The rulers of the west had one thing in common with Hitler, they both despised the idea of Socialism in the form adopted by Russia.
What an amazing piece of propaganda. Yes, the "rulers" (by which I assume you mean the democratically elected presidents/prime ministers, as opposed to Soviet dictators) of the West despised Soviet communism. But they did tolerate Eurosocialism. Moreover, the West did not hate socialism so much that that it would ally with Hitler (which is what Hitler wanted). They allied with Stalin against Hitler. Your attempt to draw some kind of moral equivalence between the West and Hitler, simply because neither liked Stalinist Bolshevism, is rather pathetic.
Moreover, the justification for U.S. Cold War grand strategy, contained in George Kennan's "X" article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", does not locate the threat from the Soviet Union in its ideology. In fact, he believes that ideology is the critical weakness of the USSR that will allow the U.S. to triumph over the Soviet Union without need for war. The threat was simply traditional Russian territorial expansionism, which would require political, economic, and military containment (not rollback or liberation or anything aggressive).
At the time, East Prussia was not German territory, it was directly incorporated into the Soviet Union. It was actually (and remains today) an exclave of the Russian SFR. What was once East Prussia (about 300 years ago) is now Kaliningrad. The state of Prussia proper (of Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck fame) is divided up between Kaliningrad, Poland, and Germany now.
Spelling and grammar are not the same thing. I'm a spelling nazi, not a grammar nazi. Being taught grammar is not the same as being taught spelling. Perhaps you should have been taught spelling by rote rather than by phonics.
Normally I don't harp on the spelling mistakes of other posters, but in the context of your posting, wherein you use the authority of your status "as a member of the higher education system" to lend weight to your opinions, I thought it the right thing to do.
Perhaps I'm just cranky after grading 80 undergrad midterms.
Just imagine merging Apple and Adobe, which I believe is housed in Seattle. Now we're talking about a two-campus company, rewriting the corporate management style-guide, firing sales staff and overlapping departments, yada yada yada. That would be mess #1.
You're right. It'd probably just be a better idea for Apple and Adobe to engage in a $150 million dollar stock swap, like Apple did with that other Seattle-area company. Then they'd both have a stake in each other's survival and health.
The Dock is a crappy task switcher, and the Finder is still broken in most of the same ways it has been broken since, oh, 1984.
I seriously don't understand why any non-grandma users even bother with the Dock and Finder. I have nothing in my Dock except Preview and Text Edit--two applications that I can drag various documents into to open automatically. Otherwise I keep it hidden all the time. All of my launching is done with LaunchBar/Spotlight/Quicksilver/insert-your-favorite-search-n-launch-program-here. There is no reason to use Dock shortcuts. I plan to make zero use of the new Dock and zero use of stacks. I will probably delete the Downloads stack out of privacy concerns to boot.
Again, what use is the Finder at all? Besides moving files from your download folder to their various content ghettos (Movies folder, Documents Folder, Pictures Folder, etc.), I almost never use the Finder to look for files or launch files. It's all LaunchBar/Spotlight/Quicksilver. Obviously, for FTP you're not using the Finder--you're using Transmit or CyberDuck or equivalents. For mass file handling or renaming there are any dozen of apps to take care of that.
Power users ought to hide the Dock and avoid the Finder. Use your favorite search-n-launch, be it LaunchBar, Spotlight, or Quicksilver, and quit bitching about the Dock and Finder. Everyone knows they're not all that useful anymore--move on, better tools exist.
Anyway, the predominant military doctrines adopted by the Western world have been based more on attack than on defense ever since after WWI, because (a) defensive strategies proved useless and wasteful in WWI and (b) everyone in the West read von Clausewitz, and Clausewitz's idea of defense turns out to be regrouping and counterattack.
You're half right. The deadlock and strategically short-sighted warfare that resulted in WWI has actually been blamed on the "cult of the offensive" which formed after eager and not-too-bright officers misread Clausewitz. Every state intended to fight on the offensive in a quick devastating escalation, but was not prepared for the result, which turned out to be defensive trench warfare. So, after WWI, a lot of the cult of offensive was dropped, although the possibility of mechanized blitz warfare (first theorized by a Brit actually) took its place, at least for the Germans.
Not the worst idea to have ever been spouted off on Slashdot. Email clients have already integrated RSS and Newsgroups. Gmail treats Chat transcripts almost identically to email. Might as well make use of Facebook API and integrate Facebook messaging into the email client as well.
Eventually we'll progress beyond seeing the app as strictly email, but more as a general purpose messaging app, providing a storage mechanism and transmission mechanism for all sorts of messaging protocols.
