Now that our side is dominant and impleneting it's policies (mostly rolling back socialism in favor of classical liberalism) it is now the Democratic party yelling STOP! in an attempt to preserve their gains.
Soaring yearly budget deficits approaching 5% of yearly GDP are not the work of any "classical liberal"; those deficits -- as the great (and *real* classical liberal) economist Milton Friedman once wrote of deficits decades ago -- are nothing more than a tax increase on future generations. 90% steel tarriffs (ruled illegal by the WTO) are certainly not the work of any free-trading classical liberal (although to his credit, CAFTA is admittedly a nice step).
The very notion that President Bush is returning us to a more classical liberal -- a.k.a. moderate libertarian -- society is almost completely intellectually-bankrupt, whether we are discussing economics (as we are in this thread) or social policy.
We've hit Bush's economic leg, and find he hasn't one to stand on. Clearly Bush has little in the way of classical liberal leanings there (his Social Security reform aside, although even there, his plan will effectively discredit the value of private investment by greatly restricting the basket of investments into which people may invest). What about his classical liberal views on social policy?
He doesn't have a leg to stand on there either.
The real classical liberals would not have attacked a foreign nation unprovoked (Iraq), although they certainly would've fought back against the 9/11 attackers (i.e., we would have gone to Afghanistan, as we actually did). Classical liberals believe in the value of privacy; Bush does not. Classical liberals (usually) support private gun ownership; Bush supported the Assault Weapons Ban even though even the anti-gun Violence Policy Center's own leader said the AWB was of little value (the re-enactment of the AWB thankfully died in Congress, no thanks to Bush). The classical liberals of today -- like Milton Friedman -- support the legalization, or at least decriminalization of illegal drugs; Bush, like any conservative, opposes it (thanks to Ronald Reagan's promotion of the so-failed-even-some-Republicans-admit-it-now "war on drugs").
As a final nail in his socially non-classical liberal policy: on free speech, classical liberals love freedom of speech -- they wrote the First Amendment after all! We would allow full, free, and unrestricted speech on our airwaves (with exceptions perhaps only for very-specific, very limited national security instances, e.g. disallowing the announcement of the procedures and launch codes for any of our nuclear missiles, though
Ssssshhh! Don't criticize socialism here! You'll ruin their idealistic dreams!
(Granted, they were crushed by reality in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet empire collapsed. But most of the socialists posting here were probably just entering 1st grade about that time, and had no understanding of the significance of that event. Nor have more than a couple of them studied economics beyond introductory micro and macro, if they've studied even *that* much...)
You're forgetting about Hong Kong, which has long been the least-socialist area on Earth. And their rate of GDP growth is consistently-higher than most other nations, even though HK is nothing but a tiny outpost of the freest-market capitalism on the shore of China.
Not to mention that "progress in all fields of human endeavour" you mention includes economic progress -- i.e., economic progress which includes the fall of the Berlin Wall -- a wall that fell *because* socialism was such a bad system for the people trapped in its clutches...
I suppose in that regard, you're right: socialism over the last 100 years helped prove that collectivist economics like socialism don't work for the basic reason that they provide less incentive than is necessary for the human race to function, and it provides less incentive than its major competitor in the marketplace for macroeconomic systems, capitalism, does.
Not to mention the hardly-minor issue of human liberty, wherein socialism requires the force of government to get people to work, i.e., it requires putting a gun to peoples' heads. Compare that with capitalism, which tempts with money and property instead -- but whether somebody participates is still a voluntary choice on the individual's part.
Moreover, if you'd bother to go look at GDP growth rates for socialist vs. capitalist nations over the last 100 years, you'd find that the greatest growth did not occur in the socialist nations. Not by any means.
You can confirm this firsthand for yourself if you would bother to visit former East Germany (which even today shows plenty of remnants of the failures of the old Soviet-controlled socialist government) and compare it with America, Canada, Britain, etc...
Not that I would expect leftists commenting on economics to do their homework though. So very few do, and those who do, ultimately find socialism as a *full* economic system is intellectually-bankrupt; the only remaining question in their minds is how much socialism can still be salvaged from the dustbin of the 20th century and implemented within the framework of an otherwise-capitalist economy... (see also Paul Krugman as an example)
Can they really stop you from talking with your cubicle neighbor on the bus home, if they can't even stop you from reading Slashdot while on the clock?"
For legal purposes? Maybe to probably if it's in your contract, but IANAL.
For practical purposes? Unless the boss or some assistant crony is there with you, I doubt it.
Clearly not, for religion has prevented peace for thousands of years.
Religion will likewise be what incites the destruction of the human race. The tools for doing so are in place -- there are plenty of NBC weapons floating around, and an increasing number of them every day. It just takes one person to pull the trigger, be it the terrorist-king Osama bin Laden in downtown NYC, or a war-mongering Bush in the White House, or some fascist, theocratic mullah in Iran or Saudi Arabia, or the batshit-crazy Kim Jong-Il, or anybody else...
All there needs to be is a reason to press the Big Red Button. And everybody else is weaker than us, so they have a reason: the U.S. is too powerful and dominating. It's the "David vs. Goliath" syndrome. Big penis vs. little penis.
I'm not much younger than you (mid-20s), but I personally have little doubt that we will see WWIII in our lifetimes. There has never been a century in U.S. history in which some major, century-defining, multi-lateral war has not occurred; the 1700s saw the Revolutionary War, the 1800s saw the Spanish-American War and the Civil War, the 1900s saw WWI and WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.
A *truly* strict reading of the 1st Amendment would disagree with you:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Read that again: CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH, OR OF THE PRESS.
What part of "no" do you not understand? Does "no" mean "no"?
No laws restricting the freedom of speech. Period. That includes libel and slander, regardless of their menial or even negative value to society. The idea was that the public would, through a variety of media sources and from the people who might've been libeled or slandered, eventually learn the truth, regardless of what libel or slander had been originally printed. And through the forces of the free market, those papers which printed such garbage would come to be seen as unreliable, and either have to clean up their act or go out of business. So it was intended to be *pure* free speech.
At least according to the U.S. Constitution's actual text. But who cares about that worthless old rag these days anyway?
I think the issue is more of a rhetorical one than anything. I would not call East Germany "socialist", I'd call it "communist".
Well, in the strictly economic sense, this isn't quite right. A communist economy, as Marx envisioned, would not have a government. People would live on a communally-shared property, with no particular ownership for anybody, and people would work because work needs to be done, rather than because they have any particular incentive to do so.
