They walk the good talk about public safety, terrorism, etc., but it's always just a ruse to get their foot in the door of censorship. Blocking a blog won't stop the terrorists behind it. Racist speech is only dangerous when it gets the mystique that comes only from being banned by hand-wringing bureaucrats who are open about fearing it.
Repeat after me, censorship is always bad except in the most extreme cases like publishing a how-to FAQ on building a portable nuclear bomb or up-to-date troop movements. Why? Because speech never killed anyone and the fastest way to make the very people who might strengthen an idea interested in hearing more is a legislative or executive attack.
It's a perfect example of why "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is a bad argument. People quickly turn to the "anti-racist/sexist/anti-homosexual/terrorist" state and say, "what are you trying to hide?"
If you toss cash at them, what incentive do they have? Think of it like this. If you started out a college grad at $100K+ instead of making them work their way toward that, why should they care about the first few years of work? As long as they keep their job, they're making A LOT of money from their point of view. Bottom line is... there's no hurdle from them to triumph over, thus no reason to get down in the trenches and build the company.
Take that, you idiots who wring your hands about "losing your democracy." Democracy and freedom are not the same thing, and the one does NOT by default lead to the other. In fact, the only major accomplishment of democracy has been to grant legitimacy to the Fascist state. It allows the masses to throw their weight in behind every violation of the rights of the minority.
What India has proved is that democratic states have no inherent moral authority. It has landed itself in the same mass of political crap that China and Saudi Arabia are in. There is no moral difference between states that censor, even if it is "benign." Either way, a state that practices official censorship of anything except for media that requires violence or fraud to be created, is a regime that directly or indirectly uses the threat of loss of life, liberty or property to silence others. There is no moral difference between a threat of prosecution and simply shooting someone in the head, when the offense is speaking out with an unpopular idea.
And by the way, has that rubbish about the Internet detecting censorship as damage and routing around been relegated to the trash heap of history where it belongs? It seems that for citizens of China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Britain (with its hashed list of "bad sites" as if we even know whether they're all illegal under British law.) that the only routing that is being down is getting in trouble or sent to prison for non-compliance.
The only way to sell music is to raise a conscious desire to buy it in the minds of potential buyers. Exposure to the lyrics is one of the simplest ways for songwriters to encouarge people to think about the music they write and expose others to it in a way that has no meaningful way of allowing them to substitute copyright infringement for actually buying the song. Guitar tabs, for example, are useless by themselves. They form typically just one of four components to a song, but someone playing the tabs down the hallway at college or on stage at a local bar raises consciousness of the song.
"Rights, rights, rights" is the mantra of the industry and why they're so amazingly stupid. The only way to sell a cultural work is to make it part of the culture and locking it up in a maze of contract law is not going to do that. Let people violate your Happy Jolly Lawyer Land Contract Rights all day long on things like lyrics. If you're in the business of selling **songs**, and that's how songwriters make most of their money on average, you WANT people sharing the lyrics and posting them in public. It's not the song, it's not even part of the actual audio they'll enjoy. It's just a collection of written words that they'd never have a reason to buy on their own as... surprise, surprise THEY'RE NOT MUSICIANS!!
Meanwhile, most musicians, when given the choice, will gladly buy your sheet music at a reasonable cost if it means they get a 100% accurate set of sheet music with lyrics.
Before I start, let me say that I voted Badnarik in 2004 over most of what Bush stood and still stands for. That said...
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
It's not a stretch to argue that the President has a legal obligation under Article IV, Section 4 to prevent intelligence gathering. By definition, anyone who acts as an agent of a foreign power is committing a potential act of war against the United States and is not a mere criminal. If the person is an American, they could be quite justifiably be executed for treason.
Most terrorists are in fact agents of foreign governments. You will be hard-pressed to find a terror group with the power to do serious damage that isn't backed by at least one foreign government. For the President to treat such people as not mere criminals, but rather as combatants is good for us. Why? Because if done right, it doesn't involve tampering with the legal system for even serious criminals. The very fact that we give foreign agents trials at all is a testament to our civility. Many governments would probably quietly shoot such people dead without a trial.
