In part because of the cost of government, there's a basic COL difference that isn't going to allow the American coders to be competitive on price given these salaries - it's expensive to live in the U.S.
True. If I had to live off of $11,000/yr, I'd sure as hell rather be doing it in India than the States. However, I wouldn't want people to think that they'd enjoy, on $11k, the standard of living there that they'd enjoy here on $700k.
I'm not going to speak for the rest of the "west", but America generated most of its wealth in the last 150 years, long after anyone colonized anything on this continent, and long after we freed ourselves from the British who only sought to take our resources from us.
First of all, the U.S. was still in the process of colonizing the continent 150 years ago. Remember that the Cherokees' republic was only dismantled in 1907, and the Indian Wars lasted into the 1890s. Secondly, the U.S. colonized quite a few places outside of the ``lower 48'' -- Hawaii was a sovereign kingdom which was colonized and annexed, the Phillippines were retained as a colony until after WWII, Puerto Rico is still retained as a colony, and large parts of Latin America were ``informally'' colonized by U.S. companies (see the origin of the term ``banana republic,'' referring to the political power of U.S. fruit growers running Central American states).
I will grant, however, that it is unfair to lay all the sins of the colonial era at Americans' feet. While the U.S. was not innocent of imperialism in that era, it was hardly the only perpetrator, and far from the worst of the lot.
An $11,000 salary in India is about a $700,000 US salary
That's a somewhat misleading statistic. I assume you're basing that on median income or something similar rather than cost of living data (I didn't find where you got your figures on the site you cited). As someone who has lived and worked both in the States and in a developing country, I fully appreciate how much farther a dollar goes in a poor country. It is quite nice, for example, to be able to afford to eat out all the time, have a maid, etc., while making less than U.S. minimum wage. However, once you move beyond food, domestic servants, and (to a lesser extent) housing, you realize just how poor you are. Want a car? Those are quite a bit more expensive than in the States. Ditto for any kind of electronics (computers, stereos, TVs). Travel abroad? That costs you just as much as it costs an American.
Bottom line: That $11,000 may make you as rich, compared to other Indians, as making $700,000 does in the States, but it still makes you poor on a global scale. For a geek, that's significant: imagine how rich $700,000 would make you feel if the shiny new laptop you wanted cost $200,000, and if a compact car cost about $2,000,000!
oddly enough the english prof from the classes I went to last winter said that it was pretty young.
Just take a look at some (original)texts from Shakespeare.. while mostly understandable noticiably different.
I can't speak about Finnish, which I'm quite unfamiliar with (it's all umlauted as and double-ks to me <grin>). With English, though, there have certainly been changes since the time of Shakespeare, most notably the loss of the second person singular pronoun (thou), the change of the v/u distinction (from v at word beginning, like in vs for us, to v for the consonant, like in vapor for the Latin uapor), and the general systemization of spelling. Shakespeare's English, though, is clearly Modern English, as distinct from Middle English or (even moreso) Old English.
I think the point is that English existed as a literary language in a form that, while not exactly the same as 20th century English, is undisputably the same language -- and is closer to current Standard American English than the latter is to many currently-used English dialects, like Black American Vernacular. OTOH, in the 15th century, quite a few languages did not even exist in their modern literary forms: Russian (17th century), Greek (19th century), and Nynorsk (20th century), for example. Both Spanish and Italian seem to date in their modern codified forms from the 15th century, although both have changed substantially in spelling and vocabulary since then, too.
This is balanced by the fact that Old English (11th century and earlier) is totally incomprehensible to modern Englishmen and Americans, while literary Arabic is almost unchanged since the 7th century, and Classical Greek, while very difficult, can be deciphered to a large extent by a modern Greek.
Finnish seems to be a bit of an anomaly if it was codified as a literary language 500 years ago, as most of the languages of stateless nations were only formalized during the age of nationalism.
also modern english is actually a quite young language.
