So, at the slightest sign of failure, we brutally punish the leader,
Wrong. Even today, everyone loves Ronald Regan. But as early as his first term, he displayed strong signs of not only stupidity (or senility) but also dishonesty (he ran on an anti-deficit platform, and you know what happened with that!)
Likewise G W Bush has shown more than a "slightest sign" of failing, but he's been relatively unpunished, and is unlikely to get less than 47% of the vote (in his worst possibility). A brutal punishment would've had him impeached by now.
It won't cure Alzheimer's or Diabetes, a broken spine, cancer, or old age. Ever.
Yes it will! That research is a critical step to allowing every Merkian Citizen to have a personal farm of brainless clones, ready to accept a brain-transplate every 20 years to finally release mankind from the shadow of age-based mortality.
I have asked Congress to authorize the use of America's military, if it proves necessary, to enforce U.N. Security Council demands.
... We will plan carefully; we will act with the full power of the United States military; we will act with allies at our side, and we will prevail.
That's full of lies. He didn't use the authority to "enforce UN Security Council demands"; he used it in direct opposition to the demands of 3/5ths of that Council.
He didn't plan carefully. He didn't use the full power of the US military (instead allowing Rumsfeld to use a "lighter, agile force"). Acting with "allies" at our side is a real stretch too.
For another fun lie, look at his campaign promise not to use US troops for nation building.
In other words, for it to be a lie, he had to know it was false at the time he made the statement.
This is the Idiot Defense: "I can't possibly have been lying, because I'm too stupid to know what the truth is". And it's true; Bush is quite possibly too dumb to lie effectively. We can't tell whether he's dishonest or stupid.
But it doesn't make any practical difference- either condition disqualifies him for office.
When Badnarik, et al, were asked to leave private property and didn't, they were arrested for trespassing. They had no right to be there in the first place, so I don't see how you can call it civil disobedience.
If a black woman sits down at a restaurant under a "No Coloureds" sign, is that civil disobedience?
Or is she just trespassing on private property, where she has no right to be in the first place?
What I find bizarre about criticism of IRV is that it concentrates on a few very mild quirks that only ever arise in odd, carefully constructed hypothetical situations -- like your example where you have three candidates who each attract almost exactly 33.3% of the primary vote.
It's not contrived. That 33% split is exactly where things would head in an IRV system.
The current, most-votes-wins system also has a breakdown when there is a 49% split (because in that case, a 3rd party can spoil the election, causing the less-favored #2 candidate to win). It's no coincidence that the USA electorate is split at 49% now.
So instead you stick with a voting system that quite clearly has one giant problem: vote-splitting.
To address this problem, the USA would have to change its voting system, but IRV isn't the best way to do it. "Approval voting" would work better. Not only does it avoid some of IRV's defects (like how voting for someone can make her lose), but it also can be used with today's existing ballot machines.
Today, voters can pick only one candidate. With Approval, they can choose to pick as many as they want. But IRV would require a more complex ballot, so you can sort all candidates in order. Concordet would need this too.
Being able to download the technology powering the Google search engine must be the dream of every competing search engine.
They can't download it, because it's not included in this package.
The most competitively-important software Google has is their page ranking algorithm, which sorts and classifies search results using many factors, including not only data within a page, but also what other pages link to it. This code has been carefully tweaked for useful results, and to avoid abuse.
Desktop hard drives tend to have fairly little inter-document linking, and any linkages that exist will be of a different nature than what's found on the open web.
So, Google has no reason to ship their most important techniques in this product. (If someone wanted to reverse-engineer Pagerank, a better starting point would be the Google intranet search appliance)
to have families and the issue will largely take care of itself
Yes, IMO, no politician should take an anti-abortion stance without first addressing the huge demands for infants that has made "Chinese adoption broker" a booming career choice. Adoption regulations were intended to protect children, but they apparently go to far.
The government doesn't grant permits for concieving a child- why should they make adoption much harder?
