I think the better question is, "Why build a browser that finds simple HTML inaccessible?". I used to make sure everything would look hunky-dory in NS4 because it was the only browser available in most of the computing world. Those days are over. Mozilla is perfectly usable even on P120s (don't argue; my dad has one and still uses it) and is standards-compliant besides.
NS4 is broken beyond belief. Perfectly valid CSS isn't handled, isn't ignored, but is used to shrink text to ~2px and splatter visual elements all over each other. The browser frequently hangs and JavaScript crashes it like nobody's business. It is obsolete and deprecated, and as you can even get Mozilla for OpenVMS, I really don't care to cater to people too lazy to fix their broken system.
All my current content is written in XHTML 1.0, which is basically HTML 4.01 with XML prettiness (although I have includes that are nowhere near fully compliant). I make heavy use of semantic elements, such as (and it's ironic that Slashdot doesn't support <code> here) cite, dfn, abbr, q, blockquote, code, samp, kbd, etc. NS4 doesn't support much, and that's no surprise, but the scary thing is that neither does IE6. It doesn't even support <q>! Konqueror tries, but it makes a mess. (Opera seems to do okay, but it's crashy, does weird things with spaces, and I don't like what it does with the title attribute.) Mozilla's the only one I've really seen to handle semantic elements in a sensible manner.
I'm tired of trying to represent semantic content with visual markup, and I've given up caring about IE and other browsers whose developers can't be bothered to support valid and useful HTML elements. NS4 especially, since it's just plain broken. In the end, semantic markup is the only hope, not only for the disabled, but for those of us who want to do any real work with documents.
They could show "Signs". That's a pretty scary movie. Scarier when you have to take a leak and you can't go because your girlfriend is clutching your arm and won't let you leave her alone in the theater for 1min....
Please tell me you're joking. I mean, I know they're throwing their fans to the wind, as is every other major corporation today, but all I heard about was stuff like this:
But keeping the Sci Fi faithful happy is no easy task. Some of the channel's audience has taken to the Internet to blast the canceling of "Farscape," a series about an astronaut stuck on the far side of the universe with a bunch of renegades. There have also been complaints about Sci Fi Channel running movies such as "Field of Dreams" and "Cape Fear" that seem to have little in common with science fiction fare.
"Field of Dreams" is at least outside the realm of the normal. But Braveheart?
Re:Been there, done that.
on
More on Longhorn
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Which one? RMS didn't write the first emacs, that was Gosling.
That is incorrect.
RMS wrote the first emacs as an extension to TECO. Gosling wrote the first C-based emacs, but Gosling is also a conniving rat (like Tatu Ylonen) who promised RMS he could use his Emacs code, then changed his mind and threatened legal action. More recently, he has fraudulently claimed credit for inventing Emacs.
I'm extremely upset. 8 hours ago I downloaded Mozilla 1.2b for Win32 for Joie's parents' computer. It looks like they released 1.2 while I was downloading 1.2b. This isn't the first time a fresh download of mine has been obsoleted, but never this quickly.
So today I downloaded 1.2. This is quite upsetting.
Anyway, in order to save Bugzilla the crush, I'm pasting the bug report (#182500) here. It seems that the main issues are broken user-defined XML tags, broken document.write(), and checkins to the 1.2 branch missing in the release.
This is a meta-bug whose dependencies will be problems caused by the incorrect
backout described in bug 167493 comment 21. Some of these bugs have been
reported as Windows-only, but I've also been able to reproduce them on a gcc
3.2.1 Linux build with -O2.
------- Additional Comment #1 From David Baron 2002-11-28 07:38 -------
I've corrected the backout on the 1.2 branch (although I admit I only tested the
change on the trunk, but I did the backout by backing out the backout with cvs
up -j -j and then backing out the original checkin the same way). It
remains to be seen what (if anything) we'll do with the 1.2 release.
------- Additional Comment #2 From Malcolm Rowe 2002-11-28 08:26 -------
We may have to do something with the 1.2 branch anyway. Some of the checkins
to the 1.2 branch disappeared from the 1.2 release - see bug 182506.
------- Additional Comment #3 From David Baron 2002-11-28 09:07 -------
I think I've gone through all the Browser bugs filed between the 1.2 release and
now (mostly by just skimming bug summaries), and added all the relevant
dependencies. However, bug 182317 and bug 182433 are probably also dependencies
of this bug, but I didn't add them since I'm not sure.
------- Additional Comment #4 From Phil Schwartau 2002-11-28 13:21 -------
Note I've added this bug as a dependency:
bug 182253, "document.write() eats initial characters in 1.2"
It explains why so many sites with DHTML menus are being hit by the
current bug. The sites are using document.write() to create them -
------- Additional Comment #5 From Dawn Endico 2002-11-29 16:50 -------
I removed links to 1.2 from the releases page and the home page, and announced
the release of 1.2.1 when we have a correct tag and new builds. Since this
happened on a 4 day holiday weekend the new release may not happen till
Monday.
------- Additional Comment #6 From Bryan 2002-11-29 17:28 -------
Hi,
Yes I did see it happen in that relase but somebody beated me to the punch.
Are you giong to remove it form the ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/realses
page or you going to keep it there for people to download and test this problem.
IF you can e-mail me wiht that info that will be great I will like to see still
on there for the people who want to take risks like me.
------- Additional Comment #7 From Asa Dotzler 2002-11-29 20:10 -------
We're not talking about a security exploit or even major dataloss here. I see no
need to re-write history. The 1.2 release will stay where it is.
This bug is likely to see some traffic. I'm taking this oportunity to ask all of
you folks that read about this bug at mozillazine or slashdot or wherever to not
comment. Unless you're actually working on this problem your comments will only
get in the way. Thanks.
As did Opera. And Opera runs on FreeBSD, Linux, BeOS, Mac OS and WinALL.
Opera routinely crashes on every non-Win OS I've run it on.
I'm not filing a bug. I don't care. I don't care at all,
because I usually start each build of Mozilla I try a few times, and
uninstall it, and go back to using other things. If a project with the
resources of AOL/TW can't do QA, fuck them. You just called me a liar,
and I can produce this bug on my own computer every time. You must be
omniscient - you can see that I lie? [I am not, and you are no
omniscient]
I'm on my gf's family's WinMe machine right now, and I just saw
that message that you refer to. When the modem connection died,
Mozilla complained that the source file could not be read. Makes
perfect sense to me. As I said, I've never seen or heard of this
problem. Maybe you should consider filing a report, as it seems
you're the only one with this issue. I don't see how you can complain
when you don't even take the most basic steps to even issue a public
flame for this defect, instead bringing it up casually only as
ancillary evidence in a 3rd-rate flamewar on a 4th-rate discussion
site. Perhaps your machine is misconfigured.
I thought that if I were going to use a Gecko based
browser I would stick with Mozilla. It's the one whose feature set is
at close parity with IE and Opera, Phoenix isn't in the same
league. If I have to strip functionality to gain speed and light
weightiness, then forget it. Also, Phoenix's existence proves to me
much of my complaints about Mozilla is true.
But wait, I don't want a platform, which sounds like PHB crap speak. I
want an end user browser. My needs are met better by both IE and
Opera. Don't rant about how platformish things are to avoid talking of
shortcomings as a simple browser.
