I think this has to do with the SAs. Shops running mostly windows servers will have windows-saavy SAs. I say if you have a good linux SA, the TCO will be less for linux. If you have windows SAs doing linux, then of course TCO for windows will be less.
Where I work, we have had many more problems with our linux web servers than with our windows servers. I chalk it up to the fact that the team that manages our servers has WinTel in their group's name. Windows and Linux administration are two different skill sets. But somewhere along the line, someone decided that they'd rebadge a few windows SAs as linux SAs, which in my estimation, is a mistake.
well good for him, I say. Many people denounced as heretics were actually more Christian than the Church. Church and Christianity are two different things.
that's because this discussion is philosophical, not scientific. Discussing philosophy is great. Arguing about it is pointless. Watch how quickly many of the threads in this discussion degenerate into arguments.
agreed. That's why this entire discussion is a philosophical one. The people who are athiests and who deride those who believe in creation and the creationists who demonize the scientists and everyone in between is still debating this kind of stuff. Nobody has any evidence other than what they are willing to believe.
I'm not sure that Apple is really in a position to be dictating terms with them too severely.
Apple is in the catbird's seat, so to speak. Here's why: if you want your music to play on an iPod (and the labels do), you either sell DRM free music (like emusic.com) or you sell it via iTunes. Them's the choices, like it or lump it. If Apple wanted to engage in arm twisting with the labels, I think they might come out on top. It could have been different had the Zune not been a colossal failure, but nobody can compete with the iPod for the foreseeable future.
I can't stand it when I start a project that is supposed to be based on exisitng *working* *tested* code, and the software developer says 'this is crap I need three guys and 6 more months of schedule to rewrite it'.
Depends on the reason the programmers want to alter or re-write the code. Often, so called "turnkey" solutions are riddled with bad, inefficient, unmaintainable code. A bad UI often indicates a bad code base, and vice versa. If a programmer wants to fix a bad UI or fix a performance problem, then you should probably listen to him. If he wants to reformat the code so that it's to his liking, then tell him to take a hike.
'I can do it better with my eyes closed' primadonna attitude that drives software projects over cost
Programming is like driving. Everyone thinks everyone else can't. Everyone thinks they can.
yes! I have had some of the same experiences! Like getting baited into a "cheaper" contract, etc.
I too used to like the durability to the phone. The first one I had was an i80s. No joke, one time I got angry and threw it as hard as I could against a concrete wall. The antenna was impacted into the phone and could not be removed, but the stinkin phone still worked! Unbelievable! They don't make phones like that anymore. But as a result of that phone, I will always get Motorola phones, regardless of carrier.
I can agree with you to a point. There are bad UI's everywhere. Maybe moreso in Linux because it's so decentralized. But with the bad comes the good. Think: when you have one or two people developing software, with no PHB telling them how to make it look, you get innovation. Developers can be creative and take risks. Of course, sometimes this turns out well. Other times it falls flat.
With a large software corporation (like Microsoft) you get a greater degree of consistency, which is good, but along with it you get no innovation. Everything looks as if it is designed by committee. Usability problems never go away, because these usability problems are often so ingrained that nobody notices them. If you are a developer you know exactly what I mean...you can think a UI is so dirt simple but then watch as others are totally befuddled by it.
UI problems exist either way, it's just a matter of which eye you want poked.
Yes, and the other telltale sign of FUD is evident in this article: he points to nothing specific! He just spouts off glittering generalities with no real specific information to back up his bold assertations.
If you want to complain about Linux (as I have in the past), point to SPECIFIC things. Otherwise it's just FUD. I swear, this guy is just as bad as the PHBs who fear F/OSS software just because it doesn't come from Microsoft. No data to back up a single claim. OP had it right...this is archetypal FUD.
I just left them, and paid to get out of my contract. It was that bad.
