I am *so* fucking tired of those whiney liberals always voting against increased government, a reduction in "civil rights" (whatever the hell *those* are), increased spending, and war.
Those Democratic pussied don't realize killing people takes *money,* goddamnit. Lots and lots of money. And the government needs to know which of its citizens are anti-war, meaning pro-terrorist. Anyone speaking out against our President and his cabinet are treasonous bastards, just as bad as the terrorists who flew those planes into those buildings, killing all those people.
Liberals are *so* fucking stupid, they don't even realize Bin Laden doesn't even *matter* any more. This has gone so far beyond him, he's just a babe in toybox. Now America's enemies are *Americans*. Americans, just like those whiney fucking pussy liberals.
God, I hate people who are against big, intrusive government, people who want to curb the greatest spending spree of any US President *ever*, who would rather spend that money on Americans.
They are betraying everything American stands for.
Our PUC will slap our local Bell if repair service is not rendered rather quickly and they aren't doing a good job of preventative maintainence.
Yeah, that sounds nice in theory. In practice, although my phone is certainly more reliable than my cable broadband, I've had my phone go out a couple of times; in one case, it took two days to get it fixed. In another, it was two weeks before I had reliable service.
Of course, all I did was complain to the customer service of my provider. I didn't go whining to some regulatory body. I'm sure if I did that, I would have gotten much faster service.
This is described beautifully by Lewis Thomas in his essay, "Lives of the Cell." In it, he points out that complex cells are like carriers for bacteria-- in plants, the chloroplasts; and in animals, the mitochondira. We're just a fancy car to tote around and protect billions of bacteria (not even including the free bacteria in our bellies). The energy they produce (chloroplasts) and release (mitochondria) drive all other life. It's like we're just evolutionary curliques to move forward the evolution of bacteria.
It's certainly no Star Wars which is what alot of his obsessive fanbase would like to make parrallels to, but they are just deluding themselves. The concepts and acting all very uninspired and average, particularly in its' film outing. I find it to be an entirely derivitive mishmash of a few things. None done particularly well.
You just described Star Wars, and I definitely agree that Firefly was not that.
Wow, if I change any of the fundimatal physics constants, the Universe would either by chaos or booring.
Uhm... no.
Once you change a single physical constant, you've changed the universe, and all bets are off. There is no way to say that we live in a carefully-balanced universe; we do not have the knowledge to understand our own universe enough to accurately predict what another universe might look like.
Also, that view of the universe assumes that all physics constants are arbitrary. They are not. They fit together like a puzzle the same way carbon atoms form fullerenes-- they are mathematically intertwined. God is not needed; the beauty and symmetry of the universe is full within itself.
Communism is 100% government only in the way democracy is 100% government-- everyone is involved. Communism is the sharing of all equally, and hopefully voluntarily. In the ideal commune, there would be no government at all, and the the strong would protect the weak, and all would share equally in work and play and reward.
Of course, this can't work, because human nature fucks it up every time. Greed, jealousy, hate, greed, lust, greed, sloth, and greed always get in the way.
I think you are confusing communism with socialism, a common mistake due to the way the the USSR and China have claimed to be communist, while really being socialist.
Strangely, the United States is looking more and more like the worst parts of the '50s socialist USSR, with secret laws that citizens aren't allowed to know, the ability to make anyone disappear without fair trial, the gulags where "enemies of the state" are sent to be tortured, etc.
The Hairy Ranter aspects of Linux, these days, aren't a net positive. They keep Linux in the image of a previous generation.
This isn't about Linux. It's about an ideal-- the ideal that information is power, and those that wish to close up and hoard information are really trying to hoard power. It's the concept that the power of information belongs to everyone equally, and that noone can "own" information.
Most left-wing "liberals" don't understand just how fascist they are.
Apperantly, most right-wing "conservatives" don't understand just what fascism is.
They see their aims as being "good" and other people's as "bad". They assume superiority over others who do not share their view, and sneer at others, assuming that other people can't possibly decide for themselves what is good for them (eg over healthcare, transport, choice of computer).
Speak in terms of black and white much?
No, we just sneer at hypocritical greedy and/or stupid motherfuckers who think they can fuck with whatever country they want, take away whatever civil rights they deem inappropriate, increase federal spending worse than the "liberals" ever did, increase governmental powers way beyond what the constitution allows, (all of this in the name of "fighting terrorism"), remove all restraints from big business, allow 45 million Americans to go without basic healthcare, and . . .
