Ant + emerge/apt-get type thing + set of premade scripts that will do everything you ever needed provided you agree to organize your project directories exactly as Maven demands.
I think someone else said it best: huge pain in the ass.
What would be really funny is if some alien craft landed, thus creating the very first crop circle, and then, humans started making their own crop circles everywhere, more and more elaborate.
Imagine if it were humans, landing on another planet, only to find the natives imitating our "footprints" everywhere. Do you think we'd take that as a sign of intelligence?
What is LOTR about?
It's a fairly straightforward plot about defeating evil. That said, that's NOT the important element of this story that makes it so popular, IMHO. The scale is immense, however, both in time and space, and that IS a big element, I think. I think you ought to go read the books (preferably before seeing the movie) and find out for yourself what the story is about.
Why is LOTR popular?
1. Detail, detail, detail. That scale I mentioned above is present here to. The depth of detail in these books is amazing. You get an entire world, it's history, and nearly all the important people of that world make an appearance at one point or another. You get the impression after reading it that you haven't missed anything from that world.
2. The plot is essentially, small, defenseless person saves world - becomes big hero! So, it's got the necessary element to appeal to pre-teens who have no voice in our world.
3. Wise old man appreciates young would-be hero. Again, something most pre-teens yearn for that they don't have.
4. Nothing is out of place - in other words, the world exists and is consistent with itself, and is wholly separate from reality. No one swears - everyone talks funny like they're supposed to. No one ever steps out of character. The warriors never take their armor off, etc. You are never, ever, rudely reminded of the real world, and there is never any attempt to make a real world "point". Pure fantasy.
So, points 2-4 pull you in, and point 1 makes you a fan for life. The detail and thoroughness really is quite extraordinary.
Rather than a programmer's union, I'd prefer contract houses run by programmers for programmers, with ideals such as this. A contract house that actually qualified its employees might be influential enough to push the sorts of contract agreements programmers would like to see.
Exactly! You don't stop with post-modernism. But it's a tool you shouldn't discard simply because you don't like it. It is indeed like dynamite - and where would we be without dynamite? You have to destroy sometimes to make progress. Otherwise you'd forever be stuck with old, failing buildings, with no room for new shiny ones.
I'm 10 years from my degree in philosophy, and, frankly, the reason I ditched it after college for computers is because I can't stand over-complexification (hehe!) when simplicity will do.
So, the simplest definition is that PostModernism is the collection of philosophical works that critique the modernist philosophies (of Kant, Descartes, Hegel, Locke, etc). It points out logical fallacies used to support the modern philosophies. Points out cultural biases that crept in as self-evident assumptions. Assumptions that are introduced to achieve a certain desired result, but which are often unnecessary, and complicate the picture.
To me, it's what comes after post-modernism that's really interesting. Modernist philosophies now seem so quaint, so obviously wrong-headed and naive. You read Locke and he writes point blank about various things that just have to be true because he can't imagine it any other way. It's like watching a 50's movie - there's no entertainment value, but it's a great lesson in history.
But after postmodernism, we get some really interesting responses - either a modernist attempt to answer the critiques of post-modernism (and by answer I mean they accept the validity of the critiques and try to construct a philosophy that doesn't make the same mistakes), or a pragmatic philosophy that wants to leave metaphysics behind altogether and concentrate on how best to get with living.
Re:postmodernism rendered a disservice to me...
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Lot's of philosophy is incoherent and stupidly overwritten. I think when you spend 10 years of your life earning a PhD, you don't want others thinking what you learned was actually simple:-)
I don't think questioning the nature of reality corrupts anyone's thinking. I think I'd suggest that anyone for whom that appears to be true, perhaps their thinking talents weren't too great to begin with. Also, postmodernism doesn't mean you can reasonably go thinking whatever you want. Postmodernism is a rigorous, logical critique of modernist philosophy (ie, the philosophies of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Locke, etc). If you choose to take those critiques as meaning you can think anything and be right, that's your choice, but it really has nothing to do with postmodernism. I'd prefer you blame the people rather than the philosophy.
