Now who's putting words in whose mouth? I never said I was on the right, unless libertarianism tempered with realism is a strict province thereof. I wasn't suggesting you were about to dive off the Michael Moore springboard, neither. And like I said, I don't subscribe to the notion that everyone who disagrees with me is evil. But I've heard enough of Biafra's talk (I was at h2k and h2k2 and it got tiresome after about a minute) to know that his argument about "being the media" is a sidepoint to his utter contempt for all things middle America. Now, before you tack another psychological hangup on me, I'm not from Middle America either, nor do I think they have everything right: I don't think the PMRC was a good idea either, especially when they started lobbying for censorship. I'm very anti-censorship. But I do understand not wanting your kids to get stupid ideas, and I don't think parents are closedminded or ignorant or naive for simply wanting to control what their kids see. Just like because I'm pro-drug legalization, doesn't mean I condone mindless drug use.
Anyway, now that that's out of the way: I hear what you're saying about media being fed from the same source, and up until a little while ago I would've disagreed with you. The story about the LA Times reporting Paul Bremer did not give a farewell speech to Iraq when he actually did, part of which was broadcast on CNN made me realize just how lazy, inept or disinterested many traditional media sources are about reporting news.
But I think for Biafra to bitch and moan that people are complacent, when technorati is now tracking something like 1.65 MILLION blogs updated more than biweekly, seems ignorant of the facts. There ARE plenty of news sources out there, and with the advent of blogging, some of them get considerable attention. I probably get most of my news from blogs nowadays myself.
His ideas on this topic are still releevant, especially today when US media consumers are all being fed from the same spoon.
So as an alternative, we feed everyone else from another spoon, on the Michael Moore conspiracy theorist axis?
Someone else here wrote up a good analysis of the last HOPE, and I agree; he doesn't teach anyone to "think for themselves" unless that means thinking the same as him. He has a view that anyone opposed to him is a "Bush lackey" or "henchman of the right" or whatever (implying that everyone on the right is evil, which holds about as much water as saying every liberal is a communist).
Like that guy said, when you start reflexively protesting every movement by the government, you've got issues. Biafra doesn't do anything to open a dialogue with the people across the aisle, to try to convince them of his views; instead he spits venom at them, labels them as categorically evil, turns his back and lets the exhortations of the choir to whom he preaches refuel his low self-esteem.
What the hell does Jello Biafra have to do with hacking? (Besides another weak attempt to prop up his ever-fading relevancy to anything.) Seems like this guy will do anything to grab for people's attention.
Then you go on to claim that I accuse these companies of being "evil". Which I didn't do.
What conclusion do you expect the reader to draw when you single out, out of all the corporate and foundational donors, the groups categorized by "big tobacco" and "Exxon and anti-global warming"? What conclusion do you expect the reader to draw when you single out Microsoft for donating some largely unknown amount of money to these organizations?
You hardly meet the criteria of full disclosure, yourself. Your sources are largely anecdotal (newspaper articles, for this purpose, are considered such), with very little financial documentation (which, as the 501c organizations these groups are, they are required to disclose). You fail to even mention the proportion of the organizations' incomes which are represented by donations from such companies/foundations. You also fail to expose a particular organization's track record in arguing for/against the subject. Quite often, authors of this sort agree on the principle but disagree on the implementation; open source strikes me as just such an occasion.
I argue that while no, you don't state "these companies are evil" in so many words, it's reasonable to infer, from what you select and what you omit in your article, your view of these companies as evil given popular public image of groups called "Big Tobacco" and "Anti-global warming". Such descriptions, by their very nature, carry with them an implicit moral evaluation (i.e., that they are bad) -- unless, of course, you were to specifically say that big tobacco and anti-global warming companies are not necessarily bad things.
Selecting a group for indictment by implication, and then saying "but I'm not saying they're bad", does not remove the moral evaluative content of your original message, just as placing your own, selective, "notice of disclosure" at the bottom doesn't lend your article the mantle of impartiality.
I really hope so. So far that effort has been woefully inadequate. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that most average users just need their computer to write emails, surf the web, write reports and proposals, and download and play pr0n. They just want a machine to do that, and to work.
Linux, on the other hand, was always for hobbyists, who see their computers as much more than that. And it works for enterprise computing because that's where that kind of approach is the most effective.
They're two very different cultures that self-select the platforms that best conform to their values. So it should be no surprise that a linux geek forced to use MS products for their business computing have about the same feeling as the average windows dork who has to make a lot more effort to configure his own machine.
If you would be equally proficient with both MS Office and OO.org, that would be telling something. However, I am pretty sure you are not. With that assumption, the only conclusion I can draw ATM is that using software you are not familiar with take more time, especially for advanced stuff like data validation. Duh.
