I think the question's premise is false. It is, in fact, trivially easy to compete with free. All you have to do is offer a product that is better than the free alternative at a price that the market is willing to bear.
You also assume that the market is a "win/lose" binary thing. In other words, you make it sound like as long as anybody uses Linux, Microsoft loses. That's obviously false. Consider Apple. They've never been a successful company in terms of their percentage of the total market, but for the last five years or so they've been consistently, massively profitable.
Really, I think the problem with this question has to do with the use of the word "compete." Not all computer users are created equal. You'd be hard pressed to find somebody to whom you could say, "Here are Windows, Mac OS X and Linux; choose on price." Nobody, but nobody, is going to make their choice based on price. They're going to choose based on features and capabilities, bounded by price. That is, they'll choose the best product for their needs within the price bracket they can afford.
For most people, the fact that Linux is free doesn't stand up against the fact that Windows is a lot better and only slightly more expensive. Windows does stand up against the Mac, though, because the Mac is a lot better than Windows and a lot more expensive.
(Of course, it's getting to the point where the Mac isn't a lot more expensive. People who are looking to buy a new computer can now get a Mac for the same price or less, so the tide may turn.)
Everybody already knows the answer to this question: Because those two features are simply not a priority for the IE development team. I'd be very disappointed if such an obvious and shallow question made the cut, displacing what might be a more interesting question.
Um. Because we've all taken history? Because we all know the stories behind the events we're talking about? Because I'm not saying anything that isn't common knowledge? Saying "Why should anybody believe it?" when everybody already knows it's the truth is kind of silly, in my opinion.
Of course, you can always play semantic games like "Germany was already 'unstable', ergo abrupt event". What does that mean?
I don't actually know what that means; I'm having trouble figuring out your meaning.
Look, I'm talking about very simple ideas here. Totalitarian states arise from two circumstances: a seizure of power in a power vacuum, or a seizure of power by force. In Russia in 1917, it was a seizure of power by force. In Germany in 1933 and Iraq in 1979, it was a seizure of power in a power vacuum. These are the only circumstances in which totalitarianism has ever emerged, ever. Everybody knows this because we've all studied history.
I don't think I made the jump to ignoring the good and evil.
You said, "If we take a step back from what the goals of the institution are." You did, in fact, make the jump. If you want to backtrack from that position, though, that's fine with me.
in the event that a 'good' institution used 'evil' methods... then they are no better than the 'evil' people they seek to remove
And that's where you're wrong. Because moral context matters. You're suggesting that a person who kills in self defense should be subject to the same penalty as someone who kills out of malice, a proposition which is obviously bogus.
If I were to tie your hands and feet, put you in a small room and keep you there for 25 years, it would be very bad. But if you're a criminal and I'm a prison guard, then it's okay.
Intent matters. Moral context matters. You can't just say "Well, let's ignore the moral context and look only at a thin slice of reality." That's reductionistic, and it leads to false conclusions.
Jack Bauer is both a hero and the dirtiest player in the book.
I do think that there's value in pointing out the (realatively) obvious parallels between fiction and reality.
There's not, though. Any trained monkey can tell you when two things resemble each other. The more important question is whether the resemblances between two things are substantive or superficial.
For instance, a tree superficially resembles a telephone pole, in that both stick up out of the ground. But the similarities are not significant compared to the differences. Trees grow, telephone poles are manufactured. Trees are alive, telephone poles are inert. And so on, and so on.
Pointing out subtantive resemblances can be insightful and worthy, under the right circumstances. But pointing out only superficial resemblances is vapid and tedious.
First off, I read it as, at least, slightly humorous. Second, I read it as a dig against Microsoft's constant stream of revisionist press-releases.
Well, that's really it, isn't it? The person who made the comparison had two purposes: To try to be a wise-ass and to try to say something insulting about Microsoft. Hardly a worthy reason to invoke literature.
But the worst part of all is that the whole thing was just a big lie. The person who made the remark tried to say that Microsoft was like Big Brother; it's not.
And you, frankly, are just making things worse with your talk of "changing our perspective." The comparison is not sound. An unsound comparison is no reason to change our anything.
much of chomsky's political work is technically excellent
Maybe in the sense that he spells all his words correctly and knows how to use punctuation. But, for me at least, his lies and his absurd arguments outweigh the niceties of grammar.
Hmm. Maybe we're running into a communication problem here. To slip into totalitarianism means to transition gradually. That's what I'm saying has never happened. It's never been a gradual change from stable democracy to totalitarianism. It's always been a sudden, abrupt event punctuated by something like a collapse or a coup or a revolution or an invasion.
