Maybe I'm missing something, but what is the link between publishing a book in a pamphlet style and a love for digital readers?
It's a leap, but it's not as big as you think. It's not so much that Beatrix Potter was pining away for the day when you could have a book that changed what its only page looked like rather than having to flip pages. It's that she conceived of another way of presenting the story other than the conventional book form, and that shows she was more likely to embrace other non-conventional forms.
To belabor the point a bit, it might be worth noting that the form she chose is at least marginally more portable and multifunctional to boot.
Let's assume we ban campaign donations from foreign individuals -- can they give money to citizens who may be sympathetic to their cause? Or organizations formed inside the U.S.?
What about, say, BP, which, though of foreign origination, is a legally recognized entity inside the U.S.? Now that the Citizens United Ruling has come down, what kind of law will you pass to keep them from spending as money as they like getting people who are sympathetic to them elected this fall?
Even if you manage some way to fence out campaign donations flowing through citizens and businesses -- how will you keep them from spending huge amounts of money on PR firms? Without creating an highly regulated press and broadcast industry... and preserving internet freedoms?
I'm with you that these things are all real and significant problems, worthy of some serious thought about how to fix. I'm just trying to point out that even apparently simply fixes like the idea of banning foreign campaign contributions are harder than they might seem to implement. The problem of the power of money is a deep, deep topic.
I don't see how this would result in anything but meaningless spamming of that "button".
Meaningless? No, it could probably be used for quite meaningful harassment of someone you don't like. Maybe even someone you barely know.
It'd be like Slashdot moderation, except instead of "-1, I don't like what you're saying," it'd be "-1, I'd like to give the police the pretext to access your accounts and search your house."
Unless, of course, there's a different set of rules for investigations triggered by this...
Jump-starting the use of your service through a glorified referral program is a solid idea, but eventually, you want to be something more than that, particularly when it comes to search.
Don't idiots every get tired of blah-blahing that response over and over again?
It sometimes does get tiresome repeating things until they're understood.
The reason it gets brought up so often is that it's a handy counter to the idea that original framing/intent is the best yardstick for how to interpret and observe the constitution. There are good reasons we don't want everything exactly the way it was originally meant (to the extent that you can even find total consensus on how things should be from the people who wrote the constitution). There are good reasons why the arbiters of the law have interpreted things differently over the years.
There may also be bad reasons, and maybe you have good reasons for a stricter reading of the 10th amendment. Maybe your reasons are better than those for the courts and the people who've worked in the executive branch. But one thing's for sure, if someone brings up "the values upon which the nation was founded", they're going to hear about slavery, and justifiably so until they actually make the real connection: "because it's how they did/saw things in late 1780s" isn't good enough as a reason.
We've recently seen a lot of enthusiasm for expanding the right to carry the deadly weapons of the industrial age, as a means of protecting oneself from criminals and as a last means of protecting oneself from the abuse of state power.
But the thing is, short of organizing an armed revolution, firearms are terrible at protecting you from the abuse of state power. Any confrontation between you or even you and your posse and law enforcement that escalates to firearm use is going to mean a significant number of you dead. They've got what you've got and more.
You don't get anywhere without a majority of the local population on your side. And you can't do that unless you can wield the non-lethal weapons of the information age. That used to mean "the press" or "the media," but now it can be you. At least, if we're willing to stand up for our right to keep and bear these weapons of the information age with the same enthusiasm as generations have stood up for both the 1st and 2nd amendments.
When teachers didn't want to be tested as they claimed that testing was a poor indicator of someone ability. Go Figure.
Most teachers don't complain about being tested on their subject matter -- maybe a few, but not most. Testing on subject matter is standard practice for getting a secondary certificate these days... not just in the context of the dual education/subject degree you generally earn while you're working towards certification, but there's actually tests at the end to certify. Heck, in some states, you have continuing education requirements for a long while afterwards. This is all par for the course.
