Pretty soon, you may rely on the government for your health. Defy the government and lose your health care benefits because no doctor will treat someone who could be an illegal without the proper med card.
This is a valid concern. But equally valid is also the cost we all bear paying for those who get ill and lack health insurance. There is no good perfect solution to this, but it is a problem and we can't ignore it for much longer.
We granted the government the ability to control the global economy
Who else do we grant authority to? Do you think we'd ever reach this level of advancement in society without public investment via the government?
Insurance companies won't sell you the same health coverage, at the same price, on your own.
Depends. If you are younger then "average", odds are you can get it much cheaper then via your employer. If you are "old", then you will be paying upwards of $700/mo for insurance.
Of course the "let the private market do health insurance" people fail to address the following:
1) If you have a pre-existing condition, you will not be able to get private health insurance. 2) Any insurance company who offers coverage for pre-existing conditions would probably go bankrupt. 3) Therefore no sane insurance company would accept those with pre-existing conditions. 4) Unless you force all insurance companies to accept those with pre-existing conditions, "Letting you buy out of state" like McCain proposes would only result in every insurance company moving to the state with the most lax regulations. 5) Thus health care insurance would suck, if you were lucky enough to qualify for it. 6) Thus the un-insured would do as they do now... go the ER instead. 7) Thus you, the "good citizen" paying your insurance pays for the un-insured.
The "health care is a right" argument aside, if you examine the issue from a dollars and cents point of view, wouldn't we *save* money by making sure every citizen is insured? My bet is, yes. The good news is we dont even need to turn into some system that emulates the UK... we just need to offer a "default insurance pool" to those who otherwise cannot get private/employer paid insurance.
So before you reply to this saying I'm a nutcase, please answer me one thing--how will insurance companies remain in business *and* allow for pre-existing conditions. If you say they shouldn't, *who pays for the uninsured, but ill*?
Read his tax plan, specifically the bottom of page 3.
Your business might not be making investments, but are you seeking investors? One of the components of his tax plan is to eliminate the capital gains taxes for investments made in small business. That means if you need a round of private financing, your investors will not pay any tax when they sell your stock down the road.
Course, the PDF I linked to doesn't spell out a lot of detail. I'd assume as long as somebody bought the stock when you were classified as "small business", when you IPO and the investor sells their shares on the publican market they wouldn't pay capital gains tax--otherwise what is the point?
Another thing is depending on how you are structured (corporation/LLC), one of the benefits of the plan is when you sell your business in the future, the profit from selling your equity would be tax exempt as well.
The solution is education and exposure to the outside world.
The problem is, are you willing to pay for this? Somebody has to shell out for such investments. The only way is tax. Who do you tax? The guys you are trying to help, or the guys on the top who owe their success to the investment we made? McCain/Bush/Regan say the guys who are currently using the investment should pay for it. Obama says the people who are successful got there because of the investment and thus owe society for using it. In other words, pay as you go, or pay once you've finished?
I'll be voting John Jackson, because I think the three cent tax on titanium doesn't go far enough. I'm glad Jack supports but thinks it goes to far, which is obvious incorrect.
Which episode number is that anyway? They have Nixon as president for most of the episodes, and I don't recall if they had anybody really being president before that episode.
You'd be exempt from paying tax on capital gains from small business investments. Such an exemption would encourage investors to buy equity to help finance start ups rather then buying equity in big corporations. In a way, it would dampen the need for small businesses to get loans for capital improvements.
Obama's philosophy is things work better from the bottom up rather then trickling down from the top. Make life easy for those with the least and they'll have a better time making a go of things and moving up the ladder.
Regan, and by extension Bush and the republican party, is about the idea that if you make things easy at the top, there will be more incentive for people to move up. The idea is that you provide a nice carrot at the top of the ladder, and everybody will want to climb up.
When this election is over, I believe history will show this election is the rejection of Regan theory of trickle down economics. We've tried it, and it just doesn't seem to work.
Will bottom-up economics work better? Will our nation have more success by making it easier for people on the bottom rungs in hopes they move up? Only time will tell...
