The Internet is the result of a "spillover" of the dual-use technology. Developed by the DoD for itself, it turned out (or was wisely designed) to be usable by others. This was terrific and has since been matched only by GPS in popularity.
Mind you, ARPANET has paid only for the development of software and the standards -- it did not pay for the pipes or other hardware, that today's socialists demand be upgraded.
only half true. look at the evolution beyond the military personnel and facilities and their direct contractors. what do we see? public universities (america's most underrated socialist institutions) were the first non-DoD facilities on ARPANET. while i'm not sure who actually paid for the installation of the lines, the universities (and each point, individually, as it was added) paid their own maintenance costs. Bell wasn't paying to maintain this network.
and, of course, let's not forget that very much of that "private" network was built either with government subsidies or with money collected under the force of government ("universal service charge" and the like), not to mentioned sanctioned monopolies. i don't think it's unreasonable or illogical to assert that this imposes some degree of social obligation on them.
I believe, you just wanted to see the words "crypto-socialist" posted.
heh. i confess i really like the phrase, but that doesn't make it less true. it amazes me that more people don't see that aspect of the military. it's not like they go to any lengths to hide it.
i think you're basically over-optimistic about how the market will play out. monopolies really like to hold on to power, and tend towards decreasing costs rather than increasing services in a drive to increase revenue.
to be clear, i'm not particularly an advocate of net neutrality legislation. i'm fully in favor of the principle - i think it's important for everyone involved, in the long term, and for most people in the short term, too - and agree with the proponents of legislation that short-sighted corporate tendencies threaten it, but i'm explicitly undecided on whether legislation is the best solution. i just think the "ooo, socialism!" argument is a particularly stupid attack.
As for the distinction between Socialism and Communism -- yes, these are distinct. Their true adherents tend view the former as a prelude to the (inevitable) latter, however, so mixing them up is not really such a fallacy...
well, the Communists believe that. most modern socialists do not. take a look at nearly all of europe. lots of socialism in the mix there, but it's stable; neither viewed as nor attempting to be a prelude to communism. and, incidentally, it works very well. i suppose the confusion is largely understandable in that a lot of communist organizations call(ed) themselves socialists to seem less threatening, thus contributing to the poisoning of the word socialist.
You're about the fifth person today i've seen make the "ooo, socialism!" argument. This isn't particularly targeting you or your version of it, but the whole class of argument.
Am I the only one who finds it more than a little ironic (not to mention short-sighted and grating), considering the internet is the result of socialist practices in the first place? I realize we're largely an American audience here, but is our sense of history really that short that we can't even make it 20-30 years back? Do we not remember our origins with the ARPANET, a project nurtured in and entirely funded by America's favorite crypto-socialist organization, the Department of Defense? This is a project funded by tax dollars which fall well outside the core capitalist/libertarian conception of what the government should be doing, and while it's certainly got problems, it's worked out pretty well. While the technology wasn't necessarily the best around at the time (personally, I think we missed out on better things with datakit from Bell Labs), it was plenty good enough to facilitate growth.
But the most important aspect of all leading to the creation of the modern internet wasn't technical at all. Rather, it was the fact that its form and structure was decided outside the realm of commercial interests. The free interchange was facilitated by a design which had no interest in "walled gardens" of any kind. Wondering what the corporate, capitalist world would have come up with instead, if left to their own devices? We needn't wonder: look at AOL, or most of the national mobile networks (especially those on the CDMA side). Closed, tiered networks... all of which inhibit growth of services. Users, who're now accustomed to the wealth of readily-available (and frequently free, although that's secondary) resources on the Internet, have no interest in restricted choice, leading to (well, among the things leading to) very limited uptake of advanced mobile services. "The market" has told us that what "the market" comes up with on its own is, by its own measure, inferior to what the DoD's socialist practices came up with.
It's not a question of arguing "the free market is failing" - the Internet's very existence is thanks to the government realizing "the market" had no way of getting where it wanted to be.
Today, every mobile (and many fixed) network operator in America (and many internationally, although the dynamics are very different in other places) is struggling with the same conflict which ate AOL's business model: they want to be the walled garden, to be the guardian of the user's experience and to get paid for access to those users (walls work both ways). But the users just want the internet. Verizon want's to provide (or choose who provides, and get kickbacks from) my weather service, my news service, my search service, my photo sharing service, and so on. I, as a user, don't care what Verizon wants; I want to pick which ones I'm using. Fundamentally, that's what this whole net neutrality debate is about: the market you're so fond of drives network providers to be dumb pipes, or to at least divorce the content they do provide from their dumb pipes, but that's exactly what network operators are scared to death of. They don't want to compete in a commodity market.
A large part of me blames this whole mess on the McCarthyism-induced confusion between socialism and communism in America. We've given ourselves just the right kind of collective brain damage to be unable to tell the difference.
you've got an inappropriately binary sense of ambiguity. i will grant (since it's obvious) that jam and jelly are more similar than flowers and doughnuts; further, it's certainly true that this difference is important for resolving the linguistic ambiguity. but the point is that the construction, syntacticly, is in fact ambiguous. the 13th amendment uses the same syntactic construction; there is no syntactic difference. the difference is semantics; that is, the difference is dependent on the meaning of the individual terms. in the jam/jelly case, the fact that the terms are so similar in meaning as to be nearly interchangeable leads us to believe that the interjected clause refers to the entire preceding clause (although we could still be wrong; perhaps one is afraid of the seeds in jam and jelly, while similar enough to be disturbing, can sometimes be allowed.); in the flower/doughnut case, the terms are different enough that we don't assume that, and the meaning of the interjected clause inclines us to assume it refers only to the doughnuts (although, again, we could easily be wrong; perhaps i really enjoy frosted flowers? you've discounted them summarily. if i work in a confectionary, it's entirely plausible). in the case of the 13th amendment, the two objects are in the same class of thing, yes, but clearly much more different than jam and jelly. the ambiguity exists. and before you start, of course the counter-example i've provided parenthetically are far-fetched and constructed artificially. and, without the context, the more conventional assumptions are entirely valid. i would need to know some specific context to believe that jam is uniformly prohibited or that flowers are sometimes allowed. but that's the point: we resolve the linguistic ambiguity by using context from the rest of our knowledge.
