"Considering that there are hundreds of millions of people on the Internet, and hundreds of BILLIONS of different hardware configurations, the chance that a Microsoft fix will break something is much higher than the chance that a KDE fix will break something."
Are you suggesting that microsoft is as amazingly stupid as SSL directly using hardware would suggest? Most people who outright hate microsoft wouldn't suggest that they're that dumb.
Hint: SSL has no requirements as far as hardware goes, at all. SSL should not depend on much of anything, at all. SSL is provided to other things to depend on.
Couldn't you achieve the same result by just not marking anything at all? I.e. take your ballot paper, industriously fake making marks on it, then put in your blank ballot paper. It then gets counted as "spoilt ballot" and the machine doesn't complain.
If the perl 6 regex's have real benefits over the old style of regex's, then everyone else will switch over. Sure it will take a while, but then what improvements in life ever happened instantly?
So, does this complete "hands off" approach to life include, say, car makers manufacturing safe cars? What about employers who have unnecessarily unsafe working conditions?
Has it not occurred to you that history has shown that the free market does not fix all?
Besides, what's wrong with the approach that we are a country with a free market so long as everyone in it is dealing fairly and openly. Those who don't want to deal fairly and openly can go elsewhere. Is that so unreasonable?
My entire point is that language is a perfect example of where the whole push for "one choice" falls so short, and is so obviously wrong.
And on the matter of programming languages, didn't you see the essay where Havoc Pennington criticized xchat for being scriptable in not just one, but four different programming languages?
People desperate to get rid of Nautilus, could do it via gnome-session-properties, and actually, as of GNOME 2.0 I don't see the point apart from feeling 31337.
Maybe because we absolutely hate icons sitting on the "desktop"? Btw, it's not a "desktop", it's THE BACKGROUND. It exists because there has to be something behind everything, not for any other reason. I don't want cute little icons or other stupid stuff taking up memory and doing no good besides annoying me.
I don't know where all these people who think that they're God's gift to the rest of us have come from to attach themselves to Gnome, but GET OVER YOURSELVES. Not everyone is the same. Hey, speaking of which, I just checked that link that you have. That site isn't in English. Why are you using some other language, to be 31337? Everyone speaks english, stop using all those other languages, they just cause confusion. Really, english is the most widely spoken language, by far. Everyone else who wants to cling to some other language is probably just a backwards, arrogant, snivelling pimple-faced socially inept pre-pubescent teenager who is of no consequence in the world and God hates them.
need a well thought out configuration that cannot be modified by any means.
Ok, here's how to accomplish this: administrative lock. The administrater gets to lock his users out from making any configuration changes, even local ones.
Problem solved. We don't need to gut the usefullness of a program because some people can abuse it, we just shackle the offenders.
Here's a good analogy: because some people get into accidentys, should we remove the steering wheel on cars? Why not just make the people who are at fault for getting into accidents take a bus (i.e. take away their driving license). I don't know what country you come from, but here in the US (where much of gnome development is done), we have a princple called "innocent until proven guilty" (howevermuch the current government finds it inconvenient). Why treat all users like blithering morons, when that's only some (or perhaps most) of them? Why imprison everyone for the sins of some?
No, but usability testing would probably indicate which method is easiest for certain groups of users, from total newbies, to windows users, to CDE users.
Ok, I know that this thinking stuff is a bit hard, but the solution when usability testing indicates that each group finds easiest what they're already used to, which one is then the "right" one? Answer: NONE. Each person has their preference, and they are used to it. Claiming that either you or the majority are correct simply because either you are you or the majority have more people than the minority is just plain dumb when there is an alternative. Tyrrany of the majority is not a good form of government (unless you are the majority, I guess).
but who can deny that its straight-foward approach and completely uniform grammar are less useful for communicating ideas than the tremendous over-complexity of all non-constructed languages
There speaks a man who has obviously never used language very much. Language is a mess because reality is a mess and human beings live for limited periods of time and so time is precious. Now of course languages have thier quirks, but you'll never get rid of them, as they'll quickly creep in to a designed language. First off, virtually noone cares about lingual purity. Second, most people don't particularly like to think in great depth about things that aren't of great practical significance. Put those two together and it guarantees that any language which you have will mutate and change. To say that the only way in which a person can think the result good is by using mind-altering substances is just arrogance or stupidity. Natural language has proved quite useful, often because of its quirks as in spite of them.
when it ought to be (dis)(en)abled by default, and the preference removed
Alright, here is my suggestion: we do usability testing where simple majority rules on which features are enabled by default. Then everyone who doesn't like features doesn't look at the preferences dialog boxes. Simple, problem solved. You don't like features? Shut up and go away. There, you didn't have to deal with any of those nasty, scary features. What are you, a rabbit? You run scared of too many features and need to kill them to protect yourself? NOT EVERYONE IS YOU. Many of us, in fact, are rather unlike you. Quite a bit. For example, some of us would rather hit the developer of the window manager rather than use a window manager which has click-to-focus and focus-raises-window behavior. Thankfully, we still have a choice. Havoc Pennington hasn't quite gotten alternative window managers made illegal to avoid user confusion, yet. But just wait. Maybe gnome 4 or 5 will check to see what window manager you're using and delete it if you're not running his featureless preferenceless windowmanager.
