Look, I don't disagree with you that there is a significant failure of teaching discipline, responsiblity and ethics to children underpinning a lot of these violent incidents. But by arguing that there's no role for a public entity to address, you're basically punting. And reducing our options to "government wrings its hands and says bummer" vs "government micromanages" is just throwing the ball away until it's 4th down. People should always be more moral than they are, but sadly, they often fail to do so.
I'll throw one example out there to counter your personal responsiblity solution: a kid whose parents have not schooled him in personal responsibility assaults your kid with a gun he brought to school. By the way, a gun assault happened at my uptown DC public high school when I was there in 91, and has happened other times at other high schools across the city and country. The current problem area in the DC region? Fairfax County, an affluent suburb with lots of immigration happening. Let say the gun was obtained from one of the criminal element you believe - probably correctly - will always have guns. How did your teaching personal responsibility to your kids and me to mine address this? Whatever you do legally and extralegally to punish the kid and his parents for this act is retroactive and does not bring back your dead daughter.
So perhaps the public sector has a slightly more proactive role here than just cleaning up the mess after it happens?
While I'd like to think of myself as idealistic, I'd say your arguments reveal an equal naivete as anyone else's arguments.
One has to look no further than the District of High Murder Rate, ahem, Columbia, to see how well gun control works.
I know that gun control supporters are mostly well-intentioned people. But they're naively idealistic, too. You may desire a criminal-disarmament law, but be realistic - gun control laws only disarm innocent victims.
I happen to have been born and raised in the District of Columbia during the 90s, and I knew a kid or two from high school who was shot during drive-by shootings. I also knew kids who were a hair away from committing those drive-by shootings, and if I had been into drugs at all, I would have known plenty of these drive-by committers. You say "average no-good crooks" will get guns anyway, and I don't really disagree, but I'm more concerned about the people - especially young people whose judgement is not yet particularly well-developed - and how we can keep them from easily getting guns.
So I counter your charge of naivete with the same charge - in the movies only "crooks" do "bad" things. In reality, determined crooks do a lot of bad things, and lots of other people some bad things. And when they have a gun, their worst judgements impulses turn into dead people (again, usually dead people under 25).
I'm not interested in telling people they can't hunt (though I really don't see how one can make a case for against "Shooting Under the Influence" type laws), and in principle I'm OK with gun ownership among people who demonstrably know how to use a gun and only point it at people it in self-defense, but I'm adamantly against the casual availability of guns that so many gun advocates seem to cherish, and I'm deafened by their silence when it comes to meaningful solutions for reducing the number of young people shooting each other.
Talk reality to me about keeping kids from shooting each other, and I'll talk reality to you about responsible adults and guns. Deal?
One of the things I've always wondered is why Microsoft has put out so much buggy software. I mean on the coding side, they hire pretty smart people (e.g. Waterloo), and their biz devs obviously know a thing or 42 billion. So why are there such persistent problems with their software? Solaris or AIX, for example, have bugs, but have they ever had a period like this where there were just vast bugs found all the time?
When you think about there really is kind of a paradox there - obviously talented programmers, obviously talented business people, plenty of money. So why are they shipping systems with excessive bugginess? I really don't know the answer. I've found that as a company it has a huge ego - most Microsofties I've met really think on some level they're leading the world to new places, and certainly that's the kind of cheerleading that goes on within the company. The only other thing I can think of is that their strategies of acquiring and integrating lot of software, plus running competing teams and cherry-picking what they like best lead to a lot of quick deployments but fractured designs. Anyone know anything more about this?
North Korea is just running this scam for all it's worth to get more foriegn aid for it's starving populace and to ensure that South Korea is no threat.
I think the reasons are somewhat more opaque than this. My feeling is that is has something to do with China. China pretty much dominates Asia these days, and they supply N. Korea w/ most of its fuel oil and if I'm not mistaken, food as well. In other words, China could pull the plug on a lot of this nonsense, and is certainly in the best position of anybody to take him out - though I believe Beijing is in range of some of his missiles. But I think China is comfortable enough with the leash they have him on, so they're just as happy to have him distract and tie down the US with plausible threats, while they continue to sew up Asia and explore eastward for oil and other goodies.
The other factor that makes the situation opaque is that Kim Jong Il is pretty close to insane - like comic book character insane, so you can't do the usual reverse engineering of geopolitical strategy to get an idea of what his game is.
This has little to do with US foreign policy in the middle east over the past few years.
While I think we've made a big mess in the Middle East bigger in most places and smaller in a few, I believe you are indeed correct - this is not really about Iraq at all. As an aside, I do think we can improve our batting average in the Middle East if we're a) willing to be a little more circumspect and pay more attention to attitudes on the ground than Bush has been so far, and b) willing to really commit aid money, technical assistance and troops over the time scale of decades, not years. A lot of these world hotspots had their development woes magnified by being proxy states in the US-Soviet conflict and then being utterly abandoned. Undoing these kind of festering problems takes a long, long time.
That may be North Korea's excuse, but as is always in politics what people say is the cause for something, and what the actual cause is are two different things.
Interesting post, and perhaps the most interesting (and elpquently put) part of it is this:
Pretty soon you end up with little groups of people who get the equipment and service for free because they are classified as one type of minority or another. This is what happens to government programs that are not required to sustain life. They become vote buying schemes.
Yes, it's true that government programs and money can become vote-buying schemes, but there are times when they are called for. When they are created and implemented, they must be closely watched with no hesitation about scaling them down when times change. But to deal with the classic case head-on, it's pretty hard to fathom the benefits that affirmative action has brought to our society by. Does it require changing (say to strict economic criteria) with the times? Unquestionably. But before you oppose this sort of thing with a broad brush, do consider the fact that most major corporations spoke up in favor of affirmative action during Granholm. vs. U of Mich.
Unlike private corporations governments have incredible methods of ignoring laws and worse writing new ones that control access and content. They also are very good at pushing an agenda with such services.
