Ah yes, the old "two wrongs make a right" defense. How quaint. Let me guess, you also approve of secret prisons where we torture people because North Korea has them, right?
If my company we're suffering harassment as a result of an licensing fuck-up like this, I may be tempted to push for expunging all LGPL code and recreating the functionality from scratch.
Oh, yes. I'm sure you'd be tempted to do that. Until you saw the price that sort of development costs. This isn't a little library of convenience routines or something. This is WINE -- a project of extreme complexity which has benefited from nearly a decade of development and testing. It is completely non-trivial. The reason SWSoft used it in the first place is precisely because "recreating the functionality from scratch" would cost them an arm and a leg. In the real world, we don't piss away millions of dollars in development costs just because we're annoyed that we're being asked to honor the law.
Sense of entitlement? Are you serious? Listen, why don't you think of this in different terms. You own a company, and you pay your hackers to write a complex bit of software, which you sell to your clients. Suddenly, you become aware that another company, writing a piece of software that does something very similar to yours, is using your code in its product.
When you contact them to rectify the situation, they say "We know we're using your code and not abiding by the terms set forth in the license, we'll deal with it" and then a month later they still haven't dealt with it. How would you feel? Are you seriously saying that you wouldn't take them to court? They are in clear violation of your license, they have admitted as much in correspondence with your company, and still haven't dealt with it, despite your lenience. You could take them to court for millions of dollars and you would win.
For some reason, a large number of people here don't seem to understand that the GPL is a license like any other software license. It is used by free software hackers in their basements, and it is used by large, multi-national companies like IBM, RedHat, and MySQL. Just because the license is permissive does not mean that it is not a license with requirements that need to be met.
The situation with the WINE crew is exactly analogous to the scenario I outlined above, the only difference being that WINE is not a company. Everything else about it is exactly analogous. And you're going on about the coders having a "sense" of entitlement. Here's the truth: WINE is a huge and complex project that has taken a team of very talented hackers a long time to put together. Along the way, its efforts have been helped by companies, as well as by other projects like ReactOS.
The reason SWSoft used WINE in the first place, rather than just rolling their own solution, is because WINE is complex enough that to reinvent the wheel would probably have cost them millions. They were allowed to use WINE without pay -- but only on the condition that the GPL be abided by. Had it been for pay, would they have used the code first, released a product, and then waited nearly a month before sending a check? Hell no, and you know it as well as I. The problem here is that people like you and like them seem to think that just because WINE asks for source instead of code as payment, no payment is required, or that there is some leeway on the payment of debts.
In any other situation, these "internal issues that this kind of company is going to encounter" would have been taken care of prior to release. Here, they weren't.
On top of that, there's not much for them to figure out: if they used LGPL'd code, any and all changes to that code must be released. Some other posters have suggested that they're "verifying" or some such. There's nothing to verify. If they inserted code they can't release under the LGPL into a LGPL'd product and are distributing binaries produced by that mixture, they are in violation of the LGPL and can and should be sued into oblivion.
Because "taking" and "intellectual property" both imply that the person in question is being deprived of something. If I take your watch or your car, you no longer have a watch or a car, and this is why the idea of property rights are considered natural -- the fact that only one person can own a tangible object at any one time is a direct result of the natural scarcity of tangible objects.
Intellectual property, on the other hand, is actually nothing like property, despite its name. It is not scarce. If you think of something fun to do on Saturday, and tell me about it, you don't suddenly forget what that fun something was. This is a substantial difference.
This is not to say that ideas don't have value, but artificial scarcity -- and by artificial, I mean that it would not exist in the absence of laws created expressly to guarantee it -- is clearly not equivalent to real scarcity, which would exist even in the absence of government. If there is only one watch, clearly only one of us may possess it -- the existence of government or laws does not change this basic truth. But the song you are humming to yourself remains yours to enjoy even after you have shared it with me, and the only way you can prevent me from humming that same tune is with legislation and police enforcement.
"Intellectual property" is weasel terminology, designed to make us think that it is somehow similar to real property, when in fact it is not at all similar. Similarly, your use of the word "take", which implies transfer of a scarce good to the subject, is clearly meant to make us feel as though something has been taken from someone.
Analogies are here to help clarify what is apparently a difficult concept for some, like yourself, to grasp.
As I said in my original post, the edge cases between QM and GR that are interesting don't facilitate any sort of experimental testing. String theory is not simpler by any means than QM or GR, both of which have the dubious honor of already being extremely complex.
While it's true that theories that have the same predictive power are effectively equivalent, if two theories are the same in every regard then the simpler one is preferred -- this is the essence of Ockham's Razor. I'm not daft, I know that string theory was intended to unify QM and GR, but it does so in a way that the "gray area" cannot be tested. Studying string theory as an intellectual exercise is fine by me, but currently a great deal of funding that would, in my opinion, be better spent elsewhere gets eaten up by string theorists who have never made a single testable claim that was unique to their model.
Your views are yours to have. I suggest you avoid traveling anywhere substantially different from the US, though, unless you are willing to be more flexible.
What's offensive is when someone calls you obscene names in public for some perceived slight,...
I don't know your situation, but by your use of the word "perceived", you clearly are judging that whatever slight the foreigner imagined you'd committed was not egregious enough to incite their reaction. While I personally don't see swearing at strangers to ever be necessary, it is important to realize that you may very well have inadvertently done something that, within the foreigner's cultural context, was not acceptable and warranted such a response.
It's also possible, as you say, that they were just assholes. Every country has those. But don't immediately assume that you did something tiny and they just flew off the handle for no reason. Some things that you wouldn't think twice about doing in your own country are extremely insulting in someone else's. For example, in much of the Middle East and in some parts of Africa, the thumbs up gesture, elsewhere considered an indication of excellence, is equivalent to giving someone the finger or worse, and actually means something like "up yours, asshole."
In China, people take insults to their person very seriously. Whereas in Europe or the US, people routinely swear at others in anger, you'd best not think of doing the same in China unless you're prepared to back it up with your fists -- to let someone insult you in a public place and get away with it constitutes a significant loss of face, and Chinese people are unlikely to put up with it -- street fights are thus common. I'm sure you didn't swear at anyone, but this just demonstrates how the notion of what constitutes a "measured" response differs culturally. You may be afforded some cultural leeway in China if you're white, but if you're east asian, you can forget about it.
I can only comment on the countries I've lived in, but as an expat brat, I think I've lived in enough places to know that if people are swearing at you on anything resembling a regular basis, you are probably behaving in a way that is culturally inappropriate or maybe just inappropriate, period.
Discounting the offense you gave as nothing more than a "perceived" slight is, well, arrogant.
This has more to do with politeness norms than anything else. What it means to be polite is not culturally invariant -- to take an extreme example which you may have been exposed to anecdotally, the sorts of things that are important and considered polite to a Japanese person are not the same as to an American person. You're rude there if you don't pour drinks for your guests with both hands and if you don't slurp your noodles you're insulting the cook.
