Canada has as much of an irrational fear of a "two tier health system" as the US has of any sort of universal single payer health care though. The Canadian system is surprisingly effective (just compare the numbers and outcomes to the US as you've done), but their unwillingness to allow a parallel private healthcare system to take some of the load of the public system is problematic.
Public healthcare systems around the world are under strain, and many are moving to having a paralell private system particularly for expensive non-vital treatments and surgeries.
The US however, seems to have constructed the worst of all possible worlds, and is caught in some hopeless no man's land with government money being thron into the black hole of propping up a mostly private system (which of course only inflates the price of the private system). I can't believe Americans aren't desperately keen for a total ground up overhaul of they're health system - it is a disaster.
When you wrote "In the Beginning was the Command Line" you were very much in love with BeOS. As nice as BeOS was, it is now mostly gone. Do you still use BeOS 5, or have you aquired YellowTab from Zeta? Or, instead have you embreaced the new UNIX based MacOS X as the OS you want to use when you "Just want to go to Disneyland"?
I think what he's after is recolorable pixmaps and a GUI tool to do it. GTK is not in any way incapable of this (remember back when the Crux theme first came out and had a capplet in the GNOME control center to change the colours) it's just not common, and certainly the theme preferences never take account of such things.
I think there is a valid point here though - there ae far too many GNOME themes which are "X but now with scrollbars recoloured from blue to green!" - having a few good colour agnostic themes that have a simple GUI for applying different colour schemes to them might be nice.
What's up with the quality of trolling on Slashdot these days? Even the article summary trolls are poorly written and transparent these days.
Fedora and Redhat Workstation default to using GNOME for the desktop. Novell hasn't cancelled Ximian's GNOME efforts, and is in fact working on improving GNOME in SuSE. Solaris and Sun JDS both use GNOME.
Not that KDE isn't doing very well for itself as well, with SuSE being a very nice KDE oriented distro, not to mention Mandrake, and many others.
Both are doing just fine - the prospect of some distros focussing on one is not surprising, but I'd hardly call it significant. The whole DE flamewar is mostly rather silly. FreeDesktop.org is doing a good job and increasing cooperation and shared functionality between, not just KDE and GNOME, but XFCE, WindowMaker/GNUStep, and even, to some extent whatever new DE Enlightenment eventually turns out. There are different desktop needs, and different DEs pursue very different goals. As long as FreeDesktop.org manages to continue its efforts to define some good shared base standards things will work just fine.
If your going to haul Kant in then we're gettign to the level where everything we think is inescapably derived from observation. Mathematics is about as cleanly separated from that as possible. As to F=ma - that's not especially mathematical, it's physics, and yes, that's purely observational. On the other hand the fundamental theorem of calculus has considerably less to do with observation (presuming of course that we're building to it from Russell style defintions and his very limited set of axioms).
I'm not trying to argue the pointfulness of the formula here given, I'm rather trying to stand up for the fact that mathematics, unlike physics for example, goes very much further to separate itself from "depending on observation". There are plenty concepts in mathematics (p-adic numbers, non-Hausdorff spaces, projective geometry) that run completely counter to anything observable.
Those axioms are observations. One important observation, one of two axioms underpinning all of math (and therefore science), is "consistency". The other is falsifiability, that only statements that can be proven false are scientific - the rest are metaphysical. Math such as "all triangles are composed of three interior angles totaling 180 degrees" is an observation, that is supported by theories and constructions. Physics applies math by interpreting the mathematical relationships in observed phenomena.
I suggest you go and read some Bertrand Russell on philisophy of mathematics. Mathematics isn't based on observation at all. It's based on what axioms you choose to start with and using deductive logic from there - and you would be very surprised about how basic and not based on observation the funcamental axioms of mathematics are, presuming you bother to look at works that build up math from as small a foundation as possible. On that front, I would suggest you look at Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead, which is pretty much the book on purest mathematical foundations.
