B.I.O.S. to lock out non-Windows code ?

[Peter L. Peres]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, JoeHill wrote:

> On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 22:42:28 -0400
> Anton Markov <anton-F0u+EriZ6ihBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> uttered:
>
> > Yes, thanks.
>
> No. I don't think you understood a single word he said. It has nothing
> whatsoever to do with Capitalism. Capital is no longer the primary means
> of production, therefore control of Capital is no longer an issue,
> control of information *is*. Yer still stuck in this whole Communist vs.
> Capitalist thang, that is sooooo ten years ago.

Control of information ? ;-) 'Free trading' capitalism vs. government
regulation and social services financing IS the issue in the
postindustrial world, where the free trading part means moving the
taxpaying and manufacturing part of a business as far away as possible
from where goods and services and infrastructure and labor are sold
expensively. And lately government has been cooperating in this game with
enthusiasm.

> BTW, can you point me to some evidence for this "flaw" in human nature?
> I hear a lot about it from religious folk and from reading too many
> elitist philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau, but I've never actually
> seen any concrete evidence.

Look at the invention of trading, followed by speculation, followed by
memorable crashes. Very few people were involved and they caused enormous
misery in the 15th through 19th centuries. The last big crash was in the
1920's. After that serious regulation stepped in. There is a balance
between regulation and free trading. The balance is slipping because there
is a lot of offshore manufacturing going on. The regulating part is losing
ground because the moneymaking parts of their constituencies are massively
evading taxes by producing offshore and importing effectively without
duties. This shifts the taxpaying part of the equation into countries that
can suddenly afford to launch manned spacecraft. So the bad human nature
of a few will affect a lot of people.

Incidentally the communists fixed prices on everything and forbade
competition on a financial plane. Exactly the same as in the middle ages
where tampering with prices or scales or rulers could get you hanged
(prices were fixed for tens of years or longer at a stretch). It also
produced the same effect: black marketing and smuggling on staggering
scales, as well as evasion into other means of unregulated trade, like
futures and later derivatives.

> Seems to me that it ain't humans that are flawed, it's the system they
> live under, but maybe I've got it backwards...

This has been tried many times. Every time another system came up, failed,
and was blamed. Nobody blamed the part that survived the system changes:
the people. Human nature is something that needs to be reckoned with at
all times. Learning some history is the least one can do to avoid
repeating mistakes.

Peter
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml