So if I sit in Britain & buy an NTSC TV & pay for the TV license, then BBC should be forced to broadcast in NTSC also for me.
Not at all. PAL (which they use) is a standard not tied to any one company. WMA is a proprietary format, wholly owned and controlled by one company. Further, that company has been convicted of criminal actions in illegally forcing that format onto consumers. Do you see the distinction? The BBC should not be forced to provide any given format, but they should be required to provide a format that is not tied to and profits one given company, especially not a criminal one. The can provide WMA all they want, but only if they also support other proprietary formats from competitors; otherwise they are rewarding a monopolist for criminal acts while at the same time denying access to some citizens who have paid the same amount of money. Or, they could simply support an open format that any company is free to implement, which is probably what any tax funded organization should be doing.
If I run a website I'll put content out any damn way I please. This is a load of crap, regardless of who they are and what format they are objecting to.
I see, and do you happen to be an elected government that pays for running that Website by collecting tax dollars from the people (at gunpoint if need be)? I didn't think so.
But, in a high-crime area, might not the criminals be more of a day-to-day threat?
There is an implicit statement in your question, and I disagree with it. Many times police are criminals. In fact, I can think of only two cops I know that have not admitted to me that they abuse their position to commit criminal acts of some sort.
Focusing on police make it seem like a marketing stunt more than concern for the populace.
The ACLU's mission is to protect civil liberties. Police officers have more authority, and thus pose a greater danger to civil liberties than normal individuals. If a normal criminal comes up to me and tells me to get in the back of his car, I'll walk away. If I have to, I'll pull a gun and shoot him. Legally, I can't do either of those things if that criminal happens to be a cop. Obviously these cameras can be used to help prosecute criminals of all sorts, but focusing on police seems wholly appropriate to me.
Of course, you do realize that Apple has a complete monopoly on software, bundling AND hardware in its own niche
Monopolies are defined by markets, not niches. Due tell what relevant market you think Apple has monopolized. They are a near case when it comes to portable, digital music players and nothing else.
...never mind of the law is shortsighted enough to miss that.
Sigh. Laws exist for a reason. Apple is not leveraging any monopoly you might think they have (aside from possibly ipods) into another market and I defy you to cite an example. The law doesn't make what Apple is doing illegal, because it does not undermine the free market. You can still buy a Gateway preloaded with Windows or a Dell preloaded with Linux. Those are Apple's competitors.
Apple users use anything Steve feeds them and Apple's solution is far more locked down than Windows ever was.
Who cares. Apple restricts their software to just their hardware which is an annoying drawback to end users. It also is perfectly legal and has nothing to do with why antitrust actions are illegal.
Did 90% of all people sleep through the Econ101 section on monopolies?
Why don't they file against Apple? I mean, they have Spotlight and that's Apple-only and bundled, right?
Who the hell modded this "insightful?" First, Apple is not a monopoly, so they cannot illegally leverage that monopoly via bundling, hence there is no legal action that makes sense. Second, Google was not even complaining about the bundling (although they have every right to). They complained about two things:
MS's search feature slows down other search features.
MS's search feature uses undocumented APIs that provide an unfair advantage to competitors who don't happen to also have the source code and documentation to Windows.
Apple fits into neither of those categories. Google has an indexed search on OS X and it uses the same API and hooks as Spotlight, resulting in no slowdowns for Google's tool and no disadvantage given to them.
Are those enough reasons? If not, please RTFA before posting again.
I've used it. It is not ready for prime time yet. Let a few million more people get it with their new computers so that the user base is too large to ignore, then give it 12 months for hardware and software vendors get everything up to speed. Then it might be ready for adoption for users with a clue.
Right now I'm running OS X and WinXP on this machine. There is almost nothing in Vista I want that is not already better on one of these two platforms. Vista's application support is worse than XP (it won't yet run the Adobe application I need to do my job, at all, unless I want to sign up for a beta program). Almost all of the new features in Vista are already in OS X. Indexed searching works better from OS X and supports more file types. Powershell/monad runs, but does not seem to have as many tools and is not as familiar and universal as bash. Really, the only thing I'm missing is the audio output by application functionality, and since my audio manipulation tools are all OS X only, that is only marginally useful.
The people bitching about vista here are the same ones who bitched about XP, and before that, windows 2000.
Agreed, but then I was pretty disappointed with both of those OS's. If we had some actual competition in the industry, maybe Microsoft would get off their butts and introduce some real innovations that customers (not content providers or MS) want and need. Add in the fact that the licensing for Vista restricts its use in VMs to really expensive versions while at the same time adding serious bloat and I don't see upgrading to it as likely for several hardware cycles. We'll see in 3-4 years how things are looking. I might upgrade to Vista then, or I might not run Windows at all at that point.
Only after the konq team raised holy hell about getting an 11 meg undocumented patch.
Actually, it was after people peripherally communicated with Konq team raised holy hell with inflammatory and uninformed statements in forums. The Konq team did not seem to care so much at the time from what I read and had not even contacted anyone at Apple to ask for more documentation or granularity.
It didn't look good for Apple, and they could no longer claim to "play well with open source".
I'm always amazed that people think Apple cares if people on forums think they "play well with open source." Most of their customers don't even know what open source is and could not care less. Those people that do care and are in a position to do something about it are people actually working on projects Apple contributes to. They are used to contributions from large commercial shops. Sometimes they are great about collaboration and sometimes they suck, it all depends on who's in charge of it. In that respect Apple is pretty typical, aside from being a bit more secretive than average.
The original poster said that they had a monopolistic worldview. He/she did not claim they were a monopoly.
Yeah, a umm, monopolistic world view. Does that mean you have a pedophiliac worldview? After all, you do think a lot like people who molest babies. I'm not saying you're a pedophile or anything, just that you have that kind of a world view.
Oooooh! Never mind Apple's long history of closed hardware and proprietary software...
Umm "closed hardware?" What does that even mean? I've never had any problems installing Linux on a Mac. Anyway, making closed software does not mean you're opposed to FLOSS. Both make sense in different contexts. I'd say the majority of open source code is written by companies that also write closed source. My company is a huge supporter of FLOSS and we contribute to all your favorite colossal OSS projects, yet we also make closed source software.
...they contribute back to a FOSS project they exploit in one of their many proprietary software projects!
Do you write OSS? If you call giving the authors what they want and asked for (free contributions) exploiting, then maybe you just don't understand the concept.
All hail the infinite wisdom and benevolence of our Apple masters!
FLOSS is not some stupid charity trying to fight human nature. The BSD and GPL licenses were developed with commercial uses in mind. It does not rely upon charity, but instead offers good value to commercial entities in exchange for open code returned to them. I am so sick of OSS pseudo-zealots who like to preach about how the world would be a wonderful happy place if everyone was a socialist that did not eat meat. If you're going to be fanatical about a movement, why don't you at least understand it first?
At the next keynote address...
That's the best you can come up with? A lame joke about what you think Apple would do but don't. Weak.
Please go find an olde timey BSD guy, one with a big beard who grumbles a lot, and tell him how Apple is ripping him off. He'll show you what a cluestick is.
Safari lost bigtime on OS X because Apple refused to castrate ANY advertising, annoying or otherwise.
Safari has most of the OS X market. If you go to Safari: Block Pop-up Windows, I'd say that counts as castrating some advertising.
There is a powerful incentive for business to avoid Safari on any platform, for the same reason.
Safari can block ads with a plugin, just as most Firefox users do. PithHelmet comes to mind. Safari is also quite a bit faster right now, if currently less flexible than Firefox. The major reason for corporations to avoid Safari, is that it is not cross-platform. This is largely mitigated by a Windows version. It still won't run on Linux, and no Konquerer is not the same thing from a testing or training standpoint. The other reason is customizability, which will likely be largely addressed as all the browsers except IE move to unified plug-in standards.
Standardizing on Firefox is an easy decision to make.
I agree, but not because of ads. Ideally, you need not standardize on anything except "not IE" which seems to work most places I've worked.
