There are two broad "wings" to the Republican party. The first is the (quasi-)libertarian wing, which wants smaller government, lower taxes, and fewer regulations. Then you have the social conservative wing which wants to use government to create/restore/preserve their vision of society.
The Republican party as a whole is a compromise between these two viewpoints (there's also a few minor factions). But I'm thinking the divide between the two camps is widening. The social conservatives have tasted power, and they don't want to give it up. To them "small government" was merely a tactic to use while they were out of power. The libertarian wing, on the other hand, is starting to wonder what the difference really is between their big government Republican brethren and the big government Democrats.
Yet, amazingly enough, the highest spender is not always the winner. The big bucks will certainly get you the attention, but it won't guarantee your win. Otherwise Ross Perot would have been president. Just because you are easily swayed by high spending media blitzes doesn't mean everyone else is.
Big corporations back regulations for the purpose of keeping small up-and-coming destabilzing competitors out of the industry. They can absorb the cost of the regulation while the guy with the $25K SBA loan can't. Politicians and political parties are no different. They propose campaign finance reform for the express purpose of keeping new blood and new parties out of the system. They've so brainwashed the public that people actually believe that career politicians are necessary, and better qualified to represent us than teachers, farmers, doctors and programmers.
The main privilege I'm concerned with is the waiver of personal liability. This has nothing to do with signing a contract. It has everything to do with the government absolving shareholders of any responsibility for their ownership in the company.
And since the main and most expensive service of the government is to protect people's wealth...
The purpose of government is to protect the lives, liberties and properties of the citizens who created it. In my opinion, it should be in that order. Protecting the life and liberty of a poor person is every bit as expensive as protecting the life and liberty of the rich person. As for protecting the property, let's just tax the property, ala Henry George.
What about LLCs, or partnerships? What about private corporations?
If you get special privileges from government that gives you an economic advantage over private unincorporated businesses, then you should be included.
Since we haven't had anything even remotely resembling laissez-faire in well over a hundred years, and we STILL have fat cat Democrat Senators with several thousand times the net worth of their voters, somehow I don't think that getting rid of laissez faire did all that much to get rid of rich people.
Ah yes. Moral relativism. The justification for any immorality. Why stop at publishing Dr. Chomsky's address when you can push bamboo splinters under his fingernails instead? If he needs to be pressured into the margins, then let's pressure him by attaching jumper cables Saddam-style to his scrotum.
As much as I vehemently disagree with most of what Dr. Chomsky says, I still understand that my liberty is dependent upon his.
All this talk about progressive and regressive taxes misses the point. The purpose of taxation isn't to redistribute wealth, it's to fund the government. The regressiveness of a tax is certainly one factor to consider when choosing a tax system, but it's only one factor out of dozens. The fairest tax (if there's such a thing as "fair") would be a flat head tax.
p.s. My pet theory is to tax only public corporations, since they're artificial government created entities anyway. This would be their way to "pay" for their special privileges that private businesses don't get.
Yawn!!! Not to put down Firefox or anything, but EVERY browser can do this... except Internet Exploder. Netscape can do it. Mozilla can do it. Safari can do it. Opera can do it. The forbidden-to-mention Konqueror can do it. I've even heard that most text-mode browsers can do it. Yawn!!!
At least you can save your filled in f1040 if you use Acroread! If it's California's f540, you can't. It's a major pain in the butt. You can't save an edited form, but you can print it or reset it... or save a new blank form. But you can't save a form with any fields filled out. Some clown in Sacramento had to deliberately remove this functionality. It makes no sense. At least I have two ounces of savvy and printed it to a pdf file, but there's a lot of people out there that don't that will be severly discombobulated by this nutnumbing idea.
It's not retarded if they're just doing it for the convenience. But it is retarded if they think they're somehow getting money for nothing, or treat the IRS as a savings account.