What teachers do complain about is having how students fare on standardized tests serve as a metric for their performance. Everyone knows standardized tests are somewhat problematic metric of even student ability, but most people are willing to accept it as a starting point while trying to work with varying cases. So, just like you sometimes see higher grades than test scores would indicate awarded to students who diligently complete their homework, take extra credit assignments, consistently participate in classroom discussion, and in general work hard, you'll also see colleges accept students with lower standardized test scores who show a similar pattern in their schoolwork and extracurricular activities. (And you see people succeed in life that way, too -- my girlfriend says her rocket scientist father actually struggled quite a bit with math, but he's know since he was a kid he wanted to be freakin' rocket scientist, and he worked hard and he's a highly respected guy at Aerojet who's worked on stuff from the NASA New Horizons project to fielding calls from the Mythbusters team).
But when you take something that problematic and then use it as an indirect metric for something else, the problems are magnified. There are too many confounding factors. What the student population brings to the table is quite simply as important as what the teacher brings, and what the larger system does to support or work against teachers is a big factor as well.
You might be able to use tests that measure only aggregated student improvements as a minor part of an overall program including human assessments from other professionals, continuing education/training, feedback from students and parents, and organizational reviews for schools and districts. But any teacher who complains about a merit program that focuses on standardized testing is only acting on good sense.
The fact that garbage like Badgers exists on the web at all is strong evidence that we need to leave Flash behind.
The fact that Flash-haters and HTML5 partisans* also think Badgers is garbage is strong evidence that they're not only wrong about most of their arguments, they're also joyless buzzkills.
The whole point of flash was that the standards were so ignored
Seriously? That was the whole point of flash? It was a common rendering/layout engine?
Man, someone should have told Macromedia back in the day. It would have saved them all that work on the motion/vector graphics engine, integrating multimedia codecs, and coming up with their own scripting language -- all they had to do was write a browser plugin for most browsers!
Comparing timber to oil is not a valid analogy because timber is a renewable resource.
True. The question is -- if we tend not to do well with even renewable resources, how well are we likely to do with exhaustibles... at least, without some greater discipline than we've got now?
I could see them kicking up a fuss over open source compilers
Unlikely. For one thing, the Flex SDK (which is the official compiler underlying Flex) has actually been open source for a while now. And MTASC has been around for at least 4-5 years and it's open source as well.
Then there's ming which isn't exactly a compiler, but it's another method of targeting SWF, and OpenLazlo, and SWFTools and SWFMill and... well, the point is, Adobe doesn't seem to have been particularly interested in squashing tools which target the Flash runtime.
Either God doesn't heal the sick in the first place, or He's a douchewidget who will refuse to heal the sick if they're part of a study.
At least, assuming a strong/strict reading of "God listens to prayer and will heal the sick if we pray for them."
In practice, I suspect the experiment you're describing isn't testing actual religious claims. Most religious adults won't claim that God heals any sick person every time any person prays for them, but will instead state there may be number of factors involved, including the faith and/or conduct of the person praying, the faith/conduct of the person being prayed for, and some larger ineffable plan or "God's will." It isn't as if there no believers who've ever noticed that even well-prayed-over adherents suffer misfortune, injury, and death.
Now, you can say that their justifications are non-falsifiable, and speculate that they're post-hoc, and that's true, and people who tend towards rationalist epistemologies will probably take that route. But it remains the case good rationalist can't say that the experiment you're describing really thoroughly examines hypotheses other than the strict one.
In other words, possibility 3 -- that God sometimes heals individuals according to criteria unaccounted for by the study -- is outside the bounds of the experiment.
another case of someone not wanting anyone to manufacture a competing model that could shake the current makers out of their lowest common denominator complacency.
If it's not straight out fiction.
Maybe you've heard this one, folks, but I think it's time to tell it again:
If Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, An Efficient Government, and a Private Corporation are at a four way intersection, and in the center, there is a nice crisp 100 dollar bill, who will get to the money first?
The Private Corporation, of course, because the first three are figments of your imagination! Ha!
It's just good common sense. Everybody knows it. It's been scientifically, irrefutably proven, so anybody who tells you differently has an agenda: there is no such thing as a government ever producing anything better than private industry, and the sooner we learn that, the sooner we'll be free of all the problems we've got here in modern socialist America -- and particularly free to ignore or simply be amused by obvious fictions like this article.