What about those monasteries that are not only self-sufficient, but as a part of their rules require almost no contact with the outside world
They don't exist. Even just a few deliveries a year is enough to import major benefits from an external, capitalist industry. (And even if they didn't use manufactured goods, there's still intangible benefits they are given: protection of their property rights, for example. They are "recieving" defense from rampaging brigands)
I would venture to say that Marx has been disproven to some extent- given the rigid control structures and the tendency for the winners in a revolution to mimic the previous government, violent revolution isn't the way to go.
His ideas haven't been tested yet. Marx's theories were only applicable in the context of a post-capitalist society. Russia and China never even had capitalism, and you can't be post-X without reaching X first.
It is concievable that increasing monopolization of the USA economy could push it towards a post-capitalist, central-planning environment (at least bringing it closer than the USSR ever was)
I'd say it's far more likely that it would be specifically restricted.
And as I just said, "restricted" is a kind of "legal".
Issues like partial-birth abortion or parental consent are just sideshows*.
e an EXPLICIT nationwide referendum to completely legalize abortion without restrictions- and that, would never pass.
A nationwide vote to legalize weapons without restrictions would never pass either. But guns will still be legal.
* Speaking of sideshows, maybe I should've mentioned that although Republican politicians are anti-abortion, that's only because it gets them votes. (GWB has been demonstrable pro-abortion in his personal life). They don't actually want to outlaw it, because then a block of energetic supporters would declare victory and lose interest in politics. They prefer abortion as a persistent boogieman, to distract poor voters from economic issues.
That's a really classical demonstration of the slippery-slope fallacy.
Fast forward to today, when I get 200-300 spam a day, phishing is a multi-million dollar industry, and for many applications email is becoming useless.
I must have smarter ISPs or something. I've gotten fewer than 5 spams this year, and never more than 50/year across the past decade. That's not to say it isn't a problem- the public has lost an important ability to freely hang out your email address for unsolicited correspondence on topics of interest. But it's not apocalyptic.
stating the facts that our domestic software industry would indeed wither and die in that scenario
Statements like that aren't worth the time to refute.
Certainly it would be impossible to compete successfully with developers from any unencumbered country.
WHAT encumbered country? They're rare today, and another one dies every few years. It's called WIPO. Even though some Banana Republics will host regenade programmers, executing that code inside WTO nations will earn you a BSA audit, or worse.
So even the big firms will continue to get twisted.
They're not twisted today, and it's theoretically possible for a non-event to "continue". All that happens is they spend $300,000 on legal fees every couple years. No problem for a megacorp, especially in exchange for having destroyed all small/start-up software houses.
All that will happen is that, sooner or later, either the law will change, or we'll move further towards the regime's logical conclusion and software development will become something that's done overseas.
No. That's "Black & White" thinking in a Greyscale world. You point out two extremes, and then claim that one of them is inevitable (but you don't know which)
In reality, complex problems almost never go completely one way or another. Abusers of a priviledge are frequently smart enough not to go too far and rock the boat. Killing the USA programming industry would be rocking it.
while konqueror is a framework that allows you to combine lots of smaller gui elements however you want.
But it isn't.
Users cannot pull up Konqueror and drag together a few GUI elements to perform a quick job. Konqueror is not an IDE!
If the meaning was "KDE includes a framework to combine smaller GUI elements", then that is true, but Konqueror is not that framework. Try calling it KParts...
Americans do not support completely legalized abortion- latest polls show that over 71% of Americans support some form of restrictions on the "right" of abortion.
"Completely legalized" and "restricted" are both subsets of "legalized". Someone against "partial birth abortion" may still be in favor of early-stage procedures.
But it's never been put up to a vote
There's a vote on it next month. Bush has promised (using the codeword "Dred Scott") to select Supreme Court Justices willing to override Roe-Wade. (And the current bench is really aging!)
