So I'm betting Mozilla/Firefox actually crashes regularly on non-techies simply because they visit sites that most techies don't bother to test the browser on.
My wife uses Firefox on Win2k. In the months she's had it it has maybe crashed once. She visits all sorts of random sites that "techies wouldn't test their browser on"
I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix and Mozilla pre 1.0 before that. Combined all generations of the browser have crashed maybe a dozen times for me.
Contrast that to IE that crashes about every 10th time I use it.
It probably depends on the computer, what else is running, etc. etc. I'm willing to bet that has much more to do with it than the browser itself. You can also report these bugs and they will get fixed.
1. They didn't try to push their way of packaging applications on you which IMHO is the WRONG way.
2. It was easier to change the themes/colors of things. I know its nit-picky but I didn't really care for the way it looks and I couldn't figure out how to make it different.
But other than that I agree with you wholeheartedly. I never understood why GNOME and KDE had to each have their own separate apps, when they could easily have taken existing apps and ported them to their toolkit or used wrappers or something.
Sounds like the end of the human race... anyone who drives would be killed by their cars.. and the green's heads would explode having nothing else to protest.:)
Assuming of course that those people who voted for independent candidates would have showed up at all to vote for anyone, and then there's still no guarentee that they would have voted for Gore.
I'm voting for Badnarik. If he (or someone that expresses that particular viewpoint) weren't running, I wouldn't vote, I refuse to vote for more of the same. I'm sure there were people in Florida that felt the same way.
And then of course you're dismissing all those people that "accidentally" voted for Pat Buchanan. If I recall the difference between Bush and Gore was 1000 votes. Buchanan received 17,484.
Awww screw it, lets just make it illegal for these terrorist third parties to run. Obviously they're just a plot to steal the fair* elections away from the people.
*The actual meaning of the word 'fair' may not apply.
That's not my argument. My argument is that it isn't based on race its based on economics.
I also said that I disagree with the law, but my point is that breaking it is not the way to change it. People don't (most of the time) go to jail when they haven't broken a law.
In 2000 Nader got a bit better than 1% of the total vote. In other words it wouldn't have made any difference in the outcome. So no Nader didn't 'steal' votes, the big media said that.
Now think, why would the big media keep saying that? Do you think it could be because the Republicrats make decisions that benefit their profits? Seems like telling people that third parties only 'steal' votes from 'real' candidates is some good FUD to keep the powerful in power, lest the population suddenly figure out that there is a better choice out there and actually elect someone who would make a real difference.
First of all thanks for the responses. I think I have a better understanding of where the Green party stands. Though I don't agree with all of your points, I would certainly like to see more Green party politics in the elections.
One point I strongly disagree with is the idea that drug laws or the electoral college is racist. Some people are racist yes, but institutions and laws are just that.
Now like you, I strongly disagree with the current drug laws; however, wheither or not you agree with a law, don't break it and you won't go to jail for it.
Its very politically incorrect to say but I'm going to say it anyway. People of color tend to be poor and poor people commit more crimes. Should we change our laws because certain groups of people cannot control themselves and be responsible for their actions?
As for the Electoral College, the idea is so that a rural person's vote counts as much as a person in an urban area. Otherwise we'd have the policies of New York City for the whole nation which are probably not right for a farming community in South Dakota. Instant Runoff voting doesn't exactly do that. Possibly a combination of the two. Anyway, I digress: the point is the EC doesn't count slaves as 3/5 of a person now. How are they still being racist? That's like saying that because I used to be a little kid that couldn't tie my own shoes that I'm still a little kid that can't tie my shoes (even though I learned to tie them sometime ago).
Not the say the EC is perfect. One change that I would like to see is for the EC votes to be proportional to how the state voted. For instance in Florida instead of awarding all the votes to one candidate half should have gone to Bush and the other half to Gore. That way all voters in large states that have a broad range of political opinions have a say in the process.
I'm using Fedora, and when I installed Firefox via apt, the shell script it uses just works.
Desktop Linux really needs a unified place for specifying what application handles what mimetypes or protocols. Something somewhere between the current/etc/magic file and the Window's registry. I think it would solve several problems including this one.
This stuff doesn't happen on Windows with Firefox. Actually things seem to work correctly in Gnome too but that might be a Fedora/Redhat thing. At anyrate I'm using BlackBox and I don't have a problem with the shell script.
Ugh, if there is one thing I can't stand its generalizations. I'm not really even a Republican but how about some clarrifications.