Much like the native Americans, actually... That said, Chairman Mao tried real communism in China during his "Great Leap Forward", and he doomed millions to starvation as a result.
Socialism, by contrast, necessarily requires a large, powerful system of government, though whether it is democratically-controlled is a separate issue (they certainly were not under the Soviet-style socialism, but Swedish-style socialism is). Like communism, socialism requires that the "greater good" be served -- collective needs outweigh individual needs -- but the difference is that socialists don't believe that people will just necessarily co-operate, or are even capable of voluntarily co-operating with each other, as communism requires.
So, communism and socialism -- at least in their idealistic, theoeretical versions -- are differentiated by the existence of a government.
Since East Germany had a large government, it clearly cannot have been actually "communist" (despite claims by the U.S. and others); it was actually socialist in its economic structure. (Then again, the Soviet Union wasn't "communist" either, and even their name would tell you that: USSR = "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics").
It's common to refer to them as "communist", but in fact, there are very few real-world examples of communism in practice, because virtually every nation and the societies that comprise them has existed with some sort of government. Given that there exist really 3 major economic systems worth speaking of -- capitalism, socialism, and communism -- one is easily ruled-out...
I was at Paulskirche in Frankfurt (the building that I udnerstand held the first united German government in 1848) a couple of days ago, reading the panels about its history. It was pretty much destroyed in the air raids, and then it was completely rebuilt by 1947.
I didn't get there myself (my only time in Frankfurt was to drive to the airport and get on a flight home to the U.S.), but I visited a church (I don't have my notes handy, but IIRC, it was in Nurnburg) which likewise was destroyed during WWII and rebuilt just afterwards. FWIW, we were told there that the church was rebuilt via donations by the German citizenry...
A lot of people claim that the our winning the Cold War proved capitalism is better than communism, but I'm not so sure. We started off with an awefully large advantage -- 20 million dead Russians worth of an advantage.
Sure, that does make a considerable difference. But those 20 million died in large part because the Russians couldn't supply their military with enough weapons. Soldiers didn't even get their own guns; they had to share one with another soldier! At one point, Stalin literally ran his people into the German opposition, because there was little else he could do -- this is where the term "cannon fodder" came from, BTW...
Stalin's totalitarian, socialist economy surely didn't help him boost production... (now, to be fair, they'd had the Bolshevik Revolution fairly-recently. Such social upheaval can't have boded well for building an economy which could withstand the demands of war.)
Besides Russia, the Cold War has yielded other "communist" (actually socialist) examples of failure:
* North Korea -- The last remaining Soviet-style holdout in the world one
Yes, it does. If you think pure capitalism would be so much better, try Googling for the "Gilded Age" or "Standard Oil".
2 points:
1) I don't advocate *pure* capitalism (i.e., government exists solely to protect property and adjudicate violations of the law and of other peoples' property), but that's primarily because I don't believe our society can handle it, or wants to. Such a staunchly-libertarian position requires a different mindset and different culture from the one we have.
The social concerns aside, there are purely-economic considerations. I am quite cognizent of the limitations and occasional rare failures of capitalism and the extent to which government has a role in "filling in the cracks" of a capitalist economy; however, as an overall, general arrangement, capitalism is a far superior system to any other yet devised.
2) Standard Oil != capitalism. One is a business object; the other is an economic system which contains many business objects.
Now, you might be referring to its position as a monopoly provider. I have 2 takes on the issue of monopolies:
First, some monopolies will eventually lose their monopoly power due to their own weight. Consider Microsoft's slow death that Linux, etc. has been encouraging. It is a slow process, but nobody can deny that it clearly exists.
Second, despite my first point, I still consider monopolies to be a market failure to a certain -- albeit limited -- extent, which provides justification for anti-trust laws for businesses which *abuse* their monopoly position (but does not punish them for *being* a monopoly). However, whether they are really worthwhile to exercise depends entirely on the particular case, the length of the monopoly's existence, and its effect on the overall economy.
For instance, if Microsoft abuses its monopoly position, it's possible for people to go and write their own OS, their own office apps, etc.. It's been done regularly since the beginning of the computing timeline.
But in the case of Standard Oil, a fair argument could be made that because their oil powered the transportion systems which keep our economy fluid and operational -- that they play such a central (albeit not always very visible) role in the economy that to allow them to singlehandedly control the market would be too risky to the nation's security, its economic efficiency, and so on.
You need to get over it, and your insecure need to demonize the "enemy".
So long as there are ignoramuses advocating a system which the entire economically-educated world now acknowledges was an abject, empirical failure (it's about as obvious a conclusion as anything in economics ever gets), I feel duty-bound to point out their ignorance.
Show me a *credible* out-and-out socialist economist living today in a western nation. You'll have a very hard time, because nearly every socialist economist of the Cold War era either admitted they were wrong or else went into hiding after the wall's fall.
I agree that relatively-speaking, present-day Germany is still socialist (then again, so is the U.S., depending on how strict you wish to be with your definition of "socialist").
Although, having just traveled to both former West Germany and former East Germany in the last couple months, at least from a mere tourist's perspective, it clearly has significant helpings of a market economy, e.g. multiple privately-owned competitors. However, their labor markets are rather inflexible; I'm not familiar with what sort of price-controls, tariffs, subsidies, etc. they presently have.
But regarding the East/West Germany division, in actual structure, East Germany was the socialist, Soviet-controlled one. West Germany was the relatively-capitalistic (compared to East Germany) country. This is basic, indisputable world history...
Both had large, powerful governments, but East Germany's was *far* more controlling and commanding than the West's was; for example, imported automobiles were permitted -- as also was the case in Soviet Russia -- only for the wealthy party elite, not the regular citizens... Freedom of speech isn't even a fair comparison: East German tour guides of the time would tell you that all the run-down, bombed-out buildings from WWII (many of which *STILL* exist today, but in much fewer quantity than before) were to be rebuilt according to the "5 year plan" that had been put together, when the truth was obviously not in alignment with such a statement; in West Germany, people were much freer (as they are today) to criticize the government, rather than kiss its ass.
That the western parts of Germany today (in my travels) had *no* bombed-out buildings, while even in major cities of eastern Germany still do is a testament to the failure of the central planned -- i.e. socialist -- government.
Milton Friedman wrote in his classic Free to Choose in 1980 that difference between a capitalist and socialist economy was perhaps no more starkly illustrated, nor more scientifically-possible to observe, than in comparing East and West Germany. This makes sense: a nation of the same people, same culture, etc. were split up by force, and forced to live under 2 separate and very different economic systems. Hypothesis of the time: socialism is better than capitalism. Test of hypothesis: split up the populace. Conclusion of test?
