I've been a Libertarian ever since the Ron Paul presidential campaign. But the party has never seen another candidate like Ron Paul. Instead it seems like it deliberately chooses candidates from the extreme fringe. Even when they wear suits and ties their views aren't likely to appeal to any but a trivial segment of voters.
The Libertarian Party needs another mainstream candidate. By "mainstream" I don't mean a Kerry or Bush clone. There's no need to sacrifice your beliefs in order to appeal to the voters. What I mean by "mainstream" is attitude, style and a balance of priorities. Instead of presenting an extremist anarcho-capitalist who is only going to appeal to other extremist anarcho-capitalists, why not field a candidate who actually has a chance of garnering a few percentage points?
Do you plan to campaign for actual votes, or are you merely running a didactic campaign? Will you appeal to the mainstream libertarian-leaning conservative or liberal, or is your audience just the faithful few crackpots in the LP? Should our hope of a free society rest with the official Libertarian Party, or should we be looking at libertarian caucuses in the Democrat and Republican parties?
If you're not making any money on your software, with not even one paying customer, why not just Open Source it? There's no way you can lose any money, because you're not making any to start with.
Hell, I've made more money on my BSD "license to steal" Open Source software than you have as a professional proprietary developer! Shareware must truly be dead...
Maybe we find it empowering when Bruce Willis is fighting terrorists and beats them with his American moxie...
I think it's empowering to us at all, merely empowering to the Hollywood cinema industry. Back in the early days of cinema the industry was made up of ordinary people. Nosferatur (and Metropolis, etc) were remniniscent of that time. But that quickly changed. "Hollywood Babylon" wasn't just cliche, it was an echo of how different Hollywood was from the rest of the US. It is insular.
This isn't difficult to understand. It is an entire industry devoted to make believe. They do NOT live in the real world. They do not understand the real world. Therefore their movies do not reflect the real world. Cinema is a window onto the society of Hollywood, and no other society.
Hollywood has become very adept at knowing what entertains the real world. But beyond that tiny intersection they are ignorant of any society but their own. They're movies are their reality.
Hey Mom! I'm trying to make a quiche, and I have some questions. I was wondering what a "smidgen" is? Yeah? Is that my index or pinkie finger? Okay, I see. How do I "dash salt", do I use a mallet or something? Okay, I see.
Several minutes later...
Wait, you're telling me the teaspoon is the spoon that I set on the table, and the tablespoon is the spoon I sit my teabag on?
Its main point was that people were way too confident in their estimates, even when they would admit that they had no idea.
This is one of the things that's holding back the entire commercial software industry. Nothing else comes close. You don't produce a body of software overnight. It takes time. It takes a *LOT* of time. Yet my division was penalized severly because we were two months late on a FIVE YEAR project! And we shipped the product with known critical bugs! A sister division was held up as an example of good software engineering because they made their six month estimate to the day, even though they shipped an unworking and unfinished product.
The industry demands early accurate estimatation even though it is an impossible task. Even if the engineers come up with reasonable estimates, management always reels it in to match the business goals. And we are "encouraged" to sign off on these accelerated schedules. Thus we inevitably end up finishing the software with bailing wire and duct tape, commanding SQA to ignore defects, and telling the customer who complains about quality that "the next version is only three months away!"
Let's examine this shall we? Not examine it from the "unux sux" perspective, but from the "how does Windows do it" perspective.
How does Windows do it? It doesn't! The equivalent in Windows would be "help zip". But when I type that in I get a "this command is not supported" error. It turns out that Windows doesn't even have a command line zip program by default. You have to install one separately. After I installed one, I discover taht "help zip" still doesn't work! Neither does "zip ?". Finally I stumble upon "zip -h". Now I get a one page summary of commands. But this summary of command isn't much better than "man tar". I still have that "bewildering array of options".
You are right though in that the GNU man pages suck. GNU hates man pages and it seems to me they deliberately go out of their way to make them unusable. Move to a different system without GNU man pages and you'll find they're much less bewildering, chock full of examples, never tell you to look at the info page, and DO NOT threaten to stop maintaining the page if you complain.
