The Project Gutenberg web site appears to be slashdotted at the moment. I copied the relevant portion of their license from another text they produced that I happen to have handy:
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The requirement that the text be convertable to ASCII seems to have been violated. One of the pieces of the etext that shall not be removed, altered or modified says:
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg (the "Project"). Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
I have no trouble understanding the wording of "so the Project (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties."
1's and 0's! Sonny, in my day we had to make do with just 0's. And we were glad to have those. Not like those COBOL programmers who had to just pretend they were using computers.
There's different grades of trespassing and use of others property. Computer law should reflect this as well.
This is an excellent point. I used to argue that the difference between murder and attempted murder should merely be considered to be good luck on the part of the victim and not a difference in sentencing. Then I read this book. David Friedman makes good arguments for different punishments for different crimes.
The major problem with making the penalties too severe is that it encourages additional crimes in an attempt to destroy the evidence or evade capture. To use this particular case as an example, if the penalty of grossly misusing someone's server is roughly the same as the penalty for completely destroying all of the data on it, it gives the criminal an incentive to wipe the system when he's done with it to be sure that no footprints are left behind.
if the scale is from 1 to 10 you cant give a 0 to a book. The least you can give is a 1.
That was my point. There are some things that deserve to be off the bottom of the scale. There are movies that should not be watched and books that should not be read because they are such a waste of precious hours.
but every book that gets reviewed on slashdot get an 8 or a 9. use a scale of 1 to 3 if your spread is 3 points!
In part this is because the reviewers here mostly review books they've taken the time to read all the way through. Those books tend to have several qualities:
They are at least somewhat readable.
They serve a useful purpose.
Their content is basically correct.
These add up to scores above 5 on a scale from 1 to 10. Perhaps what Slashdot needs is for a few of us to admit some of our book-buying mistakes and review the real dogs. And for any of you out there who have ever been given a really bad book, this is an opportunity:
You took a class and the instructor was flogging his own book, because with the author there to explain everything that wasn't clear in print it met a standard of usefulness slightly above that of a paperweight.
Your manager gave you a book that explains what eLinuxOpenPerlML can do and expected you to use it as a coding reference. Unfortunately, the closest it ever came to an example of code was a few browser screen shots.
You found a copy of some thick but useless tome in your cube when you moved in. The past two occupants hadn't even broken the spine, or even blown off the dust.
Review the 3 out of 10 books! Hey, consider it a challenge. Find a book in a subject area that should be reviewed on Slashdot, but that richly deserves a 0 on a scale from 1 to 10. There has to be at least one. Warn us all before we waste our money!
There are three things required for any new standard to be accepted for markup on the Web:
Availability of a client that supports it.
A killer app - some need that it fills sufficiently better than HTML that will get people to use it.
Momentum - enough people using it on the Web that it gets maintained and enhanced.
As several people have pointed out, the first two conditions were already met at the time HTML was created. LaTeX has always done a better job at two things. First, it produces much better looking output for several types of content because of the underlying TeX model for composing pages. Get the TeXbook and read about boxes and glue. I learned a great deal about the inherent issues involved in typesetting from that book. Second, LaTeX in particular has always provided a clear separation of content from presentation. HTML has relentlessly driven towards blurring that distinction as it is generally used.
That leads me to the third condition. LaTeX is used primarily for printed presentation. HTML is used primarily for online hypertext browsing. Even though the audiences overlap, the tasks involved are different.
However, I plan to download a TeX/LaTeX plugin.
But still, I think the ratio of buyers is quite high here. Probably mostly because downloading is more expensive and less convenient over here. Still, the morale is high, too. I enjoyed ordering Suse boxes for the companies that I worked for, because I knew it supported a product, a company and a distribution scheme I like.
Andrew Tannenbaum allegedly said, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon loaded with tapes." The point is that the bandwidth you can get online can't rival the bandwidth you can get via physical media for large volumes of data. My installs from CD take around 20-25 minutes typically. And that it predictable. Downloading is more variable. If I had a CD burner, I would probably burn my own, but I don't.
I was thinking about this last night as I was watching a Moody Blues concert on our local PBS affiliate. It's pledge week again. But the Moody Blues have been making their music for nearly my entire life. When they were new and I was young, my parents were listening to musical genres that I considered dead at the time. Their musical taste proved longer-lived than I had realized. People hang on to the things they like.
Few people can remain novophiles their entire lives. Teenagers are the most likely to be open to new cultural trends. They have lived long enough to have mastered the basic framework of the society they are a part of. They have gained a measure of independence from their parents. And they have little investment in the past.
