If you don't believe that land should be owned, then you can't believe in government.
Not surprising, then, that I don't believe in government. Well, I believe it exists, of course, just not that it should. I am, as you suggest immediately below, an anarcho-socialist (in very loose terms). Actually, I wouldn't even go so far as to say that land can't be owned; only that it can't be owned except through occupancy and use.
If the others voluntarily agree to produce those goods or perform those services,
Workers only work for wages because they are prevented by (the threat of) force from claiming what is naturally theirs (i.e., the product of their labour or the full value thereof), and are willing, under duress, to settle for less. Without this threat of violence, workers would simply take over and operate the factories themselves. It is the threat of violence built into wage labour that constitutes the violation of human rights. Furthermore (though I'm not sure this is completely relevant), the market in which wage slavery exists (i.e., one characterized by high levels of inequality in access to capital) is a result of the past initiation of force (by the capitalist class and/or the state).
The right to private property *is* a civil right (I prefer the term "natural right" or "human right").
This is arguable. The right to be secure in one's posessions is certainly a human right. However, collecting rent on land occupied by others, or collecting profit on goods made or services performed by others probably isn't. We call both of these things private property in our society, which makes dealing with the issue difficult.
Now, there's nothing wrong with being motivated by self-interest as long as you conduct your business on a voluntary basis, interacting through others on the principle of free association. What's wrong is conducting your business on the principle of force (as government does), in order to achieve your goals of self-interest.
I agree wholeheartedly, as long as you also bear in mind that a capitalist (as opposed to free market) economy is based on the capitalist or landlord being able to call in the government to use force to defend his interests.
If they could turn the world to grey goo, bacteria would have already?
They already have -- we call it the biosphere. The real problem with a grey goo scenario is that the nanobots would have to compete on a level playing field with organic life, which has had billions of years to get better at it then them. I expect nanotech will have to be used in a sterile, highly ordered, and energy-rich environment in order to get anything done.
Wouldn't the speed of the search be influenced mostly be the capabilities of your own computer?
Ultimately, yes, but there's searching and then there's searching. For example, searching a hashed index is much faster than just searching through files in a filesystem. You could generate an index of data and metadata for all files on the system and incrementally update it during idle times, for example, or do certain kinds of updates on an as-needed basis.
GNOME used to have something like this, called Medusa. I think it was dropped because the existing implementation had performance problems (and possibly security issues?). However, it seems to be under redevelopment, and it looks like it will be quite useful when it gets a bit further along.
Please read the following before using an unofficial torrent to download FC2. Apparently, the official release of FC2 is not until Tuesday, and what you are downloading may or may not be the real FC2 release (it may be a Rawhide snapshot, or a trojaned distribution, for example). You can verify the signature on the MD5SUM file to check it, of course, but you'd have to waste your time and bandwidth downloading it first.
The idea that people aren't picking up Objective-C because they don't want to learn another language is preposterous. They're not picking it up because the only complete platform to develop with it is Apple's Cocoa
Agree! I've often admired ObjC, but haven't really bothered to learn it yet. Perhaps if there were nicely done Gnome bindings, but the existing ones appear to be Gnome 1.x and have bitrotted. Gnome development is one place where I think ObjC could really shine, because you get the similarity to the underlying GObject model (in C) but you get generic programming and automatic memory management, too. Oh well.
With the internet, this dynamic does not occur; I am guessing that the vast majority of people who use library PCs for internet access could reasonably get it (or, more accurately, already have it) in some other fashion at home...
I don't think this is true. In fact, many of the people using the library PCs for internet access at the public library near where I live don't even have homes. The public library is a tremendously valuable resource to the homeless people in my city. With the library PCs and free webmail accounts, they are able to provide an email address on job applications. It would be better if they had a phone number and a postal address other than "General Delivery", but every little bit helps.
The library is also a very good place for them to go to spend their time out of the winter cold and the summer heat. They are all very well behaved and spend their days sitting at tables reading books and magazines. The library policy is that as long as they are reading, or at least sitting quietly, they are regular library patrons like everyone else.
Konqueror, Nautilus, Epiphany, Galeon, Firefox, Mozilla et etc.. I have to agree that its getting kind of ridiculous.
All of the above, except for Konqueror, use the rendering engine from Mozilla, and the Konqueror rendering engine is reused in Apple's Safari. Nautilus isn't even a browser, it's a file manager (though it can embed a web view provided by either Galeon or Epiphany). So at the level of the rendering engine, there's very little duplication of effort.