If anything, I am more proficient with openoffice because I use linux at work, OS X at home and I'm too cheap to shell for the MS version. Like I said, I'm not a spreadsheet guru, but after reading an excel book and searching online for what I wanted to do, I found it much easier to do it with Excel, and in some cases (as in setting a list context for cells) impossible in openoffice. But then, I'm sure this was painfully obvious to someone like you.
My point is that openoffice is not a precise clone of MS Office, and as a more astute reader pointed out, it's pretty rare to find someone equally adept at using the two application suites. There will always be retraining and migration costs.
Well spoken. The issue of "which platform is more stable, secure and usable" has less to do with the subtle genius of the design of linux and more to do with the fact that, currently, linux users are a self-selecting group of people who try to solve their own problems. If linux ever gets as popular as its proselytizers hope, they will have to deal with a whole new batch of users doing silly things, weakening security policies and allowing worm and virus writers a way in. Linux is not bugproof nor bulletproof, and certainly not foolproof.
I have to argue that, despite MS's other claims, I agree that TCO will be higher, primarily because most linux programs require a lot more user support than your average windows program, installed and patched with "software wizards". If you're a user installing openoffice and you don't have a certain library, or you have an outdated one, you're going to spend a lot of time learning about ldd and ldconfig. Personally I think the library linking issue is one of Linux's biggest achilles heels, despite a few relatively intelligent attempts to fix it.
I also think that the linux office products out there are simply substandard to Microsoft. That probably has to do with the fact that MS has been at that game for a long time. But nevertheless, linux office products like openoffice, while reasonable facsimiles, simply don't reach MS in terms of functionality and behavior. I spent four hours writing up a macro-enabled, data-validity-using spreadsheet for my company's linux users, while the identical spreadsheet in Excel took me about 45 minutes, and the linux version just didn't compare, and I'm not even a spreadsheet power user.
MS's dominance might be eroding, but it's not simply due to their being entrenched in the marketplace.
gasp! nonprofit organizations take money!
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When Think Tanks Attack
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I went through the linked article and I couldn't find much hard evidence of how much these think tanks get from MS, and what percentage of their total income MS donations make. There are few dollar figures to verify independently; the only one I noticed was about $10k MS sent to the Pacific Research Institute. Of course, if one follows the link, one sees that the total contributions from ALL corporations makes up only 10% of their revenue; I wish there were more data elsewhere.
This piece seems to be a classic conspiracy theorist bash that takes a few sparse facts and uses them to paint a complete picture that coincides with the author's ethical/political alignment. It doesn't logically follow that a think tank received a payment from such companies is "in their pocket" or propagandizing as a quid pro quo. Nevertheless, the author uses it as evidence that big, nasty companies are trying to influence your view through thoughtful argumentation, a fact, while true, is morally neutral. Would we as thoughtful people prefer a reasoned argument, though wrong, or plain and simple advertising?
The author certainly doesn't care; anything done by companies he dislikes is automagically "evil" and ignorant of the facts stated above. The whole "funded by big tobacco" slant is ignorant of the fact that tobacco companies and their subservient foundations, like many companies, spread their wealth around to many different sources.
Should we complain that our schools are funded by the sweatshop-using Nike Corp. when they are donating money for new playgrounds in inner city schools, and creating new fields, parks and open spaces there?
I haven't read the articles written against Open Source that this author cites, but it strikes me that attacking a group's financial backing is a a red herring, a disingenuous tactic that plainly ignores the content of the articles. Who cares who funds them if the ideas therein are sound? Should we reject the teaching of evolution as opposed to creationism, simply because some think tanks which promote it are funded by companies we dislike?
I don't buy that. The last time they were "unknowns" was before License to Ill came out on Def Jam, and after that they jumped to Capitol. You can't tell me they were "unknowns" after "Fight for Your Right" hit the airwaves.
It begs the question, why does a band like the Beastie Boys still play with the big record labels? They have worldwide name recognition. All they need to do is cut their album, get someone to warehouse the CDs, send some press materials to Spin and Rolling Stone and Sam Goody, and they're all set to sell. I bet they could get a lot bigger percentage of their CD sales if they went the indie route (hey, maybe even enough to reopen Grand Royal so they can keep putting out all their friends' shitty bands' records).
It's baffling to me, especially concerning a band with such a conscience as they. My only guess is that record label life is a lot cushier than we're let on, and bands only bitch and moan about the oppressive record labels when they're forced to actually live up to the terms of the contract they signed.
There are plenty of places in Europe where central government is just barely in control (Spain or Northern Ireland come to mind), just like there are many Americans who accept the authority of the federal government without thinking. You can find examples of both ends of the spectrum on both continents, and there is no basis at all for your generalization.
It is a generalization, and as such I'm assuming and agreeing that there are counterexamples. But, I'm not out to say all Europeans are slaves to government, nor that all Americans are innately distrustful of theirs. Rather, a statistically significant, but by no means entire, section of both populations fall into that category.
also don't agree that the various political variations inside the two big American political parties makes them comparable to the coalitions that routinely govern European countries. Coalitions are much looser with much more internal conflict, and more importantly, they are much more flexible, potentially changing with each election (or even in between).
