Yes, I had that happen, too. It wasn't too hard to fix -- I just ran the setup routine for sound in YAST and it fixed everything -- but I imagine it would be annoying to have to do that for all the little things that you mentioned.
However, the real reason I want to post today, and the real reason I'm so excited about this (well, sometimes it doesn't take much to make me excited about things) is that 9.1 has a "My Computer" just like the computers that my primary school pupils have at home, and that, most significantly, inside "My computer"is a floppy disk icon that works exactly like the floppy disk icon in Windows.
I'm sure that for regular slashdot readers this is hardly a big deal, and I don't know if 9.0 had it or not (we use SuSE 8.2 in my elementary school classroom), but it's little details like this that make the difference between students easily taking their work home to use on their home computers, and students who need individual help to do so (which can be rather inconvenient when there are 32 to 34 of the little guys all crammed into the classroom.)
More useful than switching with escape is switching caps lock with Control
Amen!! Before the advent of the GUI, back when the original IBM PC's were real PC's (and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri) that's exactly where the CTRL key was.
I'm planning on exploring one of the other posts in this thread which promises a solution to this problem.
One quick question. I have eight Suse 8.2 machines in my elementary school classroom, and I like most things about it, but they just don't handle floppy drives that well. Yes, we still use floppies for taking work home and doing homework there on Windows machines, etc.
Anyway, I was pleased when 8.2 KDE found and set up the floppy on the desktop, except that (1) it wouldn't always read and I had to search for some configuration files and copy lines from the configuration files of working machines to get them to read, and (2) even when they did read well, you had to manually unmount them (it's on a right-click menu) before they would read the directory of another disk.
For me, it's not such a big deal to unmount disks, but for many ten-year-olds, it's disconcerting when they're used to Windows at home and you just clip the icon and read the directory every time, and I don't have much time to help them because there are 32 other kids who also need attention.
Has 9.1 fixed either of these problems? If so, I'm wiping out 8.2 and putting on 9.1 when the whole thing goes live on the net in June.
So, tax cuts and increased profits actually yielded ZERO new jobs last month.
I also find it amusing / tragic that in the last month where several thousand American jobs were created, they were created in the government / public sector and not in the private sector. I mean, if the government is the only one hiring, maybe we should reinstitute those taxes so we could put more people to work.
I keep hearing lots of good things about Debian. Perhaps when I have time to reconfigure things I'll make the switch to Debian. I agree with your point about out-of-the-box installs. I've avoided installing any new software to the SuSE machines, whereas with Windows machines I'm an installing fool! I'm definitely going to keep my eye on Debian and Debian-based distros in the future
I guess I was impressed by how clearly they explained the technical details, for those of us who don't have the vocabularly to begin with. In the future I won't be so wary of O'Reilly books!
Linux is so close to being ready -- it's just the little things that are left, but they're a big hurdle.
For example, I've been trying to get my students to understand why, when they're using KDE, they have to unmount their floppies before they can read another one. KDE already automatically mounts floppies when you click on the icon. How hard would it be to make it check to see if the same disk really is in the drive the next time they click it, and if not, then unmount and mount again? Little things like this are unnerving.
Last summer I wrote a long letter to someone describing my experiences setting up Samba on a set of computers. I've been sitting with this letter for along time, and I'll try to edit it down a little. I hope there's no taboo against long posts. I've been reading Slashdot for two or three years, now, and haven't noticed any, but I don't always notice everything.
This was my situation: I wanted to install Linux as double-boot systems with (pre-existing) Windows on nine computers in my elementary school classroom. This pool of computers changes fairly frequently as new ones may be donated (read: mainly built, bought, or reconstructed by the teacher) and old ones just seem too slow.
Eventually, I intend to remove Windows completely from most of these computers, but I want to do it gradually, making sure I have some fall-back position while working out kinks and bugs during actual classroom use. I only have limited file-sharing needs (floppy disks are adequate in most cases, mainly so the students can work further on their files at home), but all the computers absolutely must share the same printer, an aging (but built back when they really knew how to build them!) HP Laserjet 4, attached to the main computer that I personally use.
