The Republicans don't stand for anything really. The Republicans are as much of a 'big tent' as the Democrats - there are a lot of subgroups with differing interests. Some of them are:
"Religious Right" - basically your Bible beaters. They want Christian religious morality codified into law, as possible. This makes the world more like they would like it to be. They are the idealists of the bunch. They are willing to tolerate the leanings of the other general groups in the Republican tent.
"secular conservatives" - these are highly regional groupings. For example, you talk to a conservative in the West and you end up with a far different mindset than those in the Northeast. Still, these are the people who mostly want to arrest social change and solidify the status quo as the way we shall forever live. Oh and cutting some taxes wouldn't hurt either. They are very probusiness.
"Libertarians" - these guys are interested in small government, less intrusion, lower taxes, freedom in general. Social programs are anathema to the true libertarian. They mostly vote Republican since their own candidates are unable to get elected, and most of us are half-wise enough to be pragmatists (yeah, this is me)
If you wanted to cut a finer grain you could probably slice out a lot of other subgroupings as well.
Well, the Democratic candidates can talk about the reasons for the war, which may have been less than perfect (I'm sure more will come out about this in the coming months). Anyway, I'm not an expert in how public opinion is changed.
The way you do it is find issues which have traction - things people listen to, jibe with. Then you run with them, either identifying with them directly or tarring your opponent with them.
That's pretty much it, in a nutshell. Targets of opportunity - if the economy sucks, that is one. The bad part for the democrats is that anyone who comes out antiwar is a sitting duck in the event of another terrorist attack or some discovery of a huge chemical/biological weapons cache in Iraq. I guarantee one or the other will happen before November 2004. This comes from cynicism on my part, not some deep knowledge of the master plan.
It does not matter who the democrat run. As soon as Bush falls below 50% he'll start bombing sryia, iran or north korea and get re-elected by a landslide.
The democrats know this and so does the rest of the country. I say if you know you are going to lose anyway run somebody who is not afraid the tell the truth and who is not afraid to call republicans names. The republicans get to call all democrats traitors and traitors so the democrats need someone to call them facists and racists.
That's a piss poor attitude. You could win this one if you did it the right way. Rove is not unbeatable - he's just unbeatable because the people the Democrats use to run campaigns have a huge blind spot. Deluded by idealism perhaps? Kind of like you.
By "war", you are referring to the unprecedented, unjustified, trumped-up, "pre-emptive" invasion of a non-threatening foreign country that is now costing the USA about a billion dollars and 3-5 American soldiers' lives every week, with no end in sight? Unless Bush pulls some Iraqi miracle out of his ass during the next year, I think ads showing that Dean is antiwar would be the best publicity Dean could ask for.
You are about to be taught a rather severe lesson about American politics during this election cycle. Try not to be too disillusioned by what you see - it's just a reality check.
Iowa is as middle America as you can get without a perscription. We love Dean.
Lieberman had a shot at the general public. The "let's try to be like the republicans so the general public will vote for us" strategy has cost the Democrats everything.
Think of Ronald Reagan. He was far from the mainstream (too far to the right.) He campaigned on his principles and chnaged the mainstream to fit his beliefs.
Ask Tip O'Neill if the mainstream really changed during Reagan's administration. It was a time of great partisan warfare and things weren't so Republican and conservative as you seem to think they were.
Lieberman is doing the smart thing - let's watch over the next year and see who is right, you or me. I feel fairly confident.
I can also pretty much guarantee Iowa will vote Bush in November 2004 if given an up or down Dean/Bush choice.
I have a few worries about his general electability, not because i think he would do a bad job of course, but just because of the smear campaign Bush is likely to run.
Guaranteed to run - remember this is Karl Rove we are talking about here. However it has been pointed out that Dean's views on gun-control, that it should be left up to the states without any more federal involvement, is likely to pick him up a lot of "single-issue" NRA types. The fact that he's a fiscal conservative who balanced the budget in Vermont, making it one of the very few states with a budget surplus in this time of recession, is likely to pick up some of the Republicans who are more concerned that Bush has turned at 10 year $6 trillion surpluss in a $4 trillion deficit.
I think the NRA people are a small constituency who are magnified in importance in their own eyes. I belong to the NRA incidentally, just to increase the relative veracity of my statement. I get the 'alerts' to vote for this candidate or that one, and the notices to show up at public meetings.
The NRA is a primarily Republican organization so I think even if Dean proved out to be the 'select' of the NRA, the single issue vote would split evenly.
In regards the deficit, no one has ever proved that a deficit is a campaign winner. I remember the Republicans trying to get traction with this issue back in the 80's and early 90's, to no avail. It took actual scandal - House Post Office, House Bank, and the national health care fiasco, to unseat the Democrats in Congress.
