Heck, it's not the spying they're taking personally. It's the insult of not bothering to cover your tracks well enough.
To put 20+ bugs in a plane and assume that the Chinese won't find them is simply insulting the Chinese intelligence community and via them, the Chinese government. That's what they're taking personally. It's kind of a "Just how stupid do you think we are?" personal.
I think that's what the RIAA bitches don't understand. The piracy angle is insignificant if the side-channels it creates get millions of people to be more enthusiastic about music and let them find the kind of music they really want.
Actually, I tend to think that the RIAA does understand this and it scares the crap out of them. After all, if the audience splits off into a million niche groups, you know how much that adds to the companies marketing expenses?
It also gives smaller labels (that aren't part of the RIAA and paying their dues to it) access to a wider market. If there's anything the RIAA doesn't want, it's to be relegated to a non-essential, because retailers start stocking from the small labels because consumers are demanding the music from the small labels.
On the otherhand, if the market is only half as big, but can be neatly advertised to in 4 large chunks of demographics, and belongs entirely to RIAA members.. it's more profit.
Anthropomorphism of Nature never seems to give reliable results.
Nature isn't finding a way to do anything. It just is. We can't attack nature, all we can do is make our environment uninhabitable.. and nature won't (can't) care. Remember, jupiter is in an entirely natural state. Not a pleasant place to live, I'll grant, but entirely natural.
Re:One libertarian's perspective
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The one glaring problem I've found with the libertarian ideals is that they assume either perfect information or perfect honesty.
if you pollute your own land, and the pollution crosses over to someone else's property, airspace, or drinking water, YOU WILL BE LIABLE. Bar none.
When big polluters pollute, are they going to be so kind and say, "Oh, yes, that's our toxic waste in your drinking water. We dumped it six miles upstream on the piece of propery our shell corporation owns. It has nothing to do with the gas station beside the town resevoir."?
If you're worried that pollution done now might contaminate someone's property 100 years down the road, I can see where a little government intervention on a local level is necessary -- ON A LOCAL LEVEL. Let the city or county government enact rules as to what corporations or individuals can do now. If a corporation wants to, they can always move to a city that lets them do what they want to do (and the people of that city they move to made the decision to live there and accept it).
Cool. So pollution is going to respect political boundaries now? I live near the border of a no-nuke zone. Nuclear Waste Disposal Inc. moves to just the other side, buries their 200 plastic pails of heavy water perfectly legally, then closes down.
If what a company did was legal where they were, how do you sue them fifty years after they're defunct once the groundwater has carried the pollution over to you?
Get government out of this mess: the environment is not what you want to protect, you want to protect private property.
The environment IS what I want to protect, I don't give a shit about who owns it.
Because sooner or later, I'm the one who's going to be living in it.
Re:Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2
You missed one important negative:
Reduce genetic diversity.
Unfortunately, GM crops that
increase yield
increase natural resistance to [some] disease
tend to work to reduce genetic diversity. Eventually the result of this is that some unanticipated disease comes along and wipes out the entire crop.
Which only leaves GM crops that
increase the nutritional value as being really useful.
Unfortunately, nutritional value is something difficult to measure, as even nutritionists disagree and there is increasing evidence that what our bodies find most nutritious isn't any one specific vitamin or mineral, but rather the whole complex cocktail of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, etc. This throws even the last benefit into considerable doubt - assuming the companies producing GM crops were concentrating on those in the first place.
Knowing the small value that Monsanto places on human health, do we really want to let them do ANY more modification to our foods?
There just aren't enough people like that to change the social and economic systems away from capitalism and and the market.
I would add one qualifier to that - "right now."
At this point it becomes a matter of faith. You obviously don't believe that this critical mass can ever be achieved. I do.
Your examples all rely on being the "only" person to do something. In reality, that's never the case. Sure there can be only one person that's the absolute best at something, but there will always be others who are nearly as good. My car might not be fixed by the "best" mechanic, but hey, it runs and gets me from point a to point b, and that's what I really care about. My kids may not be taught by the absolute best teacher, but they've learned how to read and write - perhaps they can't spout the intricacies of the philosophical ramblings of Sartre, but they'll know enough that they can become engineers or politicians or whatever.
