Speaking as someone who lived through the transition from state-owned telco to private-owned telco, I can tell you one thing: you are talking out of your rear end.
After privatisation, the costs have gone up, the service has detoriated, and any kind of competition that even tries to arise is ruthlessly squashed.
The only ones who profited are the shareholders and the telco management. Give me a state-owned infrastructure over a rapacious bunch of MBAs anytime. I'd much prefer a communally-owned system, but for some reason the Powers That Be seem to want to squash that at all costs, no matter if the PTB are The Government or The Corporation, so I'll have to settle for the lesser of two evils for the moment.
Look at it this way: America's businesses (including it's high-technology outfits) are being run more and more by attorneys and accountants. People that, by their nature, are highly conservative, highly risk-averse.
Bravo! Finally someone who sees what is going on: despite what the conventional wisdom says, modern business is not about maximising profit, it is about minimising risk. Once you minimise the risk, have a steady income stream, then you maximise profits by cutting costs.
Actual innovation is anathema to this model, because it means increasing your risk. Of course, the payoff for succesful innovation is higher, so in the long run your profit will be higher, even if you fail a few times along the way, but in an economy that's obsessed with quarterly results, you get the fraidy-cat beancounters squashing all attempts at a little risk.
This disconnect between what the conventional wisdom says and how the market actually behaves is not new. It has been described in the 1950s by John Kenneth Galbraith, in summary in The Affluent Society and in detail in The New Industrial State. His essential point is that the modern corporation is a bureaucracy like any other, where CYA is the best practice, and the appearance of things like innovation, entrepreneurship and profit maximisation is more important than the actual activities themselves.
Should you not have read those books, by all means do. I suspect you already have, but other readers should really try to pick up a copy (or borrow it from your local library, you will find Mr. Galbraith in the Economics section).
[...] the guy guessed right on 2 obviously weak companies.
How was the highly succesful SGI of the late eighties/early nineties obviously weak? He even makes the point that it was the darling of the financial world, the tech world and the entertainment world. Sure, in hindsight they had no strategy to deal with a shifting market, but in hindsight everything is obvious.
And his HP observation is even better. If everybody in the financial and tech world keeps hailing HPaq as the most powerful PC combo in the market, poised to smash Dell in the low end PC market and using that success to challenge IBM and Sun in the high-end market, and he is one of the few heretics to point out that that scenario is highly unlikely, how is HPaq suddenly 'obviously weak'? You may have a short memory, but prior to 2004, there was very little press about the weaknesses of HPaq.
[...] a corporation must make an increasing margin of profit each year (billions into trillions)
Have you been paying attention to the stock market and the financial news sector over the past 15 years or so?
A steady profit is a death sentence these days. The market demands an increasing profit margin, and the US market in fact demands a quarterly increasing profit margin (unless you are recognised as a naturally cyclic business).
Of course, this is unsustainable, as profits can't increase indefinitely. In fact, under classical economic theory, profits will decrease with increasing competition and classical theory predicts that competition will increase as the product becomes more of a commodity. How the market will eventually resolve this paradox, I don't know, but right now the picture is obvious: increase your profit margin or die.
Rosemary's Baby. In Danse Macabre Stephen King recounts correspondence with writer Ira Levin. The idea is expressed that perhaps the director's relative inexperience was debit to him sticking very close to the book. King also advances the idea that Levin's very tight scripting of the plot makes anything but a faithful adaptation a futile approach.
The Commitments. It helps that writer Roddy Doyle was also involved in the screenplay. Also the original story was a mere novella in my eyes, making it a lot easier to bring to the screen, as the question of cutting scenes will not come up. In fact, the movie did much more by fleshing out some scenes and adding plot-relevant new scenes.
According to MS' own docs, it does use DESx (a variant on DES) as its encryption algorithm by default.
Before you start attacking someone from the safe cover of your anonymity, I'd like to see some data on your side that can shed light on this simple question: If your data is encrypted using an algorithm that is easily brute-forceable, does it matter how securely you treat your keys? And perhaps, O great and mighty Microsoft Expert, could you tell me how MS' DES implementation is more secure than the standard one?
By default EFS uses DES as it's encryption cipher. Sure the key is protected by a gazillion-bit public/private keypair, but single DES is easily brute-forcable with current hardware.
Again we see MS selling the illusion of security without actually selling any security at all.