If there is nothing that can be reasonably done to solve a problem then is it logical to spend time worrying about it?
My comments about the past spoke to the lack of an ethical entitlement to inheritance, not to a practical solution. There is a practical solution to wealth condensation, it is simply to implement enough socialism to prevent historical distribution of wealth from being the single most important factor in a person's financial success today (which is currently the case).
...otherwise how far back should we go?
We go back right up until we had a fair society governed by just laws, which is to say we travel to the future. I propose we do this, by making the present a fair and just society so that the crimes of the past do not influence the relative wealth in the present, but rather it is based upon what you do while you are alive and how hard and smart you work. It is called meritocracy.
Should I have to compensate the descendants of those Roman settlers (assuming that they are still around and could be located)? Certainly not.
Why not? If you're benefitting from the crime, you have ethical responsibility as soon as you know about it. If I steal a million dollars and give you $100K one day, when the cops catch me, you have to give it back, even though you committed no crime. Why should one person live their entire life never having to work, while another must struggle because of historical wealth distribution? It isn't fair, and we can make it fair by stopping historical aspects from being the main factor in such things.
As for the possibility of increased violence and the like I will take my chances.
Luckily, you don't get to choose that for all of society.
I will not have my life dictated to me by an angry mob and if that means violence then so be it.
Luckily, you don't get to choose that course for our society either. I'm not willing to let democracy in this country die in a bloody coup because you felt entitled to money because of who your parents were.
Why do you think that people live in gated communities with guards, razor wire, and cameras?
Because some people have disproportionately large amounts of wealth, usually due to unjust reasons and that breeds hatred among those suffering in poverty. It does not last forever. Someone has to man those gates and cameras and it isn't going to be the very wealth. Eventually, the wealth always gets redistributed. I prefer it is done so in a civilized and orderly manner that preserves democracy and keeps society stable.
If having these things means that I get to keep mine then so be it, I make no apologies.
Ahh, the old "right makes might" argument. You have it and even if it is not just you'll keep it. Fine. Don't complain when the mob shoves red hot pokers up your butt, because if they have the might, surely that gives them the right. By the time things come to a head, there are a lot more poor than their are wealthy. Already the ultra wealthy is down to about 1.5% and the number of people entering that class each year by means other than inheritance is down to handful. Meanwhile, a full 50% of our population has a median wealth of nothing, with debt equalling assets. That 37 to one odds and getting worse. Good luck with that.
which should read: "As required by license, Apple publishes its open source enhancements".
Actually, Apple publishes more than it needs to, especially with regard to all the BSD licensed projects they work with. They go beyond the minimum requirements with Webkit as well, interacting with the Konquerer team and providing packages in a more easily digestible and better documented fashion than they need to.
That is not to say that Apple is acting for the best interests of humanity or anything. They just understand the open source model and how they can use it to benefit themselves. By resubmitting their changes and actively getting them incorporated in open source code bases, Apple does not have to maintain a fork and can more easily pull in changes from the rest of the community. Safari is not Apple's core competency, just a useful tool. As such, Apple and the rest of the OSS community can collaborate and benefit one another and everyone while making money doing so.
The only "firefox killer" would likely be a Open source Webkit/Webcore based browser that is lighter and faster than firefox.
Safari and Konquerer both fit that bill. I don't expect anything to beat Safari on OS X, and I don't know that Safari has much chance on Windows. It is probably a better fit for the average user than either IE or Firefox, but average users just use what came with the machine, and that is IE. More advanced users are probably more likely to use Firefox, although the unified plug-in architecture that will allow Firefox plug-ins to work on Opera and Safari, may well change that to some degree (hopefully while motivating improvements to all browsers).
Your perspective is skewed from the blind hatred of large corporations that is harbored by so many readers here.
Gee, what would it take for a type of organization to get indifferent, uncaring americans to hate them? Oh yeah, piss us off by combining the worst bureaucratic aspects of the DMV (paperwork, employees who are clueless and don't care, expense, lack of internal communication, inability to perform) with all the worst aspects of a ticket scalper (high prices, gouging, differential pricing, bribing police). Large corporations have earned the way we feel about them.
The costs of building and maintaining an efficient broadband network on a nationwide scale is tremendous. Just how many companies do you think could afford to build a system of that scale?
Do you mean with or without the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent to subsidize what the cable company owns today?
Now, the FCC limits Comcast and ALL other cable providers to a MAXIMUM of 30% market penetration. This means in order to provide the entire country with high-speed cable internet, you would need FOUR financially thriving cable systems.
A cartel is not functionally any better than a monopoly. Unless those four cable companies both provide service to the same location (which most of them have agreements to avoid) then how is this any better for a consumer. If you have to move to get a reasonable cable provider, the system has failed. Note, it is my understanding that the new FCC rules requiring more than on provider for the majority of homes in an areas (as opposed to each provider taking half the homes in a zip code) was recently mothballed.
Yes the cable industry spends millions and millions of dollars a year lobbying the government. Does that make them evil?
That depends upon what they are lobbying for. Claiming that a non-profit organization lobbying for laws that stop pollution is the same thing as a commercial entity lobbying for laws that will force consumers to pay them more and prevent competition, is a pretty lame argument.
The fact is that lobbying the government is the most efficient way to get things done.
And that, all by itself is a problem because it favors the wealthy in what is supposed to eb a democracy where everyone has an equal vote and the people are represented by their representatives, not trying to pay them extra to do the right thing.
In Slashdot mythology, that is a...
This is called a strawman argument. It is a logical fallacy. You couldn't find anyone to espouse a weak argument, so you claim it is the opinion of "Slashdot."
Personally, I think it is about on par with what would the PC market look like if the government sanctioned a 30% marketshare cap on Microsoft.
Sigh. You don't understand the inherent geographical component to cable networks that does not apply to PCs? Besides, the PC industry is not media. If I owned 100% of the PC industry, I still can't control what airs on TV a week before the elections, which is what the market caps for media are for, to stop the terrible abuses that happened when we had no such laws.
Do you really trust the OSS community to pick up the slack for the rest of the 70% of desktop users out there?
I trust someone would. If MS had only 30% of the market, most of the problems with OSS would go away. Half of them are interoperability problems that are artificial problems with OSS products and would not exist except for MS's abuse. The rest is the lack of investment in the area because investors know competing against a monopoly who can introduce artificial problems with your new product, is a waste of resources and invest elsewhere.
Bah, I may have missed some points, but this is just off the top of my head. If you want to correct me, then by all means I welcome constructive f
I think I have one of the worst experiences with Comcast.
I can top that. I was an early cable internet adopter. Back in the day, the local service did not provide cable modems, you had to buy your own. So, of course that is what I did. Eventually, the company I had service from was bought out, and then the area was swapped to Comcast who took over the service. Okay, aside from being incompetent hacks whose service was spotty and support was clueless, all was well and good. Then I moved. The demanded I give them back "their" cable modem. I told them they never gave me one. They did not believe me and required I dig up a 4 year old receipt to prove I had bought one. In the end, I did get my credit card statement and they said okay. A few weeks later I got another bill and called them. They said it was their mistake. That happened a dozen times easily, over the course of the next year and then I started getting collections notices from agencies, who I called and told my story to and who all then went away. I was threatened with court numerous times, which I would have welcomed at that point, but they would never follow through with their legal threats so I could get it cleared up.
I have no idea how much this damaged my credit rating, but I assume significantly. I should be able to bill those bastards for the hours and hours I spent on the phone. You know what the worst part is, right now where I live my choice is Comcast or the local phone co. who wants $60 more than Comcast just for internet service. The fact that my tax dollars subsidized this lousy service and insane prices makes me want to kick a congress critter in the balls. We seriously need telecom reform.
In practice, Communism and Democracy are mutually exclusive.
You should actually read posts before replying. The US is a communist country and a democracy, of sorts. Every country is a communist country to some degree. Communism is a fundamental aspect of almost all economies. It is not a system of government.
