I feel much more threatened by super viruses created by the abuse of antibiotics.
Methinks you mean resistant bacteria, not viruses - antibiotics are used against bacterial infections, not viral ones. (You might get antibiotics to treat a cold if you've picked up a secondary bacterial infection in your sinuses in addition to the good ol' rhinovirus - they'll help clear up the sinus infection but you'll still have the cold.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
If you don't want a faster computer, you're not an imaginative person. Either that, or you can't program.
I didn't say I didn't want a faster computer...I said such people exist. (Though with what I'm playing with these days, I'm satified with hardware that some would consider outdated; my fastest is a 500Mhz K6, and I'm typing this on a P-90 I use mostly as an X terminal.)
Just like cars - some people find that a basic transportation mobile meets all their needs, and innovations that allow more speed and higher accelation just don't excite them much.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
They have bills to pay for bandwidth, power, and the salary of the people who maintain and administer the server. They expect a return on this investment.
A lot of people and companies make bad investments. Often this is because they fail to understand the market. The fact that you expect a return on an investment does not entitle you to such a return.
None of these are examples of bad business plans. If everybody plays by the rules,...
You've mistaken assumptions - bad assumptions - for rules. The NYT has no moral or legal right to tell me that I must display ads on my screen, any more than they could prevent me from running the dead-trees version through a machine that blacked out the ads it contained.
They could use technical means to try to force the ads on me; I could use more technical means to avoid them. But after a point, the advertisers are going to realize that forcing ads on those who don't want to see them is useless.
...the company succeeds and the consumer still gets what he wants for free.
No they don't. TANSTAAFL. The consumer pays for advertising-supported services via a higher cost for the advertised goods. In fact, even those who don't use the advertising-supported services pay those prices.
...and maybe pass a law in congress so they could sue to collect lost revenues due to Stallmanists blocking ads...
I suppose you want to make it illegal to hit the mute button, or change channels, or go take a piss, during TV commercials? Hey, I've got it: everyone must spend one hour in a "Clockwork Orange" apparatus, being programmed to be good little consumers. That should please your corporate masters.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
All they are able to do is detect a large gavitational fluctuation, right?
Actually all they're doing is seeing how much the stars wobble. They assume this is due to planets tugging on the stars.
But I have to wonder if there aren't other explanations for these rotational wobbles besides orbiting bodies...could they be induced by long-ago gravitational encounters with other stars passing stars? Could they be left over from stellar formation somehow?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
You fucking linux bigots are unbelievable. Does it ever occur to you that when you do something like this, it
is stealing?
No, because it's not. Duh.
When I steal something from you, you no longer have it. Copying or viewing information does not take it away from you.
BUSINESSES ARE HURT by this
activity and the next thing you know, nothing is free anymore and the NYTimes costs $10 a copy!!
If businesses can't deal with the market realities then they will lose money. In this case the market realities include the fact that a substantial number of people will decline to give up personal information (even without direct links, many of us use the "cypherpunks" (or for the NYT, "cypherpunk01") generic login on such sites), and many of us use ad filters. They don't need your self-righteous moralizing, they need an acceptance of the situatation and a business plan to profit from it.
Oh, and advertising-supported is not free.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Encapsulation is done in objects, otherwise you don't have encapsulation so much as namespaces.
Appartently you are using a strange defintion of "encapsulation" which I have never encountered before. Do we not mean by "encapsulation" the design principle of providing a module (a C++ class, a C file, any group of functions/procedures and data considered as a whole) with a set of interfaces which serve to hide implementation details? You seem to be implying that encapsulation only exists in OOP languages; I vigorously disagree.
"Encapsulation is the process of compartmentalizing the elements of an abstraction that constitute its structure and behavior; encapsulation serves to separate the contractual interface of an abstraction and its implementation." -- Booch
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Think about it a minute. What does a C++ compiler do? It translates the (high-level) C++ code to (low-level) assembly code.
Actually, it's worth noting that the original C++ implementation was a precompiler - it translated C++ to C. (I believe that this would be very difficult or impossible to do with today's C++.)
Can you do object-oriented stuff in C? Yes. It's often hideous, though. Motif was one such attempt. The horror...the horror....
The key attributes to a well-structured program (OO or not) are encapsulation and abstraction.
Can you get these in C? Yes! File scoping is the most underappreciated feature of C; it's often negelected because of poor revision control systems that end up encouraging a one function, one file paradigm. When you use it properly, though, you can put code and data members in a package with well-defined interfaces and the option of private data members. It rocks.