The GOP mainstays are piss-poor areas of the US where the chances of being a nerd with various gaming machines and enough free time to post on a webboard is pretty low.
Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Birmingham, and a few other major cities with decent economies and young technical people all disagree with you. In fact most of the poor people in this area vote democratic. Also doesn't your assertion refute the claim that the Republicans are all rich white guys?
Modern day Republicans are closely related to theocrats and the exteme right,
No, just the vocal ones. Take a peak at John Mccain especially. At the federal level he's the only one ballsey enough to speak out against the neo-cons but I'm sure there are others that agree with him.
Most of the genx/y types who frequent this site really don't see the logic in the GOP's current platform of driving the US back to the 30's both economically and socially.
Yes yes yes, and the Dems are going to force on us socialized medicine and let Paris run our country, later we'll go bankrupt from helping everyone. Please, this isn't even original.
What is "Republican" today? Good question. What's a Democrat? It gets redefined everytime Bush opens his mouth. I doubt people redefine themselves based on one speech. Most people seem to like Bush or hate him no matter what party they're in. (I know plenty of Republicans that don't like Bush).
The party of small government and fiscal responsbility is no more That's true, happened a long time ago, however by the same token its been a long time since the Democrats really cared about the working man either other than a few nice words around election time.
Libertarianism gets a lot of play here, but its whatever you want to define it as. Very few bother with the US Libertarian party.
So vote Libertarian and encourage others to do the same. Complaining on/. isn't going to help.
A lot of people would welcome well written conservative views, but like I wrote earlier they don't exist in the Republican world
By your next statements it sounds more like you think they're not well written because you disagree with them. I read several good conservative arguments on social issues like abortion just in this thread alone.
Lastly, the genx/y generation is skeptial, doessnt share dad's bigotry, doesn't share dad's religious views, etc
So now people who disagree with you are bigots? As a gen-x person, the older I get the more I realize that my dad usually knew what he was talking about after-all. I think everyone comes to that realization eventually.
thus you're going to get a lot of "crazy leftists" with "crazy" views like those held by the founders of the US, which the Republican seem to despise. Just read their 2004 convention platform: fuck gays, fuck the economy, fuck your complaints about the war, more PATRIOT ACT legislation, and blame Democrats for everything.
Well believe it or not I have my doubts that the founding fathers would have been for gay marriage, abortion, affermative action or generally higher taxes either. By the same token they also would have been against government sponsership of corporations, the war and the PATRIOT ACT. They weren't dems or republicans. They were Libertarians (well other than gay marriage).
Perhaps, these views aren't popular for a reason? No conspiracy needed.
Last poll I saw says that 56% of the country agrees with them.
However the "Business World" you refer too usually consists of very large, large and maybe a few medium sized companies.
The vast majority of the economy is made up of smaller businesses that for the most part are ignored by these surveys. Many of these businesses hire a geek to support and install their server stuff, and their server stuff is often whatever the geek throws together (maybe new hardware if there is a budget for that). These machines either started their lives as windows or started their lives as parts, neither of which is going to get included.
I'd bet you'd be surprised to find out how many businesses operate this way!
Well I've read all this about AbiWord in the past but for fun I decided to give it a try (just now). The very first thing I noticed is how blazingly fast it is. Starts up in about a second, scrolls pretty smoothly, the UI is very responsive. All problems I've always had with OOo.
And now to your assertions that it doesn't have tables or headings or indexes. Well there's a 'Tables' menu... so yes it does tables, I tried them out, they work like you would expect them to. Under the 'Format' menu I found Headers, Footers, Footnotes and Endnotes. They all appear to work as expected. I'm not sure what you mean by indexes. It does do page numbering which while OOo does it too its much more difficult to set up.
I don't see any TOC tools but at the same time I didn't know that Word or OOo could do that either so I don't even know where to look.
AbiWord also has a plugin system that allows for things like dictionary lookups, Google searches and Bablefish translation. Can Word do that? I can see those features being much more useful for most people that TOC. IMHO of course.
At anyrate please try the new versions of AbiWord before spreading FUD. It is certainly much more than just a 'Rich Text Editor'.
I've used it now for about 10 minutes and I can see already that its a better product than OOo, and at least comes pretty close to Word, which is a good thing since I'm on Linux and that option is unavailiable to me.
That's why he mentioned PDF. I've had lots of success using HTMLDOC to make reports. You make a regular HTML template (like what i use for all my stuff) some big table with bunches of report information and HTMLDOC coverts it to a PDF and takes care of all the messy page breaks, etc.