Circular reasoning is just one possible logical fallacy, though perhaps the most common. Introducing an assumption is tricky business, because you have to be real careful that you don't work your arguments around to the point where you are proving those assumptions (but, only after long ago initially assuming them to be true). The Cartesian guarantee may not be circular, but it may not have anything to do with reality, either. The "I think, therefore I am" assumes causality that it cannot prove. There are many assumptions snuck in throughout Descartes philosophy that need questioning.
If you assume a God, or a Platonic realm, then you run into other problems, like dualism, which really do lead down a path that ends in nihilism and the impossibility of knowing anything outside yourself. Those strategies don't give real solutions to the problem (the problem being: how do we know anything?).
PostModernism isn't really doing much more than pointing out that, theoretically, it's impossible to be 100% sure, and, more importantly, it's points out a myriad of ways in which we have screwed up and continue to screw up in our thinking.
My point was that shutting the door on postmodernism simply because you don't like the message is not a rational attitude. Learning the message and then moving on with things has value. At some point, you learn that people sometimes lie. But you learn that and go on, and you choose when to believe and when to distrust, hopefully with a little more awareness than before.
I've never come across a convincing argument that this basic approach is a reasonable one to take
What makes something reasonable or not is an interesting question. You seem to be taking the viewpoint of that which successfully gets you through the day is reasonable. (I get this from your critique of existentialism that seems to suggest that you have at least that one litmus test for any philosophy).
So how does post-modernism help us through the day? It's essentially a defensive measure against the dangers of absolutism. If you believe science describes the real world perfectly, and if you believe that the scientific method is an infallible method that can be used to understand everything, then science isn't much different from any other religion for you - with all the inherent problems. If you understand the post-modern critiques of science, you begin to understand the ways in which subjectivism and context creep into the theories of science. The more you understand these possibilities, the less likely you'll be fooled when they occur, and the more likely you'll catch new information when it comes around in different guises.
Post-modernism is not the final point of philosophy, in any case. After understand it, you can choose to return to a modernistic philosophy (with eyes opened a bit wider), or to a pragmatic philosophy (such as described by Richard Rorty).
If you believe in logic, then I'd suggest you have to accept post-modernist teachings, because they depend on logic. Modernist teachings depend on logical fallacies, like circular reasoning.
You discount postmodernism without acknowledging its value. You say, don't assume there is no objective reality, but then neglect to point out that the statement "there is an objective reality" is an assumption, and should be treated as such. It's not that post-modernism wants to convince you to assume there is no objective reality, but it wants you to recognize where your assumptions lie, and to be careful with them.
You also say that our approximate knowledge of objective reality can be perfected via the scientific method, but, since you have discounted all of postmodernism, you fail to account for all the assumptions that go into science, and all aspects of it that make it susceptible to error and distortion.
To accept the validity of postmodernism does not mean you have to give up on everything - it's just another tool in your possession. It's like the saying, "don't believe everything you read". Doesn't mean everything you read is lies, but just, be careful.
Also, which one of your devices (aside from the playstation) would be worth the plastic it was made out of without a PC it could dock/communicate/exchange-data with?
Nah, all we really want is a standalone, networked hard drive that any of our separate devices can connect to/disconnect from while running.
You have a point, but you've gone way off the deep end with it. Your point is simply, someone who has well-developed memorization skills has a huge advantage, and we shouldn't neglect developing memorization abilities in kids.
That said, it's still true that it's more important to learn how to think, then it is to memorize some facts.
The solution? Engage kids in activities that develop their brain, as opposed to their mind. Treat the brain as an organ, much like muscle, that grows stronger from exercise. Memorization games, visualization games (such as chess), language games, etc. Work the mind like a muscle, and it will develop all the skills it needs. Give it a rich environment, and it will learn lots of knowledge, and retain it, too.
I see no reason to suggest that good unit-testing practices requires any of the other methodologies. And good unit-testing can hardly be considered a bad thing to do.
