Why exactly is it so important that Abortion be legalized at the national level? And more importantly, why must abortion be passed by a few elitist judges rather than actually allowing a vote?
I personally don't believe abortion should be outlawed. But where and how laws are created are just as important. It should be a state issue, and it should be VOTED ON, not some edict passed down from the bench.
The problem is a lack of capital in those countries, in large part due to having a screwed up government for so long.
Even if they change now, they still can't grow as fast as a country with a large amount of capital, good infrastructure, and many people willing to invest.
Neither factor you mentioned has anything to do with the economic power of the U.S. Those are both just problems with the federal budget. The feds could go bankrupt and we could still have a great economy.
In fact, that doesn't sound like such a bad outcome, and it doesn't seem entirely unlikely (given the social security mess and the politicians competing to socialize medicine the fastest). I wonder what would actually happen.
A monopoly only really works when the monopolist is much larger than the consumer. But if the consumer is the University of California (or it's students) it seems logical that the monopoly (or in the case of the publishing industry, oligopoly) wouldn't have power. But they do.
The UC could just hire its own authors and save a lot of money, and even give away the material for free. It seems dumb to keep buying from publishers.
If you want to see some really horrible, self-serving speed analysis, check this out.
SQLite talks about how fast they are when doing the operations inside a big transaction. Well, that's wonderful, but since it's embedded that means no concurrent access. So what kind of application would do 2500 inserts in a big transaction? If you're doing a data load in PostgreSQL you just "COPY". Yet if you do a bunch of inserts with SQLite and sync on, the benchmarks show PG and Mysql to be better. I bet those numbers would be different if you turned fsynch off in postgres.
Not to mention they used postgres 7.1! Why even have the page still around? Run the tests again.
This means that you can change backend databases trivially, merely by changing one line of code.
That assumes that the SQL still works. Some databases don't follow the SQL spec very closely, so lots of stuff breaks. And sometimes you use a feature only available to some databases.
However, the U.S. has accomplished some great things regarding freedom. The U.S. fought a war against itself to free slaves. Banning slavery was quite rare at that time, and the US started to change that around the world.
People who criticize the US for various evils usually don't bother to compare to some other country, because whatever happened in the other country was probably worse.
Isn't there something wrong when we Californians dump more money into education than just about anywhere else and get lower results than just about anywhere else?
Throwing money won't get results.
You see, the problem is not money, and it's not class size. For every hard-working, intelligent teacher there are many other incompetent and lazy teachers. My teachers were often late and rarely lectured. If it was time for a lecture, it was a sermon on the merits of socialism and liberalism. History is not called history anymore because it rarely sticks to the facts, so it's now called "Social Studies". Most teachers would only pretend that they had read the books relevent to the course.
We need incentives to actually teach. REAL accountability.
Except that some distros are very open. If there was really a movement to change, it could happen. The browser on windows is entirely controlled by one company.
Just because something is a law doesn't necessarily make it right either.
I didn't say it was right. What I did say is that if a majority of people support a ban on something at the state level, you have to fight the issue democratically. You don't go whining about how something is a "right" so that you can get a few judges to usurp the will of the people.
Jim Crow ended because the people of the U.S. wouldn't stand for it any more. Eventually, the "equal protection under the laws" amendment was passed (which takes a supermajority I might add). It didn't end because a judge started making up rights. It ended because the PEOPLE created a new standard for rights with that amendment.
So no, it's not a right just because you say it is. It's a right when the majority of people decide it's a good idea to recognize a homosexual union as marriage.
And as I said, I wouldn't support an anti-sodomy law anywhere. I think it's a bad law. But it's not up to a judge to call it bad, it's up to the people. In that case it's up to the people in a state I don't even live in, so I care even less.
Remember, HOW a law comes to be is at least as important as what the law says.
And I really don't see how the disease transmission rates matter, seeing as nobody is about to outlaw sex. The point is, a state can create any law they want, assuming popular approval, as long as it doesn't violate a right. And in this case I mean a REAL right, not just something you think should be the law.
If I want lower taxes, I don't go around saying that I have a right to lower taxes and try to get a judge to declare that my taxes are too high. That doesn't even resemble a balance of government powers.
That's great, encourage people to file more lawsuits.