and, again, i'm not making this up. there's extensive judicial precedent on this. if the ambiguity did not exist, the courts wouldn't be spending time clarifying it. can you point me at any legal (or linguistic) authority or text (other than yourself, of course) which argues otherwise?
and that ambiguity is not a problem for the law, either, because laws do not exist in a vacuum. the 13th amendment depends on the body of the constitution, including the 8th amendment, to give it context. and given that enslavement as punishment for crime runs pretty far afoul of any reasonable definition of "cruel and unusual punishment" - including, importantly, those found in law and judicial precedent! - it stands to reason that the correct resolution to the existing syntactic ambiguity is to bind the interjected clause to involuntary servitude, not the first clause.
the rest of your arguments are just uninteresting. the FCC's fines on broadcasting companies don't come close to cruel and unusual punishment, and the privatization of our prison system (while grotesque, in my opinion) doesn't equate in any logical way to buying and selling of prisoners or to evidence of institutionalized slavery. you've clearly got some sort of strange emotional attachment to the issue, and i hold out no hope of convincing you of the truth of what should be an obvious distinction.
You going to argue jam cannot be used as a reward? Of course not. It's plain English. Interpreting it any other way than the obvious way is the act of an illiterate, or a sophist.
you're being dense; i can't tell whether it's intentional. this is basic linguistics. of course the ambiguity exists. in colloquial speech, we have conventional resolutions, but those don't apply in formal contexts like specifications or law. look at this other sentence with identical construction:
neither flowers nor doughnuts, except the glazed kind, shall be placed on my desk, or my chair.
it's clear, in that context, that "the glazed kind" refers to the doughnuts; interpreting it to say otherwise would be the act of an illiterate or a sophist. but the construction is exactly the same as the example you gave. the point here is that the construction, on its own, is ambiguous. (just to confirm i'm not crazy, i confirmed this with a PhD linguist friend of mine. yup, i'm not crazy. he agrees that, from a strictly linguistic standpoint, the binding is ambiguous and those three example constructions are identical)
given the ambiguity, we look to other related sources to resolve it. the 8th amendment is relevant here; i find it impossible to believe any judge in the country wouldn't find slavery to be cruel and unusual punishment. the entire integrity of our legal system does not hang on the linguistic construction of one clause. nobody owns anybody in the US. this is clear. it's a decided issue in the legislature and the courts. read FindLaw's commentary on the 13th amendment (which i just found out about today) for some relevant judicial citations, if you're actually interested. but i suspect you're not. you're being dishonest with the law and various interpretations of language to try to give yourself a talking point. it doesn't exist. call me when the US can sell prisoners to private individuals. then we're talking property.
as for your supposed half-million dollar fines. note, first, that these are not against individuals, but against companies, and ones with vastly superior resources. note further that the second link you've posted calls out the fact that the bill is abandoned. of course, i'm not defending this practice at all: i think the FCC is overstepping its bounds significantly here. but there's nothing here that qualifies as a violation of the 8th amendment by any stretch of the imagination.
"parse it as written" doesn't help resolve the legitimate linguistic ambiguity. english does not provide tight binding of dependent clauses. is it (slavery and involuntary servitude), (except as punishment for crime) or slavery and (involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime)? thankfully, judicial interpretation is soundly with the later, and i'm willing to bet you can't find a 20th or 21st century federal judge (even the Bush guys, who don't, on the whole, care too much for the law) who wouldn't put slavery out of bounds as punishment under the 8th.
i think you're underestimating the difference between slavery and involuntary servitude. slavery is ownership of people. laws around slavery are property laws. nothing before congress or any other body in the US replicates that. not even close.
as for the rest, you seem to be confusing a claim that the Constitution has held up reasonably well and still serves as a set of guiding principles with a claim that there are not lots of problems with our current implementation. i'm not going to defend our prison system, let alone the run of "ooo, terrorists!" activities our current administration has undertaken, largely at great expense to the integrity of the Constitution and the rule of law generally. but none of that changes the point. those aberrations should be fought.
also, i'm curious about this "half-million dollar fine for a curse word" claim. cite?
what does "stable" mean? unchanging? for how long? the idea of "stable" political systems is a myth. the "balance" we've got now didn't exist a decade ago, and won't a decade from now (although, sadly, i can't predict which direction it'll go in). what government doesn't change over time? England's had (one of?) the longest continuously-running monarchies on the planet, yet the changes in the political system over that span are astounding. one of the most important features of the US Constitution is its ability to incorporate change. sure, the original Articles were replace by the Constitution, but that says nothing about the stability of the model. independent nations come up with treaties governing their relations all the time. this needn't be any different.
i have a hard time imagining the EU gaining control of the member nations' military, but still: i think you're right in your implicit observation that power tends to consolidate. even without the military, that's been going on. and to a point, it's fine: that's exactly what governments are, people doing that on an individual level. but the price of liberty really is eternal vigilance - not against external threats, as that phrase is so often used, but against internal degeneration into tyranny. it's up to the people to ensure that such an inappropriate consolidation of power doesn't happen. it's not inevitable. granted, we've got a crummy track record.
the EU model is very similar to the original US model, although reserving even more to the individual "states". while there are certainly implementation issues (the EU Constitution is... not lovely, and the whole organization's way too bureaucratic, and simply too large, i think), i have more hope for the EU's "stability" (really, resilience against the same sorts of degeneration that the US's try at that model went through) based on the fact that the member nations have a much stronger sense of national identity based on a long history of being nations.
