Well, I understand the animation plugin is broken in the most current version of The Gimp, though that may no longer be true. (It was true 6 months ago.)
Sorry, the point was that renters have either no, or next to no, bargaining power. They take what is offered, or they live on the street.
I may not consider most leases I've signed contracts of adhesion, but I *HAVE* considered most of the unconscionable. A court might not so consider them, but *I* do. And I consider that a fair description of most rental agreements I've seen. (To be fair, renting requires an extreme amount of faith in those to whom one rents. This doesn't make the terms fair, but it gives some explanation as to why the owner feels free to demand them.)
If you want to understand the relationship between the landlord and the renter, look at the term "land lord" and study it's history, back at least to the Norman Conquest. The lord of the land was a friend or supporter of the kind, and granted the land as a kind of "facility manager" in return for paying the king for the use of it, and was expected to extract these payments and more from those who lived on that land. The US basically copied the English system. There were amendations necessary because of the availability of unseated land, but they were generally restricted as much as possible. But all the best land was owned by the friends of the rulers (whoever they happened to be...it varied between the colonies).
You must be exceedingly wealthy, or live in an area with a gross surplus of housing. Alternatively, you're lying.
In the area in which I live, it's rare for an apartment to be on the market for over a day, even though the rents are quite high. (Nearly high enough to justify purchase of a house instead, even though I might be moving in only a few years.... I'm speaking about my recent past, not my current situation. I now live in a house having reached a stable situation where I don't plan on moving.)
Currently I've moved from KDE3.x to Gnome because KDE4.x has been so unfriendly. In about a year Gnome is scheduled to release a new version that looks to be as unfriendly as Gnome was.
Well, that gives KDE a year to develop KDE4 into something decent. If it doesn't, I'll be looking for the best alternative under active development.
Letting users us sudo to install software is only acceptable because the right to use sudo is restrictable at the account level. Even so I'm a bit dubious. I'd really prefer if software could be installed to only run in a particular group, and that the installation itself be done with privileges to only the group directories. I *do* understand that this would make the file system more complex, as one would need/_group_/etc,/_group_/bin, etc., but I feel it would be slightly more secure. (Also this would mean that a particular group could have a super-user, who wouldn't necessarily have ANY rights outside the group.)
The odd thing is, I keep thinking that the first UNIX I ever used worked that way. Perhaps it was decided that the extra complexity wasn't worth it.
P.S.: Sorry about the _group_ markup, but/. doesn't support underscore markup, and the italic is frequently too understated in a small area. (And bold definitely isn't what I wanted, and emphasis didn't emphasize noticeably.)
Stick with KDE 3.5 as long as you can. KDE4 is headed in a very different direction. Usually it's *possible* to do the same things in either desktop, but the things that KDE3.x make easy aren't nearly as optimized in KDE4.
(KDE4.3 is a lot better than KDE4.2, but after using it for awhile I still switched over to Gnome, because it would be difficult for me to install KDE3.x while keeping some of the libraries that I need.)
N.B.: The next version of Gnome also looks as if it's going to be de-emphasizing getting common things done easily in favor of allowing newer and fancier things to be done at the OS level. But it looks like we're spared that for almost another year. By that time perhaps KDE4 will have started making more concessions to practicality.
The thing is, it sounds like they're just talking about maximizing the difference, and that's probably no where near optimal. I think that I read that the optimal level is somewhere around third or fourth cousin.
I.e., if you're too similar, then you don't have enough HLA difference, but if you're too divergent then there's a likelihood of incompatibilities. So you want to be optimally different.
Well, two things that can lower the male sperm count are jockey shorts and wearing jock straps while exercising. The testicles need to be kept cool. That's why they're located outside the body.
OTOH, I don't think those are new. It seems to me that approximately similar habits have occurred since cloth became cheap. The chemicals are a change, and they've been observed to affect wild populations of animals and the effect has also been observed in the lab. That it would also affect humans is less surprising than if it didn't.
You *do* realize how silly you're being, don't you?
Just in case you don't, you are missing several orders of magnitude in the level of effects. And charged particles are easy to manipulate (and extract energy from) with magnetic fields.
If I recall correctly, the ignition temperature for D + He 3 is considerably higher than the one that's being tried. And this is why nobody's experimenting with it.
OTOH, if you COULD manage it, extracting energy from that expelled proton would be simple electrical generator stuff (It *does* have a high velocity, doesn't it?) rather than the thermal extraction that's needed to get the energy from the neutron.
A design that I saw called for an inner wall of lithium. Something about generating tritium, though I don't remember the details. They did figure it would need to be replaced occasionally, but that it would be well worth it.
If Google really cared about that, they'd have done a much better job of scanning the books. And they wouldn't have insisted on a contract with various libraries that didn't allow anyone else to do the same thing.
(Am I wrong about that contract? I don't think so, but I don't know my original source for the information.)
I distrust ALL monopolies, including Google. Their slogan may be "do no evil", but that's not their practice.
P.S.: I'm quite happy for Google to index all information on the planet. I'm *not* happy for them to be granted a monopoly to do so.
Some reports of this kind of action have mentioned electrical systems being disrupted over a wide area. That's direct physical damage. Especially if any hospital systems go down. (Could be over-voltage rather than under-voltage, too, but the reports weren't that detailed.)
Certainly *this year* the physical damage that could be done by this kind of attack is less than it will be in a decade. Or next year. But that doesn't mean that it isn't present, and isn't a growing threat.
Information "theft" via this approach I'd classify as spying rather than war. But that's only one aspect. Sabotage is another. This approach can be used to alter information as well as to copy it. (Read the EULA of either MS or Apple: "Add, copy, modify, or delete".)
N.B.: Banks have probably been thinking about this for a long time. Talk to them about what are recommended safety measures. Don't just talk to one set of specialists.
FWIW: I remember reading, I think it was a decade or two ago, about a Nuclear plant that had in internal network for just that reason. And total separation.
Then they hired a consultant to test or fix something, and that consultant brought in his computer and hooked it up to their network, but he needed some info that was kept on his company's site, so he also hooked it up to the main internet.
Well, the virus wasn't all THAT damaging, THAT time.
Separating the nets is VERY desirable. But if you really want to be safe, you need to also use different communication protocols. Different strings for local URIs, etc. Even a simple change would probably be enough, but even a simple change would be a tremendous hassle to implement.
Say you adopt the httq protocol instead of the http. Now you need to modify all the programs that expect http...because you don't want a rogue http link that sneaks in to be able to be processed. Quite a simple change... You'd want a series of changes at about that level of simplicity, and at all 7 levels of the protocol stack. Each one trivial.
Now try to run your MSWind software.... Whoops! All you can run is software that either doesn't depend on the net, or is specially crafted. This means OSS, and practically FOSS software.
(I suppose there might be simpler solutions, but every one I thought of I soon saw holes in.)
If you haven't noticed, during that period of time the US *HAS* followed in the steps of the Roman Republic. Not precisely in lock-step, but close. I hope that there's enough play that we escape the horrendous Marius vs. Sulla civil war, but the democracy of the country has declined severely during this period. The presidency has become more imperial. The orders of the president are less subject to question. Etc.
OTOH, now that the US has defeated it's last major enemy (Russia....for some reason China doesn't count. Probably because they defeated us financially without our even noticing it. They own so much US debt they could sink us totally if they ever wanted to take the hit. But they probably won't. I did say there was a lot of play in the model.) the country seems to be collapsing. It's not for lack of military spending, either. We waste more money on the military than most countries spend. (I don't count all military spending as waste. But lots of it is.)
There are differences. E.g., the computer games that are our substitute for the arena, don't actually injure anyone. And they encourage a level of direct participation rather than mere voyeurism. If we go to virtual reality, this level of engagement will increase. But that isn't what killed the Roman Republic. The excesses of the arena happened mainly after the transition to the Empire, though they'd certainly been building up during the later days of the Republic.
What we have is the decay of the power of the common people, and the concentration of power into the hands of a few aristocrats. One of the basic tools of that in the US is the division of political parties into two, and an election system that practically guarantees that the winner will be one of those two. That means that anyone sufficiently wealthy can purchase the loyalty of BOTH candidates before the election. Since there are only two real contenders, it's not even a gamble. And the bribery laws have sufficient loopholes that anyone who is knowledgeable can bid for the vote of an office-holder. It's dangerous for the inexperienced, though. This serves to concentrate power in those who are wealthy enough to buy both sides, and, after them, the politicians and, after them, those with enough money and skills to "convince" the office-holder.
