Playing different regions games on your Xbox, PS2 or a DVD movie, hell, the whole chipping concept, using your Xbox joystick on your computer and visa versa, ripping DVD's, coping cd's, using a CueCat to scan your own barcodes, using a standalone email device with a different internet provider bypassing the monthly fee, ink jet refill kits, taking apart and reusing a disposible digital camera, pringles can for an antennea, using your wireless card as an access point, using GMail storage as a filesystem, changing hard coded default passwords, overclocking your MB or processor, removing resistor R232 from your cd burner to make it a 16x model instead of an 8x, flashing bios to get extra functionality of the next model, soldering a jumper to enable an extra feature. People will always attempt to bypass, modify, or extend the functionality of something. All it takes is one smart person to figure it out and let others know. I look at things from a different prespective. I do not view it as a company "letting" you do something with your hardware,...
[emphasis added --RGA]
But, of course, when you use GMail storage for something that Google does not intend, you are not doing something with your hardware. You are doing something with someone else's hardware (and that is what makes it unlike all of the other cases that you cited).
it doesn't matter if they just would like you not to do it.
what matters is: are they going to do anything about it?
And this is all that matters because...?
Because all that matters in life is what you, personally, can get away with?
Because it's alright to be an asshole unless you get caught?
Because other people's wishes about their own property are only worth respecting if they're willing to punish you for not respecting them?
I think the technical concept here is very neat. But when your neat hack needs someone else's computer to run on, it seems to me like you ought to be at least a little considerate of the other person's wishes. Whether or not they are actually going to police your behavior on that count.
This is silly. The reason that Mozilla suite is usually referred to as a "complete Internet suite" (and thus unlike separate applications such as Firefox and Thunderbird) is the way that the web browser, mail reader, IRC client, etc. are all bundled together in the interface. If all that you mean by "complete Internet suite" is the fact that they are packaged together in one download (or, in the case of IE/OE, without having to download anything), then this has nothing at all to do with any design decision that goes into the software whatsoever; it has to do with how downloads are packaged.
If you think the "average user" cares an awful lot about that, then why not just produce a ZIP archive with the Firefox and the Thunderbird install packages together in it? Or a CD-ROM that has them both on it? (Oh, wait, Mozilla already does that.)
What? Internet Exploder comes with a whole damn OS!
Given the degree to which Internet Exploder is entangled with the operating system, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to say from the standpoint of system architecture. But it misses the essential point--which was not about system architecture, but rather about user experience.
FooBarWidget's argument was about what "the average user wants"; s/he said that this anonymous user 'does not care about "the unix way". They want an easy to use and as complete as possible product.' That's not a point about how browsers and e-mail clients are programmed but rather about how people use them. The claim seems to be that people expect, and want, a web browser and an e-mail client that are (as in the Mozilla suite) treated as two aspects of a larger program. But that is not how the "average user" actually uses e-mail and web browsing; the average user actually uses two separate programs (IE and OE).
That's the only point being urged here. Debates about the best way to program browsers and e-mail clients are usually not very well resolved by what the "average user" wants, since they tend (with good reason!) to be indifferent to system internals.
The average user does not care about "the unix way". They want an easy to use and as complete as possible product.
Of course, this neglects the simple empirical fact that the current dominant web browser on all those desktop systems that don't run Unix is Internet Exploder--which also does not come with a built-in e-mail client, newsreader, chat program, blender, washer and dryer.
And the most popular e-mail client on those systems (Outlook Express--shudder) does not come with a built-in browser, either.
The way that Mozilla (suite, not Firefox or Thunderbird) currently does things is neither the Unix way nor the Microsoft way nor anything except the Netscape way. And the sooner the days of the old Netscape suite come to a close, the better.
Konqueror's web shortcuts: type "gg: foo" in the location bar, and it will search google for "foo", it's configurable (define your own) and has a lot of things already. Opera & Firefox both have a seperate box for it, but I find that less efficient, and as far as I can find, Opera doesn't allow it to be configured for other sites.
N.B.: This feature is already included in Opera 7.5 (I don't know whether it was in previous versions or not); the syntax is just slightly different. Go to the address field and put in "g foo" and press enter; there's your Google search from the address bar. (There are also keywords for all the other search engines that Opera supports, which are listed in Preferences > Search.)
a fun tidbit about Eiffel, because one of the teachers at my school loves it: when you compile Eiffel code, it compiles into C++ and then into assembly, so there's nothing Eiffel has over C++ other than another layer of abstraction and a longer compile time.
You might as well argue that there is no reason to use anything other than raw machine code, because after all, that's what everything is ultimately compiled into, so there's nothing that C++ has over machine code "other than another layer of abstraction and a non-zero compile time."
The reason that you don't use raw machine code, of course, is that it's a pain in the ass, and in most cases a completely unnecessary one; not just in the sense that it takes multiple memorized instruction codes just to get anything done, but also in the sense that it makes it much more difficult to understand programs of any size or complexity than it is in a higher-level language, and consequently greatly increases the costs and labor involved in minor details such as testing, debugging, and maintaining. One could (and many have) argued that C++ also has significant deficiencies in these areas, because of non-existence, incomplete or ill-conceived implementations of features such as design-by-contract, exception handling, inheritance, etc.--in which case using a language such as Eiffel to provide a helpful "layer of abstraction" may very well end up producing better code that's more likely to be correct, easier to test, and easier to debug.
