I don't agree overmuch with Rush Limbaugh (though he makes good points on occasion), nor do I agree with you, evidently, though we've obviously considered a lot of the same ideas.
But the key point I see in what you wrote is that there are distinctions to be made among capitalism, psuedo-capitalism, and anti-capitalism. For instance, don't blame capitalism for government babysitters called public schools, or for ROTC at these institutions, but do note that these are part of the 'psuedo capitalism' you mention in passing. (Check out sepschool.org.) And no, private school grads are probably no more likely to be ultracapitalist, at least not because they went to private schools. Having been to both at different points, that's my impression at least. Government funding and curricula have lowered standards all over the place, so private schools aren't as much better as would be nice.
Distinctions ought also be made between the people who write and report the news (who tend to be leftish) and those who own the papers (who tend to be rightish, at least in those areas convenient to business owners). Of course, Establishmentarianism is a stronger force that either capitalism or anti-capitalism, at least in the US.
Within a free(ish) society, people are free to educate or to de-educate themselves. 3-5 headlines, or reading for hours in a library (whether its state-funded or voluntarily funded), or renouncing worldly things and living as a mendicant monk, all up to you.
I will try to spend a reasonably portion of my life reading, eating lobster, writing, and hopefully meeting a wonderful woman, not watching much business television. We've all got different paths.
So if someone frames you by putting something incriminating on your hard drive, you're fine with the computer being seized (since "we"'re all doing it, in effect) for a few years? I'm not.
Obedience to "the system" is not what the Founders advocated, and for good reason. Germans passed laws which allowed Hitler to legally become the most powerful German politician. Would you have said to any who griped at this within Germany,
"They" do not pass laws solely because you are doing something "They" do not like. "We" pass laws, and we involve ourselves in passing laws, based on whom we elect into office, and the feedback/support/angst that we give our representatives. If you're not interested in being part of the system, go the hell somewhere else. I suggest someplace far away.
Cheap shot? Sure, but the point is to consider the consequences of the Permissionism you're advocating.
More reasonably, there is a huge body of law which is passed by no one you / we / I have elected, whether or not there is some link to elected officials at some point. When it comes to the FCC, which "we" are you referring to? How many links in the political chain does it take before it's a grey mass, and not the friendly politician who shook your hand and promised to "represent" you? Are you not concerned in the least that there are too many laws and agencies clinging to us like leeches?
And actually, yes, "they" really do pass laws because you are doing something they don't like -- case in point, producing alcoholic beverages. It's one of those things which seem absurd, even amusing, except they really happened. Unless you're a big fan of Prohibition, I'm guessing you'll agree that prohibition is not such a hot thing, and that it violated personal freedoms as it lowered respect for the law. How'd you like your opposition to an existing law or one being devised to be on record with the Nice Folks Protecting You as reference material when you're tried for disobeying such a law?
There is racism and other cultural divides in the US and other places, and plenty of them! Some people simply won't associate with others based on external and historical factors. Shame on them, and their loss. (Try visiting Korea as a Japanese tourist, or Japan as a Korea. Try pledging a US fraternity of the 'wrong' race.*)
However, what conclusions should one draw from that fact that racism and its cousins all exist?
Some people think we should counteract racism by officializing it -- with timetables, quotas, 'preferences,' etc to carefully track numbers by skin tone, sex, etc, in the effort of making sure that the 'right' number of each defined class is going to 4-year colleges, working in the Department of Bureaucracy, etc. Some people think it will go away if we stand very very still and don't make eye contact.
I've seen no evidence that it is, so I don't think that racism (which I will use from now on as a shorthand for all the other things that people lump with it, like religious discrimination and sexual discrimination) is a curable disease at all, at least not like scurvy -- there is no magic cure, like eating limes. Racism etc. springs up in all sorts of contexts. Serb / Croat, among Liberian tribes, in N. Ireland... it isn't innoculable.
So what to do about it? Declare all people equal (which the US Constitution did, even while many people were enslaved... finally amended by what, the 14th Amendment?) and after that allow people to follow their consciences so long as they do not initiate violence on another person. I think that is the approach which most values human freedom. If someone is a racist, Fine. Bring on the segregated lunch counters, as long as they are not government owned. Let them suffer for it by being denied the custom of those who they don't like, and anyone else who doesn't want to swell their coffers. Can you think of any big companies likely to institute such a policy? A nice thing about capitalism is that it has built-in incentives to treat potential customers nicely even if you don't like them otherwise. Sort of a neat trick, with an automatic feedback mechanism that sounds like "ka-CHING!"
timothy
* This is sheerly hypothetical. I am not urging anyone to join a fraternity unless they are good and sure they want to. And even then.
p.s. And no, band-aids don't come in milky blue, so they look pinky-brown on my sun-deprived Euromutt self.
Rising out of poverty through effort is just "bullshit"? Gotta disagree with you there, based both on some people I've never met (like the ones I mentioned in the first post, but with a few minute's though I'm sure you can think of dozens more) and many more people who I have. I'm sorry if you believe that people are basically doomed to stay where they're born. In that case, I hope you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth!;) I know people who are lazy and poor, lazy and rich, hardworking and poor, hardworking and rich, and many many combinations between these.
And actually, I didn't mention a "survey;" the factoid on stock ownership was part of a page that the Seattle Times had listing various tidbits about US stock exchanges, historical events relating to the US's 8 largest exchanges, etc. I bumped into it after reading the post to which mine was responding, who said that only a small percentage of Americans owned stock. I don't know how they gathered their information, but it's a good question, and I will devote some small amount of my mental energy to seeing what other sources say about this. It does jibe with other claims I've heard about this over the years. But to clarify, because you seem not to have read or understood what I wrote, the statistic I named did not "leave out" the groups you mention any more than citing the number of people with Ford autos "leaves out" the people who don't have them. Sure it does, but that claim is meaningless -- it leaves them out by definition, since it's counting something else. Just like the number of kids with cats "leaves out" all those kids without cats... so?
Whether a company offers stock as part of its compensation to employees is up to the company, not me. Maybe you should have picked the "30-plus common jobs" you applied for with this in mind if that is something you value. Also, *applying* by itself won't get you very far; you probably have to get the job. At many places, employees are also offered discounts on stock as an incentive, whether or not they are given it outright. The company I work for does not have stock because it is privately held. YMMV. The ability to *purchase* stock is open to anyone with a hundred dollars or so. Do some brokers have account minimums? Yes. Are there other ways to invest? Yes -- you might want to look at dripcentral.com, a site devoted to investment through Dividend Reinvestment Programs.
