they then live constantly under the threat of behavioral "laws" that goveren economics, mass movements, revolutions, etc. They, too, are subject to the rational "laws" of a whole that lies beyond either the logic or authority of any one of the individuals that it was designed to free.
The fundamental problem then is the adoption instrumental rationality as an end in and of itself, something that is all to easy to do when it is such a powerful means to measurable and thus easily conceptualizable and endlessly reproducable results--which then, because of their "measurable" nature--are mistaken for "gains" in empowerment and improvements in living standard that, considered in isolation, are undeniably "good" in any particular instance.
Who can argue with any one given increase in wealth? Any one reduction in crime? Any one dissolution of a social ill? And yet, considered together, the relentless accumulation of increase in wealth, reduction in crime, and dissolution of social ills leads to virulent nationalism, pseudo-communist totalitarianism, rampant, ruthless capitalism, etc.
You've essentially just described the Frankfurt School problem--the possibility that the enlightenment has failed us. Rationally unassailable, measurably productive, undeniably "good" and beneficial at any one datapoint, the enlightenment and its quest for "rational," measurable gains, systematization, and progress nonetheless as a "lifestyle" rather than simply a "tool" has come to dominate and tyrannize everyone living within its logic to much the same extent that pre-scientific forms did--in slightly different ways, but nonethless still tyranny. Progress is good. But subservience to the relentless quest for progress and sublimation of self and society to it (think Progress' [i.e. Progress prime, like acceleration vs. speed]) is just as ruthless and harmful as is the state of total lack of progress from feudalism or worse, because measures of progress (which always appear in isolation to lead to a net increase in happiness) are nonetheless different quantities from direct measures of individual happiness or even collective morality. These quantities are not directly linked in linear fashion, something that seems irreconcilable but, given twentieth century history, can not be denied to be true.
Yes, you're right. And there are arguments that bridge the two, like the one that I usually make, though I didn't this time: in an economic marketplace designed to encourage, reward, and sustain only certain types of behavior (willing all others to be eliminated), we risk ending up in a social and behavioral universe populated by very successful people whom we envy or respect materially but would utterly hate to know personally, left to choosing among a realistically limited selection of very productive tasks that we're tired of doing yet will have to do (as ruthlessly as everyone else) for the duration of essentially meaningless, übercompetitive lives.
Wealth is only meaningful as the means to an end (comfortable survival, whose end in turn is the ability to carry on a meaningful social existence and interaction, as we are social beings). The moment we turn wealth into an end in and of itself and decide to use the ability to create wealth as our criteria in a darwinistic selection mechanism, we risk creating a world populated with such ruthless, single-minded, or backward characters that it's not worth living in or surviving for in the first place.
It's the critical theorists' view, essentially: before one adopts methods and positions that are unassailably rational, one should consider carefully the ends that the given type of rationality so successfully produces and whether they are as desirable for society at large and for the individual as a complete, multifaceted being as they are for a single "successful" individual when considered only in the single context of said rationality.
Yes, and produce starts as a seed in a pile of manure, but let me guess as to whether I could get you to eat a dried kernel of corn and a bucket of steer shit for lunch today instead of a salad...
A fetus is only the same thing as you if you are saying that you are no smarter, no bigger, and no more developed than a fetus.
As for me, I am infinitely more now than I was when I was a fetus. Then = not much of a loss. Now = the loss of a person. They are not the same thing. There are decades worth of intervening years and millions of hours of labor and invested resources in difference.
The "pro-life" people seem to want to equate thing A with anything that can be turned into thing A, and anything into which thing A can be turned. By that logic, rape is a precious, life-affirming act and parents who give their kids decongestant for a cold should go to prison for the distribution of methamphetamine.
Um, yes, they did for 150,000 years of human history, before humans decided to "advance" by settling down and beginning to accumulate goods, and thus, wealth.
I love the logic. "If you don't like it, quit. Nobody forced you to take the job. You knew the rules."
Only the rules are the same anywhere, because we're all a part of the same "free market" capitalist economy.
So then the idiots say "Well then, don't take a job. Nobody's forcing you to work."
Only then how is one to eat?
People like you are effectively arguing that this is utopia. And it's not an uncommon argument, I hear it all the time and see it on Slashdot as well: the free market is perfect. If you don't like it, tough shit, it's because you must suck and not be able to compete.
So--what's the solution for those who can't compete? Kill them? Let them starve? If you're born IQ 90 and simple, you deserve to be "outcompeted" by everyone else and end up jobless, homeless, and dead (because we don't believe in social welfare in the free market)? How is this different, morally, from the Nazis, eugenics, and the termination of "defective" humans?