Whether Eiffel actually has the virtues often claimed for it, and whether these virtues outweigh its vices compared to other languages, is another question for another day. But the "tidbit" here cuts no ice; it's just irrelevant sniping at a particular compiler implementation.
In a previous post Shakrai objected to my use of third-person pronouns to describe the agents of the government, and opined that in the United States "we" (including myself, I suppose) are the government. I pointed out that this seemed a bit strange since "we" don't make the laws, and "we" don't enforce the laws, but rather people like "my" Congressman (for whom I did not vote) and the mayor, governor, and President (none of whom I voted for), and since there are lots of very well known difficulties with trying to exercise meaningful democratic controls over these people who are alleged to rule on our behalf. This point was breezed over to make the following snarky remark:
It's supposed to be our fault now that you don't vote? Or do you? If you do vote then it doesn't matter if you voted for your Congressman or not -- you are a constituent and they are supposed to take your opinion and ideas seriously. Apathy of your sort will be the death of democracy.
This strikes me as a bit odd. Certainly "my" Congressman is supposed to represent me whether I voted for him or against him, and even if I did not vote at all. You might think that that means he is "supposed to take your opinion and ideas seriously"; I do not know what to say to this except to recommend you try to take that "supposed to" to Washington and see how far it gets you. As a matter of fact I do vote, and contribute money and volunteer for candidates I support, and I even stood for office on a third party ticket in 2002. The simple fact is, however, that while the government is far more accountable to the public here than it is in many countries on the face of the earth, the civics-class myth that "we" are the government is an immensely silly abstraction from political reality.
Nor does it matter. For as I argued earlier, theft is not justified even if everyone gets together and 57% of them vote in favor of stealing your money. The only issue that is relevant is whether you said it was O.K. for the money to be taken or not. (And if you did say that, it wouldn't be taxation. It would be a fee, or a voluntary donation.) These points, too, are breezed over, in an apparent effort to guilt trip those of us who aren't interested in surrendering tribute to the State using all the "benefits" we get from it:
How about education of your follow citizens (who will support you once you retire), law enforcement (who will protect you from the real muggers of the world), the roads or sidewalks you use, the military that defends you from foreign aggression, the labor department that protects you from unscrupulous employers, etc etc etc.
There is much to argue over here. For example, I think it's unrealistic at best to claim that the main function of the police force is protecting me from violent crime rather than, say, pursuing an irrational and wasteful War on Drugs (a policy of violence against non-violent drug users, which I find morally repellant, and yet am forced to fund). I also think it's pretty silly to claim that the main function of the military, currently stationed abroad in over 100 states, is to protect you or I from foreign aggression; it seems far more involved in committing foreign aggression. (Again, these are policies that I find absolutely repugnant, but which I am forced to fund.) Nor do I want my fellow citizens to support me when I retire; nor do I want the labor department to place regulations on potential employers on my behalf.
But again, all of this is immaterial. When someone takes your money by force, that is robbery. And robbery does not become justified even if the robber turns around and uses some of the money to provide some services that you want. Because the nature of taxation is such that they will take your money whether you want what they give you or not. (Hence, the comparison to muggers.) Given tha
Shakrai asks whether the government takes all my money in taxes or not. Of course it does not; no government could do such a thing and survive, any more than a parasite that kills its host could. Like many people I pay a little in income tax every year and most of my taxes come out in the form of FICA withholdings, gasoline taxes, sales taxes, etc. That doesn't mean, however, that I think theft is O.K. as long as it's a little. (This also doesn't have anything in particular to do with the thought experiment. Do you always carry all of your money in your wallet?)
Now let's move on to substantive points. Shakrai objects to my point that the government "provides" me with roads and military and cops whether I ask for them or not, and that therefore the "services" it offers don't undermine the description of taxation as theft. Here's how s/he objects to it:
Your [sic] using words like "the" or "they" to talk about the Government. Perhaps you've forgotten about the fact that
you are the Government in the United States and "they" work for you. If you don't like what "they" are doing then perhaps you should write a letter to your Congressman or vote for somebody else.
People who oppose the expansiveness of the modern State are often accused of being wild-eyed, unrealistic radicals. But I've never seen any proposal nearly so starry-eyed and out of touch with reality than this. Apparently I am to believe that, in spite of the fact that "my" Congressman (who I didn't vote for), and not I, makes the laws; even though the mayor and the governor and the President (none of whom I voted for), and not I, chooses who to hire and either directly, or through their handpicked appointees, makes out the employment contracts in government work; even though my strongest method of influence over these people is apparently to write them a letter and ask them to pretty please stop taking the money that they force me to give them; in spite of all the well-documented and heavily discussed problems associated with campaign financing, special-interest lobbying, party bureaucracy, institutional inertia, ballot access restrictions, voting rights restrictions, first-past-the-post voting, redistricting, endless incumbency, and every other way in which professional politicians handpick their seats and keep out competition, I, personally, am in fact an effective part of the Government of the United States--and "the boss" of all the various official government functionaries no less!--and therefore I am responsible for paying whatever taxes they decide to assign me on my behalf. It seems to me that this civics-class picture of how the polity works is somewhat lacking in nuance and accuracy.