And I still think what you're arguing is really just a matter of semantics. If you spend any time working inside one of the major US parties, you'll see it's not all closed-ranks at all. The same strife over policy issues occurs, the same alliances form, the same debates rage. Buchanan republicans argue isolationism against their own party while Reagan democrats spent time convincing their leftier compatriots that the Soviets were evil. These inner conflicts and subgroups behave the same way as multiparty alliances in parliaments -- negotiating, threatening, compromising, cajoling. If it really were such a closed shop, the party who controls both the presidency and the congress would have an iron mandate (as the democrats did from '92 - '94, and the Republicans from 2000 until Jim Jeffords split the party and lost them the Senate). Yet the history of the country is a remarkably stable one.
A lot of Europeans (more and more) think this way. Spain is a nice, recent example. "Go to war without our consent? Fuck off!"
I think you're conflating a the mechanism of government, i.e., democracy with people's attitudes towards their role in regard to government, i.e., do I trust them? What do they do for me? Do I even recognize their authority? These are not rhetorical questions. A fine example of this is the difficulty encountered by the Soviets in the early 20s as they tried to pacify the countryside: Russian peasants saw government as none of their business and their business, none of government's. For them, the village was the unit of autonomy. The Tsar had largely allowed this to go on, but Lenin wasn't having it. He essentially declared war on the class he swore to protect. This is an extreme example, however, I use to illustrate my point. It's not that Europeans see themselves as subjects to be guided, with no real input (though to hear some quarters, Europe and especially the UK are suffering some of the same problems suffered by we in America) -- rather, you will find far less questioning of the reach and authority of government in Europeans circles than in America.
I'd have to argue that the preponderance of political parties and alliances has more to do with two key differences: those of the bicameral, 3-branched system of federal government in America and the parliamentary system so popular on the continent, and thosee organization of political power. Popular media presents the American two-party system as two monolithic organizations with party lines strict as communists and all diametrically opposed to the other. Nothing could be further from the truth. Within both parties are people who fall outside any common mold: democrats who oppose gun control (Zell Miller, senator from Georgia), pro-choice republicans (Mitt Romney, governor of Massachusetts), tax-and-spend Republicans (Richard Nixon and George W Bush). I think as an accident of history, people in this country (whose political life began with any number of parties) began consolidating into large alliances that became known as the political affliations they are today. I would liken them to the parliamentary alliances formed among disparate parties in European houses, towards the aim of exerting more power for their common goals.
As for the personal privacy issue, I politely request you check your facts. As a rule, in the US corporations cannot collect anything more than aggregrate information (i.e., information about you that does not uniquely identify you) without your explicit consent, and in many cases where the consumer was too liberal in exercising said consent, the courts generally find in their favor. For Americans its a plenty important issue, and I have to wonder where you get the idea they don't care about it. (I don't, personally, but that's because I think privacy is a legal fiction for neurotic political pressure groups -- a topic for another discussion).
I think you're equating the federalism of the US with the quasi-confederalism of the EU. There are far too many key distinctions between the two models to justify your statement. The design of the EU's government and parliament, the rotating presidency, and the fierce nationalism that still pervades much of continental Europe really prevents the kind of powerful central government from emerging the way it did here in the United States. Unless some demagogue comes to the EU presidency and makes some substantial changes to the design of the EU government, the most power the EU will wield will be economic power, and even there such reach will be governed by the WTO.
I doubt you'll see a U-turn on this issue, primarily because of the fundamentally different outlook on government and rights between the two continents. For Americans, rights really are important, even though everyone who says "I'm defending the Bill of Rights!" tends to defend only their favorite few (i.e., the 1st for the lefties, the 2nd and 4th for the righties). Europeans still have an essentially monarchistic view of government's relations to its citizens: citizens are subjects of the government, and all rights they enjoy, they do so at the government's pleasure. Thus stopping people from saying bad things doesn't get people as uppity there as it does here. It's the same reason gun control is not as much of a hot topic as in the US.
That must mean every socialist regime that's ever existed had leaders and educators that were lazy. Show me a shining example of glorious socialism that did not have a very active propaganda and censorship bureau.
There will always be envy, there will always be greed, and it has nothing to do with "historical preconditions" or "culture war" or anything else those Marxist space cadets shoved down your naive and willing gullet. Declaring war on the bourgeoisie and enslaving them is still war on people and slavery. And you can't wave away the moral implications thereof because you find them less than human, for the crime of owning property.
I am a software engineer who's been using Solaris for about 8 years now and just recently switched to linux as a result of a job change. Much of the switch was painless enough, but there are a few differences between the two that needed sorting out, as well as using new software and doing sysadmin things that I previously had smart people paid to do for me.