One economy failed miserably, with its members often desperately seeking to escape to the other. It was so bad that East Germany had to build a wall to keep them in the country. And ultimately, that wall fell.
Some of us don't believe it is a coincidence that the socialist nation's economy effectively died on the vine, the wall holding in its citizens was torn down, and the people of the formerly-socialist economy desired to live under a capitalist one...
The Berlin Wall fell precisely because socialism is an abject, empirical failure in practice. No even remotely-credible economist in any western nation believes any longer that a relatively-socialist system works; they haven't for 16 years now.
The wall fell, get over it. That's why even one international socialism-advocacy group, almost immediately after the wall's fall, started calling themselves "market socialists" -- recognizing the failure of government to efficiently and effectively organize society (as if that were somehow consistent with the liberal idea that individuals ought to be free from manipulation and coercion by others).
Even historically democratic-socialist Sweden has elements of a market economy built into it (although it still has very hefty taxation and vast welfare systems, the similar likes of which are presently strangling Germany's economy).
Your only insight is that all of the so-called "communist" countries -- Russia, China, etc. -- were never communist in practice, only in ideology. That is quite true (and is one of my complaints too when people speak of "communism"; it smacks of economic ignorance); they were socialist in practice, but communist in ideology. Humongous governments attempting to be all things to all people all the time: this is the signature of socialism, whereas communism, ideally, would abolish such government, leaving all property to be owned equally (leaving no incentive for anybody to care about any property, b/c it is as much anybody else's as it is one's own).
All the more evidence then that socialism was a failure...
You can't be a "little bit" libertarian any more than you can be a "little bit" pregnant.
This is an unreasonable statement.
The vast majority of people would consider people like Milton Friedman or F.A. Hayek to be libertarians. Most libertarians consider them libertarians.
Yet, they (reluctantly) support certain public institutions which may run against libertarian principle, on the grounds that libertarian ideology does not actually work (or at least cannot be implemented at the present time) in reality. Take Friedman's school-voucher system, or his negative income tax, or Hayek's more-general view (expressed in The Road to Serfdom, IIRC in chapter 5) that govn't should "fill in the cracks" when the market has clearly failed (for example, in compensating people for air pollution).
These are clearly not consistent views of libertarian ideologists who too-simply "believe" -- but cannot actually *prove* -- that the market solves all problems (even while it may solve the great majority of other problems).
But they are the views of realistic "libertarians", who recognize -- due to their lifelong, full-time studies of economics -- that reality is not ideological, despite the best intentions of more-ideological libertarians...
So, can we say that Friedman, Hayek, and their ilk "libertarian"? Yes, because their overall position still advocates moving in a more-libertarian direction than presently exists. They just are not as libertarian as the ideological libertarians would like... But the classification of "libertarian" is not a binary, all-or-nothing decision, any more than classifying somebody as "totalitarian" is such a binary proposition (for example, G. W. Bush is a relatively-totalitarian President, but compared to Chairman Mao or Stalin, he's positively liberal).
In politics and philosophy, virtually nothing exists as a logical true/false; an absolute...
After all, the armies of economists and financial gurus employed in the financial sector whose job it is to try to figure out how to more-cheaply run their companies can't be *totally* wrong...:-)
Oh, MSFT is a monopoly; there is no question about that. In economics, a monopoly in a given market -- let's say desktop operating systems -- is generally defined as existing when a single producer (MSFT) controls 75% or more of the market.
Last I checked, MSFT had Windows on somewhere around 92% of desktop machines. That clearly makes MSFT a monopoly provider in the desktop OS market.
Of course, being a monopoly is not illegal (see the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1893). But *abusing* one's monopoly position is, and that's where MSFT got in trouble and were, in fact, convicted in court for so doing if you recall...
(I am typing this on a WinXP machine. But I have run Gentoo on it as well, and run FreeBSD elsewhere.)
Good points. I'm *far* from an expert in statistics; I just remember thinking that linear regressions would be a useful tool when I learned them in econometrics.:-) But leave it to a stats newbie not to recognize their limitations, especially since I haven't used such basic statistical tools in a while...
You are right about the implications of future-looking trend prediction from these data, or any data for that matter. It's necessarily and always a backwards-looking exercise to try to make empirical predictions of future events; much like the stock market, as you note.
One could (and many well-paid analysts probably do) create a model to make worst-case assumptions like the one you suggest (i.e. "Java is hot now, but what about some new, out-of-nowhere language that totally alters the landscape?"). That's not the same as an *actual* occurrence obviously, but until somebody obtains an accurate crystal ball, it's the best thing we have.:-/
(The hypothetical ignores the rather low probability that any language would just "appear overnight" -- a not very realistic assumption, really, since mainstream languages don't develop that quickly (all the significant C-style languages took years to develop to any useful level), even with (or perhaps especially given) a large development team building it. But there's no logical reason such an assumption couldn't be factored in if we nevertheless were concerned about it. And, in any case, the more-general version of the point you make is a good one: that the IT industry moves so fast sometimes that trying to predict what will happen next in it borderlines on the ridiculous...)
I agree -- some statistical analysis would've been nice. A linear regression would've certainly been useful for predicting the trends (as you're desiring), and the ability to arrive at correlation values between 2 sets of data might have been helpful (although, it appears to me that pretty much every category listed tracks with each other; it's just a difference of scale mostly)...
Still, I liked his software. If nothing else, it's a nice start on what could become a bigger, more sophisticated project...
So, who's ready to start a corporation and bulldoze the homes of John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer?
Sell shares of the company for $100 each. The investment? In an America that legally and creatively takes revenge on judges by using the judges' own rulings against them. The ROI? A value which tabulates in too vague and nebulous a manner to actually determine, but it clearly exists to those who still believe in the classical liberal (or slightly inaccurately, libertarian) foundations upon which this country was built, and from which we have greatly strayed. I think it's fair to say that investors in such a stock aren't looking (in this particular case) strictly to maximize their profit potential in the short-run (though those of us long-run watchers might be)...
After all, according to today's ruling, all one needs to prove to local communities is a greater degree of "economic development" (read: greater tax revenues to the tax-collecting local government) and voila, the power of Eminent Domain -- the power of the government to benefit the rich and powerful people and big businesses at the expense of the weaker and smaller people and businesses -- is yours!
