a more functional operating system *than* Wince 2002.
BEOS will be their first choice...
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Lineo near Death
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· Score: 1, Interesting
1) Palm bought all of BE's assets, including the BEOS, which spawned an offshoot that Be was trying to retarget at the embedded market.
2) Palm is moving to the StrongARM platform for high end units (i.e. corporate apps). I have a Zaurus SL5000D (206Mhz, 32MB of Ram, 16MB Rom) which is a good example of what this architecture can do with a more functional operating system like Wince 2002.
3) Beos was an incredibly fast OS which ran in a very small footprint, so my guess is Palm will introduce it as PalmOS 6 or 7. When that happens, I'll go buy the Clie clamshell version of it.
Flamebait? How is pointing out racism flamebait?
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Globalism Post 9/11
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Does this moderator consider it provocative to vigorously condemn people who burned down places of worship and brutally assaulted a pregnant woman and her mate (It happened this weekend in Marsailles)? It is impossible to ignore that this site appears to be infested with blindly irrational apologists for terrorist thugs.
I'll take your criticism as a badge of honor.
Wow, that's gratitude for you.
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Globalism Post 9/11
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
I'm glad we didn't say the same thing when Hitler was sinking whole convoys of our *relief* ships on route to your country in the early years of WWII, or when Winston Churchill was begging for American intervention during the Blitz. We did agree to concentrate on Hitler first, despite being attacked by the Empire of Japan.
And I honestly hope that a city as beautiful as London never falls prey to the deprivations of the large radical Muslim contingent which lives there, but if you don't think it could happen than you haven't been keeping up with who the Arabs blame for establishing Israel. (Yet another example of their disgustingly ignorant propaganda).
But that ignores the reason why NYC was attacked, because it had nothing to do with our support for Israel. American culture fundamentally threatens the power structure of Islamic states precisely because it is so "corrosive", but we are talkin about a group of people who consider Wahabist Saudi Arabia to be corrupt, so one can readily imagine what they think about the entire EU, especially in regards to Great Britain. This is not over, and it will not be over until we have significantly eradicated a critical mass of these large scale terrorist organizations and overthrown the autocratic states which breed them.
Are you sure you're not from France, where they still refuse to lift a finger to defend respectable jewish citizens from the ignorant scum of their gutter colonies?
I think you're right about cost-effectiveness being the key, but the tariffs were not the compelling reason. The U.S. offered a ready supply of well trained workers who could not be supported in the heavily unionized labor market of the Big three. They were willing to take a good paying job with good benefits, which was still less than half the ridiculously inflated wages of the United Autoworkers. They were used to working around modern factories (unlike the Mexicans) and were educated adequately for the task. In the end, the cost of manufacturing was cheaper in the U.S. because it was closer to the raw materials, subassembly & parts suppliers, the distribution channels and the end customer.
The wages were about the same as Japan, the property costs were cheaper, and the productivity was far higher than Mexico. The productivity even proved to be better than in Japan, because the Marysville Honda plant exported more Accords back to Japan each year than the japanese plant produced in total. (I think they eventually canned the less efficient Japanese plant to trim overhead.)
Where I disagree, (other than the issue of *why* it was more cost effective) is your comments about those who have trouble adapting to the "new" economy.
The cost of labor responds to the principles of supply and demand like everything else. The fact that someone "needs" a "real" wage is irrelevant. Goods are worth what someone is willing to pay, so if you want to adjust prices upward to help out those who can't compete you end up just dragging everyone down with them.
Anyone who isn't worrying about the day the axeman commeth must yearn for a life of leisure and daytime television. Hey, at least it's incentive to keep getting retrained and looking for new opportunities. There is nothing wrong with that.
It's not supposed to be taken seriously. It's meant to show how stupid the RIAA and MPAA's arguments are. It's a common rhetorical tactic which lawyers and other people with more than five brain cells use every day.
It is a common rhetorical technique of expanding on your opponent's logic until you reach an absurd conclusion.
As here: If Grokster is to blame merely because it enables illegal filesharing, than the internet, the computer manufacturers, the backbone providers, the telephone pole manufacturers, the wire and cable manufacturers, the telephone linemen, etc. are equally enabling. So under this theory they should all be held as equally liable or not at all.
This is the EFF, [www.eff.org] Obviously they are not seriously suggesting that the Internet is illegal. Geez, you don't know who the EFF is or what they fight for?
While it is obvious that the reviewer holds "green" beliefs and prejudices, he really tried to be objective and fair-handed in his critique of the book, and perhaps more interestingly, in his critique of the shrill character assassination of the enviro-priesthood.
The reviewer may still believe in the crusade, but he no longer appears to believe in the crusaders. It sounds like Lomborg's book has brought him to the edge of "heresy", and it is oonly a matter of time before he will jump too.
As an American, I "have" to work with proud people from other cultures myself, but most Americans recognize this as a good thing, which it is, IMO.
Thank you, BTW, for recognizing that the assimulative (and tradition corrosive) mixture of American traditions and "pop culture" actually does represent American political thought, and is therefore rightfully called a culture. That's better than most people will grant us.
Re: limits on free speech no it doesn't. I can say pretty much anything I want...