What I meant by calling stock ownership a "leveler" is that the possibility for private citizens of any class besides hand-to-mouth poverty to own some shares in companies provides the chance for someone who lives in (say) the trailer park I live in to benefit from the success of Dell Computer, or AT&T, or any other publically traded stock.
If you don't like how much the CEO makes, don't invest in the company, or maybe *do* invest and help vote in someone else. (Or on the other hand, climb a mountain and howl about the unfairness of it all. Not as effective but I hear it's very cleansing.) Some CEOs are probably far overpaid, but some aren't. I hope the ones that are overpaid work for a company I don't have an investment in. Gedanksexperiment: Could the average floor worker at, say, Intel switch bodies with Andy Grove for a few years without the stockholders noticing? If you know the joke that goes "I want you to punch my hand as hard as you can when I count to three..." you know why CEOs can earn a lot of money for sitting in an office.
I'm not a worshipper of capitalism per se; I'm in favor of freedom though, and that makes the coercion of non-capitalist societies unattractive. (That includes the coercion which is slowly poisoning the US, where I live.) Capitalism is like physics - practical enough that it really doesn't need worshippers.
You don't sound "outrageous," in fact what you're saying I think is the common, resentful view which state-run and -funded schools, invasive government and trendy cynicism breed.
timothy
Front mounted OK, rear slanty-piece better.
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Vhairos wrote:
'm sorry, but I just don't get it, why do I want ports on the front? I mean, I can see why I might want USB's there if was going to swap them alot, but why anything else? I don't want a bunch of cords coming out of the front and back of the damned thing.
I agree with Vhairos that this is a bit much on the front, but though he might not want "a bunch of cords coming out of the front and back of the damned thing," if you're connecting external devices, those are at present your only choices. (Any side ports?) Many peripherals could plausably be wireless right now, actually, (though I don't know whether there are driver issues with the available cordless keyboards and pointing devices) but let's say at the very least, you will be physically connecting a monitor to your PC.
What I would like to see instead is a slanted panel on the top / back of the pc with a ribbon cable to the motherboard to carry connections. Now to make some bad ascii art that won't survive posting, let me see:
__________ a / | / | / | b | | | | | | | | |_____________| (side view)
(a) is the panel I'd like to see.
Space being what it is (and I live in a 22' Airstream trailer), computers get shoved into corners, under desks, beside carefully-squeezed-on monitors, etc. Reaching the ports on the rear can be a pain in the rear can be...
Also, the cables that are on the rear require a certain amount of clearance, and generously sized PC cases, while nicer to install things into, can take up *all* of some desks front--> rear space.
If such a case design exists, someone please tell me about it! Thanks.
An anonymous coward dribbled out like so much rancid spittle:
I was watching some cable news channels the other day, and it occurred to me "Why do they focus SO much on stocks?" I mean, a very small portion of the US population invests in them.
Actually, a fairly high number of Americans own stock. In fat, according to the online edition of the Seattle Times, the number of Americans who stock is over 100 million. This is more than a third of the population, I think, and far more than a third of the adult population. People own stock because it's part of their compensation package, because they save for retirement with a mutual fund, because they sent in an application to Yahoo or other Internet company offering free stock as incentive at their startup, because day trading seems to have replaced tattoos for those born between 1976 and 82, or for any of several other reasons. Not everyone's a big investor (I have only a few shares, and a lot of people are in that boat) but if you own even three shares of Microsoft, you'd be interested if it dove or jumped, wouldn't you?
Stockownership is one of the great levelers that capitalist public ownership has which is so totally absent from feudal or totally-statist economies, because you can own a small piece of Compaq or GE just by paying the price of a share (or a few).
Now on to the serious stuff.
You'll also notice many ads for white specific products, while NONE for blacks and the lower class (like hair care, make up, expensive vehicles, etc.)
Hold on a minute. I can think of a very few products that are functionally 'white-specific' (or race-specific in any sense) and they're mostly cosmetic, like creams to lighten or darken the skin of those who find their own too dark or too light respectively, and chemicals to curl or uncurl hair with the same sort of division. Marketing is another matter, important but different. Products are marketed to the overlap of the interested and the eligible, and this results in a different *marketing* strategy for different products, but does not make them race-specific any more than advertising salsa in Texas means people in Minnesota can't have any.
And are you really lumping together "blacks and the lower class"?! It's my favorite question, but is this inflammatory, racist flamebait? In America, there are no heriditary titles as they still are in Brittain and in other monarchal / semi-monarchal countries, and lower-class is (despite the best efforts of the Welfarists) still an adjective rather than a noun. Are some people born in poverty poor when they die? Sure. Are people 'trapped' in one place or economic state because they were born into it? Ask Thomas Sowell and Mario Puzo about that. Heck, ask Bill once he and the intern come out of his closed office.
This same audience who can afford these products, or the products are made more specifically for their race, also (percentage wise) is more likely to own stocks and other things of that nature.
Again, the reference to products 'made for their race' is either flamebait or ought to be. Would Advertising for SPF 30 sunscreen, jerrycurls and makeup built for the skin of specific Asian people be enough to pay for the evening news? Are expensive cars not "made for their [whose?] race"? What are you saying?! An observation of any large city will prove within minutes that plenty of non-whites own expensive cars (where I live, there is a large low-rider culture, and many of those are aesthetic knockouts) and that plenty of whites drive shitboxes. Sounds like you are willfully confusing race and culture, and maybe even race with species.
People have been pleasantly surpized lately by the fact that the FCC is being less aggressive than they formerly hinted at re. low-power radio stations. Wow, thanks, FCC!
Point is, the FCC (in its control, through licensure) of US airwaves relies on a wrong-headed view of airwave resources, declaring not just that airwaves are finite but they the FCC has the right and the vision to divide the pie. The premise is that if the radio spectrum was simply seen as an arena of voluntary human interaction, either anarchy or monopoly would prevail. I say this is patently false, and extending the analogy that the FCC relies on to justify itself to other fields makes elaboration here pointless.