I could see how minimalist design without pair-programming and without constant code review might be bad, because these are all essentially checks against errors being made by one programmer. If we are doing pair programming, then maybe code reviews aren't necessary. But, if you decide to do "minimalist/no design", but not pair programming, I can see how that would be trouble. The important thing is to recognize what problem each aspect is meant to solve, and make sure you have a process in place meant to deal with that problem.
We do create branches for releases and their bug fixes. That's it though. So, the bug fixes that go into 1.1 will get merged back into the main branch. CVS has no problem doing merges, and it's quite simple to use.
Creating a separate branch for each develoment team, though, strikes me as nightmarish (though, it's not as bad as the clearcase way of separate branches for each *developer*). If you have 100 developers working on the project, I would hope the project has enough sub-packages to warrant it. What does the branching get you, anyway?
If you create 5 branches to let those 100 developers work concurrently in them, then how do you know their code will merge well? How do you know the merge won't result in the introduction of bugs (and bugs caused by such large merges are very hard to find)? If your answer is that the development teams must communicate effectively, then I would say, if they were communicating effectively, then branching wasn't necessary in the first place.
Rational products cost a lot. What you get is minimal. CVS does 90% of what ClearCase does, it doesn't require full-time staff to support, it doesn't get fucked-up constantly by the full-time support staff (because it doesn't have any), and you're new developers don't need a two week training course on how to use it. Oh, and it's free. For the amount that ClearCase costs money-wise, you could hire another developer for a year. For the amount that ClearCase costs time-wise, gads - you can do a lot.
Some have talked about wonderful "visual" merges. Frankly, if you're using branches that much and doing that much merging, you are over doing it. Merging branches is time-consuming and fraught with potential gotchas. I suggest finding a new development process that will avoid those problems (like XP). Anyway, you can visually access branches on CVS if you use a free client like WinCVS. It's great. Makes dealing with a CVS repo just like dealing with your file system.
Using ClearCase will likely lead you down a bad path of more complicated development processes. And that is a bad thing. Keep it simple.
The rest of Rational's toolset isn't much better. Our requirements people use Requisite Pro to store requirements. The development group is always asking them to see the requirements (duh!), but we don't have requisite pro, so we never seem to get them. They always say they can print out versions that we could see, but what they do print out or send us doesn't display right in Word or whatever, and usually they just can't be bothered to do the work necessary to output a format we can read. If they would just use a simple program, things would be so much easier...
They say developers are nuts for stupid toys - at least our stupid toys don't cost everyone time and money!
Money that's sent to a project should be allocated by the maintainer of the project. ie Linus should spread the money around to those who did work. Himself included.....
As far as sending it to charity - no way. This is payment for work. Ideally, the best developers shouldn't have to have jobs beyond hacking the kernel (if that's their wish).
The difference between a database and an XML-centralized-parser system is pretty small. It feels like what you're arguing for is a registry. Personally, I think a registry is an excellent thing, Linus' opinions on the matter otherwise. But, I recognize the fear that as we move away from simple ASCII, the files will become too complex to edit by hand, and people will be at the mercy of the tool interfaces. And some people just don't like that. You're job is to convince them this is not something to fear.
It depends on how you design your p2p architecture. If you design it like Gnutella, with communication done via multicast, then yes, your bandwidth usage can go up O(N^2). If, however, you're a bit smarter, and do things like, say, Freenet, then you avoid a lot of that problem. If you want more information about how Freenet works, then go there.
Essentially, the problem comes down to how do you find each other, and how do you find stuff. Finding each other is generally done with centralized services (eg DNS). But, there are other options, including limited multicast, expanding spheres of knowledge (ie you learn about 1 other node, and it tells you the nodes it knows, and they tell you the nodes they know, and so on - this is similar to Freenet). But, once you've found a node to talk to, bandwidth is the same as a non P2P network.
