Sure! Also, that's the reason Piccard's replicator doesn't allow him to set his coffee to be always hot: hot coffee isn't patented, and as such, can be replicated without paying royalties. Since tepid coffee was patented in the 22nd century, exactly 3 seconds after the new patent law had become live, and another Federation law requires replicators to always offer by default royalty-bound replications if they're available, the only way you have to get free food from them is to ask specifically for it, otherwise you'll have to pay.
So, wanna free coffee? Do as Piccard: "A coffee cup, please. HOT!"
Capturing the LCD bus data directly would provide a better unencrypted rendering of the movie than recording the image displayed by the actual LCD. But, sure, whatever is easier!:)
Even if they one day develop a perfect DRM scheme full of unbreakable secure paths, it won't be possible to avoid someone simply removing the actual LCD screen, wiring the signals instructing which pixels should turn on and off to a 3rd party device, and recording the unencrypted content in raw format.
No piracy is being stopped by these means. They're and will always be utterly useless.
With the replicators, there's no real scarcity. Except personal, private space. If I want something that can be replicated, why would there be a problem if I wanted 10 of them? 100 of them? 1,000 of them?
Easy enough! Because the MAFIAA won in the 21st century, turning copyrights and patents into rights valid for all of eternity, while at the same time eliminating the very notion of "prior art" as something apt to eliminate a granted patent. As a result, everything from the 23rd century onwards, from clothes to food to the design and shape of no matter what gadget, is copyrighted and/or patented, and whenever you replicate something, you must pay royalties. What is guaranteed by the uncrackable technology of subspace quantum DRM cryptography, which gets attacked to each molecule of the resulting replicated item.
Only old digital copies of the extinct Project Gutenberg aren't affected by this. The project itself ended around 2040, when no more books apt to enter the public domain existed. Other than those, everything else requires payment.
That would be a very interesting series indeed. And even more so if they took some interesting bad guy from one of the regular series, turning him (his mirror version) into the hero or anti-hero of the series.
Imagine something like this: In the mirror universe, mirror-Khan wasn't awakened by mirror-Kirk. He awakes instead in, say, the 26th century, a time when technology for secure inter-universal travel was starting to be used. Since the regular and the mirror universes are related, meaning that passing from one to the other is way easier than to other universes, most of this travel happens between both, resulting in increases in skirmishes between an expanded Federation and the mirror Klingon-Cardassian Alliance, or a rebuilt Terran Empire, or whatever nightmare is the norm of the mirror universe of the time. Mirror-Khan sees how the things degraded since he left behind his enlightened dictatorship, and starts the path that will lead him to overthrown evil in the mirror universe, while at the same time not counting with the sympathy from the Federation (at least in the beginning), since the Federation remembers very well who their own Khan was, and what he did, not wishing to risk an alliance with a man so full of potential dangers.
So yes, there is a *huge* difference between preinstalling useless craplets that fuck up the system and constantly beg for money, and preinstalling useful, well-behaved, NON-OBTRUSIVE software like Firefox and OpenOffice.
Yes, of course there is, I wouldn't dare disagree. My point wasn't that manufacturers installing crapware was in any way a good thing. It isn't! My point was that, for them to be able to install good things, they must first be able to install things. If we say they mustn't install 3rd party softwares, which is what Microsoft is doing, then we're saying that they mustn't install neither the bad nor the good.
Let me make a comparison: Spam is a problem. So, would banishing e-mail itself be a solution to spam? Well, yes, but it's kinda overkill, don't you think? Microsoft's argument is similar to this: let's banish manufacturers installing 3rd party softwares and as a result no Windows box will come with crap installed. True, but also overkill, because it would affect not only the bad manufacturers, but also those small ones that do install Firefox and Thunderbird.
I'm Brazilian and what I see here is somewhat simple. In very poor communities there are basically two groups: new-born Christian evangelicals and loosely religious / non-religious folk. Both have similar income, but while the first groups has an extremely low level of crimes, the other has a medium to high amount of crime. So, I cannot but conclude that inequality in and of itself has no relation to criminality, because if it had, then the evangelical group would have the same crime rate of the non-evangelicals. I would rather conclude that the belief system of the individual is far more central to whether he will or not commit a crime than any kind of disparity.
This situation also applied to more rich people. A lot of people involved in drug trade here, for instance, come from the middle class. If the reason for crime was income disparity, why would these persons be into this kind of thing?
Lastly, a more general reasoning: suppose there's a society with very little inequality, where the 10% poorer get $100/month and the 10% richer $1,000/month, a 10:1 ratio, and another society where the 10% poorer get $1,000/month and the 10% richer $10,000,000/month, a 10,000:1 ratio. Do you really believe that the 2nd society is worse than the first? I bet you that ALL the poor people in the 1st society would say you otherwise, talking how they would love to live in the 2nd one.