I disagree that I was taking your comment about wealth transfer out of context. I certainly recognize that there are areas that are treated like commodities but aren't -- labor, land, currency (as any reader of Polanyi would) -- but I don't think that Wal-Mart is solely transferring wealth.
You make it seem as if no one has any choice in where they shop or where they work. That somehow consumers *must* shop at Wal-Mart if a Wal-Mart arrives, and that people *must* work at Wal-Mart regardless of the circumstances.
People shop at Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart's business model forces prices down by putting pressure on everyone it deals with--its suppliers and its employees. All of a sudden, average people's real wages go up, because things that were formerly expensive in mom-n-pop stores are now dirt cheap. That is wealth creation whether you like it or not: all the consumers are now richer because their dollar goes further. As Adam Smith said, the wealth of nations is dependent on how much the average person can afford to buy. Wal-Mart makes them able to afford more things, i.e. have greater wealth.
The "wealth creation" argument is exceedingly vague concept and is not even well understood.
Again, flat wrong. There are over 15,000 results for wealth creation on Google Scholar alone. It's an exceedingly well-studied and well-defined economic concept.
So many economists with PHD's and more education then you...
Finally, there's no need for the ad hominem. I do not have a PhD in economics, but I am a PhD student at a top-tier university, and I've taken several years worth of coursework in economics and political economy as part of my international politics and political science degrees.
The economists in the webpage you've linked are self-identified as "heterodox" for a reason: their work is unsupported by the vast majority of PhD-holding academics in their field. And while I respect Soros's work in creating pluralistic political spaces in the post-Soviet world through the Open Society Institute, I think you attribute too great an altruistic motive to a man who purposefully created not one but at least two international financial crises through deliberate attacks on the British Pound and Thai Bhat. It's hard to square those actions with someone who is "doing what he can because of the threats capitalism poses." If anyone poses a threat to capitalism, it's Soros himself.
For every ethics violation and illegal act done by Republicans, Democrats have matched them. This is exactly why we need a viable third party that can field actual candidates.
Why, so that the third party can also match the first two in ethics violations?
Most modern economic liberals forget that wealth is just transferred
This is just flat wrong. Some wealth is transferred, but most wealth is created. Inventing something new, increasing productivity, finding a more efficient or less wasteful organizational structure--all of these things create wealth. Every year someone invents something new, makes an incremental improvement on existing products, or re-organizes a system in order to cut out waste. The end result is more products, better products, at a lower cost. That's the definition of greater wealth, and that wealth wasn't transferred from someone else, it was created by doing new things or by doing old things in a new way.
Wealth that's transferred is done through government programs that confiscate the wealth you earn by working and inventing, and then give it to someone else.
I just watched that episode last night. It's really depressing how craven the media is, in willing to self-censor instead of run something and apologize if someone says it's offensive. I wrote Comedy Central a long email letter after they pussed out and they sent me back some stock email response about wanting to protect people from being hurt. I understand them not wanted to get Comedy Central headquarters suicide bombed or rioted in front of, but seriously, how many suicide bombers have their been in the U.S.? So where does such an irrational expectation come from? It's not like rioting Muslims are a huge demographic in their South Park or other audiences.
And the comparison has to be made: no one riots or gets violent over the Bloody Mary episode, which actually did its best to offend Catholics, whereas there was nothing at all offensive about the depiction of Muhammad in Cartoon Wars aside from the mere act of depicting him in the first place.
I guess back when the U.S. was a revolutionary state, and the people had just fought and risked everything for a piece of paper guaranteeing them their rights that they actually took them seriously. Seems few people care to stand up for their rights in the face of the threat of violence. And yes, you have to pick your battles, and cartoons aren't a crucial battle. But self-censorship after self-censorship sets an example and a precedent deleterious to the health of free speech and expression.
I used to be the editor in chief of an alt-weekly in Wichita, Kansas. I ran all the Danish cartoons... There was little public outcry...
You rebel you. What with Wichita being that seething hotbed of radical Muslim immigrants. I cannot imagine how awkward it was walking past the mosque after mosque in town with what must be virtually the entire Muslim diaspora of the U.S. glaring at you.
The economical way to deal with the problem would be to buy the coca and opium crops from their home countries, sell the pure finished products in government stores...
I don't think any mainstream economist would argue that the economical way to deal with something would be to have the government buy it and then sell it in government stores. Pretty much every economist would be against this kind of monopsony/monopoly setup. I'm sure they would recommend letting the market take care of it, with minimum regulations from health inspectors and store licensing.
Not that I support legalization. But your argument is certainly not one economists would make.
I have the same barber as Karl Rove--a nice gay black dude. He goes to a Dupont Circle hair salon, and as you may well know, Dupont Circle is the historic gay district of Washington, DC. Could be a coincidence.
