Yes, to-do lists are great. I make a new one every morning so I know what I want to accomplish that day.
Also, organize your schedule/contacts/etc in a Daytimer or Palm!
Actually, I prefer the 'Dayrunner' knock-off brand of organizers. The pages are much more user-friendly, and the calendars are organized more sensibly than the genuine Daytimers, which are stuffy and clunky. I don't care for electronic organizers at all, but I know some people do.
Another gadget I find useful is a vertical letter file thingy... I put all my Accounts Payable letters in one of those. Every now and then I'll pull them all out and pay 'em.
In particular, the next President must make sure that the US Department of Justice and US law enforcement agencies have the resources to enforce our intellectual property laws.
That's very possible. It's also possible that the responses were cut & pasted from somewhere else (i.e. repurposed), and that statement happened to be the closest match. I'm sure the Bush campaign is too busy with makeup and spin doctors and the like to be bothered with writing answers to Slashdot questions from scratch.
As far as religion... as a lifelong atheist, both major parties terrify me. I heard a Lieberman speech on NPR the other day, and all he talked about was the moral decay of America and how it's a good idea to have more religion in government. Reminded me of the Republican party in the 80's.
I'm currently setting up an online store using PHPShop (*excellent* package, BTW), which can optionally interface to an XML-based 'exposed web service' called Intershipper to calculate shipping charges.
The idea is great - a class module connects to a socket on Intershipper's server and passes XML containing the source and destination shipping addresses, number of packages, and weight of packages. Intershipper then pulls real-time shipping quotes from 7 major carriers, inc. FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, etc., and passes the quotes (again, in XML) back to the shopping cart so the shopper can choose the shipping they want.
The reality is that it is turning out to be quite problematic. Every once in a while the whole process will hose because the shopping cart can't get an answer from Intershipper's servers. I haven't determined yet whether its because their servers are down or because there is a routing problem between the two networks (My server is on 8 T3's to different providers, so I'm thinking its the former). Either way, I don't feel it's solid enough to depend on for an e-commerce application. Every time it hoses it means a lost sale and a pissed-off customer, and that's no way to do business.
It's a wonderful idea, but until it can guarantee at least 99.999% reliability, I'm switching back to flat USPS shipping rates.
I suspect we have a ways to go in terms of network and server reliability before exposed web services take off.
It's a well-written and interesting piece, but I'm almost certain that at some point in the relatively near future, it's going to be revealed as being a hoax
Well, we might as well get it over with sooner rather than later.
If you scroll down to the end of the 'forwarded email', you'll see the following:
Note: This article is a piece of satire meant to brighten your day.
As long as our government is in the business of providing medical care for people who fall sick, I think it's fair that the people who put themselves at disproportionate risk of costing the system SHOULD be taxed.
This is a prime example of how government grows from one area into another. With federal money *always* comes federal control.
The same dynamic applies to the school system. Until recently, government schools were were run at the state and local levels and received no federal funding, and no federal control. Now, since schools are receiving more funds from the federal government, there is a push for central "standards" and "accountability". In other words, we are moving more toward centralized, federally approved curriculum and standardized testing.
I'm no fan of government schools of any kind, but I would have to choose decentralized local schools over centralized federal schools any day.
As far as health care, I'd like to see the federal government out of that business too. And postal delivery. And ketchup-testing, and swiss-cheese-hole-size-regulating. And funding of political campaigns and corrupt debate commissions.
There were also almost a hundred decentralized, competing global networks prior to the Internet's rise. TCP/IP took off because it was built into BSD, which a lot of universities used.
Market 'network effects' actually favor open standards and 100% compatibility.
I thought Libertarians favored free trade. Why is eliminating income taxes better than eliminating tariffs and excises?
Excise taxes are levied on goods at the manufacturer prior to reaching the point of sale. They are built into the cost of goods, and so are self-limiting. If the cost of certain goods rises too high, people quit buying them, and taxes are kept in check.
There is no such mechanism to limit the income tax. If politicians decide they want more of your money, they take it.
So, as far as trimming down our federal bureaucracy, getting rid of the income tax is a good start. We got by without one until 1913, which is about when the waves of social welfare programs started and all the acronymic bureaus and agencies came into existence.