Well, French culture (for example) may share a lot more in common with American culture than Japanese culture does, but it is nonetheless different and has different ideas of what it means to be polite. Consider: most Americans think that French people are quite rude, and it's not uncommon for people who go to France on vacation (one of the most popular vacation destinations in the world) to come back with stories about how rude they are. What may surprise you is that in France, Americans are widely seen as extremely rude. Despite what you may think, this is not due to France's perceived anti-Americanism. It's due to different politeness norms. Since I'm intimately familiar with both cultures, I'll give you a run-down of why this notion persists on both sides. Similar explanations work for any other culture, I'm sure, although the details are bound to be different.
French, like many European languages (and English, in the old days, but not any more) has what is called a T-V distinction. This means that they have two different words for "you": one is formal, and one is informal. With friends and children you might use the informal one; with strangers on the street, colleagues at work, clients, etc, you'd probably use the formal one. It's actually much more subtle and complex than this, but bear with me. Then, the French rarely address people they don't know well by their first names, preferring instead words like Mister, Madam, and Sir. They place extremely heavy emphasis on greeting people, even strangers: when you walk into the Baker's shop, as soon as you open the door, you are expected to greet everyone (not individually, but you might say something like "Messieurs Dames" Saying "Please" and "Thank You" is extremely important. With people you don't know well, you are expected to be formal, even a little bit stiff. This is because being overly familiar with someone you don't know well is considered very rude, and the French person feels rather the same way that an American might feel when his personal space is invaded if someone is too informal with him.
Americans, on the other hand, speak a language which lacks a T-V distinction. While saying please and thank you is considered well-mannered, in general, the American thinks he is being polite by being friendly. In American society, smiling a lot when you greet someone and acting like you're old friends is considered polite, and calling someone Mister is seen as extremely stuffy -- outside of very formal situations, like job interviews, the average American feels uncomfortable using these terms. You don't want to be seen as stuck-up, and many Americans will feel that you are putting on airs if you don't smile much and persist in calling them sir.
I remember once that my cousin came to visit me and she had a conversation with a lady while waiting in line at the supermarket. The lady was very friendly, asked her how she liked the US, and generally did the American thing. The lady said things like, "Oh, you should come over to my place sometime, my husband really knows how to BBQ". My cousin came away feeling like this woman, who was just trying to be friendly, was extremely fake. All the small talk, the asking of questions whose answers she wasn't really interested in -- they all severely offended her French sensibilities. But this is in no way a criticism of the American woman; in the context of American culture, she was being polite and welcoming to a foreigner. Still, a misunderstanding resulted.
So, essentially, what is considered polite is different in differ
You're being extremely short-sighted. Have you ever been to Syria? It's one of the most warm-hearted and hospitable countries on earth. The government is corrupt and oppressive, no doubt, but the people are the ones getting shafted here -- embargoes on places like Cuba and Syria have demonstratively done nothing to weaken the hold of tyrannical governments. If anything, they've done the opposite. How? Because, see, it gives those governments a scapegoat. North Koreans believe that everything shitty about the DPRK is all the fault of the US and Japan, and with trade sanctions as they are, the government of the DPRK (and of Syria, and of Cuba) actually can claim that that is the case and use it to cover up the corrupt nature of their own governments.
Newsflash: embargoes don't prevent fancy American luxury items from getting into the nation, they just limit the use of those goods to the very wealthy, ie, the government cronies. So the people who get shafted are, as usual, the poor, who are already oppressed by their own governments.
How long have we had an embargo on Cuba now? Syria? North Korea? Do any of these countries show even the slightest sign of caving in? No. Their people starve, the local governments blame us for it and use the embargo as proof, all while continuing to live like kings.
People here who keep saying "Castro will be dead soon" are ignoring something fundamental about Cuba, too -- it is not, despite what you may have heard, a dictatorship. It is a one party state, and there's a huge difference. A dictatorship's government centers around a dictator, and when that dictator dies, the government acts like a body without a head. In a one-party state (ie, China, the old Soviet Union, Syria, Singapore, etc) there is typically a party whose head (chairman, president, whatever) leads the state with input from the party. The Cuban Communist Party is not beholden to Fidel, and is quite capable of running the country without him, as has been demonstrated recently. Rather like the PRC didn't collapse when Mao died, the USSR didn't collapse when Lenin or Stalin kicked the bucket, and Syria is still a thorn in the US's side even after Hafez al-Assad's death in 2000.
I didn't mention North Korea because I'm not sure how much power the Korean Worker's Party actually has -- there's a fair amount of evidence that their existence is ornamental and that real power rests in the military and that Kim Jong Il is in firm control of it. Also, Kim Il Sung, who was appointed by Stalin to lead North Korea after the Korean war, was Kim Jong Il's father, and he groomed his son for power the way a prince would be in a monarchy, which is not how one-party states generally function. (It's worth noting that Kim Il Sung was, especially in his later years, far less crazy than his son is, and was actually talking to the South Korean government when he died in 1994).
Dude, you're not getting it. It's not very complicated. You say "Universe comes into existence with nothing as the cause" is the most ludicrous of the choices you list. Given that, you claim that one of the other choices, all of which involve "something" creating the universe, is more probable. Fine so far. But then you run into a big problem: the "something" that created the universe, well, what created that?
See, most religious people will, in the same breath, say "it's ludicrous to say that nothing created the universe, something must have, ergo God" and "Nothing created God. He simply is."
What I don't understand -- perhaps you can explain it to me -- is why it is acceptable to argue that "Nothing created the universe" is unlikely, but that "Nothing created God" is acceptable.
The problem with causality is this: if you accept that every effect has a cause, then proceeding inductively, there must be an infinite number of causes and effects. Consider: A happens because B. Why does B happen? Because C happened. Why does C happen? Because D happened, and so on. If you never allow "Nothing caused X to happen", it is clear that you have what is called an "infinite regression", in other words, there must be an infinite number of events.
So there are two possibilities here, largely speaking: either our understanding of causality is correct, each cause must have an effect, and so the universe has been around forever, or our understanding of time/causality is flawed and based on observations that only hold locally. Einstein already showed that our understanding of time was deeply flawed, so it's not a really big leap to assume that our understanding of causality is likewise deeply flawed. And an "infinite" universe seems to contradict a great number of observations.
"God came into existence without a cause" is no more ridiculous than "The Universe came into existence without cause" because both involve something incredibly complex coming into existence without cause. The difference is, the Universe is provably here, and so far we've managed to explain most of what we observe without resorting to the proverbial "unmoved mover". Why add more complexity without getting any useful predictive power out of it?