I've noticed a frightening trend in the "I can write a formula so it must be mathematically true" dribble floating around. It wouldn't be so bad if these people didn't seem to apparently take themselves so seriously. I'm quite happy with the odd joke, but really, this is just crap.
Someexampleshere. Not to mention a "formula for the perfect joke" which I was unable to find. At least the news doesn't take these people too seriously.
The biggest dilemma is that this formula is just not testable. Clearly any test would be very Important and have to be carried out Frequently, and a test that covers all the situations to which Murphy's law might apply is clearly going to have to be Complex. So plugging all of that in, we see that, even if the formula is correct, all your attempts to verfiy it are doomed to failure!
It's basically the same API as the Mac OSX so apps written for GNUStep should build relatively painlessly on the Mac, though I'm not sure it implements enough of the API for the reverse to be true.
Most everythign I've heard about the GNUStep API has generally been positive, and yes, it's pretty similar to MacOS X (though certainly porting from Mac to GNUStep is not really a viable option). I'm not sure why the uptake is so poor - I guess it never really managed to grab people's attention - though personally I find the basic toolkit ugliness (which is subjective I know) a bit of an issue.
Now you'll probably throw up your hands in horror and spin wild scenarios about drunken cowboy cops on a rampage, as if people in government never misbehave or slack off. Why you think people provide better service when they work in a government-enforced monopoly is beyond me.
Not really. The people with the "The government will fix everything" mentatility piss me off just as much as the "the free market would make a utopia" people.
The free market is nice if everyone is well informed about everything, and is remarkably careful and rational all the time. It works less well when people aren't (and lets face it, a lot of people just don't have time to agonise over every decision), so its not surprising (I wouldn't think) that tempering wild free market abandon with a few protections to help the slightly less than perpetually vigilant consumers is not such a stupid idea.
I like to keep my home directory looking clean, and when random directories start showing it, it drives me mad. They are: gconfd-adp (adp is my user name) orbit-adp They form when I launch GTK applications, in this case, Mozilla. Any advice?
Well, something odd is definitely going on. Those directories are created in/tmp usually (just like KDE creates kde-[username] and mcop-[username] in/tmp. Do you have some weird tmp directory settings buried somewhere? Sorry I can't be more help.
what linux needs is a desktop environment that uses a fast toolkit, and does what is needed without the extra bells and whistles.
For light desktops that aren't just pure IceWM or *box window management your best options are XFCE (which uses GTK+, but is still surprsingly light and fast), and E17 (if and when it eventually arrives) which uses pretty much all its own technology (of which there is a lot, and its all quite impressive).
Realistically E17 is stacking up to the "other" desktop given how much functionality the E Foundation Libraries offer. I'm not trying to dis IceWM or Fluxbox here, but realistically those are mostly Window Managers, while the new E is looking to have more of the "core libraries" approach of GNOME and KDE, providing its own widget toolkit and what have you. We're still to see whether people will actually pick it up and develop with it...
Finally you've got WindowMaker, which is a very nice window manager and integrates in with GNUStep to provide your widget toolkits and other core libraries. The downside here is that while Window Maker is great, the amount of developer uptake for GNUStep has been fairly limited, so you won't exactly see a lot of GNUStep apps.
There are some good options though, so don't go complaining too much.
Aah, there we have the cost factor of risk. Uncertainty carries with it a certain disutility, making it more worthwhile to choose "sure things". So you buy from a cereal company that has a good reputation for producing healthy foods, maybe one that allows open inspection of the cleanliness of their factories, and if you pay more for it, well, you choose it: it's like a little insurance policy in every box!
So I just have to
(1) Research the reputations of all cereal companies I am considering buying from - of course that'll have to be a wide range of independent sources because the comapnies will be advertising like mad that they're perfect regardless of what their practices actually are.
(2) Based on research (that is not giving me a full picture, but hey... it's the best I can do) divine a probability of getting food poisoning, or other illness.
(3) Do a quick calculation based on the various prices of the various cereals, and the risk probabilities, when I get to the local supermarket to see what they're selling for this week.