Sure a Democracy can vote in a communist government, but until now it appears that once Communists are voted in the only way to get them out is by shooting the buggers.
Countries referred to as "communist governments" are almost always not practicing any more communism than the US. In many cases they are practicing more socialism than the US, but you'd have to be using some pretty "undergraduate" or perhaps "dropped out of high school" definitions in order to equate the too the way most Americans do.
And I say that with a certain amound of real world experience having grown up in Africa.
Ever been to Madagascar. That is a communist country (one of the few worth of the name in the world). They're a democracy where the government advocates resource sharing among groups of villages, which are also voting blocks. Of course since the country is fairly poor and disorganized in practice I'm not sure how functional it is, but that is what a communist country is, by definition, one that favors communism in the economy.
You seem to be confused by American propaganda and by the fact that most Americans refer to certain foreign political parties as the "communist party" when in truth they're a totalitarian group that promises eventual socialism. It is sad how much the US propaganda has misled and confused the people.
You worry too much about inherited wealth and the relative disparity of income...
First, it is disparity of wealth, not disparity of income that matters. Two people each make $200K a year. On works day and night inventively and with dedication creating benefit to society in his quest for wealth. The other inherited 3 million when his parents died. He does not work at all and contributes nothing to society, merely living off the interest paid to him by people who do work hard.
The latter case is is very minor example of the problem. We're not talking about a fw million, we're talking about 40% of all the wealth in the US, being conservatively invested and not motivating any people to work hard or do things that benefit society.
instead of things that really matter like lots of high quality and low cost goods and services
The cost of good and services is low when people are working and being inventive, not when they are leeching off of the rest of society due to inherited wealth.
You also spend a great deal of time trying to justify sticking your hands in pockets of other people or helping yourself to their property simply because they may have more wealth than you do.
Considering my tax bracket, I'd be justifying people taking money away from me, not the other way around. That's okay, because I'm willing to work. I'd rather live in a society that has greater equality and less violence than I would subscribe to some "right" to inherit money from a dead person.
That may be good for a populist politician, but it all boils down to coveting your neighbors oxen or his wife or indeed anything else that belongs to your neighbor and that is neither just nor right.
So just suppose 400 years ago my ancestor killed most of your ancestors, took all their wealth, and enslaved them. Now do to that crime, I now inherit billions and you begin life in debt. Maybe you covet my inherited wealth, but that does not make my having it "right" or "just" or even reasonable in a civilized society.
If you agree that one should be able to spend one's own money as one freely chooses, subject to some minimal taxes to run the courts and provide for the common defense, then why should I not be able to give that money to my children without that particular transaction being arbitrarily singled out for a particularly onerous tax?
Because in the long term it guarantees the downfall of our economy and government. Because their has never been a fair starting point. You have your wealth likely at the expense of atrocities committed by your barbaric ancestors. Why should you benefit from those actions. Maybe if on day all the wealth was redistributed equally and we prevented people from benefiting from their crimes from then on, we could claim some right to inherited wealth, but that has never happened and seems pretty impractical to me.
The fraction of inherited wealth as a percentage of wealth is actually declining in the United States and has been declining for some time.
I'd like to see your references for that. The;ast I looked less was being recorded due to IRS rules, but there was little indication that less was inherited at the high end (top 10%) and a lot to indicate that less was being inherited at the low end since more poor people are dying in debt than any time since the big monopolies were running the show.
This might have something to do with the "stupid" children that you mentioned inheriting 500 million and then pissing it all away within their lifetimes...
But most wealthy people, statistically, do not lose their wealth over 1 or even 3 generations. Most of the wealthy can quite happily live doing nothing and contributing nothing to society while the poor pay them interest.
That money is also not just sitting in some vault somewhere collecting
You're offtopic, but I'll respond anyway. I cited current trends in malware, that anyone who wants to research can easily find. If you disagree with my statements, challenge them, don't respond with an ad hominem attack based upon your presumption that the previous poster could not have been in error with regard to the breakdown of the numbers. I imagine I was modded up either by one of the people here who knows who I am, or who has seen the data I have posted on Slashdot in the past regarding the subject of malware. I'll give you a hint, the guy three offices down from me is quoted in a Slashdot article about worms about once a month.
No, we did not or at least not as you suggest. In my family we received only the basic items (food, clothing, shelter, and education) and items directly associated with those needs free of charge (and even then they were allocated by the parents, not the children).
Those items more than qualify your family as a communist cell. The allocation of resources within the cell may be democratic or it may be authoritarian. The method is immaterial to whether or not it is communism. One of the local housing co-ops votes on what groceries they buy. The monastery near where I used to live was authoritarian, with the highest ranking monk making all the final decisions. Both were communist cells.
If we wanted anything else then we had to save our allowance money...
On of the interesting aspect of communism is that usually, not all resources were shared, just some of them. In some cases the only item shared might be a set of season tickets to a ball game, whereas in another it might be almost everything, with the exception of body parts.
It would be more accurate to say that my family was and is a mini-capitalist unit (w/some minimal socialist policies...and I do mean minimal) operating within a larger capitalist society.
Actually, that would make you a communist cell as well as a mini capitalist unit. All communist cells operate within a larger economy, that is what differentiates it from socialism.
There is nothing wrong with wealth condensation provided that the total production per person and therefore the standard of living rises right along with it (which tends to happen in free market capitalism).
Well, you're right. We disagree on this. Wealth disparity is the single strongest correlative factor to violence in a society. Murder, robbery, beatings, all go up with wealth condensation because even if the average production per person rises, the disparity still rises. The idea that it was poverty and not disparity that was so strongly linked has been fairly well debunked since the 60s.
It is the responsibility of the government to enforce rules and ensure fair dealing, in much the same way that the referee enforces the rules and ensures fair play in a competitive sporting competition.
There is an inherent unfairness to inequality of birth which has been well recognized for a very long time. Have you ever heard the saying "it takes money to make money." That is wealth condensation in a nutshell. The problem is, in an unregulated capitalism some people are born with more wealth, and since that wealth condenses more wealth all other factors being equal, the society becomes less and less economically equal until the system collapses when the poor revolt against the aristocracy, usually with a lot of bloodshed and pain and suffering and random results for a new government.
The combination of democracy with free market capitalism has overwhelmingly and consistently, despite some difficulties, delivered the best economic outcomes...
I don't think you understand. No one has ever had a purely capitalist free market and if it was tried it would not survive a week. The US is a blend of capitalism, communism, and socialism, just like pretty much all other economies. To have pure capitalism, you'd have to have families no longer sharing resources to eliminate the communist element. You'd have to do away with all socialized services like government run police, military, roads, etc. not funded by donations because they are socialism.
All the economies that survive for any length of time are ones that have a similar balance of these elements. The US is just as socialist as the EU, although we direct it differently. We are probably a little less communist and becoming even less so in many ways as atomic families divide into smaller cell sizes (although extended families among the very poor are getting larger).
Socialism is an economic system, Communism is a political system.
You are completely wrong. Communism is an economic system in which groups (called cells or communes) share some or all economic resources and make economic decisions as a group. For example, the nuclear family is a very small type of communist cell. A monastery or housing co-op is a slightly larger communist cell. The groups of villages in Madagascar that share resources as well as act as voting blocks are even larger communist cells. For extremely large communist cells the size of nations, communism becomes indistinguishable from socialism.
Communism engages in socialism, but every other political system on the planet, including democracy, engages in socialism as well.
Communism is a concept. It does not engage in anything. What americans call the "communist party" in some nations engages in socialism. Governments engage in socialism. That does not make them communist, it makes them socialist.
The distinction between communism and democracy is that communism is created as a system where a small group of self-selected individuals rule the lives of the rest.
No, the system of government you describe is called an oligarchy and it can happen within any sort of economy, although it is more likely in extreme economies.
I'm not going to do you the courtesy of reading through the rest of your post. I scanned it. Almost every point you bring up was already addressed in my previous post. Please stop listening to US propaganda from the 80s and actually read some economics texts. If you want to continue this conversation, go re-read my entire original post and reply to the points I made there, rather than ignoring them and going off on a rant that completely misses the point.
