What definitely gets more customers looking is the "Other customers that purchased also purchased..." feature.
True, which is why if you're going to try to game the system, you might be better off spending that money buying multiple copies of your book along with a few selected, sustained best sellers. Then when someone looks at the best seller, they your book listed as something that other customers also published.
Or if you'd like to participate in a more honest way, I recommend these tools on Amazon, which I've used to promote my Moodle and Training books:
Create a So you'd like to... guide with your book on the guide. Make the guide relevant, not just an excuse for self promotion, and people will actually use your guide. The more people who click into items from your guide, the more Amazon will display it.
Create a Listmania list with your book on it. Again, make it relevant and you'll get better results from that list.
Make search suggestions that are relevant and accurate for your book. "You can specify the search for which you think the item should appear, along with your explanation of why it is relevant. Once approved, we'll show your suggestion in Amazon search to everyone."
And one that I've been too busy (lazy?) to use, participate in Amazon's blog program, AmazonConnect.
These are all much longer-lasting ways of improving the sale of your book on Amazon. And they're much cheaper than paying someone thousands to game the system for you. But if people really thing it's worth all that money for one hour of dubious fame, I suppose it was inevitable that someone would offer a service to do it for them.
An interesting choice of words from the article. As opposed to saying "...might be used to questions suspects." The article's choice of words assumes that if you're being interrogated, you are a criminal. Which seems to be the way people are thinking these days.
You are absolutely correct. In the end, all rights are property rights.
When a government or society treats your land as being partially public property (property taxes are legitimized by the belief that "we all own the land"), or subject to confiscation in the name of the greater good (eminent domain), it's one step away from treating your house as public property. "You can't build that kind of house because it doesn't meet our building codes...never mind that you've agreed to assume all liability for living in it and any effects it might have on your neighbors, but no, you cannot build that straw-bale or adobe house here."
Now that you've gotten used to having your land and home treated as partially public property, it's one more step to treating your body as public property. "No, you cannot have that MS treatment because we believe it's not in your best interest. Never mind that you supposedly own your own body, and that you're an adult who is willing to assume all risk for the treatment."
And then from there, it's another step to treating your thoughts and feelings as partially public property.
And this slippery slope begins when someone violates your propert rights: land > home > body > mind.
I bet nearly everyone of the diehard Firefly fans who went to see it also bought it when it came out on DVD.
Almost all the Firefly fans I know saw the movie, even though they knew the DVD would be coming out soon. Which demonstrates that the view held by theatres just isn't true: we don't go to the theatre because we can't get the movie on DVD or cable, or because we can't wait to see it. We go because we want to make seeing the movie a special event: huge screen, surrounded by our friends, making a night of it, etc.
Granted, this may be easy for me to say, as I have not been directly, personally affected (no one I know has been killed/injured/involved) by terrorism...
Well, I have been directly affected by terrorism. I stood on the sidewalk and watched in horror as innocent people flung themselves out of a quarter-mile-high building instead of being burned to death. I saw, heard, and felt the impact of the second plane. I dodged falling debris with the rest of the crowd, and walked up Broad Street to get away from the site with my fellow New Yorkers, hitting the redial button on my cell phone until I could get through to my family to tell them I was still alive.
And, I agree with you.
I watched three thousand innocent people murdered just because they had the courage to live as free people. And how are we honoring their memory? By giving up the freedoms they died for, for a false sense of security.
We've been told that we need to give up some freedoms in the name of safety. If giving up individual liberty makes you safer, then why is it that in countries where individual liberties are suppressed the most that people have the most to fear? I'm not saying that the people who want to reduce our liberty in the name of security are tyrants; I believe they think they're doing the right thing. However, the belief that you must choose between liberty and safety is not true. Perhaps it's up to the citizens of the free world to let our politicians know this. Or, we can just sit around on our well-regulated duffs and hope that the government can keep us safe.
I'm sure that the PVR industry has taken notice of the willingness of Aussies to give up privacy rights for the ability to time shift televison.
You cannot give up a right. That's what makes it a right. Rights are inherent, innate, inborn, and inseperable. They can be suppressed, ignored, and trampled on, but not given up. Only priviledges can be given up or traded away.
