Atlas--which is a downloadable piece of JavaScript code--gives developers a more structured environment for building applications, providing time-saving services such as an object model and debugging, he said. It will work across any Web browser that supports AJAX technologies.
And Microsoft also plans to make sure that ASP.NET 2.0 works well with Safari, Opera and Firefox. The last thing they want is for their web apps to generate HTML that breaks 10-15% of the market out there because that's enough now for developers to look to JSP and JavaServer Faces.
They just ruled that "private means public." The US Constitution explicitly forbids the use of eminent domain as a means to redistribute real-estate wealth. All eminent domain must be for a public use, ie a road, police state, military base, etc.
Those who minimize or even support this ruling have basically said that making room for wal-mart over the small businessman is the public good since wal-mart will always bring in more tax revenues than a small retailer. Congradulations, lefties, you've just formally subordinated one of the most basic human rights to the good of big corporations. How do you like them Apples?
It's about time we throw the baby out with the
on
Apple Sued Over iTunes UI
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· Score: 5, Insightful
bath water.
If the child is a brat, you discipline the child. If the child tries to stab you to death for disciplining it, you put the child in a mental ward for safe observation and help. If when the child (or in this case patent industry) is mature and tries it again, society prescribes the death penalty (in the US). Why shouldn't the patent system be any different?
The big IT corporations don't need patents to maintain their control because they are in a unique position to crush upstarts that few industries have. They industry as a whole has proven that they can't use them responsibly and the very fact that a hobbyist can turn their hobby into a business means that patents are bad. I'm sorry, but the ends justify the means here. Patent holders have time and again proven that milking their work and not innovating is their real goal, at least in IT. It's time that the entire system be flushed out and simplified.
Manufacturing jobs "lost their luster" a long time ago because a combination of many destructive forces converged on blue collar workers. Corporations with loyalties to no one, not even the stockholders, union bosses who wanted blue collar workers to live middle and upper middle class lifestyles, politicians hell-bent on judging their job performance in volume of regulation and prison/quasi-slave labor in countries like China all conspired to destroy those jobs. Now we are simply progressing toward the inevitable destruction of the white collar job market for anyone who isn't a business major in college.
One thing is certain about the job market. If the starry-eyed socialists would stop regulating our economy into the second world, we'd not be losing jobs the way we are. American workers are very expensive to hire, often too expensive to justify. A decent chunk of it is caused by politically correct bullshit like pushing for diversity over qualification, allowing people to sue merely for being offended rather than telling people to deal with it, the constant threat of corporate-to-corporate lawsuits over nothing and things of that nature.
The bottom line is that if you want to actually have a job and a society that produces wealth rather than living off of the wealth of bygone years, you'll vote for the Libertarian Party. The LP is the only party that actually wants to create a regulatory regime that works for everyone. The coin-operated Democrats and Republicans only care about giving back to those who put them in power and don't care about making the system work for the rest of society.
That'd be a merger between two companies that have virtually nothing in common. VoIP is not something you want Google to be able to search, you know. If they can let you search it then that means that someone has been recording all of your conversations.
I think Google would be better served by buying out a company that makes GPS software. That way they could build a system that would allow Google to integrate advertisements into the GPS system. They could work on a GPS system that passively retrieves geographic-specific information based on your GPS coordinates and delivers things like good restaraunts and that targets things like where to find a mechanic for your car and other businesses.
Do you honestly expect the United Nations, with all of its corruption, to get the job done? Heavy corruption in the government is the norm in most of the world, and do you really expect the second and third world countries to not rape and pillage the first world?
No thank you. The corruption we have on the national level is barely contained, and by contained I mean regulated enough that we can still function. We can barely hold our own elected representatives responsible for anything, so how do you expect us to do that for a global system of government?