Besides, think about what you're saying: Since we're talking about an entire society, the gift-giving system you describe places more power in the hands of the highly skilled than he can possibly get now... which creates an incentive for others to follow in his footsteps
Sounds good to me. An entire society trying to follow in the footsteps of the most highly skilled? Beats the hell out of what we have now, doesn't it? Where the power is placed in the hands of those who know the right people and are willing to step on other folks on their way up? (aka Microsoft)
Or maybe things would have gone the other way and a broad spectrum of reliable protocols for communicating information between different systems (ala SAMBA or even Java to some extent) may have occurred a lot earlier and we wouldn't be dealing with "Well, I can't run Linux because my Windows Games won't play on it."
Mac users might not be shut out in the cold on so many things, and vice versa for PC users. Hardware and OS simply wouldn't matter other than for security and speed issues.
As well, being able to make decent profits out of hardware would have provided increased research into it and running realtime CG-video over the internet might be something possible by now.
Whenever someone plays "What-if" with the past, all you can get is BS and hot air.
I'm not a lawyer of course, but I think you should consider filing a suit in small claims court. A refund has been promised and is not being given. That's a breach of the terms of sale, is it not? You should probably name both Dell and Microsoft as the defendants.
If you use small claims, you can do the work yourself, saving yourself lawyer's fees while for Dell/Microsoft, it will literally cost them more than the amount of refund you deserve just to have their lawyers look at the paperwork. To be honest, I think that the responsibility for the refund does actually fall on Dell, and if they can't get their money back from Microsoft, that their own tough luck.
Heh.. tell them to file small claims court suits as well.:-)
The key point though, is that the normal file download dialog can be spoofed so that it calls the file something normally innocuous.
So when some user clicks on a link that suppposedly downloads say a PDF file, the download dialog only pops up "MonthlyReport.pdf" or whatever it is they expect. Should the user click "Open" at that point, they're fucked.
So I'd hardly call it Microsoft-bashing, as this is a *serious* flaw.
Maybe it is a character flaw in your worldview, but a social system that demands its members accept a particular attitude must either:
1)Enforce this attitude through constant monitoring and punishment for wrong thinking.
2)give up altogether and find a system that accomodates undesirable people without punishing everyone.
3)suffer a violent revolution as the people get tired of being told how to think.
How does the GPL Society force people to be nice and give of themselves? It requires altruism on the part of the overwhelming majority, which is COMPLETELY unrealistic.
Simple.. if you don't be nice and give of yourself, you don't get given to. That's the nature of a gift-giving society. In a way, I guess it works out as number 1 in your list. Then again, you can say that EVERY world view works out as number 1 in your list, including our current one. Right now, if you followed the tactics of a "gift-giving" world-view, you'd soon be left with nothing, because people do not feel a very great sense of reciprocity these days.
If you are the "BEST" teacher, you have a limited amount of time. Those students who you choose to spend that time with would be those of the parents who are the biggest gift-givers, because that increases your prestige in the society and makes it so that more people want to give to you, even if perhaps they don't have kids at that time.
The trick to remember in a gift-giving society is that you don't say "I want.." you say "I give..".
The more you give, the more you get. The more you get, the more you can give until you finally wind up getting the thing you want. You don't go to the teacher and say "I want you to teach my child." You go to the teacher and say "Have this thing I'm giving you. I've given my neighbors many things and they like me because of it." The teacher looks at this stuff, compares it to his/her other students and decides either "I will give your child teaching as helping you will look good for me and more people will give me things" or "You are very generous, but there are people who are more generous than you, and more people will respect me if I give my time to their children than yours. But I will give you this other thing in return for your generosity."
It's not as efficient for the individual as saying "I want" and getting that thing, but it increases the movement of resources.. as movement increases, more people benefit from the resources, and the resources people do want most will tend to gravitate toward those who can provide the most value, not just to individuals, but to the society as a whole, for them.
Now say the teacher decided your kid isn't as worth it. You can keep trying to give to the teacher, but such action is seen as crass by the society as a whole, so when individuals decide who they're going to give gifts to, they look at you and think - "He's not really generous, he only gives when he wants something, better I give to someone else as I'm more likely to get something back in return." The more people that think this, the more giving circles you get shut out of, until it starts impacting the things you actually want.