Again, I share your fear that putting such services in the public sector politicizes them and encourages needless legal interference. However, your notion of just leaving it to corporations strikes me as too much faith in corporations. The problems of getting responsiveness and accountability from a large organization are surprisingly similar, whether that organization is government or corporations. People like to be in control of resources, and they apply their talents to doing so. What's worse, as corporations grow large enough, they make increasingly heavy demands on society - minimal or no taxation, subsidies, government-enforced monopolies on one or another piece of their business, unfettered and unpaid access to public resources. This is every bit as destructive as overgrown government programs and agencies that demand increasing funding and control through legislation.
In this case, I happen to somewhat agree with you that the service is a luxury and not a basic infrastructure good, so it's hard to see this as a pressing social issue. Nonetheless, the lack of wireless and/or broadband access in these places is about as clear an illustration of the notion of market failure as one can imagine. So first things first - the government must take active steps address the legal conditions that create the market failure, by eliminating legal support of the monopoly causing the market failure. Second, it is fair and appropriate for the towns to offer subsidies to remedy the market failure. When the market returns to a competitive state, the government must get out of the way.
On another level, I think a town has the right to build whatever infrastructure it wants to benefit its citizens, and doubly so when there's an obvious market failure to be remedied.
As someone currently using Postgres in production, I have to agree with the parent and another commenter in this thread on a couple issues.
Postgres is now quite easy to install and administer. The admin tool, pgAdmin3, which ships with the Windows distribution compares well with any admin tool I've ever used. There are quite a few procedural language bindings being built, from Python to Ruby to PHP to Java. This presents some great opportunities for integration with tools in those languages.
The fact that it is BSD-licensed makes it a no-brainer for uses involving developing custom software - it's great to be able to tell a client that nobody has to pay for or manage any licenses for this database.
Unfortunately, Postgresql does have some really key gotchas for use in demanding database applications:
1) Auditing
Out of the box, it is really difficult do auditing. Not only is there no standard auditing, but your option: rolling your own trigger-based auditing is also difficult due to limitations in various procedural languages and the versions in which they appear. This is really a shame, because given the number of people who have put effort into rolling auditing systems, it would be nice to see some code permanently attached to the distribution.
2) Documentation Not only are the manuals sparse, but the books that exist tend to repeat what the manuals say, leaving some key tools and features relatively undocumented. A good book strictly on programming PL/PGSQL or PL/Perl would be of tremendous utility.
3) Backup and Migration Within major releases, the utilities to backup and restore a database are actually quite good, if minimalist in design. However, there's very little provision for migrating between versions, and given the different features available in each version, migration is still something one has to consider regularly.
4)Replication and distributed processing There is now a master-slave replication tool, Slony, that I believe is slated to be part of the next release. This is a good step forward. Work towards full multi-master replication and/or clustering would really make this a good contender for a lot of enterprise use.
Overall, Postgres is a pretty darn cool database. If it can make its overall presentation a bit slicker, it could really be a contender to topple Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.
Look, I'm not interested in a flamewar here. I will take responsibility and apologize for a rather acid tone in my initial comment, but upon reading this last message, I think you actually did a better job illustrating my point than I could possibly have done. And as long as we're on apologies, your insinuation of ignorance probably merits as much of an apology as any of my acidity.
My point was this: it is extremely off-putting to a user that just wants to install and use something to instead get a lecture about how things that appear to be problems are in fact arcane "features". Case in point:
(Emphasis mine) You did exactly what you should not do. Finding and retrieving the correct package is the job of your package manager. The problems you experienced are exactly what apt, yum, urpm, emerge, YaST and the other package managers solve.
Telling me that I should switch "package managers" or "packager installers" or "dependency resolvers" is symptomatic of the very same mentality. Once upon a time I was vaguely interested in learning how different package systems work, now I'm over it, and I don't find explanations of how I'm doing the wrong thing less than a total waste of time.
As for the subtle distinction you drive between a package manager as an agent that finds the packages and a front-end that installs packages that have already been downloaded, that's certainly a distinction one could make. I would note however, that all of the systems in question include in their names the words "package" and "manage" or abbreviations thereof. For example, here's what RPM stands for. So you might perhaps be willing to concede concede that my nomenclature is also pretty common.
While your deductive powers are impressive:
Judging by what the description of your problem, I can pretty much infer that you actually never used, and/or don't know exactly what is meant by "package manager".
perhaps they are a bit overtaxed here. I have used urpmi and up2date on Mandrake and RedHat respectively, as well as Slackware's tgz installer. Upon installing Suse9.1 for a server, I skipped the nonsense and used plain old rpm -Uvh. All of the "package agents" had so many flaws in design - from timeouts on the client to Python errors to timeouts hitting overloaded servers - that I found it easier to search rpmfind than to wait 25 minutes for urpmi or Mandrake's GUI called DrakX (or whatever the hell it was called) to time out and tell me that it couldn't resolve dependencies. You can tell me I'm not using the right version of the distro or the software or whatever, but until I can transparently and quickly get, install, and use software, I will stick by my spelled out statement about installing software on Linux: B-R-O-K-E-N.
I've been through enough RPM-dependency hell and DLL hell to know something about both of them. And I've used quite a few GNOME and KDE package managers on a variety of flavors of Linux.
Sadly, none of them work like downloading and installing a Windows binary. For example, if I'm looking for a RedHat 8.0 binary for an MPEG player (by poring through rpmfind.net looking for a binary that matches my distro and version), and either download an RPM compiled for SuSE (either by accident or out of desperation), my chances are pretty decent of having it tell me that it needs 6 dependencies resolved before I can watch a simple video clip. Often you'll see it asking for libstdc++-8.6.1-3.en, even though I a have libstdc++-8.5.4-9. Why the hell do I need to upgrade a system C++ library to watch a movie?
Most of the time this occurs because the packaging process reads (by name) all the libraries that program dependended on without any regard to whether the same API or ABI is implemented in libraries that I already have on my machine. KPackage, or GPackMan or Yet Another Package Manager may present these dependency messages in a nice GUI format, but the basic problem is intolerable. And you can make all the apologies you like for it, but it is B-R-O-K-E-N, and it's going to do a lot to stall the adoption of Linux until it's fixed.