However, before we write off everyone over 30 as hopeless antiques, let's ask a couple of questions. First, whose generation first used the phrase, "Don't trust anyone over 30"? Second, for the 99% of Slashdot readers who are geeks, do you find that the copyright date on technical books is a major consideration in your decision of whether to buy it? Have you started to care about the month in which they weere printed?
This issue is not a new one. Future Shock explored the accerating rate of change in the 70's. Videogames are only one current manifestation of it.
If you want to support the "*NIX is for servers, Windows and Macintosh are for desktops" party line, then buy this book.
Actually, having screenshots from a Windows box provides a ready answer to any questions about whether Perl CGI scripts will interoperate nicely with Windows clients. We know they will. That's the whole point of open, standardized protocols. But for managers who are firmly entrenched in the Windows' Proprietary Standards world, this is an issue. They are used to products that won't talk to the rest of the world. The idea that there is software out there that plays well with others is a new one to them. This may be the way to get your foot in the door.
I'm not having a hard time at all staying in the middle of michigan (despite all the snow we got today!)
I'm glad to hear someone with a higher profile than me saying something like this. I'm in Upstate New York, which Hillary called economically depressed during her campaign. Whether she was right or not, this is a nice place to live. Housing is affordable. My commute is typically about 20 minutes, and I can bike to work in decent weather. Yet I am far enough out that there are three farm stands between here and my son's daycare.
With the net steadily eroding our sense of place, those jobs that don't require a physical presence are going to migrate. They will require reliable net access and the ability to communicate well with coworkers online. But they may no longer require addresses in Silicon Valley, Boston or RTP. The overwhelming question is whether they will require North American addresses either.
I would like to introduce the Free, But Taxed, Software License. It is essentially the same as the GPL with one additional provision. If you represent, in any way, a government that taxes free software on any basis other than the actual amount paid for the media, you are required to pay the full amount collected in taxes to the copyright holder of the software in order to use it yourself. If the media in question contained software from multiple copyright holders, you are required to pay each of them in full. The copyright holder may agree to waive this fee in exchange for a public apology and repealing the tax.
My wife and I have arranged our schedules so that she drops our son at the bus stop in the morning and I pick him up in the afternoon. We don't have to have him in wrap-around daycare. That saves us thousands of dollars a year. Needless to say, working somewhere where I couldn't do that would effectively be a pay cut.
Because our company allows flex time, but requires a manager's approval, it gives those of us using it a strong incentive to demonstrate that it isn't impacting our work. Several years ago, I was the team leader for a team that included one employee on flex time and another who was telecommuting. After we started that arrangement, our team communication improved. We made extensive use of e-mail to keep each other informed. That e-mail was a better record of important communication than any notes we might have taken in meetings.
I can't speak for the rest of that team, but I started treating e-mail as an immeadiate priority. Before that, I had occasionally decided that some e-mail late in the day could be left until the following day. But when I knew that two of my coworkers would see my replies either later that evening or early the following morning because of there work hours, I started extended them the consideration of being sure that I sent my replies right away.
While I agree that there are things wrong with the system we have, 2004 seems an awfully long time to wait to find out if Dubya really won Florida. Even recounting the ballots by hand shouldn't take that long... should it?
Maybe next time we should have computer monitors with great big colored buttons and a windows-style "are you really sure yes/no" dialogue boxes for the voters in palm beach.
And in 2004 we will have several counties complaining because all of the votes were wiped out in a BSOD at 8:45 pm.
It is now the morning after the election for the next President of the United States of America. Like so many mornings after, many of the participants are having regrets. It is clear from the popular vote count that many people did not get what they wanted. The press is showing George W. Bush with 48% percent of the popular vote, and roughly 200,000 votes less than Al Gore. It is clear that the people of the United States do not want the government they have.
Governing without a clear mandate is not such a bad thing, however. If the voters of this country pay attention to the real meaning of the results, there is no surer check against abuses of power. Large majorities can hide abuses against minorities. With such a narrow split in the popular vote for the President, and no strong majority in either house of Congress, we have no "Ruling Party". Perhaps we will get a government that does very little for the next few years. Would it be so bad for the rest of us to get on with our lives?
I have received dozens of calls with recorded messages, calls from pollsters, calls that failed to connect a person to me to pitch a candidate. I think it is high time to declare these to be a capital offense. While I am opposed to the death penalty and barbaric punishments for lesser offenses, I think an exception can be made for political telemarketting. This, at least, is worthy of public stonings.
dsplat, who is glad he doesn't live in a "battleground" state.