Oh, fuck it. Just go read the wiki entry on fascism; it pretty much covers it there.
I bet he just got bumped up on W's list... don't be surprised if RMS meets a sudden and unfortunate demise... hope they don't arrest him and try him in court.
The great thing about the President being a fascist is, they don't have to try him in court. They can just call him a liberal pinko commie.... that is, a liberal pinko terrorist, and they can just make him disappear.
Uhm... it's not only liberals who dislike Bush. He isn't a conservative-- witness the greatest expansion of government power in over fifty years, and the greatest increase in government spending. Also note the unprecedented attacks on personal liberty.
The only thing "conservative" about Bush is his willingness to fuck America (and a good portion of the rest of the world) over in the name of Big Business.
No. There's no such thing as a "free" (as in "freedom") market.
Big companies lobby congress (and the President) because it *isn't* a free market. There are two ways of controlling a market: either be the biggest and baddest and have real teeth (like Microsoft, or the old Ma Bell) so that others in the industry *have* to do what you say or face your wrath; or get congress to give you teeth.
That's what the MPAA/RIAA/BSA/etc have done with bills such as the DMCA, and are attempting to do with the new Analog Hole bill. That's what "service providers" are trying to do with this lobbying effort.
Once they have this advantage over the rest of the telecom industry, they will use this advantage to keep their superior market position. Simple as that.
Considering the development of the internet was funded in a big way by our US tax dollars, the thought of corporations moving in and fucking us over out of greed kinda gets my dander up a bit.
Not only that, but in many areas, there *is* no choice for broadband. What happens when you have Cox on one side, and SBC on the other, and that's your only choice? When two companies will fuck you over equally, and they "own" the infrastructure (partially paid for by tax dollars), what choice do you really have? What kind of "free" market is that?
"Free market" is a myth for naive slogan-spouting arm-chair economists. I was taught the whole "free market" ideal back in high school, right along with the concepts of how our government works.
I think they're bitching because there's no growth in legal music downloads. In that case, the lack of growth is much bigger than their lack of margin of error.
Their lack of understanding is even larger than the lack of growth, though.
I've used both, as well, and of KDE and GNOME, KDE is definitely more similar to the MS-Windows GUI.
This is *not* something to recommend KDE.
I fucking despise the MS-Windows GUI. For me, it sucks ducks. It's inconsistent, overly-complex, and somehow limiting at the same time. There are some definite issues with GNOME, that's true. However, since stripping things down during the early days of 2.x, the GNOME team has been slowly adding functionality and power back in. I personally like their approach.
But, excluding rants about how much I hate that C++ abomination, that's really all.
Besides, these days, I use E17. But I'm all about the eye-candy.
But yes, sadly few people realise that Microsoft *invented* AJAX, they just didn't call it that.
Uhm... there were several developers that used a similar technique without the XMLHTTPRequest. They would load html from the server in an invisible frame, and access the document in that frame using Javascript. It was a neat trick, one that I played with, but discovered was of little real use. It had the *exact* same effect as XMLHTTPRequest, and was used a while before XMLHTTPRequest was implemented in IE. In fact, that is the technique used at Microsoft before they created XMLHTTPRequest, according to your link.
The worst part was the Javascript incompatibilities. You had to access the hidden document elements using different symantics based on the browser. But that wasn't anything new, especially at the time.
XMLHTTPRequest made the process a little less of a kludge, but it's the same damned process. Microsoft didn't "invent" anything, in this case. They just formalized something that was already being done.
Put plainly, some things transcend the market. These include honour, integrity, duty, and morality.
No, here's a sticky subject. How do you legislate and enforce honour, integrity, dugy, or morality? What is "morality," anyway? I mean, I know what integrity is-- speaking plainly and standing by your word, no matter the cost. Honour? I'm not too sure. Duty? What is that? I mean, do I really owe anybody anything? How 'bout morality? Who's morality?
I would despise the world described by the grandparent post-- the ability to discriminate willy-nilly would lead to an insular, sullen world, in which you dealt only with local people you trust. Just think about travelling; how would you know which restaurant doesn't spit in the eggs they serve to strangers? How would you know which doctor really knows medicine, rather than just wanted to hang out a shingle?
Libertarianism is like communism-- it sounds good in concept, but it really, deeply sucks in practice. It fails because it treats society and the citizens within as an ideal.