Finding stuff is a different matter, and I suspect part of the solution here is to learn to accept imperfection by design. No, you can't search everything because that would involve going to every node and querying it, which would be impractical. However, you can spider out through the nearest nodes, and they should be able to point your query in the most promising directions, and you could configure your search to be as far-reaching (and slow) or as near-sighted (and quick) as you like.
Another point to make is that there is the potential for our bandwidth capabilities to go through the roof in the relatively near future. With fiber, optical switching technology, we could easily see bandwidth essentially being removed as a bottleneck - perhaps in the next 5 -10 years.
When did we just give up on things as a society? The Greens are wrong because they won't compromise and go mainstream? Is compromising and going mainstream really the point? Isn't there room for a minority view to have some effect? It would probably have an excellent moderating effect if, say 10% of the representatives in government were Greens (I'm guessing that's about the percentage of the population that would support the Green platform if we didn't have such a defeatist attitude). Sure, maybe they can't get elected president because their views are extreme, but we still need to have those extreme views around.
Harry Browne talks about selling all public property (except military bases). The idea is that property held privately is better cared for. Beyond the argument as to whether that's true, I have another question:
How exactly will you sell this land? Take a big national park, for instance - Yellowstone. Are you going to sell it as is, in one big chunk, or will it be sold in parts? The reason this is important, in my mind is that how you sell it determines who could possibly buy it, and what use it will be put to. If sold as a whole, only a very large corporation could afford it, so you're not really selling it to anyone out there - you're locking out all individuals (except maybe a handful), and essentially only allowing corporations to buy it. In which case it will surely be used to make money.
If you sell it in small chunks, you are allowing a larger percent of the population a chance to buy, but you increase the odds that the park will be destroyed as the individual owners "do there own thing".
A related question is, who controls the roads? Right now, I leave my house, and I travel on public lands to get virtually anywhere I want to go. I cannot be barred from going most anywhere (even most businesses can't really bar me from their premises without reason). However, if that all becomes private property, is it possible that I could be barred from leaving my tiny yard? What's the libertarian solution to these concerns?
Here's a thought - think longer term. So Bush may beat Gore. If no one votes for Nader, we'll have this same awful choice 4 years from now. At which point, if no one votes alternatively, it'll repeat over and over. Think longer term. Nader won't win, but a successful campaign from Nader will probably mean more in the long run than whether Bush or Gore wins.
You are a fool who has incorrectly analyzed your choices.
Here are your errors:
1. Thinking there's a difference between Gore and Bush - there isn't
2. Thinking your vote affects anything, regardless of who you voted for - it doesn't. The chance that your one vote prevents Bush from gaining office is less than your chance of winning the lottery.
3. Thinking a vote for a third party candidate who can't win doesn't get noticed - Perot's 20% scared the shit out of politicians. Do you think we'd have a budget surplus 8 years later without him?
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Wow, after reading that, I'm thinking there has probably never been a point made to you that didn't go over your head.
I'm that includes this one too.
I think someone else said it best: huge pain in the ass.
Imagine if it were humans, landing on another planet, only to find the natives imitating our "footprints" everywhere. Do you think we'd take that as a sign of intelligence?
What if, before you're allowed to work for a company, they make you take a drug test, and then make you take drugs?
What is LOTR about?
It's a fairly straightforward plot about defeating evil. That said, that's NOT the important element of this story that makes it so popular, IMHO. The scale is immense, however, both in time and space, and that IS a big element, I think. I think you ought to go read the books (preferably before seeing the movie) and find out for yourself what the story is about.
Why is LOTR popular?
1. Detail, detail, detail. That scale I mentioned above is present here to. The depth of detail in these books is amazing. You get an entire world, it's history, and nearly all the important people of that world make an appearance at one point or another. You get the impression after reading it that you haven't missed anything from that world.
2. The plot is essentially, small, defenseless person saves world - becomes big hero! So, it's got the necessary element to appeal to pre-teens who have no voice in our world.
