As for the rest of your tired conservative mantra: For those people who are so very very lucky because they're too poor to tax properly, any miniscule tax cut they received was swamped by the cuts in non-military government spending that were required to pay for the cuts. I'm sure the average taxpayer would be happy to see a few hundred dollars off my tax bill. But they'd probably reconsider when their kids' school has to get rid of the special ed. teacher, or when grandma has to move in with them because her housing assistance dried up.
And that doesn't even begin to cover the hurt we'll all be feeling when this mountain of government debt forces the U.S. to double its interest rates. Anyone remember back to the nineties, when Democrats and Republicans seemed to agree that a balanced budget was a Good Thing?
But feel free to get on your pulpit and start yammering about how these tax cuts are practically paying for themselves.
Generally, I think they leave the fanfic world alone, because there isn't any money to be made from it. Now, if somebody started selling a hardcopy of their favorite River/Buffy crossover slash, I think they'd invoke the wrath of the demon lawyer hordes.
It's basically good news that they want to defend this.
I disagree with your interpretation. While I think you're right that the fans overstepped the bounds of "viral marketing" here, my interpretation of this action is that they figure they've pretty much milked the franchise dry, to the point that the good will of the fan base is worth less to them than the $9000 licensing fee.
Soooooo.... if I get my butt hauled off to Guantanamo, how do I get myself a court hearing so that I can present the evidence showing that I am a U.S. citizen and therefore entitled to Habeus Corpus?
Face it. So long as we say, "Everyone has a right to habeus corpus, except for group X," then all the government needs to do is claim you're a member of group X to deny you access to the courts.
Final note: We are not at war. Legally, we are not at war, because Congress has not declared war. Morally, we cannot declare a war that amounts to a war against anyone, anywhere who might be plotting violence against us. That leads directly to a state of eternal war, because we cannot even conceive of a future state of affairs that could be called "victorious."
The U.S. knew the war was over when Lee signed his surrender at Appomattox. How will we know that the "global struggle against islamofascism" is at an end, that America is safe, and we can demand these so-called "war powers" back? Who is going to have to surrender their arms to make that day come? The answer, of course, is nobody. This "war" won't end with a resounding military victory or the fall of some great tyrant. It only ends when the people of the U.S. rise up and take back the liberties they traded for false security.
"Nobody writes like that?" You've missed the point in a very impressive way.
There is exactly one, unambiguous way for a conforming browser to handle the ACID2 code. Any deviation means that the browser isn't following the standard. To put it bluntly, the browser has mistakes.
They're not just throwing in broken code willy-nilly. The authors wrote broken code that the browser should handle in a very specific way.
Finally, you missed the most important point of all: the target market for the ACID2 test is not web developers like yourself, but browser developers. The fact that your pages render well on non-conforming browsers is a credit to your work, but irrelevant. The point is, and has always been, that the harder browser developers work to conform to a single standard, the easier it is for web devs to write clever, useful code that Just Works in all browsing environments.
These people would go out to parks and other gathering places, and read out the messages of the Internet to passers-by. People who found the information timely and useful would make small donations of cash, livestock, or wenches.
That way, everyone would be able to learn from the mighty Internet, without sitting in front of their computers all day.
I thought that, in some cases, the control group was taking the most common treatment available for the disease, rather than a placebo. It would make sense, in cases where long-term damage could be avoided by treating the disease. But I don't know for sure.
No, 77% of Harvard students think relative wealth will make them happier. I tend to agree with them. Luckily they (and I and you) are free to decide for ourselves. My theories aren't about economics, they are about freedom.
I think that's missing the point. The question is, why is there such a strong tendency to want relative wealth, even if (from a rarified economical standpoint) it seems to be against the best interests of the people who answered the poll?
None of us get to choose our position in the hierarchy. We can choose to compete very hard, but that's no guarantee of a successful outcome. We can choose to try and feel satisfied with what we have, but that's no guarantee either. But because it's a zero-sum game (you cannot improve your standing without demoting someone else), an infinite amount of effort can be consumed in the pursuit of relative positioning without ever delivering a net benefit. This is an example of a situation where trading a little bit of personal freedom can achieve a net social gain. It's hardly the only one.