So basically, like in a free market society, some people get, and some people don't. The difference is in who gets and who doesn't. Currently, if you think mostly of your needs, you will tend to get more than someone who thinks mostly of what society as a whole needs. With the gift-giving society, this is reversed without repealing the laws of human greed.
Are some things going to be scarce still? Damn right. But those things will gravitate toward those who help the society the most. Those who happen to have those things but give little will find themselves *having* to give those things to keep themselves in the circle and keep getting anything at all. Those who have a great abundance of things (including scarce talents, etc) can keep more of what they want while still remaining in the circles.
I'm the exact opposite. I'd rather order it from home and get it in two-three days than piss around with traffic, bad store layout, sales-drones, crowds, and out-of-stock goods.
I figure I not only gain the time that comes from avoiding all those things, I also add a few hours on to my life by avoiding the stress.
Which lasts until the first time the user upgrades their IE, Office, or Windows version - at which point the homesite resets to MSN. I expect we'll be seeing MSN get a large bump in hits over the next six months or so.
We are talking about foreign terrorists not domestic liberal fruitcakes.
How can you be sure? After all, one of the big things that these civil liberties groups have been complaining about is that we don't know who's been arrested. The government is keeping that information secret - we can't even find out.
Heard from your relatives lately? If not, they could be the ones in jail. Then again, I haven't seen Al Gore in quite a while either. I'm not saying he's gone, but the point is we just don't know, and here you are blithely condoning this.
Take reasonable measures expressed by the President, both sides of Congress and the AG and blow them out of proportion in a civil rights meltdown.
So for you, reasonable measures include the ability to secretly arrest someone, be they domestic or foreign, bring them to a secret military tribunal, have two out of three officers - using evidence being kept a secret from the accused - decide to secretly execute the person, all supported by the weight of the law? Because that is what these laws allow.
Now will they be used that way? I really doubt it, but there shouldn't even be the possibility of this happening.
That's like suggesting that the Christian Coalition for Family Values actually represents family values or the majority of Christians.
You can name yourself anything you want. Hell, we had a "Reform" party in Canada that got elected into opposition - and even the reforms they could have done from that position (eg, not wasting taxpayers money on a fancy house/limo for the leader of the opposition) were silently ignored.
Just because I call myself a genius doesn't mean I am one.
That is, it's not the Feds breaking into the guy's home, it's the Feds sending the user an email. If the user doesn't run it, the user remains safe. If the user chooses to run it, he violates his own security *on behalf of* the Feds. This may be the crucial legal distinction that makes this work in court, where the Scarfo keylogger didn't.
Serious problems with this. If I send you a gift, such as a doll, and you choose to keep the doll, is it YOUR fault the doll has a camera in it and I can now spy on your bedroom?
The reality is whatever people learn to use and like, they'll tend to stick with as they move on in life.
This works given two caveats:
1) What they work with early on has a good ratio of cost to activities performed
2) What they work on is reasonably available
First, they have no alternative. The entire movement is defined by what it is against, not by what it is for.
.. or at least, that's what being spoon-fed your information by the mainstream media would make you believe.
Is the movement coherent in what it wants? No. But some of the things that have been demanded include: Fair Trade as opposed to Free Trade, environmental protection clauses built into the agreements, social welfare concerns such as decent labor laws being recognized as valid points for discussion and inclusion, debt relief for developing nations, transparency of the negotiations, democratic input, enforcement of human rights, etc.
The anti-globalization movement is composed of many different groups, each with its own agenda and methods. Some of them agree, some of them don't. As with any populist movement, it is one made up of diverse people, opinions, and ideas that have coalesced around a common thread: Globalization as it's happening now is not working.
Second, large sections of the movement have no qualms with using false arguments and violence to advance their agenda.
Again, this is an unfortunate misconception based on relying entirely on the mainstream media for information on the subject.
The truth is actually the reverse. However peaceful protests make for boring video and the truthful arguments are complex and don't condense neatly into a fifteen second sound-byte for the evening news.