It's 2005. We should be past all of this. People should simply fucking CARE ENOUGH TO BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE SOME OF THEIR OWN WEALTH FOR THEIR FELLOW HUMANS.
Especially CEOs making more in one year than anyone needs to live comfortably for an entire LIFETIME, in a nation based on a Judeo-Christian faith that claims to believe in sacrifice and brotherhood, that claims to support individual "freedom." Freedom for who? Only the wealthy? Only the perfect? Everyone who isn't defective? Freedom to do what? Be "out-competed" into unemployment, homelessness, the grave, and then to be blamed for it because you just "couldn't compete?"
That's the brutal logic of capitalism and capitalists for you. I'd bet that 50% of the people on Slashdot see corporations/employers not as social institutions that are a component of the community, but rather as functional institutions that are part of a capital economy. The survival of "the economy" (i.e. capital flows) is seen as important; the survival of people is not.
Just watch any story about failing companies on Slashdot and you'll see just how many posters argue that a company that isn't profitable right now absolutely should go out of business because it "can't compete" in the "free market." Nevermind whether the company was competitive in the past or could be competitive again in the future with proper (i.e. less greedy and short-sighted) management, or the fact that in that "should go out of business" trope, hundreds or even thousands of lives may be ruined--when the improvement of lives is, ostensibly, the reason for commerce in the first place...
Capitalism is always short-sighted because the capitalists (in the orthodox sense--those people who have capital) will always see their holdings increase, regardless of the longevity of any particular enterprise. That's where this attitude of "bad business should fail" comes from--it's cultural brainwashing from those who control the economies through their wealth. It is their vested interest that unprofitable ventures should fail immediately, so that capital can be transferred to other ventures, in order to minimize losses and maximize profitability on an ongoing basis. If and investment in B will yield a 50% higher/faster return than an investment in A, capital will shift to B to maximize the profits of those who control, even if A was still nominally profitable, and even if thousands of non-capital-holding lives utterly depend on A. Capitalism is fundamentally anti-humanist that way.
Unfortunately, it's disabled in Red Hat by default just now, and the official IT policy is to used operating systems (including Red Hat) as-shipped, meaning no telnet.:-(
I am tempted every day to transition from editorial to IT, in order to kick some a$$es.
It's all so ridiculous! No wonder I can't help but post to/. stories like this one...
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a pro-terrorist academic in the social sciences. I am a pro-communist academic in the social sciences. Get it straight.
No, it's not "unless instructed not to do so."
The fact is that Linux installers leave it to you to CHOOSE whether you want to install the loader in the partition boot sector or the MBR, and will NOT do anything that you don't thus ask it to do.
This is VERY DIFFERENT from simply overwriting both without so much as asking or even providing a warning, which is what Windows does.
and i'm pretty sure most linux installers run straight over anything else that is in the mbr too
No, they don't.
There is a very good reason why nearly anyone installing a dual-boot from scratch partitions and installs Windows FIRST and Linux SECOND. It is because while Linux installers are happy to leave Windows in place and booting properly, the Windows installer will happily WIPE the boot sector/MBR and leave Linux inaccessible until you jump through hoops, in spite of the fact that there is little reason to do so.
Slightly OT but hopefully it doesn't get modded down, the entire line of Brother printers is well supported by desktop Linuxen.
Fedora Core (all versions, AFAIK) also supports the Brother lasers easily, clickety-click automatic via GUI, including things like configuring the toner-saving mode.
They're nice printers, too. Inexpensive, very fast, very small, very quiet, auto-sleep, etc.
Apple's Newton PDAs also did this. They would even dial for you from your contacts list if you held the phone up to the speaker, IIRC.
The problem is that companies are run by people, and unless they are technology companies, they don't employe technology-savvy people.
Most people in most companies have a fundamental lack of understanding of what the security risks are and what their nature is, even after you explain it to them.
For any given security risk, high- and mid-level management expect to simply be able to buy one expensive product to fix it (not really even understanding what it means to "buy" a security product in the first place--that's IT's job). They don't even understand that there could possibly be anything more that needs to be done, and it's very difficult to get them to understand this.
And if there is no commercial product that advertises itself specifically as "the fix" to a given security risk, management often refuses to even conceive that the risk might exist, so trapped are they in the worldview that "if there's really a problem, someone will have made a product to fix it; if no-one sells a product to fix it, then it must not actually be a problem."
Things like changing the settings of a product or altering behaviors of employees or the topologies of network are simply beyond their understanding because they just don't have that deep a view of the technology-- the entire corporate network is just a pile of magic products to them and any product will either fix a problem, in which case it's a good product, or it won't, in which case (they believe) they bought the wrong product.