Oddly enough, it's not as relatively young as people tend to assume. Among living literary languages, modern English could be argued to be older than both modern Greek (dating only to the middle of the 19th century) and modern Hebrew (late 19th century). Modern English has been more-or-less fixed in its written form for more than 500 years.
I would argue, on the other hand, that there tends to be confusion about the nature of a state. Even in organized anarchic systems (as opposed to Mogadishu-style anarchy, what I presume you mean by `chaos'), there is some organization or framework which undertakes the roles of the state. This is what is necessary, even if the modern territorial state is left by the wayside. It's at some point a matter of semantics, I guess.
I recently had the good fortune to interview a guy who was in the Spanish Civil War, and has an astonishing collection of anarchist literature from the period.
The anarchists of the SCW were a very different breed from the `right' or capitalist anarchists. IIRC they were of the line of Bakunin, who started out a socialist but parted ways with Marx over what he (correctly) foresaw as the oppressive state which would come of Marxian socialism in practice. The important difference is that they envisioned small-scale workers' syndicates as the primary organizing units of society. There would be no `expropriators' or economic elite in such a scheme, and presumably the small scale of the basic organizational unit would lend cultural homogeneity. They certainly did not envision unregulated capitalism as the main organizing force. IIRC also the workers' militia Orwell fought with in Catalonia was more anarcho-syndicalist than Marxist -- I know he always referred to the big-C Communists as `the Right'.
Regarding the "tyranny of the majority" -- I've always claimed that attempts at representative democracy are two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for lunch. Any anarchy-like communities I've seen in practice attempts to avoid this problem using some fling at moderated consensus. It's time consuming and vulnerable to intransigents and filibustering unless properly moderated. Any social arrangement always has the problem of dealing with the rare but inevitable assh*le though.
The problem on the other extreme, though, is of course paralysis. The best example is pre-partition Poland. The legislative body (made up of nobles) required unanimity to pass any law, which gave Poland unparalleled protection from the tyranny of the majority, but also resulted in complete paralysis in the face of external threats. The balance is a tricky thing.
Well, I'd want to know if said teachers were expressing on-the-spot opinions, or the typically-liberal teacher's viewpoint somewhat after the fact and in light of his political career. As I know Pournelle personally, and how loudly intolerant he is of stupidity or even an *appearance* of stupidity, I'm more inclined to take his opinion of Quayle as reality. After all, they were working together in the space program -- so yes, it WAS rocket science!:)
As I said, I can't say to what extent their comments reflected their own political biases. I was in high school at the time, and I don't think I would have picked up on such subtleties... As I think back on it now, it's entirely possible he was a C student not through lack of native intelligence, but through being a discipline problem or just a slacker. I think the teachers would be more indulgent of a kid who had real disabilities than a kid who was just a pain in the arse... Hell, I'm sure not all of my public school teachers would recall me fondly if I ever got into politics...
"Kennedy started the Vietnam War." HUH? Farking EISENHOWER got our military into Vietnam for godssake. He's the one who started the whole "Domino Theory" in 1954, creating "South Vietnam." Seventy-five percent of the casualties in the war were suffered under Nixon.
In all fairness, it was Wilson who told Ho Chi Minh to bugger off when he asked at Versailles whether self-determination applied to the Indochinese or just to white people. And it was Truman who gave Indochina back to the French after WWII when Ho again came to the U.S. to ask for help. Unfortunately, idiotic and bigoted decisions have been made by presidents from both parties...
Kinda like how Dan Quayle caught all sorts of flack for having foot-in-mouth disease, but... if he were a stupid person, Jerry Pournelle (who has worked closely with him, and has zero tolerance for idiots) wouldn't think so highly of him. So what's Quayle's problem? Most likely dyslexia. According to a friend who's been in dyslexia research programs for the past 25 years, Quayle shows typical symptoms.
FWIW, I went to school in the same district as Quayle, and there were still a few teachers around when I was there who had taught him. The consensus was that he was not too bright. Now, that's not exactly an authoritative source -- teachers have political views, too. However, public school teachers are also very reluctant to call kids with learning disabilities stupid; it's just not done.
