The [NT] file system could stand some improving (anyone ever run out of drive letters?)
Drive letters are an abomination. That "30 year old" operating system realized long ago that there needn't (and mostly shouldn't) be a linkage between the file system the user sees and the physical drives. (The exception being removable media -- CD-ROMs, floppies, et al.)
Let's not forget the godawful file layout; the mix of writable and non-writable system files, the "put it anywhere" philosophy which results in users losing the files they just created, ad infinitum.
According to a Story in the Financial times Visa successfuly blocked the use of their trademark in regard to a unrelated product (Condoms, in this case)
Brings new meaning to "Visa: it's everywhere you want to be," doesn't it?
Probably number one on the list [of things to add to Windows] would be symbolic links
Note that Windows has symbolic links in a way, as you can create an alias to another directory. While this works in the File Open/Save dialogs for navigation, it has the unfortunate side-effect of replacing the file name with the link name which makes it a lot less useful than it could be.
Up until not too long ago, people _could_ "euthanize" babies right after they were born (or during birth). Even healthy ones. It was called partial birth abortion.
That's either an inaccurate one or a deceptive one. "Partial birth abortion", as it is referred to by abortion opponents in the U.S., refers to an abortion done by essentially sticking a large needle into the fetus's brain and "pithing" it. To do so, the body of the fetus is pulled through the vaginal opening (thus the "birth" label.) However, most early term abortions are done via a vacuum system I believe, which essentially vacuums the fetus off the uterine wall and out the birth canal, yet that isn't called a "birth abortion." The alternative for late stage abortions is generally intact dismemberment, where the fetus is chopped to pieces inside the womb and then the pieces removed (somehow this doesn't generate the same outrage among abortion advocates as something they can label "partial birth."
Personally, I am extremely uncomfortable with the idea of abortion beyond the beginning of cerebral brain activity. If life ends when the brain stops, shouldn't it be considered as beginning when brain activity begins? I just dislike argument by emotion rather than reason.
Almost all serious windows developers use Windows NT. This is a developmental issue is it not?
Of course developers develop mostly on NT, but the applications they develop run mostly on 95/98. As an example of where this screws things up in the app I work on, we had a crash that appeared only on 98, and only on certain machines. I attempted to set up remote debugging on that machine, and it refused to work. I put MSVC on that machine, and it crashed while compiling. I was never able to fix that crash. Apparently it "went away" thanks to other changes in the code, but as far as I know it might reappear on any new compile.
Unix/Linux machines often give you core dumps -- memory images of the program when it crashes -- which you can then use a debugger on to find the point in the code where it crashed. While this doesn't matter to the developer who is generally running the program under live debugging (MSVC isn't perfect, but it's not bad either), it does mean that it's harder to track down problems discovered by alpha testers (people in the same building.)
I mean, what Win9x application have you run on NT that goes all funny?
First off, there are a whole bunch that don't run at all. Second off, we've had to write workarounds for things that work in NT, not 98. Mercifully, I personally haven't had to deal with them much (other than the above crash), but I hear plenty of kvetching from my coworkers...
Sorry, I just don't have the time to respond more, but DDE and OLE are totally different (DDE is text-based, OLE is like published C++ classes), and you still need DDE to do thing like change the start bar; installing an app shouldn't change the OS (and break other programs) at all, no matter what the app; and the Linux guys have issued 2.0.x revisions even after 2.2/2.3 started.
Show me some major bugs in NT that stops software development.
That comment is revealing in itself. Most people use 95/98, not NT. So why did you limit it so particularly? (And I see you've done it again in *another* posting on this thread.) I personally have to reboot 98 at least once every evening I use it, for some mysterious leak (that has survived the 95->98 upgrade, changes in devices, etc.)
I still hear bug reports for the app I work on where the toolbar buttons have disappeared. This was caused not by a bug of ours, not by an OS bug, but because the user installed Internet Explorer 4.0. So I guess IE really is part of the OS...
Things about Windows that have made development more difficult:
1) NT vs. 95/98, where the two have similar but not bug-for-bug identical APIs
2) DDE vs. OLE vs. DLLs vs. MCI vs. COM vs... 10,000 different ways to share data and code rather than getting it right the first time.
3) Changing the OS with their own apps, like the IE 4.0 thing mentioned above.
4) Once they move onto the new feature set (such as 98 vs. 95) they'll never touch the 95 code to fix bugs again.
5)... there's more, but I have work to do.