But, trying to pass laws and regulations based on undefinable properties like "honour" or "morality" is also a recipe for disaster. I do not want the be governed by the morality of a fundamentalist Christian, for instance. (I am responsible for my own sins, thank you very much. I don't care how many long-haired peace-loving hippies you nail to a cross.) Nor do I want a war-mongering chickenhawk deciding what my "duty" is.
No, I don't have a solution. But I do know that anyone trying to silence anyone for any reason is wrong. Unless I disagree with what they have to say. In which case, they better shut the fuck up.
Not least there's the cost of re/training staff to use new software.
1. This is true for every major upgrade of MS-Office, as well. It is not unique to switching to a "different" document editing suite.
Iif you're not using MS Office you may find a lot of your secretarial staff are keen to leave.. they need to keep their skills current just as much as the resident IT geeks.. and in the secretarial world 'current' = latest version of Office.
See point 1. You just contradicted the whole "training/retraining" point you made earlier. And this is one of the most ludicrous statements I've heard in defence of MS-Office. Granted, I haven't worked in an office dedicated to creating documents since my university-worker days, but I've never met an office worker who would quit their job over MS-Office. Even those that insisted on WordPerfect (back when it was king, and MS-Office was the also-ran) made the transition to another office suite just fine.
While it's nice to say "these guys saved 20 million Euros" I wouldn't take that figure as red. They might have saved 20m euros on Microsoft licences (yay!), but what did the change cost elsewhere? Was that 20m euros really an overall saving?
This is an excellent point.
I think it will be worth it, just because they *are* moving to an open standard. It might cost a little bit up front, but over the next decade, it will save a tremendous amount of money. Hell, just being able to put the office suite licensing out to bid (which you sure as hell can't do if you use MS-Office document formats) should provide a bit of competition, which is good for the citizen or organization spending their hard-earned cash.
Now, when you put it in that light, the question becomes "do we want material that is not accepted by the scientific community taught in classrooms.
I enthusiastically disagree. The teaching of ID in a science class makes the question, "Why are we teaching non-scientific subjects in science class?"
ID cannot be tested by the scientific method; ergo, it is not science! No matter how much the proponents of this backwards "theory" wish it were science, it is not. You cannot test for the existence of God, a pre-requisite for ID (otherwise, to what does "intelligence" refer in the title?). Since there is no test, and can be no test, it is not science.
Those areas, such as local telephone service, where government granted monopolies are still the rule rather than the exception is where little to no innovation exists.
Also, I'd like to point out, that's exactly the opposite of what this article tells us-- that regulated markets in the telecom industry are *better off* than the non-regulated ones.
Kind of hurts when you realize you JUST MIGHT BE WRONG, doesn't it?
What you suggest is communism-- the idea that we are all in this together, we all own everything together, we all partake of everything together, and we all contribute together.
In the ideal, I do not disagree.
In practice, there ain't no fuckin' way it's going to work.
Consider the old parable:
An 8-year-old boy comes down to dinner. His mother asks, "Did you wash your hands?"
The boy bares his arms, which are clean at the hands, but filthy from the wrist up.
The mother cries, "You didn't wash! Look at those dirty arms!"
To which the boy replies, "I washed the hands. Where the hell am I supposed to stop?"
See, you and I *can't* own the infrastructure, not in any meaningful way. We can own a parcel of land, and all the pipes that fit to it; but what of the pipes that feed our street?... our town?... our county?... our country? Where does it stop?
Ownership is all about control. Without control, ownership means nothing. So, it's important that control factor into any meaningful discussion of ownership. And if you and I can't own it together, *some*body needs to control it. Some group. Say, a representation of everyone who has interest in that infrastructure.
Good God Why Would You Trust Such People With The Power Of Government?
Ah-HAH! Now you cut to the quick of the matter. I do *NOT* trust *ANY*one with that power.
See, that's one of the problems with *any* form of [political|economic] power. There are people more ruthless than me willing to exploit me and my friends. And I *don't* trust them.
As usual, failures of government regulation are being touted as "free market" failures where there is no "free market".
And this is the same problem that exists in certain markets, where the cost of entry exceeds the GNP of some nations. Such as the telecom industry. The government (that is, the people) helped fund the infrastructure, and then that infrastructure was handed over wholecloth to certain companies. Okay, so this is a problem, where the citizens fund something, and then a company is given a monopoly.