But what I want to know is when did it become OK to make fun of people for their learning disabilites? I thought Hollywood Liberals were sensitive and caring? I guess it's OK to pick on disabled people if they're conservatives.
I don't make fun of people with Parkinson's disease, but I would not be keen on having one be my surgeon.
Many right anarchists dispute precisely this. There is a common notion that without the state, there would be no law, that the state provides law, and therefore, in particular, that the state provides legal recourse with respect to property.
But this notion is disputed. You might google "anarcho-capitalism" for alternative views.
I'm familiar with the concept. The basic problem with any sort of anarchy in practice is that there is no protection against non-state coercion. In particular, there is no curb on the armed elite's exploitation of a de facto monopoly on violence (see Somalia for a good case study, or the Congo more recently). There is also no curb on the tyranny of the majority. Social and political organization based solely on free association and lack of state coercion can work only if there is a quite even distribution of wealth, such that some individuals are not forced into de facto servitude by economic pressures, and if the society is quite homogeneous culturally, such that there are not factions which will cause ersatz states to form.
Imagine being an adolescent girl with no property, wealth, or family connections trying to obtain security under anarchic conditions. How would she secure the protection of what theorists like to call a ``defence agency,'' but a cynic might call a ``protection racket''? And what would happen to her if she didn't? Again, places like the Congo provide illuminating case studies.
Indeed, there's a right-anarchist argument that, unlike private property, copyright is nothing but a government-created monopoly. (Of course, there's also a left-anarchist argument that private property is a government-created monopoly too, but I'm not so sure -- territory is a pretty fundamental idea for a lot of species that don't have governments or copyright.)
Actually, the idea that private property is a government-created monopoly is not just an anarchist idea. Without taking a stand on whether it is a good thing or not, it is pretty clearly something that doesn't exist without state enforcement. It's important to distinguish ``property'' in the sense of ``my stuff'' from ``property'' in the sense of something that remains mine whether or not it's in my actual possession or use, and which I can have legal recourse to regain if I lose. The latter is what is provided by the state, not the former. (Many versions of socialist thought, BTW, make this distinction, too. Your house, your computer, your trousers are yours, it's just things like factories and farmland you don't farm yourself that you can't own.)
These ideas are also based on the idea that property is primarily land. In order to have claim to land that you're not actually using (for example, holding for speculation or renting to tenants), you have to have a state to enforce it -- or you have to have a private army in an anarchic situation. This is what Hobbes was referring to in his famous ``nasty, brutish, and short'' quote: without a state you would never get anything done, because you would have to waste all your effort employing violence to keep hold of your goods and land.
What you're calling ``left anarchists'' would hold that the state enforcement required to keep hold of property that is being rented by others (or simply in disuse) is oppressive. The idea is that if you're not actually using it, you don't really need it, and you're only using the state to squeeze wealth out of the people who really do need it.
Heck, they even get snow in north Texas from time to time.
FWIW, we get snow in Phoenix from time to time, too. It never stays on the ground, but it will fall, usually in the predawn hours, every few years.
We usually get frost a few times a winter, too.
Yes, there are crazy fundamentalists in America. The difference is that their words don't have the backing of law, and generally, if they try to act on them, they will go to jail.
It now makes me wonder how much quality is in the CD's we buy. I'm still trying to determine if some of my older CD's from the 80's have begun to sound worse over time. Or were some just not recorded very well to start.
It's not the age of the physical medium, it's the age of the recording and quality of production. You can buy a copy of Black Sabbath's Paranoid today and the recording quality is crap. OTOH, the quality on my copy of The Wall (almost 15-year-old CD) is great -- if not as good as it would be if the recording had been done twenty years later.
Someday, a new, better lossy compression will come out, and everyone who bought MP3s or AACs will be SOL because when they try to convert their files, they'll sound like crap!