It seems like every feature that was supposed to be cool except for the 3d-accelerated desktop is going to be either taken out of Longhorn or is going to be backported to XP to promote developers' use of it (like Avalon). Does anyone else see how this could end up with Microsoft effectively having no good reason for the average person to leave XP unless they buy a new PC? Why would a business want to move to Longhorn if it is a warmed over rehash of Windows XP?
So many people went to Windows XP because even those who used Windows 2000 saw a lot of good benefits in it. Despite what some people may say, Windows XP can be a lot faster than Windows 2000 on things like disk I/O. I remember ripping a DVD under Win2k and then doing it again under WinXP when I got XP and seeing significant performance gains to the tune of going from about 4000kb/sec to about 7500-8000kb/sec under XP. Then there were other enhancements, but we all truthfully know that XP was a big jump for the average user of Windows.
But why should people who like XP leave it for Longhorn? Unless Microsoft follows Be's upgrade path for BeOS and charges only $25-$50 for XP upgrade CDs, why should people switch? What does it do for them that can't be done just as easily with XP and which isn't negated by more hardware needs?
See monad and think that it's going to be an emasculated, one testicled command shell that no real man would ever touch out of a jealous regard for the family jewels?
You're ignoring the fact that for the past few years, the Macintosh has been built on commodity hardware with the exception of the CPU and motherboard. The Macintosh userbase has actually grown since it began to compete using commodity hardware.
It's also possible that Google's CEO could go on a murderous rampage tomorrow at Microsoft's Redmond campus. 0.000000000001% is still a possibility you know. Do you realize what would happen to Google if they did that? They'd be dumped by most website owners faster than they could count the drop in their search and ad hits.
Then again, Google coming up with detailed design guidelines for their pages for public consumption would be incredibly useful for designers. They use a lot of cutting edge JS tricks like AJAX and their layout is great. It's very clean and the kind of thing I wish I had the skills right now to emulate, but I have too much to learn about web design right now to do that.
The thing that seems so cool about this sort of thing is that it opens up the search service to the rest of us to help us make our content easier to find when it is updated. One thing that I have come to really respect about Google is that they don't rely on the government to beat Microsoft back down the way Netscape did. Google has managed to make a product that 47% of the US Internet users want to use, even though MSN is the default in IE. Remember Netscape 4? There's a reason that bloated POS failed, anyone who remembers the releases of it for the first six months that it went public knows EXACTLY why that was.
The only thing that Google can do at this point is continue to let some of their more biased employees run wild. They've been causing Google's Adsense and Adwords to take extremely partisan stances between the Dems and Reps, and that's gotten the ire of many on the right. My concern is primarily that Google will end up pissing off so many of these users that they will end up switching to MSN and helping Microsoft take Google down. Google is certainly not perfect, and I'm still wondering why Google News had the National Vanguard, a neo-nazi publication in their news feed list, but says that some of the bigger blogs like Michelle Malkin are not up to editorial snuff. Go figure, like the neo-nazis aren't biased or anything. Then there's their tendency to run ads for Hamas on their arabic pages.
Oh well, in many respects they still have a lot farther to go before they have tried as much evil as Microsoft and they are still more innovative, so time will tell.
The problem with all of this "choice" is that to be able to compete with Windows, MacOS X or even Zeta in the long run, Linux distributions have to have all of their components that tightly integrated. That means that ideally the KDE, X.Org and Linux developers need to be all on the same sheet of music to make sure that their components work very, very well together. Most people cannot even tell you what GDI is on Windows, or Quartz is on MacOS X, so why should they have to know what X.Org is and why they need to care about it?
This is the painful reality for these developers. The average buyer doesn't want a distribution, they want a complete operating system. KDE + X.Org + Linux is a cobbled together setup, Windows, MacOS X, Syllable, BeOS, etc. were and are not. That's what they expect, and it may mean that some of the smaller projects have to take on a lot of work. So be it. If you want desktop Linux to work well, and be a true replacement for Windows, then it may mean that the KDE and/or GNOME guys have to go Linux only or that another project has to be started that creates a complete and pure Linux operating system that is a "total experience and environment" rather than a collection of packages.