I'd assumed that the old MPG ratings were gamed by manufacturers to reflect higher-than-real-world performance myself. But I've recently been measuring the MPG of my '97 Geo Prizm (set the mileage counter when I fill up, record gallons-to-top at the next fill up, divide first figure by second) and I've been seeing numbers that range from 29 to 37 mpg. If you look at the fueleconomy.gov ratings, that's not only closer to old rating system, it exceeds it.
I suppose there may be factors from vehicle maintenance to how it's driven to what's kept inside, but it's an old car at this point (200k+), I don't think I've done anything special with it, I probably have more than the usual amount of stuff in the thing, and doubt I drive much more conservatively or efficiently than the average.
I talked about them a little bit at the December BayJax Meetup, and I've been meaning to turn that presentation into a web page since then, but I haven't.
However... I've also been meaning to create an audio-focused JavaScript mailing list so that when I do put it up, I'd have somewhere to announce it. And thanks to your comment, I just got off my butt and created the js-audio Google Group.:)
I'd love to have you or anyone else join and share what you've observed and experimented with yourself, and I'll be posting my experiments there in due time.
From what I've read, there was an off-screen flash helper playing the audio, and I'm not surprised. It's nigh impossible to get reliable audio with JavaScript only. People have been doing some experiments with stuffing data urls into , , and tags for a while now (heck, I've been doing it since last fall) in order to programmatically generate audio, but it generally suffers from performance issues and various glitches for a while now. You can mostly pull it off only if you stick with MIDI or you use Flash or Java to deliver the audio.
Here's something I didn't get until recently: Audio is in some ways harder than video. It's more timing sensitive. With video, you're generally slinging a lot more data per frame, but you can get away with *much* lower frame rates... 24 fps works, 60's not bad, and you don't have to get much higher than that to pass the threshold of perception. With audio, very small "frames"/samples will hold adequately resolved data from one point in the signal, but you have to move a lot *more* of them (44,100 of 'em per second for CD quality audio) and move them *reliably* in order to get sound fidelity. JavaScript timing might be millisecond reliable except in IE, but it's not microsecond reliable. Totally realtime programmatic sound is probably out of the question for a while.
But, programmatic generation of the audio *data* is possible now, and you can probably precompute enough things ahead of time that if they can work the bugs out of the audio tag or something else to enable microsecond level starting/stoping/looping of playback, then pure JavaScript audio would get real wings.
they are fearful their corpocleptocractic campaign donors will support someone else if they don't stop this return to normalcy.
And thanks to a recent supreme court decision uncapping corporate election spending, they're right to be fearful.
they are acting against their own interests - just wait until they end up having to pay extra to all the ISPs so that the voters can get to their own campaign websites.
As long as incumbents are good at falling in line with the interests of people with money, higher expenses for all comers actually give them an advantage, because it's easier for them to raise money than it is for contenders, and they probably have a war chest from past elections.
Do you understand the difference between biological and chemical weapons?
I think Gates does, and it seems likely he meant his statement to address the policy regarding both in the recent treaty. So even though, yes, I understand there are some potentially important differences depending on the agent you're talking about, no, I doubt it changes the policy calculations.
moron at 1600 Penn Ave announced that we wouldn't use them in response to one.
Wow. Someone else a "moron" because they've figured out (a) that, as Robert Gates says, "there's no credible scenario where a chemical weapon could have the kind of consequences that would warrant a nuclear response" AND we have a conventional arsenal that's enough of a threat by itself and (b) there's potential in offering even rogue states carrots as well as sticks and (c) if for some reason we're wrong about (a), it's not as if we couldn't reconsider?
Just imagine the outcry if Microsoft banned all other development environments than Visual Studio and.NET from Windows. It would be hit with lawsuits and there would be tons of stories and tens of thousands of comments dissing MS on slashdot.
Can you think of any differences between even Apple's current and strong position in the mobile market and Microsoft's position, particularly in the past?
But suddenly when it's Apple it's all ok. Why the hell?
Wow. It must be hard for you to be the lone voice that's willing to speak up on Slashdot and say that there's something wrong with this. You must feel alone. So very, very alone. If only there were any indication that there were anyone else in the world who felt even remotely the same way as you do. If only there were even one other Linux fan that would be willing to add their voice to yours on this site, maybe it would alleviate the frustration you obviously feel. But it's too bad that Slashdot is totally and completely overrun with Apple users who never utter a word of criticism against the company. Maybe you should find some other forum where you can associate with likeminded people!
I think he's talking about JavaScript missing critical language features. You know, things like proper namespaces, exceptions, static typing, a sensible object model (or even something like the approaches to prototype-based OO that Self and Io take), and so on.
If you actually know how to program in JavaScript, rather than assuming you should be able to write Java or C++ or whatever your favorite language is, then the language actually has suitable idioms/mechanisms for all these things that you mention, except static typing, which might be a legitimate preference strike if you're the kind of person who actually does full-on static analysis/correctness proofs, rather than the typical static typing whiner who grips to compilation and type hierarchies as a kind of magic feather.
How about procedural audio? Say I want to write a speech synthesizer in JavaScript. How do I send the samples to the speaker?
Well, it depends on if you mean "in the browser" or "in JavaScript." If you mean that latter, I'd probably fire up Mozilla Rhino and put together something using the libraries that ship with Java. Some of those are still available in the context of the browser via applets in a lot of cases, too, so with some work, you could probably do it in browser as well.
If you mean in-browser, no Java libraries, I'd probably have the samples in an array of bytes which I'd base64 encode and stuff into the src attribute of an audio, embed, or object tag as a dataURL. This likely wouldn't work in realtime, but then again, you didn't ask for a realtime speech synthesizer.:)
(FWIW: I know Flash 10 has an audio buffer explicitly for writing to programatically in realtime, and I agree it's awesome I agree a lot of the people going on and on about how great Ajax was and HTML5 is and how it all renders Flash totally unnecessary are generally not thinking about features like this. Just pointing out that there is in fact more than one way to do it and some of the other approaches have their merits.)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm missing something, but what is the link between publishing a book in a pamphlet style and a love for digital readers?
It's a leap, but it's not as big as you think. It's not so much that Beatrix Potter was pining away for the day when you could have a book that changed what its only page looked like rather than having to flip pages. It's that she conceived of another way of presenting the story other than the conventional book form, and that shows she was more likely to embrace other non-conventional forms.
To belabor the point a bit, it might be worth noting that the form she chose is at least marginally more portable and multifunctional to boot.
Let's assume we ban campaign donations from foreign individuals -- can they give money to citizens who may be sympathetic to their cause? Or organizations formed inside the U.S.?
What about, say, BP, which, though of foreign origination, is a legally recognized entity inside the U.S.? Now that the Citizens United Ruling has come down, what kind of law will you pass to keep them from spending as money as they like getting people who are sympathetic to them elected this fall?
Even if you manage some way to fence out campaign donations flowing through citizens and businesses -- how will you keep them from spending huge amounts of money on PR firms? Without creating an highly regulated press and broadcast industry... and preserving internet freedoms?
I'm with you that these things are all real and significant problems, worthy of some serious thought about how to fix. I'm just trying to point out that even apparently simply fixes like the idea of banning foreign campaign contributions are harder than they might seem to implement. The problem of the power of money is a deep, deep topic.
I don't see how this would result in anything but meaningless spamming of that "button".
Meaningless? No, it could probably be used for quite meaningful harassment of someone you don't like. Maybe even someone you barely know.
It'd be like Slashdot moderation, except instead of "-1, I don't like what you're saying," it'd be "-1, I'd like to give the police the pretext to access your accounts and search your house."
Unless, of course, there's a different set of rules for investigations triggered by this...
Jump-starting the use of your service through a glorified referral program is a solid idea, but eventually, you want to be something more than that, particularly when it comes to search.
Don't idiots every get tired of blah-blahing that response over and over again?
It sometimes does get tiresome repeating things until they're understood.
The reason it gets brought up so often is that it's a handy counter to the idea that original framing/intent is the best yardstick for how to interpret and observe the constitution. There are good reasons we don't want everything exactly the way it was originally meant (to the extent that you can even find total consensus on how things should be from the people who wrote the constitution). There are good reasons why the arbiters of the law have interpreted things differently over the years.