Liberals are, like conservatives, the consummate hypocrites. Where was the left-wing outrage when Clinton pulled 500 confidential, need-to-know FBI files on some of his political enemies? How about the actual massacres at Ruby Ridge and Waco? If you want to point fingers, then point them at the FBI and the powers that be who are unwilling to actually enforce the law and constitution against corrupt presidents like Clinton and Bush. The CIA's efforts against terrorists aren't what should scare anyone. What should scare everyone is the fact that there are no checks and enforcements against presidents who are out of control and that the people simply don't care.
The only time, including Kindergarten, that we were ever controlled was when the teacher brought his or her iron fist down on the class and made us worked on regimented little projects. Parents are by far the "lesser evil" here as they don't need to simulate a minimum security prison to keep their kids under control. The fact that many don't control their kids is another issue in and of itself.
If anything it'll just make it so that fewer Americans travel abroad outside of areas that the feds want them to. In case anyone's not noticed it, but we have a very perverse open borders policy. We'll allow immigrants to flood our borders, but damned if we'll allow Americans to come and go freely without having to report almost every dime of property they're taking out and where they're going.
The federal government is one of the worst polluters in the country. The Congress is partially responsible for this because they're too busy getting their rocks off with lobbyists to do their jobs. We need a new law that says that grand-standing in public by a Congresscritter is automatic grounds for a FBI investigation into all of their personal and campaign finances, gifts received, contacts and trips. Who wants to bet that there isn't almost a 1:1 correlation between the grand-standers and those who are too busy getting graft to do their job?
When I read Lord of the Flies in high school, all of my problems with the public school system suddenly made sense. There is so little adult involvement in K-12 that it is almost like having no adult discipline and guidance. Kids actually **need** socialization around adults and they need it much more than they need "socialization" around other kids. Two kids by themselves teaching each other how to behave is like one blind man trying to lead another.
I don't know if you've forgotten this due to age or a glorified childhood, but little kids are often nasty and cruel toward one another. They need the guiding hand of good adults, not children. There is a difference between letting kids play together and actual socialization.
Take a lot of the political arguments that get started on slashdot and digg. Talk about some of the most unnuanced garbage out there worthy of the bowels of MySpace. "Conservative=Fascist=Republican" and "Democrat=Socialist=Liberal" is what passes for "intelligent and insightful." Most of the time, it's just repeating commonly accepted ideas without any sort of critical eye for whether they are right or not.
So please... while it is true that MySpace can be utterly inane, the more "elite" sites are just as bad.
This is no better than a car company banning its customers from modding their cars on the grounds that it distorts their original aesthetics. Funny how the corporatists turn property rights into a mechanism for controlling others rather than as a foundation for individuals to control themselves...
It makes contract bidding cheaper. If you can use an OSS toolkit over a proprietary one, the cost that gets billed to the government is lower which makes it easier to win contracts. Other than that, bureaucratic inertia is the only major problem OSS faces. There is hardly any more bias against OSS than there is toward any regular commercial software.
It's pretty clear that parents today aren't doing their jobs and policing their kids' MySpace accounts in many ways. I'd want to know where my teen was getting videos from if I were a parent. Not to spy on them, but just to let them know that their parents just want to have a general idea of what's going on in their life. As soon as I saw one of these popups, I'd demand that they take the videos off and would file a criminal complaint with the police against the spyware vendor.
People look at me like I'm a Nazi because I seriously don't think most Americans should be enfranchised. Let's face an ugly truth. Our founding fathers were right: most people are unfit to vote. This is a perfect example why. Parents and teens that by now can't handle their own security online are generally irresponsible people, and irresponsible people make terrible voters. Problem is that for every voter who has his or her shit together, watches their kids and is a good, solid citizen, there are 5 morons who will vote like sheep. That dilutes the power of the responsible people to guide society.
I'm personally sick of the MySpace crap. I don't know how we'd find a good criteria for mass-disenfranchising bad parents and most college-age people, but we need to find one. Society is going to hell because we let people who cannot take responsibility for themselves vote in people who won't take responsibility for themselves... and that's bad. These are the people with their fingers on the most powerful nuclear arsenal on Earth.
Learning how spyware gets you is part of using the Internet. It's like living in a big city and actively avoiding finding out where the bad sections of town are.
Someday OSS developers will learn
on
WxPython in Action
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Most other programmers don't want to have to hunt down and really play around with parts of a toolkit to understand it and use it well. For most people, WxPython would probably be a hobby GUI toolkit. Who wants to spend more time learning the API than making cool little apps or making a serious one with it? Very few.
