Even the earliest version of the CSS 2 spec has passed its ninth birthday.
Why should a web developer use a brand new web standard that requires the use of such an outdated and difficult-to-use spec? Making web pages to standards won't be worth the extra time until 90% of surfers are using fully CSS3 compliant user agents. That still looks a long way off.
And then, no doubt, people like you will be telling us that there's no point in making web pages to standards until 90% of users are using fully CSS4 compliant user agents.
Anyhow, since when is CSS 2 'outdated'? Not only was the CSS 2 spec most recently updated YESTERDAY, but it's a specification that's actually tailored to the real-world implementations:
CSS 2.1 represents a "snapshot" of CSS usage: it consists of all CSS features that are implemented interoperably at the date of publication of the Recommendation.
As for your claim that the CSS specs are 'difficult-to-use,' in what profession other than web development have you ever heard so many people whine about having to learn the basic tools of the trade?
Please explain how <center> is more intrusive than <div style="text-align: center;>.
It's not. They're both equally stupid.
Something like <div class="foo">Lorem ipsum dolor sit.</div> is much preferable a) because it can be overriden by user stylesheets, and b) because it's possible to change the text alignment at a later time if it becomes useful to do so without editing the document.
Out of all of those things, the only one that's changed at all is the img tag, and that's only in two places - first, in XHTML you are required to provide an alt= attribute (instead of just strongly recommended like in HTML 4), and second, you have to close the tag properly, with a/> at the end.
The "rules" are stupid. Do you know how hard it is to make a 3-column or 4-column content site using CSS 1.0? Is it even possible? Yet I can "break" the rules, use table cells as layout, and accomplish the same thing in seconds.
Using CSS 1.0, that's probably impossible. However, that's not too surprising since that version of the spec didn't even pretend to offer much more than basic text formatting.
But besides that: CSS 1.0?! You do know that even the revised version of that spec is eight and a half years old, right? And that the original version of it is nearly eleven years old? Even the earliest version of the CSS 2 spec has passed its ninth birthday.
Web developers would use the standards if the standards reflected the reality of their job and *made it easier*.
In general the problem is not, and never has been, the specifications. The problem has always been the implementations. Once browsers started to actually do what the specification specified, the job suddenly got dramatically easier. Before about 2002 or 2003, the table-based -vs- tableless layout debate made some kind of sense. But since then, the widely-used browsers--even including IE 6 and all of its bugs--have become robust enough that if tableless layouts aren't making your job easier it's because you don't know what you're doing.
In the past 3 years, for example, I've used one base template for every HTML document I've created, and the actual structural markup probably changes less than 15% from the original in any given case--regardless of layout. I can change columns from side to side by changing three CSS declarations, and any number of columns can be added by adding one new div element per column to the markup. Pages built this way are also usable on small-screen devices with almost no alteration, and making pages that print well becomes absolutely trivial.
I would prefer to see new features going into XHTML rather than HTML. However, XHTML does need a modification IMHO: the spec states that XHTML which isn't well formed must not be rendered - I think it would be better to require the browser display a page saying something along the lines of "this page is broken, click this button to try and fix it - it may not render correctly". Forcing web developers into writing well formed code is a Good Thing, but the end user needs a way of trying to render the page anyway if the developer did muppet it up.
The trick to making bad web developers write good code is to make sure the people who are paying them know that they are bad developers - presenting a page stating that fact is a good way to do that.
Mod parent up. This is probably the best and most workable solution to the problem of bad html coding practices I've ever heard anybody suggest...
On a side note, the 1,000,000 figure is pretty much pulled out of nowhere - last I checked, the most pessimistic estimates were ~100,000.
Is that because you haven't 'checked' since 2004? The number of reported deaths in the conflict is close to (but less than) 100000, but obviously not all deaths in a conflict are reported.