(4) Profit!
Glad that was easy, only took several hours. Now, what brand of milk should I put on my cereal...
Furthermore, I regret to say that I don't see much prospect of any of the Linux GUI efforts approaching the ease of use and elegance of OS X any time soon - partially due to a lack of imagination, and partially due to being over-wedded to X which is evolving way too slowly and is over-wedded to a basic design that is simply outdated.
Yes, X11 really sucks. It sucks so bad that Apple packages it for OS X and calls it a significant feature.
Could you explain a little more as to why X11 sucks, or what exactly it is about X11's design that is so horribly outdated? I agree that under XFree86 things were progressin a little slowly, but now that Xorg has geared up we're seeing some significant improvements coming pretty fast.
Sure, right now Linux desktops are not exactly as "easy and elegant" as OS X, but on some levels they are very good indeed, and more importantly, they are improving surprisingly quick. X11 is far from the albatross you seem to think.
I read both articles, and I think they were both overly pessimistic. I don't think Apple has very much to lose from porting OS X (presuming they don't seel it cheaply, or have stpid licensing schemes), the problem is that they don't really have much to gain either.
They would lose some of their hardware market, but it wouldn't crash to zer as some people here are claiming. As many Mac fans will point out, a decent part of the appeal of a Mac is the hardware - well designed, nice looking, nd generally just slick. There's a definite niche for such things and I think Apple hardware would continue to sell reasonably well. The articles you pointed to, however, made the very reasonable point that the uptake of OS X on x86 would not be as strong as many people would imagine. I suspect if they sold copies for $300 a shot, they'd do well, and probably cover any losses their hardware side had, but going to a lot of effort (for a port, and maintining drivers etc) to end up treading water really isn't worth it.
It may still happen at some time in the future of course: markets change (Apple is moving more and more into iPods and music sales for instance), and a shift in opportunities could make it more viable. I wouldn't write it off as impossible, merely as very unlikely without some serious changes in the market first.
This would kill apple however because nobody in their right mind would pay $2000+ for a good mac when they could pay for a PC at $1500 and get mac OS on it as well.
See, that's just not a good enough reason. In part because it's not true. Take a look at the G5 iMac. It sells, in a large part, because of its design and style. People in their right minds would still be willing to pay a premium for nice Apple hardware because, as the Apple fanatics keep telling us, it is nice hardware.
Yes, you'll definitely take a hit to your sales on hardware, but it wouldn't be utterly fatal - not when you've got all the revenue from charging MS style pricing for MacOS X on x86 (we're not talking OEM pricing here). I don't think it would put Apple under in any way shape or form. It just wouldn't suddenly expand Apples revenue to quite the extent people would expect either.
A good point, but it need not be done through government. The company where I work puts in its marketing material a reference to the "ISO 9002" quality standard. They also put a reference to the private company that did the audit and certified that the processes here do follow the ISO-9002 standards. All this is done without any interference from any government and it works fine.
Sure, but as long as it is voluntary for a company to sign up to such a standard, all the companies that don't bother can have their long drawn out court case that costs a fortune - so if they have more money than the consumer, they might just win.
No system is going to be perfect here, but there are some very reasonable justifications for either system.
A true free market solves this by having these big corporations *compete* against each other rather than against the people who consume their products.
Because big corporations don't have to compete against one another when they have to label their products according to a regulation?
If a consumer feels that they have been screwed, the product is defective, etc, they have the option of going to someone else to get it. Odds are they'll tell their friends, too. This effect is instantaneous and will sort out any company / individual that the market deems troublesome.
Instantaneous you say? A word of mouth campaign about a company with poor product has an instantaneous significant effect on the company? So all the MS security flaws, and people's general unhappiness with their computing expereicne has caused a rapid turnaround for MS's fortunes? Yes, in a perfect world where everyone is rational, and takes time to research all their purchasing decisions the free market will efficiently smack down bad companies. In the real world it takes quite a long time for sufficient consumer unrest to make any significant dent. You're arguing the "real life" situation of my theoretical proposition against the pure theory side of your own. Don't you think that's more than a little disingenuous?