But let's put all that aside for the moment. Let's pretend that, instead of the system we have now, we had a direct democracy in which I and all my neighbors could directly vote on the tax rate. I think that this would result in much lower tax rates than we have today--most people are notoriously much less interested in raising taxes than professional politicians. But if the majority did vote to levy taxes, would that change its moral status at all? I don't see how it would. The nature of a tax--as opposed to a voluntary fee--is that it is taken from you whether you want it to be taken from you or not, and that it is spent on things whether you want it to be spent on those things or not.
So back to your wallet. Let's say that everyone in the neighborhood gets together, and 57% of us decide that we are going to take all the money out of your wallet and use it to buy you a lot of food. Will the fact that 57% of us voted in favor of it make it something other than theft, if you were opposed to the plan? (Remember, we will take the money out of your wallet whether or not you want us to.)
If that is still theft, then how is taxation, even in a directly democratic state, different in
An AC characterizes 'cheating' on your taxes as keeping what belongs to you, and taxation as theft. Shakrai replies:
Stealing? So those highways that you drive on to work and that military/law enforcement that defends you from outside aggression were stolen from you?
People say this all the time when anyone (libertarians, anti-statist Leftists, conservatives, whoever) complain about taxes. But it hardly seems an apt response. Since the government didn't ask me (or, mutatis mutandis, the AC Shakrai is replying to) whether or not I want those roads built, or the military and police doing what they are doing, and since it'll take the same amount of money whether I want it to go to these things or not, that hardly seems to undermine the AC's point.
Think of it this way: if I take all the money out of your wallet one day, and then use it to buy you a lot of food (in a complete coincidence, I happen to buy it all from a grocery store that my brother owns and that gives me kickbacks for my purchase), the fact that I used your money to buy you a lot of food doesn't mean that I didn't steal it from you after all. It just means that I used the stolen money to give you some stuff that you may or may not want.
(Since people are so hung up on roads, I'll gladly make a deal with the government: I won't drive on the roads ever again. I'll walk or telecommute for everything I need. In return, I don't have to pay any taxes ever again. I'll gladly take this deal if the government will. If the government won't take it, then it's pretty hard to see how what they are doing is any different from theft.)/p>
Simon cites three things that Google AdWords does right, compared to other web advertising: that they are (1) "non-intrusive, they don't detract from the page layout", (2) "have minimal information in them - just enough to tell you what the product is, and no more", and (3) "Well-positioned. If I search for electric chainsaws, I get ads related to electric chainsaws. Probably."
All of these are positive features of AdWords ads. But I think they also pass over the central fact that makes AdWords successful: they are on Google. What I mean is this: AdWords ads, unlike almost every other form of web advertising, are located on a site that you go to when you are looking for something. There's no better time to let you know about a product or service that's available than when you are looking for it, or something closely related to it. It shouldn't be any surprise that click-through rates are orders of magnitude higher than when ads are slapped on sites that you have gone to to read news, or do other things that don't have a lot to do with buying or looking for product information.
Many people misinterpret the US government as a democracy when in fact it is a democratic republic. One of the strenghts is that people are believed to have unalienable rights, rights given to them by their creator that cannot be taken away by any law. The point of this is not religious, but rather that no one can take away unalienable [loc.gov] rights. Thus the formation of a body (the US goverment) to protect these rights, versus in the case of many systems (ie a democracy), a government that grants rights.
This seems to me confused. The issue here is surely not that the United States has "republican" as well as "democratic" institutions. Restricting legislative authority to a representative body (such as Congress or a Parliament) isn't what protects fundamental rights from being rescinded on political whim. It's the fact that (some of) those rights are protected by the Constitution which does that.
If the government had the same "republican" institutions that it does now, but without any Constitutional protections of inalienable rights, then there would be no legal barrier to the enforcement of those rights being rescinded by a simple majority vote of Congress. (and that is in fact what happened in, e.g., the case of slavery, before the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution).
If, on the other hand, we altered the Constitution so as to approve or repeal legislation by a simple plebiscite instead of by the vote of an elected legislature, then this would not change the fact that the Constitution protects (some) fundamental rights, and it would not give any legal authority for enforcement of fundamental rights to be rescinded by majority vote.
Rights are safeguarded from legislative fiat by Constitutional protection, not who is invested with legislative authority.
hmmmmm.... you take a little of fact, elaborate it and blend it in with an unconnected argument.
This is not how I would describe the situation; I would say, rather, that I was responding to a particular thesis (that tyrannies arise from manipulation of a "popular base," either through the use of democratic institutions or by other means) with some discussion of what actually happened in the historical situations that were taken to be examples of this general proposition. The upshot of this was that the generalization was, in fact, false--at least of these cases. It is false of those cases because those regimes did not rise to power by manipulating the power of a "popular base"; they rose to power through ruthless antidemocratic politics, the frequent use of violence and intimidation to suppress dissent, and in general a concerted effort to sidestep or controvert what the "popular base" wanted. I then connected these observations to the original claim that "democracy can be dangerous" because it can encourage the rise of demagogic tyrannies; I take them to undermine that claim. That is what we call "responding to a prior claim with evidence."
Of course, you may not think that my evidence actually supports the conclusion that I think it does; in that case it is bad evidence. But to show this would take a bit of argument and discussion of the points taken as evidence, which you have not (yet) given here.