If not for the income tax, where will the money come from? National Sales Tax? Propery taxes? What? Are there other "necessary" projects that would be funded this way? If so, how will those get money?
The same place it came from in the first 120 years of the country's existence, before we had an income tax.
The federal budget is $1.9 trillion. I have no idea how many zeros that is. Of that, about half comes from income taxes, and the other half is from tariffs and excise taxes.
My son keeps waffling. He's voting in a mock kids' election at school, with real voting machines and everything. He's changed his mind from Bush to Browne to Gore in the space of a week. His reason for Bush was that 'his wife is nice and gives candy out whenever she visits people'.
What oil we do produce here is shuttled off to other countries (from Alaska).
It doesn't make one bit of difference whether we use our oil domestically or ship it abroad. It still results in the same effect on the world's oil supply, and hence on the price of oil in the world market.
I really want to go with the Libertarians, but I'm sorry, the general population is just not smart enough to govern themselves.
It's good to know that someone out there is willing to take over responsibility for my personal decisions. Sadly, I'm just not smart enough to know what's in my own best interest.
No, that's in reference to what a particular Libertarian tried to convince me of one time. He felt that anyone has a perfect right to take shots at anyone else -- until they hit them. You see, you have the right to do anything you want until it infringes on someone else's rights, and the infringement didn't start until the bullet hit.
There are inconsistencies in libertarian philosophy and disagreements among libertarians as to what constitutes an infringement of another's rights. Most (all?) libertarians don't want some freak neighbor shooting a howitzer at us any more than you do.
Slashdot is inherently Republican-unfriendly. I would estimate that most of the readership is either Democrat/Green/radical left wing pinko commie bastard, or radical right/Libertarian.
Please don't associate Libertarians with the radical right, or even the right for that matter. When I think of the radical right I think of the fire and brimstone, bible-thumping we-must-legislate-moral-character types, and that's certainly not an accurate portrayal of libertarians.
Libertarians tend to draw from the left on social matters, and the right on fiscal matters, and so are neither left nor right. We're coming from a different philosophical angle and really don't fit anywhere on a left-right scale.
I agree that both the readership and editorial staff of Slashdot is hostile to Republicans (and usually libertarians also), but I would rather they be open about that than try to hide under the pretense of objectivity like the major media does. I don't think it's possible to be truly objective. I think we 'media consumers' should lower our expectations for objectivity and learn to think more critically, think for ourselves, and stop accepting at face value everything the talking heads shovel down our throats. I think that's already starting to happen. I know many people who are distrustful of television news and newspapers, with good reason IMHO.
Jeez, that sure turned into a rant pretty quickly, didn't it? I'm sorry, I can't help it sometimes. The media pisses me off.
Difference between Republican + Libertarian
|-------------------------------------------|
Difference between Democrat + Libertarian
|-------------------------------------------|
The Demopublicans only seem different when compared to each other. Considered within the wider spectrum of political thought, they are two peas from the same centrist pod. There may have been ideological differences in the past, but they are rapidly dwindling, what with Democrats supporting censorship and Republicans supporting massive federal spending programs.
I just don't understand the point of porn that doesn't have nekkid people getting it on. If I wanted to look at a photo of an empty bed, I'd go to sealy.com or some shit. Why couldn't he have kept the nekkid people and digitally removed the beds and carpets?
VMS has had this for many, many years. Files are listed as such:
ex: README.TXT;4 would be version 4 of README.TXT
There's a command you can type to purge all but the 'x' most recent versions, but I don't remember what it is, as I'm actively trying to forget I ever even used VMS. Anyway, you could really eat up some disk space if you didn't run this command every so often.
I always found the versioning to be a pain in the ass to deal with, but I guess it did come in handy occasionally. I think the negatives outweigh the benefits though.
I don't vote though, not out of laziness but out of conviction. I disagree with self-government in general and I disagree with our government in particular. To vote would be to betray that which I believe, and I will not do it.
You might be interested in the Voluntaryist movement. Basically they are libertarians who are trying to effect change outside the political arena. Their angle, as I understand it, is that participation in the political process lends validity to it, and that it's better just to obsolete it than to work within it. That's about all I know about the movement - but I did find what I read about them to be quite interesting.