You're forgetting so called "Hate speech", which is really the criminalization of the expression of unpopular political views, as well as a host of other "forbidden" topics. Racism may be ugly and ignorant, but the state shouldn't be able to decide that a personally held belief is "incorrect", and therefore worthy of sanction if it is ever expressed. But if it only stopped there. Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Re: monitoring of it's citizen's internet activity It does? Care to provide some reasoning behind that...
Sure. I don't know how you could deny this. The article's very title is:
Australia Spying On Its Own From the body of the post: "the Defence Signals Directorate listens to just about every bit of communications in Australia...In this case the govt spied because they were trying to win an election,...National security be damned, this is echelon for political gain."
I am by no means suggesting that other countries, including the U.S., do not do it, but that was not my point to begin with.
Re: Gun confiscation.
My anonymous friend answered this, but I would add that the confiscation of any property merely because you own it obviously *is* both a seizure of property and a restriction on freedom. If a guy wants to build a howitzer in his back yard, isn't it his business so long as he doesn't use it to endanger or destroy other people's property, or otherwise deprive his neighbors of their right to peace and quiet?
Regrettably, the United States has been seduced by this "progressive reform", [albeit to a lesser degree], despite compelling statistical evidence that states which allow citizens to carry handguns have seen their crimes against persons drop in direct proportion to a surge in crimes against property. Apparently criminals are willing to consider career changes, because this strongly suggests that a criminal would rather break into an empty house or car than confront a potentially armed citizen. OTOH, "Home invasions" in Australia have skyrocketed since weapons suitable for personal defense have been confiscated. Here is a link with some interesting statistics, and here is another with graphs.
Re: restrictions upon encryption
Unfortunately, Australia, the United States, and 32 other countries are signatories of the Wassenaar Agreement. The agreement to subject commercial cryptosystems of moderate strength to inspection is not a big restriction, [and I certainly don't mind bans on exports to the "T7" (the so-called "Terrorist 7")], but it is stupid to pass a law which is impossible to enforce, unless that is not your motive, which in fact is the case. The licensing system is enough to stop and harrass a lot of commercial ventures, which in effect explains why most people do not use, or even know how to use encryption for email, while they will buy and use an envelope when using the post. [Trust me, I have worked on both the Berstein and Junger Federal lawsuits which challenged the U.S. export restrictions on crypto.]
Australia practices policies which place limits on free speech, monitoring of it's citizen's internet activity, confiscation of guns, and (if I am not mistaken) severe restrictions on encryption and other privacy enabling technologies.
These could hardly be considered "conservative" policies, but "Conservative" is a very tricky label so maybe this is the source of the confusion. Read on if you are interested in why I say this.
A Primer on Conservatism for the Uninitiated:
If there are any traditional "conservatives" (i.e. paleo-conservatives) still living in industrialized countries who believe in Divine Right Monarchy, Theocracy, or Aristocratic rule, I'd like to know what they are eating and who their doctor is. [Maybe the Queen of England or the odd Romanoff, but otherwise these guys are extinct.] They can still be found, even dominate, "traditional" (i.e. primitive, non-industrialized) societies, which are particularly prevalent in fundamentalist "Islamic republics" and kingdoms. That is because these political systems are based upon the assumption that the average individual is not fit for self-government.
As noted by others, modern "conservatives" [neo-conservatives] are not the same animal. These conservatives seek to retain the status quo of modern civilization, which means that today's conservatives ironically would have been considered "liberals" when these terms were invented. This is because modern conservatives seek to preserve the individual-centric reforms of the Enlightenment, many of which are currently under attack by modern leftist movements.
Generally speaking, traditionally "liberal" reforms concern themselves with the balance of power between the individual and the state. In practice, the reforms promote the protection of individual rights as the principle aim of good government, and a government of limited lawful powers to ensure that the state does not become oppressive to these rights.
True conservatives, (i.e., conservatives whose personal beliefs are logically consistent with their professed ideology, aka: "philosophically consistent") believe in rights as inherent and involiate individual property, which is far more than a mere privilege. (Privileges are granted at the behest of another and can be limited or recinded at any time by the grantor.)
But modern conservatives split into two camps based on competing theories as to what constitutes a legitimate right, resulting in two different subsets of "rights". These two groups are often called "Libertarians" and "social conservatives".
Contrary to leftist propaganda, all philosophically consistent conservatives would agree that every person is entitled to equal treatment under the law, and most would accept individual "property rights" as the practical cornerstone of any system which seeks to protect individual rights, [as opposed to mere privileges] because property rights are a useful analogy for defining what "belongs" to the individual and is therefore worthy of the law's protection.
Therefore it follows that most conservatives support the distribution of wealth via mechanisms of merit such as the free market, as opposed to by birth (aristocracy) or social class (socialism), and would also support your basic civil liberties which promote human dignity, such as freedom of speech, religion, assembly, etc.
Libertarian conservatives would interpret these basic freedoms as absolutes, providing their practice does not result in the destruction of another's property (think practice of religion so long as your god doesn't require you to burn down your neighbor's house.)