Even if the firewall were enabled, this is a pre-SP2 box he was talking about. That still leaves a short window of vulnerability, as Windows XP will bring up the firewall after the networking is set up.
You'll have to face the music sooner or later anyway. When MS releases a new OS, and the scanner manufacturer decides that writing a new driver for an old piece of hardware is not in their best interest, you'll be stuck with either an old version of your OS, or with a paperweight that used to be a scanner.
Especially scanners appear to be hard hit by the 9x->XP migration. I have heard plenty of horror stories of scanners not even 2 years old whose manufacturer had decided not to write an XP driver.
The only way around this is for a manufacturer to document the wire protocol of its scanner so that third parties can write a driver. Not surprisingly, these are usually also the manufacturers providing the more decent hardware, and these bits of hardware are usually well supported under Linux as well. And also not surprisingly, the ones not documenting their specs and protocols are the ones playing the 'upgrade your hardware along with your OS' game.
Even if you are stuck on Windows, I'd advise you to buy only peripherals that work with Linux as well. 9 times out 10 it is just the better hardware anyway, and the manufacturer has proven that it is interested in you as a customer, not merely someone to be screwed out of as much cash as possible.
The reviewer faulted this tool for not finding cookies. Big whoop. Seriously, cookies are highly overrated. Ad-Aware is a pretty good tool, but its insistance in clearing out all my cookies causes me to have to redo passwords and such for websites that I would have rather left alone. This utility ignoring the cookies is a good thing.
Two things:
Tracking cookies, as used by e.g. DoubleClick, are a definite threat to your privacy online, and as such should be detected as spyware.
Ad-Aware presents you with a list of all items it is going to remove. It clearly marks malicious cookies as such. How hard is it to click on the column header and deselect all your session cookies that hold passwords etc.?
First off, I am not an Objectivist. I strongly resent the comparison to those wingnuts.
Second, my reasoning is as follows:
Moral relativism states that all viewpoints are morally equal.
A viewpoint that states that some viewpoints are morally superior is therefore wrong according to point 1.
Therefore, that viewpoint is inferior.
However, we just stated that all viewpoints are morally equal.
Or more shortly: "All morality is relative" is itself an absolute moral statement, and therefore in contradiction with itself.
See here the internal inconsistency of moral relativism. And that's why I don't like it, nothing to do with my morals or being a moralist, I just don't like illogical thinking.
And incidentally, my parent poster was talking about logical consistency, and in logic internal inconsistency is wrong.
Now go take a logic class before you start flaming people from behind the safety of your anonymity.
Man, there is so much wrong with your post, I don't know where to start. Let me first start by pointing out that I started my post with a simple phrase: Devil's Advocate. Look it up. It might make you look less of a dumbass next time you flame someone.
The political process has obviously not been subverted. So the whole "if-then" thing is just so much noise.
There are plenty of indications that the current political process in the democratic countries of the West only panders to the interests of a small elite: Laws like the DMCA and the EUCD, the ongoing problems in the US with campaign finance, massive corruption and outright fraud in the European Commision.
Now, I've given some backing to my statement. Let me see if you can do more than just argue by assertion.
Are you seriously asking whether it's okay to incite violence against police officers who are there only to keep you doing violence?
I gave examples of the overwhelming power deployed by the authorities and I asked how a brick compared to that. Don't start strawmanning me by snipping away parts of my argument.
As for your argument for the benevolence of the police, I think the news speaks for itself. If demonstrators are left dead in the streets, even if they were throwing bricks, then there is an obvious disparity in the levels of violence used. And since the police is indeed meant to protect me, it worries me a lot that that disparity falls out in their favour.
it is not an accurate statement to refer to a system whereby 120 million people who show up on election day get to make the decisions as an oligarchy.
It is not? Go look at the backgrounds of the candidates. Go look at who pays for their campaigns. Go look at who their legislation benefits. I think you'll find that the current U.S. system is a whole lot closer to an oligarchy than you think.
And as for Europe: the background of our politicians is a bit more diverse, but they all end up openly calling for policies that benefit that same small elite. If that isn't an oligarchy, I think we are using different meanings for the term.
I won't bother replying further, so just go on with your obvious strawmanning. I hope you enjoy boasting to your neo-con friends that you slapped down yet another leftie.