Ironically, if that were to happen, the silent majority pro-abortion position of USA voters would become apparent, and within 3 years Congress would specifically legalize it. After this years of legalized abortion, the public is simply addicted to it (although they many addicts, they might not admit it until facing withdrawal)
Software is a creative expression - not a machine.
That's completely wrong. Software IS a machine, by the very definition of the word. (And, most machines are creative, some not- it doesn't matter)
The only difference between "data" and "software" is that the latter is a machine. Hardware and software are both machines, but one is made from atoms, and the other from information.
Software patents must be repealed, or our technology industry will wither and die
While I agree that software patents are bad and harmful, that's chicken-little hyperbole.
Like with most things that are legal and harmful, those who benefit from software patents will be smart enough not to kill a good deal. They'll scrape their 5-15% tithe off of development, and price non-commericial programmers out of key areas... but they won't abuse it so much that the overall industry dies. Even approaching that level of enforcement would get Congress to wake up and legislate software patents into oblivion.
The reason so many ludicrous software patents exist today is that they're hardly ever enforced.
I think a way to handle the patent problem is to make a patent license which work with patent law as the GPL work with copyright law.
Won't work; patents and copyright are too different.
Copyright protection only stops you from copying someone else's program. Patents make it illegal for you either to copy his work, OR to invent it entirely on your own, without ever knowing that someone else was already doing it.
(Note that the problem the GPL solves is enabling authors to release their code freely, without being worried that someone else might release modified code nonfreely)
Why install a spreadsheet, presentation app when my employee only needs a wordprocessor.
So he can read any wordprocessing files people send him.
As it happens, modern "Office" documents frequently have bits of Excel and Powerpoint embedded right into Word files. You can't view the Word Document correctly without having the rest of Office (which in this case, acts rather as a plugin for Word)
but in fact it is the modern-day version of the commandline's pipe
No it isn't. What does a bash user do with a pipe (that's a "|") on the command line? It passes output from one program to another, and possibly to another after that. Konqueror has no analogous feature.
A basic use of pipe would be cat list.txt | grep -v INACTIVE | more. But you can get much more advanced, like ssh otherhost "cat dump.bz2" | bunzip2 | awk -e filter.awk | sort -u | tr -n15 | bzip2 | cdrecord dev=0,0,0 speed=1 -
Can you tell me how you'd even do the simpler kinds of piping operations in Konqueror?
A "GUI pipe" would be very cool, but KDE doesn't provide one. (Arts is more like a "pipe" than Konqueror is)
You can't convince me of it because I know it isn't true. The drive for survival of the genome is just too strong for that to be true.
If that drive were as strong as you think it is, then the legality of abortion would be irrelevant, because no rational woman would pass up the opportunity to bear a child.
Someone who doesn't want children clearly has a defective genome- but will the government go and force her to reproduce?
Actually, communism has never been tried outside of the Catholic Monasteries. And there it's rather successfull and has been for over a thousand years now.
Communalism is not communism. Those monestaries only survive by trading with the outside, non-communal public. Religous rites in exchange for donation is still a kind of capitalism.
(Leninism, however, is also not communism. And Stalinism certainly isn't!)
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So, at the slightest sign of failure, we brutally punish the leader,
Wrong. Even today, everyone loves Ronald Regan. But as early as his first term, he displayed strong signs of not only stupidity (or senility) but also dishonesty (he ran on an anti-deficit platform, and you know what happened with that!)
Likewise G W Bush has shown more than a "slightest sign" of failing, but he's been relatively unpunished, and is unlikely to get less than 47% of the vote (in his worst possibility). A brutal punishment would've had him impeached by now.
It won't cure Alzheimer's or Diabetes, a broken spine, cancer, or old age. Ever.
Yes it will! That research is a critical step to allowing every Merkian Citizen to have a personal farm of brainless clones, ready to accept a brain-transplate every 20 years to finally release mankind from the shadow of age-based mortality.
For example, take two lines from this speech:
We will plan carefully; we will act with the full power of the United States military; we will act with allies at our side, and we will prevail.