Also, all of the above have different goals, mostly related to the UI they provide. Konqueror provides a browser that is integrated into KDE. Epiphany provides a lightweight, simple browser integrated into GNOME. Galeon provides a more richly featured, more tweakable browser, also for GNOME. Firefox provides a simple, cross-platform browser. Mozilla provides a full-featured cross-platform browser and internet software suite. They're not perfectly interchangable.
I'm not sure exactly what the point of these is...we've already got very nice apps that do the same thing as these (and have nicer interfaces): for music, either Rhythmbox or Muine, and for photos, GPhoto. The only purpose I can see for LinSpire to have its own photo and music apps is branding, which is pretty silly since they're already positioning themselves as the OS for "generic" PCs. I'm afraid I just don't see the point.
The "real value" of any good or service is whatever you can get in exchange for it - any notion of intrinsic worth is a specious concept, as is any valuation other than exchange value.
Well, there's certainly been a lot of money and effort expended to propagandize us all to believe that. That doesn't change the fact that things actually do have a "use value": the concrete way in which a thing meets human needs. The fact that things also have exchange value doesn't change that, it just obscures it.
I go to a major university and have always had the habit of seeing what types of laptops people use as I walk around. In the last 6 months I've noticed a huge increase in the number of Mac users.
That's probably because Apple laptops are price-competitve with Wintel. Wintel desktops are cheaper than Apple because of economies of scale which don't really apply in laptops -- all laptops are basically proprietary designs. So if you buy a Powerbook or iBook, you get a quality laptop at about the same price as a Wintel laptop, plus desirable features like OSX and much longer battery life. Not surprising, then, that Apple laptops are popular even while the desktops are kind of a niche market.
Or the ability to "wiretap" the things floating around in someone's head, the dissents they thought that they were voicing only to themselves.
This technology doesn't detect thoughts, it detects subvocalization. You don't normally subvocalize when thinking to yourself; it takes a conscious effort similar to talking out loud.
Apparently the API for the new GTK file selectors was designed with support for drag-and-drop saving in mind. So if you want to volunteer to implement a ROX-style save dialog, go right ahead! I'll probably even use it.
More likely, the result would be "Work for Hire", and the company that hired you would end up owning the software.
True, but if the work for hire is implementing new features on an existing GPL-ed application, then it doesn't matter that much that the company that hired you would own the software. The worst they can do is keep the changes in-house, but then if they want to keep up with improvements in the main branch of the software, they'll have to keep paying you to keep your modifications up to date, so you win anyway.
I think you may be missing the point. It's good to help people. It's very good to make money by helping people. This is what's called
Right Livelihood in Buddhism. It's one of the components of the Noble Eightfold Path.
I don't think most Slashdotters have anything against a free market. I certainly don't. What I do object to, however, are business models that rely on distortions of the free market: state-enforced private monopolies in land, raw materials, and information; the externalization of the costs of production (e.g., pollution, paying less than a living wage so that the state is forced to step in to prevent poverty, not paying health care so that the cost of the uninsured is pushed off on the state and on hospitals), the exploitation of workers (as above, but also lockouts, the use of private or state violence to break strikes, company towns, slavery, etc.), and the use of deceptive marketing to avoid the free-market ideal of a fully-informed consumer. All of these things are part of capitalism, but they're not part of a free market. Rather, they are deviations from a free market that benefit the class of people that already own property. For a look at what a real free market would look like, read up on Mutualism.
What's good about this story is that the business plan uses a real free-market solution to do well by doing good. Not only should it dramatically reduce the cost of glasses in underserved parts of the world, it will also provide
"micro-entrepeneurs" in poor areas to make a living while doing so. When done properly, a free market can benefit everyone. However, the non-free market we call corporate capitalism doesn't do this.
I'd like it if I had a choice other than becoming a vegetarian. I for one would pay a premium for range fed beef or even beef from certified humane feed lots, if my supermarket would carry it.
Try natural food stores or specialty grocery stores like the Fresh Market or EarthFare? They usually sell range-fed beef and free range chicken.