I think all these people that are against inequalities have a very weak grasp on how ACTUAL poor people really see reality. IMHO, they're too much driven by ideological abstractions, and as a result end up failing to see reality as it is.
A small income with lots of equality is NOT what a poor want. He wants a big income, point. If that means living in a society where a rich guy get 10,000 times more than him, hell, that's okay for him! More money is always better. More equality? That doesn't brings food to their children.
So, since when has the/. crowd began thinking that what Microsoft thinks should be in their OS is what should be in their OS?
I mean, now and then some company sues Microsoft due to Windows coming with a built-in software (media player, browser, whatever), with said company maintaining that this doesn't allows manufacturers to replace them, what blocks competition etc. etc. etc. And slashdotters are usually happy when that happens. Now, however, when manufacturers do include "competition", in the way of these 3rd party addons, some of which are actually alternative browsers (even if was crappy and used MSHTML core, AOL still was an alternative browser), then suddenly manufacturers being able to add 3rd party software isn't good anymore.
Please note: wishing that Windows came with Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird and OpenOffice pre-installed requires you first accepting the idea that manufacturer including 3rd party applications is in and of itself a good thing. What doesn't precludes you from despising poor choices, of course.
I suggest you make your mind. Either manufacturers including competition is good, or it isn't. You cannot have it both ways.
You're being extremely ungrateful for a software you actively employed and that you got for free. Have you attempted once to contact David Harris asking him to change the default settings? If no, why not? Besides, what prevented you from installing a Linux or BSD box to handle SMTP/POP, or to at least work as a firewall? Or, for that matter, from simply shutting down the mail server on weekends? Also, if MM was an open relay at the time, most of the other SMTP servers out there also were, since spam still wasn't seen as such a big problem as it is today. This (now seen as a) problematic behavior was far from being specific to it.
All in all, you seem like the beggar who begins calling names the person who feeds him because the food isn't perfectly cooked and doesn't have the spices he likes. Sigh... some people just don't know the meaning of the word "gratitude".
You can either use an exporter found in Google, as the AC suggested, or tell Pegasus Mail to create some empty mailbox in the Unix format and copy your archived messages into them. This kind of mailbox doesn't have all the features of the proprietary ones, but there are tons of tools out there than can handle them, and also a ton of 3rd party mail softwares that can use them directly (this probably includes all Linux ones, but I haven't tried).
Not only that. The original was for DOS, is still around, and able to do both POP/SMTP as well as Netware mail. Same thing for the Windows 3.1 client, which can still be found and still works pretty well.
By the way, I'd love to see Pegasus Mail open sourced. It's a marvelous e-mailing package. It's UI isn't the most intuitive around, but once you get used to it, it becomes a very powerful tool for your mail needs. Many years ago I evaluated a lot of e-mail softwares, including Eudora, and ended up choosing Pegasus Mail. It's really worth it.
I would surely help if a fund for purchasing and open sourcing it was established.
Profit still comes from what Marx noted as a Labour value. You cannot sell for less than the cost of making it (on a whole of your company including external forces) and make a profit. That's basic maths I can't buy something for $10 and sell every item for $5 and make any money.
You're right on your reasoning, but wrong on attributing this to Marx' theory of labor value. For Marx, profit arises from the exploitation, by the capitalist, of the work done by his employees. Hypothetical example: your employees work enough to make $100 in goods, you sell those goods for the $100 but pay them $60. The $40 you paid less to them is both the amount of your exploitation of them as well as of your profit. (Of course this is a simplification, but the general concept is basically as explained.)
Nowadays it's know that this reasoning is wrong due precisely to its extreme simplicity. A lot of work has been developed on understanding what profit is (both in general as well as in particular, monetary profit being just one type), what's the nature of economic valuation, both in terms of qualitative as well as quantitative valuation, how different amounts of goods are related to different amounts of exchange means (money and/or other types) in relation to both human needs and wants (Marx, for instance, lacked the distinction between these two categories), and so on and so forth.
So, although you're right in your example, that making something for $10 and selling it for $5 won't result in profit, and that your business will surely break if you do this kind of thing, this isn't the whole history. For instance, if you made it for $10, that was because you expected it to sell for more. This means a temporal transaction: $10 now (instant A) in exchange for $10+profit in future (instant B). When you reach B but it doesn't happen as you expected, two things result: first, you becomes aware that you didn't plan this very well, so you'll try to avoid the same mistake. Second, that you now (instant B) have a lot of goods in your hands, and you have to decide what to do with it in light of a new expected future (instant C), thus, another temporal transaction. One action path would be to sell them all for $5. Another is to hold them, expecting the future price to favor you. If you sell them, when instance C comes you'll have more money in hand than what you had on B. So, even if from the point of view of A you had a very sizable prejudice, from the point of view of B you're in better shape than you would have been had you hold the goods, because then you would have the goods, yes, but $0 still in hands.