Keep in mind that none of this is about the government allowing people to earn overtime pay. People could always earn overtime pay, and always will be able to. What an overtime pay law does is that it simply makes it illegal to pay some employees less than 1.5 times their normal wage when that employee has worked more than 40 hours.
Is that good for the employee? Maybe, maybe not. It could result in less work for some people who desperately need it, in favor of a few people who are lucky enough to get some benefit from an overtime pay law.
There is no free lunch. If that were true, why not make it 3 times their normal pay after 20 hours?
Sodomy is orthogonal to homosexuality. You can be straight and practice sodomy, or be gay and not practice it. The state legislature could have had many reasons to outlaw it, I merely guessed that "health" was the reason they used since it can transmit disease.
You can't just invent a group and invent rights to go along with it. Sexual preference is just a preference, it doesn't carry any rights along with it.
The arguments you call "straw men" are legitimate "slippery slope" precedent issues. It sets a precedent that groups of people who share a preference can claim rights that don't exist simply based on their stated preference.
"Religious beliefs" don't allow you to sacrafice virgins and get away with it, right? That's because it's against the law.
I don't think it should be illegal to practice sodomy, despite your assumption. I would be less likely to vote for a representative if they voted that illegal. However, if the people of Texas vote for representatives with that inclination, a judge can't come by and overrule the people because of a non-existant right.
And the mayor in SF is supposed to uphold the law. If he want's to practice civil disobedience than he can resign first, not abuse his power.
And I'll remind you that marriage is not a right, and there are other circumstances that could prevent a marriage, such as being related.
Finally, being gay is not something you do, it's who you are. It's in your being.
Let's say that's true, it still doesn't matter. Just because something is "in your being" doesn't necessarily make it right, particularly if it involves violating the law. Some people have it "in their being" to kill other people, but we call those people murderers and lock them away.
I think that the best approach for gays is to keep the government out of their business, which used to be their argument. What many gays are asking for now is government approval of their activities through "gay marriage".
Marriage law for hundreds of years has evolved without consideration for same-sex unions. What about common law marriage? Can two male roommate bachelors suddenly find themselves married? It starts to get rediculous quickly. What about polygamy or men marrying animals? The list continues.
And about the anti-sodomy law, you've got things backwards. Sodomy is an act, and can be outlawed for numerous reasons (health being one). There are lots of dangerous things that people like to do while having sex, and many of them are already outlowed. Not all gay people necessarily engage in sodomy. In fact, being gay itself is merely something you do, it's not who you are. Race is an indelible quality, but homosexuaility is just what some people prefer to do in their free time.
I have a very similar story. Small company, big spending, decent business plan, very poorly implemented.
I went to talk to the guy in charge because he got in his head to buy Oracle. I was trying to convinve him to use MySQL because of cost. He thought Oracle was the only way a company could operate.
Here's what actually happened: (1) We settled on Sybase (2) Took forever to get plans worked out and the software in place (it would have taken a matter of hours for me to get MySQL in place...) (3) We never moved off our "temporary development" system that was a flat text file[1] (4) Investors realized nothing was making it to market and too much was being spent, and company went under.
[1] The flat text file -- 100's of MB -- was being read several times each time the front page of the company website was loaded. And no, nobody ever got sybase in place behind it. After all, details like that don't impress investors.
Disclaimer: I now use postgresql. At the time ('99) postgresql still had some rough edges, but now it's the best database out there for everything that I use an RDBMS for.
When someone is examining a couple alternatives, and one works right away and the other requires reading (even merely 5 pages), the reading just won't happen unless the user really cares. You eliminate a large number of users just by raising the bar a very slight amount.
However, I'm a postgres user, and I'm here to say that reading 5 pages of docs is not required to issue your first "create table" command.
In Debian, it's one command to install and it will ask you simple questions, like where to put the data. For those who like a GUI, another command will install pgadmin3. Really, how much easier can it get to install?
To connect for the first time in Debian, just become the user "postgres" and connect to "template1" and it will let you in without a password (after that you can create more databases and users).
Why are these vague accusations about usability never pointed at the distributor (Redhat, etc)? I don't complain about the installation difficulties of KDE because Debian handles that for me. If I were to write a usability report of KDE without using Debian, would it be fair to speak of the myriad dependency problems and long compile times? No, it wouldn't, 'cause the distributor handles that for most people.