There may also be bad reasons, and maybe you have good reasons for a stricter reading of the 10th amendment. Maybe your reasons are better than those for the courts and the people who've worked in the executive branch. But one thing's for sure, if someone brings up "the values upon which the nation was founded", they're going to hear about slavery, and justifiably so until they actually make the real connection: "because it's how they did/saw things in late 1780s" isn't good enough as a reason.
Think of it as the right to bear arms.
A-men.
We've recently seen a lot of enthusiasm for expanding the right to carry the deadly weapons of the industrial age, as a means of protecting oneself from criminals and as a last means of protecting oneself from the abuse of state power.
But the thing is, short of organizing an armed revolution, firearms are terrible at protecting you from the abuse of state power. Any confrontation between you or even you and your posse and law enforcement that escalates to firearm use is going to mean a significant number of you dead. They've got what you've got and more.
You don't get anywhere without a majority of the local population on your side. And you can't do that unless you can wield the non-lethal weapons of the information age. That used to mean "the press" or "the media," but now it can be you. At least, if we're willing to stand up for our right to keep and bear these weapons of the information age with the same enthusiasm as generations have stood up for both the 1st and 2nd amendments.
When teachers didn't want to be tested as they claimed that testing was a poor indicator of someone ability. Go Figure.
Most teachers don't complain about being tested on their subject matter -- maybe a few, but not most. Testing on subject matter is standard practice for getting a secondary certificate these days... not just in the context of the dual education/subject degree you generally earn while you're working towards certification, but there's actually tests at the end to certify. Heck, in some states, you have continuing education requirements for a long while afterwards. This is all par for the course.
What teachers do complain about is having how students fare on standardized tests serve as a metric for their performance. Everyone knows standardized tests are somewhat problematic metric of even student ability, but most people are willing to accept it as a starting point while trying to work with varying cases. So, just like you sometimes see higher grades than test scores would indicate awarded to students who diligently complete their homework, take extra credit assignments, consistently participate in classroom discussion, and in general work hard, you'll also see colleges accept students with lower standardized test scores who show a similar pattern in their schoolwork and extracurricular activities. (And you see people succeed in life that way, too -- my girlfriend says her rocket scientist father actually struggled quite a bit with math, but he's know since he was a kid he wanted to be freakin' rocket scientist, and he worked hard and he's a highly respected guy at Aerojet who's worked on stuff from the NASA New Horizons project to fielding calls from the Mythbusters team).
But when you take something that problematic and then use it as an indirect metric for something else, the problems are magnified. There are too many confounding factors. What the student population brings to the table is quite simply as important as what the teacher brings, and what the larger system does to support or work against teachers is a big factor as well.
You might be able to use tests that measure only aggregated student improvements as a minor part of an overall program including human assessments from other professionals, continuing education/training, feedback from students and parents, and organizational reviews for schools and districts. But any teacher who complains about a merit program that focuses on standardized testing is only acting on good sense.
The fact that garbage like Badgers exists on the web at all is strong evidence that we need to leave Flash behind.
The fact that Flash-haters and HTML5 partisans* also think Badgers is garbage is strong evidence that they're not only wrong about most of their arguments, they're also joyless buzzkills.
The whole point of flash was that the standards were so ignored
Seriously? That was the whole point of flash? It was a common rendering/layout engine?
Man, someone should have told Macromedia back in the day. It would have saved them all that work on the motion/vector graphics engine, integrating multimedia codecs, and coming up with their own scripting language -- all they had to do was write a browser plugin for most browsers!
Comparing timber to oil is not a valid analogy because timber is a renewable resource.
True. The question is -- if we tend not to do well with even renewable resources, how well are we likely to do with exhaustibles... at least, without some greater discipline than we've got now?
I could see them kicking up a fuss over open source compilers
Unlikely. For one thing, the Flex SDK (which is the official compiler underlying Flex) has actually been open source for a while now. And MTASC has been around for at least 4-5 years and it's open source as well.
Then there's ming which isn't exactly a compiler, but it's another method of targeting SWF, and OpenLazlo, and SWFTools and SWFMill and ... well, the point is, Adobe doesn't seem to have been particularly interested in squashing tools which target the Flash runtime.
Either God doesn't heal the sick in the first place, or He's a douchewidget who will refuse to heal the sick if they're part of a study.
At least, assuming a strong/strict reading of "God listens to prayer and will heal the sick if we pray for them."