I first signed up with Nextel in 2001, when they were business-oriented. For about two years, they were very good except that I could not get coverage on the few occasions I went to a rural area. When I did have a problem, the customer service was top notch. Then it all went downhill. Their customer services started sucking big time, the service did not improve, and now, in the city, there are blackout times (or so it seems...if I had to make a call at about 9PM, it would always make me try two or three times before getting through). Nextel started sucking and just got worse when they merged with Sprint. Crap crap crap.
The funny part is, at the time, I worked for Cingular, and still used nextel because I felt it was better. Now, I think Cingular is the best one out there so I just signed up with them. I have several friends who say they are *happy* with Cingular, and when someone can actually say they are happy with their service, that means a lot.
Ah, yes JSON. I like that. Also cool is creating array objects using []; This is the foundation of many AJAX programs I have written. You write a service that passes something like:
Leaner than XML, and you have a wonderful 2D array. Just return it to the page via an http request, and you have easy, lean, and fast AJAX code. Evaluate the object, loop over it, build HTML elements, et viola! instamatic content. Good stuff. And they say Javascript isn't powerful. Arrays, functions, they are all objects. Just have to tap into the power of the language.
a few stupid quirks (string concatenation / addition issues, especially)
Yeah, my favorite one right now is how datevar.getYear() returns 107 in Firefox and 07 in IE. Just use datevar.getFullYear(), I know. But still...if you didn't know that imagine how frustrating it could be to have some date code return different stuff in different browsers?
Just like you said, aside from stuff like that, javascript is very powerful. Everyone has a somewhat new browser, so everyone can use it.
Yeah, that's the way it used to be. Prototype is what I use, because along with a very useful AJAX library it has several useful tools that totally abstract browser differences. For example, it has the $() function. Plug the id of an element in there like such: $('chewbacca'). Assign that to a var, and you have an object var that references the fully qualified element regardless of which browser you are in.
That's pretty simple actually. I used to have my own library that did that and more. But Prototype also does some totally awesome AJAX stuff, and adds useful functions that simulate methods that SHOULD exist (like document.getElementByClassName(), which does what its name implies.) You can get prototype here: http://www.prototypejs.org/download. There is even an (unofficial) reference here: http://www.sergiopereira.com/articles/prototype.js .html.
I use this all the time, and it is a fantastic library. I never have to worry about feature sniffing or *shudder* browser string sniffing.
If you are on an intranet and you don't have to worry about some schlub having netscape 1 or something, then you can really do some very cool stuff with javascript (like AJAX) that makes the user experience much much better. Just be subtle with it. Going over the top with javascript and AJAX just makes you look ridiculous. If you are on the internet, I am not sure how well prototype works with ancient browsers (IE 3, etc). But unless you are amazon.com, who the heck cares?
But to take the "everything that is wrong with the earth is our fault" approach is arrogant.
Not sure I understand your logic here. I can see you saying it's incorrect perhaps, but arrogant?
Hunting really has nothing to do with it.
Nothing wrong with hunting. What I was talking about, though, was industrialized hunting. A century and a half ago, man decimated the sperm whale population through whaling. Before we started the business of harvesting whales, sperm whales were plentiful even in northern climes, for example off the east coast of the USA. Just got through reading a book about the sinking of the whaleship Essex, and one of the things it talked about in a good bit of depth was the whaling industry. After 40 or 50 years of whaling, Nantucket whaleships had to venture as far as the south pacific to find whales. This is because they basically hunted them out of existence up north. Same today with trawling. How many fish are|will be endangered as a result? For another example, when's the last time you heard of a herd of buffalo running across Kansas?
Corporations aren't full of people whose mission in life is to pollute the earth.
That's true, but as someone who works for a large corporation, I can tell you: profits are #1. As they should be for a corporation. But that often comes at the expense of other things. Not that I think there is some evil board of directors working for each company trying to figure out how to pollute the local stream, but I also think that a lot of corporations follow the letter of the law (and the EPA has been criticized for leniency) and will use any loopholes that exist. Simply due to the way corporations are run, (especially publicly traded ones...and perhaps that's a good distinction to make) profit is number 1 and everything else follows.