However, it wouldn't've been different had several small companies started out selling services (most likely, gratuitiously incompatible services) and eventually one prevailed, buying up all the smaller companies, merging with major competitors, etc, until there was only one company, with all the infrastructure. This is no more a "free market" than the one regulated by the government. In fact, it's *worse*, as the citizens have no real say.
The problem with *any* economic or political theory is this: they are *all* based on an ideal, and that ideal never really exists. The whole "free market" ideal is just that: an ideal. It is not a natural law. It is not a mathematical model that accurately reflects the economic interaction of a libertarian society. It is nothing but a bunch of ideals, based on a bunch of ideal people behaving and interacting ideally.
Guess what? Nobody behaves ideally. There will always be those who will be in a position to game the system. As long as they have something to gain, they will continue to game the system, *any* system. In some situations (such as a single, expensive, pervasive utility infrastructure), a "free market" will be much easier to manipulate and control than a regulated market.
In the real world, there is no such thing as a free market, just as there is no such thing as a pure democracy. It's nice in theory, but in practice, it works only as well as we allow it to work.
I do agree it would be nice if there was *less* regulation, if there was only exactly the right kind of regulation. But that's true of all parts of life; just like some laws are good (that whole "don't murder" or "don't steal" bit, for instance), there is a such thing as too much law. Same with regulation of the market. A few of the right laws judiciously applied would make a much better system than this whole regulatory fiasco we have.
But to claim the market would be better off without regulation is like saying society would be better off without law. It just isn't supported by history, nor common sense. As long as there are people who are willing to fuck over other people for their own good, we need regulation.
Anyway, that's my rant. I know I won't change any minds; those who "believe" in the free market as a natural law will cleave to that belief. Oh, well.
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Jeez, and don't forget sex with underage girls. For that alone he should have been castrated and fed his balls in scrambled eggs.
Right on, my conservative brother!
I am *so* fucking tired of those whiney liberals always voting against increased government, a reduction in "civil rights" (whatever the hell *those* are), increased spending, and war.
Those Democratic pussied don't realize killing people takes *money,* goddamnit. Lots and lots of money. And the government needs to know which of its citizens are anti-war, meaning pro-terrorist. Anyone speaking out against our President and his cabinet are treasonous bastards, just as bad as the terrorists who flew those planes into those buildings, killing all those people.
Liberals are *so* fucking stupid, they don't even realize Bin Laden doesn't even *matter* any more. This has gone so far beyond him, he's just a babe in toybox. Now America's enemies are *Americans*. Americans, just like those whiney fucking pussy liberals.
God, I hate people who are against big, intrusive government, people who want to curb the greatest spending spree of any US President *ever*, who would rather spend that money on Americans.
They are betraying everything American stands for.
Molly Ivans seems to think democracy died in Texas, in 2002. There are signs it died ealier.
Our PUC will slap our local Bell if repair service is not rendered rather quickly and they aren't doing a good job of preventative maintainence.
Yeah, that sounds nice in theory. In practice, although my phone is certainly more reliable than my cable broadband, I've had my phone go out a couple of times; in one case, it took two days to get it fixed. In another, it was two weeks before I had reliable service.
Of course, all I did was complain to the customer service of my provider. I didn't go whining to some regulatory body. I'm sure if I did that, I would have gotten much faster service.
This is described beautifully by Lewis Thomas in his essay, "Lives of the Cell." In it, he points out that complex cells are like carriers for bacteria-- in plants, the chloroplasts; and in animals, the mitochondira. We're just a fancy car to tote around and protect billions of bacteria (not even including the free bacteria in our bellies). The energy they produce (chloroplasts) and release (mitochondria) drive all other life. It's like we're just evolutionary curliques to move forward the evolution of bacteria.
Kinda cool thought, even if it's not perfect.
It's certainly no Star Wars which is what alot of his obsessive fanbase would like to make parrallels to, but they are just deluding themselves. The concepts and acting all very uninspired and average, particularly in its' film outing. I find it to be an entirely derivitive mishmash of a few things. None done particularly well.
You just described Star Wars, and I definitely agree that Firefly was not that.
Wow, if I change any of the fundimatal physics constants, the Universe would either by chaos or booring.
Uhm... no.
Once you change a single physical constant, you've changed the universe, and all bets are off. There is no way to say that we live in a carefully-balanced universe; we do not have the knowledge to understand our own universe enough to accurately predict what another universe might look like.