This limitation is philosophically consistent because a libertarian defines all rights as "negative", in that they are designed to protect you from the actions of others. Therefore any supposed "right" which would allow you to violate the rights of another cannot really be considered a right. This is why conservatives in general and libertarians in particular are so opposed to so-called "positive rights", (such as the claimed right to a job, or housing, or medical care), because these programs require that a legal duty be imposed upon other citizens to pay for these services if an individual is unable or unwilling to pay for them himself, which in turn would require an involuntary redistribution of wealth via taxation for an "illegitimate" government purpose, (aka: a violation of a citizen's right to the "fruits of his labor".)
Therefore libertarians are correct to point out that all positive rights are philosophically *inconsistent* because they require that a supposedly involiate right be "balanced" against another suposedly involiate right. As an aside, the UN's Universal Declaration of the Human Rights is chock full of positive rights.
Libertarians also extend the penumbra of rights to so-called "victimless crimes" such as private drug use and prostitution, providing that it does not impact the rights of another.
Contrary to reputation, Libertarians support taxation for traditional government duties which they deem to be consistent with their view of individual property rights, such as adjudicating disputes via the courts, protecting property via the police, and providing for the military defense of the nation.
Social conservatives, on the other hand, define rights via a concept of "natural law", which far older than the Enlightenment. (What follows is only intended to be an approachable definition of natural law.) Natural law is usually based on the premise that there is a Divinity which desires justice, so it can be said that he wants humanity to do what is "good" and that humanity can do good if it discovers what this natural law is.
Philosophically consistent social conservatives accept most of the liberal reforms of the enlightenment as "good" because they affirm the dignity of the individual, whom post enlightenment religions are concerned with.
Under this view, it is legitimate for the state to encourage morality which is consistant with natural law. Therefore rights are only there to protect the "good" and no right which violates natural law can be legitimate. Therefore restrictions on speech, private behavior (drug use, abortion etc.) might be permissable.
Natural law can appear arbitrary because it seems so dependant on particular religious interpretations, but in actuality most religions agree on basic concepts of justice such as prohibitions against murder, adultery, stealing, etc. Furthermore, natural law has one rhetorical advantage that is difficult to dismiss: By declaring all humans as worthy of respect and dignity, it preempts and removes from the table any discussion of whether human beings deserve to be treated with dignity. This is a powerful safeguard when one considers that secular regimes of the 20th century which claimed the right to subvert the individual to the needs of the state resulted in the deaths of approximately 100 million individuals. (including an estimated 60 million who starved when Chairman Mao came up with the incredibly brilliant idea to press food producing peasants into industrial factory work during the "Great Leap Forward").
In opposition to conservatives, modern "leftist" movements span a spectrum of belief in the need for state intervention in the affairs of the individual, a belief that grew out of an (anti) intellectual counter-revolution to the Enlightenment, (i.e., the "Romantic" Age), which among other things sought to validate and elevate emotion as more important than reason, [with reason being the original justification for a system of individual rights based on merit, as opposed to birth or circumstances].
Some may disagree as to the actual demarcations, but this spectrum could fairly be characterized as ranging from totalitarian intervention (communism), to regular and systematic intervention (socialism), to occasional intervention "when needed" (modern liberals, who are probably better identified as "progressives".)
In the end, the consistently unifying premise of these belief systems is a fundamental lack of faith in the individual to do what is right, and the resultant need for "the right people" come into power and set things "right" so that the poor hapless masses don't get screwed. The fact that every serious attempt to do so has ended in box cars and concentration camps is lost on its adherents, because good intentions are all that one needs to qualify as the "right" kind of leader.
And that is why I am a conservative and Australia certainly is not.
I cited the webserver and the other examples as an illustration of how far the application availability has come in the few months since it has been released. This variety is only possible because the devices OS is a real Linux OS, not a weak subset of its established namesake.
But, since it is so trivial to run a webserver on your casio watch, when will you send me the link to the IIS port for a wince device?
Oh- That's right, you can't, because:
1) Wince is a stripped down version of a bloated OS which can't run IIS natively.
2) IIS is a bloated intrusion assistance device.
3) You can't port it because you lack the source code.
Oh Ok, how about I make it easy and just ask for the Apache port? That will never happen either because:
1) wince is still a stripped down piece of crippleware that can barely run a 12(?) function "PocketExcel" spreadsheet.
Ooooh. What a powerful brick you got, and for only $500. Where's the keyboard again?
Bundled Games:
- Go
- Asteroids clone (3d version, not the original)
- Solitaire clone
- Snake (Tron)
- Minehunt clone
- Scrabble clone
- Mindbreaker (think Mastermind)
Other famous games which have been tried:
- Quake
- Quake II (runs low on memory)
And as for apps, RTFPost, it is a *real*, fully-functional OS, so memory space is the only limitation as to what apps can be ported. In general, most console based apps can be ported directly. Other's have already ported an X server, so that opens up that set of apps.
In short, the SL5000D has surpassed in one month's time the pitiful selection of applications which the wince platform has struggled to attract for the last four years. *cough cough* Suck it up you MS toady.