This has long been a problem, but it's become much worse since the 70's. And one of the vehicles of this was a decision by the FCC that networks weren't required to offer equal time to all candidates.
It's possible that the net could reform this, but my bet would be that the laws are instead somehow changed to provide more benefit to those currently in office. And to maintain the expense of campaigning.
It's quite possible that there won't be any dramatic assassination followed by a usurpation as was involved in the shift from the Roman Republic to the Empire, but that didn't really change anything. That merely consolidated changes that either had already happened or were already well in motion. (Note that at first the Imperial mantel was not hereditary, an Augustus initially had to share power with two other co-rulers.)
We've come a long way towards the transition in a shorter period than I had expected. We certainly did it a lot faster than the Romans did. But the signs of the collapse are writ large for those to see who can.
OTOH, the Imperial period of Rome wasn't a bad period for those who stayed out of politics. (Well, and weren't enemies of Rome.) The politics got a lot bloodier, but the lot of the common folk didn't become much worse until quite a bit later.
However, it's worth noting that the Imperial period of Rome was considerably shorter than the Republic was. And it wasn't invaders that destroyed Rome, they merely delivered the final coup, it was internal dissension. Various powerful groups fighting against each other without regard for law or custom striving for ultimate power. If you don't see the roots of that in the here-and-now, you're being willfully blind.
I understand that yours is a commonly respected opinion. I just don't happen to respect it.
When you send a gang of thugs over to kill someone it doesn't matter to me whether it's called a gang or an army. What matters is that it's going there to kill someone. Or torture them to death. And shooting someone and leaving them to die I count as torturing them to death, even if you don't watch. That you did it by dropping bombs from a safe distance doesn't make it any better....except for you.
If something is immoral for one person to do, then it's immoral for a thousand people to do it. Or a few million.
This, naturally, means that standard morality doesn't work very well in the current world. So it's important to try to figure out what a workable morality would be that would lead to a world that it would be decent to grow up in. I don't claim to have a good answer to that, but some things are clearly NOT part of a good answer. And torturing people to death is one of them. I'm not sure about killing people. There might be circumstances where that would be necessary. But always remember, an immoral action doesn't become moral just because it's being done by a state.
BOTH sides were blatantly immoral in this case. But I think that side that killed more people was probably the less moral.
I'm not sure why, but this strikes me as an issue of morality rather than ethics. I'm not really sure how I differentiate the two, but they are different.
KDE 4.3 is far better than the earlier versions. It's still not as good as Gnome, and not even approximately as good as KDE 3.x, but it's a lot better. Enough better that I have reasonable hopes that 4.4 or 4.5 will again be my desktop of choice.
I don't understand why they dropped KDE 3.x, but apparently there were underlying reasons (that I'd need to grok the code to understand). Perhaps they were good enough to account for the MAJOR degradation in usability. As someone who doesn't know the reasons I can't really say. I *can* say that it caused me to switch to Gnome.
P.S.: MSWind is not an option for me, as I cannot agree with their EULA. As such, I don't even look at their features. They're totally irrelevant. So I can't evaluate any claims that you make about their "ease of use" or whatever. Any such claims are, to me, irrelevant. (Because of this I may have skipped over portions of your post that were relevant to this argument. If so, my appologies.)
I was thinking of it somewhat differently. My thought was: "I'm glad that they aren't doing this for a year. By that time KDE4 might be nearly as useful as KDE3.0 was."
FWIW, I'm currently using Gnome, but I'd used a KDE desktop since the days of Gnome1.x. (When they changed that out, I switched to KDE...over the same kind of usability issues that have currently caused me to switch back to Gnome.)
It's not merely bugs, it's design issues. Interface designers don't seem to be able to design a new interface without including so many usability problems that it's nearly always a disaster.
(N.B.: The KDE2.x->KDE3.x wasn't a major change in the interface. The major changes were under the hood, and showed up as bugs. There are known ways of dealing with bugs. They don't work perfectly, but they exist. There don't seem to be known ways of dealing with basic UI design errors. Not even ways to collect the information that would let you know that you've made a mistake.)
To me this looks like a massive redesign of the interface. And it looks terrible. (Quite esthetic, but terrible from the usability standpoint.) I could be wrong, because I'm judging from still images, and I don't know how or why those images were selected, or how common it is for the system to get in that state.
The dual bar design is excellent. It allows one to have a constant display ot the most common tools used, and the currently active applications, in a very small area of the screen. The images showed render the screen unusable when that information is being displayed. Quite very much not good. Twice as bas as double plus ungood.
So I'm really glad that it won't show up for another year. Maybe by then they'll have realized a few of their mistakes. And I don't mean bugs, I mean design errors. Until then... well, the latest revision of KDE4 was approaching the usability of Gnome. It still has a ways to go, but a couple of more revisions and I may be able to switch back to it.
P.S.: Eye-candy is all very well, but it doesn't have much, if anything, to do with usability. It often seems to be an inverse relationship. And usability trumps eye-candy any day in my use.
Mine too. A few more thousand instances of them acting legally, and a few years of them not acting illegally and I might start thinking of them as not much worse than most mega-corporations.
I expect that we'll move to mem based memory within the century. They *might* connect to the computer using some descendant of USB3.
Note that this memory is a factor of 10^6 less dense than nano-tech based memory, but it's known to be currently buildable, and durable. (Think of it as a bunch of iron needles that can move into one of two positions as selected by magnets. Now scale that really small, but each needle over 10 nm in length and you have a kind of crude mem memory.)
Mem memory is rather like core memory, only it's a lot smaller, doesn't depend on magnetic fields persisting, and can be built by automated factories. They're just working out the details. It's faster than flash to write, is as fast as semi-conductors to read, and should last a humongous number of read-write cycles. (Well, the lab versions have.) It's also persistent with the power removed.
These will probably obsolete both flash and disk memory, and possibly even semiconductor memory. Unless something else comes along first that's even better.
Sun hasn't given me any reason that I've noticed to distrust them. (Outside, that is, of being a large corporation, and therefore inherently untrustworthy. Policies are subject to change with the board of directors and/or general manager.)
Apple has. After that trick with the EULA I wouldn't put it past them to intentionally lie about important features if that lie were to the benefit of Apple.
P.S.: I *don't* depend only on Sun for my Java info. I didn't seriously consider Java until after Sun released it under GPL. Since then I've seriously considered it, and it does look very nice. But I didn't depend on Sun for my information. I used Sun information, but my primary sources were independent. (I eventually decided that Java was too slow for my primary use, but VERY interesting. I'll wait for awhile now to see how the dealing with Oracle turns out before investing any more time with it, though.)
No, I wouldn't. Being dependent on Microsoft is a very good reason to continue to stay clear of Mono. (I didn't know that I was expected to depend of MS documents to learn Mono. I was staying clear of it for other reasons. I'm not certain that I yet know that this dependency exists, but I acknowledge the possibility.)
I don't feel quite as untrusting of Apple as I do of MS, though the changes that they made in their EULA about 3 years ago mean that I will no longer buy or recommend them. Or trust them connected to the internet. (I *can't* agree with the EULA that they tried to slip into a security update...so the one Mac I still have is no longer in active use.)
If your suggestion for learning to use Objective-C is that I use Apple's guides, then that's a reasonable reason to avoid Objective-C. If that were a supplemental text that covered some particular points, this objection would be less significant, but Apple has proven that they aren't trustworthy. The language that they tried to slip into the EULA that I'm objecting to allowed them to (paraphrase, probably)"Add, copy, delete, remove, or modify any file on your computer". Sorry, but I can't accept that, and to try to sneak it into a security upgrade means that I can't trust Apple, or anything dependent on them.
That may be true, but having encountered tied actions from purportedly independent MS funded groups before, I'm going to remain a bit dubious. I don't know what their agenda is, and I'll accept that it *MIGHT* be academic research. But it's going to take a bushel and a half of proof before I'll consider that a reasonable default assumption.
It does look like they've redesigned the GnuStep page recently, and added a new news item. I haven't followed the development much (only look in sporadically) so I can't say for sure that the linked pages are still the same as they were. The documents, however, advertising blurbs, and not very informative to someone interested in learning how to program in Objective-C.
Besides, while GnuStep is an essential library for using Objective C, it's not the langugage. Even if that had been a good tutorial on GnuStep (I didn't even notice a bad tutorial there), it wouldn't answer what I was asking for. The "User Guides" contain small amounts of essential information, but far from what is needed. Look at the documentation of any successful language (except C and C++, which are successful because of the grandfather clause) and you may get an idea as to what I mean. (Python is a particularly good example.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I understand the animation plugin is broken in the most current version of The Gimp, though that may no longer be true. (It was true 6 months ago.)