String theory makes no useful predictions beyond what QM and GR already predict, and is much, much more complicated. The edge cases between QM and GR that are interesting defy attempts at experimental testing, because to do so would require "more energy that exists in the universe" and other such bullshit.
String "theory" is a pseudoscientific wankfest that siphons funds from people who are actually doing real science. Its only redeeming feature is that some interesting mathematics has come out of it.
I agree with the GP -- string theory is as much a theory as ID is a theory, which is to say, not at all.
I used to also say I was agnostic, because while I was fairly certain that no god existed, I had to admit that I was unable to prove that. I have since developed a more nuanced understanding, which I explained in this post some time ago. Sorry for linking to myself, but I think it bears repeating and I said it well enough last time.
You don't seem to understand what "antitrust" means -- and unfortunately, you're not alone in this here on Slashdot. It seems lots of people think "antitrust" means any sort of subjectively "unfair" market manipulation, but that's not what it means. Antitrust law, broadly speaking, has to do with monopolies that are unfairly leveraged, with oligopolies that collude to set prices, and with mergers and acquisitions that consolidate the only major players in a market into one, dominant player.
First off, despite what you may have heard, in the US at least, monopolies are not illegal. If by fair competition you become the only player on the block, you are not subject to antitrust law. If, however, you use your monopoly position to create barriers to entry into the market (other than the natural barriers caused by competition) or if you use your monopoly in one market to unfairly compete in another market, you may be subject to antitrust law.
With regards to Apple -- and for the record, I am not a fanboy, I don't own an iPod and I run Debian on my Thinkpad -- there is very little evidence that they have a monopoly anywhere at all. First: the iPod is not a monopoly. This seems to be very difficult for some Slashdotters to grasp. Yes, it is by far and away the most popular digital music player on the market today, but it is not the only one. And it isn't like the only alternative is Microsoft's Zune or some other non-profitable offering subsidized by a powerful company trying to break into the market, either. There are literally thousands of competitive offerings, with the same feature set as the iPod, many of them technically superior in pretty much every way to the iPod, that are cheaper to boot. People in the US don't seem to buy them much, but they most certainly are available. The barriers to entry in the digital music player market are extremely low, and there is nothing whatsoever about Apple's dominance that changes that. Companies like Creative, iRiver, and countless other small no-name brands from China manage to remain profitable, although their volumes are somewhat lower than Apple's. But hey, newsflash: most markets have a dominant player. That doesn't mean the dominant player has a monopoly, and even if it they did, it doesn't mean they obtained that monopoly unfairly or that they're abusing their monopoly to fix prices.
The only semi-possible charge related to antitrust law that has ever been levied against Apple is with regards to their Fairplay DRM, which is only available on the iPod, and which allegedly causes vendor lock-in. Well, there's a big reason that no one ever pursues this: it's a non-starter. Many competing music players play AAC without DRM these days, and according to Apple's own data, the overwhelming majority of music on people's iPods does not come from the iTunes music store, which is pretty much the only place that you might get AAC + Fairplay tracks. Unless you put DRM on your own tracks -- and who does that -- most music is still ripped from people's own CD collection or obtained illegally via P2P or similar.
These complaints about Fairplay also ignore the glaringly obvious: pretty much any proprietary software package also has proprietary file formats, many of which are deliberately obfuscated, precisely in order to lock users into their products. Reading Microsoft hackers' own experiences reverse engineering the WordPerfect document formats back when that product was dominant is extremely illustrative in this regard. (The fact that I'm pointing out that this is standard industry practice should not in any way be construed as support for said practice; I am in favor of open document formats precisely because I disagree with vendor lock-in. But the fact remains: this sort of thing, by itself, is not an antitrust violation.)
In fact, my iRiver (which I purchased because it supports Ogg Vorbis and love) supports some DRM-laden format of its own, IRM or somesuch, which
That's a good point, of course, but the quantum computer will only be useful for solving certain classes of hard problems, not all of them. The mathematics behind their capabilities are relatively well understood, and in all likelihood cryptographers will design new algorithms that are difficult for quantum computers to solve.
I have no evidence of this, of course, but it's too important a problem for the experts to ignore. Lest you forget, the government too has data it seeks to keep secret, and while basement-dwelling hackers may be unable to purchase a quantum supercomputer, odds are foreign states will have the resources to do so.
[F]or example, suppose manufacturing is very cheap in Japan and very expensive in the US. As a result, everyone buys Japanese products instead of American products, right? But the result of this is, demand for the Japanese Yen increases, while its supply stays roughly constant, and so the value of the Yen falls relative to other currencies, such as the dollar. The lack of demand for the dollar causes the value of the dollar to fall. As a result, American goods, which were previously not price-competitive with Japanese goods, decline in price on the world market, boosting the American economy.
Sorry, the emphasized should have been "increases", as should be obvious from context. My bad. Should have read the preview more carefully.
Well, that's sort of the point of fiat money -- to make the money supply a policy variable. This fails spectacularly when the government mismanages the money supply, which has happened historically and tends to happen whenever the central bank is unable to act independently -- this is why the Fed and the European Central Bank are not beholden to the central government but instead to economists.
The thing is, a supply-side cap on the money supply can cause serious problems, because economics is not a zero-sum game: the size of the pie is not fixed. If the economy is going to grow, the money supply needs to grow as well, or deflation occurs. Deflation is just as bad -- perhaps worse -- than inflation.
The question really is, can you trust the group in charge of monetary policy to not fuck it up? The alternative is to cap the growth of the economy with a money supply that can't grow to match economic growth.
Currently, the Fed and its analog in other countries deliberately targets a very low, constant inflationary value of between 2 and 4 percent. There are a number of reasons for this; one of the most often stated is that it provides investment incentive and insures that cash remains in circulation by making it financially unwise to hide money in your mattress, where it does no one any good.
The cost of gold and other precious metals is not constant either, because the supply is not truly capped -- when someone discovers a major new ore, for example, the supply can fluctuate radically, especially since the supply of gold is not uniformly distributed in the world. For example, the Soviet Union had massive gold reserves, and under the gold standard, they were able to leverage this wealth without any real economic production. Very efficient economies like Hong Kong or Israel do not have their true value adequately reflected in a gold standard, because the entire system is warped by poor countries in Africa and Asia that naturally have massive reserves.
The demand is also not constant -- other than people liking gold jewelry, gold is used in electronics and in other applications. When entrepreneurs find a way to substitute away from gold -- for example, using a ceramic or polymer replacement -- demand for gold drops and so its effective value drops. But wait, your monetary system is tied to the value of gold -- and so you have constant, erratic inflation and deflation. That's not good.