A keyboard. A decent means of handwriting recognition. I've used IPaq's handwriting rec. It blows. Try a Zaurus SL5000D for comparison, which offers handwriting rec., pickboards, a virtual keyboard, and a real, live, retractable, built in RIM style two thumb hunt and peck keyboard.
or any other decent means of entering text? I've tried the handwriting recognition on an IPaq, and it blows almost as bad as the original newton. Hell, it's not much better on the Zaurus.
There's one thing you could say about Palm's Grafitti: it works.
BTW, the Office support on a palmOS for both Word and Excel via a product like "Documents To Go" or "QuickOffice" is superior to MS's own built-in pocket variants, and on 1/4 the power. How pathetic is that?
[Hint: check out a Zaurus SL5000D or SL5500, with built in, retractable RIM style keyboard running a real desktop OS, Embedix Linux - kernel 2.4.6, as opposed to a stripped down subset of the Window's API. I am running a full blown Opera browser with Javascript support, and a Python 2.0 environment, and (just for shit and giggles), a webserver on my PDA. Others have even gotten Quake II to run on the platform. --Try that with wince.]
Palm has 60% of the marketshare by itself. The second largest competitor, Handspring, owns 25%, which is 5 times more than Ipaq's or Jornadas, respectively, despite the fact that they have been in existance for several years before the Handspring arrived.
The only one getting killed are tech analysts spewing ridiculous obituaries for a platform that has a $200-400 price advantage during a consumer tech downturn.
Je, un American, c'est tres ignorant. [Please forgive me while I slaughter the Lingua Franca.] I just remember the word from my french classes, and I remember seeing pictures of them which are probably what our PC's would look like if we let Ma Bell design them.
Besides, it struck me as funny since the French make such a big deal over translating technical jargon of an English origin into native terms, (which one's aren't?), and I have heard that they are lagging far behind the ever growing tidal wave of buzzwords.
A libertarian that is for the war on drugs can hardly be considered a libertarian. Libertarians disagree on a lot of things, but every libertarian would agree that determining the proper role of government is the critical starting point which policies will be measured against. I've never met one that would say that regulating personal behavior because it impinges on a Judeo Christian value system is acceptable, especially since (if you want to take a constitutionalist approach to the issue) it is not a delimited power of the (libertarian leaning) Constitution. If it can't pass constitutional muster it can hardly pass Constitution++.
Secondly, no economically savy republican would believe that increasing prison populations would be good for the economy, for the following reasons:
Prisons are expensive. It costs more for U.S. taxpayers to send a prisoner to Prison than it does to send a student to an ivy league college.
"enslaved" workforces are not economically efficient, because it is the "army game" in another context. The sergeant, in this case the prison guard (who is hardly motivated to make the contractor money) tries to get the private, i.e. the prisoner to work as hard as possible, while the private tries to get away with as little work as possible. An economy based on slavery always loses to an economy based on workers who trade their efforts for pay because they are better motivated because they have the opportunity for both advancement and better pay.
Prison run businesses are partnerships with the state. The state might be a good customer, but it is an inefficient business partner, and organizations which are partly state run are less efficient and flexible than purely private sector organizations.
welfare has been carved back to workfare in most states, (thank God), so the goal is to turn welfare recipients into productive taxpayers anyways. These programs have met with considerable success across the country, and are probably the most siginificant policy change of the entire 90's decade.
Social Security 7.5% from you, and another 7.5% from your employer that he won't be paying you. If you are self employed, you are both the employer and the employee, and you will have to pay the self-employer tax of 15% instead of social security.
other things that your employer is required to pay for you (i.e. he would pay a lower rate if your weren't there, so it won't show up in your paystub) include: unemployment insurance and workman's compensation insurance.
Medicare/Medicaid (4%?) are social medicine programs that U.S. employees don't need because most good jobs (i.e. post college white collar/unionized blue collar) have far better health/life/disability insurance than the state run programs, which they do are excluded from anyways.
Capital gains tax is also a big one. Most U.S. workers are owners of taxable securities, a habit which the smart ones learn from their 401k's. Capital gains mean that you risk your money, which in turn gives business the funding to create economic opportunity, and the government taxes you if you happen to actually have backed a business which does well.
Also, regarding the deductability of state taxes, there is a difference between a deduction and a "below the line" tax break. A deduction simply lessens your taxable income so you pay less taxes. A "below the line" tax break actually comes off the tax bill itself, which is usually a much greater percentage of savings. You may have less taxable income, but most states (I know that TX, AZ, FL, and possibly Alaska, do not) do have income taxes of between 4-8%.
Municipalities also exact an income tax based at 1-2%, to say nothing of the property taxes we pay if you are a residence owner to fund a very expensive and very innefficient public school system. (Most people don't know that private schools spend far less per student than their neighborhood public schools.)
And he is also right about the tax credits. Most tax credits phase out very quickly, so that most of the middle class can't take them. That means they have to pay for services (like health insurance, food, rent that other's get breaks on.)
Long story short, this is not about being stingy with the "less fortunate", it is about pulling your own weight and contributing to society. Most people who are poor (i.e. most are able-bodied and of decent intelligence) have made choices in the past which have made them poor, and they refuse to change their lifestyle in the present to increase the likelyhood that they will succeed.