I listened to a bit of the speach (it was on CSPAN on TV). He specifically stated that not all uses of P2P are illegal. Which is a bit refreshing.
Honestly, while I thing the gov should be worried about more important matters, there's no way that what these people were doing wasn't obviously illegal. There are three ways to change laws in this country, the first is to vote for people who support your cause, secondly is to encourage others to do the same. If the first two don't work then the only option is to OPENLY rebel. Hiding on closed networks sharing music does not 'fight the man'. When you get caught you go down in disgrace, no support.
Now I'm not advocating taking the second route, I don't think the first has throughly been explored, most types of people "concerned" by this issue, are looking for ways to do it anyway without the trouble of getting caught, or people who really just don't care because they don't really don't share a bunch of music but its cool to say "fight the man" "RIAA Sucks!"
If an event isn't random, then it must be under the control of a preceding event.
Looks like a matter of semantics. For instance say I pick up my pen and twirl it. Why did I do that? Because I'm bored. Why am I bored? Because I have a boring job. First of all I wouldn't nessicarily consider being bored and 'event' rather a state of mind. My point is that you still can't predict human behavior in general. For instance I could have picked up the pen and chewed on the end. I could have picked up a different object on my desk such as my keys. I could have decided instead to take a walk to the water cooler out of my boredom. Without knowing me, there's no way to know. Also the choices of others could affect my decision. I didn't get up and go to the water cooler because my boss decided to stroll through the cube farm about the same time. (but not that I couldn't have chosen to do so anyway and told my boss I was doing something important).
Besides (and this is semantic to) a cause of something is a long way from controlling it.
Programming a catalogue of complex behaviors isn't the hard part of AI research. The main difficulty is getting the computer to respond properly to discriminative stimuli.
My point here is that programming is rule based. I submit that it is impossible to make an AI that can respond properly to discriminative stimuli. The programming language at its very core would have to be discriminative... and you'd need a discriminative AI to be able to know what to do with it... a computer either has a rule or does something randomly while a human can weigh in on what the 'best' decision is even if all the outcomes are undesirable or unknown.
Why would I do those things if they went against my best interests? Is capricious and irrational behavior essential to your definition of free will?
No but the mere fact that I can do something irrational if I so choose proves the existance of free will. People do irrational things all the time, I don't see why this is such a surprise.
If the options are equal in all other ways, [snip]
They almost never are, we have to choose what to do with what is given to us in a certain situation. By your logic we'd all be drones trying to make ourselves happy. But if that's true how can you explain why we get up early and go to work every day? Its not immediatly rewarding, we choose to do it to get a bigger reward later. How are some people able to sacrifice/risk their life for someone else? Not much reward in that if you're dead... the reward that someone else goes on living? What good does that do you personally? What if you didn't even know the person you saved, what is the rational cause of all of that?
"I have free will in the sense that I can make decisions,"
Uh... DUH. The very definition of free will is the idea that we can choose what we should do with whatever external force is acting upon us. Wheither that be nature, or someone else's choice. I don't think anyone who believes in free will would disagree that external forces cause us to make decisions, but its unpredictable what decision a given person will make. And no unpredictable doesn't mean random.
"but I did not implement the decision-making algorithms that control my behavior."
How do you know there is one? The fallacy here is assumption that humans are like computers. Which isn't true, at least in the sense in which we currently understand computers, otherwise we'd be able to build an AI easily (as someone already mentioned)
"I never programmed myself to prefer peanuts to cashews, or to be attracted to waist to hip ratios of 0.7. Nor did I set the temperature that would make me retreat from a heat source."
No, but genetics did. There's still nothing stopping you from from eating cashews anyway, date someone with a ratio of 0.8 or holding you hand over a flame even when its too hot.
For example, I personally was afraid to speak in public, when I got to college I chose to major in speech communication. I felt it would be better to learn something I wasn't good at would be better than rehashing something I already knew (computers). Even when the dot-bomb had driven the IT industry to its deepest depths and I twice lost my job, I never went more than a few weeks without finding another one. Why? Because I can communicate effectively, I bettered myself because of a choice I made. Things would have been much different for me had I not made that choice. Was my previous inability to communicate genetic, or perhaps a product of the way I was raised? Who knows? But what difference does that make, my own choice made the difference, and I'm sure there are tons of examples from other people just like that.
I hypothesize that free will was a concept manufactured to defend a god that was either stupid enough of cruel enough or sufficiently reckless to create things like the tree of knowledge and the devil.
Nice dig at Christianity, I'm not going to comment on God's intentions since I'm not looking for a theological debate, however, the funny thing is there are tons of Christians that believe their lives are predetermined by God so I certainly don't believe those people think that...
First of all it assumes that the 'left' is 'empithetical'. Which is very subjective. For instance I don't believe the left is very empithetical to unborn children.
Secondly it assumes that all people fall into one side or the other. Not only untrue, but quite frankly media BS and stupid. Someone watches to much CNN. There are plenty of people who agree with some issues on both sides, personally anyone who agrees with everything spouted off by the 'left' or the 'right' without deciding on each issue for themselves is a blind sheep.
And finally as a bonus, it assumes the 'left' and the 'right' are different which they aren't except in the trollish social issues such as abortion and homosexuality where there are no clear answers and actually doing something either way is going to piss off half the population.
Government should be modded -1 flamebait/case of the Mondays//shut up and leave me alone
OH AND FOR AN OFFTOPIC RANT.. the stupid fricking lameness filter should be shot. CAN'T YOU CHECK IF I'M ONLY DOING ONE LINE SEPARATED OUT???? ITS PERL, ITS NOT THAT HARD
Arrrg!!! I'm going to strangle the next person who says this! Are you so brain-washed you can't go Google for some stats instead of simply regurgitating something Al Gore said in a debate 4 years ago?
I can prove your assertion wrong right away: I am not one of the wealthest 2% of Americans. In fact I chose to live in a smaller city, and work for a locally owned ISP and I make significantly less money than someone working for a real corporation. I got a tax cut. Sure someone making more money than me got a bigger cut... but they make more money AND they pay a higher percentage of their income in the first place!!!
It amazes me how much the Dems have blinded people's eyes to the unfairness of the tax system. Sure on the surface it looks fair. If you're poor you pay a low percentage of your income. If you're rich you pay a higher percentage of your income. But wait, what's this little word 'percentage'? That kind of changes things. Here's an example. (round numbers to make this easier).
Say I'm making $50k a year, and Bob makes $100k a year. The government puts me in a tax bracket that says I need to pay 25% of my salary in taxes. Bob is in a tax bracket to pay 50% of his salary in taxes. Sounds fair... he pays double the percentage in tax that I do. But wait a minute, what's the tax in real dollars? 25% of 50k is $12,500... but 50% of $100k is $50k!! So Bob makes double what I make, but he actually pays 4 times what I do in taxes. Somehow that doesn't seem fair.
Re:Does it matter? Opera's still the best browser.
on
Netscape 7.2 Released
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· Score: 1
How are sessions different from profiles?
Firefox has far more customizablility when it comes to layout, Try getting the bookmark bar under the address bar in Opera. In Firefox its a matter of drag and drop. Customizability in Opera is a bunch of confusing settings in two places in the menus.
But really that doesn't matter much to me. Most people (including myself) don't really mess with that much customization. I personally still use the default firefox setup (well I take that back I moved my Google search box). At any rate the three biggest problems with Opera I see:
1. It still doesn't render right. Lots of CSS bugs in Opera. As a web developer this is not acceptable.
2. The new interface has too much eye candy and takes up too much screen space. Its confusing, especially if you want people to switch from IE or another browser, they're going to get lost.
3. Incomplete ECMA script support, and very few work arounds. (BTW this is the same complaint I have about Konquerer). IE's Jscript sucks donkey balls but at least with some hacks I can still do some pretty advanced stuff. And Mozilla and Firefox have almost 100% compatibility with ECMA so I can look on the W3C's site as a reference.
Re:Does it matter? Opera's still the best browser.
on
Netscape 7.2 Released
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· Score: 1
I think he's probably refering to the rending and CSS support that nearly rival IE./kidding... Opera is a bit better, a bit.
1. Since all three are built from the same software base and the Slashdot summary even says that Netscape 7.2 is Mozilla 1.7... why would you expect something different?
2. Why are you blaming the browser for dumb web developers that don't know how to make websites that work for everyone?
3. Why are you bothering to visit IE only sites? Surely even if the information on them is useful it can be found elsewhere without the need for proprietary software.
Slashdot Mirror
I opened these in Firefox on Linux. Die 1 showed an input box, Die 2 showed nothing at all, but neither crashed the browser.
So I'm betting Mozilla/Firefox actually crashes regularly on non-techies simply because they visit sites that most techies don't bother to test the browser on.