Then there's the issue of foreign exchanges. With fiat currencies, foreigners who want to buy American goods must first buy dollars, and similarly, Americans who want to buy foreign goods must first purchase foreign currencies. This has an automatic balancing effect: for example, suppose manufacturing is very cheap in Japan and very expensive in the US. As a result, everyone buys Japanese products instead of American products, right? But the result of this is, demand for the Japanese Yen increases, while its supply stays roughly constant, and so the value of the Yen falls relative to other currencies, such as the dollar. The lack of demand for the dollar causes the value of the dollar to fall. As a result, American goods, which were previously not price-competitive with Japanese goods, decline in price on the world market, boosting the American economy.
Now, when everyone was on a precious metal standard, the only foreign exchange markets were due to differences between silver, gold, platinum, or whatever. If America and Japan were both on the gold standard, demand for Japanese yen translated into demand for American dollars, because both were backed by the same commodity. This negated any possible balancing effect, making competition in international markets far less dynamic. This is similar to the problem with the US and China today -- China pegs its currency to the dollar, and so the falling price of US-made goods on the international market causes the international price of goods manufactured in China to fall as well, despite China's incredible economic growth. Thi
Supply is only one side of the value equation; demand is the other. The fact that there is very little gold around, for example, is not all that is required to make it valuable -- people wanting to purchase it is the other side of the transaction.
You're welcome to note that there is demand for gold, as long as you understand that I'm not claiming there isn't. But don't make the classic economic faux pas of assuming that gold has intrinsic value thanks to its rarity. Gold has value because people want it, and people only want it because it is perceived to have value. A supply-side cap only serves to simplify the economics by removing (or at least limiting) supply-side variance.
Weak. You completely missed the point. The guy wanted to buy an Ubuntu laptop to support Dell's decision to sell Ubuntu, and he wanted to buy it for his business. He found that he could not do this, and he is doing something about it: telling others. All your "alternatives" do not do what he intended to do, which is to support Dell in its decision to sell Ubuntu. However, bad press -- which is what this is -- may cause Dell to rethink its arbitrary decision not to sell business laptops with Ubuntu, or at least clarify their position.
Your comments about "Americans" notwithstanding, consumers can get an awful lot by complaining. There's an old saying in business: "A satisfied customer tells one person, and a dissatisfied customer tells ten". Companies worry about this because bad press is bad for their bottom line. Complaining about service (or lack thereof) is a tried and tested way to hit a company where it hurts, ie, financially. Getting burned quietly and then voting with your feet has a far smaller impact.
Well, I'll admit that it's been a while since I saw Bowling or Farenheit -- unimpressed as I was by both I only saw them once when they were released, and it's been a while now -- but if recollection serves, the thing that MM was criticizing was the NRA's decision to hold the meeting in Denver shortly after Columbine, given the situation. I personally don't see why the NRA shouldn't have been allowed to assemble, mind you -- but from MM's perspective (and I think too the perspective of his supporters) just the fact that they decided to assemble is what was upsetting. The reason I said I thought your example was pretty weak was because of that -- because I don't think the fact that he also mentioned that "he'd fought for the right to assemble" materially impacted the reality of what MM was attacking in the first place, which was that the decision was made to assemble at all. To them, saying he has "the right to assemble" for any reason whatsoever is callous, or something. Obviously, as Americans we have the right to assemble, the Moore-ophiles don't contest that (I don't think). They just think he shouldn't have made the decision to.
As for the whole Condi thing, adding the rest of the quote doesn't really convince me of much, because what the US apparently forgot was that for all his dictatorial tendencies, Iraq under Saddam was a secular state and one of the most hated regimes of Al Qaeda. I can't remember exactly how the quote was used in Farenheit, but my guess is that MM was quoting a bunch of US muckity-mucks saying 9/11 and Iraq were linked, which lest you forget was how they convinced us that war in Iraq was a good idea. Certainly, he probably made it sound as though Condi was saying that the two were directly related, instead of ideologically related. That's a perversion of what she meant, perhaps, but from my perspective, either way, she was full of shit.
But to answer your point, yes, this quote seems much more manipulative than the first you produced. I don't think it'll win over many MM supporters, though, because Condi's full quote is just as ridiculous as the snippet, taken in hindsight. But their implications are clearly different, so I see your point.
Well, I have an expensive Blue Shield PPO and live in one of the most affluent areas of Silicon Valley; I made an appointment with the dermatologist today, and was told that the soonest I could be seen to examine a possibly cancerous mole growth was in late July.
I'm sure for every random anecdote you provide, someone else can provide one "proving" the opposite point. That's why, as we say, the plural of anecdote is not data. And the data seems to indicate that Americans pay much more than people in Canada and the UK for the same coverage.
That's not to say that their system is perfect or even that we should emulate it, just that ours is fucked up.
Now imagine if most taxes were repealed. Not only would people have twice the money they normally would, they would no longer feel like they "gave at the office". Suddenly individuals are responsible for the world around them. And your typical person is far more likely to donate to caring institutions than they are to a bunch of thugs who want to kill people. If you take the power out of the hands of government, health care would become a priority in the way war is now.
You have absolutely no proof of this, no matter how much you may wish it so. The US does have an impressive record of philanthropy, but as economists say, "incentives matter", and as the failed communists states taught us, depending on altruism to solve a problem is generally a non-starter. It always surprises me that free market fundamentalists point to "charity" as a way to solve the market's shortcomings. Here's a hint: the market works because people are selfish, not because they're altruistic.
The fact that Americans have an impressive philanthropic record has, in all likelihood, more to do with the fact that they get tax breaks on their charitable giving than on their inherent desire to do good. This explanation is much more inline with "real" economics rather than over-simplified and idealized libertarian dogma. Currently, wealthy persons can often "abuse" loopholes the tax system (and I use the term abuse lightly, because I don't see the result as being bad) to decrease their overall tax burden. In essence, they end up paying less overall thanks to their charitable giving: hey, if you had a choice between paying 50 grand to the government and 30 grand to various charitable institutions, which would you pick? After all, either way, the money you give away isn't yours to spend anymore. Unfortunately, your idea of doing away with taxes also does away with this incentive. I suspect you'd see charitable giving plummet in that scenario.
Occasionally, extremely rich persons (such as Gates or Buffet) give away swaths of money for altruistic reasons, and they are to be commended for their voluntary actions. No doubt there will always be people who make such gestures (and the fact that, even after giving away 80% of their wealth, they are still among the richest people in the world probably doesn't hurt). But depending on such gestures to ensure the health of the population of one of the wealthiest nations in the world is folly. I don't know if you noticed, but many of these high-profile charitable institutions are working (commendably, might I add) to fight Malaria or AIDS in Africa, not to provide universal health care to Americans.