The study of monetary valuation as an atomistic chronological function of subjective qualitative valuations is something that Marx never, ever, attempted, because for him monetary values have reality in themselves, being as much concrete as, let's say, the glass in your LCD/CRT, if not more. This is a deep philosophical assumption that he, however, doesn't justify. He just adopts it as fact and proceeds from there onward. But once you put this monetary realism in question things become way more nuanced. And this is precisely what I mean by the science of Economics having advanced a lot since the 1860's. The labor theory of value developed by Marx has no solid ground, and modern alternatives, such as the more contemporary theory of subjective marginal value, are way more apt to describe how money is really used on the real world.
You seem to also forget that laws are made by states. A state does not exist in a free market, and laws also cannot exist. If a state does exist it is not at all a free market. Therefore any laws at all contradict your free market ideals and hence you are really just an anarchist. A rebel without a brain.
Not really. What is incompatible with a free market isn't a state with laws, but a state with jus-positive laws, w
Your knowledge of the history of working conditions is clouded by ideological abstractions. Marx himself did this. When he studied the parliament statistics on the social conditions of the British proletariat (AFAIK, the name of these were "blue books", but I'm not sure this is exact since English isn't my primary language), for example, he selected as bibliography for the Capital only those volumes that showed a descending standard of living, but selectively refused to include those that showed, after the decline, how their standard of living increased afterwards. Since your argument comes directly from this biased selection, it is also biased, even if you yourself aren't.
Also, your argument that the western countries are more socialist than other seem to be a petitio principii, in the sense that you seem to believe that if socialism and well being are synonymous or at least causally related, so much that if something is good, it's socialist, and if it's bad, it's non-socialist. As it stands, this is in reality a non-argument.
And regarding companies, they are neither good nor bad. The profit goal is amoral, in the sense that it can lead to one thing or the other depending on the conditions on which it is allowed to flow. Under a set of pro-monopolist legal rules, where the appearing of competition is forbidden or made almost impossible by existing laws, profit comes from smashing salaries and driving prices to the highest possible value. Under a set of anti-monopolist legal rules, where the market is open to as much competition as it's able to sustain, providing higher salaries (to attract the best workers) and diminishing prices (by optimizing production means) are the means to higher profits. This concept applies to all profit seeking groups, including worker's unions.
You must understand, above all else, that Marx, although important, is dated. The science of Economics advanced by leaps and bounds since he wrote the Capital, and almost all of his concepts have been surpassed by now. Much has happened in the field since the 1860's.:)
Even if they don't pay taxes, they pay salaries, which in turn pay taxes. Please note: you're saying that unemployment would be better for those people than having a bad job. This is idealistic, because they, the people, choose to have the job, not to stay unemployed. Given the two choices, they made the decision. So, yes, maybe they wouldn't have the cough, but they would also have less food, less water, and less a lot of other things. And they prefer to have the cough if that's the price to pay for more food, more water etc.
Of course they would love to have the good without the bad, but when your options aren't between the good and the optimal, when they are between 1 good plus 100 bads in one hand, and 50 goods plus 50 bads on the other, the choice is clear. Whatever harms these companies cause is counterbalanced by the supreme good of hundreds or thousands of good paying (or at least paying) jobs. Or, expressing this in other words, you cannot expect them to reach 1st world level when they weren't able to at least get out of the 4th. First comes food, and a place to sleep. Then, years or decades later, comfort, hygiene, high-tech entertainment, money to pay the psychoanalyst etc. There's no short circuit in this, no matter what idealists prefer to believe.
There's a problem. If he simply signed a $100 million check to help some starving people in, let's say, an African country, the local government would say: "Nice! Please hand us the check and we'll take care of the details!". Then the money would simply disappear. This, by the way, also happens each and every time the rich countries forgive loans made to poor countries.
Any good charity towards these people must be done in such a way as to minimize governmental robbery. Simply giving away a big amount of money is the worst way to accomplish any goal whatsoever.
the profits are probably shipped outside of the country. If the company was setting up jobs & providing services and money in the economy, then I'd almost be tempted to overlook the asthma & health problems associated with these companies. The problem is that I'm almost certain none of that wealth is returning to the local community.
How about the taxes that company pay to the local government? Isn't that wealth returning to the local community, even if in an indirect way?
Beside, suppose that company wasn't there. Meaning: all the local community people who work there simply hadn't those jobs. Would they be better or worse? And how about those small family businesses who make their living by selling things to those who have such salaries?