Realize that your benefits are not without cost. Paychecks are smaller by exactly the cost of providing them (and the same applies to the so-caled "employer" section of your social security taxe: your wages are roughly 7.6% lower to accomodate this). The same "housewife tax" problem applies to tax deductions for daycare that do not also accrue to housewifes.
hawk, it's good to see someone else around here who not only understands economics, but uses it. This strikes me as an ideal situation for one of three solutions:
Companies filling different niches. Different companies can attract employees with different needs based on the benefits provided.
A large company can make on-site daycare available without subsidizing it. Offer it at cost. This guarantees that it is available to the parents who want it, without costing the single or childless folks.
Many companies can either locate where there is daycare available, or facilitate getting daycare nearby by making providers aware of the demand and perhaps putting the parents and daycare providers in touch with each other.
Of the three, I like the third solution the best. It is not free, but it shouldn't have to cost much. It avoids most of the costs of subsidizing. It avoids the conflicts of interest that might arise when a parent has a problem with on site daycare. In fact, the company can help the parents by negotiating hours that fit their work schedules, etc. And finally, it helps fill the need.
dsplat, speaking as an individual voice in the chorus of the free market.
This is an exccellent example of providing parental responsibility! You have to actively interview the said "daycare" to see if it is right for your child. Daycare workers have degrees in Developmental Psychology, Early childhood education, etc. etc. etc. If anything, they're more qualified than YOU are to raise a kid.
I wouldn't say that daycare workers are better qualified in every respect to raise my children. They lack a couple of things. One is continuity with the children they care for. My children have been my children all of their lives. I plan to attend their graduations and weddings. I want them to grow up to be good, happy people who I respect. And I plan to be around to see that.
However, you are quite right that they have skills and a perspective that I don't have. My wife and I struck a balance that we are quite happy with. Our kids have been in daycare three days a week. It has served as a supervised playgroup for them, a place to develop social skills. We have also gotten valuable feedback from their caregivers about their behavior and development. It is a rare day that I don't spend five to ten minutes talking to one of the caregivers about my son's day. I know them by name. I know many of the other children and their parents as well.
My children's daycare has been fare from an abdication of responsibility. It has been a conscious effort to provide my children with a greater range of experiences than my wife and I could provide alone.
Rather than worrying about providing or even subsidizing daycare, one thing that employers can provide is a childcare reimbursement account. For those of you outside the US or without children who've never heard of these, I'll explain. An amount of money you specify (up to a maximum) is withheld pre-tax from each paycheck. That money is returned to you for any qualified childcare. It is a way of paying for your childcare with absolutely no taxes on it, rather than deducting it on your income tax forms after you've paid Social Security, etc.
The only questions in my mind are: Who created it? and Why was anyone fooled? This paragraph:
In years past, we've discussed various ways to stop the Linux wave; we have considered everything from FUD to mud slinging to benchmarks to proprietary "standards" to force them down. The next step is usually what the Linux community refers to as "embrace and extend," where we make our own proprietary version of Linux, brand it with our trademark, and improve it until people would rather use our flavor than any other. At that point, we can lock everyone else out of the market.
Almost no one sees his own actions as evil, and certainly there is no evidence that Bill Gates does. Yet this paragraph uses the terms FUD and proprietary "standards" in a way that implies that they are underhanded while admitting that they were seriously considered. These are not the words of a leader who believes he is right rallying his troops.
One of the things that the Hellmouth series highlighted is that alienation and marginalization of low-status subcultures and individuals is nothing new. For a perspective on this that goes back a generation to my high school days, I suggest digging up a copy of Fantasy Role Playing Games by J. Eric Holmes, which is sadly out of print. He is (or at least was) a psychologist by profession and a gamer in his spare time. He examined the psychology of gaming and debunked many of the myths about its detrimental effects on teens. He even examined the urban myths of the late 70's and early 80's about gaming-crazed teens hunting monsters in steam tunnels at a couple of universities.
Remember, those who do not learn from history know that their ideas are new and right and that the rest of us must be forced to live by them.
Given the choice, I'd vote Browne. But given that Browne's not gonna win, I'll take Bush. A fool? Sure. Malicious? Perhaps. But at least malice sleeps at night. Those with good intentions never rest.