But even the GNU man pages are easier to use then the non-existant alternative under Windows...
If you did a "man man", you would see that there's this '-k' option...
Seriously, when I first started using Unix twenty years ago the SECOND thing I learned was apropos. I don't remember how I learned it, but it wasn't from a manual. It might have been from a fellow student or hint on the professor's assignment sheet. But I learned it the very first day I used Unix.
While a "help" program might be interesting, your other points are completely off base.
First off, if you know man, then you know man -k (otherwise known as "apropos").
Second, those tutorials are a dime a dozen. I haven't used a commercial Linux in a very long time, but they all used to come with printed manuals that explained basic stuff like this. I use FreeBSD, and it has a section for newbies in the handbook. Many other beginning tutorials for Unix newbs are available online.
Third, you're not staring at a command prompt with most Linux distros, but desktop so chock full friendly advice for the newbie (like the big 'help' or 'start here' icon).
Most GNU man pages, such as you will find in Linux, are woefully bereft of examples. That's because GNU hates man pages and consider them obsolete. But if you go look at FreeBSD man pages (as one example of non-GNU man pages), you'll find them full of examples.
Here's one example from the FreeBSD find man page:
find / -newer ttt -user wnj -print
Print out a list of all the files owned by user ``wnj'' that are newer than the file ttt.
(This might also work for water-walking religous figures, but I wouldn't recommend it.)
A Baptist minister, Anglican vicar, and Roman Catholic priest are out on the lake fishing. The minister realizes the left his thermos of coffee on the shore, so he gets out the boat, walks across the water to shore, and gets his coffee. The priest is amazed by this. Then the vicar discovers he's left his sandwiches in his car, so he gets out of the boat, walks across the water to his car, and gets his sandwiches. The priest is stunned by this modern miracle.
Then the priest finds that he's out of sunscreen. He knows that he has a spare bottle back on shore. He thinks to himself that if the minister and vicar can both walk on water, then he as a good Roman Catholic with faith can do the same. So he steps out of the boat... and instantly starts sinking. As he's thrashing about yelling to the others to pull him back in the boat, the vicar turns to the minister and says, "I guess he doesn't know where the rocks are..."
Like Nader and Soros, they don't have enough influence to affect the top-down populism of their nominal party. But so what? If you're expecting the mainstream of either major party to rally around the banner of IP rollback, you're going to be very disappointed.
Back to your orginal question: I have named three conservatives who are for weakening/reforming/abolishing IP laws. Why can't you accept that?
You asked for three conservatives, and I gave you the names of three conservatives. Your quote, exactly, was "Really? Name three". That I have done. I have named three.
I will have to challenge your assertion that they aren't influential. Ron Paul is the leader of the Republican Liberty Caucus and the figurehead of the libertarian wing of the party. Steve Forbes has a magazine that is one of the staples of the pro-business conservative, and represents the fiscal/economic conservatives. And Phyllis Schlafly is one of the beacons of traditional old guard conservatism.
Any leading conservative magazine would jump on the chance to have a cover article written by any one of these three.
I just repeated the LGF experiment: type in the 1973 memo using MS Word default settings. Frankily, this three minute test has me stunned. It's not perfect, but it's remarkably close. Photocopy it a few times and run it through a fax and it would be extremely hard to tell which was which.
Paul? Just because he's not a Bushite neocon mouthpiece doesn't mean he's not a genuine, active politician. Sheesh...
Both Forbes and Schlafly should count as well, because they are both extremely influential for two major segments of conservatism. Besides which, the request was for three conservatives, not three genuine active politicians in office otherwise holding centrist Republican positions.
That would be four extra keys then, for "st", "nd", "rd" and "th", not counting 1/2 and 1/4.
But even if they were around (and I really doubt it), most typists will still find it much easier to type 't' and 'h' then to find the non-standard superscripted "th". For a report they might do this, but not for a memo.
Conservatives believe what's good for the corporations is good for everyone.