My local linux guru happens to be a good friend of mine, and even when I come to him with seemingly intelligent questions, I get borderline hostile responses, suggesting to me I am an idiot/asshole/whatever for daring to waste his time with a question that I could've found the answer to myself.
Unfortunately, for someone of my intelligence and experience, "finding the answer for myself" usually means hours spent poring through manuals and FAQs and HOWTOs for the weird little behavioral quirk I'm looking to get answered. I dare not look into newsgroups and ask, for fear of even harsher treatment.
Most of the time, the people complaining about how idiotic newbies are, are often the same people wondering why linux hasn't taken over the world, established peace and harmony and cured cancer. Quite simply, it's not because people aren't curious about a free operating system and tons of free apps to do what people normally pay to do -- it doesn't take a sociologist or economist to realize that people will gladly do the same things they pay for, for free, given the chance. The problem is, they need to ask questions, and the best people to ask generally have enormous egos and a massive elitist streak.
RTFM/RTFFAQ is not without it's merits, but unfortunately many linux geeks use it as a simple, smarmy response to questions one can't reasonably be expected to know or discover for oneself. RTFM is meant to stop people from wasting time with common questions, but instead it's being used to stop otherwise interested people from pursuing linux further because those already steeped in it treat them like idiots. People like free software, but they don't like being insulted to get it.
One of the reasons Microsoft ascended to where it is now is not because they make high quality, stable, efficient, easy to use software. It's because they treat their customers like gold, help them with their problems happily, and treat even the most idiotic questions with empathy. Linux users looking to evangelize the movement should do likewise. Remember, you were there once too, not knowing how the hell to install patches or configure a Samba server or get your network running. Just because you have the knowledge doesn't make you a better person, unless you REALLY embrace the open source movement and make your knowledge as open source as the software.
We've tried unfettered capitalism. It failed, and led to the Great Depression.
Actually, what led to the Black Monday crash was the newly created FEDERAL RESERVE trying to manage interest rates and keeping them artificially deflated to try to spur an "eternal boom cycle". That, coupled with the speculative loans the Fed had created, caused a massive market correction. Think of a casino lending you tons of chips to play with, on little more than your say-so, and then finally saying "ok, you have to pay us now". And you've got maybe a tenth of what you actually owe them. This is called fractional-reserve banking. It's what the Fed did (and still does, but with slightly better results), and it's their fault.
Now, to extend that analogy, consider half the casino's patrons doing this. What happens when the casino can't take the income it expected from these people? It can't pay its workers, its mortgage, its debts. And this is the "callous pocketstuffing" everyone laments; in reality, it's the Fed simply being too stupid to manage the economy.
But you can't blame them. For years and years and years, governments have tried to do exactly that, and met anywhere from mediocre to disastrous results.
Unfettered capitalism? No, not now, not anywhere, ever. We've never had a truly free market in the history of the world.
The notion that continual offshoring will depress wages is based on a number of false assumptions, especially the notion that worker productivity is static. Fact of the matter is, workers in India are less productive than workers here - that is one of the key reasons they are generally paid less, and the cost of living is reduced. Productivity does not have any moral baggage attached - Indians are not less smart or good or whatever - they just don't have the same economic facilities that US workers do to match the output per unit time as Americans. One thing offshoring will do, in fact, is incite productivity increases in the places that get the new jobs.
When manufacturers started moving their factories out of places like Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco and moved them overseas, the job losses were temporary - those workers are not still out of work. It allowed newer, higher-paid and higher-skilled jobs to be created HERE -- while providing newer, higher-paid and higher-skilled jobs to people overseas.
I mean, I don't believe the RIAA either when they say that file sharing is the reason sales are down. But then again, I thought most slashdotters felt the same way. Why is the RIAA (rightfully) chastised for false cause in that argument, yet slashdot publishes a story with the same logical error and people lap it up?
Simply because filesharing is out there now, and record sales are up in Australia, doesn't mean filesharing caused the increase. What will they say a year from now, if sales suddenly slump? Certainly not "filesharing killed Australian music sales".
Re:Can we moderate the submission itself
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Melting Europa
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Amen to that. The comments sections get moderated and meta-moderated, all in the name of intelligent discussion and democracy, yet only the slashdot elite get to publish their stories, however biased they may be.
amen to that. Like I said somewhere else, it's amazing how many people who say "software should be free", and try to put linux on casio wristwatches get all closed-minded and say "we should forbid people from building this!" when it comes to technology that the government might use to invade privacy. Worry when they outlaw the countermeasures.
Slashdot Mirror
Expropriating an old catchphrase on the cover of his book, and then expropriating free software concepts inside it. Both, badly.