1) Explain to user why the desktop OS they currently use which seems to work simply except when they occasionally need to call their IT dude is really the wrong approach altogether
2) Explain to user how the OS they "should" move to makes is so much better because makes it impossible to install a great deal of software packages.
3) Continue to complain about Windows when user prefers an OS on which mere mortals can install software packages.
Your point about multiple DLLs leading to eventual OS rot is a fair one, although I'd be interested to see what role unclean poweroffs, hardware degradation, etc play as opposed to application DLLs. The disk space argument is basically moot these days, though the multiple unpatched libraries issue is not, but the current RPM dependency resolution really doesn't handle ferreting out old (now insecure) library versions either.
The only versioning proposal I've heard that makes sense is the DragonflyBSD one - where there's a smart dependency resolver that lets you use installed libraries when possible, and lets you easily install new library when that won't work.
For all you Access-bashers out there, the PIVOT keyword was exclusive to Jet SQL (and I believe it still is - it will be added to the next release of SQL Server). Please correct me if I'm wrong.
While it's obviously possible to build stored procs that do what PIVOT does (I'll likely be doing this in Postgres), you have to give credit to the Access team for being ahead of the curve on that one. Unfortunately, its syntax is pretty hard to understand. I can build those crosstab queries in Access using the builder, but I'll be damned if I can understand how to do anything with PIVOT.
Perhaps it hasn't occurred to many of the geeks here that writing job postings and job description is itself a difficult skill to master. As the grandparent noted, you are trying to condense a complex set of balances and desired goals into a couple hundred words or less.
So the quality of most job listings you see is somewhere between terrible and great, with the majority being merely OK. If you learn a bit more about how people approach writing the ads and considering responses, you'll see the clues that grandparent was discussing, no matter how good a job (s)he actually did at writing the ad.
Linux needs to fight this battle in the small businesses of the world. They got a toe in the door as far as POS machines and kiosks, that type of thing. But linux needs to be running on the PC in the back office of every mom and pop grocery store or restaurant or doctors office, etc...... I don't think we should be trying to shoehorn Windows compatibility into a Unix clone. Linux' strength comes from its Unix roots, and I think it should stay close to them, and stay focused on conquering the backend.
There are a lot of areas will OSS is already strong and will get stronger, but an polished, integrated desktop is not one of them. OSS's pillars of strength are its openness, robustness, and the way that it commoditizes previously pricey functionality. We should build forward from there.
Savvy tech observers have pointed out that attacking Microsoft where it thinks you will attack is always a recipe for failure. They have spent millions upon millions of developer hours and billions of dollar producing a desktop that is tightly integrated. If anything, it is their key selling point. For disparate groups of OSS developers to try to accomplish anything like that is lunacy.
When you stick the UNIX method of laying one brick on another to build a wall, you get slow, robust development. The article is right that several individual bricks must be easier to lay mortar for - his points about version dependencies and driver installation are right on, and these basically about gluing one more thing on at a time. General support for wireless, for example, is now feasible, as the technology has started to stabilize, and represents one more piece to add on.
A great example of growth through commoditization is in the database market, from embedded systems to big iron installations. The vast majority of businesses need nothing more than a simple, functional database server. MySQL and Postgres on Linux are both close to stepping in nicely to fill this void. Postgres needs another brick layered on it - that being a simpler install process, but most other pieces are there.
As long as Linux sticks to its roots, it will grow slowly and steadily, and obligate other market players to react to its strengths.
Also note that politicians only make promises they don't know they can keep on the campaign trail. If you ever go speak with them in the offices, they're all ahems and perhapses.
Incredibly insightful posts. Thanks for the history and geopolitics lesson.
Some questions and some thoughts.
Questions: Is Beijing in range of North Korea's missiles? How effective would bombing southern missile emplacements be? A missile attack on Seoul really only becomes mass death if: a) there are a lot of them and/or b) their combined effect is great (i.e. firebombing, etc.)
I thought I read something about a North Korea-Pakistan link. Have you heard anything about this?
Thoughts: This seems to be yet another example of a two-bit dictatorship that came as a result of rapid disengagement by the world's superpowers (USSR/Russia, USA, China). It's amazing how well running a country as a military outpost and then leaving abruptly works to foment hatred and dangerous regimes.
To my armchair international negotiator's brain it seems that the only road is to help create a legitimate political alternative to Kim Jong Il. N. Korea/S. Korea is like Isreal/Palestine to me in that there is really only one endgame, and that's a single state. Fortunately, the S. Koreans are apparently all for this (not so sure it'll pan out like they hope when millions of starving, illiterate, brainwashed peasants coming storming down looking for jobs in Samsung's HDTV plants). One of the key difficulties with Palestine is that lack of a real political infrastructure with whom to negotiate - one with enough legitimacy and clout to tell Hamas and Hizbullah to piss off. Arafat has always been more interested in posturing than in any real,on-the-ground politics work.
Yes, the approach is long and fraught with difficulty, but it can actually work. Countries like Poland, Mexico, India have all worked their way back from dictaorships to more or less functioning democracies. Given how paranoid Kim Jong Il is, and the current disarray of the US diplomacy, not to mention HUMINT, this is a decade-long project (which, as you note, makes it very hard for any one politician to own it). It is also one where the likelihood of being hornswaggled by an Ahmed Chalabi-type character is just as high as in Iraq and the stakes are 100 times as high. But it does have potential to bring real stability.
Just to stir the pot, why should you get to cast a direct vote for president if you haven't been paying much attention to his (or her eventually) work in the first place? Do you speak math-ese? That argument is invalid by the process of induction. If a random voter is unqualified to make a choice, why is he qualified to choose the man who makes that choice?
I'd be hesitant to call that particular line of induction a proof. For example: If a shareholder is not qualified to make a budget and strategy for a company, why is she qualified to choose the CEO who does do this?
My original point, which I'm still not entirely convinced of, was that: a) Hamilton's idea was not just have to the electors cast votes, but for them to analyze, debate and evaluate the candidate. As you point out the electoral college no longer serves this function. He presumably did not believe that the common person understood enough to make a considered choice. b) perhaps it's worth considering the merits of Hamilton's idea from a modern standpoint, where many voters don't follow politics or even world events enough to make a considered choice.