Most conservatives rather believe (or so they state) that lessening government interference in the economy is good for everyone. That this also benefits corporations is a side effect.
and you don't have OpenGL acceleration, then you probably shouldn't be trying to run such a graphically-rich application on your machine.
The problem is that everyone and their uncle on Slashdot is advocating doing EVERYTHING in OpenGL. While I personally think this is ridiculous, they are serious about it. I have no illusions about runnning 3D applications on my laptop. But the future may be requiring a 3D engine to render every 2D X11 primitive.
Everything in the near future might be a graphically-rich application, rendering them unusable on most laptops, thin client, or anything with a non-Xorg server like Solaris, Exceed, ReflectionsX, etc.
Bushsupporter or not, you did avoid all the other remarks made by the original poster.
I avoided them because they didn't address my original remark about the book reading "incident". But since you bring up the Bin Laden family the third time this thread, let me answer briefly:
Yes, Bush supplied the Bin Laden family with favors. If I were president I would have done the same thing. This is, to use a very localized vernacular, a "nothingburger". Having ties to the Bin Laden family is completely immaterial. You do not condemn an entire family for the actions of someone they disowned years ago. Moore didn't bring up this topic because he was concerned about the president's ties to wealthy individuals in other nations. He brought it up solely because of the name "Bin Laden".
M.Moore just made it plain obvious Bush was and is a complete idiot without any real character
If he would have kept it at that, I probably would not have had much of a problem. Lobbing charges of lack of character and intelligence is an old and worn tactic by all sides. I ignore it when I hear it. But Moore went beyond this. His thesis wasn't "look how stupid this guy is", but rather "look how evil and conspiratorial this guy is."
Slashdot Mirror
I've been a Libertarian ever since the Ron Paul presidential campaign. But the party has never seen another candidate like Ron Paul. Instead it seems like it deliberately chooses candidates from the extreme fringe. Even when they wear suits and ties their views aren't likely to appeal to any but a trivial segment of voters.
The Libertarian Party needs another mainstream candidate. By "mainstream" I don't mean a Kerry or Bush clone. There's no need to sacrifice your beliefs in order to appeal to the voters. What I mean by "mainstream" is attitude, style and a balance of priorities. Instead of presenting an extremist anarcho-capitalist who is only going to appeal to other extremist anarcho-capitalists, why not field a candidate who actually has a chance of garnering a few percentage points?
Do you plan to campaign for actual votes, or are you merely running a didactic campaign? Will you appeal to the mainstream libertarian-leaning conservative or liberal, or is your audience just the faithful few crackpots in the LP? Should our hope of a free society rest with the official Libertarian Party, or should we be looking at libertarian caucuses in the Democrat and Republican parties?
If you're not making any money on your software, with not even one paying customer, why not just Open Source it? There's no way you can lose any money, because you're not making any to start with.
Hell, I've made more money on my BSD "license to steal" Open Source software than you have as a professional proprietary developer! Shareware must truly be dead...
Yes, anything you want... except those acts granted exclusively to the copyright holder :-)
Maybe we find it empowering when Bruce Willis is fighting terrorists and beats them with his American moxie...
I think it's empowering to us at all, merely empowering to the Hollywood cinema industry. Back in the early days of cinema the industry was made up of ordinary people. Nosferatur (and Metropolis, etc) were remniniscent of that time. But that quickly changed. "Hollywood Babylon" wasn't just cliche, it was an echo of how different Hollywood was from the rest of the US. It is insular.
This isn't difficult to understand. It is an entire industry devoted to make believe. They do NOT live in the real world. They do not understand the real world. Therefore their movies do not reflect the real world. Cinema is a window onto the society of Hollywood, and no other society.
Hollywood has become very adept at knowing what entertains the real world. But beyond that tiny intersection they are ignorant of any society but their own. They're movies are their reality.
They're fun, but they're not reflect reality.
Hey Mom! I'm trying to make a quiche, and I have some questions. I was wondering what a "smidgen" is? Yeah? Is that my index or pinkie finger? Okay, I see. How do I "dash salt", do I use a mallet or something? Okay, I see.
Several minutes later...