Sorry, the point was that renters have either no, or next to no, bargaining power. They take what is offered, or they live on the street.
I may not consider most leases I've signed contracts of adhesion, but I *HAVE* considered most of the unconscionable. A court might not so consider them, but *I* do. And I consider that a fair description of most rental agreements I've seen. (To be fair, renting requires an extreme amount of faith in those to whom one rents. This doesn't make the terms fair, but it gives some explanation as to why the owner feels free to demand them.)
If you want to understand the relationship between the landlord and the renter, look at the term "land lord" and study it's history, back at least to the Norman Conquest. The lord of the land was a friend or supporter of the kind, and granted the land as a kind of "facility manager" in return for paying the king for the use of it, and was expected to extract these payments and more from those who lived on that land. The US basically copied the English system. There were amendations necessary because of the availability of unseated land, but they were generally restricted as much as possible. But all the best land was owned by the friends of the rulers (whoever they happened to be...it varied between the colonies).
You must be exceedingly wealthy, or live in an area with a gross surplus of housing. Alternatively, you're lying.
In the area in which I live, it's rare for an apartment to be on the market for over a day, even though the rents are quite high. (Nearly high enough to justify purchase of a house instead, even though I might be moving in only a few years. ... I'm speaking about my recent past, not my current situation. I now live in a house having reached a stable situation where I don't plan on moving.)
How about doing both?
It's much harder to get rid of an entrenched evil.
That all depends.
Currently I've moved from KDE3.x to Gnome because KDE4.x has been so unfriendly. In about a year Gnome is scheduled to release a new version that looks to be as unfriendly as Gnome was.
Well, that gives KDE a year to develop KDE4 into something decent. If it doesn't, I'll be looking for the best alternative under active development.
Letting users us sudo to install software is only acceptable because the right to use sudo is restrictable at the account level. Even so I'm a bit dubious. I'd really prefer if software could be installed to only run in a particular group, and that the installation itself be done with privileges to only the group directories. I *do* understand that this would make the file system more complex, as one would need /_group_/etc, /_group_/bin, etc., but I feel it would be slightly more secure. (Also this would mean that a particular group could have a super-user, who wouldn't necessarily have ANY rights outside the group.)
The odd thing is, I keep thinking that the first UNIX I ever used worked that way. Perhaps it was decided that the extra complexity wasn't worth it.
P.S.: Sorry about the _group_ markup, but /. doesn't support underscore markup, and the italic is frequently too understated in a small area. (And bold definitely isn't what I wanted, and emphasis didn't emphasize noticeably.)
Stick with KDE 3.5 as long as you can. KDE4 is headed in a very different direction. Usually it's *possible* to do the same things in either desktop, but the things that KDE3.x make easy aren't nearly as optimized in KDE4.
(KDE4.3 is a lot better than KDE4.2, but after using it for awhile I still switched over to Gnome, because it would be difficult for me to install KDE3.x while keeping some of the libraries that I need.)
N.B.: The next version of Gnome also looks as if it's going to be de-emphasizing getting common things done easily in favor of allowing newer and fancier things to be done at the OS level. But it looks like we're spared that for almost another year. By that time perhaps KDE4 will have started making more concessions to practicality.
The thing is, it sounds like they're just talking about maximizing the difference, and that's probably no where near optimal. I think that I read that the optimal level is somewhere around third or fourth cousin.
I.e., if you're too similar, then you don't have enough HLA difference, but if you're too divergent then there's a likelihood of incompatibilities. So you want to be optimally different.
Well, two things that can lower the male sperm count are jockey shorts and wearing jock straps while exercising. The testicles need to be kept cool. That's why they're located outside the body.
OTOH, I don't think those are new. It seems to me that approximately similar habits have occurred since cloth became cheap. The chemicals are a change, and they've been observed to affect wild populations of animals and the effect has also been observed in the lab. That it would also affect humans is less surprising than if it didn't.
You *do* realize how silly you're being, don't you?
Just in case you don't, you are missing several orders of magnitude in the level of effects. And charged particles are easy to manipulate (and extract energy from) with magnetic fields.
If I recall correctly, the ignition temperature for D + He 3 is considerably higher than the one that's being tried. And this is why nobody's experimenting with it.