I was not and am not endorsing the elitist nature of Hamilton's argument, just noting that a considered choice of president is a lot better than an ill-considered one, and comparing it to the problems associated with direct legislation.
If you go way back to the poster who first invoked the Federalist papers, there's a passage in there that merits some decent debate:
It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.
Hamilton's proposal is not entirely off-base: it's not clear to me that a simple majority election is the best way to do things. While the language about careful deliberations and proper conditions may have been window dressing around the political negotiations of the day, we have the good fortune that we can now evaluate what he wrote free of those constraints and with a contemporary perspective. Careful deliberation and analysis seem like a damn good prerequisite for someone who runs the richest country and the world, and has a big say over most others. That is, a robust voting process requires engagement and thought by the people voting, something that is notably lacking in many recent elections in this country. Just to stir the pot, why should you get to cast a direct vote for president if you haven't been paying much attention to his (or her eventually) work in the first place?
However, as other posters have also made clear, the current role of the elector involves neither analysis nor deliberation, so the college is not even vaguely living up to the purpose set forth for it.
A good place to look at direct democracy in action is ballot initiatives. I recently had the misfortune of living in Washington state in a period increasing reliance on ballot initiatives. This let voters loose on such questions as:
Should legislature be forced to abandon the motor vehicles registration fees that were created a few years previous to try to strengthen transportation infrastructure?
Should legislature be forced to alter environmental regulations governing streams in order to try to protect salmon populations?
As an individual, I don't know how the budgeting process of a state government works, nor the overall process of designing environmental regulations. If you don't think your legislators are doing a good job, fire them or lobby them. But don't mangle the whole process just cause you don't like what the legislature is doing right now.
I don't really know which side I fall on about electors vs. direct voting - perhaps the indirectness of legislature is not the right strategy for getting a good chief executive. None the less, the electoral college needs to either be used as it was designed or scrapped.
You can do this, and though it's not quite as simple as IE, it's really not bad.
Right click on the toolbar and choose customize. Drag all the elements from the navigation toolbar up next to the field menu. Click close from the customization box. Right click on the now-empty navigation bar and uncheck it from the list.
Voile! Buttons, address bar, and menus all in one toolbar.
There are many issues on which this is the case. For example, while I am deeply distrustful of the rationale Bush used to launch the Iraq war, I can definitely see that the issues are complex and the fact that the different spins don't line up doesn't mean that one side is lying. Likewise the attacks on Kerry's military spending record, which conveniently overlook the fact that Cheney led the charge in cutting military spending after the Cold War (a stance that generally seemed justified at the time). So while I don't think attacking Kerry on this issue is straightforward, it's definitely not slander.
However, when it comes to the Swift Boat Vets, there is no such middle ground. Their current statements totally contradict their previous statements and military records. Prior to being brought together by an associate of Karl Rove's, they had not made these factually false statements attacking Kerry's character. A decent number of them were not entirely aware that their names were being included on the list.
Had they stuck to saying that "Kerry hates America" or "Kerry's against our troops", or rehashing his anti war statements, I would not call their political speech slander. But lying about known facts (the falsity statements being shown by the direct contradicition with both their previous statements and the records) with express intent of defaming a person's character is slander, period. And it's a damn shame that our media is too cowed from doing actual analysis to properly call a lie a lie.
Pardon me if I've taken a harsh tone. I have no idea what your views are on politics in general, and I would happily debate in a civilized way on issues of substance.
I think you also have to give credit to thoughtful people on either side. Thoughtful lefties recognized that government as a direct solution to social/economic problems frequently has very deep problems. Thoughtful righties have realized that there are some social/economic problems whose scope makes the government the only agent whose intervention will allow for a solution.
Likewise, the thoughtful left has realized that military force ("hard power") is sometimes not an immoral answer and sometimes a useful way to do things. The thoughtful right has realized (or recalled) that diplomacy and trust-building are not just for peace-lovin'-hippies, but can be a critical part of protecting the country's interests.
On the left side, the challenge in the next few election cycles will be to stabilize that movement away from big government within the party and present a credible vision of foreign policy.
On the right side, the challenge will be to tame the rabidly anti-statist forces so the party it does want government to do, not what it doesn't want government to do.
That's very well put. It's a rare politician who shows the character to honestly face the crappy things s/he's done in her/his past.
My hope is that after this fall's brutal election:
a) people get tired of all this dredging through personal histories
b) both parties try to run true moderatees in the next election cycle so people can get away from party branding and back to the questions that matter and that both sides of the aisle are worried about, like the deficit.
c) people learn that they'll have to debunk spin for themselves - everyone's spin.
But if we're going on character, Bush is an ever tougher sell.
George W. was weaseled into the Air National Guard by his transplant-Connecticut-investment-banker family's wealth and power (see Ben Barnes about that on CBS tonight), and spent much of his 20s getting drunker and making messes (ask folks in Montgomery AL about him trashing the house they rented to him, or his father about the "mano a mano" incident) and apparently doing coke (which makes Clinton's "I didn't inhale" non-denial seem like a sneeze). W is basically a jerky overgrown rich kid who's never faced an obstacle his family couldn't get him around. He has a definite knack for connecting with people of many stripes, but a longtime stand-up guy he is not.
By way of context, there are numerous Republicans who I disagree with but consider people of honesty and integrity. One example is Pat Buchanan. He doesn't seem like the nicest guy on earth when I see him on TV, and I hate his politics like hell, but he's stuck to his paleocon guns, and I respect him for it. Another is Trent Lott. In spite of his untimely remarks and associations with the CCC, he remains an excellent historian. Or Bill Frist - little bit of an insufferable keep-his-nose-clean overacheiver (as is John Edwards), I hate his politics too, don't think he's that effective as a Senate leader, but I think that the man is basically a decent sort. Tom DeLay - absolutely slimeball. Denny Hastert - pretty decent.
I can't believe anyone would mod this insightful, no matter how much they dislike Kerry. The Swift Boat ads were outright slander. John Kerry, citizen, has every right to object to the defamation of his character by persons making knowingly false statements. Nor were the swift boat ads remotely related to any of the issues at stake in this election.