By traditional I meant Marx-Lenin-Mao communism, not hippy communes.
Lenin and Marx both advocated socialism, not communism, and they never implemented such a system, instead they implemented oligarchies that claimed some day they would implement even more extreme socialism. You seem to be viewing it in terms of what many USA residents think of and the mislabeled "communist" political parties they worked within. They were never actual communists, just socialists.
Northern Europen Socialism is MUCH different form old USSR socialism. Governments have an incentive to run their socialist programs well or be voted out. The Soviet Union could just kill their critics and sometimes did just that.
You're describing the difference between a totalitarian government and a democracy, not between two different kinds of socialism. The economic principals are the same (except for being applied much more extremely in the soviet bloc. In theory, Russia was even a democracy, it is just that in practice it was not effectively operating.
The UK has nationalized and then privatized various industries as political parties came and went.
Yes, when they are nationalized, that is socialism. When it is privatized that is capitalism. Some governments implement more or less socialism over time, while others maintain a more steady level. That doesn't make it any less socialism.
By it's[sic] nature socialism run by free people lacks the odious cooercive aspetcs[sic].
The coercion you refer to is the result of totalitarianism, not socialism. You might as well say "by its nature capitalism run by free people lack the odious aspects." It is equally true. Take a look at capitalist totalitarianism, run by feudal lords who enslaved people. It was pretty odious.
Socialism, capitalism, and communism are economic systems that can be applied in differing degrees. It is the nature of the government applying them what they are used for.
You are right of course that it matters little to a dying camp inmate if Stalin or Hitler put him there, but it is much easier to MAKE a Hitler-style dictatorship than a Communist one. Hitler at first went after marginal groups and tinkered at the edge of things. Big industrial concers were co-opted, not wholesale taken over. Lenin had to "break a few eggs and then some" to turn Russia into the USSR. There was not much gradual about it.
Both are dictatorships. How easy it is to create a dictatorship form a free society depends upon a couple of economic factors. First, how consolidated is the economic power to be controlled. The more centralized the power, the easier it is to control it and create a dictatorship. With extreme socialism, all of the industry is controlled by the government so it is very consolidated, leading to easier creation of a totalitarian state. With extreme communism you have very large cell sizes, so you need only take over each cell. With extreme capitalism, you only have a few monopolistic companies. All are likely to lead to totalitarianism. With a more moderate system that balances all of these items, power must be consolidated from many more, smaller sources, making totalitarianism harder to pull off.
The second major consideration is how the economy affects the motivation of the people. Wealth disparity leads to violent crime and lends itself to recruitment for revolutionary movements. The greater the wealth disparity, the easier it is for any given government to fall (totalitarian or free). Extreme capitalism is actually the most likely to topple, because the wealth so rapidly and permanently consolidates and creates situations where a few are born very wealthy, while the majority are born into relative poverty and spend their lives borrowing from the wealthy few. It is this disparity, much more than simple poverty levels, that determines how easy it is to recruit the populace to overthrow a government.
Good post! I must point out that traditional communism WILL NOT happen in a free society.
Well, traditional communism, would be communes, and they certainly do happen in a free society. There are quite a few just in this area.
You have to MAKE THEM do it. Thus Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, blood drenched butchers all.
Ahh, perhaps you're referring to the agendas of the "communist" political parties in Russia and China. Those did not advocate communism any more than the democratic party is for greater democracy. It was just a name they used. Their agenda was (ostensibly) to consolidate power so that at some point in the distant future a socialist state could be perfected. As far as I know, none of them ever tried to establish actual communist cells of increased size within their populations.
Northern European socialism is quite different.
Socialism is socialism. In much of Europe, nations have some fairly reasonable levels of socialism in their economies and directed in ways that help to balance the other aspects. In the former soviet union they advocated extreme amounts of socialism, which worked quite poorly. The US actually engages in similar levels of socialism as Europe, ours is just directed very differently... mostly towards the military-industrial complex which actually exacerbates wealth consolidation as much as it ameliorates it.
Dictatorship = Dictator controls population with cooperation of some major industrial powers.
When wealth and power consolidate, I don't think it makes much difference whether that begins in the private sector or in the government. Either way people with political power gain wealth and people with wealth gain political power. The distinction is lost in the shuffle. Is Cheney a wealth private sector industrialist who leveraged that into political power, or a politician who exploits his position to gain wealth for his industrial concerns? He's both of course.
Whether intentional or just a result of all those pirated copies of Winderz, the sheer number of bot-net/zombie attacks coming from China is staggering.
Actually, the US is quite a bit ahead on the botnet/zombie attack category. China is more making up for it with other scans and attempted worm propagation from non-zombied (just infected) machines. More attacks are coming out of China than anywhere else, but the US is still hosting more botnets/zombies than China.
It's comfortable on the chair of moral relativism, isn't it? If you believe that Communism and freedom and democracy are just two sides of the same coin, I can see your line of reasoning.
And this right here folks is why propaganda is a bad idea. Sure it can help you sway citizens to your cause, but in the end the populace is a bunch of people whose ideas are so clouded by the propaganda and emotions tied to it, they don't even understand the terms they are discussing.
Communism is an economic system akin to capitalism. It, in fact, co-exists with capitalism on some level in every nation on earth. Did you grow up in a family where your parents and the children shared resources and allocated them as a group? That is a very small communist cell operating within a larger capitalist economy. The US currently and always has been a nation of widespread communism. The term "communism" in the US, however, has been assigned a different meaning. Ironically, that meaning is "a totalitarian government that advocates extreme socialism." Socialism is also an economic system and one also in widespread use in every nation on earth. Public schools, roads, police, the military, welfare, prisons, etc. are all examples of socialism. Even more confusingly, the term "socialism" in the US has been co-opted to mean any socialist program that is new and not something we've always had and don't consider.
Every economy is a blend of capitalism, communism, and socialism. The economic system you have and how it favors those three components does not determine what type of government you have, but it does influence it. For example, economies that favor extreme socialism, like the former soviet union and current day China (although in decreasing amounts) have more consolidated decision making. That is consolidated power. The more of this that exists, the easier it is for a totalitarian regime to seize that power. For this reason, democracies that favor socialism to extreme extents, tend to fail and become totalitarian states (dictatorships and oligarchies).
Sure, Capitalism is in the mix as well, but Captialism only exists and flourishes in a manifestly free society.
You have it backwards. As I explained, moderate capitalism helps to prevent a totalitarian regime from taking over the government and it lends itself to the overthrow of those regimes, although not necessarily to democracy.
Some believe that neither model is "better"; just different
Your fallacy is in equating capitalism with democracy and in failing to see that all economies are a blend of the three economic systems. Favoring any one of those three models to an extreme leads to a breakdown of the system. Too much capitalism leads to wealth condensation, where all the money and hence power consolidates into only a few hands, thus also making it easy for a totalitarian regime to take over and motivates the people to aid in overthrowing those in power (since it is the only way to return to a more level economic playing field). The US is perilously close to that end of the spectrum right now, as wealth disparity continues to rise in this country.
Thankfully, many people don't see it that way, and have recognized the benefits of freedom, free access to information, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and so on.
Sadly, very few people in the US see much of anything clearly when the term "communist" is mentioned, even when applied to an extreme socialist state like China. How often do you see the press point out and explain the difference?
...to quote Winston Churchill, "Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
I agree with him. I just don't conflate democracy with capitalism as you seem to. One is a system of government and one is an economic system. Extreme capitalism can just as easily destroy a democracy as extreme communism or extreme socialism. The key is to have a moderate, balanced economy instead of being an extremist.
Sure they'll be this quick in the future, right up until it leaves beta, then they'll actually have to do full regression tests which will take longer and have a turn around time aout the same as the Mac version.
