although I think it speaks more strongly for global environmental protection treaties
If they could exist and be reasonably effective, I'd be right in there every day with mah letter-opener-of-death forcing my country's leaders to sign. In an imperfect, Hobbsian economic-superpower eat economic-minnow world, however, the only thing that can save us is a good healthy attitude of "Y'aint dumpin' that shit here. Now git. This thing's loaded."
... but anyway, what does pollution have to do with writing and selling software?
Nothing whatsoever, zatz. Thanks for asking. I actually stopped writing half-way through my essay because I was suddenly hugely afraid that I was off-topic. Come to think of it, I'm not, so here we go.
If I started spouting off about mob-run software sweatshops in the former USSR, people might write me off as one of those scruffy-lookin', Z-net readin', International-Buy-Nothing-Day observin' Chomsky-agreein'-with socialist fruitcakes. Chomsky's the fruitcake, and I ain't no socialist. (I mean, Who's Scruffy Lookin'?) It's just that Big Business ain't just plain folks like you and me.
Software is Big Business. Big business, be it oil, pharmas, or software, is in it for the money, and to hell with your civil rights. To hell with your human rights, for that matter -- Big Oil walks on 'em as a matter of course. Therefore, whenever you start talking about restricting a sovereign government's abilities to control the actions of a hypercorp WITHIN THAT SOVEREIGN NATION, why, I start to get a little nervous. So should you.
Your government, as shitty as they might be at it, has entered into a social contract with you, as a citizen, to provide you with certain things, like security of property and person. The nature of the contract is outlined in your constitution, or some other such document. In other words, your government is there to take care of your ass and your shit. If they didn't do that, we wouldn't have 'em. That's the basis of modern liberal political theory.
A hypercorp has entered into a contract with its shareholders. The rich ones. The little guys don't vote, generally speaking, and they don't hold enough stock to make a difference. The people a hypercorp cares about are easy to recognize. Simply put, they're the ones rich enough to own automobiles with climate control systems which enable them to not care if the smog index is too high to bike to work today. Or roll the windows down in your Ford POS, for that matter.
If they don't care about the poor piece of shit wheezing his last in the next car, what makes you think they care about some poor, intelligent, but sadly manipulated and controlled sod that they'll never see because he lives in Russia or India?
Again, I use pollution as the allegorical soapbox for my human rights tirade. I see this pollution shit going down. So do you if you'll look around. We don't see intellectual sweatshop laborers getting the shit beat out of them for trying to unionize very often, so it doesn't make a very gut-wrenching example. It is what we should really be concerned about, though. The really bad shit will never go down here, cause this is where the rich folks live.
So to sum up, forget pollution. I'm talking Sovereignty. It's there for a whole bunch of really good reasons, and it's worked quite well for a few hundred years. A hypercorp is ultimately a self-serving and incredibly resourceful beastie. Having your government promise to not interfere with a hypercorp's fits of selfish whimsy might be a good idea and it might not.
All I'm saying is that if you think it's a good idea, please go it slow. Real fuckin' slow.
If you're not so sure and the WTO asks to meet in your city, tell 'em to piss off. I'd be doing it myself if I could get to Seattle by Monday.
I am in favour of a global economy, but a moratorium on tariffs means one more nail in the coffin of governmental control over the hypercorps. Microsoft isn't asking that governments work towards eliminating unreasonable barriers to international trade. They are asking that elected governments be categorically forced to allow unrestricted trade. They are lobbying for an overruling of the democratic principle in this one specific case that happens to strongly favour -- you got it, the hypercorps.
This is precisely what makes it possible for third-world wage-slavery to exist. This is what makes it possible for unnamed chemical companies to dump as much shit as they want into the water, so long as they do it in countries too poor to say no to the business. Odd how those same countries also tend to be too poor to buy their products, too.
Here is an example of why tariffs can be good. Canada can't impose strict environmental protection laws, because to do so would be to force some companies to produce in Mexico, which cannot afford strong environment laws for exactly the same reason. Canada loses the business, Mexico's environment gets polluted. Canada is then prohibited from imposing an "environmental tariff" on those same goods. That tariff would keep the company in Canada, locally producing goods for local consumption. If the locals think the pollution is too bad to justify the product, then they get to legislate it out of existence. That is what government is for.
An electronic transaction is no different than a phone call. If there is no good reason for import restrictions then let free market do as it will! But when there is a good reason, then somebody should make it clear that I am doing the world a disservice by purchasing that product.
A tariff will do this perfectly well, without prohibiting a damned thing.
This has been an unsponsored and uneducated rant. Flame away.
But my impression of Smith is that he was very much that he was in favour of self-interest, rather than public interest, driving economic and political decisions. Of course I am nowhere nearly qualified to suggest that this is wrong. I mean, it works, right?
