The second article is way off because of various assumptions it makes about the relative capabilities and potential of the two nations.
First the author quotes one Rand Simberg:
"a true free-market approach (of which, under the current regime, I suspect they're incapable) will leave them in the dust. That's why I don't even consider them relevant to our species' future in space, unless they display some dramatic change in approach."
Later he says himself:
The United States cherishes its traditions of human freedom, belief in progress, and optimism for the future. China elevates the might of the state over the rights of the individual, crushes dissent, and seeks world domination.
Very patrotic, but it's really just drum-beating. It's true that the Chinese have a very authoritarian style of government and they are guilty of human rights abuses from a Western point of view (Western nations' own guilt of similar crimes notwithstanding). But it would be foolish to underestimate the Chinese' economic potential, given current policy of fostering free enterprise under fairly light-handed government control - a policy which ahs been extremely successful up to now, and on which they are clearly betting their future.
And by the way, the latter of the two quotations finishes by blaming Chinese aspirations toward world leadership, via whatever means possible, and the suppression of individual rights by the ruling class. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
Well, when you put it like that, it makes a lot more sense. But I don't know where you got the idea you were pushing earlier, that today's untrammeled multinationals are somehow like foreign powers working against US interests.
This is actually a global problem; people in Europe are just as much under the corporate thumb as you are, and just as uncomfortable with it (see the current hoo-ha about the proposed EU software patent law for example). And moreover, these corporations do seem to be mostly US led, so I don't see how you can conflate this with some sort of foreign threat.
I suppose you must have been hoping you could leverage some kind of patriotic response amongst your own countrymen. But, if you try to sell it like that then I suspect all you will achieve is to alienate your natural allies - the anti-globalisation movements in other parts of the world. And I really do think it is going to take all of us together to see off these usurpers of the people's power. Enough of this jingoistic nonsense. Your enemy's enemy is your friend.
Well no, they don't think that at all - since they have already received an enormous number of written representations and petition signatures demonstrating the opposite.
Maybe you didn't hear, but the entire basis on which the officials sponsoring this leglsation have decided to completely ignore public opinion is, ludicrously, that a *financial majority*, i.e. big business *is* in favour, and so the public can just go fuck themselves.
So I hardly think that further outraged letters will do any good at all. In fact given their apparently complete capture by special interests I don't think anything will work - except, maybe, getting round there in person with baseball bats, pitchforks etc. and "reminding" them of who they are supposed to be working for.
Hey, I did this already. I mailed all my local MEPs and what happened? Only one of them (the Tory) bothered to respond - a junior assistant wrote back and basically just restated Tory party policy - which is that they believe software patents are necessary and will be completely benign.
Don't expect anybody to listen to the likes of you. They don't want to, and they apparently think they don't even have to.
it's not about the equality comparison operator either (which, by the way, is just fine if you use it right)
Hey that's crazy talk. I can't let that go unchallenged!
The only way to use the equality comparison operator is to calculate everything at a precision level way beyond where you will truncate the result before doing the comparison. The question of just how much extra precision you need to throw away really depends on how many arithmetical operations you'll be doing on it before you get to the comparison. This is ambiguous, which is a Very Bad Thing (subsequent programmers assume the existing code works, then they re-use it in repeated calcs and BAM!).
So no, it's just not worth the trouble. When you use floating point you should never expect to compare results for equality, instead use less-than-or-equal/greater-than-or-equal to place the result within a specified range. It's OK for representing analogue (i.e. continuous) quantities but should *never* be used for discrete quantities like money. Use a "big integer" library for that, or use normal longword/quadword integers and throw an exception if you get an overflow, depending on how likely you are to get up to the magic +/-2.17bn figure.
Sorry, I didn't really mean to be rude. "Mental illness"? Goodness me, you are a little tetchy aren't you. I suppose you must have some "issues" with this particular topic.
Well, duh. Could there really be any programmer working for a living anywhere in the world who doesn't know that already? And you with such a low UserId too.
Your very first college lesson on float data types should have explicitly stated that they should never be used with the equality comparison operator, so even a completely-wet-behind the-ears rookie should know it.
What I really want is mail stored in a monolithic file with indexed access - with the *keys* placed in these buckets. With multiple categories applied to each email so that eg. a message from your brother which contains a new joke *and* clues you about a business opportunity can get filed under "family" "jokes" and "business" all at the same time without duplicating the underlying data.
Actually while we're at it the proverbial *they* need to make this indexed data structure readable and writable by other applications. It would be nice if you could access *all* your data (contacts, post-it notes, appointment history, chat conversation logs, URL bookmarks, movie clips, everything) neatly, each item presented in the relevant format. from a single search query.
Intelligent filtering is only half useful in its current form. The real benefits won't be perceptible until we are able to use it to index our stuff in a purely subject-oriented way rather than (as now) in a format-oriented way.
Sender in my case was always "big@boss.com" Subject "Re: Movies" or "Sample" or "Re: Here is that sample". Mime attatchment was "Document003.pif" or "Movie_0074.mpeg.pif".
The subject and attachment name appear to come in any permutation.
I run linux and Mozilla, so I'm not hurt - and I've trained my junk filter on them now anyway;o)
This is a fact we all have to get to grips with; wishful thinking is irrelevant. America's huge influence in the global marketplace means that what goes down in the USA goes down everywhere else.
I blame this partly on globalization; US economic power has been leveraged out of all proportion via their controlling stake in most global corporations. Just look at the WIPO treaty for example - designed by American corporations, and pressed upon the rest of the world via the lobbying efforts of their overseas arms.
It has the effect of subverting foreign democracies and turning them into puppet states. Worst of all it leaves foreign populations, even those in Europe, without any effective representation in their own government. The influence can be subtle or it can be overt. See for example the European Parliament's support for software patents in the face of huge popular opposition. See the UK government's support of the US invasion of Iraq despite a massive and plainly active majority against it. There are dozens more examples; virtually every foreign litigation and legislation story on Slashdot included.
What has happened is that the politicians and lawmakers in these client states no longer hear the cries of their electors - somehow, they have been repurposed to serve their new global (US) corporate masters.
The people in these countries pay for this through the nose, of course: high costs of goods due to US cartel-controlled pricing; lost trading opportunities due to US-imposed trade tariffs and sanctions; economic debt caused by involvement in US military adventurism. How could it be otherwise when one player dominates, controls who is allowed to play and by what rules, implements only those international treaties that operate in its favour and ignores or refuses to sign up to any that even the score?
So it's an ironic turn of affairs, but one that should appeal to patriotic Americans if only in a nostalgic sense: those of us in the Old World are now smarting over the unfairness of what might be described as effectively taxation, of us, by US industry, without proper representation.
Given what this led to when it was the other way around 230 years ago, it's no wonder the US wants to keep a military stranglehold over the rest of the world. And since the problem isn't going to go away by itself, we may only expect the US to tighten the noose even further, whatever else happens. Because they can.
Thanks for extending the helping hand. Unfortunately it's not just one or two websites, I think it might be any web site with Javascript on it but it only happens when Moz has been running for a while and has a number of tabs/windows open. I'm pinning my hopes on 1.4 (sucker!)
Latest updates? I have them all. This may be part of the problem. SuSE's QA is terrible, the updates always seem to add at least as many bugs as they fix.
As for Gnome - I've avoided it mainly because I find the interface confusing and non-intuitive. I think I may try again, especially now that the new ximian updates have come out.
Ah, I wasn't fishing for help. I don't think there is any to be had, there are just too many symptoms and google doesn't help much when you're searching for common terms like "mozilla (lock-up freeze-up)".
When I do find a similar problem detailed somewhere, invariably the only answer is a shrug - it's usually too much work for the code maintainers to root out the cause, and most users (myself included) can afford even less the hours of patient debugging since it would need to be accompanied by the steep learning curve of a major code base such as mozilla or KDE.
On my workstation I run SuSE 8.1, kernel 2.4.20, XFree 4.3.0, KDE 3.1.2, Mozilla 1.3. I have 256MB RAM and about 400MB swap. The graphics card is an original ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder.
* Sometimes when hitting a URL in mozilla the whole UI freezes until the web page either finally loads or fails to load. The whole desktop UI shouldn't freeze like that just because there is pending I/O.
* The same thing happens to konqueror which may or may not permanently freeze the whole desktop. If the former it means bouncing the whole X environment (init 3) immediately; if the latter you'll still have to log out of kdm.
* The whole system frequently runs out of memory and then responses times degrade progressively until the whole UI locks up. The culprit is usually mozilla; the only way out of the situation is to get to a console by ssh from another system and "killall -9 mozilla-bin".
* Some desktop applications in the distribution just plain refuse to load at all.