The "civil unions" issue will probably hurt him, but he apparently did a very good job of turning a lot people's views around in Vermont, who were initially very against the idea, as long as he stuck with "civil union" rather than "gay marriage." Conservatives get upset about the sanctity of marriage, and homosexuals get upset about the lack of social benefits inherit in marriage, civil unions are a good compromise that doesn't torque off either side off too badly.
Expect the civil unions to be twisted to something unrecognizable in the general election. That stuff won't play down South - and without a few Southern pickups a Democrat has no chance at all, even if he wins the popular vote (as Al Gore proved).
In essence I agree with you, despite my cited clarifications.
If he is so unelectable, doesn't that HELP the GOP?
Yeah it does.
Note what I said about not wanting this to be too easy. It just helps out the radicalized right. Second terms are for fucking over people because you don't have to worry about getting re-elected, right?
I disagree completely. This guy is going to lose and lose hard because he has huge chinks in his armor that are going to come out in the general election.
You are overrating your constituencies very sharply also. Single issue voters of any stripe are very limited. I wouldn't even attempt to break it down because you don't know what things will be like then. If the economy sucks bad enough you'll have a lot of people voting just on that, screw being a lesbian or being a gun-toter.
In essence you bring up a lot of good points. Your style is a bit bombthrowing, but you are telling it like it is. One thing you neglect is that, while the Democrat party is a 'big tent' with lots of little constituencies, they generally come together for a sufficiently charismatic candidate. Also, Democrats can win on the back of a big scandal. Take a look at the last two big Democrat victories in 1976 and 1992.
In 1976, Watergate was the issue, and Carter promised us he would 'never lie to the American people'. Therefore, we elected him. He was right - he wouldn't lie to us. He was just kind of ineffectual at governing.
In 1992, there was no governing issue beside the economy, and Clinton ran with it. He was the best politician I have seen in my life, and better than anyone noted in history since FDR. He played the game like a skin flute, welding together the disparate elements of the Democrat 'constitutency' into a single bloc. Also, Perot helped by drawing off moderate votes. I think Clinton would have won anyway in 1992 even without that, though.
I can't see any of these candidates in 2004 pulling either of the previous tricks off. Maybe they can come up with a new one. Not likely.
I honestly think that if the Democrat who wins the nomination (preferrably Dean or Kucinich for me) puts up a bunch of TV ads about the USA PATRIOT Act, they'll at least counter the anti-war stuff Bush's campaign would say.
I disagree completely. I think the Bush ads will be much more effective since most people will know what he is talking about, while PATRIOT Is a non-issue to most people.
My point is that several of the candidates, particularly Kerry, will defuse any BS about the Democrats being pacifists or ready to bend over to the US' foes. Dean will do no such thing, and is very vulnerable on the defense issue.
I'm a republican. I'm certainly not going to vote for Dean. Let's make that clear at the outset.
That being said, who cares about this in the long run? He apologized, I doubt they'll do it again, so I would hardly hold it against him long term. With all the spammers out there who will send out junk email - it's kind of hard to find someone reputable to do this for you. A campaign worker fucked up. Big deal.
That being said, isn't anyone on that side of the aisle worried about Dean? I find him to be the easiest Democrat to beat in the fall of 2004. This guy can be turned directly into the scion of leftist antiwar evil with a few carefully placed TV ads. The reason why he has survived till now is that he is running in a Democrat primary audience - a very leftist group to start with. His credentials and arguments play well there. Put him in a general electoral audience and watch how fast he gets bashed.
I'm going to risk a preliminary estimate of 500 electorals for Bush if Dean is the Democrat candidate. If you think i'm wrong, I recommend a drive to Middle America and a discussion with some of the people there.
At least Graham or Kerry or Lieberman would have a better chance with the general public. And for my sake, make this an actual campaign rather than a romp, willya? I haven't been overly happy with this administration.
Linux is here to stay and it's presence on the desktop will only increase from here. As people get used to the idea that Windows is not the only option, Mac OS may also pick up new converts.
You are an optimist. People buy home machines because they look like what they are used to at work/school/whatever. Hence, most purchases are Windows boxes.
Breaking that requires breaking into schools and businesses with Linux on the desktop, and that isn't happening anywhere significant in the US. Cited issue is 'the users are used to what we have, why change'. You might have a better shot in Europe. Even the specter of huge licensing costs doesn't seem to have made much of a dent here.
Macs even had a toehold in education once - it's pretty much faded far as I can see: most community colleges seem to be all Win32 now. Only the well funded private schools provide labs full of Macs anymore. Who knows how long even that will last.
The window (no pun intended) for breaking Microsoft's desktop monopoly has passed. IBM had the last big shot back in the 93-95 timeframe with OS/2 and blew it for various reasons. I don't think we are going to see much luck here, now or in the future.
I must sadly note that OS/2 had about as slick a desktop compared to Win31 as KDE or GNOME compare to Win32 today. Within close striking distance but not quite as good. The parallels to that situation back then are fairly striking. Big complaints back then were 'difficult to get vendor drivers for' 'new hardware isn't supported' 'lack of applications' - 2 out of 3 apply today. If you turn the third one to 'lack of commercial quality applications with a consistent interface', you have 3 out of 3.