If you want to talk about crying, let's talk about the whining that the left has finally started closed multibillionaire funder gap with the GOP. Richard Scaife much? And I won't even start on the fact that all the principals were friends and associates of Karl Rove.
Doubly frightening when you consider that China is establishing itself as the economic and political hub of Asia and Oceania. The only country in the world that truly has a leash on Kim Jong Il right now is China. So if they go down, they will take a lot with them.
On the other hand, as other posters have noted, 20 years is a long, long way away.
Do you really, truly, in your heart of hearts believe that a group some longtime financial supporters of Bush and longtime friends of Karl Rove just coincidentally came up with several hundred thousand for a group of veterans to contradict their own previous statements and just about every record in the Navy at the most opportune time in the Bush reelection campaign - without so much as a phone call to Karl? All of the players in that slander are in the business of politics, and one of the lawyers on in the group was also an advisor to the Bush campaign, until he resigned after being outed. Let's call a spade a spade, shall we?
As for Bush calling Kerry's service admirable, yes, he did the right thing there, both morally and politically (he's the good cop, the "unaffiliated" agents are bad cop). I guess it's naive to expect campaigns not to engage in outright lying (as opposed to the standard practice beating on a marginally relevant flaw in the opposition), but it's still fair to call scurrilous when it's practiced.
Good points about breaking the ice. Actually, I think that having a website of some sort where you can sort of get acquainted with people before having to cast around for something to say in person is a great intermediate step. I certainly hope the site works.
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Look, I don't disagree with you that there is a significant failure of teaching discipline, responsiblity and ethics to children underpinning a lot of these violent incidents. But by arguing that there's no role for a public entity to address, you're basically punting. And reducing our options to "government wrings its hands and says bummer" vs "government micromanages" is just throwing the ball away until it's 4th down. People should always be more moral than they are, but sadly, they often fail to do so.
I'll throw one example out there to counter your personal responsiblity solution: a kid whose parents have not schooled him in personal responsibility assaults your kid with a gun he brought to school. By the way, a gun assault happened at my uptown DC public high school when I was there in 91, and has happened other times at other high schools across the city and country. The current problem area in the DC region? Fairfax County, an affluent suburb with lots of immigration happening. Let say the gun was obtained from one of the criminal element you believe - probably correctly - will always have guns. How did your teaching personal responsibility to your kids and me to mine address this? Whatever you do legally and extralegally to punish the kid and his parents for this act is retroactive and does not bring back your dead daughter.
So perhaps the public sector has a slightly more proactive role here than just cleaning up the mess after it happens?
So I counter your charge of naivete with the same charge - in the movies only "crooks" do "bad" things. In reality, determined crooks do a lot of bad things, and lots of other people some bad things. And when they have a gun, their worst judgements impulses turn into dead people (again, usually dead people under 25).
I'm not interested in telling people they can't hunt (though I really don't see how one can make a case for against "Shooting Under the Influence" type laws), and in principle I'm OK with gun ownership among people who demonstrably know how to use a gun and only point it at people it in self-defense, but I'm adamantly against the casual availability of guns that so many gun advocates seem to cherish, and I'm deafened by their silence when it comes to meaningful solutions for reducing the number of young people shooting each other.
Talk reality to me about keeping kids from shooting each other, and I'll talk reality to you about responsible adults and guns. Deal?
One of the things I've always wondered is why Microsoft has put out so much buggy software. I mean on the coding side, they hire pretty smart people (e.g. Waterloo), and their biz devs obviously know a thing or 42 billion. So why are there such persistent problems with their software? Solaris or AIX, for example, have bugs, but have they ever had a period like this where there were just vast bugs found all the time?
When you think about there really is kind of a paradox there - obviously talented programmers, obviously talented business people, plenty of money. So why are they shipping systems with excessive bugginess? I really don't know the answer. I've found that as a company it has a huge ego - most Microsofties I've met really think on some level they're leading the world to new places, and certainly that's the kind of cheerleading that goes on within the company. The only other thing I can think of is that their strategies of acquiring and integrating lot of software, plus running competing teams and cherry-picking what they like best lead to a lot of quick deployments but fractured designs. Anyone know anything more about this?
The other factor that makes the situation opaque is that Kim Jong Il is pretty close to insane - like comic book character insane, so you can't do the usual reverse engineering of geopolitical strategy to get an idea of what his game is.
While I think we've made a big mess in the Middle East bigger in most places and smaller in a few, I believe you are indeed correct - this is not really about Iraq at all. As an aside, I do think we can improve our batting average in the Middle East if we're a) willing to be a little more circumspect and pay more attention to attitudes on the ground than Bush has been so far, and b) willing to really commit aid money, technical assistance and troops over the time scale of decades, not years. A lot of these world hotspots had their development woes magnified by being proxy states in the US-Soviet conflict and then being utterly abandoned. Undoing these kind of festering problems takes a long, long time.
It's a global chessboard..ain't politics grand?
Yes, it's true that government programs and money can become vote-buying schemes, but there are times when they are called for. When they are created and implemented, they must be closely watched with no hesitation about scaling them down when times change. But to deal with the classic case head-on, it's pretty hard to fathom the benefits that affirmative action has brought to our society by. Does it require changing (say to strict economic criteria) with the times? Unquestionably. But before you oppose this sort of thing with a broad brush, do consider the fact that most major corporations spoke up in favor of affirmative action during Granholm. vs. U of Mich.
Again, I share your fear that putting such services in the public sector politicizes them and encourages needless legal interference. However, your notion of just leaving it to corporations strikes me as too much faith in corporations. The problems of getting responsiveness and accountability from a large organization are surprisingly similar, whether that organization is government or corporations. People like to be in control of resources, and they apply their talents to doing so. What's worse, as corporations grow large enough, they make increasingly heavy demands on society - minimal or no taxation, subsidies, government-enforced monopolies on one or another piece of their business, unfettered and unpaid access to public resources. This is every bit as destructive as overgrown government programs and agencies that demand increasing funding and control through legislation.