Part of the problem is that OS bugs, once detected, are the most difficult to "fix" (more properly, to work around.) Often they require the developer shift platforms to create the workaround. They may introduce inefficiencies for users who wouldn't have the problem to begin with. And there's no way to really fix the problem, since you don't have access to the source. And get the OS company to fix it? Hah! For one recent bug, I would need a fix for a product the OS company has dropped, and they laid off/transferred the entire development team (Apple and the QuickDraw3D team).
(its not -- pornography treats people as objects. I though that was something geeks were against?).
Feh. How many people did you treat as objects today? I dealt with multiple cashier objects, sales clerk objects, and hundreds of Slashdot poster objects, including you. I watched a number of actor objects, who I might have "cared" about, but if so it was about their screen persona, not themselves. Do you really care about me or the person you responded to? Don't be ridiculous, your sole contact and concern is with what we've said, which is a microscopic detail in the entirety of our lives.
We all treat many people as "objects", few as anything more. Claiming otherwise, or that this is only objectionable when it comes to sex, is specious.
>So where are we going to get all the money to go metric?
Acutally, there's a very easy way to convince Americans to go metric. First, as a convenience, set up metric equivalents that are similar to Imperial units. A metric "inch" is 2.5 cm (2.54 is too many digits). A metric pound is 0.5 kg. Most of us already know liters from 2 liter bottles. The handy thing about doing this is that with these "metric inches" and "metric pounds", everyone would be an inch or two taller and ~10% lighter! That alone should sell the conversion...
However, if you don't like the Rage Pro that comes with the box you can always run out and buy a 3Dfx Voodoo card
Not for an iMac, you can't. So it'll lag well behind the fastest PCs at 3-D graphics, with no possibility of fixing that problem. You'll have to move up to a Blue&White or G4 for Voodoo3 speed.
>Read this to learn what the Supreme Court has said recently about copyrighting "facts"
Seth, you should tell a little more about it; this decision is huge. A unanimous Supreme Court here ruled that extending copyright protection to databases was not merely current law, but would violate the Constitution. While fat cats might buy changes to the law to help make more money (for example, the extension of copyright duration, which stretches the "limited time" phrase in the Constitution to near breaking point), this particular change would require changing the Constitution. Somehow, I don't think that will happen.
So, the only issue is how much will be spent on lawyers getting any changes to the law declared unconstitutional, an annoyance to be sure, but not nearly as bad as if it could become law.
Database collators can make money by not distributing the entire database en masse, or by doing it for people who really need it for a fee.
So, it's fine if you want to kill genetic patents. They've always struck me as conceptually rather questionable too. But if you do, you're going to have to come up with an alternate way to protect pharmeceuticals' interests.
I believe there is trade secret law that covers this. Basically, you aren't required to reveal all you know. Also, you can arrange contracts that require secrecy on the other party's part, with the consequence of substantial monetary damages being awarded if they violate their part of the contract. So if a gene is valuable, make it a trade secret and sell access to the hidden knowledge.
Please don't bite my head off, but I don't see what's wrong here. Someone created a webpage with a link to files that are illegal to distribute.
But it is the responsibility of the person who sets up the files to ensure that they are legal to distribute, not the linker. If I link to mp3.com, where many legal-to-distribute files reside, and it turns out an mp3 there is illegal to distribute, should I be held liable? An mp3 is not illegal by definition. Or what if I link to a story on a news site that turns out was plagiarized? Again, am I liable?
Now, the fundamental difference here may be intent, that this kid knew these files were being distributed illegally. But at the very least this means that the plaintiffs should be required to show that he knew the distribution was illegal, which raises the bar significantly.
>There is plenty of information available on just about every candidate available for anybody who wants to look for it.
And if I do spend that time, there's a vanishingly small chance that my vote will affect the result. Moreover, the candidates that do appear by the time I vote (given that I don't live in New Hampshire or Iowa, and even the ones who show up there are the ones with big money orgs behind them) will be Tweedledee and Tweedledum as far as I'm concerned.
Read David Freidman's "Hidden Costs" for his analysis of why voter turnout is as small as it is here.
Try to code nice console programs and static libs not touching the horrible VC MFC libs and go STL and stdio instead. What happens?
I've found it often works better than egcs. I had to rewrite an egcs version of a console test app because it didn't like typedefs in templates based on typedefs from the template parameters. (I ended up using -- God help us! -- #defines.) Maybe egcs has improved since then, but slamming a compiler because it isn't quite up to the standards spec means you slam all compilers.