You are either a political science student in desperate need of a thesis or plain ignoring conjuncture.
I am, in fact, neither a political science student nor in need of a thesis. I have no idea what the word "conjuncture" is supposed to mean; so I suppose I will have to withhold judgment on whether or not I am ignoring it until or unless you clarify just what it is you're trying to say.
I think his point was that in any scenario where a popular base can affect control (such as during a civil war or revolution), a charismatic leader (such as Lenin) can maintain power. At that point, you have a popular dictatorship, where the leader just spews out enough propoganda to keep everyone on his side, even while he commits atrocities.
But again, this seems to me quite a distortion of what actually happened. Many people seem to think that what happened in the Russian Revolution is that everyone got up and kicked out the Czar and then the Provisional Government and then installed Lenin as absolute dictator by more or less popular consent. But this is not at all what happened. The Oktober Revolution was launched by a pretty wide coalition of different forces -- including the Bolsheviks, and also including many other socialist, populist, and anarchist groups. The immediate aftermath of the Revolution was the reorganization of the Russian Republic into numerous, decentralized, fairly (though not perfectly) democratic communities through the institutions of local soviets (workers' councils) and other forms of popular organizations. The dominance of the top-down, centralized rule of Communist Party bosses -- and the Bolshevik faction in particular -- and Lenin most of all was a gradual, and at times quite brutal, process of undermining and destroying these democratic institutions and solidifying power in the hands of Lenin and his ideological cronies. The process was accelerated by the Russian Civil War, due to Bolshevik control (especially through the direction of Trotsky) over the Red Army, and their willingness to use "National Security" as a pretext for crushing internal dissent (sound familiar?). This was finalized with acts such as the bloody suppression of the Kronstadt uprising (1921) and the suppression of the Workers' Opposition (1922) (in which Lenin pushed through a resolution at the 10th Party Congress that banned all factions within the Party). It was also accompanied with the creation of the Cheka secret police and the other instruments of internal repression.
The point here is that democracy in Russia did not die of natural causes; it was murdered--and it was not murdered by the will of the people, who had spent the past few years since the Revolution building their own local democratic institutions, but rather by the will of Communist Party bureaucrats who, in the course of the Civil War, had accumulated control over much of the military and were quite willing to use it against those who stood in their way.
(A similar point, incidentally, must be made in connection with the oft-repeated claim that no less a tyrant than Hitler was democratically elected. The problem with the claim is that it is not true: although the Nazis initially gained a large number of seats in the Reichstag through democratic means, they never controlled anywhere near a majority, and neither Hitler nor the Nazis ever achieved a majority vote. Hitler gained the Chancellorship through a legal appointment by President Hindenburg through the use of hardball politics with his allies on the Right; he used that position to gain dictatorial powers and suppress democratic institutions and civil liberties after the Reichstag fire in 1933, and proceeded to simply expel all the members of the major opposition party -- the Communists -- from the Reichstag, and had most of them jailed or killed. That is how he got his "majority" of the legislature to vote for dictatorial powers in March 1933.)
The general point here is that -- contrary to Plato's argument in the Republic, and contrary to popular mishandlings of history -- tyranny is not the natural result of decaying democracy. It is something that tyrants impose, usually with violence and usually by going to great effort to sidestep or simply crush democratic institutions. (That doesn't mean that robust democratic institutions are a silver bullet for peace, freedom and prosperity. No political institutions are; hum
Because, as Plato pointed out over 2000 years ago, democracy is a dangerous thing. The populace can be taken advantage of - note the cultural revolution was supported by the majority when millions were killed, so was the Russian revolution which supported Lenin's oppression and later Stalin's.
This seems like an odd tack to take in the argument--since neither China during the Cultural Revolution nor the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin had substantive democratic institutions. In point of fact, Lenin and Stalin and Mao each in their time took deliberate actions (such as the brutal suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, the dismantling of the Workers' Opposition, the creation of the secret police and the gulag, and, well, the Cultural Revolution) to crush local democratic power, concentrate power in the hands of party bosses, and create a totalitarian environment in which people do not dare to express dissent for fear of hearing a knock on the door in the middle of the night.
(In such an environment, by the way, it also seems to me to be rather tendentious, to say the least, to claim to have any clear knowledge of what people thought about the rulers -- since part of the purpose of the totalitarian apparatus was to keep people from honestly saying what they though about things.)
I thoroughly recommend you read some of the descriptions of the power struggles in post-Revolutionary Russia, such as Emma Goldman's My Disillusionment in Russia or The Workers' Opposition.
Actually, it wasn't. The number of people in the anti-Vietnam war movement was far greater.
By what measure? By most standards the largest demonstrations against the Vietnam War were the marches on New York in April, 1967, and on Washington, DC in 1969 and 1971. Each of these marches drew an estimated 500,000 people. In January 2003, about 500,000 marched in Washington, DC; in February 2003, about 500,000 marched in New York. Over a million (!) marched in London and Rome. It's worth noting that the Vietnam-era protests took years of bloody conflict and hard organizing to reach the levels they reached at their peak; organizing against the Iraq war drew unprecendented numbers before the war had even begun.
This is not to slight the work of those who poured themselves into the struggle against the Vietnam War. (Many of them, after all, are now pouring themselves into the struggle against the on-going war/occupation of Iraq.) We just have better tools now than we did then, and it has made a major difference to the dynamics of antiwar organizing. To miss this requires a lack of attention to the real progress in anti-war organizing that has been made over the past 30 years.
