...and I really dread arguing with religious people, free market advocates and American loyalists.
While it's important to constantly that those categories of people are completely morally bankrupt, stupid and plain evil, it's like diving with a snorkel into an enormous vat filled with decomposing brains. Can someone else do it?
Write a program that can determine whether another arbitrary program will halt on a given set of inputs, or run forever. You can't do it. Its impossible.
That's irrelevant. The task is not to take an arbitrary program and determine if it will perform a particular action. It's to take GIVEN piece of software and determine if it can be proven to perform a particular action, and if not, determine how to modify that piece of software so it will be possible to prove that it will perform that particular action.
While this is likely to produce inefficient software, and it may require more time and effort than just writing "what seems right", this is nowhere close to the halting problem.
Sick people in US (and only in US) are afraid to see doctors because they expect treatment to be unaffordable, ineffective or both. As a result, pharmaceutical companies believe, they NEED ads hawking their drugs, so after seeing the ad few thousand times a person will finally drag his ass to a hospital and annoy a doctor into prescribing something. Then hopefully that person won't throw a prescription into trash after learning how much it will cost.
This is what happens when pharmaceutical price gouging and insurance companies' machinations reach their logical conclusion -- no one can afford anything. I see the next bailout coming in a few years to them.
What are you talking about? All historians express nothing but their ideological prejudices when they talk about 19th-20th centuries. Add 18th century, too, if historian is American.
a democracy's government constantly consults the will of the people, and so it is constantly realigned with the people's will. this is possible in any human culture that exists, ever has existed, or ever will. it is completely compatible with simple human nature, regardless of any cultural differences. so you can criticize democracy all you want, but this simple truth about democracy makes it better than all other governments because it makes democracy much more stable than other government types. its legitimacy is constantly being refreshed
No. In democracy powerful entities smother the uneducated population with propaganda, wait for it to take hold, then elect people who are then bribed by the same entities, and finally a new wave of propaganda is unleashed to promote the decisions made by those elected officials as somehow being beneficial. As long as at least half of the population is disinterested or ignorant about the matter, anything can be railroaded through this process. No member of population who knows enough to want to affect this process, can affect it, unless he is a member of the ruling elite. There is nothing democratic about it. As I have mentioned before, such a person has better chance under monarchy -- because monarch is likely bored, and reads books in his spare time.
well, i'm going to tell someone that you prefer mexican food over chinese food. if you protest, i'll say it is my culture not to consult you when i represent your interests, and its only western propaganda that you think that you should be consulted before something is done in your name without your consultation
If you (being an idiot) didn't notice yet, I am Russian. I lived in USSR, post-USSR Russia and Belarus, and US. I have experienced firsthand, and communicated with plenty of people whose opinions and preferences I have described to you. This is my culture. It has little to do with yours one. You should be happy that this culture is not openly hostile toward you -- because plenty of other cultures already are.
The problem is not that large amount of software can be developed, and is developed using large amount of pre-existing code. It's not even that large amount of software is excruciatingly boring to develop because the easiest -- and right -- way to do it is to use large libraries and write a very small amount of original code to implement the functionality expected from new software.
The problem is, software is being developed by incompetent people in incompetent manner, and incompetent people use libraries, frameworks, protocols and programming ideologies as crutches, to develop seemingly working software despite their incompetence. Those people hunt for libraries, protocols and code to cut and paste, so they can implement their software despite having no idea how it is supposed to work. It does not matter if code they use is poorly suited for their purposes. It does not matter if it's pre-alpha quality code going into a safety-critical project. It does not matter if those programmers' assumptions are wrong, and they use libraries in unsafe way, produce countless buffer overflows in supposedly not-buffer-overflow-capable language and create massive mess with allocated and unallocated memory. It doesn't matter that they fundamentally misunderstand data formats and protocol they are using, so their software stops working the moment it leaves the environment it was developed in -- often the developer's desktop. The users and management expect those things to happen, and let those programmers continue for months in their perma-debugging cycle until everything is shoehorned into whatever seems to work well enough that the customer would pay for it. And the next person who will have to reuse THAT code, or merely interact with it, is given the task to write more new crud to keep old crud from breaking.
The problem is not that people use existing code -- the problem is that stupid, ignorant people who should have never been allowed to write software that will be used by others, use existing code to hide the fact that they are unfit to program. And another related problem is that this is tolerated.