Skipping down to your last paragraph, my argument wasn't "for the children," but simply "homo economicus is a heartless bastard." I interpreted your original post as claiming that it's unreasonable to feel bad that someone is better off than you. It might be nice if that were the case (jealousy can be very damaging to the social fabric), but that view struck me as very similar to the homo economicus view of humans as rational agents who always evaluate decisions in terms of economic benefits.
I never said that, given the same amount of money to spend, everyone would spend it in the same way. Nor did I say that everyone would derive the same amount of happiness from their choices. Nor did I say that we must stop anyone from ever choosing to do things that are against their own better interests (though as a society we sometimes do exactly that). Finally, I've never said that an ideal society is one wherein everyone has exactly the same amount of wealth. From a practical standpoint, I recognize the need for economic incentives. From a personal liberty standpoint, a society that could distribute wealth so equally would have to be utterly totalitarian.
But I also believe that extreme inequities of wealth are poisonous to a democratic society. They breed resentment and unhappiness, make people far too eager to consume, and turn us against each other. It's not a matter of one person choosing the simple house and the fancy vacations while another chooses a huge house and simple vacations. We live in a world where one person has the huge house, the fancy vacations, the top-notch health care, the personal trainer, the butler, and the Ferrari. The other person lives on Ramen, splits a cramped two bedroom apartment with three friends, and scrubs the first person's toilet. Worst of all, the first person can more easily get the ear of our elected representatives, and therefore can rewrite the laws to keep themselves entrenched in their privileged position.
The only thing that holds the system together, I believe, is the "American Dream": the promise that, if we work really really hard, any of us can have the good life. But by objective measures, wealth inequity is increasing and class lines are increasingly stratified. Once people give up on the dream, things could turn very ugly very quickly.
But that's a rant for another day. Today, let's just leave it at this: freedom and equality are orthogonal. They're not always in sync, they're not always in tension, and just about all of us value both. It's unfair of me to paint you as someone who doesn't care about the poor, and it's unfair of you to paint me as someone who wants the government to micromanage our everyday decisions. We're really just arguing about where to draw which lines.
Now excuse me while I go pat myself on the back for being all deep and nuanced in my reasoning. Yay me.
I don't generally expend much effort thinking about alternative histories. My only reason for doing so was to provide some counterweight to the defeatist "elections don't matter" mantra.
Russ does have a point. If all we do is obediently queue up every two or four years, then there are very firm limits on how much change we can effect. There are problems with the government that neither party has an interest in fixing. The overstating of a case that has some merit doesn't bother me much, but the apathy such attitudes engender is antithetical to the attitudes that will get this country back on track.
You know, Russ, I've never been terribly impressed by your rhetorical skills. This post pretty well demonstrates why.
We could go round and round for hours, trying to figure out the full effects of a Gore presidency. You could argue yourself blue about how Kyoto would have turned us into a third world nation, or how his victory would have destroyed our moral fabric by legitimizing Oval Office blowjobs. Or how he was a nutjob who wanted everyone to believe he singlehandedly wrote the TCP/IP protocol stack.
But that was never the point.
The point is, the country would be in a very different place today had the election turned out differently. We would probably have higher taxes, stronger environmental regulations, lower corporate earnings, etc. I don't see that state of affairs as 'evil,' but maybe you do. But the country would be running more in accordance with my beliefs and values had Gore won. That fact singlehandedly debunks your overreaching claim that elections don't matter. Now, if you want to scale back your claim and say that there isn't nearly enough difference between the parties, and that both parties are too self-interested, you'll have my full agreement.
But right now you're defending an untenable position, and doing it rather badly.
You know, I could spend about twenty hours trying to explain to a troll why the environment is very much the opposite of pointless. But I'm tired, and others have done it better.
You know, cynicism is addictive, but it's not attractive. You can't think of a single thing that would be different about this country if Al Gore had won the 2000 election?
Would we be at war in Iraq? No.
Would we be running up record deficits? Probably not.
Would we have slashed public services to provide tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans? Hardly.
Would we be torturing people in secret prisons?
Would September 11th have been pumped up into justification for a global war against 'Islamofascism?'
Yes, both sides are pretty deep in the pockets of corporations. Both sides are often self-serving at the expense of both their stated ideals and the good of the country. Neither side is offering up solutions that really satisfy me. But to say there is "no difference" is just whiny, and promotes the sort of apathy that corrupt systems thrive on.
