It's going to take several major software companies having legal "heart attacks" because of software patents before the rest of the industry gets a clue and quits dining at the trough of patents and IP.
I think that's what PJ was getting at: the Kodak vs. Sun lawsuit is big enough to draw attention to the broken nature of the patent system. Considering the rate at which software patent lawsuits are popping up, I think there's a dawning realisation in the software world that things are amiss.
Currently, we seem to be in a cold-war type arms buildup, in which software companies are stockpiling patents to use as some sort of mutually-assured-destruction deterrent. Maybe soon we can have talks concerning disarmament.
Much of the evidence presented as "proof" had been discredited before the President's State of the Union address that presented the evidence as unequivocable. The yellow-cake evidence had already been determined to be a forgery, the British intelligence report that figured prominently had been shown to be a cribbed-together mishmash of outdated sources (a 5-year old thesis available off the 'net, and some stuff from one of the Jane's military references), the the "aluminum tubes" evidence had been widely discredited by experts in the nucular field. I read all of this after the UN presentation by Collin Powell, and before President Bush's State of the Union address.
The one piece of evidence that was kept rather quiet, mentioned obliquely as reports from defected Iraqi citizens, turned out to come from one or two con artists.
There was not one single piece of evidence that was valid, and anybody following the leadup to war could tell. Anyone who questioned the legitimacy of the evidence was labelled a "liberal," as if it were a dirty word. Hell, even Anne Coulter called those folks traitors.
To place so many citizens in harm's way (and to perform a national variety of vigilante justice) based on such questionable evidence took either an unbelievable amount of self-deception, or a desire to attack Iraq *in spite* of the evidence.
Considering there was *no link whatsoever* between bin Laden and Hussien, I can only interpret the evidence in one way: President Bush intentionally lied to the US citizens to follow a path to war with a beaten enemy. I don't know why. The "liberal" in me thinks it might be to benefit Halliburton and Bechtel. The realist in me realizes it might be nothing more than a distraction from the complete disaster in Afghanistan. Or there might have been a *real* reason to go after Iraq, one that had to be hidden from the world.
Considering the price tag in human life and our nation's honor and credibility, I'm not sure which would be worse.
I said "taxes," not "income taxes." And I *was* wrong; 28% is *way* understated. 28% is their tax *rate*. Sorry about that. 2004 numbers are lower than stated, of course.
The ideal of communism is great? Maybe the end-dream is great, but communism itself is hardly great. To think that one man, or a small number of men, can central plan an economy efficiently is absurd.
The failed "communism" of the USSR is about as close to communism as the capitalist economy in the US is to free trade. Close, but not close enough.
Communism at its heart requires no central planning. You can have a democratic communism, as well. Communism is not a form of government, but a form of economy, which is idealised by cooperative production and fair disbursement. There is nothing wrong in principle; it's in practice that it fails, because as a model it doesn't take into account human nature.
Free market economics suffers from the same drawback. It has several advantages over communism, but that doesn't mean it isn't seriously flawed.
You view a free market, and open trade as a zero-sum game. The truth of the matter is, the poor don't have to win, and the wealthier business owners don't have to win, in order for both parties to increase both their own wealth and their own living standards.
There are limited resources, therefore it *is* a zero sum game. As long as one group of people can control the majority of the resources and lock out the majority from participating in control, there *will* be losers.
It certainly doesn't *have* to be a zero sum game. But, history indicates that there are people who will wrest as much control as possible. To limit the amount of control one group can grab, you must have some sort of limit. That requires government intervention, which is exactly what you are arguing against. The market *does not* self-correct, at least not in a timely fashion.
I would never claim that a free market society is the road to utopia. Humanity is far from perfect, and humans have proven to be unjust on more than one occasion. My stance is that to limit the amount of damage and power one person or small group of people can accumulate, you would either have to evolve into, or form a free market society, or you would have hope that people can some how manage to find a way that allows for the welfare state to be affordable over a long period of time.
Sounds like we agree on principle. It's just a matter of degree.
The free market is a result of limited resources. Power is the fundamental control of those resources. I *do* agree that a free market is probably the best we have; but I don't think resource control should be controlled by anyone but the citizens of the state and/or federal government.
Personally, I'd agree to a free market in which corporations exist at the whim of the citizens of the country. The corporation charter may be revoked if the corporation is found to be in violation of the laws of the country.
But to do away with corporate law and oversight (that is, "government intervention") is to give control of the resources directly to the biggest corporations.
I think what you're missing is that without government regulation and interference, the wealthy elite DO NOT get to say in control, and they do not get to ward off would-be competitors as they are no longer protected. They are forced to play on a level field. For most of them, this would be their undoing. For some of them, they might make an honest business and prove to be ok people. Could you honestly argue against that?
Yes, I *can* argue against that.
Basically, money==power. The more money one has, the greater their ability to manipulate their environment to their liking. This can be done through either official political channels (such as influencing the government), or through unofficial channels, such as the ability to purchase up all resources to block a competitor.
I believe the ideal of a free market society is great. But I also believe the ideal of communism is great. The problem is, they both run counter to human nature. The major difference between the two is that a true communism is easier to exploit than a true free market society.
That doesn't mean that it's hard to game a free market. It's very easy, as long as you have superior position. For the poor, it's difficult to win. It's like playing a chess game without a queen, when your opponent has one. Sure, you *can* win, as long as your oponent truly sucks. But if those in a superior position have a modicum of competence, you don't stand a chance.