And the thing is, MySQL and PostgreSQL, as far as using the database, basically both just provide the ability to execute SQL commands. The difficulty couldn't be over PostgreSQL's syntax for creating a table, I assume. So where is this usability issue appearing? If it's during the install, shouldn't the distribution do a better job of installing it for you?
It's really not fair to point the finger at postgres when the reality is that your distributor just doesn't care enough to make it easy for you, and maybe their default database is MySQL.
And even compiling from source, there aren't many packages anywhere near as complicated as PostgreSQL that compile and install so easily.
Then again, different people choose to be ignorant of different topics.
Some of these people are very well educated and make a lot of money. It would not be wise for these people to forgo high pay to learn about computers when the knowledge will save them only a small amount.
It makes much more sense for these people to pick a company that they blindly trust (e.g. Microsoft) and let them do the work.
How much time would they need to spend before they could trust OSS as much?
Following your logic, the domain registrars could remove their endorsement as well. Major ISPs could decide that it isn't worth their while to route packets to your servers, or acknowledge that you occupy the IP address that you think you have.
I suppose the difference is private industry assistance vs. government action. It's sort of unrealistic for you to expect to publish anything if you have no help from anyone in the private sector. However, you could argue that if THAT many people (read: everyone) doesn't want it published, who's your audience?
I guess your definition of censorship requires that some kind of enforcement agent prevents you from acting in an otherwise law-abiding way in order to prevent the publication.
I mostly agree with that, but it would be rather easy to convince a few major ISPs to prevent you from using them to publish (if the content is of a certain nature), which pretty much ruins any chance of online publication. I don't know whether it's "censorship" or not, but it certainly prevents someone from reading your publication even if they wanted to.
Agreed, and not only that but I think that people always underestimate the amount of money in midsize businesses.
MS is not going to win away all of Oracle's business and all of IBM's business because MS software just can't do quite as much for a very large enterprise.
However, a lot of midsize businesses will be faced with the UNIX vs windows question, because midsize businesses have requirements that are available in both UNIX and windows.
If sun is no longer around, people will still be applying the myth that linux is unsupported, and just choose windows.
So, microsoft DOES have a lot to gain.
In fact, does linux really have as much as microsoft to gain by Sun's demise? If Sun loses a customer, let's say for the sake of argument that customer is considering two choices: (1) Move to linux (2) Move to another big vendor (e.g. Microsoft)
Why would they choose #1 now if they haven't already? Probably they stuck with Sun because of support. That means they're looking for another vendor with a big name, e.g. microsoft.
One interesting point about the liability issue is that proprietary software developers would benefit greatly from liability laws, and consumers would probably suffer.
It's natural to assume that placing barriers or restrictions would hurt the vendors. Intuitively, anti-drug laws would hurt drug dealers, but in reality they drive the price up, and therefore the dealers' profits.
It's the same with software vendors. It would take more time to develop a quality product, and so it would eliminate most of the smaller developers. In effect, it would drive the price of software up across the board. Most consumers don't care about security or stability, they really don't. And developers would shy away from some of the most useful features for fear it could be considered a security problem. So the consumers are getting no real benefit, but paying a huge cost.
In the case of doctors, a patient's body would qualify, in computer terms, as "mission critical", meaning one problem is too many. So the patient loses if they see a quack. But, if a consumer gets bad software they reboot a few times a week, and maybe re-download some mp3s.
A better solution is if the vendors who actually do provide mission-critical software would provide guarantees. You can get a lot better guarantee from IBM or Oracle than MS, and enterprises recognize that.
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Well, since weight is measured in units of force, and not mass, it doesn't surprise me that he was confused.
Maybe they should have asked him how many Newtons he weighs.
I do know that RieserFS has some "features" that are unexpected and can be agrivated by powerfailure during write.
Like what? You obviously have a negative attitude toward reiserfs, could you point to some evidence?
Why exactly is it so important that Abortion be legalized at the national level? And more importantly, why must abortion be passed by a few elitist judges rather than actually allowing a vote?