As far as they are capable of understanding, throw some IBM, some Cisco, and some Microsoft all into a cemement mixer and stir, and *boom*, corporate network and you have "instant 21st century!"
"Thin, brittle, and chintzy?"
Um, I like "thin" and I don't find the Linux AA fonts to be "brittle and chintzy" which are certainly odd adjectives to use for a font (brittle? did you try to break your fonts by tapping them with a reflex hammer? chintzy? did you ask them for money?)
IMHO, the Cleartype fonts are just less readable than the subpixel AA fonts I see in, for example, KDE. I've spent tons of time trying to find a way to get Cleartype in XP to render Arial the same way that KDE does and as far as I can tell, it's not possible.
But in any case, I find the font rendering in Linux to be much more book-like. I find the unnecessary heavyness and color fringing (both adjectives, note, that actually say something about what I'm experiencing) of Windows fonts to be distracting and straining on the eyes.
You cannot legally/bindingly sell yourself into slavery, because there are some natural rights that are considered to be inviolable.
I'd suggest that cases like this begin to border on slavery. You are tied to one employer and one employer only in order to eat, and thus you are tied to his/her whims and conditions, whatever they may be, in order to survive.
Yes, but until degredation begins, CDs hold a perfect, perfectly reproducible, arbitrarily-quickly-accessible, quantity of information in data-friendly format, in a smaller package that can be played in places (i.e. cars, backpacks) where vinyl simply can't.
My point was not what they're made of but rather the superiority of one over another is completely dependent on what you measure. If I, for example, measure on the ability to archive digital photos, then CDs aren't just vastly superior to vinyl, they're the only choice.
Early LCD displays were bad, sure, but these days I use a CRT at work and a low-end 17" Advueu LCD display at home (on which I watch both TV and DVDs as well, in addition to gaming), and I can honestly say that the LCD's display quality--contrast, brightness, sharpness, lack of distortion--is far better than my Optiquest at work, and I haven't experienced anything even suggestive of a ghosting problem, whether while watching action films or playing FPS games.
Geesh. Better for WHAT? It all depends on what your intent is.
Otherwise,
paper holds ink with great integrity when you write on it, while when you write on the surface of water, you can't make out anything at all a second later. Therefore, paper is better than water, acid and deforestation and all.
Call me a loser, but I love the interfaces of both bash and The GIMP.
I absolutely adore filename completion, arrow-navigatable history, the heavily customizable prompts, command-line editing, and other aspects of the bash interface.
I also absolutely adore the "per-image context menu" interface of The GIMP that makes it easy to have many image windows open and tiled at the same time in focus-follows-mouse mode without causing problems related to relating menus to images as would apply in the "one menu for the entire app, all images" interface in Photoshop.
Time zones are not so much for behavioral guidance as they are userful for communication--it's a kind of shorthand, a pre-made set of calculations.
Without a timezone, you can't say "I go to bed every night about 8:00 pm" on an Internet forum because any listed time is meaningless without also listing your latitude and logitude for everyone else, which most people don't know and fewer people will relate in any meaningful way to real time.
You could of course say "I got to bed every night about two hours after sundown" but then you'd need not only latitude and logitude but also altitude and other pieces of information.
But time zones give us a shorthand, pre-computed way for explaining to people across vast distances when things happen during the average day.
I ran a multiuser office from a Linux server all the way back in '92, using four VT100 terminals and a console on an i386DX/25 with 8MB RAM. And at home, I ran TWM on my Linux desktop along with NCSA Mosaic for World Wide Web access through term rather than slip which gave me TCP/IP through 7-bit shell dial-up, along with InterViews (which I later replaced with Andrew) both GUI WYSIWYG office suites on an accelerated full color desktop that were also free.
This is long before Be. And before Linux was Linux, its direct ancestors (sharing virtually the same user interface as today) were X and GNU applications on the hardware accelerated Unix desktop (mine was SunOS on an sbus Sparc) at 1152x900 full color with 32MB memory, which I was enjoying in the '80s when DOS users were still oohing and aaahing at Windows 3.0 (can you say 'no preemptive multitasking, 640k application limit') running 640x400 in 4-bit color on their 1MB machines.
BeOS wasn't even a sparkle in anyone's eye when Linux was already powering sites on the Internet. And to suggest that BeOS predates the Unix 'way' and the dominance of Unix and Unix desktop applications at the high end of microcomputing (including high-end graphics) through the '80s and '90s is very, very silly.