If anything, it could be easily argued that those who use the most violence and false arguments to advance their agenda are those that favor the unfettered globalization process we see happening today. Fortunately for them, the violence often takes place in the developing nations affected by the agreements -- places where reporters are not hanging around looking for a story.
Members of the anti-globalization movement at the BARE MINIMUM must confront why their message and method is so attractive to violent thugs.
I'm not one to argue that there are idiots who like to use protests as cover for simply being assholes and wrecking things. But it's not just this movement's message and method that attracts these people, you get the same morons at soccer games, outdoor music festivals and other public gatherings. When it happens during these other events though it's generally somewhat separated from the centre of a city where major damage can be caused, and the news tends not to lump them in with the rest of the people who are present. At the protests, it's typically the opposite on both counts.
Check out www.indymedia.org for a different take on your nightly news. You may not agree with their viewpoint, but at least you'll be exposed to a different one than normal.
If by your post, you mean the original story, you screwed up.
Check out this site: http://www.ups.com/canada/using/services/accs/engd v-guide.html
You'll see they give $100 automatically, and charge you 55cents for every $100 additional. This applies to pretty much every international shipping method they have, including the Standard service which is their ground service.
Of course, beyond that, if I asked them for insurance and was told I couldn't, I'd be looking for another place to ship from.
Re:You can't escape the benfits of globalism
on
Defining Globalism
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· Score: 1
A second dark side, one that isn't talked about much is that the geographic nature of countries has a significant influence on whether globalization is a good thing or not.
Landlocked countries tend to suffer since companies simply don't want to move into them - too expensive to ship to/from when there are coastal countries. So the countries around the landlocked ones prosper, furthering the gap between the poor and the super-poor.
You can even see the effects on our countries, where do the biggest cities form? On the coasts and on the major water-ways. Where are the poorest people in general? Other than those who have moved out to the coastal areas to try and pick up some of all that money - the furthest inland.
Combine this with a lack of freedom of movement and you have a serious problem.
And there are more than healthy middle-class youths protesting globalism. The unfortunate thing is, protestors in third world countries tend to be called 'revolutionaries', 'anarchists' or (today's buzzword) 'terrorists' and subsequently disappear.. and to our media it's a non-event since they weren't white anyway.
To be more accurate, Culp's analogy is that it is as acceptable to curtail the free speech of someone yelling "security hole!" as it is to curtail the free speech of someone yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre when there is none.
Bruce's continuation of the analogy is to show that this simply doesn't work, because those yelling "security hole!" are doing it because there is, in fact, a security hole.
Equating the anti-competitive forces of MS with the barrier to entry created by Linux is not reasonable.
Does Linux add an extra hurdle? Of course. As does every single other alternative OS. The size of the hurdle depends on the features they offer. One of Linux's features is that it's free. For some, this is an excellent feature. For many, as we see by the current marketplace, this is not as important as ease of use and universality of applications.
A commercial alternative does have several advantages over a free system however. One being that improvements to the system are generally uniform throughout distributions. In Linux, developers make solutions to what they need, which is great, but trying to support these various combinations of solutions, some of which are better done than others, is a nightmare. A second advantage being a central point of reliable contact for problems and support. Companies like Redhat are trying to offer this, but they have to deal with the vagaries of supporting a system they really don't
control. Third, when money is involved there becomes a reason for complaints to be dealt with. If you're not a programmer and you have a problem with obscure function x, you're basically screwed unless some programmer person decides they're going to fix that problem. With a central point of contact, complaints can turn into action based on something other than a programmer's largesse.
These are just some of the reasons I think your statement is false. If Microsoft falls, competitive OS's will be able to arise that compete by including the features Linux does not possess. BeOS was growing for a time, so much so that they managed to convince major OEMs to include them on their systems. Had it not been for Microsoft's anti-competitve practices keeping that OS hidden from the purchasers, it may have become a serious contender in the OS world.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, it's not the spying they're taking personally. It's the insult of not bothering to cover your tracks well enough.
To put 20+ bugs in a plane and assume that the Chinese won't find them is simply insulting the Chinese intelligence community and via them, the Chinese government. That's what they're taking personally. It's kind of a "Just how stupid do you think we are?" personal.