People need to think about that big time. Think about any large public works project in your region. Here in Seattle, I can name three large infrastructure projects we've got to deal with in the Puget Sound area:
1) Light Rail to Bellevue/Redmon and Lynwood. Cost $4 billion or more. 2) Replace, tunnel or remove our aging vidauct before another earthquake. Cost: $3.5 -> $4.5 billion 3) Replace the aging 520 floating bridge linking Seattle to Bellevue before the next earthquake. Cost: $4->5 billion.
In little over a month, we could have pretty much financed all three infrastructure projects with federal funds that are now being "invested" in building up some other country.
I bet every reader can imagine similar public works projects in their region. Take the cost of those projects and map them to the cost of Iraq per week. Each project you name is probably about 1 to 2 weeks in Iraq, eh?
Think of how much we could have done in this country to improve our infrastructure if we spent that Iraq "investment" money and used it to invest in our own country. Even a year of Iraq money could buy us a regional and national high speed rail system, massive broadband improvements, new bridges, better schools, hell *energy independence* so we wouldn't need to "invest" in oil rich countries.
You wanna know how Obama plans to pay for all this? Invest taxpayer money in our country instead of investing your money in other countries. I dunno about you, but investing in our country sounds a hell of a lot more patriotic then the republican notion of investing in other countries.
He devised, organized and ran perhaps one of the most brilliant campaigns in history. He took down the Clintons and the DLC in the primary election. He has managed what will be over half a billion dollars in donations. He hired some very smart advisers too. Good managers (which a president essentially is) know that it is important to hire smart people and trust them; Obama seems to understand this.
Early on in this election season, when asked "how would you act as president", Obama answered "look at how I run my campaign".
I believe the end to the war on drugs will come about through state or regional initiatives. Several years ago here in Seattle, we passed an initiative that would make marijuana crimes the lowest police priority, lower then j-walking even. We've got a statewide medicinal marijuana initiative passed too. The feds, headed by our wondrous republican president GW Bush, have tried to chip away at our state laws and similar initiatives passed by other states.
The question you have to ask is "will the president raise a stink about it"? That is to say, if we passed a "buy a pack of weed from 7-11" initiative, would McCain or Obama raise a stink about it and try to go after the state?
- Obama, I believe would say "this state should serve as a role model for other states to follow" and leave it at that. - McCain, I dont actually know. My hunch is in order to please the republican evangelical base, he'd go after the state in a tizzy of moral outrage.
Ditto with gay marriage, actually. While Obama is a pragmatist and supports "civil unions", I doubt he'd lift a finger if a state took it further and called it "gay marriage". McCain, however, would be over it like hot grits, I'd imagine (lest he upset the fragile far-right evangelical base)
Google is nothing but a couple little improvements to Archie and Veronica. Typical of marketing losers, they take a working search engine like Veronica, "embrace and extend" GOPHER to use HTTP, and then plaster it with useless ads and graphics.
I have my copy of Lynx complied with HTTP off. Screw those corporate bastards!
Modern languages have "exit for" or "break" to bail out of a loop.
If you have a triple nested loop in the same function, you should refactor the code and move the inner loops into another function.
What do you mean by "Clean Up Code"? If you have so many branches in a single function, again, refactor the code and split them into multiple functions.
Calling a variable "myInt" doesn't make it an integer -- it was a float from the second you added a dot. First, duh. Second, are you sure it will return "hello1.0" and not "hello1.00" or "hello1"? I'm not, I could test to find out, but that makes my point. It adds ambeguity to the language and makes me think about something I really should be thinking about. To use your example, what does the following result in?
function blah(arg1) {
var blah = "10" + arg1 + 5 + "hi"; }
My example isn't as contrived as yours. What if blah() was in some other JS file. It could be easy to trip the function up based on what you pass in.
Using "." for string concatenation at least gives both you, the code reader, and the compiler a hint at what you mean. That way the compiler can barf if you do something silly like concatenate an integer with a string. Using "+" for both addition and concatenation just makes more work for both parties.
In any case, I don't find concatenation nearly as useful as interpolation, most of the time. In Ruby, at least, interpolation is known to execute faster than concatenation. But that doesn't help you if you're using JavaScript.
I agree with this statement. I much prefer how Ruby and Perl do it... just toss the variables into your string and it will interpolate them.