This one has been beaten to death by trolls in the past, but sheesh, when history repeats itself do we all have to stay dumb and watch things go south without comment? Huge expenditures of time and effort by both paid and volunteer coders are being made to match Microsoft's commercial application/os juggernaut. I have been watching this industry for 20+ years. I have seen companies come and go, and technologies follow their arc. I can't see a longterm plan where the current Linux model works to take over the desktop, however.
I actually got to support Macintoshes in a large distribution, about 800 systems total spread out to 140 locations. Maybe 200 were located in the corporate headquarters in NYC and the rest were out in the boonies at various offices near colleges. I worked at this joint for a considerable period in the 94-96 time frame as the tech services mgr.
I am sure all my observations apply with System 9 still, but OSX is a different animal as noted.
Good points were:
Hardware was cookie-cutter - none of the 'video card of the month' crap you got from Gateway and sometimes from Dell. This made distributing software to the field very easy.
System software was relatively stable - much fewer patches than we experience today, or even then on Win31, OS releases were more frequent however (then, as today) - twice a year it seemed the OS would get a version bump. We would ignore most of them and do en masse upgrades when we thought there was justification.
Remote control utilities (mostly Timbuktu and Timbuktu/Remote) were workable and available. They were mostly constrained by bandwidth - was like a really bad VNC connection over a 14.4 modem. Which is quite a feat really, considering we couldn't afford nationwide frame relay. I'm sure you could SSH or VNC into Darwin/OSX so that issue is mostly moot now.
1st level support was easy to train. Kind of like desktop win32 people are today.
The users generally liked them.
Bad points were:
Hardware was unstable - lots of cracked cases, for one thing, but we also had issues with bad RAM and flaky SCSI drives. Diagnosing a flaky Macintosh HD back then, on System 7.0.1 or 7.5.3, was a bitch. You had disk first aid and hdsc setup, and then you had Norton disk doctor - frankly it was a lot easier on MS-DOS or Novell or even NT... macs pretty much suck for low level diagnostics. Most of the time we'd end up replacing the drive rather than messing too much with it. However, this cost shipping back and forth, probably $80 for a field machine. Cheaper than $700 or so to send a guy to Cincinnati out of NYC, but still sucked.
RAM problems were even worse - extension hell is probably a thing of the past with OSX - don't know much about that - but in general Macintoshes are less than forthcoming with error messages as befits their 'easy to use' reputation. Getting a lot of 'Type 0' errors? Who knows what the cause is...the diagnostic list of problems that could cause this is mindboggling. Generally, however, it meant that either the OS was hosed or the RAM was bad. So there is another $80 to ship, plus a facility is out of action for 2 or 3 days.
I'm sure that it is much easier with BSD/Darwin, since fsck and various other utilities are available. I'm also sure the hardware is just as prone to breakage - plastic clips, front panel bezels, hard disk carriers, you name it. Apple case designs have always been more towards pretty than functional, and they don't pack all that well in boxes when you are moving equipment around. A lot of noise has been made about Apple hardware being built to 'last'. I can testify it can still work 10 years out, but they obviously aren't geared towards building their equipment to be survivable in the field. I was really sad when a Quadra 950 got hosed - what a beautiful machine, and poor packing resulted in it getting bashed badly on the way back to NYC. A beige box would have had no problem most probably, and would be easily repairable to boot. That Q950 cost easily a grand to fix and had a plastic case with light metal shielding on the inside. Beige boxes are generally metal.
Serial ports sucked - moot point now with readily available networking and broadband but the RS-422 ports were missing a pin and therefore didn't do hardware handshaking (RTS/CTS) all that well.
The OS was flaky. It always has been unstable in the past, before OSX again. Another moot point perhaps, but there nonetheless. Note flaky in comparison with Windows NT 3.5 or Novell 3.1
Corruption is almost unknown in the US Government. Yes, I work there. Why is it unknown?
Fear.
There are just too many people watching in most instances, and corruption *will* get you a long trip to an ass-ramming federal pen. Besides, government workers are dweebs. Anyone with enough smarts to pull off a good extortion racket wouldn't take the job, the pay is too low.
Amtrak is a typical government monopoly and as such, it wastes the majority of its funding supporting losing proposition long haul lines out west. Who the hell is going to ride a train for 36 hours to get to New York? Maybe some old people who reminisce about the days of passenger liners and Pullman cars, but that's about it.
Amtrak is only useful in the Northeast Corridor where it isn't reasonable to fly from New York to Boston - a bullet train could get you there faster. If they dumped money into that, I could see it. Politics as usual means that each state that can feasibly have service must have it, so therefore Amtrak sucks ass.
Waste of funds, government should shitcan it and let private industry do it right, ie, funding the lines that actually can make money.
Not a single first (or third person) fantasy game has beaten Ultima Underworld, from 1991 I think.