The bigger picture, though, is that in the US (and everywhere), there are acronymical organizations (bureaucracies with a capital B) designed to 'regulate' and --unbelievably!-- 'stimulate' certain aspects of your interaction with other people by printing hefty volumes of their Wise and Considered rules. And the longer these organizations are around, the harder it is to realize clearheadedly that all such bodies are artificial -- as in, 'artifice' -- rather than remnants of the Dreamtime. Radio spectra could be split, used, sold, shared in any number of possible combinations; it takes the shortsightedness of appointed officials and their sack of good intentions to declare all visions other than their own illusory.
There probably are some individual rules passed by some of these Departments of Abbreviation that you agree with; I've had people tell me what a bad person I am if I don't like the EPA because they 'protect the environment,' for instance. (Sort of like being against ALF bombings and being berated as 'an animal hater.') I like clean water and clean air; government regulations no matter how extensive have little to do with either in any way which an unfettered market could not deliver, faster and better.
Like I said, in the bigger picture, there are simply too many laws and too many bodies given authority to pass them. "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state." And boy, are our laws numerous! FCC, NHSTA, DEA, FDA, FTC, DOE, EPA, DOA, BATF, and those are just the biggies. When the body of law is in practical terms unavailable to most people, and every industry is subject to regulation, licensure and sanction, the result is not capitalism, but rather a form of mercantilism (in which favored producers are de facto appointed by the ruling authority, and produce at it's discretion) which is only a few jumps, winks and nudges from fascism. (As a political system -- quite apart from the societal control that it requires and which can have the results we've seen in films about concentration and death camps of WWII.)
Rather than you simply making your choice among available goods, the philosophy is that the range of goods and their qualities oiught first be inspected and approved by the Higher Ups, and their availability only possible if their producers have jumped through the right hoops.
And those higher ups, having been appointed by congress (or appointed by such appointees, etc etc) are arrogant in their power. They seize things they don't like (computers, radio equipment, houses, boats, cars) and know that even if the owners get it back, they've been screwed but good. Fair? Ask Steve Jackson.
Just be grateful it hasn't quite reached software yet. (Please correct me if there is in fact already some busybody agency regulating software...)
As I like to say, "If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind this anal probe."
Since criminality is decided by the same people (that is, an entrenched, poorly-responsive government) as would like to watch your movements, listen to your phone calls for dirty thoughts, etc, the idea that "this should only worry you if you are a criminal" is nonsensical.
If you do something they don't like, you'll soon find that you're a criminal.
coyote-san, thanks for answering calmly this post, which reads either like flamebait or from NAMBLA (or flamebait from NAMBLA).
I also won't jump down the slippery slope about Traci Lords etc... there is a grey area, and youngish people do have / can have sex. That's *not* to say "children," especially not "young children."
mwalker did the right thing (and I say that as someone who generally distrusts the police at whatever level -- see the Steve Jackson references throughout this thread) and I am impressed that he doesn't sound angrier than he does.
Disclaimer: This answer is not definitive, and I know that the innocent word 'trust' has been turned into a buzzword, or at least it's close to it now... but FWIW;)
In discussing the concept of "trust" / "authenticity," etc. context changes everything, and when people talk about trusting email vs. trusting snail mail, I think there's sometimes the impression that people ever (or often, say) rely on either of these methods in complete isolation.
In my job, I sometimes request and receive publication permissions for logos and quotes via email; it's usually the most reliable way to reach people in my industry (I work in advertising for personal computers that rhyme with "Smell").
Now, since the email originates with me for the most part, and there is usually some level of phone contact, the occasional fax, etc, I have no real problem with presenting the resulting replies as permission to our client, though usually we also get paper copies in the mail as well.
If someone with the email address "EdMcMahon@whitehouse.gov" wrote email to say that I'd won a million dollars and simply needed to mail him $10 to cover the shipping on the winnings, I would be... suspicious. If my mom wrote to say that my sister will be home for a certain week next month, I would probably not be.
Point is, spoofing someone into thinking that *any* communication (phone, fax, email, snail mail, smoke signals, whatever) is legitimate when it is not requires that it be innocuous seeming and have enough clues indicating authenticity that they would never question its legitimacy. It's not just putting on a Halloween mask and saying "I'm Papa Smurf!" -- you actually have to at least make the other person think that you are only 3 apples tall, blue, etc.
And another thing to point out is that people seem to have a lower threshold of trust for paper mail (because everyone knows you can't trust that dang in-ter-net), so perhaps it's easier to actually fool someone with it. In fact, that's my opinion, at least in business contexts.
Cisco was the first to market with many technologies. All came from the same type of R&D projects.So what does this mean for you and me?
Maybe it means we should buy some Cisco stock.;)
But I don't get your drift about xDSL - are you saying it does or does not have a short shelflife? If you're saying it's basically obsolete already, I disagree -- I think DSL will overtake cable modems for small-business and home connections, and become the technology that everyone uses for years and complains about as slow and old until it's replaced... like phone lines have been for while.
The reason I'd like to see a chart that shows the price curve on hard drive space cost is just this... so I could tell how linear / what tendency the line is / has. Even if in 5 years we have hard drive space that is 25 times cheaper, that would mean your USD 180 could get you 200 gigs-plus... and that's room for... well, for a lot.
Though I hope we really do see that kind of increase, from the middle of 1999 this still seems like a crazy one. It wasn't long ago that I was stunned that my computer had an entire gig (!) of hard disk at all.
As some writers have pointed out, some things that are not widely available and cheap would have seemed like an impossible pipedream just a few years ago... even given that storage space has gotten cheaper, it always seems that the curve has to level out soon.
I wonder if there is a site (or if I can intrigue someone into creating one) that shows a curve representing the falling cost of storage space, as in
"X: Time
Y: Cost of 1 MB of (hard drive or equivalent) storage, in constant dollars (how about 1999 just for current easy-ness)"
Similar charts would be great / neat / mind-blowing for both RAM and 'processing power' (though deciding on the unit to measure might be tricky, since processors are not a strict 'x amount of processing'...
Maybe this should have been an Ask Slashdot question instead, but it's this topic which reminded me of this idea which has been brewing a few years.
Mandrake is making money off something that RedHat is trying to sell, and I just think that it is crappy. I would happily use Mandrake, but I would never pay for it. I know its available, just like RedHat, for free. But at the same time I am more than happy to pay for RedHat, simply because I like the idea of supporting their work.
