I guess that's the thing - those tools in a Linux command line aren't unique (except uniq:). Those tools are ported to Windows, and have been for ever. Sure, some of the shells aren't available but the big two are (bash & ksh).
You are, of course, correct. Oh, to be able to install cygwin+GNU utilities on all my company's Windows workstations (DROOL).
Unfortunately, it seems the IT department was trained in a Windows house and has some odd conception about nature of operating systems and some kind of a priori "pristine" state. We only use "pristine" Red Hat and "pristine" Windows (and anyone caught in violation of this policy is hung from a tree) and we only add to them "certified" (i.e. expensive, with support contracts) tools.
The result is that they spend $$$ on silly tools for the Windows components of the infrastructure that perform only 1/100th as well as a few GNU utils at the command line would. *sigh*
The funny thing is that they aren't even aware of anything other than the GUI. IT will stumble past an editor or two (i.e. me) working at the command line on a Linux station and ask in worried fashioon if I am "hacking something." I am loathe to try to explain to them that I have walked all the way across the building to use a Linux station on a particular database or directory tree because in so doing I can save two days' work of data processing just by spending ten minutes with bash+perl+tools.
Classic formulation: if you're not interested in adopting the Unix mindset (text-based text processing, pipes, small well-defined tools, a de-emphasis on graphical user interfaces, non-data-processing devices, etc.) then why choose a Unix operating system?
Linux offers a great deal of value that Windows doesn't. As someone who works with huge databases of text at a major publisher on a day-to-day basis and who has to use both systems at varying times, I can assure you of this. Just because you don't have the needs that justify the Linux learning curve doesn't mean that no-one else does. And even if you can't even see any features that Linux/Unix has that Windows doesn't, it's fairly rich of you to assume that everyone who chooses Linux/Unix over Windows does so simply becuase they are deluded.
I can honestly tell you that for any number of large jobs in my workplace, two or three commands at a Linux command line replace either dozens of labor hours, dozens of development hours, or the $$$ to purchase a specialized product in Windows.
What I don't understand is why desktop users who have no need of the "Unix philosophy" of data processing insist on complaining about an operating system that was designed to move DATA (not icons or mouse pointers) around efficiently.
If it doesn't fill your needs, don't use it. The unfathomable leap comes when you assert that no-one else should either.
The results. It's all about the results. If it produces things that work, and that meet goals (the validity of those goals being another matter) then its functionality is unassailable.
To claim that science is false or that scientists are the same as priests is to completely ignore a history of socially powerful, yet materially impotent priests and a contrasting history of socially impotent, yet materially powerful scientists.
I'm playing with you a little bit now, but you get the point.:-)
All presupposing (as is so often done) that the ultimate "goal of Linux" (thereby attributing to "Linux" intentionality that it no doubt does not possess) is to woo Windows users away from their desktops, rather than to provide a superior computing and data processing platform.
I am very happy with the latter, which Linux has provided me with for some years now, and if Linux ceases to do so in favor of attempting the former, I'll happily switch to some other platform (until "I hate elitsts" n00bs who want to be elite but don't want to work for it invade and begin to transform-to-inefficiency that one as well, at which point I'll move on yet again).
Give me efficient computing or give me death. I want to manage my reams of data and my network tasks. I don't care if it jives with the [utterly inefficient] way of doing things in Windows, or if the Windows users care to adopt my methods.
I just want the powerful tools, unpolluted, task-oriented, intelligently designed, that let me talk to my computer using the language through which it can most quickly and subtly be isntructed.
It's not an elitist view, it's the view of a data processing pragmatist with a lot of tasks to juggle and a lot of work to get done.
It's always very interesting to see reactionaries/creationists/evangelicals/luddites who don't understand the scientific method attempt to judge it using the framework of their own belief system, namely making the assumption that scientists must be like gods and their research therefore edicts that claim to come from on high, and thus, when those "edicts" don't hold true, it stands to reason that they are false gods, rather than The One True God that such people seek.
I'm not sure that there's a way to ever really reframe the worldview of people socialized in such a way to help them understand the secular, methodical, aggregate-dialectic nature of of the scientific method.
You'd think that the results it produces (i.e. the very computers, electricity, television, and telephone used by so many reactionaries to try to preach the ills of the scientific method) would go some distance toward demonstrating to them the empirical utility of the method for instrumental-rational gains (regardless of the merits of such), but no--they remain oblivious to the obvious paradox.
I'm happy not being force to waste money every time someone decides that a current technology is obsolete and everyone should be forced to upgrade!
They're not deciding it's obsolete. They're deciding that if they lobby The Powers That Be to force you to switch to an incompatible technology (and thereby make a purchase), you'll probably eventually cave and buy one of their products, thus lining their pockets.
And The Powers That Be are deciding that this is a Good Thing[TM] because it lines their pockets as well.
And the sad thing is that 95% of us will indeed eventually cave sooner or later and line all of their pockets needlessly (doubly so when you consider just how wealthy the media and manufacturing moguls already are), costing us a bit of food on the table and retirement security, despite our Valorous protests of "Then I Shan't Watch TV After 2009!" here on Slashdot.