I agree that government bureaucracy needs to be streamlined, corruption reduced, etc, and I think that in the information age, this can be achieved by greater transparency in government (ie, allowing any member of the public access to non-classified information, especially financial information, thereby making it easier for us to audit and trace government spending, and by making it considerably more difficult to classify information). But there are some things the government does better than the market -- the market is only the most efficient allocator of scarce resources in particular instances, as any economist would cheerfully tell you (mainly in competitive markets with low barriers to entry, and health care isn't one of these). You seem to know this, but depending on voluntary donations as a solution is folly. Having a healthy, educated populace is important in recessions as well as in boom years. Giving, while commendable, cannot be counted on.
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Ah yes, the old "two wrongs make a right" defense. How quaint. Let me guess, you also approve of secret prisons where we torture people because North Korea has them, right?
Classically, legal research into licenses used in code that you intend to be part of your flagship product is done before you release.
Oh, yes. I'm sure you'd be tempted to do that. Until you saw the price that sort of development costs. This isn't a little library of convenience routines or something. This is WINE -- a project of extreme complexity which has benefited from nearly a decade of development and testing. It is completely non-trivial. The reason SWSoft used it in the first place is precisely because "recreating the functionality from scratch" would cost them an arm and a leg. In the real world, we don't piss away millions of dollars in development costs just because we're annoyed that we're being asked to honor the law.
Sense of entitlement? Are you serious? Listen, why don't you think of this in different terms. You own a company, and you pay your hackers to write a complex bit of software, which you sell to your clients. Suddenly, you become aware that another company, writing a piece of software that does something very similar to yours, is using your code in its product.
When you contact them to rectify the situation, they say "We know we're using your code and not abiding by the terms set forth in the license, we'll deal with it" and then a month later they still haven't dealt with it. How would you feel? Are you seriously saying that you wouldn't take them to court? They are in clear violation of your license, they have admitted as much in correspondence with your company, and still haven't dealt with it, despite your lenience. You could take them to court for millions of dollars and you would win.
For some reason, a large number of people here don't seem to understand that the GPL is a license like any other software license. It is used by free software hackers in their basements, and it is used by large, multi-national companies like IBM, RedHat, and MySQL. Just because the license is permissive does not mean that it is not a license with requirements that need to be met.
The situation with the WINE crew is exactly analogous to the scenario I outlined above, the only difference being that WINE is not a company. Everything else about it is exactly analogous. And you're going on about the coders having a "sense" of entitlement. Here's the truth: WINE is a huge and complex project that has taken a team of very talented hackers a long time to put together. Along the way, its efforts have been helped by companies, as well as by other projects like ReactOS.
The reason SWSoft used WINE in the first place, rather than just rolling their own solution, is because WINE is complex enough that to reinvent the wheel would probably have cost them millions. They were allowed to use WINE without pay -- but only on the condition that the GPL be abided by. Had it been for pay, would they have used the code first, released a product, and then waited nearly a month before sending a check? Hell no, and you know it as well as I. The problem here is that people like you and like them seem to think that just because WINE asks for source instead of code as payment, no payment is required, or that there is some leeway on the payment of debts.
In any other situation, these "internal issues that this kind of company is going to encounter" would have been taken care of prior to release. Here, they weren't.
On top of that, there's not much for them to figure out: if they used LGPL'd code, any and all changes to that code must be released. Some other posters have suggested that they're "verifying" or some such. There's nothing to verify. If they inserted code they can't release under the LGPL into a LGPL'd product and are distributing binaries produced by that mixture, they are in violation of the LGPL and can and should be sued into oblivion.
Those of us who are not lawyers appreciate the clarification.
Because "taking" and "intellectual property" both imply that the person in question is being deprived of something. If I take your watch or your car, you no longer have a watch or a car, and this is why the idea of property rights are considered natural -- the fact that only one person can own a tangible object at any one time is a direct result of the natural scarcity of tangible objects.
Intellectual property, on the other hand, is actually nothing like property, despite its name. It is not scarce. If you think of something fun to do on Saturday, and tell me about it, you don't suddenly forget what that fun something was. This is a substantial difference.
This is not to say that ideas don't have value, but artificial scarcity -- and by artificial, I mean that it would not exist in the absence of laws created expressly to guarantee it -- is clearly not equivalent to real scarcity, which would exist even in the absence of government. If there is only one watch, clearly only one of us may possess it -- the existence of government or laws does not change this basic truth. But the song you are humming to yourself remains yours to enjoy even after you have shared it with me, and the only way you can prevent me from humming that same tune is with legislation and police enforcement.
"Intellectual property" is weasel terminology, designed to make us think that it is somehow similar to real property, when in fact it is not at all similar. Similarly, your use of the word "take", which implies transfer of a scarce good to the subject, is clearly meant to make us feel as though something has been taken from someone.
Analogies are here to help clarify what is apparently a difficult concept for some, like yourself, to grasp.
As I said in my original post, the edge cases between QM and GR that are interesting don't facilitate any sort of experimental testing. String theory is not simpler by any means than QM or GR, both of which have the dubious honor of already being extremely complex.
While it's true that theories that have the same predictive power are effectively equivalent, if two theories are the same in every regard then the simpler one is preferred -- this is the essence of Ockham's Razor. I'm not daft, I know that string theory was intended to unify QM and GR, but it does so in a way that the "gray area" cannot be tested. Studying string theory as an intellectual exercise is fine by me, but currently a great deal of funding that would, in my opinion, be better spent elsewhere gets eaten up by string theorists who have never made a single testable claim that was unique to their model.
Your views are yours to have. I suggest you avoid traveling anywhere substantially different from the US, though, unless you are willing to be more flexible.
I don't know your situation, but by your use of the word "perceived", you clearly are judging that whatever slight the foreigner imagined you'd committed was not egregious enough to incite their reaction. While I personally don't see swearing at strangers to ever be necessary, it is important to realize that you may very well have inadvertently done something that, within the foreigner's cultural context, was not acceptable and warranted such a response.
It's also possible, as you say, that they were just assholes. Every country has those. But don't immediately assume that you did something tiny and they just flew off the handle for no reason. Some things that you wouldn't think twice about doing in your own country are extremely insulting in someone else's. For example, in much of the Middle East and in some parts of Africa, the thumbs up gesture, elsewhere considered an indication of excellence, is equivalent to giving someone the finger or worse, and actually means something like "up yours, asshole."
In China, people take insults to their person very seriously. Whereas in Europe or the US, people routinely swear at others in anger, you'd best not think of doing the same in China unless you're prepared to back it up with your fists -- to let someone insult you in a public place and get away with it constitutes a significant loss of face, and Chinese people are unlikely to put up with it -- street fights are thus common. I'm sure you didn't swear at anyone, but this just demonstrates how the notion of what constitutes a "measured" response differs culturally. You may be afforded some cultural leeway in China if you're white, but if you're east asian, you can forget about it.
I can only comment on the countries I've lived in, but as an expat brat, I think I've lived in enough places to know that if people are swearing at you on anything resembling a regular basis, you are probably behaving in a way that is culturally inappropriate or maybe just inappropriate, period.