3. Wise old man appreciates young would-be hero. Again, something most pre-teens yearn for that they don't have.
4. Nothing is out of place - in other words, the world exists and is consistent with itself, and is wholly separate from reality. No one swears - everyone talks funny like they're supposed to. No one ever steps out of character. The warriors never take their armor off, etc. You are never, ever, rudely reminded of the real world, and there is never any attempt to make a real world "point". Pure fantasy.
So, points 2-4 pull you in, and point 1 makes you a fan for life. The detail and thoroughness really is quite extraordinary.
Rather than a programmer's union, I'd prefer contract houses run by programmers for programmers, with ideals such as this. A contract house that actually qualified its employees might be influential enough to push the sorts of contract agreements programmers would like to see.
Exactly! You don't stop with post-modernism. But it's a tool you shouldn't discard simply because you don't like it. It is indeed like dynamite - and where would we be without dynamite? You have to destroy sometimes to make progress. Otherwise you'd forever be stuck with old, failing buildings, with no room for new shiny ones.
So, the simplest definition is that PostModernism is the collection of philosophical works that critique the modernist philosophies (of Kant, Descartes, Hegel, Locke, etc). It points out logical fallacies used to support the modern philosophies. Points out cultural biases that crept in as self-evident assumptions. Assumptions that are introduced to achieve a certain desired result, but which are often unnecessary, and complicate the picture.
To me, it's what comes after post-modernism that's really interesting. Modernist philosophies now seem so quaint, so obviously wrong-headed and naive. You read Locke and he writes point blank about various things that just have to be true because he can't imagine it any other way. It's like watching a 50's movie - there's no entertainment value, but it's a great lesson in history.
But after postmodernism, we get some really interesting responses - either a modernist attempt to answer the critiques of post-modernism (and by answer I mean they accept the validity of the critiques and try to construct a philosophy that doesn't make the same mistakes), or a pragmatic philosophy that wants to leave metaphysics behind altogether and concentrate on how best to get with living.
Lot's of philosophy is incoherent and stupidly overwritten. I think when you spend 10 years of your life earning a PhD, you don't want others thinking what you learned was actually simple :-)
I don't think questioning the nature of reality corrupts anyone's thinking. I think I'd suggest that anyone for whom that appears to be true, perhaps their thinking talents weren't too great to begin with. Also, postmodernism doesn't mean you can reasonably go thinking whatever you want. Postmodernism is a rigorous, logical critique of modernist philosophy (ie, the philosophies of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Locke, etc). If you choose to take those critiques as meaning you can think anything and be right, that's your choice, but it really has nothing to do with postmodernism. I'd prefer you blame the people rather than the philosophy.
If you assume a God, or a Platonic realm, then you run into other problems, like dualism, which really do lead down a path that ends in nihilism and the impossibility of knowing anything outside yourself. Those strategies don't give real solutions to the problem (the problem being: how do we know anything?).
PostModernism isn't really doing much more than pointing out that, theoretically, it's impossible to be 100% sure, and, more importantly, it's points out a myriad of ways in which we have screwed up and continue to screw up in our thinking.
My point was that shutting the door on postmodernism simply because you don't like the message is not a rational attitude. Learning the message and then moving on with things has value. At some point, you learn that people sometimes lie. But you learn that and go on, and you choose when to believe and when to distrust, hopefully with a little more awareness than before.
I've never come across a convincing argument that this basic approach is a reasonable one to take
What makes something reasonable or not is an interesting question. You seem to be taking the viewpoint of that which successfully gets you through the day is reasonable. (I get this from your critique of existentialism that seems to suggest that you have at least that one litmus test for any philosophy).
So how does post-modernism help us through the day? It's essentially a defensive measure against the dangers of absolutism. If you believe science describes the real world perfectly, and if you believe that the scientific method is an infallible method that can be used to understand everything, then science isn't much different from any other religion for you - with all the inherent problems. If you understand the post-modern critiques of science, you begin to understand the ways in which subjectivism and context creep into the theories of science. The more you understand these possibilities, the less likely you'll be fooled when they occur, and the more likely you'll catch new information when it comes around in different guises.