Also, have you taken a fish out of a pond and placed it into a bowl of "clean" water? It dies within a few days.
Yeah, because of the chlorine, which is used to clean the crap (literally) we dump into the water. Chlorine is poisonus to fish in lower concentrations that is poisonus to humans. Not that I like cholorine in my water. I guess it's better than coliform. Yes, overpopulation is largely to blame for that (and hog farms). I don't know much about this, I am not a sanitation engineer <<insert joke here>>, but I'd think that there's a better way to handle sewage than dumping it into the river.
Note the common thread here? Commercial fishing? Industrialized hog farming? Corporations placing profits first? The problem is that everything is over-industrialized. Instead of purchasing meat from a local farm or (gasp) slaughtering the animal ourselves (and how many would be vegetarians after cleaning a hog?) we have large, industrial, hog farms. These, instead of producing a manageable amout of waste (like a family farm) it produces a tremendous amout, which ruins any nearby water source. These hogs are sold to a large plant which employs some poor wretches to kill, clean, and grind up hogs all day. This meat is sent to a factory where is is processed, chemicals added to it, and packaged up for us to purchase at a grocery store. So we get unhealthy food, and we eat too much of it, and waste too much of it because we didn't work hard to get it. I guarantee, if you had to slaughter that hog, you'd waste none of the food. Yes, I am a part of this system just like you probably are. But do you ever step back and realize that something is fundamentally wrong here? I like programming and computers and all, but sometimes I think it'd be better if we went back to a simpler life. I'd become a farmer if I knew my family wouldn't starve. Technology is nice, science is good, and progress is ok, but sometimes I think we go a bit too far with it all. We get arrogant and think we know better than nature (I say our Creator), thinking we can do better, and thereby
man, when I first saw your post I wondered what the heck you were talking about. Never heard of the guy. Then I clicked the link...and I must say that is the saddest list of crappy movies ever. This guy is solely responsible for 50% of the crap coming out of Hollywood! *shudder*
Well, since I have your attention...I really enjoyed your commodore 64 article (blog, whatev) on your site. Even though I am relatively new to programming (wrote my first program in college 10 years ago and do it professionally today) and have never used a commodore 64, I want one now! Not only so I can teach my son how to program the old fashioned way, but also to see it for myself. I well know how new machines can lose the soul of the devices they purportedly replace. I always read about how back in the day these guys would hack at commodore 64s, PDPs, etc, and I would love to have a stripped down, just-you-and-the-machine, programming experience. Anyhow, your article made me think, and I can always appreciate that. Just wanted to tell you that. Good work!
Most of my posts have been about history. Posting even somewhat conservative comments into slashdot is like putting your arm into the cage of a hungry tiger
I know what you mean, but I contend that a lot of it has to do with the quality of your arguments. I have posted comments here defending my Bible-based faith and have been modded up for it (on a few occasions, at that). I'd say that's the one thing people hate more here than conservative politics and "net neutrality" legislation and DRM. People here HATE religion (in most cases, rightfully so) and mistakenly assume the Bible supports religion's misdeeds and thus HATE the Bible.
The reason I said what I did was specifically was this: "And the fact that species are becoming extinct is normal. Things die. Whether its a single individual or entire species." (and I'll admit I judged you a bit harshly. I too am sick of people seizing on one word of a post and totally ignoring the meaning. On a site that purports to have an educated user base, that's unacceptable.) But I digress. Let's talk.
I take issue with the above-quoted statement because all evidence points to the fact that WE are causing this. It's a bit irresponsible to kill living things and take the attitude "hey, things die. get over it." GW may be debatable, but you cannot deny that all the overhunting/overfishing/destruction of habitat/pollution that man is responsible for has had an adverse effect on the earth. Now, the specific nature of the effects may be open to debate, but that one fact is pretty much absolute, right? I sure think so. Well, who is responsible? Man. It's our fault.