I'll grant you the non-standard scope for variables declared in for loops, and the lack of a standard switch for just changing that, sucks.
To my mind no IDE (including emacs) is really at the level I need it. I like the multiple independently-resizeable edit windows of CodeWarrior (that offer more than just editing, things like setting breakpoints for example). I like the displays of local variables and the edit and continue of Visual. I like the power of command line programs with Unix/Linux. (Especially the ability to pipe grep, grep -v, etc.) I like the ease of learning the simple stuff of CodeWarrior and Visual.
I want the ability to add hyperlinks to documentation in source code, where I can click to get a viewer. I want easy to browse instructions. I want to be able to set *compile* breakpoints, so I can see what header files are included and what's defined at a given point. I want the ability to indicate groupings of functionality even when there's no language-level indication (such as namespaces) of that grouping. I want diff tools that show word-level differences if lines aren't very different, and that show the difference in context. I want to be able to change a variable's name, and have all references to it change too -- but not identically named but different variables.
I noticed something today while I was at home after 8 hours of work. At about 9:00PM my boss calls me up. He's changing my schedule around to 12-9PM and scheduling me to work on weekends.
You ahve less than a month left. How much does this job really matter to you? What's stopping you from just saying no?
Companies ask ridiculous things of their employees because employees grudgingly go along with them.
It seems a little strange here. Guinness claims he persuaded Lucas to kill him off and make him a ghost, yet he couldn't exercise enough influence to change his lines a little? I'm a big Alec Guiness fan (including his Star Wars role), but this sounds a bit fishy.
On the other hand, he's not the only unsatisfied Star Wars actor. There's a link to David Prowse's comments, but also I've read that Denis "Wedge Antilles" Lawson didn't enjoy making the movies. I suspect that any time you have a director who is also the creator (such as Lucas, but also JMS of Babylon 5), the director is going to want to exercise more creative control in creating his "vision."
They [...] just can't do some of the very very basic math. [...] we already know 1/3 of them are (pardon the expression) idiots, what about the other 1/2rds?
Ugly, and like all Apple stuff, overprice, underperform.
Name another LCD available today with the same or better size, resolution, and price. Heck, with the exception of the widescreen Sony 24" monitor, I can't even name a CRT that beats it in all three categories. Plasmas are big, but low resolution and expensive, the big CRTs usually don't go that high-res and cost a bundle.
Otherwise rats would have evolved this increased set of NMDA receptors a long time ago (if it had any survival value)
Not necessarily.
(Cover your eyes if you're in Kansas.) The evolutionary ancestors of humans probably had better hearing, vision, strength, and sense of smell, or some combination. While all of the above can be helpful in survival, and should rarely be a hindrance, they all went away. Why? Because harmful mutations are much more common than helpful ones, and if a positive characteristic isn't that beneficial for the current evolutionary niche, mutations tend to lessen the characteristic in future generations.
Check out this page if you're interested in SGI financials. There's been a serious downturn in profitability between 1995 and 1998 which is seriously disconcerting.
I think a potential strategy of integrating the best of IRIX into Linux would be a winner for SGI. Most people aren't buying SGIs for IRIX, are they? So unloading some of that development cost to the Linux community would be a wise move for them, and making XFS a fully-supported file system for Linux means working between the two is easier.
Go figure, and for some reason, rob's scripts have given me a default score of 2. Guess I'm just really magical or something.
If you post a number of articles that are moderated up, your default score gets boosted. I have no idea how many it takes, but I too am one of the Chosen...;-)
I will admit that the "central" idiology of the libertarians would appear to be against this, but what I've seen of some particular "libertarian" private lives (i.e., the way they were running companies) doesn't encourage me to believe that this is an automatic cure.
The fundamental flaw of Libertarianism is that you can do what you want with your own property, including restrict the activities of those who are on it or impose obligations on them for remaining there. So, if you think of the U.S. as one big Home Owner's Association, and the Constitution as the rules of that HOA, we live in a perfectly Libertarian society. Don't like the rules of the U.S.? You're perfectly welcome to go elsewhere and live by the rules of the current owner. There's nowhere on earth with the rules you want? Not my problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The [NT] file system could stand some improving (anyone ever run out of drive letters?)