I see a lot of replies saying that "governments are put in place to do what the public mandates them to do" but of course that's my point: the voting public is the location of this debate.
No-one can seriously claim that the public has resolved in any clear way or with any consensus its intent for government. I'm aware that governments are vested with power by virtue of the popular will and sovereignty; I'm just suggesting that the selfsame populace has spent quite a long time now voting back and forth (i.e. debating in the material realm), launching revolutions, etc., because there is no consensus on just what government is supposed to do, beyond the simplistic "do what we want!" (as though that were easy to divine or measure, or as though it were a discrete quantity upon which everyone agrees).
Yes, the government represents you as a citizen. It also represents me as a citizen. What I am suggesting is that if we disagree fundamentally about what we want government to do, there is not at all some a priori moral foundation of government beyond popular sovereignty and this very debate within the populace by which the actions of government should proceed.
Governments are put in place to do the things that private citizens and corporations can't do on their own: enforce order, build roads, provide for the common defense, etc.
Says who? You deftly slide this by as though it's a statement of fact. How about:
Governments are put in place to do things that private citizens or corproations won't do, but that most private citizens wish somebody would do.
or:
Governments are put in place to make golf courses.
Just what "governments are put in place to do" is a central debate of modernity that has shaped much of the history of the twentieth century. It is what this entire story is about, and why it is so controversial.
I'd be just as happy with:
Governments are put in place to do whatever it is they do and to encourage and facilitate the near-free distribution of valuable works by long-dead people that can benefit the public at large.
is that corporations will sue private citizens giving things away for free, claiming "unfair competition by [those people who damn well should be] the buying public."
No, Microsoft sucks because their products are simplistic, underpowered and unsophisticated compared to Unix, and thus your productivity is 80% lower when using Windows, and you continually see things that you could do in two commands in Unix that will require either 40,000 clicks or asking IT to purchase entire additional software site licenses in your office's Windows environemnt, yet YOUR BOSS MAKES YOU USE WINDOWS ANYWAY.
Linux is cool because of -(all of the above), and because my home computer runs it and I'm cool.:-p
Just be careful not to apply your indignation to the wrong kids.
I dropped out of high school after getting thrown out of my history class for knowing too much, along with several other students. Today I am a history editor at a major publisher, no help from the public education system. At the time, I was part of a reading group and would meet in the library most weeknights to read. We knew more about Vichy France or Mesoamerican achaeology than our history instructor and routinely had to correct his bizarre formulations and factual mistakes in class. To compound the problem, most of our assignments (this is 10th grade honors history) were lists of fill-in-the-blank questions like:
"On page 346 of your textbook, who is listed as being 'as inquisitive a mind as Franklin?'"
Our exams were very similar:
"Which three western figures are mentioned most prominently in Chapter 12, 'The Modern era?'"
These weren't history questions, these were textbook questions, for which we were given one line about three inches long for our answers. Hooray for history, eh? And we didn't read the textbook anyway; if the class was studying a topic with which we felt unfamiliar, we'd read (and in many case come to class with) primary sources and relevant monographs, because the textbook was almost always frustratingly thin. For it we were labeled disruptions and poor students and dismissed from class, meaning that we'd be unable to graduate unless we a) made it up later or b) switched schools. And you'd be right if you said that we weren't "following the program" and were thus disruptive. But so what? Why do so many insist on making the public education system the end in and of itself? The public education system is supposed to be there to serve the inquisitive student in his or her attempt to learn. And if it isn't, who needs it and what is it good for, beyond feeding civil service workers?
So instead of going and repeating the same idiocy at summer school, or at another public school, I simply said about ten rude words in a row and got my parents' permission to leave high school and apply for early admission at my state university, where I enrolled at 15, matriculated in the humanities and social sciences as a double major, and never looked back... because at university, they actually encouraged me to learn and to think not merely to behave or to conform.
I honestly think our high school educators are ill-equipped and perhaps even just a little bit intellectually short to cope with the sorts of unexpected problems and deviations that arise when dealing with any body of youths. We certainly don't pay enough to get the cream of the crop.
But I certainly feel as though the number one problem in my own public education was simply that instead of being rewarded for being ahead of the curve, I was constantly pushed down by my instructors. I could go on all day, but instead I'll just go on for another half-page or so:
In 4th grade I was moved from an advanced Algebra class in which I was thriving alongside a small group of advanced 6th graders back to the standard 4th grade class because, according to what my parents were told, both the dozen-odd 6th graders and their teacher were embarrassed to have such a young student in the class. It wasn't age-appropriate. My parents ended up having me tutored privately in algebra, trig, and the calculus after school since the school system refused to supply it until I was in high school or later.
In 5th grade I read Don Quixote (in translation to English, of course) for a book report, but failed the assignment, at first because my teacher refused to believe that I'd read it, and then when my parents assured her that I had read it and enjoyed it as well, because it wasn't (you guessed it) age appropriate.
In 7th grade I enrolled in pull-out computer science and physics classes at the aforementioned state U, only to be told by the high school that I'd have to make
It's not just education and friends that are missing, either. Having grown up and been socialized in isolation from mainstream society, they possess a disctinctly different set of social skills and a different connotative vocabulary, both verbally and nonverbally.