OTOH, if you COULD manage it, extracting energy from that expelled proton would be simple electrical generator stuff (It *does* have a high velocity, doesn't it?) rather than the thermal extraction that's needed to get the energy from the neutron.
A design that I saw called for an inner wall of lithium. Something about generating tritium, though I don't remember the details. They did figure it would need to be replaced occasionally, but that it would be well worth it.
If Google really cared about that, they'd have done a much better job of scanning the books. And they wouldn't have insisted on a contract with various libraries that didn't allow anyone else to do the same thing.
(Am I wrong about that contract? I don't think so, but I don't know my original source for the information.)
I distrust ALL monopolies, including Google. Their slogan may be "do no evil", but that's not their practice.
P.S.: I'm quite happy for Google to index all information on the planet. I'm *not* happy for them to be granted a monopoly to do so.
Some reports of this kind of action have mentioned electrical systems being disrupted over a wide area. That's direct physical damage. Especially if any hospital systems go down. (Could be over-voltage rather than under-voltage, too, but the reports weren't that detailed.)
Certainly *this year* the physical damage that could be done by this kind of attack is less than it will be in a decade. Or next year. But that doesn't mean that it isn't present, and isn't a growing threat.
Information "theft" via this approach I'd classify as spying rather than war. But that's only one aspect. Sabotage is another. This approach can be used to alter information as well as to copy it. (Read the EULA of either MS or Apple: "Add, copy, modify, or delete".)
N.B.: Banks have probably been thinking about this for a long time. Talk to them about what are recommended safety measures. Don't just talk to one set of specialists.
FWIW:
I remember reading, I think it was a decade or two ago, about a Nuclear plant that had in internal network for just that reason. And total separation.
Then they hired a consultant to test or fix something, and that consultant brought in his computer and hooked it up to their network, but he needed some info that was kept on his company's site, so he also hooked it up to the main internet.
Well, the virus wasn't all THAT damaging, THAT time.
Separating the nets is VERY desirable. But if you really want to be safe, you need to also use different communication protocols. Different strings for local URIs, etc. Even a simple change would probably be enough, but even a simple change would be a tremendous hassle to implement.
Say you adopt the httq protocol instead of the http. Now you need to modify all the programs that expect http...because you don't want a rogue http link that sneaks in to be able to be processed. Quite a simple change... You'd want a series of changes at about that level of simplicity, and at all 7 levels of the protocol stack. Each one trivial.
Now try to run your MSWind software.... Whoops! All you can run is software that either doesn't depend on the net, or is specially crafted. This means OSS, and practically FOSS software.
(I suppose there might be simpler solutions, but every one I thought of I soon saw holes in.)
If you haven't noticed, during that period of time the US *HAS* followed in the steps of the Roman Republic. Not precisely in lock-step, but close. I hope that there's enough play that we escape the horrendous Marius vs. Sulla civil war, but the democracy of the country has declined severely during this period. The presidency has become more imperial. The orders of the president are less subject to question. Etc.
OTOH, now that the US has defeated it's last major enemy (Russia....for some reason China doesn't count. Probably because they defeated us financially without our even noticing it. They own so much US debt they could sink us totally if they ever wanted to take the hit. But they probably won't. I did say there was a lot of play in the model.) the country seems to be collapsing. It's not for lack of military spending, either. We waste more money on the military than most countries spend. (I don't count all military spending as waste. But lots of it is.)
There are differences. E.g., the computer games that are our substitute for the arena, don't actually injure anyone. And they encourage a level of direct participation rather than mere voyeurism. If we go to virtual reality, this level of engagement will increase. But that isn't what killed the Roman Republic. The excesses of the arena happened mainly after the transition to the Empire, though they'd certainly been building up during the later days of the Republic.
What we have is the decay of the power of the common people, and the concentration of power into the hands of a few aristocrats. One of the basic tools of that in the US is the division of political parties into two, and an election system that practically guarantees that the winner will be one of those two. That means that anyone sufficiently wealthy can purchase the loyalty of BOTH candidates before the election. Since there are only two real contenders, it's not even a gamble. And the bribery laws have sufficient loopholes that anyone who is knowledgeable can bid for the vote of an office-holder. It's dangerous for the inexperienced, though. This serves to concentrate power in those who are wealthy enough to buy both sides, and, after them, the politicians and, after them, those with enough money and skills to "convince" the office-holder.