I am a "real programmer". I was a programmer for more than two decades, I studied EE and CS, I had to implement algorithms in C because I was writing programs in C when pre-made implementations did not exist, I had to re-implement them again because I had to make those implementations and they had to be more efficient and generalized, and I had to implement them once more when I had to deal with unusual environments where existing implementations did not work.
I spend most of my time using and adapting other people's work. I develop software for embedded environments that have all kinds of constraints that usually are not taken into account, and most of my effort goes into taking an established piece of software, making it work there, and building on it. I can reimplement it from scratch. My implementation would be likely better suited for my particular purpose. It may not be that much of an effort to create such a thing. However others' implementations are being actively developed by many people, and are portable between multiple platforms. And by using those existing libraries and pieces of infrastructure I can keep this portability and benefit from ongoing development when I have to extend my software. So I would rather use and contribute to those projects than creating yet another thing with identical functionality and completely different implementation and interface.
However often a time comes when I look at all available options, and see nothing that I want to reuse. Existing implementations are all made with assumptions that are not and can not be met within a system that I am developing. There are frameworks that I would use otherwise, however they are monolithic, require large amounts of resources, introduce unnecessary complexity, have far-reaching effect on the models and style of development, and for that particular application I only need a trivial piece of their functionality. And then t
Computer security can not be achieved by responding to attacks. It's achieved by not being vulnerable to them.
Attacks may happen at any moment, and may target anything -- nothing that happened in the past can predict what might happen in the future considering that any host on the Internet can talk to your server. The amount of connection would matter if it is high enough to produce a DoS attack or number of attempt is so high, a brute force password guessing becomes viable. You are so far from both, pretty much any action you can perform would DECREASE the security because attackers might find a way to turn it against you. For example, if you block a host that tried to establish too many connections, they may try to spoof your host, so you will end up locking yourself out.
1. why do you confuse judgment of a government with judgment of a culture?
2. why do you confuse judgment of a government with judgment of a people?
Because, contrary to what US propaganda tells you, those governments rule at consent and with support of those people. I know, I am one of the people who preferred Communists over all possible alternatives as the government of then-USSR. Not seeing government as perfect is not the same as rejecting it at the fundamental level -- and even majority of dissidents did not reject those "tyrannical" governments at such extent. This is because those governments act consistently with their cultures.
you understand why i can't take anything you say seriously if you can't understand the different between these simple concepts, right? if you can't see the difference in those concepts, and say that i am attacking someone's culture when i am only attacking their illegitimate government, i can only conclude you are incredibly stupid or massively deluded
I can assure you that most of those supposedly oppressed people actually have the same position as myself. If you hate me so much, you should hate them, too, but please don't expect that they want anything that resembles your idea of a "free" society. I am one of them, and as opposed to the majority of them, I am trying to explain my position to you.
you do understand that to equate a people or a culture with the government that lords over them is complete intellectual failure on your part, right?
No, because I am one of people who recognizes supposedly oppressive government as just as normal as your own one for people like you.
a north korean, or a cuban, or a brazilian, or a vanuatuan, or anyone, who is a human being, is my equal, and deserves the same as i do. because they are MY EQUAL. because they are a HUMAN BEING. i say this as a HUMAN BEING. not an america, or a westerner
You are not equal. Your society grants people power over others depending on their wealth, membership in established organizations, etc. Poor education in your society keeps you one well-funded propaganda campaign away from being enslaved, killed or tortured. You society IS one well-funded propaganda campaign away from passing universal healthcare -- it would have it if insurance companies didn't recruit hordes of stupid rednecks to scream at congressmen to abandon it. You may have a delusion that your opinion matters if you happen to share your beliefs with those masters of your society but answer this question -- how would society change if you happened to have different beliefs? Would you be able to steer rednecks to do your bidding? Would you blackmail government into bending to your will? Would it be any different if all people in US with college education tried to do so?
I realize that in an imaginary society where all people are educated and interested in politics, democracy would work just fine. However your society has nothing to do with such a fantasy. As an educated person I can find (with difficulty) a way to steer ideologically inflexible Communist Party officials. I have some idea how to write a book that can influence monarch and nobility. I am worse than powerless in a democratic society that fallen under control of mass media controlled by people like Rupert Murdoch. And I can do nothing to influence Murdoch -- I would have greater success with any leader of Russia, USSR or China over the last two centuries than with Murdoch.