One argument is that yes, geeks do not socialize. More specifically, the author argues that the Internet is inherently detrimental to social debate:
Another shortcoming of the Internet is that it lends itself to individual rather than communal activities. It "is about people sitting in front of a terminal, barely interacting," says one Laotian researcher. The Web is less well-suited to fostering political discussion and debate because, unlike radio or even television, it does not generally bring people together in one house or one room.
This seems like a rather odd statement to make. It seems even more odd to single out as insightful on a collaborative news website read, and contributed to, by thousands of people. I am at the moment sitting in front of a computer terminal not talking to anyone. I am also talking to people. Not anyone in my house to be sure, but to thousands of other politically-concerned people.
This seems the precise reverse of the confusion that goes on in many discussions about television and radio. In both cases it is a matter of what is seen and what is not seen; but the focus is reversed. Many criticisms of radio and television as media focus on the "passive," one-way nature of the medium. As the TNR article quite rightly points out, this is nothing more than an optical illusion--one that ignores what is going on around the medium and focuses only on what is going on in it:
In Rangoon, the capital of Burma--one of the most repressive nations on earth--groups of men often crowd around radios in tea shops to clandestinely listen to news from the BBC's Burmese service and then discuss what they've heard. Similarly, in bars and cafes in China, people gather around televisions to watch and discuss the news.
But Kurlantzick commits the reverse error when it comes to surveying an Internet cafe--he puts narrow focus on what is going on around the medium and completely neglects what's going on in it! It seems to me--and, growing up on BBSs and IRC as I did, it always has--that a considerable amount of Internet activity, and certainly most of the culturally and politically interesting Internet activity, has to do with fostering communities and discussion, not with just sitting around and leafing through an endless library of pamphlets.
That doesn't mean that these online communities and online communication are a silver bullet for undermining tyranny. Of course they aren't; nothing in the world is. But while this article is thoughtful and raises interesting points on several points, it seems like Mr. Kurlantzick would have come out with a different, and more nuanced take, if he had some inkling of how people use the Internet other than as a way to read traditional magazines like The New Republic. (It's understandable that that's where his focus would lie, but understandable distortions are still distortions.)
Slashdot Mirror
But, of course, when you use GMail storage for something that Google does not intend, you are not doing something with your hardware. You are doing something with someone else's hardware (and that is what makes it unlike all of the other cases that you cited).
And this is all that matters because...?
Because all that matters in life is what you, personally, can get away with?
Because it's alright to be an asshole unless you get caught?
Because other people's wishes about their own property are only worth respecting if they're willing to punish you for not respecting them?
I think the technical concept here is very neat. But when your neat hack needs someone else's computer to run on, it seems to me like you ought to be at least a little considerate of the other person's wishes. Whether or not they are actually going to police your behavior on that count.
This is silly. The reason that Mozilla suite is usually referred to as a "complete Internet suite" (and thus unlike separate applications such as Firefox and Thunderbird) is the way that the web browser, mail reader, IRC client, etc. are all bundled together in the interface. If all that you mean by "complete Internet suite" is the fact that they are packaged together in one download (or, in the case of IE/OE, without having to download anything), then this has nothing at all to do with any design decision that goes into the software whatsoever; it has to do with how downloads are packaged.
If you think the "average user" cares an awful lot about that, then why not just produce a ZIP archive with the Firefox and the Thunderbird install packages together in it? Or a CD-ROM that has them both on it? (Oh, wait, Mozilla already does that.)
Given the degree to which Internet Exploder is entangled with the operating system, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to say from the standpoint of system architecture. But it misses the essential point--which was not about system architecture, but rather about user experience.
FooBarWidget's argument was about what "the average user wants"; s/he said that this anonymous user 'does not care about "the unix way". They want an easy to use and as complete as possible product.' That's not a point about how browsers and e-mail clients are programmed but rather about how people use them. The claim seems to be that people expect, and want, a web browser and an e-mail client that are (as in the Mozilla suite) treated as two aspects of a larger program. But that is not how the "average user" actually uses e-mail and web browsing; the average user actually uses two separate programs (IE and OE).
That's the only point being urged here. Debates about the best way to program browsers and e-mail clients are usually not very well resolved by what the "average user" wants, since they tend (with good reason!) to be indifferent to system internals.
Of course, this neglects the simple empirical fact that the current dominant web browser on all those desktop systems that don't run Unix is Internet Exploder--which also does not come with a built-in e-mail client, newsreader, chat program, blender, washer and dryer.
And the most popular e-mail client on those systems (Outlook Express--shudder) does not come with a built-in browser, either.
The way that Mozilla (suite, not Firefox or Thunderbird) currently does things is neither the Unix way nor the Microsoft way nor anything except the Netscape way. And the sooner the days of the old Netscape suite come to a close, the better.
N.B.: This feature is already included in Opera 7.5 (I don't know whether it was in previous versions or not); the syntax is just slightly different. Go to the address field and put in "g foo" and press enter; there's your Google search from the address bar. (There are also keywords for all the other search engines that Opera supports, which are listed in Preferences > Search.)
HTH.