The idea is that you have to buy all the files all over again. You're not supposed to be able to make the switch without spending more money. Try to think like a suit, not a geek;)
This whole debate sounds to me like what the BSDers call "bikeshedding". Arguing ad nauseam over minor details like colors because the deep-down architectural stuff is beyond intelligent discussion for most folks.
You've piqued my curiosity. What's the connection between a bicycle shed and this use? Maybe I'm just being braindead, but it's not obvious to me...
If the firm requires qt apps, the admin does the relevant apt-get when he makes the image that all the desktops will use. If the users aren't installing unauthorized software, and the firm doesn't have any standard qt software, then the lack of qt libs is irrelevant.
This decision unselects the KDE checkbox for all who would use UserLinux, and does not give the option to recheck.
Not really. apt-get install kde will `recheck' it nicely, regardless of whether it's included on the installation media or supported by UL. That's why basing UL on Debian is so important.
However, you're not going to get the same productivity from X with a lightweight WM as you do with Windows. If I could pick my WM and have a properly working terminal, maybe Windows would be more user-friendly, but I can't.
Again, YMMV (this is why choice is good), but I get much higher productivity with (at the moment) IceWM on Debian Sarge than I can with any version of Windows.
In Windows, I can drag a file from Explorer into almost any application, and I have a reasonable expectation of that file being opened by that app.
I personally don't have any use for drag-and-drop. It seems like a very cumbersome way of doing things to me; it's much easier to type `openoffice foo.sxc' in an xterm than fiddle around with a GUI file manager and trying to find the app in the Start menu. But many people seem to like to work this way, which is why the desktop environments (Gnome/KDE) are implementing it. I can't say what the status is, but AFAIK the basic functionality is there.
I can cut text from any app, and paste it into any other app with confidence.
This one again... I really don't know why the belief that this doesn't work under X is so prevalent. I spend most of my waking hours working on Linux desktops and have never found an app that doesn't understand highlight-to-copy and middle-click pasting. Maybe some distros that I don't use just have horribly broken X setups or something, but I can say with confidence that it Just Works with a variety of WMs on Debian systems.
Just admit it, X is slow compared to Windows on similar systems *every time*.
Just admit it: Windows is slow compared to X on similar systems *every time*.
Both are silly statements. Win9x will be much snappier than XP. X with a lightweight WM is not too far off Win9x, and definitely snappier than Win2k on my hardware. One reason I finally abandoned Windows for good was that 2k couldn't give me adequate performance on my existing hardware, but X with just about anything but Gnome/KDE/E could. YMMV.
I thought about it. If coming up with that is the best you can think, I hope you get educated soon.
If ad hominems are the best you can come up with, I question why I am bothering to reply. Perhaps because the semester has just ended and all my grading is done.
By the way, I am getting educated. In fact, I have devoted my entire life to scholarship; I am an historian.
Slavery does not require ownership by a person. Socialism makes everybody a slave to the government. Communism makes everybody a slave to the neighbor. Only capitalism as an economic system, and libertarianism as originally specified by the U.S.A. founding fathers, placed human freedom as supremely important.
Slavery is the state of being a slave. If I may direct your attention to the Oxford English Dictionary, a slave (definition I.1.a) is ``One who is the property of, and entirely subject to, another person...''
It is beyond the scope of a/. posting to attempt to explain socialist thought in all its detail and permutations (I believe that, in the Western Civ syllabus I just put together, it got more than a full class period). However, you might want to familiarize yourself with, for example, anarcho-socialist thought, before you make such sweeping generalizations about the relationship of socialism and servitude.
You might also want to check out the concept of libertarian socialism. This is the true form of libertarianism, before the term was hijacked by the right-wing capitalist apologists. Google should help a bit.