You complain about large corporations weighing in with expensive lawyers in the court system as a downside against my theoretical proposition, yet neglect to mention large corporations weighing with extremely expensive advertising campaigns to efficiently quash any rumours of defective products.
Ever had to deal with Dell service? They suck right? Yet everyone still buys Dell. Convenience, advertising, and price have a remarkably large impact on consumer decision making in the real world.
Look, neither system is some perfect paragon of efficiency and effectiveness. All I'm trying to point out is that, at least from the theoretical view, you can stack up fairly well reasoned arguments for either way of doing of things.
No the premise here is why give these two candidates and only these two candidates a free ride publicity wise? Remeber it is not just the debates but the spin and free airtime that comes after.
Spin broadcast on private channels that can choose what they care to show and how they care to show it. You see, I can see David Cobb's reasoning: he doesn't support political campaigning in private hands - he wants to see everythign handled with public funds over public airwaves, and clearly all of this goes against his ideals. I just don't see what Badnarik is on about. All of this is being done within Libertarian principles - it's all private, so they have a right to choose who they show and who they don't.
All I've seen is a few arguments about it being held at a University recieving public funding, but really that's a pretty slim argument, and seems like more of an excuse than a decent reason.
Or do you believe that, just because the law says so, no one will do otherwise?
The principle of regulating it through law is that it then greases the legal system when a problem arises. Instead of having a long drawn out lawsuit about whether the possible mislabelling may or may not have been in harmful, and several round of litigation, you now have a law on the books so it goes straigth to "They broke this law right here", and the case is largely open and shut.
That's the theory. I'm not saying it works, but there is some reasoning behind all of this.
So let me get this straight - we're discussing whether having some regulation on labelling forces consumers into complacency, while smart consumers (such as yourself) don't trust the system at all, and bother to properly research and understand what they're buying... and yet you complain about manfuacturers and the
1000MB vs 1024MB in a hard drive
Funny, I was pretty sure the 1GB = 1000MB. Perhaps you should do a little more research yourself, and note that what you're thinking of is 1GiB = 1024MiB with MebiBytes, and GibiBytes.
Good to know consumers won't get misinformed when they take the trouble to properly learn about this stuff themselves.
Fire: Pay in advance, just like your garbage service. If a firefighting company doesn't perform, people will give their business to a competitor.
Yup, and it will probably only take 4 or 5 destroyed homes that the company neglected to attend before sufficient word of mouth has spread that this particular company is unreliable, and they lose enough business that they actually find themselves in any financial difficulty. Then again, if they didn't actually bother to pay for decent firefighting equipment (who needs to when you're not going to bother going...) they could probably run a little longer. The free market works. It's kind of abitch for the 5 families who lost their homes (including irreplacable sentimental items, so don't say "insurance will fix all") and potentially loved ones in the fire.
It's okay though, because they can sue... The now bankrupt fire company which already spent all their cash on drugs, alcohol and women. And I'm sure the court mandated damages will do well to replace the dead daughter and family heirlooms.
But who would subscribe to such a poor fire company in the first place? Only idiots right? They had it coming. Because lord knows that only complete idiots have ever been taken in by slick advertising or propaganda (even the kind with 0 substance).
Slashdot Mirror
Canada has as much of an irrational fear of a "two tier health system" as the US has of any sort of universal single payer health care though. The Canadian system is surprisingly effective (just compare the numbers and outcomes to the US as you've done), but their unwillingness to allow a parallel private healthcare system to take some of the load of the public system is problematic.
Public healthcare systems around the world are under strain, and many are moving to having a paralell private system particularly for expensive non-vital treatments and surgeries.
The US however, seems to have constructed the worst of all possible worlds, and is caught in some hopeless no man's land with government money being thron into the black hole of propping up a mostly private system (which of course only inflates the price of the private system). I can't believe Americans aren't desperately keen for a total ground up overhaul of they're health system - it is a disaster.
