Please tell me how! I'm stuck here at work forced to use IE/Outlook, and desperately want something else. There are multiple "web applications" that I have to use, such as time card, employee portal, collaboration, etc, that require the use of Internet Exploder. So while I can browse Slashdot comfortably with Firefox, I still have to use IE for everything internal.
And the mail situation isn't much better. I have to use Outlook Calendar, so Outlook has to stay around. And I've also discovered that Exchange manages to lose a lot of emails and attachements if I don't use Outlook. I have no idea but I guess there's stuff that Exchange won't serve out to IMAP. After two years of this they finally enabled the webdav for Exchange, but unfortunately I need to go through the IE-only employee portal to access it.
Sigh. One year ago today I was happily using Konqueror, KMail and KDE under FreeBSD at work. But I guess our CTO read too much PC World, because now the use of Windows, IE and Outlook are mandatory. Hell, we've even been commanded to replace the RTOS in one of our products with WinXPe...
Why is it that people keep stating that you have to write software that targets HT specifically?
Because otherwise you're not using the HT efficiently. It is a single CPU pretending to be two. Unless your software was optimized for HT, you won't see much advantage to it. Heck, if you're running a scheduler that assumes SMP, you might even get a performance decrease!
Here's the rest of the story. One of those multinationals listed bought my company three years ago. Then last year they started bragging up their Asia division, and hinting that we were the bad guys because we weren't coming out with innovative products like they were. Well we finally got one of those "innovative" products in the shop and started poking into it. Turns out it was essentially *OUR* old product with a new skin!
I've got nothing against my company lowballing itself, but it really pisses me off that they're insulting the goose the laid their golden eggs.
What I would expect to see fairly quickly is a "GNU/Solaris"
Nonsense! There mere inclusion of GNU tools does not a GNU System make. All of the BSD's, including Darwin, have the same set of GNU tools that you're talking about, but no one calls them "GNU/BSD". Not even RMS. Putting the same tools on Solaris doesn't qualify it for a name change either.
Although I currently work for a public corporation, in the past I worked for numerous private busnesses. Every last one of them was started by someone who was born poor or middle class. Some say I shouldn't count that middle class. But to please you and your world view I won't talk about them.
One boss was born a poor hispanic immigrant. Was he a statistical anomoly? Not at all! He got his business by working his butt off. Another boss was born poor, joined the military, became a cop, then retired to buy and run the bookstore I worked at.
Now let's talk about college. One of my grandfathers came to this country with nothing but a suitcase and a new wife. He didn't even speak English. But he managed to send my dad to college on teamster's wages. My other grandfather had it slightly better, but he would probably still be counted as poor (great grandad was a circuit rider). But he managed to send my mom through college.
The poor aren't "severely disadvantaged by their birth". It has nothing to do with their birth, they're disadvantaged merely by their lack of money!
So basically, the way I read this is that the Libertarian Party opposes monopolies, but thinks that if they just turn their head the problem will go away.
You read it wrong then. The solution isn't to turn the head, but to eliminate the laws that encourage monopolies. While won't get rid of all monopolies, it will go a long ways towards eliminating monopolies such as Microsoft, your cableco, the old railroad tycoons, etc.
Microsoft has a monopoly ONLY because of the government. They got it through copyright and patent laws, and government enforcement of non-contracts like the EULA. But at least Microsoft had to earn their monopolyhood. Others like your local cableco only had to get the right city council elected.
Both versions of killall are useful. But the solution shouldn't be to get rid of one in favor of the other, but to simply use different names for the commands. Tada! That's why Solaris has both killall and pkill!
Why is it useful? I would think that's obvious. To write shutdown scripts with! killall doesn't kill all processes, it only kills all processes not directly related to the shutdown process. While the same thing can be done with a quick shell script, the current solution probably uses fewer resources.
Funny, stuff like that has ALREADY happened under the watch of the EPA. I guess your side isn't as utopian as you let on. Let me make this point clear: there is no perfect solution. You would think that would be obvious. Yet I know a good many environmentalist who sincerely believe that every problem can be perfectly solved through the government.
We libertarians are not claiming our market solutions are perfect. We are only claiming that they are better than government solutions. We may disagree as to whether that is true or not, but don't try to tell me any government solution is flawless.
but if we can agree that the point of the federal government is to protect the lives and rights of its citizens...