That's full of lies. He didn't use the authority to "enforce UN Security Council demands"; he used it in direct opposition to the demands of 3/5ths of that Council.
He didn't plan carefully. He didn't use the full power of the US military (instead allowing Rumsfeld to use a "lighter, agile force"). Acting with "allies" at our side is a real stretch too.
For another fun lie, look at his campaign promise not to use US troops for nation building.
In other words, for it to be a lie, he had to know it was false at the time he made the statement.
This is the Idiot Defense: "I can't possibly have been lying, because I'm too stupid to know what the truth is". And it's true; Bush is quite possibly too dumb to lie effectively. We can't tell whether he's dishonest or stupid.
But it doesn't make any practical difference- either condition disqualifies him for office.
um...he was obviously refering to his original stance on Iraq.
Kerry's stance on Iraq didn't change in the past 3 years.
He voted to give Bush the authority he asked for, based on Bush's promise to use it "to enforce the demands of the UN Security Council".
The UN-supported mission Bush asked for is what Kerry approved. What Bush did, though, was something totally different.
Get it: Iraq has WMD. Attack! Oops, they got nothing. Maybe this war wasn't such a great idea then huh?
Kerry has specifically said that his knowledge of Iraq's WMD would not have changed his vote on the war.
Furthermore, Kerry's campaign tacitly supports some remarkably dirty tricks to keep Nader/Camejo off the ballot or tied up in court
Bush's supporters explicitly supports some dirty tricks to get Nader on the ballot.
Whenever a competitor starts supporting you, you need to take a hard look at the possibility your own efforts are counterproductive.
When Badnarik, et al, were asked to leave private property and didn't, they were arrested for trespassing. They had no right to be there in the first place, so I don't see how you can call it civil disobedience.
If a black woman sits down at a restaurant under a "No Coloureds" sign, is that civil disobedience?
Or is she just trespassing on private property, where she has no right to be in the first place?
Nader(*) kind-of answered the question
Yeah, a real answer:
Q: What's a national-scale mistake you've made?
A: Once, I ate a hot dog.
Hmm, is that the most important error he's ever made? What about the time he made G.W.Bush the USA's president?
What I find bizarre about criticism of IRV is that it concentrates on a few very mild quirks that only ever arise in odd, carefully constructed hypothetical situations -- like your example where you have three candidates who each attract almost exactly 33.3% of the primary vote.
It's not contrived. That 33% split is exactly where things would head in an IRV system.
The current, most-votes-wins system also has a breakdown when there is a 49% split (because in that case, a 3rd party can spoil the election, causing the less-favored #2 candidate to win). It's no coincidence that the USA electorate is split at 49% now.
So instead you stick with a voting system that quite clearly has one giant problem: vote-splitting.
To address this problem, the USA would have to change its voting system, but IRV isn't the best way to do it. "Approval voting" would work better. Not only does it avoid some of IRV's defects (like how voting for someone can make her lose), but it also can be used with today's existing ballot machines.
Today, voters can pick only one candidate. With Approval, they can choose to pick as many as they want. But IRV would require a more complex ballot, so you can sort all candidates in order. Concordet would need this too.
Being able to download the technology powering the Google search engine must be the dream of every competing search engine.
They can't download it, because it's not included in this package.
The most competitively-important software Google has is their page ranking algorithm, which sorts and classifies search results using many factors, including not only data within a page, but also what other pages link to it. This code has been carefully tweaked for useful results, and to avoid abuse.
Desktop hard drives tend to have fairly little inter-document linking, and any linkages that exist will be of a different nature than what's found on the open web.
So, Google has no reason to ship their most important techniques in this product. (If someone wanted to reverse-engineer Pagerank, a better starting point would be the Google intranet search appliance)
Does Google Search not have 'don't index these directories' functionality?
So the wife just opens the preferences and reads which directories were excluded from indexing...
Osama is still on the lose,
Ok, I can accept that interneters now write "loose" instead of "lose".