The difference is fundamental, not symantic. It means that the projects must be coordinated together with one vision, one plan and a goal of one end result.
is when people who are very intelligent compared to the rest of the public think they know it all. I think there is probably nothing worse than arguing with someone who thinks that because they are brilliant in one area that they are now all of a sudden uniquely qualified to render an opinion in all areas.
One of the reasons that I pretty much never read corporate blogs like Schwartz's is that they are usually just launching pads. Some of the Microsoft employee ones are kinda interesting because you get to see a little bit of what goes on with the development of IE and stuff like that. Yet I don't know anyone who really takes Schwartz seriously at all except for a few entries I have seen on the copyright expansionist blog IPCentral.
I think it is only a matter of time before the bigger corporate bloggers screw up and get censored or fired for being too honest. What would happent to an IE developer that grudgingly admits that they're making CSS2.1 and 3.0 support top priority for 7.0 because Firefox's CSS support is better right now? They'd probably be fired. The same goes for a Sun developer who says that Apache's Harmony project may be what saves Java from being destroyed by.NET.
There is one thing that all of the elitists who post here saying how worthless blogging is ultimately fail to comprehend. Blogging gives the average citizen a stake in online free speech. It makes censorship actually hit home and does anyone honestly think that the average blogger is going to vote for a candidate that supported a measure that directly censored them? A lot are already jumping ship from the GOP because of Bush's uncritical support for McCain-Feingold. Sadly, blogging may be the last, best hope for restoring a drive for liberty in this country post-9/11 and the elitist nerds here and elsewhere should accept that and embrace it. So what if someone's blog is asinine, don't read it. Problem solved. Ironically I have seen few blog posts as utterly asinine as 90% of what gets posted by Anonymous Cowards here.
They bust hundreds or even thousands of users and take this to Congress to justify funding and manpower increases? This could be a big profile bust and they're going to exploit it to their advantage.
in our society, for Americans at least. One of the things that I have noticed about blogging is that it is quite hard for people who take unorthodox views to get any attention. The vanity that is often involved in blogging ends up causing people to shy away from real debates because they want to be flattered, not challenged. Blogging seems like a sexy thing to do for a lot of people more out of a sense of a dellusion of grandeur than any desire to write intelligently.
I'm a political blogger of sorts, but I could really care less what happens in the Republicratic oligarchy on a daily basis. Most bloggers that I have seen that do write about politics end up obsessing about such mundane shit that they have no power over. Really, Bush's nominees aren't that interesting. Ideologically he is a continuation of the triangulation centrism of Clinton except with a pragmatic approach to using our military abroad against terrorists. Whoever Bush chooses won't end up being a true conservative, but rather a closet moderate or left-liberal like Clinton and half of Reagan's appointees. Until the LP, Reason Foundation or Cato vouches for some of those guys I won't give them more attention than a passive yawn.
Part of the reason I read so few blogs is that I don't want to read what amounts to a political soap opera. That really is what it is all about in the end. Most bloggers act like housewives obsessed with the Young and the Restless and Days of Our Lives.
I tried it out and actually like it for the most part. The thing that's particularly nice IMO is that all of the personalized content appears below the search feature so that the top looks more or less like the old Google. The interface seems to be the standard Google through and through and it does a pretty good job of showing you only the stuff you want when you take the time to customize it.
The only thing that they really need to do is add a feature to let you add custom news feeds based on RSS you specify or by creating Google News searches. Good News already lets you add your own categories based on search criteria so My Google needs that too.
Does China even have a tradition of freedom of any kind at all? The Communists didn't exactly change the cultural outlook on individualism overnight you know...
Thomas' dissent was about respecting the laws that congress had already established, the written letter of the constitution and the "protecting minors" angle that the states supposedly had. Beside the obvious fact that protecting minors was never a factor in this regulatory area, Thomas does indirectly invoke a good question. Where does too much freedom become a problem?