* Kspread (from the koffice suite) is buggy as heck. Text attributes such as bold or colour don't work at all; values entered into some cells remain invisible until you close the spreadsheet and reload it; cell dimensions get buggered then can't be fixed (so you have one cell in the row with the wrong height).
* Most of the games can't be persuaded to run in full screen mode, as my Dell P1110 monitor cuts out - it seems not to agree with X about what it's refresh rate should be in the selected mode.
* Attempts to select certain fonts in the KDE font dialogue (eg in Konqueror browser settings) crash the browser.
* Some fonts just can't be rendered in KDE at all, not even in the font selection list.
* Konqeror still can't render theregister.com with visible text at all.
All the above is just what heppened to spring to mind at the moment.
Microsoft has always looked upon any x86 competitor as a threat, and therefore has tried to kill it.
I guess what you're saying is the reason Apple didn't take on Microsoft in the mass market is that they thought MS would crush them altogether.
Wait a minute I just looked at what you are using now - that thing is selling for less than $50! What a piece of crap! So try a more expensive one instead (Dakota Computer solutions have changed their name to Daxten. They still sell the model I've got (which has been rock solid), and they now have USB versions as well.
There is one gotcha with this type of KVM switch - the cables cost extra. The video quality I get is good at 1600x1200, but I did get the special high-definition KVM cables for the connections to the monitor and to any boxes running a graphical desktop. You're OK with the low-def cables for boxes just running text consoles.
I have an inexpensive four-port Dakota Scout KVM which uses PS/2 sockets for the mouse and keyboard connections. All the boxes connected to it run SuSE Linux 8.1. I have had no problems at all with switching between console sessions running gpm and X sessions using the imps/2 driver to provide access to the wheel. The only difficult bit was getting X to recognize the correct mouse module (IIRC there was a spelling or capitalization issue with the module name, either in 8.1 or one of the previous versions). So I think it might be your KVM. Maybe try a cheaper one:o\
Now, I am a committed Linux user - I won't let anything else into the house - but Linux desktop software is, let's be honest, still very buggy and unreliable. Particularly big programs like object frameworks, web browsers and integrated office suites.
It will ever be thus, because a team of teen-plus OSS GUI programmers basically just doing what ever floats their particular boat are never going to be as committed to stamping out bugs vs. adding k3w1 new bloat as would, say, anyone associated with *BSD, or any other team of hairy 1970s renegades working on big important infrastructure software like sendmail or apache.
So OSS desktop software bugs may move around, but I don't see them going away any time soon. Mac software developers on the other hand seem to aspire to clean design, stability and trouble-free operation. You might say it's their animus.
The result is that where Mac software might lack some variety, what is available is very high quality indeed, and it runs on a rock solid platform. With a desktop that is just breathtakingly elegant. So I don't think Linux is going to beat Mac OSX in the desktop marketplace, at least not on the grounds of desktop desirability.
Also bear in mind that Apple has chosen to be a niche player. They have had ten years to compete with Microsoft, and they had a head start as well, but they have never tried to own the mass desktop market. They have always left that to Microsoft, and concentrated on winning a dedicated minority of discriminating users, compensating with high profit margins.
However, If they actually had ambitions to become a mass market desktop player I have no doubt they could do so most effectively. If it gets around that the Mac is so painless to use, and Apple then gets the idea that there is a genuine sustainable market for cheaper Macs beyond the traditional arty-farty sector, they may be emboldened finally to grab a larger slice of the pie. And that sort of groundswell can easily reach critical mass. Just look what happened to Linux.
Then Microsoft really would have something to worry about - a world run on Macs connected to Linux servers.
For these reasons it's only in Microsoft's interest to suppress public interest in the Mac platform. In my opinion MSNBC, Slate etc. have always managed to keep their journalism more unbiased than their ownership might lead one to expect, but there must be some influence from time to time even if it is of the most subtle kind. So it's not too surprising to see an article like this in a Microsoft-owned publcation.
Why redesign it at all? It's more or less perfect as it is. Maybe remove the blinking gifs but that's all. There's nothing more diappointing than seeing a relatively usable site get "redesigned" with bad javascript, pointless flash animations, badly designed tables and frames. All these things do is serve to make the site less navigable and even impossible for some web clients to render correctly.
I would have thought that speakers of that size must be designed to dissipate at least 150W. If you drive them at much lower levels, surely you won't get anything like a linear frequency response. Wouldn't you be better off with smaller speakers for close listening?