You do realize that the ideas you are espousing are basically the same as those people you derisively call "Confederate yahoos" - Right?
um, some of them, sure. here, out with it: i think the Confederacy had the more correct stance on the relationship between State and Federal government, as prescribed by the Constitution, during the Civil War (although it's hard to say on the specific issue of secession, as it's not addressed in the text). and if the current secession or "new south" movements stopped there, i could support them ideologically. the reality, however, is that while "states rights" was the underlying political issue, what got things moving in the Civil War was the disgusting practice of slavery, and most of the current southern secession movements retain most of the more disturbing portions of the racial outlook. they basically seek to create a bunch of white christian States. that's what gets them my derision and makes them yahoos.
Hmmm. Did you mean to say that the most significant changes have been the results of ignoring the amendments?
no, i did not. no doubt, the tendency to ignore the law when it's inconvenient is at least as strong in government as it is in individuals, but i do mean that the most significant and long-lasting changes are the result of the amendments themselves. keep in mind that the first ten themselves were changes (if almost immediate ones). as for how intact 1-10 (or any others) are, that's a matter of interpretation. while there's been a concerted attack by the current administration (and less organized offenses pretty much since the constitution's inception), i think it's held up remarkably well over time. none of the current attacks are irreparable.
Ah, no. The 13th amendment doesn't do away with slavery at all. What it does is reserves it as a right of the government.
and this is why judicial interpretation is important. it's pretty unanimously agreed that it's involuntary servitude, not slavery, which can be prescribed as punishment for a crime. the 14th and 15th were equally important here (and then we got into the 16th, which was a definite turn for the worse). it's also not a case of "whatever they want to put you to work doing," as the protections of the 8th amendment still apply. the involuntary servitude represented by labor in prison is a very far cry from ownership of the person.
first, you provide two alternatives (current US government vs. 50 independent states) and implicitly assert that they are the only two available. this is false. historically, we've got the Articles of Confederation, of course, to illustrate an obviously distinct alternative, but then there's the fact that the current US government does not particularly resemble the government we had ~200 years ago. the most significant changes have been the results of amendments, but changes in judicial interpretation is also very important. some of these changes have been positive (yay for no more slavery! yay for women voting!), some are negative (what happened to all other powers falling to the states or the people?), and on several the jury's still out (like direct election of senators; much more complicated than it seems). the point is change happens, if only slowly, and that change represents another alternative (arguably the most viable).
second, why are you assuming or asserting that having 50 independent countries would suck? there's nothing to prevent those countries from entering into treaties to, for example, allow unfettered travel between them or share a currency. this is much the same as the origin of the EU (another example of where the current incarnation does not reflect the initial formulation). personally, that actually sounds kinda good. decentralizing the power would likely have the effect of making us a bit less abusive of it, at least. several of our states have intact free-standing governments that predate the US. probably more than any industrialized country in the world, the US Federal government could just close up shop with a relative minimum of fuss and a short transition period.
sounds kinda fun, actually; would certainly be an exciting change. Vermot's got its own succession movement; probably the largest in the country. there's a smaller but still noticeable one in Hawai'i, which makes sense (since we got the country in the first place through pretty bad means), a bunch of "the south will rise again!" yahoos down in the Confederacy, and a few not-really-significant ones in other places (like Manhattan). the trickiest legal issue is what the status of the reservations would be; they're already "odd", to say the least, but they sorta bypass the states and "report" directly into the federal government. maybe just stop futzing around with this "dual sovereignty" and "conquered nation" nonsense and make them independent? simplest, but not clear it's best (most would be friggin' tiny, for starters).
okay, well i guess i ought to repost my correction to you from that thread, as well:
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Also keep in mind that there are other legal ways of acquiring Mac OS X 10.4.x for Intel Macs, such as membership in the Apple Developer Program. The license there has other restrictions on use, but it is acceptable in a large number of cases.
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generally, i find your post informative, but it'd be nice if you could stop repeating the false portion about there being no legal way to obtain Mac OS X for Intel.
Also keep in mind that there are other legal ways of acquiring Mac OS X 10.4.x for Intel Macs, such as membership in the Apple Developer Program. The license there has other restrictions on use, but it is acceptable in a large number of cases.
Yes, I mean the entire story, or the summary, or Dvorak, or whatever you can get your hands on. Can we please stop hearing about this moron? While I'll grant he's got above-average writing abilities, he's no more insightful than the average/. comment.
People get this wrong all the time: it entirely depends on the failure mode. Sure, a clock which is broken in the sense of being stopped cold will be right twice a day. But that's not Dvorak. Dvorak's a clock that runs slow, missing, say one minute per year. He's right once every 720 year, not twice a day.
And this is me being generous. At a casual observation, Dvorak seems to be insightful and informed; that is, mostly a "working" clock. Maybe he runs just fine, but is "broken" in the sense of having a bad starting state. That'd make him right, oh... never.