My wife uses Firefox on Win2k. In the months she's had it it has maybe crashed once. She visits all sorts of random sites that "techies wouldn't test their browser on"
I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix and Mozilla pre 1.0 before that. Combined all generations of the browser have crashed maybe a dozen times for me.
Contrast that to IE that crashes about every 10th time I use it.
It probably depends on the computer, what else is running, etc. etc. I'm willing to bet that has much more to do with it than the browser itself. You can also report these bugs and they will get fixed.
The optical version will exploit your eyes if you turn it upside-down and look into it.
ROX would be awesome if:
1. They didn't try to push their way of packaging applications on you which IMHO is the WRONG way.
2. It was easier to change the themes/colors of things. I know its nit-picky but I didn't really care for the way it looks and I couldn't figure out how to make it different.
But other than that I agree with you wholeheartedly. I never understood why GNOME and KDE had to each have their own separate apps, when they could easily have taken existing apps and ported them to their toolkit or used wrappers or something.
Sounds like the end of the human race ... anyone who drives would be killed by their cars .. and the green's heads would explode having nothing else to protest. :)
welcome our intellegent mechanical overlords!!!
...)
(Had to be done. Never done it before. Feel a bit dirty now
Assuming of course that those people who voted for independent candidates would have showed up at all to vote for anyone, and then there's still no guarentee that they would have voted for Gore.
I'm voting for Badnarik. If he (or someone that expresses that particular viewpoint) weren't running, I wouldn't vote, I refuse to vote for more of the same. I'm sure there were people in Florida that felt the same way.
And then of course you're dismissing all those people that "accidentally" voted for Pat Buchanan. If I recall the difference between Bush and Gore was 1000 votes. Buchanan received 17,484.
Awww screw it, lets just make it illegal for these terrorist third parties to run. Obviously they're just a plot to steal the fair* elections away from the people.
*The actual meaning of the word 'fair' may not apply.
That's not my argument. My argument is that it isn't based on race its based on economics.
I also said that I disagree with the law, but my point is that breaking it is not the way to change it. People don't (most of the time) go to jail when they haven't broken a law.
In 2000 Nader got a bit better than 1% of the total vote. In other words it wouldn't have made any difference in the outcome. So no Nader didn't 'steal' votes, the big media said that.
Now think, why would the big media keep saying that? Do you think it could be because the Republicrats make decisions that benefit their profits? Seems like telling people that third parties only 'steal' votes from 'real' candidates is some good FUD to keep the powerful in power, lest the population suddenly figure out that there is a better choice out there and actually elect someone who would make a real difference.
First of all thanks for the responses. I think I have a better understanding of where the Green party stands. Though I don't agree with all of your points, I would certainly like to see more Green party politics in the elections.
One point I strongly disagree with is the idea that drug laws or the electoral college is racist. Some people are racist yes, but institutions and laws are just that.
Now like you, I strongly disagree with the current drug laws; however, wheither or not you agree with a law, don't break it and you won't go to jail for it.
Its very politically incorrect to say but I'm going to say it anyway. People of color tend to be poor and poor people commit more crimes. Should we change our laws because certain groups of people cannot control themselves and be responsible for their actions?
As for the Electoral College, the idea is so that a rural person's vote counts as much as a person in an urban area. Otherwise we'd have the policies of New York City for the whole nation which are probably not right for a farming community in South Dakota. Instant Runoff voting doesn't exactly do that. Possibly a combination of the two. Anyway, I digress: the point is the EC doesn't count slaves as 3/5 of a person now. How are they still being racist? That's like saying that because I used to be a little kid that couldn't tie my own shoes that I'm still a little kid that can't tie my shoes (even though I learned to tie them sometime ago).
Not the say the EC is perfect. One change that I would like to see is for the EC votes to be proportional to how the state voted. For instance in Florida instead of awarding all the votes to one candidate half should have gone to Bush and the other half to Gore. That way all voters in large states that have a broad range of political opinions have a say in the process.
I'm using Fedora, and when I installed Firefox via apt, the shell script it uses just works.
/etc/magic file and the Window's registry. I think it would solve several problems including this one.
Desktop Linux really needs a unified place for specifying what application handles what mimetypes or protocols. Something somewhere between the current
This stuff doesn't happen on Windows with Firefox. Actually things seem to work correctly in Gnome too but that might be a Fedora/Redhat thing. At anyrate I'm using BlackBox and I don't have a problem with the shell script.
Ugh, if there is one thing I can't stand its generalizations. I'm not really even a Republican but how about some clarrifications.