Jedidiah.
It's just like Alien vs. Predator:
whoever wins, we lose.
Or Bush vs. Kerry for that matter.
Jedidiah.
When you wrote "In the Beginning was the Command Line" you were very much in love with BeOS. As nice as BeOS was, it is now mostly gone. Do you still use BeOS 5, or have you aquired YellowTab from Zeta? Or, instead have you embreaced the new UNIX based MacOS X as the OS you want to use when you "Just want to go to Disneyland"?
Jedidiah.
I think what he's after is recolorable pixmaps and a GUI tool to do it. GTK is not in any way incapable of this (remember back when the Crux theme first came out and had a capplet in the GNOME control center to change the colours) it's just not common, and certainly the theme preferences never take account of such things.
I think there is a valid point here though - there ae far too many GNOME themes which are "X but now with scrollbars recoloured from blue to green!" - having a few good colour agnostic themes that have a simple GUI for applying different colour schemes to them might be nice.
Jedidiah.
What's up with the quality of trolling on Slashdot these days? Even the article summary trolls are poorly written and transparent these days.
Fedora and Redhat Workstation default to using GNOME for the desktop. Novell hasn't cancelled Ximian's GNOME efforts, and is in fact working on improving GNOME in SuSE. Solaris and Sun JDS both use GNOME.
Not that KDE isn't doing very well for itself as well, with SuSE being a very nice KDE oriented distro, not to mention Mandrake, and many others.
Both are doing just fine - the prospect of some distros focussing on one is not surprising, but I'd hardly call it significant. The whole DE flamewar is mostly rather silly. FreeDesktop.org is doing a good job and increasing cooperation and shared functionality between, not just KDE and GNOME, but XFCE, WindowMaker/GNUStep, and even, to some extent whatever new DE Enlightenment eventually turns out. There are different desktop needs, and different DEs pursue very different goals. As long as FreeDesktop.org manages to continue its efforts to define some good shared base standards things will work just fine.
Jedidiah.
If your going to haul Kant in then we're gettign to the level where everything we think is inescapably derived from observation. Mathematics is about as cleanly separated from that as possible. As to F=ma - that's not especially mathematical, it's physics, and yes, that's purely observational. On the other hand the fundamental theorem of calculus has considerably less to do with observation (presuming of course that we're building to it from Russell style defintions and his very limited set of axioms).
I'm not trying to argue the pointfulness of the formula here given, I'm rather trying to stand up for the fact that mathematics, unlike physics for example, goes very much further to separate itself from "depending on observation". There are plenty concepts in mathematics (p-adic numbers, non-Hausdorff spaces, projective geometry) that run completely counter to anything observable.
Jedidiah.
Those axioms are observations. One important observation, one of two axioms underpinning all of math (and therefore science), is "consistency". The other is falsifiability, that only statements that can be proven false are scientific - the rest are metaphysical. Math such as "all triangles are composed of three interior angles totaling 180 degrees" is an observation, that is supported by theories and constructions. Physics applies math by interpreting the mathematical relationships in observed phenomena.
I suggest you go and read some Bertrand Russell on philisophy of mathematics. Mathematics isn't based on observation at all. It's based on what axioms you choose to start with and using deductive logic from there - and you would be very surprised about how basic and not based on observation the funcamental axioms of mathematics are, presuming you bother to look at works that build up math from as small a foundation as possible. On that front, I would suggest you look at Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead, which is pretty much the book on purest mathematical foundations.
Jedidiah.
I've noticed a frightening trend in the "I can write a formula so it must be mathematically true" dribble floating around. It wouldn't be so bad if these people didn't seem to apparently take themselves so seriously. I'm quite happy with the odd joke, but really, this is just crap.
Some examples here. Not to mention a "formula for the perfect joke" which I was unable to find. At least the news doesn't take these people too seriously.
Jedidiah.