Do you think the elite 10% will easily give up their 50% of the resources? Hell, no. And since they control those resources, they are the ones who make the rules, in a free market society or in a republico-democracy with a socialist/capitalist economy.
The "ignorance and naivete" is to deny that some have a distinct and almost-insurmountable advantage. Just as history has shown that communism won't work as things stand now, so a free market economy won't work, as things stand now. There are too many people with too much control who are willing to fuck over as many people as necessary to stay in control.
But that's how I see the world. I've been told I'm a pessimist.
You simply mean their potential competitors won't be able to turn a profit.
History indicates otherwise. It's not that one company is so successful that competitors can't make a profit; the problem is when one company is able to *control* the ability of others to turn a profit, or even survive.
Our anti-trust system was instituted because the free trade of the 19th centry led to situations where major corporations were able to block upstart competitors from even entering the market, let alone turning a profit. Standard oil controlled access to distribution routes, and was able to block anyone from transporting competing products. This was back in the days of mostly-unregulated markets, closer to the "ideal" of a free market than we are today.
The "free market" has historically *not* worked. Those who yearn for complete freedom in the market ignore the preponderance of evidence from history. In *every* case, a certain handful of corporations get so large, they become the de-facto government, controlling access to the ability to make wealth. That is exactly what we are seeing today.
We have too many freeloaders. There are many who are fully capable, who are *LAZY*.
There aren't as many as you seem to think.
My wife manages a regional welfare-to-work program. She deals with welfare recipients *every day.* Her job: get them off the dole, and into the workforce. She experiences *every day* the reason *most* people are on welfare.
The system is stacked against them.
Most of the people she helps *want* to be independent. Many have come on poor times because of lost jobs, or poor seasonal work performance. (What's the difference between a fisherman and a large pizza? The pizza can feed a family of four.) We live in a country where 10% of the population controls 50% of the wealth, but only pays 28% of the taxes. We live in a country with a 3% unemployment rate.
How are these people you call lazy supposed to get a toehold in a world like this?
There are some that are truly lazy, and expect a hand-out. But these are few. Very few. Within a population of 50,000, there are 3 that she claims, "Even Jesus hates."
A captialistic society is dog-eat-dog, and it makes everyone better for it.
What's your evidence for this? I see a lot of Randian rhetoric, but very little evidence. In fact, the evidence I *do* see suggests that those in power will do everything they can to retain and increase power. Without government regulation (or at least government oversight), those in control will destroy potential competitors *before* they become competitors.
I am well-off, and I'd prefer *not* to live in a dog-eat-dog world. I think everyone would be better off if we realized we were all in this together, and only through kindness, cooperation, and good intentions will we come out the other end a sane and good society. I don't put my faith in some vague "market," or in well-debunked and overly-simplicistic views of economic theory.
The market looks out for the market, not people. And I don't give a fuck about the market. I care about people.
Granted, I doubt many people share that point of view, and many people would exploit anything vaguely innocent for their own profit. But there you go.
The idea that our government can operate in secret is a scary one. The whole idea of keeping this information around is that, after 25 years, information can and should be released to the public. This is a great step in helping keep our government relatively honest.
Granted, it is scary to learn 40 years after the fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis almost led to nuclear war. A Russian submarine officer disobeyed a direct order: he did not launch nuclear warhead tipped torpedos at the US fleet.
This came out via the freedom of information act. Yes, it's a little late to learn about it so long after the fact, but it's great to know we should all thank Vasili Arkhipov for stopping the destruction of the world as we know it.
Basically, Behe trotts out the "Life is complex, it required a watchmaker" argument, only on a micro-biological scale; and Johnson uses the old standby, "There are no intermediate fossils!"
Micheal Behe's "Irreducible complexity" amounts this: "I can't see how this could evolve, so it could *not* have evolved." *He* decides what is "irreducible," based on his ability to grasp how something may or may not have evolved.
This is so damned similar to the old, "But the eye is irreducibly complex! It could not have evolved in parts." When in fact, if you look at single-celled creatures with photosensitive spots on their backs, or at the pinhole camera simplicity of the nautilus eye, you can quickly see how this argument is, well, stupid.
Johnson, on the other hand, uses his skills as a lawyer to obfuscate the real issues of scientific evolution. He is, in fact, "ultra religious." He has a pre-determined outcome in mind, and it is through this bias and with the skills of rhetoric that he attempts to gut evolution.
Are there arguments between evolutionists? Yes. They do not all agree with each other on every point. Gould was an original advocate for punctuated equilibrium, which is still a point of debate. Others debate the placement of humanity on specific branches of the family tree.
This internal debate can sometimes seem like squabbling. Creationsists (fuck the term "intelligent design;" it is creationism) try to force their unscientific viewpoint into the midst of the squabble, and they call it "truth." But, it is impossible to prove or disprove creationism, and therefor it is not subject to scientific reasoning.
Anyway, both authors have an agenda that, ultimately, has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with religion.
Oh, I wasn't arguing the constitutionality of it. I was simply explaining that in many cases, it's against state law for the state's electoral college to vote against the popular vote wishes of the state.
For instance, in Alaska, the winning party of the popular vote gets to appoint the voters. The votes themselves automatically go to the winning party.