So do you want anybody who wants to start a cable company to be able to dig a trench across your front yard to bury their cable a week after someone else did the same thing a week after someone else did the same thing, etc., or do you want no companies able to do so in order to offer you cable service?
AFAIK, no cable co. can dig your lawn without your permission. A friend of mine got cable run to his house once, and they had to ask his neighbor's permission to dig a trench across his lawn. This is as it should be, IMHO. If it is your lawn in question you can either tell them 'no', or negotiate a fee for allowing them to dig.
Anyway, cable companies generally don't run cable to homes on speculation, except in new developments where the place is already dug up anyway. They only dig when you request to be connected.
OK, that's certainly less objectionable, but there still is no reason a private company couldn't negotiate rights-of-way, run the wires and resell the use to other companies.
Qwest did something similar on a national scale... they negotiated rights-of-way with railroad lines, and they now resell dark fiber to other telecom providers.
Does anyone seriously propose that competing companies build alternative roads to your house and that they compete freely?!
Not really. While that scenario might work for interstate highways, turnpikes, etc. I agree that it's quite unworkable for the last mile... but here's a workable solution that may not have occurred to you: private homeowners' associations already build and maintain roads infrastructure for tens of thousands of neighborhoods in the U.S. The homeowners' associations are a form of privately-run democratic government at the neighborhood level. Within the scope of the groups' charters, contracts serve in place of land-use laws, and dues serve in place of taxes. Of course there is a need for some entity to enforce the contracts, and that's where government comes in.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a much more interesting article about the Nader/Gore vote-swapping thing.
Personally, I'm voting for the lesser of seven evils, Harry Browne.
--
Yes, to-do lists are great. I make a new one every morning so I know what I want to accomplish that day.
Also, organize your schedule/contacts/etc in a Daytimer or Palm!
Actually, I prefer the 'Dayrunner' knock-off brand of organizers. The pages are much more user-friendly, and the calendars are organized more sensibly than the genuine Daytimers, which are stuffy and clunky. I don't care for electronic organizers at all, but I know some people do.
Another gadget I find useful is a vertical letter file thingy... I put all my Accounts Payable letters in one of those. Every now and then I'll pull them all out and pay 'em.
--
In particular, the next President must make sure that the US Department of Justice and US law enforcement agencies have the resources to enforce our intellectual property laws.
I wonder if these are the type of resources he's talking about.
--
That's very possible. It's also possible that the responses were cut & pasted from somewhere else (i.e. repurposed), and that statement happened to be the closest match. I'm sure the Bush campaign is too busy with makeup and spin doctors and the like to be bothered with writing answers to Slashdot questions from scratch.
As far as religion... as a lifelong atheist, both major parties terrify me. I heard a Lieberman speech on NPR the other day, and all he talked about was the moral decay of America and how it's a good idea to have more religion in government. Reminded me of the Republican party in the 80's.
--
I'm currently setting up an online store using PHPShop (*excellent* package, BTW), which can optionally interface to an XML-based 'exposed web service' called Intershipper to calculate shipping charges.
The idea is great - a class module connects to a socket on Intershipper's server and passes XML containing the source and destination shipping addresses, number of packages, and weight of packages. Intershipper then pulls real-time shipping quotes from 7 major carriers, inc. FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, etc., and passes the quotes (again, in XML) back to the shopping cart so the shopper can choose the shipping they want.
The reality is that it is turning out to be quite problematic. Every once in a while the whole process will hose because the shopping cart can't get an answer from Intershipper's servers. I haven't determined yet whether its because their servers are down or because there is a routing problem between the two networks (My server is on 8 T3's to different providers, so I'm thinking its the former). Either way, I don't feel it's solid enough to depend on for an e-commerce application. Every time it hoses it means a lost sale and a pissed-off customer, and that's no way to do business.
It's a wonderful idea, but until it can guarantee at least 99.999% reliability, I'm switching back to flat USPS shipping rates.
I suspect we have a ways to go in terms of network and server reliability before exposed web services take off.