Does the remarkable similarity of your philosophy to that of totalitarian dictatorships not worry you, even a little? Doesn't the fact that your arguments would fairly easily support, "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Furor!" make you wonder, just a little?
People are different. Get over your megalomaniacal fantasies that everyone is just a copy of you running around who happens to take different shoe sizes. We're not. And even if you can't get over this egotistical delusion of yours, please at least don't do some research to find out what the "most common" shoe size is and lobby for laws to force all shoes to be made in that size.
Neither reference to God in either context serves to enhance freedom of religion, and both serve to undermine the fundamental separation of church and state upon which the republic was founded, revisionist Christian rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.
And just to play a bit of devil's advocate: what of the effect of enforcing an essentially atheistic education through a person's 18th year by law? Is not forcing a person to avoid their religion for 8 hours a day an interference? (note: not everyone can afford to send their children to private schools or to home school them, and being poor is not a legitimate reason for a person to be deprived of their rights.)
Repeating the pledge, every day in school, over and over, seems an awfully lot like an attempt to indoctrinate children, instead of educating them.
What the hell do you think that education is? Education is the forcible stuffing of ideas into children, often against their will. Besides, why is it so unreasonable to ask citizens of a country to be loyal to it (hint: the flag stands for the country, it's a thing called a "symbol")?
incidently, sloppy focus really is total crack, as Havoc also says in the README
Then both you and he are fools. There is no right or wrong way to determine which window recieves focus based on where the mouse is. The mouse is used to tell the computer which window the user wants events to go to. Focus policy simply dictates how the user does this.
What you're saying uses the same reasoning as saying that for people to communicate, it's total crack for them to use chinese, but this is one of those cases where it's just too darn useful. All conventions which are merely convention are equal in value and worth. This is why there are so many preferences, and until everyone is the same, good programs will be stuck with a lot of preferences.
Moreover, I've looked at the metacity readme. Havoc is just plain going off the deep end. This man has gotten to the point where he actually thinks that if there are two or more ways to do something, then one of them is better than the rest. That just isn't the case. Sometimes there are alterntives which are better than others, but in many, many situations there are alternatives where none are superior to the others. Hence options.
Do you people really believe that the last 30 years of software implemented so many options because programmers are just mean at heart? That there has been, all along, one shining path that we've all just ignored because we want to punish users with making them wade through configuration files and dialogs to find it?
If you really believe that, then of all the things here mentioned it's your opinion which is on crack.
Why are you using woody for newbies? Well, if you're administering it than it's not a big deal, but still. Debian is just about the least user-friendly of the distros (my favorite, but still not user-friendly).
How are you trying to configure your printer? Did you use printtool? Or what about foomatic? The linuxprinting.org page lists it as mostly working. I strongly suggest going a foomatic route if you can, it makes installing printers very easy.
Every other software vendor has had the same options and opportunities available to them
So Sun and Apple and SGI and Linux and BSD etc. all had the opportunity to supply the operating system for IBM's PC? Do remember that microsoft didn't get to where it is by some sort of tactical genius on the part of bill gates, it got where it is largely by luck. Microsoft was chosen to supply the operating system on what wasn't planned to be a huge product. However, when compaq reverse engineered the PC and started making them cheaply, the market for them exploded handing microsoft the dominant position as the OS distributor.
Microsoft's boat was carried by the rising waters of the PC hardware industry - rising waters that they were in no way responsible for.
Now, granted, it was possible for microsoft to lose its tremendous windfall, and to their credit (as tactitions) they didn't. They managed to kill their competition for PC operating systems (of course, the only competition that I can think of was OS/2 which came late in the game (and unmarketed) and something called NeoGeo (or something of that kind), which was also later on). But had microsoft not had this tremendous advantage, had their company not been hugely bolstered by events far beyond their control, they would have found their dominance much harder to win.
Another advantage little commented on is the boom that the internet has provided for them. They were again in a good position when the internet gave a huge number of people a reason (email + the web) to own a computer. So again with a giant boom in computer purchases stimulated by this new reason to own a computer, microsoft again had its boat brought up by rising waters.
And as the saying goes, there's nothing so conducive to success as huge gobs of money. But give microsoft time. They may yet drop the ball that they've been handed. There are some interesting rumors of what will happen when they become a mature company whose stock does not rise in value (abnormally) and thus they are unable to print money in the form of stock options. But that isn't relevant to the current discussion.
You said that everyone had the same opportunities. They did not. That doesn't make microsoft any better or worse than other companies, but it also means that they are not comparable. Microsoft has been immensely successful and they have immensely abused their success. That is what's really important. We need to undue the damage that they've done and unshakle computing from the bonds that microsoft put on it in an attempt to keep it from running away.
Being that most people there are still poor and dying from starvation I wouldn't say they brought much.
Care to back up the claim that greater than 50% of africans are dying of starvation with some references?
Problem is that you think that the "third world" needs the insane things you have.
No, but the third world seems to want them. There are groups who have decided that they really don't want modern technology. Take the amish. It's possible to do, it just isn't done in Africa, so to say that they're unnecessary isn't really relevant. They're wanted and to some degree fought over. If nothing else that at least shows that "most" Africans disagree with you about the value of these things.
As for the current problems, what do you want? What has been done by other people cannot how be simply undone. Do you want us to go in, take over the governments of poorly run African countries, and make them protectorates of the US until they get their act together?
It's all well and good to say that the europeans were at fault (neglecting how much of the corrupt government is government by native people), but that's in the past. We live in the present. So what is it that you want?
the only thing whites have brought to Africa is racism and their own forms of control over the lands true owners.
So you don't believe that cars, telephones, mass-produced books, vaccines, television, movies, cheap clothing (i.e. mass-produced clothing such as denim jeans), or computers are things? Don't get me wrong, I don't approve of one group attacking another and subjugating it, but you're going a bit overboard in the other direction, don't you think?
No, he actually has it the right way forward. If you view life as an abberation (based on how absurdly complicated and extraordinarily delicate life is), not the main point of the universe, then you wouldn't expect to see that abberation frequently at all. In point of fact, given how exacting the requirements of active life are (it is true that inactive bacteria can survive quite a lot, but they don't do anything while they're surviving, i.e. they don't reproduce while on the outside of a space shuttle), if the universe is not predisposed to create life, while it's already quite a wonder to think that it did it at all, it's even more absurd to think that it would do it again.
Well, I thought about this as well and the problem with it, as far as I can tell, is that Dooku would probably make it very hard for yoda to accurately weild his saber by force power, as Dooku would doubtless use his force power on the saber as well, and dooku is quite powerful.
I doubt that yoda could effectively use his blade remotely with a powerful sith fighting him for control of it. This is why, I suspect, that jedi/sith battles don't primarily consist of one of them pulling the other one's saber out of his hand and then making a quick end of the now saberless opponent. If both pull, the net effect is probably 0 or close to it.
Of course, this probably was not thought of, but battles between jedi and sith would be pretty boring otherwise.
Well, a 10' lightsaber blade would still be very combersome, especially inside of rooms where you (1) don't want to kill everyone and (2) don't want to destroy everything. Also, just by the lever principle your strength in pushing the blade decreases along its length, so fighting with the end of it if it were 10' long would probably be ineffective (it is indicated that you need strength to push through things, even if the saber is good at it).
Also, jedi need to be fast with their saber and a 10' saber would be much slower not because of increased mass but just because of increased distance that it would have to travel.
Well, did you ever see yoda get hit? His opponent had no opportunity to hit him. What other quality is there to the perfect parry, or the perfect stroke?
Why should yoda have fought like someone twice his size with none of his force powers? It doesn't make sense.
As the old saying goes: "If you're a master of the invisible kick, it really doesn't matter what your opponent knows." Similarly: "It is better to be great at one type of punch than good at ten." Yoda could move faster than essentially any other living creature. Since yoda's speed came from an unexhaustable source of power, why waste time with skillful moves on the gamble that your opponent isn't better at his attack than you are at your specific parry, when you can constantly bombard him with attacks that give him no chance to counterattack?
Something that a judo sensei told me: once your a blackbelt, you'll have some move that you do really well -- better than prettymuch everyone else. When you're a high degree blackbelt, you'll have for or five such moves. When you're practicing, you practice all of your moves. When you're in a competition (or fighting), you use the ones that you're expert at. yoda was an expert in the force. Why would he ignore that in favor of his skill in fencing?
Please note that what you're describing is very hard to do against a skilled opponent, let alone a skilled opponent who is literally bigger than twice your size? Bear in mind that it's hard to take advantage of small mistakes in someone's attack when their body isn't actually within your reach, partially because your head is as high as their waste and partially because their arms are as long as your entire body. Don't you recall how Yoda's unignited light saber was about half as big as he was?