AC: Not like I'm going to save any money from having an open source driver instead. Most consumers don'tt care about driver source code.
The important thing isn't the cost-- it's the ability to program my audio device to suit my needs. Don't like.wmv support? Compile it out! Want a different menu structure? Change it! Make your audio device work they way you want it to work, not the way another company thinks it should work.
Me: * Modular, so you can have backpacks with different genres of music
AC: Huh, what does that mean?
The Neuros is really a very small computer unit, which snaps into larger hard-drive/battery units. The computer has a certain amount of on-board flash memory, to which you can move music. Then, plug in the small, light battery backpack, and you have a small audio device for jogging. You can have multiple backpacks, each with their own hard drive and battery. Each hard drive can have a different type of music on it.
This isn't a big deal to most people; but I have over 40GB of.ogg files. Multiple backpacks is *definitely* a big deal to me.
No electoral college will (realistically) vote against the party which it was selected to vote for.
Each state has its own set of regulations governing the composition and behavior of the electoral college. I *believe* the majority of the states mandate that the electoral college all cast their votes the way the state voted. (I'm too lazy to look up the exact numbers. You have google, too.)
Colorado is currently considering a referendum to be voted on November 2nd which will distribute their 9 electoral college votes proportionally to their popular vote. I *believe* they will be the first state to distribute their votes to more than one Presidential candidate.
In any case, this is a very complex issue, which may or may not have a reasonable solution. My opinion is overly-simple: the two-party system allows two essentially identical candidates to dominate the process, disallowing potentially more reasonable candidates from consideration. Until we come up with an alternative to the two-party system, the issue of how to determine a winner is moot.
And the other negative about dspam is it doesn't integrate well at the SMTP/MTA layer, it has a marked design preference for the delivery agent layer.
It's really layer-agnostic. Most implementations include a quarantine area and mail body markup. But, you aren't stuck with that.
I've had no problem integrating it into the MTA layer. Our mail store is on the inside of a firewall. Our external MTA is on the DMZ-- this is where DSPAM lives. I have DSPAM marking the headers of the email. I have a Sieve filter on the internal mail store checking the headers, and delivering messages marked as SPAM to a user's SPAM folder. Under the spam folder are two other folders: "Drop_Spam_Here," and "False_Positives." Users drop mail into those two folders for DSPAM training.
I have some simple Perl programs that scan the mail store and move mail out of the training folders, passing the messages on to DSPAM.
It's all much simpler than it sounds, especially for the user.
Email me at tee oh en why at searhc.org if you want the DMZ Exim config, Sieve filter, and Perl scripts.
Let's see.... the internet, the web, email, chat, network-aware windowing systems, DNS, NTP, security systems (like kerberos), and a slew of other network stuff that we take for granted these days.
More recently:
CODA, GNOME Storage (RDBMS-based filesystem), Dashboard (which Microsoft bit off of and calls "implicit query"), Wiki, . ..
A *lot* of true software innovation starts in the free software world. Often it's taken, usurped, and out-marketted by commercial vendors (like the case of MS Internet Explorer). That doesn't mean it didn't start as free software.
There are quite a few examples of commercial innovation, too, especially in the case of business software like the various office suites, database query tools, etc. Innovation is not exclusively a free software activity. But I think the GP post was correct: the free software community has demonstrably provided more innovation than Microsoft.
After years of everyone saying that the relational model was the answer to all data organziation needs... the hierarchical model reappeared in the form of XML, and people realized that it is convenient to organize some types of data hierarchically.
Convenient, and flawed.
XML isn't designed to handle changing data. It's designed to be a data markup language, which indicates it's used for presenting data, not managing data.
So far, the relational model is the best mathematically-rigorous method of managing sets of data. There are many advantages to hierarchical data representation, but for manipulation, the relational still trumps.
Do I want to use SQL to access my files? Not if I don't have to. There are perhaps better methods, even some transparent methods.
But, do I want to continue to self-organize my data? Hell, no! There's just too much information stored on my computer, and on my network, these days. And, considering that much of my data has multiple relationships, the hierarchical model is growing a bit long in the tooth. Many of my documents belong in multiple hierarchies.
In a free country you never trust your leaders; you always question their actions and intentions, never taking your eye off the ball. It's the only way to keep them honest.
God, if only that were true for the majority of people.
As it is, we have people like Ann Coulter saying it is treasonous to question the president, let alone attack his policies. We have "Free Speech Zones" safely removed from political arenas.
But I think there are more of us that question than the current (and recent-past) administrations might believe.
If the answers represent their policy instead of their own personal belief, than the answers are perfectly valid-- hopefully, more valid than if they were their personal belief.
I'd rather know about a candidate's proposed policy than their personal opinions or beliefs. As an example, if their personal belief is that a balanced budget is necessary for a stable economy, but their fiscal policy is one of massive overspending, I would be very, very concerned.
I'm more interested on why people assume that it has to be creationism OR evolution.
There's no such thing as "creationism" in science. Science is merely an epistomology that stresses experimentation, prediction, data gathering, and objective analysis. The fundamentals of science is simply this: an hypothesis must be falsifiable, or it is merely conjecture and flights of fancy.
I can assert there are invisible pink unicorns all around us, helping us every day. There are only two way to prove this assertion: present all these pink unicorns, or create an experiment that tests for the *nonexistence* of pink unicorns, and have that experiment present negative results. (That's a double-negative, which is a positive. Don't do that in English.)