Earlier in this thread, someone suggested that if consumers didn't want hormone-grown, genetically-modified, antibiotic-laden meat, they'd stop buying it, and when it became unprofitable, producers would stop producing and selling it. While that's true in principle, it depends on informed consumers. The nasty thing is that agribusiness is spending a lot of money on lawsuits and lobbying to prevent customers from becoming informed. For example, Monsanto has sued a Maine dairy to prevent them from marketing their milk as free of bovine growth hormone. Likewise, agribusiness lobbying has prevented every effort in Congress to require labelling of genetically modified produce -- information that would allow customers to make informed decisions about the produce they buy.
Now, I am not an opponent of genetically-modified foods; I prefer to make my decisions on a case by case basis. For example, given the information to make the choice, I would not buy Roundup-Ready(tm) produce, since the genetic modifications are of no benefit to me as the consumer, but help the industrial farmers practice environmentally-damaging and unsustainable pesticide-drenched monocropping. On the other hand, I would love to buy Flavr-Savr(tm) tomatoes, because the modifications actually benefit the consumer -- they mean that I can buy tomatoes that are actually ripe rather than green tomatoes that have been ethylene-ripened on the shelf. But unless GM crops are labelled, I have no way of knowing what kind of modifications my tomatoes or soybeans contain. Informed consumers are a basic requirement of a free market, and if the necessary information is withheld, it's not realistic to expect market forces to reflect what consumers actually want.
It's actually probably legal for Novak to have published that information. However, it's certainly illegal for whoever leaked that information to have leaked it to him.
The reason no one is going to jail for this is that the person responsible for investigating this, the Attorney General, is appointed by the person whose office was responsible for the leak. And though Ashcroft has recused himself, the people directly and ultimately responsible for the investigation are both presidential appointees.
This is why we need an Independent Counsel law. Unfortunately, after the multi-year investigation of Clinton's penis, the Democrats in Congress were happy to let the law lapse (and the Republicans had never supported it, though they were glad to be able to take advantage of it while it lasted).
It certainly does. But if you look at the problem closer, it gets even worse.
Now, presumably the reason the Pentagon is involved in the development of an absentee voting system is that military personnel overseas are the largest group of absentee voters. All well and good; it is vitally important that our troops be able to exercise their rights while they're out there doing their duty.
However, things are more Interesting this year. Traditionally, military absentee ballots have been free votes for the Republican party -- look at the role they played in the 2000 presidential election, especially in Florida. This year, military personnel and their families are enraged at the Bush administration for quite a few reasons, mostly having to do with the war in and occupation of Iraq (see, e.g., Military Families Speak Out), but also at the administrations cuts to veterans benefits, etc. So overseas military votes won't be quite the godsend to the Republicans they would normally be, and quite possibly might be a disaster for them.
My gut reaction to this Pentagon program is that it is principally intended as a way to disenfranchise disgruntled military personnel, ideally by forging their votes if possible, or by simply spoiling them if not. Conspiracy theory? Yes, but after seeing how absentee ballots were manipulated in Florida in 2000, a little paranoia is justified.
The Sims Online, as a subscription service, has the rights to prevent anyone from using their service. It's kind of like private property in real life: not everyone has to be let in.
If your private property is a business open to paying members of the public, that's not 100% true. While "No shoes, no shirt, no service" may be a legitimate policy, "No Colored People" isn't. Do a google search on the phrase "Orangeburg Massacre" to see what happens if your position is taken seriously.
-But you need guns to protect yourself and your family, why not rocket launchers and atomic weapon. Heaven knows that nothing protects you better than some heavy duty atomic weapons.
Vernor Vinge's short story "The Ungoverned" describes the invasion of an "ungoverned" territory occupied by a right-libertarian contract society by its fascist neighbours. At least some members of that society have taken the above advice to heart. Bear in mind that it can be very hard to get homeowners' insurance when you are storing thermonuclear weapons on-site.
GA: At the end of the trial, the Progressive magazine lost a
small fortune, even though it managed to get the Morland article
published without censor. Essentially, it was a case of limited
private funds versus a bottomless pot of Government gold
I'm not sure where I stand on the article and its attempted censorship, but I am somewhat amused that one of its authors said the above. Doesn't it sound *exactly* like a typical right-wing diatribe against the government? The article in question was in the well known *leftist* magazine "The Progressive".
Why is that surprising, really? The term 'progressive' is usally used to refer to people in the left+libertarian corner of the political compass. Progressives are opposed to the domination of individuals by authorities, whether those authorities be public or private. This is just one of those cases where opression comes from the government (though we shouldn't ignore the partnership of government and private power in this case -- what's called the military-industrial complex). The real irony is actually the way people in the right+libertarian corner are able to conceptualize the domination of individuals by non-governmental power as 'voluntary.' Nevertheless, when complaining about the government, it's no surprise that left-libertarians and right-libertarians will sound alike.