I've never seen anyone who can be so inconsistent from one paragraph
to the next. Do you want a platform, or do you want an "end user
browser"? Phoenix is a browser, IE is a browser, Opera is a browser.
I'm puzzled as to what functionality is being "strip[ped]" relative to
IE, personally. Mozilla includes a mail/news reader, an IRC client,
and HTML/XML/JavaScript development tools; Phoenix doesn't. IE
doesn't either. Mail/news is separated into Outlook Express,
Microsoft killed their IRC client years ago, and they include no
development tools to speak of. Phoenix and IE seem to be at parity to
me.
What on mis-configured Win95/98/ME boxes with 9000 adware,
activex and other malware polluting the shit out of the system? You
tell me that loser's computer have "bad Internet Explorer"
functionality. Opera protects the idiot user from craptiveX junk. Your
experience sounds anecdotal . You call me a liar on a machine I have
mastered and use every day, but you use random fool computers full of
junk, viruses and OEM installs of Windows and judge me, call me a
liar, throw me in the trash?
Pathetic. You know that I am adamant about running Ad-Aware,
F-Prot, msconfig, etc and cleaning out all the Gator BonziBuddy
CometCursor Klez monopoly on CPU hogging. I also run Windows Update
to install IE 6 and update system libs (pathetic that all important
system libs are embedded in the browser and not distinguishable and
that I have to move past v5.5 to finally get systems to stop hanging
for 10s every minute...). Besides, basic logic should imply that if
the system is as waterlogged as you insinuate, Mozilla would suffer
equal performance degradation. More, in fact, because of the
abstraction layers involved in Mozilla XPCOM.
I am on a garbage HP Pavilion with 128MB right now, stock WinMe
install, but all MS critical updates installed. IE6 and Moz1.2b. I
visited http://candlemart.com/, a
random site from the bookmarks here. Load time is about equal, but IE
takes slightly longer than Mozilla to redraw the window with opaque
resizing, does it slightly more choppily and actually causes the hard
drive to start thrashing. Mozilla, "bloat king", doesn't. Remember
that Mozilla should be slower because of its abstraction.
I don't denigrate your experience. It's entirely possible that on
your system IE is speed king and Mozilla is O(n^1e6) for length of
pages and etc. But on every system I have seen, multiple computers
and on multiple OSes, Mozilla wins. And browsing functionality is
superior enough to make me willing to take a speed hit if it existed.
Use what works for you. But for the rest of the world, it seems
Mozilla doesn't cause the problems you have.
I doubt you have used IE much on Windows 2000 or
NT.
This is a blatant lie. I've used Windows 2000 extensively at a
previous job, to gain experience. I'm not impressed with it. It's
certainly superior to the DOS garbage, but when it can't load drivers
for a simple USB Mass Storage device without hanging the system, hard,
I'm not impressed. And this was on a system set up by an expert MCSE,
you know.
Opera doesn't ask me to QA the browser. Oh, how is the pay
scale for beta testing Mozilla?
I don't "beta test" Mozilla. I use it. It's the only browser I've found to be reasonable. Konqueror doesn't impress me, Opera doesn't, IE certainly doesn't impress. Like you, I'm too lazy to file reports obsessively -- I just wait for the next version and miraculously most seem to sort themselves out -- but unlike you I put up, help out, or shut up. If I have a problem, at least I have the option of inserting a record into a public database rather than spending hours on hold waiting for moron to tell me to go jump in a lake (and scroll up for an example of MS quality control) and read incomprehensible URLs-always-changing-search-references-dead-404-li nks Knowledge Base.
Back and forth you go, Opera to IE to Opera. You defend IE and
throw in Opera as a strawman, when we all know IE is your primary
browser and you'll complain about "onerous licensing" or "annoying
MDI" or some such to keep from using Opera so you can keep other
technologies around and claim a hatred of Microsoft while at the same
time sucking off their teat and continuing to fester in the pit of
1995 hypertext viewer technologies. We've moved on.
And they believe so for a good reason - unless by "everyday use" you mean writing school reports or letters to your mom.
MS Word's not even good enough for that. I used to do all my homework at home using LaTeX, then either print it out at home or take it to school as a PDF and print it on the laser printers there. Well, one day I forgot about something and had to start it at school the morning it was due, using MS Word. Copied it to a floppy (2 for redundancy, and it's good I did, 'cause floppies leak data like a strainer leaks water), went to class, opened it up on a different computer, and lo and behold, everything broke. Fonts were different sizes, frames moved around, etc.
And in case the guy I'm involved in an IE vs Mozilla discussion with follows me here, let's look at MS Word's load time and memory usage. Pathetic. Plus the fact that MS Office, like Mozilla, likes to shove itself into RAM on boot, taking what little RAM the typical consumer PC has. And people scoff at Emacs; at least it leaves things where I put them. Not to mention you can't even paste a text snippet into Word without it reformatting out the wazoo, absolutely broken style tools, inane word-by-word selection model (thanks to IE too for that one), etc.
Never again. I decided I'd rather turn something in a day late than waste my day trying to clean up after MS Word. I'll take LaTeX, Lout, an SGML or XML DTD, or some other markup language-based tool any day. Unambiguous, completely portable, and with absolutely no system requirements to edit.
In a post above someone posted the text of the.doc file and said something along the lines that OpenOffice is cool, but some characters turned up weird.
I'd like to note that the difficulty arose when trying to import an MS Word document with strange quote marks. I don't hear anyone talking about problems importing OpenOffice-exported documents into MS Word.
I'd also like to raise the question of why people are sending out MS Word documents as the primary distribution format. It's like me sending out a.tex file instead of a.dvi,.ps, or.pdf. It's only readable by people lucky enough to have the same software as me, but with the added disadvantage that things will go all haywire if the reader has a different printer driver, version of MS Word, etc.
10 is still less than 12. And it is possible with various tools to see what IE "wants," like ldd. It's extensive and messy, but it's not 12MB worth of junk.
But 10 is a lot closer to 12, and 8x the 1.5MB you initially claimed. Your story keeps changing...
As to your second point, that "12MB of junk" supports W3C HTML. IE doesn't. Guess which one I'm more impressed with. (Especially since IE/Mac is apparently much more standards-compliant, which means Microsoft can't be bothered to maintain a cross-platform HTML library, nor port the one they have.)
Generally, the per window performance of IE and Mozilla are similar. But mozilla uses up more memory and uses less native ways of "talking" to the windowing system. It's clearly slower. New windows take longer to popup, and resizing mozilla windows is chunky and un-optimized.
I haven't seen this. Precisely the reverse, in fact.
I am not defending IE. It has issues. I am trying to make sure Mozilla supporters learn to say to the Mozilla developers, need. more. speed. yesterday. Form follows function. I believe that mozilla's programmers are sloppy and pasting together something that does a lot, but is un-optimized.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil." -- Donald Knuth.
You seem to forget that Mozilla has only recently reached 1.0 (and yet many people do seem to consider it usable). No, speed was not the primary concern until recently, and this was publicly stated. The goals were correctness and cross-platform compatibility, something I am grateful for, as I have a browser I can run on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, and Windows, on x86, Alpha, and PPC. What's IE run on? So. Now I have a browser. You have another browser, and suddenly Microsoft, reduced to playing catch-up once more, is starting to improve their product. Be grateful.