As for managing the earth, I only mean that we should work in harmony with it. Don't build on floodplains. Don't drain marshland. Don't cut down forests for farmland. Stuff like that. And, since man has taken the initiative to carve up the earth into little political boundaries largely because of natural resource allocation, then we have effectively assumed management of the earth. We want to profit from the resources but don't want to give anything back or save anything for future generations. That's just a tad shortsighted, no? We have to be more responsible. That's basically all I was trying to say.
As for water, I do understand what you are saying. But even in those times, one could walk up to a river or stream and get relitively clean water from it. Now, well, you'd better not drink from most rivers or streams without taking some drastic purification measures. A small percentage of earth's water is fresh, potable water. Yet, we just dump crap into it. Ironically, we have the technology to purify any water (sea water, etc) and yet we claim it "costs too much". Go to the cia factbook and look at virtually any nation's annual millitary expenses. The amount of money it would take to give everyone clean water could fall off the back of a truck in Baghdad and be forgotten about forever. Yet nodody wants to spend that money for the common good. That's messed up.
The GW thing is just a way to force societal changes without the general public being any wiser...
Yes. Both extremes are equally reprehensible.
Individuals do not have to make big changes. Want to drive an SUV? Plant a tree. If you have a relatively small lawn, try an old fashioned reel mower (and get some exercise). Don't water your lawn in July and August. Replace half of the lightbulbs in your house with CFLs. Recycle paper. Recycle your used motor oil. It's the little things.
Think, if everyone chose two or three things from this list how much better would things be? Without any political wrangling at all, each individual can make a difference without changing to socialism. The trouble is, everyone is so extreme. Everyone wants big solutions (outlaw SUVs, build a solar reflector for the earth) when a bunch of small ones would at least make a big difference. If small changes don't help, that's when you start trying big ones. It's like optimizing software -- you go for the low hanging fruit first.
It's pretty arrogant to think that we can "manage our planet properly."
No it's not. I think you and I are on the same side on this one. By manage the planet, I do not mean dump ice cubes into warm gulf coast waters to stop hurricanes. By manage the planet, I mean work with it's natural features. Hurricane Katrina is a perfect example. News flash: don't want to be flooded? Don't build on the flood plain. And don't drain marshland, for goodness sake. Don't want catastrophic floods? Don't be so arrogant as to try to channel the Mississippi river. I read with horror the proposal to build some sort of reflector around the earth to help stop global warming. I mean, what is that all about? Isn't it easier and cheaper to control emissions?
There is more than one way to manage something. Since man takes an active role in carving up the earth's surface into countries and so forth, then we effectively have taken on the role of managing the earth. The question is how do we do that? One would hope in a manner that shows respect for natural forces. The evidence, as you pointed out, shows otherwise.
Yeah, those are political to a degree, I must concur with you on that. I guess what I meant is that political agendas are often (or always) pushed in front of the common good. Which is sad, because governments exist for nothing if not for the common good.
I realize I am spouting off mere idealism here. Nobody cares, and things will continue as they are.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this has to do with the SAs. Shops running mostly windows servers will have windows-saavy SAs. I say if you have a good linux SA, the TCO will be less for linux. If you have windows SAs doing linux, then of course TCO for windows will be less.
Where I work, we have had many more problems with our linux web servers than with our windows servers. I chalk it up to the fact that the team that manages our servers has WinTel in their group's name. Windows and Linux administration are two different skill sets. But somewhere along the line, someone decided that they'd rebadge a few windows SAs as linux SAs, which in my estimation, is a mistake.
well good for him, I say. Many people denounced as heretics were actually more Christian than the Church. Church and Christianity are two different things.
that's because this discussion is philosophical, not scientific. Discussing philosophy is great. Arguing about it is pointless. Watch how quickly many of the threads in this discussion degenerate into arguments.
agreed. That's why this entire discussion is a philosophical one. The people who are athiests and who deride those who believe in creation and the creationists who demonize the scientists and everyone in between is still debating this kind of stuff. Nobody has any evidence other than what they are willing to believe.
