1. The private sector will only do it if they believe there's profit in it.
2. The private sector may fail to provide anything.
1. So, The Red Cross doesn't exist?
2. Gosh, the public sector may also fail to provide anything, too.
The private sector is good at providing what people want, or at least think they want. And, obviously, people want utilities and "life & death services". The private industry would provide these better and at lower cost than government. There would be competition, and innovation, and all manner of marvelous outcomes. Compare The Red Cross and The Salvation Army to The Department of Health & Human Services. Compare private retirement accounts to Social Security! Which do you prefer?
But let's look at all your examples! When a company has a hell of a lot of money on its hand, it is often willing to invest in "very difficult/expensive endeavors with inadequate profit potential". Witness Microsoft plowing money into the XBox. Just because a project is large, or may not pay off handsomely, certainly does not mean that private industry will not attempt it. As for your last one, I'm not sure what you mean by "public services". If you mean "things that governments do", you're right, private industry tries not to provide those as a rule.
It sounds like you've played Katamari Damacy; perhaps you've even played We Love Katamari. But it sounds like you haven't played Me And My Katamari for the Sony PSP--a console which has only has one analog joystick. M&MK ignores the analog nub, and instead you use the D-pad and the four buttons (triangle - x - square - circle) to navigate like they were two D-pads.
Anyway, I can certainly envision other control schemes for KM. For instance: joystick moves, shoulder buttons rotate, other buttons for special moves (dash, 180 degree jump, Prince Look, etc).
Yup! Because, as everyone knows, middle managers didn't exist back in the 60s. Well, wait a minute--if we haven't invented anything new since the 60s, I guess they must have been invented back then. But surely nobody had any.
And technology really hasn't really changed any since 1969. I mean, apart from some new style sheets, Slashdot today is basically the same as it was back then, right?
'The internet is now such a massive industry but people haven't caught up in terms of their dress'.
Thus citing that well-known and incontrovertible law of business, "the larger an industry is, the dressier it must inevitably become." Yesterday I went to McDonald's and the person at the cash register was wearing a ballroom gown!
The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is
no evidence that people want to use these things.
What businessman knows about point sizes on typefaces or the value of
variable point sizes? Who out there in the general marketplace even knows
what a 'font' is?
The whole concept and attitude towards icons and hieroglyphs is actually
counterrevolutionary - it's a language that is hardly 'user friendly.'
This type of machine was developed by hardware hackers working out of
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. It has yet to find popular success.
There seems to be some mysterious user resistance to this type of machine.
--John C. Dvorak on why the Macintosh would fail,
San Francisco Examiner, February 19, 1984
They don't support a law that says (for example) "You can't copy a CD", but they support the right of the copyright to say, "You can't, under any circumstance, copy the CD I just sold you."
And what would prevent you from copying the CD? Why, that'd be a law. You seem to understand that Libertarians view laws as a necessary evil that should be minimized wherever possible. But you don't extend that to copyright... law.
Let's review exactly what the Constitution said which resulted in copyright law and the patent office:
The Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
We can debate whether even this much is necessary. Without copyright and patent law, would people continue to sing and paint and invent, or would they say "why bother"? I bet the former. But let's assume that some form of government protection of copyright is necessary. What the Constitution doesn't say is "To procure an eternal source of revenue for businesses". That's what copyright law has been mangled into, and a Libertarian administration would reverse that trend. A Libertarian administration would certainly never pass the DMCA, which is what changed some forms of copyright violation from civil to criminal law.
As a Libertarian, I think the market no longer needs even these protections. The market would prosper even in the absence of copyright or patent law. But, if we must have it, I would be thrilled if we simply returned copyright to its original term of seventeen years. After that, copyright protection would no longer exist, and the ideas would become public domain. (How thrilling it would be to see "Star Wars" enter the public domain!)
And there'll be no more talk about Libertarianism not supporting the rights of the individual. Libertarianism is founded on exactly that principle, and goes to far greater extents to preserve the rights of individuals than any another political party in the US.
Certainly more so than you do! For instance, unlike you, I support the right of a restaurant owner to be able to choose his clientele. I think he's an idiot and a bigot if he chooses to not serve people based on their race, and I would choose to take my business elsewhere. But I feel it is his right to make that decision. You seem to suggest that this is a bad "right" and laud the government for taking it away. I do not. "Personal liberty" means having the right to make your own choices, even if they are bad choices. I, and Libertarians like me, support more "personal liberty" than you do.
By "the company store", I gather you're referring to a "truck system", and not things like the Microsoft company store (where you can buy T-shirts and XBox games). If the system in question is not fraudulent, then yes it would be permitted under a Libertarian regime, and people would be free to choose for themselves whether or not they wished to sign up. And? It may very well be better than what they've got. Again, they would have the "personal liberty" to choose whether or not they signed up.