So even if I measured my success in life by how much my actions affect lives of other people, in 70's USSR I would have greater success in doing so than in 10's US. Your democracy is worthless for me. I lived in US for 16 years and still refuse to take US citizenship for this very reason, I recognize my position in your society as a foreigner, and direct my efforts into areas that I care about, and that have nothing to do with your politicians. Bu
"While you believe that your position is justified and other people are "wrong", it's clearly not universal, both have cultures behind them, not some kind of constant government control that forces people to pretend that they disagree with you."
this is the highest form of patronizing idiocy there is
Without any value judgment attached, it's actually nothing but stating a fact. You may still argue that other people's cultures are objectively inferior or underdeveloped, just not make an assumption that everyone shares your value, or that foreign people don't really like what they claim to like.
1. that you confuse my opposition to tyrannical governments with the some sort of opposition to the people living under those tyrannical governments. my opinion is in solidarity with people suffering under totalitarian governments. their totalitarian governments are illegitimate, they do not represent the wills of their people. in a democracy, the government is composed of the will of the people. do you understand the fucking basics here?
That would make sense if those government actually were more "tyrannical" than your own one (or one that you would propose them as an alternative). In reality the amount of actual oppression is/was about the same, or possibly less than one that is practiced in US, it just promotes values and behavior that American would feel oppressed if he was subjected to them.
Imagine yourself in a society of early English Puritan settlers in what is now US. They fled England because they felt oppressed, yet a person with modern American background would find himself far more oppressed in their society than in England of the same time. However for those people such a society was less oppressive because it matched their beliefs. In the modern terms they basically called England "totalitarian" while England called them "totalitarian". In reality it was never about freedom, just a significant cultural difference that was completely erased, if not reversed, in a matter of decades.
2. that these tyrannical governments are part of the "culture" of someone else.
First of all, those governments are not nearly as tyrannical. They would be if they managed to rule over Americans and cause Americans to behave according to the norms of the local culture, however no one ever tried to do that. If anything, this is one of the reasons no one really threatens to conquer US -- no government wants to deal with citizens who are so far removed from the culture it promotes.
as if ancient korean or cuban culture supports hardcore communism,
Actually yes, they do. Those cultures commonly promote common good, co-operation and personal sacrifices to promote interests of fellow humans, society as a whole and future improvement over instant gratification. Even Capitalism in places similar to those, has significant differences from one practiced in US.
which, if you will recall, was imported from extremely traditional cuban and korean places like marx's germany and stalin's russia/ georgia.
Actually obschina and associated values of co-operation and society's interests being placed above the personal ones is a major part of the Russian culture since ancient times. This is why USSR was more successful than, say, Eastern Germany, and why Stasi was more oppressive than KGB.
tyrannical governments do not defend the culture of their lands, do not defend their people. they are illegitimate parasites off of the people, because the people have no voice in the structure which rules them BECAUSE THEY AREN'T DEMOCRACIES. duh
This is entirely unfounded statement, based on a perception of a person who was taught for his whole life to treat those governments AND those people as enemies.
3. there is constant government control of the media i
A much better question is how these regimes have managed to STAY in power. It is pretty clear that whatever popular support they had initially has waned away over the years and decades. Essentially, every single one of these regimes has become what they originally set out to fight - an abusive, tyrannical government.
Those words would be just as true if applied to, say, US.
but it is clearly ideologically superior to societies that are not democratic, at least according to me, not you apparently
Only because "democratic" societies require people to act in a way that you, being a member of such society, find culturally acceptable.
there are limits on my freedom in a democracy. some are stupid, and i fight them, some limits are natural and i accept them. but i would like to know why these limits are in any way comparable to the limits on someone's freedom
And this is nothing but a part of your society's idiosyncrasy. For example, in your "democratic" society you face much more danger and oppression if you try to fight a mob boss, compared to fighting all "oppressive" governments combined. You find it acceptable because you "feel" that opposing a criminal should be dangerous while opposing a government shouldn't be. A person in another culture would find it offensive because he thinks that governments should never let malevolent and violent criminals (who are morally inferior to the rest of population) be more powerful than the government (that usually is morally at about the same level as the rest of population) when it comes to oppressing individual's freedoms.
While you believe that your position is justified and other people are "wrong", it's clearly not universal, both have cultures behind them, not some kind of constant government control that forces people to pretend that they disagree with you.
living in north korea or cuba
North Korea and Cuba are first and foremost countries that are very poor due to foreign oppression and economic blockades. Political and economic systems are more or less incidental to living conditions in those countries. Just as well USSR in 70's-80' had higher quality of life than US, and currently China is far ahead of pretty much all of sub-Saharan Africa.
i call them totalitarian societies. you say there are no totalitarian socities. i would like you to tell me how the rulers of cuba, iran, north korea, or china came to power.