Your reply implies that everyone communicates well in person... and that is certainly not the case, although I would say I am personally better face to face than through email.
hrm. that was certainly not my intent; i explicitly agree with you that this isn't true. but that's an implementation failure, not a design issue. my point was that face to face communication inherently contains the opportunity to demonstrate quick thinking, to be responsive to questions, and to resolve confusion or uncertainty on the part of the person you're talking to; of course it's possible to bungle this opportunity. you're also correct that things like medical conditions can impact this (i noted that in another post), but again, that's a specific case. the issue in the article was differences in the communication media generally.
honestly, i've never worked in an organization where marketing engaged in more dubious activities than questionable product claims in literature. i've worked in several which engaged in bribery (both legal and illegal forms). thankfully, never coercion (to the best of my knowledge).
i think you've totally misunderstood what "persuasion" is about. or rather you've taken some particular degenerate form as all there is.
what you've described is basically bribery or coercion. sure, those happen, and are much more prevalent in some industries than others. i've worked in environments where "Sales" consisted mostly of explaining the benefits of your product, helping whoever you're talking to understand them, why it's a better choice than your competitors' products, and why they should trust you or your company. i've also worked in environments where "Sales" was coke and hookers. i'll agree whole-heartedly that the later is inappropriate and almost never (occasionally by chance) leads to the optimal decisions being made. but the former is what's more commonly meant by "persuasion" in a business context. the company i work in now, we've got sales guys who travel the world visiting customers. we're mostly a service bureau; letting the customer know that they have our attention and that we're willing to go out of our way to make them happy is directly related to (which is not to say it's the same thing as) actually doing the job. we explain our service and our platform, talk about experiences others have had comparing our products to our competitors' products, and - most importantly - answer whatever questions they have in real time. we seek to persuade them by demonstrating our excellence, not to coerce them. the closest we ever come to the "coke and hookers" world here is taking people to dinner once in a while and maybe a box of chocolates when something significant happens. but even that's not in the spirit of bribery; we actually intend to have a genuine relationship with our customers, and this is just part of doing so.
(incidentally, as someone well outside the sales world, it's nice to know that i'm working for a company that feels it can compete based on its merits rather than bribery. it makes me feel better about the work i put in to building our products and services.)
persuasion is important for making decisions. you say things like you'll "have none of it", but that's just stupid. you're never convinced by a technical argument? that's persuasion. you never decide you trust one party over another, even if the other looks better on paper? that's generally a result of persuasion, and that's even an emotional response rather than a factual. these are clearly valid parts of business (or any decision making process). it's true that often the people making decisions don't have the skills or knowledge to make them effectively, but that's another issue. people who can't be persuaded are the most infuriating people to work with, and it's almost always a sign of (some combination of) arrogance, ignorance, stupidity, or pride. all those traits diminish your value to most organizations.
i think your internal view is even more disturbing, actually. you say that it's not a manager's job to persuade their employees to do something, but i find work environments where it is to be the most productive. i don't do what my boss tells me "because he said so" (or if i do, it's only long enough to find another job), and i don't expect people who work for me to, either. i try hard to show people who work for me that what they're being asked to do is actually the right thing to be doing. now, there is of course a balancing act here: it's an inappropriate use of everyone's time to try to get all your engineers to know the details of what marketing's doing, or to get the sales people to understand what all the technical limitations are. but it's very useful for the techs to know what marketing's trying to do and how they fit in with that, and for the sales guys to know why they can't always promise the moon. similarly, i expect my employees to ask questions if something doesn't seem right and to let me know if they have any particular insights into things. and i expect the same treatment from my management. we are not cogs in a machine, but are independent, intelligent, creative people. i don't hire any other kind.
When considering F2F vs. Email think about the following as well. Face to face, you have to think on your feet and "roll w/ the punches" while emails can be much more crafted, thought-out, and cogent.
you write like this is a cost or risk of face to face communications, but in fact (at least in my experience) it's the biggest benefit. in several ways.
first, note that there are lots and lots of cases where the person you're communicating with will explicitly be trying to gauge your ability to respond to those sorts of issues. job interviews are the most obvious, but it also comes up in vendor selection, especially in situations where you're likely to have only one (or very few) people you're working with, rather than a faceless company. all sorts of partnership arrangements, too. i imagine it's less of an issue for purchasing decisions.
also, keep in mind that the person you're communicating with will almost certainly have questions you haven't anticipated, regardless of how well thought out your message is or the form it's presented in. if they can ask the questions and get a response interactively, that round of communication ends with them feeling mostly satisfied; if they have to wait for a response to email, that uncertainty has the opportunity to sit and fester in their mind. they spend more time associating you with a feeling of uncertainty than satisfaction.
lots of people are really bad at forming their questions back to you electronically, too. ever gotten questions back to email in-line when the question's answered later on in the document? or had someone miss a point because they have to take information from two different parts of your document together? all those things are much easier to resolve quickly in an interactive session for the recipient of the communication.
But I've realized, many people simply do not, and will not, sit down and master the information in a book to save their lives.
or can not. when i was in grade school everyone in a certain grade (3rd, i think) was given a set of tests (WISC tests?). part of these tests were designed to determine how one learned best: written, oral, what kind of repetition was important, and so on. it was very interesting (obviously much more so now that i'm older and can look back at what was going on). myself, i can read dense technical specifications and comprehend and retain the information well, but i learn far, far more efficiently if i can just have a conversation with someone who already knows the stuff. i'm not entirely clear on why; perhaps something about being able to follow the connections my brain's trying to make by asking questions. i've observed this in myself for everything from literary analysis to programming languages to foreign languages. being able to pick up on it with other people (particularly coworkers; it takes a while to observe) is immensely useful, too.
of course, most of those expensive training courses suck, but that's an entirely separate issue.