--
It's a well-written and interesting piece, but I'm almost certain that at some point in the relatively near future, it's going to be revealed as being a hoax
Well, we might as well get it over with sooner rather than later.
If you scroll down to the end of the 'forwarded email', you'll see the following:
Note: This article is a piece of satire meant to brighten your day.
--
As long as our government is in the business of providing medical care for people who fall sick, I think it's fair that the people who put themselves at disproportionate risk of costing the system SHOULD be taxed.
This is a prime example of how government grows from one area into another. With federal money *always* comes federal control.
The same dynamic applies to the school system. Until recently, government schools were were run at the state and local levels and received no federal funding, and no federal control. Now, since schools are receiving more funds from the federal government, there is a push for central "standards" and "accountability". In other words, we are moving more toward centralized, federally approved curriculum and standardized testing.
I'm no fan of government schools of any kind, but I would have to choose decentralized local schools over centralized federal schools any day.
As far as health care, I'd like to see the federal government out of that business too. And postal delivery. And ketchup-testing, and swiss-cheese-hole-size-regulating. And funding of political campaigns and corrupt debate commissions.
--
Granted, I got $4000 when I sold my porno collection, but I doubt that even the libertarians have $50bn worth of old Playboys.
:)
Hehe. No comment
--
There were also almost a hundred decentralized, competing global networks prior to the Internet's rise. TCP/IP took off because it was built into BSD, which a lot of universities used.
Market 'network effects' actually favor open standards and 100% compatibility.
--
I thought Libertarians favored free trade. Why is eliminating income taxes better than eliminating tariffs and excises?
Excise taxes are levied on goods at the manufacturer prior to reaching the point of sale. They are built into the cost of goods, and so are self-limiting. If the cost of certain goods rises too high, people quit buying them, and taxes are kept in check.
There is no such mechanism to limit the income tax. If politicians decide they want more of your money, they take it.
So, as far as trimming down our federal bureaucracy, getting rid of the income tax is a good start. We got by without one until 1913, which is about when the waves of social welfare programs started and all the acronymic bureaus and agencies came into existence.
--
If not for the income tax, where will the money come from? National Sales Tax? Propery taxes? What? Are there other "necessary" projects that would be funded this way? If so, how will those get money?
The same place it came from in the first 120 years of the country's existence, before we had an income tax.
The federal budget is $1.9 trillion. I have no idea how many zeros that is. Of that, about half comes from income taxes, and the other half is from tariffs and excise taxes.
--
My son keeps waffling. He's voting in a mock kids' election at school, with real voting machines and everything. He's changed his mind from Bush to Browne to Gore in the space of a week. His reason for Bush was that 'his wife is nice and gives candy out whenever she visits people'.
--
What oil we do produce here is shuttled off to other countries (from Alaska).
It doesn't make one bit of difference whether we use our oil domestically or ship it abroad. It still results in the same effect on the world's oil supply, and hence on the price of oil in the world market.
--
I really want to go with the Libertarians, but I'm sorry, the general population is just not smart enough to govern themselves.
It's good to know that someone out there is willing to take over responsibility for my personal decisions. Sadly, I'm just not smart enough to know what's in my own best interest.
--
No, that's in reference to what a particular Libertarian tried to convince me of one time. He felt that anyone has a perfect right to take shots at anyone else -- until they hit them. You see, you have the right to do anything you want until it infringes on someone else's rights, and the infringement didn't start until the bullet hit.
There are inconsistencies in libertarian philosophy and disagreements among libertarians as to what constitutes an infringement of another's rights. Most (all?) libertarians don't want some freak neighbor shooting a howitzer at us any more than you do.
In his book Th e Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism , Economist and anarchist David D. Friedman does an excellent job of explaining the problems with libertarianism, and in fact directly addresses your gun-firing-neighbor question. (Make sure also to see the following chapters, 42 and )
--
W2K ate my balls.
--
Slashdot is inherently Republican-unfriendly. I would estimate that most of the readership is either Democrat/Green/radical left wing pinko commie bastard, or radical right/Libertarian.
Please don't associate Libertarians with the radical right, or even the right for that matter. When I think of the radical right I think of the fire and brimstone, bible-thumping we-must-legislate-moral-character types, and that's certainly not an accurate portrayal of libertarians.