Originally -- through popular revolutions, same as all other countries.
Particular rulers are elected through procedures that are not significantly unlike your own one, often less prone to corruption and fraud.
i would like you to tell me how barack obama or gordon brown came to power. and finally i would like to know according to what amazing logic you equivocate these two (very different) paths to power
There is no fundamental difference. One can argue that Barack Obama used more political manipulation and exhibited less honesty in his election campaign promises than average president of China.
xenophobia is an interesting topic. i would like to know what the hell that has to do with totalitarianism in your mind. all societies are xenophobic to some degree or another. and it seems to me, that the more totalitarian a society, the more the xenophobia. you apparently see nothing but the same totalitarianism and xenophobia everywhere
Actually no on both counts. There is nothing "interesting" about xenophobia that is relevant to this discussion. The definition of a "totalitarianism" is a system where government has an over-reaching, nearly total control of people behavior, something that does not exist in the world, and can be shown to be impossible to sustain for more than few hours without society breaking down. My point is that Americans' belief in "totalitarianism" stems from their xenophobia, and not from countries actually being "totalitarian" -- they see people doing something that they can't imagine themselves doing, and believe that some kind of massive oppression causes those people to act that way. It does not enter their mind that what they are seeing is merely a culture with values slightly different from their own ones.
That's actually a valid explanation why all American political movements are such an epic fail since the end of Civil Rights/racial equality movement (that was a personal army, too, but for a way too huge number of people).
1984 can be seen as a valid comment on the worst abuses of power by Stalin, however it had just as little to do with post-Stalin USSR as with "democratic" Western countries. American propaganda latched onto it as a valid description of all designated enemies of their nation, regardless of any relationship to reality.
The truth is, any society where norms and traditions are incompatible with your own ones will look oppressive to you. So if you are an ignoramus, and believe that only your society's idiosyncrasies are "natural", you would believe that government control somehow extends to all aspects of society because sure as hell, people would never act in such a manner if it didn't.
There are no totalitarian societies -- they are not at any greater extent "totalitarian" than your own one. Get off your high horse and admit that you are raised as a bunch of disgusting xenophobes.
They were in window managers that initially were used in Gnome, and both times when Gnome switched default window manager (Enlightenment to Sawfish to Metacity), there was a massive reduction of functionality.
Yes, overreact and call everyone insane who prefers the drag-to-edge-maximize behavior.
No one prefers it. It is painful for the fingers, and messes up organized screen if the user decided to abandon the operation mid-drag.
Which is everyone but you, apparently.
How so? Even Windows fan that mentioned dragging, claims that he uses keyboard shortcuts. Dragging a large window is a tedious operation, it doesn't make things easier.
The devil is in the details. Windows 7 makes the feature really easy to use, and the visual feedback about "hey, if you drop your windows here, we will maximize it!" is really intuitive.
That's actually a bad part of Microsoft "solution". I don't want to drag window for any purpose other than moving it -- that would make windows hard to manage -- so X always used keys and buttons for this purpose.
In Gnome it wasn't, AFAIK.
Current GNOME-native window manager never supported this at all -- it was the answer to Windows users who complained about fvwm, window maker, fluxbox, enlightenment and countless others that had this feature.
Nor in other window managers that supported it, like Ion. Furthermore, the feature of half-wide windows is more useful with today's wide screens.
And even now I can't imagine a sane person dragging a window to resize it.
That's the point, the features in X are great, but you have to very carefully apply them to make it intuitive. From a computer science perspective such a feature is not significant progress. From a usability perspective, it is.
The point is, Windows users can go through great pains accommodating anything Microsoft implements, however they also happen to be vehemently against against the same features in any other desktop or operating system, even if non-Microsoft implementation is superior.
Those are actually functions that X window managers had for decades. They ended up being removed from the default Gnome configuration because Windows users complained about them.
Now, that Microsoft itself had approved 20 years of X window managers' development, can we put them back into default configuration, or will you just start complaining about some other superior interface feature?
Slashdot Mirror
to constantly that
I accidentally the whole verb. It's supposed to be
to constantly demonstrate
...and I really dread arguing with religious people, free market advocates and American loyalists.
While it's important to constantly that those categories of people are completely morally bankrupt, stupid and plain evil, it's like diving with a snorkel into an enormous vat filled with decomposing brains. Can someone else do it?
Write a program that can determine whether another arbitrary program will halt on a given set of inputs, or run forever. You can't do it. Its impossible.