I don't remember where I got it originally but if you google for the final sentence (in double quotes, to force "phrase" mode) you will see a lot of sites carrying the same quotation.
Here are some more that might be of interest:
Law
"No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom." -- Mahatma Ghandi
"Probably all laws are useless; for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them." -- Demonax - (Roman philosopher c. 150 A.D.)
"More laws, less justice." -- Marcus Tullius Ciceroca (42 BC)
Democracy
"Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic." --Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." -- James Bovard, (1994)
Politicans and Government
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience." -- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology. " -- Michael Parenti (and it's just as true for the UK)
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." "The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." -- Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945
"The technological capacities the government is acquiring and the removal of basic legal checks move us in a direction that was never possible 20 years ago. Does this bring us a lot closer to 1984? Absolutely." -- Tim Edgar, legislative counsel for the ACLU
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." -- Milton Friedman
Outcomes
"The search of the young today is more specific than the ancient search for the Holy Grail. The search of the youth today is for ways and means to make the machine - and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of government that runs that machine - the servant of man. That is the revolution that is coming. It could be a revolution in the nature of an explosive political regeneration. It depends on how wise the Establishment is. If, with its stockpile of arms, it resolves to suppress the dissenters, America will face, I fear, an awful ordeal."
-- William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice
(again, just as true of the UK).
"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny." --Thomas Jefferson
Regarding ancient Athens: "In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again." -- Edward Gibbon
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, vi sucks (and emacs sucks worse ;o) but *vim* doesn't suck at all.
And by the way, the latter of the two quotations finishes by blaming Chinese aspirations toward world leadership, via whatever means possible, and the suppression of individual rights by the ruling class. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
Well, when you put it like that, it makes a lot more sense. But I don't know where you got the idea you were pushing earlier, that today's untrammeled multinationals are somehow like foreign powers working against US interests.
This is actually a global problem; people in Europe are just as much under the corporate thumb as you are, and just as uncomfortable with it (see the current hoo-ha about the proposed EU software patent law for example). And moreover, these corporations do seem to be mostly US led, so I don't see how you can conflate this with some sort of foreign threat.
I suppose you must have been hoping you could leverage some kind of patriotic response amongst your own countrymen. But, if you try to sell it like that then I suspect all you will achieve is to alienate your natural allies - the anti-globalisation movements in other parts of the world. And I really do think it is going to take all of us together to see off these usurpers of the people's power. Enough of this jingoistic nonsense. Your enemy's enemy is your friend.
Well no, they don't think that at all - since they have already received an enormous number of written representations and petition signatures demonstrating the opposite.
Maybe you didn't hear, but the entire basis on which the officials sponsoring this leglsation have decided to completely ignore public opinion is, ludicrously, that a *financial majority*, i.e. big business *is* in favour, and so the public can just go fuck themselves.
So I hardly think that further outraged letters will do any good at all. In fact given their apparently complete capture by special interests I don't think anything will work - except, maybe, getting round there in person with baseball bats, pitchforks etc. and "reminding" them of who they are supposed to be working for.
Hey, I did this already. I mailed all my local MEPs and what happened? Only one of them (the Tory) bothered to respond - a junior assistant wrote back and basically just restated Tory party policy - which is that they believe software patents are necessary and will be completely benign.
Don't expect anybody to listen to the likes of you. They don't want to, and they apparently think they don't even have to.
The only way to use the equality comparison operator is to calculate everything at a precision level way beyond where you will truncate the result before doing the comparison. The question of just how much extra precision you need to throw away really depends on how many arithmetical operations you'll be doing on it before you get to the comparison. This is ambiguous, which is a Very Bad Thing (subsequent programmers assume the existing code works, then they re-use it in repeated calcs and BAM!).
So no, it's just not worth the trouble. When you use floating point you should never expect to compare results for equality, instead use less-than-or-equal/greater-than-or-equal to place the result within a specified range. It's OK for representing analogue (i.e. continuous) quantities but should *never* be used for discrete quantities like money. Use a "big integer" library for that, or use normal longword/quadword integers and throw an exception if you get an overflow, depending on how likely you are to get up to the magic +/-2.17bn figure.
Sorry, I didn't really mean to be rude. "Mental illness"? Goodness me, you are a little tetchy aren't you. I suppose you must have some "issues" with this particular topic.
Well, duh. Could there really be any programmer working for a living anywhere in the world who doesn't know that already? And you with such a low UserId too.