It always amazes me when I hear people complaining about bug fix times from vendors who take between one and six weeks to get a bug into production. Those are normal turn around times assuming the vendor starts work immediately on a development/testing cycle for a large, production software project. After reading the comments here, I get the impression most Slashdot posters have never worked in a real software development house. I doesn't take a genius to see the turn around for bug fixes for a beta that does not need to be tested other than a quick smoke test is going to be a hell of a lot faster than a final release.
I was ironic when asking about port of iPhoto.. Because then my would anyone bother buying Macs (with bundled Mac OS), if similar-looking applications run on Windoze?
Maybe they'd use it for security, or because it is more usable, or because it has more features?
Probably Safari on Win is just a tool for letting everyone develop for iPhone.
Well, sort of. Safari for them Mac must have been in development a lot longer than the time between its release and when developers started asking to develop 3rd party apps and were told it was not planned.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. PAL (which they use) is a standard not tied to any one company. WMA is a proprietary format, wholly owned and controlled by one company. Further, that company has been convicted of criminal actions in illegally forcing that format onto consumers. Do you see the distinction? The BBC should not be forced to provide any given format, but they should be required to provide a format that is not tied to and profits one given company, especially not a criminal one. The can provide WMA all they want, but only if they also support other proprietary formats from competitors; otherwise they are rewarding a monopolist for criminal acts while at the same time denying access to some citizens who have paid the same amount of money. Or, they could simply support an open format that any company is free to implement, which is probably what any tax funded organization should be doing.
I see, and do you happen to be an elected government that pays for running that Website by collecting tax dollars from the people (at gunpoint if need be)? I didn't think so.
There is an implicit statement in your question, and I disagree with it. Many times police are criminals. In fact, I can think of only two cops I know that have not admitted to me that they abuse their position to commit criminal acts of some sort.
Focusing on police make it seem like a marketing stunt more than concern for the populace.The ACLU's mission is to protect civil liberties. Police officers have more authority, and thus pose a greater danger to civil liberties than normal individuals. If a normal criminal comes up to me and tells me to get in the back of his car, I'll walk away. If I have to, I'll pull a gun and shoot him. Legally, I can't do either of those things if that criminal happens to be a cop. Obviously these cameras can be used to help prosecute criminals of all sorts, but focusing on police seems wholly appropriate to me.
Monopolies are defined by markets, not niches. Due tell what relevant market you think Apple has monopolized. They are a near case when it comes to portable, digital music players and nothing else.
...never mind of the law is shortsighted enough to miss that.Sigh. Laws exist for a reason. Apple is not leveraging any monopoly you might think they have (aside from possibly ipods) into another market and I defy you to cite an example. The law doesn't make what Apple is doing illegal, because it does not undermine the free market. You can still buy a Gateway preloaded with Windows or a Dell preloaded with Linux. Those are Apple's competitors.
Apple users use anything Steve feeds them and Apple's solution is far more locked down than Windows ever was.Who cares. Apple restricts their software to just their hardware which is an annoying drawback to end users. It also is perfectly legal and has nothing to do with why antitrust actions are illegal.
Did 90% of all people sleep through the Econ101 section on monopolies?
Who the hell modded this "insightful?" First, Apple is not a monopoly, so they cannot illegally leverage that monopoly via bundling, hence there is no legal action that makes sense. Second, Google was not even complaining about the bundling (although they have every right to). They complained about two things:
Apple fits into neither of those categories. Google has an indexed search on OS X and it uses the same API and hooks as Spotlight, resulting in no slowdowns for Google's tool and no disadvantage given to them.
Are those enough reasons? If not, please RTFA before posting again.
I've used it. It is not ready for prime time yet. Let a few million more people get it with their new computers so that the user base is too large to ignore, then give it 12 months for hardware and software vendors get everything up to speed. Then it might be ready for adoption for users with a clue.
Right now I'm running OS X and WinXP on this machine. There is almost nothing in Vista I want that is not already better on one of these two platforms. Vista's application support is worse than XP (it won't yet run the Adobe application I need to do my job, at all, unless I want to sign up for a beta program). Almost all of the new features in Vista are already in OS X. Indexed searching works better from OS X and supports more file types. Powershell/monad runs, but does not seem to have as many tools and is not as familiar and universal as bash. Really, the only thing I'm missing is the audio output by application functionality, and since my audio manipulation tools are all OS X only, that is only marginally useful.
The people bitching about vista here are the same ones who bitched about XP, and before that, windows 2000.Agreed, but then I was pretty disappointed with both of those OS's. If we had some actual competition in the industry, maybe Microsoft would get off their butts and introduce some real innovations that customers (not content providers or MS) want and need. Add in the fact that the licensing for Vista restricts its use in VMs to really expensive versions while at the same time adding serious bloat and I don't see upgrading to it as likely for several hardware cycles. We'll see in 3-4 years how things are looking. I might upgrade to Vista then, or I might not run Windows at all at that point.
Actually, it was after people peripherally communicated with Konq team raised holy hell with inflammatory and uninformed statements in forums. The Konq team did not seem to care so much at the time from what I read and had not even contacted anyone at Apple to ask for more documentation or granularity.
It didn't look good for Apple, and they could no longer claim to "play well with open source".I'm always amazed that people think Apple cares if people on forums think they "play well with open source." Most of their customers don't even know what open source is and could not care less. Those people that do care and are in a position to do something about it are people actually working on projects Apple contributes to. They are used to contributions from large commercial shops. Sometimes they are great about collaboration and sometimes they suck, it all depends on who's in charge of it. In that respect Apple is pretty typical, aside from being a bit more secretive than average.
Yeah, a umm, monopolistic world view. Does that mean you have a pedophiliac worldview? After all, you do think a lot like people who molest babies. I'm not saying you're a pedophile or anything, just that you have that kind of a world view.
Oooooh! Never mind Apple's long history of closed hardware and proprietary software...Umm "closed hardware?" What does that even mean? I've never had any problems installing Linux on a Mac. Anyway, making closed software does not mean you're opposed to FLOSS. Both make sense in different contexts. I'd say the majority of open source code is written by companies that also write closed source. My company is a huge supporter of FLOSS and we contribute to all your favorite colossal OSS projects, yet we also make closed source software.
...they contribute back to a FOSS project they exploit in one of their many proprietary software projects!Do you write OSS? If you call giving the authors what they want and asked for (free contributions) exploiting, then maybe you just don't understand the concept.
All hail the infinite wisdom and benevolence of our Apple masters!FLOSS is not some stupid charity trying to fight human nature. The BSD and GPL licenses were developed with commercial uses in mind. It does not rely upon charity, but instead offers good value to commercial entities in exchange for open code returned to them. I am so sick of OSS pseudo-zealots who like to preach about how the world would be a wonderful happy place if everyone was a socialist that did not eat meat. If you're going to be fanatical about a movement, why don't you at least understand it first?
At the next keynote address...That's the best you can come up with? A lame joke about what you think Apple would do but don't. Weak.
Please go find an olde timey BSD guy, one with a big beard who grumbles a lot, and tell him how Apple is ripping him off. He'll show you what a cluestick is.
Safari has most of the OS X market. If you go to Safari: Block Pop-up Windows, I'd say that counts as castrating some advertising.
There is a powerful incentive for business to avoid Safari on any platform, for the same reason.Safari can block ads with a plugin, just as most Firefox users do. PithHelmet comes to mind. Safari is also quite a bit faster right now, if currently less flexible than Firefox. The major reason for corporations to avoid Safari, is that it is not cross-platform. This is largely mitigated by a Windows version. It still won't run on Linux, and no Konquerer is not the same thing from a testing or training standpoint. The other reason is customizability, which will likely be largely addressed as all the browsers except IE move to unified plug-in standards.
Standardizing on Firefox is an easy decision to make.I agree, but not because of ads. Ideally, you need not standardize on anything except "not IE" which seems to work most places I've worked.
Yeah, you'd think a person who doesn't know what a monopoly is would be modded up when making comments about them, huh?