That's irrelevant. The task is not to take an arbitrary program and determine if it will perform a particular action. It's to take GIVEN piece of software and determine if it can be proven to perform a particular action, and if not, determine how to modify that piece of software so it will be possible to prove that it will perform that particular action.
While this is likely to produce inefficient software, and it may require more time and effort than just writing "what seems right", this is nowhere close to the halting problem.
Sick people in US (and only in US) are afraid to see doctors because they expect treatment to be unaffordable, ineffective or both. As a result, pharmaceutical companies believe, they NEED ads hawking their drugs, so after seeing the ad few thousand times a person will finally drag his ass to a hospital and annoy a doctor into prescribing something. Then hopefully that person won't throw a prescription into trash after learning how much it will cost.
This is what happens when pharmaceutical price gouging and insurance companies' machinations reach their logical conclusion -- no one can afford anything. I see the next bailout coming in a few years to them.
You might be onto something. See if they can get a healthcare bill down to a single tweet.
strlen("Medicare for everyone!") = 22
Not that American politicians would ever allow this to happen.
history
scientific rigour
What are you talking about? All historians express nothing but their ideological prejudices when they talk about 19th-20th centuries. Add 18th century, too, if historian is American.
A Democrat who thinks that all Republicans are selfish ultra-capitalist fundamentalists is a moron.
True. Not all Republicans are ultra-capitalist fundamentalists, some are stupid rednecks, and some are just insane.
No, its business.
I see no contradiction. Microsoft long ago reached the point when intimidating its enemies is more effective than recruiting allies.
a democracy's government constantly consults the will of the people, and so it is constantly realigned with the people's will. this is possible in any human culture that exists, ever has existed, or ever will. it is completely compatible with simple human nature, regardless of any cultural differences. so you can criticize democracy all you want, but this simple truth about democracy makes it better than all other governments because it makes democracy much more stable than other government types. its legitimacy is constantly being refreshed
No. In democracy powerful entities smother the uneducated population with propaganda, wait for it to take hold, then elect people who are then bribed by the same entities, and finally a new wave of propaganda is unleashed to promote the decisions made by those elected officials as somehow being beneficial. As long as at least half of the population is disinterested or ignorant about the matter, anything can be railroaded through this process. No member of population who knows enough to want to affect this process, can affect it, unless he is a member of the ruling elite. There is nothing democratic about it. As I have mentioned before, such a person has better chance under monarchy -- because monarch is likely bored, and reads books in his spare time.
well, i'm going to tell someone that you prefer mexican food over chinese food. if you protest, i'll say it is my culture not to consult you when i represent your interests, and its only western propaganda that you think that you should be consulted before something is done in your name without your consultation
If you (being an idiot) didn't notice yet, I am Russian. I lived in USSR, post-USSR Russia and Belarus, and US. I have experienced firsthand, and communicated with plenty of people whose opinions and preferences I have described to you. This is my culture. It has little to do with yours one. You should be happy that this culture is not openly hostile toward you -- because plenty of other cultures already are.
And who in his right mind would run those on Windows?
The problem is not that large amount of software can be developed, and is developed using large amount of pre-existing code. It's not even that large amount of software is excruciatingly boring to develop because the easiest -- and right -- way to do it is to use large libraries and write a very small amount of original code to implement the functionality expected from new software.
The problem is, software is being developed by incompetent people in incompetent manner, and incompetent people use libraries, frameworks, protocols and programming ideologies as crutches, to develop seemingly working software despite their incompetence. Those people hunt for libraries, protocols and code to cut and paste, so they can implement their software despite having no idea how it is supposed to work. It does not matter if code they use is poorly suited for their purposes. It does not matter if it's pre-alpha quality code going into a safety-critical project. It does not matter if those programmers' assumptions are wrong, and they use libraries in unsafe way, produce countless buffer overflows in supposedly not-buffer-overflow-capable language and create massive mess with allocated and unallocated memory. It doesn't matter that they fundamentally misunderstand data formats and protocol they are using, so their software stops working the moment it leaves the environment it was developed in -- often the developer's desktop. The users and management expect those things to happen, and let those programmers continue for months in their perma-debugging cycle until everything is shoehorned into whatever seems to work well enough that the customer would pay for it. And the next person who will have to reuse THAT code, or merely interact with it, is given the task to write more new crud to keep old crud from breaking.
The problem is not that people use existing code -- the problem is that stupid, ignorant people who should have never been allowed to write software that will be used by others, use existing code to hide the fact that they are unfit to program. And another related problem is that this is tolerated.