Yes, some people do actually believe. I always get pissed off when people say Americans are stupid, but then tax day rolls around and I realize that a heck of a lot of them are. I've got one friend who deliberately increases his withholding, just so he can get a bigger refund. One day out of the year he's ecstatic and throws a party with the refund money. The other 364 days he's bitching because he never has enough cash in his pocket. He's not alone in this attitude.
I would like to see what the specific wording of that poll was. It makes great copy to talk about how a poll shows that Americans don't want the Bill of Rights, but it's simply not true.
Polls can be worded to skew things however you want. Run a poll asking "is it okay for people to lie" and you end up with the result that people don't want the freedom of speech. Run a poll about marrying off twelve year olds to polygamist families and you end up finding that people don't want freedom of religion.
So without knowing what questions were asked, your poll results are meaningless.
In the past we had the freedom to choose between right and wrong, between the correct and mistake. Because of this we've managed to put most of racism and sexism behind us. But the freedom to choose is being taken away from us in the present. In the great fear that we might choose wrongly, we are being stripped of our freedom to choose rightly.
Freedom isn't utopia. Societies problems aren't going to disappear just because it has freedom. However, without freedom, societies are unable to improve themselves.
That being said, I would be against any law banning the publication of addresses, since every address is already public. But the presence of absence of a law has no bearing on the morality of an act. If it's immoral to publish the address of Joe Private Citizen for harassment purposes, then it's immoral to publish the address of a politician, CEO, school board member or church official for harassment purposes.
Get with the meme man! You're not truly concerned about [insert cause here] unless you blame everything on Bush! Even if he didn't do it, if enough people blame him then it becomes the reality.
You mean I don't have to browse with the user agent of "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.4; FreeBSD) KHTML/3.4.0 (like Gecko) male (Y chromosome)."
Re:Wouldn't it have been better...
on
From Bash To Z Shell
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Which is a shame because the world ends up with more bash-only and zsh-only scripts. As a user give me all the bash goodness you can, but as a scripter give me the lingua franca that is the vanilla bourne shell.
I say this because I once spent months fixing hundreds of scripts in an embedded system after the OS vendor upgraded from bash-1.x to bash-2.x. If you don't need the extras that bash gives you, then use the #!/bin/sh shebang and make sure it works with sh/ash/ksh.
Since there's a free native Qt for Mac, you should consider that as one of your options. A lot of Mac purists will discredit this option out of hand, simply because it's not a Mac-first framework. Don't listen to them, and make up your own mind. One of the chief objections is that it doesn't force you into Apple's interface guidelines. But at the same time, there's nothing stopping you from voluntarily following them, so I don't consider this a valid objection.
If you're writing a bunch of small custom apps, and they don't need to be proprietary closed source, then Qt is free. Otherwise you do have to pay (gasp) for Qt. It's hard to tell from your description what you need, but I'm guessing you can get away with the free GPL version.
I haven't played with the Apple frameworks, but compared to Microsoft's that you're used to, Qt will be a breath of fresh air!
Too bad you don't understand copyright law. You don't have a right to copy the GPL'd code into your program if you don't agree to the license, period.
I think you're thinking of "preparation of derivative works". If so, then copyright law indeed covers that (it also covers distribution). You are not allowed to modify a work, even in private, without permission.
But the culture of Free Software has always hinged any requirements on *distribution*. If you're copying, modifying, folding, spindling or mutilating, you do do whatever you want in private. It's only when you start distributing the software (original or modified) to others that licensing takes over.
There is not a very big difference between giving someone a copy of a program so they can run it on their machine, and giving them full access to run it remotely on your machine.
Actually there's a world of difference. It's the difference between building a house for your friend or letting him sleep in your spare bedroom.
Slashdot Mirror
I though it was because communist China sees the American mainstream media as allies...
Ba-da-boom!
There are two broad "wings" to the Republican party. The first is the (quasi-)libertarian wing, which wants smaller government, lower taxes, and fewer regulations. Then you have the social conservative wing which wants to use government to create/restore/preserve their vision of society.