I don't have the illusion that I am going to persuade many people who've already made up their minds for other reasons that they should vote for a third party candidate. But for the people who are taking the lesser of two evils approach to voting, I have a thought. Whether it is true or not, various third party candidates have been accused of throwing elections to the major party candidate on the other side of the fence. Many Gore supporters, including the New York Times, have urged Nader to get out of the race because they fear this effect.
It doesn't matter whether third party candidates draw voters away from the major parties, or draw in voters who otherwise wouldn't come to the polls, or both. The Democrats and Republicans want those votes. You can bet that they will pay attention to any issues that have been championed by candidates who drew a significant portion of the vote. They will try to make those issues their issues.
I believe it was Edsgar Dijkstra who said in the 1970's, "I do not know what language we will be programming in in the year 2000, but I do know that we will call it Fortran." Okay, the exact prediction was wrong, but the point was valid. Incremental change happens, and often over long periods the end results are unrecognizable as the offspring of the original. I don't actually want Republican-lite or Democrat-lite, but I prefer them to the likely results I'll get this year either way. And, regardless of who gets elected, he'll be preparing over the next four years for a re-election campaign. So a vote for a losing third party candidate can even have an effect on the policies that the winner pursues.
Whether you flip the numbers for Bush and Gore only changes who's in office and which voting bloc he is courting. If the size of any third party candidate's turnout in the polls is greater than the difference between the front-runners, or the projected difference four years from now, that candidate represents a voting bloc worth having.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't aware that 1984 was available as an etext yet.
The requirement that the text be convertable to ASCII seems to have been violated. One of the pieces of the etext that shall not be removed, altered or modified says:
I have no trouble understanding the wording of "so the Project (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties."
1's and 0's! Sonny, in my day we had to make do with just 0's. And we were glad to have those. Not like those COBOL programmers who had to just pretend they were using computers.
Is there anyone out there perverse enough to hack a text-only, hardcopy browser so that we can all surf the Web on Decwriters at 110 baud?
This is an excellent point. I used to argue that the difference between murder and attempted murder should merely be considered to be good luck on the part of the victim and not a difference in sentencing. Then I read this book. David Friedman makes good arguments for different punishments for different crimes.
The major problem with making the penalties too severe is that it encourages additional crimes in an attempt to destroy the evidence or evade capture. To use this particular case as an example, if the penalty of grossly misusing someone's server is roughly the same as the penalty for completely destroying all of the data on it, it gives the criminal an incentive to wipe the system when he's done with it to be sure that no footprints are left behind.
That was my point. There are some things that deserve to be off the bottom of the scale. There are movies that should not be watched and books that should not be read because they are such a waste of precious hours.
In part this is because the reviewers here mostly review books they've taken the time to read all the way through. Those books tend to have several qualities:
These add up to scores above 5 on a scale from 1 to 10. Perhaps what Slashdot needs is for a few of us to admit some of our book-buying mistakes and review the real dogs. And for any of you out there who have ever been given a really bad book, this is an opportunity:
Review the 3 out of 10 books! Hey, consider it a challenge. Find a book in a subject area that should be reviewed on Slashdot, but that richly deserves a 0 on a scale from 1 to 10. There has to be at least one. Warn us all before we waste our money!
[nasal voice] "Hello, Chief"
[short pause while listening]
"Why yes, I am taking to you on my new Shoeix sneaker-phone."
[another short pause]
"No, Chief, I don't think that's what they meant when they called it portable."
- Availability of a client that supports it.
- A killer app - some need that it fills sufficiently better than HTML that will get people to use it.
- Momentum - enough people using it on the Web that it gets maintained and enhanced.
As several people have pointed out, the first two conditions were already met at the time HTML was created. LaTeX has always done a better job at two things. First, it produces much better looking output for several types of content because of the underlying TeX model for composing pages. Get the TeXbook and read about boxes and glue. I learned a great deal about the inherent issues involved in typesetting from that book. Second, LaTeX in particular has always provided a clear separation of content from presentation. HTML has relentlessly driven towards blurring that distinction as it is generally used. That leads me to the third condition. LaTeX is used primarily for printed presentation. HTML is used primarily for online hypertext browsing. Even though the audiences overlap, the tasks involved are different. However, I plan to download a TeX/LaTeX plugin.Andrew Tannenbaum allegedly said, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon loaded with tapes." The point is that the bandwidth you can get online can't rival the bandwidth you can get via physical media for large volumes of data. My installs from CD take around 20-25 minutes typically. And that it predictable. Downloading is more variable. If I had a CD burner, I would probably burn my own, but I don't.