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scripsit NormalVisual:
True. If I had to live off of $11,000/yr, I'd sure as hell rather be doing it in India than the States. However, I wouldn't want people to think that they'd enjoy, on $11k, the standard of living there that they'd enjoy here on $700k.
scripsit Grishnakh:
First of all, the U.S. was still in the process of colonizing the continent 150 years ago. Remember that the Cherokees' republic was only dismantled in 1907, and the Indian Wars lasted into the 1890s. Secondly, the U.S. colonized quite a few places outside of the ``lower 48'' -- Hawaii was a sovereign kingdom which was colonized and annexed, the Phillippines were retained as a colony until after WWII, Puerto Rico is still retained as a colony, and large parts of Latin America were ``informally'' colonized by U.S. companies (see the origin of the term ``banana republic,'' referring to the political power of U.S. fruit growers running Central American states).
I will grant, however, that it is unfair to lay all the sins of the colonial era at Americans' feet. While the U.S. was not innocent of imperialism in that era, it was hardly the only perpetrator, and far from the worst of the lot.
scripsit rmassa:
That's a somewhat misleading statistic. I assume you're basing that on median income or something similar rather than cost of living data (I didn't find where you got your figures on the site you cited). As someone who has lived and worked both in the States and in a developing country, I fully appreciate how much farther a dollar goes in a poor country. It is quite nice, for example, to be able to afford to eat out all the time, have a maid, etc., while making less than U.S. minimum wage. However, once you move beyond food, domestic servants, and (to a lesser extent) housing, you realize just how poor you are. Want a car? Those are quite a bit more expensive than in the States. Ditto for any kind of electronics (computers, stereos, TVs). Travel abroad? That costs you just as much as it costs an American.
Bottom line: That $11,000 may make you as rich, compared to other Indians, as making $700,000 does in the States, but it still makes you poor on a global scale. For a geek, that's significant: imagine how rich $700,000 would make you feel if the shiny new laptop you wanted cost $200,000, and if a compact car cost about $2,000,000!
scripsit gl4ss:
I can't speak about Finnish, which I'm quite unfamiliar with (it's all umlauted as and double-ks to me <grin>). With English, though, there have certainly been changes since the time of Shakespeare, most notably the loss of the second person singular pronoun (thou), the change of the v/u distinction (from v at word beginning, like in vs for us, to v for the consonant, like in vapor for the Latin uapor), and the general systemization of spelling. Shakespeare's English, though, is clearly Modern English, as distinct from Middle English or (even moreso) Old English.
I think the point is that English existed as a literary language in a form that, while not exactly the same as 20th century English, is undisputably the same language -- and is closer to current Standard American English than the latter is to many currently-used English dialects, like Black American Vernacular. OTOH, in the 15th century, quite a few languages did not even exist in their modern literary forms: Russian (17th century), Greek (19th century), and Nynorsk (20th century), for example. Both Spanish and Italian seem to date in their modern codified forms from the 15th century, although both have changed substantially in spelling and vocabulary since then, too.
This is balanced by the fact that Old English (11th century and earlier) is totally incomprehensible to modern Englishmen and Americans, while literary Arabic is almost unchanged since the 7th century, and Classical Greek, while very difficult, can be deciphered to a large extent by a modern Greek.
Finnish seems to be a bit of an anomaly if it was codified as a literary language 500 years ago, as most of the languages of stateless nations were only formalized during the age of nationalism.
scripist gl4ss:
Oddly enough, it's not as relatively young as people tend to assume. Among living literary languages, modern English could be argued to be older than both modern Greek (dating only to the middle of the 19th century) and modern Hebrew (late 19th century). Modern English has been more-or-less fixed in its written form for more than 500 years.
scripsit gobbo:
I would argue, on the other hand, that there tends to be confusion about the nature of a state. Even in organized anarchic systems (as opposed to Mogadishu-style anarchy, what I presume you mean by `chaos'), there is some organization or framework which undertakes the roles of the state. This is what is necessary, even if the modern territorial state is left by the wayside. It's at some point a matter of semantics, I guess.