Libertarians tend to draw from the left on social matters, and the right on fiscal matters, and so are neither left nor right. We're coming from a different philosophical angle and really don't fit anywhere on a left-right scale.
I agree that both the readership and editorial staff of Slashdot is hostile to Republicans (and usually libertarians also), but I would rather they be open about that than try to hide under the pretense of objectivity like the major media does. I don't think it's possible to be truly objective. I think we 'media consumers' should lower our expectations for objectivity and learn to think more critically, think for ourselves, and stop accepting at face value everything the talking heads shovel down our throats. I think that's already starting to happen. I know many people who are distrustful of television news and newspapers, with good reason IMHO.
Jeez, that sure turned into a rant pretty quickly, didn't it? I'm sorry, I can't help it sometimes. The media pisses me off.
--
Difference between Republican + Democrat:
|---|
Difference between Republican + Libertarian
|-------------------------------------------|
Difference between Democrat + Libertarian
|-------------------------------------------|
The Demopublicans only seem different when compared to each other. Considered within the wider spectrum of political thought, they are two peas from the same centrist pod. There may have been ideological differences in the past, but they are rapidly dwindling, what with Democrats supporting censorship and Republicans supporting massive federal spending programs.
--
I just don't understand the point of porn that doesn't have nekkid people getting it on. If I wanted to look at a photo of an empty bed, I'd go to sealy.com or some shit. Why couldn't he have kept the nekkid people and digitally removed the beds and carpets?
--
IIRC, the Delphi online service used to run under VMS on a honking big VAXCluster, as did the WELL (minus the honking big part).
I'll say one thing about VMS... it was/is mega-reliable. I don't recall our 2-node cluster hicupping even once in the course of 6 years.
--
VMS has had this for many, many years. Files are listed as such:
ex: README.TXT;4 would be version 4 of README.TXT
There's a command you can type to purge all but the 'x' most recent versions, but I don't remember what it is, as I'm actively trying to forget I ever even used VMS. Anyway, you could really eat up some disk space if you didn't run this command every so often.
I always found the versioning to be a pain in the ass to deal with, but I guess it did come in handy occasionally. I think the negatives outweigh the benefits though.
--
I don't vote though, not out of laziness but out of conviction. I disagree with self-government in general and I disagree with our government in particular. To vote would be to betray that which I believe, and I will not do it.
You might be interested in the Voluntaryist movement. Basically they are libertarians who are trying to effect change outside the political arena. Their angle, as I understand it, is that participation in the political process lends validity to it, and that it's better just to obsolete it than to work within it. That's about all I know about the movement - but I did find what I read about them to be quite interesting.
--
So do you want anybody who wants to start a cable company to be able to dig a trench across your front yard to bury their cable a week after someone else did the same thing a week after someone else did the same thing, etc., or do you want no companies able to do so in order to offer you cable service?
AFAIK, no cable co. can dig your lawn without your permission. A friend of mine got cable run to his house once, and they had to ask his neighbor's permission to dig a trench across his lawn. This is as it should be, IMHO. If it is your lawn in question you can either tell them 'no', or negotiate a fee for allowing them to dig.
Anyway, cable companies generally don't run cable to homes on speculation, except in new developments where the place is already dug up anyway. They only dig when you request to be connected.
--
OK, that's certainly less objectionable, but there still is no reason a private company couldn't negotiate rights-of-way, run the wires and resell the use to other companies.
Qwest did something similar on a national scale... they negotiated rights-of-way with railroad lines, and they now resell dark fiber to other telecom providers.
--
Does anyone seriously propose that competing companies build alternative roads to your house and that they compete freely?!
Not really. While that scenario might work for interstate highways, turnpikes, etc. I agree that it's quite unworkable for the last mile... but here's a workable solution that may not have occurred to you: private homeowners' associations already build and maintain roads infrastructure for tens of thousands of neighborhoods in the U.S. The homeowners' associations are a form of privately-run democratic government at the neighborhood level. Within the scope of the groups' charters, contracts serve in place of land-use laws, and dues serve in place of taxes. Of course there is a need for some entity to enforce the contracts, and that's where government comes in.
--