As far as user demands, users have been doing this, and developers have been listening. The 0.9 series is the first I would consider easily usable by a non-fan, and each consecutive release has prominently featured "speed improvements".
The download error occurs reliably when I download any file with.exe
Once again, I'm very interested in reading the Bugzilla discussion on this.
I have tried Phoenix. It's Crap.
How so?
Actually I laugh at how big Mozilla is and how small Opera is - yet the do the same thing.
Wrong. Opera is an HTML viewer, a good one, but no more. Mozilla is an application deployment platform that prominently features an HTML viewer. This is the same functionality that frightened Microsoft so much about Java, but with the advantages that the source is available without onerous licensing and the product, or pieces of it, can be embedded royalty-free. This is attractive, and I predict more companies will follow the lead of AOL and begin embedding Gecko and/or building their products on/including XUL. Once this happens, watch the IE dominance in HTML standards go away, and the Windows client-side monopoly with it. I wonder if you are an astroturfer; you seem so defensive, and you don't reveal your identity.
Mozilla doesn't beat IE on Windows. Mozilla doesn't even hold a candle to Opera. You should probably use Windows before you claim Mozilla is better on Windows.
I have. I don't run it myself, as I said, but I've had occasion to use it on the computers of friends, family, and employers. Every time, I've been decidedly unimpressed with the performance of IE. It hangs when downloading large pages (similar to the problem NS4.x(!) had with nested tables and CSS), the throbber sometimes moves and sometimes doesn't, form content is nuked at the slightest whim, connection reliability is poor, it hides error messages in a pile of fluff, etc. This is on IE4-6, on Windows 95-Me and NT 4.0-5.1.
As far as Opera goes, the only platform I really like it on is the Zaurus. Everywhere else the interface seems bulky and clunky, and the times it does/doesn't ask for confirmation on things seem unintuitive. But that's personal preference. Speed-wise, it didn't seem any better or worse than Mozilla.
I've installed Mozilla on Windows computers for friends, often without any guidance or extensive verbal bias from me, and they all use it exclusively now, often saying how much more they like it than IE. Surely there's a reason for this.
In fact, as we get to more complicated web pages (xforms, etc), and more streamlined client machines, we are ironically regressing back toward the days of 3270 dumb terminals that conneted en-masse to big 360 and 370 main frames.
I agree with the main idea of your post, but you've made an error here which obscures its correctness. The 3270 is not a dumb terminal; in fact, this is what distinguishes it from the VT series and the ANSI X3.64 standard.
The 3270 is a smart terminal with support for forms-based input. The server specifies the types and locations of the fields required, and the terminal draws them, accepts input, and does basic verification, batch-submitting the entire form when complete. Typing lag, therefore, doesn't exist (this fact saved me from going completely insane when Office Depot couldn't keep its network running and thoroughput dropped to ~300bps).
So yes, HTML viewers and 3270 terminals are very much alike, and share many features, drawbacks, and programming issues.
No. So, when IE loads, it uses 1.5MB instead of 12, including everything its pointing to.
I don't run Windows, so I don't have a first-hand way to measure it myself, but I'm positive your analysis is incorrect. This article, certainly not by a fan of Mozilla, has a screenshot of IE using 9.98MB.
And the entire thrust of the memory usage discussion is that Internet Explorer uses "system libraries"; libraries aside from the ones it opens itself and that are not counted against it. Windows Explorer displays little HTML-based summaries in the left of folder windows; Windows Help is HTML-based now. Are you seriously trying to say that Windows loads no HTML-rendering components itself?
- IE is still faster on Windows. Rendering time is about the same, but startup time and memory usage for Nutzilla is still much higher.
Nice strawman. You admit that rendering time is the same, then start complaining about the irrelevancy of startup time. This is just like Mac/PPC fanatics blithering about Photoshop start time, something that happens only once and is highly dependent on HDD speed, bus speed, system load, etc, but with the additional error that a good chunk of Internet Explorer is already loaded.
Enable Quick Start and put Mozilla in your startup. Watch your system startup time go up and your Mozilla startup time go down. Don't complain that this is "cheating"; this is what IE does.
- You are valid being contrarian about IE, there are real reasons why it sucks, non compliance, pop-ups, bad JVM, poor integrate-ability with the real JVM, bad scripting engine, prone to viruses.
I really don't understand your post. It seems you're defending IE, but in this paragraph you systematically demolish any reason I can think of for using it.
- I have found Mozilla on several occasions unable to download things because of errors in the salt.
I don't understand this. Do you mean some sort of SSL error, or an error in referring to the salted profile directory? If the latter, perhaps you deleted your profile, but only partially. Regardless, I've never seen this, and I'm intrigued. Give me the ID# for the bug you filed and I will read about it on Bugzilla.
- It should be clear to anyone that Mozilla the browser isn't Gecko. I do not think Gecko sucks. Mozilla does.
So get Phoenix. 35% smaller than Mozilla, with things like an improved forms manager, improved keyboard navigation, improved tabbed browsing, etc.
Its clear that the people at Opera know how to put things together far better than the Mozilla folk.
How so?
They are owned by AOSHIT, if that isn't a mark of inferiority, I don't know what is.
Sounds to me like someone is being self deceptive.
Yes, but
IT'S YOU
It's been well known for quite a while that since IE is integrated with Microsoft, most of its memory usage is counted as "system libs" or whatnot. You are aware that "Internet Explorer" is just a wrapper around their HTML ActiveX control, akin to Mozilla and Gecko. But while IE only has to account for that skin, Mozilla has to account for everything it loads.
The problem, the last nail in the coffin if you will, is that Mozilla fails to render many web sites that IE renders perfectly.
Do you have examples?
What's important is that it just doesn't work.
I've never noticed a problem.
When Mozilla is as fast as IE for Windows, when it has a native UI, and most importantly when it has 100% compatibility with IE 5 and 6, then and only then will it become a reasonable alternative.
My experience says that Mozilla, on *nix or Win32, is faster than IE for Windows. Every time I've had occasion to see either in action. Further, Mozilla has enough efficiency tools built into it that any slowdown, if there was any, would be amply compensated by the overall speedup of my "browsing experience". And the retention of my sanity.
The native UI thing, you'll note, is something I've complained about myself on occasion. But the XUL stuff has gotten much faster, and at the same time enhanced its capabilities. And they're finally starting to use native widgets. Remember that Mozilla is both a proof-of-concept and a software deployment platform (which, once again, has proven itself worthy; I love the DOM Inspector, the Prefbar, etc). If you want simple fast HTML, get a simple browser built around Gecko. Heck, the next generation of AOL's getting built around Gecko...
In the Bad Old Days, yes, browsing in the *nix world was no fun. Netscape 4 was broken, thanks to getting rid of apparently the only guy who knew what he was doing, and when Mozilla first arrived, it was slow. Painfully slow. I'll admit that I was often envious of Windows at that time. But the tables have turned. Coupled with a good window manager, Mozilla provides me a more pleasurable and efficient time on the Web than I could have dreamed of several years ago. And Microsoft's products have been left in the dust.
As for 100% compatibility, congratulations, you're attempting to crush the return of technodiversity and heterogenity. I'll remember to thank you when the next worm sweeps through.