Yes, yes, I know they are doing this in their spare time too. I'm not complaining. I'm just saying that when people can choose between well-documented free toolkits from big companies or poorly documented open source ones, the former will usually win.
Be knew how to do an OS. Small updates sold frequently at low prices. If Microsoft released a new version of Windows every year to two years with incremental updates for say... $25 for a home upgrade, they'd have a steadier flow of cash and less expectations placed on them to make radical new things. Vista might actually already be here if Microsoft had sold successors to XP code named NT 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, etc. that added small improvements. They could then sell NT 6.0 featuring Aero for $50 for an upgrade or something. Seems to me their problem is biting off more than even they can chew.
The patent system has come to resemble the old English charters that granted the "right to trade with other nations" to selected merchants. Now it's "only" the right to enter one's own native economy and produce. My, how things have changed. And when it's not that bad, it's a lottery ticket for the lucky company that can sue the pants off of another.
On the bright side, nothing makes a typical lawyer's brain implode as quickly as having to justify software patents as not being patents on ideas themselves. An algorithm is just an idea. Yet we allow them to patent the algorithm in its abstract form. Imagine that. The whole idea of the patent system being violated because non-technical people just don't get it.
The arguments for these patents, that they benefit the little guy, almost sound like a bad attempt at "social justice" rhetoric from my fellow capitalists. Capitalism is not about the little guy, it's about property rights. It has no concept of fairness except allowing people to keep their own property secure. Screw all of the aforementioned crap. Let's truly maximize property rights with a new legal idea of "the right to make new property."
"Buy Linux. We don't use licensing like some companies *cough*Microsoft*cough* use. When you buy our Enterprise platforms, you are also buying the peace of mind of knowing that we value our customers to not treat them like criminals. Buy Linux today and the only documentation you will ever need to have on hand is your support contract."
The rednecks I have always known aren't big on PC things like raping our political and legal systems to accomodate potential terrorists. They'd rather just shoot the fuckers that our military catchs abroad than subject everyone, including Muslims, to police state type tactics in the United States. Bush is not a redneck. You can't be a redneck and go to Yale for a MBA. Many of the people that Bush represents, probably most of them are country club dads and soccer moms, not your average yeehaw redneck.
And btw, dumbass, there is nothing "ignorant" about the Bush Administration. They know EXACTLY what they are doing. The word your PC mind is groping for is "evil," not "ignorant." Idiots and ignorami don't get elected to the Presidency. Evil people, well, that's a compeletely different matter, ain't it?
I guess I must be a redneck because I agree with them. No trials for people caught carrying explosives to a terrorist attack. Line them up and shoot them dead like they're an enemy soldier. No stasi-style surveillance state. A nice 0.50 round to the head is just fine with me.
Microsoft is not hit so much because they are popular, they are hit because their whole development and security model is badly employed by others. How much software can run on a limited user account in Windows without any issue? OSX is far beyond them in this respect.
I've noticed that most of the people who advocate the popularity myth are not programmers. Whenever I have asked them just what they actually know about programming, I often get the usual populist bullshit "does that really matter?! Who do you think you are, elitist?"
How stupid do you have to be to believe that all designs are fundamentally the same? That's what the popularity model assumes. It assumes that OSX is more secure only because it hasn't had any scrutiny. Maybe so, but its flaws are its own. It might be worse than Windows, but if it is, it's because of OSX's design and implementation.
The only long term solution is depoliticization. The very reason that people need to actually care about these things is that the government can come after them in the first place. Solution? Strip the government of such power. Unfortunately, the government can exert a wide range of controls today. It can harass you from anything to the tax code to basic traffic violations to willfully misconstruing something you do. The fewer tenticles that the government has into society, the fewer avenues it has to suppress dissent.
Well start telling these teens that they got what they deserved for being stupid? Blame the victim? Damn straight. If at 13, especially if you're a girl, you don't realize that people who are 20 or older and who are attracted to you and trying to hook up with you are bad people, you are one of hell of a daft future sheeple. You can blame the victim for letting themselves get into the situation while throwing away the key of the rapist who did it. Responsibility can be dispensed 100% for both people involved. The rapist was a POS, the victim not only walked right into it, but probably did their part to instigate it.