Wait, you're telling me the teaspoon is the spoon that I set on the table, and the tablespoon is the spoon I sit my teabag on?
Its main point was that people were way too confident in their estimates, even when they would admit that they had no idea.
This is one of the things that's holding back the entire commercial software industry. Nothing else comes close. You don't produce a body of software overnight. It takes time. It takes a *LOT* of time. Yet my division was penalized severly because we were two months late on a FIVE YEAR project! And we shipped the product with known critical bugs! A sister division was held up as an example of good software engineering because they made their six month estimate to the day, even though they shipped an unworking and unfinished product.
The industry demands early accurate estimatation even though it is an impossible task. Even if the engineers come up with reasonable estimates, management always reels it in to match the business goals. And we are "encouraged" to sign off on these accelerated schedules. Thus we inevitably end up finishing the software with bailing wire and duct tape, commanding SQA to ignore defects, and telling the customer who complains about quality that "the next version is only three months away!"
try man tar
Let's examine this shall we? Not examine it from the "unux sux" perspective, but from the "how does Windows do it" perspective.
How does Windows do it? It doesn't! The equivalent in Windows would be "help zip". But when I type that in I get a "this command is not supported" error. It turns out that Windows doesn't even have a command line zip program by default. You have to install one separately. After I installed one, I discover taht "help zip" still doesn't work! Neither does "zip ?". Finally I stumble upon "zip -h". Now I get a one page summary of commands. But this summary of command isn't much better than "man tar". I still have that "bewildering array of options".
You are right though in that the GNU man pages suck. GNU hates man pages and it seems to me they deliberately go out of their way to make them unusable. Move to a different system without GNU man pages and you'll find they're much less bewildering, chock full of examples, never tell you to look at the info page, and DO NOT threaten to stop maintaining the page if you complain.
But even the GNU man pages are easier to use then the non-existant alternative under Windows...
If you did a "man man", you would see that there's this '-k' option...
Seriously, when I first started using Unix twenty years ago the SECOND thing I learned was apropos. I don't remember how I learned it, but it wasn't from a manual. It might have been from a fellow student or hint on the professor's assignment sheet. But I learned it the very first day I used Unix.
While a "help" program might be interesting, your other points are completely off base.
First off, if you know man, then you know man -k (otherwise known as "apropos").
Second, those tutorials are a dime a dozen. I haven't used a commercial Linux in a very long time, but they all used to come with printed manuals that explained basic stuff like this. I use FreeBSD, and it has a section for newbies in the handbook. Many other beginning tutorials for Unix newbs are available online.
Third, you're not staring at a command prompt with most Linux distros, but desktop so chock full friendly advice for the newbie (like the big 'help' or 'start here' icon).
Most GNU man pages, such as you will find in Linux, are woefully bereft of examples. That's because GNU hates man pages and consider them obsolete. But if you go look at FreeBSD man pages (as one example of non-GNU man pages), you'll find them full of examples.
Here's one example from the FreeBSD find man page:
find / -newer ttt -user wnj -print
Print out a list of all the files owned by user ``wnj'' that are newer than the file ttt.
(This might also work for water-walking religous figures, but I wouldn't recommend it.)
A Baptist minister, Anglican vicar, and Roman Catholic priest are out on the lake fishing. The minister realizes the left his thermos of coffee on the shore, so he gets out the boat, walks across the water to shore, and gets his coffee. The priest is amazed by this. Then the vicar discovers he's left his sandwiches in his car, so he gets out of the boat, walks across the water to his car, and gets his sandwiches. The priest is stunned by this modern miracle.
Then the priest finds that he's out of sunscreen. He knows that he has a spare bottle back on shore. He thinks to himself that if the minister and vicar can both walk on water, then he as a good Roman Catholic with faith can do the same. So he steps out of the boat... and instantly starts sinking. As he's thrashing about yelling to the others to pull him back in the boat, the vicar turns to the minister and says, "I guess he doesn't know where the rocks are..."
I only bring up programming because config files really seem to confuse MCSE's, since there is nothing to click on and you actually have to type.