Also, the ideal scientist will not set out to "prove" or "disprove" an hypothesis. They set out in search of the truth of the matter. An hypothesis is merely one step on the way to that truth, and they set out to test that hypothesis. As soon as they attempt to "prove" a particular hypothesis, their interpretation of the data becomes biased and skewed. (For example, check out Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box.)
Evolution is a theory, yes; but in science, "theory" is a class of hypothesis that have passed experimentation. This means it has been backed up by evidence, not by personal belief or the assertions of ancient documents of questionable literal veracity. The basics of evolution by natural selection (generally what people mean when they talk about "evolution") have passed all tests so far. Since we can't easily directly test natural selection, these tests are mostly comprised of tests of the predictions and necessities of natural selection, such as the genetic relationships among species, or the filling-in of the fossil record.
The problem isn't a personal belief in creationism, or a higher being. (To have a creation, you must have a creator.) That is a very personal choice, and since there is no known way to prove or disprove the existence of a God, there is no way to prove or disprove creationism. And in this, I respect whichever side you choose.
However, to teach something that doesn't even rate the label of "hypothesis" as a competing theory to evolution is to ignore the fundamental philosophy of science: the doctrine of testability. This is why the proposition of teaching creationism in a science class is absurd.
Doing so would be a disservice to our children, our society, and our future.
Both Democrats and Republicans are conservative. The term "liberal" has turned into a contentless profanity flung about from one side to the other simply to provide a convenient derogatory label.
The US leans so far to the right that Democrats seem liberal. There is really hardly anything to distinguish either US political party other than paying lip service to some ineffable ideology like "family values."
Most of the calls for social reform come from true liberals such as Eben Moglen and Noam Chomsky, people so far outside the conservative mainstream that they are labelled "radicals," and therefore automatically wrong.
The Democrats and Republicans just have different masters. There is very little real difference.
I call bullshiat, I bet Diebold has many signed approvals by authorized members of the government of California.
I call bullshit too, but on Diebold. This isn't the start of it; this was reported and investigated months ago. Diebold *did* install untested software on many of their voting machines. They had a specific list of build numbers that were authorized. They ignored this list.
This is well-known, and well-documented. Diebold tried to pull a fast one, fucked up the engine of democracy, and tried to weasel out of it.
Companies do this. It's easier to make money by sometimes not following the rules than it is by following the rules all the time.
This is just the start of all the "election irregularies" finger pointing when Kerry takes it up the arse in November.
They have a horrible product which doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.
Several things wrong with that statement. The first thing wrong is simple: you can't scrutinize the product, because the source code was hidden. Second, the product that Diebold deployed was not always the same product that the elections commission in CA had vetted.
The problem is simple: Diebold promised one thing, and delivered another.
Diebold's job was to sell their product. It was the customers job to decide if they needed it, and unfortunately, that customer uses our money.
See, this is the problem. Every free market apologist I read seems to think that every consumer can know everything about every product they buy. They further assume that it's okay for companies to lie, cheat, and steal to sell their product. Or, they assume that companies won't lie, cheat, or steal to sell their product.
The state of CA did study the issue, and they did try to purchase a product they thought would work. They are the ones who discovered the flaws in the system. They were promised those flaws did not exist.
Diebold has interfered with our electoral system, the underpinnings of our democracy, on a a grand scale. This is not simply a bag of Fritos that turned out to suck (duh). This is stuff that Diebold should have been more careful about, just like makers of nuclear reactors have to be more careful than makers of 50KW diesel generators.
Or are you saying that when a nuclear reactor has a design flaw and goes chernobyl, the designer/manufacturer isn't to blame?
[Diebold] is obviously working for a secure system
And where is the evidence for this? Diebold set up machines with code that was not vetted by the CA electoral commission folks. The system had so many flaws that new ones were popping up every week. Email published to the web showed the Diebold honchos in a rather bad light, saying things like, "If democracy really worked, it would be outlawed," and, "We will sue anyone who exposes flaws in our system."
Yeah, they sound like real keen guys.
If they really were interested in providing a secure system, they would have. They are trying to replace a system that has proven relatively secure, easy to use, and fairly accurate (FL's 2000 presidential election clusterfuck notwithstanding). They should at least provide one advantage over the old system: make it more secure (it isn't), more accurate (definitely not), or easier to use (debatable).
Diebold sold them machines on promises. Those promises turned out to be lies. Let me say this exactly once: If a company sells a product based on promises, it is up to the company to provide a product that lives up to the promises.
Don't try to blame this on the operators. That's like blaming the rape victim. It's Diebold's fault for promising one thing, and delivering another.
I believe Nader stays in the race because he believes the US government does not represent the US citizens. Basically, we're given the choice between two more-or-less similar candidates that seem to cater to special interest groups.
I admire Mr. Nader. I voted for him last time. I'd vote for him this time, as AK is definitely voting for Bush (AKA "Destroying America's Future") and my vote is not going to count anyway; but I am voting for Kerry just in case a good portion of the citizens of Alaska come to their collective senses.
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It's going to take several major software companies having legal "heart attacks" because of software patents before the rest of the industry gets a clue and quits dining at the trough of patents and IP.
I think that's what PJ was getting at: the Kodak vs. Sun lawsuit is big enough to draw attention to the broken nature of the patent system. Considering the rate at which software patent lawsuits are popping up, I think there's a dawning realisation in the software world that things are amiss.