Not sure about the rest, but Newton and Kepler were most certainly not athiests.
yes! I have had some of the same experiences! Like getting baited into a "cheaper" contract, etc.
I too used to like the durability to the phone. The first one I had was an i80s. No joke, one time I got angry and threw it as hard as I could against a concrete wall. The antenna was impacted into the phone and could not be removed, but the stinkin phone still worked! Unbelievable! They don't make phones like that anymore. But as a result of that phone, I will always get Motorola phones, regardless of carrier.
I can agree with you to a point. There are bad UI's everywhere. Maybe moreso in Linux because it's so decentralized. But with the bad comes the good. Think: when you have one or two people developing software, with no PHB telling them how to make it look, you get innovation. Developers can be creative and take risks. Of course, sometimes this turns out well. Other times it falls flat.
With a large software corporation (like Microsoft) you get a greater degree of consistency, which is good, but along with it you get no innovation. Everything looks as if it is designed by committee. Usability problems never go away, because these usability problems are often so ingrained that nobody notices them. If you are a developer you know exactly what I mean...you can think a UI is so dirt simple but then watch as others are totally befuddled by it.
UI problems exist either way, it's just a matter of which eye you want poked.
Yes, and the other telltale sign of FUD is evident in this article: he points to nothing specific! He just spouts off glittering generalities with no real specific information to back up his bold assertations.
If you want to complain about Linux (as I have in the past), point to SPECIFIC things. Otherwise it's just FUD. I swear, this guy is just as bad as the PHBs who fear F/OSS software just because it doesn't come from Microsoft. No data to back up a single claim. OP had it right...this is archetypal FUD.
I just left them, and paid to get out of my contract. It was that bad.
I first signed up with Nextel in 2001, when they were business-oriented. For about two years, they were very good except that I could not get coverage on the few occasions I went to a rural area. When I did have a problem, the customer service was top notch. Then it all went downhill. Their customer services started sucking big time, the service did not improve, and now, in the city, there are blackout times (or so it seems...if I had to make a call at about 9PM, it would always make me try two or three times before getting through). Nextel started sucking and just got worse when they merged with Sprint. Crap crap crap.
The funny part is, at the time, I worked for Cingular, and still used nextel because I felt it was better. Now, I think Cingular is the best one out there so I just signed up with them. I have several friends who say they are *happy* with Cingular, and when someone can actually say they are happy with their service, that means a lot.
What kind of pants do you wear?
Ah, yes JSON. I like that. Also cool is creating array objects using []; This is the foundation of many AJAX programs I have written. You write a service that passes something like:
[
['chris','jones','7182232000','programmer'],
['miles','davis','7182232000','musician'],
['hobart','macarthur','7182232000','lawyer'],
['bobo','clown','7182232000','clown'],
['chew','bacca','7182232000','wookie']
]
Leaner than XML, and you have a wonderful 2D array. Just return it to the page via an http request, and you have easy, lean, and fast AJAX code. Evaluate the object, loop over it, build HTML elements, et viola! instamatic content. Good stuff. And they say Javascript isn't powerful. Arrays, functions, they are all objects. Just have to tap into the power of the language.
Just like you said, aside from stuff like that, javascript is very powerful. Everyone has a somewhat new browser, so everyone can use it.
Yeah, that's the way it used to be. Prototype is what I use, because along with a very useful AJAX library it has several useful tools that totally abstract browser differences. For example, it has the $() function. Plug the id of an element in there like such: $('chewbacca'). Assign that to a var, and you have an object var that references the fully qualified element regardless of which browser you are in.
s .html.