In this case, I happen to somewhat agree with you that the service is a luxury and not a basic infrastructure good, so it's hard to see this as a pressing social issue. Nonetheless, the lack of wireless and/or broadband access in these places is about as clear an illustration of the notion of market failure as one can imagine. So first things first - the government must take active steps address the legal conditions that create the market failure, by eliminating legal support of the monopoly causing the market failure. Second, it is fair and appropriate for the towns to offer subsidies to remedy the market failure. When the market returns to a competitive state, the government must get out of the way.
On another level, I think a town has the right to build whatever infrastructure it wants to benefit its citizens, and doubly so when there's an obvious market failure to be remedied.
As someone currently using Postgres in production, I have to agree with the parent and another commenter in this thread on a couple issues.
Postgres is now quite easy to install and administer. The admin tool, pgAdmin3, which ships with the Windows distribution compares well with any admin tool I've ever used. There are quite a few procedural language bindings being built, from Python to Ruby to PHP to Java. This presents some great opportunities for integration with tools in those languages.
The fact that it is BSD-licensed makes it a no-brainer for uses involving developing custom software - it's great to be able to tell a client that nobody has to pay for or manage any licenses for this database.
Unfortunately, Postgresql does have some really key gotchas for use in demanding database applications:
1) Auditing
Out of the box, it is really difficult do auditing. Not only is there no standard auditing, but your option: rolling your own trigger-based auditing is also difficult due to limitations in various procedural languages and the versions in which they appear. This is really a shame, because given the number of people who have put effort into rolling auditing systems, it would be nice to see some code permanently attached to the distribution.
2) Documentation
Not only are the manuals sparse, but the books that exist tend to repeat what the manuals say, leaving some key tools and features relatively undocumented. A good book strictly on programming PL/PGSQL or PL/Perl would be of tremendous utility.
3) Backup and Migration
Within major releases, the utilities to backup and restore a database are actually quite good, if minimalist in design. However, there's very little provision for migrating between versions, and given the different features available in each version, migration is still something one has to consider regularly.
4)Replication and distributed processing
There is now a master-slave replication tool, Slony, that I believe is slated to be part of the next release. This is a good step forward. Work towards full multi-master replication and/or clustering would really make this a good contender for a lot of enterprise use.
Overall, Postgres is a pretty darn cool database. If it can make its overall presentation a bit slicker, it could really be a contender to topple Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.
My point was this: it is extremely off-putting to a user that just wants to install and use something to instead get a lecture about how things that appear to be problems are in fact arcane "features". Case in point:
Telling me that I should switch "package managers" or "packager installers" or "dependency resolvers" is symptomatic of the very same mentality. Once upon a time I was vaguely interested in learning how different package systems work, now I'm over it, and I don't find explanations of how I'm doing the wrong thing less than a total waste of time.
As for the subtle distinction you drive between a package manager as an agent that finds the packages and a front-end that installs packages that have already been downloaded, that's certainly a distinction one could make. I would note however, that all of the systems in question include in their names the words "package" and "manage" or abbreviations thereof. For example, here's what RPM stands for. So you might perhaps be willing to concede concede that my nomenclature is also pretty common.
While your deductive powers are impressive:
perhaps they are a bit overtaxed here. I have used urpmi and up2date on Mandrake and RedHat respectively, as well as Slackware's tgz installer. Upon installing Suse9.1 for a server, I skipped the nonsense and used plain old rpm -Uvh. All of the "package agents" had so many flaws in design - from timeouts on the client to Python errors to timeouts hitting overloaded servers - that I found it easier to search rpmfind than to wait 25 minutes for urpmi or Mandrake's GUI called DrakX (or whatever the hell it was called) to time out and tell me that it couldn't resolve dependencies. You can tell me I'm not using the right version of the distro or the software or whatever, but until I can transparently and quickly get, install, and use software, I will stick by my spelled out statement about installing software on Linux: B-R-O-K-E-N.
I've been through enough RPM-dependency hell and DLL hell to know something about both of them. And I've used quite a few GNOME and KDE package managers on a variety of flavors of Linux.
Sadly, none of them work like downloading and installing a Windows binary. For example, if I'm looking for a RedHat 8.0 binary for an MPEG player (by poring through rpmfind.net looking for a binary that matches my distro and version), and either download an RPM compiled for SuSE (either by accident or out of desperation), my chances are pretty decent of having it tell me that it needs 6 dependencies resolved before I can watch a simple video clip. Often you'll see it asking for libstdc++-8.6.1-3.en, even though I a have libstdc++-8.5.4-9. Why the hell do I need to upgrade a system C++ library to watch a movie?
Most of the time this occurs because the packaging process reads (by name) all the libraries that program dependended on without any regard to whether the same API or ABI is implemented in libraries that I already have on my machine. KPackage, or GPackMan or Yet Another Package Manager may present these dependency messages in a nice GUI format, but the basic problem is intolerable. And you can make all the apologies you like for it, but it is B-R-O-K-E-N, and it's going to do a lot to stall the adoption of Linux until it's fixed.
Steps to alienate non-geek Linux desktop users
1) Explain to user why the desktop OS they currently use which seems to work simply except when they occasionally need to call their IT dude is really the wrong approach altogether
2) Explain to user how the OS they "should" move to makes is so much better because makes it impossible to install a great deal of software packages.
3) Continue to complain about Windows when user prefers an OS on which mere mortals can install software packages.
Your point about multiple DLLs leading to eventual OS rot is a fair one, although I'd be interested to see what role unclean poweroffs, hardware degradation, etc play as opposed to application DLLs. The disk space argument is basically moot these days, though the multiple unpatched libraries issue is not, but the current RPM dependency resolution really doesn't handle ferreting out old (now insecure) library versions either.
The only versioning proposal I've heard that makes sense is the DragonflyBSD one - where there's a smart dependency resolver that lets you use installed libraries when possible, and lets you easily install new library when that won't work.
For all you Access-bashers out there, the PIVOT keyword was exclusive to Jet SQL (and I believe it still is - it will be added to the next release of SQL Server). Please correct me if I'm wrong.