They lack the correctly formed tools to cope with basic aspects of the mainstream social world, things like dealing with separation and boundaries/emotional distance, the need to be assertive or to tolerate assertiveness in others, the "sixth sense" that most urban and even suburban dwellers develop about crime and dangerous situations, the expectations about what the rights/responsibilities of friendships and coupline relationships are, etc. It's not that they don't have any social tools or skills, it's just that theirs are all applicable to a very different society.
It's rather like traveling to another country--you think it's nice to visit, but for most people, nothing feels as "comfortable" as being "home," for the very same reasons. Of course the difference is that for religious groups, visits outside the group aren't constructed as visits just to "other people" as they would be if an American visited New Zealand, but rather they are constructed as good vs. evil--you are leaving the "good" people to visit and explore the structurally opposed world of "apostates" or "heretics" or "nonbelievers," so the experience is in no way value-neutral, but rather begins with the expectation that the outside world isn't just different (and hence always at least a little uncomfortable), but that it is uncomfortable because of the presence of various kinds of evil presumed to be a property of the outside world, and conversely absent within the group.
Thus, even for the most outgoing, life outside the community, while potentially exciting at first, ultimately seems both frightening and hollow, since nothing (including relationships and interpersonal communication) seems to respond safely in a manner that they expect, understand, or need as social beings, and they attribute this mismatch to nefarious forces.
The problem isn't unique to the Amish, it's seen in children from nearly any intensively lived faith organized into insular communities, i.e. Mormonism, or hare krishna, etc. Even when someone decides that they want to leave the faith, life outside it can be so difficult to navigate and their methods of social interaction and personal development so dependent on its structures that it's easier just to stay inside the group as a nonbeliever.
I think it's time that the United States codified a broad, sweeping appeal to "common sense" in federal law that judges at all levels could/can employ at their own discretion, like some other nations have done. To my eye, a situation like this one would be an ideal use of the law.
Yes, a codified basis in "common sense" increases the potential for judicial abuse in some cases, or for rulings that are controversial and can't be reduced to a single important point in case law, but judges can be removed and decisions can ultimately be overturned if too many others deem them inappropriate, and at this point in the historical narrative, it seems that we've veered so far into legislation and litigation that for every one of the most simple decisions that need to be made in life by the most unimportant of parties, an army of layers is needed, to descend into endless minutiae and discern the multiple various and sundry legal ramifications.
It's truly sad that "you can't even take a crap without first consulting a lawyer" is no longer biting sarcasm but is rather informed legal advice.
Mass produced them? A thousand identical probes? Just how advanced, intelligent, multi-functional do you think our "probes" can be right now? I don't know that we could come up with a really workable *dual* use design (say, one design that could go to both the moon and mars and do useful things), much less a design that would be useful for a *thousand* different exploration/testing tasks using an identical probe in each case.
What features that are currently technically feasable (at any cost) would you put into a "probe" such than 1,000 of them would actually be useful to us? Where would you send them?
It's not like we can currently build a machine (at any cost) that we can just send straight up into space with a single instruction to "explore everything, follow your whims, and tell us stuff" in anything more than a completely random, unintelligent (and thus not very scientifically useful) way.
Yes, I was a WordStar user. It's true that some text-based word processors had these features, but they didn't display onscreen, and in order for them to work at all, your printer had to be both capable of using such features and have a "driver" available (connecting printer to WordStar via control codes).
Most of the time, unless you bought a high-end printer from the compatibility list, you just couldn't do anything but plain text. Not even simple underlines.
I had a Mac 128 w/2 drives. The thing that made the Mac immortal wasn't necessarily the user interface, though the user interface was indeed revolutionary.
The thing that made the Mac immortal was the fact that anyone could "publish" documents from their desktop without needing complex typesetting systems or knowledge of traditional "publishing" and commercial printing processes.
At the time, most people with home computers didn't even have printers, which were expensive, error-prone, often massive, and didn't produce pretty output. All non-industrial printers at the time were either dot matrix or daisy wheel (using letter blocks like a typewriter to pound letters through a ribbon) impact printers and had only one typeface at one size. On dot matrix printers the quality of these letters was horrible (think NINE dots of vertical resolution per letter for consumer-grade printers or FIFTEEN dots of vertical resolution for business class printers). Very expensive printers might have a second "high quality" typeface that you could select by pressing a button on the printer, but this typically wasn't much better.
Basically, the process of creating a printed document with a computer had, until the Mac, been one of simply typing ASCII into a very basic editor program (Linux users: think pico or similar; Windows users, think Notepad), then sending it to the printer directly as a stream of characters, which it would output using its single available ugly, low-res typeface and size. No formatting, no fonts, no graphics, certainly (even the dot matrix printers generally didn't have any graphics capability whatsoever--it just wasn't included; only the ability to accept a stream of ASCII and dump it out to the page was in the ROM). What little formatting could be performed (left/right justification, line spacing, etc.) was often set in a word processor as a document property globally, and wouldn't be displayed on the screen as you typed.