Also, that view of the universe assumes that all physics constants are arbitrary. They are not. They fit together like a puzzle the same way carbon atoms form fullerenes-- they are mathematically intertwined. God is not needed; the beauty and symmetry of the universe is full within itself.
Communism is 100% government only in the way democracy is 100% government-- everyone is involved. Communism is the sharing of all equally, and hopefully voluntarily. In the ideal commune, there would be no government at all, and the the strong would protect the weak, and all would share equally in work and play and reward.
Of course, this can't work, because human nature fucks it up every time. Greed, jealousy, hate, greed, lust, greed, sloth, and greed always get in the way.
I think you are confusing communism with socialism, a common mistake due to the way the the USSR and China have claimed to be communist, while really being socialist.
Strangely, the United States is looking more and more like the worst parts of the '50s socialist USSR, with secret laws that citizens aren't allowed to know, the ability to make anyone disappear without fair trial, the gulags where "enemies of the state" are sent to be tortured, etc.
Are *your* papers in order?
The Hairy Ranter aspects of Linux, these days, aren't a net positive. They keep Linux in the image of a previous generation.
This isn't about Linux. It's about an ideal-- the ideal that information is power, and those that wish to close up and hoard information are really trying to hoard power. It's the concept that the power of information belongs to everyone equally, and that noone can "own" information.
Linux is merely a byproduct of that ideal.
Most left-wing "liberals" don't understand just how fascist they are.
Apperantly, most right-wing "conservatives" don't understand just what fascism is.
They see their aims as being "good" and other people's as "bad". They assume superiority over others who do not share their view, and sneer at others, assuming that other people can't possibly decide for themselves what is good for them (eg over healthcare, transport, choice of computer).
Speak in terms of black and white much?
No, we just sneer at hypocritical greedy and/or stupid motherfuckers who think they can fuck with whatever country they want, take away whatever civil rights they deem inappropriate, increase federal spending worse than the "liberals" ever did, increase governmental powers way beyond what the constitution allows, (all of this in the name of "fighting terrorism"), remove all restraints from big business, allow 45 million Americans to go without basic healthcare, and . . .
Oh, fuck it. Just go read the wiki entry on fascism; it pretty much covers it there.
I bet he just got bumped up on W's list... don't be surprised if RMS meets a sudden and unfortunate demise... hope they don't arrest him and try him in court.
The great thing about the President being a fascist is, they don't have to try him in court. They can just call him a liberal pinko commie.... that is, a liberal pinko terrorist, and they can just make him disappear.
I LOVE MY FUCKIN' COUNTRY!
Uhm... it's not only liberals who dislike Bush. He isn't a conservative-- witness the greatest expansion of government power in over fifty years, and the greatest increase in government spending. Also note the unprecedented attacks on personal liberty.
The only thing "conservative" about Bush is his willingness to fuck America (and a good portion of the rest of the world) over in the name of Big Business.
It's a free market right?
No. There's no such thing as a "free" (as in "freedom") market.
Big companies lobby congress (and the President) because it *isn't* a free market. There are two ways of controlling a market: either be the biggest and baddest and have real teeth (like Microsoft, or the old Ma Bell) so that others in the industry *have* to do what you say or face your wrath; or get congress to give you teeth.
That's what the MPAA/RIAA/BSA/etc have done with bills such as the DMCA, and are attempting to do with the new Analog Hole bill. That's what "service providers" are trying to do with this lobbying effort.
Once they have this advantage over the rest of the telecom industry, they will use this advantage to keep their superior market position. Simple as that.
Considering the development of the internet was funded in a big way by our US tax dollars, the thought of corporations moving in and fucking us over out of greed kinda gets my dander up a bit.
Not only that, but in many areas, there *is* no choice for broadband. What happens when you have Cox on one side, and SBC on the other, and that's your only choice? When two companies will fuck you over equally, and they "own" the infrastructure (partially paid for by tax dollars), what choice do you really have? What kind of "free" market is that?
"Free market" is a myth for naive slogan-spouting arm-chair economists. I was taught the whole "free market" ideal back in high school, right along with the concepts of how our government works.
Both turned out to be lies.
But, no, I'm not cynical.
I think they're bitching because there's no growth in legal music downloads. In that case, the lack of growth is much bigger than their lack of margin of error.
Their lack of understanding is even larger than the lack of growth, though.