The Aussies are not giving up their privacy rights. They are giving up their privacy. They can reclaim their rights any time they have the courage to do so (I speak for my fellow Americans, as well). Unfortunately, privacy like virginity is not so easily reclaimed.
Shameless Self-Promotion: If you're a programmer who needs to write a user manual, the book reviewed here sounds like a great fit. But if you need to write a training course for the application you've created, check out my book, User Training for Busy Programmers. It gives you step-by-step instructions for developing an instructor-led software class. It takes a practical, condensed approach for when you don't have time to learn training theory.
If it were any other book, you might be able to establish a valid parallel between two different languages. However, almost every translation of the Bible is "informed by tradition." This means the translators attempted to translate the Bible in the context of what the people paying the translators believe. Almost all Bible translations are made by committees. They interpret the text through theological doctrines and dogmas that arose centuries after the Bible was written. And, this "understanding" of what the Bible means can change not only from version to version, but also from culture to culture. The book is just too burdened with tradition for any two translations to parallel each other as closely as, say, two translations or Huck Finn.
Any Gaus's translation, "The Unvarnished New Testament," is the only one I've found that simply translates from the original Greek without interpretation. You would need two language versions that both attempt to suppress the author's prejudice and beliefs to use the Bible as a corpus for translation.
"At least the police, when armed, have very very strict rules regarding firearm use. They have regular training, and their performance levels are frequently checked. They have medicals and psych evaluations. Normal gun-owning members of the public don't have those, which is tragic, as they're also less trained. The logic of the whole situation is beyond belief."
"According to criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, every year adults use guns for protective purposes 2.5 million times. As many as 65 lives are protected by guns for every life lost to a gun. Each year, potential victims kill between 2,000 and 3,000 criminals; they wound an additional 9,000 to 17,000. Moreover, mishaps are rare. Private citizens mistakenly kill innocent people only thirty times a year, compared with about 330 mistaken killings by police."
When a police officer fires their gun in the line of duty, there's an 11% chance that (s)he will shoot an innocent person. For civilians, the rate is 2%.
It might be a U.S. thing. In the time I worked in the legal field as a PC instructor, I never worked with anyone who handled legal issues outside of the U.S.
I've since found out from my lawyer friends that Word is making inroads into the legal profession here, because clients supply most documents to their counsel in Word format. I told him, "But WordPerfect can read simple Word files pefectly, and these files you get can't all be heavily formatted, complex structured documents." He said most lawyers in the U.S. don't know that WordPerfect can read their clients' Word files, so many are switching over. Now that most of the typing is out of the hands of the professional typists who grew up on WordPerfect (legal secretaries), we'll probably see less WordPerfect and more Word with each passing month.
Personally, I prefer OpenOffice. I like to own my data, not just rent it from the vendor who made the tool that I used to create the data.
I taught word processing and basic PC skills to paralegals in the 90's. In spite of Word's increasing popularity, many law offices stayed with WordPerfect. Here's what I saw happen:
Law offices adopted WordPerfect because its style sheets and macro features matured before Word's. In a business that produces massive numbers of identically-formatted documents, with many passages repeated from doc-to-doc, robust stylesheets and macros were a powerful selling point.
WordPerfect's keystroke shortcuts were also critical to its success in the law field. Most of the typing in law offices was done by secretaries, who were professional typists. They didn't want thier fingers to leave the keyboard for any reason. And they certainly didn't want to have to wait for a menu to pop up or pull down, and then navigate through that menu (even if they could do so without leaving the keyboard). WordPerfect enabled these professional typists to do everything with keyboard shortcuts only, and bypass slower menus. WordPerfect was to legal secretaries what emacs is to programmers.
Third-party vendors saw the dominance of WordPerfect in the legal profession, and developed thier products around WordPerfect. Whether it was an add-on to produce legal citations more easily, or templates for legal documents, they further supported WordPerfect's dominance in this specialized market.
After spending years developing thier WordPerfect reflexes, integrating third party products, and even writing thier own WordPerfect macros, legal typists were not going to easily abandon the application. So while most of the rest of the world switched to Word, the legal profession has kept on chugging away with WordPerfect. And now every lawyer I know still uses it.