I happen to believe that morality means nothing when not imposed from within. Law and order can only accomplish so much and history has shown that the states that care about peace and that leave the matters of personal morality like sex and drug use to the church to deal with are the states that have the most peace. That's why some of us believe that the state's goal should be to maximize freedom to the highest extent without undermining law and order, even if many of the people don't want it.
For libertarians, this makes sense. Why not be able to have both unfettered school prayer AND legal drug use by adults? Isn't society better off when the individual is free and the government has a few defined tasks that it specializes on rather than becoming some monstrosity that has 50 bazillion departments that regulate everything from littering to education to the hair cut a toy poodle can have on sunday? Sometimes what the people want isn't moral or legal as it infringes on the rights of others without cause.
There was no good reason to keep people from being able to buy wine from other states directly. Part of the goal of the establishment of the federal government was to turn the states into a free trade zone. That's why the federal government has the exclusive authority to regulate interestate commerce. The "will of the people" had to bow to the law, and sometimes doing that actually makes the people freer than they may want to admit.
Part of the reason we have a constitution is that our founders did not believe that the will of the people often should be followed... and for good reason. It was the will of most whites for much of our history to keep blacks down. It was the will of most Germans to elect Hitler. Go down the line and you'll see that good men and women backed by good laws, not a democratic process, have carried the day for freedom and justice.
It couldn't be any worse than what the big names in media do already. Newsweek played a major role in spreading a story about a soldier trying to flush part of the Koran down the toilet in gitmo. Just one little problem: Newsweek's "source" was an anonymous phone call from someone alleging to be a government official who paraphrased what they claimed was a report to be issued. They never even read an excerpt of the report to the Newsweek reporter and what did they do? They pounced on this "story" (as in a complete fiction) and now 9 people in Afghanistan are dead because the riot that Newsweek helped start got so out of control that the small fledgling Afghani government had to use a lot of force to stop huge crowds of rioting students and other civilians.
The news media can talk about blogging killing the media, but bloggers haven't contributed to people being killed yet. The mainstream media on the other hand, has. So much for the much vaunted "accountability" that is supposed to separate blogging from "journalism" these days. That's what's always cited by the media as the important difference. While I don't trust bloggers either for objective reporting of the facts, can anyone seriously say that the professional media cares about the truth any more than bloggers do?
A large part of the reason that Apple is still around with not even 5% of the market is that they do care about the user. With a user base that small for their platform, most vendors would be dead but Apple focuses heavily on the user experience. I don't see a lot of that at all coming from most open source projects.
Here's a little theory of mine: users are more concerned with having a great UI and having apps that work together than raw speed. Open source desktops used to have the speed advantage, but not anymore. Can anyone honestly say that GNOME is faster than Windows XP's desktop these days? Same for KDE and MacOS X.
For all of this bitching about Apple exploiting OSS, I don't see any recognition that the mere fact that OSX's underpinnings are OSS gives OSS a vote of confidence in the corporate world. For one of the two largest platforms in the world to switch to that foundation is a big endoresement and help lend legitimacy to OSS. The funniest part of this is that KDE's developers are finally discovering the fact that forks do happen. Imagine that, Apple actually forked KHTML for their own needs. Why is it OK for X.Org to fork and go off in one direction, but not OK for Apple to do the same thing? They give the patches back and excuse me if I am at a loss as to how a forked code base is going to maintain a lot of similarity with the original when both are going off in separate directions.
Hmmm sounds awfull...
on
Star Wars Sickout
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, right. This is the final installment in the series so it's not like this is going to be one of many "productivity hits" that businesses will have to suffer. You want to bitch about a productivity hit, why not bitch about the dumbasses who cannot follow IT department policy about opening insecure attachments and who do other things like that which open them up to worms? God only knows how much money businesses have lost to such willfully negligent behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
And Microsoft also plans to make sure that ASP.NET 2.0 works well with Safari, Opera and Firefox. The last thing they want is for their web apps to generate HTML that breaks 10-15% of the market out there because that's enough now for developers to look to JSP and JavaServer Faces.