I am a "real programmer". I was a programmer for more than two decades, I studied EE and CS, I had to implement algorithms in C because I was writing programs in C when pre-made implementations did not exist, I had to re-implement them again because I had to make those implementations and they had to be more efficient and generalized, and I had to implement them once more when I had to deal with unusual environments where existing implementations did not work.
I spend most of my time using and adapting other people's work. I develop software for embedded environments that have all kinds of constraints that usually are not taken into account, and most of my effort goes into taking an established piece of software, making it work there, and building on it. I can reimplement it from scratch. My implementation would be likely better suited for my particular purpose. It may not be that much of an effort to create such a thing. However others' implementations are being actively developed by many people, and are portable between multiple platforms. And by using those existing libraries and pieces of infrastructure I can keep this portability and benefit from ongoing development when I have to extend my software. So I would rather use and contribute to those projects than creating yet another thing with identical functionality and completely different implementation and interface.
However often a time comes when I look at all available options, and see nothing that I want to reuse. Existing implementations are all made with assumptions that are not and can not be met within a system that I am developing. There are frameworks that I would use otherwise, however they are monolithic, require large amounts of resources, introduce unnecessary complexity, have far-reaching effect on the models and style of development, and for that particular application I only need a trivial piece of their functionality. And then t
Microsoft is well Microsoft and i don't use windows. Hmm I guess as a beardy Linux user I am not the target audience for these ads.
The point of Microsoft ads is on sites frequented by users who avoid Microsoft products is intimidation.
Computer security can not be achieved by responding to attacks. It's achieved by not being vulnerable to them.
Attacks may happen at any moment, and may target anything -- nothing that happened in the past can predict what might happen in the future considering that any host on the Internet can talk to your server. The amount of connection would matter if it is high enough to produce a DoS attack or number of attempt is so high, a brute force password guessing becomes viable. You are so far from both, pretty much any action you can perform would DECREASE the security because attackers might find a way to turn it against you. For example, if you block a host that tried to establish too many connections, they may try to spoof your host, so you will end up locking yourself out.
1. why do you confuse judgment of a government with judgment of a culture?
2. why do you confuse judgment of a government with judgment of a people?
Because, contrary to what US propaganda tells you, those governments rule at consent and with support of those people. I know, I am one of the people who preferred Communists over all possible alternatives as the government of then-USSR. Not seeing government as perfect is not the same as rejecting it at the fundamental level -- and even majority of dissidents did not reject those "tyrannical" governments at such extent. This is because those governments act consistently with their cultures.
you understand why i can't take anything you say seriously if you can't understand the different between these simple concepts, right? if you can't see the difference in those concepts, and say that i am attacking someone's culture when i am only attacking their illegitimate government, i can only conclude you are incredibly stupid or massively deluded
I can assure you that most of those supposedly oppressed people actually have the same position as myself. If you hate me so much, you should hate them, too, but please don't expect that they want anything that resembles your idea of a "free" society. I am one of them, and as opposed to the majority of them, I am trying to explain my position to you.
you do understand that to equate a people or a culture with the government that lords over them is complete intellectual failure on your part, right?
No, because I am one of people who recognizes supposedly oppressive government as just as normal as your own one for people like you.
a north korean, or a cuban, or a brazilian, or a vanuatuan, or anyone, who is a human being, is my equal, and deserves the same as i do. because they are MY EQUAL. because they are a HUMAN BEING. i say this as a HUMAN BEING. not an america, or a westerner
You are not equal. Your society grants people power over others depending on their wealth, membership in established organizations, etc. Poor education in your society keeps you one well-funded propaganda campaign away from being enslaved, killed or tortured. You society IS one well-funded propaganda campaign away from passing universal healthcare -- it would have it if insurance companies didn't recruit hordes of stupid rednecks to scream at congressmen to abandon it. You may have a delusion that your opinion matters if you happen to share your beliefs with those masters of your society but answer this question -- how would society change if you happened to have different beliefs? Would you be able to steer rednecks to do your bidding? Would you blackmail government into bending to your will? Would it be any different if all people in US with college education tried to do so?
I realize that in an imaginary society where all people are educated and interested in politics, democracy would work just fine. However your society has nothing to do with such a fantasy. As an educated person I can find (with difficulty) a way to steer ideologically inflexible Communist Party officials. I have some idea how to write a book that can influence monarch and nobility. I am worse than powerless in a democratic society that fallen under control of mass media controlled by people like Rupert Murdoch. And I can do nothing to influence Murdoch -- I would have greater success with any leader of Russia, USSR or China over the last two centuries than with Murdoch.