The biggest dilemma is that this formula is just not testable. Clearly any test would be very Important and have to be carried out Frequently, and a test that covers all the situations to which Murphy's law might apply is clearly going to have to be Complex. So plugging all of that in, we see that, even if the formula is correct, all your attempts to verfiy it are doomed to failure!
Jedidiah.
None of these options hold a candle to Rat Poison. Nothing is as simple or minimal as it.
Screen on a console surely. Why bother with all that nasty Xlib library overhead?
And then there's always just the console and ALT-F1 through ALT-F12 (what you don't use 12 virtual consoles?)
But really, who wants all that clunky overhead of actually loading a shell? Far too bloated I say.
Jedidiah.
It's basically the same API as the Mac OSX so apps written for GNUStep should build relatively painlessly on the Mac, though I'm not sure it implements enough of the API for the reverse to be true.
Most everythign I've heard about the GNUStep API has generally been positive, and yes, it's pretty similar to MacOS X (though certainly porting from Mac to GNUStep is not really a viable option). I'm not sure why the uptake is so poor - I guess it never really managed to grab people's attention - though personally I find the basic toolkit ugliness (which is subjective I know) a bit of an issue.
Jedidiah.
Now you'll probably throw up your hands in horror and spin wild scenarios about drunken cowboy cops on a rampage, as if people in government never misbehave or slack off. Why you think people provide better service when they work in a government-enforced monopoly is beyond me.
Not really. The people with the "The government will fix everything" mentatility piss me off just as much as the "the free market would make a utopia" people.
The free market is nice if everyone is well informed about everything, and is remarkably careful and rational all the time. It works less well when people aren't (and lets face it, a lot of people just don't have time to agonise over every decision), so its not surprising (I wouldn't think) that tempering wild free market abandon with a few protections to help the slightly less than perpetually vigilant consumers is not such a stupid idea.
Jedidiah.
I like to keep my home directory looking clean, and when random directories start showing it, it drives me mad. They are: gconfd-adp (adp is my user name) orbit-adp They form when I launch GTK applications, in this case, Mozilla. Any advice?
/tmp usually (just like KDE creates kde-[username] and mcop-[username] in /tmp. Do you have some weird tmp directory settings buried somewhere? Sorry I can't be more help.
Well, something odd is definitely going on. Those directories are created in
Jedidiah.
what linux needs is a desktop environment that uses a fast toolkit, and does what is needed without the extra bells and whistles.
For light desktops that aren't just pure IceWM or *box window management your best options are XFCE (which uses GTK+, but is still surprsingly light and fast), and E17 (if and when it eventually arrives) which uses pretty much all its own technology (of which there is a lot, and its all quite impressive).
Realistically E17 is stacking up to the "other" desktop given how much functionality the E Foundation Libraries offer. I'm not trying to dis IceWM or Fluxbox here, but realistically those are mostly Window Managers, while the new E is looking to have more of the "core libraries" approach of GNOME and KDE, providing its own widget toolkit and what have you. We're still to see whether people will actually pick it up and develop with it...
Finally you've got WindowMaker, which is a very nice window manager and integrates in with GNUStep to provide your widget toolkits and other core libraries. The downside here is that while Window Maker is great, the amount of developer uptake for GNUStep has been fairly limited, so you won't exactly see a lot of GNUStep apps.
There are some good options though, so don't go complaining too much.
Jedidiah.
Aah, there we have the cost factor of risk. Uncertainty carries with it a certain disutility, making it more worthwhile to choose "sure things". So you buy from a cereal company that has a good reputation for producing healthy foods, maybe one that allows open inspection of the cleanliness of their factories, and if you pay more for it, well, you choose it: it's like a little insurance policy in every box!
So I just have to
(1) Research the reputations of all cereal companies I am considering buying from - of course that'll have to be a wide range of independent sources because the comapnies will be advertising like mad that they're perfect regardless of what their practices actually are.
(2) Based on research (that is not giving me a full picture, but hey... it's the best I can do) divine a probability of getting food poisoning, or other illness.
