My old geopolitics professor used to employ two TAs for his introductory Map of the Modern World class. This was a class that all freshman in the school were required to take, and that about 1/3rd failed every year and had to return to take again. Managing a class of this size was not easy. So, the first TA was there to change the maps shown on the overhead projector--a simple enough job.
The second TA was usually recruited by the professor from amongst the ROTC kids, and served as his enforcer. His entire job was to pace up and down the hallways of the lecture hall for an hour, glaring at students, and kicking them out of class if they were talking, eating, drinking, or otherwise disruptive. He would have had a field day with anyone playing a video game on their laptop.
Perhaps these law professor should consider this model of classroom behavioral management.
Macs are viable alternatives on the desktop without meeting your criteria for #3 or #4. Also, if you have a Mac, you probably won't be installing new hardware, so #5 probably doesn't apply either. And Mac users have no clue what #7 is.
So, I think you're setting the hurdles faced by Linux on the desktop slightly too high.
Adam Smith warned pretty directly about the negative effects of influence from the capital-holding class on the wealth and interest of the nation:
"His employers constitute the third order, that of those who live by profit. it is the stock that is employed for the sake of profit, which puts into motion the greater part of the useful labor of every society. The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labor, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension, of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin...
"Their superiority over the country gentleman is, not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction, that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always in the interest of the dealers...
"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this oder, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order or men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
Excepted from Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chap. XI, Part III, "Rent of Land: Conclusion".
If you want an interesting re-reading of Smith, which counters a great deal of the neoliberal/libertarian propaganda about Smith, see (I think) Chapter 2 of Adam Smith in Beijing by Giovanni Arrighi. No need to buy the whole book, just find it at Barnes & Noble and sit down and read the relevant chapter on Smith.
The extension doesn't break. Extensions have an inbuilt version number specifying which versions of Firefox they are compatible with. When you download an extension, it has an internal specification saying, "I work on Firefox 1.5 - 3b4". When you upgrade to Firefox 3b5, your extension, like a good citizen, disables itself, because it has not been tested on your new version of Firefox, and could potentially cause massive problems in unforeseen ways if there was a core change in how Firefox behaves. It is up to the extension developer to do due diligence in checking his/her own extension, and then if no problems crop up, bump the version compatibility number on their extension and re-release, often with no other changes to the core code of the extension itself. This system exists to protect your data. If you do not like it, you can turn this protection off, see here.
Since when did memory usage become such a big deal?
I'm not sure if you recall reading the comments to any other story about Firefox on Slashdot or Digg or Ars or virtually anywhere else in the past two years, but about 90% of those comments discussed memory usage. The Firefox team is doing a good job responding to its user base. They have not, to my knowledge, had to sacrifice speed or additional features to achieve lower memory usage.
That's a good point, parent. Because most users know how and why to change default connection settings, especially if they're operating through a proxy, by going into about:config and manually editing variables. Obviously, for the common user, there is absolutely no need to alter default settings.
Because you care about competition. Once you stop caring about competition, you get sideswiped just like IE has been by Firefox. The whole idea is to have a plural browser environment in which each browser vendor competes to deliver the best standards compliance and the best feature set. If you only care about Firefox, you may be missing the point. We can measure Firefox's progress objectively (against its own past performance), but we also need to assess its progress relative to other browsers so that we can assure it remains competitive, and can (at the very least) hold its ground in market share. No one wants to return to the old days of browser monoculture and stagnation.
Regarding the U.S. debt, you are absolutely correct that it is the largest debt in the history of the world. However, what you ignore is its relative size. The size of the U.S. debt relative to US. GDP is not terribly large when compared to the historic debts racked up by other great powers. Historically, other great powers would survive debts of up to 200% of their GDP. The U.S. debt is not yet even 100% of GDP. Thus, while I too am troubled by the size of the U.S. debt, the level of alarmism in your post I consider unwarranted.
Please see this chart of U.S. debt. The red bars indicate the absolute numbers, which are indeed climbing to unparalleled heights. However, the blue line shows the debt as a percentage of GDP. As you can plainly see, our current amount of debt is not the worst we've ever faced, in fact we've faced debt burdens almost twice as bad in our recent history.