You might as well argue that there is no reason to use anything other than raw machine code, because after all, that's what everything is ultimately compiled into, so there's nothing that C++ has over machine code "other than another layer of abstraction and a non-zero compile time."
The reason that you don't use raw machine code, of course, is that it's a pain in the ass, and in most cases a completely unnecessary one; not just in the sense that it takes multiple memorized instruction codes just to get anything done, but also in the sense that it makes it much more difficult to understand programs of any size or complexity than it is in a higher-level language, and consequently greatly increases the costs and labor involved in minor details such as testing, debugging, and maintaining. One could (and many have) argued that C++ also has significant deficiencies in these areas, because of non-existence, incomplete or ill-conceived implementations of features such as design-by-contract, exception handling, inheritance, etc.--in which case using a language such as Eiffel to provide a helpful "layer of abstraction" may very well end up producing better code that's more likely to be correct, easier to test, and easier to debug.
Whether Eiffel actually has the virtues often claimed for it, and whether these virtues outweigh its vices compared to other languages, is another question for another day. But the "tidbit" here cuts no ice; it's just irrelevant sniping at a particular compiler implementation.
In a previous post Shakrai objected to my use of third-person pronouns to describe the agents of the government, and opined that in the United States "we" (including myself, I suppose) are the government. I pointed out that this seemed a bit strange since "we" don't make the laws, and "we" don't enforce the laws, but rather people like "my" Congressman (for whom I did not vote) and the mayor, governor, and President (none of whom I voted for), and since there are lots of very well known difficulties with trying to exercise meaningful democratic controls over these people who are alleged to rule on our behalf. This point was breezed over to make the following snarky remark:
This strikes me as a bit odd. Certainly "my" Congressman is supposed to represent me whether I voted for him or against him, and even if I did not vote at all. You might think that that means he is "supposed to take your opinion and ideas seriously"; I do not know what to say to this except to recommend you try to take that "supposed to" to Washington and see how far it gets you. As a matter of fact I do vote, and contribute money and volunteer for candidates I support, and I even stood for office on a third party ticket in 2002. The simple fact is, however, that while the government is far more accountable to the public here than it is in many countries on the face of the earth, the civics-class myth that "we" are the government is an immensely silly abstraction from political reality.
Nor does it matter. For as I argued earlier, theft is not justified even if everyone gets together and 57% of them vote in favor of stealing your money. The only issue that is relevant is whether you said it was O.K. for the money to be taken or not. (And if you did say that, it wouldn't be taxation. It would be a fee, or a voluntary donation.) These points, too, are breezed over, in an apparent effort to guilt trip those of us who aren't interested in surrendering tribute to the State using all the "benefits" we get from it:
There is much to argue over here. For example, I think it's unrealistic at best to claim that the main function of the police force is protecting me from violent crime rather than, say, pursuing an irrational and wasteful War on Drugs (a policy of violence against non-violent drug users, which I find morally repellant, and yet am forced to fund). I also think it's pretty silly to claim that the main function of the military, currently stationed abroad in over 100 states, is to protect you or I from foreign aggression; it seems far more involved in committing foreign aggression. (Again, these are policies that I find absolutely repugnant, but which I am forced to fund.) Nor do I want my fellow citizens to support me when I retire; nor do I want the labor department to place regulations on potential employers on my behalf.
But again, all of this is immaterial. When someone takes your money by force, that is robbery. And robbery does not become justified even if the robber turns around and uses some of the money to provide some services that you want. Because the nature of taxation is such that they will take your money whether you want what they give you or not. (Hence, the comparison to muggers.) Given tha
Now let's move on to substantive points. Shakrai objects to my point that the government "provides" me with roads and military and cops whether I ask for them or not, and that therefore the "services" it offers don't undermine the description of taxation as theft. Here's how s/he objects to it:
People who oppose the expansiveness of the modern State are often accused of being wild-eyed, unrealistic radicals. But I've never seen any proposal nearly so starry-eyed and out of touch with reality than this. Apparently I am to believe that, in spite of the fact that "my" Congressman (who I didn't vote for), and not I, makes the laws; even though the mayor and the governor and the President (none of whom I voted for), and not I, chooses who to hire and either directly, or through their handpicked appointees, makes out the employment contracts in government work; even though my strongest method of influence over these people is apparently to write them a letter and ask them to pretty please stop taking the money that they force me to give them; in spite of all the well-documented and heavily discussed problems associated with campaign financing, special-interest lobbying, party bureaucracy, institutional inertia, ballot access restrictions, voting rights restrictions, first-past-the-post voting, redistricting, endless incumbency, and every other way in which professional politicians handpick their seats and keep out competition, I, personally, am in fact an effective part of the Government of the United States--and "the boss" of all the various official government functionaries no less!--and therefore I am responsible for paying whatever taxes they decide to assign me on my behalf. It seems to me that this civics-class picture of how the polity works is somewhat lacking in nuance and accuracy.
But let's put all that aside for the moment. Let's pretend that, instead of the system we have now, we had a direct democracy in which I and all my neighbors could directly vote on the tax rate. I think that this would result in much lower tax rates than we have today--most people are notoriously much less interested in raising taxes than professional politicians. But if the majority did vote to levy taxes, would that change its moral status at all? I don't see how it would. The nature of a tax--as opposed to a voluntary fee--is that it is taken from you whether you want it to be taken from you or not, and that it is spent on things whether you want it to be spent on those things or not.