Ahh, who doesn't love a fascist kleptocracy? That's basically what this ruling installs.
And BTW -- is this what liberals today think of when they say the left is defending our liberties (like in John Kerry's 2004 Presidential bid)? Bwhahahaha! What a goddamn lie. The left doesn't care about individual liberties and strong property rights any more than the right does...
I agree with the parent, and want to add another flip-side.
The additional abstractions from complexity (e.g. Java removing the developer's attention towards memory management) have allowed developers to focus on larger, more all-encompassing projects. Call it scope-creep if you like, but could a database as capable as Oracle have been written in ASM instead of C or C++? Sure, but it would've taken a lot longer. Same goes for Windows or Linux.
The abstractions of each successively higher-level language and the libs surrounding it simply allow us to generate more ASM instructions per unit of developer time than we could otherwise. That fact allows us to write ever-bigger and more-featureful (MSFT would say "richer") software. And as that software becomes bigger and more featureful, it becomes more complex...
What we are seeing is arguably a shift in complexity from technical complexity (dealing with issues of endianness, pointer issues, CPU architecture features being taken-advantage-of by compilers, etc.) to conceptual complexity (big-O times for a set of code, how to arrange the pieces of the project, the relationships between those objects, etc.)...
It's the systems vs. applications development paradigm. And yet, so long as there are new languages and libraries that are hardware-dependent, there will be a need for systems-level people; as those systems guys write code enabling the apps guys to write conceptually-larger and more-complex software. The trends of complexity expand in both directions - along the horizontal foundation the systems guys develop, and along the vertical direction the apps guys build towards... (if that makes any sense; I know this is a totally broad view...)
This isn't necessarily true. If you look at the hundreds of thousands of people running Folding@Home, GIMPS (mersenne prime search), SETI@home, etc.,they are all dedicating their CPU usuage to the greater cause of their particular project.
Sure. But look at the hundreds of *millions* of people who *aren't* running SETI@Home, etc..
You literally have several orders of magnitude more people not running these apps than people who are.
Given that/. and other tech sites, along with various science and tech industry journals and magazines have reported on these applications (thereby communicating to tens of millions of people), the fact that more people *are not* participating seems to me to be empirical evidence that altruism is not a good motivator.
It works for a small, but marginally-significant minority, but for the vast majority of people, there are 2 things that matter: a carrot and a stick. Show them a carrot for their work (a reward for spending their electricity and bandwidth on distributed computing for some organization) and their participation will rise. Pay them for it, or give them free games in return, etc., and you will see higher rates of participation, without a doubt.
Is it such a challenge to consider that corporations are made up of people, and hence share a collective social responsibility?
Corporations are nothing more than a legal construct -- they are a legal fiction, not physical entities. Hence, the grandparent is correct.
Corporations, given that they are purely legal fiction, have as their sole responsibility the task of making a profit for their owners. What those owners, being physical, actual people themselves, *do* with their earnings, is their business.
But the corporation has no responsibility to be "socially responsible" or any other such nonsense. Everybody from Milton Friedman on the right to Noam Chomsky on the left agrees with this (as the socialist book and film The Corporation shows).
If it is, may I suggest watching The Discovery Channel or Animal Planet.
As Adam Smith wrote in "The Wealth of Nations" way back in 1776, humans are the sole animal that exhibits social behavior. Wolves and dogs, often considered "social" animals due to their pack hunting organization, are not *actually* social animals, because when they make a kill, they will fight each other for that food. Those dog-based animals use each others' self-interest to take down an animal for food, but that is the extent of their cooperation; after that, their self-interest continues to dominate to ensure that they individually get enough to eat, even at the expense of others in the pack.
Humans, however, are sometimes more cooperative than that...
Nevertheless, compare Finland with current figures for:
* Germany -- a 10.6% unemployment rate presently, and rising, along with a mere 1.7% GDP growth rate.
* Norway -- 4.3% unemployment, 3.3% GDP growth.
* Sweden -- 5.6% unemployment rate, 3.6% GDP growth.
* U.S. -- 5.5% unemployment, 4.4% GDP growth.
* U.K. -- 4.8% unemployment, 3.2% GDP growth.
* Switzerland -- 3.4% unemployment, 1.8% GDP growth.
* Japan -- 4.7% unemployment, 2.9% GDP growth.
* Hong Kong -- 6.7% unemployment, and a torrid 7.9% GDP growth.
All figures taken from the CIA World Factbook (of course, place your own value on stats coming from the same U.S. government agency that overthrows democratic nations, lies on-demand, and kills people on a whim)...
The library has the right to run itself the way it sees fit.
No, seeing as the library is publicly-funded, it has the right to run itself only as the taxpayers see fit.
Do the taxpayers support this? They might; Naperville is a wealthy, fairly-conservative area. Then again, maybe not. Where's the poll showing support?
They just don't roll over when they get visited by the police.
That's absurd. Everybody besides extremists like the Montana Freemen and other so-called "militia" organizations rolls over and does what the cops say when they say it. Why? Because it's the law.
If the library got subpoena'd, they'd roll over in a heartbeat, b/c if they don't, they're liable for criminal penalty. And absent a subpoena, librarians have no real incentive to protect their customers' privacy; they're funded by taxpayer dollars, after all, not by private funds, so there's relatively-little risk of "losing out" to a competitor, b/c there *aren't* any competitors (besides private bookstores)...
Is it an overreaction to call this a step towards a totalitarian state? Explain how it is *not*, by answering the following questions:
1) Does this impede anybody's liberty? Yes, it prevents people *somebody* defines as "unauthorized" users from accessing a publicly-owned computer.
2) Does this promote the power of the state over the individual? Yes, it prevents the individual citizen from using the very property his/her taxes may have paid for (consider a tourist from out-of-state paying sales taxes on goods/services sold in-town, which then go to fund the library, which has computers that he/she cannot use). It forces the individual to identify themselves to the state -- hence, rather than the state serving the individual, the individual serves the state.
Clearly then this fingerprinting is anti-liberty, and as a result, it is therefore pro-slavery -- slavery to the state, which is better known as "totalitarianism".
An overreaction? Not really, except when considering that programs like this are par for the course under the Bush administration and in our post-9/11 culture of utterly irrational paranoia... (irrational, because for example, even in 2001 you were about 13 times more likely to die in a car crash than you were of being killed in the WTC attacks)
Slashdot Mirror
Towards classical liberalism? Really?