Can you screw things up by inappropriate use of OO strategies? Sure. Object-obfuscated designs with spaghetti inheritance are common, and are usually caused by becoming infatuated with inheritance and polymorphism at the expense of encapsulation and abstraction.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
If nothing else, think of games: Quake and Unreal Tournament do huge amounts of
number-crunching.
I know it's hard to understand, but believe it or not, not everyone loves such games. There are people now - not many, but some - who find a P90 adequate for word processing and net access and have no strong desire for anything more powerful.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Why is it that whenever anything interesting is posted on Slashdot, people CANNOT RESIST throwing in the obligatory inane "Just wait until it runs Linux" / "Hope someone's porting Quake" / "Imagine that as your firewall" / "blah blah blah Descent" / "blah blah blah Descent" comments?
It's a running gag. Just like with various friends and family I cannot resist throwing in references to The Great Race ("Push the button, Max!"), Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail ("So, logically, if she weighs the same as a duck..."), The Princess Bride ("Inconceivable!"), Pinky and the Brain (Pinky singing "Brainstem! Brainstem!"),
Bill Murray's Star Wars lounge singer (don't ask)...each reference carrying not only its literal meaning but the accumulated context of previous uses.
It's just one of those bizzare aspects of human behavior that certain phrases are often repeated...some sort of culture binding mechanism, I suppose.
So, can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these? B-)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Now if ESR had editorial control of slashdot, THEN you'd see some more violent stuff. He's quite into guns...
I know ESR only by reputation, but the sterotype that someone who has an interest in guns, or other methods of physical force, is a violent person doesn't hold.
My graduate school advisor was a firearms enthusiast, a champion rifle competitor, and the moderator of rec.guns. He was also one of the most popular CS professors on campus,
known for his good humor.
Or to consider my own self...I am a gun owner and a karate nidan (second degree black belt). I've had at least some training in firearms, empty handed combat, knifes, sticks, firearms, and swords. If it can kill, injure, or maim, I probably know something about it. Yet despite my firey and outspoken political views, I am in my day-to-day life a very non-violent person; the only times I've even come close to using any of this training are a few incidents where I stepped in to stop violence being directed against others.
There are two motivations for a serious study of violence: to use it, or to stop it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
What he's missing is that in the race to earn profits, corporations have to please people. Only by pleasing people can corporations earn money.
Only in the ideal case where buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace with equal power, full knowledge, and no costs externalized.
Which is not to say that more government action is necessarily the answer to corporate misdeeds.
We have to remember that corporations are creations of governments!
Rather than muzzling the monsters it creates, the state simply should stop creating monsters. Revoke corporate charters of misbehaving companies (that's not a new power for the state, it's an existing one that's never used). Require corporate shares to be owned by people, not other corporations. Stop treating corporations as natural persons (the Constitution defines U.S. citizens quite clearly, and corporations don't fit). These aren't increases in government regulation, they're actually decreases in the state power to create profit-obsessed artificial entities.
(Pardon me for the U.S. bias in the above; I believe the same ideas apply in other nations, but I'm most familiar with the laws here.)
But what this twit wants isn't to stop corporate abuses. If that were the goal, he'd want more freedom of discussion, making sure that net publishing remains available to the average American, not just to AOL/Time Warner and Microsoft. Like every other pro-censorship fuckhead, he's wants his opinions of what's good information or bad information to affect the rest of us, "for our own good".
"Information is not knowledge." Sure, Zappa told us that a long time ago. But I sure as hell don't need idiots like this "helping" me by forcibly filtering my data stream.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Those would be the same organizations who employ millions of people,
fund the machinery of state through corporate/employment/windfall taxes, and that your pension fund is invested in?
Large corporations pay little, if any tax. For example, Cisco and Microsoft pay no federal income taxes. Cities and states fall all over themselves to give tax breaks to megacorps in the name of attracting jobs - instead of more sensibly and justly helping smaller locally-owned businesses to grow.
(And I try to make my own investing socially responsible, as best I can.)
And your point does not justify the way megacorps buy legislators like baseball cards.
It's not just about globalization - the removal of environmental, health, and justice considerations from international trade policy is a symptom of too much corporate power, not a cause.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Re:Pharm companies giving Visor/Palm to MDs
on
Digital Doctoring
·
· Score: 2
Seems they figure its a good way to get more branded info infront of the MD and get on their good side - so they write perscriptions for the Real Stuff not some cheap Generic Equiv.
My doctor just got a Visor (I think); it wasn't a pharm. company comp, she bought it herself. She's like a kid with a new toy; got a bunch of medical references on it, including the PDR. (That's the Physicians Desk Reference, a honking big book that lists every drug on the market, its actions and contraindications. Worth consulting whenever you
are prescribed a new medication.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Finally, the WTO is there to enforce agreements, once struck (but don't forget it was YOUR politicians that first have to agree).