This does not, of course, alter the fact that U.S. real growth per year is the usual 3% that mature economies face, while China's has been about 10% per year for the last 30 years, and they still have quite a lot of potential growth left in them. Still, scare-mongering about the state of the U.S. economy does not help the pursuit of a rational, long-term national interest.
Should Administrators only have negative contributions?
A good point. Ideally no. Administrators should also add content, because they need to know what the content creation process is like as well. After all, it's hard to effectively moderate editing disputes if you've never really been a content editor in an editing dispute yourself.
That said, administrators are given their tools because Wikipedia needs people who will perform what is essentially maintenance on the vast collection of articles. Reversion of the constant tide of vandalism, getting between users locked in editing disputes, enforcing Wikipedia policy--most of these things end up being "negative" contributions, simply because the admins have to remove things that don't belong and stop behavior that isn't constructive.
Because it's their 'job', it's what the community has tasked them to do, the end result is that most admin recent changes will look similar to what you described.
Amazon is engaging in civil disobedience on behalf of their customers--the customers certainly like it, so it cannot be that all French are against free shipping. I don't think anyone on Slashdot has a problem with breaking what they view as an unjust law. In fact, most of us break several laws every day, most of which we view as unjust and therefore without moral force.
France: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, No Free Shipping.
Really you wouldn't have to even spend that much. As we know, elections come down to one or two swing states each year. In the past two elections, those states have been Florida and Ohio. Their populations are, respectively, 16 million and 11 million, for a total of 27 million. Divide that in half by the number of people who actually vote, and you get 13.5 million. Buying those votes at $1 million per vote, for an assured lock-in, would cost about 13.5 trillion == the annual GDP of the United States.
If you wanted to cut costs even more, simply look at the margins candidates won by in those swing states. In 2004, Bush won Ohio by 2.11%. In 2000, Bush won Florida by 0.009%. In terms of population, those are about 230,000 people in Ohio and 1,400 people in Florida. For the sake of argument, let's simply say you buy 500,000 votes, just to hedge against unexpectedly large swings. At $1 million per vote, and 500,000 voters in the decisive swing state, you could buy an election for $500 billion dollars.
Given that the richest person in the world, Bill Gates, has only $50 billion dollars, I'd say that a $1 million price tag on an individual vote is still too high to justify an outright plutocracy.
About communication, I agree wholeheartedly. I spent last semester as a TA at JHU. Admittedly it was in a non-comp sci field, but nevertheless I had to grade some pretty atrocious essays and exams from freshmen and sophomores. I found it shocking that kids could get into a top tier university without knowing how to write an essay. I gave each a page of comments, and almost all would start off with: number your pages, don't use the first person in academic writing, don't use contractions in formal writing, proofread to catch typos, etc. The second paragraph would go over organizational issues, e.g. not having a thesis until five pages into their ten page paper, not explaining how paragraphs of evidence support their argument, and so on. A lot of the exams read more like diagrams (especially from the engineering students) than essays.
You're not taking into account that black leaders have endorsed Hillary Clinton while claiming that "Obama is not black." Obama doesn't necessarily have the black vote tied up simply due to his skin color. He's not an African-American in the same sense that most African-Americans are descendants of former slaves. He's the son of an immigrant, and does not share in the same historical-cultural background, and does not make racial politics a central plank of his candidacy. Hillary Clinton and the Clinton family more broadly has made racial appeals and alliance with black leaders a central part of their strategy over the last 15 years, if not longer. That Obama is winning in white states is not really remarkable. If and when he wins in a state with a large black population, that will be remarkable.
That poll would be better if it allowed you to weight each of the ten issues (say on a 1-5 scale of importance to you). Then it could calculate a weighted score for you--my concern about the economy is not equivalent to my concern about health care, and maybe other people vice versa. Assigning an equal weight to each issue distorts your final results.
Interesting essay, but I disagree that it's socialist in its fundamental mechanism. I wrote an essay, about a month before yours, on why wikipedia's mechanism is capitalist in nature.
Given the events discussed in this Slashdot article, the final quip about the "death squads" way warrant revision.