The Macintosh and relatively cheap ImageWriter printer changed all this radically; you could format text using multiple typefaces, set them to a range of sizes, boldface, italicize, even full justify (!), and not only would these things appear on the screen as you did them (beyond magical in an era in which most PCs also only had the ability to display ASCII on their screens, lacking graphics capability unless you had expensive hardware like a so-called Hercules card, IIRC, still mono), but they could be output to the printer and would appear on the page just as they did on the screen. And you could even mix text and graphics.
This kind of capability was unheard of because it had never before been available to the consumer at any price, and certainly not in a system that required no specialized knowledge to use.
You knew the Mac was an important computer historically from the moment it was released, because within a month or two, in any city or neighborhood, every newsletter, advertisement, flyer, poster, city council report, whatever that hadn't been commercially printed had obviously been done on a Mac. Everyone knew what a Mac was and knew that it was the computer that could be used to publish readable, visually pleasing, professional documents straight from your office or bedroom, for just a few thousand dollars.
What problems are you experiencing with kicker/kdesktop? I run FC3 on my desktop and uptime is measured in months through multiple suspend/resume cycles, without ever logging out, and without kicker or kdesktop ever faltering... and I have piles of child panels and files piled on my desktop. KDE3 is rock solid for me.
1. Get a big server tower case w/5+ 5.25" bays. 2. Get 4 250GB EIDE drives (cheap anymore!) 3. Get 4 $20.00 CompUSA lockable EIDE drive trays. 4. Get an SMP board + CPUs and slap 'em in there.
Ta-da. One power supply, four quiet drives, one case, software RAID-5 easily swappable with 2 dedicated fans per drive, looks professional, comparatively quiet, with the benefit of included scalable SMP workstation. And.7TB to boot. Or get a PCI EIDE raid card compatible with both Linux and Windows and go to town with RAID-0 and 1TB.
There was a time when a SCSI array of many, many drives in a separate case at 10k RPM was something to lust after at home, but these days it just isn't. You can get close enough at home while saving space, using less power, and getting better overall performance.
Try to get a blender repaired, or a vacuum cleaner, or a television set, or household furniture in most areas. If you find one or two shops that still do any kind of appliance or furniture repair in a major metropolitan area of several to several dozen million people, you're lucky.
And if you manage to track one of them down and carry in a product made after 1990, they'll likely tell you that it's unfixable because things these days "aren't made to be serviced" and there are "no parts available from the manufacturer."
If you happen to still have an older unit of some kind, and you manage to track a shop down, the price of repair will usually be double the cost of a brand-new unit with twice the features, half the energy consumption, half the noise, far better compatibility with accessories of any kind likely to be sold at department stores.
The nature of the marketplace dictates this; there will never be a major ad campaign for anything other than a new product, because new products are what must be sold in order to fund ad campaigns. In order to sell new products, old products must be made obsolete, either by premature failure, giving the impression that they are lesser (by developing new products with endless silly features), or by associating new products with fashionability (celebrity endorsement, bare ass on screen, young people party picture, etc.) and associating existing products with uncoolness. People want new things all the time, not because new things are better for the job at hand, or because their old things can't be fixed, but because they have been made to want new things by the logic of the capital markets.
In short, letting the marketplace decide what consumers buy and use necessarily leads to an overwhelming marketplace bias toward cheap, low-quality, disposable products and an endless cycle of wasteful consumption and re-consumption in order to drive economic "growth." This bias won't change until the marketplace begins to feel the effects of encroaching, toxic waste from all sides. And of course by then the landfills will have taken over the planet and the marketplace won't be able to do a damn thing about it.
1-If you (personally) did not have television or did not have Internet access, I would say that you were in a position of diminished participation in society.
2-The fact that you are okay with that or did not steal when you were in that position in no way changes the fact that many others will.
Or, to put it another way, I repeat what I said in response to you the first time.
Decide who you're talking about here: the person who can't afford a television and steals one to keep, or yourself, admittedly employed, who decides not to have one while having access to the Internet (also required for material participation in society).
Call it greed, call it crime, it doesn't bother me what you call it. You can pretend all you want that everyone else will share your values and make the identical set of sacrifices that you make, will agree to live with whatever self-sacrifices you live with.
You didn't have a job, then you found a job. So what? How does this singular anecdote have anything to do with the issue at hand? You didn't steal, ergo no-one else will? You didn't steal, ergo no-one else should and thus, no-one else will? What exactly is your claim or proposition?
The problem could be solved if every participant in a revolution was arrested? Well, go ahead: arrest them all. Or wait--the inability to do so is the very definition of revolution.
Your personal story is lovely. It has no bearing whatsoever on social policy or the realities thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that's the thing - those tools in a Linux command line aren't unique (except uniq :). Those tools are ported to Windows, and have been for ever. Sure, some of the shells aren't available but the big two are (bash & ksh).
You are, of course, correct. Oh, to be able to install cygwin+GNU utilities on all my company's Windows workstations (DROOL).