BTW, I'm not too familiar with Ruby. Does it pull the same trick Perl does and use a different operator for string comparison?
Yikes. What about IDE's that let you search your code using regular expressions? The ones I've used all support using escape codes as part of the package.
So now if I want to search my code for all references to a particular namespace, I might have to escape the damn namespace characters!/my\\namespace\\is\\cool/
Do a search and replace:/my\\namespace\\is\\cool/\\my\\namespace\\sucks/g
What if I do a search/replace and forget to escape a namespace that starts with \n:/my\\namespace\\is\\cool/\\my\namespace\\sucks/g
1) "/" - used by almost all languages in regex expressions. I wouldn't want to pollute that namespace. 2) "::" - Awesome. Many other languages do this. I think this is already taken for PHP, but I dont know PHP well enough 3) "|" - Pipe has a very specific meaning on the command line and I'd hate to pollute that. Plus it looks ugly. 4) "~" - Any reasons this wouldn't work? 5) "." - Again, awesome. Many other languages use this. 6) "!" - Used 7) "&" - Ugly, used. 8) "," - Why not? Does any language use the comma for anything? Might be kinda ugly though "$var = My,Class($arg1);"
Now do you have to escape your namespaces before passing them through eval?
eval("$instance = new My\\Super\\Class(\"blah\"););
Since they now are using the escape character for namespaces, I wonder what kinds of security implications this might have? What happens when a PHP program for some reason evals() some user input that doesn't properly escape the namespaces?
Personally, I get annoyed with languages like Javascript that use + for string concatenation. VB did it back in the day, and you would sometimes run into issues where you'd combine two variables and it would treat one as an integer or a decimal and do the wrong or unexpected thing. IIRC you could do this: Dim myInt as Variant Dim myStr as string
myInt = 1 myStr = "hi"
myStr = myStr + myInt
And you'd get something like "hi1.0"
It just doesn't feel right to do the same thing in modern languages. What should be the result of this bit of javascript?
var myInt = 1.0; var myStr = "hello" alert(myStr + myInt);
What should that return?
I dunno, maybe I'm full of it, but I just dont like when dynamic languages use "+" for both addition and concatenation.
At least in a sense. You can map a.NET namespace to an XML namespace. Say you have namespace that is:
Shados.Awesome.Controls
You can map that into:
http://www.shados.com/controls
In c# you'd plunk this into your AssemblyInfo.cs file: [XmlnsDefinition("Shadows.Awesome.Controls","http://www.shados.com/controls")] And thus add it to your XAML code:
The big problem with that approach is that depending on were you put the javascript that does the prgressive enhancement, there could be a few seconds where the javascript hasn't "hooked into" the HTML and added it's magic.
This is especially true when a visitor is on a slower connection. Those visitors will click on the non-progressive link and get, for them, unexpected behavior.
Unless I'm missing some "right way" to do what you suggest, and if there is, please let me know because I think, minus the technical problems, progressive enhancement is the right way to go.
The real flaw is the underlying philosophy that the standards, HTML/CSS, should never get to make assumptions on how a page is rendered by a client. This philosphy, a core value of the W3C, says that as long as you the website author do not get to dictate how a page is rendered.
Unfortunately, this core value is at odds with what the industry is demanding. The industry is demanding there be a *standard* for how a page is rendered. The attitude is now "screw the 'standards' as long as it works in all the browsers". And clearly this attitude is the majority, or more people would be following the W3C standards. Worse for the W3C, people are now routing around their standards by using Flash and Silverlight, both of which render content in the same manner regardless of browser.
I hold that until the W3C rethinks their long held value that it is up to the browser to decide how a page is rendered, they will be unable to meet the needs of a rapidly changing industry.
The problem is the W3C and "standards advocates" are chasing the wrong problem. They view the problem like this:
- Standards = Proper structure. Correct use of syntax. Cross your t's, dot your i's and leave it to the browser to decide how a page is rendered.
Worse, this "who cares how it is displayed on the browser as long as you get the syntax right" is considered to be a feature by these types! The rest of the world, all 95.87% of them, don't think of "Standards" that way. For the majority, standards means only one thing:
- Standards = Looks and Behaves the same on all browsers.