Currently, we seem to be in a cold-war type arms buildup, in which software companies are stockpiling patents to use as some sort of mutually-assured-destruction deterrent. Maybe soon we can have talks concerning disarmament.
Much of the evidence presented as "proof" had been discredited before the President's State of the Union address that presented the evidence as unequivocable. The yellow-cake evidence had already been determined to be a forgery, the British intelligence report that figured prominently had been shown to be a cribbed-together mishmash of outdated sources (a 5-year old thesis available off the 'net, and some stuff from one of the Jane's military references), the the "aluminum tubes" evidence had been widely discredited by experts in the nucular field. I read all of this after the UN presentation by Collin Powell, and before President Bush's State of the Union address.
The one piece of evidence that was kept rather quiet, mentioned obliquely as reports from defected Iraqi citizens, turned out to come from one or two con artists.
There was not one single piece of evidence that was valid, and anybody following the leadup to war could tell. Anyone who questioned the legitimacy of the evidence was labelled a "liberal," as if it were a dirty word. Hell, even Anne Coulter called those folks traitors.
To place so many citizens in harm's way (and to perform a national variety of vigilante justice) based on such questionable evidence took either an unbelievable amount of self-deception, or a desire to attack Iraq *in spite* of the evidence.
Considering there was *no link whatsoever* between bin Laden and Hussien, I can only interpret the evidence in one way: President Bush intentionally lied to the US citizens to follow a path to war with a beaten enemy. I don't know why. The "liberal" in me thinks it might be to benefit Halliburton and Bechtel. The realist in me realizes it might be nothing more than a distraction from the complete disaster in Afghanistan. Or there might have been a *real* reason to go after Iraq, one that had to be hidden from the world.
Considering the price tag in human life and our nation's honor and credibility, I'm not sure which would be worse.
I said "taxes," not "income taxes." And I *was* wrong; 28% is *way* understated. 28% is their tax *rate*. Sorry about that. 2004 numbers are lower than stated, of course.
But here is interesting look at taxes.
I apologize for shooting off my mouth.
The ideal of communism is great? Maybe the end-dream is great, but communism itself is hardly great. To think that one man, or a small number of men, can central plan an economy efficiently is absurd.
The failed "communism" of the USSR is about as close to communism as the capitalist economy in the US is to free trade. Close, but not close enough.
Communism at its heart requires no central planning. You can have a democratic communism, as well. Communism is not a form of government, but a form of economy, which is idealised by cooperative production and fair disbursement. There is nothing wrong in principle; it's in practice that it fails, because as a model it doesn't take into account human nature.
Free market economics suffers from the same drawback. It has several advantages over communism, but that doesn't mean it isn't seriously flawed.
You view a free market, and open trade as a zero-sum game. The truth of the matter is, the poor don't have to win, and the wealthier business owners don't have to win, in order for both parties to increase both their own wealth and their own living standards.
There are limited resources, therefore it *is* a zero sum game. As long as one group of people can control the majority of the resources and lock out the majority from participating in control, there *will* be losers.
It certainly doesn't *have* to be a zero sum game. But, history indicates that there are people who will wrest as much control as possible. To limit the amount of control one group can grab, you must have some sort of limit. That requires government intervention, which is exactly what you are arguing against. The market *does not* self-correct, at least not in a timely fashion.
I would never claim that a free market society is the road to utopia. Humanity is far from perfect, and humans have proven to be unjust on more than one occasion. My stance is that to limit the amount of damage and power one person or small group of people can accumulate, you would either have to evolve into, or form a free market society, or you would have hope that people can some how manage to find a way that allows for the welfare state to be affordable over a long period of time.
Sounds like we agree on principle. It's just a matter of degree.
The free market is a result of limited resources. Power is the fundamental control of those resources. I *do* agree that a free market is probably the best we have; but I don't think resource control should be controlled by anyone but the citizens of the state and/or federal government.
Personally, I'd agree to a free market in which corporations exist at the whim of the citizens of the country. The corporation charter may be revoked if the corporation is found to be in violation of the laws of the country.
But to do away with corporate law and oversight (that is, "government intervention") is to give control of the resources directly to the biggest corporations.
I think what you're missing is that without government regulation and interference, the wealthy elite DO NOT get to say in control, and they do not get to ward off would-be competitors as they are no longer protected. They are forced to play on a level field. For most of them, this would be their undoing. For some of them, they might make an honest business and prove to be ok people. Could you honestly argue against that?
Yes, I *can* argue against that.
Basically, money==power. The more money one has, the greater their ability to manipulate their environment to their liking. This can be done through either official political channels (such as influencing the government), or through unofficial channels, such as the ability to purchase up all resources to block a competitor.
I believe the ideal of a free market society is great. But I also believe the ideal of communism is great. The problem is, they both run counter to human nature. The major difference between the two is that a true communism is easier to exploit than a true free market society.
That doesn't mean that it's hard to game a free market. It's very easy, as long as you have superior position. For the poor, it's difficult to win. It's like playing a chess game without a queen, when your opponent has one. Sure, you *can* win, as long as your oponent truly sucks. But if those in a superior position have a modicum of competence, you don't stand a chance.
Do you think the elite 10% will easily give up their 50% of the resources? Hell, no. And since they control those resources, they are the ones who make the rules, in a free market society or in a republico-democracy with a socialist/capitalist economy.