Server rescued after running unchecked 24/7 for years under layers of dust and dirt
Sometimes the dust is all that's holding a computer together. Many's the time I've opened up a machine that was running perfectly for years, blown the dust out of it, closed it up and turned it back on, only to have it fail immediately. You'd think I'd learn to stop doing that.
I'd give anything to have trained as a plumber growing up. But no, I had to be the geek and go into computer shit.
Well, the comparison is apt. Plumbers and IT workers are both skilled laborers, who use their specialized knowledge to repair and maintain technology that most people don't want to take the time to learn about and maintain for themselves. But plumbers make more money and have better job security (despite often having less formal education). What's the difference?
Plumbers have a union. IT workers think they don't need one.
Amusingly,
Unprecedented is also the name of a documentary
about the Florida election irregularities in 2000. It's a really good film, in that it makes the sequence of events before and during the election and recount very easy to follow, especially compared to the news coverage at the time.
I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how the debacle in Florida happened, and what the legal issues were that led to the SCOTUS deciding the election.
Slashdot Mirror
Not surprising, then, that I don't believe in government. Well, I believe it exists, of course, just not that it should. I am, as you suggest immediately below, an anarcho-socialist (in very loose terms). Actually, I wouldn't even go so far as to say that land can't be owned; only that it can't be owned except through occupancy and use.
Workers only work for wages because they are prevented by (the threat of) force from claiming what is naturally theirs (i.e., the product of their labour or the full value thereof), and are willing, under duress, to settle for less. Without this threat of violence, workers would simply take over and operate the factories themselves. It is the threat of violence built into wage labour that constitutes the violation of human rights. Furthermore (though I'm not sure this is completely relevant), the market in which wage slavery exists (i.e., one characterized by high levels of inequality in access to capital) is a result of the past initiation of force (by the capitalist class and/or the state).
This is arguable. The right to be secure in one's posessions is certainly a human right. However, collecting rent on land occupied by others, or collecting profit on goods made or services performed by others probably isn't. We call both of these things private property in our society, which makes dealing with the issue difficult.
I agree wholeheartedly, as long as you also bear in mind that a capitalist (as opposed to free market) economy is based on the capitalist or landlord being able to call in the government to use force to defend his interests.
They already have -- we call it the biosphere. The real problem with a grey goo scenario is that the nanobots would have to compete on a level playing field with organic life, which has had billions of years to get better at it then them. I expect nanotech will have to be used in a sterile, highly ordered, and energy-rich environment in order to get anything done.
Ultimately, yes, but there's searching and then there's searching. For example, searching a hashed index is much faster than just searching through files in a filesystem. You could generate an index of data and metadata for all files on the system and incrementally update it during idle times, for example, or do certain kinds of updates on an as-needed basis.
GNOME used to have something like this, called Medusa. I think it was dropped because the existing implementation had performance problems (and possibly security issues?). However, it seems to be under redevelopment, and it looks like it will be quite useful when it gets a bit further along.
Please read the following before using an unofficial torrent to download FC2. Apparently, the official release of FC2 is not until Tuesday, and what you are downloading may or may not be the real FC2 release (it may be a Rawhide snapshot, or a trojaned distribution, for example). You can verify the signature on the MD5SUM file to check it, of course, but you'd have to waste your time and bandwidth downloading it first.
Agree! I've often admired ObjC, but haven't really bothered to learn it yet. Perhaps if there were nicely done Gnome bindings, but the existing ones appear to be Gnome 1.x and have bitrotted. Gnome development is one place where I think ObjC could really shine, because you get the similarity to the underlying GObject model (in C) but you get generic programming and automatic memory management, too. Oh well.
I don't think this is true. In fact, many of the people using the library PCs for internet access at the public library near where I live don't even have homes. The public library is a tremendously valuable resource to the homeless people in my city. With the library PCs and free webmail accounts, they are able to provide an email address on job applications. It would be better if they had a phone number and a postal address other than "General Delivery", but every little bit helps.
The library is also a very good place for them to go to spend their time out of the winter cold and the summer heat. They are all very well behaved and spend their days sitting at tables reading books and magazines. The library policy is that as long as they are reading, or at least sitting quietly, they are regular library patrons like everyone else.