No, I think the best thing would be for Bugs to win 100% in one precinct, 37.4% in another precinct, and 12.3% in a third. If someone simply hacks the vote to give one candidate 100%, there's a large chunk of the electorate who will assume that the results can only be manipulated in easily discovered ways.
No, he left off the words "to sane, rational people who haven't let their vindictive excuse for morality blind them to the real problems." If you're claiming there are valid reasons to prioritize the "dudes kissing" problem over genocide in Darfur and the Iraq war, you're going to have to present them, because I'm pretty damned skeptical.
Actually, the amount of wealth relative to others is what determines your freedom. Poverty is generally measured, not by how little you have, but by how much less you have than average.
Yeah, and that's wrong. That is a totally corrupted perception of freedom.
"Wrong" in what sense? Are you saying it's wrong in the sense that it's not really like that? Are you saying that it's wrong in the sense that only a few greedy moral reprobates would begrudge someone additional wealth?
Either way, you're the one who is wrong. By defending this idealized notion of how people ought to feel under a capitalistic system, you're simply illustrating the naivete of some of your cherished free market principles.
A rather famous poll of a group of Harvard students asked whether the students would prefer to live in a town where they made $100K and everyone else made $200K, or a town where they made $50K and everyone else made $25K. Roughly 77% responded that they'd prefer the latter situation. If you consider this fact tantamount to saying, "77% of Harvard students are idiots," then maybe your economic theories aren't taking human nature into account.
For better or worse, we are tribal creatures. For millions of years, our ancestors have fought for the position of top monkey. The top monkey got the best food, got to mate with the top girl monkeys, and eventually left descendants who were happier being top monkeys themselves. Thus, we are acutely aware of our position relative to other monkeys, and desperately seeking to improve it. To deny that, and insist against all reason and all evidence that we should evaluate our happiness and our material comforts in a vacuum, is absurd.
Allow me to make the case for the correctness of the "Idiot Harvard" position. If you choose the $100K salary, you're going to be able to buy more stuff. According to the homo economicus theory, this should make you happier. But all around you you'll be seeing people owning and doing things that are beyond your resources. You'll send your children to a school where everyone has the latest clothes, where every child lives in a house with a pool (except yours), etc. When they come home, they'll have questions about why they can't have as nice of possessions as the other kids. When it comes time for your kids to compete with all the other kids for a place at the most prestigious universities, guess who can afford the better tutors? Hint: Not you.
In short, if you choose to live in the first town, you'll get the benefit of looking your surroundings and thinking, "My life is pretty good." If you choose the second town, you'll look at your surroundings and fight down the feeling that you should have a lot more.
"Relative freedom" is nothing more and nothing less than the perceived ability to fulfill your own desires. If you live in a society where your desires are being constantly inflated by the perception that everyone is living better than you, then you're not going to feel terribly free. Adam Smith himself recognized that many of your needs are dictated by your social surroundings. He defined the necessities of life as those things which were necessary for being a "respectable member of society", not just the things that delay your physical death. His own example: If no respectable person would ever be seen in public wearing a dirty shirt, then having a clean shirt is a necessity.
Contrary to your argument, this isn't saying that happiness is tied to materialism, per se. It's saying that a person's perceived happiness is strongly correlated to his perceived place in society. The fact that so much of our perceived place is tied to material consumption is regrettable, but strongly encouraged by the free market crowd.
Which brings me to my next point, which I'll call "social pollution via overconsumption." When a person moves into town and builds his family the biggest house in the county, he has a re
I disagree. While Linux shouldn't even be brought up in the context of securing a Windows XP lab (except maybe to serve network resources and authentication), using a Linux desktop is only going to help high school students learn computer skills.
Basic web usage is portable to Internet Explorer (and even moreso to Firefox on Windows). Basic word processing skills can be easily transferred from OpenOffice to MSOffice. Basic fragging skills are transferrable from Quake 3 to Half-Life (c'mon, these are high school students).
More important, learning to accomplish the same task using more than one application can really help cement in the kids' minds that they're not learning "how computers work," but "how this particular application works." Which is very important for a real understanding of computers. Where differences exist, they open up opportunities for learning. What is a file format? How can multiple programs handle the same data, and why do they sometimes do it slightly differently? What are web standards?
Couple that with the number of programming languages freely available to educational institutions under the apt-get license, and it seems to me that there is definitely a place for Linux in the classroom.