Since when is a $1.2 TRILLION Medicare spending bill (passed by Dubya) something that a smaller government would do?
The idea that Bush is any fiscal conservative at all is a bunch of cracksmokery.
You clearly don't read enough of the Cato Institute which called him a "Progressive President" or The Economist magazine or Reason magazine where Bush's spending record is concerned. Oh, and Bush's "lean budget" this year? It's "like being the slimmest sumo wrestler in the ring."
Soaring yearly budget deficits approaching 5% of yearly GDP are not the work of any "classical liberal"; those deficits -- as the great (and *real* classical liberal) economist Milton Friedman once wrote of deficits decades ago -- are nothing more than a tax increase on future generations. 90% steel tarriffs (ruled illegal by the WTO) are certainly not the work of any free-trading classical liberal (although to his credit, CAFTA is admittedly a nice step).
The very notion that President Bush is returning us to a more classical liberal -- a.k.a. moderate libertarian -- society is almost completely intellectually-bankrupt, whether we are discussing economics (as we are in this thread) or social policy.
We've hit Bush's economic leg, and find he hasn't one to stand on. Clearly Bush has little in the way of classical liberal leanings there (his Social Security reform aside, although even there, his plan will effectively discredit the value of private investment by greatly restricting the basket of investments into which people may invest). What about his classical liberal views on social policy?
He doesn't have a leg to stand on there either.
The real classical liberals would not have attacked a foreign nation unprovoked (Iraq), although they certainly would've fought back against the 9/11 attackers (i.e., we would have gone to Afghanistan, as we actually did). Classical liberals believe in the value of privacy; Bush does not. Classical liberals (usually) support private gun ownership; Bush supported the Assault Weapons Ban even though even the anti-gun Violence Policy Center's own leader said the AWB was of little value (the re-enactment of the AWB thankfully died in Congress, no thanks to Bush). The classical liberals of today -- like Milton Friedman -- support the legalization, or at least decriminalization of illegal drugs; Bush, like any conservative, opposes it (thanks to Ronald Reagan's promotion of the so-failed-even-some-Republicans-admit-it-now "war on drugs").
As a final nail in his socially non-classical liberal policy: on free speech, classical liberals love freedom of speech -- they wrote the First Amendment after all! We would allow full, free, and unrestricted speech on our airwaves (with exceptions perhaps only for very-specific, very limited national security instances, e.g. disallowing the announcement of the procedures and launch codes for any of our nuclear missiles, though
Ssssshhh! Don't criticize socialism here! You'll ruin their idealistic dreams!
(Granted, they were crushed by reality in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet empire collapsed. But most of the socialists posting here were probably just entering 1st grade about that time, and had no understanding of the significance of that event. Nor have more than a couple of them studied economics beyond introductory micro and macro, if they've studied even *that* much...)
You're forgetting about Hong Kong, which has long been the least-socialist area on Earth. And their rate of GDP growth is consistently-higher than most other nations, even though HK is nothing but a tiny outpost of the freest-market capitalism on the shore of China.
Not to mention that "progress in all fields of human endeavour" you mention includes economic progress -- i.e., economic progress which includes the fall of the Berlin Wall -- a wall that fell *because* socialism was such a bad system for the people trapped in its clutches...
I suppose in that regard, you're right: socialism over the last 100 years helped prove that collectivist economics like socialism don't work for the basic reason that they provide less incentive than is necessary for the human race to function, and it provides less incentive than its major competitor in the marketplace for macroeconomic systems, capitalism, does.
Not to mention the hardly-minor issue of human liberty, wherein socialism requires the force of government to get people to work, i.e., it requires putting a gun to peoples' heads. Compare that with capitalism, which tempts with money and property instead -- but whether somebody participates is still a voluntary choice on the individual's part.
Moreover, if you'd bother to go look at GDP growth rates for socialist vs. capitalist nations over the last 100 years, you'd find that the greatest growth did not occur in the socialist nations. Not by any means.
You can confirm this firsthand for yourself if you would bother to visit former East Germany (which even today shows plenty of remnants of the failures of the old Soviet-controlled socialist government) and compare it with America, Canada, Britain, etc...
Not that I would expect leftists commenting on economics to do their homework though. So very few do, and those who do, ultimately find socialism as a *full* economic system is intellectually-bankrupt; the only remaining question in their minds is how much socialism can still be salvaged from the dustbin of the 20th century and implemented within the framework of an otherwise-capitalist economy... (see also Paul Krugman as an example)
For legal purposes? Maybe to probably if it's in your contract, but IANAL.
For practical purposes? Unless the boss or some assistant crony is there with you, I doubt it.
WTF did Ghandi achieve? World peace?
Clearly not, for religion has prevented peace for thousands of years.
Religion will likewise be what incites the destruction of the human race. The tools for doing so are in place -- there are plenty of NBC weapons floating around, and an increasing number of them every day. It just takes one person to pull the trigger, be it the terrorist-king Osama bin Laden in downtown NYC, or a war-mongering Bush in the White House, or some fascist, theocratic mullah in Iran or Saudi Arabia, or the batshit-crazy Kim Jong-Il, or anybody else...
All there needs to be is a reason to press the Big Red Button. And everybody else is weaker than us, so they have a reason: the U.S. is too powerful and dominating. It's the "David vs. Goliath" syndrome. Big penis vs. little penis.
I'm not much younger than you (mid-20s), but I personally have little doubt that we will see WWIII in our lifetimes. There has never been a century in U.S. history in which some major, century-defining, multi-lateral war has not occurred; the 1700s saw the Revolutionary War, the 1800s saw the Spanish-American War and the Civil War, the 1900s saw WWI and WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.
Plus there are a variety of smaller "wars" and skirmishes dotting the timeline between those bigger events.
The 2000s has no reason I can think of to prove any different from the previous 3 centuries.
Read that again: CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH, OR OF THE PRESS.
What part of "no" do you not understand? Does "no" mean "no"?
No laws restricting the freedom of speech. Period. That includes libel and slander, regardless of their menial or even negative value to society. The idea was that the public would, through a variety of media sources and from the people who might've been libeled or slandered, eventually learn the truth, regardless of what libel or slander had been originally printed. And through the forces of the free market, those papers which printed such garbage would come to be seen as unreliable, and either have to clean up their act or go out of business. So it was intended to be *pure* free speech.
At least according to the U.S. Constitution's actual text. But who cares about that worthless old rag these days anyway?