When you live in a society as fluid and dynamic as the United States, being poor is usually a choice. Its sound's funny, but it's true. If you can get cable, nintendo, good clothes, medical insurance and stuff yourself to the gills with food, your far better off than most people in the world, especially from a historical point of view. There are no poor people in the United States.
TWOD == The War On Drugs. But you've got a good point on the non-voting part. I've never actually heard of a good reason *for* the War on Drugs. Thanks, you've broadened my mind.
Belgium won't have a high tech industry then. You will sing a different tune once you a start working for a living and watching 50+% of your earnings going to deadbeats and the politicians which live off them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, passport objected to my first name of "Microsoft" so I changed it to "ms isaprivacy" (lastname: "buttpirate"). It accepted it just fine.
...a stick full of 256MB PC100 SDRAM.
I've had a PII 400 BX system with 196MB ram, and the biggest performance boost by far came with swapping out the stock 5400 HD for a Barracuda.
It ran Win2k very well, (fast boots) and now runs XP for my parental units several states away with zero problems.
You could do both for ~$200 USD.
..they are wasting their time chasing this market.
Those embedded engineers probably have it all sewn up, so we should all just go home and wait for them to make it happen.
a more functional operating system *than* Wince 2002.
1) Palm bought all of BE's assets, including the BEOS, which spawned an offshoot that Be was trying to retarget at the embedded market.
2) Palm is moving to the StrongARM platform for high end units (i.e. corporate apps). I have a Zaurus SL5000D (206Mhz, 32MB of Ram, 16MB Rom) which is a good example of what this architecture can do with a more functional operating system like Wince 2002.
3) Beos was an incredibly fast OS which ran in a very small footprint, so my guess is Palm will introduce it as PalmOS 6 or 7. When that happens, I'll go buy the Clie clamshell version of it.
Does this moderator consider it provocative to vigorously condemn people who burned down places of worship and brutally assaulted a pregnant woman and her mate (It happened this weekend in Marsailles)? It is impossible to ignore that this site appears to be infested with blindly irrational apologists for terrorist thugs.
I'll take your criticism as a badge of honor.
I'm glad we didn't say the same thing when Hitler was sinking whole convoys of our *relief* ships on route to your country in the early years of WWII, or when Winston Churchill was begging for American intervention during the Blitz. We did agree to concentrate on Hitler first, despite being attacked by the Empire of Japan.
And I honestly hope that a city as beautiful as London never falls prey to the deprivations of the large radical Muslim contingent which lives there, but if you don't think it could happen than you haven't been keeping up with who the Arabs blame for establishing Israel. (Yet another example of their disgustingly ignorant propaganda).
But that ignores the reason why NYC was attacked, because it had nothing to do with our support for Israel. American culture fundamentally threatens the power structure of Islamic states precisely because it is so "corrosive", but we are talkin about a group of people who consider Wahabist Saudi Arabia to be corrupt, so one can readily imagine what they think about the entire EU, especially in regards to Great Britain. This is not over, and it will not be over until we have significantly eradicated a critical mass of these large scale terrorist organizations and overthrown the autocratic states which breed them.
Are you sure you're not from France, where they still refuse to lift a finger to defend respectable jewish citizens from the ignorant scum of their gutter colonies?
I think you're right about cost-effectiveness being the key, but the tariffs were not the compelling reason. The U.S. offered a ready supply of well trained workers who could not be supported in the heavily unionized labor market of the Big three. They were willing to take a good paying job with good benefits, which was still less than half the ridiculously inflated wages of the United Autoworkers. They were used to working around modern factories (unlike the Mexicans) and were educated adequately for the task. In the end, the cost of manufacturing was cheaper in the U.S. because it was closer to the raw materials, subassembly & parts suppliers, the distribution channels and the end customer.
The wages were about the same as Japan, the property costs were cheaper, and the productivity was far higher than Mexico. The productivity even proved to be better than in Japan, because the Marysville Honda plant exported more Accords back to Japan each year than the japanese plant produced in total. (I think they eventually canned the less efficient Japanese plant to trim overhead.)
Where I disagree, (other than the issue of *why* it was more cost effective) is your comments about those who have trouble adapting to the "new" economy.
The cost of labor responds to the principles of supply and demand like everything else. The fact that someone "needs" a "real" wage is irrelevant. Goods are worth what someone is willing to pay, so if you want to adjust prices upward to help out those who can't compete you end up just dragging everyone down with them.
Anyone who isn't worrying about the day the axeman commeth must yearn for a life of leisure and daytime television. Hey, at least it's incentive to keep getting retrained and looking for new opportunities. There is nothing wrong with that.
It's not supposed to be taken seriously. It's meant to show how stupid the RIAA and MPAA's arguments are. It's a common rhetorical tactic which lawyers and other people with more than five brain cells use every day.
It is a common rhetorical technique of expanding on your opponent's logic until you reach an absurd conclusion.
As here:
If Grokster is to blame merely because it enables illegal filesharing, than the internet, the computer manufacturers, the backbone providers, the telephone pole manufacturers, the wire and cable manufacturers, the telephone linemen, etc. are equally enabling. So under this theory they should all be held as equally liable or not at all.
This is the EFF, [www.eff.org] Obviously they are not seriously suggesting that the Internet is illegal. Geez, you don't know who the EFF is or what they fight for?