Down with FOSS!! Long live Apple!!Umm, Apple is a FOSS contributor. Webkit (the engine behind Safari) is LGPL and Apple is one of the largest contributors.
No wonder the only way you get modded up is as "funny" your opinions are a joke.
My comments about the past spoke to the lack of an ethical entitlement to inheritance, not to a practical solution. There is a practical solution to wealth condensation, it is simply to implement enough socialism to prevent historical distribution of wealth from being the single most important factor in a person's financial success today (which is currently the case).
...otherwise how far back should we go?We go back right up until we had a fair society governed by just laws, which is to say we travel to the future. I propose we do this, by making the present a fair and just society so that the crimes of the past do not influence the relative wealth in the present, but rather it is based upon what you do while you are alive and how hard and smart you work. It is called meritocracy.
Should I have to compensate the descendants of those Roman settlers (assuming that they are still around and could be located)? Certainly not.Why not? If you're benefitting from the crime, you have ethical responsibility as soon as you know about it. If I steal a million dollars and give you $100K one day, when the cops catch me, you have to give it back, even though you committed no crime. Why should one person live their entire life never having to work, while another must struggle because of historical wealth distribution? It isn't fair, and we can make it fair by stopping historical aspects from being the main factor in such things.
As for the possibility of increased violence and the like I will take my chances.Luckily, you don't get to choose that for all of society.
I will not have my life dictated to me by an angry mob and if that means violence then so be it.Luckily, you don't get to choose that course for our society either. I'm not willing to let democracy in this country die in a bloody coup because you felt entitled to money because of who your parents were.
Why do you think that people live in gated communities with guards, razor wire, and cameras?Because some people have disproportionately large amounts of wealth, usually due to unjust reasons and that breeds hatred among those suffering in poverty. It does not last forever. Someone has to man those gates and cameras and it isn't going to be the very wealth. Eventually, the wealth always gets redistributed. I prefer it is done so in a civilized and orderly manner that preserves democracy and keeps society stable.
If having these things means that I get to keep mine then so be it, I make no apologies.Ahh, the old "right makes might" argument. You have it and even if it is not just you'll keep it. Fine. Don't complain when the mob shoves red hot pokers up your butt, because if they have the might, surely that gives them the right. By the time things come to a head, there are a lot more poor than their are wealthy. Already the ultra wealthy is down to about 1.5% and the number of people entering that class each year by means other than inheritance is down to handful. Meanwhile, a full 50% of our population has a median wealth of nothing, with debt equalling assets. That 37 to one odds and getting worse. Good luck with that.
Actually, Apple publishes more than it needs to, especially with regard to all the BSD licensed projects they work with. They go beyond the minimum requirements with Webkit as well, interacting with the Konquerer team and providing packages in a more easily digestible and better documented fashion than they need to.
That is not to say that Apple is acting for the best interests of humanity or anything. They just understand the open source model and how they can use it to benefit themselves. By resubmitting their changes and actively getting them incorporated in open source code bases, Apple does not have to maintain a fork and can more easily pull in changes from the rest of the community. Safari is not Apple's core competency, just a useful tool. As such, Apple and the rest of the OSS community can collaborate and benefit one another and everyone while making money doing so.
The only "firefox killer" would likely be a Open source Webkit/Webcore based browser that is lighter and faster than firefox.Safari and Konquerer both fit that bill. I don't expect anything to beat Safari on OS X, and I don't know that Safari has much chance on Windows. It is probably a better fit for the average user than either IE or Firefox, but average users just use what came with the machine, and that is IE. More advanced users are probably more likely to use Firefox, although the unified plug-in architecture that will allow Firefox plug-ins to work on Opera and Safari, may well change that to some degree (hopefully while motivating improvements to all browsers).
Your perspective is skewed from the blind hatred of large corporations that is harbored by so many readers here.
Gee, what would it take for a type of organization to get indifferent, uncaring americans to hate them? Oh yeah, piss us off by combining the worst bureaucratic aspects of the DMV (paperwork, employees who are clueless and don't care, expense, lack of internal communication, inability to perform) with all the worst aspects of a ticket scalper (high prices, gouging, differential pricing, bribing police). Large corporations have earned the way we feel about them.
The costs of building and maintaining an efficient broadband network on a nationwide scale is tremendous. Just how many companies do you think could afford to build a system of that scale?
Do you mean with or without the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent to subsidize what the cable company owns today?
Now, the FCC limits Comcast and ALL other cable providers to a MAXIMUM of 30% market penetration. This means in order to provide the entire country with high-speed cable internet, you would need FOUR financially thriving cable systems.
A cartel is not functionally any better than a monopoly. Unless those four cable companies both provide service to the same location (which most of them have agreements to avoid) then how is this any better for a consumer. If you have to move to get a reasonable cable provider, the system has failed. Note, it is my understanding that the new FCC rules requiring more than on provider for the majority of homes in an areas (as opposed to each provider taking half the homes in a zip code) was recently mothballed.
Yes the cable industry spends millions and millions of dollars a year lobbying the government. Does that make them evil?
That depends upon what they are lobbying for. Claiming that a non-profit organization lobbying for laws that stop pollution is the same thing as a commercial entity lobbying for laws that will force consumers to pay them more and prevent competition, is a pretty lame argument.
The fact is that lobbying the government is the most efficient way to get things done.
And that, all by itself is a problem because it favors the wealthy in what is supposed to eb a democracy where everyone has an equal vote and the people are represented by their representatives, not trying to pay them extra to do the right thing.
In Slashdot mythology, that is a...
This is called a strawman argument. It is a logical fallacy. You couldn't find anyone to espouse a weak argument, so you claim it is the opinion of "Slashdot."
Personally, I think it is about on par with what would the PC market look like if the government sanctioned a 30% marketshare cap on Microsoft.
Sigh. You don't understand the inherent geographical component to cable networks that does not apply to PCs? Besides, the PC industry is not media. If I owned 100% of the PC industry, I still can't control what airs on TV a week before the elections, which is what the market caps for media are for, to stop the terrible abuses that happened when we had no such laws.
Do you really trust the OSS community to pick up the slack for the rest of the 70% of desktop users out there?
I trust someone would. If MS had only 30% of the market, most of the problems with OSS would go away. Half of them are interoperability problems that are artificial problems with OSS products and would not exist except for MS's abuse. The rest is the lack of investment in the area because investors know competing against a monopoly who can introduce artificial problems with your new product, is a waste of resources and invest elsewhere.
Bah, I may have missed some points, but this is just off the top of my head. If you want to correct me, then by all means I welcome constructive f
I can top that. I was an early cable internet adopter. Back in the day, the local service did not provide cable modems, you had to buy your own. So, of course that is what I did. Eventually, the company I had service from was bought out, and then the area was swapped to Comcast who took over the service. Okay, aside from being incompetent hacks whose service was spotty and support was clueless, all was well and good. Then I moved. The demanded I give them back "their" cable modem. I told them they never gave me one. They did not believe me and required I dig up a 4 year old receipt to prove I had bought one. In the end, I did get my credit card statement and they said okay. A few weeks later I got another bill and called them. They said it was their mistake. That happened a dozen times easily, over the course of the next year and then I started getting collections notices from agencies, who I called and told my story to and who all then went away. I was threatened with court numerous times, which I would have welcomed at that point, but they would never follow through with their legal threats so I could get it cleared up.
I have no idea how much this damaged my credit rating, but I assume significantly. I should be able to bill those bastards for the hours and hours I spent on the phone. You know what the worst part is, right now where I live my choice is Comcast or the local phone co. who wants $60 more than Comcast just for internet service. The fact that my tax dollars subsidized this lousy service and insane prices makes me want to kick a congress critter in the balls. We seriously need telecom reform.
You should actually read posts before replying. The US is a communist country and a democracy, of sorts. Every country is a communist country to some degree. Communism is a fundamental aspect of almost all economies. It is not a system of government.