Thank you, thank you... :P
Well, in the strictly economic sense, this isn't quite right. A communist economy, as Marx envisioned, would not have a government. People would live on a communally-shared property, with no particular ownership for anybody, and people would work because work needs to be done, rather than because they have any particular incentive to do so.
Much like the native Americans, actually... That said, Chairman Mao tried real communism in China during his "Great Leap Forward", and he doomed millions to starvation as a result.
Socialism, by contrast, necessarily requires a large, powerful system of government, though whether it is democratically-controlled is a separate issue (they certainly were not under the Soviet-style socialism, but Swedish-style socialism is). Like communism, socialism requires that the "greater good" be served -- collective needs outweigh individual needs -- but the difference is that socialists don't believe that people will just necessarily co-operate, or are even capable of voluntarily co-operating with each other, as communism requires.
So, communism and socialism -- at least in their idealistic, theoeretical versions -- are differentiated by the existence of a government.
Since East Germany had a large government, it clearly cannot have been actually "communist" (despite claims by the U.S. and others); it was actually socialist in its economic structure. (Then again, the Soviet Union wasn't "communist" either, and even their name would tell you that: USSR = "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics").
It's common to refer to them as "communist", but in fact, there are very few real-world examples of communism in practice, because virtually every nation and the societies that comprise them has existed with some sort of government. Given that there exist really 3 major economic systems worth speaking of -- capitalism, socialism, and communism -- one is easily ruled-out...
I didn't get there myself (my only time in Frankfurt was to drive to the airport and get on a flight home to the U.S.), but I visited a church (I don't have my notes handy, but IIRC, it was in Nurnburg) which likewise was destroyed during WWII and rebuilt just afterwards. FWIW, we were told there that the church was rebuilt via donations by the German citizenry...
Sure, that does make a considerable difference. But those 20 million died in large part because the Russians couldn't supply their military with enough weapons. Soldiers didn't even get their own guns; they had to share one with another soldier! At one point, Stalin literally ran his people into the German opposition, because there was little else he could do -- this is where the term "cannon fodder" came from, BTW...
Stalin's totalitarian, socialist economy surely didn't help him boost production... (now, to be fair, they'd had the Bolshevik Revolution fairly-recently. Such social upheaval can't have boded well for building an economy which could withstand the demands of war.)
Besides Russia, the Cold War has yielded other "communist" (actually socialist) examples of failure:
* North Korea -- The last remaining Soviet-style holdout in the world one
2 points:
1) I don't advocate *pure* capitalism (i.e., government exists solely to protect property and adjudicate violations of the law and of other peoples' property), but that's primarily because I don't believe our society can handle it, or wants to. Such a staunchly-libertarian position requires a different mindset and different culture from the one we have.
The social concerns aside, there are purely-economic considerations. I am quite cognizent of the limitations and occasional rare failures of capitalism and the extent to which government has a role in "filling in the cracks" of a capitalist economy; however, as an overall, general arrangement, capitalism is a far superior system to any other yet devised.
2) Standard Oil != capitalism. One is a business object; the other is an economic system which contains many business objects.
Now, you might be referring to its position as a monopoly provider. I have 2 takes on the issue of monopolies:
First, some monopolies will eventually lose their monopoly power due to their own weight. Consider Microsoft's slow death that Linux, etc. has been encouraging. It is a slow process, but nobody can deny that it clearly exists.
Second, despite my first point, I still consider monopolies to be a market failure to a certain -- albeit limited -- extent, which provides justification for anti-trust laws for businesses which *abuse* their monopoly position (but does not punish them for *being* a monopoly). However, whether they are really worthwhile to exercise depends entirely on the particular case, the length of the monopoly's existence, and its effect on the overall economy.
For instance, if Microsoft abuses its monopoly position, it's possible for people to go and write their own OS, their own office apps, etc.. It's been done regularly since the beginning of the computing timeline.
But in the case of Standard Oil, a fair argument could be made that because their oil powered the transportion systems which keep our economy fluid and operational -- that they play such a central (albeit not always very visible) role in the economy that to allow them to singlehandedly control the market would be too risky to the nation's security, its economic efficiency, and so on.
So long as there are ignoramuses advocating a system which the entire economically-educated world now acknowledges was an abject, empirical failure (it's about as obvious a conclusion as anything in economics ever gets), I feel duty-bound to point out their ignorance.
Show me a *credible* out-and-out socialist economist living today in a western nation. You'll have a very hard time, because nearly every socialist economist of the Cold War era either admitted they were wrong or else went into hiding after the wall's fall.
While you're at it, read this article.
I agree that relatively-speaking, present-day Germany is still socialist (then again, so is the U.S., depending on how strict you wish to be with your definition of "socialist").
Although, having just traveled to both former West Germany and former East Germany in the last couple months, at least from a mere tourist's perspective, it clearly has significant helpings of a market economy, e.g. multiple privately-owned competitors. However, their labor markets are rather inflexible; I'm not familiar with what sort of price-controls, tariffs, subsidies, etc. they presently have.
But regarding the East/West Germany division, in actual structure, East Germany was the socialist, Soviet-controlled one. West Germany was the relatively-capitalistic (compared to East Germany) country. This is basic, indisputable world history...
Both had large, powerful governments, but East Germany's was *far* more controlling and commanding than the West's was; for example, imported automobiles were permitted -- as also was the case in Soviet Russia -- only for the wealthy party elite, not the regular citizens... Freedom of speech isn't even a fair comparison: East German tour guides of the time would tell you that all the run-down, bombed-out buildings from WWII (many of which *STILL* exist today, but in much fewer quantity than before) were to be rebuilt according to the "5 year plan" that had been put together, when the truth was obviously not in alignment with such a statement; in West Germany, people were much freer (as they are today) to criticize the government, rather than kiss its ass.
That the western parts of Germany today (in my travels) had *no* bombed-out buildings, while even in major cities of eastern Germany still do is a testament to the failure of the central planned -- i.e. socialist -- government.
Milton Friedman wrote in his classic Free to Choose in 1980 that difference between a capitalist and socialist economy was perhaps no more starkly illustrated, nor more scientifically-possible to observe, than in comparing East and West Germany. This makes sense: a nation of the same people, same culture, etc. were split up by force, and forced to live under 2 separate and very different economic systems. Hypothesis of the time: socialism is better than capitalism. Test of hypothesis: split up the populace. Conclusion of test?
One economy failed miserably, with its members often desperately seeking to escape to the other. It was so bad that East Germany had to build a wall to keep them in the country. And ultimately, that wall fell.