If you're doin' the Gnome/Linux thang*, open up the GConf editor and drill down through / -> desktop -> gnome -> interface. Change the key 'gtk_key_theme' to 'Emacs'. When you're focused on a textbox or the location bar, you get C-w, along with a bunch of other nifty stuff. My biggest complaint is that C-k deletes to the end of the line, but doesn't copy it into the clipboard.
You're making the assumption that the entire point of the proposed business is to create and distribute Open Source Software. What he seems to be doing is creating some sort of umbrella corporation for a group of high-tech freelancers. The goal is to give them all the benefits of a corporation, while maintaining lots of autonomy and a minimum of hierarchy.
Re:Twenty years from now...
on
An Ode To Al
·
· Score: 1
I wonder what Weird Al will be like 20 years from now
I think it could change everything. Here's the plan: spend it all buying up textbooks. Not necessarily the top books, but decent books that can be had at a good price. Create a company devoted to publishing them at positively Walmartian prices and promoting the books. Flood the university scene until you can guarantee that students who are paying more than $20 for a textbook know that they're getting ripped off.
Once you have your collective foot in the door, you start working your way up the value chain. Offer to buy the top-of-the line books, but negotiate from a position of strength. If they don't sell for a reasonable price, you threaten to buy up a competing book and undercut them that way. Or pay someone to write a new offering. Whichever is cheaper. Either way, the message should be, "You have no chance to survive. Make your time."
If you have $100M to blow, and play your cards right, you could sound the death knell of the textbook industry, and cut thousands of dollars from the cost of educating a person. My back-o-the-cantaloupe calculations indicate that students at my university spend about $8,000,000 a year on textbooks, so I imagine open textbooks could save education a couple billion a year U.S.-wide. For a startup price of $100M, that would be a huge, huge thing.
Well, this joke went over like a lead balloon. I was trying to point out the recursive nature of oath-taking. How do you know that a person taking an oath is telling the truth? Why, you have him take an oath promising to tell the truth beforehand. But how do you know he was telling the truth when he promised to tell the truth?
Well, it's funny if you're living inside my brain.
Morrill said two of three disks were never used and that the third was version 4.3.15c, which was used in Maryland during the 2004 primary. Ross Goldstein, the state's deputy elections administrator, said Maryland now uses version 4.6 and that the public should be confident that their votes are secure. The disks contain "nothing that's being used in this election," Goldstein said.
This is just sad. We've all seen the security warnings that say, "this exploit affects all versions before 1.51.rc3." Code gets reused between versions, especially between minor revisions. Very likely, whatever vulnerabilities are found in this version are still present.
What he's really saying is, "please, please, please believe that I didn't screw up as badly as it appears I screwed up. Just pretend that the machines are secure, and that democracy as we know it is not in danger."
Slashdot Mirror
As for the rest of your tired conservative mantra: For those people who are so very very lucky because they're too poor to tax properly, any miniscule tax cut they received was swamped by the cuts in non-military government spending that were required to pay for the cuts. I'm sure the average taxpayer would be happy to see a few hundred dollars off my tax bill. But they'd probably reconsider when their kids' school has to get rid of the special ed. teacher, or when grandma has to move in with them because her housing assistance dried up.
And that doesn't even begin to cover the hurt we'll all be feeling when this mountain of government debt forces the U.S. to double its interest rates. Anyone remember back to the nineties, when Democrats and Republicans seemed to agree that a balanced budget was a Good Thing?
But feel free to get on your pulpit and start yammering about how these tax cuts are practically paying for themselves.
Generally, I think they leave the fanfic world alone, because there isn't any money to be made from it. Now, if somebody started selling a hardcopy of their favorite River/Buffy crossover slash, I think they'd invoke the wrath of the demon lawyer hordes.
Ah, well. Firefly, we hardly knew ye.
Soooooo.... if I get my butt hauled off to Guantanamo, how do I get myself a court hearing so that I can present the evidence showing that I am a U.S. citizen and therefore entitled to Habeus Corpus?
Face it. So long as we say, "Everyone has a right to habeus corpus, except for group X," then all the government needs to do is claim you're a member of group X to deny you access to the courts.
Final note: We are not at war. Legally, we are not at war, because Congress has not declared war. Morally, we cannot declare a war that amounts to a war against anyone, anywhere who might be plotting violence against us. That leads directly to a state of eternal war, because we cannot even conceive of a future state of affairs that could be called "victorious."