Oh, sorry. I forgot. All of Clinton's appointees are religious right fanatics. Thanks for reminding me.
They just ruled that "private means public." The US Constitution explicitly forbids the use of eminent domain as a means to redistribute real-estate wealth. All eminent domain must be for a public use, ie a road, police state, military base, etc.
Those who minimize or even support this ruling have basically said that making room for wal-mart over the small businessman is the public good since wal-mart will always bring in more tax revenues than a small retailer. Congradulations, lefties, you've just formally subordinated one of the most basic human rights to the good of big corporations. How do you like them Apples?
bath water.
If the child is a brat, you discipline the child. If the child tries to stab you to death for disciplining it, you put the child in a mental ward for safe observation and help. If when the child (or in this case patent industry) is mature and tries it again, society prescribes the death penalty (in the US). Why shouldn't the patent system be any different?
The big IT corporations don't need patents to maintain their control because they are in a unique position to crush upstarts that few industries have. They industry as a whole has proven that they can't use them responsibly and the very fact that a hobbyist can turn their hobby into a business means that patents are bad. I'm sorry, but the ends justify the means here. Patent holders have time and again proven that milking their work and not innovating is their real goal, at least in IT. It's time that the entire system be flushed out and simplified.
Manufacturing jobs "lost their luster" a long time ago because a combination of many destructive forces converged on blue collar workers. Corporations with loyalties to no one, not even the stockholders, union bosses who wanted blue collar workers to live middle and upper middle class lifestyles, politicians hell-bent on judging their job performance in volume of regulation and prison/quasi-slave labor in countries like China all conspired to destroy those jobs. Now we are simply progressing toward the inevitable destruction of the white collar job market for anyone who isn't a business major in college.
One thing is certain about the job market. If the starry-eyed socialists would stop regulating our economy into the second world, we'd not be losing jobs the way we are. American workers are very expensive to hire, often too expensive to justify. A decent chunk of it is caused by politically correct bullshit like pushing for diversity over qualification, allowing people to sue merely for being offended rather than telling people to deal with it, the constant threat of corporate-to-corporate lawsuits over nothing and things of that nature.
The bottom line is that if you want to actually have a job and a society that produces wealth rather than living off of the wealth of bygone years, you'll vote for the Libertarian Party. The LP is the only party that actually wants to create a regulatory regime that works for everyone. The coin-operated Democrats and Republicans only care about giving back to those who put them in power and don't care about making the system work for the rest of society.
That'd be a merger between two companies that have virtually nothing in common. VoIP is not something you want Google to be able to search, you know. If they can let you search it then that means that someone has been recording all of your conversations.
I think Google would be better served by buying out a company that makes GPS software. That way they could build a system that would allow Google to integrate advertisements into the GPS system. They could work on a GPS system that passively retrieves geographic-specific information based on your GPS coordinates and delivers things like good restaraunts and that targets things like where to find a mechanic for your car and other businesses.
Do you honestly expect the United Nations, with all of its corruption, to get the job done? Heavy corruption in the government is the norm in most of the world, and do you really expect the second and third world countries to not rape and pillage the first world?
No thank you. The corruption we have on the national level is barely contained, and by contained I mean regulated enough that we can still function. We can barely hold our own elected representatives responsible for anything, so how do you expect us to do that for a global system of government?
It seems like every feature that was supposed to be cool except for the 3d-accelerated desktop is going to be either taken out of Longhorn or is going to be backported to XP to promote developers' use of it (like Avalon). Does anyone else see how this could end up with Microsoft effectively having no good reason for the average person to leave XP unless they buy a new PC? Why would a business want to move to Longhorn if it is a warmed over rehash of Windows XP?