Actually, the James Bond types will likely be driving this: http://www.tacom.army.mil/tardec/nac/projects/smar trck.pdf (PDF file).
No jet boat, but drops oil, smoke-screens, pepper spray, teargas, electro-shocking door handles, bulletproof, and with some get up and go to boot.
Sheer size. :)
We've already wired Korea twice with the amount of cable we've put down, we just live so far apart that it doesn't mean as much.
--A good, unscheduled demonstration, actually. Thank you!
;)
Wait.. does this mean you normally schedule demonstrations about obscuring the truth?
So was your first message scheduled, or not?
I think that's what the RIAA bitches don't understand. The piracy angle is insignificant if the side-channels it creates get millions of people to be more enthusiastic about music and let them find the kind of music they really want.
Actually, I tend to think that the RIAA does understand this and it scares the crap out of them. After all, if the audience splits off into a million niche groups, you know how much that adds to the companies marketing expenses?
It also gives smaller labels (that aren't part of the RIAA and paying their dues to it) access to a wider market. If there's anything the RIAA doesn't want, it's to be relegated to a non-essential, because retailers start stocking from the small labels because consumers are demanding the music from the small labels.
On the otherhand, if the market is only half as big, but can be neatly advertised to in 4 large chunks of demographics, and belongs entirely to RIAA members.. it's more profit.
Anthropomorphism of Nature never seems to give reliable results.
Nature isn't finding a way to do anything. It just is. We can't attack nature, all we can do is make our environment uninhabitable.. and nature won't (can't) care. Remember, jupiter is in an entirely natural state. Not a pleasant place to live, I'll grant, but entirely natural.
The one glaring problem I've found with the libertarian ideals is that they assume either perfect information or perfect honesty.
if you pollute your own land, and the pollution crosses over to someone else's property, airspace, or drinking water, YOU WILL BE LIABLE. Bar none.
When big polluters pollute, are they going to be so kind and say, "Oh, yes, that's our toxic waste in your drinking water. We dumped it six miles upstream on the piece of propery our shell corporation owns. It has nothing to do with the gas station beside the town resevoir."?
If you're worried that pollution done now might contaminate someone's property 100 years down the road, I can see where a little government intervention on a local level is necessary -- ON A LOCAL LEVEL. Let the city or county government enact rules as to what corporations or individuals can do now. If a corporation wants to, they can always move to a city that lets them do what they want to do (and the people of that city they move to made the decision to live there and accept it).
Cool. So pollution is going to respect political boundaries now? I live near the border of a no-nuke zone. Nuclear Waste Disposal Inc. moves to just the other side, buries their 200 plastic pails of heavy water perfectly legally, then closes down.
If what a company did was legal where they were, how do you sue them fifty years after they're defunct once the groundwater has carried the pollution over to you?
Get government out of this mess: the environment is not what you want to protect, you want to protect private property.
The environment IS what I want to protect, I don't give a shit about who owns it.
Because sooner or later, I'm the one who's going to be living in it.
You missed one important negative:
Reduce genetic diversity.
Unfortunately, GM crops that
increase yield
increase natural resistance to [some] disease
tend to work to reduce genetic diversity. Eventually the result of this is that some unanticipated disease comes along and wipes out the entire crop.
Which only leaves GM crops that
increase the nutritional value
as being really useful.
Unfortunately, nutritional value is something difficult to measure, as even nutritionists disagree and there is increasing evidence that what our bodies find most nutritious isn't any one specific vitamin or mineral, but rather the whole complex cocktail of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, etc. This throws even the last benefit into considerable doubt - assuming the companies producing GM crops were concentrating on those in the first place.
Knowing the small value that Monsanto places on human health, do we really want to let them do ANY more modification to our foods?
There just aren't enough people like that to change the social and economic systems away from capitalism and and the market.
I would add one qualifier to that - "right now."
At this point it becomes a matter of faith. You obviously don't believe that this critical mass can ever be achieved. I do.
Your examples all rely on being the "only" person to do something. In reality, that's never the case. Sure there can be only one person that's the absolute best at something, but there will always be others who are nearly as good. My car might not be fixed by the "best" mechanic, but hey, it runs and gets me from point a to point b, and that's what I really care about. My kids may not be taught by the absolute best teacher, but they've learned how to read and write - perhaps they can't spout the intricacies of the philosophical ramblings of Sartre, but they'll know enough that they can become engineers or politicians or whatever.