We can agree on that. Absent an anarchist society, there is a large role the government can play to protect the environment. What makes the libertarian position different from the EPA's is that the first reaction to a problem is not to impose a new regulations and bureaucracies upon the populace. This is not to deny that a government solution might be better, but to not automatically select it as a knee-jerk "there ought to be a law" response. At the same time, non-libertarians shouldn't be knee-jerk statists who believe every problem must have a government solution.
Please don't lump all libertarians into a single container. Only a few of us are anarcho-capitalists who see no role for the government in any situation.
They can't police that area of land themselves with a rifle, but give them a nuke, or some other high powered explosives and they can take out any tresspassers with only a little video surveillance.
In the immortal words of John Cleese, "you're a loony!"
You're trying to demonstrate the inconsistancy of the libertarian position by using extreme wacky examples. So what? I will freely admit that we libertarians are frequently inconsistant. But I dare you to show me a platform from any other party that is fully consistant.
Should fully automatic rifles be banned for people living in apartment buildings?
You mean "banned" as in "government coercion"? I would say no. But at the same time I fully support the right of the landlord to forbid them on his property. This isn't unusual. I currently work for a company that did not need the government's permission to explicitly forbid carrying a firearm into work.
Did you read my post? Who cares that you can come up with some wierd ass scenarios where the use of nukes is safe. So what? You don't base real world policy and wild improbabilities like this.
just pointing out that parties seem to drift to center.
It's not just the extremes in their party they don't have to worry about, they can pretty much assume they'll get the moderates in their party as well. Unfortunately this means that the ignorant and indecisive will be deciding this race...
The catch with this is that it tends to be ractive rather than preventative.
Not at all. The certainty of a reactive lawsuit is a wonderful preventative. Your example is one of a criminal act. Dumping on the sly is going to happen REGARDLESS of what solution you pick. The old libertarian saying is "utopia is not an option". What has to be considered is not which solution is perfect, because none of them are, but rather which solution is best.
And then there's dumping from your neighbours property into unowned property.
I don't know of any unowned property within the EPA's jurisdiction that does not affect owned property. You mention the atmosphere, but if you cause noxious emissions to drift over the fence into the air on my property, then you have still trespassed. If you dump sludge into the a river two states upstream from me and it winds up in my well, you have still trespassed. Dump waste into the middle of the ocean and if it ends up on my beach, you have trespassed.
I really don't understand why environmentalists aren't behind trespass as the legal basis for stopping pollution, but instead advocate regulation. Trespass laws work equally well under private AND public property. You don't need a special agency to battle pollution, just have the DOI sue the crap out of a company if it finds its pollutants on public land.
That would be a private fire department paid for with tax dollars.
Actually, members get a monthly statement. It's not being paid for with tax dollars. It is a mandated monopoly, so it certainly isn't a libertarian solution, but it is still demonstrates how a truly private fire department could work. I wasn't arguing that my hometown was an example of anarcho-capitalism in action, only that the concept of a private fire department isn't a wacky belief.
That's the problem with trying to impose a standard from above. If the "market" hasn't already provided a standard to follow, providing one in hopes that everyone will is pointless.
That there are so few distros following the LSB tells me that there's not much of a need or desire out there for such a standard. Either that or the need and desire for product differentiation has a higher priority. LSB should make compliance less costly by making their standard easier to comply with (not so extensive, fewer commandments, not as detailed, etc).
I wonder if the idea of a corporation as being it's own citizen is nonlibertarian
It is non-libertarian in that only the coercive power of the state can make people accept the personhood of corporations and the non-liability of its owners.
Most libertarians don't make a distinction between a private business and a corporation. This isn't hard to understand because most people don't make a distinction either. But it is a crucial distincion that needs to be made.
One can be for business while also being against the laws that provide some business with unfair legal advantages.
Any argument you make for weapon X I can make for nukes.
Wrong. A nuke cannot be used defensively. You cannot use it without a huge collateral loss of innocent life. You're going to have to go to extreme imaginative lengths to come up with a scenario where you could justifiably use a nuclear weapon defensively. In the meantime we libertarians will be scratching your heads wondering why you're spending so much effort being the devil's advocate. Can't we just agree that we agree and move on?