All of the above, except for Konqueror, use the rendering engine from Mozilla, and the Konqueror rendering engine is reused in Apple's Safari. Nautilus isn't even a browser, it's a file manager (though it can embed a web view provided by either Galeon or Epiphany). So at the level of the rendering engine, there's very little duplication of effort.
Also, all of the above have different goals, mostly related to the UI they provide. Konqueror provides a browser that is integrated into KDE. Epiphany provides a lightweight, simple browser integrated into GNOME. Galeon provides a more richly featured, more tweakable browser, also for GNOME. Firefox provides a simple, cross-platform browser. Mozilla provides a full-featured cross-platform browser and internet software suite. They're not perfectly interchangable.
Argh, I wrote GPhoto, I meant GThumb. I have no idea whether GPhoto is any good or not, but GThumb's the one with the nice UI.
I'm not sure exactly what the point of these is...we've already got very nice apps that do the same thing as these (and have nicer interfaces): for music, either Rhythmbox or Muine, and for photos, GPhoto. The only purpose I can see for LinSpire to have its own photo and music apps is branding, which is pretty silly since they're already positioning themselves as the OS for "generic" PCs. I'm afraid I just don't see the point.
Well, there's certainly been a lot of money and effort expended to propagandize us all to believe that. That doesn't change the fact that things actually do have a "use value": the concrete way in which a thing meets human needs. The fact that things also have exchange value doesn't change that, it just obscures it.
That's probably because Apple laptops are price-competitve with Wintel. Wintel desktops are cheaper than Apple because of economies of scale which don't really apply in laptops -- all laptops are basically proprietary designs. So if you buy a Powerbook or iBook, you get a quality laptop at about the same price as a Wintel laptop, plus desirable features like OSX and much longer battery life. Not surprising, then, that Apple laptops are popular even while the desktops are kind of a niche market.
This technology doesn't detect thoughts, it detects subvocalization. You don't normally subvocalize when thinking to yourself; it takes a conscious effort similar to talking out loud.
Apparently the API for the new GTK file selectors was designed with support for drag-and-drop saving in mind. So if you want to volunteer to implement a ROX-style save dialog, go right ahead! I'll probably even use it.
True, but if the work for hire is implementing new features on an existing GPL-ed application, then it doesn't matter that much that the company that hired you would own the software. The worst they can do is keep the changes in-house, but then if they want to keep up with improvements in the main branch of the software, they'll have to keep paying you to keep your modifications up to date, so you win anyway.
I think you may be missing the point. It's good to help people. It's very good to make money by helping people. This is what's called Right Livelihood in Buddhism. It's one of the components of the Noble Eightfold Path.
I don't think most Slashdotters have anything against a free market. I certainly don't. What I do object to, however, are business models that rely on distortions of the free market: state-enforced private monopolies in land, raw materials, and information; the externalization of the costs of production (e.g., pollution, paying less than a living wage so that the state is forced to step in to prevent poverty, not paying health care so that the cost of the uninsured is pushed off on the state and on hospitals), the exploitation of workers (as above, but also lockouts, the use of private or state violence to break strikes, company towns, slavery, etc.), and the use of deceptive marketing to avoid the free-market ideal of a fully-informed consumer. All of these things are part of capitalism, but they're not part of a free market. Rather, they are deviations from a free market that benefit the class of people that already own property. For a look at what a real free market would look like, read up on Mutualism.
What's good about this story is that the business plan uses a real free-market solution to do well by doing good. Not only should it dramatically reduce the cost of glasses in underserved parts of the world, it will also provide "micro-entrepeneurs" in poor areas to make a living while doing so. When done properly, a free market can benefit everyone. However, the non-free market we call corporate capitalism doesn't do this.
Try natural food stores or specialty grocery stores like the Fresh Market or EarthFare? They usually sell range-fed beef and free range chicken.
Earlier in this thread, someone suggested that if consumers didn't want hormone-grown, genetically-modified, antibiotic-laden meat, they'd stop buying it, and when it became unprofitable, producers would stop producing and selling it. While that's true in principle, it depends on informed consumers. The nasty thing is that agribusiness is spending a lot of money on lawsuits and lobbying to prevent customers from becoming informed. For example, Monsanto has sued a Maine dairy to prevent them from marketing their milk as free of bovine growth hormone. Likewise, agribusiness lobbying has prevented every effort in Congress to require labelling of genetically modified produce -- information that would allow customers to make informed decisions about the produce they buy.