I must've spent the entire weekend one week, no sleep, playing that damn thing. Nothing today can compare. Baldur's Gate, D2, all fun. But not anywhere near the same quality of gameplay.
D2 is like a graphical mud. Hack, slash, gain experience. The only thing it lacks is a socialization element. BG 1 and 2 are nice games but sheesh, they have very little replay value - it's just tedium. I break out the editor if I want to experiment.
As for the belief that OSS goes anywhere without companies -- it isn't a band of unpaid geeks who make free software what it is. It's corporate support in various forms. Very little gets done for free. If SCO scares people away from OSS, we're all fucked. I remember what things were like back in 93 or 94 when no company would touch Linux with a 10 foot pole. Movement was _slow_. Now it's quick. People are getting paid, you see. They aren't going to get paid anymore if SCO succeeds.
As for the wedge, I couldn't give a shit less what pansy types think. Neither could the corporate world. The paid people will continue hacking the OSS. Besides, just fork the project if you don't like how it is being run, right?
SCO *IS* screwed without any GNU support. You just try running a UNIX company where you can't get the GNU tools ported to your system. Right.
Lastly, SCO's remaining developers (a very limited group i'm sure) aren't an obstructive monolith - they will see the writing on the wall just fine. I feel no need to kowtow to 3 guys and their dog.
Failing to drive a stake through the heart of your enemy results in your ultimate disappearance.
Take a gander at Digital Research, WordPerfect, Lotus, Novell, Netscape...the stories differ but the defunct-ness is just the same. They lost credibility, lost market share, and either died or are in their death spiral.
Being the nice guy is a loser strategy. Only by adopting the tactics of your opponent do you stand a chance for survival. This is a concerted effort orchestrated by Microsoft to discredit and destroy open source.
You are choosing extinction by not taking retributive action.
Looks to me like they are raising the issue to see the upshot before they actually do it.
I wish they would. It would be quite appropriate in this case. SCO is certainly pressuring companies to drop free operating systems for their product, let's play the game their way for a bit. Nothing to be ashamed of there.
I have a feeling this will cause more longterm harm for SCO than this lawsuit, since this cuts SCO off from many of the GNU software packages out there. For that matter, things like Xfree86, KDE and GNOME won't compile either. They could use older compilers - for a while. Ultimately this will force most businesses to reconsider keeping SCO in any way, shape, or form.
I imagine they could either use something like Intel's compiler, or hack up their own, but either solution would be a big problem for them. I am thinking support costs and ensuring compatibility with common packages.
I don't see this as any negative whatsoever. Keeping the support is playing 'nice guy' when the opposing party is pulling out all the stops to screw over OSS. It's just plain foolish.
I have often dreamed of a system whereby I could have four missiles stored in the quarter panels of my car. They would be vertical launch tubes with caps painted the same color as the car, to be less conspicuous.
At the appropriate moment, I could press a steering-wheel mounted firing button to launch the missile. The missile would launch, locate the double yellow line in the middle of the road, and track it until it found the person blocking traffic. It would then break left till it circled around, slightly above traffic levels, do a pop-down maneuver, and lay into a slight up-angle as it strikes the driver's side rocker panel of the offending vehicle, knocking it off the road.
Unfortunately, I don't believe the kinetic energy imparted by a small missile of the 50 lbs variety can actually do that to a 2 ton SUV (it's a given that someone in an SUV is blocking traffic. Ok, maybe a minivan). But I can dream, can't I?
In the process of thinking about this, I realized a couple things that may be of interest to you. First, not all roads have the same kinds of painted lines. Some have shoulder marks. Some have buzz strips. Some have single yellow lines, and some have double. Some have single yellow lines with a dashed line on the other side (signifiying a passing lane). Assuring an optical sensor would be able to digest all these differing inputs would be challenging, to say the least.
Also, what happens when a road has a middle passing lane with double yellow lines, dashed on the inside? Those confuse human drivers, I can guarantee an optical sensor would not be happy with that.
What about turn lanes? NJ is famous for those stupid jug handles. Obviously a 'turn/go straight' decision would have to be made. But what happens when the primary road turns slightly at the point of the turn lane? Some interesting behavior of your automated system could result.
I also doubt that GPS has the resolution to actually handle driving down a road. The promised CPE is big enough that you could ram into a telephone pole at just about any time.
This is a really tough problem. I ultimately think that a passive response device along the lines of an RFID would be necessary to keep vehicles travelling in the correct direction. These would need to be installed along all road surfaces. For those which aren't equipped, we'd be stuck with the current method.
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The Republicans don't stand for anything really. The Republicans are as much of a 'big tent' as the Democrats - there are a lot of subgroups with differing interests. Some of them are:
"Religious Right" - basically your Bible beaters. They want Christian religious morality codified into law, as possible. This makes the world more like they would like it to be. They are the idealists of the bunch. They are willing to tolerate the leanings of the other general groups in the Republican tent.