Here's what I wrote:
==
My objective is to share the printer transparently - without any need for reconfiguration - no matter what I boot into (having the printer attached to my pc) or what the eight student computers boot up into. I want to be able to add new computers and take away old ones without having to reconfigure anything except the computer being added.
Obviously, Samba is the way to go.
Now, I agree with you that, with Samba, interoperability with Linux and Windows has been achieved. However, compared to Windows or Macintosh, setting it up is a pain in the tush, and far beyond the capabilities of a typical home user or small office user, particularly if that person is not already familiar with Unix.
My question is - why isn't Samba installation and setup easier? Why can't it be mostly automatic like so many other things already are? Linux programmers have already programmed so many clever utilities for automatically installing everything from hardware identification to disk partitioning, to software dependency checking etc. etc. What's been accomplished already is really quite remarkable. It seems to me that adding an automatic Samba setup would be trivial in comparison. It also seems to me that if they did add it, they might have a profound effect on the adoption of Linux in home and small office networks everywhere.
For the sake of argument, let me describe just a little of what I've gone through to get Samba set up the way I wanted.
First, I do think that I understand pc's better than most non-programmers, having owned and played with them for over twenty years now. (I still have my old Apple ][+ stowed away under the house). I've thought of installing Linux for a couple years now, having first played with SuSE version 4 or 5 a while back. I've tried various versions of Red Hat and Mandrake and found them easy to set up and get working. The only hangup has been sharing the printer. My teaching job generally requires fifty to sixty hours of work each week, so time is limited. I'd get Linux installed, fail to quickly get the printer shared, say to heck with it and revert to Windows. There's simply no time to fool with it.
Even assuming the numbers claimed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' talking head are true
And there is plenty of reason to feel that they are not true. For example, take a look at what Brad DeLong, a Berkeley economics professor and well-known blogger, says about the recent government forecast of over 2 million new jobs to be created this year.
Now he has been. He, not bin Laden, will be at the forefront of millions of Americans' minds, seen as a defeated figurehead for terrorist activity -- despite the fact that he was not responsible for 9/11. And this means re-election.
Actually, it's a little too early to mean that, since the American Memory Hole (R) tends to wipe out anything older than a month. On the other hand, some real paranoid types think the US knows exactly where bin Laden is. So let's see if he appears in chains next summer.
As someone who likes Chomsky's work (and gets modded down for mentioning it - so I'm glad to see it didn't happen with people this time, though maybe to me, we'll see) and has someone who's studied cognitive science, I agree with this poster and also the one poster two steps up.
That is, yes, things are that complicated. In fact that's a point that Chomsky himself makes, not only in reference to language, but also in reference to economics and sociology. He often says this in reference to economists and sociologists who claim to understand how human societies work, but I could also imagine him saying this in the context of human psychology / linguistics.
I am a fifth and sixth grade teacher with a masters in educational psychology (which I'd be prouder of if not for a certain Fireside Theater sketch).
I do think there are wonderful uses for computers. Nothing teaches my students about angles and geometrical reasoning, for example, better than the old tried-and-true Turtle Graphics. I also am in favor of upper-grade kids learning keyboard skills, and I think that searching for things on a CD-based encyclopedia can be a good exercise in verbal reasoning. Cooperative e-mail projects with classrooms on the other side of the world can be useful as well, to give kids some sense of the range of culture on our globe. Finally, school web sites can be useful in publishing student writing, to be admired by grandparents across the continent. There is a lot to be said, after all, for some authentic motivation behind what you're writing.
On the other hand, I feel the use of computers with kids younger than fourth grade is a complete waste of time. I think that kids of that age should be interacting with real objects in the real 3-D world.