I personally don't believe abortion should be outlawed. But where and how laws are created are just as important. It should be a state issue, and it should be VOTED ON, not some edict passed down from the bench.
The problem is a lack of capital in those countries, in large part due to having a screwed up government for so long.
Even if they change now, they still can't grow as fast as a country with a large amount of capital, good infrastructure, and many people willing to invest.
Neither factor you mentioned has anything to do with the economic power of the U.S. Those are both just problems with the federal budget. The feds could go bankrupt and we could still have a great economy.
In fact, that doesn't sound like such a bad outcome, and it doesn't seem entirely unlikely (given the social security mess and the politicians competing to socialize medicine the fastest). I wonder what would actually happen.
What confuses me is this:
A monopoly only really works when the monopolist is much larger than the consumer. But if the consumer is the University of California (or it's students) it seems logical that the monopoly (or in the case of the publishing industry, oligopoly) wouldn't have power. But they do.
The UC could just hire its own authors and save a lot of money, and even give away the material for free. It seems dumb to keep buying from publishers.
God forbid the police actually try to PREVENT a crime...
Again, they didn't violate his rights at all. They asked him questions. Anyone with his phone number can do that.
That's like saying a construction worker is a physicist.
If you want to see some really horrible, self-serving speed analysis, check this out.
SQLite talks about how fast they are when doing the operations inside a big transaction. Well, that's wonderful, but since it's embedded that means no concurrent access. So what kind of application would do 2500 inserts in a big transaction? If you're doing a data load in PostgreSQL you just "COPY". Yet if you do a bunch of inserts with SQLite and sync on, the benchmarks show PG and Mysql to be better. I bet those numbers would be different if you turned fsynch off in postgres.
Not to mention they used postgres 7.1! Why even have the page still around? Run the tests again.
This means that you can change backend databases trivially, merely by changing one line of code.
That assumes that the SQL still works. Some databases don't follow the SQL spec very closely, so lots of stuff breaks. And sometimes you use a feature only available to some databases.
phpPgAdmin is available, although perhaps that's what you already tried.
Also, there's pgAdmin III which is a nice database tool, but it's not web based.
Personally I just use psql, which is command line, but I understand a lot of people don't like to work with a database that way.
There never has been liberty and justice for all.
However, the U.S. has accomplished some great things regarding freedom. The U.S. fought a war against itself to free slaves. Banning slavery was quite rare at that time, and the US started to change that around the world.
People who criticize the US for various evils usually don't bother to compare to some other country, because whatever happened in the other country was probably worse.
Isn't there something wrong when we Californians dump more money into education than just about anywhere else and get lower results than just about anywhere else?
Throwing money won't get results.
You see, the problem is not money, and it's not class size. For every hard-working, intelligent teacher there are many other incompetent and lazy teachers. My teachers were often late and rarely lectured. If it was time for a lecture, it was a sermon on the merits of socialism and liberalism. History is not called history anymore because it rarely sticks to the facts, so it's now called "Social Studies". Most teachers would only pretend that they had read the books relevent to the course.
We need incentives to actually teach. REAL accountability.
Except that some distros are very open. If there was really a movement to change, it could happen. The browser on windows is entirely controlled by one company.
Just because something is a law doesn't necessarily make it right either.
I didn't say it was right. What I did say is that if a majority of people support a ban on something at the state level, you have to fight the issue democratically. You don't go whining about how something is a "right" so that you can get a few judges to usurp the will of the people.
Jim Crow ended because the people of the U.S. wouldn't stand for it any more. Eventually, the "equal protection under the laws" amendment was passed (which takes a supermajority I might add). It didn't end because a judge started making up rights. It ended because the PEOPLE created a new standard for rights with that amendment.
So no, it's not a right just because you say it is. It's a right when the majority of people decide it's a good idea to recognize a homosexual union as marriage.
And as I said, I wouldn't support an anti-sodomy law anywhere. I think it's a bad law. But it's not up to a judge to call it bad, it's up to the people. In that case it's up to the people in a state I don't even live in, so I care even less.
Remember, HOW a law comes to be is at least as important as what the law says.
And I really don't see how the disease transmission rates matter, seeing as nobody is about to outlaw sex. The point is, a state can create any law they want, assuming popular approval, as long as it doesn't violate a right. And in this case I mean a REAL right, not just something you think should be the law.