The U.S. knew the war was over when Lee signed his surrender at Appomattox. How will we know that the "global struggle against islamofascism" is at an end, that America is safe, and we can demand these so-called "war powers" back? Who is going to have to surrender their arms to make that day come? The answer, of course, is nobody. This "war" won't end with a resounding military victory or the fall of some great tyrant. It only ends when the people of the U.S. rise up and take back the liberties they traded for false security.
November 7, people. Mark it on your calendars.
"Nobody writes like that?" You've missed the point in a very impressive way.
There is exactly one, unambiguous way for a conforming browser to handle the ACID2 code. Any deviation means that the browser isn't following the standard. To put it bluntly, the browser has mistakes.
They're not just throwing in broken code willy-nilly. The authors wrote broken code that the browser should handle in a very specific way.
Finally, you missed the most important point of all: the target market for the ACID2 test is not web developers like yourself, but browser developers. The fact that your pages render well on non-conforming browsers is a credit to your work, but irrelevant. The point is, and has always been, that the harder browser developers work to conform to a single standard, the easier it is for web devs to write clever, useful code that Just Works in all browsing environments.
Solution: Internet Troubadors.
These people would go out to parks and other gathering places, and read out the messages of the Internet to passers-by. People who found the information timely and useful would make small donations of cash, livestock, or wenches.
That way, everyone would be able to learn from the mighty Internet, without sitting in front of their computers all day.
I thought that, in some cases, the control group was taking the most common treatment available for the disease, rather than a placebo. It would make sense, in cases where long-term damage could be avoided by treating the disease. But I don't know for sure.
None of us get to choose our position in the hierarchy. We can choose to compete very hard, but that's no guarantee of a successful outcome. We can choose to try and feel satisfied with what we have, but that's no guarantee either. But because it's a zero-sum game (you cannot improve your standing without demoting someone else), an infinite amount of effort can be consumed in the pursuit of relative positioning without ever delivering a net benefit. This is an example of a situation where trading a little bit of personal freedom can achieve a net social gain. It's hardly the only one.
Skipping down to your last paragraph, my argument wasn't "for the children," but simply "homo economicus is a heartless bastard." I interpreted your original post as claiming that it's unreasonable to feel bad that someone is better off than you. It might be nice if that were the case (jealousy can be very damaging to the social fabric), but that view struck me as very similar to the homo economicus view of humans as rational agents who always evaluate decisions in terms of economic benefits.
I never said that, given the same amount of money to spend, everyone would spend it in the same way. Nor did I say that everyone would derive the same amount of happiness from their choices. Nor did I say that we must stop anyone from ever choosing to do things that are against their own better interests (though as a society we sometimes do exactly that). Finally, I've never said that an ideal society is one wherein everyone has exactly the same amount of wealth. From a practical standpoint, I recognize the need for economic incentives. From a personal liberty standpoint, a society that could distribute wealth so equally would have to be utterly totalitarian.
But I also believe that extreme inequities of wealth are poisonous to a democratic society. They breed resentment and unhappiness, make people far too eager to consume, and turn us against each other. It's not a matter of one person choosing the simple house and the fancy vacations while another chooses a huge house and simple vacations. We live in a world where one person has the huge house, the fancy vacations, the top-notch health care, the personal trainer, the butler, and the Ferrari. The other person lives on Ramen, splits a cramped two bedroom apartment with three friends, and scrubs the first person's toilet. Worst of all, the first person can more easily get the ear of our elected representatives, and therefore can rewrite the laws to keep themselves entrenched in their privileged position.
The only thing that holds the system together, I believe, is the "American Dream": the promise that, if we work really really hard, any of us can have the good life. But by objective measures, wealth inequity is increasing and class lines are increasingly stratified. Once people give up on the dream, things could turn very ugly very quickly.
But that's a rant for another day. Today, let's just leave it at this: freedom and equality are orthogonal. They're not always in sync, they're not always in tension, and just about all of us value both. It's unfair of me to paint you as someone who doesn't care about the poor, and it's unfair of you to paint me as someone who wants the government to micromanage our everyday decisions. We're really just arguing about where to draw which lines.
Now excuse me while I go pat myself on the back for being all deep and nuanced in my reasoning. Yay me.
/me bows before your greatness
Seriously, that idea rocks.