I also think that, even with worthwhile projects like keyboarding and publishing stories, you have to be careful. For example, I've found through experience that kids are much more likely to revise their writing if they make their first drafts on paper rather than in the computer. This, to adults, seems somewhat counterintuitive, but the reason, of course, is that it's much easier to draw circles and arrows and write in the margin of a normal piece of paper. Since revision is the essence of good writing, then, it's important not to overuse computers in this instance.
I am reminded of several years ago, when I attended a special screening of Jurassic Park, introduced by Steve "Spaz" Williams, who did a lot of the animation in that movie. At the end there was a question-and-answer session, at which Williams was asked by somebody's grandmother what equipment and software she should purchase for her teenage grandson, who wanted to grow up and do exactly what Williams was already doing. The answer? Buy the kid some pencils and paper. Tell him to start sketching and get a good teacher.
I say amen to that. Let's not be as foolish as the people back in the 80's who thought that kids had to be taught computer programming, because anybody who couldn't program a computer obviously couldn't do anything useful with it.
You have to consider the source when you hear stuff like this. Hearing complaints like this from Fortune reminds me of all the complaints you hear about Berry Bonds being difficult and unfriendly. Well, it turns out that Berry Bonds is fine, but doesn't necessarily believe that sportscasters are more important than his family and his career. When I hear stuff like this from Fortune, I can only assume that Google is doing something right. Thank goodness that Google is not the ordinary "business as usual."
U.S. citizens need to stop relying on the federal government to perform every citizen organizational function. We're free, and we need to excercize our freedom to associate. If we let the government in on this one any more, they're just going to screw it up even more.
Please don't take this as a troll, because I'm mostly in agreement with many of your points. In a lot of ways I like your idea because it takes a small step in a particular direction, rather than setting up an entire new system from scratch, which is always bound to run into major implementation headaches, and the law of unintended consequences, etc. etc.
I do think that some sort of change in copyright, or rather, a change in giving artists fair compensation for their work, would be valuable for the reasons citing in the original article -- that monopolies, particularly for-profit monopolies, tend to stifle not only access, but growth. Microsoft is the obvious example.
Anyway, any change in our present economic system will of necessity require some change in government. One could even argue that the copyright groups you're espousing are a sort of government, or governmental extension.
In this sense, corporations like Microsoft or Home depot or Walmart are also a sort of government. Government is simply working out a means of living together with one's neighbors. The nice thing about the Federal Government is that it is, at least ostensibly, a non-profit corporation, as are local governments, state governments, etc. That's a critical difference compared to "governments" like SBC or Time Warner.
I guess my point is this. In everything one does, it's important to have the right tool for the right job. Only the federal government is the right tool for a lot of jobs, particularly those where the entire country has to stand firm, lest states or cities be played off one against the other to the detriment of all. If you read Grover Norquist, you will see that one of the dominent trends in political thinking, the neoconservatives, tries to do precisely that, as he recommends shrinking federal government so that capital in one state that's "badly behaved" can more easily go to another that's "better behaved," at least in terms of the corporate elites.
If we are to live together, and if we really do want to have any sort of commitment to one another as countrymen, we will need a federal government to safeguard our interests. The twentieth century is a good example of how this can work. I mean, otherwise no one would see an 8-hour work day as anything like normal, and certain of us would still be riding in the back of the bus. Neither of these changes would have happened without a federal government or the American constitution.
To me, as aggravating as government can be, whether federal, state, city, or township, it is one important way to excercise our freedom to associate, and by no means stands opposed to it. I also think that, particularly to the extent that it is nonprofit, government is not less, but more efficient than the forces that often oppose it, thinking of the trillions lost in savings and loan scandals, Enron collapses, private military contractors, etc. etc. I think that if the cost of that was more consistently factored in, then the "efficiency" of corporations would be seen for what it is.