So even if I measured my success in life by how much my actions affect lives of other people, in 70's USSR I would have greater success in doing so than in 10's US. Your democracy is worthless for me. I lived in US for 16 years and still refuse to take US citizenship for this very reason, I recognize my position in your society as a foreigner, and direct my efforts into areas that I care about, and that have nothing to do with your politicians. Bu
"While you believe that your position is justified and other people are "wrong", it's clearly not universal, both have cultures behind them, not some kind of constant government control that forces people to pretend that they disagree with you."
this is the highest form of patronizing idiocy there is
Without any value judgment attached, it's actually nothing but stating a fact. You may still argue that other people's cultures are objectively inferior or underdeveloped, just not make an assumption that everyone shares your value, or that foreign people don't really like what they claim to like.
1. that you confuse my opposition to tyrannical governments with the some sort of opposition to the people living under those tyrannical governments. my opinion is in solidarity with people suffering under totalitarian governments. their totalitarian governments are illegitimate, they do not represent the wills of their people. in a democracy, the government is composed of the will of the people. do you understand the fucking basics here?
That would make sense if those government actually were more "tyrannical" than your own one (or one that you would propose them as an alternative). In reality the amount of actual oppression is/was about the same, or possibly less than one that is practiced in US, it just promotes values and behavior that American would feel oppressed if he was subjected to them.
Imagine yourself in a society of early English Puritan settlers in what is now US. They fled England because they felt oppressed, yet a person with modern American background would find himself far more oppressed in their society than in England of the same time. However for those people such a society was less oppressive because it matched their beliefs. In the modern terms they basically called England "totalitarian" while England called them "totalitarian". In reality it was never about freedom, just a significant cultural difference that was completely erased, if not reversed, in a matter of decades.
2. that these tyrannical governments are part of the "culture" of someone else.
First of all, those governments are not nearly as tyrannical. They would be if they managed to rule over Americans and cause Americans to behave according to the norms of the local culture, however no one ever tried to do that. If anything, this is one of the reasons no one really threatens to conquer US -- no government wants to deal with citizens who are so far removed from the culture it promotes.
as if ancient korean or cuban culture supports hardcore communism,
Actually yes, they do. Those cultures commonly promote common good, co-operation and personal sacrifices to promote interests of fellow humans, society as a whole and future improvement over instant gratification. Even Capitalism in places similar to those, has significant differences from one practiced in US.
which, if you will recall, was imported from extremely traditional cuban and korean places like marx's germany and stalin's russia/ georgia.
Actually obschina and associated values of co-operation and society's interests being placed above the personal ones is a major part of the Russian culture since ancient times. This is why USSR was more successful than, say, Eastern Germany, and why Stasi was more oppressive than KGB.
tyrannical governments do not defend the culture of their lands, do not defend their people. they are illegitimate parasites off of the people, because the people have no voice in the structure which rules them BECAUSE THEY AREN'T DEMOCRACIES. duh
This is entirely unfounded statement, based on a perception of a person who was taught for his whole life to treat those governments AND those people as enemies.
3. there is constant government control of the media i
A much better question is how these regimes have managed to STAY in power. It is pretty clear that whatever popular support they had initially has waned away over the years and decades. Essentially, every single one of these regimes has become what they originally set out to fight - an abusive, tyrannical government.
Those words would be just as true if applied to, say, US.
but it is clearly ideologically superior to societies that are not democratic, at least according to me, not you apparently
Only because "democratic" societies require people to act in a way that you, being a member of such society, find culturally acceptable.
there are limits on my freedom in a democracy. some are stupid, and i fight them, some limits are natural and i accept them. but i would like to know why these limits are in any way comparable to the limits on someone's freedom
And this is nothing but a part of your society's idiosyncrasy.
For example, in your "democratic" society you face much more danger and oppression if you try to fight a mob boss, compared to fighting all "oppressive" governments combined. You find it acceptable because you "feel" that opposing a criminal should be dangerous while opposing a government shouldn't be. A person in another culture would find it offensive because he thinks that governments should never let malevolent and violent criminals (who are morally inferior to the rest of population) be more powerful than the government (that usually is morally at about the same level as the rest of population) when it comes to oppressing individual's freedoms.
