On 19/03/2004 02:04, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
Kenneth Whistler wrote:
Why is an Anarchist asking to standardize something?
Why not!? Can you elaborate on this? Myself, I am an anarchist sympathizer,
and I have been deeply interested in a character encoding standard for
nearly ten years now...
Anarchism is against imposing forms of organization, non against
organization itself. And standards are quite like the useful side of laws
(the organization) without the harmful side (the imposition), so they should
be welcome to anarchists.
Obedience to laws can only be imposed with violence by a parasitical clique
(cops, tribunals), whereas compliance to standards is achieved solely by the
intrinsic usefulness and quality of the standard's design.
_ Marco
But I guess anarchists would prefer the W3C kind of standard in which
each participant gets an equal vote to ones like Unicode which are
defined in practice by a consortium of large corporations - although in
principle an individual anarchist could buy voting rights. Come to think
of it, a not very large group of them with a bit of money behind them
could buy enough votes to outvote the corporations and destroy Unicode -
which they couldn't do in the W3C model.
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
