Perhaps it is just Maryland. Was your course in college or high school? I had to wait until college to get any kind of education in the Enlightenment philosophy that underlies the U.S. Constitution.
Properly, the issue in the Civil War was one of jus cogens temporarily trumping the principle of dual sovereignty. But the United States did not become and is not today a unitary state. It remains a federation of fifty states.
Looking at the Civil War and the Electoral College from the liberal philosophical tradition that came out of the Enlightenment, one can see that the two are consistent. Liberal political philosophy posited that society ought to strive for the diffusion of power throughout the populace rather than centralizing it in a central government. Hence ideas such as individualism, federalism, separation of power, capitalism, and civil rights/liberties. The Civil War was a fight for the civil rights of individuals whose proper citizenship and protection were being denied on the basis of skin color. The Electoral College is a feature of federalism that institutionalizes the diffusion of political power through a number of state units--mitigating the effect of any central demagogic appeal to mass movement.
If civics were taught in high school anymore people might understand more about the philosophical roots of the American system and why our leaders have made some of the decisions that they did.
States are only "artificial" if you have no concept of American history and have never traveled through the United States. People from other countries don't understand regional or state-specific differences in the U.S. Moreover, American history is taught with poorer and poorer standards, and with less focus on state history. For instance, I received no education in Maryland history even though I attended high school there. So even Americans don't understand why we have states instead of a unitary government.
Division of power between a number of levels and branches of government is fundamental to the liberal philosophical tradition. Read Locke and Montesquieu. Liberal institutions which diffuse power to intermediate and co-equal entities is essential in preventing the centralization of power. It is centralized power that is far more prone to abuse than decentralized power--that should be obvious. Why then would you want to eliminate the substantive role of state divisions, when they are there to fundamentally split power, prevent swaying of the masses through temporary demagogy, and check the central government?
"But there are extensions for all that!"â"In fact that gets me to what I hate most about Firefox. Extension hell. Every time I install Firefox on a new system I have to hunt down a list of extensions for it or my user experience is going to change radically. And all those extensions take up memory and processor time, and often have bugs or security flaws of their own.
But this is really the whole point of having extensions. Think of how bloated and buggy and unstable Firefox would be if every feature was built directly into the browser. It would be a horrible horrible mess. The idea behind Firefox, which everyone seems to be forgetting, is that it's not supposed to include everything. That was Mozilla Suite / SeaMonkey. Firefox is supposed to be lean and mean.
You have the option to extend Firefox however you like, but that's *your* option. Don't blame Firefox for giving you the option to customize your browser--that's absurd. Furthermore, don't blame Firefox for the bugs in the extensions. Yes, that sucks, but Firefox didn't write those extensions. They wrote a lean, quick browser.
Bitching about having to download Firefox extensions is like bitching about the Lean Cuisine meals you got and how they don't have enough calories until you add extra side dishes. If you want a plethora of features, get a browser that has a plethora of features to begin with!
If you want something with everything already included in it by default, get Opera or SeaMonkey.
I thought power users wanted everything and the kitchen sink in the browser (old Mozilla Suite), whereas the common user just wanted something they could surf the web and read MySpace with (Firefox)?
We have two different wrappers around the Gecko engine: SeaMonkey and Firefox. One has everything a developer/power user could want built in. The other has very little built in, but you can add whatever you want, if you so choose.
Surfing the web: doable on a PC
Listening to iTunes: doable on a PC
Installing Opera browser: doable on a PC
Installing Windows: doable on a PC
Being extremely smug about it all? Mac only.
That said, here comes my Mac zealot rejoinder. It's not about what grandparent was doing, it's about what grandparent wasn't doing:
Cleaning out spyware: only on a PC
Cleaning out viruses: only on a PC
Deleting malicious reg keys: only on a PC
Reinstalling Windows (again): only on a PC
Rebooting from a BSOD: only on a PC
Writing apologist posts on/.: platform free!
Because often the sex or violence or profanity is gratuitous to the plot. It's almost axiomatic to state that sex and violence sells. Movie companies, interested in making top-dollar for their investors, don't shy away from pushing for scripts with sexier content, bigger explosions, and more realistic gore. Why should the viewer have to deal with the content which was inserted under pressure from the movie studios' profit motive? Do you have no recollection of how awkward it is to watch a sex scene in a movie with your parents? Parents don't want to have to deal with that kind of content when renting movies that are heavily marketed to their kids. And there are plenty of people who just don't care to see gore unnecessary to the plot.
(That said, I would love to watch Reservoir Dogs with the filter turned on. A really short film.)