It's easy for use to judge the situation based on our own high standards of life and lots of opportunities. But the fact is that, given the choice, most people in poor countries actually choose to move near the polluting facilities, for the sole fact that, even with things being dirty and far from hygienic, it's still WAY better than the alternative.
I don't wish to discuss the history leading to the French Revolution. Social darwinism was the doctrine through which the aristocracy legitimized oppressing the peasantry. But make no mistake -- that doctrine was held by the peasantry as well. When the peasantry realized that there was to rise in a society that afforded them no opportunity, they rebelled. It was a blood thirsty form of social darwinism.
You're being anachronistic. Darwinism didn't exist at the time. Actually, Charles Darwin himself hadn't even been born when the French Revolution happened.
Anyway, what actually happened isn't exactly what you describe. Yes, the revolution happened because "someone" wanted access to more opportunities. But this "someone" wasn't either the peasantry or the bourgeoisie. Actually, the leaders and members of the French Revolution were all from the intellectual class: students of Colleges and Universities training to become members of the State bureaucracy, or members of the bureaucracy interested in rising their ranks. Neither couldn't do what they wanted because the number of jobs was smaller than the number of candidates, causing them to be what one might call a "virtual bureaucracy": a class deprived of what it thought was rightfully theirs. What's the solution then? To overthrow the government, kill or expel the current holders of the bureaucratic positions, and claim them for themselves.
Actually, if you go analyze all revolution that happened since, all of them worked more or less in the same way: a group of intellectuals claiming that they were going to altruistically overthrow the government in benefit of some other class (the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the nation, the "superior race", whatever), but who actually benefited only themselves, by providing them the places they wanted in the (new) bureaucracy. So much, indeed, that one might say that the academic intellectuals are the revolutionary class by definition.
To confirm, just go look all the societies where an academic intellectual class didn't exist (I don't mean "no intellectuals", I mean "no mass production of intellectuals", an entirely different phenomenon): not a single one produced a revolution of any kind. You had power struggles in them all the time, of course. But never the uprising of a subset of its population with the deliberate objective of replacing the whole of the governmental machine with something entirely different.
So, in conclusion: while Social Darwinism had no place, itself, in that event, the basis from which intellectual fashions (such as Social Darwinism) arise, the mass production of intellectuals for the purpose of managing a State bureaucracy, was indeed present. If some revolutions happened based on Social Darwinism, and if some happened based on something entirely different, all were still a bunch of academic intellectuals seeking power and government jobs. This is the sole solid rule, the sole common characteristic uniting them all.
Yep, I know. And it's precisely this way of moving that I find cumbersome and unintuitive. WASD is very imprecise: either too slow or too fast. Having to click on my avatar is something that makes no sense, and thus I always forget to do it.
Alas, this clicking is not only idiotic, but also prone to error. If I don't click in the precise spot of my avatar that 2nd Life understands to mean the avatar as a whole, it'll think I'm clicking some piece of cloth or some appendage, with unpredictable results. I've lost the count of times it ended in my avatar losing its mask, and in me having to open my inventory and search for it to put it back. The inventory itself, by the way, is a complete nightmare to manage, but let's not dwell into that.
It's as if LL forgot such a thing is supposed to have the word "user" before the word "interface". Sure, those who're used to it probably can do well. But that doesn't mean it isn't very badly designed. "Poor" is too light a word to describe 2nd Life's GUI.
WoW isn't perfect, but the one thing it has that 2nd Life should copy NOW, is the way you control your character.
No, seriously: walking in 2L is slow. Running is bizarre. WoW's way of handling this is so much better! Left-click: select. Right-click: use/sit/go there. Both-buttons: walk/run (it doesn't matter if you're in 1st or 3rd-person). Space: jump. Scroll button: camera distance (including entering and exiting 1st person mode). Mouse-movement: select direction (up, down, left, right) of movement/camera if a button is pressed.
I've tried 2nd Life for two days. But I just don't feel comfortable moving around. It's cumbersome and frustrating, no matter how much I try to like it.
And in regards to the way the environment is a streaming, why the hell can't LL feed with at least the wire-frame of the outside of buildings in the near area, while caching it for the remaining areas around? I don't mind waiting for actual textures and the like to load, but I surely expect to at least know in advance that something is there to be loaded. And, yes, that includes having a decent pre-rendered map that doesn't take 10 minutes to load. I don't mind if it's updated only once a week: just put it there anyway.
All in all, 2nd Life still seems to be a beta product. It's far, far away from an actual version 1.0. I'll try again in one or two years, but until then, forget it. It's not worth the effort.
Correction: "David Horowitz, one of the most important and widely know new-left activists of the 1960s, turned conservative in the 1980s." Here, I fixed it for you. Also, he replied with documentation to each and every claim of inaccuracy in "The Professors", and most of his replies weren't replied to by his critics. Same for DTN, with the same no-replies-back by the critics.