Finally! All that non-conformance pays off!!
--
Psychic spies from China cryin to pass deregulation
Little girls from Sweden dream of free speech legislation
Says the guy with a Red Hot Chili Peppers lyric as his sig...
Slashdot Mirror
Here's why we need tanks.
Computers still can't hold a candle to us in playing Go, so there's time yet on the handover to our computing overlords.
What an amazing piece of propaganda. Yes, the "rulers" (by which I assume you mean the democratically elected presidents/prime ministers, as opposed to Soviet dictators) of the West despised Soviet communism. But they did tolerate Eurosocialism. Moreover, the West did not hate socialism so much that that it would ally with Hitler (which is what Hitler wanted). They allied with Stalin against Hitler. Your attempt to draw some kind of moral equivalence between the West and Hitler, simply because neither liked Stalinist Bolshevism, is rather pathetic.
Moreover, the justification for U.S. Cold War grand strategy, contained in George Kennan's "X" article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", does not locate the threat from the Soviet Union in its ideology. In fact, he believes that ideology is the critical weakness of the USSR that will allow the U.S. to triumph over the Soviet Union without need for war. The threat was simply traditional Russian territorial expansionism, which would require political, economic, and military containment (not rollback or liberation or anything aggressive).
Spread propaganda elsewhere.
At the time, East Prussia was not German territory, it was directly incorporated into the Soviet Union. It was actually (and remains today) an exclave of the Russian SFR. What was once East Prussia (about 300 years ago) is now Kaliningrad. The state of Prussia proper (of Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck fame) is divided up between Kaliningrad, Poland, and Germany now.
We are the joke.
Cry me a river.
Spelling and grammar are not the same thing. I'm a spelling nazi, not a grammar nazi. Being taught grammar is not the same as being taught spelling. Perhaps you should have been taught spelling by rote rather than by phonics.
Normally I don't harp on the spelling mistakes of other posters, but in the context of your posting, wherein you use the authority of your status "as a member of the higher education system" to lend weight to your opinions, I thought it the right thing to do.
Perhaps I'm just cranky after grading 80 undergrad midterms.
You're right. It'd probably just be a better idea for Apple and Adobe to engage in a $150 million dollar stock swap, like Apple did with that other Seattle-area company. Then they'd both have a stake in each other's survival and health.
Interesting. The way you phrased things leads me to a second idea.
Siracusa distinguishes between spatial-Finder and browser-Finder. But we've added this third thing, Spotlight, which is nearly a return to CLI.
Perhaps the Finder should just be made spatial, while the Spotlight and browser-Finder should merge.
I seriously don't understand why any non-grandma users even bother with the Dock and Finder. I have nothing in my Dock except Preview and Text Edit--two applications that I can drag various documents into to open automatically. Otherwise I keep it hidden all the time. All of my launching is done with LaunchBar/Spotlight/Quicksilver/insert-your-favorite-search-n-launch-program-here. There is no reason to use Dock shortcuts. I plan to make zero use of the new Dock and zero use of stacks. I will probably delete the Downloads stack out of privacy concerns to boot.
Again, what use is the Finder at all? Besides moving files from your download folder to their various content ghettos (Movies folder, Documents Folder, Pictures Folder, etc.), I almost never use the Finder to look for files or launch files. It's all LaunchBar/Spotlight/Quicksilver. Obviously, for FTP you're not using the Finder--you're using Transmit or CyberDuck or equivalents. For mass file handling or renaming there are any dozen of apps to take care of that.
Power users ought to hide the Dock and avoid the Finder. Use your favorite search-n-launch, be it LaunchBar, Spotlight, or Quicksilver, and quit bitching about the Dock and Finder. Everyone knows they're not all that useful anymore--move on, better tools exist.
As a member of the higher education system, you should know how to spell "rote."
You're half right. The deadlock and strategically short-sighted warfare that resulted in WWI has actually been blamed on the "cult of the offensive" which formed after eager and not-too-bright officers misread Clausewitz. Every state intended to fight on the offensive in a quick devastating escalation, but was not prepared for the result, which turned out to be defensive trench warfare. So, after WWI, a lot of the cult of offensive was dropped, although the possibility of mechanized blitz warfare (first theorized by a Brit actually) took its place, at least for the Germans.
Canada, where everyone threatens to go when something happens that they don't like.
Not the worst idea to have ever been spouted off on Slashdot. Email clients have already integrated RSS and Newsgroups. Gmail treats Chat transcripts almost identically to email. Might as well make use of Facebook API and integrate Facebook messaging into the email client as well.
Eventually we'll progress beyond seeing the app as strictly email, but more as a general purpose messaging app, providing a storage mechanism and transmission mechanism for all sorts of messaging protocols.
The ACLU does, in fact, get yearly reimbursement for costs incurred on a number of their cases. This has been the case for several decades.
I disagree that I was taking your comment about wealth transfer out of context. I certainly recognize that there are areas that are treated like commodities but aren't -- labor, land, currency (as any reader of Polanyi would) -- but I don't think that Wal-Mart is solely transferring wealth.
You make it seem as if no one has any choice in where they shop or where they work. That somehow consumers *must* shop at Wal-Mart if a Wal-Mart arrives, and that people *must* work at Wal-Mart regardless of the circumstances.
People shop at Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart's business model forces prices down by putting pressure on everyone it deals with--its suppliers and its employees. All of a sudden, average people's real wages go up, because things that were formerly expensive in mom-n-pop stores are now dirt cheap. That is wealth creation whether you like it or not: all the consumers are now richer because their dollar goes further. As Adam Smith said, the wealth of nations is dependent on how much the average person can afford to buy. Wal-Mart makes them able to afford more things, i.e. have greater wealth.
Again, flat wrong. There are over 15,000 results for wealth creation on Google Scholar alone. It's an exceedingly well-studied and well-defined economic concept.
Finally, there's no need for the ad hominem. I do not have a PhD in economics, but I am a PhD student at a top-tier university, and I've taken several years worth of coursework in economics and political economy as part of my international politics and political science degrees.
The economists in the webpage you've linked are self-identified as "heterodox" for a reason: their work is unsupported by the vast majority of PhD-holding academics in their field. And while I respect Soros's work in creating pluralistic political spaces in the post-Soviet world through the Open Society Institute, I think you attribute too great an altruistic motive to a man who purposefully created not one but at least two international financial crises through deliberate attacks on the British Pound and Thai Bhat. It's hard to square those actions with someone who is "doing what he can because of the threats capitalism poses." If anyone poses a threat to capitalism, it's Soros himself.
Why, so that the third party can also match the first two in ethics violations?
This is just flat wrong. Some wealth is transferred, but most wealth is created. Inventing something new, increasing productivity, finding a more efficient or less wasteful organizational structure--all of these things create wealth. Every year someone invents something new, makes an incremental improvement on existing products, or re-organizes a system in order to cut out waste. The end result is more products, better products, at a lower cost. That's the definition of greater wealth, and that wealth wasn't transferred from someone else, it was created by doing new things or by doing old things in a new way.
Wealth that's transferred is done through government programs that confiscate the wealth you earn by working and inventing, and then give it to someone else.
I just watched that episode last night. It's really depressing how craven the media is, in willing to self-censor instead of run something and apologize if someone says it's offensive. I wrote Comedy Central a long email letter after they pussed out and they sent me back some stock email response about wanting to protect people from being hurt. I understand them not wanted to get Comedy Central headquarters suicide bombed or rioted in front of, but seriously, how many suicide bombers have their been in the U.S.? So where does such an irrational expectation come from? It's not like rioting Muslims are a huge demographic in their South Park or other audiences.
And the comparison has to be made: no one riots or gets violent over the Bloody Mary episode, which actually did its best to offend Catholics, whereas there was nothing at all offensive about the depiction of Muhammad in Cartoon Wars aside from the mere act of depicting him in the first place.
I guess back when the U.S. was a revolutionary state, and the people had just fought and risked everything for a piece of paper guaranteeing them their rights that they actually took them seriously. Seems few people care to stand up for their rights in the face of the threat of violence. And yes, you have to pick your battles, and cartoons aren't a crucial battle. But self-censorship after self-censorship sets an example and a precedent deleterious to the health of free speech and expression.
You rebel you. What with Wichita being that seething hotbed of radical Muslim immigrants. I cannot imagine how awkward it was walking past the mosque after mosque in town with what must be virtually the entire Muslim diaspora of the U.S. glaring at you.
Considering that the WTO has only been in existence for about 12 years, "a long history" seems like a bit of hyperbole from you.
I don't think any mainstream economist would argue that the economical way to deal with something would be to have the government buy it and then sell it in government stores. Pretty much every economist would be against this kind of monopsony/monopoly setup. I'm sure they would recommend letting the market take care of it, with minimum regulations from health inspectors and store licensing.
Not that I support legalization. But your argument is certainly not one economists would make.
Where's that "+1 Awesome" moderation when you need it...
I have the same barber as Karl Rove--a nice gay black dude. He goes to a Dupont Circle hair salon, and as you may well know, Dupont Circle is the historic gay district of Washington, DC. Could be a coincidence.
Best slashdot post in a long, long time.
Says the guy with a Red Hot Chili Peppers lyric as his sig...