Rather than avoiding government, I think it's a better strategy to reform it, a process that's been going on in this country for over 200 years now. In this sense (and getting back to the topic) that's what these vouchers are all about, and also what your ideas about copyright groups are about. I'm excited about both of these ideas, because if we can solve this problem with copyright, there will be a richer and freer life ahead.
I agree with the poster above who wonders why Google needs to go public. Once you go public, the bottom line becomes of paramount importance, since stockholders buy into a company to make money and not for the other things that you can do with a large business, such as to provide cool new non-profitable services just because you want to, or to be philanthropic where no tax dodges are involved, etc. etc.
I hope that they resist the temptation to IPO as long as possible, and if they do sell stock, then they at least keep a majority control for themselves. Google is too cool a business to go the way of corporate monetary single mindedness.
Yes, I still use my circa 1990 copy of PC Outline in a DOS box. It's amazing to me that somebody hasn't come along to make a (preferably GNU) clone of this tremendously useful program.
And while the bulk of the military itself has never been privatized (for the same reason the government hasn't - to keep policy decisions out of the hands of private industry and to keep soldier loyalty directly under the decision-makers), you would probably be amazed at how much -has- been privatized.
My response:
There are many people with the view, most eloquently expressed by Noam Chomsksy, who might say that the reason the military has not been privatized has as much to do with economics as it does with policy (to the extent that those are two different things, anyway....)
In other words, one of the primary controls and directors to the United States economy is the military. In this view, one could argue that the reason for the hundred dollar hammers and toilet seats is not the government per se, but the cozy relationship is has with all those private contractors you mentioned.
For more on Noam Chomsky and how the economy really works, there's a lot available on the web. One site is:
http://monkeyfist.com/ChomskyArchive
You can access even more Chomsky matrial from Z Magazine's site at:
http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm
Also recommended is the video entitled Manufacturing Consent.
Uhhh... Health Care Services require things like trained medical staff, medical equipment, drugs, and so forth. Broad coverage is via having more hospitals and better working conditions within them, not satellite communications. Education needs the same things -- schools, teachers and better resources.
Yes, I think that the tenth reason given in the article, which is:
Creation of new jobs and Industries -- a new vision for the 21st century and a mandate to explore truly new frontiers
is the most important to me. I agree with Noam Chomsky's thoughts about the US economy, which is that its basis is not a free market, but a market regulated and developed through controlled government spending. Currently this market control is handled through the Pentagon. I would much rather see it regulated through NASA. Even though there are many militaristic applications for space, the non-military applications are much broader and easier to justify in terms of the overall mission than when the military is the primary reason for their existence. The only trick, I guess, is the politics - to get people to be as anxious about what we might be missing in the exploration of space as they are anxious about what weapons of mass destruction we might be missingin the deserts of Iraq. Well, that's another story.
So I think that the more NASA, the more peaceful a basis we would have for our economy, while still keeping it with the tight top-down control it currently has, thereby placating the ones who like to control it.
Seriously. A DVD might have 3 hours of content on it while a CD might have 1 hour of content, but I can bet you 99.9% of the time, the CD is going to be listened to way more than the movie is watched, and therefore is the better value,
Yes, but what about Music Videos? A friend of mine has been trying to get me to listen to Rage Against the Machine for a long time. I went to the store and found that the DVD was cheaper than the CD, so I bought the DVD.
For most things, emusic.com uses a variable bit-rate encoding that, as already stated, works out to average about 160. Older things are 128. It's not CD, but it's not that far off, either. You can sign up for a free trial and see if you like it. I've used the service for a year now, and really enjoy it, as I enjoy classic jazz and they have a lot of the old Fantasy-riverside catalog on it.
One thing I haven't seen yet, unless it's "below my current threshold" or something, is the idea that the military is one of the major means of controlling our economy, and has been since the second world war. This is the famous military industrial complex first warned of by Eisenhower.