Feel free to quarrel with their methodology if you're qualified, but (a) don't try to suggest that the numbers could not possibly be approaching the million mark, and (b) please do not try to imply that 100000 deaths brought on by a 'war of choice' isn't a truly hellish number.
Your Premise Is Wrong, We Are A REPUBLIC, Not A Democracy. There Is Quite A Big Difference Between The Two.
You know, I'm not an American, but it's idiotic claims like this--which seem to pop up surprisingly often--that really make me fear for the future of the USA. Where did this idea come from? What the hell is it that you think makes republics necessarily undemocratic?
"Republic" is a way of describing a country that refers to a the structure of its government, while "democracy" is a way of describing a country that indicates (in a very general way) how office holders are selected.
There is no problem with referring to a republic as a democracy so long as office holders are democratically elected, and there is no problem with referring to a democracy as a republic, provided it really has a republican form of government. A country can be one, the other, both, or neither.
I guess you do think that physics can completely describe the universe. But on what grounds are you claiming that this universe is [solely] a physical one? (Note that to approach the question of whether or not the universe is physical from the point of view of physics instantly involves you in question-begging again...)
This is an meaningless question, though. There is no evidence, even in theory,
that could settle it. Either the universe is purely physical or it isn't, but since we are only able to experience physical things, then we could never acquire any evidence that the universe was not purely physical. This is a problem for a lot of traditional philosophical arguments (the existence of god, free will, etc.). I think I first encountered this in A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic.
Well though you're right that there is likely no way to settle some sorts of questions, that doesn't make them meaningless. How to discuss problems like these was one of Kant's main concerns. He was interested, among other things, in establishing a philosophical justification for the objective reality of the physical sciences and describing the requirements for future metaphysical speculations (metaphysical questions are the questions such as the existence of god, free will and so on that you referred to). See, for example, the companion piece to the first Critique, the "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics").
Kant's starting point (partially in response to some of Hume's speculations) was that time and space must be conditions of human experience rather than things that can be experienced. This, according to Kant, is the reason that we can understand causality (since, i.e., if you didn't already understand time, cause and effect could never teach you about it...)
These sort of epistemological questions are important--especially if you're interested in science--partly because they force you to think about exactly what kinds of questions science is actually able to tackle, and about the nature of scientific claims and practice.
On the other hand, even if you think this is all nonsense, you may still find yourself in good philosophical company;-)
Well in the first place, you're assuming I'm taking the opposing position to yours. At this moment, I'm doing no such thing--I've only pointed out that your characterization of the free will problem was question-begging.
What is it that you think is going on inside your head? Do you think it's magic?
Well, what do you think is going on inside yours? Are you quite sure that physics can paint a complete picture of the universe?
... explain how, barring magic, any sort of "free will" can exist in a physical universe.
I guess you do think that physics can completely describe the universe. But on what grounds are you claiming that this universe is [solely] a physical one? (Note that to approach the question of whether or not the universe is physical from the point of view of physics instantly involves you in question-begging again...)
If you're actually interested in thinking about that question, you may want to look into Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Since you seem to enjoy jumping to conclusions, I will point out that I'm not claiming Kant was right about everything or about anything in particular, but the idea he called "Transcendental Idealism" is still tantalizing enough to be taken seriously by some philosophers, though not by some others.
In extremely brief terms, Kant postulated that space and time, rather than being entities in their own right are characteristics of our 'minds,' (my oversimplification, not Kant's), and that the only way we can understand the universe is in spatiotemporal terms regardless of what the universe might actually be 'like'. In other words, it's conceivable that the universe is not spatio-temporal per-se--and if it's not, then physics cannot provide an exhaustive description of it.
The point is that determinism is a tricky business, and it can't be dismissed or proved as casually as you would have us believe.
Anyone with who is physically identical to you in an identical situation (with the requisite identical past experiences) would do exactly the same thing as you are doing right now and at every moment from now until you're dead. At which point their body would decompose in an identical manner.