Unfortunately, it seems the IT department was trained in a Windows house and has some odd conception about nature of operating systems and some kind of a priori "pristine" state. We only use "pristine" Red Hat and "pristine" Windows (and anyone caught in violation of this policy is hung from a tree) and we only add to them "certified" (i.e. expensive, with support contracts) tools.
The result is that they spend $$$ on silly tools for the Windows components of the infrastructure that perform only 1/100th as well as a few GNU utils at the command line would. *sigh*
The funny thing is that they aren't even aware of anything other than the GUI. IT will stumble past an editor or two (i.e. me) working at the command line on a Linux station and ask in worried fashioon if I am "hacking something." I am loathe to try to explain to them that I have walked all the way across the building to use a Linux station on a particular database or directory tree because in so doing I can save two days' work of data processing just by spending ten minutes with bash+perl+tools.
It's a sad world. Think H.G. Wells.
Classic formulation: if you're not interested in adopting the Unix mindset (text-based text processing, pipes, small well-defined tools, a de-emphasis on graphical user interfaces, non-data-processing devices, etc.) then why choose a Unix operating system?
Linux offers a great deal of value that Windows doesn't. As someone who works with huge databases of text at a major publisher on a day-to-day basis and who has to use both systems at varying times, I can assure you of this. Just because you don't have the needs that justify the Linux learning curve doesn't mean that no-one else does. And even if you can't even see any features that Linux/Unix has that Windows doesn't, it's fairly rich of you to assume that everyone who chooses Linux/Unix over Windows does so simply becuase they are deluded.
I can honestly tell you that for any number of large jobs in my workplace, two or three commands at a Linux command line replace either dozens of labor hours, dozens of development hours, or the $$$ to purchase a specialized product in Windows.
What I don't understand is why desktop users who have no need of the "Unix philosophy" of data processing insist on complaining about an operating system that was designed to move DATA (not icons or mouse pointers) around efficiently.
If it doesn't fill your needs, don't use it. The unfathomable leap comes when you assert that no-one else should either.
The results. It's all about the results. If it produces things that work, and that meet goals (the validity of those goals being another matter) then its functionality is unassailable.
:-)
To claim that science is false or that scientists are the same as priests is to completely ignore a history of socially powerful, yet materially impotent priests and a contrasting history of socially impotent, yet materially powerful scientists.
I'm playing with you a little bit now, but you get the point.
All presupposing (as is so often done) that the ultimate "goal of Linux" (thereby attributing to "Linux" intentionality that it no doubt does not possess) is to woo Windows users away from their desktops, rather than to provide a superior computing and data processing platform.
I am very happy with the latter, which Linux has provided me with for some years now, and if Linux ceases to do so in favor of attempting the former, I'll happily switch to some other platform (until "I hate elitsts" n00bs who want to be elite but don't want to work for it invade and begin to transform-to-inefficiency that one as well, at which point I'll move on yet again).
Give me efficient computing or give me death. I want to manage my reams of data and my network tasks. I don't care if it jives with the [utterly inefficient] way of doing things in Windows, or if the Windows users care to adopt my methods.
I just want the powerful tools, unpolluted, task-oriented, intelligently designed, that let me talk to my computer using the language through which it can most quickly and subtly be isntructed.
It's not an elitist view, it's the view of a data processing pragmatist with a lot of tasks to juggle and a lot of work to get done.
It's always very interesting to see reactionaries/creationists/evangelicals/luddites who don't understand the scientific method attempt to judge it using the framework of their own belief system, namely making the assumption that scientists must be like gods and their research therefore edicts that claim to come from on high, and thus, when those "edicts" don't hold true, it stands to reason that they are false gods, rather than The One True God that such people seek.
I'm not sure that there's a way to ever really reframe the worldview of people socialized in such a way to help them understand the secular, methodical, aggregate-dialectic nature of of the scientific method.
You'd think that the results it produces (i.e. the very computers, electricity, television, and telephone used by so many reactionaries to try to preach the ills of the scientific method) would go some distance toward demonstrating to them the empirical utility of the method for instrumental-rational gains (regardless of the merits of such), but no--they remain oblivious to the obvious paradox.
I'm happy not being force to waste money every time someone decides that a current technology is obsolete and everyone should be forced to upgrade!
They're not deciding it's obsolete. They're deciding that if they lobby The Powers That Be to force you to switch to an incompatible technology (and thereby make a purchase), you'll probably eventually cave and buy one of their products, thus lining their pockets.
And The Powers That Be are deciding that this is a Good Thing[TM] because it lines their pockets as well.
And the sad thing is that 95% of us will indeed eventually cave sooner or later and line all of their pockets needlessly (doubly so when you consider just how wealthy the media and manufacturing moguls already are), costing us a bit of food on the table and retirement security, despite our Valorous protests of "Then I Shan't Watch TV After 2009!" here on Slashdot.
I see a lot of replies saying that "governments are put in place to do what the public mandates them to do" but of course that's my point: the voting public is the location of this debate.