The Republican party as a whole is a compromise between these two viewpoints (there's also a few minor factions). But I'm thinking the divide between the two camps is widening. The social conservatives have tasted power, and they don't want to give it up. To them "small government" was merely a tactic to use while they were out of power. The libertarian wing, on the other hand, is starting to wonder what the difference really is between their big government Republican brethren and the big government Democrats.
Yet, amazingly enough, the highest spender is not always the winner. The big bucks will certainly get you the attention, but it won't guarantee your win. Otherwise Ross Perot would have been president. Just because you are easily swayed by high spending media blitzes doesn't mean everyone else is.
Big corporations back regulations for the purpose of keeping small up-and-coming destabilzing competitors out of the industry. They can absorb the cost of the regulation while the guy with the $25K SBA loan can't. Politicians and political parties are no different. They propose campaign finance reform for the express purpose of keeping new blood and new parties out of the system. They've so brainwashed the public that people actually believe that career politicians are necessary, and better qualified to represent us than teachers, farmers, doctors and programmers.
The main privilege I'm concerned with is the waiver of personal liability. This has nothing to do with signing a contract. It has everything to do with the government absolving shareholders of any responsibility for their ownership in the company.
And since the main and most expensive service of the government is to protect people's wealth...
The purpose of government is to protect the lives, liberties and properties of the citizens who created it. In my opinion, it should be in that order. Protecting the life and liberty of a poor person is every bit as expensive as protecting the life and liberty of the rich person. As for protecting the property, let's just tax the property, ala Henry George.
What about LLCs, or partnerships? What about private corporations?
If you get special privileges from government that gives you an economic advantage over private unincorporated businesses, then you should be included.
Since we haven't had anything even remotely resembling laissez-faire in well over a hundred years, and we STILL have fat cat Democrat Senators with several thousand times the net worth of their voters, somehow I don't think that getting rid of laissez faire did all that much to get rid of rich people.
We have to take it on a case by case basis.
Ah yes. Moral relativism. The justification for any immorality. Why stop at publishing Dr. Chomsky's address when you can push bamboo splinters under his fingernails instead? If he needs to be pressured into the margins, then let's pressure him by attaching jumper cables Saddam-style to his scrotum.
As much as I vehemently disagree with most of what Dr. Chomsky says, I still understand that my liberty is dependent upon his.
All this talk about progressive and regressive taxes misses the point. The purpose of taxation isn't to redistribute wealth, it's to fund the government. The regressiveness of a tax is certainly one factor to consider when choosing a tax system, but it's only one factor out of dozens. The fairest tax (if there's such a thing as "fair") would be a flat head tax.
p.s. My pet theory is to tax only public corporations, since they're artificial government created entities anyway. This would be their way to "pay" for their special privileges that private businesses don't get.
Yawn!!! Not to put down Firefox or anything, but EVERY browser can do this... except Internet Exploder. Netscape can do it. Mozilla can do it. Safari can do it. Opera can do it. The forbidden-to-mention Konqueror can do it. I've even heard that most text-mode browsers can do it. Yawn!!!
At least you can save your filled in f1040 if you use Acroread! If it's California's f540, you can't. It's a major pain in the butt. You can't save an edited form, but you can print it or reset it... or save a new blank form. But you can't save a form with any fields filled out. Some clown in Sacramento had to deliberately remove this functionality. It makes no sense. At least I have two ounces of savvy and printed it to a pdf file, but there's a lot of people out there that don't that will be severly discombobulated by this nutnumbing idea.
It's not retarded if they're just doing it for the convenience. But it is retarded if they think they're somehow getting money for nothing, or treat the IRS as a savings account.
Yes, some people do actually believe. I always get pissed off when people say Americans are stupid, but then tax day rolls around and I realize that a heck of a lot of them are. I've got one friend who deliberately increases his withholding, just so he can get a bigger refund. One day out of the year he's ecstatic and throws a party with the refund money. The other 364 days he's bitching because he never has enough cash in his pocket. He's not alone in this attitude.
But at least you get the opportunity to wait in line for a free cardiologist to fix your heart after it stopped when you saw your tax bill!