Well, I'm definitely setting myself up for an intellectual beating by posting this in front of so many smart people, but let's see what happens anyway. I submit to you that the entire concept of a "greater good" is a logical fallacy. There is an "individual good," which exists. But logically, there is no "greater good;" it's an abstraction and has no real existence.
Anything that's real, that is, anything that is not just an abstraction or intellectual construct, has a defineable limit between it and the rest of the world. The monitor you're reading this on, by virtue of the definition of "monitor," has a boundary that delineates it from the rest of the world. You know objectively and certainly where that monitor ends and the rest of the world begins.
"The Greater Good" has no such objective definition. Exactly who is this "Greater" who is experiencing the "Good" you speak of? The majority of Americans? The majority of humans? White people? Black people? The composition of this "Greater" changes with every situation. It's no more definable than the concept of "warmth." Prove to me objectively where "warmth" ends and "heat" begins. You can't, and that makes it arbitrary.
When you base law upon the "Greater Good" you base it upon something that's arbitrary, upon the shifting sand of an intellectual construct. If you do that, what makes your laws better than any other arbitray system?
"Individual Good," however, does pass at least one test for a real, objective, existent "thing." It has a defineable boundary. My individual good, my individual rights, end where yours begins. We may argue about where my rights end, just as we may argue about where the monitor ends and the computer begins (at which end of the cable?). But we both agree that such a boundary exists and that it's defineable.
I would be suspicious of anyone passing regulations for the "greater good," and so were the founders of this country. They recognized that the only "good" and the only "liberty" that is not subject to a whimsical redefinition by society is that of the individual. Our politicians and schools push the idea of the "greater good," but I think they unwittingly do us a disservice.
Simply quoting Chief Justice Rehnquist's famous example of freedom of speech not applying to yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre ignores the principle of "No harm, no crime." If I yell "Fire!" and everyone either laughs or ignores me, the law might accuse me of committing a crime, but if there's no harm there is no actual crime. That doesn't mean I won't be punished for a "crime." It just means that I will be punished for a victimless crime.
To punish someone for something that might have caused harm ("You could have started a stampede. You're lucky no one took you seriously!") is to start going down a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line on punishing people for speech that might have caused harm? And give me an objective reason for drawing the line there. You enter a realm where the definition of "crime" depends upon societal whim.
"Unless your family was hunting buffalo here thousands of years ago, you're just a newbie tourist."
There are many good arguments for keeping our borders open and for us to continue welcoming immigrants to America. I won't go into them all. I will say, however, that "Because we're a country of immigrants." or "Because only the Native Americans aren't immigrants here." is a lousy reason.
First of all, with the exception of some watering hole in central Africa where humanity first appeared, every country on Earth is "a country of immigrants." But we don't hear anyone saying that other countries should indiscriminately allow anyone who wants to immigrate. This seems to be a charge leveled only at America.
Second, just because a country is populated by immigrants doesn't mean that their borders are any less real, or that their government is any less sovereign. A sovereign nation--America, yours, any nation--does not exist for the purpose of helping other countries and cultures. It exists for the purpose of serving its citizens. And if open borders and free immigration serves a nation's citizens, then that's the best and only acceptable reason for allowing it. And just for the record, I believe that the immigrants that I work with are a net benefit to our nation, and I'm glad they're here.
This argument for government-run health care (aka "single-payer system") gets made a lot, and at first look it seems reasonable. But consider that the U.S. government is already deeply involved in health care, and it may be this very involvement that is driving up prices.
For example, the Medicare physician fee schedule in place until 1996 paid physicians far more for high-technology services than for basic care, encouraging them to use as much expensive technology as possible. Also, Medicare fees for basic services are set lower than the market. Is it any wonder that doctors go for the high-priced procedures instead of focusing on basic medical services? Gov't involvement distorted prices and drove up the cost of health care. The system works only because those services that are over-reimbursed make up for those services that are under-reimbursed -- for example, overpaying for cancer drugs makes up for underpaying for cancer treatment.
Government control over medical pricing and no incentives for individuals to control their own health-care costs: it's a recipe for high health care costs. Get gov't out of the health care business, and let the free market bring down the prices. You can give vouchers to the needy, and allow them to purchase the private-sector health care that best serves them.