Mart
Moral relativism can't be logically consistent. It's basic axiom "All viewpoints are morally equal" is itself an absolute moral position, considered to be better than the position "Some viewpoints are superior to others", therefore it is inconsistent with itself.
That might be the original intent, but somewhere along the way it became a facility whereby troublemakers coordinate their efforts to disrupt the political process
If the political process has been subverted to take power away from the people and hand it to an oligarchy, isn't the process worth disrupting?
[...] the malicious ones who seek to manipulate the first group into doing their bidding. They're the ones who tell kids to bring a brick to a so-called "peace march."
If the authorities can bring to a protest march:
Police in body armour, with shields and other heavy equipment and weapons.
Water cannons and tear gas.
Armoured cars.
Or even the Army.
How serious is it then to tell people to bring a brick? Especially given the pervasive stories that the authorities like to incite minor violence first so that they have an excuse to execute an all-out assault on an otherwise peaceful protest?
Indymedia has become a powerful force for the incitement of violence [...]
When violence is used to take away your freedoms and your rights, is it then wrong to defend yourself violently?
These, IMO, are the hard questions worth asking. Unfortunately, too often the negative aspects of certain positions are used to totally discredit one side in political discourse. I may disagree with a lot on Indymedia, but I am glad they exist, because without opposition, we may as well hand over our freedom to the oligarchists right now.
Booting into single user does not automatically give you a root shell. Some distros (I use Debian, for example) require the root password before giving you a shell in runlevel 1.
Booting with init=/bin/bash (or any shell you know is available from the root fs) will work however.
With all due respect to Mr. Connery, but selling out is out of the question for him, because he has always been willing to perform in any movie as long as his price is met. You can't sell out if you're as mercenary in your choice of roles as he has been historically.
And frankly, I find his attitude refreshing. None of that hoity-toity "I'm doing it for the sake of the art" bullshit, just plain "Pay me, give me a script, and I'll bloody well play whatever you want". He may be mercenary, but he's honest about it.
Imagine the rate of adoption if the OO team got off their dead asses and make OO behave exactly like MSO? I'm talking about duplicating the same shortcuts, toolbars, and menus.
How do people manage to upgrade MS Office in your world? The last 3 upgrades all looked different, to the point of using different terms for the same concepts and different placement of menu items. Trust me, I have seen people flounder aplenty after an upgrade.
In the end, moving to OOo will happen exactly the same as upgrading to a new version of MS Office:
The stupid users who only bothered to remember rote actions will flounder and harass the helpdesk for months.
The slightly smarter users will try to look at the menus in the main menu bar to find what they need, and flounder if anything is actually in a submenu or a dialog box, and will harass the helpdesk for weeks.
The user with average smarts will look in the menus, submenus and dialog boxes, and call the helpdesk a couple of times because something isn't obvious in 5 minutes.
The really smart users will do all of the above, read the help files, the helpdesk supplied migration documentation, and then call to point out any discrepancies, at which point the helpdesk will blame the vendor.
And of course, when yet another of MS' asinine patents is discussed, the shills come out of the woodwork bleating the corporate line "Microsoft is only interested in using their IP defensively!".
I completely fail to see how this can ever be used for anything but to harass competitors. Not surprising, since this strategic direction was already outlined in a 1998 memo.
So this ought to shut up the MS shills for awhile (unfortunately, there is a large divide between 'ought' and 'will').
My remarks on the relative powers of the Allied Powers were obviously in the context of occupied Germany. And it that context it was the USA calling the shots.
However shameful the treatment the Finns got, it has nothing at all to do with my post.
The country code in his URL is.dk. Would it be so hard to look up the ISO country codes before going off on your anti-German rant? Because Denmark suffered as much as the rest of Europe under the Nazis. You know you are not helping if you perpetuate the stereotype of the ignorant American, no?
The German anti-Nazi laws are pretty strong, yes. Guess where they got them from? They were dictated to the German Federal Republic by the Allied Powers, and given the relative power levels in those days, that means by the United States of America.
Here's a clue boy: go get yourself an education, you seem to need it.
But thanks to our 'friends' in the European Commision who sold us out to the entertainment cartel, the ISP will care about the European Union Copyright Directive, which basically is the DMCA (no wonder, since it was written specifically to please the entertainment industry).
Ok, last post for me in this thread, if you want to continue the discussion I suggest we take it to e-mail (the address is valid).