If I want lower taxes, I don't go around saying that I have a right to lower taxes and try to get a judge to declare that my taxes are too high. That doesn't even resemble a balance of government powers.
That's great, encourage people to file more lawsuits.
Keep in mind that none of this is about the government allowing people to earn overtime pay. People could always earn overtime pay, and always will be able to. What an overtime pay law does is that it simply makes it illegal to pay some employees less than 1.5 times their normal wage when that employee has worked more than 40 hours.
Is that good for the employee? Maybe, maybe not. It could result in less work for some people who desperately need it, in favor of a few people who are lucky enough to get some benefit from an overtime pay law.
There is no free lunch. If that were true, why not make it 3 times their normal pay after 20 hours?
Sodomy is orthogonal to homosexuality. You can be straight and practice sodomy, or be gay and not practice it. The state legislature could have had many reasons to outlaw it, I merely guessed that "health" was the reason they used since it can transmit disease.
You can't just invent a group and invent rights to go along with it. Sexual preference is just a preference, it doesn't carry any rights along with it.
The arguments you call "straw men" are legitimate "slippery slope" precedent issues. It sets a precedent that groups of people who share a preference can claim rights that don't exist simply based on their stated preference.
"Religious beliefs" don't allow you to sacrafice virgins and get away with it, right? That's because it's against the law.
I don't think it should be illegal to practice sodomy, despite your assumption. I would be less likely to vote for a representative if they voted that illegal. However, if the people of Texas vote for representatives with that inclination, a judge can't come by and overrule the people because of a non-existant right.
And the mayor in SF is supposed to uphold the law. If he want's to practice civil disobedience than he can resign first, not abuse his power.
And I'll remind you that marriage is not a right, and there are other circumstances that could prevent a marriage, such as being related.
Finally, being gay is not something you do, it's who you are. It's in your being.
Let's say that's true, it still doesn't matter. Just because something is "in your being" doesn't necessarily make it right, particularly if it involves violating the law. Some people have it "in their being" to kill other people, but we call those people murderers and lock them away.
I think that the best approach for gays is to keep the government out of their business, which used to be their argument. What many gays are asking for now is government approval of their activities through "gay marriage".
Marriage law for hundreds of years has evolved without consideration for same-sex unions. What about common law marriage? Can two male roommate bachelors suddenly find themselves married? It starts to get rediculous quickly. What about polygamy or men marrying animals? The list continues.
And about the anti-sodomy law, you've got things backwards. Sodomy is an act, and can be outlawed for numerous reasons (health being one). There are lots of dangerous things that people like to do while having sex, and many of them are already outlowed. Not all gay people necessarily engage in sodomy. In fact, being gay itself is merely something you do, it's not who you are. Race is an indelible quality, but homosexuaility is just what some people prefer to do in their free time.
I have a very similar story. Small company, big spending, decent business plan, very poorly implemented.
I went to talk to the guy in charge because he got in his head to buy Oracle. I was trying to convinve him to use MySQL because of cost. He thought Oracle was the only way a company could operate.
Here's what actually happened:
(1) We settled on Sybase
(2) Took forever to get plans worked out and the software in place (it would have taken a matter of hours for me to get MySQL in place...)
(3) We never moved off our "temporary development" system that was a flat text file[1]
(4) Investors realized nothing was making it to market and too much was being spent, and company went under.
[1] The flat text file -- 100's of MB -- was being read several times each time the front page of the company website was loaded. And no, nobody ever got sybase in place behind it. After all, details like that don't impress investors.
Disclaimer: I now use postgresql. At the time ('99) postgresql still had some rough edges, but now it's the best database out there for everything that I use an RDBMS for.
When someone is examining a couple alternatives, and one works right away and the other requires reading (even merely 5 pages), the reading just won't happen unless the user really cares. You eliminate a large number of users just by raising the bar a very slight amount.
However, I'm a postgres user, and I'm here to say that reading 5 pages of docs is not required to issue your first "create table" command.
In Debian, it's one command to install and it will ask you simple questions, like where to put the data. For those who like a GUI, another command will install pgadmin3. Really, how much easier can it get to install?