While it's obviously possible to build stored procs that do what PIVOT does (I'll likely be doing this in Postgres), you have to give credit to the Access team for being ahead of the curve on that one. Unfortunately, its syntax is pretty hard to understand. I can build those crosstab queries in Access using the builder, but I'll be damned if I can understand how to do anything with PIVOT.
Perhaps it hasn't occurred to many of the geeks here that writing job postings and job description is itself a difficult skill to master. As the grandparent noted, you are trying to condense a complex set of balances and desired goals into a couple hundred words or less.
So the quality of most job listings you see is somewhere between terrible and great, with the majority being merely OK. If you learn a bit more about how people approach writing the ads and considering responses, you'll see the clues that grandparent was discussing, no matter how good a job (s)he actually did at writing the ad.
There are a lot of areas will OSS is already strong and will get stronger, but an polished, integrated desktop is not one of them. OSS's pillars of strength are its openness, robustness, and the way that it commoditizes previously pricey functionality. We should build forward from there.
Savvy tech observers have pointed out that attacking Microsoft where it thinks you will attack is always a recipe for failure. They have spent millions upon millions of developer hours and billions of dollar producing a desktop that is tightly integrated. If anything, it is their key selling point. For disparate groups of OSS developers to try to accomplish anything like that is lunacy.
When you stick the UNIX method of laying one brick on another to build a wall, you get slow, robust development. The article is right that several individual bricks must be easier to lay mortar for - his points about version dependencies and driver installation are right on, and these basically about gluing one more thing on at a time. General support for wireless, for example, is now feasible, as the technology has started to stabilize, and represents one more piece to add on.
A great example of growth through commoditization is in the database market, from embedded systems to big iron installations. The vast majority of businesses need nothing more than a simple, functional database server. MySQL and Postgres on Linux are both close to stepping in nicely to fill this void. Postgres needs another brick layered on it - that being a simpler install process, but most other pieces are there.
As long as Linux sticks to its roots, it will grow slowly and steadily, and obligate other market players to react to its strengths.
Well put. Mod parent up.
Also note that politicians only make promises they don't know they can keep on the campaign trail. If you ever go speak with them in the offices, they're all ahems and perhapses.
Incredibly insightful posts. Thanks for the history and geopolitics lesson.
Some questions and some thoughts.
Questions:
Is Beijing in range of North Korea's missiles?
How effective would bombing southern missile emplacements be? A missile attack on Seoul really only becomes mass death if:
a) there are a lot of them
and/or
b) their combined effect is great (i.e. firebombing, etc.)
I thought I read something about a North Korea-Pakistan link. Have you heard anything about this?
Thoughts:
This seems to be yet another example of a two-bit dictatorship that came as a result of rapid disengagement by the world's superpowers (USSR/Russia, USA, China). It's amazing how well running a country as a military outpost and then leaving abruptly works to foment hatred and dangerous regimes.
To my armchair international negotiator's brain it seems that the only road is to help create a legitimate political alternative to Kim Jong Il.
N. Korea/S. Korea is like Isreal/Palestine to me in that there is really only one endgame, and that's a single state. Fortunately, the S. Koreans are apparently all for this (not so sure it'll pan out like they hope when millions of starving, illiterate, brainwashed peasants coming storming down looking for jobs in Samsung's HDTV plants). One of the key difficulties with Palestine is that lack of a real political infrastructure with whom to negotiate - one with enough legitimacy and clout to tell Hamas and Hizbullah to piss off. Arafat has always been more interested in posturing than in any real,on-the-ground politics work.
Yes, the approach is long and fraught with difficulty, but it can actually work. Countries like Poland, Mexico, India have all worked their way back from dictaorships to more or less functioning democracies. Given how paranoid Kim Jong Il is, and the current disarray of the US diplomacy, not to mention HUMINT, this is a decade-long project (which, as you note, makes it very hard for any one politician to own it). It is also one where the likelihood of being hornswaggled by an Ahmed Chalabi-type character is just as high as in Iraq and the stakes are 100 times as high. But it does have potential to bring real stability.
I'd be hesitant to call that particular line of induction a proof. For example:
If a shareholder is not qualified to make a budget and strategy for a company, why is she qualified to choose the CEO who does do this?
My original point, which I'm still not entirely convinced of, was that:
a) Hamilton's idea was not just have to the electors cast votes, but for them to analyze, debate and evaluate the candidate. As you point out the electoral college no longer serves this function. He presumably did not believe that the common person understood enough to make a considered choice.
b) perhaps it's worth considering the merits of Hamilton's idea from a modern standpoint, where many voters don't follow politics or even world events enough to make a considered choice.
I was not and am not endorsing the elitist nature of Hamilton's argument, just noting that a considered choice of president is a lot better than an ill-considered one, and comparing it to the problems associated with direct legislation.
Hamilton's proposal is not entirely off-base: it's not clear to me that a simple majority election is the best way to do things. While the language about careful deliberations and proper conditions may have been window dressing around the political negotiations of the day, we have the good fortune that we can now evaluate what he wrote free of those constraints and with a contemporary perspective. Careful deliberation and analysis seem like a damn good prerequisite for someone who runs the richest country and the world, and has a big say over most others. That is, a robust voting process requires engagement and thought by the people voting, something that is notably lacking in many recent elections in this country. Just to stir the pot, why should you get to cast a direct vote for president if you haven't been paying much attention to his (or her eventually) work in the first place?
However, as other posters have also made clear, the current role of the elector involves neither analysis nor deliberation, so the college is not even vaguely living up to the purpose set forth for it.
A good place to look at direct democracy in action is ballot initiatives. I recently had the misfortune of living in Washington state in a period increasing reliance on ballot initiatives. This let voters loose on such questions as:
- Should legislature be forced to abandon the motor vehicles registration fees that were created a few years previous to try to strengthen transportation infrastructure?
- Should legislature be forced to alter environmental regulations governing streams in order to try to protect salmon populations?
