The point was for a small amount of taxation to alleviate a small amount of the poverty, such as the worst cases affecting the most disadvantaged children. That wasn't clear in my original post.

Maybe if we actually had a viable liberal party in the USA. It's not a two sided note, it's a Möbius strip

Do you think he did this out of the goodness of his anti-Semitic heart, or because he saw the writing on the wall and wanted to get out ahead of the labor movement? Things were heading in that direction anyway and he just preemptively implemented a policy which was rapidly approaching. Why was it approaching? The labor movement.

He probably avoided a lot of smashed windows.

It's the GPL vs. BSD license debate all over again!

I have a hard time believing someone can be so ignorant of history. Do you think slaves were happy? What about feudal serfs? Or pre-unionized steel workers? Or the children working in textile factories?

Capital has never, and will never, care about the happiness of their workers unless those workers force them to care. We had to fight tooth and nail for the rights we have now; eight hour days, forty hour weeks, weekends, workplace safety, sick leave, maternity leave, minimum wage. These things make workers happy, and none of them were offered up voluntarily. They had to be bought with the blood and the lives of the working class from generations ago, and capital has been tirelessly waging a ceaseless campaign to take them back.

I've mostly stopped typing out my own rebuttals and just started linking to the specific part of my .sig that addresses whatever particular libertarian fallacy someone is invoking. Rarely do I need to go offscript, and even more rarely is a competent rebuttal offered that doesn't distill down to a simple difference in values. Libertarians are, at heart, corporate fascists. They are simply working from a different value system--a horrifyingly barbarous one.

You can consider the debate over when you get them to affirm their subscription to the unadulterated version of those beliefs. For example, I've cornered one before and forced them to admit that rampant poverty is preferable to even a small amount of taxation to alleviate it.

I'll give them credit for their absolute devotion to ideological purity. That's real devotion.

Not if this technology actually delivers and makes the workforce more efficient--even if it's through dehumanizing total control. Your hippy dippy startup won't be able to compete.

So while you're giving extravagant perks to your employees such as unmetered bathroom breaks and letting them skip their quarterly non-work related conversation log review, your competitors are brutalizing their employees and reaping the rewards associated with turning human beings into pliable, docile, terrified, machines.

The worst thing about fascism is that it can actually deliver; as long as you don't get side tracked by useless and expensive crusades of ethnic cleansing or territorial expansion.

What exactly is a "classic" desktop anyway? Are we talking classic Windows? Classic Mac OS? There's a constellation of UI paradigms which work. Some of them are mutually incompatible, you can't use them simultaneously. If you want to come up with something new, it has to actually work better than what we had before. If it merely works "as good" as what it's replacing then users won't be happy. You're changing things for the sake of change. So from those choices you pick the ones you think work best together and create a DE out of them. So we get Gnome Shell, KDE, XFCE, et al. Then there are the numerous eccentrics, throwbacks, and masochists running things like Awesome, DWM, Trinty, or any of the others which don't even add up to 1% all together.

I don't think Linux users are getting more pragmatic. The different camps have mostly just solidified around their own "classic" vision. There's 3-4 different main camps now depending how you choose to slice it, and numerous sub groups and forks if you drill down deeper. It'll always be more fragmented, contentious, and fluid than Windows or OS X. That's a good thing, as long as you have the wherewithal to navigate your way between all the various spin-offs and cousin projects spawned when the devs make a boneheaded change for change's sake. Gnome 2 users need to know enough that MATE is their upgrade path, etc.

I've actually been using Unity these days. It's level of polish and completeness is better than anything else I've found and it replicates the features I most enjoy from OS X. I had to install a less offensive theme and icon pack, change the system font to Lucida Grande, but after that it's a very nice desktop. I only have a few criticisms: you can't move the dock to the bottom; the search features aren't as simple and elegant as Spotlight, lenses are over-engineered and pointlessly complicated for what the achieve even if it's a more powerful tool overall; and there are a couple minor GUI glitches which I've come to find unacceptable after spending so much time in the pixel-perfect world Apple has created.

In case some people don't RTFA,

Emphasis mine. XP updates ARE ending, but MSE/Forefront will still get updated. XP will still be susceptible to any zero day until it gets detected by MSE--if it's even installed at all. This is a marginal increase in safety for XP post-EOL, at best. The apocalypse is still nigh.

My advice for fellow ITAs. Don't mention this to your boss at all if you're still trying to migrate. It's not really relevant to the threat posed by XP's end of support. If they get wind of it on their own, emphasize that XP itself is still going to be wide open. At best all MSE does is let you know you've been owned after the fact once MS gets around to updating the definitions. MSE already has a pretty poor record for detecting even older threats. It's better than nothing but you shouldn't be relying on it.

It's theoretically possible that they don't bother submitting requests unless they are highly confident it will be accepted. I don't believe that, but it's at least possible. We need to know more about the process and the types of requests--unfortunately that's difficult with a secret court.

Seriously, there is so much freely available Unix derived code available with permissive licenses, and it works better than anything they could make from scratch or by improving the NT kernel. They should fork the BSD kernel, port the Windows 7 UI to it with the necessary upgrades, and write a Win32 emulation/compatibility mode for legacy apps. It can't be that hard, WINE et al were able to do it with zero help from MS.

Apple essentially did the same exact thing with less money and manpower than MS has at their disposal.

Absolutely true, if you're willing to plan it out ahead of time and use pre-emptive force. Libertarians can't use preemptive force, it's sort of their thing. They need the desperate poor to make the first move so they can kill them in self-defense. The response will of course be disproportional, but as long as its technically a reaction and not an initiation of force, it's kosher in their religion.

They'd rather pay the, as you pointed out, much greater costs of extermination/disposal of the "undesirables" because it's the ideologically pure position in their system of thought. Libertarians don't really care about outcomes, they obsess on keeping the process pure.

The end game of these libertarian fantasies is the literal wholesale murder of millions of poor "undesirables", either directly on the small scale and justified as self defense or the defence of property, or enmasse through isolation into ghettos and systematic starvation. It would dwarf the Holocaust in numbers of dead.

If you start with the premise (itself not unreasonable) that every individual has a right to defend themselves from harm and their property from theft, and you have millions of people with no ability to survive other than the appropriation of resources by force, you're going to end up with a lot of dead humans. And when the tent cities gather enough boldness and enough desperation to march on the proper cities, then you'd have the military and police slaughtering thousands at a time to protect the property rights of the middle and upper classes.

Horrifying to imagine, but there are some people who would not only be willing to go through this conflagration, but would practically welcome it. Indeed, some are even working in earnest to bring it about. They want to see the streets run red with the blood of the poor. The worst reflection I've ever had on the human condition is that some of them don't just see this nightmare as a horrible means justified by a glorious utopian end--the process itself satisfies some dark urge inside them to cause pain on the largest scale possible. If evil exists, this is it.

This is how I know you're lying. You should have stopped at the just plausible anecdote, but you couldn't resist overreaching and throwing some stereotypical beuracratic incompetence into your yarn.