Note the juxtaposition. I think Libertarians look like Marxists. I think Objectivists look like Maxist-Leninists (Communists). And I don't think either are actually a cult, and I'm not sure how you inferred I did. Now, if I'd been talking about the Landmark Foundation...
(Your notes on the actual cult are interesting and spooky).
Libertarians - as in, the flavour I see through the lens of the people who talk most - most resemble Marxist idealists. Just as Marx thought the edifices of society created the corruption of the world (through keeping the proletariat down) and that abolishing the bourgoise-capitalist government and other institutions would magically cause a fine society to emege, Libertarians seem to hold to a similar set of opinions - except, of course, the interests that the government are propping up are different.
The same naive "magic happens here" is the salient feature.
They point being that most of the small States (who often like to protray themselves as the "heartland" and vote Republican while yakking on about self-reliance) that would be feasible to influence are welfare junkies, sitting in their trailer part binging on the tax dollars of the big States.
So either the Free Staters are going to have to risk corrupting their own philosophy (while having a helluva hard road selling it to their new neighbours), or they're gonna be just another collection of the wierd and wonderful fringe groups of big States like New York or California.
Actually, any number of corrupt governments have been overthrown - India, the Phillipines, Cuba (not that it established a free society in the long term) , Romania, and East Germany are but a handful of examples from last century.
But more to the point: how does the government enforce the rules against a corporation without force? At what point would a corporation be considered to be in excess of reasonable standards? Plenty of companies the world over have armed security forces, for example.
One problem with the argument that says government is philiosophically wrong is that unless you're prepared to embrace an anarchist system of some sort, you'll end up with some form of centralised authority to administer a set of rules and provide services (eg national defence) you're comfortable with. At that point, you're now just squabbling over the utilitarian value of what current governments do; you've lost the moral argument.
Those exceptions do not refute the general principle that "companies don't use tanks; goverments do."
Actually, they falsify a general principal quite nicely. THe fact you're staggeringly ignorant of Logic 101 goes quite nicely with History 101.
While you work yourself into a frenzy contemplating how many people were killed by the Nazi government, for example, you might consider that one of the largest support blocs that got Hitler in power were business groups (why, even foriegners like Henry Ford gave him presents!), that the death camps were operated by and for the benefit of large industrial conglomerates (including American firms such as Ford and GM, as well as big German business).
You might also want to read up on the history of the American Union movement and find out how many workers were murdered for wanting a pay rise. Or look up "Massey's Cossacks". Or see how many Native Americans were massacred to make room for railroad barons. Or ask an expert about the role of the companies and wealthy individuals in sustaining the slave trade.
Or you might want to sit at home, play with yourself, and indulge in fantasise about Big Evil Gummit.
And the proper response to generosity isn't to whine about wanting more, dickwad. A million bucks to one project (Gates donates to any number of health initiatives) means a hell of a lot to the people on the recieving end.
I've felt modern capitalism is moving to resemble fuedalism for a while; moreover, what we're seeing now, especially in the States, is the moral problem of capitalism Adam Smith warned about.
Why? Stock ownership on the stock market more closely resembles the activity of a sports betting syndicate than actually owning a company; most stock trading is not driven by an individual interested in a company but institutions interested in maximising return.
The people who actually care about companies are referred to as stakeholders these days - non-C*O level employees, customers, and the communities in which those companies do business. They all have an interest in the long term value of the company (much as sports fans care about thier favourite teams and the quality of the game). Stockholders don't.
The two problems with executives incentives are these:
1/ Anyone smart/devious/whatever enough to end up the CEO of a company like Tyco will likely understand very well how to screw the company (and owners, and stakeholders) for all they're worth. If you've hired someone who has a good understanding of the complexities of modern multinaitonal businesses and who is ruthless enough to, eg, fire thousands of people on your behalf, why would you assume that they won't look after number one? It's the rational thing to do.
2/ GTHe stockholder problem I alluded to above. Funds managers and VCs don't actually give a fuck if the company succeeds, nor do many investors. They care about maximising return, and if that means raping the company into oblivion, screwing staff, communities, and customers, they won't care - because they'll just shift their money elsewhere to someone who is doing it on their behalf.
Markets have become so efficient and rational in the short term, they're incapable of protecting the long term. And investors have gotten very good at socialising risks (bankruptcy, layoffs, etc) and keeping profits.
For all the faults I would lay at the feet of Microsoft - in terms of technical and business issues - Gates himself is quite a philanthropist, and deserves brownie points for spending some of his enourmous fortune on helping people out.
The media throughput is, yes. At the moment (I remember when my old 4 MB/s Seagate Barracuda were considered quite fast; that was only oin the mid-90s), which will doubtless change as densities and rotational speed increases.