...do what interests you. Having done several rounds of hiring for all sorts of different positions myself, let me tell you that's what I look for most: someone who's actually interested in what they're doing. If I'm hiring a web application developer, I'll take the guy who's passionate about it with three years experience over the guy with five (provided he can talk intelligently about it).
Or, hell, interested in something. If I'm choosing between two equally qualified web developers, and one of them's really passionate about, oh i don't know, VAX compiler optimization and the other guy just seems to be in it for the paycheck, I'll go for the VAX guy in a second. VAX compiler optimization hasn't been a "hot" area since i was in grade school, but the fact that he's able to think enough about technical topics like that to get excited about them is a really good sign.
that being said, here's the thing about "hot" areas: it's easy to find people in them. i know where to find really good ajax-y web people, desktop application developers, bio-med CS people, wireless networking people (RF, equipment, whatever), and so on. the "hot" areas get saturated first. what we're having a really hard time finding are really good Product Managers. not anything currently "hot", certainly not glamourous, but people who can envision a product at some point down the road and figure out how to get there. mostly what we see are glorified project managers or systems-engineers-light. but finding someone who knows enough about tech to understand what pieces are needed (and keep the real techs honest) and with some vision of the future? they are few and far between.
it's worth noting that this simply isn't true of all commencement speakers; it's entirely at the school's discretion. i know of some schools (such as Bryn Mawr College) who see it as cheapening their degrees to simply give them away. i've got a lot of respect for that principle: you want a degree, do the work! of course, if they offered me one, i'd accept. would make my mom happy.;-)
Until music is sold without DRM in mp3/flac form for reasonable prices people will continue to download and nobody will buy cds.
bollocks. there's plenty of places which will sell you exactly that. personally, i use (and am quite happy with) eMusic, but there's several others. you just want your stuff free.
poor journalism with stupid, useless metrics. why can't they just stick to established industry norms? how am i supposed to know how many Libraries of Congress this is?
no, you're confused. the article is about the growing momentum behind Windows Mobile. the mobile operators are searching for a solution to their desire for a system which operates less.
not entirely so, no. while the distinction is certainly fuzzy, "terrorist" is about tactics, not which side you're on. don't let the NeoCon perversion of the word to mean "someone we don't like" take over the language. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were certainly revolutionary; one could probably argue that they were freedom fighters. it would be laughable to suggest either was a terrorist.
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and, of course, let's not forget that very much of that "private" network was built either with government subsidies or with money collected under the force of government ("universal service charge" and the like), not to mentioned sanctioned monopolies. i don't think it's unreasonable or illogical to assert that this imposes some degree of social obligation on them.heh. i confess i really like the phrase, but that doesn't make it less true. it amazes me that more people don't see that aspect of the military. it's not like they go to any lengths to hide it.
i think you're basically over-optimistic about how the market will play out. monopolies really like to hold on to power, and tend towards decreasing costs rather than increasing services in a drive to increase revenue.
to be clear, i'm not particularly an advocate of net neutrality legislation. i'm fully in favor of the principle - i think it's important for everyone involved, in the long term, and for most people in the short term, too - and agree with the proponents of legislation that short-sighted corporate tendencies threaten it, but i'm explicitly undecided on whether legislation is the best solution. i just think the "ooo, socialism!" argument is a particularly stupid attack.well, the Communists believe that. most modern socialists do not. take a look at nearly all of europe. lots of socialism in the mix there, but it's stable; neither viewed as nor attempting to be a prelude to communism. and, incidentally, it works very well. i suppose the confusion is largely understandable in that a lot of communist organizations call(ed) themselves socialists to seem less threatening, thus contributing to the poisoning of the word socialist.eh, gotta use that karma for something, right?
You're about the fifth person today i've seen make the "ooo, socialism!" argument. This isn't particularly targeting you or your version of it, but the whole class of argument.
Am I the only one who finds it more than a little ironic (not to mention short-sighted and grating), considering the internet is the result of socialist practices in the first place? I realize we're largely an American audience here, but is our sense of history really that short that we can't even make it 20-30 years back? Do we not remember our origins with the ARPANET, a project nurtured in and entirely funded by America's favorite crypto-socialist organization, the Department of Defense? This is a project funded by tax dollars which fall well outside the core capitalist/libertarian conception of what the government should be doing, and while it's certainly got problems, it's worked out pretty well. While the technology wasn't necessarily the best around at the time (personally, I think we missed out on better things with datakit from Bell Labs), it was plenty good enough to facilitate growth.
But the most important aspect of all leading to the creation of the modern internet wasn't technical at all. Rather, it was the fact that its form and structure was decided outside the realm of commercial interests. The free interchange was facilitated by a design which had no interest in "walled gardens" of any kind. Wondering what the corporate, capitalist world would have come up with instead, if left to their own devices? We needn't wonder: look at AOL, or most of the national mobile networks (especially those on the CDMA side). Closed, tiered networks... all of which inhibit growth of services. Users, who're now accustomed to the wealth of readily-available (and frequently free, although that's secondary) resources on the Internet, have no interest in restricted choice, leading to (well, among the things leading to) very limited uptake of advanced mobile services. "The market" has told us that what "the market" comes up with on its own is, by its own measure, inferior to what the DoD's socialist practices came up with.
It's not a question of arguing "the free market is failing" - the Internet's very existence is thanks to the government realizing "the market" had no way of getting where it wanted to be.