Widespread adoption will come when large vendors simply repackage Gecko in their products instead of IE. Suddenly browser independence and standards compliance will matter again. That is, unless you want to cut off all the potential customers from, say, AOL. That's a lot of potential customers. And all of those arguments about "market share" and "most common browser" will come back to bite Microsoft in the butt.
[Apologies if this is slightly incoherent; I work nights and I got up in the middle of my sleep time to check on some stuff...]
We're talking about actual running speed, as in the time required to render a given web page. IE is faster than other browsers.
I read a story in The Psychology of Computer Programming about a guy brought in to look at some sort of card-based system (for manufacturing cars, I think). He came to the conclusion that it needed a complete overhaul, as the existing system was brute-forced and called for things like cars with 6 wheels and no steering wheel. The code would break in random places, and any addition or removal of options would require the generation of hundreds or thousands of new possibility cards. So he redid it, and it ran much more sensibly.
When he explained his new software at the meeting, the programmer who had written the original software grew defensive. "My software", he pontificated, "takes only 850ms/card. How long does yours take?" The new guy adroitly dodged the question. "I can write one that takes 0ms/card, if it doesn't have to work."
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Well, they just got done raping the 4th amendment, among other things.
The Senate just approved the "Homeland Security" bill, granting the government the right to read mail without warrants, as well as stuffing INS, Customs, and others into one giant department. The bill (law now) also includes such provisions apparently unrelated to security as refusing government contracts to US-traded companies based in the Cayman Islands, with no justification given.
They were forced to back down from some of the most explicit corporate pork (but only as a promise to rescind these provisions later; they're law now):
* Shield Eli Lilly only from future lawsuits based on claims that thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, caused autism in children; as passed, the bill makes moot a number of pending suits.
* Restore a provision from the late Sen. Paul Wellstone that would ban companies from getting federal homeland-security contracts if they reincorporated abroad to avoid U.S. taxes, unless an administration finds national security is at stake. The GOP language now in the bill broadens the waiver power.
* Drop an earmark that would have put a new homeland-security research center at Texas A&M.
-- WSJ, "Bush Wins Senate Passage Of Homeland-Security Bill", 2002-11-20
Last night I found this speech by Senator Thomas rushing the bill to a vote without further debate or discussion:
Mr. THOMAS. Mr. President, I just listened to the two Senators who are probably most involved with the details of this homeland security bill--very interesting comments. I have been, frankly, disappointed that it has taken us as long as it has. We have been on this measure, I understand, now for about 7 weeks, and we are still not finished--a bill that needs to be finished. It needs to be there for security. Yet we continue to debate and worry over issues that are not as significant as the passage of this bill.
And here I thought people were concerned about the unconstitutional aspects of this bill and worried about the amount of power being placed into the hands of the Executive Branch. Now I know that getting a bad law passed is more important than fixing the issues it has first, passing a better law instead, or even determining if a new law is needed.
I'd like to quote from an article about 1930s Germany:
In Jan., 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor without an absolute majority, the Reichstag was dissolved and new elections were set for Mar. 5; a violent election campaign ensued. On Feb. 27, 1933, a fire destroyed part of the Reichstag building. Hitler immediately accused the Communists of having set the fire. President von Hindenburg proclaimed a state of emergency[...]
Sound eerily familiar? I pray that the second half of that last sentence never comes to pass in the United States of America:
[...]and issued decrees suspending freedom of speech and assembly.
Now, look at how Hitler got all his power. Did he seize it in a military coup? No:
On Mar. 23 the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which gave the government, i.e., Hitler, dictatorial powers. -- http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/Reichstg_ HitlerandtheReichstagFire.asp
I say that the World Trade Center is our Reichstag. Yes, the United States was attacked. Yes, there are those who wish our doom. But shifting power between the branches of government and giving the FBI power to read our mail without warrants and browse our library reading lists freely does nothing to stop someone flying another plane into a building, shooting random people as they go about their business, or sailing a ship with a nuclear weapon aboard into a harbor. No, it merely clears the way for more... dramatic domestic happenings.
I'm surprised that this wasn't passed by secret voice vote, the way the DMCA was. At least we know the names of those who sold us out, abrogating the constitutional rights which define the freedom they are so eager to protect. Whether the Supreme Court will intervene is an open question.
As citizens of the United States, we share a solemn responsibility in that we allowed this to happen, the same responsibility we place upon those who gave Hitler his power. And should we see our government take further steps along the road to establishing a tyrant, and do nothing, we are not merely careless and apathetic, but fools. For we have seen this happen before, and we know the potential results.
God bless America.
[This email may be reproduced and redistributed verbatim and in its entirety.]
- -- vsync http://quadium.net/ Save man-years by not saying things like "mature software process concepts" when you mean things like "good plan." -- http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44717&cid= 4641043
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Slavery was in the CSA's constitution. It was the bedrock of their nation.
And just to show you that I believe in fair discussion and I'm not a blind apologist, here's a speech that would seem to back you up.
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition.
Whether Stephens was merely pandering to racist whites or actually believed this, and whether his assessment of their reasons was accurate, I really don't know.
Our past may be shameful, but it's not like our government explicitly permitted raping and slaughtering the natives in our Constitution.
On the flip side, they certainly didn't let Thomas Jefferson put this paragraph in the Declaration of Independance:
he [the king of Britain] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
Granted, it was mainly southern representatives who objected, but the northern ones certainly seemed to follow a policy of appeasement and compromise.
You seem to be defending- or at least apologizing for- the CSA based on legal reasoning, but it was founded based on a largely untenable principle.
I'm not defending them necessarily. I just think that by and large, their legal reasoning was as valid as that of the United States (which, after all, was founded by a bunch of tax-dodgers). Slavery wasn't the only cause of the civil war, it just unfortunately ended up being the focal point of argument. For all eternity, it seems.
I just think that a government that prides itself on the rule of law and its written constitution should find better justification for crushing a rebellion than disagreement with the same reasons for its own rebellion. If they felt so strongly about slavery, they should have had the guts to say so and frame it as a war for human rights. It's highly debatable whether Lincoln even genuinely cared about the plight of southern blacks...
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause."
-- The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume V, "Letter to Horace Greeley" (August 22, 1862), p. 388.
They did so because their entire economy was based on
it.
Once again, I don't have a source offhand, but I remember reading
several economic analyses showing that black slaves were far more
expensive than poor whites, as a free serf could simply be given a
meager wage and left to starve, while slaves required the owner to
provide housing, clothing, etc. And as slaves were assets, the owner
would have to provide at least minimal food and medical care.
Hopefully reading this reassures you that I don't in any way approve
of the disgusting morals of the average southern plantation owner.
And even in the highly unlikely event that slavery was
phased out if the south stayed independent, you only need to look at
the real post-bellum south to see how non-whites would have been
treated. They were defeated in a war and non-whites did not achieve
equal rights for a hundred years.
Gandhi pulled it off in India...
Anyway, I've never been to the southern US, but you don't have to tell
me about racist attitudes. My girlfriend's grandmother grew up in
Kentucky, and I hear racist garbage from her all the time. Any time
the dog barks outside, it's because a Mexican is walking by. She
wouldn't want to live in San Francisco because it's got "too many ni--
er, negroes". Any mystery movie, she waits until a black character
appears and then says "the black man did it, huh".