Your very first college lesson on float data types should have explicitly stated that they should never be used with the equality comparison operator, so even a completely-wet-behind the-ears rookie should know it.
What I really want is mail stored in a monolithic file with indexed access - with the *keys* placed in these buckets. With multiple categories applied to each email so that eg. a message from your brother which contains a new joke *and* clues you about a business opportunity can get filed under "family" "jokes" and "business" all at the same time without duplicating the underlying data.
Actually while we're at it the proverbial *they* need to make this indexed data structure readable and writable by other applications. It would be nice if you could access *all* your data (contacts, post-it notes, appointment history, chat conversation logs, URL bookmarks, movie clips, everything) neatly, each item presented in the relevant format. from a single search query.
Intelligent filtering is only half useful in its current form. The real benefits won't be perceptible until we are able to use it to index our stuff in a purely subject-oriented way rather than (as now) in a format-oriented way.
Sender in my case was always "big@boss.com"
;o)
Subject "Re: Movies" or "Sample" or "Re: Here is that sample".
Mime attatchment was "Document003.pif" or "Movie_0074.mpeg.pif".
The subject and attachment name appear to come in any permutation.
I run linux and Mozilla, so I'm not hurt - and I've trained my junk filter on them now anyway
Mod up the parent, someone.
This is a fact we all have to get to grips with; wishful thinking is irrelevant. America's huge influence in the global marketplace means that what goes down in the USA goes down everywhere else.
I blame this partly on globalization; US economic power has been leveraged out of all proportion via their controlling stake in most global corporations. Just look at the WIPO treaty for example - designed by American corporations, and pressed upon the rest of the world via the lobbying efforts of their overseas arms.
It has the effect of subverting foreign democracies and turning them into puppet states. Worst of all it leaves foreign populations, even those in Europe, without any effective representation in their own government. The influence can be subtle or it can be overt. See for example the European Parliament's support for software patents in the face of huge popular opposition. See the UK government's support of the US invasion of Iraq despite a massive and plainly active majority against it. There are dozens more examples; virtually every foreign litigation and legislation story on Slashdot included.
What has happened is that the politicians and lawmakers in these client states no longer hear the cries of their electors - somehow, they have been repurposed to serve their new global (US) corporate masters.
The people in these countries pay for this through the nose, of course: high costs of goods due to US cartel-controlled pricing; lost trading opportunities due to US-imposed trade tariffs and sanctions; economic debt caused by involvement in US military adventurism. How could it be otherwise when one player dominates, controls who is allowed to play and by what rules, implements only those international treaties that operate in its favour and ignores or refuses to sign up to any that even the score?
So it's an ironic turn of affairs, but one that should appeal to patriotic Americans if only in a nostalgic sense: those of us in the Old World are now smarting over the unfairness of what might be described as effectively taxation, of us, by US industry, without proper representation.
Given what this led to when it was the other way around 230 years ago, it's no wonder the US wants to keep a military stranglehold over the rest of the world. And since the problem isn't going to go away by itself, we may only expect the US to tighten the noose even further, whatever else happens. Because they can.
Second funniest post ever!
Funniest post ever, that's for sure. And there have been a few good ones.
Thanks for extending the helping hand. Unfortunately it's not just one or two websites, I think it might be any web site with Javascript on it but it only happens when Moz has been running for a while and has a number of tabs/windows open. I'm pinning my hopes on 1.4 (sucker!)
Latest updates? I have them all. This may be part of the problem. SuSE's QA is terrible, the updates always seem to add at least as many bugs as they fix.
As for Gnome - I've avoided it mainly because I find the interface confusing and non-intuitive. I think I may try again, especially now that the new ximian updates have come out.
When I do find a similar problem detailed somewhere, invariably the only answer is a shrug - it's usually too much work for the code maintainers to root out the cause, and most users (myself included) can afford even less the hours of patient debugging since it would need to be accompanied by the steep learning curve of a major code base such as mozilla or KDE.
See this earlier post of mine about a proposed solution.
I never see my BIOS. Because I never reboot my machine. You see, I run Linux.
There is one gotcha with this type of KVM switch - the cables cost extra. The video quality I get is good at 1600x1200, but I did get the special high-definition KVM cables for the connections to the monitor and to any boxes running a graphical desktop. You're OK with the low-def cables for boxes just running text consoles.