The sort of technique that you're talking about works well if you're roughly physically comparable to your opponent. When your opponent is much, much, much larger than you are, different techniques have to be used. Often the compensation that the small use is to be a lot faster than their opponent.
Remember: reach counts for quite a lot in martial arts. More over, all things being equal, big people have an advantage over small ones - they're stronger and have a longer reach. Is it any wonder that yoda used the same sort of technique in fighting larger people that small people have traditionally used: being faster?
I've always thought that the Jedi are a pretty clear reference to martial arts and that The Force is similar to the chinese concept of "chi".
Well, sort of. The Chinese concept of chi is a fairly internal one, whereas the idea of the force is very external. Chi powers have more to do with manipulating energy in one's body, and force powers have more to do with manipulating energy outside of one's body (not that the force isn't inside of people as well, but it's by virtue of being all-pervasive).
I don't think that people object to Yoda fighting, it was the way in which he fought. Movies have somehow perpetuated the idiotic notion that martial arts is about jumps and flips.
Well, this isn't so idiotic. There are chinese styles that are very, very jumping-heavy. From what I understand, there are some northern styles where a fighting person spends more time in the air then on the ground. (This is supposed to be derived from fighting on ice, where the air is actually a more stable place than the ground is.)
That being said, I heard a story (from someone who witnessed it) about a 60-something year old black dragon gung fu practicioner who drank gin from the bottle, smoked cigars about 1" in diameter, had a pot belly the side of some people's bodies, and waddled around. Some students insulted him (laughed at how fat he was, I believe) and by way of demonstration, after informing them of what he was going to do, he jumped upso that his waste was around the height of their shoulders or heads, kicked one in the shoulder and before he hit the ground had spun around and kicked the other one in the side of the leg. The students both hit the ground at approximately the same time.
So maybe there's more to the idea of a master jumping around at really high speeds than you realize.:-)
He expended a lot of useless energy bouncing around. Remember, when you're doing a flip, you're basically defenseless and not doing any real attack.
Well, I thought that (1) it wasn't his energy - it was the force, so that there was an unlimited supply of it and (2) he was moving around to attack from different positions. After all, it's not like he jumped up and waited to land again before attacking. His saber was spinning around saw-tooth fashion while he was jumping, and I recall Dooku having to block it more than once while yoda's feet were not on the ground.
You would think that a wise old Jedi like Yoda would be able to use some pretty efficient moves on Dooku.
Given that Yoda probably couldn't even reach Dooku's chest with his light saber, how did you want him to fight? By constantly attacking Dooku's ankles? Do remember that in traditional sword fighting a longer reach count's for quite a lot - and Dooku's arms were something like twice as long as Yoda's, if not more. Yoda would have been severely outmatched just by that, had he stayed relatively motionless on the ground. By jumping around, Yoda was able to attack Dooku near his head.
That being said, he didn't seem to be doing much in the way of deflecting Dooku's saber and attacking a more vulnerable spot, which happens a lot in real fencing. That was a bit dissapointing. That and yoda not winning. It's not like Dooku wasn't expendible.
Do you have any evidence or reason to believe that there's not an _infinite_ number of dimensions?
Nope. There might be. Can you provide some reason to believe why there aren't? Until you can provide some reason to believe that there are in fact only 3 (or 4, or whatever exactly it is that you believe in), why do you go on about how nonsensical talking about 5 or 6 dimensions is?
Human knowledge is currently fairly limited. Why do you insist on speaking as if it weren't?
Why? This is a most extraordinary claim. Are you prepared to produce your extraordinary evidence?
Oh, and a quote from Einstein that I rather like, ""Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
"When they go outside five dimensions (3 space, 1 time, 1 energy), I lose interest."
It's funny: when I read this I got a mental picture of a race of blind people discussing physics and introducing this bizarre concept of "energy waves" that travel around, and people getting bored by it because it's obviously just an overly complex theory being shoe-horned onto reality.
Do you have any evidence, or even any reason to believe, that there are in fact not seventeen dimensions and we just don't have the necessary organs to readily percieve them all as being distinct?
Bear in mind that without sight or our kinesthetic sense, there would be no especially good or convincing way to tell that space had 3 dimensions to it.
Btw, when the view that you are currently advancing was put forth on some other topic a few weeks ago, a name for was mentioned that seems highly appropriate: "proof by instant gratification". How do you maintain it with a straight face?
Before trying to implement true democracy, I suggest that you first spend some time getting to know people who live in different places from you (especially in poorer neighborhoods). You'll find that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to get acquainted with facts concerning the things that they would be voting about.
Hell, if this doesn't scare you just think about how much the mass media influences people's opinions on issues. Do you really want the deciding influence on the vote on a given law to be what the "friends" episode that aired the night before was in favor of?