(3) Do a quick calculation based on the various prices of the various cereals, and the risk probabilities, when I get to the local supermarket to see what they're selling for this week.
(4) Profit!
Glad that was easy, only took several hours. Now, what brand of milk should I put on my cereal...
Jedidiah.
Furthermore, I regret to say that I don't see much prospect of any of the Linux GUI efforts approaching the ease of use and elegance of OS X any time soon - partially due to a lack of imagination, and partially due to being over-wedded to X which is evolving way too slowly and is over-wedded to a basic design that is simply outdated.
Yes, X11 really sucks. It sucks so bad that Apple packages it for OS X and calls it a significant feature.
Could you explain a little more as to why X11 sucks, or what exactly it is about X11's design that is so horribly outdated? I agree that under XFree86 things were progressin a little slowly, but now that Xorg has geared up we're seeing some significant improvements coming pretty fast.
Sure, right now Linux desktops are not exactly as "easy and elegant" as OS X, but on some levels they are very good indeed, and more importantly, they are improving surprisingly quick. X11 is far from the albatross you seem to think.
Jedidiah.
I read both articles, and I think they were both overly pessimistic. I don't think Apple has very much to lose from porting OS X (presuming they don't seel it cheaply, or have stpid licensing schemes), the problem is that they don't really have much to gain either.
They would lose some of their hardware market, but it wouldn't crash to zer as some people here are claiming. As many Mac fans will point out, a decent part of the appeal of a Mac is the hardware - well designed, nice looking, nd generally just slick. There's a definite niche for such things and I think Apple hardware would continue to sell reasonably well. The articles you pointed to, however, made the very reasonable point that the uptake of OS X on x86 would not be as strong as many people would imagine. I suspect if they sold copies for $300 a shot, they'd do well, and probably cover any losses their hardware side had, but going to a lot of effort (for a port, and maintining drivers etc) to end up treading water really isn't worth it.
It may still happen at some time in the future of course: markets change (Apple is moving more and more into iPods and music sales for instance), and a shift in opportunities could make it more viable. I wouldn't write it off as impossible, merely as very unlikely without some serious changes in the market first.
Jedidiah.
This would kill apple however because nobody in their right mind would pay $2000+ for a good mac when they could pay for a PC at $1500 and get mac OS on it as well.
See, that's just not a good enough reason. In part because it's not true. Take a look at the G5 iMac. It sells, in a large part, because of its design and style. People in their right minds would still be willing to pay a premium for nice Apple hardware because, as the Apple fanatics keep telling us, it is nice hardware.
Yes, you'll definitely take a hit to your sales on hardware, but it wouldn't be utterly fatal - not when you've got all the revenue from charging MS style pricing for MacOS X on x86 (we're not talking OEM pricing here). I don't think it would put Apple under in any way shape or form. It just wouldn't suddenly expand Apples revenue to quite the extent people would expect either.
Jedidiah.
A good point, but it need not be done through government. The company where I work puts in its marketing material a reference to the "ISO 9002" quality standard. They also put a reference to the private company that did the audit and certified that the processes here do follow the ISO-9002 standards. All this is done without any interference from any government and it works fine.
Sure, but as long as it is voluntary for a company to sign up to such a standard, all the companies that don't bother can have their long drawn out court case that costs a fortune - so if they have more money than the consumer, they might just win.
No system is going to be perfect here, but there are some very reasonable justifications for either system.
Jedidiah.
A true free market solves this by having these big corporations *compete* against each other rather than against the people who consume their products.
Because big corporations don't have to compete against one another when they have to label their products according to a regulation?
If a consumer feels that they have been screwed, the product is defective, etc, they have the option of going to someone else to get it. Odds are they'll tell their friends, too. This effect is instantaneous and will sort out any company / individual that the market deems troublesome.