Now who's putting words in whose mouth? I never said I was on the right, unless libertarianism tempered with realism is a strict province thereof. I wasn't suggesting you were about to dive off the Michael Moore springboard, neither. And like I said, I don't subscribe to the notion that everyone who disagrees with me is evil. But I've heard enough of Biafra's talk (I was at h2k and h2k2 and it got tiresome after about a minute) to know that his argument about "being the media" is a sidepoint to his utter contempt for all things middle America. Now, before you tack another psychological hangup on me, I'm not from Middle America either, nor do I think they have everything right: I don't think the PMRC was a good idea either, especially when they started lobbying for censorship. I'm very anti-censorship. But I do understand not wanting your kids to get stupid ideas, and I don't think parents are closedminded or ignorant or naive for simply wanting to control what their kids see. Just like because I'm pro-drug legalization, doesn't mean I condone mindless drug use.
Anyway, now that that's out of the way: I hear what you're saying about media being fed from the same source, and up until a little while ago I would've disagreed with you. The story about the LA Times reporting Paul Bremer did not give a farewell speech to Iraq when he actually did, part of which was broadcast on CNN made me realize just how lazy, inept or disinterested many traditional media sources are about reporting news.
But I think for Biafra to bitch and moan that people are complacent, when technorati is now tracking something like 1.65 MILLION blogs updated more than biweekly, seems ignorant of the facts. There ARE plenty of news sources out there, and with the advent of blogging, some of them get considerable attention. I probably get most of my news from blogs nowadays myself.
In short, point well taken, if redundant.
His ideas on this topic are still releevant, especially today when US media consumers are all being fed from the same spoon.
So as an alternative, we feed everyone else from another spoon, on the Michael Moore conspiracy theorist axis?
Someone else here wrote up a good analysis of the last HOPE, and I agree; he doesn't teach anyone to "think for themselves" unless that means thinking the same as him. He has a view that anyone opposed to him is a "Bush lackey" or "henchman of the right" or whatever (implying that everyone on the right is evil, which holds about as much water as saying every liberal is a communist).
Like that guy said, when you start reflexively protesting every movement by the government, you've got issues. Biafra doesn't do anything to open a dialogue with the people across the aisle, to try to convince them of his views; instead he spits venom at them, labels them as categorically evil, turns his back and lets the exhortations of the choir to whom he preaches refuel his low self-esteem.
What the hell does Jello Biafra have to do with hacking? (Besides another weak attempt to prop up his ever-fading relevancy to anything.) Seems like this guy will do anything to grab for people's attention.
Then you go on to claim that I accuse these companies of being "evil". Which I didn't do.
What conclusion do you expect the reader to draw when you single out, out of all the corporate and foundational donors, the groups categorized by "big tobacco" and "Exxon and anti-global warming"? What conclusion do you expect the reader to draw when you single out Microsoft for donating some largely unknown amount of money to these organizations?
You hardly meet the criteria of full disclosure, yourself. Your sources are largely anecdotal (newspaper articles, for this purpose, are considered such), with very little financial documentation (which, as the 501c organizations these groups are, they are required to disclose). You fail to even mention the proportion of the organizations' incomes which are represented by donations from such companies/foundations. You also fail to expose a particular organization's track record in arguing for/against the subject. Quite often, authors of this sort agree on the principle but disagree on the implementation; open source strikes me as just such an occasion.
I argue that while no, you don't state "these companies are evil" in so many words, it's reasonable to infer, from what you select and what you omit in your article, your view of these companies as evil given popular public image of groups called "Big Tobacco" and "Anti-global warming". Such descriptions, by their very nature, carry with them an implicit moral evaluation (i.e., that they are bad) -- unless, of course, you were to specifically say that big tobacco and anti-global warming companies are not necessarily bad things.
Selecting a group for indictment by implication, and then saying "but I'm not saying they're bad", does not remove the moral evaluative content of your original message, just as placing your own, selective, "notice of disclosure" at the bottom doesn't lend your article the mantle of impartiality.
I really hope so. So far that effort has been woefully inadequate. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that most average users just need their computer to write emails, surf the web, write reports and proposals, and download and play pr0n. They just want a machine to do that, and to work.
Linux, on the other hand, was always for hobbyists, who see their computers as much more than that. And it works for enterprise computing because that's where that kind of approach is the most effective.
They're two very different cultures that self-select the platforms that best conform to their values. So it should be no surprise that a linux geek forced to use MS products for their business computing have about the same feeling as the average windows dork who has to make a lot more effort to configure his own machine.
If you would be equally proficient with both MS Office and OO.org, that would be telling something. However, I am pretty sure you are not. With that assumption, the only conclusion I can draw ATM is that using software you are not familiar with take more time, especially for advanced stuff like data validation. Duh.
If anything, I am more proficient with openoffice because I use linux at work, OS X at home and I'm too cheap to shell for the MS version. Like I said, I'm not a spreadsheet guru, but after reading an excel book and searching online for what I wanted to do, I found it much easier to do it with Excel, and in some cases (as in setting a list context for cells) impossible in openoffice. But then, I'm sure this was painfully obvious to someone like you.