Believe me, I'm well aware that a democratic republic is a pretty bad form of government, but it seems to be better than all the rest. Direct democracy is actually a very scary thing. As it is it's bad enough when some large group of people decides to ban together and elects some idiot to government (this is rare, thankfully), but can you just imagine how legislation on complicated issues would go? People would hear "nuclear" and it would be banned. There would be a 100% tax on the "rich" where rich is defined as earning more than 51% of the people.
Basically, life is very imperfect, it's amazing to what a degree we (i.e. the middle class and above in America) currently escape the suffering that is typically associated with life, and the prospect of most people directly telling their neighbors how to live is absolutely frightening. Say what you want about oligarchy (which is basically what every form of current government is), but at least (when it answers to the people) it is reasonably moderate and relatively hard to sway by emotion (the key word here is relatively).
Slashdot Mirror
"Considering that there are hundreds of millions of people on the Internet, and hundreds of BILLIONS of different hardware configurations, the chance that a Microsoft fix will break something is much higher than the chance that a KDE fix will break something." Are you suggesting that microsoft is as amazingly stupid as SSL directly using hardware would suggest? Most people who outright hate microsoft wouldn't suggest that they're that dumb. Hint: SSL has no requirements as far as hardware goes, at all. SSL should not depend on much of anything, at all. SSL is provided to other things to depend on.
Couldn't you achieve the same result by just not marking anything at all? I.e. take your ballot paper, industriously fake making marks on it, then put in your blank ballot paper. It then gets counted as "spoilt ballot" and the machine doesn't complain.
Seems simple enough to me.
If the perl 6 regex's have real benefits over the old style of regex's, then everyone else will switch over. Sure it will take a while, but then what improvements in life ever happened instantly?
So, does this complete "hands off" approach to life include, say, car makers manufacturing safe cars? What about employers who have unnecessarily unsafe working conditions?
Has it not occurred to you that history has shown that the free market does not fix all?
Besides, what's wrong with the approach that we are a country with a free market so long as everyone in it is dealing fairly and openly. Those who don't want to deal fairly and openly can go elsewhere. Is that so unreasonable?
Have you ever heard of sarcasm? :-)
My entire point is that language is a perfect example of where the whole push for "one choice" falls so short, and is so obviously wrong.
And on the matter of programming languages, didn't you see the essay where Havoc Pennington criticized xchat for being scriptable in not just one, but four different programming languages?
Maybe because we absolutely hate icons sitting on the "desktop"? Btw, it's not a "desktop", it's THE BACKGROUND. It exists because there has to be something behind everything, not for any other reason. I don't want cute little icons or other stupid stuff taking up memory and doing no good besides annoying me.
I don't know where all these people who think that they're God's gift to the rest of us have come from to attach themselves to Gnome, but GET OVER YOURSELVES. Not everyone is the same. Hey, speaking of which, I just checked that link that you have. That site isn't in English. Why are you using some other language, to be 31337? Everyone speaks english, stop using all those other languages, they just cause confusion. Really, english is the most widely spoken language, by far. Everyone else who wants to cling to some other language is probably just a backwards, arrogant, snivelling pimple-faced socially inept pre-pubescent teenager who is of no consequence in the world and God hates them.
I hope tha tyou get my point.
Ok, here's how to accomplish this: administrative lock. The administrater gets to lock his users out from making any configuration changes, even local ones.
Problem solved. We don't need to gut the usefullness of a program because some people can abuse it, we just shackle the offenders.
Here's a good analogy: because some people get into accidentys, should we remove the steering wheel on cars? Why not just make the people who are at fault for getting into accidents take a bus (i.e. take away their driving license). I don't know what country you come from, but here in the US (where much of gnome development is done), we have a princple called "innocent until proven guilty" (howevermuch the current government finds it inconvenient). Why treat all users like blithering morons, when that's only some (or perhaps most) of them? Why imprison everyone for the sins of some?
Ok, I know that this thinking stuff is a bit hard, but the solution when usability testing indicates that each group finds easiest what they're already used to, which one is then the "right" one? Answer: NONE. Each person has their preference, and they are used to it. Claiming that either you or the majority are correct simply because either you are you or the majority have more people than the minority is just plain dumb when there is an alternative. Tyrrany of the majority is not a good form of government (unless you are the majority, I guess).
There speaks a man who has obviously never used language very much. Language is a mess because reality is a mess and human beings live for limited periods of time and so time is precious. Now of course languages have thier quirks, but you'll never get rid of them, as they'll quickly creep in to a designed language. First off, virtually noone cares about lingual purity. Second, most people don't particularly like to think in great depth about things that aren't of great practical significance. Put those two together and it guarantees that any language which you have will mutate and change. To say that the only way in which a person can think the result good is by using mind-altering substances is just arrogance or stupidity. Natural language has proved quite useful, often because of its quirks as in spite of them.