Besides, think about what you're saying: Since we're talking about an entire society, the gift-giving system you describe places more power in the hands of the highly skilled than he can possibly get now... which creates an incentive for others to follow in his footsteps
Sounds good to me. An entire society trying to follow in the footsteps of the most highly skilled? Beats the hell out of what we have now, doesn't it? Where the power is placed in the hands of those who know the right people and are willing to step on other folks on their way up? (aka Microsoft)
Or maybe things would have gone the other way and a broad spectrum of reliable protocols for communicating information between different systems (ala SAMBA or even Java to some extent) may have occurred a lot earlier and we wouldn't be dealing with "Well, I can't run Linux because my Windows Games won't play on it."
Mac users might not be shut out in the cold on so many things, and vice versa for PC users. Hardware and OS simply wouldn't matter other than for security and speed issues.
As well, being able to make decent profits out of hardware would have provided increased research into it and running realtime CG-video over the internet might be something possible by now.
Whenever someone plays "What-if" with the past, all you can get is BS and hot air.
I'm not a lawyer of course, but I think you should consider filing a suit in small claims court. A refund has been promised and is not being given. That's a breach of the terms of sale, is it not? You should probably name both Dell and Microsoft as the defendants.
:-)
If you use small claims, you can do the work yourself, saving yourself lawyer's fees while for Dell/Microsoft, it will literally cost them more than the amount of refund you deserve just to have their lawyers look at the paperwork. To be honest, I think that the responsibility for the refund does actually fall on Dell, and if they can't get their money back from Microsoft, that their own tough luck.
Heh.. tell them to file small claims court suits as well.
The key point though, is that the normal file download dialog can be spoofed so that it calls the file something normally innocuous.
So when some user clicks on a link that suppposedly downloads say a PDF file, the download dialog only pops up "MonthlyReport.pdf" or whatever it is they expect. Should the user click "Open" at that point, they're fucked.
So I'd hardly call it Microsoft-bashing, as this is a *serious* flaw.
Maybe it is a character flaw in your worldview, but a social system that demands its members accept a particular attitude must either:
1)Enforce this attitude through constant monitoring and punishment for wrong thinking.
2)give up altogether and find a system that accomodates undesirable people without punishing everyone.
3)suffer a violent revolution as the people get tired of being told how to think.
How does the GPL Society force people to be nice and give of themselves? It requires altruism on the part of the overwhelming majority, which is COMPLETELY unrealistic.
Simple.. if you don't be nice and give of yourself, you don't get given to. That's the nature of a gift-giving society. In a way, I guess it works out as number 1 in your list. Then again, you can say that EVERY world view works out as number 1 in your list, including our current one. Right now, if you followed the tactics of a "gift-giving" world-view, you'd soon be left with nothing, because people do not feel a very great sense of reciprocity these days.
If you are the "BEST" teacher, you have a limited amount of time. Those students who you choose to spend that time with would be those of the parents who are the biggest gift-givers, because that increases your prestige in the society and makes it so that more people want to give to you, even if perhaps they don't have kids at that time.
The trick to remember in a gift-giving society is that you don't say "I want.." you say "I give..".
The more you give, the more you get. The more you get, the more you can give until you finally wind up getting the thing you want. You don't go to the teacher and say "I want you to teach my child." You go to the teacher and say "Have this thing I'm giving you. I've given my neighbors many things and they like me because of it." The teacher looks at this stuff, compares it to his/her other students and decides either "I will give your child teaching as helping you will look good for me and more people will give me things" or "You are very generous, but there are people who are more generous than you, and more people will respect me if I give my time to their children than yours. But I will give you this other thing in return for your generosity."
It's not as efficient for the individual as saying "I want" and getting that thing, but it increases the movement of resources.. as movement increases, more people benefit from the resources, and the resources people do want most will tend to gravitate toward those who can provide the most value, not just to individuals, but to the society as a whole, for them.