What worries me most is this: Fortuyn was an attack on the power elite coming from the right. He was fair in his attacks, both right-wing and left-wing politicians got rightly condemned for being more concerned about their own positions than about the state of the country (IOW acting like a typical power elite). Yet after his death, his successors and supporters have used the broad popularity of Mr. Fortuyn, not to destroy the power elite, but to become part of it themselves.
What saddens me most is to see the common people still blindly supporting these politicians, thinking that they are still standing up to the system, while the people are still being screwed.
Unfortunately, the Dutch online political discourse is almost entirely monopolised by neo-cons who do their utmost best to shout down any dissenting viewpoint.
Just try even being moderately left-wing on an online forum these days. The funny bit is that by acting like this, the neo-cons set up an online media that is as biased in favour of the power elite as is the traditional media. I have seen Fortuyn supporters shout down dissent by effectively stating that ordinary citizens shouldn't have a say in politics, exactly the opposite of what he was preaching (and despite my own left leanings, I agree with Fortuyn's assessment of Dutch politics).
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as someone who lived through the transition from state-owned telco to private-owned telco, I can tell you one thing: you are talking out of your rear end.
After privatisation, the costs have gone up, the service has detoriated, and any kind of competition that even tries to arise is ruthlessly squashed.
The only ones who profited are the shareholders and the telco management. Give me a state-owned infrastructure over a rapacious bunch of MBAs anytime. I'd much prefer a communally-owned system, but for some reason the Powers That Be seem to want to squash that at all costs, no matter if the PTB are The Government or The Corporation, so I'll have to settle for the lesser of two evils for the moment.
MartBravo! Finally someone who sees what is going on: despite what the conventional wisdom says, modern business is not about maximising profit, it is about minimising risk. Once you minimise the risk, have a steady income stream, then you maximise profits by cutting costs.
Actual innovation is anathema to this model, because it means increasing your risk. Of course, the payoff for succesful innovation is higher, so in the long run your profit will be higher, even if you fail a few times along the way, but in an economy that's obsessed with quarterly results, you get the fraidy-cat beancounters squashing all attempts at a little risk.
This disconnect between what the conventional wisdom says and how the market actually behaves is not new. It has been described in the 1950s by John Kenneth Galbraith, in summary in The Affluent Society and in detail in The New Industrial State. His essential point is that the modern corporation is a bureaucracy like any other, where CYA is the best practice, and the appearance of things like innovation, entrepreneurship and profit maximisation is more important than the actual activities themselves.
Should you not have read those books, by all means do. I suspect you already have, but other readers should really try to pick up a copy (or borrow it from your local library, you will find Mr. Galbraith in the Economics section).
MartHow was the highly succesful SGI of the late eighties/early nineties obviously weak? He even makes the point that it was the darling of the financial world, the tech world and the entertainment world. Sure, in hindsight they had no strategy to deal with a shifting market, but in hindsight everything is obvious.
And his HP observation is even better. If everybody in the financial and tech world keeps hailing HPaq as the most powerful PC combo in the market, poised to smash Dell in the low end PC market and using that success to challenge IBM and Sun in the high-end market, and he is one of the few heretics to point out that that scenario is highly unlikely, how is HPaq suddenly 'obviously weak'? You may have a short memory, but prior to 2004, there was very little press about the weaknesses of HPaq.
MartHave you been paying attention to the stock market and the financial news sector over the past 15 years or so?
A steady profit is a death sentence these days. The market demands an increasing profit margin, and the US market in fact demands a quarterly increasing profit margin (unless you are recognised as a naturally cyclic business).
Of course, this is unsustainable, as profits can't increase indefinitely. In fact, under classical economic theory, profits will decrease with increasing competition and classical theory predicts that competition will increase as the product becomes more of a commodity. How the market will eventually resolve this paradox, I don't know, but right now the picture is obvious: increase your profit margin or die.
Mart(Sorry, you just pushed one of my buttons)
A very fitting quote, given the fundamentalist fervour with which Carl Sagan believed in SETI.
MartOffhand I can think of two examples:
Mart
According to MS' own docs, it does use DESx (a variant on DES) as its encryption algorithm by default.
Before you start attacking someone from the safe cover of your anonymity, I'd like to see some data on your side that can shed light on this simple question: If your data is encrypted using an algorithm that is easily brute-forceable, does it matter how securely you treat your keys? And perhaps, O great and mighty Microsoft Expert, could you tell me how MS' DES implementation is more secure than the standard one?