The reason that teens don't take responsibility is that we say "no one should ever be a victim." That's all well and good, but the world doesn't work in "shoulds." If you are 14 and hook up with a 25 year old, chances are, he or she wants to screw you silly. This is not an age of innocence. Don't give me that bullshit about teens not understanding sex. The average teen today knows more nuanced things about sex than most adults did 50 years ago!
"Our children" aren't being victimized. Our dumbass, horny teens are. They're old enough to know better. Show me a real kid, ie a person who is a prepubescent 11 year old or younger who has gotten really hurt this way. Where are all of the 7, 8, 9 and 10 year olds getting raped? Uh huh. It ain't children, just adolescents. People who are old enough to understand personal safety, even if they can't fully grok the ramifications of sex.
We libertarians for years have been trying to tell you that corporations cannot legally act without the law being on their side. We have been trying to tell the left-wing "enlightened" that if you want to stop corporate abuse like this, that you have to pull the government out of the equation. If the government is limited, it can't grant them favors like software patents! There's a high correllation between politicians who want the government to feed you, clothe you and house you when you're down and politicians who will be sympathetic to "other groups' concerns."
In the course of human history, the people who have risen to power and want the government to be active in public life are almost always greedy, power-hungry, very easily corrupted people. I'm sick of the idealists who believe that we're going to change that. If you can't change basic facts about social organization, including the propensity to corruption in government and law, in the past 5,000 years, you can't change it in the next 5,000 years.
Abolish every aspect of law and government that isn't strictly needed to keep people from killing each other or others from invading if you want a government that might actually be run by people who will say to Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc. "not my job to promote your business." The very reason that we have fights over things like software patents is that the federal government got so powerful that there was major influence to peddle. Get rid of the power, you get rid of a significant avenue by which corporations can legally shaft you.
Cops aren't supposed to armed and trained like the military. Their purpose is to keep the peace and peacefully prevent crime where they can. A large part of that is politely informing private citizens if they see something that could get them victimized. It's not common anymore because riding around with a loaded gun and the ability to bust down doors to raid drug users/dealers (if your stash is big, you must be a dealer). It's just not cool to do such old granny policing when the SWAT offers you the chance to play urban warfare with targets that typically don't fight back.
Slashdot Mirror
They walk the good talk about public safety, terrorism, etc., but it's always just a ruse to get their foot in the door of censorship. Blocking a blog won't stop the terrorists behind it. Racist speech is only dangerous when it gets the mystique that comes only from being banned by hand-wringing bureaucrats who are open about fearing it.
Repeat after me, censorship is always bad except in the most extreme cases like publishing a how-to FAQ on building a portable nuclear bomb or up-to-date troop movements. Why? Because speech never killed anyone and the fastest way to make the very people who might strengthen an idea interested in hearing more is a legislative or executive attack.
It's a perfect example of why "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is a bad argument. People quickly turn to the "anti-racist/sexist/anti-homosexual/terrorist" state and say, "what are you trying to hide?"
If you toss cash at them, what incentive do they have? Think of it like this. If you started out a college grad at $100K+ instead of making them work their way toward that, why should they care about the first few years of work? As long as they keep their job, they're making A LOT of money from their point of view. Bottom line is... there's no hurdle from them to triumph over, thus no reason to get down in the trenches and build the company.
Take that, you idiots who wring your hands about "losing your democracy." Democracy and freedom are not the same thing, and the one does NOT by default lead to the other. In fact, the only major accomplishment of democracy has been to grant legitimacy to the Fascist state. It allows the masses to throw their weight in behind every violation of the rights of the minority.
What India has proved is that democratic states have no inherent moral authority. It has landed itself in the same mass of political crap that China and Saudi Arabia are in. There is no moral difference between states that censor, even if it is "benign." Either way, a state that practices official censorship of anything except for media that requires violence or fraud to be created, is a regime that directly or indirectly uses the threat of loss of life, liberty or property to silence others. There is no moral difference between a threat of prosecution and simply shooting someone in the head, when the offense is speaking out with an unpopular idea.
And by the way, has that rubbish about the Internet detecting censorship as damage and routing around been relegated to the trash heap of history where it belongs? It seems that for citizens of China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Britain (with its hashed list of "bad sites" as if we even know whether they're all illegal under British law.) that the only routing that is being down is getting in trouble or sent to prison for non-compliance.
