I see this comment of mine escaled all the way to being Flamebait...
I was just trying to point that the people that took the are responsible for what motivated this whole thread might actually proud of the fact that this can be seen as a socialist thing.
If it were me, I know having my actions called `socialist' would not make me feel bad in the least.
Note that I did not say "standarizing on the form of DRM used by Apple".
If society decides that DRM is good or if it decides that is is bad but needed, then it is in its best interest to come up with a choice of a preferred DRM format. Now, I would think that it would also be in its best interest that that DRM format be one that does not belong to a particular company, one that is not patented, which is not guarded by any gatekeeper who charges anyone anything (and of course it would be in that society's best interest not to have unethical copyright laws...)
There is nothing in DRM that requires the format to be closed, expensively patented, and owned by anyone, just as there is no correlation between the security of a cryptographic algorithm and the closedness of its inner workings.
Why is standardizing on one form of DRM in any way helpful to the populace.
Assuming that DRM is unavoidable (which is a bad assumtion, but that is beside my point), standardizing on one form of DRM would be good, like standardizing on one form of video tape, of laser disk format, of width of cars, of voltage for household electrical current, and so on.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Wow, are you a veteran of the debate over the nature of authority between Marxist socialism and anarchist socialism? Probably not, but I like that sig anyway for that reson.;)
I am just pointing out that the argument you use to justify your claim that "Word is, hands down, a better product [than OOo]" is really not good enough.
I am just pointing that comparaisons as to what is better than what have to be done relative to a "better to do something specific" or "better for some particular use".
For the uses most people I know use Word for, WordPad would be a better product. For the uses I could possibly use Word for, LaTeX+vim is a better product. You get the idea.
I don't think that's it at all. I love OOo, but MSWord is, hands down, a better product (I work at a book publisher-- OOo is missing some important features).
That is not a great argument for supporting your claim that Word is a better product. It would be an acceptable argument if you were claiming that Word is a better product if you are a book publisher and the features relevant to book publishing are indispensable to you.
See, most people do not work at book publishers.
(And, by the way, for those that do work at a book publisher, there are far, far better products that Word!)
Listen to someone from the #1 economic power in the world on this...
I am sorry, but the US is not exactly the one country I would be listening if I wanted to develop a country in such a way that its people get to live better lives. If I were interested in building a country which is good for corporations and a small part of its population, I'd have a different opinion. The US has, in very many aspects, gotten to the point that it can compete with England the eerie status of the only undeveloping nation in the world.
I'm quite sure that if you lived in Bolivia and had no potable water and had to pay ridiculous prices for gas and oil, your ideas about fucking Capitalism would be different.
Probably, but then I'd also likely be uneducated and scratching at dirt with a stick to try and get a meager amount of food to grow on a tiny plot of land...maybe if I'm lucky have a timeshared plowing animal!
Not at all: that notion, very much in line with information one might have gotten reading National Geographic specials about Africa, is quite mistaken. There are very well educated, well fed people in Bolivia, who have, for a few of generations already, left the agricultural stage which you have in mind when you refer to "timeshared plowing animals". None of that is incompatible with not having potable water and paying ridiculous prices for gas and oil. Not even with having learned yet different ideas of fucking Capitalism from those you have.
This is in stark contrast to any extreme authoritarian regime where the leadership is much more free to act stupid.
There may be local oposition to Bush, keeping him in check &c, as you say, and I have no idea if he feels free to act stupid or not. Yet I do see that he does act stupidly.
In fact, that local oposition did not exactly oppose to much of the stupidity at the time it might have effectively opposed it; I'd say the very contrary was the case. That opposition is not even opposing a lot of stupidity going on right now, and from what it looks from here, he's still feeling quite comfortable acting stupidly. (Of course, he is not acting stupidly: his actions have reasonable explanations, concerning his intentions)
And woe betide daddy if he gets drunk and acts inappropriately (like getting into a fight with the neighbor over a political difference or making a pass at that horny widow who lives down the street). Now all of a sudden, its the kids chance to morally bitch-slap their father, for not living up to the standards that they had laid out for their kids....
Hmm. My only reaction to this is a not-that-strong hope that you are kidding.
You've already got dictators using military power to take over assets of foreign held companies (not even US companies....companies from other S American countries...), turning the economies into shit...all in the name of "helping the people" and trying to fuck Capitalism.
That is one way of seeing it.
First, a little note: there are no dictators in South America, currently: every government has been elected democratically by the population. You may not like their choices, but, well, you'll have to learn to deal with it (hopefully, you have gotten past the Kissinger method of dealing with outcomes of elections which you do not like, like in Chile...) I know lots and lots of people, and I know that there are many, many more people in the world, that did not like the choice the US population made last time they elected their president, and yet we have dealt with it as well as we have been able to; for one thing, we do not call Bush a dictator.
