If you’re actually trying to install another version of Firefox, then click on the Firefox tag, as there may be an entry on that other version.

Since I am now principally using Fedora, I'd not planned to continue my entries on installing Firefox on RHEL. But people continue to visit this 'blog for help on just that, and since I do also run Scientific Linux (a close clone of RHEL), I can still investigate what procedure will work (though this entry might more cautiously be entitled Installing Firefox 6.0 under Scientific Linux 6.x). (I don't plan to go back and add an entry on installing Firefox 5.x, but since the procedure for Firefox 6.0 proves to be the same, except for the name of the archive, as that for 4.0, I believe that one can infer that it is likewise the same for 5.x.)

In any case, here are the steps that I recommend:

1. Download the archive, firefox-6.0[.n].tar.bz2.
2. The tarball contains a directory, firefox, which should be dropped-in as a sub-directory of something. If you want to ponder where, then study the FHS. As for me, as root, I put it in /opt:
   

   tar -xjvf firefox-6.0[.n].tar.bz2 -C /opt/

   (Omit that [.n] if it isn’t in the name of the archive that you downloaded. Replace it with the actual number from the name of the archive if such a number was included.)

3. You’ll need a .desktop file for Firefox (though you may already have one). As root, edit/create /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop, ensuring that it reads
   

   [Desktop Entry]
   Categories=Application;Network;X-Red-Hat-Base;
   Type=Application
   Encoding=UTF-8
   Name=Firefox
   Comment='WWW browser'
   Exec='/opt/firefox/firefox'
   Icon='/opt/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png'
   Terminal=false

   (If you didn't install in /opt, or changed the name of the firefox directory, then you'll need to change the above accordingly.)

4. Restart the GUI, by logging out and back in or by restarting the system.

This 'blog was off-line for more than 24 hours after an event on the server. A technician at the hosting service ultimately identified the problem as a conflict between a security up-date and the theme — software establishing the appearance (lay-out, color-scheme, &c) of the 'blog. (I find the same conflict when I attempt to use WordPress Default Theme 1.6, upon which my theme was originally based.)

I am told that the administrators can and will change a configuration of the server to allow that theme to be used; but, to get the 'blog back up-and-running in the mean-time, I am temporarily using a very different theme. If, by the time that you read this entry, the 'blog looks pretty much as you're used to seeing it, that means that I have returned to the original theme.

Having read that the Esterbrook Nº 356 was Carl Barks' pen nib of choice for inking his work, I got some to try. The Esterbrook Steel Pen Mfg. Co. itself has essentially been gone for decades, so one looks for NOS; the nibs that I got are ostensibly from the 1940s.

Having got nibs, I wanted an Esterbrook Nº 35 holder for them. Again, it would be some decades old. I found one in a set with 12 nibs of varying size.

Well, it arrived on Friday, with the paper seal still intact on the box. I cannot open the box without committing some crime against antiquarian preservation!

I am defeated. I will look for another holder for my nibs.

While looking for information on the physical specifications of the gahoon, I ran across mention of the Maui Xaphoon and of the Maui Xaphoon Pocket Sax. Now, a pocket saxophone could be a good thing, but the marketing by Maui Xaphoon indicates how it could become a social ill:

It will bring you JOY — Imagine being able to create a sense of community wherever you are — at a bus stop, in a cave, waiting in line, even a parking garage!

Yeah, imagine. Imagine innocent people stuck at the bus stop, spelunking in the Sand Cave, queued at the DMV, or just trying to get to or from their cars, and some g_dd_mn'd would-be pied piper tries to horn them into a community to end the loneliness of his here-to-fore friendless existence.

(BTW, if you don't want to pay US$57.95 or more for a pocket saxophone, then consider flubberjibbel's DIY pocket saxophone. Just don't try to rope me into some community with it.)

Up-Date (2020:09/25): The Maui Xaphoon products pages have moved, and the lowest list price of a The Maui Xaphoon Pocket Sax is now $65. (The DIY video to which I linked parenthetically was made private, but a search of YouTube finds other videos for DIY pocket saxophones.)