No-one can seriously claim that the public has resolved in any clear way or with any consensus its intent for government. I'm aware that governments are vested with power by virtue of the popular will and sovereignty; I'm just suggesting that the selfsame populace has spent quite a long time now voting back and forth (i.e. debating in the material realm), launching revolutions, etc., because there is no consensus on just what government is supposed to do, beyond the simplistic "do what we want!" (as though that were easy to divine or measure, or as though it were a discrete quantity upon which everyone agrees).
Yes, the government represents you as a citizen. It also represents me as a citizen. What I am suggesting is that if we disagree fundamentally about what we want government to do, there is not at all some a priori moral foundation of government beyond popular sovereignty and this very debate within the populace by which the actions of government should proceed.
Thanks for that. I suppose it had to be.
There's certainly a sickening kind of ecstasy in realizing that logical extremes have become the unquestioned norm.
Governments are put in place to do the things that private citizens and corporations can't do on their own: enforce order, build roads, provide for the common defense, etc.
Says who? You deftly slide this by as though it's a statement of fact. How about:
Governments are put in place to do things that private citizens or corproations won't do, but that most private citizens wish somebody would do.
or:
Governments are put in place to make golf courses.
Just what "governments are put in place to do" is a central debate of modernity that has shaped much of the history of the twentieth century. It is what this entire story is about, and why it is so controversial.
I'd be just as happy with:
Governments are put in place to do whatever it is they do and to encourage and facilitate the near-free distribution of valuable works by long-dead people that can benefit the public at large.
is that corporations will sue private citizens giving things away for free, claiming "unfair competition by [those people who damn well should be] the buying public."
Corporations = have rights.
Anyone/thing else = "with the terrorists."
No, Microsoft sucks because their products are simplistic, underpowered and unsophisticated compared to Unix, and thus your productivity is 80% lower when using Windows, and you continually see things that you could do in two commands in Unix that will require either 40,000 clicks or asking IT to purchase entire additional software site licenses in your office's Windows environemnt, yet YOUR BOSS MAKES YOU USE WINDOWS ANYWAY.
:-p
Linux is cool because of -(all of the above), and because my home computer runs it and I'm cool.
It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
NASA spends two years to fix the problem of stuff falling off the shuttle during launch and damaging it.
Now, after all that work and money, they've regressed: now not even the forces of launch are needed to cause bits to fall off and smash tiles.
In fact, no force at all is needed to cause the problem. The thing is disintegrating as it sits there.
A bad batch of super glue, perhaps?
Just be careful not to apply your indignation to the wrong kids.
I dropped out of high school after getting thrown out of my history class for knowing too much, along with several other students. Today I am a history editor at a major publisher, no help from the public education system. At the time, I was part of a reading group and would meet in the library most weeknights to read. We knew more about Vichy France or Mesoamerican achaeology than our history instructor and routinely had to correct his bizarre formulations and factual mistakes in class. To compound the problem, most of our assignments (this is 10th grade honors history) were lists of fill-in-the-blank questions like:
"On page 346 of your textbook, who is listed as being 'as inquisitive a mind as Franklin?'"
Our exams were very similar:
"Which three western figures are mentioned most prominently in Chapter 12, 'The Modern era?'"
These weren't history questions, these were textbook questions, for which we were given one line about three inches long for our answers. Hooray for history, eh? And we didn't read the textbook anyway; if the class was studying a topic with which we felt unfamiliar, we'd read (and in many case come to class with) primary sources and relevant monographs, because the textbook was almost always frustratingly thin. For it we were labeled disruptions and poor students and dismissed from class, meaning that we'd be unable to graduate unless we a) made it up later or b) switched schools. And you'd be right if you said that we weren't "following the program" and were thus disruptive. But so what? Why do so many insist on making the public education system the end in and of itself? The public education system is supposed to be there to serve the inquisitive student in his or her attempt to learn. And if it isn't, who needs it and what is it good for, beyond feeding civil service workers?
So instead of going and repeating the same idiocy at summer school, or at another public school, I simply said about ten rude words in a row and got my parents' permission to leave high school and apply for early admission at my state university, where I enrolled at 15, matriculated in the humanities and social sciences as a double major, and never looked back... because at university, they actually encouraged me to learn and to think not merely to behave or to conform.
I honestly think our high school educators are ill-equipped and perhaps even just a little bit intellectually short to cope with the sorts of unexpected problems and deviations that arise when dealing with any body of youths. We certainly don't pay enough to get the cream of the crop.
But I certainly feel as though the number one problem in my own public education was simply that instead of being rewarded for being ahead of the curve, I was constantly pushed down by my instructors. I could go on all day, but instead I'll just go on for another half-page or so:
In 4th grade I was moved from an advanced Algebra class in which I was thriving alongside a small group of advanced 6th graders back to the standard 4th grade class because, according to what my parents were told, both the dozen-odd 6th graders and their teacher were embarrassed to have such a young student in the class. It wasn't age-appropriate. My parents ended up having me tutored privately in algebra, trig, and the calculus after school since the school system refused to supply it until I was in high school or later.
In 5th grade I read Don Quixote (in translation to English, of course) for a book report, but failed the assignment, at first because my teacher refused to believe that I'd read it, and then when my parents assured her that I had read it and enjoyed it as well, because it wasn't (you guessed it) age appropriate.