Let's say you should pay for Mandrake's distribution. Would you be somehow supporting Mandrake's software contributions (GPLed) and at the same time *not* supporting Redhat (also GPLed, and thus able to take full advantage of Mandrake innovations)?
You say it's "crappy" that Mandrake should sell a distrib based on RH work, but as you can read in other posts and other places, Redhat is as much a reseller of previous works as any other Linux distributor. Both RH and Mandrake are paying full-time developers to improve their distributions as well. Each is free to fold back in (or reject as buggy, or as useless, or whyever...) the contributions of the other. Result is cool... I have Mandrake 6.0 and like it very much. It's Redhat-based, yeah, and it went on smoother than the last time I tried RH, also yeah. So... what's the problem?
And also, as you can read in this same discussion, RH has publically expressed support for Mandrake, and I see no reason to doubt their sincerity, at least not for a few years (when competition might become closer between them.). Mandrake is expanding the Linux market by making installation of what-is-essentially-RH-6.0 easier; as market leader and brand name extra'ordinaire, Red hat probably stands to gain nearly 1-to-1 with Mandrake sales in the medium -term because people are trying / switching to and Mandrake is one big reason why.
So if RH doesn't think it's "crappy," (and they're the ones you're trying to support), then to what end do you dislike Mandrake so? RH doesn't, and they're the ones who ought to know about the good of RH.
I bet those guys would have / have had good parties together, and they deserve it, too.
Re:Who cares about consoles by m3000 (m2999athotmaildotcom) on 18/08/99 6:42 EDT (#) (User Info) http://m3000.1wh.com Most of the stuff you are complaining about, are changing for this coming generation. They will have internet gaming. The now defunt (in the US anyway) 64DD was going to allow you to update cars, sports teams, or new tracks to your games. Maybe Nintendo will release a harddrive like device for the Dolphin that will write stuff like that, or download it off the internet. That would be neat. And the big reason I like console gaming, is it's cheap, and multiplayer with my friends. I can have a great time being together, playing Mario Golf or Smash Brothers, and don't have to be sitting alone staring at the computer by myself.
First, my qualifications: None. I haven't played more than an hour total on console games since I gave up (regular) NES' Super Mario Brothers.
Next: my response to the post above is confusion. Yes, you can do multi-player with your friends. But are you really content with the proprietary gaming networks that it will require to do multi-player on the new Sony or the DreamCast? With PC-based gaming, you can do your multiplayer gaming over a local area network or over the Internet... and you don't have to pay a special at-the-mercy-of-the-maker fee.
Insight appreciated, this is somwhat of a random comment I know, but relying on the console makers for multi-play network capabilities seems a lot like WebTV or AOL for email service.
Just a thought,
timothy
Re:Great computers for kids
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Two things:
1) Not everyone has the disposable income to provide 'the technology of today' to their kids.
2) It is good to find out how useful something is without obsessing about always having the newest / coolest, and this is a lesson that kids need probably more than adults. Not that it's not widespread among adults (like me!), but it's probably better to try to head it off then correct it later on. And comptuters that are a few years old (a 486 as in the first poster on this thread) is plenty fast enough for more than I'd like to admit, since I have a 233MHz K6...
Thanks! I'd wondered about this, but I've always seen it attributed to Goldwater without mentioning Jefferson.
:)
Point is still the same though... extremism is used as a dirty word, but it oughtn't be other than a morally neutral modifier rendered good or bad by context.
Linux, at least in the sense of "Mandrake Linux 6.0."
I don't say this to be contrary, either -- I agree with you that it's a shame that cut-and-paste (among other things) is less consistent in Linux / Unix / various graphical interfaces than in Windows, but as people have pointed out, Windows has a lot of inconsistencies / inexplicables which (and this is the important part!) it's harder to find answers clarifying than with Linux.
I mean, "In order to End your session, go to the button labeled 'Start'" is pretty offensive.
I'd certainly say that Linux, as embodied in RH / Mandrake 6.0 (can't speak for others) is on par with Windows in intelligibility, *once installed*. And that is from a person who can find electronic devices very frustrating.
"Truthfully, I think that the framers of the constitution should have stopped at "Congress shall make no law" and been finished there.
Hear, hear! Actually, I'm in favor of some laws occasionally, but every law should not only be necessary but should be periodically reviewed (or reviewable on demand).
But I think every law can be analyzed in terms of how much freedom it either safeguards or removes -- and that this is the most important benchmark. Not "how many lives can be saved," "making an important moral statement," "protecting members of Interest Group X," etc.
Today's politicians are (with few exceptions) late-Roman empire types, dispensing favors in order to keep their purple togas -- not the revolutionaries who broke from Brittain and said "No taxation without representation." Instead, it's "Taxation is OK, so long as my district gets a portion of gravy, and my friend here gets the contract for ladling it out."
just thoughts (with the conclusion that voting l/Libertarian is the least evil thing to do...)
"I guess we can only hope that the justice system doesnt get screwed with extremist appointees... i think that there are going to be a large amount of privacy and free speech debates. we definately need some strict constitutionalists in there...
I'll agree with Dr. Wiggnz that we need some strict Constitutionalists if we are to defend free speech rights and privacy, but remember, that is a position that requires some extrapolation to take -- nowwhere, for instance, is a 'right to privacy' outlined in the Constitution, and many people clamor *against* 'strict Constitutionalists' on the basis that they would try to inhibit free speech. (See examples below.)
And the difference between a strict Constitutionalist and an extremist is that the first (to those who support it) is a positive term and the second is nearly always pejorative unless used by people who know that *other* people are using it pejoratively. Without getting into whether you like his views (those I've read I have liked, but I'm no expert on his entire body of work), consider whether you consider Robert Bork a) "an extremist" or b) "a strict Constitutionalist," both of which he might agree with (I would).
How about Patrick Henry?
Barry Goldwater? ("Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.")
The other thing to consider is that freedom of speech is a complex thing. I think it would be silly if AOL got the trademark for "You've got mail," both because similar phrasing has been used in other pre-AOL systems for many years and because it is a simple descriptive sentence.
I'm suprized that "Buddy List" though got nixed, and if I were AOL I'd feel cheated... trademarking doesn't prevent generic use in non-commerical areas (I could write email and say "hey, you're on my buddy list, eh?" but I couldn't start an email service and give the option "Create a new Buddy List!" That is, if the phrase *were* protectable)
Just some thoughts -
timothy
The closest thing yet to MS support?
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Wasn't SCO a Microsoft spinoff?
If that is the case (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if not!), what is the relationship between the two now?
If SCO starts doing Linux support, it'd be an interesting irony, eh? It'd be funny if SCO should be called in when MS suddenly needs more Linux support than it can generate internally...
timothy
p.s. I don't hate Microsoft; I just like Free / free software better for both the reasons given by RMS and the ones given by ESR.
Though even experts in the field disagree on exactly the best conditions, general concensus is that the best software is the result of a mild season with moderate rainfalls separated by relatively dry periods, and aging in casks made out of Tiki wood which has previously held fine literature.
The casks should be turned at least once a fortnight, to ensure that no bits have become lodged in the crevices.
Upon bottling (preferably into extremely flat, aluminum flasks), the barrel residue can be separately processed into a second aging batch. The result will be slightly more refined, and should be served in smaller SP glasses (for "Service Packs" -a term of uncertain origin). These are not typically available in cases, and are much prized by collectors.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree overmuch with Rush Limbaugh (though he makes good points on occasion), nor do I agree with you, evidently, though we've obviously considered a lot of the same ideas.
But the key point I see in what you wrote is that there are distinctions to be made among capitalism, psuedo-capitalism, and anti-capitalism. For instance, don't blame capitalism for government babysitters called public schools, or for ROTC at these institutions, but do note that these are part of the 'psuedo capitalism' you mention in passing. (Check out sepschool.org.) And no, private school grads are probably no more likely to be ultracapitalist, at least not because they went to private schools. Having been to both at different points, that's my impression at least. Government funding and curricula have lowered standards all over the place, so private schools aren't as much better as would be nice.
Distinctions ought also be made between the people who write and report the news (who tend to be leftish) and those who own the papers (who tend to be rightish, at least in those areas convenient to business owners). Of course, Establishmentarianism is a stronger force that either capitalism or anti-capitalism, at least in the US.
Within a free(ish) society, people are free to educate or to de-educate themselves. 3-5 headlines, or reading for hours in a library (whether its state-funded or voluntarily funded), or renouncing worldly things and living as a mendicant monk, all up to you.
I will try to spend a reasonably portion of my life reading, eating lobster, writing, and hopefully meeting a wonderful woman, not watching much business television. We've all got different paths.
timothy
Obedience to "the system" is not what the Founders advocated, and for good reason. Germans passed laws which allowed Hitler to legally become the most powerful German politician. Would you have said to any who griped at this within Germany,
Cheap shot? Sure, but the point is to consider the consequences of the Permissionism you're advocating.
More reasonably, there is a huge body of law which is passed by no one you / we / I have elected, whether or not there is some link to elected officials at some point. When it comes to the FCC, which "we" are you referring to? How many links in the political chain does it take before it's a grey mass, and not the friendly politician who shook your hand and promised to "represent" you? Are you not concerned in the least that there are too many laws and agencies clinging to us like leeches?
And actually, yes, "they" really do pass laws because you are doing something they don't like -- case in point, producing alcoholic beverages. It's one of those things which seem absurd, even amusing, except they really happened. Unless you're a big fan of Prohibition, I'm guessing you'll agree that prohibition is not such a hot thing, and that it violated personal freedoms as it lowered respect for the law. How'd you like your opposition to an existing law or one being devised to be on record with the Nice Folks Protecting You as reference material when you're tried for disobeying such a law?
Well ok,
timothy
There is racism and other cultural divides in the US and other places, and plenty of them! Some people simply won't associate with others based on external and historical factors. Shame on them, and their loss. (Try visiting Korea as a Japanese tourist, or Japan as a Korea. Try pledging a US fraternity of the 'wrong' race.*)
... it isn't innoculable.
... finally amended by what, the 14th Amendment?) and after that allow people to follow their consciences so long as they do not initiate violence on another person. I think that is the approach which most values human freedom. If someone is a racist, Fine. Bring on the segregated lunch counters, as long as they are not government owned. Let them suffer for it by being denied the custom of those who they don't like, and anyone else who doesn't want to swell their coffers. Can you think of any big companies likely to institute such a policy? A nice thing about capitalism is that it has built-in incentives to treat potential customers nicely even if you don't like them otherwise. Sort of a neat trick, with an automatic feedback mechanism that sounds like "ka-CHING!"
However, what conclusions should one draw from that fact that racism and its cousins all exist?
Some people think we should counteract racism by officializing it -- with timetables, quotas, 'preferences,' etc to carefully track numbers by skin tone, sex, etc, in the effort of making sure that the 'right' number of each defined class is going to 4-year colleges, working in the Department of Bureaucracy, etc. Some people think it will go away if we stand very very still and don't make eye contact.
I've seen no evidence that it is, so I don't think that racism (which I will use from now on as a shorthand for all the other things that people lump with it, like religious discrimination and sexual discrimination) is a curable disease at all, at least not like scurvy -- there is no magic cure, like eating limes. Racism etc. springs up in all sorts of contexts. Serb / Croat, among Liberian tribes, in N. Ireland
So what to do about it? Declare all people equal (which the US Constitution did, even while many people were enslaved
timothy
* This is sheerly hypothetical. I am not urging anyone to join a fraternity unless they are good and sure they want to. And even then.
p.s. And no, band-aids don't come in milky blue, so they look pinky-brown on my sun-deprived Euromutt self.
Rising out of poverty through effort is just "bullshit"? Gotta disagree with you there, based both on some people I've never met (like the ones I mentioned in the first post, but with a few minute's though I'm sure you can think of dozens more) and many more people who I have. I'm sorry if you believe that people are basically doomed to stay where they're born. In that case, I hope you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth! ;) I know people who are lazy and poor, lazy and rich, hardworking and poor, hardworking and rich, and many many combinations between these.
... so?
..." you know why CEOs can earn a lot of money for sitting in an office.