To connect for the first time in Debian, just become the user "postgres" and connect to "template1" and it will let you in without a password (after that you can create more databases and users).
Why are these vague accusations about usability never pointed at the distributor (Redhat, etc)? I don't complain about the installation difficulties of KDE because Debian handles that for me. If I were to write a usability report of KDE without using Debian, would it be fair to speak of the myriad dependency problems and long compile times? No, it wouldn't, 'cause the distributor handles that for most people.
And the thing is, MySQL and PostgreSQL, as far as using the database, basically both just provide the ability to execute SQL commands. The difficulty couldn't be over PostgreSQL's syntax for creating a table, I assume. So where is this usability issue appearing? If it's during the install, shouldn't the distribution do a better job of installing it for you?
It's really not fair to point the finger at postgres when the reality is that your distributor just doesn't care enough to make it easy for you, and maybe their default database is MySQL.
And even compiling from source, there aren't many packages anywhere near as complicated as PostgreSQL that compile and install so easily.
Then again, different people choose to be ignorant of different topics.
Some of these people are very well educated and make a lot of money. It would not be wise for these people to forgo high pay to learn about computers when the knowledge will save them only a small amount.
It makes much more sense for these people to pick a company that they blindly trust (e.g. Microsoft) and let them do the work.
How much time would they need to spend before they could trust OSS as much?
Following your logic, the domain registrars could remove their endorsement as well. Major ISPs could decide that it isn't worth their while to route packets to your servers, or acknowledge that you occupy the IP address that you think you have.
I suppose the difference is private industry assistance vs. government action. It's sort of unrealistic for you to expect to publish anything if you have no help from anyone in the private sector. However, you could argue that if THAT many people (read: everyone) doesn't want it published, who's your audience?
I guess your definition of censorship requires that some kind of enforcement agent prevents you from acting in an otherwise law-abiding way in order to prevent the publication.
I mostly agree with that, but it would be rather easy to convince a few major ISPs to prevent you from using them to publish (if the content is of a certain nature), which pretty much ruins any chance of online publication. I don't know whether it's "censorship" or not, but it certainly prevents someone from reading your publication even if they wanted to.
Agreed, and not only that but I think that people always underestimate the amount of money in midsize businesses.
MS is not going to win away all of Oracle's business and all of IBM's business because MS software just can't do quite as much for a very large enterprise.
However, a lot of midsize businesses will be faced with the UNIX vs windows question, because midsize businesses have requirements that are available in both UNIX and windows.
If sun is no longer around, people will still be applying the myth that linux is unsupported, and just choose windows.
So, microsoft DOES have a lot to gain.
In fact, does linux really have as much as microsoft to gain by Sun's demise? If Sun loses a customer, let's say for the sake of argument that customer is considering two choices:
(1) Move to linux
(2) Move to another big vendor (e.g. Microsoft)
Why would they choose #1 now if they haven't already? Probably they stuck with Sun because of support. That means they're looking for another vendor with a big name, e.g. microsoft.
One interesting point about the liability issue is that proprietary software developers would benefit greatly from liability laws, and consumers would probably suffer.
It's natural to assume that placing barriers or restrictions would hurt the vendors. Intuitively, anti-drug laws would hurt drug dealers, but in reality they drive the price up, and therefore the dealers' profits.
It's the same with software vendors. It would take more time to develop a quality product, and so it would eliminate most of the smaller developers. In effect, it would drive the price of software up across the board. Most consumers don't care about security or stability, they really don't. And developers would shy away from some of the most useful features for fear it could be considered a security problem. So the consumers are getting no real benefit, but paying a huge cost.
In the case of doctors, a patient's body would qualify, in computer terms, as "mission critical", meaning one problem is too many. So the patient loses if they see a quack. But, if a consumer gets bad software they reboot a few times a week, and maybe re-download some mp3s.
A better solution is if the vendors who actually do provide mission-critical software would provide guarantees. You can get a lot better guarantee from IBM or Oracle than MS, and enterprises recognize that.
I also assume that many ways of getting OSS don't even qualify as a contract because the end user provides no compensation.
Does that mean that it would be harder to hold an OSS author liable?
Of course, that still leaves Red Hat and the like out in the cold.