Now say the teacher decided your kid isn't as worth it. You can keep trying to give to the teacher, but such action is seen as crass by the society as a whole, so when individuals decide who they're going to give gifts to, they look at you and think - "He's not really generous, he only gives when he wants something, better I give to someone else as I'm more likely to get something back in return." The more people that think this, the more giving circles you get shut out of, until it starts impacting the things you actually want.
So basically, like in a free market society, some people get, and some people don't. The difference is in who gets and who doesn't. Currently, if you think mostly of your needs, you will tend to get more than someone who thinks mostly of what society as a whole needs. With the gift-giving society, this is reversed without repealing the laws of human greed.
Are some things going to be scarce still? Damn right. But those things will gravitate toward those who help the society the most. Those who happen to have those things but give little will find themselves *having* to give those things to keep themselves in the circle and keep getting anything at all. Those who have a great abundance of things (including scarce talents, etc) can keep more of what they want while still remaining in the circles.
I'm the exact opposite. I'd rather order it from home and get it in two-three days than piss around with traffic, bad store layout, sales-drones, crowds, and out-of-stock goods.
I figure I not only gain the time that comes from avoiding all those things, I also add a few hours on to my life by avoiding the stress.
Plus, I don't impulse shop as much.
Unless you buy your computer from an OEM,
Which lasts until the first time the user upgrades their IE, Office, or Windows version - at which point the homesite resets to MSN. I expect we'll be seeing MSN get a large bump in hits over the next six months or so.
We are talking about foreign terrorists not domestic liberal fruitcakes.
How can you be sure? After all, one of the big things that these civil liberties groups have been complaining about is that we don't know who's been arrested. The government is keeping that information secret - we can't even find out.
Heard from your relatives lately? If not, they could be the ones in jail. Then again, I haven't seen Al Gore in quite a while either. I'm not saying he's gone, but the point is we just don't know, and here you are blithely condoning this.
Take reasonable measures expressed by the President, both sides of Congress and the AG and blow them out of proportion in a civil rights meltdown.
So for you, reasonable measures include the ability to secretly arrest someone, be they domestic or foreign, bring them to a secret military tribunal, have two out of three officers - using evidence being kept a secret from the accused - decide to secretly execute the person, all supported by the weight of the law? Because that is what these laws allow.
Now will they be used that way? I really doubt it, but there shouldn't even be the possibility of this happening.
That's like suggesting that the Christian Coalition for Family Values actually represents family values or the majority of Christians.
You can name yourself anything you want. Hell, we had a "Reform" party in Canada that got elected into opposition - and even the reforms they could have done from that position (eg, not wasting taxpayers money on a fancy house/limo for the leader of the opposition) were silently ignored.
Just because I call myself a genius doesn't mean I am one.
That is, it's not the Feds breaking into the guy's home, it's the Feds sending the user an email. If the user doesn't run it, the user remains safe. If the user chooses to run it, he violates his own security *on behalf of* the Feds. This may be the crucial legal distinction that makes this work in court, where the Scarfo keylogger didn't.
Serious problems with this. If I send you a gift, such as a doll, and you choose to keep the doll, is it YOUR fault the doll has a camera in it and I can now spy on your bedroom?
The reality is whatever people learn to use and like, they'll tend to stick with as they move on in life.
This works given two caveats:
1) What they work with early on has a good ratio of cost to activities performed
2) What they work on is reasonably available
Linux fits into both of these reasonably well.
First, they have no alternative. The entire movement is defined by what it is against, not by what it is for.
.. or at least, that's what being spoon-fed your information by the mainstream media would make you believe.
Is the movement coherent in what it wants? No. But some of the things that have been demanded include: Fair Trade as opposed to Free Trade, environmental protection clauses built into the agreements, social welfare concerns such as decent labor laws being recognized as valid points for discussion and inclusion, debt relief for developing nations, transparency of the negotiations, democratic input, enforcement of human rights, etc.
The anti-globalization movement is composed of many different groups, each with its own agenda and methods. Some of them agree, some of them don't. As with any populist movement, it is one made up of diverse people, opinions, and ideas that have coalesced around a common thread: Globalization as it's happening now is not working.
Second, large sections of the movement have no qualms with using false arguments and violence to advance their agenda.