That being the root of the problem - they ain't our politicans. They're the megacorp's politicans, bought and paid for. Which is why the agreements struck are generally good for megacorps and bad for people.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Re:We need to be more like the Europeans
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 2
Well, sure, because they stopped shooting people in the head:) Seriously, if you consistently maintain the death penalty for a crime, then of course the rate of occurrence of that crime will decrease and stay fairly low.
Incorrect. States with capital punishment for murder do not have a lower incidence of murder.
In the drug trade, dealers already accept the possibility of a violent death. Users accept the possibility of death by overdose or adulteration. The possibility of the death penalty doesn't mean much in that context.
That's not the current policy in China, I imagine; it was just employed when the
Communists first got into power.
As I said eariler in this thread, the death penalty has been used for drug crimes - for tobacco posession in 17th century Russian and the Ottoman Empire, for opium sales in 18th century China, for any drug sales in present day China. It still exists in the U.S. today under the Narcotics Control Act for sale of heroin to minors (though I don't think it's ever been imposed). Yet drug abuse continues.
We can't even keep drugs out of prisons.
Even with totalitarian measures, prohibition doesn't work.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Re:We need to be more like the Europeans
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 2
When the communists came to power they took all the drug addicts, pushers, users etc etc, lined them up in a square and shot them in the back of the head. Drug use dropped overnight.
Long term, it still doesn't work. Drug use still exists in China.
A quick Google search for "drug use in China" shows that opium is still grown there; HIV transmission via shared needles is still a problem; and China's State Council said only months ago that "the situation is grim for the anti-drug struggle."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Wake up to what? What happens on your street is not my concern.... As for murders and such on the street, it is your responsibility to clean it up on your street.
Ah, the short-sighted ideas of the self-involved. (Are you, by chance, an Objectivist? And/or a member of the Libertarian Party?)
What you don't realize is that what happens on my street today, can happen on your street next week. The people commiting murders and such on my street could very well move into your neighborhood, or at least the factors that drove them to murder could come to apply to people in your neighborhood.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Re:We need to be more like the Europeans
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 2
But when it comes to super addictive stuff like cocain and nicotine, I say ban it and enforce it, because this indulgent culture can't stay away from it.
Cocaine is banned. The ban is enforced. The ban does not work.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Re:Why is the war still raging?
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 2
What is the motive? Whom does it benefit?
Who benefits?
The prison-industrial complex. Prison building and prison labor are big businesses.
Law enforcement agencies. With the magic of civil forfeiture, they get to steal all sorts of stuff from suspects, without inconcenient trials.
Manufacturers of legal recreational drugs. Several beer and cigarette companies contribute to the "Partnership for a Drug-Free America".
Manufacturers of certain pharmecuticals. Legal cannabis could replace a lot of theraputic drugs, and it hard to make a high profit off of something people can grow in their backyard.
Manufacturers of synthetic fibers, who are still fighting against the growing hemp industry.
Self-righteous politicians looking for scapegoats.
Drug dealers.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
In reality, when all citizens have equal access to violent force, the group with the largest number of subscribers takes measures to insure that other groups cannot have the same access to violent force.
Right. Actions like firearms prohibitions. (Some of the first modern American anti-gun laws were passed by conservatives who wanted to keep guns out of the hands of groups like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
Ironically, your rights are better preserved when the capacity for violent force is in the hands of a higher, democratically-authorized authority. Your neighbors will not have the consideration of giving you a trial.
Tell that to the Jews, homosexuals, and other "undesirables" killed by democratically-authorized Nazis. Or we could check with the black Americans beaten by democratically-authorized police officers before (and during, and after) the civil rights movement. Or the American Indians about the actions of the democratically-authorized army, or more recently FBI.
Democracy is no guarantee of liberty for the minority.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
after all how many people have 26k to drop for a few hours joy?
People pay in excess of 26k$ for cars. I'd rather drive a rusty old Toyota for 5k$ and spend 26k$ on a space flight (even three hours) than pay 31k$ for a BMW or whatever. I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Re:Shame about the risk...
on
Space Tourism
·
· Score: 1
Firstly I think there is a good chance liquid fuels-which are the major danger with space vehicles-will not be used for taking people into space.