What exactly do you think you have proved with by observing that in an identical world, things would be identical? Does the word "tautology" mean anything to you?
If you think physics settles the question of free will, then I'd guess you're not that well versed in either physics or philosophy.
You can't skip the lima beans! If you include them, this method not only stores hydrogen more efficiently, it produces another usable fuel--namely methane. Admittedly the collection methods are, um, a bit uncomfortable...
According to TFQ, the people in question work for a web design firm. Chances are very good that almost any other local web design firm that they might migrate to can be considered as direct competitors to the original company.
This means that your comparison is not apropos to the situation. It'd be like you--as a software engineer--signing a contract that prohibited you from doing things that every company that employes software engineers needs (such as, say, employing variables or control structures in your work) for a year after leaving the organization.
The last time an employer showed me a contract like that, I explained--more diplomatically than this--that if they were going to hire me as a contractor with no security and they were going to try to prevent me from working in the same field after I no longer worked for them, that they could quadruple my salary and I'd take a twelve-month holiday after we parted ways.
In that case, the company simply struck that item from the contract. I suspect the whole problem came up there--as in this case--because the lawyers drawing up the contract had no real idea about the difference between software engineers developing high-value closed systems and IP, and web developers doing valuable, but ultimately open and reproducible work like making text <blink>blink</blink>
The core meaning of 'unprofitable' means: consumes more energy than it produces. So when a thing fails to make money, that's the market's way of telling you that you are wasting your natural resources...
What total bullsh*t this is. 'Unprofitable' is also a way of saying the product or service is priced too cheaply to account for all of the energy that goes into manufacturing/providing it and eventually disposing of it.
What you are describing is the outcome of the nasty corporate habit of externalizing whatever costs they can; remember that these costs (i.e. the costs of disposal etc) must be paid for one way or another, whether collectively through taxation and government facilities, by user fees charged to the actual purchasers, or in higher prices if the manufacturers were to incorporate those costs into their pricing.
The problem is that corporations offload as many costs as they can so that the sticker price on new electronics and other iStuff (TM) has little relationship to the total amount of money/energy that the item is eventually going to cost.
I highly doubt that warships would be connecting to the public Internet with the users downloading any number of buggy apps to conflict with mission-critical applications.
Hopefully nobody on these ships is allowed to play 'Minesweeper' or 'Missile Attack'...
It is possible in principle; i.e. it is logically possible to make observations that would contradict the claims made by the theory. This is a claim about logic, not about whether we do or do not have the capability to verify the (non) existence of extraterrestrial civilizations.
I.D. / C.S. are considered unscientific partly--but not only--because there are no conceivable observations that can contradict the claims made by the theory (i.e. it's not possible to observe anything that falsifies statements such as 'observation X is evidence of the hand of omniscient, omnipotent, unknowable designer Y at work in the universe' unless it's designer Y appearing to you directly and denying his or her involvement with the phenomena in question...)
Slashdot Mirror
And then, no doubt, people like you will be telling us that there's no point in making web pages to standards until 90% of users are using fully CSS4 compliant user agents.
Anyhow, since when is CSS 2 'outdated'? Not only was the CSS 2 spec most recently updated YESTERDAY, but it's a specification that's actually tailored to the real-world implementations:
As for your claim that the CSS specs are 'difficult-to-use,' in what profession other than web development have you ever heard so many people whine about having to learn the basic tools of the trade?
It's not. They're both equally stupid.
Something like <div class="foo">Lorem ipsum dolor sit.</div> is much preferable a) because it can be overriden by user stylesheets, and b) because it's possible to change the text alignment at a later time if it becomes useful to do so without editing the document.
Not quite. The alt attribute is required on img elements in HTML 4.01 too. A fortiori to your argument though.
Using CSS 1.0, that's probably impossible. However, that's not too surprising since that version of the spec didn't even pretend to offer much more than basic text formatting.
