You're right -- take my moderate position, and pretend I have an extreme position, and argue that. I believe that safe working conditions and not having to work 100 hours a week are a Good Thing (TM), but we have gone too far in that direction, and need to find a balance.
Leave it to/. to find people to ignore what you say and argue their perception of "the other side" which they carefully concoct arguments for. Unfortunately, no one pigeon holes himself into such narrow viewpoints. Too bad some of us have critical thinking skills.
What if they go out of business? If they're allowed to leave, at least they have some power against legislature that screws them over. If they can't leave, then I suspect they'd get screwed more (since they're stuck here).
Companies have rights too...you can't bully them around and expect to get a better economy.
The thing that's most upsetting to me about the current climate is that there's no dialogue about issues, just pandering of propaganda. For example, I really am a huge supporter of public education, from the k-12 to university levels, and like to see lots of funding go into it. But I also completely resonate with arguments that teacher unions (and unions in general) hamper progress and competition. I think there's something to be said about cutting taxes and curbing unneccesary spending, but I do think you should have the money to pay for services if they're needed.
Here's where I feel like social programs that do a lot of good can work. Ditch them all at the federal level, and devolve them to the state and local level. If the state of Wyoming wants a great public education, and it's voters support the cost, by all means let them do it. 300 million Americans won't ever agree, but maybe 2 million might, or even 500,000. Let local politics rule these issues, and everyone will be happy (if not, then you can go somewhere where you feel more at home with the issues and voting blocks).
I feel like no one is actually talking about the problems that need to be discussed.
Studies have shown that political efficacy (how much you feel the government responds to your needs) have declined at the federal level, but increased at the local level in the last 25 years. Hence, people feel like local politicians will respond and that they have a say, but at the federal level, they have no power. If local politics got more power, and communites would meet in a secular way (like the colonial town meetings), people could get things done.
The scary thing to me is that both parties are now bent on increasing the government, be it socially and domestically, or with defense budgets and morality laws.
Stock holders would have a huge problem with the CEO giving himself a huge raise, if the board ever agreed to it.
CEOs do get paid quite a lot, but one CEO making 5 million dollars a year versus 1 isn't a whole lot when the company deals in the hundreds of millions or even billions.
Though as a wage slave, this does piss me off. I don't think such a salary cap would be such a Bad Thing (TM), as it can be enforced without a bearocracy (just sue the company for violation and get the courts to settle it). Though lawsuits are another big problem....
Forgive me if I think being wealthy implies that you actually *produce* something.
You idiots on the right don't get it, do you? Why should any American, a resident of the richest country in the world with the greatest skills and capital resources, have to work for peanuts?
Because they don't have an education? Not everyone goes to college. You know, we're not idiots, and we do get it. You're bringing up an entirely different point, however. That we should let other countries produce unskilled labor for us, while we take the technical jobs. This isn't something that the "geniuses on the left" believe either. We don't have the most well-educated society in the world, and if you had ever lived in America (I sincerely hoped you either haven't or you are physically blind), you'd see that most Americans, like most humans, aren't cut out for the high-profile research or designing jobs you're talking about. Only a few will actually make it to become good engineers; being an engineer is hard.
If/when the US stops producing anything, we will essentially be a third world nation.
Ever heard of John McCain? Forget what you know and actually read about him.
Republicans in power now are pretty awful, but they *used* to be sane-minded conservatives that wanted to down-size the government. Besides, you can either be a greedy bastard sucking on American's teet with self-important posturing or a Marxist zealot and belong to the Democratic party.:)
I honestly would vote libertarian if their candidates weren't usually total cooks.
I don't vote for people like Bush, because they're only concerned with War and God (in that order). I think most of the Republican Party's core values are good, and would benefit this country, so voting Republican is a pragmatic decision to get those policies implemented. IF the Republican party swung things too far to the right, then I WOULD vote democrat.
Liberal-conservative is a phony paradigm that defines the parameters of the debates in a rather silly fashion, but I can't help but to be annoyed with Democratic policies with respect to the economy (and the other way around with civil rights, but only within the last 5 years).
Good idea. Instead of shipping US jobs to Malaysia, why not make the US a place with the living conditions of Malaysia ?
That argument doesn't hold water. Take the auto workers, for example. Let's say they made just 8$ an hour. That's a large cut in pay, but still about ten times what a Malaysian would make. Here in Texas, unions are less prevalent, and the prices of consumer goods are (on average) 50 to 70 percent the price of what goods are in the Northeast coast (my friend goes to Yale; we've discussed this), where everyone makes twice as much but spends twice as much.