/. isn't going to help.
The GOP mainstays are piss-poor areas of the US where the chances of being a nerd with various gaming machines and enough free time to post on a webboard is pretty low.
Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Birmingham, and a few other major cities with decent economies and young technical people all disagree with you. In fact most of the poor people in this area vote democratic. Also doesn't your assertion refute the claim that the Republicans are all rich white guys?
Modern day Republicans are closely related to theocrats and the exteme right,
No, just the vocal ones. Take a peak at John Mccain especially. At the federal level he's the only one ballsey enough to speak out against the neo-cons but I'm sure there are others that agree with him.
Most of the genx/y types who frequent this site really don't see the logic in the GOP's current platform of driving the US back to the 30's both economically and socially.
Yes yes yes, and the Dems are going to force on us socialized medicine and let Paris run our country, later we'll go bankrupt from helping everyone. Please, this isn't even original.
What is "Republican" today? Good question. What's a Democrat?
It gets redefined everytime Bush opens his mouth. I doubt people redefine themselves based on one speech. Most people seem to like Bush or hate him no matter what party they're in. (I know plenty of Republicans that don't like Bush).
The party of small government and fiscal responsbility is no more
That's true, happened a long time ago, however by the same token its been a long time since the Democrats really cared about the working man either other than a few nice words around election time.
Libertarianism gets a lot of play here, but its whatever you want to define it as. Very few bother with the US Libertarian party.
So vote Libertarian and encourage others to do the same. Complaining on
A lot of people would welcome well written conservative views, but like I wrote earlier they don't exist in the Republican world
By your next statements it sounds more like you think they're not well written because you disagree with them. I read several good conservative arguments on social issues like abortion just in this thread alone.
Lastly, the genx/y generation is skeptial, doessnt share dad's bigotry, doesn't share dad's religious views, etc
So now people who disagree with you are bigots? As a gen-x person, the older I get the more I realize that my dad usually knew what he was talking about after-all. I think everyone comes to that realization eventually.
thus you're going to get a lot of "crazy leftists" with "crazy" views like those held by the founders of the US, which the Republican seem to despise. Just read their 2004 convention platform: fuck gays, fuck the economy, fuck your complaints about the war, more PATRIOT ACT legislation, and blame Democrats for everything.
Well believe it or not I have my doubts that the founding fathers would have been for gay marriage, abortion, affermative action or generally higher taxes either. By the same token they also would have been against government sponsership of corporations, the war and the PATRIOT ACT. They weren't dems or republicans. They were Libertarians (well other than gay marriage).
Perhaps, these views aren't popular for a reason? No conspiracy needed.
Last poll I saw says that 56% of the country agrees with them.
However the "Business World" you refer too usually consists of very large, large and maybe a few medium sized companies.
The vast majority of the economy is made up of smaller businesses that for the most part are ignored by these surveys. Many of these businesses hire a geek to support and install their server stuff, and their server stuff is often whatever the geek throws together (maybe new hardware if there is a budget for that). These machines either started their lives as windows or started their lives as parts, neither of which is going to get included.
I'd bet you'd be surprised to find out how many businesses operate this way!
Well I've read all this about AbiWord in the past but for fun I decided to give it a try (just now). The very first thing I noticed is how blazingly fast it is. Starts up in about a second, scrolls pretty smoothly, the UI is very responsive. All problems I've always had with OOo.
... so yes it does tables, I tried them out, they work like you would expect them to. Under the 'Format' menu I found Headers, Footers, Footnotes and Endnotes. They all appear to work as expected. I'm not sure what you mean by indexes. It does do page numbering which while OOo does it too its much more difficult to set up.
And now to your assertions that it doesn't have tables or headings or indexes. Well there's a 'Tables' menu
I don't see any TOC tools but at the same time I didn't know that Word or OOo could do that either so I don't even know where to look.
AbiWord also has a plugin system that allows for things like dictionary lookups, Google searches and Bablefish translation. Can Word do that? I can see those features being much more useful for most people that TOC. IMHO of course.
At anyrate please try the new versions of AbiWord before spreading FUD. It is certainly much more than just a 'Rich Text Editor'.
I've used it now for about 10 minutes and I can see already that its a better product than OOo, and at least comes pretty close to Word, which is a good thing since I'm on Linux and that option is unavailiable to me.
This has been talked about on blogs, on the Security Focus mailing lists and at several conferences, at length, for months now.
In fact the searches don't really even work anymore because the results all return articles, stories etc. about how easy it is to find this stuff.