Post-modernism is not the final point of philosophy, in any case. After understand it, you can choose to return to a modernistic philosophy (with eyes opened a bit wider), or to a pragmatic philosophy (such as described by Richard Rorty).
If you believe in logic, then I'd suggest you have to accept post-modernist teachings, because they depend on logic. Modernist teachings depend on logical fallacies, like circular reasoning.
You also say that our approximate knowledge of objective reality can be perfected via the scientific method, but, since you have discounted all of postmodernism, you fail to account for all the assumptions that go into science, and all aspects of it that make it susceptible to error and distortion.
To accept the validity of postmodernism does not mean you have to give up on everything - it's just another tool in your possession. It's like the saying, "don't believe everything you read". Doesn't mean everything you read is lies, but just, be careful.
Nah, all we really want is a standalone, networked hard drive that any of our separate devices can connect to/disconnect from while running.
You have a point, but you've gone way off the deep end with it. Your point is simply, someone who has well-developed memorization skills has a huge advantage, and we shouldn't neglect developing memorization abilities in kids.
That said, it's still true that it's more important to learn how to think, then it is to memorize some facts.
The solution? Engage kids in activities that develop their brain, as opposed to their mind. Treat the brain as an organ, much like muscle, that grows stronger from exercise. Memorization games, visualization games (such as chess), language games, etc. Work the mind like a muscle, and it will develop all the skills it needs. Give it a rich environment, and it will learn lots of knowledge, and retain it, too.
I see no reason to suggest that good unit-testing practices requires any of the other methodologies. And good unit-testing can hardly be considered a bad thing to do.
I could see how minimalist design without pair-programming and without constant code review might be bad, because these are all essentially checks against errors being made by one programmer. If we are doing pair programming, then maybe code reviews aren't necessary. But, if you decide to do "minimalist/no design", but not pair programming, I can see how that would be trouble. The important thing is to recognize what problem each aspect is meant to solve, and make sure you have a process in place meant to deal with that problem.
We do create branches for releases and their bug fixes. That's it though. So, the bug fixes that go into 1.1 will get merged back into the main branch. CVS has no problem doing merges, and it's quite simple to use.
Creating a separate branch for each develoment team, though, strikes me as nightmarish (though, it's not as bad as the clearcase way of separate branches for each *developer*). If you have 100 developers working on the project, I would hope the project has enough sub-packages to warrant it. What does the branching get you, anyway?
If you create 5 branches to let those 100 developers work concurrently in them, then how do you know their code will merge well? How do you know the merge won't result in the introduction of bugs (and bugs caused by such large merges are very hard to find)? If your answer is that the development teams must communicate effectively, then I would say, if they were communicating effectively, then branching wasn't necessary in the first place.
Some have talked about wonderful "visual" merges. Frankly, if you're using branches that much and doing that much merging, you are over doing it. Merging branches is time-consuming and fraught with potential gotchas. I suggest finding a new development process that will avoid those problems (like XP). Anyway, you can visually access branches on CVS if you use a free client like WinCVS. It's great. Makes dealing with a CVS repo just like dealing with your file system.
Using ClearCase will likely lead you down a bad path of more complicated development processes. And that is a bad thing. Keep it simple.
The rest of Rational's toolset isn't much better. Our requirements people use Requisite Pro to store requirements. The development group is always asking them to see the requirements (duh!), but we don't have requisite pro, so we never seem to get them. They always say they can print out versions that we could see, but what they do print out or send us doesn't display right in Word or whatever, and usually they just can't be bothered to do the work necessary to output a format we can read. If they would just use a simple program, things would be so much easier...
They say developers are nuts for stupid toys - at least our stupid toys don't cost everyone time and money!
Money that's sent to a project should be allocated by the maintainer of the project. ie Linus should spread the money around to those who did work. Himself included.....
As far as sending it to charity - no way. This is payment for work. Ideally, the best developers shouldn't have to have jobs beyond hacking the kernel (if that's their wish).