Now, I am not an opponent of genetically-modified foods; I prefer to make my decisions on a case by case basis. For example, given the information to make the choice, I would not buy Roundup-Ready(tm) produce, since the genetic modifications are of no benefit to me as the consumer, but help the industrial farmers practice environmentally-damaging and unsustainable pesticide-drenched monocropping. On the other hand, I would love to buy Flavr-Savr(tm) tomatoes, because the modifications actually benefit the consumer -- they mean that I can buy tomatoes that are actually ripe rather than green tomatoes that have been ethylene-ripened on the shelf. But unless GM crops are labelled, I have no way of knowing what kind of modifications my tomatoes or soybeans contain. Informed consumers are a basic requirement of a free market, and if the necessary information is withheld, it's not realistic to expect market forces to reflect what consumers actually want.
It's actually probably legal for Novak to have published that information. However, it's certainly illegal for whoever leaked that information to have leaked it to him.
The reason no one is going to jail for this is that the person responsible for investigating this, the Attorney General, is appointed by the person whose office was responsible for the leak. And though Ashcroft has recused himself, the people directly and ultimately responsible for the investigation are both presidential appointees.
This is why we need an Independent Counsel law. Unfortunately, after the multi-year investigation of Clinton's penis, the Democrats in Congress were happy to let the law lapse (and the Republicans had never supported it, though they were glad to be able to take advantage of it while it lasted).
It certainly does. But if you look at the problem closer, it gets even worse.
Now, presumably the reason the Pentagon is involved in the development of an absentee voting system is that military personnel overseas are the largest group of absentee voters. All well and good; it is vitally important that our troops be able to exercise their rights while they're out there doing their duty.
However, things are more Interesting this year. Traditionally, military absentee ballots have been free votes for the Republican party -- look at the role they played in the 2000 presidential election, especially in Florida. This year, military personnel and their families are enraged at the Bush administration for quite a few reasons, mostly having to do with the war in and occupation of Iraq (see, e.g., Military Families Speak Out), but also at the administrations cuts to veterans benefits, etc. So overseas military votes won't be quite the godsend to the Republicans they would normally be, and quite possibly might be a disaster for them.
My gut reaction to this Pentagon program is that it is principally intended as a way to disenfranchise disgruntled military personnel, ideally by forging their votes if possible, or by simply spoiling them if not. Conspiracy theory? Yes, but after seeing how absentee ballots were manipulated in Florida in 2000, a little paranoia is justified.
If your private property is a business open to paying members of the public, that's not 100% true. While "No shoes, no shirt, no service" may be a legitimate policy, "No Colored People" isn't. Do a google search on the phrase "Orangeburg Massacre" to see what happens if your position is taken seriously.
Vernor Vinge's short story "The Ungoverned" describes the invasion of an "ungoverned" territory occupied by a right-libertarian contract society by its fascist neighbours. At least some members of that society have taken the above advice to heart. Bear in mind that it can be very hard to get homeowners' insurance when you are storing thermonuclear weapons on-site.
Why is that surprising, really? The term 'progressive' is usally used to refer to people in the left+libertarian corner of the political compass. Progressives are opposed to the domination of individuals by authorities, whether those authorities be public or private. This is just one of those cases where opression comes from the government (though we shouldn't ignore the partnership of government and private power in this case -- what's called the military-industrial complex). The real irony is actually the way people in the right+libertarian corner are able to conceptualize the domination of individuals by non-governmental power as 'voluntary.' Nevertheless, when complaining about the government, it's no surprise that left-libertarians and right-libertarians will sound alike.
Sometimes the dust is all that's holding a computer together. Many's the time I've opened up a machine that was running perfectly for years, blown the dust out of it, closed it up and turned it back on, only to have it fail immediately. You'd think I'd learn to stop doing that.
Well, the comparison is apt. Plumbers and IT workers are both skilled laborers, who use their specialized knowledge to repair and maintain technology that most people don't want to take the time to learn about and maintain for themselves. But plumbers make more money and have better job security (despite often having less formal education). What's the difference?
Plumbers have a union. IT workers think they don't need one.
Amusingly, Unprecedented is also the name of a documentary about the Florida election irregularities in 2000. It's a really good film, in that it makes the sequence of events before and during the election and recount very easy to follow, especially compared to the news coverage at the time.
I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how the debacle in Florida happened, and what the legal issues were that led to the SCOTUS deciding the election.