My point is that openoffice is not a precise clone of MS Office, and as a more astute reader pointed out, it's pretty rare to find someone equally adept at using the two application suites. There will always be retraining and migration costs.
Well spoken. The issue of "which platform is more stable, secure and usable" has less to do with the subtle genius of the design of linux and more to do with the fact that, currently, linux users are a self-selecting group of people who try to solve their own problems. If linux ever gets as popular as its proselytizers hope, they will have to deal with a whole new batch of users doing silly things, weakening security policies and allowing worm and virus writers a way in. Linux is not bugproof nor bulletproof, and certainly not foolproof.
I have to argue that, despite MS's other claims, I agree that TCO will be higher, primarily because most linux programs require a lot more user support than your average windows program, installed and patched with "software wizards". If you're a user installing openoffice and you don't have a certain library, or you have an outdated one, you're going to spend a lot of time learning about ldd and ldconfig. Personally I think the library linking issue is one of Linux's biggest achilles heels, despite a few relatively intelligent attempts to fix it.
I also think that the linux office products out there are simply substandard to Microsoft. That probably has to do with the fact that MS has been at that game for a long time. But nevertheless, linux office products like openoffice, while reasonable facsimiles, simply don't reach MS in terms of functionality and behavior. I spent four hours writing up a macro-enabled, data-validity-using spreadsheet for my company's linux users, while the identical spreadsheet in Excel took me about 45 minutes, and the linux version just didn't compare, and I'm not even a spreadsheet power user.
MS's dominance might be eroding, but it's not simply due to their being entrenched in the marketplace.
I went through the linked article and I couldn't find much hard evidence of how much these think tanks get from MS, and what percentage of their total income MS donations make. There are few dollar figures to verify independently; the only one I noticed was about $10k MS sent to the Pacific Research Institute. Of course, if one follows the link, one sees that the total contributions from ALL corporations makes up only 10% of their revenue; I wish there were more data elsewhere.
This piece seems to be a classic conspiracy theorist bash that takes a few sparse facts and uses them to paint a complete picture that coincides with the author's ethical/political alignment. It doesn't logically follow that a think tank received a payment from such companies is "in their pocket" or propagandizing as a quid pro quo. Nevertheless, the author uses it as evidence that big, nasty companies are trying to influence your view through thoughtful argumentation, a fact, while true, is morally neutral. Would we as thoughtful people prefer a reasoned argument, though wrong, or plain and simple advertising?
The author certainly doesn't care; anything done by companies he dislikes is automagically "evil" and ignorant of the facts stated above. The whole "funded by big tobacco" slant is ignorant of the fact that tobacco companies and their subservient foundations, like many companies, spread their wealth around to many different sources.
Should we complain that our schools are funded by the sweatshop-using Nike Corp. when they are donating money for new playgrounds in inner city schools, and creating new fields, parks and open spaces there?
I haven't read the articles written against Open Source that this author cites, but it strikes me that attacking a group's financial backing is a a red herring, a disingenuous tactic that plainly ignores the content of the articles. Who cares who funds them if the ideas therein are sound? Should we reject the teaching of evolution as opposed to creationism, simply because some think tanks which promote it are funded by companies we dislike?
I don't buy that. The last time they were "unknowns" was before License to Ill came out on Def Jam, and after that they jumped to Capitol. You can't tell me they were "unknowns" after "Fight for Your Right" hit the airwaves.
It begs the question, why does a band like the Beastie Boys still play with the big record labels? They have worldwide name recognition. All they need to do is cut their album, get someone to warehouse the CDs, send some press materials to Spin and Rolling Stone and Sam Goody, and they're all set to sell. I bet they could get a lot bigger percentage of their CD sales if they went the indie route (hey, maybe even enough to reopen Grand Royal so they can keep putting out all their friends' shitty bands' records).
It's baffling to me, especially concerning a band with such a conscience as they. My only guess is that record label life is a lot cushier than we're let on, and bands only bitch and moan about the oppressive record labels when they're forced to actually live up to the terms of the contract they signed.
There are plenty of places in Europe where central government is just barely in control (Spain or Northern Ireland come to mind), just like there are many Americans who accept the authority of the federal government without thinking. You can find examples of both ends of the spectrum on both continents, and there is no basis at all for your generalization.
It is a generalization, and as such I'm assuming and agreeing that there are counterexamples. But, I'm not out to say all Europeans are slaves to government, nor that all Americans are innately distrustful of theirs. Rather, a statistically significant, but by no means entire, section of both populations fall into that category.
also don't agree that the various political variations inside the two big American political parties makes them comparable to the coalitions that routinely govern European countries. Coalitions are much looser with much more internal conflict, and more importantly, they are much more flexible, potentially changing with each election (or even in between).