I was thinking about this last night as I was watching a Moody Blues concert on our local PBS affiliate. It's pledge week again. But the Moody Blues have been making their music for nearly my entire life. When they were new and I was young, my parents were listening to musical genres that I considered dead at the time. Their musical taste proved longer-lived than I had realized. People hang on to the things they like.
Few people can remain novophiles their entire lives. Teenagers are the most likely to be open to new cultural trends. They have lived long enough to have mastered the basic framework of the society they are a part of. They have gained a measure of independence from their parents. And they have little investment in the past.
However, before we write off everyone over 30 as hopeless antiques, let's ask a couple of questions. First, whose generation first used the phrase, "Don't trust anyone over 30"? Second, for the 99% of Slashdot readers who are geeks, do you find that the copyright date on technical books is a major consideration in your decision of whether to buy it? Have you started to care about the month in which they weere printed?
This issue is not a new one. Future Shock explored the accerating rate of change in the 70's. Videogames are only one current manifestation of it.
Actually, having screenshots from a Windows box provides a ready answer to any questions about whether Perl CGI scripts will interoperate nicely with Windows clients. We know they will. That's the whole point of open, standardized protocols. But for managers who are firmly entrenched in the Windows' Proprietary Standards world, this is an issue. They are used to products that won't talk to the rest of the world. The idea that there is software out there that plays well with others is a new one to them. This may be the way to get your foot in the door.
I'm glad to hear someone with a higher profile than me saying something like this. I'm in Upstate New York, which Hillary called economically depressed during her campaign. Whether she was right or not, this is a nice place to live. Housing is affordable. My commute is typically about 20 minutes, and I can bike to work in decent weather. Yet I am far enough out that there are three farm stands between here and my son's daycare.
With the net steadily eroding our sense of place, those jobs that don't require a physical presence are going to migrate. They will require reliable net access and the ability to communicate well with coworkers online. But they may no longer require addresses in Silicon Valley, Boston or RTP. The overwhelming question is whether they will require North American addresses either.
I would like to introduce the Free, But Taxed, Software License. It is essentially the same as the GPL with one additional provision. If you represent, in any way, a government that taxes free software on any basis other than the actual amount paid for the media, you are required to pay the full amount collected in taxes to the copyright holder of the software in order to use it yourself. If the media in question contained software from multiple copyright holders, you are required to pay each of them in full. The copyright holder may agree to waive this fee in exchange for a public apology and repealing the tax.
My wife and I have arranged our schedules so that she drops our son at the bus stop in the morning and I pick him up in the afternoon. We don't have to have him in wrap-around daycare. That saves us thousands of dollars a year. Needless to say, working somewhere where I couldn't do that would effectively be a pay cut.
Because our company allows flex time, but requires a manager's approval, it gives those of us using it a strong incentive to demonstrate that it isn't impacting our work. Several years ago, I was the team leader for a team that included one employee on flex time and another who was telecommuting. After we started that arrangement, our team communication improved. We made extensive use of e-mail to keep each other informed. That e-mail was a better record of important communication than any notes we might have taken in meetings.
I can't speak for the rest of that team, but I started treating e-mail as an immeadiate priority. Before that, I had occasionally decided that some e-mail late in the day could be left until the following day. But when I knew that two of my coworkers would see my replies either later that evening or early the following morning because of there work hours, I started extended them the consideration of being sure that I sent my replies right away.
While I agree that there are things wrong with the system we have, 2004 seems an awfully long time to wait to find out if Dubya really won Florida. Even recounting the ballots by hand shouldn't take that long ... should it?
</sarcasm>
And in 2004 we will have several counties complaining because all of the votes were wiped out in a BSOD at 8:45 pm.
It is now the morning after the election for the next President of the United States of America. Like so many mornings after, many of the participants are having regrets. It is clear from the popular vote count that many people did not get what they wanted. The press is showing George W. Bush with 48% percent of the popular vote, and roughly 200,000 votes less than Al Gore. It is clear that the people of the United States do not want the government they have.
Governing without a clear mandate is not such a bad thing, however. If the voters of this country pay attention to the real meaning of the results, there is no surer check against abuses of power. Large majorities can hide abuses against minorities. With such a narrow split in the popular vote for the President, and no strong majority in either house of Congress, we have no "Ruling Party". Perhaps we will get a government that does very little for the next few years. Would it be so bad for the rest of us to get on with our lives?