Of course, practically speaking, America is a rich and populous country. If America became a Libertarian society tomorrow, I would not expect to see "truck systems" become common, because other employers who offered a more conventional system of remuneration would certainly be more attractive to workers. I certainly wouldn't work for one, and I gather you wouldn't either. Most people wouldn't. So even if America became Libertarian I suspect you have little to fear from this.
As for toxic waste dumping. Libertarians policies are far better than current USG policies regarding the enviornment. Polluting someone else's property is trespass, which is a violation of someone's "personal liberty", and therefore un
Communism is an economic system in which the government regulates the market.
Capitalism is another economic system, in which the market regulates itself.
A patent is a statement from the government regulating the market.
In which system does this belong?
Your statements are uninformed and incorrect. The presentation layer of Office is the only part that would be majorly affected by a port to Linux; all the other code would need only minor changes. And even here Microsoft engineers wouldn't necessarily need to rewrite it. They could take an approach similar to their approach for Word 6 for the Mac, where they wrote an API emulation layer that allowed their Win32 windowing to run virtually unchanged on the Mac.
As for your statement <<Windows 3.0 didn't have builtin TCP/IP support, and required installation of a special package that interfaced with a modem, and used IPC to allow other applications to use the internet>>, Windows 3.0 shipped in 1990, the days of UUCP and sneakernet. That it supported had TCP/IP networking at all was a minor miracle. TCP/IP was a standard part of Windows for Workgroups (aka 3.11), which shipped a year later. Not that I see how fifteen-year-old developments in Windows are relevant to the topic of porting Office to Linux.
Solution: while at the polling place, you can only vote for real exactly once, but you can enter as many "fake" votes as you like. They could have one or two duplicate polling booths that say "FAKE FAKE FAKE" in person, and if you vote there, everything happens like normal except your vote doesn't actually count. You would get a gen-u-ine receipt that looked for all the world like a real vote. The only people who could tell whether a particular vote was "real" or "fake" would be people in the election commission.
That destroys the concept of "property". Property is something which is yours to do with as you please. A house under your suggested system would be your "property" as long as the government didn't force you to sell it to somebody else.
Got an ancestral home that you'd never willingly sell? Too bad! You can't afford to keep it, if someone else with more money than you has their eye on it.
Housing prices in your area are shooting through the roof? Doesn't matter if you're on a fixed income--you better run down to City Hall so you can get in line to pay more taxes!
I think your statement "they're [...] screwing the city out of a lot of property taxes" is quite telling. You seem to believe that the government has a God-given right to take someone's money by force. Well, heck! If your primary goal is to make this institutionalized robbery more efficient, I can suggest lots of simpler approaches. Granted, they probably wouldn't have the faint sheen of fairness and respectability that your proposal carries, but the principle would be exactly the same.
Slashdot Mirror
larry
Have there been any more important privacy and free speech issues this century? No?
larry
2. Gosh, the public sector may also fail to provide anything, too.
The private sector is good at providing what people want, or at least think they want. And, obviously, people want utilities and "life & death services". The private industry would provide these better and at lower cost than government. There would be competition, and innovation, and all manner of marvelous outcomes. Compare The Red Cross and The Salvation Army to The Department of Health & Human Services. Compare private retirement accounts to Social Security! Which do you prefer?
But let's look at all your examples! When a company has a hell of a lot of money on its hand, it is often willing to invest in "very difficult/expensive endeavors with inadequate profit potential". Witness Microsoft plowing money into the XBox. Just because a project is large, or may not pay off handsomely, certainly does not mean that private industry will not attempt it. As for your last one, I'm not sure what you mean by "public services". If you mean "things that governments do", you're right, private industry tries not to provide those as a rule.
larry
Anyway, I can certainly envision other control schemes for KM. For instance: joystick moves, shoulder buttons rotate, other buttons for special moves (dash, 180 degree jump, Prince Look, etc).
larry
--John S. Coleman, address to the Detroit Chamber of Commerce
larry
Well, maybe not 8-core, but the XBox 360 has six cores. Three dual-core PPCs.
larry
And technology really hasn't really changed any since 1969. I mean, apart from some new style sheets, Slashdot today is basically the same as it was back then, right?
How insightful!
larry
But I thought they cancelled that show last year!
larry
larry
larry
larry
Thus citing that well-known and incontrovertible law of business, "the larger an industry is, the dressier it must inevitably become." Yesterday I went to McDonald's and the person at the cash register was wearing a ballroom gown!
If only Lawrence Welk were still alive!