I don't generally expend much effort thinking about alternative histories. My only reason for doing so was to provide some counterweight to the defeatist "elections don't matter" mantra.
Russ does have a point. If all we do is obediently queue up every two or four years, then there are very firm limits on how much change we can effect. There are problems with the government that neither party has an interest in fixing. The overstating of a case that has some merit doesn't bother me much, but the apathy such attitudes engender is antithetical to the attitudes that will get this country back on track.
You know, Russ, I've never been terribly impressed by your rhetorical skills. This post pretty well demonstrates why.
We could go round and round for hours, trying to figure out the full effects of a Gore presidency. You could argue yourself blue about how Kyoto would have turned us into a third world nation, or how his victory would have destroyed our moral fabric by legitimizing Oval Office blowjobs. Or how he was a nutjob who wanted everyone to believe he singlehandedly wrote the TCP/IP protocol stack.
But that was never the point.
The point is, the country would be in a very different place today had the election turned out differently. We would probably have higher taxes, stronger environmental regulations, lower corporate earnings, etc. I don't see that state of affairs as 'evil,' but maybe you do. But the country would be running more in accordance with my beliefs and values had Gore won. That fact singlehandedly debunks your overreaching claim that elections don't matter. Now, if you want to scale back your claim and say that there isn't nearly enough difference between the parties, and that both parties are too self-interested, you'll have my full agreement.
But right now you're defending an untenable position, and doing it rather badly.
You know, I could spend about twenty hours trying to explain to a troll why the environment is very much the opposite of pointless. But I'm tired, and others have done it better.
You know, cynicism is addictive, but it's not attractive. You can't think of a single thing that would be different about this country if Al Gore had won the 2000 election?
Would we be at war in Iraq? No.
Would we be running up record deficits? Probably not.
Would we have slashed public services to provide tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans? Hardly.
Would we be torturing people in secret prisons?
Would September 11th have been pumped up into justification for a global war against 'Islamofascism?'
Yes, both sides are pretty deep in the pockets of corporations. Both sides are often self-serving at the expense of both their stated ideals and the good of the country. Neither side is offering up solutions that really satisfy me. But to say there is "no difference" is just whiny, and promotes the sort of apathy that corrupt systems thrive on.
No, I think the best thing would be for Bugs to win 100% in one precinct, 37.4% in another precinct, and 12.3% in a third. If someone simply hacks the vote to give one candidate 100%, there's a large chunk of the electorate who will assume that the results can only be manipulated in easily discovered ways.
No, he left off the words "to sane, rational people who haven't let their vindictive excuse for morality blind them to the real problems." If you're claiming there are valid reasons to prioritize the "dudes kissing" problem over genocide in Darfur and the Iraq war, you're going to have to present them, because I'm pretty damned skeptical.
"Wrong" in what sense? Are you saying it's wrong in the sense that it's not really like that? Are you saying that it's wrong in the sense that only a few greedy moral reprobates would begrudge someone additional wealth?
Either way, you're the one who is wrong. By defending this idealized notion of how people ought to feel under a capitalistic system, you're simply illustrating the naivete of some of your cherished free market principles.
A rather famous poll of a group of Harvard students asked whether the students would prefer to live in a town where they made $100K and everyone else made $200K, or a town where they made $50K and everyone else made $25K. Roughly 77% responded that they'd prefer the latter situation. If you consider this fact tantamount to saying, "77% of Harvard students are idiots," then maybe your economic theories aren't taking human nature into account.
For better or worse, we are tribal creatures. For millions of years, our ancestors have fought for the position of top monkey. The top monkey got the best food, got to mate with the top girl monkeys, and eventually left descendants who were happier being top monkeys themselves. Thus, we are acutely aware of our position relative to other monkeys, and desperately seeking to improve it. To deny that, and insist against all reason and all evidence that we should evaluate our happiness and our material comforts in a vacuum, is absurd.
Allow me to make the case for the correctness of the "Idiot Harvard" position. If you choose the $100K salary, you're going to be able to buy more stuff. According to the homo economicus theory, this should make you happier. But all around you you'll be seeing people owning and doing things that are beyond your resources. You'll send your children to a school where everyone has the latest clothes, where every child lives in a house with a pool (except yours), etc. When they come home, they'll have questions about why they can't have as nice of possessions as the other kids. When it comes time for your kids to compete with all the other kids for a place at the most prestigious universities, guess who can afford the better tutors? Hint: Not you.