Huh? Are you implying that editing configuration files by hand is "programming"? I think you need a basic computer dictionary!
Regardless of the laws in Florida, your rights or non-rights, or what's fair or not, always do what's pragmatic.
Pragmatism says that when a hurricane is headed your way, get the hell out of the area! Duh!
Like Nader and Soros, they don't have enough influence to affect the top-down populism of their nominal party. But so what? If you're expecting the mainstream of either major party to rally around the banner of IP rollback, you're going to be very disappointed.
Back to your orginal question: I have named three conservatives who are for weakening/reforming/abolishing IP laws. Why can't you accept that?
You asked for three conservatives, and I gave you the names of three conservatives. Your quote, exactly, was "Really? Name three". That I have done. I have named three.
I will have to challenge your assertion that they aren't influential. Ron Paul is the leader of the Republican Liberty Caucus and the figurehead of the libertarian wing of the party. Steve Forbes has a magazine that is one of the staples of the pro-business conservative, and represents the fiscal/economic conservatives. And Phyllis Schlafly is one of the beacons of traditional old guard conservatism.
Any leading conservative magazine would jump on the chance to have a cover article written by any one of these three.
Similar scams have been played in real life with fake ATMs...
I repeated that experiment and came up with the a nearly exact duplicate. Not exact, mind you, but so close that the printer font might do it.
I just repeated the LGF experiment: type in the 1973 memo using MS Word default settings. Frankily, this three minute test has me stunned. It's not perfect, but it's remarkably close. Photocopy it a few times and run it through a fax and it would be extremely hard to tell which was which.
Paul? Just because he's not a Bushite neocon mouthpiece doesn't mean he's not a genuine, active politician. Sheesh...
Both Forbes and Schlafly should count as well, because they are both extremely influential for two major segments of conservatism. Besides which, the request was for three conservatives, not three genuine active politicians in office otherwise holding centrist Republican positions.
That would be four extra keys then, for "st", "nd", "rd" and "th", not counting 1/2 and 1/4.
But even if they were around (and I really doubt it), most typists will still find it much easier to type 't' and 'h' then to find the non-standard superscripted "th". For a report they might do this, but not for a memo.
Did the IBM Selectric use proportional type? Though I didn't use any Selectrics until the late '70s, the ones I did certainly were not proportional.
Schlafly, Forbes, Paul.
Conservatives believe what's good for the corporations is good for everyone.
Most conservatives rather believe (or so they state) that lessening government interference in the economy is good for everyone. That this also benefits corporations is a side effect.
and you don't have OpenGL acceleration, then you probably shouldn't be trying to run such a graphically-rich application on your machine.
The problem is that everyone and their uncle on Slashdot is advocating doing EVERYTHING in OpenGL. While I personally think this is ridiculous, they are serious about it. I have no illusions about runnning 3D applications on my laptop. But the future may be requiring a 3D engine to render every 2D X11 primitive.
Everything in the near future might be a graphically-rich application, rendering them unusable on most laptops, thin client, or anything with a non-Xorg server like Solaris, Exceed, ReflectionsX, etc.
Bushsupporter or not, you did avoid all the other remarks made by the original poster.
I avoided them because they didn't address my original remark about the book reading "incident". But since you bring up the Bin Laden family the third time this thread, let me answer briefly:
Yes, Bush supplied the Bin Laden family with favors. If I were president I would have done the same thing. This is, to use a very localized vernacular, a "nothingburger". Having ties to the Bin Laden family is completely immaterial. You do not condemn an entire family for the actions of someone they disowned years ago. Moore didn't bring up this topic because he was concerned about the president's ties to wealthy individuals in other nations. He brought it up solely because of the name "Bin Laden".
M.Moore just made it plain obvious Bush was and is a complete idiot without any real character
If he would have kept it at that, I probably would not have had much of a problem. Lobbing charges of lack of character and intelligence is an old and worn tactic by all sides. I ignore it when I hear it. But Moore went beyond this. His thesis wasn't "look how stupid this guy is", but rather "look how evil and conspiratorial this guy is."