And its two insurmountable drawbacks as well:
- Very narrow video, storage, and device driver support; you are unlikely to get it to run unless you shell out for compatible hardware in addition to the OS itself
- Very few applications of any kind; sure, it runs a smattering of applications from the open source world, but not really very many at all in comparison to the number of OSS apps out there, and there's little diversity, but precious little else unless you want to write it or port it yourself
You basically have to buy a PC with supported hardware just to run it, and once you do, there's little you can do with it that you couldn't also do with a web appliance or a Windows CE HPC--you're basically relegated to browsing, emailing, typing letters, and watching DVDs.
America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser.
The problem with this calculus is that there are no winners. EVERY HUMAN will ultimately end in total impoverishment (i.e. death).
There is no win or lose. There is only "suffer more" or "suffer less"--and the curve is logarithmic with respect to increases in wealth. Past a certain level of capitalization in an individual life, the inverse relationship between dollar quantities and suffering quantities is increasingly shallow, the opposite of what lies at the other end of the curve.
Or in simple terms, having $11 million instead of $10 million in a personal bank account makes only an infantesimally small difference in the suffering that such an account holder will endure before his/her unavoiadable death. The extra $1 million really doesn't bring the multi-millionaire much. HOWEVER, that same $1 million could relieve a vast quantity of suffering if divided among numerous people who have $0.00 in their personal bank accounts.
Seeing that all will lose--we are all in this mortality/existential hollowness game together--it is clearly an incredible waste of resources to dedicade so many billions worldwide to making unmeasurably tiny additional improvements to the lives of the already ultra-wealthy when those same billions could make truly massive, world-shattering improvements to the lives of the ultra-poor.
No, we shouldn't remove wealth from anyone to the point that they themselves are thrust into poverty. However, we should remove wealth to the extent that such redistribution is nominally unnoticable to the wealthy in relation to any day-to-day concern, when the gains at the other end of the spectrum that result from such redistribution are huge.
Absolutely correct. The rationality of the whole takes on a mythic intentionality that no single individual has the power to challenge or escape. Even those at the top don't enjoy pure benefit because they then live constantly under the threat of behavioral "laws" that goveren economics, mass movements, revolutions, etc. They, too, are subject to the rational "laws" of a whole that lies beyond either the logic or authority of any one of the individuals that it was designed to free.
The fundamental problem then is the adoption instrumental rationality as an end in and of itself, something that is all to easy to do when it is such a powerful means to measurable and thus easily conceptualizable and endlessly reproducable results--which then, because of their "measurable" nature--are mistaken for "gains" in empowerment and improvements in living standard that, considered in isolation, are undeniably "good" in any particular instance.
Who can argue with any one given increase in wealth? Any one reduction in crime? Any one dissolution of a social ill? And yet, considered together, the relentless accumulation of increase in wealth, reduction in crime, and dissolution of social ills leads to virulent nationalism, pseudo-communist totalitarianism, rampant, ruthless capitalism, etc.
You've essentially just described the Frankfurt School problem--the possibility that the enlightenment has failed us. Rationally unassailable, measurably productive, undeniably "good" and beneficial at any one datapoint, the enlightenment and its quest for "rational," measurable gains, systematization, and progress nonetheless as a "lifestyle" rather than simply a "tool" has come to dominate and tyrannize everyone living within its logic to much the same extent that pre-scientific forms did--in slightly different ways, but nonethless still tyranny. Progress is good. But subservience to the relentless quest for progress and sublimation of self and society to it (think Progress' [i.e. Progress prime, like acceleration vs. speed]) is just as ruthless and harmful as is the state of total lack of progress from feudalism or worse, because measures of progress (which always appear in isolation to lead to a net increase in happiness) are nonetheless different quantities from direct measures of individual happiness or even collective morality. These quantities are not directly linked in linear fashion, something that seems irreconcilable but, given twentieth century history, can not be denied to be true.
Yes, you're right. And there are arguments that bridge the two, like the one that I usually make, though I didn't this time: in an economic marketplace designed to encourage, reward, and sustain only certain types of behavior (willing all others to be eliminated), we risk ending up in a social and behavioral universe populated by very successful people whom we envy or respect materially but would utterly hate to know personally, left to choosing among a realistically limited selection of very productive tasks that we're tired of doing yet will have to do (as ruthlessly as everyone else) for the duration of essentially meaningless, übercompetitive lives.
Wealth is only meaningful as the means to an end (comfortable survival, whose end in turn is the ability to carry on a meaningful social existence and interaction, as we are social beings). The moment we turn wealth into an end in and of itself and decide to use the ability to create wealth as our criteria in a darwinistic selection mechanism, we risk creating a world populated with such ruthless, single-minded, or backward characters that it's not worth living in or surviving for in the first place.