Some of us don't believe it is a coincidence that the socialist nation's economy effectively died on the vine, the wall holding in its citizens was torn down, and the people of the formerly-socialist economy desired to live under a capitalist one...
Socialism works? What a laugh!
The Berlin Wall fell precisely because socialism is an abject, empirical failure in practice. No even remotely-credible economist in any western nation believes any longer that a relatively-socialist system works; they haven't for 16 years now.
The wall fell, get over it. That's why even one international socialism-advocacy group, almost immediately after the wall's fall, started calling themselves "market socialists" -- recognizing the failure of government to efficiently and effectively organize society (as if that were somehow consistent with the liberal idea that individuals ought to be free from manipulation and coercion by others).
Even historically democratic-socialist Sweden has elements of a market economy built into it (although it still has very hefty taxation and vast welfare systems, the similar likes of which are presently strangling Germany's economy).
Your only insight is that all of the so-called "communist" countries -- Russia, China, etc. -- were never communist in practice, only in ideology. That is quite true (and is one of my complaints too when people speak of "communism"; it smacks of economic ignorance); they were socialist in practice, but communist in ideology. Humongous governments attempting to be all things to all people all the time: this is the signature of socialism, whereas communism, ideally, would abolish such government, leaving all property to be owned equally (leaving no incentive for anybody to care about any property, b/c it is as much anybody else's as it is one's own).
All the more evidence then that socialism was a failure...
See my post.
* Milton Friedman, PhD Nobel Laureate economist: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/dunnweb/rprnts.f riedman.html
7 /do_corporations.html
7 /the_social_resp.html
d =3555212
* Gary Becker, PhD Nobel laureate U. of Chicago economist (still teaching!): http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/0
* Judge Richard Posner, economist and U.S. Federal judge: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/0
* The Economist magazine: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_i
This is an unreasonable statement.
The vast majority of people would consider people like Milton Friedman or F.A. Hayek to be libertarians. Most libertarians consider them libertarians.
Yet, they (reluctantly) support certain public institutions which may run against libertarian principle, on the grounds that libertarian ideology does not actually work (or at least cannot be implemented at the present time) in reality. Take Friedman's school-voucher system, or his negative income tax, or Hayek's more-general view (expressed in The Road to Serfdom, IIRC in chapter 5) that govn't should "fill in the cracks" when the market has clearly failed (for example, in compensating people for air pollution).
These are clearly not consistent views of libertarian ideologists who too-simply "believe" -- but cannot actually *prove* -- that the market solves all problems (even while it may solve the great majority of other problems).
But they are the views of realistic "libertarians", who recognize -- due to their lifelong, full-time studies of economics -- that reality is not ideological, despite the best intentions of more-ideological libertarians...
So, can we say that Friedman, Hayek, and their ilk "libertarian"? Yes, because their overall position still advocates moving in a more-libertarian direction than presently exists. They just are not as libertarian as the ideological libertarians would like... But the classification of "libertarian" is not a binary, all-or-nothing decision, any more than classifying somebody as "totalitarian" is such a binary proposition (for example, G. W. Bush is a relatively-totalitarian President, but compared to Chairman Mao or Stalin, he's positively liberal).
In politics and philosophy, virtually nothing exists as a logical true/false; an absolute...
After all, the armies of economists and financial gurus employed in the financial sector whose job it is to try to figure out how to more-cheaply run their companies can't be *totally* wrong... :-)
Oh, MSFT is a monopoly; there is no question about that. In economics, a monopoly in a given market -- let's say desktop operating systems -- is generally defined as existing when a single producer (MSFT) controls 75% or more of the market.
Last I checked, MSFT had Windows on somewhere around 92% of desktop machines. That clearly makes MSFT a monopoly provider in the desktop OS market.
Server OSs are a different story. Where webservers are concerned, it is official; Netcraft confirms: Apache controls nearly three times the amount of marketshare that MSFT does. Apache, in fact, almost qualifies as a monopoly provider in the webserver market...
Of course, being a monopoly is not illegal (see the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1893). But *abusing* one's monopoly position is, and that's where MSFT got in trouble and were, in fact, convicted in court for so doing if you recall...
(I am typing this on a WinXP machine. But I have run Gentoo on it as well, and run FreeBSD elsewhere.)
Good points. I'm *far* from an expert in statistics; I just remember thinking that linear regressions would be a useful tool when I learned them in econometrics. :-) But leave it to a stats newbie not to recognize their limitations, especially since I haven't used such basic statistical tools in a while...
:-/
You are right about the implications of future-looking trend prediction from these data, or any data for that matter. It's necessarily and always a backwards-looking exercise to try to make empirical predictions of future events; much like the stock market, as you note.
One could (and many well-paid analysts probably do) create a model to make worst-case assumptions like the one you suggest (i.e. "Java is hot now, but what about some new, out-of-nowhere language that totally alters the landscape?"). That's not the same as an *actual* occurrence obviously, but until somebody obtains an accurate crystal ball, it's the best thing we have.
(The hypothetical ignores the rather low probability that any language would just "appear overnight" -- a not very realistic assumption, really, since mainstream languages don't develop that quickly (all the significant C-style languages took years to develop to any useful level), even with (or perhaps especially given) a large development team building it. But there's no logical reason such an assumption couldn't be factored in if we nevertheless were concerned about it. And, in any case, the more-general version of the point you make is a good one: that the IT industry moves so fast sometimes that trying to predict what will happen next in it borderlines on the ridiculous...)
I agree -- some statistical analysis would've been nice. A linear regression would've certainly been useful for predicting the trends (as you're desiring), and the ability to arrive at correlation values between 2 sets of data might have been helpful (although, it appears to me that pretty much every category listed tracks with each other; it's just a difference of scale mostly)...
Still, I liked his software. If nothing else, it's a nice start on what could become a bigger, more sophisticated project...
I'd like to think that our Founding Fathers would be throwing Boston's CDs into the harbor...
Is it news when somebody takes a bunch of existing documents and creates a PDF out of them?
/. headline!
Let me go take one of my reports for school currently in HTML and convert it to PDF. Instant
"Undergrad student posts operating system report in PDF. Go download!"
So, who's ready to start a corporation and bulldoze the homes of John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer?
Sell shares of the company for $100 each. The investment? In an America that legally and creatively takes revenge on judges by using the judges' own rulings against them. The ROI? A value which tabulates in too vague and nebulous a manner to actually determine, but it clearly exists to those who still believe in the classical liberal (or slightly inaccurately, libertarian) foundations upon which this country was built, and from which we have greatly strayed. I think it's fair to say that investors in such a stock aren't looking (in this particular case) strictly to maximize their profit potential in the short-run (though those of us long-run watchers might be)...