And actually, I didn't mention a "survey;" the factoid on stock ownership was part of a page that the Seattle Times had listing various tidbits about US stock exchanges, historical events relating to the US's 8 largest exchanges, etc. I bumped into it after reading the post to which mine was responding, who said that only a small percentage of Americans owned stock. I don't know how they gathered their information, but it's a good question, and I will devote some small amount of my mental energy to seeing what other sources say about this. It does jibe with other claims I've heard about this over the years. But to clarify, because you seem not to have read or understood what I wrote, the statistic I named did not "leave out" the groups you mention any more than citing the number of people with Ford autos "leaves out" the people who don't have them. Sure it does, but that claim is meaningless -- it leaves them out by definition, since it's counting something else. Just like the number of kids with cats "leaves out" all those kids without cats
Whether a company offers stock as part of its compensation to employees is up to the company, not me. Maybe you should have picked the "30-plus common jobs" you applied for with this in mind if that is something you value. Also, *applying* by itself won't get you very far; you probably have to get the job. At many places, employees are also offered discounts on stock as an incentive, whether or not they are given it outright. The company I work for does not have stock because it is privately held. YMMV. The ability to *purchase* stock is open to anyone with a hundred dollars or so. Do some brokers have account minimums? Yes. Are there other ways to invest? Yes -- you might want to look at dripcentral.com, a site devoted to investment through Dividend Reinvestment Programs.
What I meant by calling stock ownership a "leveler" is that the possibility for private citizens of any class besides hand-to-mouth poverty to own some shares in companies provides the chance for someone who lives in (say) the trailer park I live in to benefit from the success of Dell Computer, or AT&T, or any other publically traded stock.
If you don't like how much the CEO makes, don't invest in the company, or maybe *do* invest and help vote in someone else. (Or on the other hand, climb a mountain and howl about the unfairness of it all. Not as effective but I hear it's very cleansing.) Some CEOs are probably far overpaid, but some aren't. I hope the ones that are overpaid work for a company I don't have an investment in. Gedanksexperiment: Could the average floor worker at, say, Intel switch bodies with Andy Grove for a few years without the stockholders noticing? If you know the joke that goes "I want you to punch my hand as hard as you can when I count to three
I'm not a worshipper of capitalism per se; I'm in favor of freedom though, and that makes the coercion of non-capitalist societies unattractive. (That includes the coercion which is slowly poisoning the US, where I live.) Capitalism is like physics - practical enough that it really doesn't need worshippers.
You don't sound "outrageous," in fact what you're saying I think is the common, resentful view which state-run and -funded schools, invasive government and trendy cynicism breed.
timothy
I agree with Vhairos that this is a bit much on the front, but though he might not want "a bunch of cords coming out of the front and back of the damned thing," if you're connecting external devices, those are at present your only choices. (Any side ports?) Many peripherals could plausably be wireless right now, actually, (though I don't know whether there are driver issues with the available cordless keyboards and pointing devices) but let's say at the very least, you will be physically connecting a monitor to your PC.
What I would like to see instead is a slanted panel on the top / back of the pc with a ribbon cable to the motherboard to carry connections. Now to make some bad ascii art that won't survive posting, let me see:
__________
a / |
/ |
/ | b
| |
| |
| |
| |
|_____________|
(side view)
(a) is the panel I'd like to see.
Space being what it is (and I live in a 22' Airstream trailer), computers get shoved into corners, under desks, beside carefully-squeezed-on monitors, etc. Reaching the ports on the rear can be a pain in the rear can be
Also, the cables that are on the rear require a certain amount of clearance, and generously sized PC cases, while nicer to install things into, can take up *all* of some desks front--> rear space.
If such a case design exists, someone please tell me about it! Thanks.
timothy
I'll see you your alleged "high standards" and raise you Steve Jackson games.
I call.
timothy
Actually, a fairly high number of Americans own stock. In fat, according to the online edition of the Seattle Times, the number of Americans who stock is over 100 million. This is more than a third of the population, I think, and far more than a third of the adult population. People own stock because it's part of their compensation package, because they save for retirement with a mutual fund, because they sent in an application to Yahoo or other Internet company offering free stock as incentive at their startup, because day trading seems to have replaced tattoos for those born between 1976 and 82, or for any of several other reasons. Not everyone's a big investor (I have only a few shares, and a lot of people are in that boat) but if you own even three shares of Microsoft, you'd be interested if it dove or jumped, wouldn't you?
Stockownership is one of the great levelers that capitalist public ownership has which is so totally absent from feudal or totally-statist economies, because you can own a small piece of Compaq or GE just by paying the price of a share (or a few).
Now on to the serious stuff.
Hold on a minute. I can think of a very few products that are functionally 'white-specific' (or race-specific in any sense) and they're mostly cosmetic, like creams to lighten or darken the skin of those who find their own too dark or too light respectively, and chemicals to curl or uncurl hair with the same sort of division. Marketing is another matter, important but different. Products are marketed to the overlap of the interested and the eligible, and this results in a different *marketing* strategy for different products, but does not make them race-specific any more than advertising salsa in Texas means people in Minnesota can't have any.
And are you really lumping together "blacks and the lower class"?! It's my favorite question, but is this inflammatory, racist flamebait? In America, there are no heriditary titles as they still are in Brittain and in other monarchal / semi-monarchal countries, and lower-class is (despite the best efforts of the Welfarists) still an adjective rather than a noun. Are some people born in poverty poor when they die? Sure. Are people 'trapped' in one place or economic state because they were born into it? Ask Thomas Sowell and Mario Puzo about that. Heck, ask Bill once he and the intern come out of his closed office.
Again, the reference to products 'made for their race' is either flamebait or ought to be. Would Advertising for SPF 30 sunscreen, jerrycurls and makeup built for the skin of specific Asian people be enough to pay for the evening news? Are expensive cars not "made for their [whose?] race"? What are you saying?! An observation of any large city will prove within minutes that plenty of non-whites own expensive cars (where I live, there is a large low-rider culture, and many of those are aesthetic knockouts) and that plenty of whites drive shitboxes. Sounds like you are willfully confusing race and culture, and maybe even race with species.
Am I going crazy here or what?
timothy
People have been pleasantly surpized lately by the fact that the FCC is being less aggressive than they formerly hinted at re. low-power radio stations. Wow, thanks, FCC!
...)
Point is, the FCC (in its control, through licensure) of US airwaves relies on a wrong-headed view of airwave resources, declaring not just that airwaves are finite but they the FCC has the right and the vision to divide the pie. The premise is that if the radio spectrum was simply seen as an arena of voluntary human interaction, either anarchy or monopoly would prevail. I say this is patently false, and extending the analogy that the FCC relies on to justify itself to other fields makes elaboration here pointless.