I haven't read the article but last time I checked Europe is not immune to racism
Yeah, I'm actually quite surprised that no Europeans are touched off by this ad. Europeans colonized and oppressed the entirety of Africa, engaged wholeheartedly in the slave trade, and saddled them with the legacy of bizarre national borders. Then Europeans turn around and say that only in racist America would this ad be perceived to have negative connotations? I guess there is no racism in Europe anymore (except for the far right, xenophobic, nationalist political parties, the anti-Turkish sentiment, the racial riots in Paris suburbs, etc).
Seriously. The reports that come out of the NYTimes, WaPo, and LA Times read like something the KGB would have put together back in the day. They're doing all the work unearthing programs, leaving next to nothing for foreign intelligence agencies or al-Qaeda to do. I'm pretty sure that the FSB and Chinese intelligence just read the front page of our newspapers now to figure out what we're up to.
Not really. Implemented the web interface might be easy, but providing the massive fraud-prevention, user-support, and legal teams is not an overnight affair. Google is having enough trouble dealing with basic click fraud complaints from relatively savvy webmasters. Can you imagine the lunatic kind of stuff they would have to deal with when the world's trailer trash starts getting fleeced through Auctions.Google.com? Google is a lightweight operation--the last thing they want is a project requiring huge amounts of human-wrangling.
In any case, everyone seems to be forgetting Google Base already exists.
Redneck is a derogatory ethnic term used to refer to denizens of Appalachia and the South principally. Those areas were predominantly settled by Scotch-Irish (there are several studies showing how the modern Southern accent is derived from Scotch and Irish speech patterns). The racism of the English toward their Celtic neighbors carried over to the United States and continues in the long tradition of mocking "redneck" speech and culture. How many times have you used a Southern accent mockingly to demonstrate someone's stupidity? Happens all the time. When the United States first experienced mass immigration from Ireland, the Irish weren't considered "white" by the existing English settlers. So yes, calling people "rednecks" is a racial slur.
Grandparent doesn't mean "conservative" in the United States left-right political spectrum meaning of the word. Kthejoker clearly means conservative in the more general, resistance-to-change sense.
Christianity and Marxism aren't so similar. The former is anti-materialist whereas the latter is wholly materialist. Capitalism has no ontology, so a materialst or an anti-materialist could be a fine capitalist. The Catholic Church criticizes both Capitalism and Marxism on a wide range of grounds. Marxism derides religion as a whole.
The only reason you think Capitalism is an ugly philosophy is because you've never read Capitalist philosophy. Try starting with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Executive Orders function as law until repealed by the President, overruled by subsequent Congressional legislation, or perhaps overturned by the Supreme Court (although I'm unaware of the Supreme Court ever hearing a case to decide the constitutionality of a specific Executive Order). They are most certainly legally-binding on the actions of the federal government and not just "good advice."
It's interesting (on a side note) that Americans work more hours than almost anyone else, and yet still have shit production.
Only if you regard being in the top 5 per capita productive nations "shit." It's true that a handful of European countries (e.g. France) work less and have slightly higher per capita productivity, but it's an incredibly large (and fundamentally incorrect) leap to say that the U.S. has "shit" productivity.
I'm certainly a loyal Mac user, although I wouldn't call myself a zealot. Further, I think I'd withhold judgement on the x86 Darwin kernel. I know it's not yet been released, but there's also no (public) decision yet that it's been closed. Essentially, it's hanging in limbo. If and when Apple goes ahead and says x86 Darwin will remain closed, then I think it will be valid to complain about a bait-and-switch.
Still, what did OSS lose by spending time on Darwin? Time spent on other OSS projects, sure. But the participants made the choice to collaborate on something that interested them. The last open versions of x86 Darwin are still out there with all their hard work. It's possible that if x86 Darwin is closed by Apple that the contributors won't have access to the latest Apple versions. But that's not the end of the world, and a free Darwin x86 can still be worked on.
Finally, I think the clone era was a historically unique period for Apple and coincided with the return of Jobs who hated the clone idea from day one. It wasn't a decision that was made under leadership continuity, but one made by a corporation on the brink of death that brought in a new (old) leader to turn in back from the brink. Apple today is in an objectively different situation.
Ah, true, but one can not go blindly accepting them.
It doesn't appear that Mr. Phipps is advocating blind acceptance of capitalism. Instead he's saying, look at the lessons of capitalism and capitalists and take the positive lessons from that. It's right in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it is just Maryland. Was your course in college or high school? I had to wait until college to get any kind of education in the Enlightenment philosophy that underlies the U.S. Constitution.