In 7th grade I enrolled in pull-out computer science and physics classes at the aforementioned state U, only to be told by the high school that I'd have to make
It's not just education and friends that are missing, either. Having grown up and been socialized in isolation from mainstream society, they possess a disctinctly different set of social skills and a different connotative vocabulary, both verbally and nonverbally.
They lack the correctly formed tools to cope with basic aspects of the mainstream social world, things like dealing with separation and boundaries/emotional distance, the need to be assertive or to tolerate assertiveness in others, the "sixth sense" that most urban and even suburban dwellers develop about crime and dangerous situations, the expectations about what the rights/responsibilities of friendships and coupline relationships are, etc. It's not that they don't have any social tools or skills, it's just that theirs are all applicable to a very different society.
It's rather like traveling to another country--you think it's nice to visit, but for most people, nothing feels as "comfortable" as being "home," for the very same reasons. Of course the difference is that for religious groups, visits outside the group aren't constructed as visits just to "other people" as they would be if an American visited New Zealand, but rather they are constructed as good vs. evil--you are leaving the "good" people to visit and explore the structurally opposed world of "apostates" or "heretics" or "nonbelievers," so the experience is in no way value-neutral, but rather begins with the expectation that the outside world isn't just different (and hence always at least a little uncomfortable), but that it is uncomfortable because of the presence of various kinds of evil presumed to be a property of the outside world, and conversely absent within the group.
Thus, even for the most outgoing, life outside the community, while potentially exciting at first, ultimately seems both frightening and hollow, since nothing (including relationships and interpersonal communication) seems to respond safely in a manner that they expect, understand, or need as social beings, and they attribute this mismatch to nefarious forces.
The problem isn't unique to the Amish, it's seen in children from nearly any intensively lived faith organized into insular communities, i.e. Mormonism, or hare krishna, etc. Even when someone decides that they want to leave the faith, life outside it can be so difficult to navigate and their methods of social interaction and personal development so dependent on its structures that it's easier just to stay inside the group as a nonbeliever.
I think it's time that the United States codified a broad, sweeping appeal to "common sense" in federal law that judges at all levels could/can employ at their own discretion, like some other nations have done. To my eye, a situation like this one would be an ideal use of the law.
Yes, a codified basis in "common sense" increases the potential for judicial abuse in some cases, or for rulings that are controversial and can't be reduced to a single important point in case law, but judges can be removed and decisions can ultimately be overturned if too many others deem them inappropriate, and at this point in the historical narrative, it seems that we've veered so far into legislation and litigation that for every one of the most simple decisions that need to be made in life by the most unimportant of parties, an army of layers is needed, to descend into endless minutiae and discern the multiple various and sundry legal ramifications.
It's truly sad that "you can't even take a crap without first consulting a lawyer" is no longer biting sarcasm but is rather informed legal advice.
Mass produced them? A thousand identical probes? Just how advanced, intelligent, multi-functional do you think our "probes" can be right now? I don't know that we could come up with a really workable *dual* use design (say, one design that could go to both the moon and mars and do useful things), much less a design that would be useful for a *thousand* different exploration/testing tasks using an identical probe in each case.
What features that are currently technically feasable (at any cost) would you put into a "probe" such than 1,000 of them would actually be useful to us? Where would you send them?
It's not like we can currently build a machine (at any cost) that we can just send straight up into space with a single instruction to "explore everything, follow your whims, and tell us stuff" in anything more than a completely random, unintelligent (and thus not very scientifically useful) way.
Methinks you've been watching too much Star Trek.
Yes, I was a WordStar user. It's true that some text-based word processors had these features, but they didn't display onscreen, and in order for them to work at all, your printer had to be both capable of using such features and have a "driver" available (connecting printer to WordStar via control codes).
Most of the time, unless you bought a high-end printer from the compatibility list, you just couldn't do anything but plain text. Not even simple underlines.
I had a Mac 128 w/2 drives. The thing that made the Mac immortal wasn't necessarily the user interface, though the user interface was indeed revolutionary.
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The thing that made the Mac immortal was the fact that anyone could "publish" documents from their desktop without needing complex typesetting systems or knowledge of traditional "publishing" and commercial printing processes.
At the time, most people with home computers didn't even have printers, which were expensive, error-prone, often massive, and didn't produce pretty output. All non-industrial printers at the time were either dot matrix or daisy wheel (using letter blocks like a typewriter to pound letters through a ribbon) impact printers and had only one typeface at one size. On dot matrix printers the quality of these letters was horrible (think NINE dots of vertical resolution per letter for consumer-grade printers or FIFTEEN dots of vertical resolution for business class printers). Very expensive printers might have a second "high quality" typeface that you could select by pressing a button on the printer, but this typically wasn't much better.