There are many articles / analyses on this idea by Noam Chomsky, which can be found at the web site devoted to his work at:
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm
Chomsky rejects the idea that modern nation-states have anything resembling a free market, despite propaganda to the contrary. Much of the planning in the United States' economy, then, occurs through the army. This is one reason why so much military research is really dual-purpose military / civilian. (as was mentioned somewhere in this tangle of posts) It's supposed to be this way so that the taxpayer can pay for the basic research, and then when that's done some corporation can take the technology and become rich from it. Much of the high tech and aerospace industry works this way. In a country like Japan, in contrast, such government support of industry is done more out in the open, since they don't have the military that we have.
Anyway, in this manner, the free market is left to the little guy -- the small businesses, while large corporations have a constant government feed. It may be that there are scientists who will refuse military money on principal, but if there weren't a lot of others who didn't, our economny was sink pretty fast.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I had that happen, too. It wasn't too hard to fix -- I just ran the setup routine for sound in YAST and it fixed everything -- but I imagine it would be annoying to have to do that for all the little things that you mentioned.
However, the real reason I want to post today, and the real reason I'm so excited about this (well, sometimes it doesn't take much to make me excited about things) is that 9.1 has a "My Computer" just like the computers that my primary school pupils have at home, and that, most significantly, inside "My computer"is a floppy disk icon that works exactly like the floppy disk icon in Windows.
I'm sure that for regular slashdot readers this is hardly a big deal, and I don't know if 9.0 had it or not (we use SuSE 8.2 in my elementary school classroom), but it's little details like this that make the difference between students easily taking their work home to use on their home computers, and students who need individual help to do so (which can be rather inconvenient when there are 32 to 34 of the little guys all crammed into the classroom.)
So THANK YOU to SuSE!
Amen!! Before the advent of the GUI, back when the original IBM PC's were real PC's (and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri) that's exactly where the CTRL key was.
I'm planning on exploring one of the other posts in this thread which promises a solution to this problem.
One quick question. I have eight Suse 8.2 machines in my elementary school classroom, and I like most things about it, but they just don't handle floppy drives that well. Yes, we still use floppies for taking work home and doing homework there on Windows machines, etc.
Anyway, I was pleased when 8.2 KDE found and set up the floppy on the desktop, except that (1) it wouldn't always read and I had to search for some configuration files and copy lines from the configuration files of working machines to get them to read, and (2) even when they did read well, you had to manually unmount them (it's on a right-click menu) before they would read the directory of another disk.
For me, it's not such a big deal to unmount disks, but for many ten-year-olds, it's disconcerting when they're used to Windows at home and you just clip the icon and read the directory every time, and I don't have much time to help them because there are 32 other kids who also need attention.
Has 9.1 fixed either of these problems? If so, I'm wiping out 8.2 and putting on 9.1 when the whole thing goes live on the net in June.
Thanks,
TB
I also find it amusing / tragic that in the last month where several thousand American jobs were created, they were created in the government / public sector and not in the private sector. I mean, if the government is the only one hiring, maybe we should reinstitute those taxes so we could put more people to work.
I keep hearing lots of good things about Debian. Perhaps when I have time to reconfigure things I'll make the switch to Debian. I agree with your point about out-of-the-box installs. I've avoided installing any new software to the SuSE machines, whereas with Windows machines I'm an installing fool! I'm definitely going to keep my eye on Debian and Debian-based distros in the future
I guess I was impressed by how clearly they explained the technical details, for those of us who don't have the vocabularly to begin with. In the future I won't be so wary of O'Reilly books!
For example, I've been trying to get my students to understand why, when they're using KDE, they have to unmount their floppies before they can read another one. KDE already automatically mounts floppies when you click on the icon. How hard would it be to make it check to see if the same disk really is in the drive the next time they click it, and if not, then unmount and mount again? Little things like this are unnerving.
Last summer I wrote a long letter to someone describing my experiences setting up Samba on a set of computers. I've been sitting with this letter for along time, and I'll try to edit it down a little. I hope there's no taboo against long posts. I've been reading Slashdot for two or three years, now, and haven't noticed any, but I don't always notice everything.