I've used both, as well, and of KDE and GNOME, KDE is definitely more similar to the MS-Windows GUI.
This is *not* something to recommend KDE.
I fucking despise the MS-Windows GUI. For me, it sucks ducks. It's inconsistent, overly-complex, and somehow limiting at the same time. There are some definite issues with GNOME, that's true. However, since stripping things down during the early days of 2.x, the GNOME team has been slowly adding functionality and power back in. I personally like their approach.
But, excluding rants about how much I hate that C++ abomination, that's really all.
Besides, these days, I use E17. But I'm all about the eye-candy.
But yes, sadly few people realise that Microsoft *invented* AJAX, they just didn't call it that.
Uhm... there were several developers that used a similar technique without the XMLHTTPRequest. They would load html from the server in an invisible frame, and access the document in that frame using Javascript. It was a neat trick, one that I played with, but discovered was of little real use. It had the *exact* same effect as XMLHTTPRequest, and was used a while before XMLHTTPRequest was implemented in IE. In fact, that is the technique used at Microsoft before they created XMLHTTPRequest, according to your link.
The worst part was the Javascript incompatibilities. You had to access the hidden document elements using different symantics based on the browser. But that wasn't anything new, especially at the time.
XMLHTTPRequest made the process a little less of a kludge, but it's the same damned process. Microsoft didn't "invent" anything, in this case. They just formalized something that was already being done.
Put plainly, some things transcend the market. These include honour, integrity, duty, and morality.
No, here's a sticky subject. How do you legislate and enforce honour, integrity, dugy, or morality? What is "morality," anyway? I mean, I know what integrity is-- speaking plainly and standing by your word, no matter the cost. Honour? I'm not too sure. Duty? What is that? I mean, do I really owe anybody anything? How 'bout morality? Who's morality?
I would despise the world described by the grandparent post-- the ability to discriminate willy-nilly would lead to an insular, sullen world, in which you dealt only with local people you trust. Just think about travelling; how would you know which restaurant doesn't spit in the eggs they serve to strangers? How would you know which doctor really knows medicine, rather than just wanted to hang out a shingle?
Libertarianism is like communism-- it sounds good in concept, but it really, deeply sucks in practice. It fails because it treats society and the citizens within as an ideal.
But, trying to pass laws and regulations based on undefinable properties like "honour" or "morality" is also a recipe for disaster. I do not want the be governed by the morality of a fundamentalist Christian, for instance. (I am responsible for my own sins, thank you very much. I don't care how many long-haired peace-loving hippies you nail to a cross.) Nor do I want a war-mongering chickenhawk deciding what my "duty" is.
No, I don't have a solution. But I do know that anyone trying to silence anyone for any reason is wrong. Unless I disagree with what they have to say. In which case, they better shut the fuck up.
In other words, solve the problem by throwing money at it. Just look at what all that extra $$$ has done for our public education system.
This is satire, right?
If you are talking about the United States, we hardly spend any money at all on education, comparatively-speaking.
Not least there's the cost of re/training staff to use new software.
.. they need to keep their skills current just as much as the resident IT geeks .. and in the secretarial world 'current' = latest version of Office.
1. This is true for every major upgrade of MS-Office, as well. It is not unique to switching to a "different" document editing suite.
Iif you're not using MS Office you may find a lot of your secretarial staff are keen to leave
See point 1. You just contradicted the whole "training/retraining" point you made earlier. And this is one of the most ludicrous statements I've heard in defence of MS-Office. Granted, I haven't worked in an office dedicated to creating documents since my university-worker days, but I've never met an office worker who would quit their job over MS-Office. Even those that insisted on WordPerfect (back when it was king, and MS-Office was the also-ran) made the transition to another office suite just fine.
While it's nice to say "these guys saved 20 million Euros" I wouldn't take that figure as red. They might have saved 20m euros on Microsoft licences (yay!), but what did the change cost elsewhere? Was that 20m euros really an overall saving?
This is an excellent point.
I think it will be worth it, just because they *are* moving to an open standard. It might cost a little bit up front, but over the next decade, it will save a tremendous amount of money. Hell, just being able to put the office suite licensing out to bid (which you sure as hell can't do if you use MS-Office document formats) should provide a bit of competition, which is good for the citizen or organization spending their hard-earned cash.
Making fun of people is seldom a good way to encourage healthy dialogue and understanding...
Yes... but it's fun!