The "ignorance and naivete" is to deny that some have a distinct and almost-insurmountable advantage. Just as history has shown that communism won't work as things stand now, so a free market economy won't work, as things stand now. There are too many people with too much control who are willing to fuck over as many people as necessary to stay in control.
But that's how I see the world. I've been told I'm a pessimist.
You simply mean their potential competitors won't be able to turn a profit.
History indicates otherwise. It's not that one company is so successful that competitors can't make a profit; the problem is when one company is able to *control* the ability of others to turn a profit, or even survive.
Our anti-trust system was instituted because the free trade of the 19th centry led to situations where major corporations were able to block upstart competitors from even entering the market, let alone turning a profit. Standard oil controlled access to distribution routes, and was able to block anyone from transporting competing products. This was back in the days of mostly-unregulated markets, closer to the "ideal" of a free market than we are today.
The "free market" has historically *not* worked. Those who yearn for complete freedom in the market ignore the preponderance of evidence from history. In *every* case, a certain handful of corporations get so large, they become the de-facto government, controlling access to the ability to make wealth. That is exactly what we are seeing today.
We have too many freeloaders. There are many who are fully capable, who are *LAZY*.
There aren't as many as you seem to think.
My wife manages a regional welfare-to-work program. She deals with welfare recipients *every day.* Her job: get them off the dole, and into the workforce. She experiences *every day* the reason *most* people are on welfare.
The system is stacked against them.
Most of the people she helps *want* to be independent. Many have come on poor times because of lost jobs, or poor seasonal work performance. (What's the difference between a fisherman and a large pizza? The pizza can feed a family of four.) We live in a country where 10% of the population controls 50% of the wealth, but only pays 28% of the taxes. We live in a country with a 3% unemployment rate.
How are these people you call lazy supposed to get a toehold in a world like this?
There are some that are truly lazy, and expect a hand-out. But these are few. Very few. Within a population of 50,000, there are 3 that she claims, "Even Jesus hates."
A captialistic society is dog-eat-dog, and it makes everyone better for it.
What's your evidence for this? I see a lot of Randian rhetoric, but very little evidence. In fact, the evidence I *do* see suggests that those in power will do everything they can to retain and increase power. Without government regulation (or at least government oversight), those in control will destroy potential competitors *before* they become competitors.
I am well-off, and I'd prefer *not* to live in a dog-eat-dog world. I think everyone would be better off if we realized we were all in this together, and only through kindness, cooperation, and good intentions will we come out the other end a sane and good society. I don't put my faith in some vague "market," or in well-debunked and overly-simplicistic views of economic theory.
The market looks out for the market, not people. And I don't give a fuck about the market. I care about people.
Granted, I doubt many people share that point of view, and many people would exploit anything vaguely innocent for their own profit. But there you go.
The idea that our government can operate in secret is a scary one. The whole idea of keeping this information around is that, after 25 years, information can and should be released to the public. This is a great step in helping keep our government relatively honest.
Granted, it is scary to learn 40 years after the fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis almost led to nuclear war. A Russian submarine officer disobeyed a direct order: he did not launch nuclear warhead tipped torpedos at the US fleet.
This came out via the freedom of information act. Yes, it's a little late to learn about it so long after the fact, but it's great to know we should all thank Vasili Arkhipov for stopping the destruction of the world as we know it.
Basically, Behe trotts out the "Life is complex, it required a watchmaker" argument, only on a micro-biological scale; and Johnson uses the old standby, "There are no intermediate fossils!"
Micheal Behe's "Irreducible complexity" amounts this: "I can't see how this could evolve, so it could *not* have evolved." *He* decides what is "irreducible," based on his ability to grasp how something may or may not have evolved.
This is so damned similar to the old, "But the eye is irreducibly complex! It could not have evolved in parts." When in fact, if you look at single-celled creatures with photosensitive spots on their backs, or at the pinhole camera simplicity of the nautilus eye, you can quickly see how this argument is, well, stupid.
Johnson, on the other hand, uses his skills as a lawyer to obfuscate the real issues of scientific evolution. He is, in fact, "ultra religious." He has a pre-determined outcome in mind, and it is through this bias and with the skills of rhetoric that he attempts to gut evolution.
Are there arguments between evolutionists? Yes. They do not all agree with each other on every point. Gould was an original advocate for punctuated equilibrium, which is still a point of debate. Others debate the placement of humanity on specific branches of the family tree.
This internal debate can sometimes seem like squabbling. Creationsists (fuck the term "intelligent design;" it is creationism) try to force their unscientific viewpoint into the midst of the squabble, and they call it "truth." But, it is impossible to prove or disprove creationism, and therefor it is not subject to scientific reasoning.
Anyway, both authors have an agenda that, ultimately, has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with religion.
Oh, I wasn't arguing the constitutionality of it. I was simply explaining that in many cases, it's against state law for the state's electoral college to vote against the popular vote wishes of the state.
For instance, in Alaska, the winning party of the popular vote gets to appoint the voters. The votes themselves automatically go to the winning party.
Me: * Open Source, bay-bee!
.wmv support? Compile it out! Want a different menu structure? Change it! Make your audio device work they way you want it to work, not the way another company thinks it should work.
.ogg files. Multiple backpacks is *definitely* a big deal to me.