As an individual, I don't know how the budgeting process of a state government works, nor the overall process of designing environmental regulations. If you don't think your legislators are doing a good job, fire them or lobby them. But don't mangle the whole process just cause you don't like what the legislature is doing right now.I don't really know which side I fall on about electors vs. direct voting - perhaps the indirectness of legislature is not the right strategy for getting a good chief executive. None the less, the electoral college needs to either be used as it was designed or scrapped.
You can do this, and though it's not quite as simple as IE, it's really not bad.
Right click on the toolbar and choose customize. Drag all the elements from the navigation toolbar up next to the field menu. Click close from the customization box. Right click on the now-empty navigation bar and uncheck it from the list.
Voile! Buttons, address bar, and menus all in one toolbar.
There are many issues on which this is the case. For example, while I am deeply distrustful of the rationale Bush used to launch the Iraq war, I can definitely see that the issues are complex and the fact that the different spins don't line up doesn't mean that one side is lying. Likewise the attacks on Kerry's military spending record, which conveniently overlook the fact that Cheney led the charge in cutting military spending after the Cold War (a stance that generally seemed justified at the time). So while I don't think attacking Kerry on this issue is straightforward, it's definitely not slander.
However, when it comes to the Swift Boat Vets, there is no such middle ground. Their current statements totally contradict their previous statements and military records. Prior to being brought together by an associate of Karl Rove's, they had not made these factually false statements attacking Kerry's character. A decent number of them were not entirely aware that their names were being included on the list.
Had they stuck to saying that "Kerry hates America" or "Kerry's against our troops", or rehashing his anti war statements, I would not call their political speech slander. But lying about known facts (the falsity statements being shown by the direct contradicition with both their previous statements and the records) with express intent of defaming a person's character is slander, period. And it's a damn shame that our media is too cowed from doing actual analysis to properly call a lie a lie.
Pardon me if I've taken a harsh tone. I have no idea what your views are on politics in general, and I would happily debate in a civilized way on issues of substance.
Very well put on all counts.
I think you also have to give credit to thoughtful people on either side. Thoughtful lefties recognized that government as a direct solution to social/economic problems frequently has very deep problems. Thoughtful righties have realized that there are some social/economic problems whose scope makes the government the only agent whose intervention will allow for a solution.
Likewise, the thoughtful left has realized that military force ("hard power") is sometimes not an immoral answer and sometimes a useful way to do things. The thoughtful right has realized (or recalled) that diplomacy and trust-building are not just for peace-lovin'-hippies, but can be a critical part of protecting the country's interests.
On the left side, the challenge in the next few election cycles will be to stabilize that movement away from big government within the party and present a credible vision of foreign policy.
On the right side, the challenge will be to tame the rabidly anti-statist forces so the party it does want government to do, not what it doesn't want government to do.
That's very well put. It's a rare politician who shows the character to honestly face the crappy things s/he's done in her/his past.
My hope is that after this fall's brutal election:
a) people get tired of all this dredging through personal histories
b) both parties try to run true moderatees in the next election cycle so people can get away from party branding and back to the questions that matter and that both sides of the aisle are worried about, like the deficit.
c) people learn that they'll have to debunk spin for themselves - everyone's spin.
But if we're going on character, Bush is an ever tougher sell.
George W. was weaseled into the Air National Guard by his transplant-Connecticut-investment-banker family's wealth and power (see Ben Barnes about that on CBS tonight), and spent much of his 20s getting drunker and making messes (ask folks in Montgomery AL about him trashing the house they rented to him, or his father about the "mano a mano" incident) and apparently doing coke (which makes Clinton's "I didn't inhale" non-denial seem like a sneeze). W is basically a jerky overgrown rich kid who's never faced an obstacle his family couldn't get him around. He has a definite knack for connecting with people of many stripes, but a longtime stand-up guy he is not.
By way of context, there are numerous Republicans who I disagree with but consider people of honesty and integrity. One example is Pat Buchanan. He doesn't seem like the nicest guy on earth when I see him on TV, and I hate his politics like hell, but he's stuck to his paleocon guns, and I respect him for it. Another is Trent Lott. In spite of his untimely remarks and associations with the CCC, he remains an excellent historian. Or Bill Frist - little bit of an insufferable keep-his-nose-clean overacheiver (as is John Edwards), I hate his politics too, don't think he's that effective as a Senate leader, but I think that the man is basically a decent sort. Tom DeLay - absolutely slimeball. Denny Hastert - pretty decent.
I can't believe anyone would mod this insightful, no matter how much they dislike Kerry. The Swift Boat ads were outright slander. John Kerry, citizen, has every right to object to the defamation of his character by persons making knowingly false statements. Nor were the swift boat ads remotely related to any of the issues at stake in this election.
If you want to talk about crying, let's talk about the whining that the left has finally started closed multibillionaire funder gap with the GOP. Richard Scaife much? And I won't even start on the fact that all the principals were friends and associates of Karl Rove.
Doubly frightening when you consider that China is establishing itself as the economic and political hub of Asia and Oceania. The only country in the world that truly has a leash on Kim Jong Il right now is China. So if they go down, they will take a lot with them.
On the other hand, as other posters have noted, 20 years is a long, long way away.
I hate to get into a flame war during the grand opening of this politics section of /., but take a look at this:p osts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1195870/
Do you really, truly, in your heart of hearts believe that a group some longtime financial supporters of Bush and longtime friends of Karl Rove just coincidentally came up with several hundred thousand for a group of veterans to contradict their own previous statements and just about every record in the Navy at the most opportune time in the Bush reelection campaign - without so much as a phone call to Karl? All of the players in that slander are in the business of politics, and one of the lawyers on in the group was also an advisor to the Bush campaign, until he resigned after being outed. Let's call a spade a spade, shall we?
As for Bush calling Kerry's service admirable, yes, he did the right thing there, both morally and politically (he's the good cop, the "unaffiliated" agents are bad cop). I guess it's naive to expect campaigns not to engage in outright lying (as opposed to the standard practice beating on a marginally relevant flaw in the opposition), but it's still fair to call scurrilous when it's practiced.
Good points about breaking the ice. Actually, I think that having a website of some sort where you can sort of get acquainted with people before having to cast around for something to say in person is a great intermediate step. I certainly hope the site works.