And sure, with the "political education" bit he allows for the possibility of enlightened or longer-term self-interest, which must, of course, align with the public interest. Economy does well, you do well.
But then along came Keynes and said "In the long run we're dead, dude! Like, carpe cash!" So perhaps it is a Keynes-corrupted Smith at whose feet I wish to lay the woes of the world.
Much like the Corel/Wine debacle, if the original submitter had taken the couple of minutes to confirm what they were posting, the entire 150K of wasted human life would have been avoided.
"Hey Bruce, did you mean this?" "Uh, no. Bad morning." "OK. I won't post it on/. and get 1000s of people's hackles up, OK?" "Yeah, good idea."
But of course that couple of minutes might have meant someone else beating them to the punch, and if you can't have the glory, what's the point in even participating, right? I too have had bad mornings, and I'm even smarter than you are, you knee-jerk jerk.
By your own argument you have complicity in the U.S. financed murders of children in any of the above countries. And maybe some others, too.
For the sake of simplicity I will neglect the case of parents who don't dare speak out because doing so would result in their deaths, and thereby remove their ability to care for their children... thereby causing the deaths of those self-same children you are so concerned about.
Now that you have personally taken responsibility for your government's actions, I'm waiting to see you jump in and wrest control from the dickheads ordering the murders.
It is often forgotten that in the original (Rouseau's) definition of democracy, your decision must be based on your judgement of what is best for the commonwealth, not what is best for you. These two "rights" are often at odds.
North Americans vote selfishly, and think that it is right to do so. Smithian economics would have you believe that it is. Personally, I do not think that selfish voters can make good decisions about the ultimate destination of their tax dollars.
That said, anything, anything, would have to be better than what goes on now.
Weave a rug out of long, narrow, flat strips. Join both ends of each strip into a loop. Drive the N/S loops and the E/W sets of loops.
The floor can be be moved under the subject as a simple vector of the two sets of loops. There would be some experience of "undulating floor" but it could surely be overcome with stiff shoes.
You could conceivably even apply a torque to the subject by moving adjacent parallel weave loops in different directions.
Don't talk to me about the intra-weave friction. That's (a) why I haven't built it, and (b) a problem for the materials scientists.
Forking of the unices hurt unix really badly, and for a very long time. I tell you three times -- if not for the fact that the world standardized on Linux, I would be running IP masquerade on NT right now.
I mean "design forking," not code forking. I haven't been around long enough to know what the original X desktop was, but I bet there was one. And someone wrote a better one. Someone else, too. That's great, because now there are three good desktops, and each will make the others better. It also sucks, because each one has a camp of devoted followers, each developing to a different paradigm. It's not the division of labour that concerns me. That's almost always productive, useful, and good. The struggle for user-mindshare, however, is always bad. I don't want to learn to use apps, I want to use apps. Binary compatibility is not enough -- I, Joe Sixpack, want ergonomic compatibility too. This is not a question of Linux "winning." Linux doesn't need to win. It simply is. My concern is simply about Linux making my life easier, sooner. Your point about E-Darwinism is a good one. I must, however, quote Keynes' refutation of Adam Smith: "In the long run, we are all dead." That said, I hope you're right. Autumn
I love Linux and I hate it. You know why I love it. Now listen: the Windows UI paradigm provides some Good Stuff. Shift-selection. Standard cut-n-paste hotkeys. Control-tab for MDI window cycling. Etc. There are a bunch of Desktops for Linux, and they're mostly damned good. Unfortuntely, they all use different paradigms. Therefore, Linux lacks the App/Desktop standardization that gives me "moderate proficiency" in any new Windows app that I happen to pick out of the trash bin. The "design fork" in the Linux Desktop Paradigm (if I may use the p-word without sounding like a PBH) makes it seem unlikely that I will see this kind of stuff as Standard Feature stuff in Linux apps anytime soon. None of this keeps me from running Debian on 2 of my 3 machines, but the third one is the one that I do all my work on. Flame away. I hope to learn that I'm wrong.
LIRC may do exactly what you want. Unfortunately, it is a generic tool, and all remotes have different buttons. Therefore, you have to spend the time to hook the buttons up the apps you want. Painful, yes, but a good, good kind of pain. http://fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de/~columbus/lirc/
I had occasion to do this with an old 19" mono Vax monitor and a 21" IBM 6091. Both served me well, but the lack of console-mode eventually drove me to abandon them. The hardest part will be finding specific specs on your monitors so you can compute the dot clocks. Here are two useful links on the subject. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/pc-har dware-faq/video/part4/http://www.mindspring.com/~nunez/info/monitor
Slashdot Mirror
although I think it speaks more strongly for global environmental protection treaties
... but anyway, what does pollution have to do with writing and selling software?