Unfortunately many lefties (and I consider myself more a moderate righty than anything extreme) don't understand the basics of business, and put businesses' back to the wall, and force them out. The auto industry can't just quadruple prices if they quadruple labor costs, since foreign cars compete at lower prices because they don't have this problem. So, American car companies have had to cut costs in the cars themselves, and the result is losing quality. American cars used to be the most dependable, now they're a joke!
So what's your solution? Have tons of social programs and lament as companies leave? Force them to stay here? Or cut down on the programs, let business boom, and pass that economic gain to the average American? It isn't this simple, and monopolies for example can screw people in a big way, but I still find it a better philosophy.
Actually, I find that it is myopic Democratic idealism that forces businesses out. If we are so arrogant that we believe we deserve so many costly benefits and salaries that only labor unions can inflate so much, then what else will companies do? They can't afford to do business here, because it's to expensive!
Businesses would love to stay here, but they have no choice. And farmers right now are sadly getting squeezed out of our heritage because of large-scale corporate factory farmers. As a Republican, I have no answer for this (unless a monopoly comes to exist), but as a person, I do find it sad. All I can do is attend Willie Nelson Farm Aid events and donate. You don't have to be greedy to be a Republican.
That said, many foreign economies not only need our jobs, but despite the companies paying what appears to us as pittance, it is by far more than they're accustomed to with local jobs.
Basically, the US is becoming a third world nation, relying on paper wealth, and not producing anything. The end result will be quite scary. Oh, and there is more to Republican values than morality. Bush and his regime is a counterfit Republican one, and I owe him no alleigance. The more libertarian-minded Republicans of the early 90's are gone.
Perhaps there is a tradeoff to unionized auto workers getting paid 20$ an hour for working basic assembly lines? Or mandatory health benefits for full time workers? Or phony lawsuits? Or any number of social policies that cost businesses tons of money.
Not that veering to the "right" too much doesn't cause catastrophe with monopolies and such, but we really have made doing business in this country incredibly difficult (especially small businesses). Haven't we asked for this?
There was a senator or rep who was a staunch Democrat who, when he retired, tried to start a small business (a hotel I think). His business floundered because of many of the extremely harsh policies that he himself had pushed. Also, former NYC mayor Ed Koch (of People's Court fame) began his term quite social minded, but he lamented that his ideas for transportation of homeless actually costed more than just paying for cab rides for every homeless person (there's more to it than this, my memory is just a bit shaky).
Basically, I feel the pendulum has swung too far to the right perhaps, and overseas business has gotten too attractive, since we've essentially pushed these businesses into a corner with our well-intentioned programs.
I think Debian has a great devel team, and is a fine distro...the plugs from the users are just insane.
Honestly, a lot of newbies install Gentoo and don't know anything about source or what optimizations do, but think that because "they" "built from source" "with optimizations" they're system is somehow l337.
Actually, I think debian would be better suited for this. Any working system of automatic dependency resolving is a must, but building from source isn't necessary.
While you *can* use gentoo with binaries, it isn't very useful, and debian is much more tried and tested. Packages have to be well tested to get into stable.
This is only a viable option for broadband users. I have a cable modem, and I'm not authorized to serve content via http or ftp. Time Warner owns this. They would disallow me to serve on this new network (which they would control via proprietary protocols) unless I "upgraded" and paid more to do this. In the end, would I really save?
I know I could go dsl, but still, my point remains: at some point, these 800 pound charge you for everything. That's why Napster was popular...we don't like doing business with those jerks.
It is ironic that Caldera's last stand in Linux territory, UnitedLinux, is losing support because its only potential source of income (licensing and suing for license violations) seems to have its sights on milking IBM and Linux itself. Am I smelling mismanagement? UnitedLinux could have actually migrated SCO from UNIX to Linux, but instead now they're going to have to either convince companies to not migrate to Linux, or convince judges that Linux is a derivative of UNIX, and start charging license fees.
[Dr. Evil voice] I'd like a gagizzillion billon dollars[/Dr. Evil voice]
SCO needs to find a new business model other than charging for IP that they didn't even create. I mean, I can understand an author wanting exclusive rights to his work, but when you just "buy" an idea or concept (granted these libraries are much more than that) and sell rights to it, you are just depriving people of knowledge who are no less responsible (and indeed in some cases more) for the existence of said knowledge.
Honestly, what prevents a small group of people from pooling capital, purchasing tons of obscure but still used IP rights, and making a killing off of license fees that users are unaware of?
How about this? Get rid of most of the options in the control panel, but make then accessible to themers. Thay way, the user doesn't select Every Little Detail (TM), he just chooses a theme that happens to match both his asthetic preferences, and his ui behavior preferences. In this way, a theme designer could successfully emulate a Win2k look and feel, and someone else could emulate a OSX l'n'f.