Instantaneous you say? A word of mouth campaign about a company with poor product has an instantaneous significant effect on the company? So all the MS security flaws, and people's general unhappiness with their computing expereicne has caused a rapid turnaround for MS's fortunes? Yes, in a perfect world where everyone is rational, and takes time to research all their purchasing decisions the free market will efficiently smack down bad companies. In the real world it takes quite a long time for sufficient consumer unrest to make any significant dent. You're arguing the "real life" situation of my theoretical proposition against the pure theory side of your own. Don't you think that's more than a little disingenuous?
You complain about large corporations weighing in with expensive lawyers in the court system as a downside against my theoretical proposition, yet neglect to mention large corporations weighing with extremely expensive advertising campaigns to efficiently quash any rumours of defective products.
Ever had to deal with Dell service? They suck right? Yet everyone still buys Dell. Convenience, advertising, and price have a remarkably large impact on consumer decision making in the real world.
Look, neither system is some perfect paragon of efficiency and effectiveness. All I'm trying to point out is that, at least from the theoretical view, you can stack up fairly well reasoned arguments for either way of doing of things.
Jedidiah.
The cost of a box of cereal that gives you food poisoning is much higher than the cost of one that doesn't. Try learning some basic economics.
And I always know which food will give me food poisoning before I buy it, allowing me to easily factor in the extra cost.
Jedidiah.
No the premise here is why give these two candidates and only these two candidates a free ride publicity wise? Remeber it is not just the debates but the spin and free airtime that comes after.
Spin broadcast on private channels that can choose what they care to show and how they care to show it. You see, I can see David Cobb's reasoning: he doesn't support political campaigning in private hands - he wants to see everythign handled with public funds over public airwaves, and clearly all of this goes against his ideals. I just don't see what Badnarik is on about. All of this is being done within Libertarian principles - it's all private, so they have a right to choose who they show and who they don't.
All I've seen is a few arguments about it being held at a University recieving public funding, but really that's a pretty slim argument, and seems like more of an excuse than a decent reason.
Jedidiah.
Or do you believe that, just because the law says so, no one will do otherwise?
The principle of regulating it through law is that it then greases the legal system when a problem arises. Instead of having a long drawn out lawsuit about whether the possible mislabelling may or may not have been in harmful, and several round of litigation, you now have a law on the books so it goes straigth to "They broke this law right here", and the case is largely open and shut.
That's the theory. I'm not saying it works, but there is some reasoning behind all of this.
Jedidiah.
So let me get this straight - we're discussing whether having some regulation on labelling forces consumers into complacency, while smart consumers (such as yourself) don't trust the system at all, and bother to properly research and understand what they're buying... and yet you complain about manfuacturers and the
1000MB vs 1024MB in a hard drive
Funny, I was pretty sure the 1GB = 1000MB. Perhaps you should do a little more research yourself, and note that what you're thinking of is 1GiB = 1024MiB with MebiBytes, and GibiBytes.
Good to know consumers won't get misinformed when they take the trouble to properly learn about this stuff themselves.
Jedidiah.
Fire: Pay in advance, just like your garbage service. If a firefighting company doesn't perform, people will give their business to a competitor.
Yup, and it will probably only take 4 or 5 destroyed homes that the company neglected to attend before sufficient word of mouth has spread that this particular company is unreliable, and they lose enough business that they actually find themselves in any financial difficulty. Then again, if they didn't actually bother to pay for decent firefighting equipment (who needs to when you're not going to bother going...) they could probably run a little longer. The free market works. It's kind of abitch for the 5 families who lost their homes (including irreplacable sentimental items, so don't say "insurance will fix all") and potentially loved ones in the fire.
It's okay though, because they can sue... The now bankrupt fire company which already spent all their cash on drugs, alcohol and women. And I'm sure the court mandated damages will do well to replace the dead daughter and family heirlooms.
But who would subscribe to such a poor fire company in the first place? Only idiots right? They had it coming. Because lord knows that only complete idiots have ever been taken in by slick advertising or propaganda (even the kind with 0 substance).
Brilliant system. I love it.
Jedidiah.