That's why he mentioned PDF. I've had lots of success using HTMLDOC to make reports. You make a regular HTML template (like what i use for all my stuff) some big table with bunches of report information and HTMLDOC coverts it to a PDF and takes care of all the messy page breaks, etc.
I listened to a bit of the speach (it was on CSPAN on TV). He specifically stated that not all uses of P2P are illegal. Which is a bit refreshing.
Honestly, while I thing the gov should be worried about more important matters, there's no way that what these people were doing wasn't obviously illegal. There are three ways to change laws in this country, the first is to vote for people who support your cause, secondly is to encourage others to do the same. If the first two don't work then the only option is to OPENLY rebel. Hiding on closed networks sharing music does not 'fight the man'. When you get caught you go down in disgrace, no support.
Now I'm not advocating taking the second route, I don't think the first has throughly been explored, most types of people "concerned" by this issue, are looking for ways to do it anyway without the trouble of getting caught, or people who really just don't care because they don't really don't share a bunch of music but its cool to say "fight the man" "RIAA Sucks!"
I mean we'll never actually have real girlfriends
/gazes at the pic of my smokin' hot wife in her wedding dress on my desk. :)
Speak for yourself!
If an event isn't random, then it must be under the control of a preceding event.
... and you'd need a discriminative AI to be able to know what to do with it ... a computer either has a rule or does something randomly while a human can weigh in on what the 'best' decision is even if all the outcomes are undesirable or unknown.
... the reward that someone else goes on living? What good does that do you personally? What if you didn't even know the person you saved, what is the rational cause of all of that?
Looks like a matter of semantics. For instance say I pick up my pen and twirl it. Why did I do that? Because I'm bored. Why am I bored? Because I have a boring job. First of all I wouldn't nessicarily consider being bored and 'event' rather a state of mind. My point is that you still can't predict human behavior in general. For instance I could have picked up the pen and chewed on the end. I could have picked up a different object on my desk such as my keys. I could have decided instead to take a walk to the water cooler out of my boredom. Without knowing me, there's no way to know. Also the choices of others could affect my decision. I didn't get up and go to the water cooler because my boss decided to stroll through the cube farm about the same time. (but not that I couldn't have chosen to do so anyway and told my boss I was doing something important).
Besides (and this is semantic to) a cause of something is a long way from controlling it.
Programming a catalogue of complex behaviors isn't the hard part of AI research. The main difficulty is getting the computer to respond properly to discriminative stimuli.
My point here is that programming is rule based. I submit that it is impossible to make an AI that can respond properly to discriminative stimuli. The programming language at its very core would have to be discriminative
Why would I do those things if they went against my best interests? Is capricious and irrational behavior essential to your definition of free will?
No but the mere fact that I can do something irrational if I so choose proves the existance of free will. People do irrational things all the time, I don't see why this is such a surprise.
If the options are equal in all other ways, [snip]
They almost never are, we have to choose what to do with what is given to us in a certain situation. By your logic we'd all be drones trying to make ourselves happy. But if that's true how can you explain why we get up early and go to work every day? Its not immediatly rewarding, we choose to do it to get a bigger reward later. How are some people able to sacrifice/risk their life for someone else? Not much reward in that if you're dead
"I have free will in the sense that I can make decisions,"
... DUH. The very definition of free will is the idea that we can choose what we should do with whatever external force is acting upon us. Wheither that be nature, or someone else's choice. I don't think anyone who believes in free will would disagree that external forces cause us to make decisions, but its unpredictable what decision a given person will make. And no unpredictable doesn't mean random.
...
Uh
"but I did not implement the decision-making algorithms that control my behavior."
How do you know there is one? The fallacy here is assumption that humans are like computers. Which isn't true, at least in the sense in which we currently understand computers, otherwise we'd be able to build an AI easily (as someone already mentioned)
"I never programmed myself to prefer peanuts to cashews, or to be attracted to waist to hip ratios of 0.7. Nor did I set the temperature that would make me retreat from a heat source."
No, but genetics did. There's still nothing stopping you from from eating cashews anyway, date someone with a ratio of 0.8 or holding you hand over a flame even when its too hot.
For example, I personally was afraid to speak in public, when I got to college I chose to major in speech communication. I felt it would be better to learn something I wasn't good at would be better than rehashing something I already knew (computers). Even when the dot-bomb had driven the IT industry to its deepest depths and I twice lost my job, I never went more than a few weeks without finding another one. Why? Because I can communicate effectively, I bettered myself because of a choice I made. Things would have been much different for me had I not made that choice. Was my previous inability to communicate genetic, or perhaps a product of the way I was raised? Who knows? But what difference does that make, my own choice made the difference, and I'm sure there are tons of examples from other people just like that.