Actually, Phoenix has one of the best fire companies in the nation and it's private by subscription. Also, don't forget all those volunteer fire companies in suburbs, small towns and rural areas. Their high level of service for the negligible price negates the need for most local governments to fund a fire company. Also, private security officers outnumber local police by five to one in this country. So, there is competition in providing police and fire services.
My point here is not to make you "wrong" for saying that Verizon is a crybaby. It's just to show that even for services that are usually thought of as government functions, when a private company comes along and provides that service, it's often better than the government. When you need to send a package overnight, guaranteed, do you choose FedEx/UPS or the Post Office?
Philly's wifi service must be paid for by the people of Philadelphia. If the gov't provides the service, there's no incentive to excell and it costs everyone more. Even if you fund it with a tax on businesses or the rich, every tax dollar you take from a business or a rich person eventually comes out of the pocket of a poorer person. Where do you think that business/rich person will go to replenish the money the gov't just took from them? They'll charge higher prices or more interest or donate less to charity, etc.
If you let the businesses compete for the wifi customers, then there's competition to drive down prices and drive up quality. Eventually, the service becomes affordable to poorer people and everyone ends up paying less in the end. Example: I park in a low-income neighborhood every day and see plenty of cell phones around me. That happened without gov't subsidies or gov't-run cell phone companies. It can happen for wifi, too, if we're patient and give the free market a chance. Sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do is let the "heartless capitalists" do what they do best: produce good products at low prices.
Yeah, because Malcolm Reynolds and his fellow Independents were all fighting to keep their slaves. Don't be ridiculous.
In The Soul of Battle : From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, Victor Davis Hanson discusses how the motivations for fighting the Civil War differed between rich and poor southerners. The rich were fighting to keep their slaves. The poor, who generally didn't own slaves, were fighting to keep their culture and right to self-rule. When the Union general Sherman marched through Georgia, looting and destroying plantations and Southern infrastructure, he concentrated on destroying the property of the rich Southerners. Of course, a lot of poor farmers got caught in the swath of destruction that he cut across the state, but his intention was to break the will of the Southern leaders by bringing the cost of the war home to them.
I think it was these conflicting motivations for fighting--greed vs. self rule--that gives rise to comments like yours and the conflicting view that many Americans have about our Civil War. For some Americans, it was about slavery. For others, it was about self rule.
Another interesting fact is that the original American colonists, who were English citizens, practically begged the English king to forbid slavery in the Colonies. They believed it was immoral, and feared that it would pollute and ultimately divide the culture of the new Colonies. The king insisted on permitting slavery in the New World because he thought it would help the agricultural trade. Guess those original colonists knew what they were talking about, didn't they?
What the slightly-paranoid writer of this article suggests is that Firefly (remember, this was a discussion about Firefly?) offers us a chance to explore the politics and emotional fallout of that war, without the slavery issue.
Hank Parnell of the Texas Mercury asserts that Fox deliberately killed Firefly for political reasons. Personally, I don't think Fox's politics had anything to do with it, but his article is entertaining. The complete essay is on fireflyfans.net. I copied the most inflammatory, er, interesting, excerpts below:
They wanted to kill this show. I believe that, as surely as I do that the sun rises in the east...
The conscious patterning of the Firefly milieu on the Confederate defeat that Whedon publicly stated was the case may have not set very well in the Yankee-dominated halls of Political Correctness that rules modern America, be they "liberal" or "conservative" ("neoconservative"; again, the two are virtually indistinguishable). Firefly was an unabashed post-Civil War space Western where the losers were the good guys; and everything about the series echoed that, from the desert settings of the frontier moons and planets, the costumes, the music, even the characters' patterns of speech. We knew who these people really were. They had no slavery to fight for, only the right of self-governance...
Firefly, in its way, was, in this post 9-11 climate, almost downright seditious. The Alliance enforcers--the "bad guys"--were called "Feds." The attempt to unite and homogenize people was seen, by Firefly, as not a "good" thing; and yet it is the undeniable Zeitgeist of the modern age and behind every bit of mischief and misadventure in the world today...