Sure a Democracy can vote in a communist government, but until now it appears that once Communists are voted in the only way to get them out is by shooting the buggers.Countries referred to as "communist governments" are almost always not practicing any more communism than the US. In many cases they are practicing more socialism than the US, but you'd have to be using some pretty "undergraduate" or perhaps "dropped out of high school" definitions in order to equate the too the way most Americans do.
And I say that with a certain amound of real world experience having grown up in Africa.Ever been to Madagascar. That is a communist country (one of the few worth of the name in the world). They're a democracy where the government advocates resource sharing among groups of villages, which are also voting blocks. Of course since the country is fairly poor and disorganized in practice I'm not sure how functional it is, but that is what a communist country is, by definition, one that favors communism in the economy.
You seem to be confused by American propaganda and by the fact that most Americans refer to certain foreign political parties as the "communist party" when in truth they're a totalitarian group that promises eventual socialism. It is sad how much the US propaganda has misled and confused the people.
You worry too much about inherited wealth and the relative disparity of income...
First, it is disparity of wealth, not disparity of income that matters. Two people each make $200K a year. On works day and night inventively and with dedication creating benefit to society in his quest for wealth. The other inherited 3 million when his parents died. He does not work at all and contributes nothing to society, merely living off the interest paid to him by people who do work hard.
The latter case is is very minor example of the problem. We're not talking about a fw million, we're talking about 40% of all the wealth in the US, being conservatively invested and not motivating any people to work hard or do things that benefit society.
instead of things that really matter like lots of high quality and low cost goods and services
The cost of good and services is low when people are working and being inventive, not when they are leeching off of the rest of society due to inherited wealth.
You also spend a great deal of time trying to justify sticking your hands in pockets of other people or helping yourself to their property simply because they may have more wealth than you do.
Considering my tax bracket, I'd be justifying people taking money away from me, not the other way around. That's okay, because I'm willing to work. I'd rather live in a society that has greater equality and less violence than I would subscribe to some "right" to inherit money from a dead person.
That may be good for a populist politician, but it all boils down to coveting your neighbors oxen or his wife or indeed anything else that belongs to your neighbor and that is neither just nor right.
So just suppose 400 years ago my ancestor killed most of your ancestors, took all their wealth, and enslaved them. Now do to that crime, I now inherit billions and you begin life in debt. Maybe you covet my inherited wealth, but that does not make my having it "right" or "just" or even reasonable in a civilized society.
If you agree that one should be able to spend one's own money as one freely chooses, subject to some minimal taxes to run the courts and provide for the common defense, then why should I not be able to give that money to my children without that particular transaction being arbitrarily singled out for a particularly onerous tax?
Because in the long term it guarantees the downfall of our economy and government. Because their has never been a fair starting point. You have your wealth likely at the expense of atrocities committed by your barbaric ancestors. Why should you benefit from those actions. Maybe if on day all the wealth was redistributed equally and we prevented people from benefiting from their crimes from then on, we could claim some right to inherited wealth, but that has never happened and seems pretty impractical to me.
The fraction of inherited wealth as a percentage of wealth is actually declining in the United States and has been declining for some time.
I'd like to see your references for that. The ;ast I looked less was being recorded due to IRS rules, but there was little indication that less was inherited at the high end (top 10%) and a lot to indicate that less was being inherited at the low end since more poor people are dying in debt than any time since the big monopolies were running the show.
This might have something to do with the "stupid" children that you mentioned inheriting 500 million and then pissing it all away within their lifetimes...
But most wealthy people, statistically, do not lose their wealth over 1 or even 3 generations. Most of the wealthy can quite happily live doing nothing and contributing nothing to society while the poor pay them interest.
That money is also not just sitting in some vault somewhere collecting
You're offtopic, but I'll respond anyway. I cited current trends in malware, that anyone who wants to research can easily find. If you disagree with my statements, challenge them, don't respond with an ad hominem attack based upon your presumption that the previous poster could not have been in error with regard to the breakdown of the numbers. I imagine I was modded up either by one of the people here who knows who I am, or who has seen the data I have posted on Slashdot in the past regarding the subject of malware. I'll give you a hint, the guy three offices down from me is quoted in a Slashdot article about worms about once a month.
No, we did not or at least not as you suggest. In my family we received only the basic items (food, clothing, shelter, and education) and items directly associated with those needs free of charge (and even then they were allocated by the parents, not the children).
Those items more than qualify your family as a communist cell. The allocation of resources within the cell may be democratic or it may be authoritarian. The method is immaterial to whether or not it is communism. One of the local housing co-ops votes on what groceries they buy. The monastery near where I used to live was authoritarian, with the highest ranking monk making all the final decisions. Both were communist cells.
If we wanted anything else then we had to save our allowance money...
On of the interesting aspect of communism is that usually, not all resources were shared, just some of them. In some cases the only item shared might be a set of season tickets to a ball game, whereas in another it might be almost everything, with the exception of body parts.
It would be more accurate to say that my family was and is a mini-capitalist unit (w/some minimal socialist policies...and I do mean minimal) operating within a larger capitalist society.
Actually, that would make you a communist cell as well as a mini capitalist unit. All communist cells operate within a larger economy, that is what differentiates it from socialism.
There is nothing wrong with wealth condensation provided that the total production per person and therefore the standard of living rises right along with it (which tends to happen in free market capitalism).
Well, you're right. We disagree on this. Wealth disparity is the single strongest correlative factor to violence in a society. Murder, robbery, beatings, all go up with wealth condensation because even if the average production per person rises, the disparity still rises. The idea that it was poverty and not disparity that was so strongly linked has been fairly well debunked since the 60s.
It is the responsibility of the government to enforce rules and ensure fair dealing, in much the same way that the referee enforces the rules and ensures fair play in a competitive sporting competition.
There is an inherent unfairness to inequality of birth which has been well recognized for a very long time. Have you ever heard the saying "it takes money to make money." That is wealth condensation in a nutshell. The problem is, in an unregulated capitalism some people are born with more wealth, and since that wealth condenses more wealth all other factors being equal, the society becomes less and less economically equal until the system collapses when the poor revolt against the aristocracy, usually with a lot of bloodshed and pain and suffering and random results for a new government.
The combination of democracy with free market capitalism has overwhelmingly and consistently, despite some difficulties, delivered the best economic outcomes...
I don't think you understand. No one has ever had a purely capitalist free market and if it was tried it would not survive a week. The US is a blend of capitalism, communism, and socialism, just like pretty much all other economies. To have pure capitalism, you'd have to have families no longer sharing resources to eliminate the communist element. You'd have to do away with all socialized services like government run police, military, roads, etc. not funded by donations because they are socialism.
All the economies that survive for any length of time are ones that have a similar balance of these elements. The US is just as socialist as the EU, although we direct it differently. We are probably a little less communist and becoming even less so in many ways as atomic families divide into smaller cell sizes (although extended families among the very poor are getting larger).
You are completely wrong. Communism is an economic system in which groups (called cells or communes) share some or all economic resources and make economic decisions as a group. For example, the nuclear family is a very small type of communist cell. A monastery or housing co-op is a slightly larger communist cell. The groups of villages in Madagascar that share resources as well as act as voting blocks are even larger communist cells. For extremely large communist cells the size of nations, communism becomes indistinguishable from socialism.
Communism engages in socialism, but every other political system on the planet, including democracy, engages in socialism as well.Communism is a concept. It does not engage in anything. What americans call the "communist party" in some nations engages in socialism. Governments engage in socialism. That does not make them communist, it makes them socialist.
The distinction between communism and democracy is that communism is created as a system where a small group of self-selected individuals rule the lives of the rest.No, the system of government you describe is called an oligarchy and it can happen within any sort of economy, although it is more likely in extreme economies.
I'm not going to do you the courtesy of reading through the rest of your post. I scanned it. Almost every point you bring up was already addressed in my previous post. Please stop listening to US propaganda from the 80s and actually read some economics texts. If you want to continue this conversation, go re-read my entire original post and reply to the points I made there, rather than ignoring them and going off on a rant that completely misses the point.