Slashdot Mirror
My old geopolitics professor used to employ two TAs for his introductory Map of the Modern World class. This was a class that all freshman in the school were required to take, and that about 1/3rd failed every year and had to return to take again. Managing a class of this size was not easy. So, the first TA was there to change the maps shown on the overhead projector--a simple enough job.
The second TA was usually recruited by the professor from amongst the ROTC kids, and served as his enforcer. His entire job was to pace up and down the hallways of the lecture hall for an hour, glaring at students, and kicking them out of class if they were talking, eating, drinking, or otherwise disruptive. He would have had a field day with anyone playing a video game on their laptop.
Perhaps these law professor should consider this model of classroom behavioral management.
Macs are viable alternatives on the desktop without meeting your criteria for #3 or #4. Also, if you have a Mac, you probably won't be installing new hardware, so #5 probably doesn't apply either. And Mac users have no clue what #7 is. So, I think you're setting the hurdles faced by Linux on the desktop slightly too high.
Excepted from Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chap. XI, Part III, "Rent of Land: Conclusion".
If you want an interesting re-reading of Smith, which counters a great deal of the neoliberal/libertarian propaganda about Smith, see (I think) Chapter 2 of Adam Smith in Beijing by Giovanni Arrighi. No need to buy the whole book, just find it at Barnes & Noble and sit down and read the relevant chapter on Smith.
The extension doesn't break. Extensions have an inbuilt version number specifying which versions of Firefox they are compatible with. When you download an extension, it has an internal specification saying, "I work on Firefox 1.5 - 3b4". When you upgrade to Firefox 3b5, your extension, like a good citizen, disables itself, because it has not been tested on your new version of Firefox, and could potentially cause massive problems in unforeseen ways if there was a core change in how Firefox behaves. It is up to the extension developer to do due diligence in checking his/her own extension, and then if no problems crop up, bump the version compatibility number on their extension and re-release, often with no other changes to the core code of the extension itself. This system exists to protect your data. If you do not like it, you can turn this protection off, see here.
Flawless victory, AC. You win this round.
I'm not sure if you recall reading the comments to any other story about Firefox on Slashdot or Digg or Ars or virtually anywhere else in the past two years, but about 90% of those comments discussed memory usage. The Firefox team is doing a good job responding to its user base. They have not, to my knowledge, had to sacrifice speed or additional features to achieve lower memory usage.
That's a good point, parent. Because most users know how and why to change default connection settings, especially if they're operating through a proxy, by going into about:config and manually editing variables. Obviously, for the common user, there is absolutely no need to alter default settings.
Because you care about competition. Once you stop caring about competition, you get sideswiped just like IE has been by Firefox. The whole idea is to have a plural browser environment in which each browser vendor competes to deliver the best standards compliance and the best feature set. If you only care about Firefox, you may be missing the point. We can measure Firefox's progress objectively (against its own past performance), but we also need to assess its progress relative to other browsers so that we can assure it remains competitive, and can (at the very least) hold its ground in market share. No one wants to return to the old days of browser monoculture and stagnation.
Try Mozilla Weave?
Permanent link to the actual post.
Regarding the U.S. debt, you are absolutely correct that it is the largest debt in the history of the world. However, what you ignore is its relative size. The size of the U.S. debt relative to US. GDP is not terribly large when compared to the historic debts racked up by other great powers. Historically, other great powers would survive debts of up to 200% of their GDP. The U.S. debt is not yet even 100% of GDP. Thus, while I too am troubled by the size of the U.S. debt, the level of alarmism in your post I consider unwarranted.
Please see this chart of U.S. debt. The red bars indicate the absolute numbers, which are indeed climbing to unparalleled heights. However, the blue line shows the debt as a percentage of GDP. As you can plainly see, our current amount of debt is not the worst we've ever faced, in fact we've faced debt burdens almost twice as bad in our recent history.
This does not, of course, alter the fact that U.S. real growth per year is the usual 3% that mature economies face, while China's has been about 10% per year for the last 30 years, and they still have quite a lot of potential growth left in them. Still, scare-mongering about the state of the U.S. economy does not help the pursuit of a rational, long-term national interest.
Encyclopedias are tertiary sources and not suitable for citation.