If they could exist and be reasonably effective, I'd be right in there every day with mah letter-opener-of-death forcing my country's leaders to sign. In an imperfect, Hobbsian economic-superpower eat economic-minnow world, however, the only thing that can save us is a good healthy attitude of "Y'aint dumpin' that shit here. Now git. This thing's loaded."
Nothing whatsoever, zatz. Thanks for asking. I actually stopped writing half-way through my essay because I was suddenly hugely afraid that I was off-topic. Come to think of it, I'm not, so here we go.
If I started spouting off about mob-run software sweatshops in the former USSR, people might write me off as one of those scruffy-lookin', Z-net readin', International-Buy-Nothing-Day observin' Chomsky-agreein'-with socialist fruitcakes. Chomsky's the fruitcake, and I ain't no socialist. (I mean, Who's Scruffy Lookin'?) It's just that Big Business ain't just plain folks like you and me.
Software is Big Business. Big business, be it oil, pharmas, or software, is in it for the money, and to hell with your civil rights. To hell with your human rights, for that matter -- Big Oil walks on 'em as a matter of course. Therefore, whenever you start talking about restricting a sovereign government's abilities to control the actions of a hypercorp WITHIN THAT SOVEREIGN NATION, why, I start to get a little nervous. So should you.
Your government, as shitty as they might be at it, has entered into a social contract with you, as a citizen, to provide you with certain things, like security of property and person. The nature of the contract is outlined in your constitution, or some other such document. In other words, your government is there to take care of your ass and your shit. If they didn't do that, we wouldn't have 'em. That's the basis of modern liberal political theory.
A hypercorp has entered into a contract with its shareholders. The rich ones. The little guys don't vote, generally speaking, and they don't hold enough stock to make a difference. The people a hypercorp cares about are easy to recognize. Simply put, they're the ones rich enough to own automobiles with climate control systems which enable them to not care if the smog index is too high to bike to work today. Or roll the windows down in your Ford POS, for that matter.
If they don't care about the poor piece of shit wheezing his last in the next car, what makes you think they care about some poor, intelligent, but sadly manipulated and controlled sod that they'll never see because he lives in Russia or India?
Again, I use pollution as the allegorical soapbox for my human rights tirade. I see this pollution shit going down. So do you if you'll look around. We don't see intellectual sweatshop laborers getting the shit beat out of them for trying to unionize very often, so it doesn't make a very gut-wrenching example. It is what we should really be concerned about, though. The really bad shit will never go down here, cause this is where the rich folks live.
So to sum up, forget pollution. I'm talking Sovereignty. It's there for a whole bunch of really good reasons, and it's worked quite well for a few hundred years. A hypercorp is ultimately a self-serving and incredibly resourceful beastie. Having your government promise to not interfere with a hypercorp's fits of selfish whimsy might be a good idea and it might not.
All I'm saying is that if you think it's a good idea, please go it slow. Real fuckin' slow.
If you're not so sure and the WTO asks to meet in your city, tell 'em to piss off. I'd be doing it myself if I could get to Seattle by Monday.
EviLid
I am in favour of a global economy, but a moratorium on tariffs means one more nail in the coffin of governmental control over the hypercorps. Microsoft isn't asking that governments work towards eliminating unreasonable barriers to international trade. They are asking that elected governments be categorically forced to allow unrestricted trade. They are lobbying for an overruling of the democratic principle in this one specific case that happens to strongly favour -- you got it, the hypercorps.
This is precisely what makes it possible for third-world wage-slavery to exist. This is what makes it possible for unnamed chemical companies to dump as much shit as they want into the water, so long as they do it in countries too poor to say no to the business. Odd how those same countries also tend to be too poor to buy their products, too.
Here is an example of why tariffs can be good. Canada can't impose strict environmental protection laws, because to do so would be to force some companies to produce in Mexico, which cannot afford strong environment laws for exactly the same reason. Canada loses the business, Mexico's environment gets polluted. Canada is then prohibited from imposing an "environmental tariff" on those same goods. That tariff would keep the company in Canada, locally producing goods for local consumption. If the locals think the pollution is too bad to justify the product, then they get to legislate it out of existence. That is what government is for.
An electronic transaction is no different than a phone call. If there is no good reason for import restrictions then let free market do as it will! But when there is a good reason, then somebody should make it clear that I am doing the world a disservice by purchasing that product.
A tariff will do this perfectly well, without prohibiting a damned thing.
This has been an unsponsored and uneducated rant. Flame away.
It's like this, man: sarcasm is never funny. Not unless it's in italics.
I'm very glad to hear that you were being sarcastic, BTW. I hereby retract the "even" bit about being smarter.
An oversimplification, of course.