Lenin and Marx both advocated socialism, not communism, and they never implemented such a system, instead they implemented oligarchies that claimed some day they would implement even more extreme socialism. You seem to be viewing it in terms of what many USA residents think of and the mislabeled "communist" political parties they worked within. They were never actual communists, just socialists.
Northern Europen Socialism is MUCH different form old USSR socialism. Governments have an incentive to run their socialist programs well or be voted out. The Soviet Union could just kill their critics and sometimes did just that.You're describing the difference between a totalitarian government and a democracy, not between two different kinds of socialism. The economic principals are the same (except for being applied much more extremely in the soviet bloc. In theory, Russia was even a democracy, it is just that in practice it was not effectively operating.
The UK has nationalized and then privatized various industries as political parties came and went.Yes, when they are nationalized, that is socialism. When it is privatized that is capitalism. Some governments implement more or less socialism over time, while others maintain a more steady level. That doesn't make it any less socialism.
By it's[sic] nature socialism run by free people lacks the odious cooercive aspetcs[sic].The coercion you refer to is the result of totalitarianism, not socialism. You might as well say "by its nature capitalism run by free people lack the odious aspects." It is equally true. Take a look at capitalist totalitarianism, run by feudal lords who enslaved people. It was pretty odious.
Socialism, capitalism, and communism are economic systems that can be applied in differing degrees. It is the nature of the government applying them what they are used for.
You are right of course that it matters little to a dying camp inmate if Stalin or Hitler put him there, but it is much easier to MAKE a Hitler-style dictatorship than a Communist one. Hitler at first went after marginal groups and tinkered at the edge of things. Big industrial concers were co-opted, not wholesale taken over. Lenin had to "break a few eggs and then some" to turn Russia into the USSR. There was not much gradual about it.Both are dictatorships. How easy it is to create a dictatorship form a free society depends upon a couple of economic factors. First, how consolidated is the economic power to be controlled. The more centralized the power, the easier it is to control it and create a dictatorship. With extreme socialism, all of the industry is controlled by the government so it is very consolidated, leading to easier creation of a totalitarian state. With extreme communism you have very large cell sizes, so you need only take over each cell. With extreme capitalism, you only have a few monopolistic companies. All are likely to lead to totalitarianism. With a more moderate system that balances all of these items, power must be consolidated from many more, smaller sources, making totalitarianism harder to pull off.
The second major consideration is how the economy affects the motivation of the people. Wealth disparity leads to violent crime and lends itself to recruitment for revolutionary movements. The greater the wealth disparity, the easier it is for any given government to fall (totalitarian or free). Extreme capitalism is actually the most likely to topple, because the wealth so rapidly and permanently consolidates and creates situations where a few are born very wealthy, while the majority are born into relative poverty and spend their lives borrowing from the wealthy few. It is this disparity, much more than simple poverty levels, that determines how easy it is to recruit the populace to overthrow a government.
Well, traditional communism, would be communes, and they certainly do happen in a free society. There are quite a few just in this area.
You have to MAKE THEM do it. Thus Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, blood drenched butchers all.Ahh, perhaps you're referring to the agendas of the "communist" political parties in Russia and China. Those did not advocate communism any more than the democratic party is for greater democracy. It was just a name they used. Their agenda was (ostensibly) to consolidate power so that at some point in the distant future a socialist state could be perfected. As far as I know, none of them ever tried to establish actual communist cells of increased size within their populations.
Northern European socialism is quite different.Socialism is socialism. In much of Europe, nations have some fairly reasonable levels of socialism in their economies and directed in ways that help to balance the other aspects. In the former soviet union they advocated extreme amounts of socialism, which worked quite poorly. The US actually engages in similar levels of socialism as Europe, ours is just directed very differently... mostly towards the military-industrial complex which actually exacerbates wealth consolidation as much as it ameliorates it.
Dictatorship = Dictator controls population with cooperation of some major industrial powers.When wealth and power consolidate, I don't think it makes much difference whether that begins in the private sector or in the government. Either way people with political power gain wealth and people with wealth gain political power. The distinction is lost in the shuffle. Is Cheney a wealth private sector industrialist who leveraged that into political power, or a politician who exploits his position to gain wealth for his industrial concerns? He's both of course.
Actually, the US is quite a bit ahead on the botnet/zombie attack category. China is more making up for it with other scans and attempted worm propagation from non-zombied (just infected) machines. More attacks are coming out of China than anywhere else, but the US is still hosting more botnets/zombies than China.
And this right here folks is why propaganda is a bad idea. Sure it can help you sway citizens to your cause, but in the end the populace is a bunch of people whose ideas are so clouded by the propaganda and emotions tied to it, they don't even understand the terms they are discussing.
Communism is an economic system akin to capitalism. It, in fact, co-exists with capitalism on some level in every nation on earth. Did you grow up in a family where your parents and the children shared resources and allocated them as a group? That is a very small communist cell operating within a larger capitalist economy. The US currently and always has been a nation of widespread communism. The term "communism" in the US, however, has been assigned a different meaning. Ironically, that meaning is "a totalitarian government that advocates extreme socialism." Socialism is also an economic system and one also in widespread use in every nation on earth. Public schools, roads, police, the military, welfare, prisons, etc. are all examples of socialism. Even more confusingly, the term "socialism" in the US has been co-opted to mean any socialist program that is new and not something we've always had and don't consider.
Every economy is a blend of capitalism, communism, and socialism. The economic system you have and how it favors those three components does not determine what type of government you have, but it does influence it. For example, economies that favor extreme socialism, like the former soviet union and current day China (although in decreasing amounts) have more consolidated decision making. That is consolidated power. The more of this that exists, the easier it is for a totalitarian regime to seize that power. For this reason, democracies that favor socialism to extreme extents, tend to fail and become totalitarian states (dictatorships and oligarchies).
Sure, Capitalism is in the mix as well, but Captialism only exists and flourishes in a manifestly free society.You have it backwards. As I explained, moderate capitalism helps to prevent a totalitarian regime from taking over the government and it lends itself to the overthrow of those regimes, although not necessarily to democracy.
Some believe that neither model is "better"; just differentYour fallacy is in equating capitalism with democracy and in failing to see that all economies are a blend of the three economic systems. Favoring any one of those three models to an extreme leads to a breakdown of the system. Too much capitalism leads to wealth condensation, where all the money and hence power consolidates into only a few hands, thus also making it easy for a totalitarian regime to take over and motivates the people to aid in overthrowing those in power (since it is the only way to return to a more level economic playing field). The US is perilously close to that end of the spectrum right now, as wealth disparity continues to rise in this country.
Thankfully, many people don't see it that way, and have recognized the benefits of freedom, free access to information, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and so on.Sadly, very few people in the US see much of anything clearly when the term "communist" is mentioned, even when applied to an extreme socialist state like China. How often do you see the press point out and explain the difference?
...to quote Winston Churchill, "Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."I agree with him. I just don't conflate democracy with capitalism as you seem to. One is a system of government and one is an economic system. Extreme capitalism can just as easily destroy a democracy as extreme communism or extreme socialism. The key is to have a moderate, balanced economy instead of being an extremist.
Sure they'll be this quick in the future, right up until it leaves beta, then they'll actually have to do full regression tests which will take longer and have a turn around time aout the same as the Mac version.
It always amazes me when I hear people complaining about bug fix times from vendors who take between one and six weeks to get a bug into production. Those are normal turn around times assuming the vendor starts work immediately on a development/testing cycle for a large, production software project. After reading the comments here, I get the impression most Slashdot posters have never worked in a real software development house. I doesn't take a genius to see the turn around for bug fixes for a beta that does not need to be tested other than a quick smoke test is going to be a hell of a lot faster than a final release.
Maybe they'd use it for security, or because it is more usable, or because it has more features?
Probably Safari on Win is just a tool for letting everyone develop for iPhone.Well, sort of. Safari for them Mac must have been in development a lot longer than the time between its release and when developers started asking to develop 3rd party apps and were told it was not planned.