Properly, the issue in the Civil War was one of jus cogens temporarily trumping the principle of dual sovereignty. But the United States did not become and is not today a unitary state. It remains a federation of fifty states.
Looking at the Civil War and the Electoral College from the liberal philosophical tradition that came out of the Enlightenment, one can see that the two are consistent. Liberal political philosophy posited that society ought to strive for the diffusion of power throughout the populace rather than centralizing it in a central government. Hence ideas such as individualism, federalism, separation of power, capitalism, and civil rights/liberties. The Civil War was a fight for the civil rights of individuals whose proper citizenship and protection were being denied on the basis of skin color. The Electoral College is a feature of federalism that institutionalizes the diffusion of political power through a number of state units--mitigating the effect of any central demagogic appeal to mass movement.
If civics were taught in high school anymore people might understand more about the philosophical roots of the American system and why our leaders have made some of the decisions that they did.
States are only "artificial" if you have no concept of American history and have never traveled through the United States. People from other countries don't understand regional or state-specific differences in the U.S. Moreover, American history is taught with poorer and poorer standards, and with less focus on state history. For instance, I received no education in Maryland history even though I attended high school there. So even Americans don't understand why we have states instead of a unitary government.
Division of power between a number of levels and branches of government is fundamental to the liberal philosophical tradition. Read Locke and Montesquieu. Liberal institutions which diffuse power to intermediate and co-equal entities is essential in preventing the centralization of power. It is centralized power that is far more prone to abuse than decentralized power--that should be obvious. Why then would you want to eliminate the substantive role of state divisions, when they are there to fundamentally split power, prevent swaying of the masses through temporary demagogy, and check the central government?
But this is really the whole point of having extensions. Think of how bloated and buggy and unstable Firefox would be if every feature was built directly into the browser. It would be a horrible horrible mess. The idea behind Firefox, which everyone seems to be forgetting, is that it's not supposed to include everything. That was Mozilla Suite / SeaMonkey. Firefox is supposed to be lean and mean.
You have the option to extend Firefox however you like, but that's *your* option. Don't blame Firefox for giving you the option to customize your browser--that's absurd. Furthermore, don't blame Firefox for the bugs in the extensions. Yes, that sucks, but Firefox didn't write those extensions. They wrote a lean, quick browser.
Bitching about having to download Firefox extensions is like bitching about the Lean Cuisine meals you got and how they don't have enough calories until you add extra side dishes. If you want a plethora of features, get a browser that has a plethora of features to begin with!
If you want something with everything already included in it by default, get Opera or SeaMonkey.
I thought power users wanted everything and the kitchen sink in the browser (old Mozilla Suite), whereas the common user just wanted something they could surf the web and read MySpace with (Firefox)?
We have two different wrappers around the Gecko engine: SeaMonkey and Firefox. One has everything a developer/power user could want built in. The other has very little built in, but you can add whatever you want, if you so choose.
This is fairly simple people.
"War on Poverty"
Worked for that too!
Surfing the web: doable on a PC
Listening to iTunes: doable on a PC
Installing Opera browser: doable on a PC
Installing Windows: doable on a PC
Being extremely smug about it all? Mac only.
That said, here comes my Mac zealot rejoinder. It's not about what grandparent was doing, it's about what grandparent wasn't doing:
Cleaning out spyware: only on a PC /.: platform free!
Cleaning out viruses: only on a PC
Deleting malicious reg keys: only on a PC
Reinstalling Windows (again): only on a PC
Rebooting from a BSOD: only on a PC
Writing apologist posts on
I'm interested to know what kind of non-human beings competent to make legal decisions you have in mind.
Because often the sex or violence or profanity is gratuitous to the plot. It's almost axiomatic to state that sex and violence sells. Movie companies, interested in making top-dollar for their investors, don't shy away from pushing for scripts with sexier content, bigger explosions, and more realistic gore. Why should the viewer have to deal with the content which was inserted under pressure from the movie studios' profit motive? Do you have no recollection of how awkward it is to watch a sex scene in a movie with your parents? Parents don't want to have to deal with that kind of content when renting movies that are heavily marketed to their kids. And there are plenty of people who just don't care to see gore unnecessary to the plot.
(That said, I would love to watch Reservoir Dogs with the filter turned on. A really short film.)