It's the critical theorists' view, essentially: before one adopts methods and positions that are unassailably rational, one should consider carefully the ends that the given type of rationality so successfully produces and whether they are as desirable for society at large and for the individual as a complete, multifaceted being as they are for a single "successful" individual when considered only in the single context of said rationality.
No, priests and kings only arise once populations stop and begin to accumulate wealth post-agriculture.
Yes, and produce starts as a seed in a pile of manure, but let me guess as to whether I could get you to eat a dried kernel of corn and a bucket of steer shit for lunch today instead of a salad...
A fetus is only the same thing as you if you are saying that you are no smarter, no bigger, and no more developed than a fetus.
As for me, I am infinitely more now than I was when I was a fetus. Then = not much of a loss. Now = the loss of a person. They are not the same thing. There are decades worth of intervening years and millions of hours of labor and invested resources in difference.
The "pro-life" people seem to want to equate thing A with anything that can be turned into thing A, and anything into which thing A can be turned. By that logic, rape is a precious, life-affirming act and parents who give their kids decongestant for a cold should go to prison for the distribution of methamphetamine.
Um, yes, they did for 150,000 years of human history, before humans decided to "advance" by settling down and beginning to accumulate goods, and thus, wealth.
I love the logic. "If you don't like it, quit. Nobody forced you to take the job. You knew the rules."
Only the rules are the same anywhere, because we're all a part of the same "free market" capitalist economy.
So then the idiots say "Well then, don't take a job. Nobody's forcing you to work."
Only then how is one to eat?
People like you are effectively arguing that this is utopia. And it's not an uncommon argument, I hear it all the time and see it on Slashdot as well: the free market is perfect. If you don't like it, tough shit, it's because you must suck and not be able to compete.
So--what's the solution for those who can't compete? Kill them? Let them starve? If you're born IQ 90 and simple, you deserve to be "outcompeted" by everyone else and end up jobless, homeless, and dead (because we don't believe in social welfare in the free market)? How is this different, morally, from the Nazis, eugenics, and the termination of "defective" humans?
It's 2005. We should be past all of this. People should simply fucking CARE ENOUGH TO BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE SOME OF THEIR OWN WEALTH FOR THEIR FELLOW HUMANS.
Especially CEOs making more in one year than anyone needs to live comfortably for an entire LIFETIME, in a nation based on a Judeo-Christian faith that claims to believe in sacrifice and brotherhood, that claims to support individual "freedom." Freedom for who? Only the wealthy? Only the perfect? Everyone who isn't defective? Freedom to do what? Be "out-competed" into unemployment, homelessness, the grave, and then to be blamed for it because you just "couldn't compete?"
That's the brutal logic of capitalism and capitalists for you. I'd bet that 50% of the people on Slashdot see corporations/employers not as social institutions that are a component of the community, but rather as functional institutions that are part of a capital economy. The survival of "the economy" (i.e. capital flows) is seen as important; the survival of people is not.
Just watch any story about failing companies on Slashdot and you'll see just how many posters argue that a company that isn't profitable right now absolutely should go out of business because it "can't compete" in the "free market." Nevermind whether the company was competitive in the past or could be competitive again in the future with proper (i.e. less greedy and short-sighted) management, or the fact that in that "should go out of business" trope, hundreds or even thousands of lives may be ruined--when the improvement of lives is, ostensibly, the reason for commerce in the first place...
Capitalism is always short-sighted because the capitalists (in the orthodox sense--those people who have capital) will always see their holdings increase, regardless of the longevity of any particular enterprise. That's where this attitude of "bad business should fail" comes from--it's cultural brainwashing from those who control the economies through their wealth. It is their vested interest that unprofitable ventures should fail immediately, so that capital can be transferred to other ventures, in order to minimize losses and maximize profitability on an ongoing basis. If and investment in B will yield a 50% higher/faster return than an investment in A, capital will shift to B to maximize the profits of those who control, even if A was still nominally profitable, and even if thousands of non-capital-holding lives utterly depend on A. Capitalism is fundamentally anti-humanist that way.
Unfortunately, it's disabled in Red Hat by default just now, and the official IT policy is to used operating systems (including Red Hat) as-shipped, meaning no telnet. :-(
/. stories like this one...
I am tempted every day to transition from editorial to IT, in order to kick some a$$es.
It's all so ridiculous! No wonder I can't help but post to
There is no SSH on our Windows stations, and we are forbidden from installing it! (*sob*)
I must go drink now. I have to return to this environment in a few short hours!