The bigger picture, though, is that in the US (and everywhere), there are acronymical organizations (bureaucracies with a capital B) designed to 'regulate' and --unbelievably!-- 'stimulate' certain aspects of your interaction with other people by printing hefty volumes of their Wise and Considered rules. And the longer these organizations are around, the harder it is to realize clearheadedly that all such bodies are artificial -- as in, 'artifice' -- rather than remnants of the Dreamtime. Radio spectra could be split, used, sold, shared in any number of possible combinations; it takes the shortsightedness of appointed officials and their sack of good intentions to declare all visions other than their own illusory.
There probably are some individual rules passed by some of these Departments of Abbreviation that you agree with; I've had people tell me what a bad person I am if I don't like the EPA because they 'protect the environment,' for instance. (Sort of like being against ALF bombings and being berated as 'an animal hater.') I like clean water and clean air; government regulations no matter how extensive have little to do with either in any way which an unfettered market could not deliver, faster and better.
Like I said, in the bigger picture, there are simply too many laws and too many bodies given authority to pass them. "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state." And boy, are our laws numerous! FCC, NHSTA, DEA, FDA, FTC, DOE, EPA, DOA, BATF, and those are just the biggies. When the body of law is in practical terms unavailable to most people, and every industry is subject to regulation, licensure and sanction, the result is not capitalism, but rather a form of mercantilism (in which favored producers are de facto appointed by the ruling authority, and produce at it's discretion) which is only a few jumps, winks and nudges from fascism. (As a political system -- quite apart from the societal control that it requires and which can have the results we've seen in films about concentration and death camps of WWII.)
Rather than you simply making your choice among available goods, the philosophy is that the range of goods and their qualities oiught first be inspected and approved by the Higher Ups, and their availability only possible if their producers have jumped through the right hoops.
And those higher ups, having been appointed by congress (or appointed by such appointees, etc etc) are arrogant in their power. They seize things they don't like (computers, radio equipment, houses, boats, cars) and know that even if the owners get it back, they've been screwed but good. Fair? Ask Steve Jackson.
Just be grateful it hasn't quite reached software yet. (Please correct me if there is in fact already some busybody agency regulating software
OK, this rant has gone too long.
timothy
As I like to say, "If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind this anal probe."
Since criminality is decided by the same people (that is, an entrenched, poorly-responsive government) as would like to watch your movements, listen to your phone calls for dirty thoughts, etc, the idea that "this should only worry you if you are a criminal" is nonsensical.
If you do something they don't like, you'll soon find that you're a criminal.
timothy
coyote-san, thanks for answering calmly this post, which reads either like flamebait or from NAMBLA (or flamebait from NAMBLA).
... there is a grey area, and youngish people do have / can have sex. That's *not* to say "children," especially not "young children."
I also won't jump down the slippery slope about Traci Lords etc
mwalker did the right thing (and I say that as someone who generally distrusts the police at whatever level -- see the Steve Jackson references throughout this thread) and I am impressed that he doesn't sound angrier than he does.
timothy
Disclaimer: This answer is not definitive, and I know that the innocent word 'trust' has been turned into a buzzword, or at least it's close to it now ... but FWIW;)
... suspicious. If my mom wrote to say that my sister will be home for a certain week next month, I would probably not be.
In discussing the concept of "trust" / "authenticity," etc. context changes everything, and when people talk about trusting email vs. trusting snail mail, I think there's sometimes the impression that people ever (or often, say) rely on either of these methods in complete isolation.
In my job, I sometimes request and receive publication permissions for logos and quotes via email; it's usually the most reliable way to reach people in my industry (I work in advertising for personal computers that rhyme with "Smell").
Now, since the email originates with me for the most part, and there is usually some level of phone contact, the occasional fax, etc, I have no real problem with presenting the resulting replies as permission to our client, though usually we also get paper copies in the mail as well.
If someone with the email address "EdMcMahon@whitehouse.gov" wrote email to say that I'd won a million dollars and simply needed to mail him $10 to cover the shipping on the winnings, I would be
Point is, spoofing someone into thinking that *any* communication (phone, fax, email, snail mail, smoke signals, whatever) is legitimate when it is not requires that it be innocuous seeming and have enough clues indicating authenticity that they would never question its legitimacy. It's not just putting on a Halloween mask and saying "I'm Papa Smurf!" -- you actually have to at least make the other person think that you are only 3 apples tall, blue, etc.
And another thing to point out is that people seem to have a lower threshold of trust for paper mail (because everyone knows you can't trust that dang in-ter-net), so perhaps it's easier to actually fool someone with it. In fact, that's my opinion, at least in business contexts.
Just thoughts,
timothy
Maybe it means we should buy some Cisco stock.
But I don't get your drift about xDSL - are you saying it does or does not have a short shelflife? If you're saying it's basically obsolete already, I disagree -- I think DSL will overtake cable modems for small-business and home connections, and become the technology that everyone uses for years and complains about as slow and old until it's replaced
timothy
The reason I'd like to see a chart that shows the price curve on hard drive space cost is just this ... so I could tell how linear / what tendency the line is / has. Even if in 5 years we have hard drive space that is 25 times cheaper, that would mean your USD 180 could get you 200 gigs-plus ... and that's room for ... well, for a lot.
Though I hope we really do see that kind of increase, from the middle of 1999 this still seems like a crazy one. It wasn't long ago that I was stunned that my computer had an entire gig (!) of hard disk at all.
timothy
This sounds like a fair measure (is there anyone with a technical reason for why MIPS on one machine could not be compared to MIPS on another?).
...
The prices need to be measured in some realstic way, too, though, for the result to mean anything.
Y'know, either retail prices or street prices
timothy
As some writers have pointed out, some things that are not widely available and cheap would have seemed like an impossible pipedream just a few years ago ... even given that storage space has gotten cheaper, it always seems that the curve has to level out soon.
...
I wonder if there is a site (or if I can intrigue someone into creating one) that shows a curve representing the falling cost of storage space, as in
"X: Time
Y: Cost of 1 MB of (hard drive or equivalent) storage, in constant dollars (how about 1999 just for current easy-ness)"
Similar charts would be great / neat / mind-blowing for both RAM and 'processing power' (though deciding on the unit to measure might be tricky, since processors are not a strict 'x amount of processing'
Maybe this should have been an Ask Slashdot question instead, but it's this topic which reminded me of this idea which has been brewing a few years.