Alright, here is my suggestion: we do usability testing where simple majority rules on which features are enabled by default. Then everyone who doesn't like features doesn't look at the preferences dialog boxes. Simple, problem solved. You don't like features? Shut up and go away. There, you didn't have to deal with any of those nasty, scary features. What are you, a rabbit? You run scared of too many features and need to kill them to protect yourself? NOT EVERYONE IS YOU. Many of us, in fact, are rather unlike you. Quite a bit. For example, some of us would rather hit the developer of the window manager rather than use a window manager which has click-to-focus and focus-raises-window behavior. Thankfully, we still have a choice. Havoc Pennington hasn't quite gotten alternative window managers made illegal to avoid user confusion, yet. But just wait. Maybe gnome 4 or 5 will check to see what window manager you're using and delete it if you're not running his featureless preferenceless windowmanager.
Does the remarkable similarity of your philosophy to that of totalitarian dictatorships not worry you, even a little? Doesn't the fact that your arguments would fairly easily support, "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Furor!" make you wonder, just a little?
People are different. Get over your megalomaniacal fantasies that everyone is just a copy of you running around who happens to take different shoe sizes. We're not. And even if you can't get over this egotistical delusion of yours, please at least don't do some research to find out what the "most common" shoe size is and lobby for laws to force all shoes to be made in that size.
And just to play a bit of devil's advocate: what of the effect of enforcing an essentially atheistic education through a person's 18th year by law? Is not forcing a person to avoid their religion for 8 hours a day an interference? (note: not everyone can afford to send their children to private schools or to home school them, and being poor is not a legitimate reason for a person to be deprived of their rights.)
What the hell do you think that education is? Education is the forcible stuffing of ideas into children, often against their will. Besides, why is it so unreasonable to ask citizens of a country to be loyal to it (hint: the flag stands for the country, it's a thing called a "symbol")?
Then both you and he are fools. There is no right or wrong way to determine which window recieves focus based on where the mouse is. The mouse is used to tell the computer which window the user wants events to go to. Focus policy simply dictates how the user does this.
What you're saying uses the same reasoning as saying that for people to communicate, it's total crack for them to use chinese, but this is one of those cases where it's just too darn useful. All conventions which are merely convention are equal in value and worth. This is why there are so many preferences, and until everyone is the same, good programs will be stuck with a lot of preferences.
Moreover, I've looked at the metacity readme. Havoc is just plain going off the deep end. This man has gotten to the point where he actually thinks that if there are two or more ways to do something, then one of them is better than the rest. That just isn't the case. Sometimes there are alterntives which are better than others, but in many, many situations there are alternatives where none are superior to the others. Hence options.
Do you people really believe that the last 30 years of software implemented so many options because programmers are just mean at heart? That there has been, all along, one shining path that we've all just ignored because we want to punish users with making them wade through configuration files and dialogs to find it?
If you really believe that, then of all the things here mentioned it's your opinion which is on crack.
Why are you using woody for newbies? Well, if you're administering it than it's not a big deal, but still. Debian is just about the least user-friendly of the distros (my favorite, but still not user-friendly).
How are you trying to configure your printer? Did you use printtool? Or what about foomatic? The linuxprinting.org page lists it as mostly working. I strongly suggest going a foomatic route if you can, it makes installing printers very easy.
So Sun and Apple and SGI and Linux and BSD etc. all had the opportunity to supply the operating system for IBM's PC? Do remember that microsoft didn't get to where it is by some sort of tactical genius on the part of bill gates, it got where it is largely by luck. Microsoft was chosen to supply the operating system on what wasn't planned to be a huge product. However, when compaq reverse engineered the PC and started making them cheaply, the market for them exploded handing microsoft the dominant position as the OS distributor.
Microsoft's boat was carried by the rising waters of the PC hardware industry - rising waters that they were in no way responsible for.
Now, granted, it was possible for microsoft to lose its tremendous windfall, and to their credit (as tactitions) they didn't. They managed to kill their competition for PC operating systems (of course, the only competition that I can think of was OS/2 which came late in the game (and unmarketed) and something called NeoGeo (or something of that kind), which was also later on). But had microsoft not had this tremendous advantage, had their company not been hugely bolstered by events far beyond their control, they would have found their dominance much harder to win.
Another advantage little commented on is the boom that the internet has provided for them. They were again in a good position when the internet gave a huge number of people a reason (email + the web) to own a computer. So again with a giant boom in computer purchases stimulated by this new reason to own a computer, microsoft again had its boat brought up by rising waters.