While it is obvious that the reviewer holds "green" beliefs and prejudices, he really tried to be objective and fair-handed in his critique of the book, and perhaps more interestingly, in his critique of the shrill character assassination of the enviro-priesthood.
The reviewer may still believe in the crusade, but he no longer appears to believe in the crusaders. It sounds like Lomborg's book has brought him to the edge of "heresy", and it is oonly a matter of time before he will jump too.
As an American, I "have" to work with proud people from other cultures myself, but most Americans recognize this as a good thing, which it is, IMO.
Thank you, BTW, for recognizing that the assimulative (and tradition corrosive) mixture of American traditions and "pop culture" actually does represent American political thought, and is therefore rightfully called a culture. That's better than most people will grant us.
This is what conservatism is.
no it doesn't. I can say pretty much anything I want...
You're forgetting so called "Hate speech", which is really the criminalization of the expression of unpopular political views, as well as a host of other "forbidden" topics. Racism may be ugly and ignorant, but the state shouldn't be able to decide that a personally held belief is "incorrect", and therefore worthy of sanction if it is ever expressed. But if it only stopped there. Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Re: monitoring of it's citizen's internet activity
It does? Care to provide some reasoning behind that...
Sure. I don't know how you could deny this. The article's very title is: Australia Spying On Its Own ...National security be damned, this is echelon for political gain."
From the body of the post: "the Defence Signals Directorate listens to just about every bit of communications in Australia...In this case the govt spied because they were trying to win an election,
I am by no means suggesting that other countries, including the U.S., do not do it, but that was not my point to begin with.
Re: Gun confiscation.
My anonymous friend answered this, but I would add that the confiscation of any property merely because you own it obviously *is* both a seizure of property and a restriction on freedom. If a guy wants to build a howitzer in his back yard, isn't it his business so long as he doesn't use it to endanger or destroy other people's property, or otherwise deprive his neighbors of their right to peace and quiet?
Regrettably, the United States has been seduced by this "progressive reform", [albeit to a lesser degree], despite compelling statistical evidence that states which allow citizens to carry handguns have seen their crimes against persons drop in direct proportion to a surge in crimes against property. Apparently criminals are willing to consider career changes, because this strongly suggests that a criminal would rather break into an empty house or car than confront a potentially armed citizen. OTOH, "Home invasions" in Australia have skyrocketed since weapons suitable for personal defense have been confiscated. Here is a link with some interesting statistics, and here is another with graphs.
Re: restrictions upon encryption
Unfortunately, Australia, the United States, and 32 other countries are signatories of the Wassenaar Agreement. The agreement to subject commercial cryptosystems of moderate strength to inspection is not a big restriction, [and I certainly don't mind bans on exports to the "T7" (the so-called "Terrorist 7")], but it is stupid to pass a law which is impossible to enforce, unless that is not your motive, which in fact is the case. The licensing system is enough to stop and harrass a lot of commercial ventures, which in effect explains why most people do not use, or even know how to use encryption for email, while they will buy and use an envelope when using the post. [Trust me, I have worked on both the Berstein and Junger Federal lawsuits which challenged the U.S. export restrictions on crypto.]
These could hardly be considered "conservative" policies, but "Conservative" is a very tricky label so maybe this is the source of the confusion. Read on if you are interested in why I say this.
A Primer on Conservatism for the Uninitiated:
If there are any traditional "conservatives" (i.e. paleo-conservatives) still living in industrialized countries who believe in Divine Right Monarchy, Theocracy, or Aristocratic rule, I'd like to know what they are eating and who their doctor is. [Maybe the Queen of England or the odd Romanoff, but otherwise these guys are extinct.] They can still be found, even dominate, "traditional" (i.e. primitive, non-industrialized) societies, which are particularly prevalent in fundamentalist "Islamic republics" and kingdoms. That is because these political systems are based upon the assumption that the average individual is not fit for self-government.
As noted by others, modern "conservatives" [neo-conservatives] are not the same animal. These conservatives seek to retain the status quo of modern civilization, which means that today's conservatives ironically would have been considered "liberals" when these terms were invented. This is because modern conservatives seek to preserve the individual-centric reforms of the Enlightenment, many of which are currently under attack by modern leftist movements.
Generally speaking, traditionally "liberal" reforms concern themselves with the balance of power between the individual and the state. In practice, the reforms promote the protection of individual rights as the principle aim of good government, and a government of limited lawful powers to ensure that the state does not become oppressive to these rights.
True conservatives, (i.e., conservatives whose personal beliefs are logically consistent with their professed ideology, aka: "philosophically consistent") believe in rights as inherent and involiate individual property, which is far more than a mere privilege. (Privileges are granted at the behest of another and can be limited or recinded at any time by the grantor.)
But modern conservatives split into two camps based on competing theories as to what constitutes a legitimate right, resulting in two different subsets of "rights". These two groups are often called "Libertarians" and "social conservatives".