By the way: funny that someone modded me "flamebait". I never buried someone with mod points just because I disagreed with him, much less when the guy offered links to actual data. Slashdot left-wing readers seem to be very similar to the left-wingers I know from University. A pretty standard behavior indeed.
I wonder why they don't make a series, animated or not, of Star Trek: New Frontier. It's simply the setting if what you want are dark stories, a violent lawless background, government corruption, and tons of politically incorrect fast paced action inside the Star Trek universe.
The captain of the Excalibur starship, for instance, is an ex-guerrilla terrorist who successfully won independence back for his home planet using such lovely tools of the profession as genocide.
It's an amazing series of Science Fiction novels. If you haven't read it yet, please do so. It's worth the effort, even if you don't like the standard Star Trek universe.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure! Also, that's the reason Piccard's replicator doesn't allow him to set his coffee to be always hot: hot coffee isn't patented, and as such, can be replicated without paying royalties. Since tepid coffee was patented in the 22nd century, exactly 3 seconds after the new patent law had become live, and another Federation law requires replicators to always offer by default royalty-bound replications if they're available, the only way you have to get free food from them is to ask specifically for it, otherwise you'll have to pay.
So, wanna free coffee? Do as Piccard: "A coffee cup, please. HOT!"
Capturing the LCD bus data directly would provide a better unencrypted rendering of the movie than recording the image displayed by the actual LCD. But, sure, whatever is easier! :)
Even if they one day develop a perfect DRM scheme full of unbreakable secure paths, it won't be possible to avoid someone simply removing the actual LCD screen, wiring the signals instructing which pixels should turn on and off to a 3rd party device, and recording the unencrypted content in raw format.
No piracy is being stopped by these means. They're and will always be utterly useless.
Only old digital copies of the extinct Project Gutenberg aren't affected by this. The project itself ended around 2040, when no more books apt to enter the public domain existed. Other than those, everything else requires payment.
Imagine something like this: In the mirror universe, mirror-Khan wasn't awakened by mirror-Kirk. He awakes instead in, say, the 26th century, a time when technology for secure inter-universal travel was starting to be used. Since the regular and the mirror universes are related, meaning that passing from one to the other is way easier than to other universes, most of this travel happens between both, resulting in increases in skirmishes between an expanded Federation and the mirror Klingon-Cardassian Alliance, or a rebuilt Terran Empire, or whatever nightmare is the norm of the mirror universe of the time. Mirror-Khan sees how the things degraded since he left behind his enlightened dictatorship, and starts the path that will lead him to overthrown evil in the mirror universe, while at the same time not counting with the sympathy from the Federation (at least in the beginning), since the Federation remembers very well who their own Khan was, and what he did, not wishing to risk an alliance with a man so full of potential dangers.
He, that would be fun to watch!
Let me make a comparison: Spam is a problem. So, would banishing e-mail itself be a solution to spam? Well, yes, but it's kinda overkill, don't you think? Microsoft's argument is similar to this: let's banish manufacturers installing 3rd party softwares and as a result no Windows box will come with crap installed. True, but also overkill, because it would affect not only the bad manufacturers, but also those small ones that do install Firefox and Thunderbird.
I'm Brazilian and what I see here is somewhat simple. In very poor communities there are basically two groups: new-born Christian evangelicals and loosely religious / non-religious folk. Both have similar income, but while the first groups has an extremely low level of crimes, the other has a medium to high amount of crime. So, I cannot but conclude that inequality in and of itself has no relation to criminality, because if it had, then the evangelical group would have the same crime rate of the non-evangelicals. I would rather conclude that the belief system of the individual is far more central to whether he will or not commit a crime than any kind of disparity.
This situation also applied to more rich people. A lot of people involved in drug trade here, for instance, come from the middle class. If the reason for crime was income disparity, why would these persons be into this kind of thing?
Lastly, a more general reasoning: suppose there's a society with very little inequality, where the 10% poorer get $100/month and the 10% richer $1,000/month, a 10:1 ratio, and another society where the 10% poorer get $1,000/month and the 10% richer $10,000,000/month, a 10,000:1 ratio. Do you really believe that the 2nd society is worse than the first? I bet you that ALL the poor people in the 1st society would say you otherwise, talking how they would love to live in the 2nd one.
I think all these people that are against inequalities have a very weak grasp on how ACTUAL poor people really see reality. IMHO, they're too much driven by ideological abstractions, and as a result end up failing to see reality as it is.
A small income with lots of equality is NOT what a poor want. He wants a big income, point. If that means living in a society where a rich guy get 10,000 times more than him, hell, that's okay for him! More money is always better. More equality? That doesn't brings food to their children.