The worst thing was when I was watching some History Channel thing
about a massacre involving the KKK and civil rights protestors in some
southern town. She came in, sat down, and said: "That's no made up
show. I was there during that kind of thing." Then, and I still get
a weird feeling in my gut remembering it, she said: "That's Martin
Luther King's fault. They like to talk about him nowadays like he's
some great man, but he started riots, you know. Everyone was
happy and peaceful, and he got them blacks all discontented."
To this day I wish I'd had the guts to tell her that maybe she'd get
discontented too if she figured out that without doing something she
and her children would all likely be treated like so much garbage
until they died. That the black protestors were the ones sitting down
quietly to eat their lunch or to ride the bus while the "peaceful"
whites unleashed fire hoses and attack dogs on them. That she should
be grateful Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. got his way, or the Black
Panthers would have attracted a far larger following and unleashed a
vengeful race war.
No, I'm not impressed with the actions of the south.
The south was not some mythical happy-land of states
rights. It was a backward,
agricultural society based
on the debasement of non-white peoples for white
ends.
Pejorative?
I'm not dismissing the possibility of coercion, but what of the
oft-mentioned free blacks who chose of their own free will to
volunteer to fight for the CSA?
The Native American issue is a straw man. Just because
the US government did some unpardonable things does not excuse the
actions of the CSA, nor does it erase their own infractions against
them, which, by the way, were almost as numerous.
Of course it doesn't, but I think it's telling when a group of people
actually involved in the situation decides that one side or the other
is the lesser of 2 evils.
Is "empire" supposed to be a perjorative term here?
Just a statement of fact. But no, I'd rather not live in an empire myself, thank you.
Most of your other points make sense, but I'd argue any system that allows something as evil as slavery to continue because of "states' rights" is hopelessly flawed and should be eliminated as quickly as possible.
From what I remember (don't have a source to cite right off the bat, sorry), the CSA did explicitly legalize slave ownership -- they pretty much had to in order to avoid a rebellion of their own -- but outlawed the importation of new slaves, and likely would have ended up phasing out slavery. I'm not excusing the system of slavery practiced in the Americas by any means -- it was cruel and immoral -- but much of what I've read indicates that it was an economically untenable system anyway, and they held on to it as long as they did they felt backed against the wall by northern interests.
As far as hopeless flaws go, you do know that the Cherokee joined the CSA, listing among their reasons the doctrine of nullification, Lincoln's abrogation of various Constitutionally enumerated rights, and most importantly the fact that the CSA actually showed an interest in making treaties with the Cherokee nation and sticking to them, don't you? This was in marked contrast to the USA, which stole the Cherokees' land and sent them off to concentration camps on a death march that rivalled Nazi Germany for cruelty. Any system that allows something as evil as a racist holocaust because of "manifest destiny" is hopelessly flawed and should be eliminated as quickly as possible.
You might first consider getting him something better than his current sound card. Internal ISA and PCI sound cards are subject to RF interference from other components inside the case. Therefore, without good shielding around the DAC and all the connections leading to the analog cable, and on the end of said cable, there will be a lot of static and noise. On many computers you will find that with no sound playing, if you turn the speaker volume up, you will hear clicking, chirping, and hissing when you do things like move the mouse.
USB audio connectors such as the Extigy and the Stereo Link, on the other hand, have an all-digital connection to the computer and shielding around all the electronic components. This will produce much cleaner sound.
There's no point getting good speakers if the audio being played on them is of poor quality.
The us also tried to ruin Osama Bin Laden's life, and according to Frontline on PBS tried to assasinate him twice in the
1990s but failed (I assume his Allah protected him).
[...]
Then Osama could not take it anymore and may have tried to participate in destroyingh the world trade centers.
It was his revenge. Finally.
Um, I thought the US was kind of upset with Osama because he had already tried to blow up the WTC once.
Because we got our asses kicked in that part of the world trying to do them a favor (we entered vietnam at south vietnams request).
When attempting to win his country's independence from the authoritarian French colonists, Ho Chi Min wrote a declaration of independence, patterned after the USA's, and appealed to the USA for help. Rebuffed, he decided that maybe the USA's system of government wasn't so great after all and maybe he'd just go communist. At this point, the USA said "Oh no you don't!" and decided it was appropriate to intervene in the region.
Slashdot Mirror
NS4 is broken beyond belief. Perfectly valid CSS isn't handled, isn't ignored, but is used to shrink text to ~2px and splatter visual elements all over each other. The browser frequently hangs and JavaScript crashes it like nobody's business. It is obsolete and deprecated, and as you can even get Mozilla for OpenVMS, I really don't care to cater to people too lazy to fix their broken system.
All my current content is written in XHTML 1.0, which is basically HTML 4.01 with XML prettiness (although I have includes that are nowhere near fully compliant). I make heavy use of semantic elements, such as (and it's ironic that Slashdot doesn't support <code> here) cite, dfn, abbr, q, blockquote, code, samp, kbd, etc. NS4 doesn't support much, and that's no surprise, but the scary thing is that neither does IE6. It doesn't even support <q>! Konqueror tries, but it makes a mess. (Opera seems to do okay, but it's crashy, does weird things with spaces, and I don't like what it does with the title attribute.) Mozilla's the only one I've really seen to handle semantic elements in a sensible manner.
I'm tired of trying to represent semantic content with visual markup, and I've given up caring about IE and other browsers whose developers can't be bothered to support valid and useful HTML elements. NS4 especially, since it's just plain broken. In the end, semantic markup is the only hope, not only for the disabled, but for those of us who want to do any real work with documents.
"Field of Dreams" is at least outside the realm of the normal. But Braveheart?
"Taken" sounds interesting, though...
I said this myself recently.
That is incorrect.
RMS wrote the first emacs as an extension to TECO. Gosling wrote the first C-based emacs, but Gosling is also a conniving rat (like Tatu Ylonen) who promised RMS he could use his Emacs code, then changed his mind and threatened legal action. More recently, he has fraudulently claimed credit for inventing Emacs.
More history here.
So today I downloaded 1.2. This is quite upsetting.
Anyway, in order to save Bugzilla the crush, I'm pasting the bug report (#182500) here. It seems that the main issues are broken user-defined XML tags, broken document.write(), and checkins to the 1.2 branch missing in the release.
[Emphasis mine.]Slap a "tsarkon" on it and call it done...
Opera routinely crashes on every non-Win OS I've run it on.
I'm on my gf's family's WinMe machine right now, and I just saw that message that you refer to. When the modem connection died, Mozilla complained that the source file could not be read. Makes perfect sense to me. As I said, I've never seen or heard of this problem. Maybe you should consider filing a report, as it seems you're the only one with this issue. I don't see how you can complain when you don't even take the most basic steps to even issue a public flame for this defect, instead bringing it up casually only as ancillary evidence in a 3rd-rate flamewar on a 4th-rate discussion site. Perhaps your machine is misconfigured.
I've never seen anyone who can be so inconsistent from one paragraph to the next. Do you want a platform, or do you want an "end user browser"? Phoenix is a browser, IE is a browser, Opera is a browser. I'm puzzled as to what functionality is being "strip[ped]" relative to IE, personally. Mozilla includes a mail/news reader, an IRC client, and HTML/XML/JavaScript development tools; Phoenix doesn't. IE doesn't either. Mail/news is separated into Outlook Express, Microsoft killed their IRC client years ago, and they include no development tools to speak of. Phoenix and IE seem to be at parity to me.Pathetic. You know that I am adamant about running Ad-Aware, F-Prot, msconfig, etc and cleaning out all the Gator BonziBuddy CometCursor Klez monopoly on CPU hogging. I also run Windows Update to install IE 6 and update system libs (pathetic that all important system libs are embedded in the browser and not distinguishable and that I have to move past v5.5 to finally get systems to stop hanging for 10s every minute...). Besides, basic logic should imply that if the system is as waterlogged as you insinuate, Mozilla would suffer equal performance degradation. More, in fact, because of the abstraction layers involved in Mozilla XPCOM.
I am on a garbage HP Pavilion with 128MB right now, stock WinMe install, but all MS critical updates installed. IE6 and Moz1.2b. I visited http://candlemart.com/, a random site from the bookmarks here. Load time is about equal, but IE takes slightly longer than Mozilla to redraw the window with opaque resizing, does it slightly more choppily and actually causes the hard drive to start thrashing. Mozilla, "bloat king", doesn't. Remember that Mozilla should be slower because of its abstraction.
I don't denigrate your experience. It's entirely possible that on your system IE is speed king and Mozilla is O(n^1e6) for length of pages and etc. But on every system I have seen, multiple computers and on multiple OSes, Mozilla wins. And browsing functionality is superior enough to make me willing to take a speed hit if it existed. Use what works for you. But for the rest of the world, it seems Mozilla doesn't cause the problems you have.
This is a blatant lie. I've used Windows 2000 extensively at a previous job, to gain experience. I'm not impressed with it. It's certainly superior to the DOS garbage, but when it can't load drivers for a simple USB Mass Storage device without hanging the system, hard, I'm not impressed. And this was on a system set up by an expert MCSE, you know.
I don't "beta test" Mozilla. I use it. It's the only browser I've found to be reasonable. Konqueror doesn't impress me, Opera doesn't, IE certainly doesn't impress. Like you, I'm too lazy to file reports obsessively -- I just wait for the next version and miraculously most seem to sort themselves out -- but unlike you I put up, help out, or shut up. If I have a problem, at least I have the option of inserting a record into a public database rather than spending hours on hold waiting for moron to tell me to go jump in a lake (and scroll up for an example of MS quality control) and read incomprehensible URLs-always-changing-search-references-dead-404-li nks Knowledge Base.
Back and forth you go, Opera to IE to Opera. You defend IE and throw in Opera as a strawman, when we all know IE is your primary browser and you'll complain about "onerous licensing" or "annoying MDI" or some such to keep from using Opera so you can keep other technologies around and claim a hatred of Microsoft while at the same time sucking off their teat and continuing to fester in the pit of 1995 hypertext viewer technologies. We've moved on.
MS Word's not even good enough for that. I used to do all my homework at home using LaTeX, then either print it out at home or take it to school as a PDF and print it on the laser printers there. Well, one day I forgot about something and had to start it at school the morning it was due, using MS Word. Copied it to a floppy (2 for redundancy, and it's good I did, 'cause floppies leak data like a strainer leaks water), went to class, opened it up on a different computer, and lo and behold, everything broke. Fonts were different sizes, frames moved around, etc.
And in case the guy I'm involved in an IE vs Mozilla discussion with follows me here, let's look at MS Word's load time and memory usage. Pathetic. Plus the fact that MS Office, like Mozilla, likes to shove itself into RAM on boot, taking what little RAM the typical consumer PC has. And people scoff at Emacs; at least it leaves things where I put them. Not to mention you can't even paste a text snippet into Word without it reformatting out the wazoo, absolutely broken style tools, inane word-by-word selection model (thanks to IE too for that one), etc.
Never again. I decided I'd rather turn something in a day late than waste my day trying to clean up after MS Word. I'll take LaTeX, Lout, an SGML or XML DTD, or some other markup language-based tool any day. Unambiguous, completely portable, and with absolutely no system requirements to edit.
I'd like to note that the difficulty arose when trying to import an MS Word document with strange quote marks. I don't hear anyone talking about problems importing OpenOffice-exported documents into MS Word.
I'd also like to raise the question of why people are sending out MS Word documents as the primary distribution format. It's like me sending out a .tex file instead of a .dvi, .ps, or .pdf. It's only readable by people lucky enough to have the same software as me, but with the added disadvantage that things will go all haywire if the reader has a different printer driver, version of MS Word, etc.
But 10 is a lot closer to 12, and 8x the 1.5MB you initially claimed. Your story keeps changing...
As to your second point, that "12MB of junk" supports W3C HTML. IE doesn't. Guess which one I'm more impressed with. (Especially since IE/Mac is apparently much more standards-compliant, which means Microsoft can't be bothered to maintain a cross-platform HTML library, nor port the one they have.)
I haven't seen this. Precisely the reverse, in fact.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil." -- Donald Knuth.
You seem to forget that Mozilla has only recently reached 1.0 (and yet many people do seem to consider it usable). No, speed was not the primary concern until recently, and this was publicly stated. The goals were correctness and cross-platform compatibility, something I am grateful for, as I have a browser I can run on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, and Windows, on x86, Alpha, and PPC. What's IE run on? So. Now I have a browser. You have another browser, and suddenly Microsoft, reduced to playing catch-up once more, is starting to improve their product. Be grateful.
As far as user demands, users have been doing this, and developers have been listening. The 0.9 series is the first I would consider easily usable by a non-fan, and each consecutive release has prominently featured "speed improvements".
Once again, I'm very interested in reading the Bugzilla discussion on this.
How so?
Wrong. Opera is an HTML viewer, a good one, but no more. Mozilla is an application deployment platform that prominently features an HTML viewer. This is the same functionality that frightened Microsoft so much about Java, but with the advantages that the source is available without onerous licensing and the product, or pieces of it, can be embedded royalty-free. This is attractive, and I predict more companies will follow the lead of AOL and begin embedding Gecko and/or building their products on/including XUL. Once this happens, watch the IE dominance in HTML standards go away, and the Windows client-side monopoly with it. I wonder if you are an astroturfer; you seem so defensive, and you don't reveal your identity.
I have. I don't run it myself, as I said, but I've had occasion to use it on the computers of friends, family, and employers. Every time, I've been decidedly unimpressed with the performance of IE. It hangs when downloading large pages (similar to the problem NS4.x(!) had with nested tables and CSS), the throbber sometimes moves and sometimes doesn't, form content is nuked at the slightest whim, connection reliability is poor, it hides error messages in a pile of fluff, etc. This is on IE4-6, on Windows 95-Me and NT 4.0-5.1.
As far as Opera goes, the only platform I really like it on is the Zaurus. Everywhere else the interface seems bulky and clunky, and the times it does/doesn't ask for confirmation on things seem unintuitive. But that's personal preference. Speed-wise, it didn't seem any better or worse than Mozilla.
I've installed Mozilla on Windows computers for friends, often without any guidance or extensive verbal bias from me, and they all use it exclusively now, often saying how much more they like it than IE. Surely there's a reason for this.
I'd like to see something like this. Perhaps something with a 512MB flash drive, a bunch of RAM, and USB, VGA, and audio ports, running Mozilla?