Discounting the offense you gave as nothing more than a "perceived" slight is, well, arrogant.
This has more to do with politeness norms than anything else. What it means to be polite is not culturally invariant -- to take an extreme example which you may have been exposed to anecdotally, the sorts of things that are important and considered polite to a Japanese person are not the same as to an American person. You're rude there if you don't pour drinks for your guests with both hands and if you don't slurp your noodles you're insulting the cook.
Well, French culture (for example) may share a lot more in common with American culture than Japanese culture does, but it is nonetheless different and has different ideas of what it means to be polite. Consider: most Americans think that French people are quite rude, and it's not uncommon for people who go to France on vacation (one of the most popular vacation destinations in the world) to come back with stories about how rude they are. What may surprise you is that in France, Americans are widely seen as extremely rude. Despite what you may think, this is not due to France's perceived anti-Americanism. It's due to different politeness norms. Since I'm intimately familiar with both cultures, I'll give you a run-down of why this notion persists on both sides. Similar explanations work for any other culture, I'm sure, although the details are bound to be different.
French, like many European languages (and English, in the old days, but not any more) has what is called a T-V distinction. This means that they have two different words for "you": one is formal, and one is informal. With friends and children you might use the informal one; with strangers on the street, colleagues at work, clients, etc, you'd probably use the formal one. It's actually much more subtle and complex than this, but bear with me. Then, the French rarely address people they don't know well by their first names, preferring instead words like Mister, Madam, and Sir. They place extremely heavy emphasis on greeting people, even strangers: when you walk into the Baker's shop, as soon as you open the door, you are expected to greet everyone (not individually, but you might say something like "Messieurs Dames" Saying "Please" and "Thank You" is extremely important. With people you don't know well, you are expected to be formal, even a little bit stiff. This is because being overly familiar with someone you don't know well is considered very rude, and the French person feels rather the same way that an American might feel when his personal space is invaded if someone is too informal with him.
Americans, on the other hand, speak a language which lacks a T-V distinction. While saying please and thank you is considered well-mannered, in general, the American thinks he is being polite by being friendly. In American society, smiling a lot when you greet someone and acting like you're old friends is considered polite, and calling someone Mister is seen as extremely stuffy -- outside of very formal situations, like job interviews, the average American feels uncomfortable using these terms. You don't want to be seen as stuck-up, and many Americans will feel that you are putting on airs if you don't smile much and persist in calling them sir.
I remember once that my cousin came to visit me and she had a conversation with a lady while waiting in line at the supermarket. The lady was very friendly, asked her how she liked the US, and generally did the American thing. The lady said things like, "Oh, you should come over to my place sometime, my husband really knows how to BBQ". My cousin came away feeling like this woman, who was just trying to be friendly, was extremely fake. All the small talk, the asking of questions whose answers she wasn't really interested in -- they all severely offended her French sensibilities. But this is in no way a criticism of the American woman; in the context of American culture, she was being polite and welcoming to a foreigner. Still, a misunderstanding resulted.
So, essentially, what is considered polite is different in differ
You're being extremely short-sighted. Have you ever been to Syria? It's one of the most warm-hearted and hospitable countries on earth. The government is corrupt and oppressive, no doubt, but the people are the ones getting shafted here -- embargoes on places like Cuba and Syria have demonstratively done nothing to weaken the hold of tyrannical governments. If anything, they've done the opposite. How? Because, see, it gives those governments a scapegoat. North Koreans believe that everything shitty about the DPRK is all the fault of the US and Japan, and with trade sanctions as they are, the government of the DPRK (and of Syria, and of Cuba) actually can claim that that is the case and use it to cover up the corrupt nature of their own governments.
Newsflash: embargoes don't prevent fancy American luxury items from getting into the nation, they just limit the use of those goods to the very wealthy, ie, the government cronies. So the people who get shafted are, as usual, the poor, who are already oppressed by their own governments.
How long have we had an embargo on Cuba now? Syria? North Korea? Do any of these countries show even the slightest sign of caving in? No. Their people starve, the local governments blame us for it and use the embargo as proof, all while continuing to live like kings.
People here who keep saying "Castro will be dead soon" are ignoring something fundamental about Cuba, too -- it is not, despite what you may have heard, a dictatorship. It is a one party state, and there's a huge difference. A dictatorship's government centers around a dictator, and when that dictator dies, the government acts like a body without a head. In a one-party state (ie, China, the old Soviet Union, Syria, Singapore, etc) there is typically a party whose head (chairman, president, whatever) leads the state with input from the party. The Cuban Communist Party is not beholden to Fidel, and is quite capable of running the country without him, as has been demonstrated recently. Rather like the PRC didn't collapse when Mao died, the USSR didn't collapse when Lenin or Stalin kicked the bucket, and Syria is still a thorn in the US's side even after Hafez al-Assad's death in 2000.
I didn't mention North Korea because I'm not sure how much power the Korean Worker's Party actually has -- there's a fair amount of evidence that their existence is ornamental and that real power rests in the military and that Kim Jong Il is in firm control of it. Also, Kim Il Sung, who was appointed by Stalin to lead North Korea after the Korean war, was Kim Jong Il's father, and he groomed his son for power the way a prince would be in a monarchy, which is not how one-party states generally function. (It's worth noting that Kim Il Sung was, especially in his later years, far less crazy than his son is, and was actually talking to the South Korean government when he died in 1994).
Dude, you're not getting it. It's not very complicated. You say "Universe comes into existence with nothing as the cause" is the most ludicrous of the choices you list. Given that, you claim that one of the other choices, all of which involve "something" creating the universe, is more probable. Fine so far. But then you run into a big problem: the "something" that created the universe, well, what created that?
See, most religious people will, in the same breath, say "it's ludicrous to say that nothing created the universe, something must have, ergo God" and "Nothing created God. He simply is."
What I don't understand -- perhaps you can explain it to me -- is why it is acceptable to argue that "Nothing created the universe" is unlikely, but that "Nothing created God" is acceptable.
The problem with causality is this: if you accept that every effect has a cause, then proceeding inductively, there must be an infinite number of causes and effects. Consider: A happens because B. Why does B happen? Because C happened. Why does C happen? Because D happened, and so on. If you never allow "Nothing caused X to happen", it is clear that you have what is called an "infinite regression", in other words, there must be an infinite number of events.
So there are two possibilities here, largely speaking: either our understanding of causality is correct, each cause must have an effect, and so the universe has been around forever, or our understanding of time/causality is flawed and based on observations that only hold locally. Einstein already showed that our understanding of time was deeply flawed, so it's not a really big leap to assume that our understanding of causality is likewise deeply flawed. And an "infinite" universe seems to contradict a great number of observations.