Sometimes a person or group of persons will present a system of lies that they know to be unsustainable, with the intention of gradually abandoning the pretense. The purpose is largely to pay the costs of truth in installments which, by virtue of their distribution, are more bearable than would be the cost if borne more immediately. (There may also be the hope of identifying a point at which the lies remaining are sustainable.)

This is how the Clinton Administration handled its sex scandal (calling the process telling the truth slowly) and how John Edwards seems to have handled his.

It is now how world leaders are handling the disintegration of the European Monetary Union.

The prevailing rates of time preference and understandings of the nature and origin of wealth vary markèdly amongst the cultures within Europe. By comparison with northern European nations, southern European nations tend to have very high rates of time preference and have less reälistic understandings of wealth, so that they are relatively less willing to save and to invest.

Under a union of shared fiat currency, if fiscal policy remains at the discretion of each state, then some states are able to adopt an otherwise unsustainable fiscal policy which other member states become obliged to support in order to support the shared currency.

A system of enforceable fiscal policy rules was not adopted at the time of the monetary union. The states of all of these nations are representative democracies of one sort or of another, with a strong sense in each nation that popular will must ultimately be obeyed, so that unpopular regimes would be quickly over-thrown; and national sovereignty is important in most or all of these nations. Additionally, few state officials are keen to lose their own power, and therefore most resist a surrender of power to the European Union unless they imagine themselves either as retiring or as moving on to positions within the Union as such. Under these circumstances, a monetary union could not be founded with sufficient mechanisms to compel southern European states to behave like northern European states, especially as northern European states wanted an ability to stray at their own discretion from their norms, during extraordinary circumstances; so, instead, the union was formed based upon wishful thinking.

Rather than behaving as many wished, some member states acted as was feared and as should have been expected.

The peoples of the southern European nations might like best to be bailed-out by the tax-payers of other nations; but failing that option, with their rates of time-preference and with their illusions about wealth, they would rather leave the monetary union than adopt the habits of northern Europeans; they would certainly not be willing to subject themselves to the rule of German bankers, regardless of what their states might want. Meanwhile, whatever northern states might want, their peoples are not willing indefinitely to subsidize the vacations and retirements of southern Europeans. And the democratic impulse will bend the wills of these states to those of their respective peoples.

The political leaders of the European Union are acutely aware of the beliefs and powers of the peoples of their respective nations. Most leaders of Western-style democracies understand the situation as well. (Officials of states such as that of the PRC are, however, likely to stare with a sense of outraged bewilderment.) Yet virtually all are maintaining the pretense that the EMU may plausibly be saved.

Nor is it merely state officials who are doing this. Newspapers and magazines have been confronted with explanations of why the Monetary Union cannot be fixed, but most choose to pass over them in silence. The financier George Soros, who has been insisting that the EMU must be preserved, has more recently spoken of the desirability of Greece and Portugal leaving it; yet he is aware that Italy will almost certainly default, and that Spain is very likely to do so as well.

It may be that these leaders are stalling with absolutely no Plan B, but I believe that the real point of present discussions ostensibly on how to save the Monetary Union is actually to buy time to develop and agree upon a plan to unwind it, with a minimum of political fall-out and of economic damage. The unstated objective is to preserve as much as possible of the existing political and economic order, with most or all of the same people in its ruling class.

(Actually, there is some evidence that a quantitative theory of probability developed and then disappeared in ancient India.[10] But Franklin's essential point here is none-the-less well-taken.)

---

⁹ Foot-note in the original, citing Decretales Pseudo-Isidorianae, et Capitula Angilramni edited by Paul Hinschius, and recommending comparison with The Collection in Seventy-Four Titles: A Canon Law Manual of the Gregorian Reform edited by John Gilchrist.

[10] In The Story of Nala and Damayanti within the Mahābhārata, there is a character Rtuparna (aka Rituparna, and mistakenly as Rtupama and as Ritupama) who seems to have a marvelous understanding of sampling and is a master of dice-play. I learned about Rtuparna by way of Ian Hacking's outstanding The Emergence of Probability; Hacking seems to have learned of it by way of V.P. Godambe, who noted the apparent implication in A historical perspective of the recent developments in the theory of sampling from actual populations, Journal of the Indian Society of Agricultural Statistics v. 38 #1 (Apr 1976) pp 1-12.