AC: Not like I'm going to save any money from having an open source driver instead. Most consumers don'tt care about driver source code.
The important thing isn't the cost-- it's the ability to program my audio device to suit my needs. Don't like
Me: * Modular, so you can have backpacks with different genres of music
AC: Huh, what does that mean?
The Neuros is really a very small computer unit, which snaps into larger hard-drive/battery units. The computer has a certain amount of on-board flash memory, to which you can move music. Then, plug in the small, light battery backpack, and you have a small audio device for jogging. You can have multiple backpacks, each with their own hard drive and battery. Each hard drive can have a different type of music on it.
This isn't a big deal to most people; but I have over 40GB of
No electoral college will (realistically) vote against the party which it was selected to vote for.
Each state has its own set of regulations governing the composition and behavior of the electoral college. I *believe* the majority of the states mandate that the electoral college all cast their votes the way the state voted. (I'm too lazy to look up the exact numbers. You have google, too.)
Colorado is currently considering a referendum to be voted on November 2nd which will distribute their 9 electoral college votes proportionally to their popular vote. I *believe* they will be the first state to distribute their votes to more than one Presidential candidate.
In any case, this is a very complex issue, which may or may not have a reasonable solution. My opinion is overly-simple: the two-party system allows two essentially identical candidates to dominate the process, disallowing potentially more reasonable candidates from consideration. Until we come up with an alternative to the two-party system, the issue of how to determine a winner is moot.
But, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
There are other reasons to favor the Neuros over the iPod, but those are the big ones.
But, as for everything, personal preferences play a huge role in your selection of a personal music device (PMD).
And the other negative about dspam is it doesn't integrate well at the SMTP/MTA layer, it has a marked design preference for the delivery agent layer.
It's really layer-agnostic. Most implementations include a quarantine area and mail body markup. But, you aren't stuck with that.
I've had no problem integrating it into the MTA layer. Our mail store is on the inside of a firewall. Our external MTA is on the DMZ-- this is where DSPAM lives. I have DSPAM marking the headers of the email. I have a Sieve filter on the internal mail store checking the headers, and delivering messages marked as SPAM to a user's SPAM folder. Under the spam folder are two other folders: "Drop_Spam_Here," and "False_Positives." Users drop mail into those two folders for DSPAM training.
I have some simple Perl programs that scan the mail store and move mail out of the training folders, passing the messages on to DSPAM.
It's all much simpler than it sounds, especially for the user.
Email me at tee oh en why at searhc.org if you want the DMZ Exim config, Sieve filter, and Perl scripts.
For example...?
.
Let's see.... the internet, the web, email, chat, network-aware windowing systems, DNS, NTP, security systems (like kerberos), and a slew of other network stuff that we take for granted these days.
More recently:
CODA, GNOME Storage (RDBMS-based filesystem), Dashboard (which Microsoft bit off of and calls "implicit query"), Wiki, . .
A *lot* of true software innovation starts in the free software world. Often it's taken, usurped, and out-marketted by commercial vendors (like the case of MS Internet Explorer). That doesn't mean it didn't start as free software.
There are quite a few examples of commercial innovation, too, especially in the case of business software like the various office suites, database query tools, etc. Innovation is not exclusively a free software activity. But I think the GP post was correct: the free software community has demonstrably provided more innovation than Microsoft.
Personally I wonder what advantage "boiling the oceans" would give to anyone trying to fill the 128-bit storage pool.
The world's largest steam bath?
After years of everyone saying that the relational model was the answer to all data organziation needs... the hierarchical model reappeared in the form of XML, and people realized that it is convenient to organize some types of data hierarchically.
Convenient, and flawed.
XML isn't designed to handle changing data. It's designed to be a data markup language, which indicates it's used for presenting data, not managing data.
So far, the relational model is the best mathematically-rigorous method of managing sets of data. There are many advantages to hierarchical data representation, but for manipulation, the relational still trumps.
Do I want to use SQL to access my files? Not if I don't have to. There are perhaps better methods, even some transparent methods.
But, do I want to continue to self-organize my data? Hell, no! There's just too much information stored on my computer, and on my network, these days. And, considering that much of my data has multiple relationships, the hierarchical model is growing a bit long in the tooth. Many of my documents belong in multiple hierarchies.
But, there might be a real solution soon:
Gnome Storage looks to be a good first step.
In a free country you never trust your leaders; you always question their actions and intentions, never taking your eye off the ball. It's the only way to keep them honest.
God, if only that were true for the majority of people.
As it is, we have people like Ann Coulter saying it is treasonous to question the president, let alone attack his policies. We have "Free Speech Zones" safely removed from political arenas.
But I think there are more of us that question than the current (and recent-past) administrations might believe.
I hope.
If the answers represent their policy instead of their own personal belief, than the answers are perfectly valid-- hopefully, more valid than if they were their personal belief.
I'd rather know about a candidate's proposed policy than their personal opinions or beliefs. As an example, if their personal belief is that a balanced budget is necessary for a stable economy, but their fiscal policy is one of massive overspending, I would be very, very concerned.
I'm more interested on why people assume that it has to be creationism OR evolution.
There's no such thing as "creationism" in science. Science is merely an epistomology that stresses experimentation, prediction, data gathering, and objective analysis. The fundamentals of science is simply this: an hypothesis must be falsifiable, or it is merely conjecture and flights of fancy.