See? Not gradual. Not insidious. Very sudden, very abrupt, very dramatic.
Too many freshmen come away from 1984 with the idea that it can happen so gradually nobody notices. That's not true. It's never happened that way in all of human history.
A leader with dictatorial tendencies gets voted into office, then starts changing the laws to increase his powers and decrease checks and balances. It has happened dozens of times, including Germany in the 1930s.
That has, in fact, never happened. Never in the history of the world has a stable democracy slipped into totalitarianism.
Germany in the 1930s was a million miles away from being stable. Due to the Weimar Republic's adoption of the fundamentally flawed parliamentary system -- where entire legislatures can be dismissed at the executive's whim --the German government was already a sham. The German people had no faith in their government, so they has no reason to take the electoral process seriously. Germany in 1933 was essentially a failed state, a state without a sovereign government.
The Nazis seized power in 1933 after an election that we now know to be so infested with fraud that it makes the recent Palestinian farce look like a Platonic ideal of democracy. They were not elected into office.
In a stable democracy, the passage of the subsequent "Enabling Act" would have been immediately challenged as unconstitutional. The very first clause subverted the German constitution and gave legislative power to the executive branch. No such law could ever stand in a stable democracy; it was only able to stand in Germany because there was a complete power vacuum there at the time.
So you see, Germany didn't just slip into totalitarianism. The government, due to a combination of built-in flaws, criminal mismanagement and a coup so insidious it passed itself off as an election, collapsed. The Nazis simply seized power in the resulting vacuum, just as the Baath Party seized power in Iraq in 1979 or the Communist Party seized power in Russia in 1917.
So no, no country has ever just slipped into totalitarianism, ever. In order for totalitarianism to rise, the existing government has to first collapse for some reason, then some group has to use force to seize power. It never happens gradually or slowly, like 1984 led people to think it could.
If we take a step back from what the goals of the institution are
But that's the thing. You can't. You can't separate the thing from the moral context surrounding that thing without rendering the whole discussion meaningless.
It's like trying to do a physics experiment in which you assume, in order to simplify the math, that the acceleration of gravity is 10 meters per second every second and that objects are unaffected by friction. Your predictions won't be anywhere near your experimental results, because your assumptions were bogus.
If you assume, for sake of argument, that good and evil are the same thing, then you've assumed your way completely out of reality and into some abstract place that has nothing to do with the real world.
I think you raise a good point, but I also think you overstate the case. While it's certainly true that illustrating the evils of totalitarianism is a good thing, I think it's wrong to say that 1984 "helped save" anybody. I mean, think about it. Who lived under totalitarianism? The Russians, of course, and the people that the USSR subjugated: the East Germans, the Czechoslovakians, the Romanians, the Hungarians, etc., etc. Do you really think those regimes fell because of 1984? I seriously doubt it. Those people were living under totalitarianism. They didn't need a book to tell them that it was bad.
If the history of the 20th century has taught us anything, it's that totalitarianism doesn't just happen. It's not a natural state. It has to be imposed, either from outside via some kind of overt or covert invasion (think Prague or Budapest), or from inside via some kind of coup (think Baghdad or Tehran or Beijing or countless others). Countries don't just slip into totalitarianism, so it's also bogus, in my opinion, to say that 1984 inspired people to fight against the insidious creep of totalitarianism within the free countries of the world. That kind of process just doesn't happen. In fact, if anything, the opposite tends to occur. Totalitarian states, when sufficiently weakened, tend to collapse on their own into liberal democracies with property rights and free economies. The only problem, naturally, is that it takes decades for that process to occur, and millions die in the meantime.
I agree with that completely. I've read Manufacturing Consent, and there are a number of massive problems with it.
The first is that Chomsky and his co-author choose to disregard any moral distinction between free societies and totalitarian societies. Fighting for freedom and liberty is considered by the authors to be no different from fighting to enslave and oppress. That's kinda crazy. It's like ignoring the difference between killing out of malice and killing in self-defense.
Then there are the well documented problems with the assertions of fact Chomsky uses in his book. He provides lots of details that just aren't true. His statistics on the number of people murdered by the communist insurgency in Vietnam versus the number of people who died during the war against that insurgency are completely false... but that's okay, because his bigger error is denying that totalitarian regimes end up murdering millions of people per decade, on average. One mistake kind of eclipses the other.
The details have all been thoroughly documented on other Web sites, so I won't bother trying to recite chapter and verse here. Suffice to say that Manufacturing Consent is exactly the opposite of the kind of book you really want to be recommending to people.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the question's premise is false. It is, in fact, trivially easy to compete with free. All you have to do is offer a product that is better than the free alternative at a price that the market is willing to bear.