And I still think what you're arguing is really just a matter of semantics. If you spend any time working inside one of the major US parties, you'll see it's not all closed-ranks at all. The same strife over policy issues occurs, the same alliances form, the same debates rage. Buchanan republicans argue isolationism against their own party while Reagan democrats spent time convincing their leftier compatriots that the Soviets were evil. These inner conflicts and subgroups behave the same way as multiparty alliances in parliaments -- negotiating, threatening, compromising, cajoling. If it really were such a closed shop, the party who controls both the presidency and the congress would have an iron mandate (as the democrats did from '92 - '94, and the Republicans from 2000 until Jim Jeffords split the party and lost them the Senate). Yet the history of the country is a remarkably stable one.
A lot of Europeans (more and more) think this way. Spain is a nice, recent example. "Go to war without our consent? Fuck off!"
I think you're conflating a the mechanism of government, i.e., democracy with people's attitudes towards their role in regard to government, i.e., do I trust them? What do they do for me? Do I even recognize their authority? These are not rhetorical questions. A fine example of this is the difficulty encountered by the Soviets in the early 20s as they tried to pacify the countryside: Russian peasants saw government as none of their business and their business, none of government's. For them, the village was the unit of autonomy. The Tsar had largely allowed this to go on, but Lenin wasn't having it. He essentially declared war on the class he swore to protect. This is an extreme example, however, I use to illustrate my point. It's not that Europeans see themselves as subjects to be guided, with no real input (though to hear some quarters, Europe and especially the UK are suffering some of the same problems suffered by we in America) -- rather, you will find far less questioning of the reach and authority of government in Europeans circles than in America.
I'd have to argue that the preponderance of political parties and alliances has more to do with two key differences: those of the bicameral, 3-branched system of federal government in America and the parliamentary system so popular on the continent, and thosee organization of political power. Popular media presents the American two-party system as two monolithic organizations with party lines strict as communists and all diametrically opposed to the other. Nothing could be further from the truth. Within both parties are people who fall outside any common mold: democrats who oppose gun control (Zell Miller, senator from Georgia), pro-choice republicans (Mitt Romney, governor of Massachusetts), tax-and-spend Republicans (Richard Nixon and George W Bush). I think as an accident of history, people in this country (whose political life began with any number of parties) began consolidating into large alliances that became known as the political affliations they are today. I would liken them to the parliamentary alliances formed among disparate parties in European houses, towards the aim of exerting more power for their common goals.
As for the personal privacy issue, I politely request you check your facts. As a rule, in the US corporations cannot collect anything more than aggregrate information (i.e., information about you that does not uniquely identify you) without your explicit consent, and in many cases where the consumer was too liberal in exercising said consent, the courts generally find in their favor. For Americans its a plenty important issue, and I have to wonder where you get the idea they don't care about it. (I don't, personally, but that's because I think privacy is a legal fiction for neurotic political pressure groups -- a topic for another discussion).
Acts 4, the Apostles. Unless you consider St. Luke to have been the department of Propaganda
I recognize the reference, but I don't understand how it serves as an example.
but what makes you think that is the only way to achieve communism? Expand your mind a bit!
And what makes you think I have the arrogance and temerity to impose my supposedly enlightened view on other people?
I think you're equating the federalism of the US with the quasi-confederalism of the EU. There are far too many key distinctions between the two models to justify your statement. The design of the EU's government and parliament, the rotating presidency, and the fierce nationalism that still pervades much of continental Europe really prevents the kind of powerful central government from emerging the way it did here in the United States. Unless some demagogue comes to the EU presidency and makes some substantial changes to the design of the EU government, the most power the EU will wield will be economic power, and even there such reach will be governed by the WTO.
I doubt you'll see a U-turn on this issue, primarily because of the fundamentally different outlook on government and rights between the two continents. For Americans, rights really are important, even though everyone who says "I'm defending the Bill of Rights!" tends to defend only their favorite few (i.e., the 1st for the lefties, the 2nd and 4th for the righties). Europeans still have an essentially monarchistic view of government's relations to its citizens: citizens are subjects of the government, and all rights they enjoy, they do so at the government's pleasure. Thus stopping people from saying bad things doesn't get people as uppity there as it does here. It's the same reason gun control is not as much of a hot topic as in the US.
That must mean every socialist regime that's ever existed had leaders and educators that were lazy. Show me a shining example of glorious socialism that did not have a very active propaganda and censorship bureau.
There will always be envy, there will always be greed, and it has nothing to do with "historical preconditions" or "culture war" or anything else those Marxist space cadets shoved down your naive and willing gullet. Declaring war on the bourgeoisie and enslaving them is still war on people and slavery. And you can't wave away the moral implications thereof because you find them less than human, for the crime of owning property.