I can assert there are invisible pink unicorns all around us, helping us every day. There are only two way to prove this assertion: present all these pink unicorns, or create an experiment that tests for the *nonexistence* of pink unicorns, and have that experiment present negative results. (That's a double-negative, which is a positive. Don't do that in English.)
Also, the ideal scientist will not set out to "prove" or "disprove" an hypothesis. They set out in search of the truth of the matter. An hypothesis is merely one step on the way to that truth, and they set out to test that hypothesis. As soon as they attempt to "prove" a particular hypothesis, their interpretation of the data becomes biased and skewed. (For example, check out Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box.)
Evolution is a theory, yes; but in science, "theory" is a class of hypothesis that have passed experimentation. This means it has been backed up by evidence, not by personal belief or the assertions of ancient documents of questionable literal veracity. The basics of evolution by natural selection (generally what people mean when they talk about "evolution") have passed all tests so far. Since we can't easily directly test natural selection, these tests are mostly comprised of tests of the predictions and necessities of natural selection, such as the genetic relationships among species, or the filling-in of the fossil record.
The problem isn't a personal belief in creationism, or a higher being. (To have a creation, you must have a creator.) That is a very personal choice, and since there is no known way to prove or disprove the existence of a God, there is no way to prove or disprove creationism. And in this, I respect whichever side you choose.
However, to teach something that doesn't even rate the label of "hypothesis" as a competing theory to evolution is to ignore the fundamental philosophy of science: the doctrine of testability. This is why the proposition of teaching creationism in a science class is absurd.
Doing so would be a disservice to our children, our society, and our future.
Both Democrats and Republicans are conservative. The term "liberal" has turned into a contentless profanity flung about from one side to the other simply to provide a convenient derogatory label.
The US leans so far to the right that Democrats seem liberal. There is really hardly anything to distinguish either US political party other than paying lip service to some ineffable ideology like "family values."
Most of the calls for social reform come from true liberals such as Eben Moglen and Noam Chomsky, people so far outside the conservative mainstream that they are labelled "radicals," and therefore automatically wrong.
The Democrats and Republicans just have different masters. There is very little real difference.
But I'm still voting Democrat.
I call bullshiat, I bet Diebold has many signed approvals by authorized members of the government of California.
I call bullshit too, but on Diebold. This isn't the start of it; this was reported and investigated months ago. Diebold *did* install untested software on many of their voting machines. They had a specific list of build numbers that were authorized. They ignored this list.
This is well-known, and well-documented. Diebold tried to pull a fast one, fucked up the engine of democracy, and tried to weasel out of it.
Companies do this. It's easier to make money by sometimes not following the rules than it is by following the rules all the time.
This is just the start of all the "election irregularies" finger pointing when Kerry takes it up the arse in November.
If Bush wins, we *all* "take it up the arse."
They have a horrible product which doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.
Several things wrong with that statement. The first thing wrong is simple: you can't scrutinize the product, because the source code was hidden. Second, the product that Diebold deployed was not always the same product that the elections commission in CA had vetted.
The problem is simple: Diebold promised one thing, and delivered another.
Diebold's job was to sell their product. It was the customers job to decide if they needed it, and unfortunately, that customer uses our money.
See, this is the problem. Every free market apologist I read seems to think that every consumer can know everything about every product they buy. They further assume that it's okay for companies to lie, cheat, and steal to sell their product. Or, they assume that companies won't lie, cheat, or steal to sell their product.
The state of CA did study the issue, and they did try to purchase a product they thought would work. They are the ones who discovered the flaws in the system. They were promised those flaws did not exist.
Diebold has interfered with our electoral system, the underpinnings of our democracy, on a a grand scale. This is not simply a bag of Fritos that turned out to suck (duh). This is stuff that Diebold should have been more careful about, just like makers of nuclear reactors have to be more careful than makers of 50KW diesel generators.
Or are you saying that when a nuclear reactor has a design flaw and goes chernobyl, the designer/manufacturer isn't to blame?
[Diebold] is obviously working for a secure system
And where is the evidence for this? Diebold set up machines with code that was not vetted by the CA electoral commission folks. The system had so many flaws that new ones were popping up every week. Email published to the web showed the Diebold honchos in a rather bad light, saying things like, "If democracy really worked, it would be outlawed," and, "We will sue anyone who exposes flaws in our system."
Yeah, they sound like real keen guys.
If they really were interested in providing a secure system, they would have. They are trying to replace a system that has proven relatively secure, easy to use, and fairly accurate (FL's 2000 presidential election clusterfuck notwithstanding). They should at least provide one advantage over the old system: make it more secure (it isn't), more accurate (definitely not), or easier to use (debatable).
Diebold sold them machines on promises. Those promises turned out to be lies. Let me say this exactly once: If a company sells a product based on promises, it is up to the company to provide a product that lives up to the promises.
Don't try to blame this on the operators. That's like blaming the rape victim. It's Diebold's fault for promising one thing, and delivering another.
I believe Nader stays in the race because he believes the US government does not represent the US citizens. Basically, we're given the choice between two more-or-less similar candidates that seem to cater to special interest groups.
I admire Mr. Nader. I voted for him last time. I'd vote for him this time, as AK is definitely voting for Bush (AKA "Destroying America's Future") and my vote is not going to count anyway; but I am voting for Kerry just in case a good portion of the citizens of Alaska come to their collective senses.
Hope springs eternal.