When I'm required to provide a working e.mail address for a relationship with an institution, I usually creäte a new address, specific to my account with that institution. The address itself is typically that of a forwarder, and that forwarder is almost always to an address whose sole purpose is to receive the e.mails from these various forwarders.

One benefit of this arrangement is that, if I want to disconnect from that institution, I can delete the forwarder. But my real concern has been control of spam. If I receive spam, then from the address of the forwarder I can determine which institution provided my address to the spammers; and I can cut-off the spammers by deleting the forwarder.

This morning, I received three pieces of spam, each with the title UPS notification, each ostensibly from UPS, and each with a body

Dear customer.


The parcel was sent your home address.
And it will arrive within 3 business day.

More information and the tracking number are attached in document below.

Thank you.

Copyright © 1994-2011 United Parcel Service of America, Inc. All rights reserved.

(Anti-spam software on the mail-server removed any attachment.) Many of you will have got e.mail similar or identical to this; it's a trick that has been employed now for years.

But what is of particular interest is that each of these three messages came to the address that I'd provided exactly and only to Fred Flare .com. So Fred Flare has allowed some or all of my account information to be leaked to some party who tried then to hijack my computer.

Upon discovering the first two, I quickly tried to contact Fred Flare. My first attempt failed because their own filters prevent the delivery of attachments, and I'd attached copies of the spam. My second attempt therefore omitted these, which potentially compounds the problem for Flare.

In my case, I can just delete the forwarder once I'm done communicating with Fred Flare, but other, more trusting people provided their principal e.mail addresses. It would be no small task for Fred Flare to make it right for those people, but it is the responsibility of Fred Flare to do so.

By some time in the mid-'90s, much of the New Deal coälition — the main-stream of America's political left and the base of its Democratic Party — had largely ceased to believe.

It was hard to see its positive programmes as successes. Keynesianism as it was then understood in America had led to stagflation in the '70s. Programmes intended to lift people from poverty had instead creäted a permanent under-class, of disintegrated families. Nearly everyone was beginning to understand that Social Security was a pyramid scheme of some sort. And the increasing intrusions of the state that were intrinsic to these programmes put the lie to any claim that the center left had much concern for individual liberty.

The main-stream of the media had increasingly aligned itself with the left, and had grossly over-played its hand, which brought disrepute upon both.

Meanwhile, a cluster of ideologies known jointly as conservative were drawing upon various sorts of economic and moral arguments (largely cribbed from libertarians) for reduced state control of the economy, some of which arguments were quite difficult to meet.

Then the Soviet Bloc collapsed. Most Americans on the left had abhorred various aspects of those states, but had also seen those states as concrete proof of the practical viability of extensive state control of national economies. And, even as the left tried to turn hopefully to the Swedish model, the political system in Sweden began to unwind that model. Uncertainty developed over whether much if any degree of state intervention were sustainable over the long run.

It wasn't that most or all of the left converted to a rival position. They didn't become conservatives; they didn't become libertarians. They still wanted to believe in the New Deal, in the New Frontier (rather imperfectly remembered!), in the Great Society; they just really didn't. (Some would haul-out the Call to tell themselves other-wise, attempting to build conviction with a chant.) Many of them did switch their foci from supporting extensive state intervention on behalf of human welfare to supporting extensive state intervention on behalf of environmental protection; this allowed them to keep pushing for the same institution (the state) to be directed against many of the same enemies, but now the talk was of life-boat scenarios, rather than of promoting general affluence.

But, in 2008, the American political left again believed.

The ground-work for that resurgent belief had been laid by Republicans, especially by those in Congress from 2001 to 2006, and by the Presidential Administration of George Walker Bush. They had promoted dramatic deficit spending, greatly expanded the intrusions of the state into the every-day lives of Americans, and taken the United States into two wars, each of which they grossly mismanaged. They had also partnered with Congressional Democrats in what amounted to an extensive corrupting of financial markets, which led to a collapse while Republicans held the White House and had majorities in both Houses of Congress. And since the Republicans had styled themselves as conservatives and believers in market economics while doing these things, it was easy for the left to see this wave of disasters as a refutation both of conservatism and of reliance upon unregulated markets. That, however, is still essentially negative — less a certainty of the left that they were right than that their opponents were wrong.