This has long been a problem, but it's become much worse since the 70's. And one of the vehicles of this was a decision by the FCC that networks weren't required to offer equal time to all candidates.
It's possible that the net could reform this, but my bet would be that the laws are instead somehow changed to provide more benefit to those currently in office. And to maintain the expense of campaigning.
It's quite possible that there won't be any dramatic assassination followed by a usurpation as was involved in the shift from the Roman Republic to the Empire, but that didn't really change anything. That merely consolidated changes that either had already happened or were already well in motion. (Note that at first the Imperial mantel was not hereditary, an Augustus initially had to share power with two other co-rulers.)
We've come a long way towards the transition in a shorter period than I had expected. We certainly did it a lot faster than the Romans did. But the signs of the collapse are writ large for those to see who can.
OTOH, the Imperial period of Rome wasn't a bad period for those who stayed out of politics. (Well, and weren't enemies of Rome.) The politics got a lot bloodier, but the lot of the common folk didn't become much worse until quite a bit later.
However, it's worth noting that the Imperial period of Rome was considerably shorter than the Republic was. And it wasn't invaders that destroyed Rome, they merely delivered the final coup, it was internal dissension. Various powerful groups fighting against each other without regard for law or custom striving for ultimate power. If you don't see the roots of that in the here-and-now, you're being willfully blind.
I understand that yours is a commonly respected opinion. I just don't happen to respect it.
When you send a gang of thugs over to kill someone it doesn't matter to me whether it's called a gang or an army. What matters is that it's going there to kill someone. Or torture them to death. And shooting someone and leaving them to die I count as torturing them to death, even if you don't watch. That you did it by dropping bombs from a safe distance doesn't make it any better....except for you.
If something is immoral for one person to do, then it's immoral for a thousand people to do it. Or a few million.
This, naturally, means that standard morality doesn't work very well in the current world. So it's important to try to figure out what a workable morality would be that would lead to a world that it would be decent to grow up in. I don't claim to have a good answer to that, but some things are clearly NOT part of a good answer. And torturing people to death is one of them. I'm not sure about killing people. There might be circumstances where that would be necessary. But always remember, an immoral action doesn't become moral just because it's being done by a state.
BOTH sides were blatantly immoral in this case. But I think that side that killed more people was probably the less moral.
I'm not sure why, but this strikes me as an issue of morality rather than ethics. I'm not really sure how I differentiate the two, but they are different.
KDE 4.3 is far better than the earlier versions. It's still not as good as Gnome, and not even approximately as good as KDE 3.x, but it's a lot better. Enough better that I have reasonable hopes that 4.4 or 4.5 will again be my desktop of choice.
I don't understand why they dropped KDE 3.x, but apparently there were underlying reasons (that I'd need to grok the code to understand). Perhaps they were good enough to account for the MAJOR degradation in usability. As someone who doesn't know the reasons I can't really say. I *can* say that it caused me to switch to Gnome.
P.S.: MSWind is not an option for me, as I cannot agree with their EULA. As such, I don't even look at their features. They're totally irrelevant. So I can't evaluate any claims that you make about their "ease of use" or whatever. Any such claims are, to me, irrelevant. (Because of this I may have skipped over portions of your post that were relevant to this argument. If so, my appologies.)
I was thinking of it somewhat differently. My thought was:
"I'm glad that they aren't doing this for a year. By that time KDE4 might be nearly as useful as KDE3.0 was."
FWIW, I'm currently using Gnome, but I'd used a KDE desktop since the days of Gnome1.x. (When they changed that out, I switched to KDE...over the same kind of usability issues that have currently caused me to switch back to Gnome.)
It's not merely bugs, it's design issues. Interface designers don't seem to be able to design a new interface without including so many usability problems that it's nearly always a disaster.
(N.B.: The KDE2.x->KDE3.x wasn't a major change in the interface. The major changes were under the hood, and showed up as bugs. There are known ways of dealing with bugs. They don't work perfectly, but they exist. There don't seem to be known ways of dealing with basic UI design errors. Not even ways to collect the information that would let you know that you've made a mistake.)
To me this looks like a massive redesign of the interface. And it looks terrible. (Quite esthetic, but terrible from the usability standpoint.) I could be wrong, because I'm judging from still images, and I don't know how or why those images were selected, or how common it is for the system to get in that state.