So, since when has the /. crowd began thinking that what Microsoft thinks should be in their OS is what should be in their OS?
I mean, now and then some company sues Microsoft due to Windows coming with a built-in software (media player, browser, whatever), with said company maintaining that this doesn't allows manufacturers to replace them, what blocks competition etc. etc. etc. And slashdotters are usually happy when that happens. Now, however, when manufacturers do include "competition", in the way of these 3rd party addons, some of which are actually alternative browsers (even if was crappy and used MSHTML core, AOL still was an alternative browser), then suddenly manufacturers being able to add 3rd party software isn't good anymore.
Please note: wishing that Windows came with Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird and OpenOffice pre-installed requires you first accepting the idea that manufacturer including 3rd party applications is in and of itself a good thing. What doesn't precludes you from despising poor choices, of course.
I suggest you make your mind. Either manufacturers including competition is good, or it isn't. You cannot have it both ways.
POP/SMTP was available through plugins, one of which was made by David Harris himself. See some of these here: Guide to Pegasus Mail Addons List.
You're being extremely ungrateful for a software you actively employed and that you got for free. Have you attempted once to contact David Harris asking him to change the default settings? If no, why not? Besides, what prevented you from installing a Linux or BSD box to handle SMTP/POP, or to at least work as a firewall? Or, for that matter, from simply shutting down the mail server on weekends? Also, if MM was an open relay at the time, most of the other SMTP servers out there also were, since spam still wasn't seen as such a big problem as it is today. This (now seen as a) problematic behavior was far from being specific to it.
All in all, you seem like the beggar who begins calling names the person who feeds him because the food isn't perfectly cooked and doesn't have the spices he likes. Sigh... some people just don't know the meaning of the word "gratitude".
It's sad, to say the least.
You can either use an exporter found in Google, as the AC suggested, or tell Pegasus Mail to create some empty mailbox in the Unix format and copy your archived messages into them. This kind of mailbox doesn't have all the features of the proprietary ones, but there are tons of tools out there than can handle them, and also a ton of 3rd party mail softwares that can use them directly (this probably includes all Linux ones, but I haven't tried).
Not only that. The original was for DOS, is still around, and able to do both POP/SMTP as well as Netware mail. Same thing for the Windows 3.1 client, which can still be found and still works pretty well.
You can find more detailed information on this move the following link, by a Pegasus Mail beta tester:
. html
http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/dh_upd1
By the way, I'd love to see Pegasus Mail open sourced. It's a marvelous e-mailing package. It's UI isn't the most intuitive around, but once you get used to it, it becomes a very powerful tool for your mail needs. Many years ago I evaluated a lot of e-mail softwares, including Eudora, and ended up choosing Pegasus Mail. It's really worth it.
I would surely help if a fund for purchasing and open sourcing it was established.
You're right on your reasoning, but wrong on attributing this to Marx' theory of labor value. For Marx, profit arises from the exploitation, by the capitalist, of the work done by his employees. Hypothetical example: your employees work enough to make $100 in goods, you sell those goods for the $100 but pay them $60. The $40 you paid less to them is both the amount of your exploitation of them as well as of your profit. (Of course this is a simplification, but the general concept is basically as explained.)
Nowadays it's know that this reasoning is wrong due precisely to its extreme simplicity. A lot of work has been developed on understanding what profit is (both in general as well as in particular, monetary profit being just one type), what's the nature of economic valuation, both in terms of qualitative as well as quantitative valuation, how different amounts of goods are related to different amounts of exchange means (money and/or other types) in relation to both human needs and wants (Marx, for instance, lacked the distinction between these two categories), and so on and so forth.
So, although you're right in your example, that making something for $10 and selling it for $5 won't result in profit, and that your business will surely break if you do this kind of thing, this isn't the whole history. For instance, if you made it for $10, that was because you expected it to sell for more. This means a temporal transaction: $10 now (instant A) in exchange for $10+profit in future (instant B). When you reach B but it doesn't happen as you expected, two things result: first, you becomes aware that you didn't plan this very well, so you'll try to avoid the same mistake. Second, that you now (instant B) have a lot of goods in your hands, and you have to decide what to do with it in light of a new expected future (instant C), thus, another temporal transaction. One action path would be to sell them all for $5. Another is to hold them, expecting the future price to favor you. If you sell them, when instance C comes you'll have more money in hand than what you had on B. So, even if from the point of view of A you had a very sizable prejudice, from the point of view of B you're in better shape than you would have been had you hold the goods, because then you would have the goods, yes, but $0 still in hands.