Nor do most people agree with Captain Reynolds' words (as quoted by Reverend Book in the episode "War Stories"), "The government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned."...Do not think that Firefly was not drawing allusions and parallels to our own society and its attendant beliefs, or that this implicit criticism went unnoticed by the powers-that-be...
And Firefly made the case, through Reynolds, as persuasively as it has ever been made in American fiction, print, TV, film or otherwise, in my opinion, for the ultimate superiority of the rule of honor over the rule of law...For you see, the rule of honor demands what law must defer: individual responsibility, personal culpability, what is fair and what is just, of every man (and woman) who lives by it...And it is the greatest offense, the greatest affront, that Firefly could give to our vaunted modern age, and why, in my opinion, Fox never gave the show any kind of a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
True, which is why if you're going to try to game the system, you might be better off spending that money buying multiple copies of your book along with a few selected, sustained best sellers. Then when someone looks at the best seller, they your book listed as something that other customers also published.
Or if you'd like to participate in a more honest way, I recommend these tools on Amazon, which I've used to promote my Moodle and Training books:
Create a So you'd like to... guide with your book on the guide. Make the guide relevant, not just an excuse for self promotion, and people will actually use your guide. The more people who click into items from your guide, the more Amazon will display it.
Create a Listmania list with your book on it. Again, make it relevant and you'll get better results from that list.
Make search suggestions that are relevant and accurate for your book. "You can specify the search for which you think the item should appear, along with your explanation of why it is relevant. Once approved, we'll show your suggestion in Amazon search to everyone."
Participate in Amazon's Search Inside! program.
Add descriptive content to your book's Amazon listing.
Ditto for adding a cover image.And one that I've been too busy (lazy?) to use, participate in Amazon's blog program, AmazonConnect.
These are all much longer-lasting ways of improving the sale of your book on Amazon. And they're much cheaper than paying someone thousands to game the system for you. But if people really thing it's worth all that money for one hour of dubious fame, I suppose it was inevitable that someone would offer a service to do it for them.
An interesting choice of words from the article. As opposed to saying "...might be used to questions suspects." The article's choice of words assumes that if you're being interrogated, you are a criminal. Which seems to be the way people are thinking these days.
Or any of the other techniques from 43folders.com http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/15/recap-procrast ination-hacks-email-overload-kinkless-gtd-and-a-vi sit-from-the-word-spy/ .
You are absolutely correct. In the end, all rights are property rights.
When a government or society treats your land as being partially public property (property taxes are legitimized by the belief that "we all own the land"), or subject to confiscation in the name of the greater good (eminent domain), it's one step away from treating your house as public property. "You can't build that kind of house because it doesn't meet our building codes...never mind that you've agreed to assume all liability for living in it and any effects it might have on your neighbors, but no, you cannot build that straw-bale or adobe house here."
Now that you've gotten used to having your land and home treated as partially public property, it's one more step to treating your body as public property. "No, you cannot have that MS treatment because we believe it's not in your best interest. Never mind that you supposedly own your own body, and that you're an adult who is willing to assume all risk for the treatment."
And then from there, it's another step to treating your thoughts and feelings as partially public property.
And this slippery slope begins when someone violates your propert rights: land > home > body > mind.
Rats, I blew it when I tried to post the link.
You want sustainability in a home? How about growing your house by weaving and fusing trees together.
Almost all the Firefly fans I know saw the movie, even though they knew the DVD would be coming out soon. Which demonstrates that the view held by theatres just isn't true: we don't go to the theatre because we can't get the movie on DVD or cable, or because we can't wait to see it. We go because we want to make seeing the movie a special event: huge screen, surrounded by our friends, making a night of it, etc.
Well, I have been directly affected by terrorism. I stood on the sidewalk and watched in horror as innocent people flung themselves out of a quarter-mile-high building instead of being burned to death. I saw, heard, and felt the impact of the second plane. I dodged falling debris with the rest of the crowd, and walked up Broad Street to get away from the site with my fellow New Yorkers, hitting the redial button on my cell phone until I could get through to my family to tell them I was still alive.
And, I agree with you.
I watched three thousand innocent people murdered just because they had the courage to live as free people. And how are we honoring their memory? By giving up the freedoms they died for, for a false sense of security.