"God came into existence without a cause" is no more ridiculous than "The Universe came into existence without cause" because both involve something incredibly complex coming into existence without cause. The difference is, the Universe is provably here, and so far we've managed to explain most of what we observe without resorting to the proverbial "unmoved mover". Why add more complexity without getting any useful predictive power out of it?
String theory makes no useful predictions beyond what QM and GR already predict, and is much, much more complicated. The edge cases between QM and GR that are interesting defy attempts at experimental testing, because to do so would require "more energy that exists in the universe" and other such bullshit.
String "theory" is a pseudoscientific wankfest that siphons funds from people who are actually doing real science. Its only redeeming feature is that some interesting mathematics has come out of it.
I agree with the GP -- string theory is as much a theory as ID is a theory, which is to say, not at all.
I used to also say I was agnostic, because while I was fairly certain that no god existed, I had to admit that I was unable to prove that. I have since developed a more nuanced understanding, which I explained in this post some time ago. Sorry for linking to myself, but I think it bears repeating and I said it well enough last time.
You don't seem to understand what "antitrust" means -- and unfortunately, you're not alone in this here on Slashdot. It seems lots of people think "antitrust" means any sort of subjectively "unfair" market manipulation, but that's not what it means. Antitrust law, broadly speaking, has to do with monopolies that are unfairly leveraged, with oligopolies that collude to set prices, and with mergers and acquisitions that consolidate the only major players in a market into one, dominant player.
First off, despite what you may have heard, in the US at least, monopolies are not illegal. If by fair competition you become the only player on the block, you are not subject to antitrust law. If, however, you use your monopoly position to create barriers to entry into the market (other than the natural barriers caused by competition) or if you use your monopoly in one market to unfairly compete in another market, you may be subject to antitrust law.
With regards to Apple -- and for the record, I am not a fanboy, I don't own an iPod and I run Debian on my Thinkpad -- there is very little evidence that they have a monopoly anywhere at all. First: the iPod is not a monopoly. This seems to be very difficult for some Slashdotters to grasp. Yes, it is by far and away the most popular digital music player on the market today, but it is not the only one. And it isn't like the only alternative is Microsoft's Zune or some other non-profitable offering subsidized by a powerful company trying to break into the market, either. There are literally thousands of competitive offerings, with the same feature set as the iPod, many of them technically superior in pretty much every way to the iPod, that are cheaper to boot. People in the US don't seem to buy them much, but they most certainly are available. The barriers to entry in the digital music player market are extremely low, and there is nothing whatsoever about Apple's dominance that changes that. Companies like Creative, iRiver, and countless other small no-name brands from China manage to remain profitable, although their volumes are somewhat lower than Apple's. But hey, newsflash: most markets have a dominant player. That doesn't mean the dominant player has a monopoly, and even if it they did, it doesn't mean they obtained that monopoly unfairly or that they're abusing their monopoly to fix prices.
The only semi-possible charge related to antitrust law that has ever been levied against Apple is with regards to their Fairplay DRM, which is only available on the iPod, and which allegedly causes vendor lock-in. Well, there's a big reason that no one ever pursues this: it's a non-starter. Many competing music players play AAC without DRM these days, and according to Apple's own data, the overwhelming majority of music on people's iPods does not come from the iTunes music store, which is pretty much the only place that you might get AAC + Fairplay tracks. Unless you put DRM on your own tracks -- and who does that -- most music is still ripped from people's own CD collection or obtained illegally via P2P or similar.
These complaints about Fairplay also ignore the glaringly obvious: pretty much any proprietary software package also has proprietary file formats, many of which are deliberately obfuscated, precisely in order to lock users into their products. Reading Microsoft hackers' own experiences reverse engineering the WordPerfect document formats back when that product was dominant is extremely illustrative in this regard. (The fact that I'm pointing out that this is standard industry practice should not in any way be construed as support for said practice; I am in favor of open document formats precisely because I disagree with vendor lock-in. But the fact remains: this sort of thing, by itself, is not an antitrust violation.)
In fact, my iRiver (which I purchased because it supports Ogg Vorbis and love) supports some DRM-laden format of its own, IRM or somesuch, which
That's a good point, of course, but the quantum computer will only be useful for solving certain classes of hard problems, not all of them. The mathematics behind their capabilities are relatively well understood, and in all likelihood cryptographers will design new algorithms that are difficult for quantum computers to solve.
I have no evidence of this, of course, but it's too important a problem for the experts to ignore. Lest you forget, the government too has data it seeks to keep secret, and while basement-dwelling hackers may be unable to purchase a quantum supercomputer, odds are foreign states will have the resources to do so.
Neither of my two older brothers is as smart as I am.
Thank you, please drive through.
Sorry, the emphasized should have been "increases", as should be obvious from context. My bad. Should have read the preview more carefully.
Well, that's sort of the point of fiat money -- to make the money supply a policy variable. This fails spectacularly when the government mismanages the money supply, which has happened historically and tends to happen whenever the central bank is unable to act independently -- this is why the Fed and the European Central Bank are not beholden to the central government but instead to economists.
The thing is, a supply-side cap on the money supply can cause serious problems, because economics is not a zero-sum game: the size of the pie is not fixed. If the economy is going to grow, the money supply needs to grow as well, or deflation occurs. Deflation is just as bad -- perhaps worse -- than inflation.
The question really is, can you trust the group in charge of monetary policy to not fuck it up? The alternative is to cap the growth of the economy with a money supply that can't grow to match economic growth.
Currently, the Fed and its analog in other countries deliberately targets a very low, constant inflationary value of between 2 and 4 percent. There are a number of reasons for this; one of the most often stated is that it provides investment incentive and insures that cash remains in circulation by making it financially unwise to hide money in your mattress, where it does no one any good.
The cost of gold and other precious metals is not constant either, because the supply is not truly capped -- when someone discovers a major new ore, for example, the supply can fluctuate radically, especially since the supply of gold is not uniformly distributed in the world. For example, the Soviet Union had massive gold reserves, and under the gold standard, they were able to leverage this wealth without any real economic production. Very efficient economies like Hong Kong or Israel do not have their true value adequately reflected in a gold standard, because the entire system is warped by poor countries in Africa and Asia that naturally have massive reserves.
The demand is also not constant -- other than people liking gold jewelry, gold is used in electronics and in other applications. When entrepreneurs find a way to substitute away from gold -- for example, using a ceramic or polymer replacement -- demand for gold drops and so its effective value drops. But wait, your monetary system is tied to the value of gold -- and so you have constant, erratic inflation and deflation. That's not good.
Then there's the issue of foreign exchanges. With fiat currencies, foreigners who want to buy American goods must first buy dollars, and similarly, Americans who want to buy foreign goods must first purchase foreign currencies. This has an automatic balancing effect: for example, suppose manufacturing is very cheap in Japan and very expensive in the US. As a result, everyone buys Japanese products instead of American products, right? But the result of this is, demand for the Japanese Yen increases, while its supply stays roughly constant, and so the value of the Yen falls relative to other currencies, such as the dollar. The lack of demand for the dollar causes the value of the dollar to fall. As a result, American goods, which were previously not price-competitive with Japanese goods, decline in price on the world market, boosting the American economy.