And as the saying goes, there's nothing so conducive to success as huge gobs of money. But give microsoft time. They may yet drop the ball that they've been handed. There are some interesting rumors of what will happen when they become a mature company whose stock does not rise in value (abnormally) and thus they are unable to print money in the form of stock options. But that isn't relevant to the current discussion.
You said that everyone had the same opportunities. They did not. That doesn't make microsoft any better or worse than other companies, but it also means that they are not comparable. Microsoft has been immensely successful and they have immensely abused their success. That is what's really important. We need to undue the damage that they've done and unshakle computing from the bonds that microsoft put on it in an attempt to keep it from running away.
Care to back up the claim that greater than 50% of africans are dying of starvation with some references?
No, but the third world seems to want them. There are groups who have decided that they really don't want modern technology. Take the amish. It's possible to do, it just isn't done in Africa, so to say that they're unnecessary isn't really relevant. They're wanted and to some degree fought over. If nothing else that at least shows that "most" Africans disagree with you about the value of these things.
As for the current problems, what do you want? What has been done by other people cannot how be simply undone. Do you want us to go in, take over the governments of poorly run African countries, and make them protectorates of the US until they get their act together?
It's all well and good to say that the europeans were at fault (neglecting how much of the corrupt government is government by native people), but that's in the past. We live in the present. So what is it that you want?
So you don't believe that cars, telephones, mass-produced books, vaccines, television, movies, cheap clothing (i.e. mass-produced clothing such as denim jeans), or computers are things? Don't get me wrong, I don't approve of one group attacking another and subjugating it, but you're going a bit overboard in the other direction, don't you think?
Thank you for putting it so well. It's always nice to see people advocating the true extents of human ignorance. :-) Thanks.
No, he actually has it the right way forward. If you view life as an abberation (based on how absurdly complicated and extraordinarily delicate life is), not the main point of the universe, then you wouldn't expect to see that abberation frequently at all. In point of fact, given how exacting the requirements of active life are (it is true that inactive bacteria can survive quite a lot, but they don't do anything while they're surviving, i.e. they don't reproduce while on the outside of a space shuttle), if the universe is not predisposed to create life, while it's already quite a wonder to think that it did it at all, it's even more absurd to think that it would do it again.
Well, I thought about this as well and the problem with it, as far as I can tell, is that Dooku would probably make it very hard for yoda to accurately weild his saber by force power, as Dooku would doubtless use his force power on the saber as well, and dooku is quite powerful.
I doubt that yoda could effectively use his blade remotely with a powerful sith fighting him for control of it. This is why, I suspect, that jedi/sith battles don't primarily consist of one of them pulling the other one's saber out of his hand and then making a quick end of the now saberless opponent. If both pull, the net effect is probably 0 or close to it.
Of course, this probably was not thought of, but battles between jedi and sith would be pretty boring otherwise.
Well, a 10' lightsaber blade would still be very combersome, especially inside of rooms where you (1) don't want to kill everyone and (2) don't want to destroy everything. Also, just by the lever principle your strength in pushing the blade decreases along its length, so fighting with the end of it if it were 10' long would probably be ineffective (it is indicated that you need strength to push through things, even if the saber is good at it).
Also, jedi need to be fast with their saber and a 10' saber would be much slower not because of increased mass but just because of increased distance that it would have to travel.
Well, did you ever see yoda get hit? His opponent had no opportunity to hit him. What other quality is there to the perfect parry, or the perfect stroke?
Why should yoda have fought like someone twice his size with none of his force powers? It doesn't make sense.
As the old saying goes: "If you're a master of the invisible kick, it really doesn't matter what your opponent knows." Similarly: "It is better to be great at one type of punch than good at ten." Yoda could move faster than essentially any other living creature. Since yoda's speed came from an unexhaustable source of power, why waste time with skillful moves on the gamble that your opponent isn't better at his attack than you are at your specific parry, when you can constantly bombard him with attacks that give him no chance to counterattack?
Something that a judo sensei told me: once your a blackbelt, you'll have some move that you do really well -- better than prettymuch everyone else. When you're a high degree blackbelt, you'll have for or five such moves. When you're practicing, you practice all of your moves. When you're in a competition (or fighting), you use the ones that you're expert at. yoda was an expert in the force. Why would he ignore that in favor of his skill in fencing?
Please note that what you're describing is very hard to do against a skilled opponent, let alone a skilled opponent who is literally bigger than twice your size? Bear in mind that it's hard to take advantage of small mistakes in someone's attack when their body isn't actually within your reach, partially because your head is as high as their waste and partially because their arms are as long as your entire body. Don't you recall how Yoda's unignited light saber was about half as big as he was?
The sort of technique that you're talking about works well if you're roughly physically comparable to your opponent. When your opponent is much, much, much larger than you are, different techniques have to be used. Often the compensation that the small use is to be a lot faster than their opponent.