Contrary to leftist propaganda, all philosophically consistent conservatives would agree that every person is entitled to equal treatment under the law, and most would accept individual "property rights" as the practical cornerstone of any system which seeks to protect individual rights, [as opposed to mere privileges] because property rights are a useful analogy for defining what "belongs" to the individual and is therefore worthy of the law's protection. Therefore it follows that most conservatives support the distribution of wealth via mechanisms of merit such as the free market, as opposed to by birth (aristocracy) or social class (socialism), and would also support your basic civil liberties which promote human dignity, such as freedom of speech, religion, assembly, etc. Libertarian conservatives would interpret these basic freedoms as absolutes, providing their practice does not result in the destruction of another's property (think practice of religion so long as your god doesn't require you to burn down your neighbor's house.)
This limitation is philosophically consistent because a libertarian defines all rights as "negative", in that they are designed to protect you from the actions of others. Therefore any supposed "right" which would allow you to violate the rights of another cannot really be considered a right. This is why conservatives in general and libertarians in particular are so opposed to so-called "positive rights", (such as the claimed right to a job, or housing, or medical care), because these programs require that a legal duty be imposed upon other citizens to pay for these services if an individual is unable or unwilling to pay for them himself, which in turn would require an involuntary redistribution of wealth via taxation for an "illegitimate" government purpose, (aka: a violation of a citizen's right to the "fruits of his labor".)
Therefore libertarians are correct to point out that all positive rights are philosophically *inconsistent* because they require that a supposedly involiate right be "balanced" against another suposedly involiate right. As an aside, the UN's Universal Declaration of the Human Rights is chock full of positive rights. Libertarians also extend the penumbra of rights to so-called "victimless crimes" such as private drug use and prostitution, providing that it does not impact the rights of another. Contrary to reputation, Libertarians support taxation for traditional government duties which they deem to be consistent with their view of individual property rights, such as adjudicating disputes via the courts, protecting property via the police, and providing for the military defense of the nation.
Social conservatives, on the other hand, define rights via a concept of "natural law", which far older than the Enlightenment. (What follows is only intended to be an approachable definition of natural law.) Natural law is usually based on the premise that there is a Divinity which desires justice, so it can be said that he wants humanity to do what is "good" and that humanity can do good if it discovers what this natural law is.
Philosophically consistent social conservatives accept most of the liberal reforms of the enlightenment as "good" because they affirm the dignity of the individual, whom post enlightenment religions are concerned with.
Under this view, it is legitimate for the state to encourage morality which is consistant with natural law. Therefore rights are only there to protect the "good" and no right which violates natural law can be legitimate. Therefore restrictions on speech, private behavior (drug use, abortion etc.) might be permissable.
Natural law can appear arbitrary because it seems so dependant on particular religious interpretations, but in actuality most religions agree on basic concepts of justice such as prohibitions against murder, adultery, stealing, etc. Furthermore, natural law has one rhetorical advantage that is difficult to dismiss: By declaring all humans as worthy of respect and dignity, it preempts and removes from the table any discussion of whether human beings deserve to be treated with dignity. This is a powerful safeguard when one considers that secular regimes of the 20th century which claimed the right to subvert the individual to the needs of the state resulted in the deaths of approximately 100 million individuals. (including an estimated 60 million who starved when Chairman Mao came up with the incredibly brilliant idea to press food producing peasants into industrial factory work during the "Great Leap Forward").
In opposition to conservatives, modern "leftist" movements span a spectrum of belief in the need for state intervention in the affairs of the individual, a belief that grew out of an (anti) intellectual counter-revolution to the Enlightenment, (i.e., the "Romantic" Age), which among other things sought to validate and elevate emotion as more important than reason, [with reason being the original justification for a system of individual rights based on merit, as opposed to birth or circumstances].
Some may disagree as to the actual demarcations, but this spectrum could fairly be characterized as ranging from totalitarian intervention (communism), to regular and systematic intervention (socialism), to occasional intervention "when needed" (modern liberals, who are probably better identified as "progressives".) In the end, the consistently unifying premise of these belief systems is a fundamental lack of faith in the individual to do what is right, and the resultant need for "the right people" come into power and set things "right" so that the poor hapless masses don't get screwed. The fact that every serious attempt to do so has ended in box cars and concentration camps is lost on its adherents, because good intentions are all that one needs to qualify as the "right" kind of leader.
And that is why I am a conservative and Australia certainly is not.
I cited the webserver and the other examples as an illustration of how far the application availability has come in the few months since it has been released. This variety is only possible because the devices OS is a real Linux OS, not a weak subset of its established namesake.
But, since it is so trivial to run a webserver on your casio watch, when will you send me the link to the IIS port for a wince device?
Oh- That's right, you can't, because:
1) Wince is a stripped down version of a bloated OS which can't run IIS natively.
2) IIS is a bloated intrusion assistance device.
3) You can't port it because you lack the source code.
Oh Ok, how about I make it easy and just ask for the Apache port? That will never happen either because:
1) wince is still a stripped down piece of crippleware that can barely run a 12(?) function "PocketExcel" spreadsheet.
Ooooh. What a powerful brick you got, and for only $500. Where's the keyboard again?