The anarchists of the SCW were a very different breed from the `right' or capitalist anarchists. IIRC they were of the line of Bakunin, who started out a socialist but parted ways with Marx over what he (correctly) foresaw as the oppressive state which would come of Marxian socialism in practice. The important difference is that they envisioned small-scale workers' syndicates as the primary organizing units of society. There would be no `expropriators' or economic elite in such a scheme, and presumably the small scale of the basic organizational unit would lend cultural homogeneity. They certainly did not envision unregulated capitalism as the main organizing force. IIRC also the workers' militia Orwell fought with in Catalonia was more anarcho-syndicalist than Marxist -- I know he always referred to the big-C Communists as `the Right'.
The problem on the other extreme, though, is of course paralysis. The best example is pre-partition Poland. The legislative body (made up of nobles) required unanimity to pass any law, which gave Poland unparalleled protection from the tyranny of the majority, but also resulted in complete paralysis in the face of external threats. The balance is a tricky thing.
scripsit Reziac:
As I said, I can't say to what extent their comments reflected their own political biases. I was in high school at the time, and I don't think I would have picked up on such subtleties... As I think back on it now, it's entirely possible he was a C student not through lack of native intelligence, but through being a discipline problem or just a slacker. I think the teachers would be more indulgent of a kid who had real disabilities than a kid who was just a pain in the arse... Hell, I'm sure not all of my public school teachers would recall me fondly if I ever got into politics...
scripsit spun:
scripsit C10H14N2:
In all fairness, it was Wilson who told Ho Chi Minh to bugger off when he asked at Versailles whether self-determination applied to the Indochinese or just to white people. And it was Truman who gave Indochina back to the French after WWII when Ho again came to the U.S. to ask for help. Unfortunately, idiotic and bigoted decisions have been made by presidents from both parties...
scripsit C10H14N2:
Funny, it's actually Harkonnen who usually comes to mind when I think of this administration...
scripsit Reziac:
FWIW, I went to school in the same district as Quayle, and there were still a few teachers around when I was there who had taught him. The consensus was that he was not too bright. Now, that's not exactly an authoritative source -- teachers have political views, too. However, public school teachers are also very reluctant to call kids with learning disabilities stupid; it's just not done.
scripsit bill_mcgonigle:
I don't make fun of people with Parkinson's disease, but I would not be keen on having one be my surgeon.
scripsit eddie can read:
I'm familiar with the concept. The basic problem with any sort of anarchy in practice is that there is no protection against non-state coercion. In particular, there is no curb on the armed elite's exploitation of a de facto monopoly on violence (see Somalia for a good case study, or the Congo more recently). There is also no curb on the tyranny of the majority. Social and political organization based solely on free association and lack of state coercion can work only if there is a quite even distribution of wealth, such that some individuals are not forced into de facto servitude by economic pressures, and if the society is quite homogeneous culturally, such that there are not factions which will cause ersatz states to form.
Imagine being an adolescent girl with no property, wealth, or family connections trying to obtain security under anarchic conditions. How would she secure the protection of what theorists like to call a ``defence agency,'' but a cynic might call a ``protection racket''? And what would happen to her if she didn't? Again, places like the Congo provide illuminating case studies.
scripsit Frater 219:
Actually, the idea that private property is a government-created monopoly is not just an anarchist idea. Without taking a stand on whether it is a good thing or not, it is pretty clearly something that doesn't exist without state enforcement. It's important to distinguish ``property'' in the sense of ``my stuff'' from ``property'' in the sense of something that remains mine whether or not it's in my actual possession or use, and which I can have legal recourse to regain if I lose. The latter is what is provided by the state, not the former. (Many versions of socialist thought, BTW, make this distinction, too. Your house, your computer, your trousers are yours, it's just things like factories and farmland you don't farm yourself that you can't own.)
These ideas are also based on the idea that property is primarily land. In order to have claim to land that you're not actually using (for example, holding for speculation or renting to tenants), you have to have a state to enforce it -- or you have to have a private army in an anarchic situation. This is what Hobbes was referring to in his famous ``nasty, brutish, and short'' quote: without a state you would never get anything done, because you would have to waste all your effort employing violence to keep hold of your goods and land.