MartHow about another highlight?
By default EFS uses DES as it's encryption cipher. Sure the key is protected by a gazillion-bit public/private keypair, but single DES is easily brute-forcable with current hardware.
Again we see MS selling the illusion of security without actually selling any security at all.
MartEven if the firewall were enabled, this is a pre-SP2 box he was talking about. That still leaves a short window of vulnerability, as Windows XP will bring up the firewall after the networking is set up.
MartYou'll have to face the music sooner or later anyway. When MS releases a new OS, and the scanner manufacturer decides that writing a new driver for an old piece of hardware is not in their best interest, you'll be stuck with either an old version of your OS, or with a paperweight that used to be a scanner.
Especially scanners appear to be hard hit by the 9x->XP migration. I have heard plenty of horror stories of scanners not even 2 years old whose manufacturer had decided not to write an XP driver.
The only way around this is for a manufacturer to document the wire protocol of its scanner so that third parties can write a driver. Not surprisingly, these are usually also the manufacturers providing the more decent hardware, and these bits of hardware are usually well supported under Linux as well. And also not surprisingly, the ones not documenting their specs and protocols are the ones playing the 'upgrade your hardware along with your OS' game.
Even if you are stuck on Windows, I'd advise you to buy only peripherals that work with Linux as well. 9 times out 10 it is just the better hardware anyway, and the manufacturer has proven that it is interested in you as a customer, not merely someone to be screwed out of as much cash as possible.
MartThe reviewer faulted this tool for not finding cookies. Big whoop. Seriously, cookies are highly overrated. Ad-Aware is a pretty good tool, but its insistance in clearing out all my cookies causes me to have to redo passwords and such for websites that I would have rather left alone. This utility ignoring the cookies is a good thing.
Two things:
- Tracking cookies, as used by e.g. DoubleClick, are a definite threat to your privacy online, and as such should be detected as spyware.
- Ad-Aware presents you with a list of all items it is going to remove. It clearly marks malicious cookies as such. How hard is it to click on the column header and deselect all your session cookies that hold passwords etc.?
MartFirst off, I am not an Objectivist. I strongly resent the comparison to those wingnuts.
Second, my reasoning is as follows:
- Moral relativism states that all viewpoints are morally equal.
- A viewpoint that states that some viewpoints are morally superior is therefore wrong according to point 1.
- Therefore, that viewpoint is inferior.
- However, we just stated that all viewpoints are morally equal.
Or more shortly: "All morality is relative" is itself an absolute moral statement, and therefore in contradiction with itself.See here the internal inconsistency of moral relativism. And that's why I don't like it, nothing to do with my morals or being a moralist, I just don't like illogical thinking.
And incidentally, my parent poster was talking about logical consistency, and in logic internal inconsistency is wrong.
Now go take a logic class before you start flaming people from behind the safety of your anonymity.
MartMan, there is so much wrong with your post, I don't know where to start. Let me first start by pointing out that I started my post with a simple phrase: Devil's Advocate. Look it up. It might make you look less of a dumbass next time you flame someone.
There are plenty of indications that the current political process in the democratic countries of the West only panders to the interests of a small elite: Laws like the DMCA and the EUCD, the ongoing problems in the US with campaign finance, massive corruption and outright fraud in the European Commision.
Now, I've given some backing to my statement. Let me see if you can do more than just argue by assertion.
I gave examples of the overwhelming power deployed by the authorities and I asked how a brick compared to that. Don't start strawmanning me by snipping away parts of my argument.
As for your argument for the benevolence of the police, I think the news speaks for itself. If demonstrators are left dead in the streets, even if they were throwing bricks, then there is an obvious disparity in the levels of violence used. And since the police is indeed meant to protect me, it worries me a lot that that disparity falls out in their favour.
It is not? Go look at the backgrounds of the candidates. Go look at who pays for their campaigns. Go look at who their legislation benefits. I think you'll find that the current U.S. system is a whole lot closer to an oligarchy than you think.
And as for Europe: the background of our politicians is a bit more diverse, but they all end up openly calling for policies that benefit that same small elite. If that isn't an oligarchy, I think we are using different meanings for the term.