Just a thought,
timothy
BELG wrote:
Let's say you should pay for Mandrake's distribution. Would you be somehow supporting Mandrake's software contributions (GPLed) and at the same time *not* supporting Redhat (also GPLed, and thus able to take full advantage of Mandrake innovations)?
You say it's "crappy" that Mandrake should sell a distrib based on RH work, but as you can read in other posts and other places, Redhat is as much a reseller of previous works as any other Linux distributor. Both RH and Mandrake are paying full-time developers to improve their distributions as well. Each is free to fold back in (or reject as buggy, or as useless, or whyever
And also, as you can read in this same discussion, RH has publically expressed support for Mandrake, and I see no reason to doubt their sincerity, at least not for a few years (when competition might become closer between them.). Mandrake is expanding the Linux market by making installation of what-is-essentially-RH-6.0 easier; as market leader and brand name extra'ordinaire, Red hat probably stands to gain nearly 1-to-1 with Mandrake sales in the medium -term because people are trying / switching to and Mandrake is one big reason why.
So if RH doesn't think it's "crappy," (and they're the ones you're trying to support), then to what end do you dislike Mandrake so? RH doesn't, and they're the ones who ought to know about the good of RH.
I bet those guys would have / have had good parties together, and they deserve it, too.
Just a thought,
timothy
" ...and slashdot users are primarily responsible ... ;)"
Heh - at least this is true for me.
timothy
First, my qualifications: None. I haven't played more than an hour total on console games since I gave up (regular) NES' Super Mario Brothers.
Next: my response to the post above is confusion. Yes, you can do multi-player with your friends. But are you really content with the proprietary gaming networks that it will require to do multi-player on the new Sony or the DreamCast? With PC-based gaming, you can do your multiplayer gaming over a local area network or over the Internet
Insight appreciated, this is somwhat of a random comment I know, but relying on the console makers for multi-play network capabilities seems a lot like WebTV or AOL for email service.
Just a thought,
timothy
Two things:
...
1) Not everyone has the disposable income to provide 'the technology of today' to their kids.
2) It is good to find out how useful something is without obsessing about always having the newest / coolest, and this is a lesson that kids need probably more than adults. Not that it's not widespread among adults (like me!), but it's probably better to try to head it off then correct it later on. And comptuters that are a few years old (a 486 as in the first poster on this thread) is plenty fast enough for more than I'd like to admit, since I have a 233MHz K6
Thanks! I'd wondered about this, but I've always seen it attributed to Goldwater without mentioning Jefferson.
... extremism is used as a dirty word, but it oughtn't be other than a morally neutral modifier rendered good or bad by context.
:)
Point is still the same though
timothy
Linux, at least in the sense of "Mandrake Linux 6.0."
I don't say this to be contrary, either -- I agree with you that it's a shame that cut-and-paste (among other things) is less consistent in Linux / Unix / various graphical interfaces than in Windows, but as people have pointed out, Windows has a lot of inconsistencies / inexplicables which (and this is the important part!) it's harder to find answers clarifying than with Linux.
I mean, "In order to End your session, go to the button labeled 'Start'" is pretty offensive.
I'd certainly say that Linux, as embodied in RH / Mandrake 6.0 (can't speak for others) is on par with Windows in intelligibility, *once installed*. And that is from a person who can find electronic devices very frustrating.
timothy
Hear, hear! Actually, I'm in favor of some laws occasionally, but every law should not only be necessary but should be periodically reviewed (or reviewable on demand).
But I think every law can be analyzed in terms of how much freedom it either safeguards or removes -- and that this is the most important benchmark. Not "how many lives can be saved," "making an important moral statement," "protecting members of Interest Group X," etc.
Today's politicians are (with few exceptions) late-Roman empire types, dispensing favors in order to keep their purple togas -- not the revolutionaries who broke from Brittain and said "No taxation without representation." Instead, it's "Taxation is OK, so long as my district gets a portion of gravy, and my friend here gets the contract for ladling it out."
just thoughts (with the conclusion that voting l/Libertarian is the least evil thing to do
timothy
I'll agree with Dr. Wiggnz that we need some strict Constitutionalists if we are to defend free speech rights and privacy, but remember, that is a position that requires some extrapolation to take -- nowwhere, for instance, is a 'right to privacy' outlined in the Constitution, and many people clamor *against* 'strict Constitutionalists' on the basis that they would try to inhibit free speech. (See examples below.)
And the difference between a strict Constitutionalist and an extremist is that the first (to those who support it) is a positive term and the second is nearly always pejorative unless used by people who know that *other* people are using it pejoratively. Without getting into whether you like his views (those I've read I have liked, but I'm no expert on his entire body of work), consider whether you consider Robert Bork a) "an extremist" or b) "a strict Constitutionalist," both
of which he might agree with (I would).
How about Patrick Henry?
Barry Goldwater? ("Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.")
The other thing to consider is that freedom of speech is a complex thing. I think it would be silly if AOL got the trademark for "You've got mail," both because similar phrasing has been used in other pre-AOL systems for many years and because it is a simple descriptive sentence.
I'm suprized that "Buddy List" though got nixed, and if I were AOL I'd feel cheated
Just some thoughts -
timothy
Wasn't SCO a Microsoft spinoff?
...
If that is the case (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if not!), what is the relationship between the two now?
If SCO starts doing Linux support, it'd be an interesting irony, eh? It'd be funny if SCO should be called in when MS suddenly needs more Linux support than it can generate internally
timothy
p.s. I don't hate Microsoft; I just like Free / free software better for both the reasons given by RMS and the ones given by ESR.
Though even experts in the field disagree on exactly the best conditions, general concensus is that the best software is the result of a mild season with moderate rainfalls separated by relatively dry periods, and aging in casks made out of Tiki wood which has previously held fine literature.
The casks should be turned at least once a fortnight, to ensure that no bits have become lodged in the crevices.
Upon bottling (preferably into extremely flat, aluminum flasks), the barrel residue can be separately processed into a second aging batch. The result will be slightly more refined, and should be served in smaller SP glasses (for "Service Packs" -a term of uncertain origin). These are not typically available in cases, and are much prized by collectors.
timothy