This was my situation: I wanted to install Linux as double-boot systems with (pre-existing) Windows on nine computers in my elementary school classroom. This pool of computers changes fairly frequently as new ones may be donated (read: mainly built, bought, or reconstructed by the teacher) and old ones just seem too slow.
Eventually, I intend to remove Windows completely from most of these computers, but I want to do it gradually, making sure I have some fall-back position while working out kinks and bugs during actual classroom use. I only have limited file-sharing needs (floppy disks are adequate in most cases, mainly so the students can work further on their files at home), but all the computers absolutely must share the same printer, an aging (but built back when they really knew how to build them!) HP Laserjet 4, attached to the main computer that I personally use.
Here's what I wrote:
==
My objective is to share the printer transparently - without any need for reconfiguration - no matter what I boot into (having the printer attached to my pc) or what the eight student computers boot up into. I want to be able to add new computers and take away old ones without having to reconfigure anything except the computer being added.
Obviously, Samba is the way to go.
Now, I agree with you that, with Samba, interoperability with Linux and Windows has been achieved. However, compared to Windows or Macintosh, setting it up is a pain in the tush, and far beyond the capabilities of a typical home user or small office user, particularly if that person is not already familiar with Unix.
My question is - why isn't Samba installation and setup easier? Why can't it be mostly automatic like so many other things already are? Linux programmers have already programmed so many clever utilities for automatically installing everything from hardware identification to disk partitioning, to software dependency checking etc. etc. What's been accomplished already is really quite remarkable. It seems to me that adding an automatic Samba setup would be trivial in comparison. It also seems to me that if they did add it, they might have a profound effect on the adoption of Linux in home and small office networks everywhere.
For the sake of argument, let me describe just a little of what I've gone through to get Samba set up the way I wanted.
First, I do think that I understand pc's better than most non-programmers, having owned and played with them for over twenty years now. (I still have my old Apple ][+ stowed away under the house). I've thought of installing Linux for a couple years now, having first played with SuSE version 4 or 5 a while back. I've tried various versions of Red Hat and Mandrake and found them easy to set up and get working. The only hangup has been sharing the printer. My teaching job generally requires fifty to sixty hours of work each week, so time is limited. I'd get Linux installed, fail to quickly get the printer shared, say to heck with it and revert to Windows. There's simply no time to fool with it.
Ah, but then summer arrived and for on
And there is plenty of reason to feel that they are not true. For example, take a look at what Brad DeLong, a Berkeley economics professor and well-known blogger, says about the recent government forecast of over 2 million new jobs to be created this year.
here
Actually, it's a little too early to mean that, since the American Memory Hole (R) tends to wipe out anything older than a month. On the other hand, some real paranoid types think the US knows exactly where bin Laden is. So let's see if he appears in chains next summer.
That is, yes, things are that complicated. In fact that's a point that Chomsky himself makes, not only in reference to language, but also in reference to economics and sociology. He often says this in reference to economists and sociologists who claim to understand how human societies work, but I could also imagine him saying this in the context of human psychology / linguistics.
I am a fifth and sixth grade teacher with a masters in educational psychology (which I'd be prouder of if not for a certain Fireside Theater sketch).
I do think there are wonderful uses for computers. Nothing teaches my students about angles and geometrical reasoning, for example, better than the old tried-and-true Turtle Graphics. I also am in favor of upper-grade kids learning keyboard skills, and I think that searching for things on a CD-based encyclopedia can be a good exercise in verbal reasoning. Cooperative e-mail projects with classrooms on the other side of the world can be useful as well, to give kids some sense of the range of culture on our globe. Finally, school web sites can be useful in publishing student writing, to be admired by grandparents across the continent. There is a lot to be said, after all, for some authentic motivation behind what you're writing.