So many people went to Windows XP because even those who used Windows 2000 saw a lot of good benefits in it. Despite what some people may say, Windows XP can be a lot faster than Windows 2000 on things like disk I/O. I remember ripping a DVD under Win2k and then doing it again under WinXP when I got XP and seeing significant performance gains to the tune of going from about 4000kb/sec to about 7500-8000kb/sec under XP. Then there were other enhancements, but we all truthfully know that XP was a big jump for the average user of Windows.
But why should people who like XP leave it for Longhorn? Unless Microsoft follows Be's upgrade path for BeOS and charges only $25-$50 for XP upgrade CDs, why should people switch? What does it do for them that can't be done just as easily with XP and which isn't negated by more hardware needs?
See monad and think that it's going to be an emasculated, one testicled command shell that no real man would ever touch out of a jealous regard for the family jewels?
You're ignoring the fact that for the past few years, the Macintosh has been built on commodity hardware with the exception of the CPU and motherboard. The Macintosh userbase has actually grown since it began to compete using commodity hardware.
Leopard? Maybe leper would be a more description of how the x86 buyers will be treated by the PPC users. Btw, I have the coverage mirrored here
It's also possible that Google's CEO could go on a murderous rampage tomorrow at Microsoft's Redmond campus. 0.000000000001% is still a possibility you know. Do you realize what would happen to Google if they did that? They'd be dumped by most website owners faster than they could count the drop in their search and ad hits.
Then again, Google coming up with detailed design guidelines for their pages for public consumption would be incredibly useful for designers. They use a lot of cutting edge JS tricks like AJAX and their layout is great. It's very clean and the kind of thing I wish I had the skills right now to emulate, but I have too much to learn about web design right now to do that.
The thing that seems so cool about this sort of thing is that it opens up the search service to the rest of us to help us make our content easier to find when it is updated. One thing that I have come to really respect about Google is that they don't rely on the government to beat Microsoft back down the way Netscape did. Google has managed to make a product that 47% of the US Internet users want to use, even though MSN is the default in IE. Remember Netscape 4? There's a reason that bloated POS failed, anyone who remembers the releases of it for the first six months that it went public knows EXACTLY why that was.
The only thing that Google can do at this point is continue to let some of their more biased employees run wild. They've been causing Google's Adsense and Adwords to take extremely partisan stances between the Dems and Reps, and that's gotten the ire of many on the right. My concern is primarily that Google will end up pissing off so many of these users that they will end up switching to MSN and helping Microsoft take Google down. Google is certainly not perfect, and I'm still wondering why Google News had the National Vanguard, a neo-nazi publication in their news feed list, but says that some of the bigger blogs like Michelle Malkin are not up to editorial snuff. Go figure, like the neo-nazis aren't biased or anything. Then there's their tendency to run ads for Hamas on their arabic pages.
Oh well, in many respects they still have a lot farther to go before they have tried as much evil as Microsoft and they are still more innovative, so time will tell.
The problem with all of this "choice" is that to be able to compete with Windows, MacOS X or even Zeta in the long run, Linux distributions have to have all of their components that tightly integrated. That means that ideally the KDE, X.Org and Linux developers need to be all on the same sheet of music to make sure that their components work very, very well together. Most people cannot even tell you what GDI is on Windows, or Quartz is on MacOS X, so why should they have to know what X.Org is and why they need to care about it?
This is the painful reality for these developers. The average buyer doesn't want a distribution, they want a complete operating system. KDE + X.Org + Linux is a cobbled together setup, Windows, MacOS X, Syllable, BeOS, etc. were and are not. That's what they expect, and it may mean that some of the smaller projects have to take on a lot of work. So be it. If you want desktop Linux to work well, and be a true replacement for Windows, then it may mean that the KDE and/or GNOME guys have to go Linux only or that another project has to be started that creates a complete and pure Linux operating system that is a "total experience and environment" rather than a collection of packages.