But a large chunk of the performance in a moden drive isn't the platter to interface performance, it's the cache to interface. Adding RAM to a drive is a relatively inexpensive way to improve performance.
Thinner cables are very impressive for those who like to stuff drives in boxes. In fact, thinner cables sell me on the standard - I don't care about the speed.
You don't want to replace VHS with a lossy format, so you want to use DVDs?
You do know DVDs are, well, lossy, yes? You could just stream raw vidcaps onto one, but you'd struggle to fit an hour of broadcast video onto a single DVD side.
(Of course, VHS is also lossy, since it effectively discards most of the horizontal resolution)
Re:Don't compare Mac OS Finder to Windows Explorer
on
The Captains of Nautilus
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Yuk. IMO, Finder wasn't perfected in OS X, it was butchered into that awful NeXT fil manager.
You wouldn't even need to do it that randomly. A huge chunk of the MAC space is assigned to vendors who no longer exist or who produce non-consumer systems. You could just grab MAC addresses assigned to mainframe and minicomputer vendors, for example.
Existing MAC addresses only matter on the same non-routed segment from a general network perspective. In the case of their big database of MAC addresses, who are they going to kick? You? The other guy? Both of you? They've just set thenselves up for a huge DOS from people rotating through a reaonable subset of the MAC space (everything issued to Intel, 3Com, RealTek ought to be a good start).
Actually, a well-formed HTML 4.0 page will be parsable and can be rendered by old browsers; XHTML possibly even more so (except for those stupid
tags). HTML isn't too bad on that front.
Perhaps you should ask the folks in Afghanistan how well the worked out. Your M-16 is gonna look real impressive when they start dropping daisy cutters on you.
Go. Read up on Las Vegas. Note how the corporations involved were never involved with private armies and never used violence. Or Shell's involvement in Nigeria. Or copper mining companies in the South Pacific.
Companies don't use violence because they can't get away with it in most of the world you appear to be familiar with.
Slashdot Mirror
Note the juxtaposition. I think Libertarians look like Marxists. I think Objectivists look like Maxist-Leninists (Communists). And I don't think either are actually a cult, and I'm not sure how you inferred I did. Now, if I'd been talking about the Landmark Foundation...
(Your notes on the actual cult are interesting and spooky).
Libertarians - as in, the flavour I see through the lens of the people who talk most - most resemble Marxist idealists. Just as Marx thought the edifices of society created the corruption of the world (through keeping the proletariat down) and that abolishing the bourgoise-capitalist government and other institutions would magically cause a fine society to emege, Libertarians seem to hold to a similar set of opinions - except, of course, the interests that the government are propping up are different.
The same naive "magic happens here" is the salient feature.
And they're stationed where?
Besides, if the leadership of the Republican party is any indication, Texans spend all their time dodging millitary service.
It currently works. Getting a bunch of C monkeys to rewrite it is going to make it better how, exactly?
They point being that most of the small States (who often like to protray themselves as the "heartland" and vote Republican while yakking on about self-reliance) that would be feasible to influence are welfare junkies, sitting in their trailer part binging on the tax dollars of the big States.
So either the Free Staters are going to have to risk corrupting their own philosophy (while having a helluva hard road selling it to their new neighbours), or they're gonna be just another collection of the wierd and wonderful fringe groups of big States like New York or California.
Actually, any number of corrupt governments have been overthrown - India, the Phillipines, Cuba (not that it established a free society in the long term) , Romania, and East Germany are but a handful of examples from last century.
But more to the point: how does the government enforce the rules against a corporation without force? At what point would a corporation be considered to be in excess of reasonable standards? Plenty of companies the world over have armed security forces, for example.
One problem with the argument that says government is philiosophically wrong is that unless you're prepared to embrace an anarchist system of some sort, you'll end up with some form of centralised authority to administer a set of rules and provide services (eg national defence) you're comfortable with. At that point, you're now just squabbling over the utilitarian value of what current governments do; you've lost the moral argument.
Actually, they falsify a general principal quite nicely. THe fact you're staggeringly ignorant of Logic 101 goes quite nicely with History 101.
While you work yourself into a frenzy contemplating how many people were killed by the Nazi government, for example, you might consider that one of the largest support blocs that got Hitler in power were business groups (why, even foriegners like Henry Ford gave him presents!), that the death camps were operated by and for the benefit of large industrial conglomerates (including American firms such as Ford and GM, as well as big German business).
You might also want to read up on the history of the American Union movement and find out how many workers were murdered for wanting a pay rise. Or look up "Massey's Cossacks". Or see how many Native Americans were massacred to make room for railroad barons. Or ask an expert about the role of the companies and wealthy individuals in sustaining the slave trade.