We've been told "They hate us for our freedoms." If that's true, then why has Switzerland, where people have at least as much individual liberty as we do, not been attacked by The Terrorists?
We've been told that we need to give up some freedoms in the name of safety. If giving up individual liberty makes you safer, then why is it that in countries where individual liberties are suppressed the most that people have the most to fear? I'm not saying that the people who want to reduce our liberty in the name of security are tyrants; I believe they think they're doing the right thing. However, the belief that you must choose between liberty and safety is not true. Perhaps it's up to the citizens of the free world to let our politicians know this. Or, we can just sit around on our well-regulated duffs and hope that the government can keep us safe.
Doesn't the PATRIOT act allow them to do that now? Except they don't have to tell you that you've been indexed.
You cannot give up a right. That's what makes it a right. Rights are inherent, innate, inborn, and inseperable. They can be suppressed, ignored, and trampled on, but not given up. Only priviledges can be given up or traded away.
The Aussies are not giving up their privacy rights. They are giving up their privacy. They can reclaim their rights any time they have the courage to do so (I speak for my fellow Americans, as well). Unfortunately, privacy like virginity is not so easily reclaimed.
You've just been handed hundreds of hours of footage to use in video editing class. Very cool.
Shameless Self-Promotion: If you're a programmer who needs to write a user manual, the book reviewed here sounds like a great fit. But if you need to write a training course for the application you've created, check out my book, User Training for Busy Programmers. It gives you step-by-step instructions for developing an instructor-led software class. It takes a practical, condensed approach for when you don't have time to learn training theory.
You've made a flawed assumption here: that the design documents have anything to do with the resulting code.
[ducks flying objects]
If it were any other book, you might be able to establish a valid parallel between two different languages. However, almost every translation of the Bible is "informed by tradition." This means the translators attempted to translate the Bible in the context of what the people paying the translators believe. Almost all Bible translations are made by committees. They interpret the text through theological doctrines and dogmas that arose centuries after the Bible was written. And, this "understanding" of what the Bible means can change not only from version to version, but also from culture to culture. The book is just too burdened with tradition for any two translations to parallel each other as closely as, say, two translations or Huck Finn. Any Gaus's translation, "The Unvarnished New Testament," is the only one I've found that simply translates from the original Greek without interpretation. You would need two language versions that both attempt to suppress the author's prejudice and beliefs to use the Bible as a corpus for translation.
Thanks! On the F train, this will be quite an improvement!
"At least the police, when armed, have very very strict rules regarding firearm use. They have regular training, and their performance levels are frequently checked. They have medicals and psych evaluations. Normal gun-owning members of the public don't have those, which is tragic, as they're also less trained. The logic of the whole situation is beyond belief."
"According to criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, every year adults use guns for protective purposes 2.5 million times. As many as 65 lives are protected by guns for every life lost to a gun. Each year, potential victims kill between 2,000 and 3,000 criminals; they wound an additional 9,000 to 17,000. Moreover, mishaps are rare. Private citizens mistakenly kill innocent people only thirty times a year, compared with about 330 mistaken killings by police."
When a police officer fires their gun in the line of duty, there's an 11% chance that (s)he will shoot an innocent person. For civilians, the rate is 2%.
It might be a U.S. thing. In the time I worked in the legal field as a PC instructor, I never worked with anyone who handled legal issues outside of the U.S.
I've since found out from my lawyer friends that Word is making inroads into the legal profession here, because clients supply most documents to their counsel in Word format. I told him, "But WordPerfect can read simple Word files pefectly, and these files you get can't all be heavily formatted, complex structured documents." He said most lawyers in the U.S. don't know that WordPerfect can read their clients' Word files, so many are switching over. Now that most of the typing is out of the hands of the professional typists who grew up on WordPerfect (legal secretaries), we'll probably see less WordPerfect and more Word with each passing month.
Personally, I prefer OpenOffice. I like to own my data, not just rent it from the vendor who made the tool that I used to create the data.
I taught word processing and basic PC skills to paralegals in the 90's. In spite of Word's increasing popularity, many law offices stayed with WordPerfect. Here's what I saw happen:
Law offices adopted WordPerfect because its style sheets and macro features matured before Word's. In a business that produces massive numbers of identically-formatted documents, with many passages repeated from doc-to-doc, robust stylesheets and macros were a powerful selling point.