The difference is fundamental, not symantic. It means that the projects must be coordinated together with one vision, one plan and a goal of one end result.
is when people who are very intelligent compared to the rest of the public think they know it all. I think there is probably nothing worse than arguing with someone who thinks that because they are brilliant in one area that they are now all of a sudden uniquely qualified to render an opinion in all areas.
One of the reasons that I pretty much never read corporate blogs like Schwartz's is that they are usually just launching pads. Some of the Microsoft employee ones are kinda interesting because you get to see a little bit of what goes on with the development of IE and stuff like that. Yet I don't know anyone who really takes Schwartz seriously at all except for a few entries I have seen on the copyright expansionist blog IPCentral.
I think it is only a matter of time before the bigger corporate bloggers screw up and get censored or fired for being too honest. What would happent to an IE developer that grudgingly admits that they're making CSS2.1 and 3.0 support top priority for 7.0 because Firefox's CSS support is better right now? They'd probably be fired. The same goes for a Sun developer who says that Apache's Harmony project may be what saves Java from being destroyed by .NET.
There is one thing that all of the elitists who post here saying how worthless blogging is ultimately fail to comprehend. Blogging gives the average citizen a stake in online free speech. It makes censorship actually hit home and does anyone honestly think that the average blogger is going to vote for a candidate that supported a measure that directly censored them? A lot are already jumping ship from the GOP because of Bush's uncritical support for McCain-Feingold. Sadly, blogging may be the last, best hope for restoring a drive for liberty in this country post-9/11 and the elitist nerds here and elsewhere should accept that and embrace it. So what if someone's blog is asinine, don't read it. Problem solved. Ironically I have seen few blog posts as utterly asinine as 90% of what gets posted by Anonymous Cowards here.
They bust hundreds or even thousands of users and take this to Congress to justify funding and manpower increases? This could be a big profile bust and they're going to exploit it to their advantage.
in our society, for Americans at least. One of the things that I have noticed about blogging is that it is quite hard for people who take unorthodox views to get any attention. The vanity that is often involved in blogging ends up causing people to shy away from real debates because they want to be flattered, not challenged. Blogging seems like a sexy thing to do for a lot of people more out of a sense of a dellusion of grandeur than any desire to write intelligently.
I'm a political blogger of sorts, but I could really care less what happens in the Republicratic oligarchy on a daily basis. Most bloggers that I have seen that do write about politics end up obsessing about such mundane shit that they have no power over. Really, Bush's nominees aren't that interesting. Ideologically he is a continuation of the triangulation centrism of Clinton except with a pragmatic approach to using our military abroad against terrorists. Whoever Bush chooses won't end up being a true conservative, but rather a closet moderate or left-liberal like Clinton and half of Reagan's appointees. Until the LP, Reason Foundation or Cato vouches for some of those guys I won't give them more attention than a passive yawn.
Part of the reason I read so few blogs is that I don't want to read what amounts to a political soap opera. That really is what it is all about in the end. Most bloggers act like housewives obsessed with the Young and the Restless and Days of Our Lives.
I tried it out and actually like it for the most part. The thing that's particularly nice IMO is that all of the personalized content appears below the search feature so that the top looks more or less like the old Google. The interface seems to be the standard Google through and through and it does a pretty good job of showing you only the stuff you want when you take the time to customize it.
The only thing that they really need to do is add a feature to let you add custom news feeds based on RSS you specify or by creating Google News searches. Good News already lets you add your own categories based on search criteria so My Google needs that too.
I guess you can't have the Total Information Awareness project if they can't buy any computers since all of the hardware is made in Taiwan...
Does China even have a tradition of freedom of any kind at all? The Communists didn't exactly change the cultural outlook on individualism overnight you know...