Bundled Games:
- Go
- Asteroids clone (3d version, not the original)
- Solitaire clone
- Snake (Tron)
- Minehunt clone
- Scrabble clone
- Mindbreaker (think Mastermind)
Other famous games which have been tried:
- Quake
- Quake II (runs low on memory)
And as for apps, RTFPost, it is a *real*, fully-functional OS, so memory space is the only limitation as to what apps can be ported. In general, most console based apps can be ported directly. Other's have already ported an X server, so that opens up that set of apps.
In short, the SL5000D has surpassed in one month's time the pitiful selection of applications which the wince platform has struggled to attract for the last four years. *cough cough* Suck it up you MS toady.
A keyboard. A decent means of handwriting recognition. I've used IPaq's handwriting rec. It blows. Try a Zaurus SL5000D for comparison, which offers handwriting rec., pickboards, a virtual keyboard, and a real, live, retractable, built in RIM style two thumb hunt and peck keyboard.
BTW, the Office support on a palmOS for both Word and Excel via a product like "Documents To Go" or "QuickOffice" is superior to MS's own built-in pocket variants, and on 1/4 the power. How pathetic is that?
[Hint: check out a Zaurus SL5000D or SL5500, with built in, retractable RIM style keyboard running a real desktop OS, Embedix Linux - kernel 2.4.6, as opposed to a stripped down subset of the Window's API. I am running a full blown Opera browser with Javascript support, and a Python 2.0 environment, and (just for shit and giggles), a webserver on my PDA. Others have even gotten Quake II to run on the platform. --Try that with wince.]
Palm has 60% of the marketshare by itself. The second largest competitor, Handspring, owns 25%, which is 5 times more than Ipaq's or Jornadas, respectively, despite the fact that they have been in existance for several years before the Handspring arrived.
The only one getting killed are tech analysts spewing ridiculous obituaries for a platform that has a $200-400 price advantage during a consumer tech downturn.
Besides, it struck me as funny since the French make such a big deal over translating technical jargon of an English origin into native terms, (which one's aren't?), and I have heard that they are lagging far behind the ever growing tidal wave of buzzwords.
Secondly, no economically savy republican would believe that increasing prison populations would be good for the economy, for the following reasons:
Prisons are expensive. It costs more for U.S. taxpayers to send a prisoner to Prison than it does to send a student to an ivy league college.
"enslaved" workforces are not economically efficient, because it is the "army game" in another context. The sergeant, in this case the prison guard (who is hardly motivated to make the contractor money) tries to get the private, i.e. the prisoner to work as hard as possible, while the private tries to get away with as little work as possible. An economy based on slavery always loses to an economy based on workers who trade their efforts for pay because they are better motivated because they have the opportunity for both advancement and better pay.
Prison run businesses are partnerships with the state. The state might be a good customer, but it is an inefficient business partner, and organizations which are partly state run are less efficient and flexible than purely private sector organizations.
welfare has been carved back to workfare in most states, (thank God), so the goal is to turn welfare recipients into productive taxpayers anyways. These programs have met with considerable success across the country, and are probably the most siginificant policy change of the entire 90's decade.
other things that your employer is required to pay for you (i.e. he would pay a lower rate if your weren't there, so it won't show up in your paystub) include: unemployment insurance and workman's compensation insurance.
Medicare/Medicaid (4%?) are social medicine programs that U.S. employees don't need because most good jobs (i.e. post college white collar/unionized blue collar) have far better health/life/disability insurance than the state run programs, which they do are excluded from anyways.
Capital gains tax is also a big one. Most U.S. workers are owners of taxable securities, a habit which the smart ones learn from their 401k's. Capital gains mean that you risk your money, which in turn gives business the funding to create economic opportunity, and the government taxes you if you happen to actually have backed a business which does well.
Also, regarding the deductability of state taxes, there is a difference between a deduction and a "below the line" tax break. A deduction simply lessens your taxable income so you pay less taxes. A "below the line" tax break actually comes off the tax bill itself, which is usually a much greater percentage of savings. You may have less taxable income, but most states (I know that TX, AZ, FL, and possibly Alaska, do not) do have income taxes of between 4-8%.
Municipalities also exact an income tax based at 1-2%, to say nothing of the property taxes we pay if you are a residence owner to fund a very expensive and very innefficient public school system. (Most people don't know that private schools spend far less per student than their neighborhood public schools.)
And he is also right about the tax credits. Most tax credits phase out very quickly, so that most of the middle class can't take them. That means they have to pay for services (like health insurance, food, rent that other's get breaks on.)
Long story short, this is not about being stingy with the "less fortunate", it is about pulling your own weight and contributing to society. Most people who are poor (i.e. most are able-bodied and of decent intelligence) have made choices in the past which have made them poor, and they refuse to change their lifestyle in the present to increase the likelyhood that they will succeed.
When you live in a society as fluid and dynamic as the United States, being poor is usually a choice. Its sound's funny, but it's true. If you can get cable, nintendo, good clothes, medical insurance and stuff yourself to the gills with food, your far better off than most people in the world, especially from a historical point of view. There are no poor people in the United States.
TWOD == The War On Drugs. But you've got a good point on the non-voting part. I've never actually heard of a good reason *for* the War on Drugs. Thanks, you've broadened my mind.
Belgium won't have a high tech industry then. You will sing a different tune once you a start working for a living and watching 50+% of your earnings going to deadbeats and the politicians which live off them.