The dual bar design is excellent. It allows one to have a constant display ot the most common tools used, and the currently active applications, in a very small area of the screen. The images showed render the screen unusable when that information is being displayed. Quite very much not good. Twice as bas as double plus ungood.
So I'm really glad that it won't show up for another year. Maybe by then they'll have realized a few of their mistakes. And I don't mean bugs, I mean design errors. Until then ... well, the latest revision of KDE4 was approaching the usability of Gnome. It still has a ways to go, but a couple of more revisions and I may be able to switch back to it.
P.S.: Eye-candy is all very well, but it doesn't have much, if anything, to do with usability. It often seems to be an inverse relationship. And usability trumps eye-candy any day in my use.
Mine too. A few more thousand instances of them acting legally, and a few years of them not acting illegally and I might start thinking of them as not much worse than most mega-corporations.
I expect that we'll move to mem based memory within the century. They *might* connect to the computer using some descendant of USB3.
Note that this memory is a factor of 10^6 less dense than nano-tech based memory, but it's known to be currently buildable, and durable. (Think of it as a bunch of iron needles that can move into one of two positions as selected by magnets. Now scale that really small, but each needle over 10 nm in length and you have a kind of crude mem memory.)
Mem memory is rather like core memory, only it's a lot smaller, doesn't depend on magnetic fields persisting, and can be built by automated factories. They're just working out the details. It's faster than flash to write, is as fast as semi-conductors to read, and should last a humongous number of read-write cycles. (Well, the lab versions have.) It's also persistent with the power removed.
These will probably obsolete both flash and disk memory, and possibly even semiconductor memory. Unless something else comes along first that's even better.
Sun hasn't given me any reason that I've noticed to distrust them. (Outside, that is, of being a large corporation, and therefore inherently untrustworthy. Policies are subject to change with the board of directors and/or general manager.)
Apple has. After that trick with the EULA I wouldn't put it past them to intentionally lie about important features if that lie were to the benefit of Apple.
P.S.: I *don't* depend only on Sun for my Java info. I didn't seriously consider Java until after Sun released it under GPL. Since then I've seriously considered it, and it does look very nice. But I didn't depend on Sun for my information. I used Sun information, but my primary sources were independent. (I eventually decided that Java was too slow for my primary use, but VERY interesting. I'll wait for awhile now to see how the dealing with Oracle turns out before investing any more time with it, though.)
No, I wouldn't. Being dependent on Microsoft is a very good reason to continue to stay clear of Mono. (I didn't know that I was expected to depend of MS documents to learn Mono. I was staying clear of it for other reasons. I'm not certain that I yet know that this dependency exists, but I acknowledge the possibility.)
I don't feel quite as untrusting of Apple as I do of MS, though the changes that they made in their EULA about 3 years ago mean that I will no longer buy or recommend them. Or trust them connected to the internet. (I *can't* agree with the EULA that they tried to slip into a security update...so the one Mac I still have is no longer in active use.)
If your suggestion for learning to use Objective-C is that I use Apple's guides, then that's a reasonable reason to avoid Objective-C. If that were a supplemental text that covered some particular points, this objection would be less significant, but Apple has proven that they aren't trustworthy. The language that they tried to slip into the EULA that I'm objecting to allowed them to (paraphrase, probably)"Add, copy, delete, remove, or modify any file on your computer". Sorry, but I can't accept that, and to try to sneak it into a security upgrade means that I can't trust Apple, or anything dependent on them.
That may be true, but having encountered tied actions from purportedly independent MS funded groups before, I'm going to remain a bit dubious. I don't know what their agenda is, and I'll accept that it *MIGHT* be academic research. But it's going to take a bushel and a half of proof before I'll consider that a reasonable default assumption.
It does look like they've redesigned the GnuStep page recently, and added a new news item. I haven't followed the development much (only look in sporadically) so I can't say for sure that the linked pages are still the same as they were.
The documents, however, advertising blurbs, and not very informative to someone interested in learning how to program in Objective-C.
Besides, while GnuStep is an essential library for using Objective C, it's not the langugage. Even if that had been a good tutorial on GnuStep (I didn't even notice a bad tutorial there), it wouldn't answer what I was asking for. The "User Guides" contain small amounts of essential information, but far from what is needed. Look at the documentation of any successful language (except C and C++, which are successful because of the grandfather clause) and you may get an idea as to what I mean. (Python is a particularly good example.)