On the other hand, I feel the use of computers with kids younger than fourth grade is a complete waste of time. I think that kids of that age should be interacting with real objects in the real 3-D world.
I also think that, even with worthwhile projects like keyboarding and publishing stories, you have to be careful. For example, I've found through experience that kids are much more likely to revise their writing if they make their first drafts on paper rather than in the computer. This, to adults, seems somewhat counterintuitive, but the reason, of course, is that it's much easier to draw circles and arrows and write in the margin of a normal piece of paper. Since revision is the essence of good writing, then, it's important not to overuse computers in this instance.
I am reminded of several years ago, when I attended a special screening of Jurassic Park, introduced by Steve "Spaz" Williams, who did a lot of the animation in that movie. At the end there was a question-and-answer session, at which Williams was asked by somebody's grandmother what equipment and software she should purchase for her teenage grandson, who wanted to grow up and do exactly what Williams was already doing. The answer? Buy the kid some pencils and paper. Tell him to start sketching and get a good teacher.
I say amen to that. Let's not be as foolish as the people back in the 80's who thought that kids had to be taught computer programming, because anybody who couldn't program a computer obviously couldn't do anything useful with it.
You have to consider the source when you hear stuff like this. Hearing complaints like this from Fortune reminds me of all the complaints you hear about Berry Bonds being difficult and unfriendly. Well, it turns out that Berry Bonds is fine, but doesn't necessarily believe that sportscasters are more important than his family and his career. When I hear stuff like this from Fortune, I can only assume that Google is doing something right. Thank goodness that Google is not the ordinary "business as usual."
Please don't take this as a troll, because I'm mostly in agreement with many of your points. In a lot of ways I like your idea because it takes a small step in a particular direction, rather than setting up an entire new system from scratch, which is always bound to run into major implementation headaches, and the law of unintended consequences, etc. etc.
I do think that some sort of change in copyright, or rather, a change in giving artists fair compensation for their work, would be valuable for the reasons citing in the original article -- that monopolies, particularly for-profit monopolies, tend to stifle not only access, but growth. Microsoft is the obvious example.
Anyway, any change in our present economic system will of necessity require some change in government. One could even argue that the copyright groups you're espousing are a sort of government, or governmental extension.
In this sense, corporations like Microsoft or Home depot or Walmart are also a sort of government. Government is simply working out a means of living together with one's neighbors. The nice thing about the Federal Government is that it is, at least ostensibly, a non-profit corporation, as are local governments, state governments, etc. That's a critical difference compared to "governments" like SBC or Time Warner.
I guess my point is this. In everything one does, it's important to have the right tool for the right job. Only the federal government is the right tool for a lot of jobs, particularly those where the entire country has to stand firm, lest states or cities be played off one against the other to the detriment of all. If you read Grover Norquist, you will see that one of the dominent trends in political thinking, the neoconservatives, tries to do precisely that, as he recommends shrinking federal government so that capital in one state that's "badly behaved" can more easily go to another that's "better behaved," at least in terms of the corporate elites.
If we are to live together, and if we really do want to have any sort of commitment to one another as countrymen, we will need a federal government to safeguard our interests. The twentieth century is a good example of how this can work. I mean, otherwise no one would see an 8-hour work day as anything like normal, and certain of us would still be riding in the back of the bus. Neither of these changes would have happened without a federal government or the American constitution.
To me, as aggravating as government can be, whether federal, state, city, or township, it is one important way to excercise our freedom to associate, and by no means stands opposed to it. I also think that, particularly to the extent that it is nonprofit, government is not less, but more efficient than the forces that often oppose it, thinking of the trillions lost in savings and loan scandals, Enron collapses, private military contractors, etc. etc. I think that if the cost of that was more consistently factored in, then the "efficiency" of corporations would be seen for what it is.