The longer the W3C denies the majority definition and continues to dismiss the importance of a standard way of browser behavior, the longer they remain in the wilderness. The W3C will be the minority until they define how web browsers should *render* a page so that HTML *looks* the same regardless of browser.
And before you shoot back to me and carry the W3C talking point "it is up to the browser to determine how to render and dammit, it is a feature not a bug", remember that this very article asserts you are the minority.
Either accept that the majority of us want browsers to display a page the same way, or continue to be dismayed when nobody cares about your standard.
If you honestly cannot see a difference between McCain and Obama, you might as well write in Palin for president because your IQ would be about the same.
Nader framed his campaigns as "the other guys are basically the same party". As we watch the GOP implode and Bush go down as the worst president in history, are you honestly going to say that there is no difference between both parties, their platforms and their candidates? Seriously?
Do you really foresee an Obama administration twisting words like Terrorism, Freedom (fries), Patriot, etc? Do you foresee him installing crazy supreme court judges that have and will continue to fuck our country until they retire? Do you foresee him installing a vice president who refuses to talk with the press and cannot answer basic questions?
They only do this with game engines from last generation whos value has been ammortized to pretty much zero. Those engines have all been copied by other companies and don't offer Id Software a competitive edge to keep around.
GTA IV is a modern game engine that probably is still worth something all on its own. Even if they couldn't "license" the engine to other game companies (or if I was boss, simulator companies), the IP has value in that it would take a long time for the competition to "borrow" all the features.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted,
This is a valid concern. But equally valid is also the cost we all bear paying for those who get ill and lack health insurance. There is no good perfect solution to this, but it is a problem and we can't ignore it for much longer.
Who else do we grant authority to? Do you think we'd ever reach this level of advancement in society without public investment via the government?
Depends. If you are younger then "average", odds are you can get it much cheaper then via your employer. If you are "old", then you will be paying upwards of $700/mo for insurance.
Of course the "let the private market do health insurance" people fail to address the following:
1) If you have a pre-existing condition, you will not be able to get private health insurance.
2) Any insurance company who offers coverage for pre-existing conditions would probably go bankrupt.
3) Therefore no sane insurance company would accept those with pre-existing conditions.
4) Unless you force all insurance companies to accept those with pre-existing conditions, "Letting you buy out of state" like McCain proposes would only result in every insurance company moving to the state with the most lax regulations.
5) Thus health care insurance would suck, if you were lucky enough to qualify for it.
6) Thus the un-insured would do as they do now... go the ER instead.
7) Thus you, the "good citizen" paying your insurance pays for the un-insured.
The "health care is a right" argument aside, if you examine the issue from a dollars and cents point of view, wouldn't we *save* money by making sure every citizen is insured? My bet is, yes. The good news is we dont even need to turn into some system that emulates the UK... we just need to offer a "default insurance pool" to those who otherwise cannot get private/employer paid insurance.
So before you reply to this saying I'm a nutcase, please answer me one thing--how will insurance companies remain in business *and* allow for pre-existing conditions. If you say they shouldn't, *who pays for the uninsured, but ill*?
Read his tax plan, specifically the bottom of page 3.
Your business might not be making investments, but are you seeking investors? One of the components of his tax plan is to eliminate the capital gains taxes for investments made in small business. That means if you need a round of private financing, your investors will not pay any tax when they sell your stock down the road.
Course, the PDF I linked to doesn't spell out a lot of detail. I'd assume as long as somebody bought the stock when you were classified as "small business", when you IPO and the investor sells their shares on the publican market they wouldn't pay capital gains tax--otherwise what is the point?
Another thing is depending on how you are structured (corporation/LLC), one of the benefits of the plan is when you sell your business in the future, the profit from selling your equity would be tax exempt as well.
The problem is, are you willing to pay for this? Somebody has to shell out for such investments. The only way is tax. Who do you tax? The guys you are trying to help, or the guys on the top who owe their success to the investment we made? McCain/Bush/Regan say the guys who are currently using the investment should pay for it. Obama says the people who are successful got there because of the investment and thus owe society for using it. In other words, pay as you go, or pay once you've finished?
