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Comment Re:Anachronistic much? (Score 1) 283

The backend is just catching up to Debian/yum, but the front end is way ahead.

The interfaces for Windows and OS X may be way ahead for people who point-and-click, but for people such as myself, whose fingers rarely leave the home row, window managers such as awesome and xmonad are way ahead of anything produced by Microsoft and Apple.

Comment Re:P.J. O'Rourke said... (Score 1) 309

A legal framework based on property rights would decentralize these decisions and apply local considerations.

As you said, the devil is in the details. If detailed proposals for both 1) an optimal legal framework based on property rights and 2) an optimal set of locally-enforced environmental regulations were available, a more thorough comparison could be made.

For example, I'd be interested in seeing how an optimal legal framework based on property rights would address violations involving diesel exhaust. Who could be sued when a dangerous level of submicron particulate matter pollution from diesel exhaust is found in a person's lungs by their doctor? Individual truckers? Truck manufacturers and sellers? Diesel fuel producers and sellers? The owners of the (private?) roads?

Yeah, but this isn't surprising since property rights are not properly protected these days.

Is this due to corruption? Also, do you think that the enforcement of property rights given an optimal legal framework would be less susceptible to corruption compared to the enforcement of equally optimal environmental regulations? Would corruption of the former be less harmful?

Sorry for all the questions. I find this very interesting.

Comment Re:P.J. O'Rourke said... (Score 1) 309

But stronger property rights, which are another essential ingredient, would.

Thanks for responding. I had originally included a paragraph in my post containing questions about the enforcement of property rights in matters relating to air pollution, but I deleted it.

What I wanted to know is this: without environmental regulations, would everyone need to monitor the air quality on their property, determine the cause(s) of any pollution, and successfully sue the polluter(s)? If so, I think that would be too difficult for most people, including myself.

I've known people who have sued over blatant property rights violations that were relatively simple to understand, and the process was very difficult and time-consuming. I imagine that suing over air quality (e.g., an AQI of 51) would be far worse.

Comment Re:P.J. O'Rourke said... (Score 2) 309

The general idea is that it would force corporations to compete by meeting their customers' needs instead of buying political influence.

Can you explain how a lack of environmental regulations would result in better air quality? Why would Corporation X, which produces luxury goods, want to limit the pollution created by its factories if said factories were located near only low-income people who are not customers of Corporation X?

Comment Re:The best minds (Score 2) 125

I don't see a problem with that as long as that's what they like/want to do.

You don't see a problem with a greater amount of humanity's resources being allocated to the production and distribution of propaganda (e.g., advertising)? You don't see a problem with the public basing more and more of their decisions, including medical and political decisions, on propaganda?

Not only do I think it's a problem, I think the severity is so great that the students from K-12 should be required to study propaganda, including its history, philosophy, theory, and practice (e.g., advertising).

Alternative solutions, such as campaign finance reform, treat the symptoms of propaganda, not the root of the problem, which is its efficacy. Furthermore, many of these alternative solutions threaten freedom of speech.

Comment Re:Mission Accomplished (Score 1) 1855

the overwhelming majority of recruits for Al Qaeda were not "impoverished and uneducated" young men. They are most frequently middle to upper class, well-educated young men (doctors and engineers).

Your comment history is completely devoid of citations, so I won't both asking for empirical evidence indicating that members of Al Qaeda "most frequently" have medical, engineering, and similar degrees.

In fact, based on your comment history, you're clearly the sort of ideologue for whom substantiating evidence is only warranted for matters relating to the birthplace of a black president.[1]

[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2087772&cid=35852010

Comment Re:Why not extend vim? (Score 1) 193

> vim is more concerned with text editing.

Vim users often state this, but when I last compared Vim and Emacs, the latter was vastly superior for editing plain text lists [1] and tables [2], which are used extensively in my notes and other non-code documents.

With the exception of Vim being arguably more ergonomic, in what way is Vim superior to Emacs for editing text?

[1] http://orgmode.org/manual/Plain-lists.html
[2] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/tables.php

Comment Re:bah humbug! (Score 1) 754

The following article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine summarizes the evidence from recent systematic reviews and clears some of the existing confusion about the effectiveness of spinal manipulation. The authors found no convincing evidence from systematic reviews to suggest that spinal manipulation is a recommendable treatment option for any medical condition.

A systematic review of systematic reviews of spinal manipulation
http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/cgi/content/full/99/4/192

Comment Re:Fox gets a bad rap... (Score 0, Troll) 176

> The real problem is that liberals can't own up to the fact that rest of > the cable news clique panders to their political sensibilities. Do you define "liberals" to mean people who want only Pentagon operatives to analyze foreign conflicts on TV? The Pulitzer-winning investigation that dare not be uttered on TV http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/21/pulitzer/ Pentagon military analyst program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_military_analyst_program http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Pentagon_military_analyst_program Y'gotta love the United States, where Barack Obama is considered a socialist and corporate media is considered liberal.

Comment Re:LOL, No... (Score 1) 429

> It was because it was. See my response to defaria downthread.

I don't think your response to defaria contained sufficient empirical evidence to adequately support the assertion that MP3 players were "virtually useless before the iPod." But at least you provided some evidence, unlike Rayban, so thanks for contributing.

Comment Re:Uh huh (Score 1) 435

I was the "Open Source evangelist" [...] supress my "enthusiastic bachellors" spirit [...] a "service based" buisness [...] a "software" based company [...] with "free lunch" [...] inside the "economic circle" [...] a "payless" or "gratis" asset [...] they "tie" the client
Can I "quote" you on that? :-)

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