I liked the JavaStation...
I agree with the main idea of your post, but you've made an error here which obscures its correctness. The 3270 is not a dumb terminal; in fact, this is what distinguishes it from the VT series and the ANSI X3.64 standard.
The 3270 is a smart terminal with support for forms-based input. The server specifies the types and locations of the fields required, and the terminal draws them, accepts input, and does basic verification, batch-submitting the entire form when complete. Typing lag, therefore, doesn't exist (this fact saved me from going completely insane when Office Depot couldn't keep its network running and thoroughput dropped to ~300bps).
So yes, HTML viewers and 3270 terminals are very much alike, and share many features, drawbacks, and programming issues.
I don't run Windows, so I don't have a first-hand way to measure it myself, but I'm positive your analysis is incorrect. This article, certainly not by a fan of Mozilla, has a screenshot of IE using 9.98MB.
And the entire thrust of the memory usage discussion is that Internet Explorer uses "system libraries"; libraries aside from the ones it opens itself and that are not counted against it. Windows Explorer displays little HTML-based summaries in the left of folder windows; Windows Help is HTML-based now. Are you seriously trying to say that Windows loads no HTML-rendering components itself?
Nice strawman. You admit that rendering time is the same, then start complaining about the irrelevancy of startup time. This is just like Mac/PPC fanatics blithering about Photoshop start time, something that happens only once and is highly dependent on HDD speed, bus speed, system load, etc, but with the additional error that a good chunk of Internet Explorer is already loaded.
Enable Quick Start and put Mozilla in your startup. Watch your system startup time go up and your Mozilla startup time go down. Don't complain that this is "cheating"; this is what IE does.
I really don't understand your post. It seems you're defending IE, but in this paragraph you systematically demolish any reason I can think of for using it.
I don't understand this. Do you mean some sort of SSL error, or an error in referring to the salted profile directory? If the latter, perhaps you deleted your profile, but only partially. Regardless, I've never seen this, and I'm intrigued. Give me the ID# for the bug you filed and I will read about it on Bugzilla. So get Phoenix. 35% smaller than Mozilla, with things like an improved forms manager, improved keyboard navigation, improved tabbed browsing, etc. How so?Point. But somehow Mozilla overcomes.
Do you have examples?
I've never noticed a problem.
My experience says that Mozilla, on *nix or Win32, is faster than IE for Windows. Every time I've had occasion to see either in action. Further, Mozilla has enough efficiency tools built into it that any slowdown, if there was any, would be amply compensated by the overall speedup of my "browsing experience". And the retention of my sanity.
The native UI thing, you'll note, is something I've complained about myself on occasion. But the XUL stuff has gotten much faster, and at the same time enhanced its capabilities. And they're finally starting to use native widgets. Remember that Mozilla is both a proof-of-concept and a software deployment platform (which, once again, has proven itself worthy; I love the DOM Inspector, the Prefbar, etc). If you want simple fast HTML, get a simple browser built around Gecko. Heck, the next generation of AOL's getting built around Gecko...
In the Bad Old Days, yes, browsing in the *nix world was no fun. Netscape 4 was broken, thanks to getting rid of apparently the only guy who knew what he was doing, and when Mozilla first arrived, it was slow. Painfully slow. I'll admit that I was often envious of Windows at that time. But the tables have turned. Coupled with a good window manager, Mozilla provides me a more pleasurable and efficient time on the Web than I could have dreamed of several years ago. And Microsoft's products have been left in the dust.
As for 100% compatibility, congratulations, you're attempting to crush the return of technodiversity and heterogenity. I'll remember to thank you when the next worm sweeps through.
Widespread adoption will come when large vendors simply repackage Gecko in their products instead of IE. Suddenly browser independence and standards compliance will matter again. That is, unless you want to cut off all the potential customers from, say, AOL. That's a lot of potential customers. And all of those arguments about "market share" and "most common browser" will come back to bite Microsoft in the butt.
[Apologies if this is slightly incoherent; I work nights and I got up in the middle of my sleep time to check on some stuff...]
I read a story in The Psychology of Computer Programming about a guy brought in to look at some sort of card-based system (for manufacturing cars, I think). He came to the conclusion that it needed a complete overhaul, as the existing system was brute-forced and called for things like cars with 6 wheels and no steering wheel. The code would break in random places, and any addition or removal of options would require the generation of hundreds or thousands of new possibility cards. So he redid it, and it ran much more sensibly.
When he explained his new software at the meeting, the programmer who had written the original software grew defensive. "My software", he pontificated, "takes only 850ms/card. How long does yours take?" The new guy adroitly dodged the question. "I can write one that takes 0ms/card, if it doesn't have to work."
Internet Explorer can't render standard HTML worth beans.
The Lameness Filter Is Requiring Me To Have _More_ Characters Per Line; Interesting... I Thought It Was Supposed To _Fight_ Page Widening. Lalalalla--MEEPT-- CmdrTaco Can'T Handle Losing Control, Doo Dah Doo Dah, CmdrTaco Can'T Hack Perl, Doo Dah Doo Dah, How Are We Supposed To Post Meaningful Comments When Lists And Blockquotes And Indentation Are All Considered "Trolling", E-I-E-I-O
/~r1077h0c6g
_ HitlerandtheReichstagFire.asp
... dramatic domestic happenings.
= 4641043
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Subject: The Reichstag BURNS
From: vsync <vsync@quadium.net>
Organization: quadium.net
Date: 20 Nov 2002 06:11:19 -0700
Message-ID: <87u1ic2xoo.fsf@piro.quadium.net>
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Well, they just got done raping the 4th amendment, among other things.
The Senate just approved the "Homeland Security" bill, granting the
government the right to read mail without warrants, as well as
stuffing INS, Customs, and others into one giant department. The bill
(law now) also includes such provisions apparently unrelated to
security as refusing government contracts to US-traded companies based
in the Cayman Islands, with no justification given.
They were forced to back down from some of the most explicit corporate
pork (but only as a promise to rescind these provisions later; they're
law now):
* Shield Eli Lilly only from future lawsuits based on claims that
thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, caused autism in children; as
passed, the bill makes moot a number of pending suits.
* Restore a provision from the late Sen. Paul Wellstone that would
ban companies from getting federal homeland-security contracts if
they reincorporated abroad to avoid U.S. taxes, unless an
administration finds national security is at stake. The GOP language
now in the bill broadens the waiver power.
* Drop an earmark that would have put a new homeland-security
research center at Texas A&M.
-- WSJ, "Bush Wins Senate Passage Of Homeland-Security Bill",
2002-11-20
Last night I found this speech by Senator Thomas rushing the bill to a
vote without further debate or discussion:
Mr. THOMAS. Mr. President, I just listened to the two Senators who
are probably most involved with the details of this homeland
security bill--very interesting comments. I have been, frankly,
disappointed that it has taken us as long as it has. We have been
on this measure, I understand, now for about 7 weeks, and we are
still not finished--a bill that needs to be finished. It needs to
be there for security. Yet we continue to debate and worry over
issues that are not as significant as the passage of this bill.
-- [Page: S11243],
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/C?r107:./temp
And here I thought people were concerned about the unconstitutional
aspects of this bill and worried about the amount of power being
placed into the hands of the Executive Branch. Now I know that
getting a bad law passed is more important than fixing the issues it
has first, passing a better law instead, or even determining if a new
law is needed.