The difference between a database and an XML-centralized-parser system is pretty small. It feels like what you're arguing for is a registry. Personally, I think a registry is an excellent thing, Linus' opinions on the matter otherwise. But, I recognize the fear that as we move away from simple ASCII, the files will become too complex to edit by hand, and people will be at the mercy of the tool interfaces. And some people just don't like that. You're job is to convince them this is not something to fear.
No, but he might make a bush president.
I am a very talanted mainframe systems programmer, so should I be qualified to be president?
Maybe you should be qualified. What, are you slacking off?
Read the "all watching" sentance again and ask if that is what you really want from your president.
You're right, Reagan was best when dozing off.
Nader has shown himself (in my opinion) to be arrogant and self-righteous.
Yes, that's what makes him different and refreshing as a political candidate!
Essentially, the problem comes down to how do you find each other, and how do you find stuff. Finding each other is generally done with centralized services (eg DNS). But, there are other options, including limited multicast, expanding spheres of knowledge (ie you learn about 1 other node, and it tells you the nodes it knows, and they tell you the nodes they know, and so on - this is similar to Freenet). But, once you've found a node to talk to, bandwidth is the same as a non P2P network.
Finding stuff is a different matter, and I suspect part of the solution here is to learn to accept imperfection by design. No, you can't search everything because that would involve going to every node and querying it, which would be impractical. However, you can spider out through the nearest nodes, and they should be able to point your query in the most promising directions, and you could configure your search to be as far-reaching (and slow) or as near-sighted (and quick) as you like.
Another point to make is that there is the potential for our bandwidth capabilities to go through the roof in the relatively near future. With fiber, optical switching technology, we could easily see bandwidth essentially being removed as a bottleneck - perhaps in the next 5 -10 years.
When did we just give up on things as a society? The Greens are wrong because they won't compromise and go mainstream? Is compromising and going mainstream really the point? Isn't there room for a minority view to have some effect? It would probably have an excellent moderating effect if, say 10% of the representatives in government were Greens (I'm guessing that's about the percentage of the population that would support the Green platform if we didn't have such a defeatist attitude). Sure, maybe they can't get elected president because their views are extreme, but we still need to have those extreme views around.
Harry Browne talks about selling all public property (except military bases). The idea is that property held privately is better cared for. Beyond the argument as to whether that's true, I have another question:
How exactly will you sell this land? Take a big national park, for instance - Yellowstone. Are you going to sell it as is, in one big chunk, or will it be sold in parts? The reason this is important, in my mind is that how you sell it determines who could possibly buy it, and what use it will be put to. If sold as a whole, only a very large corporation could afford it, so you're not really selling it to anyone out there - you're locking out all individuals (except maybe a handful), and essentially only allowing corporations to buy it. In which case it will surely be used to make money.
If you sell it in small chunks, you are allowing a larger percent of the population a chance to buy, but you increase the odds that the park will be destroyed as the individual owners "do there own thing".
A related question is, who controls the roads? Right now, I leave my house, and I travel on public lands to get virtually anywhere I want to go. I cannot be barred from going most anywhere (even most businesses can't really bar me from their premises without reason). However, if that all becomes private property, is it possible that I could be barred from leaving my tiny yard? What's the libertarian solution to these concerns?
Here's a thought - think longer term. So Bush may beat Gore. If no one votes for Nader, we'll have this same awful choice 4 years from now. At which point, if no one votes alternatively, it'll repeat over and over. Think longer term. Nader won't win, but a successful campaign from Nader will probably mean more in the long run than whether Bush or Gore wins.
You are a fool who has incorrectly analyzed your choices.
;-)
Here are your errors:
1. Thinking there's a difference between Gore and Bush - there isn't
2. Thinking your vote affects anything, regardless of who you voted for - it doesn't. The chance that your one vote prevents Bush from gaining office is less than your chance of winning the lottery.
3. Thinking a vote for a third party candidate who can't win doesn't get noticed - Perot's 20% scared the shit out of politicians. Do you think we'd have a budget surplus 8 years later without him?
I'm also guessing you don't live in Minnesota