"secular conservatives" - these are highly regional groupings. For example, you talk to a conservative in the West and you end up with a far different mindset than those in the Northeast. Still, these are the people who mostly want to arrest social change and solidify the status quo as the way we shall forever live. Oh and cutting some taxes wouldn't hurt either. They are very probusiness.
"Libertarians" - these guys are interested in small government, less intrusion, lower taxes, freedom in general. Social programs are anathema to the true libertarian. They mostly vote Republican since their own candidates are unable to get elected, and most of us are half-wise enough to be pragmatists (yeah, this is me)
If you wanted to cut a finer grain you could probably slice out a lot of other subgroupings as well.
Well, the Democratic candidates can talk about the reasons for the war, which may have been less than perfect (I'm sure more will come out about this in the coming months). Anyway, I'm not an expert in how public opinion is changed.
The way you do it is find issues which have traction - things people listen to, jibe with. Then you run with them, either identifying with them directly or tarring your opponent with them.
That's pretty much it, in a nutshell. Targets of opportunity - if the economy sucks, that is one. The bad part for the democrats is that anyone who comes out antiwar is a sitting duck in the event of another terrorist attack or some discovery of a huge chemical/biological weapons cache in Iraq. I guarantee one or the other will happen before November 2004. This comes from cynicism on my part, not some deep knowledge of the master plan.
It does not matter who the democrat run. As soon as Bush falls below 50% he'll start bombing sryia, iran or north korea and get re-elected by a landslide.
The democrats know this and so does the rest of the country. I say if you know you are going to lose anyway run somebody who is not afraid the tell the truth and who is not afraid to call republicans names. The republicans get to call all democrats traitors and traitors so the democrats need someone to call them facists and racists.
That's a piss poor attitude. You could win this one if you did it the right way. Rove is not unbeatable - he's just unbeatable because the people the Democrats use to run campaigns have a huge blind spot. Deluded by idealism perhaps? Kind of like you.
By "war", you are referring to the unprecedented, unjustified, trumped-up, "pre-emptive" invasion of a non-threatening foreign country that is now costing the USA about a billion dollars and 3-5 American soldiers' lives every week, with no end in sight? Unless Bush pulls some Iraqi miracle out of his ass during the next year, I think ads showing that Dean is antiwar would be the best publicity Dean could ask for.
You are about to be taught a rather severe lesson about American politics during this election cycle. Try not to be too disillusioned by what you see - it's just a reality check.
I'm a cynic - you soon will be too.
Iowa is as middle America as you can get without a perscription. We love Dean.
Lieberman had a shot at the general public. The "let's try to be like the republicans so the general public will vote for us" strategy has cost the Democrats everything.
Think of Ronald Reagan. He was far from the mainstream (too far to the right.) He campaigned on his principles and chnaged the mainstream to fit his beliefs.
Ask Tip O'Neill if the mainstream really changed during Reagan's administration. It was a time of great partisan warfare and things weren't so Republican and conservative as you seem to think they were.
Lieberman is doing the smart thing - let's watch over the next year and see who is right, you or me. I feel fairly confident.
I can also pretty much guarantee Iowa will vote Bush in November 2004 if given an up or down Dean/Bush choice.
I have a few worries about his general electability, not because i think he would do a bad job of course, but just because of the smear campaign Bush is likely to run.
Guaranteed to run - remember this is Karl Rove we are talking about here.
However it has been pointed out that Dean's views on gun-control, that it should be left up to the states without any more federal involvement, is likely to pick him up a lot of "single-issue" NRA types. The fact that he's a fiscal conservative who balanced the budget in Vermont, making it one of the very few states with a budget surplus in this time of recession, is likely to pick up some of the Republicans who are more concerned that Bush has turned at 10 year $6 trillion surpluss in a $4 trillion deficit.
I think the NRA people are a small constituency who are magnified in importance in their own eyes. I belong to the NRA incidentally, just to increase the relative veracity of my statement. I get the 'alerts' to vote for this candidate or that one, and the notices to show up at public meetings.
The NRA is a primarily Republican organization so I think even if Dean proved out to be the 'select' of the NRA, the single issue vote would split evenly.
In regards the deficit, no one has ever proved that a deficit is a campaign winner. I remember the Republicans trying to get traction with this issue back in the 80's and early 90's, to no avail. It took actual scandal - House Post Office, House Bank, and the national health care fiasco, to unseat the Democrats in Congress.
The "civil unions" issue will probably hurt him, but he apparently did a very good job of turning a lot people's views around in Vermont, who were initially very against the idea, as long as he stuck with "civil union" rather than "gay marriage." Conservatives get upset about the sanctity of marriage, and homosexuals get upset about the lack of social benefits inherit in marriage, civil unions are a good compromise that doesn't torque off either side off too badly.
Expect the civil unions to be twisted to something unrecognizable in the general election. That stuff won't play down South - and without a few Southern pickups a Democrat has no chance at all, even if he wins the popular vote (as Al Gore proved).