I'll be voting John Jackson, because I think the three cent tax on titanium doesn't go far enough. I'm glad Jack supports but thinks it goes to far, which is obvious incorrect.
Which episode number is that anyway? They have Nixon as president for most of the episodes, and I don't recall if they had anybody really being president before that episode.
The more people grow dependent on the government, the more they will allow to be taken away to protect it
But I can't name a single nation with a very minimal government that has any significance in the global economy. Can you?
You'd be exempt from paying tax on capital gains from small business investments. Such an exemption would encourage investors to buy equity to help finance start ups rather then buying equity in big corporations. In a way, it would dampen the need for small businesses to get loans for capital improvements.
Obama's philosophy is things work better from the bottom up rather then trickling down from the top. Make life easy for those with the least and they'll have a better time making a go of things and moving up the ladder.
Regan, and by extension Bush and the republican party, is about the idea that if you make things easy at the top, there will be more incentive for people to move up. The idea is that you provide a nice carrot at the top of the ladder, and everybody will want to climb up.
When this election is over, I believe history will show this election is the rejection of Regan theory of trickle down economics. We've tried it, and it just doesn't seem to work.
Will bottom-up economics work better? Will our nation have more success by making it easier for people on the bottom rungs in hopes they move up? Only time will tell...
People need to think about that big time. Think about any large public works project in your region. Here in Seattle, I can name three large infrastructure projects we've got to deal with in the Puget Sound area:
1) Light Rail to Bellevue/Redmon and Lynwood. Cost $4 billion or more.
2) Replace, tunnel or remove our aging vidauct before another earthquake. Cost: $3.5 -> $4.5 billion
3) Replace the aging 520 floating bridge linking Seattle to Bellevue before the next earthquake. Cost: $4->5 billion.
In little over a month, we could have pretty much financed all three infrastructure projects with federal funds that are now being "invested" in building up some other country.
I bet every reader can imagine similar public works projects in their region. Take the cost of those projects and map them to the cost of Iraq per week. Each project you name is probably about 1 to 2 weeks in Iraq, eh?
Think of how much we could have done in this country to improve our infrastructure if we spent that Iraq "investment" money and used it to invest in our own country. Even a year of Iraq money could buy us a regional and national high speed rail system, massive broadband improvements, new bridges, better schools, hell *energy independence* so we wouldn't need to "invest" in oil rich countries.
You wanna know how Obama plans to pay for all this? Invest taxpayer money in our country instead of investing your money in other countries. I dunno about you, but investing in our country sounds a hell of a lot more patriotic then the republican notion of investing in other countries.
He devised, organized and ran perhaps one of the most brilliant campaigns in history. He took down the Clintons and the DLC in the primary election. He has managed what will be over half a billion dollars in donations. He hired some very smart advisers too. Good managers (which a president essentially is) know that it is important to hire smart people and trust them; Obama seems to understand this.
Early on in this election season, when asked "how would you act as president", Obama answered "look at how I run my campaign".
Works for me.
I believe the end to the war on drugs will come about through state or regional initiatives. Several years ago here in Seattle, we passed an initiative that would make marijuana crimes the lowest police priority, lower then j-walking even. We've got a statewide medicinal marijuana initiative passed too. The feds, headed by our wondrous republican president GW Bush, have tried to chip away at our state laws and similar initiatives passed by other states.
The question you have to ask is "will the president raise a stink about it"? That is to say, if we passed a "buy a pack of weed from 7-11" initiative, would McCain or Obama raise a stink about it and try to go after the state?
- Obama, I believe would say "this state should serve as a role model for other states to follow" and leave it at that.
- McCain, I dont actually know. My hunch is in order to please the republican evangelical base, he'd go after the state in a tizzy of moral outrage.
Ditto with gay marriage, actually. While Obama is a pragmatist and supports "civil unions", I doubt he'd lift a finger if a state took it further and called it "gay marriage". McCain, however, would be over it like hot grits, I'd imagine (lest he upset the fragile far-right evangelical base)
John McCain getting cancer in his first term and passing away. I'll leave the implications to the reader.