Power users could just modify the themes. Not-so-power users can find a cool theme and learn to use that.
Berlin has transparency. X11 does not yet. The cursors are transparent, yes, but work by taking a snapshot of what's underneath and laying out a shadow manually. If what's underneath changes, the shadow's fakeness will be revealed, like a magician's secret to his magic trick. KDE has drop shadows for menus based on this (and I have even seen this done to borders). The problem is dealing with changes to underlying windows. Keith Packard's transparency server will attempt to notify windows when they need to redraw because a window underneath has changed (this isn't normally communicated because when the protocol was developed, it was assumed to be redundant).
Berlin also abstracts the pixels on the screen and lets developers deal with sizes in plain distance measurements. An icon that is one inch tall will always be one inch tall (it may be x or y pixels high though). SVG icon support will go into KDE, but XFree86 will still be pixel-based.
In correct textbook English, you default to the masculine form. Way back in the mideval times, when English was Germanic, the Church came in and huge parts of Latin got folded in over the years (including defaulting to the masculine).
The cursors have transparency yes, I meant the actual architecture. Like making a menu truly transparent, or a window, or a shadow. XFree86 does not yet support it.
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Leave it to /. to find people to ignore what you say and argue their perception of "the other side" which they carefully concoct arguments for. Unfortunately, no one pigeon holes himself into such narrow viewpoints. Too bad some of us have critical thinking skills.
Companies have rights too...you can't bully them around and expect to get a better economy.
Here's where I feel like social programs that do a lot of good can work. Ditch them all at the federal level, and devolve them to the state and local level. If the state of Wyoming wants a great public education, and it's voters support the cost, by all means let them do it. 300 million Americans won't ever agree, but maybe 2 million might, or even 500,000. Let local politics rule these issues, and everyone will be happy (if not, then you can go somewhere where you feel more at home with the issues and voting blocks).
Studies have shown that political efficacy (how much you feel the government responds to your needs) have declined at the federal level, but increased at the local level in the last 25 years. Hence, people feel like local politicians will respond and that they have a say, but at the federal level, they have no power. If local politics got more power, and communites would meet in a secular way (like the colonial town meetings), people could get things done.
The scary thing to me is that both parties are now bent on increasing the government, be it socially and domestically, or with defense budgets and morality laws.
CEOs do get paid quite a lot, but one CEO making 5 million dollars a year versus 1 isn't a whole lot when the company deals in the hundreds of millions or even billions.
Though as a wage slave, this does piss me off. I don't think such a salary cap would be such a Bad Thing (TM), as it can be enforced without a bearocracy (just sue the company for violation and get the courts to settle it). Though lawsuits are another big problem....
Well, I didn't intend this to prove anything, but to merely give an example of my point. If it didn't ever happen, my argument would still stand.
Because they don't have an education? Not everyone goes to college. You know, we're not idiots, and we do get it. You're bringing up an entirely different point, however. That we should let other countries produce unskilled labor for us, while we take the technical jobs. This isn't something that the "geniuses on the left" believe either. We don't have the most well-educated society in the world, and if you had ever lived in America (I sincerely hoped you either haven't or you are physically blind), you'd see that most Americans, like most humans, aren't cut out for the high-profile research or designing jobs you're talking about. Only a few will actually make it to become good engineers; being an engineer is hard.
If/when the US stops producing anything, we will essentially be a third world nation.
Why? Costing companies more in labor would keep them here? What kind of logic is that? I don't understand...
Republicans in power now are pretty awful, but they *used* to be sane-minded conservatives that wanted to down-size the government. Besides, you can either be a greedy bastard sucking on American's teet with self-important posturing or a Marxist zealot and belong to the Democratic party. :)
I don't vote for people like Bush, because they're only concerned with War and God (in that order). I think most of the Republican Party's core values are good, and would benefit this country, so voting Republican is a pragmatic decision to get those policies implemented. IF the Republican party swung things too far to the right, then I WOULD vote democrat.
Liberal-conservative is a phony paradigm that defines the parameters of the debates in a rather silly fashion, but I can't help but to be annoyed with Democratic policies with respect to the economy (and the other way around with civil rights, but only within the last 5 years).
That argument doesn't hold water. Take the auto workers, for example. Let's say they made just 8$ an hour. That's a large cut in pay, but still about ten times what a Malaysian would make. Here in Texas, unions are less prevalent, and the prices of consumer goods are (on average) 50 to 70 percent the price of what goods are in the Northeast coast (my friend goes to Yale; we've discussed this), where everyone makes twice as much but spends twice as much.