In essence I agree with you, despite my cited clarifications.
If he is so unelectable, doesn't that HELP the GOP?
Yeah it does.
Note what I said about not wanting this to be too easy. It just helps out the radicalized right. Second terms are for fucking over people because you don't have to worry about getting re-elected, right?
I disagree completely. This guy is going to lose and lose hard because he has huge chinks in his armor that are going to come out in the general election.
You are overrating your constituencies very sharply also. Single issue voters of any stripe are very limited. I wouldn't even attempt to break it down because you don't know what things will be like then. If the economy sucks bad enough you'll have a lot of people voting just on that, screw being a lesbian or being a gun-toter.
Actually I probably couldn't vote in a Dem primary under NJ law - you have to skip an election before voting in the opposing party's primary.
Just an interesting footnote.
In essence you bring up a lot of good points. Your style is a bit bombthrowing, but you are telling it like it is. One thing you neglect is that, while the Democrat party is a 'big tent' with lots of little constituencies, they generally come together for a sufficiently charismatic candidate. Also, Democrats can win on the back of a big scandal. Take a look at the last two big Democrat victories in 1976 and 1992.
In 1976, Watergate was the issue, and Carter promised us he would 'never lie to the American people'. Therefore, we elected him. He was right - he wouldn't lie to us. He was just kind of ineffectual at governing.
In 1992, there was no governing issue beside the economy, and Clinton ran with it. He was the best politician I have seen in my life, and better than anyone noted in history since FDR. He played the game like a skin flute, welding together the disparate elements of the Democrat 'constitutency' into a single bloc. Also, Perot helped by drawing off moderate votes. I think Clinton would have won anyway in 1992 even without that, though.
I can't see any of these candidates in 2004 pulling either of the previous tricks off. Maybe they can come up with a new one. Not likely.
I honestly think that if the Democrat who wins the nomination (preferrably Dean or Kucinich for me) puts up a bunch of TV ads about the USA PATRIOT Act, they'll at least counter the anti-war stuff Bush's campaign would say.
I disagree completely. I think the Bush ads will be much more effective since most people will know what he is talking about, while PATRIOT Is a non-issue to most people.
My point is that several of the candidates, particularly Kerry, will defuse any BS about the Democrats being pacifists or ready to bend over to the US' foes. Dean will do no such thing, and is very vulnerable on the defense issue.
I'm a republican. I'm certainly not going to vote for Dean. Let's make that clear at the outset.
That being said, who cares about this in the long run? He apologized, I doubt they'll do it again, so I would hardly hold it against him long term. With all the spammers out there who will send out junk email - it's kind of hard to find someone reputable to do this for you. A campaign worker fucked up. Big deal.
That being said, isn't anyone on that side of the aisle worried about Dean? I find him to be the easiest Democrat to beat in the fall of 2004. This guy can be turned directly into the scion of leftist antiwar evil with a few carefully placed TV ads. The reason why he has survived till now is that he is running in a Democrat primary audience - a very leftist group to start with. His credentials and arguments play well there. Put him in a general electoral audience and watch how fast he gets bashed.
I'm going to risk a preliminary estimate of 500 electorals for Bush if Dean is the Democrat candidate. If you think i'm wrong, I recommend a drive to Middle America and a discussion with some of the people there.
At least Graham or Kerry or Lieberman would have a better chance with the general public. And for my sake, make this an actual campaign rather than a romp, willya? I haven't been overly happy with this administration.
Linux is here to stay and it's presence on the desktop will only increase from here. As people get used to the idea that Windows is not the only option, Mac OS may also pick up new converts.
You are an optimist. People buy home machines because they look like what they are used to at work/school/whatever. Hence, most purchases are Windows boxes.
Breaking that requires breaking into schools and businesses with Linux on the desktop, and that isn't happening anywhere significant in the US. Cited issue is 'the users are used to what we have, why change'. You might have a better shot in Europe. Even the specter of huge licensing costs doesn't seem to have made much of a dent here.
Macs even had a toehold in education once - it's pretty much faded far as I can see: most community colleges seem to be all Win32 now. Only the well funded private schools provide labs full of Macs anymore. Who knows how long even that will last.
The window (no pun intended) for breaking Microsoft's desktop monopoly has passed. IBM had the last big shot back in the 93-95 timeframe with OS/2 and blew it for various reasons. I don't think we are going to see much luck here, now or in the future.
I must sadly note that OS/2 had about as slick a desktop compared to Win31 as KDE or GNOME compare to Win32 today. Within close striking distance but not quite as good. The parallels to that situation back then are fairly striking. Big complaints back then were 'difficult to get vendor drivers for' 'new hardware isn't supported' 'lack of applications' - 2 out of 3 apply today. If you turn the third one to 'lack of commercial quality applications with a consistent interface', you have 3 out of 3.