That's pretty simple actually. I used to have my own library that did that and more. But Prototype also does some totally awesome AJAX stuff, and adds useful functions that simulate methods that SHOULD exist (like document.getElementByClassName(), which does what its name implies.) You can get prototype here: http://www.prototypejs.org/download. There is even an (unofficial) reference here: http://www.sergiopereira.com/articles/prototype.j
I use this all the time, and it is a fantastic library. I never have to worry about feature sniffing or *shudder* browser string sniffing.
If you are on an intranet and you don't have to worry about some schlub having netscape 1 or something, then you can really do some very cool stuff with javascript (like AJAX) that makes the user experience much much better. Just be subtle with it. Going over the top with javascript and AJAX just makes you look ridiculous. If you are on the internet, I am not sure how well prototype works with ancient browsers (IE 3, etc). But unless you are amazon.com, who the heck cares?
Not sure I understand your logic here. I can see you saying it's incorrect perhaps, but arrogant?
Nothing wrong with hunting. What I was talking about, though, was industrialized hunting. A century and a half ago, man decimated the sperm whale population through whaling. Before we started the business of harvesting whales, sperm whales were plentiful even in northern climes, for example off the east coast of the USA. Just got through reading a book about the sinking of the whaleship Essex, and one of the things it talked about in a good bit of depth was the whaling industry. After 40 or 50 years of whaling, Nantucket whaleships had to venture as far as the south pacific to find whales. This is because they basically hunted them out of existence up north. Same today with trawling. How many fish are|will be endangered as a result? For another example, when's the last time you heard of a herd of buffalo running across Kansas?
That's true, but as someone who works for a large corporation, I can tell you: profits are #1. As they should be for a corporation. But that often comes at the expense of other things. Not that I think there is some evil board of directors working for each company trying to figure out how to pollute the local stream, but I also think that a lot of corporations follow the letter of the law (and the EPA has been criticized for leniency) and will use any loopholes that exist. Simply due to the way corporations are run, (especially publicly traded ones...and perhaps that's a good distinction to make) profit is number 1 and everything else follows.
Yeah, because of the chlorine, which is used to clean the crap (literally) we dump into the water. Chlorine is poisonus to fish in lower concentrations that is poisonus to humans. Not that I like cholorine in my water. I guess it's better than coliform. Yes, overpopulation is largely to blame for that (and hog farms). I don't know much about this, I am not a sanitation engineer <<insert joke here>>, but I'd think that there's a better way to handle sewage than dumping it into the river.
Note the common thread here? Commercial fishing? Industrialized hog farming? Corporations placing profits first? The problem is that everything is over-industrialized. Instead of purchasing meat from a local farm or (gasp) slaughtering the animal ourselves (and how many would be vegetarians after cleaning a hog?) we have large, industrial, hog farms. These, instead of producing a manageable amout of waste (like a family farm) it produces a tremendous amout, which ruins any nearby water source. These hogs are sold to a large plant which employs some poor wretches to kill, clean, and grind up hogs all day. This meat is sent to a factory where is is processed, chemicals added to it, and packaged up for us to purchase at a grocery store. So we get unhealthy food, and we eat too much of it, and waste too much of it because we didn't work hard to get it. I guarantee, if you had to slaughter that hog, you'd waste none of the food. Yes, I am a part of this system just like you probably are. But do you ever step back and realize that something is fundamentally wrong here? I like programming and computers and all, but sometimes I think it'd be better if we went back to a simpler life. I'd become a farmer if I knew my family wouldn't starve. Technology is nice, science is good, and progress is ok, but sometimes I think we go a bit too far with it all. We get arrogant and think we know better than nature (I say our Creator), thinking we can do better, and thereby
man, when I first saw your post I wondered what the heck you were talking about. Never heard of the guy. Then I clicked the link...and I must say that is the saddest list of crappy movies ever. This guy is solely responsible for 50% of the crap coming out of Hollywood! *shudder*
Well, since I have your attention...I really enjoyed your commodore 64 article (blog, whatev) on your site. Even though I am relatively new to programming (wrote my first program in college 10 years ago and do it professionally today) and have never used a commodore 64, I want one now! Not only so I can teach my son how to program the old fashioned way, but also to see it for myself. I well know how new machines can lose the soul of the devices they purportedly replace. I always read about how back in the day these guys would hack at commodore 64s, PDPs, etc, and I would love to have a stripped down, just-you-and-the-machine, programming experience. Anyhow, your article made me think, and I can always appreciate that. Just wanted to tell you that. Good work!