You also assume that the market is a "win/lose" binary thing. In other words, you make it sound like as long as anybody uses Linux, Microsoft loses. That's obviously false. Consider Apple. They've never been a successful company in terms of their percentage of the total market, but for the last five years or so they've been consistently, massively profitable.
Really, I think the problem with this question has to do with the use of the word "compete." Not all computer users are created equal. You'd be hard pressed to find somebody to whom you could say, "Here are Windows, Mac OS X and Linux; choose on price." Nobody, but nobody, is going to make their choice based on price. They're going to choose based on features and capabilities, bounded by price. That is, they'll choose the best product for their needs within the price bracket they can afford.
For most people, the fact that Linux is free doesn't stand up against the fact that Windows is a lot better and only slightly more expensive. Windows does stand up against the Mac, though, because the Mac is a lot better than Windows and a lot more expensive.
(Of course, it's getting to the point where the Mac isn't a lot more expensive. People who are looking to buy a new computer can now get a Mac for the same price or less, so the tide may turn.)
Everybody already knows the answer to this question: Because those two features are simply not a priority for the IE development team. I'd be very disappointed if such an obvious and shallow question made the cut, displacing what might be a more interesting question.
On the PNG issue, use AlphaImageLoader. Works like a charm.
Why should anybody believe it?
Um. Because we've all taken history? Because we all know the stories behind the events we're talking about? Because I'm not saying anything that isn't common knowledge? Saying "Why should anybody believe it?" when everybody already knows it's the truth is kind of silly, in my opinion.
Of course, you can always play semantic games like "Germany was already 'unstable', ergo abrupt event". What does that mean?
I don't actually know what that means; I'm having trouble figuring out your meaning.
Look, I'm talking about very simple ideas here. Totalitarian states arise from two circumstances: a seizure of power in a power vacuum, or a seizure of power by force. In Russia in 1917, it was a seizure of power by force. In Germany in 1933 and Iraq in 1979, it was a seizure of power in a power vacuum. These are the only circumstances in which totalitarianism has ever emerged, ever. Everybody knows this because we've all studied history.
I really don't see what you're complaining about.
I don't think I made the jump to ignoring the good and evil.
... then they are no better than the 'evil' people they seek to remove
You said, "If we take a step back from what the goals of the institution are." You did, in fact, make the jump. If you want to backtrack from that position, though, that's fine with me.
in the event that a 'good' institution used 'evil' methods
And that's where you're wrong. Because moral context matters. You're suggesting that a person who kills in self defense should be subject to the same penalty as someone who kills out of malice, a proposition which is obviously bogus.
If I were to tie your hands and feet, put you in a small room and keep you there for 25 years, it would be very bad. But if you're a criminal and I'm a prison guard, then it's okay.
Intent matters. Moral context matters. You can't just say "Well, let's ignore the moral context and look only at a thin slice of reality." That's reductionistic, and it leads to false conclusions.
Jack Bauer is both a hero and the dirtiest player in the book.
I'm sorry, I don't get the allusion.
I do think that there's value in pointing out the (realatively) obvious parallels between fiction and reality.
There's not, though. Any trained monkey can tell you when two things resemble each other. The more important question is whether the resemblances between two things are substantive or superficial.
For instance, a tree superficially resembles a telephone pole, in that both stick up out of the ground. But the similarities are not significant compared to the differences. Trees grow, telephone poles are manufactured. Trees are alive, telephone poles are inert. And so on, and so on.
Pointing out subtantive resemblances can be insightful and worthy, under the right circumstances. But pointing out only superficial resemblances is vapid and tedious.
First off, I read it as, at least, slightly humorous. Second, I read it as a dig against Microsoft's constant stream of revisionist press-releases.
Well, that's really it, isn't it? The person who made the comparison had two purposes: To try to be a wise-ass and to try to say something insulting about Microsoft. Hardly a worthy reason to invoke literature.
But the worst part of all is that the whole thing was just a big lie. The person who made the remark tried to say that Microsoft was like Big Brother; it's not.
And you, frankly, are just making things worse with your talk of "changing our perspective." The comparison is not sound. An unsound comparison is no reason to change our anything.
much of chomsky's political work is technically excellent
Maybe in the sense that he spells all his words correctly and knows how to use punctuation. But, for me at least, his lies and his absurd arguments outweigh the niceties of grammar.
Hmm. Maybe we're running into a communication problem here. To slip into totalitarianism means to transition gradually. That's what I'm saying has never happened. It's never been a gradual change from stable democracy to totalitarianism. It's always been a sudden, abrupt event punctuated by something like a collapse or a coup or a revolution or an invasion.