This one has been beaten to death by trolls in the past, but sheesh, when history repeats itself do we all have to stay dumb and watch things go south without comment? Huge expenditures of time and effort by both paid and volunteer coders are being made to match Microsoft's commercial application/os juggernaut. I have been watching this industry for 20+ years. I have seen companies come and go, and technologies follow their arc. I can't see a longterm plan where the current Linux model works to take over the desktop, however.
Paradigm shift required.
Dude, you have read some P.J. O'Rourke I see!
Nice mixing of his themes.
I actually got to support Macintoshes in a large distribution, about 800 systems total spread out to 140 locations. Maybe 200 were located in the corporate headquarters in NYC and the rest were out in the boonies at various offices near colleges. I worked at this joint for a considerable period in the 94-96 time frame as the tech services mgr.
I am sure all my observations apply with System 9 still, but OSX is a different animal as noted.
Good points were:
Hardware was cookie-cutter - none of the 'video card of the month' crap you got from Gateway and sometimes from Dell. This made distributing software to the field very easy.
System software was relatively stable - much fewer patches than we experience today, or even then on Win31, OS releases were more frequent however (then, as today) - twice a year it seemed the OS would get a version bump. We would ignore most of them and do en masse upgrades when we thought there was justification.
Remote control utilities (mostly Timbuktu and Timbuktu/Remote) were workable and available. They were mostly constrained by bandwidth - was like a really bad VNC connection over a 14.4 modem. Which is quite a feat really, considering we couldn't afford nationwide frame relay. I'm sure you could SSH or VNC into Darwin/OSX so that issue is mostly moot now.
1st level support was easy to train. Kind of like desktop win32 people are today.
The users generally liked them.
Bad points were:
Hardware was unstable - lots of cracked cases, for one thing, but we also had issues with bad RAM and flaky SCSI drives. Diagnosing a flaky Macintosh HD back then, on System 7.0.1 or 7.5.3, was a bitch. You had disk first aid and hdsc setup, and then you had Norton disk doctor - frankly it was a lot easier on MS-DOS or Novell or even NT... macs pretty much suck for low level diagnostics. Most of the time we'd end up replacing the drive rather than messing too much with it. However, this cost shipping back and forth, probably $80 for a field machine. Cheaper than $700 or so to send a guy to Cincinnati out of NYC, but still sucked.
RAM problems were even worse - extension hell is probably a thing of the past with OSX - don't know much about that - but in general Macintoshes are less than forthcoming with error messages as befits their 'easy to use' reputation. Getting a lot of 'Type 0' errors? Who knows what the cause is...the diagnostic list of problems that could cause this is mindboggling. Generally, however, it meant that either the OS was hosed or the RAM was bad. So there is another $80 to ship, plus a facility is out of action for 2 or 3 days.
I'm sure that it is much easier with BSD/Darwin, since fsck and various other utilities are available. I'm also sure the hardware is just as prone to breakage - plastic clips, front panel bezels, hard disk carriers, you name it. Apple case designs have always been more towards pretty than functional, and they don't pack all that well in boxes when you are moving equipment around. A lot of noise has been made about Apple hardware being built to 'last'. I can testify it can still work 10 years out, but they obviously aren't geared towards building their equipment to be survivable in the field. I was really sad when a Quadra 950 got hosed - what a beautiful machine, and poor packing resulted in it getting bashed badly on the way back to NYC. A beige box would have had no problem most probably, and would be easily repairable to boot. That Q950 cost easily a grand to fix and had a plastic case with light metal shielding on the inside. Beige boxes are generally metal.
Serial ports sucked - moot point now with readily available networking and broadband but the RS-422 ports were missing a pin and therefore didn't do hardware handshaking (RTS/CTS) all that well.
The OS was flaky. It always has been unstable in the past, before OSX again. Another moot point perhaps, but there nonetheless. Note flaky in comparison with Windows NT 3.5 or Novell 3.1
Corruption is almost unknown in the US Government. Yes, I work there. Why is it unknown?
Fear.
There are just too many people watching in most instances, and corruption *will* get you a long trip to an ass-ramming federal pen. Besides, government workers are dweebs. Anyone with enough smarts to pull off a good extortion racket wouldn't take the job, the pay is too low.
And before you ask, i'm a contractor.
Amtrak is a typical government monopoly and as such, it wastes the majority of its funding supporting losing proposition long haul lines out west. Who the hell is going to ride a train for 36 hours to get to New York? Maybe some old people who reminisce about the days of passenger liners and Pullman cars, but that's about it.
Amtrak is only useful in the Northeast Corridor where it isn't reasonable to fly from New York to Boston - a bullet train could get you there faster. If they dumped money into that, I could see it. Politics as usual means that each state that can feasibly have service must have it, so therefore Amtrak sucks ass.
Waste of funds, government should shitcan it and let private industry do it right, ie, funding the lines that actually can make money.
Not a single first (or third person) fantasy game has beaten Ultima Underworld, from 1991 I think.