In practice, I suspect the experiment you're describing isn't testing actual religious claims. Most religious adults won't claim that God heals any sick person every time any person prays for them, but will instead state there may be number of factors involved, including the faith and/or conduct of the person praying, the faith/conduct of the person being prayed for, and some larger ineffable plan or "God's will." It isn't as if there no believers who've ever noticed that even well-prayed-over adherents suffer misfortune, injury, and death.
Now, you can say that their justifications are non-falsifiable, and speculate that they're post-hoc, and that's true, and people who tend towards rationalist epistemologies will probably take that route. But it remains the case good rationalist can't say that the experiment you're describing really thoroughly examines hypotheses other than the strict one.
In other words, possibility 3 -- that God sometimes heals individuals according to criteria unaccounted for by the study -- is outside the bounds of the experiment.
People like you make me angry. You're so stupid
I'm not stupid, but apparently I need to work on my deadpan delivery.
Either that, or Tom Lehrer was right when he said satire is obsolete.
another case of someone not wanting anyone to manufacture a competing model that could shake the current makers out of their lowest common denominator complacency.
If it's not straight out fiction.
Maybe you've heard this one, folks, but I think it's time to tell it again:
If Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, An Efficient Government, and a Private Corporation are at a four way intersection, and in the center, there is a nice crisp 100 dollar bill, who will get to the money first?
The Private Corporation, of course, because the first three are figments of your imagination! Ha!
It's just good common sense. Everybody knows it. It's been scientifically, irrefutably proven, so anybody who tells you differently has an agenda: there is no such thing as a government ever producing anything better than private industry, and the sooner we learn that, the sooner we'll be free of all the problems we've got here in modern socialist America -- and particularly free to ignore or simply be amused by obvious fictions like this article.
I'd assumed that the old MPG ratings were gamed by manufacturers to reflect higher-than-real-world performance myself. But I've recently been measuring the MPG of my '97 Geo Prizm (set the mileage counter when I fill up, record gallons-to-top at the next fill up, divide first figure by second) and I've been seeing numbers that range from 29 to 37 mpg. If you look at the fueleconomy.gov ratings, that's not only closer to old rating system, it exceeds it.
I suppose there may be factors from vehicle maintenance to how it's driven to what's kept inside, but it's an old car at this point (200k+), I don't think I've done anything special with it, I probably have more than the usual amount of stuff in the thing, and doubt I drive much more conservatively or efficiently than the average.
Have you published your experiments anywhere?
I talked about them a little bit at the December BayJax Meetup, and I've been meaning to turn that presentation into a web page since then, but I haven't.
However... I've also been meaning to create an audio-focused JavaScript mailing list so that when I do put it up, I'd have somewhere to announce it. And thanks to your comment, I just got off my butt and created the js-audio Google Group. :)
http://groups.google.com/group/js-audio
I'd love to have you or anyone else join and share what you've observed and experimented with yourself, and I'll be posting my experiments there in due time.
There is no Flash involved here, you read wrong.
In the topic of the linked article, or in Google's Pac-man?
I wonder why you got modded up.
Possibly because even if it turns out what I've read about GPac is incorrect, most of what I've written besides is correct.
This:
was meant to be
From what I've read, there was an off-screen flash helper playing the audio, and I'm not surprised. It's nigh impossible to get reliable audio with JavaScript only. People have been doing some experiments with stuffing data urls into , , and tags for a while now (heck, I've been doing it since last fall) in order to programmatically generate audio, but it generally suffers from performance issues and various glitches for a while now. You can mostly pull it off only if you stick with MIDI or you use Flash or Java to deliver the audio.
Here's something I didn't get until recently: Audio is in some ways harder than video. It's more timing sensitive. With video, you're generally slinging a lot more data per frame, but you can get away with *much* lower frame rates... 24 fps works, 60's not bad, and you don't have to get much higher than that to pass the threshold of perception. With audio, very small "frames"/samples will hold adequately resolved data from one point in the signal, but you have to move a lot *more* of them (44,100 of 'em per second for CD quality audio) and move them *reliably* in order to get sound fidelity. JavaScript timing might be millisecond reliable except in IE, but it's not microsecond reliable. Totally realtime programmatic sound is probably out of the question for a while.