Now, when you put it in that light, the question becomes "do we want material that is not accepted by the scientific community taught in classrooms.
I enthusiastically disagree. The teaching of ID in a science class makes the question, "Why are we teaching non-scientific subjects in science class?"
ID cannot be tested by the scientific method; ergo, it is not science! No matter how much the proponents of this backwards "theory" wish it were science, it is not. You cannot test for the existence of God, a pre-requisite for ID (otherwise, to what does "intelligence" refer in the title?). Since there is no test, and can be no test, it is not science.
Those areas, such as local telephone service, where government granted monopolies are still the rule rather than the exception is where little to no innovation exists.
Also, I'd like to point out, that's exactly the opposite of what this article tells us-- that regulated markets in the telecom industry are *better off* than the non-regulated ones.
Kind of hurts when you realize you JUST MIGHT BE WRONG, doesn't it?
What you suggest is communism-- the idea that we are all in this together, we all own everything together, we all partake of everything together, and we all contribute together.
... our town? ... our county? ... our country? Where does it stop?
In the ideal, I do not disagree.
In practice, there ain't no fuckin' way it's going to work.
Consider the old parable:
An 8-year-old boy comes down to dinner. His mother asks, "Did you wash your hands?"
The boy bares his arms, which are clean at the hands, but filthy from the wrist up.
The mother cries, "You didn't wash! Look at those dirty arms!"
To which the boy replies, "I washed the hands. Where the hell am I supposed to stop?"
See, you and I *can't* own the infrastructure, not in any meaningful way. We can own a parcel of land, and all the pipes that fit to it; but what of the pipes that feed our street?
Ownership is all about control. Without control, ownership means nothing. So, it's important that control factor into any meaningful discussion of ownership. And if you and I can't own it together, *some*body needs to control it. Some group. Say, a representation of everyone who has interest in that infrastructure.
We call that government.
That's it, really. It's just that simple.
Until it gets complex. Then we're fucked.
Good God Why Would You Trust Such People With The Power Of Government?
Ah-HAH! Now you cut to the quick of the matter. I do *NOT* trust *ANY*one with that power.
See, that's one of the problems with *any* form of [political|economic] power. There are people more ruthless than me willing to exploit me and my friends. And I *don't* trust them.
Kind of strange paradox we find ourselves in, no?
As usual, failures of government regulation are being touted as "free market" failures where there is no "free market".
And this is the same problem that exists in certain markets, where the cost of entry exceeds the GNP of some nations. Such as the telecom industry. The government (that is, the people) helped fund the infrastructure, and then that infrastructure was handed over wholecloth to certain companies. Okay, so this is a problem, where the citizens fund something, and then a company is given a monopoly.
However, it wouldn't've been different had several small companies started out selling services (most likely, gratuitiously incompatible services) and eventually one prevailed, buying up all the smaller companies, merging with major competitors, etc, until there was only one company, with all the infrastructure. This is no more a "free market" than the one regulated by the government. In fact, it's *worse*, as the citizens have no real say.
The problem with *any* economic or political theory is this: they are *all* based on an ideal, and that ideal never really exists. The whole "free market" ideal is just that: an ideal. It is not a natural law. It is not a mathematical model that accurately reflects the economic interaction of a libertarian society. It is nothing but a bunch of ideals, based on a bunch of ideal people behaving and interacting ideally.
Guess what? Nobody behaves ideally. There will always be those who will be in a position to game the system. As long as they have something to gain, they will continue to game the system, *any* system. In some situations (such as a single, expensive, pervasive utility infrastructure), a "free market" will be much easier to manipulate and control than a regulated market.
In the real world, there is no such thing as a free market, just as there is no such thing as a pure democracy. It's nice in theory, but in practice, it works only as well as we allow it to work.
I do agree it would be nice if there was *less* regulation, if there was only exactly the right kind of regulation. But that's true of all parts of life; just like some laws are good (that whole "don't murder" or "don't steal" bit, for instance), there is a such thing as too much law. Same with regulation of the market. A few of the right laws judiciously applied would make a much better system than this whole regulatory fiasco we have.
But to claim the market would be better off without regulation is like saying society would be better off without law. It just isn't supported by history, nor common sense. As long as there are people who are willing to fuck over other people for their own good, we need regulation.
Anyway, that's my rant. I know I won't change any minds; those who "believe" in the free market as a natural law will cleave to that belief. Oh, well.