The only way to sell music is to raise a conscious desire to buy it in the minds of potential buyers. Exposure to the lyrics is one of the simplest ways for songwriters to encouarge people to think about the music they write and expose others to it in a way that has no meaningful way of allowing them to substitute copyright infringement for actually buying the song. Guitar tabs, for example, are useless by themselves. They form typically just one of four components to a song, but someone playing the tabs down the hallway at college or on stage at a local bar raises consciousness of the song.
"Rights, rights, rights" is the mantra of the industry and why they're so amazingly stupid. The only way to sell a cultural work is to make it part of the culture and locking it up in a maze of contract law is not going to do that. Let people violate your Happy Jolly Lawyer Land Contract Rights all day long on things like lyrics. If you're in the business of selling **songs**, and that's how songwriters make most of their money on average, you WANT people sharing the lyrics and posting them in public. It's not the song, it's not even part of the actual audio they'll enjoy. It's just a collection of written words that they'd never have a reason to buy on their own as... surprise, surprise THEY'RE NOT MUSICIANS!!
Meanwhile, most musicians, when given the choice, will gladly buy your sheet music at a reasonable cost if it means they get a 100% accurate set of sheet music with lyrics.
Before I start, let me say that I voted Badnarik in 2004 over most of what Bush stood and still stands for. That said...
It's not a stretch to argue that the President has a legal obligation under Article IV, Section 4 to prevent intelligence gathering. By definition, anyone who acts as an agent of a foreign power is committing a potential act of war against the United States and is not a mere criminal. If the person is an American, they could be quite justifiably be executed for treason.
Most terrorists are in fact agents of foreign governments. You will be hard-pressed to find a terror group with the power to do serious damage that isn't backed by at least one foreign government. For the President to treat such people as not mere criminals, but rather as combatants is good for us. Why? Because if done right, it doesn't involve tampering with the legal system for even serious criminals. The very fact that we give foreign agents trials at all is a testament to our civility. Many governments would probably quietly shoot such people dead without a trial.
Liberals are, like conservatives, the consummate hypocrites. Where was the left-wing outrage when Clinton pulled 500 confidential, need-to-know FBI files on some of his political enemies? How about the actual massacres at Ruby Ridge and Waco? If you want to point fingers, then point them at the FBI and the powers that be who are unwilling to actually enforce the law and constitution against corrupt presidents like Clinton and Bush. The CIA's efforts against terrorists aren't what should scare anyone. What should scare everyone is the fact that there are no checks and enforcements against presidents who are out of control and that the people simply don't care.
The only time, including Kindergarten, that we were ever controlled was when the teacher brought his or her iron fist down on the class and made us worked on regimented little projects. Parents are by far the "lesser evil" here as they don't need to simulate a minimum security prison to keep their kids under control. The fact that many don't control their kids is another issue in and of itself.
If anything it'll just make it so that fewer Americans travel abroad outside of areas that the feds want them to. In case anyone's not noticed it, but we have a very perverse open borders policy. We'll allow immigrants to flood our borders, but damned if we'll allow Americans to come and go freely without having to report almost every dime of property they're taking out and where they're going.
The federal government is one of the worst polluters in the country. The Congress is partially responsible for this because they're too busy getting their rocks off with lobbyists to do their jobs. We need a new law that says that grand-standing in public by a Congresscritter is automatic grounds for a FBI investigation into all of their personal and campaign finances, gifts received, contacts and trips. Who wants to bet that there isn't almost a 1:1 correlation between the grand-standers and those who are too busy getting graft to do their job?
When I read Lord of the Flies in high school, all of my problems with the public school system suddenly made sense. There is so little adult involvement in K-12 that it is almost like having no adult discipline and guidance. Kids actually **need** socialization around adults and they need it much more than they need "socialization" around other kids. Two kids by themselves teaching each other how to behave is like one blind man trying to lead another.
I don't know if you've forgotten this due to age or a glorified childhood, but little kids are often nasty and cruel toward one another. They need the guiding hand of good adults, not children. There is a difference between letting kids play together and actual socialization.
Take a lot of the political arguments that get started on slashdot and digg. Talk about some of the most unnuanced garbage out there worthy of the bowels of MySpace. "Conservative=Fascist=Republican" and "Democrat=Socialist=Liberal" is what passes for "intelligent and insightful." Most of the time, it's just repeating commonly accepted ideas without any sort of critical eye for whether they are right or not.