I hypothesize that free will was a concept manufactured to defend a god that was either stupid enough of cruel enough or sufficiently reckless to create things like the tree of knowledge and the devil.
Nice dig at Christianity, I'm not going to comment on God's intentions since I'm not looking for a theological debate, however, the funny thing is there are tons of Christians that believe their lives are predetermined by God so I certainly don't believe those people think that
Two major fallacies with this whole idea.
/case of the Mondays //shut up and leave me alone
First of all it assumes that the 'left' is 'empithetical'. Which is very subjective. For instance I don't believe the left is very empithetical to unborn children.
Secondly it assumes that all people fall into one side or the other. Not only untrue, but quite frankly media BS and stupid. Someone watches to much CNN. There are plenty of people who agree with some issues on both sides, personally anyone who agrees with everything spouted off by the 'left' or the 'right' without deciding on each issue for themselves is a blind sheep.
And finally as a bonus, it assumes the 'left' and the 'right' are different which they aren't except in the trollish social issues such as abortion and homosexuality where there are no clear answers and actually doing something either way is going to piss off half the population.
Government should be modded -1 flamebait
OH AND FOR AN OFFTOPIC RANT.. the stupid fricking lameness filter should be shot. CAN'T YOU CHECK IF I'M ONLY DOING ONE LINE SEPARATED OUT???? ITS PERL, ITS NOT THAT HARD
...wealthiest 2 percent of Americans...
... but they make more money AND they pay a higher percentage of their income in the first place!!!
... he pays double the percentage in tax that I do. But wait a minute, what's the tax in real dollars? 25% of 50k is $12,500 ... but 50% of $100k is $50k!! So Bob makes double what I make, but he actually pays 4 times what I do in taxes. Somehow that doesn't seem fair.
Arrrg!!! I'm going to strangle the next person who says this! Are you so brain-washed you can't go Google for some stats instead of simply regurgitating something Al Gore said in a debate 4 years ago?
I can prove your assertion wrong right away: I am not one of the wealthest 2% of Americans. In fact I chose to live in a smaller city, and work for a locally owned ISP and I make significantly less money than someone working for a real corporation. I got a tax cut. Sure someone making more money than me got a bigger cut
It amazes me how much the Dems have blinded people's eyes to the unfairness of the tax system. Sure on the surface it looks fair. If you're poor you pay a low percentage of your income. If you're rich you pay a higher percentage of your income. But wait, what's this little word 'percentage'? That kind of changes things. Here's an example. (round numbers to make this easier).
Say I'm making $50k a year, and Bob makes $100k a year. The government puts me in a tax bracket that says I need to pay 25% of my salary in taxes. Bob is in a tax bracket to pay 50% of his salary in taxes. Sounds fair
How are sessions different from profiles?
Firefox has far more customizablility when it comes to layout, Try getting the bookmark bar under the address bar in Opera. In Firefox its a matter of drag and drop. Customizability in Opera is a bunch of confusing settings in two places in the menus.
But really that doesn't matter much to me. Most people (including myself) don't really mess with that much customization. I personally still use the default firefox setup (well I take that back I moved my Google search box). At any rate the three biggest problems with Opera I see:
1. It still doesn't render right. Lots of CSS bugs in Opera. As a web developer this is not acceptable.
2. The new interface has too much eye candy and takes up too much screen space. Its confusing, especially if you want people to switch from IE or another browser, they're going to get lost.
3. Incomplete ECMA script support, and very few work arounds. (BTW this is the same complaint I have about Konquerer). IE's Jscript sucks donkey balls but at least with some hacks I can still do some pretty advanced stuff. And Mozilla and Firefox have almost 100% compatibility with ECMA so I can look on the W3C's site as a reference.
I think he's probably refering to the rending and CSS support that nearly rival IE. /kidding ... Opera is a bit better, a bit.
but - just like Mozilla or Firefox ...
... why would you expect something different?
1. Since all three are built from the same software base and the Slashdot summary even says that Netscape 7.2 is Mozilla 1.7
2. Why are you blaming the browser for dumb web developers that don't know how to make websites that work for everyone?
3. Why are you bothering to visit IE only sites? Surely even if the information on them is useful it can be found elsewhere without the need for proprietary software.