I am a software engineer who's been using Solaris for about 8 years now and just recently switched to linux as a result of a job change. Much of the switch was painless enough, but there are a few differences between the two that needed sorting out, as well as using new software and doing sysadmin things that I previously had smart people paid to do for me.
My local linux guru happens to be a good friend of mine, and even when I come to him with seemingly intelligent questions, I get borderline hostile responses, suggesting to me I am an idiot/asshole/whatever for daring to waste his time with a question that I could've found the answer to myself.
Unfortunately, for someone of my intelligence and experience, "finding the answer for myself" usually means hours spent poring through manuals and FAQs and HOWTOs for the weird little behavioral quirk I'm looking to get answered. I dare not look into newsgroups and ask, for fear of even harsher treatment.
Most of the time, the people complaining about how idiotic newbies are, are often the same people wondering why linux hasn't taken over the world, established peace and harmony and cured cancer. Quite simply, it's not because people aren't curious about a free operating system and tons of free apps to do what people normally pay to do -- it doesn't take a sociologist or economist to realize that people will gladly do the same things they pay for, for free, given the chance. The problem is, they need to ask questions, and the best people to ask generally have enormous egos and a massive elitist streak.
RTFM/RTFFAQ is not without it's merits, but unfortunately many linux geeks use it as a simple, smarmy response to questions one can't reasonably be expected to know or discover for oneself. RTFM is meant to stop people from wasting time with common questions, but instead it's being used to stop otherwise interested people from pursuing linux further because those already steeped in it treat them like idiots. People like free software, but they don't like being insulted to get it.
One of the reasons Microsoft ascended to where it is now is not because they make high quality, stable, efficient, easy to use software. It's because they treat their customers like gold, help them with their problems happily, and treat even the most idiotic questions with empathy. Linux users looking to evangelize the movement should do likewise. Remember, you were there once too, not knowing how the hell to install patches or configure a Samba server or get your network running. Just because you have the knowledge doesn't make you a better person, unless you REALLY embrace the open source movement and make your knowledge as open source as the software.
We've tried unfettered capitalism. It failed, and led to the Great Depression.
Actually, what led to the Black Monday crash was the newly created FEDERAL RESERVE trying to manage interest rates and keeping them artificially deflated to try to spur an "eternal boom cycle". That, coupled with the speculative loans the Fed had created, caused a massive market correction. Think of a casino lending you tons of chips to play with, on little more than your say-so, and then finally saying "ok, you have to pay us now". And you've got maybe a tenth of what you actually owe them. This is called fractional-reserve banking. It's what the Fed did (and still does, but with slightly better results), and it's their fault.
Now, to extend that analogy, consider half the casino's patrons doing this. What happens when the casino can't take the income it expected from these people? It can't pay its workers, its mortgage, its debts. And this is the "callous pocketstuffing" everyone laments; in reality, it's the Fed simply being too stupid to manage the economy.
But you can't blame them. For years and years and years, governments have tried to do exactly that, and met anywhere from mediocre to disastrous results.
Unfettered capitalism? No, not now, not anywhere, ever. We've never had a truly free market in the history of the world.
The notion that continual offshoring will depress wages is based on a number of false assumptions, especially the notion that worker productivity is static. Fact of the matter is, workers in India are less productive than workers here - that is one of the key reasons they are generally paid less, and the cost of living is reduced. Productivity does not have any moral baggage attached - Indians are not less smart or good or whatever - they just don't have the same economic facilities that US workers do to match the output per unit time as Americans. One thing offshoring will do, in fact, is incite productivity increases in the places that get the new jobs.
When manufacturers started moving their factories out of places like Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco and moved them overseas, the job losses were temporary - those workers are not still out of work. It allowed newer, higher-paid and higher-skilled jobs to be created HERE -- while providing newer, higher-paid and higher-skilled jobs to people overseas.
...or is this storying suffering from a classic logical fallacy?
I mean, I don't believe the RIAA either when they say that file sharing is the reason sales are down. But then again, I thought most slashdotters felt the same way. Why is the RIAA (rightfully) chastised for false cause in that argument, yet slashdot publishes a story with the same logical error and people lap it up?
Simply because filesharing is out there now, and record sales are up in Australia, doesn't mean filesharing caused the increase. What will they say a year from now, if sales suddenly slump? Certainly not "filesharing killed Australian music sales".
Amen to that. The comments sections get moderated and meta-moderated, all in the name of intelligent discussion and democracy, yet only the slashdot elite get to publish their stories, however biased they may be.
You obviously don't work in my office.
I knew it when I paid $20 for a half a gig! That DRAM couldn't be worth more than $17, tops.
Since we only ever talk about satellites when they break, it seems only fair.
amen to that. Like I said somewhere else, it's amazing how many people who say "software should be free", and try to put linux on casio wristwatches get all closed-minded and say "we should forbid people from building this!" when it comes to technology that the government might use to invade privacy. Worry when they outlaw the countermeasures.