Google is nothing but a couple little improvements to Archie and Veronica. Typical of marketing losers, they take a working search engine like Veronica, "embrace and extend" GOPHER to use HTTP, and then plaster it with useless ads and graphics.
I have my copy of Lynx complied with HTTP off. Screw those corporate bastards!
Modern languages have "exit for" or "break" to bail out of a loop.
If you have a triple nested loop in the same function, you should refactor the code and move the inner loops into another function.
What do you mean by "Clean Up Code"? If you have so many branches in a single function, again, refactor the code and split them into multiple functions.
See also: Code Complete
Is that like saying a cordless phone and a cell phone is *almost* identical because they both make phone calls?
Or did I just get trolled by the summary?
Calling a variable "myInt" doesn't make it an integer -- it was a float from the second you added a dot.
First, duh. Second, are you sure it will return "hello1.0" and not "hello1.00" or "hello1"? I'm not, I could test to find out, but that makes my point. It adds ambeguity to the language and makes me think about something I really should be thinking about. To use your example, what does the following result in?
function blah(arg1) {
var blah = "10" + arg1 + 5 + "hi";
}
alert(blah("hi"));
alert(blah(1));
alert(blah("1"));
My example isn't as contrived as yours. What if blah() was in some other JS file. It could be easy to trip the function up based on what you pass in.
Using "." for string concatenation at least gives both you, the code reader, and the compiler a hint at what you mean. That way the compiler can barf if you do something silly like concatenate an integer with a string. Using "+" for both addition and concatenation just makes more work for both parties.
In any case, I don't find concatenation nearly as useful as interpolation, most of the time. In Ruby, at least, interpolation is known to execute faster than concatenation. But that doesn't help you if you're using JavaScript.
I agree with this statement. I much prefer how Ruby and Perl do it... just toss the variables into your string and it will interpolate them.
BTW, I'm not too familiar with Ruby. Does it pull the same trick Perl does and use a different operator for string comparison?
if($myStr eq "hi") { print "hi";}
Yikes. What about IDE's that let you search your code using regular expressions? The ones I've used all support using escape codes as part of the package.
So now if I want to search my code for all references to a particular namespace, I might have to escape the damn namespace characters! /my\\namespace\\is\\cool/
Do a search and replace: /my\\namespace\\is\\cool/\\my\\namespace\\sucks/g
What if I do a search/replace and forget to escape a namespace that starts with \n: /my\\namespace\\is\\cool/\\my\namespace\\sucks/g
Oops!!
1) "/" - used by almost all languages in regex expressions. I wouldn't want to pollute that namespace.
2) "::" - Awesome. Many other languages do this. I think this is already taken for PHP, but I dont know PHP well enough
3) "|" - Pipe has a very specific meaning on the command line and I'd hate to pollute that. Plus it looks ugly.
4) "~" - Any reasons this wouldn't work?
5) "." - Again, awesome. Many other languages use this.
6) "!" - Used
7) "&" - Ugly, used.
8) "," - Why not? Does any language use the comma for anything? Might be kinda ugly though "$var = My,Class($arg1);"
Now do you have to escape your namespaces before passing them through eval?
eval("$instance = new My\\Super\\Class(\"blah\"););
Since they now are using the escape character for namespaces, I wonder what kinds of security implications this might have? What happens when a PHP program for some reason evals() some user input that doesn't properly escape the namespaces?
Personally, I get annoyed with languages like Javascript that use + for string concatenation. VB did it back in the day, and you would sometimes run into issues where you'd combine two variables and it would treat one as an integer or a decimal and do the wrong or unexpected thing. IIRC you could do this:
Dim myInt as Variant
Dim myStr as string
myInt = 1
myStr = "hi"
myStr = myStr + myInt
And you'd get something like "hi1.0"
It just doesn't feel right to do the same thing in modern languages. What should be the result of this bit of javascript?
var myInt = 1.0;
var myStr = "hello"
alert(myStr + myInt);
What should that return?
I dunno, maybe I'm full of it, but I just dont like when dynamic languages use "+" for both addition and concatenation.