The study of monetary valuation as an atomistic chronological function of subjective qualitative valuations is something that Marx never, ever, attempted, because for him monetary values have reality in themselves, being as much concrete as, let's say, the glass in your LCD/CRT, if not more. This is a deep philosophical assumption that he, however, doesn't justify. He just adopts it as fact and proceeds from there onward. But once you put this monetary realism in question things become way more nuanced. And this is precisely what I mean by the science of Economics having advanced a lot since the 1860's. The labor theory of value developed by Marx has no solid ground, and modern alternatives, such as the more contemporary theory of subjective marginal value, are way more apt to describe how money is really used on the real world.
Not really. What is incompatible with a free market isn't a state with laws, but a state with jus-positive laws, w
Your knowledge of the history of working conditions is clouded by ideological abstractions. Marx himself did this. When he studied the parliament statistics on the social conditions of the British proletariat (AFAIK, the name of these were "blue books", but I'm not sure this is exact since English isn't my primary language), for example, he selected as bibliography for the Capital only those volumes that showed a descending standard of living, but selectively refused to include those that showed, after the decline, how their standard of living increased afterwards. Since your argument comes directly from this biased selection, it is also biased, even if you yourself aren't.
:)
Also, your argument that the western countries are more socialist than other seem to be a petitio principii, in the sense that you seem to believe that if socialism and well being are synonymous or at least causally related, so much that if something is good, it's socialist, and if it's bad, it's non-socialist. As it stands, this is in reality a non-argument.
And regarding companies, they are neither good nor bad. The profit goal is amoral, in the sense that it can lead to one thing or the other depending on the conditions on which it is allowed to flow. Under a set of pro-monopolist legal rules, where the appearing of competition is forbidden or made almost impossible by existing laws, profit comes from smashing salaries and driving prices to the highest possible value. Under a set of anti-monopolist legal rules, where the market is open to as much competition as it's able to sustain, providing higher salaries (to attract the best workers) and diminishing prices (by optimizing production means) are the means to higher profits. This concept applies to all profit seeking groups, including worker's unions.
You must understand, above all else, that Marx, although important, is dated. The science of Economics advanced by leaps and bounds since he wrote the Capital, and almost all of his concepts have been surpassed by now. Much has happened in the field since the 1860's.
Even if they don't pay taxes, they pay salaries, which in turn pay taxes. Please note: you're saying that unemployment would be better for those people than having a bad job. This is idealistic, because they, the people, choose to have the job, not to stay unemployed. Given the two choices, they made the decision. So, yes, maybe they wouldn't have the cough, but they would also have less food, less water, and less a lot of other things. And they prefer to have the cough if that's the price to pay for more food, more water etc.
Of course they would love to have the good without the bad, but when your options aren't between the good and the optimal, when they are between 1 good plus 100 bads in one hand, and 50 goods plus 50 bads on the other, the choice is clear. Whatever harms these companies cause is counterbalanced by the supreme good of hundreds or thousands of good paying (or at least paying) jobs. Or, expressing this in other words, you cannot expect them to reach 1st world level when they weren't able to at least get out of the 4th. First comes food, and a place to sleep. Then, years or decades later, comfort, hygiene, high-tech entertainment, money to pay the psychoanalyst etc. There's no short circuit in this, no matter what idealists prefer to believe.
There's a problem. If he simply signed a $100 million check to help some starving people in, let's say, an African country, the local government would say: "Nice! Please hand us the check and we'll take care of the details!". Then the money would simply disappear. This, by the way, also happens each and every time the rich countries forgive loans made to poor countries.
Any good charity towards these people must be done in such a way as to minimize governmental robbery. Simply giving away a big amount of money is the worst way to accomplish any goal whatsoever.
Beside, suppose that company wasn't there. Meaning: all the local community people who work there simply hadn't those jobs. Would they be better or worse? And how about those small family businesses who make their living by selling things to those who have such salaries?
It's easy for use to judge the situation based on our own high standards of life and lots of opportunities. But the fact is that, given the choice, most people in poor countries actually choose to move near the polluting facilities, for the sole fact that, even with things being dirty and far from hygienic, it's still WAY better than the alternative.
Anyway, what actually happened isn't exactly what you describe. Yes, the revolution happened because "someone" wanted access to more opportunities. But this "someone" wasn't either the peasantry or the bourgeoisie. Actually, the leaders and members of the French Revolution were all from the intellectual class: students of Colleges and Universities training to become members of the State bureaucracy, or members of the bureaucracy interested in rising their ranks. Neither couldn't do what they wanted because the number of jobs was smaller than the number of candidates, causing them to be what one might call a "virtual bureaucracy": a class deprived of what it thought was rightfully theirs. What's the solution then? To overthrow the government, kill or expel the current holders of the bureaucratic positions, and claim them for themselves.