Unfortunately many lefties (and I consider myself more a moderate righty than anything extreme) don't understand the basics of business, and put businesses' back to the wall, and force them out. The auto industry can't just quadruple prices if they quadruple labor costs, since foreign cars compete at lower prices because they don't have this problem. So, American car companies have had to cut costs in the cars themselves, and the result is losing quality. American cars used to be the most dependable, now they're a joke!
So what's your solution? Have tons of social programs and lament as companies leave? Force them to stay here? Or cut down on the programs, let business boom, and pass that economic gain to the average American? It isn't this simple, and monopolies for example can screw people in a big way, but I still find it a better philosophy.
Businesses would love to stay here, but they have no choice. And farmers right now are sadly getting squeezed out of our heritage because of large-scale corporate factory farmers. As a Republican, I have no answer for this (unless a monopoly comes to exist), but as a person, I do find it sad. All I can do is attend Willie Nelson Farm Aid events and donate. You don't have to be greedy to be a Republican.
That said, many foreign economies not only need our jobs, but despite the companies paying what appears to us as pittance, it is by far more than they're accustomed to with local jobs.
Basically, the US is becoming a third world nation, relying on paper wealth, and not producing anything. The end result will be quite scary. Oh, and there is more to Republican values than morality. Bush and his regime is a counterfit Republican one, and I owe him no alleigance. The more libertarian-minded Republicans of the early 90's are gone.
Not that veering to the "right" too much doesn't cause catastrophe with monopolies and such, but we really have made doing business in this country incredibly difficult (especially small businesses). Haven't we asked for this?
There was a senator or rep who was a staunch Democrat who, when he retired, tried to start a small business (a hotel I think). His business floundered because of many of the extremely harsh policies that he himself had pushed. Also, former NYC mayor Ed Koch (of People's Court fame) began his term quite social minded, but he lamented that his ideas for transportation of homeless actually costed more than just paying for cab rides for every homeless person (there's more to it than this, my memory is just a bit shaky).
Basically, I feel the pendulum has swung too far to the right perhaps, and overseas business has gotten too attractive, since we've essentially pushed these businesses into a corner with our well-intentioned programs.
The Linux From Scratch book has a cvs system in place, and automatically converts to html, xml, txt, ext from the sources (which are TeX now iirc).
Honestly, a lot of newbies install Gentoo and don't know anything about source or what optimizations do, but think that because "they" "built from source" "with optimizations" they're system is somehow l337.
While you *can* use gentoo with binaries, it isn't very useful, and debian is much more tried and tested. Packages have to be well tested to get into stable.
I know I could go dsl, but still, my point remains: at some point, these 800 pound charge you for everything. That's why Napster was popular...we don't like doing business with those jerks.
It is ironic that Caldera's last stand in Linux territory, UnitedLinux, is losing support because its only potential source of income (licensing and suing for license violations) seems to have its sights on milking IBM and Linux itself. Am I smelling mismanagement? UnitedLinux could have actually migrated SCO from UNIX to Linux, but instead now they're going to have to either convince companies to not migrate to Linux, or convince judges that Linux is a derivative of UNIX, and start charging license fees.
SCO needs to find a new business model other than charging for IP that they didn't even create. I mean, I can understand an author wanting exclusive rights to his work, but when you just "buy" an idea or concept (granted these libraries are much more than that) and sell rights to it, you are just depriving people of knowledge who are no less responsible (and indeed in some cases more) for the existence of said knowledge.
Honestly, what prevents a small group of people from pooling capital, purchasing tons of obscure but still used IP rights, and making a killing off of license fees that users are unaware of?
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, the stratosphere will streak through a lorge flux of Comet Dust from the Grig Skejellerup earth-crossing dust trail on YOU!
Power users could just modify the themes. Not-so-power users can find a cool theme and learn to use that.
Berlin also abstracts the pixels on the screen and lets developers deal with sizes in plain distance measurements. An icon that is one inch tall will always be one inch tall (it may be x or y pixels high though). SVG icon support will go into KDE, but XFree86 will still be pixel-based.
In correct textbook English, you default to the masculine form. Way back in the mideval times, when English was Germanic, the Church came in and huge parts of Latin got folded in over the years (including defaulting to the masculine).
The cursors have transparency yes, I meant the actual architecture. Like making a menu truly transparent, or a window, or a shadow. XFree86 does not yet support it.
Yes...the cursors have transparency. But the whole architecture does not yet support transparency. I've been using cvs for about a month ;)
Did you have it build it's own freetype or did you build it against your own? Hint: read up on host.def in the config/cf directory.