Drive letters are an abomination. That "30 year old" operating system realized long ago that there needn't (and mostly shouldn't) be a linkage between the file system the user sees and the physical drives. (The exception being removable media -- CD-ROMs, floppies, et al.)
Let's not forget the godawful file layout; the mix of writable and non-writable system files, the "put it anywhere" philosophy which results in users losing the files they just created, ad infinitum.
According to a Story in the Financial times Visa successfuly blocked the use of their trademark in regard to a unrelated product (Condoms, in this case)
Brings new meaning to "Visa: it's everywhere you want to be," doesn't it?
Probably number one on the list [of things to add to Windows] would be symbolic links
Note that Windows has symbolic links in a way, as you can create an alias to another directory. While this works in the File Open/Save dialogs for navigation, it has the unfortunate side-effect of replacing the file name with the link name which makes it a lot less useful than it could be.
Up until not too long ago, people _could_ "euthanize" babies right after they were born (or during birth). Even healthy ones. It was called partial birth abortion.
That's either an inaccurate one or a deceptive one. "Partial birth abortion", as it is referred to by abortion opponents in the U.S., refers to an abortion done by essentially sticking a large needle into the fetus's brain and "pithing" it. To do so, the body of the fetus is pulled through the vaginal opening (thus the "birth" label.) However, most early term abortions are done via a vacuum system I believe, which essentially vacuums the fetus off the uterine wall and out the birth canal, yet that isn't called a "birth abortion." The alternative for late stage abortions is generally intact dismemberment, where the fetus is chopped to pieces inside the womb and then the pieces removed (somehow this doesn't generate the same outrage among abortion advocates as something they can label "partial birth."
Personally, I am extremely uncomfortable with the idea of abortion beyond the beginning of cerebral brain activity. If life ends when the brain stops, shouldn't it be considered as beginning when brain activity begins? I just dislike argument by emotion rather than reason.
Almost all serious windows developers use Windows NT. This is a developmental issue is it not?
Of course developers develop mostly on NT, but the applications they develop run mostly on 95/98. As an example of where this screws things up in the app I work on, we had a crash that appeared only on 98, and only on certain machines. I attempted to set up remote debugging on that machine, and it refused to work. I put MSVC on that machine, and it crashed while compiling. I was never able to fix that crash. Apparently it "went away" thanks to other changes in the code, but as far as I know it might reappear on any new compile.
Unix/Linux machines often give you core dumps -- memory images of the program when it crashes -- which you can then use a debugger on to find the point in the code where it crashed. While this doesn't matter to the developer who is generally running the program under live debugging (MSVC isn't perfect, but it's not bad either), it does mean that it's harder to track down problems discovered by alpha testers (people in the same building.)
I mean, what Win9x application have you run on NT that goes all funny?
First off, there are a whole bunch that don't run at all. Second off, we've had to write workarounds for things that work in NT, not 98. Mercifully, I personally haven't had to deal with them much (other than the above crash), but I hear plenty of kvetching from my coworkers...
Sorry, I just don't have the time to respond more, but DDE and OLE are totally different (DDE is text-based, OLE is like published C++ classes), and you still need DDE to do thing like change the start bar; installing an app shouldn't change the OS (and break other programs) at all, no matter what the app; and the Linux guys have issued 2.0.x revisions even after 2.2/2.3 started.
And just try to get an HP DeskJet 712 to work under Linux.
:-(
Note that pbm2ppa, available at Freshmeat, allows you to print from these printers under Linux. B&W only last I checked though.
Show me some major bugs in NT that stops software development.
That comment is revealing in itself. Most people use 95/98, not NT. So why did you limit it so particularly? (And I see you've done it again in *another* posting on this thread.) I personally have to reboot 98 at least once every evening I use it, for some mysterious leak (that has survived the 95->98 upgrade, changes in devices, etc.)
I still hear bug reports for the app I work on where the toolbar buttons have disappeared. This was caused not by a bug of ours, not by an OS bug, but because the user installed Internet Explorer 4.0. So I guess IE really is part of the OS...
Things about Windows that have made development more difficult:
1) NT vs. 95/98, where the two have similar but not bug-for-bug identical APIs
2) DDE vs. OLE vs. DLLs vs. MCI vs. COM vs... 10,000 different ways to share data and code rather than getting it right the first time.
3) Changing the OS with their own apps, like the IE 4.0 thing mentioned above.
4) Once they move onto the new feature set (such as 98 vs. 95) they'll never touch the 95 code to fix bugs again.
5)... there's more, but I have work to do.