I have received dozens of calls with recorded messages, calls from pollsters, calls that failed to connect a person to me to pitch a candidate. I think it is high time to declare these to be a capital offense. While I am opposed to the death penalty and barbaric punishments for lesser offenses, I think an exception can be made for political telemarketting. This, at least, is worthy of public stonings.
dsplat, who is glad he doesn't live in a "battleground" state.
hawk, it's good to see someone else around here who not only understands economics, but uses it. This strikes me as an ideal situation for one of three solutions:
Of the three, I like the third solution the best. It is not free, but it shouldn't have to cost much. It avoids most of the costs of subsidizing. It avoids the conflicts of interest that might arise when a parent has a problem with on site daycare. In fact, the company can help the parents by negotiating hours that fit their work schedules, etc. And finally, it helps fill the need.
dsplat, speaking as an individual voice in the chorus of the free market.
I wouldn't say that daycare workers are better qualified in every respect to raise my children. They lack a couple of things. One is continuity with the children they care for. My children have been my children all of their lives. I plan to attend their graduations and weddings. I want them to grow up to be good, happy people who I respect. And I plan to be around to see that.
However, you are quite right that they have skills and a perspective that I don't have. My wife and I struck a balance that we are quite happy with. Our kids have been in daycare three days a week. It has served as a supervised playgroup for them, a place to develop social skills. We have also gotten valuable feedback from their caregivers about their behavior and development. It is a rare day that I don't spend five to ten minutes talking to one of the caregivers about my son's day. I know them by name. I know many of the other children and their parents as well.
My children's daycare has been fare from an abdication of responsibility. It has been a conscious effort to provide my children with a greater range of experiences than my wife and I could provide alone.
Rather than worrying about providing or even subsidizing daycare, one thing that employers can provide is a childcare reimbursement account. For those of you outside the US or without children who've never heard of these, I'll explain. An amount of money you specify (up to a maximum) is withheld pre-tax from each paycheck. That money is returned to you for any qualified childcare. It is a way of paying for your childcare with absolutely no taxes on it, rather than deducting it on your income tax forms after you've paid Social Security, etc.
Almost no one sees his own actions as evil, and certainly there is no evidence that Bill Gates does. Yet this paragraph uses the terms FUD and proprietary "standards" in a way that implies that they are underhanded while admitting that they were seriously considered. These are not the words of a leader who believes he is right rallying his troops.
One of the things that the Hellmouth series highlighted is that alienation and marginalization of low-status subcultures and individuals is nothing new. For a perspective on this that goes back a generation to my high school days, I suggest digging up a copy of Fantasy Role Playing Games by J. Eric Holmes, which is sadly out of print. He is (or at least was) a psychologist by profession and a gamer in his spare time. He examined the psychology of gaming and debunked many of the myths about its detrimental effects on teens. He even examined the urban myths of the late 70's and early 80's about gaming-crazed teens hunting monsters in steam tunnels at a couple of universities.
Remember, those who do not learn from history know that their ideas are new and right and that the rest of us must be forced to live by them.
I don't have the illusion that I am going to persuade many people who've already made up their minds for other reasons that they should vote for a third party candidate. But for the people who are taking the lesser of two evils approach to voting, I have a thought. Whether it is true or not, various third party candidates have been accused of throwing elections to the major party candidate on the other side of the fence. Many Gore supporters, including the New York Times, have urged Nader to get out of the race because they fear this effect.
It doesn't matter whether third party candidates draw voters away from the major parties, or draw in voters who otherwise wouldn't come to the polls, or both. The Democrats and Republicans want those votes. You can bet that they will pay attention to any issues that have been championed by candidates who drew a significant portion of the vote. They will try to make those issues their issues.
I believe it was Edsgar Dijkstra who said in the 1970's, "I do not know what language we will be programming in in the year 2000, but I do know that we will call it Fortran." Okay, the exact prediction was wrong, but the point was valid. Incremental change happens, and often over long periods the end results are unrecognizable as the offspring of the original. I don't actually want Republican-lite or Democrat-lite, but I prefer them to the likely results I'll get this year either way. And, regardless of who gets elected, he'll be preparing over the next four years for a re-election campaign. So a vote for a losing third party candidate can even have an effect on the policies that the winner pursues.
Imagine an outcome like this:
Bush: 35%
Gore: 33%
Browne: 10%
Nader: 10%
Buchanan: 2%
Whether you flip the numbers for Bush and Gore only changes who's in office and which voting bloc he is courting. If the size of any third party candidate's turnout in the polls is greater than the difference between the front-runners, or the projected difference four years from now, that candidate represents a voting bloc worth having.