Remember: reach counts for quite a lot in martial arts. More over, all things being equal, big people have an advantage over small ones - they're stronger and have a longer reach. Is it any wonder that yoda used the same sort of technique in fighting larger people that small people have traditionally used: being faster?
Well, sort of. The Chinese concept of chi is a fairly internal one, whereas the idea of the force is very external. Chi powers have more to do with manipulating energy in one's body, and force powers have more to do with manipulating energy outside of one's body (not that the force isn't inside of people as well, but it's by virtue of being all-pervasive).
Well, this isn't so idiotic. There are chinese styles that are very, very jumping-heavy. From what I understand, there are some northern styles where a fighting person spends more time in the air then on the ground. (This is supposed to be derived from fighting on ice, where the air is actually a more stable place than the ground is.)
That being said, I heard a story (from someone who witnessed it) about a 60-something year old black dragon gung fu practicioner who drank gin from the bottle, smoked cigars about 1" in diameter, had a pot belly the side of some people's bodies, and waddled around. Some students insulted him (laughed at how fat he was, I believe) and by way of demonstration, after informing them of what he was going to do, he jumped upso that his waste was around the height of their shoulders or heads, kicked one in the shoulder and before he hit the ground had spun around and kicked the other one in the side of the leg. The students both hit the ground at approximately the same time.
So maybe there's more to the idea of a master jumping around at really high speeds than you realize. :-)
Well, I thought that (1) it wasn't his energy - it was the force, so that there was an unlimited supply of it and (2) he was moving around to attack from different positions. After all, it's not like he jumped up and waited to land again before attacking. His saber was spinning around saw-tooth fashion while he was jumping, and I recall Dooku having to block it more than once while yoda's feet were not on the ground.
Given that Yoda probably couldn't even reach Dooku's chest with his light saber, how did you want him to fight? By constantly attacking Dooku's ankles? Do remember that in traditional sword fighting a longer reach count's for quite a lot - and Dooku's arms were something like twice as long as Yoda's, if not more. Yoda would have been severely outmatched just by that, had he stayed relatively motionless on the ground. By jumping around, Yoda was able to attack Dooku near his head.
That being said, he didn't seem to be doing much in the way of deflecting Dooku's saber and attacking a more vulnerable spot, which happens a lot in real fencing. That was a bit dissapointing. That and yoda not winning. It's not like Dooku wasn't expendible.
Nope. There might be. Can you provide some reason to believe why there aren't? Until you can provide some reason to believe that there are in fact only 3 (or 4, or whatever exactly it is that you believe in), why do you go on about how nonsensical talking about 5 or 6 dimensions is?
Human knowledge is currently fairly limited. Why do you insist on speaking as if it weren't?
Why? This is a most extraordinary claim. Are you prepared to produce your extraordinary evidence?
Oh, and a quote from Einstein that I rather like, ""Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
It's funny: when I read this I got a mental picture of a race of blind people discussing physics and introducing this bizarre concept of "energy waves" that travel around, and people getting bored by it because it's obviously just an overly complex theory being shoe-horned onto reality.
Do you have any evidence, or even any reason to believe, that there are in fact not seventeen dimensions and we just don't have the necessary organs to readily percieve them all as being distinct?
Bear in mind that without sight or our kinesthetic sense, there would be no especially good or convincing way to tell that space had 3 dimensions to it.
Btw, when the view that you are currently advancing was put forth on some other topic a few weeks ago, a name for was mentioned that seems highly appropriate: "proof by instant gratification". How do you maintain it with a straight face?
Before trying to implement true democracy, I suggest that you first spend some time getting to know people who live in different places from you (especially in poorer neighborhoods). You'll find that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to get acquainted with facts concerning the things that they would be voting about.
Hell, if this doesn't scare you just think about how much the mass media influences people's opinions on issues. Do you really want the deciding influence on the vote on a given law to be what the "friends" episode that aired the night before was in favor of?
Believe me, I'm well aware that a democratic republic is a pretty bad form of government, but it seems to be better than all the rest. Direct democracy is actually a very scary thing. As it is it's bad enough when some large group of people decides to ban together and elects some idiot to government (this is rare, thankfully), but can you just imagine how legislation on complicated issues would go? People would hear "nuclear" and it would be banned. There would be a 100% tax on the "rich" where rich is defined as earning more than 51% of the people.
Basically, life is very imperfect, it's amazing to what a degree we (i.e. the middle class and above in America) currently escape the suffering that is typically associated with life, and the prospect of most people directly telling their neighbors how to live is absolutely frightening. Say what you want about oligarchy (which is basically what every form of current government is), but at least (when it answers to the people) it is reasonably moderate and relatively hard to sway by emotion (the key word here is relatively).