Belief returned with Barack Hussein Obama. That was why he, and not one of the other Democratic candidates, got the Presidential nomination; that was why he scared the Hell out of so many with firm precepts in opposition to those of the left. Obama conveyed himself in a manner that people associate with intelligence, with alertness, with education, and with good judgment. And, while as a candidate he was deliberately vague about much of what he would seek as President, he postured as if it would be those things to which all reasonable people agreed. His ambiguity allowed people of various ideologies to see in him what they wanted to see in him (thus making him electable), but it was easiest of all to see him as resuming the project of the New Deal coälition, especially as he described what seemed just that when he was more forth-coming. For such a man to act as if he believed made it again possible for them to believe.

The belief of the left didn't subsequently develop more to sustain it beyond this cult of personality. And belief on the left in Barack Hussein Obama has been dying. Where policy has been at his discretion, he has often not done what he promised them and the nation that he would do. Where the left has seen a need to fight or an opportunity to crush their opponents, he has often seemed in the eyes of the left to fold. And often they must choose between admitting that their policies are simply mistaken, or asserting that the Administration didn't, after all, effect those policies. (For example, that it wasn't sufficiently aggressive.)

So we are sliding back towards a state-of-affairs where the left does not believe. It does not seem plausible to me that Obama's reputation could be rescued except perhaps by his premature death, and the experience with Obama has, for the time being, inoculated people against the effects of a similar personality.

I cannot help but wish, vainly, that those on the left would do better this time than to dig-in and wait for their belief to be restored.

After the fiasco with Theory and Decision (see my entry of 28 March and that of 18 April), I submitted my paper on indecision to yet another journal on 23 April.

To my surprise, that journal gave my paper for review to someone whom I regard as having a markèd conflict-of-interest. I know to whom they gave it because the rejecting review that I received on 16 Jun was, also to my surprise, attributed rather than anonymous.

Some of the criticism was legitimate, but would best have been handled by directing me to revise-and-resubmit. Some of the important criticism was absurd.

For example, the reviewer declared

this is not how one writes proofs in general (except may be in logic)

Considering that the propositions are almost exclusively formal logic (there not being much arithmetic to the structure), it's rather to be expected that the proofs will look as proofs (in or out of quotation marks) do in logic.

And, in defending the attempt to distinguish indecision from indifference found in Indifference or Indecision? by Eliaz and Ok, the reviewer wrote that Mrs Watson (a hypothetical agent presented in that paper)

is indecisive whenever she deems multiple choices as choosable

But she also deems multiple choices as choosable when she is indifferent, and in both cases (according to Eliaz and Ok) makes her decision by flipping a coin.

(In fact, Eliaz and Ok claim something more interesting about what distinguishes indecision from indifference, but an observable distinction does not result from it.)

I stared for a bit, and then sent to the reviewer a simple request for permission to cite the review in future versions of the paper. (I offered no argument or evaluation; I just requested permission to cite.) The review is plainly not itself a publication; it seems closer to being a personal communication. And one is supposed to secure permission before citing personal communications.

I waited for some days, and got no reply. I concluded that none would be forth-coming. I therefore effected what changes I felt should be made given that I could not cite the review, both to make straight-forward improvements, and to preëmptively meet repetition of what I regarded as illegitimate criticisms.

Then I went over my big spread-sheet o' econ journals, and selected the next journal to which to submit the paper. As with previous submissions, I read the author guidelines, and did some further rewriting and reformatting to tailor a version specific to that journal. I made the new submission on 28 July. Its reported status when I checked this morning was the same as that when I completed the submission process, so I presume that no editor has accepted assignment to it.

The recent relative quiescence of this 'blog has obtained from a confluence of things. I have rival demands of my time or of my energy, have not always been in the best of moods, and have not known quite how I want to formulate some of the entries upon which I have been working.

With respect to the last, one problem has been that I've wanted to present the entries in a certain order (or at least a certain preörder), which has allowed bottle-necks to develop. I think, now, that I'd better loosen-up on some of these considerations of the order of entries.