After all, according to today's ruling, all one needs to prove to local communities is a greater degree of "economic development" (read: greater tax revenues to the tax-collecting local government) and voila, the power of Eminent Domain -- the power of the government to benefit the rich and powerful people and big businesses at the expense of the weaker and smaller people and businesses -- is yours!
Ahh, who doesn't love a fascist kleptocracy? That's basically what this ruling installs.
And BTW -- is this what liberals today think of when they say the left is defending our liberties (like in John Kerry's 2004 Presidential bid)? Bwhahahaha! What a goddamn lie. The left doesn't care about individual liberties and strong property rights any more than the right does...
I agree with the parent, and want to add another flip-side.
The additional abstractions from complexity (e.g. Java removing the developer's attention towards memory management) have allowed developers to focus on larger, more all-encompassing projects. Call it scope-creep if you like, but could a database as capable as Oracle have been written in ASM instead of C or C++? Sure, but it would've taken a lot longer. Same goes for Windows or Linux.
The abstractions of each successively higher-level language and the libs surrounding it simply allow us to generate more ASM instructions per unit of developer time than we could otherwise. That fact allows us to write ever-bigger and more-featureful (MSFT would say "richer") software. And as that software becomes bigger and more featureful, it becomes more complex...
What we are seeing is arguably a shift in complexity from technical complexity (dealing with issues of endianness, pointer issues, CPU architecture features being taken-advantage-of by compilers, etc.) to conceptual complexity (big-O times for a set of code, how to arrange the pieces of the project, the relationships between those objects, etc.)...
It's the systems vs. applications development paradigm. And yet, so long as there are new languages and libraries that are hardware-dependent, there will be a need for systems-level people; as those systems guys write code enabling the apps guys to write conceptually-larger and more-complex software. The trends of complexity expand in both directions - along the horizontal foundation the systems guys develop, and along the vertical direction the apps guys build towards... (if that makes any sense; I know this is a totally broad view...)
Sure. But look at the hundreds of *millions* of people who *aren't* running SETI@Home, etc..
You literally have several orders of magnitude more people not running these apps than people who are.
Given that
It works for a small, but marginally-significant minority, but for the vast majority of people, there are 2 things that matter: a carrot and a stick. Show them a carrot for their work (a reward for spending their electricity and bandwidth on distributed computing for some organization) and their participation will rise. Pay them for it, or give them free games in return, etc., and you will see higher rates of participation, without a doubt.
But then you write:
Corporations are nothing more than a legal construct -- they are a legal fiction, not physical entities. Hence, the grandparent is correct.
Corporations, given that they are purely legal fiction, have as their sole responsibility the task of making a profit for their owners. What those owners, being physical, actual people themselves, *do* with their earnings, is their business.
But the corporation has no responsibility to be "socially responsible" or any other such nonsense. Everybody from Milton Friedman on the right to Noam Chomsky on the left agrees with this (as the socialist book and film The Corporation shows).
As Adam Smith wrote in "The Wealth of Nations" way back in 1776, humans are the sole animal that exhibits social behavior. Wolves and dogs, often considered "social" animals due to their pack hunting organization, are not *actually* social animals, because when they make a kill, they will fight each other for that food. Those dog-based animals use each others' self-interest to take down an animal for food, but that is the extent of their cooperation; after that, their self-interest continues to dominate to ensure that they individually get enough to eat, even at the expense of others in the pack.
Humans, however, are sometimes more cooperative than that...
...and about a 3% GDP growth rate. Pretty mediocre by U.S. standards, really; we haven't had an unemployment rate as high as yours since about 1985, and moreover, our GDP growth rate tends to average around 3-3.5% per year. We employ more people more often and tend to grow faster all the while.
Nevertheless, compare Finland with current figures for:
* Germany -- a 10.6% unemployment rate presently, and rising, along with a mere 1.7% GDP growth rate.
* Norway -- 4.3% unemployment, 3.3% GDP growth.
* Sweden -- 5.6% unemployment rate, 3.6% GDP growth.
* U.S. -- 5.5% unemployment, 4.4% GDP growth.
* U.K. -- 4.8% unemployment, 3.2% GDP growth.
* Switzerland -- 3.4% unemployment, 1.8% GDP growth.
* Japan -- 4.7% unemployment, 2.9% GDP growth.
* Hong Kong -- 6.7% unemployment, and a torrid 7.9% GDP growth.
All figures taken from the CIA World Factbook (of course, place your own value on stats coming from the same U.S. government agency that overthrows democratic nations, lies on-demand, and kills people on a whim)...
No, seeing as the library is publicly-funded, it has the right to run itself only as the taxpayers see fit.
Do the taxpayers support this? They might; Naperville is a wealthy, fairly-conservative area. Then again, maybe not. Where's the poll showing support?
That's absurd. Everybody besides extremists like the Montana Freemen and other so-called "militia" organizations rolls over and does what the cops say when they say it. Why? Because it's the law.
If the library got subpoena'd, they'd roll over in a heartbeat, b/c if they don't, they're liable for criminal penalty. And absent a subpoena, librarians have no real incentive to protect their customers' privacy; they're funded by taxpayer dollars, after all, not by private funds, so there's relatively-little risk of "losing out" to a competitor, b/c there *aren't* any competitors (besides private bookstores)...
Is it an overreaction to call this a step towards a totalitarian state? Explain how it is *not*, by answering the following questions:
1) Does this impede anybody's liberty? Yes, it prevents people *somebody* defines as "unauthorized" users from accessing a publicly-owned computer.
2) Does this promote the power of the state over the individual? Yes, it prevents the individual citizen from using the very property his/her taxes may have paid for (consider a tourist from out-of-state paying sales taxes on goods/services sold in-town, which then go to fund the library, which has computers that he/she cannot use). It forces the individual to identify themselves to the state -- hence, rather than the state serving the individual, the individual serves the state.
Clearly then this fingerprinting is anti-liberty, and as a result, it is therefore pro-slavery -- slavery to the state, which is better known as "totalitarianism".
An overreaction? Not really, except when considering that programs like this are par for the course under the Bush administration and in our post-9/11 culture of utterly irrational paranoia... (irrational, because for example, even in 2001 you were about 13 times more likely to die in a car crash than you were of being killed in the WTC attacks)