But do you have to also use "lose" instead of the much-rarer "loose"? When was it decided to completely swap those words?
is to have fat astronauts.
Better, really, to have small astronauts. No one more than 4 feet tall. They'll need less food to stay alive, a smaller habitat, and less air to heat.
Could pick em short + fat, I guess...
to have families and the issue will largely take care of itself
Yes, IMO, no politician should take an anti-abortion stance without first addressing the huge demands for infants that has made "Chinese adoption broker" a booming career choice. Adoption regulations were intended to protect children, but they apparently go to far.
The government doesn't grant permits for concieving a child- why should they make adoption much harder?
What about those monasteries that are not only self-sufficient, but as a part of their rules require almost no contact with the outside world
They don't exist. Even just a few deliveries a year is enough to import major benefits from an external, capitalist industry. (And even if they didn't use manufactured goods, there's still intangible benefits they are given: protection of their property rights, for example. They are "recieving" defense from rampaging brigands)
I would venture to say that Marx has been disproven to some extent- given the rigid control structures and the tendency for the winners in a revolution to mimic the previous government, violent revolution isn't the way to go.
His ideas haven't been tested yet. Marx's theories were only applicable in the context of a post-capitalist society. Russia and China never even had capitalism, and you can't be post-X without reaching X first.
It is concievable that increasing monopolization of the USA economy could push it towards a post-capitalist, central-planning environment (at least bringing it closer than the USSR ever was)
I'd say it's far more likely that it would be specifically restricted.
And as I just said, "restricted" is a kind of "legal".
Issues like partial-birth abortion or parental consent are just sideshows*.
e an EXPLICIT nationwide referendum to completely legalize abortion without restrictions- and that, would never pass.
A nationwide vote to legalize weapons without restrictions would never pass either. But guns will still be legal.
* Speaking of sideshows, maybe I should've mentioned that although Republican politicians are anti-abortion, that's only because it gets them votes. (GWB has been demonstrable pro-abortion in his personal life). They don't actually want to outlaw it, because then a block of energetic supporters would declare victory and lose interest in politics. They prefer abortion as a persistent boogieman, to distract poor voters from economic issues.
That's a really classical demonstration of the slippery-slope fallacy.
Fast forward to today, when I get 200-300 spam a day, phishing is a multi-million dollar industry, and for many applications email is becoming useless.
I must have smarter ISPs or something. I've gotten fewer than 5 spams this year, and never more than 50/year across the past decade. That's not to say it isn't a problem- the public has lost an important ability to freely hang out your email address for unsolicited correspondence on topics of interest. But it's not apocalyptic.
stating the facts that our domestic software industry would indeed wither and die in that scenario
Statements like that aren't worth the time to refute.
Certainly it would be impossible to compete successfully with developers from any unencumbered country.
WHAT encumbered country? They're rare today, and another one dies every few years. It's called WIPO. Even though some Banana Republics will host regenade programmers, executing that code inside WTO nations will earn you a BSA audit, or worse.
So even the big firms will continue to get twisted.
They're not twisted today, and it's theoretically possible for a non-event to "continue". All that happens is they spend $300,000 on legal fees every couple years. No problem for a megacorp, especially in exchange for having destroyed all small/start-up software houses.
All that will happen is that, sooner or later, either the law will change, or we'll move further towards the regime's logical conclusion and software development will become something that's done overseas.
No. That's "Black & White" thinking in a Greyscale world. You point out two extremes, and then claim that one of them is inevitable (but you don't know which)
In reality, complex problems almost never go completely one way or another. Abusers of a priviledge are frequently smart enough not to go too far and rock the boat. Killing the USA programming industry would be rocking it.
while konqueror is a framework that allows you to combine lots of smaller gui elements however you want.
But it isn't.
Users cannot pull up Konqueror and drag together a few GUI elements to perform a quick job. Konqueror is not an IDE!
If the meaning was "KDE includes a framework to combine smaller GUI elements", then that is true, but Konqueror is not that framework. Try calling it KParts...