Funny you bring this up. About fire departments that is. My hometown privatized its fire department and ambulance service. Since then there hasn't been any problems. I don't know the details of the setup, but it is a "completely private fire department". I do hear it's much better than the old volunteer (euphemism for "part time") fire department.
Letting a fire spread is bad for business. If you don't stop a fire from spreading even though you have all the equipment there to stop it, you can get your financial butts sued off. So you stop the fire from spreading.
If you have a mortgage, your bank is going to require that you have fire protection. If you have paid off your home, you still have neighbors who are going to sue you if the fire spreads. So you're going to buy fire protection. This isn't a wacky belief.
Pollution is trespass. You dump your garbage over the fence into my yard, you are trespassing. You dump your chemical waste into the stream that runs through my yard, you're also trespassing.
There's no need for an EPA as long as there is property. It doesn't even matter if this property is public or private, since the trespass still occurs. The EPA may be a solution, but it isn't the ONLY solution, or even the best solution.
Rather I'm saying that if all public property is privatized, do civil rights have any meaning at all?
Under some definitions these civil rights would no longer exist. But but the same definitions they don't exist *today* outside of government land for the same reason. The problem is that the definition is bad.
There is no right to free speech, per se. It is not something granted to you by the government. Either you have it innately (via God, nature, birth, etc) or you do not have it at all. All the first ammendment does is prohibit government from taking it away from you. The constitution does not guarantee you free speech, it merely guarantees that the government won't take it away.
The modern public corporation can only exist via the state, because only the state can provide the corporation with an abolition of responsibility and the charter of personhood.
Libertarians have nothing against businesses or even big businesses. But libertarians who understand the issue should be against the state chartered corporation. There is no need for government laws to control multinational corporations, instead all you need is an *elimination* of laws, specifically the laws of incorporation. Let the corporation compete fairly with the private business on a level playing field without any state granted mulligans.
Slashdot Mirror
Please tell me how! I'm stuck here at work forced to use IE/Outlook, and desperately want something else. There are multiple "web applications" that I have to use, such as time card, employee portal, collaboration, etc, that require the use of Internet Exploder. So while I can browse Slashdot comfortably with Firefox, I still have to use IE for everything internal.
And the mail situation isn't much better. I have to use Outlook Calendar, so Outlook has to stay around. And I've also discovered that Exchange manages to lose a lot of emails and attachements if I don't use Outlook. I have no idea but I guess there's stuff that Exchange won't serve out to IMAP. After two years of this they finally enabled the webdav for Exchange, but unfortunately I need to go through the IE-only employee portal to access it.
Sigh. One year ago today I was happily using Konqueror, KMail and KDE under FreeBSD at work. But I guess our CTO read too much PC World, because now the use of Windows, IE and Outlook are mandatory. Hell, we've even been commanded to replace the RTOS in one of our products with WinXPe...
Why is it that people keep stating that you have to write software that targets HT specifically?
Because otherwise you're not using the HT efficiently. It is a single CPU pretending to be two. Unless your software was optimized for HT, you won't see much advantage to it. Heck, if you're running a scheduler that assumes SMP, you might even get a performance decrease!
That's too funny. Now I'm busy hacking my kernel to display that information instead of the usual hardware detection messages...
Here's the rest of the story. One of those multinationals listed bought my company three years ago. Then last year they started bragging up their Asia division, and hinting that we were the bad guys because we weren't coming out with innovative products like they were. Well we finally got one of those "innovative" products in the shop and started poking into it. Turns out it was essentially *OUR* old product with a new skin!
I've got nothing against my company lowballing itself, but it really pisses me off that they're insulting the goose the laid their golden eggs.
What I would expect to see fairly quickly is a "GNU/Solaris"
Nonsense! There mere inclusion of GNU tools does not a GNU System make. All of the BSD's, including Darwin, have the same set of GNU tools that you're talking about, but no one calls them "GNU/BSD". Not even RMS. Putting the same tools on Solaris doesn't qualify it for a name change either.
Although I currently work for a public corporation, in the past I worked for numerous private busnesses. Every last one of them was started by someone who was born poor or middle class. Some say I shouldn't count that middle class. But to please you and your world view I won't talk about them.