I have an inexpensive four-port Dakota Scout KVM which uses PS/2 sockets for the mouse and keyboard connections. All the boxes connected to it run SuSE Linux 8.1. I have had no problems at all with switching between console sessions running gpm and X sessions using the imps/2 driver to provide access to the wheel. The only difficult bit was getting X to recognize the correct mouse module (IIRC there was a spelling or capitalization issue with the module name, either in 8.1 or one of the previous versions). So I think it might be your KVM. Maybe try a cheaper one :o\
There's no way this could happen.
Now, I am a committed Linux user - I won't let anything else into the house - but Linux desktop software is, let's be honest, still very buggy and unreliable. Particularly big programs like object frameworks, web browsers and integrated office suites.
It will ever be thus, because a team of teen-plus OSS GUI programmers basically just doing what ever floats their particular boat are never going to be as committed to stamping out bugs vs. adding k3w1 new bloat as would, say, anyone associated with *BSD, or any other team of hairy 1970s renegades working on big important infrastructure software like sendmail or apache.
So OSS desktop software bugs may move around, but I don't see them going away any time soon. Mac software developers on the other hand seem to aspire to clean design, stability and trouble-free operation. You might say it's their animus.
The result is that where Mac software might lack some variety, what is available is very high quality indeed, and it runs on a rock solid platform. With a desktop that is just breathtakingly elegant. So I don't think Linux is going to beat Mac OSX in the desktop marketplace, at least not on the grounds of desktop desirability.
Also bear in mind that Apple has chosen to be a niche player. They have had ten years to compete with Microsoft, and they had a head start as well, but they have never tried to own the mass desktop market. They have always left that to Microsoft, and concentrated on winning a dedicated minority of discriminating users, compensating with high profit margins.
However, If they actually had ambitions to become a mass market desktop player I have no doubt they could do so most effectively. If it gets around that the Mac is so painless to use, and Apple then gets the idea that there is a genuine sustainable market for cheaper Macs beyond the traditional arty-farty sector, they may be emboldened finally to grab a larger slice of the pie. And that sort of groundswell can easily reach critical mass. Just look what happened to Linux.
Then Microsoft really would have something to worry about - a world run on Macs connected to Linux servers.
For these reasons it's only in Microsoft's interest to suppress public interest in the Mac platform. In my opinion MSNBC, Slate etc. have always managed to keep their journalism more unbiased than their ownership might lead one to expect, but there must be some influence from time to time even if it is of the most subtle kind. So it's not too surprising to see an article like this in a Microsoft-owned publcation.
How moronic does somebody have to be, to moderate the above comment "overrated"? Do we have chimpanzees for moderators now? Hamsters?
Why redesign it at all? It's more or less perfect as it is. Maybe remove the blinking gifs but that's all. There's nothing more diappointing than seeing a relatively usable site get "redesigned" with bad javascript, pointless flash animations, badly designed tables and frames. All these things do is serve to make the site less navigable and even impossible for some web clients to render correctly.
somone with points please mod that one up...
I would have thought that speakers of that size must be designed to dissipate at least 150W. If you drive them at much lower levels, surely you won't get anything like a linear frequency response. Wouldn't you be better off with smaller speakers for close listening?
Here are some more that might be of interest:
Law
"No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom." -- Mahatma Ghandi
"Probably all laws are useless; for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them." -- Demonax - (Roman philosopher c. 150 A.D.)
"More laws, less justice." -- Marcus Tullius Ciceroca (42 BC)
Democracy
"Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic." --Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." -- James Bovard, (1994)
Politicans and Government
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience." -- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology. " -- Michael Parenti (and it's just as true for the UK)
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." "The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." -- Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945
"The technological capacities the government is acquiring and the removal of basic legal checks move us in a direction that was never possible 20 years ago. Does this bring us a lot closer to 1984? Absolutely." -- Tim Edgar, legislative counsel for the ACLU
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." -- Milton Friedman
Outcomes
"The search of the young today is more specific than the ancient search for the Holy Grail. The search of the youth today is for ways and means to make the machine - and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of government that runs that machine - the servant of man . That is the revolution that is coming. It could be a revolution in the nature of an explosive political regeneration. It depends on how wise the Establishment is. If, with its stockpile of arms, it resolves to suppress the dissenters, America will face, I fear, an awful ordeal." -- William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice (again, just as true of the UK).
"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny." --Thomas Jefferson
Regarding ancient Athens: "In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again." -- Edward Gibbon
I am grateful for Vincent Tijms' web site, from which I selected all the above quotations.