Do you mean solid fuels?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
You might also take a look at ODE, the OSF Development Environment. Like CVS, it's layered on top of RCS. I beleive it has more support for branching than CVS.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Slashdot Mirror
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
I didn't say I didn't want a faster computer...I said such people exist. (Though with what I'm playing with these days, I'm satified with hardware that some would consider outdated; my fastest is a 500Mhz K6, and I'm typing this on a P-90 I use mostly as an X terminal.)
Just like cars - some people find that a basic transportation mobile meets all their needs, and innovations that allow more speed and higher accelation just don't excite them much.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
A lot of people and companies make bad investments. Often this is because they fail to understand the market. The fact that you expect a return on an investment does not entitle you to such a return.
You've mistaken assumptions - bad assumptions - for rules. The NYT has no moral or legal right to tell me that I must display ads on my screen, any more than they could prevent me from running the dead-trees version through a machine that blacked out the ads it contained.
They could use technical means to try to force the ads on me; I could use more technical means to avoid them. But after a point, the advertisers are going to realize that forcing ads on those who don't want to see them is useless.
No they don't. TANSTAAFL. The consumer pays for advertising-supported services via a higher cost for the advertised goods. In fact, even those who don't use the advertising-supported services pay those prices.
I suppose you want to make it illegal to hit the mute button, or change channels, or go take a piss, during TV commercials? Hey, I've got it: everyone must spend one hour in a "Clockwork Orange" apparatus, being programmed to be good little consumers. That should please your corporate masters.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Actually all they're doing is seeing how much the stars wobble. They assume this is due to planets tugging on the stars.
But I have to wonder if there aren't other explanations for these rotational wobbles besides orbiting bodies...could they be induced by long-ago gravitational encounters with other stars passing stars? Could they be left over from stellar formation somehow?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
No, because it's not. Duh.
When I steal something from you, you no longer have it. Copying or viewing information does not take it away from you.
If businesses can't deal with the market realities then they will lose money. In this case the market realities include the fact that a substantial number of people will decline to give up personal information (even without direct links, many of us use the "cypherpunks" (or for the NYT, "cypherpunk01") generic login on such sites), and many of us use ad filters. They don't need your self-righteous moralizing, they need an acceptance of the situatation and a business plan to profit from it.
Oh, and advertising-supported is not free.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Appartently you are using a strange defintion of "encapsulation" which I have never encountered before. Do we not mean by "encapsulation" the design principle of providing a module (a C++ class, a C file, any group of functions/procedures and data considered as a whole) with a set of interfaces which serve to hide implementation details? You seem to be implying that encapsulation only exists in OOP languages; I vigorously disagree.
"Encapsulation is the process of compartmentalizing the elements of an abstraction that constitute its structure and behavior; encapsulation serves to separate the contractual interface of an abstraction and its implementation." -- Booch
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Actually, it's worth noting that the original C++ implementation was a precompiler - it translated C++ to C. (I believe that this would be very difficult or impossible to do with today's C++.)
Can you do object-oriented stuff in C? Yes. It's often hideous, though. Motif was one such attempt. The horror...the horror....
The key attributes to a well-structured program (OO or not) are encapsulation and abstraction.
Can you get these in C? Yes! File scoping is the most underappreciated feature of C; it's often negelected because of poor revision control systems that end up encouraging a one function, one file paradigm. When you use it properly, though, you can put code and data members in a package with well-defined interfaces and the option of private data members. It rocks.
Can you screw things up by inappropriate use of OO strategies? Sure. Object-obfuscated designs with spaghetti inheritance are common, and are usually caused by becoming infatuated with inheritance and polymorphism at the expense of encapsulation and abstraction.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
It's a running gag. Just like with various friends and family I cannot resist throwing in references to The Great Race ("Push the button, Max!"), Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail ("So, logically, if she weighs the same as a duck..."), The Princess Bride ("Inconceivable!"), Pinky and the Brain (Pinky singing "Brainstem! Brainstem!"), Bill Murray's Star Wars lounge singer (don't ask)...each reference carrying not only its literal meaning but the accumulated context of previous uses.
It's just one of those bizzare aspects of human behavior that certain phrases are often repeated...some sort of culture binding mechanism, I suppose.
So, can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these? B-)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
I know ESR only by reputation, but the sterotype that someone who has an interest in guns, or other methods of physical force, is a violent person doesn't hold.
My graduate school advisor was a firearms enthusiast, a champion rifle competitor, and the moderator of rec.guns. He was also one of the most popular CS professors on campus, known for his good humor.
Or to consider my own self...I am a gun owner and a karate nidan (second degree black belt). I've had at least some training in firearms, empty handed combat, knifes, sticks, firearms, and swords. If it can kill, injure, or maim, I probably know something about it. Yet despite my firey and outspoken political views, I am in my day-to-day life a very non-violent person; the only times I've even come close to using any of this training are a few incidents where I stepped in to stop violence being directed against others.