Actually, if you go analyze all revolution that happened since, all of them worked more or less in the same way: a group of intellectuals claiming that they were going to altruistically overthrow the government in benefit of some other class (the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the nation, the "superior race", whatever), but who actually benefited only themselves, by providing them the places they wanted in the (new) bureaucracy. So much, indeed, that one might say that the academic intellectuals are the revolutionary class by definition.
To confirm, just go look all the societies where an academic intellectual class didn't exist (I don't mean "no intellectuals", I mean "no mass production of intellectuals", an entirely different phenomenon): not a single one produced a revolution of any kind. You had power struggles in them all the time, of course. But never the uprising of a subset of its population with the deliberate objective of replacing the whole of the governmental machine with something entirely different.
So, in conclusion: while Social Darwinism had no place, itself, in that event, the basis from which intellectual fashions (such as Social Darwinism) arise, the mass production of intellectuals for the purpose of managing a State bureaucracy, was indeed present. If some revolutions happened based on Social Darwinism, and if some happened based on something entirely different, all were still a bunch of academic intellectuals seeking power and government jobs. This is the sole solid rule, the sole common characteristic uniting them all.
Yep, I know. And it's precisely this way of moving that I find cumbersome and unintuitive. WASD is very imprecise: either too slow or too fast. Having to click on my avatar is something that makes no sense, and thus I always forget to do it.
Alas, this clicking is not only idiotic, but also prone to error. If I don't click in the precise spot of my avatar that 2nd Life understands to mean the avatar as a whole, it'll think I'm clicking some piece of cloth or some appendage, with unpredictable results. I've lost the count of times it ended in my avatar losing its mask, and in me having to open my inventory and search for it to put it back. The inventory itself, by the way, is a complete nightmare to manage, but let's not dwell into that.
It's as if LL forgot such a thing is supposed to have the word "user" before the word "interface". Sure, those who're used to it probably can do well. But that doesn't mean it isn't very badly designed. "Poor" is too light a word to describe 2nd Life's GUI.
WoW isn't perfect, but the one thing it has that 2nd Life should copy NOW, is the way you control your character.
No, seriously: walking in 2L is slow. Running is bizarre. WoW's way of handling this is so much better! Left-click: select. Right-click: use/sit/go there. Both-buttons: walk/run (it doesn't matter if you're in 1st or 3rd-person). Space: jump. Scroll button: camera distance (including entering and exiting 1st person mode). Mouse-movement: select direction (up, down, left, right) of movement/camera if a button is pressed.
I've tried 2nd Life for two days. But I just don't feel comfortable moving around. It's cumbersome and frustrating, no matter how much I try to like it.
And in regards to the way the environment is a streaming, why the hell can't LL feed with at least the wire-frame of the outside of buildings in the near area, while caching it for the remaining areas around? I don't mind waiting for actual textures and the like to load, but I surely expect to at least know in advance that something is there to be loaded. And, yes, that includes having a decent pre-rendered map that doesn't take 10 minutes to load. I don't mind if it's updated only once a week: just put it there anyway.
All in all, 2nd Life still seems to be a beta product. It's far, far away from an actual version 1.0. I'll try again in one or two years, but until then, forget it. It's not worth the effort.
Correction: "David Horowitz, one of the most important and widely know new-left activists of the 1960s, turned conservative in the 1980s." Here, I fixed it for you. Also, he replied with documentation to each and every claim of inaccuracy in "The Professors", and most of his replies weren't replied to by his critics. Same for DTN, with the same no-replies-back by the critics.
Anyway, nothing prevents you from going into http://www.ucsusa.org/ucs/about/financials.html and seek the owners^H^H^H^H^H^Hcontributors names by yourself.
By the way: funny that someone modded me "flamebait". I never buried someone with mod points just because I disagreed with him, much less when the guy offered links to actual data. Slashdot left-wing readers seem to be very similar to the left-wingers I know from University. A pretty standard behavior indeed.
Hey, good! Political correctness is a mental disease. These sites are the cure.
Here're some of the corporations that own... I mean, that "contribute" to the Union of Concerned Scientists:
"Beldon Fund, the Compton Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Scherman Foundation, the Blue Moon Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Energy Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Turner Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trusts."
For more information on the "unbiased" nature of what these guys do, see its page on Discover The Network.
I wonder why they don't make a series, animated or not, of Star Trek: New Frontier. It's simply the setting if what you want are dark stories, a violent lawless background, government corruption, and tons of politically incorrect fast paced action inside the Star Trek universe.
The captain of the Excalibur starship, for instance, is an ex-guerrilla terrorist who successfully won independence back for his home planet using such lovely tools of the profession as genocide.
It's an amazing series of Science Fiction novels. If you haven't read it yet, please do so. It's worth the effort, even if you don't like the standard Star Trek universe.