Today, every mobile (and many fixed) network operator in America (and many internationally, although the dynamics are very different in other places) is struggling with the same conflict which ate AOL's business model: they want to be the walled garden, to be the guardian of the user's experience and to get paid for access to those users (walls work both ways). But the users just want the internet. Verizon want's to provide (or choose who provides, and get kickbacks from) my weather service, my news service, my search service, my photo sharing service, and so on. I, as a user, don't care what Verizon wants; I want to pick which ones I'm using. Fundamentally, that's what this whole net neutrality debate is about: the market you're so fond of drives network providers to be dumb pipes, or to at least divorce the content they do provide from their dumb pipes, but that's exactly what network operators are scared to death of. They don't want to compete in a commodity market.
A large part of me blames this whole mess on the McCarthyism-induced confusion between socialism and communism in America. We've given ourselves just the right kind of collective brain damage to be unable to tell the difference.
you've got an inappropriately binary sense of ambiguity. i will grant (since it's obvious) that jam and jelly are more similar than flowers and doughnuts; further, it's certainly true that this difference is important for resolving the linguistic ambiguity. but the point is that the construction, syntacticly, is in fact ambiguous. the 13th amendment uses the same syntactic construction; there is no syntactic difference. the difference is semantics; that is, the difference is dependent on the meaning of the individual terms. in the jam/jelly case, the fact that the terms are so similar in meaning as to be nearly interchangeable leads us to believe that the interjected clause refers to the entire preceding clause (although we could still be wrong; perhaps one is afraid of the seeds in jam and jelly, while similar enough to be disturbing, can sometimes be allowed.); in the flower/doughnut case, the terms are different enough that we don't assume that, and the meaning of the interjected clause inclines us to assume it refers only to the doughnuts (although, again, we could easily be wrong; perhaps i really enjoy frosted flowers? you've discounted them summarily. if i work in a confectionary, it's entirely plausible). in the case of the 13th amendment, the two objects are in the same class of thing, yes, but clearly much more different than jam and jelly. the ambiguity exists.
and before you start, of course the counter-example i've provided parenthetically are far-fetched and constructed artificially. and, without the context, the more conventional assumptions are entirely valid. i would need to know some specific context to believe that jam is uniformly prohibited or that flowers are sometimes allowed. but that's the point: we resolve the linguistic ambiguity by using context from the rest of our knowledge.
and, again, i'm not making this up. there's extensive judicial precedent on this. if the ambiguity did not exist, the courts wouldn't be spending time clarifying it. can you point me at any legal (or linguistic) authority or text (other than yourself, of course) which argues otherwise?
and that ambiguity is not a problem for the law, either, because laws do not exist in a vacuum. the 13th amendment depends on the body of the constitution, including the 8th amendment, to give it context. and given that enslavement as punishment for crime runs pretty far afoul of any reasonable definition of "cruel and unusual punishment" - including, importantly, those found in law and judicial precedent! - it stands to reason that the correct resolution to the existing syntactic ambiguity is to bind the interjected clause to involuntary servitude, not the first clause.
the rest of your arguments are just uninteresting. the FCC's fines on broadcasting companies don't come close to cruel and unusual punishment, and the privatization of our prison system (while grotesque, in my opinion) doesn't equate in any logical way to buying and selling of prisoners or to evidence of institutionalized slavery. you've clearly got some sort of strange emotional attachment to the issue, and i hold out no hope of convincing you of the truth of what should be an obvious distinction.
(just to confirm i'm not crazy, i confirmed this with a PhD linguist friend of mine. yup, i'm not crazy. he agrees that, from a strictly linguistic standpoint, the binding is ambiguous and those three example constructions are identical)
given the ambiguity, we look to other related sources to resolve it. the 8th amendment is relevant here; i find it impossible to believe any judge in the country wouldn't find slavery to be cruel and unusual punishment. the entire integrity of our legal system does not hang on the linguistic construction of one clause. nobody owns anybody in the US. this is clear. it's a decided issue in the legislature and the courts. read FindLaw's commentary on the 13th amendment (which i just found out about today) for some relevant judicial citations, if you're actually interested. but i suspect you're not. you're being dishonest with the law and various interpretations of language to try to give yourself a talking point. it doesn't exist. call me when the US can sell prisoners to private individuals. then we're talking property.
as for your supposed half-million dollar fines. note, first, that these are not against individuals, but against companies, and ones with vastly superior resources. note further that the second link you've posted calls out the fact that the bill is abandoned. of course, i'm not defending this practice at all: i think the FCC is overstepping its bounds significantly here. but there's nothing here that qualifies as a violation of the 8th amendment by any stretch of the imagination.
"parse it as written" doesn't help resolve the legitimate linguistic ambiguity. english does not provide tight binding of dependent clauses. is it (slavery and involuntary servitude), (except as punishment for crime) or slavery and (involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime)? thankfully, judicial interpretation is soundly with the later, and i'm willing to bet you can't find a 20th or 21st century federal judge (even the Bush guys, who don't, on the whole, care too much for the law) who wouldn't put slavery out of bounds as punishment under the 8th.
i think you're underestimating the difference between slavery and involuntary servitude. slavery is ownership of people. laws around slavery are property laws. nothing before congress or any other body in the US replicates that. not even close.
as for the rest, you seem to be confusing a claim that the Constitution has held up reasonably well and still serves as a set of guiding principles with a claim that there are not lots of problems with our current implementation. i'm not going to defend our prison system, let alone the run of "ooo, terrorists!" activities our current administration has undertaken, largely at great expense to the integrity of the Constitution and the rule of law generally. but none of that changes the point. those aberrations should be fought.
also, i'm curious about this "half-million dollar fine for a curse word" claim. cite?
what does "stable" mean? unchanging? for how long? the idea of "stable" political systems is a myth. the "balance" we've got now didn't exist a decade ago, and won't a decade from now (although, sadly, i can't predict which direction it'll go in).