There are two motivations for a serious study of violence: to use it, or to stop it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Only in the ideal case where buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace with equal power, full knowledge, and no costs externalized.
Which is not to say that more government action is necessarily the answer to corporate misdeeds. We have to remember that corporations are creations of governments!
Rather than muzzling the monsters it creates, the state simply should stop creating monsters. Revoke corporate charters of misbehaving companies (that's not a new power for the state, it's an existing one that's never used). Require corporate shares to be owned by people, not other corporations. Stop treating corporations as natural persons (the Constitution defines U.S. citizens quite clearly, and corporations don't fit). These aren't increases in government regulation, they're actually decreases in the state power to create profit-obsessed artificial entities.
(Pardon me for the U.S. bias in the above; I believe the same ideas apply in other nations, but I'm most familiar with the laws here.)
But what this twit wants isn't to stop corporate abuses. If that were the goal, he'd want more freedom of discussion, making sure that net publishing remains available to the average American, not just to AOL/Time Warner and Microsoft. Like every other pro-censorship fuckhead, he's wants his opinions of what's good information or bad information to affect the rest of us, "for our own good".
"Information is not knowledge." Sure, Zappa told us that a long time ago. But I sure as hell don't need idiots like this "helping" me by forcibly filtering my data stream.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Large corporations pay little, if any tax. For example, Cisco and Microsoft pay no federal income taxes. Cities and states fall all over themselves to give tax breaks to megacorps in the name of attracting jobs - instead of more sensibly and justly helping smaller locally-owned businesses to grow.
(And I try to make my own investing socially responsible, as best I can.)
And your point does not justify the way megacorps buy legislators like baseball cards.
It's not just about globalization - the removal of environmental, health, and justice considerations from international trade policy is a symptom of too much corporate power, not a cause.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Oh, yes. It's scary the way drug companies court doctors and hospitals. (Even veternarians, too, to a lesser extent.) For example, for one new allergy drug the makers sponsored a seminar: "the invitation included round-trip airfare to California, accommodations at a luxury hotel, and a participation fee of $1,000..."
My doctor just got a Visor (I think); it wasn't a pharm. company comp, she bought it herself. She's like a kid with a new toy; got a bunch of medical references on it, including the PDR. (That's the Physicians Desk Reference, a honking big book that lists every drug on the market, its actions and contraindications. Worth consulting whenever you are prescribed a new medication.)Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Incorrect. States with capital punishment for murder do not have a lower incidence of murder.
In the drug trade, dealers already accept the possibility of a violent death. Users accept the possibility of death by overdose or adulteration. The possibility of the death penalty doesn't mean much in that context.
As I said eariler in this thread, the death penalty has been used for drug crimes - for tobacco posession in 17th century Russian and the Ottoman Empire, for opium sales in 18th century China, for any drug sales in present day China. It still exists in the U.S. today under the Narcotics Control Act for sale of heroin to minors (though I don't think it's ever been imposed). Yet drug abuse continues.
We can't even keep drugs out of prisons.
Even with totalitarian measures, prohibition doesn't work.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Long term, it still doesn't work. Drug use still exists in China.
A quick Google search for "drug use in China" shows that opium is still grown there; HIV transmission via shared needles is still a problem; and China's State Council said only months ago that "the situation is grim for the anti-drug struggle."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Ah, the short-sighted ideas of the self-involved. (Are you, by chance, an Objectivist? And/or a member of the Libertarian Party?)
What you don't realize is that what happens on my street today, can happen on your street next week. The people commiting murders and such on my street could very well move into your neighborhood, or at least the factors that drove them to murder could come to apply to people in your neighborhood.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Cigarettes have been banned before. In 17th century Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, tobacco possession was punishable by death. In the U.S. in 1921, cigarettes were illegal in fourteen states.
PROHIBITION DOES NOT WORK.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Right. Actions like firearms prohibitions. (Some of the first modern American anti-gun laws were passed by conservatives who wanted to keep guns out of the hands of groups like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
Tell that to the Jews, homosexuals, and other "undesirables" killed by democratically-authorized Nazis. Or we could check with the black Americans beaten by democratically-authorized police officers before (and during, and after) the civil rights movement. Or the American Indians about the actions of the democratically-authorized army, or more recently FBI.
Democracy is no guarantee of liberty for the minority.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
You might also take a look at ODE, the OSF Development Environment. Like CVS, it's layered on top of RCS. I beleive it has more support for branching than CVS.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/