So back to your wallet. Let's say that everyone in the neighborhood gets together, and 57% of us decide that we are going to take all the money out of your wallet and use it to buy you a lot of food. Will the fact that 57% of us voted in favor of it make it something other than theft, if you were opposed to the plan? (Remember, we will take the money out of your wallet whether or not you want us to.)
If that is still theft, then how is taxation, even in a directly democratic state, different in
An AC characterizes 'cheating' on your taxes as keeping what belongs to you, and taxation as theft. Shakrai replies:
People say this all the time when anyone (libertarians, anti-statist Leftists, conservatives, whoever) complain about taxes. But it hardly seems an apt response. Since the government didn't ask me (or, mutatis mutandis, the AC Shakrai is replying to) whether or not I want those roads built, or the military and police doing what they are doing, and since it'll take the same amount of money whether I want it to go to these things or not, that hardly seems to undermine the AC's point.
Think of it this way: if I take all the money out of your wallet one day, and then use it to buy you a lot of food (in a complete coincidence, I happen to buy it all from a grocery store that my brother owns and that gives me kickbacks for my purchase), the fact that I used your money to buy you a lot of food doesn't mean that I didn't steal it from you after all. It just means that I used the stolen money to give you some stuff that you may or may not want.
(Since people are so hung up on roads, I'll gladly make a deal with the government: I won't drive on the roads ever again. I'll walk or telecommute for everything I need. In return, I don't have to pay any taxes ever again. I'll gladly take this deal if the government will. If the government won't take it, then it's pretty hard to see how what they are doing is any different from theft.)/p>
Simon cites three things that Google AdWords does right, compared to other web advertising: that they are (1) "non-intrusive, they don't detract from the page layout", (2) "have minimal information in them - just enough to tell you what the product is, and no more", and (3) "Well-positioned. If I search for electric chainsaws, I get ads related to electric chainsaws. Probably."
All of these are positive features of AdWords ads. But I think they also pass over the central fact that makes AdWords successful: they are on Google. What I mean is this: AdWords ads, unlike almost every other form of web advertising, are located on a site that you go to when you are looking for something. There's no better time to let you know about a product or service that's available than when you are looking for it, or something closely related to it. It shouldn't be any surprise that click-through rates are orders of magnitude higher than when ads are slapped on sites that you have gone to to read news, or do other things that don't have a lot to do with buying or looking for product information.
This seems to me confused. The issue here is surely not that the United States has "republican" as well as "democratic" institutions. Restricting legislative authority to a representative body (such as Congress or a Parliament) isn't what protects fundamental rights from being rescinded on political whim. It's the fact that (some of) those rights are protected by the Constitution which does that.
If the government had the same "republican" institutions that it does now, but without any Constitutional protections of inalienable rights, then there would be no legal barrier to the enforcement of those rights being rescinded by a simple majority vote of Congress. (and that is in fact what happened in, e.g., the case of slavery, before the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution).
If, on the other hand, we altered the Constitution so as to approve or repeal legislation by a simple plebiscite instead of by the vote of an elected legislature, then this would not change the fact that the Constitution protects (some) fundamental rights, and it would not give any legal authority for enforcement of fundamental rights to be rescinded by majority vote.
Rights are safeguarded from legislative fiat by Constitutional protection, not who is invested with legislative authority.
This is not how I would describe the situation; I would say, rather, that I was responding to a particular thesis (that tyrannies arise from manipulation of a "popular base," either through the use of democratic institutions or by other means) with some discussion of what actually happened in the historical situations that were taken to be examples of this general proposition. The upshot of this was that the generalization was, in fact, false--at least of these cases. It is false of those cases because those regimes did not rise to power by manipulating the power of a "popular base"; they rose to power through ruthless antidemocratic politics, the frequent use of violence and intimidation to suppress dissent, and in general a concerted effort to sidestep or controvert what the "popular base" wanted. I then connected these observations to the original claim that "democracy can be dangerous" because it can encourage the rise of demagogic tyrannies; I take them to undermine that claim. That is what we call "responding to a prior claim with evidence."
Of course, you may not think that my evidence actually supports the conclusion that I think it does; in that case it is bad evidence. But to show this would take a bit of argument and discussion of the points taken as evidence, which you have not (yet) given here.
I am, in fact, neither a political science student nor in need of a thesis. I have no idea what the word "conjuncture" is supposed to mean; so I suppose I will have to withhold judgment on whether or not I am ignoring it until or unless you clarify just what it is you're trying to say.
But again, this seems to me quite a distortion of what actually happened. Many people seem to think that what happened in the Russian Revolution is that everyone got up and kicked out the Czar and then the Provisional Government and then installed Lenin as absolute dictator by more or less popular consent. But this is not at all what happened. The Oktober Revolution was launched by a pretty wide coalition of different forces -- including the Bolsheviks, and also including many other socialist, populist, and anarchist groups. The immediate aftermath of the Revolution was the reorganization of the Russian Republic into numerous, decentralized, fairly (though not perfectly) democratic communities through the institutions of local soviets (workers' councils) and other forms of popular organizations. The dominance of the top-down, centralized rule of Communist Party bosses -- and the Bolshevik faction in particular -- and Lenin most of all was a gradual, and at times quite brutal, process of undermining and destroying these democratic institutions and solidifying power in the hands of Lenin and his ideological cronies. The process was accelerated by the Russian Civil War, due to Bolshevik control (especially through the direction of Trotsky) over the Red Army, and their willingness to use "National Security" as a pretext for crushing internal dissent (sound familiar?). This was finalized with acts such as the bloody suppression of the Kronstadt uprising (1921) and the suppression of the Workers' Opposition (1922) (in which Lenin pushed through a resolution at the 10th Party Congress that banned all factions within the Party). It was also accompanied with the creation of the Cheka secret police and the other instruments of internal repression.