Part of the problem is that OS bugs, once detected, are the most difficult to "fix" (more properly, to work around.) Often they require the developer shift platforms to create the workaround. They may introduce inefficiencies for users who wouldn't have the problem to begin with. And there's no way to really fix the problem, since you don't have access to the source. And get the OS company to fix it? Hah! For one recent bug, I would need a fix for a product the OS company has dropped, and they laid off/transferred the entire development team (Apple and the QuickDraw3D team).
(its not -- pornography treats people as objects. I though that was something geeks were against?).
Feh. How many people did you treat as objects today? I dealt with multiple cashier objects, sales clerk objects, and hundreds of Slashdot poster objects, including you. I watched a number of actor objects, who I might have "cared" about, but if so it was about their screen persona, not themselves. Do you really care about me or the person you responded to? Don't be ridiculous, your sole contact and concern is with what we've said, which is a microscopic detail in the entirety of our lives.
We all treat many people as "objects", few as anything more. Claiming otherwise, or that this is only objectionable when it comes to sex, is specious.
Quick question: how much do you have to pay for the compiler to compile this free source?
>So where are we going to get all the money to go metric?
Acutally, there's a very easy way to convince Americans to go metric. First, as a convenience, set up metric equivalents that are similar to Imperial units. A metric "inch" is 2.5 cm (2.54 is too many digits). A metric pound is 0.5 kg. Most of us already know liters from 2 liter bottles. The handy thing about doing this is that with these "metric inches" and "metric pounds", everyone would be an inch or two taller and ~10% lighter! That alone should sell the conversion...
I think we need a "Katz' Notes" summary for Katz's articles... :-)
However, if you don't like the Rage Pro that comes with the box you can always run out and buy a 3Dfx Voodoo card
Not for an iMac, you can't. So it'll lag well behind the fastest PCs at 3-D graphics, with no possibility of fixing that problem. You'll have to move up to a Blue&White or G4 for Voodoo3 speed.
>Read this to learn what the Supreme Court has said recently about copyrighting "facts"
Seth, you should tell a little more about it; this decision is huge. A unanimous Supreme Court here ruled that extending copyright protection to databases was not merely current law, but would violate the Constitution. While fat cats might buy changes to the law to help make more money (for example, the extension of copyright duration, which stretches the "limited time" phrase in the Constitution to near breaking point), this particular change would require changing the Constitution. Somehow, I don't think that will happen.
So, the only issue is how much will be spent on lawyers getting any changes to the law declared unconstitutional, an annoyance to be sure, but not nearly as bad as if it could become law.
Database collators can make money by not distributing the entire database en masse, or by doing it for people who really need it for a fee.
So, it's fine if you want to kill genetic patents. They've always struck me as conceptually rather questionable too. But if you do, you're going to have to come up with an alternate way to protect pharmeceuticals' interests.
I believe there is trade secret law that covers this. Basically, you aren't required to reveal all you know. Also, you can arrange contracts that require secrecy on the other party's part, with the consequence of substantial monetary damages being awarded if they violate their part of the contract. So if a gene is valuable, make it a trade secret and sell access to the hidden knowledge.
Please don't bite my head off, but I don't see what's wrong here. Someone created a webpage with a link to files that are illegal to distribute.
But it is the responsibility of the person who sets up the files to ensure that they are legal to distribute, not the linker. If I link to mp3.com, where many legal-to-distribute files reside, and it turns out an mp3 there is illegal to distribute, should I be held liable? An mp3 is not illegal by definition. Or what if I link to a story on a news site that turns out was plagiarized? Again, am I liable?
Now, the fundamental difference here may be intent, that this kid knew these files were being distributed illegally. But at the very least this means that the plaintiffs should be required to show that he knew the distribution was illegal, which raises the bar significantly.
>There is plenty of information available on just about every candidate available for anybody who wants to look for it.
And if I do spend that time, there's a vanishingly small chance that my vote will affect the result. Moreover, the candidates that do appear by the time I vote (given that I don't live in New Hampshire or Iowa, and even the ones who show up there are the ones with big money orgs behind them) will be Tweedledee and Tweedledum as far as I'm concerned.
Read David Freidman's "Hidden Costs" for his analysis of why voter turnout is as small as it is here.
Try to code nice console programs and static libs not touching the horrible VC MFC libs and go STL and stdio instead. What happens?