Now, when everyone was on a precious metal standard, the only foreign exchange markets were due to differences between silver, gold, platinum, or whatever. If America and Japan were both on the gold standard, demand for Japanese yen translated into demand for American dollars, because both were backed by the same commodity. This negated any possible balancing effect, making competition in international markets far less dynamic. This is similar to the problem with the US and China today -- China pegs its currency to the dollar, and so the falling price of US-made goods on the international market causes the international price of goods manufactured in China to fall as well, despite China's incredible economic growth. Thi
Supply is only one side of the value equation; demand is the other. The fact that there is very little gold around, for example, is not all that is required to make it valuable -- people wanting to purchase it is the other side of the transaction.
You're welcome to note that there is demand for gold, as long as you understand that I'm not claiming there isn't. But don't make the classic economic faux pas of assuming that gold has intrinsic value thanks to its rarity. Gold has value because people want it, and people only want it because it is perceived to have value. A supply-side cap only serves to simplify the economics by removing (or at least limiting) supply-side variance.
Weak. You completely missed the point. The guy wanted to buy an Ubuntu laptop to support Dell's decision to sell Ubuntu, and he wanted to buy it for his business. He found that he could not do this, and he is doing something about it: telling others. All your "alternatives" do not do what he intended to do, which is to support Dell in its decision to sell Ubuntu. However, bad press -- which is what this is -- may cause Dell to rethink its arbitrary decision not to sell business laptops with Ubuntu, or at least clarify their position.
Your comments about "Americans" notwithstanding, consumers can get an awful lot by complaining. There's an old saying in business: "A satisfied customer tells one person, and a dissatisfied customer tells ten". Companies worry about this because bad press is bad for their bottom line. Complaining about service (or lack thereof) is a tried and tested way to hit a company where it hurts, ie, financially. Getting burned quietly and then voting with your feet has a far smaller impact.
Well, I'll admit that it's been a while since I saw Bowling or Farenheit -- unimpressed as I was by both I only saw them once when they were released, and it's been a while now -- but if recollection serves, the thing that MM was criticizing was the NRA's decision to hold the meeting in Denver shortly after Columbine, given the situation. I personally don't see why the NRA shouldn't have been allowed to assemble, mind you -- but from MM's perspective (and I think too the perspective of his supporters) just the fact that they decided to assemble is what was upsetting. The reason I said I thought your example was pretty weak was because of that -- because I don't think the fact that he also mentioned that "he'd fought for the right to assemble" materially impacted the reality of what MM was attacking in the first place, which was that the decision was made to assemble at all. To them, saying he has "the right to assemble" for any reason whatsoever is callous, or something. Obviously, as Americans we have the right to assemble, the Moore-ophiles don't contest that (I don't think). They just think he shouldn't have made the decision to.
As for the whole Condi thing, adding the rest of the quote doesn't really convince me of much, because what the US apparently forgot was that for all his dictatorial tendencies, Iraq under Saddam was a secular state and one of the most hated regimes of Al Qaeda. I can't remember exactly how the quote was used in Farenheit, but my guess is that MM was quoting a bunch of US muckity-mucks saying 9/11 and Iraq were linked, which lest you forget was how they convinced us that war in Iraq was a good idea. Certainly, he probably made it sound as though Condi was saying that the two were directly related, instead of ideologically related. That's a perversion of what she meant, perhaps, but from my perspective, either way, she was full of shit.
But to answer your point, yes, this quote seems much more manipulative than the first you produced. I don't think it'll win over many MM supporters, though, because Condi's full quote is just as ridiculous as the snippet, taken in hindsight. But their implications are clearly different, so I see your point.
Well, I have an expensive Blue Shield PPO and live in one of the most affluent areas of Silicon Valley; I made an appointment with the dermatologist today, and was told that the soonest I could be seen to examine a possibly cancerous mole growth was in late July.
I'm sure for every random anecdote you provide, someone else can provide one "proving" the opposite point. That's why, as we say, the plural of anecdote is not data. And the data seems to indicate that Americans pay much more than people in Canada and the UK for the same coverage.
That's not to say that their system is perfect or even that we should emulate it, just that ours is fucked up.
I don't much like MM either, but this is pretty weak. I'm hoping it's not the best example you can provide?
You have absolutely no proof of this, no matter how much you may wish it so. The US does have an impressive record of philanthropy, but as economists say, "incentives matter", and as the failed communists states taught us, depending on altruism to solve a problem is generally a non-starter. It always surprises me that free market fundamentalists point to "charity" as a way to solve the market's shortcomings. Here's a hint: the market works because people are selfish, not because they're altruistic.
The fact that Americans have an impressive philanthropic record has, in all likelihood, more to do with the fact that they get tax breaks on their charitable giving than on their inherent desire to do good. This explanation is much more inline with "real" economics rather than over-simplified and idealized libertarian dogma. Currently, wealthy persons can often "abuse" loopholes the tax system (and I use the term abuse lightly, because I don't see the result as being bad) to decrease their overall tax burden. In essence, they end up paying less overall thanks to their charitable giving: hey, if you had a choice between paying 50 grand to the government and 30 grand to various charitable institutions, which would you pick? After all, either way, the money you give away isn't yours to spend anymore. Unfortunately, your idea of doing away with taxes also does away with this incentive. I suspect you'd see charitable giving plummet in that scenario.
Occasionally, extremely rich persons (such as Gates or Buffet) give away swaths of money for altruistic reasons, and they are to be commended for their voluntary actions. No doubt there will always be people who make such gestures (and the fact that, even after giving away 80% of their wealth, they are still among the richest people in the world probably doesn't hurt). But depending on such gestures to ensure the health of the population of one of the wealthiest nations in the world is folly. I don't know if you noticed, but many of these high-profile charitable institutions are working (commendably, might I add) to fight Malaria or AIDS in Africa, not to provide universal health care to Americans.
I agree that government bureaucracy needs to be streamlined, corruption reduced, etc, and I think that in the information age, this can be achieved by greater transparency in government (ie, allowing any member of the public access to non-classified information, especially financial information, thereby making it easier for us to audit and trace government spending, and by making it considerably more difficult to classify information). But there are some things the government does better than the market -- the market is only the most efficient allocator of scarce resources in particular instances, as any economist would cheerfully tell you (mainly in competitive markets with low barriers to entry, and health care isn't one of these). You seem to know this, but depending on voluntary donations as a solution is folly. Having a healthy, educated populace is important in recessions as well as in boom years. Giving, while commendable, cannot be counted on.