But, programmatic generation of the audio *data* is possible now, and you can probably precompute enough things ahead of time that if they can work the bugs out of the audio tag or something else to enable microsecond level starting/stoping/looping of playback, then pure JavaScript audio would get real wings.
they are fearful their corpocleptocractic campaign donors will support someone else if they don't stop this return to normalcy.
And thanks to a recent supreme court decision uncapping corporate election spending, they're right to be fearful.
they are acting against their own interests - just wait until they end up having to pay extra to all the ISPs so that the voters can get to their own campaign websites.
As long as incumbents are good at falling in line with the interests of people with money, higher expenses for all comers actually give them an advantage, because it's easier for them to raise money than it is for contenders, and they probably have a war chest from past elections.
Do you understand the difference between biological and chemical weapons?
I think Gates does, and it seems likely he meant his statement to address the policy regarding both in the recent treaty. So even though, yes, I understand there are some potentially important differences depending on the agent you're talking about, no, I doubt it changes the policy calculations.
moron at 1600 Penn Ave announced that we wouldn't use them in response to one.
Wow. Someone else a "moron" because they've figured out (a) that, as Robert Gates says, "there's no credible scenario where a chemical weapon could have the kind of consequences that would warrant a nuclear response" AND we have a conventional arsenal that's enough of a threat by itself and (b) there's potential in offering even rogue states carrots as well as sticks and (c) if for some reason we're wrong about (a), it's not as if we couldn't reconsider?
Go on. Tell us who you consider "smart."
Also, maybe let us know what you think about:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/09/stewart-rips-fox-news-for_n_531455.html?ref=fb&src=sp
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2010_05/Kimball-Thielmann
Just imagine the outcry if Microsoft banned all other development environments than Visual Studio and .NET from Windows. It would be hit with lawsuits and there would be tons of stories and tens of thousands of comments dissing MS on slashdot.
Can you think of any differences between even Apple's current and strong position in the mobile market and Microsoft's position, particularly in the past?
But suddenly when it's Apple it's all ok. Why the hell?
Wow. It must be hard for you to be the lone voice that's willing to speak up on Slashdot and say that there's something wrong with this. You must feel alone. So very, very alone. If only there were any indication that there were anyone else in the world who felt even remotely the same way as you do. If only there were even one other Linux fan that would be willing to add their voice to yours on this site, maybe it would alleviate the frustration you obviously feel. But it's too bad that Slashdot is totally and completely overrun with Apple users who never utter a word of criticism against the company. Maybe you should find some other forum where you can associate with likeminded people!
I think he's talking about JavaScript missing critical language features. You know, things like proper namespaces, exceptions, static typing, a sensible object model (or even something like the approaches to prototype-based OO that Self and Io take), and so on.
If you actually know how to program in JavaScript, rather than assuming you should be able to write Java or C++ or whatever your favorite language is, then the language actually has suitable idioms/mechanisms for all these things that you mention, except static typing, which might be a legitimate preference strike if you're the kind of person who actually does full-on static analysis/correctness proofs, rather than the typical static typing whiner who grips to compilation and type hierarchies as a kind of magic feather.
How about procedural audio? Say I want to write a speech synthesizer in JavaScript. How do I send the samples to the speaker?
Well, it depends on if you mean "in the browser" or "in JavaScript." If you mean that latter, I'd probably fire up Mozilla Rhino and put together something using the libraries that ship with Java. Some of those are still available in the context of the browser via applets in a lot of cases, too, so with some work, you could probably do it in browser as well.
If you mean in-browser, no Java libraries, I'd probably have the samples in an array of bytes which I'd base64 encode and stuff into the src attribute of an audio, embed, or object tag as a dataURL. This likely wouldn't work in realtime, but then again, you didn't ask for a realtime speech synthesizer. :)
(FWIW: I know Flash 10 has an audio buffer explicitly for writing to programatically in realtime, and I agree it's awesome I agree a lot of the people going on and on about how great Ajax was and HTML5 is and how it all renders Flash totally unnecessary are generally not thinking about features like this. Just pointing out that there is in fact more than one way to do it and some of the other approaches have their merits.)