But besides that: CSS 1.0?! You do know that even the revised version of that spec is eight and a half years old, right? And that the original version of it is nearly eleven years old? Even the earliest version of the CSS 2 spec has passed its ninth birthday.
In general the problem is not, and never has been, the specifications. The problem has always been the implementations. Once browsers started to actually do what the specification specified, the job suddenly got dramatically easier. Before about 2002 or 2003, the table-based -vs- tableless layout debate made some kind of sense. But since then, the widely-used browsers--even including IE 6 and all of its bugs--have become robust enough that if tableless layouts aren't making your job easier it's because you don't know what you're doing.
In the past 3 years, for example, I've used one base template for every HTML document I've created, and the actual structural markup probably changes less than 15% from the original in any given case--regardless of layout. I can change columns from side to side by changing three CSS declarations, and any number of columns can be added by adding one new div element per column to the markup. Pages built this way are also usable on small-screen devices with almost no alteration, and making pages that print well becomes absolutely trivial.
Mod parent up. This is probably the best and most workable solution to the problem of bad html coding practices I've ever heard anybody suggest...
Well I, for one, welcome our new, neutered vampire overlords...
Memo comrade? Why should we need a memo to tell us what's always been true? There's more than a hint of crimethink about your post I'd say...
"This is information retrieval, not information disbursement!"
Correction:
bushwind, noun: a wind which blows nobody any good. See "ill wind".
Is that because you haven't 'checked' since 2004? The number of reported deaths in the conflict is close to (but less than) 100000, but obviously not all deaths in a conflict are reported.
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated 100000+ 'excess' deaths by 2004. By July 2006--that's a full year ago now--they estimated over 650000 deaths.
Feel free to quarrel with their methodology if you're qualified, but (a) don't try to suggest that the numbers could not possibly be approaching the million mark, and (b) please do not try to imply that 100000 deaths brought on by a 'war of choice' isn't a truly hellish number.
Good god. I first read that as 'gyno mouse'...
You know, I'm not an American, but it's idiotic claims like this--which seem to pop up surprisingly often--that really make me fear for the future of the USA. Where did this idea come from? What the hell is it that you think makes republics necessarily undemocratic?
"Republic" is a way of describing a country that refers to a the structure of its government, while "democracy" is a way of describing a country that indicates (in a very general way) how office holders are selected.
There is no problem with referring to a republic as a democracy so long as office holders are democratically elected, and there is no problem with referring to a democracy as a republic, provided it really has a republican form of government. A country can be one, the other, both, or neither.
Well though you're right that there is likely no way to settle some sorts of questions, that doesn't make them meaningless. How to discuss problems like these was one of Kant's main concerns. He was interested, among other things, in establishing a philosophical justification for the objective reality of the physical sciences and describing the requirements for future metaphysical speculations (metaphysical questions are the questions such as the existence of god, free will and so on that you referred to). See, for example, the companion piece to the first Critique, the "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics").
Kant's starting point (partially in response to some of Hume's speculations) was that time and space must be conditions of human experience rather than things that can be experienced. This, according to Kant, is the reason that we can understand causality (since, i.e., if you didn't already understand time, cause and effect could never teach you about it...)
These sort of epistemological questions are important--especially if you're interested in science--partly because they force you to think about exactly what kinds of questions science is actually able to tackle, and about the nature of scientific claims and practice.
On the other hand, even if you think this is all nonsense, you may still find yourself in good philosophical company ;-)
Well, what do you think is going on inside yours? Are you quite sure that physics can paint a complete picture of the universe?
I guess you do think that physics can completely describe the universe. But on what grounds are you claiming that this universe is [solely] a physical one? (Note that to approach the question of whether or not the universe is physical from the point of view of physics instantly involves you in question-begging again...)