Or you might want to sit at home, play with yourself, and indulge in fantasise about Big Evil Gummit.
Seconded. Caps for cable/ADSL in New Zealand with pay-per-meg thereafter would make this a loser of an idea here, too.
(If I had to pay the per meg charges, I'd be up for around $100 per movie. Oddly enough, I think I'll buy the DVD.)
Microsoft != Bill Gates.
And the proper response to generosity isn't to whine about wanting more, dickwad. A million bucks to one project (Gates donates to any number of health initiatives) means a hell of a lot to the people on the recieving end.
I repeat: Yay Bill!
I've felt modern capitalism is moving to resemble fuedalism for a while; moreover, what we're seeing now, especially in the States, is the moral problem of capitalism Adam Smith warned about.
Why? Stock ownership on the stock market more closely resembles the activity of a sports betting syndicate than actually owning a company; most stock trading is not driven by an individual interested in a company but institutions interested in maximising return.
The people who actually care about companies are referred to as stakeholders these days - non-C*O level employees, customers, and the communities in which those companies do business. They all have an interest in the long term value of the company (much as sports fans care about thier favourite teams and the quality of the game). Stockholders don't.
The two problems with executives incentives are these:
1/ Anyone smart/devious/whatever enough to end up the CEO of a company like Tyco will likely understand very well how to screw the company (and owners, and stakeholders) for all they're worth. If you've hired someone who has a good understanding of the complexities of modern multinaitonal businesses and who is ruthless enough to, eg, fire thousands of people on your behalf, why would you assume that they won't look after number one? It's the rational thing to do.
2/ GTHe stockholder problem I alluded to above. Funds managers and VCs don't actually give a fuck if the company succeeds, nor do many investors. They care about maximising return, and if that means raping the company into oblivion, screwing staff, communities, and customers, they won't care - because they'll just shift their money elsewhere to someone who is doing it on their behalf.
Markets have become so efficient and rational in the short term, they're incapable of protecting the long term. And investors have gotten very good at socialising risks (bankruptcy, layoffs, etc) and keeping profits.
For all the faults I would lay at the feet of Microsoft - in terms of technical and business issues - Gates himself is quite a philanthropist, and deserves brownie points for spending some of his enourmous fortune on helping people out.
s/hardware manufacturer/OEM/
Dell will be drooling. Cheaper cables that are easier to install will be a big win for them.
The media throughput is, yes. At the moment (I remember when my old 4 MB/s Seagate Barracuda were considered quite fast; that was only oin the mid-90s), which will doubtless change as densities and rotational speed increases.
But a large chunk of the performance in a moden drive isn't the platter to interface performance, it's the cache to interface. Adding RAM to a drive is a relatively inexpensive way to improve performance.
Thinner cables are very impressive for those who like to stuff drives in boxes. In fact, thinner cables sell me on the standard - I don't care about the speed.
Indeed - it'll be a blessing for system builders.
This gives it to you. The main problem with IDE-RAID is fucking around with cables and a standard that doesn't support hot-swap.
You don't want to replace VHS with a lossy format, so you want to use DVDs?
You do know DVDs are, well, lossy, yes? You could just stream raw vidcaps onto one, but you'd struggle to fit an hour of broadcast video onto a single DVD side.
(Of course, VHS is also lossy, since it effectively discards most of the horizontal resolution)
Yuk. IMO, Finder wasn't perfected in OS X, it was butchered into that awful NeXT fil manager.
You wouldn't even need to do it that randomly. A huge chunk of the MAC space is assigned to vendors who no longer exist or who produce non-consumer systems. You could just grab MAC addresses assigned to mainframe and minicomputer vendors, for example.
Existing MAC addresses only matter on the same non-routed segment from a general network perspective. In the case of their big database of MAC addresses, who are they going to kick? You? The other guy? Both of you? They've just set thenselves up for a huge DOS from people rotating through a reaonable subset of the MAC space (everything issued to Intel, 3Com, RealTek ought to be a good start).
Actually, a well-formed HTML 4.0 page will be parsable and can be rendered by old browsers; XHTML possibly even more so (except for those stupid
tags). HTML isn't too bad on that front.
Perhaps you should ask the folks in Afghanistan how well the worked out. Your M-16 is gonna look real impressive when they start dropping daisy cutters on you.
Go. Read up on Las Vegas. Note how the corporations involved were never involved with private armies and never used violence. Or Shell's involvement in Nigeria. Or copper mining companies in the South Pacific.
Companies don't use violence because they can't get away with it in most of the world you appear to be familiar with.
Clearly you're unfamiliar with the history of private enterprise in Las Vegas.
Will they refund the Federal taxpayer for assets they use that Federal taxpayers have provided?