So please... while it is true that MySpace can be utterly inane, the more "elite" sites are just as bad.
Dude... let's make a podcast out of this! That'd be mad stoooopid!
This is no better than a car company banning its customers from modding their cars on the grounds that it distorts their original aesthetics. Funny how the corporatists turn property rights into a mechanism for controlling others rather than as a foundation for individuals to control themselves...
It makes contract bidding cheaper. If you can use an OSS toolkit over a proprietary one, the cost that gets billed to the government is lower which makes it easier to win contracts. Other than that, bureaucratic inertia is the only major problem OSS faces. There is hardly any more bias against OSS than there is toward any regular commercial software.
It's pretty clear that parents today aren't doing their jobs and policing their kids' MySpace accounts in many ways. I'd want to know where my teen was getting videos from if I were a parent. Not to spy on them, but just to let them know that their parents just want to have a general idea of what's going on in their life. As soon as I saw one of these popups, I'd demand that they take the videos off and would file a criminal complaint with the police against the spyware vendor.
People look at me like I'm a Nazi because I seriously don't think most Americans should be enfranchised. Let's face an ugly truth. Our founding fathers were right: most people are unfit to vote. This is a perfect example why. Parents and teens that by now can't handle their own security online are generally irresponsible people, and irresponsible people make terrible voters. Problem is that for every voter who has his or her shit together, watches their kids and is a good, solid citizen, there are 5 morons who will vote like sheep. That dilutes the power of the responsible people to guide society.
I'm personally sick of the MySpace crap. I don't know how we'd find a good criteria for mass-disenfranchising bad parents and most college-age people, but we need to find one. Society is going to hell because we let people who cannot take responsibility for themselves vote in people who won't take responsibility for themselves... and that's bad. These are the people with their fingers on the most powerful nuclear arsenal on Earth.
Learning how spyware gets you is part of using the Internet. It's like living in a big city and actively avoiding finding out where the bad sections of town are.
Most other programmers don't want to have to hunt down and really play around with parts of a toolkit to understand it and use it well. For most people, WxPython would probably be a hobby GUI toolkit. Who wants to spend more time learning the API than making cool little apps or making a serious one with it? Very few.
Yes, yes, I know they are doing this in their spare time too. I'm not complaining. I'm just saying that when people can choose between well-documented free toolkits from big companies or poorly documented open source ones, the former will usually win.
Be knew how to do an OS. Small updates sold frequently at low prices. If Microsoft released a new version of Windows every year to two years with incremental updates for say... $25 for a home upgrade, they'd have a steadier flow of cash and less expectations placed on them to make radical new things. Vista might actually already be here if Microsoft had sold successors to XP code named NT 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, etc. that added small improvements. They could then sell NT 6.0 featuring Aero for $50 for an upgrade or something. Seems to me their problem is biting off more than even they can chew.
The patent system has come to resemble the old English charters that granted the "right to trade with other nations" to selected merchants. Now it's "only" the right to enter one's own native economy and produce. My, how things have changed. And when it's not that bad, it's a lottery ticket for the lucky company that can sue the pants off of another.
On the bright side, nothing makes a typical lawyer's brain implode as quickly as having to justify software patents as not being patents on ideas themselves. An algorithm is just an idea. Yet we allow them to patent the algorithm in its abstract form. Imagine that. The whole idea of the patent system being violated because non-technical people just don't get it.
The arguments for these patents, that they benefit the little guy, almost sound like a bad attempt at "social justice" rhetoric from my fellow capitalists. Capitalism is not about the little guy, it's about property rights. It has no concept of fairness except allowing people to keep their own property secure. Screw all of the aforementioned crap. Let's truly maximize property rights with a new legal idea of "the right to make new property."
"Buy Linux. We don't use licensing like some companies *cough*Microsoft*cough* use. When you buy our Enterprise platforms, you are also buying the peace of mind of knowing that we value our customers to not treat them like criminals. Buy Linux today and the only documentation you will ever need to have on hand is your support contract."
The rednecks I have always known aren't big on PC things like raping our political and legal systems to accomodate potential terrorists. They'd rather just shoot the fuckers that our military catchs abroad than subject everyone, including Muslims, to police state type tactics in the United States. Bush is not a redneck. You can't be a redneck and go to Yale for a MBA. Many of the people that Bush represents, probably most of them are country club dads and soccer moms, not your average yeehaw redneck.