Basically, the process of creating a printed document with a computer had, until the Mac, been one of simply typing ASCII into a very basic editor program (Linux users: think pico or similar; Windows users, think Notepad), then sending it to the printer directly as a stream of characters, which it would output using its single available ugly, low-res typeface and size. No formatting, no fonts, no graphics, certainly (even the dot matrix printers generally didn't have any graphics capability whatsoever--it just wasn't included; only the ability to accept a stream of ASCII and dump it out to the page was in the ROM). What little formatting could be performed (left/right justification, line spacing, etc.) was often set in a word processor as a document property globally, and wouldn't be displayed on the screen as you typed.
The Macintosh and relatively cheap ImageWriter printer changed all this radically; you could format text using multiple typefaces, set them to a range of sizes, boldface, italicize, even full justify (!), and not only would these things appear on the screen as you did them (beyond magical in an era in which most PCs also only had the ability to display ASCII on their screens, lacking graphics capability unless you had expensive hardware like a so-called Hercules card, IIRC, still mono), but they could be output to the printer and would appear on the page just as they did on the screen. And you could even mix text and graphics
This kind of capability was unheard of because it had never before been available to the consumer at any price, and certainly not in a system that required no specialized knowledge to use.
You knew the Mac was an important computer historically from the moment it was released, because within a month or two, in any city or neighborhood, every newsletter, advertisement, flyer, poster, city council report, whatever that hadn't been commercially printed had obviously been done on a Mac. Everyone knew what a Mac was and knew that it was the computer that could be used to publish readable, visually pleasing, professional documents straight from your office or bedroom, for just a few thousand dollars.
Um, Stalin != Communist.
Stalin == State Capitalist.
Read more.
What problems are you experiencing with kicker/kdesktop? I run FC3 on my desktop and uptime is measured in months through multiple suspend/resume cycles, without ever logging out, and without kicker or kdesktop ever faltering... and I have piles of child panels and files piled on my desktop. KDE3 is rock solid for me.
um... ...
'nuff said.
1. Get a big server tower case w/5+ 5.25" bays.
.7TB to boot. Or get a PCI EIDE raid card compatible with both Linux and Windows and go to town with RAID-0 and 1TB.
2. Get 4 250GB EIDE drives (cheap anymore!)
3. Get 4 $20.00 CompUSA lockable EIDE drive trays.
4. Get an SMP board + CPUs and slap 'em in there.
Ta-da. One power supply, four quiet drives, one case, software RAID-5 easily swappable with 2 dedicated fans per drive, looks professional, comparatively quiet, with the benefit of included scalable SMP workstation. And
There was a time when a SCSI array of many, many drives in a separate case at 10k RPM was something to lust after at home, but these days it just isn't. You can get close enough at home while saving space, using less power, and getting better overall performance.
Try to get a blender repaired, or a vacuum cleaner, or a television set, or household furniture in most areas. If you find one or two shops that still do any kind of appliance or furniture repair in a major metropolitan area of several to several dozen million people, you're lucky.
And if you manage to track one of them down and carry in a product made after 1990, they'll likely tell you that it's unfixable because things these days "aren't made to be serviced" and there are "no parts available from the manufacturer."
If you happen to still have an older unit of some kind, and you manage to track a shop down, the price of repair will usually be double the cost of a brand-new unit with twice the features, half the energy consumption, half the noise, far better compatibility with accessories of any kind likely to be sold at department stores.
The nature of the marketplace dictates this; there will never be a major ad campaign for anything other than a new product, because new products are what must be sold in order to fund ad campaigns. In order to sell new products, old products must be made obsolete, either by premature failure, giving the impression that they are lesser (by developing new products with endless silly features), or by associating new products with fashionability (celebrity endorsement, bare ass on screen, young people party picture, etc.) and associating existing products with uncoolness. People want new things all the time, not because new things are better for the job at hand, or because their old things can't be fixed, but because they have been made to want new things by the logic of the capital markets.
In short, letting the marketplace decide what consumers buy and use necessarily leads to an overwhelming marketplace bias toward cheap, low-quality, disposable products and an endless cycle of wasteful consumption and re-consumption in order to drive economic "growth." This bias won't change until the marketplace begins to feel the effects of encroaching, toxic waste from all sides. And of course by then the landfills will have taken over the planet and the marketplace won't be able to do a damn thing about it.
1-If you (personally) did not have television or did not have Internet access, I would say that you were in a position of diminished participation in society.
2-The fact that you are okay with that or did not steal when you were in that position in no way changes the fact that many others will.
Or, to put it another way, I repeat what I said in response to you the first time.
Decide who you're talking about here: the person who can't afford a television and steals one to keep, or yourself, admittedly employed, who decides not to have one while having access to the Internet (also required for material participation in society).
Call it greed, call it crime, it doesn't bother me what you call it. You can pretend all you want that everyone else will share your values and make the identical set of sacrifices that you make, will agree to live with whatever self-sacrifices you live with.
You didn't have a job, then you found a job. So what? How does this singular anecdote have anything to do with the issue at hand? You didn't steal, ergo no-one else will? You didn't steal, ergo no-one else should and thus, no-one else will? What exactly is your claim or proposition?
The problem could be solved if every participant in a revolution was arrested? Well, go ahead: arrest them all. Or wait--the inability to do so is the very definition of revolution.
Your personal story is lovely. It has no bearing whatsoever on social policy or the realities thereof.