what government doesn't change over time? England's had (one of?) the longest continuously-running monarchies on the planet, yet the changes in the political system over that span are astounding. one of the most important features of the US Constitution is its ability to incorporate change. sure, the original Articles were replace by the Constitution, but that says nothing about the stability of the model. independent nations come up with treaties governing their relations all the time. this needn't be any different.
i have a hard time imagining the EU gaining control of the member nations' military, but still: i think you're right in your implicit observation that power tends to consolidate. even without the military, that's been going on. and to a point, it's fine: that's exactly what governments are, people doing that on an individual level. but the price of liberty really is eternal vigilance - not against external threats, as that phrase is so often used, but against internal degeneration into tyranny. it's up to the people to ensure that such an inappropriate consolidation of power doesn't happen. it's not inevitable.
granted, we've got a crummy track record.
the EU model is very similar to the original US model, although reserving even more to the individual "states". while there are certainly implementation issues (the EU Constitution is... not lovely, and the whole organization's way too bureaucratic, and simply too large, i think), i have more hope for the EU's "stability" (really, resilience against the same sorts of degeneration that the US's try at that model went through) based on the fact that the member nations have a much stronger sense of national identity based on a long history of being nations.
as for how intact 1-10 (or any others) are, that's a matter of interpretation. while there's been a concerted attack by the current administration (and less organized offenses pretty much since the constitution's inception), i think it's held up remarkably well over time. none of the current attacks are irreparable.and this is why judicial interpretation is important. it's pretty unanimously agreed that it's involuntary servitude, not slavery, which can be prescribed as punishment for a crime. the 14th and 15th were equally important here (and then we got into the 16th, which was a definite turn for the worse). it's also not a case of "whatever they want to put you to work doing," as the protections of the 8th amendment still apply. the involuntary servitude represented by labor in prison is a very far cry from ownership of the person.
this is fun.
;-)
first, you provide two alternatives (current US government vs. 50 independent states) and implicitly assert that they are the only two available. this is false. historically, we've got the Articles of Confederation, of course, to illustrate an obviously distinct alternative, but then there's the fact that the current US government does not particularly resemble the government we had ~200 years ago. the most significant changes have been the results of amendments, but changes in judicial interpretation is also very important. some of these changes have been positive (yay for no more slavery! yay for women voting!), some are negative (what happened to all other powers falling to the states or the people?), and on several the jury's still out (like direct election of senators; much more complicated than it seems). the point is change happens, if only slowly, and that change represents another alternative (arguably the most viable).
second, why are you assuming or asserting that having 50 independent countries would suck? there's nothing to prevent those countries from entering into treaties to, for example, allow unfettered travel between them or share a currency. this is much the same as the origin of the EU (another example of where the current incarnation does not reflect the initial formulation). personally, that actually sounds kinda good. decentralizing the power would likely have the effect of making us a bit less abusive of it, at least. several of our states have intact free-standing governments that predate the US. probably more than any industrialized country in the world, the US Federal government could just close up shop with a relative minimum of fuss and a short transition period.
sounds kinda fun, actually; would certainly be an exciting change. Vermot's got its own succession movement; probably the largest in the country. there's a smaller but still noticeable one in Hawai'i, which makes sense (since we got the country in the first place through pretty bad means), a bunch of "the south will rise again!" yahoos down in the Confederacy, and a few not-really-significant ones in other places (like Manhattan). the trickiest legal issue is what the status of the reservations would be; they're already "odd", to say the least, but they sorta bypass the states and "report" directly into the federal government. maybe just stop futzing around with this "dual sovereignty" and "conquered nation" nonsense and make them independent? simplest, but not clear it's best (most would be friggin' tiny, for starters).
oh, and there is no "US continent".
okay, well i guess i ought to repost my correction to you from that thread, as well: --- Also keep in mind that there are other legal ways of acquiring Mac OS X 10.4.x for Intel Macs, such as membership in the Apple Developer Program. The license there has other restrictions on use, but it is acceptable in a large number of cases. --- generally, i find your post informative, but it'd be nice if you could stop repeating the false portion about there being no legal way to obtain Mac OS X for Intel.
Also keep in mind that there are other legal ways of acquiring Mac OS X 10.4.x for Intel Macs, such as membership in the Apple Developer Program. The license there has other restrictions on use, but it is acceptable in a large number of cases.
Yes, I mean the entire story, or the summary, or Dvorak, or whatever you can get your hands on. Can we please stop hearing about this moron? While I'll grant he's got above-average writing abilities, he's no more insightful than the average /. comment.
And whatever you do, don't RTFA!
People get this wrong all the time: it entirely depends on the failure mode. Sure, a clock which is broken in the sense of being stopped cold will be right twice a day. But that's not Dvorak. Dvorak's a clock that runs slow, missing, say one minute per year. He's right once every 720 year, not twice a day.