I must've spent the entire weekend one week, no sleep, playing that damn thing. Nothing today can compare. Baldur's Gate, D2, all fun. But not anywhere near the same quality of gameplay.
D2 is like a graphical mud. Hack, slash, gain experience. The only thing it lacks is a socialization element. BG 1 and 2 are nice games but sheesh, they have very little replay value - it's just tedium. I break out the editor if I want to experiment.
I never had to do that with UW.
Bull.
As for the belief that OSS goes anywhere without companies -- it isn't a band of unpaid geeks who make free software what it is. It's corporate support in various forms. Very little gets done for free. If SCO scares people away from OSS, we're all fucked. I remember what things were like back in 93 or 94 when no company would touch Linux with a 10 foot pole. Movement was _slow_. Now it's quick. People are getting paid, you see. They aren't going to get paid anymore if SCO succeeds.
As for the wedge, I couldn't give a shit less what pansy types think. Neither could the corporate world. The paid people will continue hacking the OSS. Besides, just fork the project if you don't like how it is being run, right?
SCO *IS* screwed without any GNU support. You just try running a UNIX company where you can't get the GNU tools ported to your system. Right.
Lastly, SCO's remaining developers (a very limited group i'm sure) aren't an obstructive monolith - they will see the writing on the wall just fine. I feel no need to kowtow to 3 guys and their dog.
Failing to drive a stake through the heart of your enemy results in your ultimate disappearance.
Take a gander at Digital Research, WordPerfect, Lotus, Novell, Netscape...the stories differ but the defunct-ness is just the same. They lost credibility, lost market share, and either died or are in their death spiral.
Being the nice guy is a loser strategy. Only by adopting the tactics of your opponent do you stand a chance for survival. This is a concerted effort orchestrated by Microsoft to discredit and destroy open source.
You are choosing extinction by not taking retributive action.
Looks to me like they are raising the issue to see the upshot before they actually do it.
I wish they would. It would be quite appropriate in this case. SCO is certainly pressuring companies to drop free operating systems for their product, let's play the game their way for a bit. Nothing to be ashamed of there.
I have a feeling this will cause more longterm harm for SCO than this lawsuit, since this cuts SCO off from many of the GNU software packages out there. For that matter, things like Xfree86, KDE and GNOME won't compile either. They could use older compilers - for a while. Ultimately this will force most businesses to reconsider keeping SCO in any way, shape, or form.
I imagine they could either use something like Intel's compiler, or hack up their own, but either solution would be a big problem for them. I am thinking support costs and ensuring compatibility with common packages.
I don't see this as any negative whatsoever. Keeping the support is playing 'nice guy' when the opposing party is pulling out all the stops to screw over OSS. It's just plain foolish.
A gubenatorial campaign...to pick up guys.
Forget dating sites, ladies. Just run for office!
I have often dreamed of a system whereby I could have four missiles stored in the quarter panels of my car. They would be vertical launch tubes with caps painted the same color as the car, to be less conspicuous.
At the appropriate moment, I could press a steering-wheel mounted firing button to launch the missile. The missile would launch, locate the double yellow line in the middle of the road, and track it until it found the person blocking traffic. It would then break left till it circled around, slightly above traffic levels, do a pop-down maneuver, and lay into a slight up-angle as it strikes the driver's side rocker panel of the offending vehicle, knocking it off the road.
Unfortunately, I don't believe the kinetic energy imparted by a small missile of the 50 lbs variety can actually do that to a 2 ton SUV (it's a given that someone in an SUV is blocking traffic. Ok, maybe a minivan). But I can dream, can't I?
In the process of thinking about this, I realized a couple things that may be of interest to you. First, not all roads have the same kinds of painted lines. Some have shoulder marks. Some have buzz strips. Some have single yellow lines, and some have double. Some have single yellow lines with a dashed line on the other side (signifiying a passing lane). Assuring an optical sensor would be able to digest all these differing inputs would be challenging, to say the least.
Also, what happens when a road has a middle passing lane with double yellow lines, dashed on the inside? Those confuse human drivers, I can guarantee an optical sensor would not be happy with that.
What about turn lanes? NJ is famous for those stupid jug handles. Obviously a 'turn/go straight' decision would have to be made. But what happens when the primary road turns slightly at the point of the turn lane? Some interesting behavior of your automated system could result.
I also doubt that GPS has the resolution to actually handle driving down a road. The promised CPE is big enough that you could ram into a telephone pole at just about any time.
This is a really tough problem. I ultimately think that a passive response device along the lines of an RFID would be necessary to keep vehicles travelling in the correct direction. These would need to be installed along all road surfaces. For those which aren't equipped, we'd be stuck with the current method.
That was probably not Franklin's whole point in co-opting Webster into doing it, but i'm sure he would be pleased with the results.
Differentiation accomplished!
You sir, have an excellent, cynical sense of humor, unlike the moderators.
Gave me a nice belly laugh, that did.