Americans do not support completely legalized abortion- latest polls show that over 71% of Americans support some form of restrictions on the "right" of abortion.
"Completely legalized" and "restricted" are both subsets of "legalized". Someone against "partial birth abortion" may still be in favor of early-stage procedures.
But it's never been put up to a vote
There's a vote on it next month. Bush has promised (using the codeword "Dred Scott") to select Supreme Court Justices willing to override Roe-Wade. (And the current bench is really aging!)
Ironically, if that were to happen, the silent majority pro-abortion position of USA voters would become apparent, and within 3 years Congress would specifically legalize it. After this years of legalized abortion, the public is simply addicted to it (although they many addicts, they might not admit it until facing withdrawal)
Software is a creative expression - not a machine.
That's completely wrong. Software IS a machine, by the very definition of the word. (And, most machines are creative, some not- it doesn't matter)
The only difference between "data" and "software" is that the latter is a machine. Hardware and software are both machines, but one is made from atoms, and the other from information.
Software patents must be repealed, or our technology industry will wither and die
While I agree that software patents are bad and harmful, that's chicken-little hyperbole.
Like with most things that are legal and harmful, those who benefit from software patents will be smart enough not to kill a good deal. They'll scrape their 5-15% tithe off of development, and price non-commericial programmers out of key areas... but they won't abuse it so much that the overall industry dies. Even approaching that level of enforcement would get Congress to wake up and legislate software patents into oblivion.
The reason so many ludicrous software patents exist today is that they're hardly ever enforced.
I think a way to handle the patent problem
is to make a patent license which work with patent law as the GPL work with copyright law.
Won't work; patents and copyright are too different.
Copyright protection only stops you from copying someone else's program. Patents make it illegal for you either to copy his work, OR to invent it entirely on your own, without ever knowing that someone else was already doing it.
(Note that the problem the GPL solves is enabling authors to release their code freely, without being worried that someone else might release modified code nonfreely)
Why install a spreadsheet, presentation app when my employee only needs a wordprocessor.
So he can read any wordprocessing files people send him.
As it happens, modern "Office" documents frequently have bits of Excel and Powerpoint embedded right into Word files. You can't view the Word Document correctly without having the rest of Office (which in this case, acts rather as a plugin for Word)
but in fact it is the modern-day version of the commandline's pipe
No it isn't. What does a bash user do with a pipe (that's a "|") on the command line? It passes output from one program to another, and possibly to another after that. Konqueror has no analogous feature.
A basic use of pipe would be cat list.txt | grep -v INACTIVE | more . But you can get much more advanced, like
ssh otherhost "cat dump.bz2" | bunzip2 | awk -e filter.awk | sort -u | tr -n15 | bzip2 | cdrecord dev=0,0,0 speed=1 -
Can you tell me how you'd even do the simpler kinds of piping operations in Konqueror?
A "GUI pipe" would be very cool, but KDE doesn't provide one. (Arts is more like a "pipe" than Konqueror is)
that life has all of the same rights as he/she will after birth nine months later.
Begging the question. That's the conclusion you want to reach, not a going-in assumption.
Contrary to popular rehtoric, rights are given by man, not God.
You can't convince me of it because I know it isn't true. The drive for survival of the genome is just too strong for that to be true.
If that drive were as strong as you think it is, then the legality of abortion would be irrelevant, because no rational woman would pass up the opportunity to bear a child.
Someone who doesn't want children clearly has a defective genome- but will the government go and force her to reproduce?
Actually, communism has never been tried outside of the Catholic Monasteries. And there it's rather successfull and has been for over a thousand years now.
Communalism is not communism. Those monestaries only survive by trading with the outside, non-communal public. Religous rites in exchange for donation is still a kind of capitalism.
(Leninism, however, is also not communism. And Stalinism certainly isn't!)
But they're not a genetically unique individual until fertilization- and thus biologically not a separate life form from the parent.
The cool thing is that identical twins are legally allowed to kill each other.