What you're calling ``left anarchists'' would hold that the state enforcement required to keep hold of property that is being rented by others (or simply in disuse) is oppressive. The idea is that if you're not actually using it, you don't really need it, and you're only using the state to squeeze wealth out of the people who really do need it.
scripsit soft_guy:
FWIW, we get snow in Phoenix from time to time, too. It never stays on the ground, but it will fall, usually in the predawn hours, every few years. We usually get frost a few times a winter, too.
...or get appointed attorney general...
scripsit east coast:
Yeah, pity they all died in that horrible accident back in '90. At least they never went the way of the Stones.
P.S. There are certain illusions it is very important for me to maintain. This is one of them.
scripsit jocknerd:
It's not the age of the physical medium, it's the age of the recording and quality of production. You can buy a copy of Black Sabbath's Paranoid today and the recording quality is crap. OTOH, the quality on my copy of The Wall (almost 15-year-old CD) is great -- if not as good as it would be if the recording had been done twenty years later.
scripsit ziplux:
The idea is that you have to buy all the files all over again. You're not supposed to be able to make the switch without spending more money. Try to think like a suit, not a geek ;)
scripsit HighOrbit:
You've piqued my curiosity. What's the connection between a bicycle shed and this use? Maybe I'm just being braindead, but it's not obvious to me...
scripsit be-fan:
Not what on an enterprise desktop? No apt-get?
If the firm requires qt apps, the admin does the relevant apt-get when he makes the image that all the desktops will use. If the users aren't installing unauthorized software, and the firm doesn't have any standard qt software, then the lack of qt libs is irrelevant.
scripsit SkArcher:
Not really. apt-get install kde will `recheck' it nicely, regardless of whether it's included on the installation media or supported by UL. That's why basing UL on Debian is so important.
scripsit g_bit:
Again, YMMV (this is why choice is good), but I get much higher productivity with (at the moment) IceWM on Debian Sarge than I can with any version of Windows.
I personally don't have any use for drag-and-drop. It seems like a very cumbersome way of doing things to me; it's much easier to type `openoffice foo.sxc' in an xterm than fiddle around with a GUI file manager and trying to find the app in the Start menu. But many people seem to like to work this way, which is why the desktop environments (Gnome/KDE) are implementing it. I can't say what the status is, but AFAIK the basic functionality is there.
This one again... I really don't know why the belief that this doesn't work under X is so prevalent. I spend most of my waking hours working on Linux desktops and have never found an app that doesn't understand highlight-to-copy and middle-click pasting. Maybe some distros that I don't use just have horribly broken X setups or something, but I can say with confidence that it Just Works with a variety of WMs on Debian systems.
scripsit g_bit:
Just admit it: Windows is slow compared to X on similar systems *every time*.
Both are silly statements. Win9x will be much snappier than XP. X with a lightweight WM is not too far off Win9x, and definitely snappier than Win2k on my hardware. One reason I finally abandoned Windows for good was that 2k couldn't give me adequate performance on my existing hardware, but X with just about anything but Gnome/KDE/E could. YMMV.
scripsit sylvandb:
If ad hominems are the best you can come up with, I question why I am bothering to reply. Perhaps because the semester has just ended and all my grading is done.
By the way, I am getting educated. In fact, I have devoted my entire life to scholarship; I am an historian.
Slavery is the state of being a slave. If I may direct your attention to the Oxford English Dictionary, a slave (definition I.1.a) is ``One who is the property of, and entirely subject to, another person...''
It is beyond the scope of a /. posting to attempt to explain socialist thought in all its detail and permutations (I believe that, in the Western Civ syllabus I just put together, it got more than a full class period). However, you might want to familiarize yourself with, for example, anarcho-socialist thought, before you make such sweeping generalizations about the relationship of socialism and servitude.
You might also want to check out the concept of libertarian socialism. This is the true form of libertarianism, before the term was hijacked by the right-wing capitalist apologists. Google should help a bit.