One boss was born a poor hispanic immigrant. Was he a statistical anomoly? Not at all! He got his business by working his butt off. Another boss was born poor, joined the military, became a cop, then retired to buy and run the bookstore I worked at.
Now let's talk about college. One of my grandfathers came to this country with nothing but a suitcase and a new wife. He didn't even speak English. But he managed to send my dad to college on teamster's wages. My other grandfather had it slightly better, but he would probably still be counted as poor (great grandad was a circuit rider). But he managed to send my mom through college.
The poor aren't "severely disadvantaged by their birth". It has nothing to do with their birth, they're disadvantaged merely by their lack of money!
So basically, the way I read this is that the Libertarian Party opposes monopolies, but thinks that if they just turn their head the problem will go away.
You read it wrong then. The solution isn't to turn the head, but to eliminate the laws that encourage monopolies. While won't get rid of all monopolies, it will go a long ways towards eliminating monopolies such as Microsoft, your cableco, the old railroad tycoons, etc.
Microsoft has a monopoly ONLY because of the government. They got it through copyright and patent laws, and government enforcement of non-contracts like the EULA. But at least Microsoft had to earn their monopolyhood. Others like your local cableco only had to get the right city council elected.
Yes I have. And it hasn't stopped me at all from running KDE and OpenOffice on FreeBSD. Microsoft CANNOT put me in jail for not buying their products.
Both versions of killall are useful. But the solution shouldn't be to get rid of one in favor of the other, but to simply use different names for the commands. Tada! That's why Solaris has both killall and pkill!
Why is it useful? I would think that's obvious. To write shutdown scripts with! killall doesn't kill all processes, it only kills all processes not directly related to the shutdown process. While the same thing can be done with a quick shell script, the current solution probably uses fewer resources.
Funny, stuff like that has ALREADY happened under the watch of the EPA. I guess your side isn't as utopian as you let on. Let me make this point clear: there is no perfect solution. You would think that would be obvious. Yet I know a good many environmentalist who sincerely believe that every problem can be perfectly solved through the government.
We libertarians are not claiming our market solutions are perfect. We are only claiming that they are better than government solutions. We may disagree as to whether that is true or not, but don't try to tell me any government solution is flawless.
but if we can agree that the point of the federal government is to protect the lives and rights of its citizens...
We can agree on that. Absent an anarchist society, there is a large role the government can play to protect the environment. What makes the libertarian position different from the EPA's is that the first reaction to a problem is not to impose a new regulations and bureaucracies upon the populace. This is not to deny that a government solution might be better, but to not automatically select it as a knee-jerk "there ought to be a law" response. At the same time, non-libertarians shouldn't be knee-jerk statists who believe every problem must have a government solution.
Please don't lump all libertarians into a single container. Only a few of us are anarcho-capitalists who see no role for the government in any situation.
They can't police that area of land themselves with a rifle, but give them a nuke, or some other high powered explosives and they can take out any tresspassers with only a little video surveillance.
In the immortal words of John Cleese, "you're a loony!"
You're trying to demonstrate the inconsistancy of the libertarian position by using extreme wacky examples. So what? I will freely admit that we libertarians are frequently inconsistant. But I dare you to show me a platform from any other party that is fully consistant.
Should fully automatic rifles be banned for people living in apartment buildings?
You mean "banned" as in "government coercion"? I would say no. But at the same time I fully support the right of the landlord to forbid them on his property. This isn't unusual. I currently work for a company that did not need the government's permission to explicitly forbid carrying a firearm into work.
Did you read my post? Who cares that you can come up with some wierd ass scenarios where the use of nukes is safe. So what? You don't base real world policy and wild improbabilities like this.
just pointing out that parties seem to drift to center.
It's not just the extremes in their party they don't have to worry about, they can pretty much assume they'll get the moderates in their party as well. Unfortunately this means that the ignorant and indecisive will be deciding this race...
The catch with this is that it tends to be ractive rather than preventative.
Not at all. The certainty of a reactive lawsuit is a wonderful preventative. Your example is one of a criminal act. Dumping on the sly is going to happen REGARDLESS of what solution you pick. The old libertarian saying is "utopia is not an option". What has to be considered is not which solution is perfect, because none of them are, but rather which solution is best.
And then there's dumping from your neighbours property into unowned property.