Again, this is an unfortunate misconception based on relying entirely on the mainstream media for information on the subject.
The truth is actually the reverse. However peaceful protests make for boring video and the truthful arguments are complex and don't condense neatly into a fifteen second sound-byte for the evening news.
If anything, it could be easily argued that those who use the most violence and false arguments to advance their agenda are those that favor the unfettered globalization process we see happening today. Fortunately for them, the violence often takes place in the developing nations affected by the agreements -- places where reporters are not hanging around looking for a story.
Members of the anti-globalization movement at the BARE MINIMUM must confront why their message and method is so attractive to violent thugs.
I'm not one to argue that there are idiots who like to use protests as cover for simply being assholes and wrecking things. But it's not just this movement's message and method that attracts these people, you get the same morons at soccer games, outdoor music festivals and other public gatherings. When it happens during these other events though it's generally somewhat separated from the centre of a city where major damage can be caused, and the news tends not to lump them in with the rest of the people who are present. At the protests, it's typically the opposite on both counts.
Check out www.indymedia.org for a different take on your nightly news. You may not agree with their viewpoint, but at least you'll be exposed to a different one than normal.
If by your post, you mean the original story, you screwed up.
d v-guide.html
Check out this site: http://www.ups.com/canada/using/services/accs/eng
You'll see they give $100 automatically, and charge you 55cents for every $100 additional. This applies to pretty much every international shipping method they have, including the Standard service which is their ground service.
Of course, beyond that, if I asked them for insurance and was told I couldn't, I'd be looking for another place to ship from.
A second dark side, one that isn't talked about much is that the geographic nature of countries has a significant influence on whether globalization is a good thing or not.
.. and to our media it's a non-event since they weren't white anyway.
Landlocked countries tend to suffer since companies simply don't want to move into them - too expensive to ship to/from when there are coastal countries. So the countries around the landlocked ones prosper, furthering the gap between the poor and the super-poor.
You can even see the effects on our countries, where do the biggest cities form? On the coasts and on the major water-ways. Where are the poorest people in general? Other than those who have moved out to the coastal areas to try and pick up some of all that money - the furthest inland.
Combine this with a lack of freedom of movement and you have a serious problem.
And there are more than healthy middle-class youths protesting globalism. The unfortunate thing is, protestors in third world countries tend to be called 'revolutionaries', 'anarchists' or (today's buzzword) 'terrorists' and subsequently disappear
We also sing the American Anthem, Jingle Bells, and some even sing Backstreet Boys tunes..
:-)
Buncha loonies up here, yessir..
To be more accurate, Culp's analogy is that it is as acceptable to curtail the free speech of someone yelling "security hole!" as it is to curtail the free speech of someone yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre when there is none.
Bruce's continuation of the analogy is to show that this simply doesn't work, because those yelling "security hole!" are doing it because there is, in fact, a security hole.
Equating the anti-competitive forces of MS with the barrier to entry created by Linux is not reasonable.
Does Linux add an extra hurdle? Of course. As does every single other alternative OS. The size of the hurdle depends on the features they offer. One of Linux's features is that it's free. For some, this is an excellent feature. For many, as we see by the current marketplace, this is not as important as ease of use and universality of applications.
A commercial alternative does have several advantages over a free system however. One being that improvements to the system are generally uniform throughout distributions. In Linux, developers make solutions to what they need, which is great, but trying to support these various combinations of solutions, some of which are better done than others, is a nightmare. A second advantage being a central point of reliable contact for problems and support. Companies like Redhat are trying to offer this, but they have to deal with the vagaries of supporting a system they really don't
control. Third, when money is involved there becomes a reason for complaints to be dealt with. If you're not a programmer and you have a problem with obscure function x, you're basically screwed unless some programmer person decides they're going to fix that problem. With a central point of contact, complaints can turn into action based on something other than a programmer's largesse.
These are just some of the reasons I think your statement is false. If Microsoft falls, competitive OS's will be able to arise that compete by including the features Linux does not possess. BeOS was growing for a time, so much so that they managed to convince major OEMs to include them on their systems. Had it not been for Microsoft's anti-competitve practices keeping that OS hidden from the purchasers, it may have become a serious contender in the OS world.