While you believe that your position is justified and other people are "wrong", it's clearly not universal, both have cultures behind them, not some kind of constant government control that forces people to pretend that they disagree with you.
living in north korea or cuba
North Korea and Cuba are first and foremost countries that are very poor due to foreign oppression and economic blockades. Political and economic systems are more or less incidental to living conditions in those countries. Just as well USSR in 70's-80' had higher quality of life than US, and currently China is far ahead of pretty much all of sub-Saharan Africa.
i call them totalitarian societies. you say there are no totalitarian socities. i would like you to tell me how the rulers of cuba, iran, north korea, or china came to power.
Originally -- through popular revolutions, same as all other countries.
Particular rulers are elected through procedures that are not significantly unlike your own one, often less prone to corruption and fraud.
i would like you to tell me how barack obama or gordon brown came to power. and finally i would like to know according to what amazing logic you equivocate these two (very different) paths to power
There is no fundamental difference. One can argue that Barack Obama used more political manipulation and exhibited less honesty in his election campaign promises than average president of China.
xenophobia is an interesting topic. i would like to know what the hell that has to do with totalitarianism in your mind. all societies are xenophobic to some degree or another. and it seems to me, that the more totalitarian a society, the more the xenophobia. you apparently see nothing but the same totalitarianism and xenophobia everywhere
Actually no on both counts. There is nothing "interesting" about xenophobia that is relevant to this discussion. The definition of a "totalitarianism" is a system where government has an over-reaching, nearly total control of people behavior, something that does not exist in the world, and can be shown to be impossible to sustain for more than few hours without society breaking down. My point is that Americans' belief in "totalitarianism" stems from their xenophobia, and not from countries actually being "totalitarian" -- they see people doing something that they can't imagine themselves doing, and believe that some kind of massive oppression causes those people to act that way. It does not enter their mind that what they are seeing is merely a culture with values slightly different from their own ones.
frankly, you're a fucking moron
What you are describing as "communism" is actually "military communism", a completely different (and always temporary) social system.
You mean, in US everything IS your personal army?
That's actually a valid explanation why all American political movements are such an epic fail since the end of Civil Rights/racial equality movement (that was a personal army, too, but for a way too huge number of people).
1984 can be seen as a valid comment on the worst abuses of power by Stalin, however it had just as little to do with post-Stalin USSR as with "democratic" Western countries. American propaganda latched onto it as a valid description of all designated enemies of their nation, regardless of any relationship to reality.
The truth is, any society where norms and traditions are incompatible with your own ones will look oppressive to you. So if you are an ignoramus, and believe that only your society's idiosyncrasies are "natural", you would believe that government control somehow extends to all aspects of society because sure as hell, people would never act in such a manner if it didn't.
There are no totalitarian societies -- they are not at any greater extent "totalitarian" than your own one. Get off your high horse and admit that you are raised as a bunch of disgusting xenophobes.
They were in window managers that initially were used in Gnome, and both times when Gnome switched default window manager (Enlightenment to Sawfish to Metacity), there was a massive reduction of functionality.
Yes, overreact and call everyone insane who prefers the drag-to-edge-maximize behavior.
No one prefers it. It is painful for the fingers, and messes up organized screen if the user decided to abandon the operation mid-drag.
Which is everyone but you, apparently.
How so? Even Windows fan that mentioned dragging, claims that he uses keyboard shortcuts. Dragging a large window is a tedious operation, it doesn't make things easier.
Who is the apologist here?
You, obviously.
The devil is in the details. Windows 7 makes the feature really easy to use, and the visual feedback about "hey, if you drop your windows here, we will maximize it!" is really intuitive.
That's actually a bad part of Microsoft "solution". I don't want to drag window for any purpose other than moving it -- that would make windows hard to manage -- so X always used keys and buttons for this purpose.
In Gnome it wasn't, AFAIK.
Current GNOME-native window manager never supported this at all -- it was the answer to Windows users who complained about fvwm, window maker, fluxbox, enlightenment and countless others that had this feature.
Nor in other window managers that supported it, like Ion. Furthermore, the feature of half-wide windows is more useful with today's wide screens.
And even now I can't imagine a sane person dragging a window to resize it.
That's the point, the features in X are great, but you have to very carefully apply them to make it intuitive. From a computer science perspective such a feature is not significant progress. From a usability perspective, it is.
The point is, Windows users can go through great pains accommodating anything Microsoft implements, however they also happen to be vehemently against against the same features in any other desktop or operating system, even if non-Microsoft implementation is superior.
Those are actually functions that X window managers had for decades. They ended up being removed from the default Gnome configuration because Windows users complained about them.
Now, that Microsoft itself had approved 20 years of X window managers' development, can we put them back into default configuration, or will you just start complaining about some other superior interface feature?