I don't know of any unowned property within the EPA's jurisdiction that does not affect owned property. You mention the atmosphere, but if you cause noxious emissions to drift over the fence into the air on my property, then you have still trespassed. If you dump sludge into the a river two states upstream from me and it winds up in my well, you have still trespassed. Dump waste into the middle of the ocean and if it ends up on my beach, you have trespassed.
I really don't understand why environmentalists aren't behind trespass as the legal basis for stopping pollution, but instead advocate regulation. Trespass laws work equally well under private AND public property. You don't need a special agency to battle pollution, just have the DOI sue the crap out of a company if it finds its pollutants on public land.
That would be a private fire department paid for with tax dollars.
Actually, members get a monthly statement. It's not being paid for with tax dollars. It is a mandated monopoly, so it certainly isn't a libertarian solution, but it is still demonstrates how a truly private fire department could work. I wasn't arguing that my hometown was an example of anarcho-capitalism in action, only that the concept of a private fire department isn't a wacky belief.
Let's turn your argument around, and ask why "killall" under Linux doesn't kill every process running. After all, that's what the command implies.
They pay for the privilege of being certified as "no different from our competitors' offerings".
That's the problem with trying to impose a standard from above. If the "market" hasn't already provided a standard to follow, providing one in hopes that everyone will is pointless.
That there are so few distros following the LSB tells me that there's not much of a need or desire out there for such a standard. Either that or the need and desire for product differentiation has a higher priority. LSB should make compliance less costly by making their standard easier to comply with (not so extensive, fewer commandments, not as detailed, etc).
I wonder if the idea of a corporation as being it's own citizen is nonlibertarian
It is non-libertarian in that only the coercive power of the state can make people accept the personhood of corporations and the non-liability of its owners.
Most libertarians don't make a distinction between a private business and a corporation. This isn't hard to understand because most people don't make a distinction either. But it is a crucial distincion that needs to be made.
One can be for business while also being against the laws that provide some business with unfair legal advantages.
Any argument you make for weapon X I can make for nukes.
Wrong. A nuke cannot be used defensively. You cannot use it without a huge collateral loss of innocent life. You're going to have to go to extreme imaginative lengths to come up with a scenario where you could justifiably use a nuclear weapon defensively. In the meantime we libertarians will be scratching your heads wondering why you're spending so much effort being the devil's advocate. Can't we just agree that we agree and move on?
Funny you bring this up. About fire departments that is. My hometown privatized its fire department and ambulance service. Since then there hasn't been any problems. I don't know the details of the setup, but it is a "completely private fire department". I do hear it's much better than the old volunteer (euphemism for "part time") fire department.
Letting a fire spread is bad for business. If you don't stop a fire from spreading even though you have all the equipment there to stop it, you can get your financial butts sued off. So you stop the fire from spreading.
If you have a mortgage, your bank is going to require that you have fire protection. If you have paid off your home, you still have neighbors who are going to sue you if the fire spreads. So you're going to buy fire protection. This isn't a wacky belief.
Pollution is trespass. You dump your garbage over the fence into my yard, you are trespassing. You dump your chemical waste into the stream that runs through my yard, you're also trespassing.
There's no need for an EPA as long as there is property. It doesn't even matter if this property is public or private, since the trespass still occurs. The EPA may be a solution, but it isn't the ONLY solution, or even the best solution.
Rather I'm saying that if all public property is privatized, do civil rights have any meaning at all?
Under some definitions these civil rights would no longer exist. But but the same definitions they don't exist *today* outside of government land for the same reason. The problem is that the definition is bad.
There is no right to free speech, per se. It is not something granted to you by the government. Either you have it innately (via God, nature, birth, etc) or you do not have it at all. All the first ammendment does is prohibit government from taking it away from you. The constitution does not guarantee you free speech, it merely guarantees that the government won't take it away.
The modern public corporation can only exist via the state, because only the state can provide the corporation with an abolition of responsibility and the charter of personhood.
Libertarians have nothing against businesses or even big businesses. But libertarians who understand the issue should be against the state chartered corporation. There is no need for government laws to control multinational corporations, instead all you need is an *elimination* of laws, specifically the laws of incorporation. Let the corporation compete fairly with the private business on a level playing field without any state granted mulligans.