I've found it often works better than egcs. I had to rewrite an egcs version of a console test app because it didn't like typedefs in templates based on typedefs from the template parameters. (I ended up using -- God help us! -- #defines.) Maybe egcs has improved since then, but slamming a compiler because it isn't quite up to the standards spec means you slam all compilers.
I'll grant you the non-standard scope for variables declared in for loops, and the lack of a standard switch for just changing that, sucks.
To my mind no IDE (including emacs) is really at the level I need it. I like the multiple independently-resizeable edit windows of CodeWarrior (that offer more than just editing, things like setting breakpoints for example). I like the displays of local variables and the edit and continue of Visual. I like the power of command line programs with Unix/Linux. (Especially the ability to pipe grep, grep -v, etc.) I like the ease of learning the simple stuff of CodeWarrior and Visual.
I want the ability to add hyperlinks to documentation in source code, where I can click to get a viewer. I want easy to browse instructions. I want to be able to set *compile* breakpoints, so I can see what header files are included and what's defined at a given point. I want the ability to indicate groupings of functionality even when there's no language-level indication (such as namespaces) of that grouping. I want diff tools that show word-level differences if lines aren't very different, and that show the difference in context. I want to be able to change a variable's name, and have all references to it change too -- but not identically named but different variables.
I noticed something today while I was at home after 8 hours of work. At about 9:00PM my boss calls me up. He's changing my schedule around to 12-9PM and scheduling me to work on weekends.
You ahve less than a month left. How much does this job really matter to you? What's stopping you from just saying no?
Companies ask ridiculous things of their employees because employees grudgingly go along with them.
It seems a little strange here. Guinness claims he persuaded Lucas to kill him off and make him a ghost, yet he couldn't exercise enough influence to change his lines a little? I'm a big Alec Guiness fan (including his Star Wars role), but this sounds a bit fishy.
On the other hand, he's not the only unsatisfied Star Wars actor. There's a link to David Prowse's comments, but also I've read that Denis "Wedge Antilles" Lawson didn't enjoy making the movies. I suspect that any time you have a director who is also the creator (such as Lucas, but also JMS of Babylon 5), the director is going to want to exercise more creative control in creating his "vision."
They [...] just can't do some of the very very basic math. [...] we already know 1/3 of them are (pardon the expression) idiots, what about the other 1/2rds?
:-)
Umm, you were saying?...
Ugly, and like all Apple stuff, overprice, underperform.
Name another LCD available today with the same or better size, resolution, and price. Heck, with the exception of the widescreen Sony 24" monitor, I can't even name a CRT that beats it in all three categories. Plasmas are big, but low resolution and expensive, the big CRTs usually don't go that high-res and cost a bundle.
Otherwise rats would have evolved this increased
set of NMDA receptors a long time ago (if it had any survival value)
Not necessarily.
(Cover your eyes if you're in Kansas.) The evolutionary ancestors of humans probably had better hearing, vision, strength, and sense of smell, or some combination. While all of the above can be helpful in survival, and should rarely be a hindrance, they all went away. Why? Because harmful mutations are much more common than helpful ones, and if a positive characteristic isn't that beneficial for the current evolutionary niche, mutations tend to lessen the characteristic in future generations.
Check out
this page if you're interested in SGI financials. There's been a serious downturn in profitability between 1995 and 1998 which is seriously disconcerting.
I think a potential strategy of integrating the best of IRIX into Linux would be a winner for SGI. Most people aren't buying SGIs for IRIX, are they? So unloading some of that development cost to the Linux community would be a wise move for them, and making XFS a fully-supported file system for Linux means working between the two is easier.
Go figure, and for some reason, rob's scripts have given me a default score of 2. Guess I'm just really magical or something.
If you post a number of articles that are moderated up, your default score gets boosted. I have no idea how many it takes, but I too am one of the Chosen...;-)
I will admit that the "central" idiology of the libertarians would appear to be against this, but what I've seen of some particular "libertarian" private lives (i.e., the way they were running companies) doesn't encourage me to believe that this is an automatic cure.
The fundamental flaw of Libertarianism is that you can do what you want with your own property, including restrict the activities of those who are on it or impose obligations on them for remaining there. So, if you think of the U.S. as one big Home Owner's Association, and the Constitution as the rules of that HOA, we live in a perfectly Libertarian society. Don't like the rules of the U.S.? You're perfectly welcome to go elsewhere and live by the rules of the current owner. There's nowhere on earth with the rules you want? Not my problem.