I won't bother replying further, so just go on with your obvious strawmanning. I hope you enjoy boasting to your neo-con friends that you slapped down yet another leftie. MartMoral relativism can't be logically consistent. It's basic axiom "All viewpoints are morally equal" is itself an absolute moral position, considered to be better than the position "Some viewpoints are superior to others", therefore it is inconsistent with itself.
MartLet me play Devil's Advocate here.
If the political process has been subverted to take power away from the people and hand it to an oligarchy, isn't the process worth disrupting?
If the authorities can bring to a protest march:
Police in body armour, with shields and other heavy equipment and weapons.
Water cannons and tear gas.
Armoured cars.
Or even the Army.
How serious is it then to tell people to bring a brick? Especially given the pervasive stories that the authorities like to incite minor violence first so that they have an excuse to execute an all-out assault on an otherwise peaceful protest?When violence is used to take away your freedoms and your rights, is it then wrong to defend yourself violently?
These, IMO, are the hard questions worth asking. Unfortunately, too often the negative aspects of certain positions are used to totally discredit one side in political discourse. I may disagree with a lot on Indymedia, but I am glad they exist, because without opposition, we may as well hand over our freedom to the oligarchists right now.
MartBooting into single user does not automatically give you a root shell. Some distros (I use Debian, for example) require the root password before giving you a shell in runlevel 1.
Booting with init=/bin/bash (or any shell you know is available from the root fs) will work however.
MartWith all due respect to Mr. Connery, but selling out is out of the question for him, because he has always been willing to perform in any movie as long as his price is met. You can't sell out if you're as mercenary in your choice of roles as he has been historically.
And frankly, I find his attitude refreshing. None of that hoity-toity "I'm doing it for the sake of the art" bullshit, just plain "Pay me, give me a script, and I'll bloody well play whatever you want". He may be mercenary, but he's honest about it.
MartHow do people manage to upgrade MS Office in your world? The last 3 upgrades all looked different, to the point of using different terms for the same concepts and different placement of menu items. Trust me, I have seen people flounder aplenty after an upgrade.
In the end, moving to OOo will happen exactly the same as upgrading to a new version of MS Office:
And I am only barely joking.
MartAnd of course, when yet another of MS' asinine patents is discussed, the shills come out of the woodwork bleating the corporate line "Microsoft is only interested in using their IP defensively!".
I completely fail to see how this can ever be used for anything but to harass competitors. Not surprising, since this strategic direction was already outlined in a 1998 memo.
So this ought to shut up the MS shills for awhile (unfortunately, there is a large divide between 'ought' and 'will').
MartDid I say anything about Finland?
My remarks on the relative powers of the Allied Powers were obviously in the context of occupied Germany. And it that context it was the USA calling the shots.
However shameful the treatment the Finns got, it has nothing at all to do with my post.
MartCan I point out two things?
Here's a clue boy: go get yourself an education, you seem to need it.
MartBut thanks to our 'friends' in the European Commision who sold us out to the entertainment cartel, the ISP will care about the European Union Copyright Directive, which basically is the DMCA (no wonder, since it was written specifically to please the entertainment industry).
Mart...It is not user-serviceable without a proprietary toolset.
Jokes about comparing proprietary software to a car with the hood welded shut are very chilling if this car is the beginning of a trend.
MartOk, last post for me in this thread, if you want to continue the discussion I suggest we take it to e-mail (the address is valid).
What worries me most is this: Fortuyn was an attack on the power elite coming from the right. He was fair in his attacks, both right-wing and left-wing politicians got rightly condemned for being more concerned about their own positions than about the state of the country (IOW acting like a typical power elite). Yet after his death, his successors and supporters have used the broad popularity of Mr. Fortuyn, not to destroy the power elite, but to become part of it themselves.
What saddens me most is to see the common people still blindly supporting these politicians, thinking that they are still standing up to the system, while the people are still being screwed.
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
MartUnfortunately, the Dutch online political discourse is almost entirely monopolised by neo-cons who do their utmost best to shout down any dissenting viewpoint.
Just try even being moderately left-wing on an online forum these days. The funny bit is that by acting like this, the neo-cons set up an online media that is as biased in favour of the power elite as is the traditional media. I have seen Fortuyn supporters shout down dissent by effectively stating that ordinary citizens shouldn't have a say in politics, exactly the opposite of what he was preaching (and despite my own left leanings, I agree with Fortuyn's assessment of Dutch politics).
Mart