At least in a sense. You can map a .NET namespace to an XML namespace. Say you have namespace that is:
Shados.Awesome.Controls
You can map that into:
http://www.shados.com/controls
In c# you'd plunk this into your AssemblyInfo.cs file:
[XmlnsDefinition("Shadows.Awesome.Controls","http://www.shados.com/controls")]
And thus add it to your XAML code:
<UserControl xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/xml/something"
xmlns:shadow="http://www.shados.com/controls">
<shadow:AwesomeControl x:Name="myControl" param="aParam"
</UserControl>
You can even get multiple .NET namespaces to map into a single XML namespace.
Except you just made a typo. It is "\" instead.
Either way, most languages use either "." or "::" for namespaces
# perl looks like
use My::CPAN::Module qw();
my $instance = My::CPAN::Module->new("junk");
# c# looks like
using System.Windows.Controls;
System.Windows.Controls.ListBox box = new System.Windows.Controls.ListBox();
# c++ looks like (I think)
namespace Blah::Blah;
# php will now look like
$object_instance = new My\PEAR\Module("myvar");
I'll leave the "looks" of PHP's method to the reader.
The big problem with that approach is that depending on were you put the javascript that does the prgressive enhancement, there could be a few seconds where the javascript hasn't "hooked into" the HTML and added it's magic.
This is especially true when a visitor is on a slower connection. Those visitors will click on the non-progressive link and get, for them, unexpected behavior.
Unless I'm missing some "right way" to do what you suggest, and if there is, please let me know because I think, minus the technical problems, progressive enhancement is the right way to go.
The real flaw is the underlying philosophy that the standards, HTML/CSS, should never get to make assumptions on how a page is rendered by a client. This philosphy, a core value of the W3C, says that as long as you the website author do not get to dictate how a page is rendered.
Unfortunately, this core value is at odds with what the industry is demanding. The industry is demanding there be a *standard* for how a page is rendered. The attitude is now "screw the 'standards' as long as it works in all the browsers". And clearly this attitude is the majority, or more people would be following the W3C standards. Worse for the W3C, people are now routing around their standards by using Flash and Silverlight, both of which render content in the same manner regardless of browser.
I hold that until the W3C rethinks their long held value that it is up to the browser to decide how a page is rendered, they will be unable to meet the needs of a rapidly changing industry.
The problem is the W3C and "standards advocates" are chasing the wrong problem. They view the problem like this:
- Standards = Proper structure. Correct use of syntax. Cross your t's, dot your i's and leave it to the browser to decide how a page is rendered.
Worse, this "who cares how it is displayed on the browser as long as you get the syntax right" is considered to be a feature by these types! The rest of the world, all 95.87% of them, don't think of "Standards" that way. For the majority, standards means only one thing:
- Standards = Looks and Behaves the same on all browsers.
The longer the W3C denies the majority definition and continues to dismiss the importance of a standard way of browser behavior, the longer they remain in the wilderness. The W3C will be the minority until they define how web browsers should *render* a page so that HTML *looks* the same regardless of browser.
And before you shoot back to me and carry the W3C talking point "it is up to the browser to determine how to render and dammit, it is a feature not a bug", remember that this very article asserts you are the minority.
Either accept that the majority of us want browsers to display a page the same way, or continue to be dismayed when nobody cares about your standard.
If you honestly cannot see a difference between McCain and Obama, you might as well write in Palin for president because your IQ would be about the same.
Nader framed his campaigns as "the other guys are basically the same party". As we watch the GOP implode and Bush go down as the worst president in history, are you honestly going to say that there is no difference between both parties, their platforms and their candidates? Seriously?
Do you really foresee an Obama administration twisting words like Terrorism, Freedom (fries), Patriot, etc? Do you foresee him installing crazy supreme court judges that have and will continue to fuck our country until they retire? Do you foresee him installing a vice president who refuses to talk with the press and cannot answer basic questions?
Seriously? Really?
They only do this with game engines from last generation whos value has been ammortized to pretty much zero. Those engines have all been copied by other companies and don't offer Id Software a competitive edge to keep around.
GTA IV is a modern game engine that probably is still worth something all on its own. Even if they couldn't "license" the engine to other game companies (or if I was boss, simulator companies), the IP has value in that it would take a long time for the competition to "borrow" all the features.