WordPerfect's keystroke shortcuts were also critical to its success in the law field. Most of the typing in law offices was done by secretaries, who were professional typists. They didn't want thier fingers to leave the keyboard for any reason. And they certainly didn't want to have to wait for a menu to pop up or pull down, and then navigate through that menu (even if they could do so without leaving the keyboard). WordPerfect enabled these professional typists to do everything with keyboard shortcuts only, and bypass slower menus. WordPerfect was to legal secretaries what emacs is to programmers.
Third-party vendors saw the dominance of WordPerfect in the legal profession, and developed thier products around WordPerfect. Whether it was an add-on to produce legal citations more easily, or templates for legal documents, they further supported WordPerfect's dominance in this specialized market.
After spending years developing thier WordPerfect reflexes, integrating third party products, and even writing thier own WordPerfect macros, legal typists were not going to easily abandon the application. So while most of the rest of the world switched to Word, the legal profession has kept on chugging away with WordPerfect. And now every lawyer I know still uses it.
Well, I'm definitely setting myself up for an intellectual beating by posting this in front of so many smart people, but let's see what happens anyway. I submit to you that the entire concept of a "greater good" is a logical fallacy. There is an "individual good," which exists. But logically, there is no "greater good;" it's an abstraction and has no real existence.
Anything that's real, that is, anything that is not just an abstraction or intellectual construct, has a defineable limit between it and the rest of the world. The monitor you're reading this on, by virtue of the definition of "monitor," has a boundary that delineates it from the rest of the world. You know objectively and certainly where that monitor ends and the rest of the world begins.
"The Greater Good" has no such objective definition. Exactly who is this "Greater" who is experiencing the "Good" you speak of? The majority of Americans? The majority of humans? White people? Black people? The composition of this "Greater" changes with every situation. It's no more definable than the concept of "warmth." Prove to me objectively where "warmth" ends and "heat" begins. You can't, and that makes it arbitrary.
When you base law upon the "Greater Good" you base it upon something that's arbitrary, upon the shifting sand of an intellectual construct. If you do that, what makes your laws better than any other arbitray system?
"Individual Good," however, does pass at least one test for a real, objective, existent "thing." It has a defineable boundary. My individual good, my individual rights, end where yours begins. We may argue about where my rights end, just as we may argue about where the monitor ends and the computer begins (at which end of the cable?). But we both agree that such a boundary exists and that it's defineable.
I would be suspicious of anyone passing regulations for the "greater good," and so were the founders of this country. They recognized that the only "good" and the only "liberty" that is not subject to a whimsical redefinition by society is that of the individual. Our politicians and schools push the idea of the "greater good," but I think they unwittingly do us a disservice.
Simply quoting Chief Justice Rehnquist's famous example of freedom of speech not applying to yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre ignores the principle of "No harm, no crime." If I yell "Fire!" and everyone either laughs or ignores me, the law might accuse me of committing a crime, but if there's no harm there is no actual crime. That doesn't mean I won't be punished for a "crime." It just means that I will be punished for a victimless crime.
To punish someone for something that might have caused harm ("You could have started a stampede. You're lucky no one took you seriously!") is to start going down a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line on punishing people for speech that might have caused harm? And give me an objective reason for drawing the line there. You enter a realm where the definition of "crime" depends upon societal whim.
"Unless your family was hunting buffalo here thousands of years ago, you're just a newbie tourist." There are many good arguments for keeping our borders open and for us to continue welcoming immigrants to America. I won't go into them all. I will say, however, that "Because we're a country of immigrants." or "Because only the Native Americans aren't immigrants here." is a lousy reason. First of all, with the exception of some watering hole in central Africa where humanity first appeared, every country on Earth is "a country of immigrants." But we don't hear anyone saying that other countries should indiscriminately allow anyone who wants to immigrate. This seems to be a charge leveled only at America. Second, just because a country is populated by immigrants doesn't mean that their borders are any less real, or that their government is any less sovereign. A sovereign nation--America, yours, any nation--does not exist for the purpose of helping other countries and cultures. It exists for the purpose of serving its citizens. And if open borders and free immigration serves a nation's citizens, then that's the best and only acceptable reason for allowing it. And just for the record, I believe that the immigrants that I work with are a net benefit to our nation, and I'm glad they're here.