I'd like to quote from an article about 1930s Germany:
In Jan., 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor without an
absolute majority, the Reichstag was dissolved and new elections
were set for Mar. 5; a violent election campaign ensued. On Feb. 27,
1933, a fire destroyed part of the Reichstag building. Hitler
immediately accused the Communists of having set the fire. President
von Hindenburg proclaimed a state of emergency[...]
Sound eerily familiar? I pray that the second half of that last
sentence never comes to pass in the United States of America:
[...]and issued decrees suspending freedom of speech and assembly.
Now, look at how Hitler got all his power. Did he seize it in a
military coup? No:
On Mar. 23 the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which gave the
government, i.e., Hitler, dictatorial powers.
-- http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/Reichstg
I say that the World Trade Center is our Reichstag. Yes, the United
States was attacked. Yes, there are those who wish our doom. But
shifting power between the branches of government and giving the FBI
power to read our mail without warrants and browse our library reading
lists freely does nothing to stop someone flying another plane into a
building, shooting random people as they go about their business, or
sailing a ship with a nuclear weapon aboard into a harbor. No, it
merely clears the way for more
I'm surprised that this wasn't passed by secret voice vote, the way
the DMCA was. At least we know the names of those who sold us out,
abrogating the constitutional rights which define the freedom they
are so eager to protect. Whether the Supreme Court will intervene is
an open question.
As citizens of the United States, we share a solemn responsibility in
that we allowed this to happen, the same responsibility we place upon
those who gave Hitler his power. And should we see our government
take further steps along the road to establishing a tyrant, and do
nothing, we are not merely careless and apathetic, but fools. For we
have seen this happen before, and we know the potential results.
God bless America.
[This email may be reproduced and redistributed verbatim and in its
entirety.]
- --
vsync
http://quadium.net/
Save man-years by not saying things like "mature software process
concepts" when you mean things like "good plan."
-- http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44717&cid
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The Lameness Filter Is Requiring Me To Have _More_ Characters Per Line; Interesting... I Thought It Was Supposed To _Fight_ Page Widening. Lalalalla--MEEPT-- CmdrTaco Can'T Handle Losing Control, Doo Dah Doo Dah, CmdrTaco Can'T Hack Perl, Doo Dah Doo Dah, How Are We Supposed To Post Meaningful Comments When Lists And Blockquotes And Indentation Are All Considered "Trolling", E-I-E-I-O
And just to show you that I believe in fair discussion and I'm not a blind apologist, here's a speech that would seem to back you up.
Whether Stephens was merely pandering to racist whites or actually believed this, and whether his assessment of their reasons was accurate, I really don't know.
On the flip side, they certainly didn't let Thomas Jefferson put this paragraph in the Declaration of Independance:
Granted, it was mainly southern representatives who objected, but the northern ones certainly seemed to follow a policy of appeasement and compromise.
I'm not defending them necessarily. I just think that by and large, their legal reasoning was as valid as that of the United States (which, after all, was founded by a bunch of tax-dodgers). Slavery wasn't the only cause of the civil war, it just unfortunately ended up being the focal point of argument. For all eternity, it seems.
I just think that a government that prides itself on the rule of law and its written constitution should find better justification for crushing a rebellion than disagreement with the same reasons for its own rebellion. If they felt so strongly about slavery, they should have had the guts to say so and frame it as a war for human rights. It's highly debatable whether Lincoln even genuinely cared about the plight of southern blacks...
Once again, I don't have a source offhand, but I remember reading several economic analyses showing that black slaves were far more expensive than poor whites, as a free serf could simply be given a meager wage and left to starve, while slaves required the owner to provide housing, clothing, etc. And as slaves were assets, the owner would have to provide at least minimal food and medical care. Hopefully reading this reassures you that I don't in any way approve of the disgusting morals of the average southern plantation owner.
Gandhi pulled it off in India...
Anyway, I've never been to the southern US, but you don't have to tell me about racist attitudes. My girlfriend's grandmother grew up in Kentucky, and I hear racist garbage from her all the time. Any time the dog barks outside, it's because a Mexican is walking by. She wouldn't want to live in San Francisco because it's got "too many ni-- er, negroes". Any mystery movie, she waits until a black character appears and then says "the black man did it, huh".
The worst thing was when I was watching some History Channel thing about a massacre involving the KKK and civil rights protestors in some southern town. She came in, sat down, and said: "That's no made up show. I was there during that kind of thing." Then, and I still get a weird feeling in my gut remembering it, she said: "That's Martin Luther King's fault. They like to talk about him nowadays like he's some great man, but he started riots, you know. Everyone was happy and peaceful, and he got them blacks all discontented."
To this day I wish I'd had the guts to tell her that maybe she'd get discontented too if she figured out that without doing something she and her children would all likely be treated like so much garbage until they died. That the black protestors were the ones sitting down quietly to eat their lunch or to ride the bus while the "peaceful" whites unleashed fire hoses and attack dogs on them. That she should be grateful Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. got his way, or the Black Panthers would have attracted a far larger following and unleashed a vengeful race war.
No, I'm not impressed with the actions of the south.
Pejorative?
I'm not dismissing the possibility of coercion, but what of the oft-mentioned free blacks who chose of their own free will to volunteer to fight for the CSA?
Of course it doesn't, but I think it's telling when a group of people actually involved in the situation decides that one side or the other is the lesser of 2 evils.
Oops. :-( I knew that, too...
Just a statement of fact. But no, I'd rather not live in an empire myself, thank you.
From what I remember (don't have a source to cite right off the bat, sorry), the CSA did explicitly legalize slave ownership -- they pretty much had to in order to avoid a rebellion of their own -- but outlawed the importation of new slaves, and likely would have ended up phasing out slavery. I'm not excusing the system of slavery practiced in the Americas by any means -- it was cruel and immoral -- but much of what I've read indicates that it was an economically untenable system anyway, and they held on to it as long as they did they felt backed against the wall by northern interests.
As far as hopeless flaws go, you do know that the Cherokee joined the CSA, listing among their reasons the doctrine of nullification, Lincoln's abrogation of various Constitutionally enumerated rights, and most importantly the fact that the CSA actually showed an interest in making treaties with the Cherokee nation and sticking to them, don't you? This was in marked contrast to the USA, which stole the Cherokees' land and sent them off to concentration camps on a death march that rivalled Nazi Germany for cruelty. Any system that allows something as evil as a racist holocaust because of "manifest destiny" is hopelessly flawed and should be eliminated as quickly as possible.
USB audio connectors such as the Extigy and the Stereo Link, on the other hand, have an all-digital connection to the computer and shielding around all the electronic components. This will produce much cleaner sound.
There's no point getting good speakers if the audio being played on them is of poor quality.
Um, I thought the US was kind of upset with Osama because he had already tried to blow up the WTC once.
When attempting to win his country's independence from the authoritarian French colonists, Ho Chi Min wrote a declaration of independence, patterned after the USA's, and appealed to the USA for help. Rebuffed, he decided that maybe the USA's system of government wasn't so great after all and maybe he'd just go communist. At this point, the USA said "Oh no you don't!" and decided it was appropriate to intervene in the region.
Some help.