The point here is that democracy in Russia did not die of natural causes; it was murdered--and it was not murdered by the will of the people, who had spent the past few years since the Revolution building their own local democratic institutions, but rather by the will of Communist Party bureaucrats who, in the course of the Civil War, had accumulated control over much of the military and were quite willing to use it against those who stood in their way.
(A similar point, incidentally, must be made in connection with the oft-repeated claim that no less a tyrant than Hitler was democratically elected. The problem with the claim is that it is not true: although the Nazis initially gained a large number of seats in the Reichstag through democratic means, they never controlled anywhere near a majority, and neither Hitler nor the Nazis ever achieved a majority vote. Hitler gained the Chancellorship through a legal appointment by President Hindenburg through the use of hardball politics with his allies on the Right; he used that position to gain dictatorial powers and suppress democratic institutions and civil liberties after the Reichstag fire in 1933, and proceeded to simply expel all the members of the major opposition party -- the Communists -- from the Reichstag, and had most of them jailed or killed. That is how he got his "majority" of the legislature to vote for dictatorial powers in March 1933.)
The general point here is that -- contrary to Plato's argument in the Republic, and contrary to popular mishandlings of history -- tyranny is not the natural result of decaying democracy. It is something that tyrants impose, usually with violence and usually by going to great effort to sidestep or simply crush democratic institutions. (That doesn't mean that robust democratic institutions are a silver bullet for peace, freedom and prosperity. No political institutions are; hum
This seems like an odd tack to take in the argument--since neither China during the Cultural Revolution nor the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin had substantive democratic institutions. In point of fact, Lenin and Stalin and Mao each in their time took deliberate actions (such as the brutal suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, the dismantling of the Workers' Opposition, the creation of the secret police and the gulag, and, well, the Cultural Revolution) to crush local democratic power, concentrate power in the hands of party bosses, and create a totalitarian environment in which people do not dare to express dissent for fear of hearing a knock on the door in the middle of the night.
(In such an environment, by the way, it also seems to me to be rather tendentious, to say the least, to claim to have any clear knowledge of what people thought about the rulers -- since part of the purpose of the totalitarian apparatus was to keep people from honestly saying what they though about things.)
I thoroughly recommend you read some of the descriptions of the power struggles in post-Revolutionary Russia, such as Emma Goldman's My Disillusionment in Russia or The Workers' Opposition.
By what measure? By most standards the largest demonstrations against the Vietnam War were the marches on New York in April, 1967, and on Washington, DC in 1969 and 1971. Each of these marches drew an estimated 500,000 people. In January 2003, about 500,000 marched in Washington, DC; in February 2003, about 500,000 marched in New York. Over a million (!) marched in London and Rome. It's worth noting that the Vietnam-era protests took years of bloody conflict and hard organizing to reach the levels they reached at their peak; organizing against the Iraq war drew unprecendented numbers before the war had even begun.
This is not to slight the work of those who poured themselves into the struggle against the Vietnam War. (Many of them, after all, are now pouring themselves into the struggle against the on-going war/occupation of Iraq.) We just have better tools now than we did then, and it has made a major difference to the dynamics of antiwar organizing. To miss this requires a lack of attention to the real progress in anti-war organizing that has been made over the past 30 years.
This seems like a rather odd statement to make. It seems even more odd to single out as insightful on a collaborative news website read, and contributed to, by thousands of people. I am at the moment sitting in front of a computer terminal not talking to anyone. I am also talking to people. Not anyone in my house to be sure, but to thousands of other politically-concerned people.
This seems the precise reverse of the confusion that goes on in many discussions about television and radio. In both cases it is a matter of what is seen and what is not seen; but the focus is reversed. Many criticisms of radio and television as media focus on the "passive," one-way nature of the medium. As the TNR article quite rightly points out, this is nothing more than an optical illusion--one that ignores what is going on around the medium and focuses only on what is going on in it:
But Kurlantzick commits the reverse error when it comes to surveying an Internet cafe--he puts narrow focus on what is going on around the medium and completely neglects what's going on in it! It seems to me--and, growing up on BBSs and IRC as I did, it always has--that a considerable amount of Internet activity, and certainly most of the culturally and politically interesting Internet activity, has to do with fostering communities and discussion, not with just sitting around and leafing through an endless library of pamphlets.
That doesn't mean that these online communities and online communication are a silver bullet for undermining tyranny. Of course they aren't; nothing in the world is. But while this article is thoughtful and raises interesting points on several points, it seems like Mr. Kurlantzick would have come out with a different, and more nuanced take, if he had some inkling of how people use the Internet other than as a way to read traditional magazines like The New Republic. (It's understandable that that's where his focus would lie, but understandable distortions are still distortions.)