yeah...and sorry about that failed ascii-art thing. That was a joke too I guess, but not a particularly funny one.
Dude, it sucks that you missed the joke.
How about the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum?
Hollywood movies suck so much it seems like they violate this one.
The reason I said what I did was specifically was this: "And the fact that species are becoming extinct is normal. Things die. Whether its a single individual or entire species." (and I'll admit I judged you a bit harshly. I too am sick of people seizing on one word of a post and totally ignoring the meaning. On a site that purports to have an educated user base, that's unacceptable.) But I digress. Let's talk.
I take issue with the above-quoted statement because all evidence points to the fact that WE are causing this. It's a bit irresponsible to kill living things and take the attitude "hey, things die. get over it." GW may be debatable, but you cannot deny that all the overhunting/overfishing/destruction of habitat/pollution that man is responsible for has had an adverse effect on the earth. Now, the specific nature of the effects may be open to debate, but that one fact is pretty much absolute, right? I sure think so. Well, who is responsible? Man. It's our fault.
As for managing the earth, I only mean that we should work in harmony with it. Don't build on floodplains. Don't drain marshland. Don't cut down forests for farmland. Stuff like that. And, since man has taken the initiative to carve up the earth into little political boundaries largely because of natural resource allocation, then we have effectively assumed management of the earth. We want to profit from the resources but don't want to give anything back or save anything for future generations. That's just a tad shortsighted, no? We have to be more responsible. That's basically all I was trying to say.
As for water, I do understand what you are saying. But even in those times, one could walk up to a river or stream and get relitively clean water from it. Now, well, you'd better not drink from most rivers or streams without taking some drastic purification measures. A small percentage of earth's water is fresh, potable water. Yet, we just dump crap into it. Ironically, we have the technology to purify any water (sea water, etc) and yet we claim it "costs too much". Go to the cia factbook and look at virtually any nation's annual millitary expenses. The amount of money it would take to give everyone clean water could fall off the back of a truck in Baghdad and be forgotten about forever. Yet nodody wants to spend that money for the common good. That's messed up.
Individuals do not have to make big changes. Want to drive an SUV? Plant a tree. If you have a relatively small lawn, try an old fashioned reel mower (and get some exercise). Don't water your lawn in July and August. Replace half of the lightbulbs in your house with CFLs. Recycle paper. Recycle your used motor oil. It's the little things.
Think, if everyone chose two or three things from this list how much better would things be? Without any political wrangling at all, each individual can make a difference without changing to socialism. The trouble is, everyone is so extreme. Everyone wants big solutions (outlaw SUVs, build a solar reflector for the earth) when a bunch of small ones would at least make a big difference. If small changes don't help, that's when you start trying big ones. It's like optimizing software -- you go for the low hanging fruit first.
There is more than one way to manage something. Since man takes an active role in carving up the earth's surface into countries and so forth, then we effectively have taken on the role of managing the earth. The question is how do we do that? One would hope in a manner that shows respect for natural forces. The evidence, as you pointed out, shows otherwise.
Yeah, those are political to a degree, I must concur with you on that. I guess what I meant is that political agendas are often (or always) pushed in front of the common good. Which is sad, because governments exist for nothing if not for the common good.
I realize I am spouting off mere idealism here. Nobody cares, and things will continue as they are.