The whole concept and attitude towards icons and hieroglyphs is actually counterrevolutionary - it's a language that is hardly 'user friendly.' This type of machine was developed by hardware hackers working out of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. It has yet to find popular success. There seems to be some mysterious user resistance to this type of machine.
I guess you've never been to Denver.
And what would prevent you from copying the CD? Why, that'd be a law. You seem to understand that Libertarians view laws as a necessary evil that should be minimized wherever possible. But you don't extend that to copyright... law.
Let's review exactly what the Constitution said which resulted in copyright law and the patent office:
We can debate whether even this much is necessary. Without copyright and patent law, would people continue to sing and paint and invent, or would they say "why bother"? I bet the former. But let's assume that some form of government protection of copyright is necessary. What the Constitution doesn't say is "To procure an eternal source of revenue for businesses". That's what copyright law has been mangled into, and a Libertarian administration would reverse that trend. A Libertarian administration would certainly never pass the DMCA, which is what changed some forms of copyright violation from civil to criminal law.
As a Libertarian, I think the market no longer needs even these protections. The market would prosper even in the absence of copyright or patent law. But, if we must have it, I would be thrilled if we simply returned copyright to its original term of seventeen years. After that, copyright protection would no longer exist, and the ideas would become public domain. (How thrilling it would be to see "Star Wars" enter the public domain!)
And there'll be no more talk about Libertarianism not supporting the rights of the individual. Libertarianism is founded on exactly that principle, and goes to far greater extents to preserve the rights of individuals than any another political party in the US.
Certainly more so than you do! For instance, unlike you, I support the right of a restaurant owner to be able to choose his clientele. I think he's an idiot and a bigot if he chooses to not serve people based on their race, and I would choose to take my business elsewhere. But I feel it is his right to make that decision. You seem to suggest that this is a bad "right" and laud the government for taking it away. I do not. "Personal liberty" means having the right to make your own choices, even if they are bad choices. I, and Libertarians like me, support more "personal liberty" than you do.
By "the company store", I gather you're referring to a "truck system", and not things like the Microsoft company store (where you can buy T-shirts and XBox games). If the system in question is not fraudulent, then yes it would be permitted under a Libertarian regime, and people would be free to choose for themselves whether or not they wished to sign up. And? It may very well be better than what they've got. Again, they would have the "personal liberty" to choose whether or not they signed up.
Of course, practically speaking, America is a rich and populous country. If America became a Libertarian society tomorrow, I would not expect to see "truck systems" become common, because other employers who offered a more conventional system of remuneration would certainly be more attractive to workers. I certainly wouldn't work for one, and I gather you wouldn't either. Most people wouldn't. So even if America became Libertarian I suspect you have little to fear from this.
As for toxic waste dumping. Libertarians policies are far better than current USG policies regarding the enviornment. Polluting someone else's property is trespass, which is a violation of someone's "personal liberty", and therefore un
Capitalism is another economic system, in which the market regulates itself.
A patent is a statement from the government regulating the market.
In which system does this belong?
larry
As for your statement <<Windows 3.0 didn't have builtin TCP/IP support, and required installation of a special package that interfaced with a modem, and used IPC to allow other applications to use the internet>>, Windows 3.0 shipped in 1990, the days of UUCP and sneakernet. That it supported had TCP/IP networking at all was a minor miracle. TCP/IP was a standard part of Windows for Workgroups (aka 3.11), which shipped a year later. Not that I see how fifteen-year-old developments in Windows are relevant to the topic of porting Office to Linux.
larry
Solution: while at the polling place, you can only vote for real exactly once, but you can enter as many "fake" votes as you like. They could have one or two duplicate polling booths that say "FAKE FAKE FAKE" in person, and if you vote there, everything happens like normal except your vote doesn't actually count. You would get a gen-u-ine receipt that looked for all the world like a real vote. The only people who could tell whether a particular vote was "real" or "fake" would be people in the election commission.
Really? Even going to see it live isn't enjoyable anymore?
So if one's John Carmack, who's the other Carmack?
Do you suggest that pineapples might be made out of something besides molecules?
Got an ancestral home that you'd never willingly sell? Too bad! You can't afford to keep it, if someone else with more money than you has their eye on it.
Housing prices in your area are shooting through the roof? Doesn't matter if you're on a fixed income--you better run down to City Hall so you can get in line to pay more taxes!
I think your statement "they're [...] screwing the city out of a lot of property taxes" is quite telling. You seem to believe that the government has a God-given right to take someone's money by force. Well, heck! If your primary goal is to make this institutionalized robbery more efficient, I can suggest lots of simpler approaches. Granted, they probably wouldn't have the faint sheen of fairness and respectability that your proposal carries, but the principle would be exactly the same.
larry
Naw, you only have to rewind five minutes, 'cause the last time you watched it, you watched that that scene and then stopped the tape.