Now, I think that a nation has complete right on the management of the assets of its country. The fact that previous (in general, non-democratically-elected and rather Kissinger-style "elected") governments decided to turn national resources to foreign (or local, in fact) companies to the detriment of the actual people of the nation (for example, Bolivia, which is the country you probably have in mind has huge reserves of natural gas, that gas is being extracted by foreign companies at an amazing pace, and yet there is a negligible number of Bolivians who have natural gas in their houses to cook and provide heating, and they pay that gas with a price comparable to the price people in LA pay for the very same gas after it has been transported to LA) and decides to change that, seems perfectly reasonable.
I'm quite sure that if you lived in Bolivia and had no potable water and had to pay ridiculous prices for gas and oil, your ideas about fucking Capitalism would be different.
1. The UN contributions should probably be based on availability: those that make more money should give more, in a way no so different from that in which most fair systems work.
As to the payments to WHO, the World Bank and what not: I can assure you that the US gets quite a lot in return from those institutions compared to the investment made. Of course, the returns are of rather abstract nature, like getting basically veto power on things and what not.
I am quite sure moving the UN out of Manhattan would not be such a catastrophe...
3. The US is one of the most protectionist countries in the world. Having high import duties (not that the US does not have those, anyways) is not the only way to be protectionist, you know...
As for your post in general: you are again confusing two things: one thing is pretending to have the world under your responsability and another thing is to be helpful with other people problems. No one minds help; most people hate a self-appointed savior.
Why is it that most of the highest of high tech, such as the microchips, computers, lasers, communications, medical, pharmaceutical, transportation and other leading edge things come more often from the USA than from any other country?
Basically, because the entities (universities, corporations, etc) that do most of that stuff have the money to buy the very best people, and the very best people are good at doing those things. Sure, probably a lot of those people are educated in some of (the few) really great programs that (some of) the univerities in the US have; the rest are educated in the (probably relatively as few) really great programs that (some of) the universities in the rest of the world have.
I would judge an education system by how much it advanced to frontier of human knowledge. [...] In education, it is not the average level of the population that really matters, but the peak achievements of the few.
The prime role of education is to help make people good citizens. An ignorant person cannot make a good citizen. Ignorant people tend to be gullible, to believe completely uncritically in fabrications, to forget (or, rather, completely ignore) history, and so on.
While it is nice to have lots of nobel prize winners around, I judge a nation (and, in particular, a nation's education system) by talking to common people.
You realise that the US has the largest fossil fuel deposits on earth on its own soil?
Somewhere else on this thread someone mentions that "The US sits on the world's largest reserve of ground fresh water". Somehow those statements seem to be quite propaganda induced, along the line of "the leader of the free world" and so one.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet another application of the old adage saying that the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from, I guess...
So it comes to "we are no worse than they are?"
I guess you do not get out much, do you?
That has to be a bug. No one sane would code on purpose an URL like those. (/.'s junk character detector won't event let me quote those -/-/-...)
I see this comment of mine escaled all the way to being Flamebait...
I was just trying to point that the people that took the are responsible for what motivated this whole thread might actually proud of the fact that this can be seen as a socialist thing.
If it were me, I know having my actions called `socialist' would not make me feel bad in the least.
Note that I did not say "standarizing on the form of DRM used by Apple".
If society decides that DRM is good or if it decides that is is bad but needed, then it is in its best interest to come up with a choice of a preferred DRM format. Now, I would think that it would also be in its best interest that that DRM format be one that does not belong to a particular company, one that is not patented, which is not guarded by any gatekeeper who charges anyone anything (and of course it would be in that society's best interest not to have unethical copyright laws...)
There is nothing in DRM that requires the format to be closed, expensively patented, and owned by anyone, just as there is no correlation between the security of a cryptographic algorithm and the closedness of its inner workings.
Assuming that DRM is unavoidable (which is a bad assumtion, but that is beside my point), standardizing on one form of DRM would be good, like standardizing on one form of video tape, of laser disk format, of width of cars, of voltage for household electrical current, and so on.
I would have thought this to be obvious.
The word `socialist' has that denigratory sense you are using only in a few places, the US being one of them.
Sure.
Once copyrights are gone, there is no need to grant the extra rights the GNU licence grants anymore.
Huh? Isn't that just plain common sense?
Oh, come one. You cannot be that naive. You simply cannot be.
yes. Because laws have such a grand effect upon preventing tapping into bank databases and telephone conversations.
And can you tell us what is it you think the word colloquium means?
It's been ages since last time a post made me laugh out loud.
Thanks.
I am just pointing out that the argument you use to justify your claim that "Word is, hands down, a better product [than OOo]" is really not good enough. I am just pointing that comparaisons as to what is better than what have to be done relative to a "better to do something specific" or "better for some particular use".