But my impression of Smith is that he was very much that he was in favour of self-interest, rather than public interest, driving economic and political decisions. Of course I am nowhere nearly qualified to suggest that this is wrong. I mean, it works, right?
And sure, with the "political education" bit he allows for the possibility of enlightened or longer-term self-interest, which must, of course, align with the public interest. Economy does well, you do well.
But then along came Keynes and said "In the long run we're dead, dude! Like, carpe cash!" So perhaps it is a Keynes-corrupted Smith at whose feet I wish to lay the woes of the world.
Would you buy that?
Dude: You chill out.
/. and get 1000s of people's hackles up, OK?"
Much like the Corel/Wine debacle, if the original submitter had taken the couple of minutes to confirm what they were posting, the entire 150K of wasted human life would have been avoided.
"Hey Bruce, did you mean this?"
"Uh, no. Bad morning."
"OK. I won't post it on
"Yeah, good idea."
But of course that couple of minutes might have meant someone else beating them to the punch, and if you can't have the glory, what's the point in even participating, right? I too have had bad mornings, and I'm even smarter than you are, you knee-jerk jerk.
"Innocent! HAH..."
By your own argument you have complicity in the U.S. financed murders of children in any of the above countries. And maybe some others, too.
For the sake of simplicity I will neglect the case of parents who don't dare speak out because doing so would result in their deaths, and thereby remove their ability to care for their children... thereby causing the deaths of those self-same children you are so concerned about.
Now that you have personally taken responsibility for your government's actions, I'm waiting to see you jump in and wrest control from the dickheads ordering the murders.
Still waiting...
North Americans vote selfishly, and think that it is right to do so. Smithian economics would have you believe that it is. Personally, I do not think that selfish voters can make good decisions about the ultimate destination of their tax dollars.
That said, anything, anything, would have to be better than what goes on now.
As long as I'm ranting, don't forget that tomorrow is International Buy Nothing Day.
Weave a rug out of long, narrow, flat strips.
Join both ends of each strip into a loop.
Drive the N/S loops and the E/W sets of loops.
The floor can be be moved under the subject as a simple vector of the two sets of loops. There would be some experience of "undulating floor" but it could surely be overcome with stiff shoes.
You could conceivably even apply a torque to the subject by moving adjacent parallel weave loops in different directions.
Don't talk to me about the intra-weave friction. That's (a) why I haven't built it, and (b) a problem for the materials scientists.
Forking of the unices hurt unix really badly, and for a very long time. I tell you three times -- if not for the fact that the world standardized on Linux, I would be running IP masquerade on NT right now.
I mean "design forking," not code forking. I haven't been around long enough to know what the original X desktop was, but I bet there was one. And someone wrote a better one. Someone else, too. That's great, because now there are three good desktops, and each will make the others better. It also sucks, because each one has a camp of devoted followers, each developing to a different paradigm. It's not the division of labour that concerns me. That's almost always productive, useful, and good. The struggle for user-mindshare, however, is always bad. I don't want to learn to use apps, I want to use apps. Binary compatibility is not enough -- I, Joe Sixpack, want ergonomic compatibility too. This is not a question of Linux "winning." Linux doesn't need to win. It simply is. My concern is simply about Linux making my life easier, sooner. Your point about E-Darwinism is a good one. I must, however, quote Keynes' refutation of Adam Smith: "In the long run, we are all dead." That said, I hope you're right. Autumn
I love Linux and I hate it. You know why I love it. Now listen: the Windows UI paradigm provides some Good Stuff. Shift-selection. Standard cut-n-paste hotkeys. Control-tab for MDI window cycling. Etc. There are a bunch of Desktops for Linux, and they're mostly damned good. Unfortuntely, they all use different paradigms. Therefore, Linux lacks the App/Desktop standardization that gives me "moderate proficiency" in any new Windows app that I happen to pick out of the trash bin. The "design fork" in the Linux Desktop Paradigm (if I may use the p-word without sounding like a PBH) makes it seem unlikely that I will see this kind of stuff as Standard Feature stuff in Linux apps anytime soon. None of this keeps me from running Debian on 2 of my 3 machines, but the third one is the one that I do all my work on. Flame away. I hope to learn that I'm wrong.
LIRC may do exactly what you want. Unfortunately, it is a generic tool, and all remotes have different buttons. Therefore, you have to spend the time to hook the buttons up the apps you want. Painful, yes, but a good, good kind of pain. http://fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de/~columbus/lirc/
I had occasion to do this with an old 19" mono Vax monitor and a 21" IBM 6091. Both served me well, but the lack of console-mode eventually drove me to abandon them. The hardest part will be finding specific specs on your monitors so you can compute the dot clocks. Here are two useful links on the subject. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/pc-har dware-faq/video/part4/ http://www.mindspring.com/~nunez/info /monitor