Rather than avoiding government, I think it's a better strategy to reform it, a process that's been going on in this country for over 200 years now. In this sense (and getting back to the topic) that's what these vouchers are all about, and also what your ideas about copyright groups are about. I'm excited about both of these ideas, because if we can solve this problem with copyright, there will be a richer and freer life ahead.
I hope that they resist the temptation to IPO as long as possible, and if they do sell stock, then they at least keep a majority control for themselves. Google is too cool a business to go the way of corporate monetary single mindedness.
Yes, I still use my circa 1990 copy of PC Outline in a DOS box. It's amazing to me that somebody hasn't come along to make a (preferably GNU) clone of this tremendously useful program.
You said:
And while the bulk of the military itself has never been privatized (for the same reason the government hasn't - to keep policy decisions out of the hands of private industry and to keep soldier loyalty directly under the decision-makers), you would probably be amazed at how much -has- been privatized.
My response:
There are many people with the view, most eloquently expressed by Noam Chomsksy, who might say that the reason the military has not been privatized has as much to do with economics as it does with policy (to the extent that those are two different things, anyway....)
In other words, one of the primary controls and directors to the United States economy is the military. In this view, one could argue that the reason for the hundred dollar hammers and toilet seats is not the government per se, but the cozy relationship is has with all those private contractors you mentioned.
For more on Noam Chomsky and how the economy really works, there's a lot available on the web. One site is:
http://monkeyfist.com/ChomskyArchive
You can access even more Chomsky matrial from Z Magazine's site at:
http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm Also recommended is the video entitled Manufacturing Consent.
Yes, I think that the tenth reason given in the article, which is:
Creation of new jobs and Industries -- a new vision for the 21st century and a mandate to explore truly new frontiers
is the most important to me. I agree with Noam Chomsky's thoughts about the US economy, which is that its basis is not a free market, but a market regulated and developed through controlled government spending. Currently this market control is handled through the Pentagon. I would much rather see it regulated through NASA. Even though there are many militaristic applications for space, the non-military applications are much broader and easier to justify in terms of the overall mission than when the military is the primary reason for their existence. The only trick, I guess, is the politics - to get people to be as anxious about what we might be missing in the exploration of space as they are anxious about what weapons of mass destruction we might be missingin the deserts of Iraq. Well, that's another story.
So I think that the more NASA, the more peaceful a basis we would have for our economy, while still keeping it with the tight top-down control it currently has, thereby placating the ones who like to control it.
Yes, but what about Music Videos? A friend of mine has been trying to get me to listen to Rage Against the Machine for a long time. I went to the store and found that the DVD was cheaper than the CD, so I bought the DVD.
For most things, emusic.com uses a variable bit-rate encoding that, as already stated, works out to average about 160. Older things are 128. It's not CD, but it's not that far off, either. You can sign up for a free trial and see if you like it. I've used the service for a year now, and really enjoy it, as I enjoy classic jazz and they have a lot of the old Fantasy-riverside catalog on it.
One thing I haven't seen yet, unless it's "below my current threshold" or something, is the idea that the military is one of the major means of controlling our economy, and has been since the second world war. This is the famous military industrial complex first warned of by Eisenhower.
There are many articles / analyses on this idea by Noam Chomsky, which can be found at the web site devoted to his work at:
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm
Chomsky rejects the idea that modern nation-states have anything resembling a free market, despite propaganda to the contrary. Much of the planning in the United States' economy, then, occurs through the army. This is one reason why so much military research is really dual-purpose military / civilian. (as was mentioned somewhere in this tangle of posts) It's supposed to be this way so that the taxpayer can pay for the basic research, and then when that's done some corporation can take the technology and become rich from it. Much of the high tech and aerospace industry works this way. In a country like Japan, in contrast, such government support of industry is done more out in the open, since they don't have the military that we have.
Anyway, in this manner, the free market is left to the little guy -- the small businesses, while large corporations have a constant government feed. It may be that there are scientists who will refuse military money on principal, but if there weren't a lot of others who didn't, our economny was sink pretty fast.