For the uses most people I know use Word for, WordPad would be a better product. For the uses I could possibly use Word for, LaTeX+vim is a better product. You get the idea.
That is not a great argument for supporting your claim that Word is a better product. It would be an acceptable argument if you were claiming that Word is a better product if you are a book publisher and the features relevant to book publishing are indispensable to you.
See, most people do not work at book publishers.
(And, by the way, for those that do work at a book publisher, there are far, far better products that Word!)
That would quite rapidly converge to a situation in which everybody has an IQ equal to 100. It'd be boring.
Now, to be honest, by personal intelligence test starts by labeling as beyond hope anyone who attaches any meaning to IQ numbers...
Oh well. We'll just have to agree to disagree, I guess.
It is sad you have not yet gotten to the part where humanity got to Illuminism, though.
I am sorry, but the US is not exactly the one country I would be listening if I wanted to develop a country in such a way that its people get to live better lives. If I were interested in building a country which is good for corporations and a small part of its population, I'd have a different opinion. The US has, in very many aspects, gotten to the point that it can compete with England the eerie status of the only undeveloping nation in the world.
Not at all: that notion, very much in line with information one might have gotten reading National Geographic specials about Africa, is quite mistaken. There are very well educated, well fed people in Bolivia, who have, for a few of generations already, left the agricultural stage which you have in mind when you refer to "timeshared plowing animals". None of that is incompatible with not having potable water and paying ridiculous prices for gas and oil. Not even with having learned yet different ideas of fucking Capitalism from those you have.
There may be local oposition to Bush, keeping him in check &c, as you say, and I have no idea if he feels free to act stupid or not. Yet I do see that he does act stupidly.
In fact, that local oposition did not exactly oppose to much of the stupidity at the time it might have effectively opposed it; I'd say the very contrary was the case. That opposition is not even opposing a lot of stupidity going on right now, and from what it looks from here, he's still feeling quite comfortable acting stupidly. (Of course, he is not acting stupidly: his actions have reasonable explanations, concerning his intentions)
Hmm. My only reaction to this is a not-that-strong hope that you are kidding.
That is one way of seeing it.
First, a little note: there are no dictators in South America, currently: every government has been elected democratically by the population. You may not like their choices, but, well, you'll have to learn to deal with it (hopefully, you have gotten past the Kissinger method of dealing with outcomes of elections which you do not like, like in Chile...) I know lots and lots of people, and I know that there are many, many more people in the world, that did not like the choice the US population made last time they elected their president, and yet we have dealt with it as well as we have been able to; for one thing, we do not call Bush a dictator.
Now, I think that a nation has complete right on the management of the assets of its country. The fact that previous (in general, non-democratically-elected and rather Kissinger-style "elected") governments decided to turn national resources to foreign (or local, in fact) companies to the detriment of the actual people of the nation (for example, Bolivia, which is the country you probably have in mind has huge reserves of natural gas, that gas is being extracted by foreign companies at an amazing pace, and yet there is a negligible number of Bolivians who have natural gas in their houses to cook and provide heating, and they pay that gas with a price comparable to the price people in LA pay for the very same gas after it has been transported to LA) and decides to change that, seems perfectly reasonable.
I'm quite sure that if you lived in Bolivia and had no potable water and had to pay ridiculous prices for gas and oil, your ideas about fucking Capitalism would be different.
Ah, perspective!
1. The UN contributions should probably be based on availability: those that make more money should give more, in a way no so different from that in which most fair systems work.
As to the payments to WHO, the World Bank and what not: I can assure you that the US gets quite a lot in return from those institutions compared to the investment made. Of course, the returns are of rather abstract nature, like getting basically veto power on things and what not.
I am quite sure moving the UN out of Manhattan would not be such a catastrophe...
3. The US is one of the most protectionist countries in the world. Having high import duties (not that the US does not have those, anyways) is not the only way to be protectionist, you know...
As for your post in general: you are again confusing two things: one thing is pretending to have the world under your responsability and another thing is to be helpful with other people problems. No one minds help; most people hate a self-appointed savior.
Basically, because the entities (universities, corporations, etc) that do most of that stuff have the money to buy the very best people, and the very best people are good at doing those things. Sure, probably a lot of those people are educated in some of (the few) really great programs that (some of) the univerities in the US have; the rest are educated in the (probably relatively as few) really great programs that (some of) the universities in the rest of the world have.
The prime role of education is to help make people good citizens. An ignorant person cannot make a good citizen. Ignorant people tend to be gullible, to believe completely uncritically in fabrications, to forget (or, rather, completely ignore) history, and so on.
While it is nice to have lots of nobel prize winners around, I judge a nation (and, in particular, a nation's education system) by talking to common people.
Somewhere else on this thread someone mentions that "The US sits on the world's largest reserve of ground fresh water". Somehow those statements seem to be quite propaganda induced, along the line of "the leader of the free world" and so one.