Yeah, I'm actually quite surprised that no Europeans are touched off by this ad. Europeans colonized and oppressed the entirety of Africa, engaged wholeheartedly in the slave trade, and saddled them with the legacy of bizarre national borders. Then Europeans turn around and say that only in racist America would this ad be perceived to have negative connotations? I guess there is no racism in Europe anymore (except for the far right, xenophobic, nationalist political parties, the anti-Turkish sentiment, the racial riots in Paris suburbs, etc).
Seriously. The reports that come out of the NYTimes, WaPo, and LA Times read like something the KGB would have put together back in the day. They're doing all the work unearthing programs, leaving next to nothing for foreign intelligence agencies or al-Qaeda to do. I'm pretty sure that the FSB and Chinese intelligence just read the front page of our newspapers now to figure out what we're up to.
Through overwhelming redundancy and superior firepower.
Not really. Implemented the web interface might be easy, but providing the massive fraud-prevention, user-support, and legal teams is not an overnight affair. Google is having enough trouble dealing with basic click fraud complaints from relatively savvy webmasters. Can you imagine the lunatic kind of stuff they would have to deal with when the world's trailer trash starts getting fleeced through Auctions.Google.com? Google is a lightweight operation--the last thing they want is a project requiring huge amounts of human-wrangling.
In any case, everyone seems to be forgetting Google Base already exists.
The same way they felt when they bought OS X machines that required running old programs in the Classic environment?
If my memory serves me, Apple turned out alright from that episode.
You're not ambitious enough. I foresee the outlawing of dictionaries. They're the root of the problem here.
You misspelled "14-year-olds" and "revert wars."
I know, but the term for those people in the United States is "Scotch-Irish."
Redneck is a derogatory ethnic term used to refer to denizens of Appalachia and the South principally. Those areas were predominantly settled by Scotch-Irish (there are several studies showing how the modern Southern accent is derived from Scotch and Irish speech patterns). The racism of the English toward their Celtic neighbors carried over to the United States and continues in the long tradition of mocking "redneck" speech and culture. How many times have you used a Southern accent mockingly to demonstrate someone's stupidity? Happens all the time. When the United States first experienced mass immigration from Ireland, the Irish weren't considered "white" by the existing English settlers. So yes, calling people "rednecks" is a racial slur.
Grandparent doesn't mean "conservative" in the United States left-right political spectrum meaning of the word. Kthejoker clearly means conservative in the more general, resistance-to-change sense.
Christianity and Marxism aren't so similar. The former is anti-materialist whereas the latter is wholly materialist. Capitalism has no ontology, so a materialst or an anti-materialist could be a fine capitalist. The Catholic Church criticizes both Capitalism and Marxism on a wide range of grounds. Marxism derides religion as a whole.
The only reason you think Capitalism is an ugly philosophy is because you've never read Capitalist philosophy. Try starting with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Mr. Dvorak, please, it's late. Go back to your column and leave these poor /.ers in peace.
Executive Orders function as law until repealed by the President, overruled by subsequent Congressional legislation, or perhaps overturned by the Supreme Court (although I'm unaware of the Supreme Court ever hearing a case to decide the constitutionality of a specific Executive Order). They are most certainly legally-binding on the actions of the federal government and not just "good advice."
Only if you regard being in the top 5 per capita productive nations "shit." It's true that a handful of European countries (e.g. France) work less and have slightly higher per capita productivity, but it's an incredibly large (and fundamentally incorrect) leap to say that the U.S. has "shit" productivity.
I'm certainly a loyal Mac user, although I wouldn't call myself a zealot. Further, I think I'd withhold judgement on the x86 Darwin kernel. I know it's not yet been released, but there's also no (public) decision yet that it's been closed. Essentially, it's hanging in limbo. If and when Apple goes ahead and says x86 Darwin will remain closed, then I think it will be valid to complain about a bait-and-switch.
Still, what did OSS lose by spending time on Darwin? Time spent on other OSS projects, sure. But the participants made the choice to collaborate on something that interested them. The last open versions of x86 Darwin are still out there with all their hard work. It's possible that if x86 Darwin is closed by Apple that the contributors won't have access to the latest Apple versions. But that's not the end of the world, and a free Darwin x86 can still be worked on.
Finally, I think the clone era was a historically unique period for Apple and coincided with the return of Jobs who hated the clone idea from day one. It wasn't a decision that was made under leadership continuity, but one made by a corporation on the brink of death that brought in a new (old) leader to turn in back from the brink. Apple today is in an objectively different situation.
It doesn't appear that Mr. Phipps is advocating blind acceptance of capitalism. Instead he's saying, look at the lessons of capitalism and capitalists and take the positive lessons from that. It's right in the article.