If you're actually interested in thinking about that question, you may want to look into Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Since you seem to enjoy jumping to conclusions, I will point out that I'm not claiming Kant was right about everything or about anything in particular, but the idea he called "Transcendental Idealism" is still tantalizing enough to be taken seriously by some philosophers, though not by some others.
In extremely brief terms, Kant postulated that space and time, rather than being entities in their own right are characteristics of our 'minds,' (my oversimplification, not Kant's), and that the only way we can understand the universe is in spatiotemporal terms regardless of what the universe might actually be 'like'. In other words, it's conceivable that the universe is not spatio-temporal per-se--and if it's not, then physics cannot provide an exhaustive description of it.
The point is that determinism is a tricky business, and it can't be dismissed or proved as casually as you would have us believe.
What exactly do you think you have proved with by observing that in an identical world, things would be identical? Does the word "tautology" mean anything to you?
If you think physics settles the question of free will, then I'd guess you're not that well versed in either physics or philosophy.
Err, no.
They use PVD to coat the dies. The dies are the things that stamp the coins, not the coins themselves.
See also:
You can't skip the lima beans! If you include them, this method not only stores hydrogen more efficiently, it produces another usable fuel--namely methane. Admittedly the collection methods are, um, a bit uncomfortable...
Nitpick: 9% is approximately 1/11. That means that 10/11 parts is 'packaging,' so there's ten times as much non-hydrogen stuff as there is hydrogen.
No, I think you've totally missed the point.
According to TFQ, the people in question work for a web design firm. Chances are very good that almost any other local web design firm that they might migrate to can be considered as direct competitors to the original company.
This means that your comparison is not apropos to the situation. It'd be like you--as a software engineer--signing a contract that prohibited you from doing things that every company that employes software engineers needs (such as, say, employing variables or control structures in your work) for a year after leaving the organization.
The last time an employer showed me a contract like that, I explained--more diplomatically than this--that if they were going to hire me as a contractor with no security and they were going to try to prevent me from working in the same field after I no longer worked for them, that they could quadruple my salary and I'd take a twelve-month holiday after we parted ways.
In that case, the company simply struck that item from the contract. I suspect the whole problem came up there--as in this case--because the lawyers drawing up the contract had no real idea about the difference between software engineers developing high-value closed systems and IP, and web developers doing valuable, but ultimately open and reproducible work like making text <blink>blink</blink>
What total bullsh*t this is. 'Unprofitable' is also a way of saying the product or service is priced too cheaply to account for all of the energy that goes into manufacturing/providing it and eventually disposing of it.
What you are describing is the outcome of the nasty corporate habit of externalizing whatever costs they can; remember that these costs (i.e. the costs of disposal etc) must be paid for one way or another, whether collectively through taxation and government facilities, by user fees charged to the actual purchasers, or in higher prices if the manufacturers were to incorporate those costs into their pricing.
The problem is that corporations offload as many costs as they can so that the sticker price on new electronics and other iStuff (TM) has little relationship to the total amount of money/energy that the item is eventually going to cost.
How about this: 'throughput' is much greater when e-coli is used...
Hopefully nobody on these ships is allowed to play 'Minesweeper' or 'Missile Attack'...
It's quite possible that even if people do not dispose properly of burned-out CFLs that mercury emissions will still be lower overall.
Some retailers (such as, for example, Ikea in Canada) collect burned-out CFLs for proper disposal.
Please read before posting:
It is possible in principle; i.e. it is logically possible to make observations that would contradict the claims made by the theory. This is a claim about logic, not about whether we do or do not have the capability to verify the (non) existence of extraterrestrial civilizations.
I.D. / C.S. are considered unscientific partly--but not only--because there are no conceivable observations that can contradict the claims made by the theory (i.e. it's not possible to observe anything that falsifies statements such as 'observation X is evidence of the hand of omniscient, omnipotent, unknowable designer Y at work in the universe' unless it's designer Y appearing to you directly and denying his or her involvement with the phenomena in question...)