And this is me being generous. At a casual observation, Dvorak seems to be insightful and informed; that is, mostly a "working" clock. Maybe he runs just fine, but is "broken" in the sense of having a bad starting state. That'd make him right, oh... never.
honestly, i've never worked in an organization where marketing engaged in more dubious activities than questionable product claims in literature. i've worked in several which engaged in bribery (both legal and illegal forms). thankfully, never coercion (to the best of my knowledge).
i think you've totally misunderstood what "persuasion" is about. or rather you've taken some particular degenerate form as all there is.
what you've described is basically bribery or coercion. sure, those happen, and are much more prevalent in some industries than others. i've worked in environments where "Sales" consisted mostly of explaining the benefits of your product, helping whoever you're talking to understand them, why it's a better choice than your competitors' products, and why they should trust you or your company. i've also worked in environments where "Sales" was coke and hookers. i'll agree whole-heartedly that the later is inappropriate and almost never (occasionally by chance) leads to the optimal decisions being made. but the former is what's more commonly meant by "persuasion" in a business context.
the company i work in now, we've got sales guys who travel the world visiting customers. we're mostly a service bureau; letting the customer know that they have our attention and that we're willing to go out of our way to make them happy is directly related to (which is not to say it's the same thing as) actually doing the job. we explain our service and our platform, talk about experiences others have had comparing our products to our competitors' products, and - most importantly - answer whatever questions they have in real time. we seek to persuade them by demonstrating our excellence, not to coerce them. the closest we ever come to the "coke and hookers" world here is taking people to dinner once in a while and maybe a box of chocolates when something significant happens. but even that's not in the spirit of bribery; we actually intend to have a genuine relationship with our customers, and this is just part of doing so.
(incidentally, as someone well outside the sales world, it's nice to know that i'm working for a company that feels it can compete based on its merits rather than bribery. it makes me feel better about the work i put in to building our products and services.)
persuasion is important for making decisions. you say things like you'll "have none of it", but that's just stupid. you're never convinced by a technical argument? that's persuasion. you never decide you trust one party over another, even if the other looks better on paper? that's generally a result of persuasion, and that's even an emotional response rather than a factual. these are clearly valid parts of business (or any decision making process). it's true that often the people making decisions don't have the skills or knowledge to make them effectively, but that's another issue. people who can't be persuaded are the most infuriating people to work with, and it's almost always a sign of (some combination of) arrogance, ignorance, stupidity, or pride. all those traits diminish your value to most organizations.
i think your internal view is even more disturbing, actually. you say that it's not a manager's job to persuade their employees to do something, but i find work environments where it is to be the most productive. i don't do what my boss tells me "because he said so" (or if i do, it's only long enough to find another job), and i don't expect people who work for me to, either. i try hard to show people who work for me that what they're being asked to do is actually the right thing to be doing. now, there is of course a balancing act here: it's an inappropriate use of everyone's time to try to get all your engineers to know the details of what marketing's doing, or to get the sales people to understand what all the technical limitations are. but it's very useful for the techs to know what marketing's trying to do and how they fit in with that, and for the sales guys to know why they can't always promise the moon.
similarly, i expect my employees to ask questions if something doesn't seem right and to let me know if they have any particular insights into things. and i expect the same treatment from my management. we are not cogs in a machine, but are independent, intelligent, creative people. i don't hire any other kind.
first, note that there are lots and lots of cases where the person you're communicating with will explicitly be trying to gauge your ability to respond to those sorts of issues. job interviews are the most obvious, but it also comes up in vendor selection, especially in situations where you're likely to have only one (or very few) people you're working with, rather than a faceless company. all sorts of partnership arrangements, too. i imagine it's less of an issue for purchasing decisions.
also, keep in mind that the person you're communicating with will almost certainly have questions you haven't anticipated, regardless of how well thought out your message is or the form it's presented in. if they can ask the questions and get a response interactively, that round of communication ends with them feeling mostly satisfied; if they have to wait for a response to email, that uncertainty has the opportunity to sit and fester in their mind. they spend more time associating you with a feeling of uncertainty than satisfaction.
lots of people are really bad at forming their questions back to you electronically, too. ever gotten questions back to email in-line when the question's answered later on in the document? or had someone miss a point because they have to take information from two different parts of your document together? all those things are much easier to resolve quickly in an interactive session for the recipient of the communication.
of course, most of those expensive training courses suck, but that's an entirely separate issue.
...do what interests you. Having done several rounds of hiring for all sorts of different positions myself, let me tell you that's what I look for most: someone who's actually interested in what they're doing. If I'm hiring a web application developer, I'll take the guy who's passionate about it with three years experience over the guy with five (provided he can talk intelligently about it).
Or, hell, interested in something. If I'm choosing between two equally qualified web developers, and one of them's really passionate about, oh i don't know, VAX compiler optimization and the other guy just seems to be in it for the paycheck, I'll go for the VAX guy in a second. VAX compiler optimization hasn't been a "hot" area since i was in grade school, but the fact that he's able to think enough about technical topics like that to get excited about them is a really good sign.
that being said, here's the thing about "hot" areas: it's easy to find people in them. i know where to find really good ajax-y web people, desktop application developers, bio-med CS people, wireless networking people (RF, equipment, whatever), and so on. the "hot" areas get saturated first.
what we're having a really hard time finding are really good Product Managers. not anything currently "hot", certainly not glamourous, but people who can envision a product at some point down the road and figure out how to get there. mostly what we see are glorified project managers or systems-engineers-light. but finding someone who knows enough about tech to understand what pieces are needed (and keep the real techs honest) and with some vision of the future? they are few and far between.
of course, if they offered me one, i'd accept. would make my mom happy.
poor journalism with stupid, useless metrics. why can't they just stick to established industry norms? how am i supposed to know how many Libraries of Congress this is?
no, you're confused. the article is about the growing momentum behind Windows Mobile. the mobile operators are searching for a solution to their desire for a system which operates less.
Not the slashdot story, but the Marvel one. Didn't we see this at least once already?
not entirely so, no. while the distinction is certainly fuzzy, "terrorist" is about tactics, not which side you're on. don't let the NeoCon perversion of the word to mean "someone we don't like" take over the language. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were certainly revolutionary; one could probably argue that they were freedom fighters. it would be laughable to suggest either was a terrorist.