And btw, dumbass, there is nothing "ignorant" about the Bush Administration. They know EXACTLY what they are doing. The word your PC mind is groping for is "evil," not "ignorant." Idiots and ignorami don't get elected to the Presidency. Evil people, well, that's a compeletely different matter, ain't it?
I guess I must be a redneck because I agree with them. No trials for people caught carrying explosives to a terrorist attack. Line them up and shoot them dead like they're an enemy soldier. No stasi-style surveillance state. A nice 0.50 round to the head is just fine with me.
Microsoft is not hit so much because they are popular, they are hit because their whole development and security model is badly employed by others. How much software can run on a limited user account in Windows without any issue? OSX is far beyond them in this respect.
I've noticed that most of the people who advocate the popularity myth are not programmers. Whenever I have asked them just what they actually know about programming, I often get the usual populist bullshit "does that really matter?! Who do you think you are, elitist?"
How stupid do you have to be to believe that all designs are fundamentally the same? That's what the popularity model assumes. It assumes that OSX is more secure only because it hasn't had any scrutiny. Maybe so, but its flaws are its own. It might be worse than Windows, but if it is, it's because of OSX's design and implementation.
What's next? "Basic Computing History for the Incomplete Moron?"
The only long term solution is depoliticization. The very reason that people need to actually care about these things is that the government can come after them in the first place. Solution? Strip the government of such power. Unfortunately, the government can exert a wide range of controls today. It can harass you from anything to the tax code to basic traffic violations to willfully misconstruing something you do. The fewer tenticles that the government has into society, the fewer avenues it has to suppress dissent.
Well start telling these teens that they got what they deserved for being stupid? Blame the victim? Damn straight. If at 13, especially if you're a girl, you don't realize that people who are 20 or older and who are attracted to you and trying to hook up with you are bad people, you are one of hell of a daft future sheeple. You can blame the victim for letting themselves get into the situation while throwing away the key of the rapist who did it. Responsibility can be dispensed 100% for both people involved. The rapist was a POS, the victim not only walked right into it, but probably did their part to instigate it.
The reason that teens don't take responsibility is that we say "no one should ever be a victim." That's all well and good, but the world doesn't work in "shoulds." If you are 14 and hook up with a 25 year old, chances are, he or she wants to screw you silly. This is not an age of innocence. Don't give me that bullshit about teens not understanding sex. The average teen today knows more nuanced things about sex than most adults did 50 years ago!
"Our children" aren't being victimized. Our dumbass, horny teens are. They're old enough to know better. Show me a real kid, ie a person who is a prepubescent 11 year old or younger who has gotten really hurt this way. Where are all of the 7, 8, 9 and 10 year olds getting raped? Uh huh. It ain't children, just adolescents. People who are old enough to understand personal safety, even if they can't fully grok the ramifications of sex.
We libertarians for years have been trying to tell you that corporations cannot legally act without the law being on their side. We have been trying to tell the left-wing "enlightened" that if you want to stop corporate abuse like this, that you have to pull the government out of the equation. If the government is limited, it can't grant them favors like software patents! There's a high correllation between politicians who want the government to feed you, clothe you and house you when you're down and politicians who will be sympathetic to "other groups' concerns."
In the course of human history, the people who have risen to power and want the government to be active in public life are almost always greedy, power-hungry, very easily corrupted people. I'm sick of the idealists who believe that we're going to change that. If you can't change basic facts about social organization, including the propensity to corruption in government and law, in the past 5,000 years, you can't change it in the next 5,000 years.
Abolish every aspect of law and government that isn't strictly needed to keep people from killing each other or others from invading if you want a government that might actually be run by people who will say to Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc. "not my job to promote your business." The very reason that we have fights over things like software patents is that the federal government got so powerful that there was major influence to peddle. Get rid of the power, you get rid of a significant avenue by which corporations can legally shaft you.
Cops aren't supposed to armed and trained like the military. Their purpose is to keep the peace and peacefully prevent crime where they can. A large part of that is politely informing private citizens if they see something that could get them victimized. It's not common anymore because riding around with a loaded gun and the ability to bust down doors to raid drug users/dealers (if your stash is big, you must be a dealer). It's just not cool to do such old granny policing when the SWAT offers you the chance to play urban warfare with targets that typically don't fight back.