I would like to see what the specific wording of that poll was. It makes great copy to talk about how a poll shows that Americans don't want the Bill of Rights, but it's simply not true.
Polls can be worded to skew things however you want. Run a poll asking "is it okay for people to lie" and you end up with the result that people don't want the freedom of speech. Run a poll about marrying off twelve year olds to polygamist families and you end up finding that people don't want freedom of religion.
So without knowing what questions were asked, your poll results are meaningless.
In the past we had the freedom to choose between right and wrong, between the correct and mistake. Because of this we've managed to put most of racism and sexism behind us. But the freedom to choose is being taken away from us in the present. In the great fear that we might choose wrongly, we are being stripped of our freedom to choose rightly.
Freedom isn't utopia. Societies problems aren't going to disappear just because it has freedom. However, without freedom, societies are unable to improve themselves.
Draw the line at everyone.
That being said, I would be against any law banning the publication of addresses, since every address is already public. But the presence of absence of a law has no bearing on the morality of an act. If it's immoral to publish the address of Joe Private Citizen for harassment purposes, then it's immoral to publish the address of a politician, CEO, school board member or church official for harassment purposes.
Get with the meme man! You're not truly concerned about [insert cause here] unless you blame everything on Bush! Even if he didn't do it, if enough people blame him then it becomes the reality.
You mean I don't have to browse with the user agent of "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.4; FreeBSD) KHTML/3.4.0 (like Gecko) male (Y chromosome)."
Which is a shame because the world ends up with more bash-only and zsh-only scripts. As a user give me all the bash goodness you can, but as a scripter give me the lingua franca that is the vanilla bourne shell.
I say this because I once spent months fixing hundreds of scripts in an embedded system after the OS vendor upgraded from bash-1.x to bash-2.x. If you don't need the extras that bash gives you, then use the #!/bin/sh shebang and make sure it works with sh/ash/ksh.
Since there's a free native Qt for Mac, you should consider that as one of your options. A lot of Mac purists will discredit this option out of hand, simply because it's not a Mac-first framework. Don't listen to them, and make up your own mind. One of the chief objections is that it doesn't force you into Apple's interface guidelines. But at the same time, there's nothing stopping you from voluntarily following them, so I don't consider this a valid objection.
If you're writing a bunch of small custom apps, and they don't need to be proprietary closed source, then Qt is free. Otherwise you do have to pay (gasp) for Qt. It's hard to tell from your description what you need, but I'm guessing you can get away with the free GPL version.
I haven't played with the Apple frameworks, but compared to Microsoft's that you're used to, Qt will be a breath of fresh air!
What the point? The Mac Mini is cheap! Show me a comparable system without an OS that's less expensive.
Sometimes the value meal is cheaper than the hamburger and fries but no coke. So you buy the value meal and throw away the coke.
In a few cases, you want a lesser salary if it keeps you out of a higher tax bracket.
PAM has been around for a while... It was around when I was building my LFS-4.0 system
So which is it? LFS-4.0 is current events.
Too bad you don't understand copyright law. You don't have a right to copy the GPL'd code into your program if you don't agree to the license, period.
I think you're thinking of "preparation of derivative works". If so, then copyright law indeed covers that (it also covers distribution). You are not allowed to modify a work, even in private, without permission.
But the culture of Free Software has always hinged any requirements on *distribution*. If you're copying, modifying, folding, spindling or mutilating, you do do whatever you want in private. It's only when you start distributing the software (original or modified) to others that licensing takes over.
There is not a very big difference between giving someone a copy of a program so they can run it on their machine, and giving them full access to run it remotely on your machine.
Actually there's a world of difference. It's the difference between building a house for your friend or letting him sleep in your spare bedroom.
...when "redistribution" of the software sort-of-occurs...
Is that in any way related to "when pregnancy sort-of-occurs"?
This is considered by many to be a "loophole" to be closed.
It's only a loophole to those stuck in the EULA mindset.