See? Not gradual. Not insidious. Very sudden, very abrupt, very dramatic.
Too many freshmen come away from 1984 with the idea that it can happen so gradually nobody notices. That's not true. It's never happened that way in all of human history.
A leader with dictatorial tendencies gets voted into office, then starts changing the laws to increase his powers and decrease checks and balances. It has happened dozens of times, including Germany in the 1930s.
That has, in fact, never happened. Never in the history of the world has a stable democracy slipped into totalitarianism.
Germany in the 1930s was a million miles away from being stable. Due to the Weimar Republic's adoption of the fundamentally flawed parliamentary system -- where entire legislatures can be dismissed at the executive's whim --the German government was already a sham. The German people had no faith in their government, so they has no reason to take the electoral process seriously. Germany in 1933 was essentially a failed state, a state without a sovereign government.
The Nazis seized power in 1933 after an election that we now know to be so infested with fraud that it makes the recent Palestinian farce look like a Platonic ideal of democracy. They were not elected into office.
In a stable democracy, the passage of the subsequent "Enabling Act" would have been immediately challenged as unconstitutional. The very first clause subverted the German constitution and gave legislative power to the executive branch. No such law could ever stand in a stable democracy; it was only able to stand in Germany because there was a complete power vacuum there at the time.
So you see, Germany didn't just slip into totalitarianism. The government, due to a combination of built-in flaws, criminal mismanagement and a coup so insidious it passed itself off as an election, collapsed. The Nazis simply seized power in the resulting vacuum, just as the Baath Party seized power in Iraq in 1979 or the Communist Party seized power in Russia in 1917.
So no, no country has ever just slipped into totalitarianism, ever. In order for totalitarianism to rise, the existing government has to first collapse for some reason, then some group has to use force to seize power. It never happens gradually or slowly, like 1984 led people to think it could.
If we take a step back from what the goals of the institution are
But that's the thing. You can't. You can't separate the thing from the moral context surrounding that thing without rendering the whole discussion meaningless.
It's like trying to do a physics experiment in which you assume, in order to simplify the math, that the acceleration of gravity is 10 meters per second every second and that objects are unaffected by friction. Your predictions won't be anywhere near your experimental results, because your assumptions were bogus.
If you assume, for sake of argument, that good and evil are the same thing, then you've assumed your way completely out of reality and into some abstract place that has nothing to do with the real world.
I think you raise a good point, but I also think you overstate the case. While it's certainly true that illustrating the evils of totalitarianism is a good thing, I think it's wrong to say that 1984 "helped save" anybody. I mean, think about it. Who lived under totalitarianism? The Russians, of course, and the people that the USSR subjugated: the East Germans, the Czechoslovakians, the Romanians, the Hungarians, etc., etc. Do you really think those regimes fell because of 1984? I seriously doubt it. Those people were living under totalitarianism. They didn't need a book to tell them that it was bad.
If the history of the 20th century has taught us anything, it's that totalitarianism doesn't just happen. It's not a natural state. It has to be imposed, either from outside via some kind of overt or covert invasion (think Prague or Budapest), or from inside via some kind of coup (think Baghdad or Tehran or Beijing or countless others). Countries don't just slip into totalitarianism, so it's also bogus, in my opinion, to say that 1984 inspired people to fight against the insidious creep of totalitarianism within the free countries of the world. That kind of process just doesn't happen. In fact, if anything, the opposite tends to occur. Totalitarian states, when sufficiently weakened, tend to collapse on their own into liberal democracies with property rights and free economies. The only problem, naturally, is that it takes decades for that process to occur, and millions die in the meantime.
I agree with that completely. I've read Manufacturing Consent, and there are a number of massive problems with it.
... but that's okay, because his bigger error is denying that totalitarian regimes end up murdering millions of people per decade, on average. One mistake kind of eclipses the other.
The first is that Chomsky and his co-author choose to disregard any moral distinction between free societies and totalitarian societies. Fighting for freedom and liberty is considered by the authors to be no different from fighting to enslave and oppress. That's kinda crazy. It's like ignoring the difference between killing out of malice and killing in self-defense.
Then there are the well documented problems with the assertions of fact Chomsky uses in his book. He provides lots of details that just aren't true. His statistics on the number of people murdered by the communist insurgency in Vietnam versus the number of people who died during the war against that insurgency are completely false
The details have all been thoroughly documented on other Web sites, so I won't bother trying to recite chapter and verse here. Suffice to say that Manufacturing Consent is exactly the opposite of the kind of book you really want to be recommending to people.