In short, if you choose to live in the first town, you'll get the benefit of looking your surroundings and thinking, "My life is pretty good." If you choose the second town, you'll look at your surroundings and fight down the feeling that you should have a lot more.
"Relative freedom" is nothing more and nothing less than the perceived ability to fulfill your own desires. If you live in a society where your desires are being constantly inflated by the perception that everyone is living better than you, then you're not going to feel terribly free. Adam Smith himself recognized that many of your needs are dictated by your social surroundings. He defined the necessities of life as those things which were necessary for being a "respectable member of society", not just the things that delay your physical death. His own example: If no respectable person would ever be seen in public wearing a dirty shirt, then having a clean shirt is a necessity.
Contrary to your argument, this isn't saying that happiness is tied to materialism, per se. It's saying that a person's perceived happiness is strongly correlated to his perceived place in society. The fact that so much of our perceived place is tied to material consumption is regrettable, but strongly encouraged by the free market crowd.
Which brings me to my next point, which I'll call "social pollution via overconsumption." When a person moves into town and builds his family the biggest house in the county, he has a re
I disagree. While Linux shouldn't even be brought up in the context of securing a Windows XP lab (except maybe to serve network resources and authentication), using a Linux desktop is only going to help high school students learn computer skills.
Basic web usage is portable to Internet Explorer (and even moreso to Firefox on Windows). Basic word processing skills can be easily transferred from OpenOffice to MSOffice. Basic fragging skills are transferrable from Quake 3 to Half-Life (c'mon, these are high school students).
More important, learning to accomplish the same task using more than one application can really help cement in the kids' minds that they're not learning "how computers work," but "how this particular application works." Which is very important for a real understanding of computers. Where differences exist, they open up opportunities for learning. What is a file format? How can multiple programs handle the same data, and why do they sometimes do it slightly differently? What are web standards?
Couple that with the number of programming languages freely available to educational institutions under the apt-get license, and it seems to me that there is definitely a place for Linux in the classroom.
If you're doin' the Gnome/Linux thang*, open up the GConf editor and drill down through / -> desktop -> gnome -> interface. Change the key 'gtk_key_theme' to 'Emacs'. When you're focused on a textbox or the location bar, you get C-w, along with a bunch of other nifty stuff. My biggest complaint is that C-k deletes to the end of the line, but doesn't copy it into the clipboard.
More information.
* Dawg.
You're making the assumption that the entire point of the proposed business is to create and distribute Open Source Software. What he seems to be doing is creating some sort of umbrella corporation for a group of high-tech freelancers. The goal is to give them all the benefits of a corporation, while maintaining lots of autonomy and a minimum of hierarchy.
I think it could change everything. Here's the plan: spend it all buying up textbooks. Not necessarily the top books, but decent books that can be had at a good price. Create a company devoted to publishing them at positively Walmartian prices and promoting the books. Flood the university scene until you can guarantee that students who are paying more than $20 for a textbook know that they're getting ripped off.
Once you have your collective foot in the door, you start working your way up the value chain. Offer to buy the top-of-the line books, but negotiate from a position of strength. If they don't sell for a reasonable price, you threaten to buy up a competing book and undercut them that way. Or pay someone to write a new offering. Whichever is cheaper. Either way, the message should be, "You have no chance to survive. Make your time."
If you have $100M to blow, and play your cards right, you could sound the death knell of the textbook industry, and cut thousands of dollars from the cost of educating a person. My back-o-the-cantaloupe calculations indicate that students at my university spend about $8,000,000 a year on textbooks, so I imagine open textbooks could save education a couple billion a year U.S.-wide. For a startup price of $100M, that would be a huge, huge thing.
Well, this joke went over like a lead balloon. I was trying to point out the recursive nature of oath-taking. How do you know that a person taking an oath is telling the truth? Why, you have him take an oath promising to tell the truth beforehand. But how do you know he was telling the truth when he promised to tell the truth?
Well, it's funny if you're living inside my brain.
Hmm. I didn't even know there was a "+1 Says complimentary things about Python" mod. :)
What he's really saying is, "please, please, please believe that I didn't screw up as badly as it appears I screwed up. Just pretend that the machines are secure, and that democracy as we know it is not in danger."
P.S.: For e-mail, add spam filtering and virus detection.