Thomas' dissent was about respecting the laws that congress had already established, the written letter of the constitution and the "protecting minors" angle that the states supposedly had. Beside the obvious fact that protecting minors was never a factor in this regulatory area, Thomas does indirectly invoke a good question. Where does too much freedom become a problem?
I happen to believe that morality means nothing when not imposed from within. Law and order can only accomplish so much and history has shown that the states that care about peace and that leave the matters of personal morality like sex and drug use to the church to deal with are the states that have the most peace. That's why some of us believe that the state's goal should be to maximize freedom to the highest extent without undermining law and order, even if many of the people don't want it.
For libertarians, this makes sense. Why not be able to have both unfettered school prayer AND legal drug use by adults? Isn't society better off when the individual is free and the government has a few defined tasks that it specializes on rather than becoming some monstrosity that has 50 bazillion departments that regulate everything from littering to education to the hair cut a toy poodle can have on sunday? Sometimes what the people want isn't moral or legal as it infringes on the rights of others without cause.
There was no good reason to keep people from being able to buy wine from other states directly. Part of the goal of the establishment of the federal government was to turn the states into a free trade zone. That's why the federal government has the exclusive authority to regulate interestate commerce. The "will of the people" had to bow to the law, and sometimes doing that actually makes the people freer than they may want to admit.
Part of the reason we have a constitution is that our founders did not believe that the will of the people often should be followed... and for good reason. It was the will of most whites for much of our history to keep blacks down. It was the will of most Germans to elect Hitler. Go down the line and you'll see that good men and women backed by good laws, not a democratic process, have carried the day for freedom and justice.
It couldn't be any worse than what the big names in media do already. Newsweek played a major role in spreading a story about a soldier trying to flush part of the Koran down the toilet in gitmo. Just one little problem: Newsweek's "source" was an anonymous phone call from someone alleging to be a government official who paraphrased what they claimed was a report to be issued. They never even read an excerpt of the report to the Newsweek reporter and what did they do? They pounced on this "story" (as in a complete fiction) and now 9 people in Afghanistan are dead because the riot that Newsweek helped start got so out of control that the small fledgling Afghani government had to use a lot of force to stop huge crowds of rioting students and other civilians.
The news media can talk about blogging killing the media, but bloggers haven't contributed to people being killed yet. The mainstream media on the other hand, has. So much for the much vaunted "accountability" that is supposed to separate blogging from "journalism" these days. That's what's always cited by the media as the important difference. While I don't trust bloggers either for objective reporting of the facts, can anyone seriously say that the professional media cares about the truth any more than bloggers do?
A large part of the reason that Apple is still around with not even 5% of the market is that they do care about the user. With a user base that small for their platform, most vendors would be dead but Apple focuses heavily on the user experience. I don't see a lot of that at all coming from most open source projects.
Here's a little theory of mine: users are more concerned with having a great UI and having apps that work together than raw speed. Open source desktops used to have the speed advantage, but not anymore. Can anyone honestly say that GNOME is faster than Windows XP's desktop these days? Same for KDE and MacOS X.
For all of this bitching about Apple exploiting OSS, I don't see any recognition that the mere fact that OSX's underpinnings are OSS gives OSS a vote of confidence in the corporate world. For one of the two largest platforms in the world to switch to that foundation is a big endoresement and help lend legitimacy to OSS. The funniest part of this is that KDE's developers are finally discovering the fact that forks do happen. Imagine that, Apple actually forked KHTML for their own needs. Why is it OK for X.Org to fork and go off in one direction, but not OK for Apple to do the same thing? They give the patches back and excuse me if I am at a loss as to how a forked code base is going to maintain a lot of similarity with the original when both are going off in separate directions.
Yeah, right. This is the final installment in the series so it's not like this is going to be one of many "productivity hits" that businesses will have to suffer. You want to bitch about a productivity hit, why not bitch about the dumbasses who cannot follow IT department policy about opening insecure attachments and who do other things like that which open them up to worms? God only knows how much money businesses have lost to such willfully negligent behavior.