A good point. Ideally no. Administrators should also add content, because they need to know what the content creation process is like as well. After all, it's hard to effectively moderate editing disputes if you've never really been a content editor in an editing dispute yourself.
That said, administrators are given their tools because Wikipedia needs people who will perform what is essentially maintenance on the vast collection of articles. Reversion of the constant tide of vandalism, getting between users locked in editing disputes, enforcing Wikipedia policy--most of these things end up being "negative" contributions, simply because the admins have to remove things that don't belong and stop behavior that isn't constructive.
Because it's their 'job', it's what the community has tasked them to do, the end result is that most admin recent changes will look similar to what you described.
I appreciate Anon's subtle Navy-trolling of the Air Force here.
I hope the meta-moderators are harsh on all those who use the "-1 redundant" mod in this thread...
The customer is always right. How hard is it to understand that?
Are French customers foregoing the free shipping, or do they like it?
Do special interests dislike Amazon's free shipping because it makes it harder for them continue their own poor service?
This is business, not social policy.
Amazon is engaging in civil disobedience on behalf of their customers--the customers certainly like it, so it cannot be that all French are against free shipping. I don't think anyone on Slashdot has a problem with breaking what they view as an unjust law. In fact, most of us break several laws every day, most of which we view as unjust and therefore without moral force.
France: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, No Free Shipping.
Really you wouldn't have to even spend that much. As we know, elections come down to one or two swing states each year. In the past two elections, those states have been Florida and Ohio. Their populations are, respectively, 16 million and 11 million, for a total of 27 million. Divide that in half by the number of people who actually vote, and you get 13.5 million. Buying those votes at $1 million per vote, for an assured lock-in, would cost about 13.5 trillion == the annual GDP of the United States.
If you wanted to cut costs even more, simply look at the margins candidates won by in those swing states. In 2004, Bush won Ohio by 2.11%. In 2000, Bush won Florida by 0.009%. In terms of population, those are about 230,000 people in Ohio and 1,400 people in Florida. For the sake of argument, let's simply say you buy 500,000 votes, just to hedge against unexpectedly large swings. At $1 million per vote, and 500,000 voters in the decisive swing state, you could buy an election for $500 billion dollars.
Given that the richest person in the world, Bill Gates, has only $50 billion dollars, I'd say that a $1 million price tag on an individual vote is still too high to justify an outright plutocracy.
About communication, I agree wholeheartedly. I spent last semester as a TA at JHU. Admittedly it was in a non-comp sci field, but nevertheless I had to grade some pretty atrocious essays and exams from freshmen and sophomores. I found it shocking that kids could get into a top tier university without knowing how to write an essay. I gave each a page of comments, and almost all would start off with: number your pages, don't use the first person in academic writing, don't use contractions in formal writing, proofread to catch typos, etc. The second paragraph would go over organizational issues, e.g. not having a thesis until five pages into their ten page paper, not explaining how paragraphs of evidence support their argument, and so on. A lot of the exams read more like diagrams (especially from the engineering students) than essays.
You're not taking into account that black leaders have endorsed Hillary Clinton while claiming that "Obama is not black." Obama doesn't necessarily have the black vote tied up simply due to his skin color. He's not an African-American in the same sense that most African-Americans are descendants of former slaves. He's the son of an immigrant, and does not share in the same historical-cultural background, and does not make racial politics a central plank of his candidacy. Hillary Clinton and the Clinton family more broadly has made racial appeals and alliance with black leaders a central part of their strategy over the last 15 years, if not longer. That Obama is winning in white states is not really remarkable. If and when he wins in a state with a large black population, that will be remarkable.
That poll would be better if it allowed you to weight each of the ten issues (say on a 1-5 scale of importance to you). Then it could calculate a weighted score for you--my concern about the economy is not equivalent to my concern about health care, and maybe other people vice versa. Assigning an equal weight to each issue distorts your final results.
That's "no leashless", actually.
Does that figure factor in the government agricultural subsidies we pay to agro-business?
Interesting essay, but I disagree that it's socialist in its fundamental mechanism. I wrote an essay, about a month before yours, on why wikipedia's mechanism is capitalist in nature.
Given the events discussed in this Slashdot article, the final quip about the "death squads" way warrant revision.