This argument for government-run health care (aka "single-payer system") gets made a lot, and at first look it seems reasonable. But consider that the U.S. government is already deeply involved in health care, and it may be this very involvement that is driving up prices.
For example, the Medicare physician fee schedule in place until 1996 paid physicians far more for high-technology services than for basic care, encouraging them to use as much expensive technology as possible. Also, Medicare fees for basic services are set lower than the market. Is it any wonder that doctors go for the high-priced procedures instead of focusing on basic medical services? Gov't involvement distorted prices and drove up the cost of health care. The system works only because those services that are over-reimbursed make up for those services that are under-reimbursed -- for example, overpaying for cancer drugs makes up for underpaying for cancer treatment.
Government control over medical pricing and no incentives for individuals to control their own health-care costs: it's a recipe for high health care costs. Get gov't out of the health care business, and let the free market bring down the prices. You can give vouchers to the needy, and allow them to purchase the private-sector health care that best serves them.
Actually, Phoenix has one of the best fire companies in the nation and it's private by subscription. Also, don't forget all those volunteer fire companies in suburbs, small towns and rural areas. Their high level of service for the negligible price negates the need for most local governments to fund a fire company. Also, private security officers outnumber local police by five to one in this country. So, there is competition in providing police and fire services.
My point here is not to make you "wrong" for saying that Verizon is a crybaby. It's just to show that even for services that are usually thought of as government functions, when a private company comes along and provides that service, it's often better than the government. When you need to send a package overnight, guaranteed, do you choose FedEx/UPS or the Post Office?
Philly's wifi service must be paid for by the people of Philadelphia. If the gov't provides the service, there's no incentive to excell and it costs everyone more. Even if you fund it with a tax on businesses or the rich, every tax dollar you take from a business or a rich person eventually comes out of the pocket of a poorer person. Where do you think that business/rich person will go to replenish the money the gov't just took from them? They'll charge higher prices or more interest or donate less to charity, etc.
If you let the businesses compete for the wifi customers, then there's competition to drive down prices and drive up quality. Eventually, the service becomes affordable to poorer people and everyone ends up paying less in the end. Example: I park in a low-income neighborhood every day and see plenty of cell phones around me. That happened without gov't subsidies or gov't-run cell phone companies. It can happen for wifi, too, if we're patient and give the free market a chance. Sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do is let the "heartless capitalists" do what they do best: produce good products at low prices.
In The Soul of Battle : From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, Victor Davis Hanson discusses how the motivations for fighting the Civil War differed between rich and poor southerners. The rich were fighting to keep their slaves. The poor, who generally didn't own slaves, were fighting to keep their culture and right to self-rule. When the Union general Sherman marched through Georgia, looting and destroying plantations and Southern infrastructure, he concentrated on destroying the property of the rich Southerners. Of course, a lot of poor farmers got caught in the swath of destruction that he cut across the state, but his intention was to break the will of the Southern leaders by bringing the cost of the war home to them.
I think it was these conflicting motivations for fighting--greed vs. self rule--that gives rise to comments like yours and the conflicting view that many Americans have about our Civil War. For some Americans, it was about slavery. For others, it was about self rule.
Another interesting fact is that the original American colonists, who were English citizens, practically begged the English king to forbid slavery in the Colonies. They believed it was immoral, and feared that it would pollute and ultimately divide the culture of the new Colonies. The king insisted on permitting slavery in the New World because he thought it would help the agricultural trade. Guess those original colonists knew what they were talking about, didn't they?
What the slightly-paranoid writer of this article suggests is that Firefly (remember, this was a discussion about Firefly?) offers us a chance to explore the politics and emotional fallout of that war, without the slavery issue.
Hank Parnell of the Texas Mercury asserts that Fox deliberately killed Firefly for political reasons. Personally, I don't think Fox's politics had anything to do with it, but his article is entertaining. The complete essay is on fireflyfans.net. I copied the most inflammatory, er, interesting, excerpts below: