Nope. It would still get kicked in the teeth by magazine reviewers who have exactly two criteria:
a) Does it have as many features as MS Word? b) Is its interface exactly like MS Word's, since that's what I've learned?
The only thing wrong with AmiPro was the manual, but I only found out when I started writing macros for it. Never needed it for anything simple like styles, tables, headers and all that other obvious stuff that I keep looking for in Openoffice help files...
I bet if I were to describe Americans like you do, I'd be called anti-American and many rather ruder terms - or does that only apply to us foreigners?
Western countries do already prescribe various intrusive measures to any company wishing to provide us with components. ISO quality certification is a huge pile of paper describing in minute detail the hoops a company needs to jump through to be even considered a qualified supplier to most companies in Europe and America. Adding a few working condition clauses to be checked during regular quality process audits would not be a big deal.
This would give local muck-raking journalists some teeth, as their revelations about sweatshop conditions could no longer be shrugged off. Working conditions are already a selling point for sneakers for many consumers. They are not nearly as callous as you make out. Or what would I know about American consumers. They definitely are not over here in Europe - and we are a bigger market and pay in better currency than you do.;)
Re:Back when people could actually code..
on
DOS 5 Upgrade Video
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· Score: 1
One of the funniest shortcut used by Microsoft coders was mentioned in a Windows 3.0 internals book, in which the author had partially disassembled the code. He found one function with a jump into the middle of an instruction word: When you started reading it from the second byte on, it formed a wholly different instruction. I just bet the coder felt he was God when he thought of that space saving optimization. We can only hope that he died on the pitchforks of an enraged mob of code maintainers...
"Ridiculous comment... as absurd as the myth about Eskimos having a hojillion words for snow..."
I don't know about Eskimos, but my mother tongue, Finnish, sure has at least four times more words for snow than English, to describe it in its various states between slush and packed. Used to be rather useful in a hunting society that tread on or through snow half the year. "What's the snow like? Do I take skis, can I still walk across the lake, will my feet get wet etc.?"
And I was not saying that language could make you distinguish more or fewer shades, since the average speaker has neither the trained eye nor the vocabulary needed to describe what that eye sees. Average people anywhere don't use or need more than a half dozen words for colors. All I said was that the vocabulary of a language is massively influenced by the surroundings it is born in. I just bet Californian English has more words for shades of pink than I can imagine. Which Californian Russians probably import en masse as is, when they walk into a car pimping shop.
"Ok, you're falling into the same problem that the author was complaining about in that you're attributing to biology that which is generally cultural. The reason for the ordering of colors is likely not from biological or evolutionary constraints."
Indeed. For it is a geographical constraint. The various regions of the world have wildly differing color palettes in their landscapes. Reading accounts of artists from Europe's greyish north traveling for their first time south of the Alps, be it southern France, Italy or Algeria, you will inevitably find ravings about an "explosion of light and color". The Russian language will obviously have more distinctions for blue, grey, green and purple colors than the yellows and pastel shades of Mediterranean landscapes, because those are the colors their poets need to describe their surroundings - poets being the obvious professionals in this domain: Who else would get persistently stuck groping for a good, sonorous word to describe the color of the telephone pole across the road?
In Finland, you need a license to carry a gun. Licenses are not available to ex-convicts. Sales of guns are restricted to licensed gun shops. Bullets are only sold to license holders. Most guns are owned by people in the countryside and by rare sports shooters. During twenty years in Helsinki, I have met exactly one non-policeman who carried a gun and he was a wiseass who went by the nickname Kummisetä (= Godfather). As said elsewhere, killing someone in self-defense is just about always seen by courts as excessive use of force. And we don't have low crime rates, due to our silly drinking habits - plenty of beatings and stabbings. We just have a low murder rate.
Finland is a small country with an extremely homogeneous population. We're practically all family here. Murderers make big headlines here and are thus easily caught, since they can't hide: All eyes are on them.
So, Finland stands for all those gun control laws you oppose. And so does Switzerland, the most law-abiding, control-freak-run country in the world, from what I hear, and also a small, close-knit community that is in no way comparable to the USA. So stop comparing us.
Every time I read one of these American gun control discussions, I lose every urge to travel to the US. You scare me. Yes, an armed society may be a polite society, but it sure doesn't sound like the friendly, safe society that Finland is.
The female genital mutilation that is presently at issue is the one practised in Africa, which has the express aim of preventing any sexual pleasure at all through removal of clitoris and vaginal lips and the sewing up of the remaining tissue, often in unhygienic conditions. It is equal to complete removal of the penis, but also causes chronic pain and frequent infections. Your historical examples of milder procedures are irrelevant and detract from the actual crime. In other words, you are again making light of it. Shame on you!
Even a small amount of honest masturbation reveals that circumcision has not destroyed my ability to enjoy sex. Genitally mutilated women achieve no pleasure, let alone orgasm from genital contact. That is a monstrous contrast. Sure, it could be that if only I had a foreskin, I would be able to explode after less than a minute of stimulation, but that is hardly conducive to a happy sex life, is it? Your wife would walk out on you within weeks.
And I do agree that allowing anyone but a trained medical professional to do this seems criminal. So one ought to campaign that religious practicioners are given proper training.
But no, I still don't see male circumcision as a serious issue.
About five years after my circumcision, my father - having one of his occasional lapses in disinterest in us kids - attempted to teach me how to wash the foreskin to avoid the nasty infections he had there. After that, I never regretted not having one. Thanks, Dad! I have difficulties understanding people who take it so seriously that they campaign against it. But do feel free to talk about it.
Just one thing though. Do not ever again mention male circumcision in the same paragraph as female genital mutilation, unless you are talking about complete penis removal. It is akin to comparing a summer camp to a Nazi concentration camp: an obscene error in magnitude that makes light of people's suffering.
"Is it really that hard to imagine that these ponds will be spread out over multiple areas?"
I vote for commandeering all the swimming pools in California. All you'd need to do is rename the pool boys into fuel boys and have them come around less frequently to collect the algae. And since all the world will utter its customary "Not in my back yard," we'd get an easy majority vote for that, right?
I stopped reading computer mags back in early 1999 when one of the CDNET rags compared the latest Netware release to the features Microsoft was promising to include in Windows 2000 the next year. A news source that is less trustworthy than Usenet simply does not deserve to live. And frankly, if I can get three drug-addled Usenet trolls to endorse a product, I'm more likely to buy it than on the recommendation of PC Magazine.
A month ago, for the first time in years, I needed to work on an image. LastFM wanted a picture of me, but complained because it was not square enough. Well excuse me for being an elongated person. So I open the Gimp 2.2, load the picture and look into adding a white sidebar with my name on it. Let's walk the menus. Image - Canvas size looks good. I widen the Width, but the Height grows with it. After some headscratching, I figure out that the pretzel icon next to the box is a lock. A mouse hover tool tip might be good here. But cool, now it's 600x600. Hey, why is it checkered gray? Let's fill that with white. Select the bucket icon in the toolbox and swap the foreground color from black to white. The tooltips are great here! Click on the checkered gray area to color it in. Nothing happens! Now what? Maybe it's one of those layer thingies the pros mumble about. Menu troll time! That was funny! Layer - Transparency - Add Alpha channel didn't seem to do nothing, but went gray afterwards. Let's try color to alpha next. All right, the dialog has a white box, so maybe it'll turn this alpha layer white? Oh no, now the whole picture's checkered! Undo undo undo. Image - Fit canvas to layers resizes to the size of the original picture. Aha, I need another layer to cover the checkered area! Layer - New layer seems to do the trick, as the broken line is now around the whole canvas. So now the fill tool should work, right? Aaaah, now the whole canvas is white! Where's my photo? Try some layer menu things, but I seem to have to white layers here. Undo. I choose Select rectangular region tool from toolbox and mark the checkered area. Now the bucket fills just that part! All right! We are making (slow!) progress. Now let's write into it. I choose the Text tool, click where I want to write, oops, must move mouse onto the text dialog, or the writing will be interpreted as a tool switch, oh and switch foreground color to black, yes. I write my first name and last name into different boxes to arrange them nicely. Can't move them around apparently. Can't click on the text to edit it. I'll just erase them and rewrite. Oops, the Eraser does not do ANYTHING AT ALL. Undo and rewrite then.
Okay, I can figure out most things here. It could be more obvious, but it works. Except for the Eraser, which does not erase anything. I remember using Paintshop Pro seven years ago. That was easy and fun. You just tried everything in the menus to learn more. With the Gimp, I feel I need a book or help dokument to explain layers or something to me *first*, before I can do anything painlessly. But I don't need image tools more than once a year, so I'll just have to suffer through this learning curve every time I touch it.
Maybe I have read too much Userfriendly.org, but that would be exactly what i'd expect a PR man to do on his death bed. Then again... Maybe I have read too much Userfriendly.org, but I would expect the nerds on that base to fool him into believing that there was a real alien craft and that he would be shot for treason, if he ever revealed it, just to see the look on his face trying to make that weather balloon story stick. And he'd be so scared of the Men in Black that he'd only muster the courage to spill the beans on his deathbed.
I don't have a TV and don't want one, nor a car, motorbike or high end computer, but I would not give up my cell phone or net connection for anything. I was past thirty when I got them, so I know what life is like without them: It is lonely and disconnected. Until I happened to feed the words "Helsinki underground music" into a search engine some years ago, I didn't know that I had a lively scene of peers in my home town. They sure as heck never showed up on television, radio or any news stand publication, being too far beyond the mainstream and too few to interest advertisers. But they have mailing lists, web sites, record labels and net connections to similar artists all over the world. That's what the net means to me.
And the cell phone means that I can take a walk in the city when I don't have work and not miss a job offer from my customers. God, how I hated sitting next to that landline phone, waiting for work!
So I'm not addicted to technology, but the people it brings me. You simply cannot compare a cell phone to a flat screen TV - the latter is a dead one way channel.
Rene Kita Artist, noise musician, freelance translator
Gorshkov (932507) said: "Yes, I think you're an idiot. And this *is* an ad hominem dismissle of you and your arguments."
Now, guess which of us lost more respect in the eyes of any readers.;)
Let me try to clarify. There are hysterical people among environmentalists, yes. But Mr. Klaus was talking about scientists, not stone age environmental hysterics. Scientists present facts. If your car breaks down, do you let a mechanic decide what is wrong with it, or do you take a poll among all passing pedestrians and then ask the mechanic to work on what they decide? Since global warming is a difficult subject, shouldn't decisions about it be made by those who understand the matter?
And here I thought we are past the time when the Pope decided whether the earth was round or not.
Even hinting that the discussion is between Oil company execs and presidents of "People for the Full Eradication of Technology and Man" is an ad hominem distortion of facts. Claiming that both sides have biases is an ad hominem argument.
You know why the scientists look so hopping mad, and thus biased? Because they are forced to argue about measurable facts with people who have spent their whole careers arguing about personal inclinations. All a politician knows about discussions is that if you harp on long enough about your view, the other one might get tired and give in.
In politics, all facts are incongruous and thus useless. How do you compare the suffering of single mothers with access to foreign markets? So, obviously, politicians are not equipped for scientific debate.
And, since it worked for Cato, let me reiterate: Lowering emissions will lead to advances in technology and thus a higher standard of living, with better gadgets and less pollution. The political opponents in the global warming debate are merely opposed to making investments into new technology and thus doomed to bankruptcy in the long run like any company that refuses to invest and innovate. Big oil and coal are already heavily dependent on government subsidies.
"Most of these are not some dork sitting in his living room moving them out his 15 dollar a month DSL account."
Huh? I thought most spam these days comes from botnets: Someone has captured ten thousand Windows PCs owned by dorks on DSL accounts, starts a mail server that puts out spam. Or maybe not. Most DSL accounts these days don't allow mail servers.
Last year, for a three month period, someone was using my email address in his spam. I got a thousand bounce messages a day from all over the world. I'm pretty sure that no bounce message of any kind gets past my spam filter anymore, so there would be no way an email from me to you could get past our filters.
"On a per capita basis (CO2 emissions per person), the U.S. is not at the top, and there are several developed nations who are right up there with the U.S."
Every country above the US in that list is either tiny or an oil producer and thus obviously uninterested in CO emission restrictions. Australia has refused to sign the Kyoto treaty like the US, and now you're using them as an argument? Note that the worst European emitters - apart from small, wholly covered with industry, coal mines and roads Luxembourg - produce a full third less than the US. On a per capita scale, the German economy is as massive and developed as the US equivalent, with highways without speed limits, even, and yet produces just half its CO emissions.
And China, which Bush likes to trot out is ranked 99th, with a sixth of US output. Looks like that list doesn't work in your favor after all. Yes, Canada and Australia need to be reigned in as well, but they are already in lockstep with the US, so that would follow automatically, if something happened in the White House.
Rainforest is not just another crop. It is an interlocked ecosystem that consists of thousands of species growing on a very thin layer of soil. Replacing that with a monoculture of eucalyptus or some such would be a criminal waste and probably doomed to failure due to soil erosion. And countries like Malaisia and Brazil have proved quite beyond doubt that they are too greedy, indifferent or incompetent to take care of their rainforests - which happen to produce much of the oxygen you are breathing.
We know very little about rainforests and couldn't even begin to "predictably grow and harvest" one within the next fifty years. So far, all attempts have had disastrous consequences.
Don't wait too long, or the new species rate will start outpacing the extinction rate again.
A thousand new species of algae and bacteria hardly make up for the loss of one mammal species. And I haven't heard of any slowing down in the extinction rate, so it looks to me that you are suffering from wishful thinking.
There have been defamation laws in every country for a long time. Since the press gives the impression that you can write anything about public persons (and then report the law suits they lose in very tiny print), kids get the impression that you can publish on the net, for all the world to see, any slander a minor can utter on the schoolyard.
Words have effects, after all. You can destroy a person's reputation and career with the right combination of words, even if they're lies. You can thoroughly invade her/his privacy with words. Are all these to be sacrificed on the altar of Freedom of Speech?
There are still many places all over the world where just being suspected of being homosexual can get you fired, divorced, defrocked, decustodied, friendless or killed. Even in Western countries. And many places where being called a union organizer gets you fired or killed. And on and on.
Words can kill. Words on a European site can kill people in Asia. It's a hard problem that does not yield to glib solutions.
"I don't think that we should panic and make irrational changes which will have severe and immediate economic effects on a global scale."
Well, happily, ecologically viable technology happens to be also economically sensible. You will find that in most cases, industries and societies with massive and unchanging CO output levels are stuck in dead ends. Detroit SUV manufacturers, power plants without efficiency upgrades, the Soviet Union etc. The "severe and immediate economic effects" you are talking about are called investments. They're good for you. So eat your spinach, pay your student loans and shut up. You'll thank me later.
I, for one, welcome our Gilmore Girls marathon masters.
If you cut out both sex and violence from tv, you are left with Gilmore Girls, selected Friends episodes and the Teletubbies. Most childrens' cartoons would have to go, as well, since they are mostly about clobbering people in imaginative ways. Although I really can't imagine what an angel I would be, if I had been spared Wile E. Coyote and Tom & Jerry in my childhood. I would probably be walking on water while turning it into wine.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. It would still get kicked in the teeth by magazine reviewers who have exactly two criteria:
a) Does it have as many features as MS Word?
b) Is its interface exactly like MS Word's, since that's what I've learned?
The only thing wrong with AmiPro was the manual, but I only found out when I started writing macros for it. Never needed it for anything simple like styles, tables, headers and all that other obvious stuff that I keep looking for in Openoffice help files...
I bet if I were to describe Americans like you do, I'd be called anti-American and many rather ruder terms - or does that only apply to us foreigners?
;)
Western countries do already prescribe various intrusive measures to any company wishing to provide us with components. ISO quality certification is a huge pile of paper describing in minute detail the hoops a company needs to jump through to be even considered a qualified supplier to most companies in Europe and America. Adding a few working condition clauses to be checked during regular quality process audits would not be a big deal.
This would give local muck-raking journalists some teeth, as their revelations about sweatshop conditions could no longer be shrugged off. Working conditions are already a selling point for sneakers for many consumers. They are not nearly as callous as you make out. Or what would I know about American consumers. They definitely are not over here in Europe - and we are a bigger market and pay in better currency than you do.
One of the funniest shortcut used by Microsoft coders was mentioned in a Windows 3.0 internals book, in which the author had partially disassembled the code. He found one function with a jump into the middle of an instruction word: When you started reading it from the second byte on, it formed a wholly different instruction. I just bet the coder felt he was God when he thought of that space saving optimization. We can only hope that he died on the pitchforks of an enraged mob of code maintainers...
Oh yeah, go on, fill my screen with feature ribbons and toolbars. I don't really need to see what I'm writing, right?
Mind, I use Evilwm as my window manager, so I just might be unusually possessive about screen real estate.
There, corrected your spelling. Right up front, in its name, the act calls anyone taken in by it a sap.
"Ridiculous comment... as absurd as the myth about Eskimos having a hojillion words for snow..."
I don't know about Eskimos, but my mother tongue, Finnish, sure has at least four times more words for snow than English, to describe it in its various states between slush and packed. Used to be rather useful in a hunting society that tread on or through snow half the year. "What's the snow like? Do I take skis, can I still walk across the lake, will my feet get wet etc.?"
And I was not saying that language could make you distinguish more or fewer shades, since the average speaker has neither the trained eye nor the vocabulary needed to describe what that eye sees. Average people anywhere don't use or need more than a half dozen words for colors. All I said was that the vocabulary of a language is massively influenced by the surroundings it is born in. I just bet Californian English has more words for shades of pink than I can imagine. Which Californian Russians probably import en masse as is, when they walk into a car pimping shop.
"Ok, you're falling into the same problem that the author was complaining about in that you're attributing to biology that which is generally cultural. The reason for the ordering of colors is likely not from biological or evolutionary constraints."
Indeed. For it is a geographical constraint. The various regions of the world have wildly differing color palettes in their landscapes. Reading accounts of artists from Europe's greyish north traveling for their first time south of the Alps, be it southern France, Italy or Algeria, you will inevitably find ravings about an "explosion of light and color". The Russian language will obviously have more distinctions for blue, grey, green and purple colors than the yellows and pastel shades of Mediterranean landscapes, because those are the colors their poets need to describe their surroundings - poets being the obvious professionals in this domain: Who else would get persistently stuck groping for a good, sonorous word to describe the color of the telephone pole across the road?
In Finland, you need a license to carry a gun. Licenses are not available to ex-convicts. Sales of guns are restricted to licensed gun shops. Bullets are only sold to license holders. Most guns are owned by people in the countryside and by rare sports shooters. During twenty years in Helsinki, I have met exactly one non-policeman who carried a gun and he was a wiseass who went by the nickname Kummisetä (= Godfather). As said elsewhere, killing someone in self-defense is just about always seen by courts as excessive use of force. And we don't have low crime rates, due to our silly drinking habits - plenty of beatings and stabbings. We just have a low murder rate.
Finland is a small country with an extremely homogeneous population. We're practically all family here. Murderers make big headlines here and are thus easily caught, since they can't hide: All eyes are on them.
So, Finland stands for all those gun control laws you oppose. And so does Switzerland, the most law-abiding, control-freak-run country in the world, from what I hear, and also a small, close-knit community that is in no way comparable to the USA. So stop comparing us.
Every time I read one of these American gun control discussions, I lose every urge to travel to the US. You scare me. Yes, an armed society may be a polite society, but it sure doesn't sound like the friendly, safe society that Finland is.
The female genital mutilation that is presently at issue is the one practised in Africa, which has the express aim of preventing any sexual pleasure at all through removal of clitoris and vaginal lips and the sewing up of the remaining tissue, often in unhygienic conditions. It is equal to complete removal of the penis, but also causes chronic pain and frequent infections. Your historical examples of milder procedures are irrelevant and detract from the actual crime. In other words, you are again making light of it. Shame on you!
Even a small amount of honest masturbation reveals that circumcision has not destroyed my ability to enjoy sex. Genitally mutilated women achieve no pleasure, let alone orgasm from genital contact. That is a monstrous contrast.
Sure, it could be that if only I had a foreskin, I would be able to explode after less than a minute of stimulation, but that is hardly conducive to a happy sex life, is it? Your wife would walk out on you within weeks.
And I do agree that allowing anyone but a trained medical professional to do this seems criminal. So one ought to campaign that religious practicioners are given proper training.
But no, I still don't see male circumcision as a serious issue.
About five years after my circumcision, my father - having one of his occasional lapses in disinterest in us kids - attempted to teach me how to wash the foreskin to avoid the nasty infections he had there. After that, I never regretted not having one. Thanks, Dad! I have difficulties understanding people who take it so seriously that they campaign against it. But do feel free to talk about it.
Just one thing though. Do not ever again mention male circumcision in the same paragraph as female genital mutilation, unless you are talking about complete penis removal. It is akin to comparing a summer camp to a Nazi concentration camp: an obscene error in magnitude that makes light of people's suffering.
"Is it really that hard to imagine that these ponds will be spread out over multiple areas?"
I vote for commandeering all the swimming pools in California. All you'd need to do is rename the pool boys into fuel boys and have them come around less frequently to collect the algae. And since all the world will utter its customary "Not in my back yard," we'd get an easy majority vote for that, right?
I stopped reading computer mags back in early 1999 when one of the CDNET rags compared the latest Netware release to the features Microsoft was promising to include in Windows 2000 the next year. A news source that is less trustworthy than Usenet simply does not deserve to live. And frankly, if I can get three drug-addled Usenet trolls to endorse a product, I'm more likely to buy it than on the recommendation of PC Magazine.
A month ago, for the first time in years, I needed to work on an image. LastFM wanted a picture of me, but complained because it was not square enough. Well excuse me for being an elongated person.
So I open the Gimp 2.2, load the picture and look into adding a white sidebar with my name on it. Let's walk the menus. Image - Canvas size looks good. I widen the Width, but the Height grows with it. After some headscratching, I figure out that the pretzel icon next to the box is a lock. A mouse hover tool tip might be good here. But cool, now it's 600x600.
Hey, why is it checkered gray? Let's fill that with white. Select the bucket icon in the toolbox and swap the foreground color from black to white. The tooltips are great here! Click on the checkered gray area to color it in. Nothing happens! Now what?
Maybe it's one of those layer thingies the pros mumble about. Menu troll time!
That was funny! Layer - Transparency - Add Alpha channel didn't seem to do nothing, but went gray afterwards. Let's try color to alpha next. All right, the dialog has a white box, so maybe it'll turn this alpha layer white? Oh no, now the whole picture's checkered! Undo undo undo.
Image - Fit canvas to layers resizes to the size of the original picture. Aha, I need another layer to cover the checkered area!
Layer - New layer seems to do the trick, as the broken line is now around the whole canvas. So now the fill tool should work, right? Aaaah, now the whole canvas is white! Where's my photo? Try some layer menu things, but I seem to have to white layers here. Undo.
I choose Select rectangular region tool from toolbox and mark the checkered area. Now the bucket fills just that part! All right! We are making (slow!) progress.
Now let's write into it.
I choose the Text tool, click where I want to write, oops, must move mouse onto the text dialog, or the writing will be interpreted as a tool switch, oh and switch foreground color to black, yes.
I write my first name and last name into different boxes to arrange them nicely.
Can't move them around apparently. Can't click on the text to edit it. I'll just erase them and rewrite. Oops, the Eraser does not do ANYTHING AT ALL. Undo and rewrite then.
Okay, I can figure out most things here. It could be more obvious, but it works. Except for the Eraser, which does not erase anything. I remember using Paintshop Pro seven years ago. That was easy and fun. You just tried everything in the menus to learn more. With the Gimp, I feel I need a book or help dokument to explain layers or something to me *first*, before I can do anything painlessly.
But I don't need image tools more than once a year, so I'll just have to suffer through this learning curve every time I touch it.
Maybe I have read too much Userfriendly.org, but that would be exactly what i'd expect a PR man to do on his death bed.
Then again...
Maybe I have read too much Userfriendly.org, but I would expect the nerds on that base to fool him into believing that there was a real alien craft and that he would be shot for treason, if he ever revealed it, just to see the look on his face trying to make that weather balloon story stick. And he'd be so scared of the Men in Black that he'd only muster the courage to spill the beans on his deathbed.
I don't have a TV and don't want one, nor a car, motorbike or high end computer, but I would not give up my cell phone or net connection for anything. I was past thirty when I got them, so I know what life is like without them: It is lonely and disconnected. Until I happened to feed the words "Helsinki underground music" into a search engine some years ago, I didn't know that I had a lively scene of peers in my home town. They sure as heck never showed up on television, radio or any news stand publication, being too far beyond the mainstream and too few to interest advertisers. But they have mailing lists, web sites, record labels and net connections to similar artists all over the world. That's what the net means to me.
And the cell phone means that I can take a walk in the city when I don't have work and not miss a job offer from my customers. God, how I hated sitting next to that landline phone, waiting for work!
So I'm not addicted to technology, but the people it brings me. You simply cannot compare a cell phone to a flat screen TV - the latter is a dead one way channel.
Rene Kita
Artist, noise musician, freelance translator
Gorshkov (932507) said: "Yes, I think you're an idiot. And this *is* an ad hominem dismissle of you and your arguments."
;)
Now, guess which of us lost more respect in the eyes of any readers.
Let me try to clarify. There are hysterical people among environmentalists, yes. But Mr. Klaus was talking about scientists, not stone age environmental hysterics. Scientists present facts. If your car breaks down, do you let a mechanic decide what is wrong with it, or do you take a poll among all passing pedestrians and then ask the mechanic to work on what they decide? Since global warming is a difficult subject, shouldn't decisions about it be made by those who understand the matter?
And here I thought we are past the time when the Pope decided whether the earth was round or not.
Even hinting that the discussion is between Oil company execs and presidents of "People for the Full Eradication of Technology and Man" is an ad hominem distortion of facts. Claiming that both sides have biases is an ad hominem argument.
You know why the scientists look so hopping mad, and thus biased? Because they are forced to argue about measurable facts with people who have spent their whole careers arguing about personal inclinations. All a politician knows about discussions is that if you harp on long enough about your view, the other one might get tired and give in.
In politics, all facts are incongruous and thus useless. How do you compare the suffering of single mothers with access to foreign markets? So, obviously, politicians are not equipped for scientific debate.
And, since it worked for Cato, let me reiterate: Lowering emissions will lead to advances in technology and thus a higher standard of living, with better gadgets and less pollution. The political opponents in the global warming debate are merely opposed to making investments into new technology and thus doomed to bankruptcy in the long run like any company that refuses to invest and innovate. Big oil and coal are already heavily dependent on government subsidies.
"Most of these are not some dork sitting in his living room moving them out his 15 dollar a month DSL account."
Huh? I thought most spam these days comes from botnets: Someone has captured ten thousand Windows PCs owned by dorks on DSL accounts, starts a mail server that puts out spam. Or maybe not. Most DSL accounts these days don't allow mail servers.
Last year, for a three month period, someone was using my email address in his spam. I got a thousand bounce messages a day from all over the world. I'm pretty sure that no bounce message of any kind gets past my spam filter anymore, so there would be no way an email from me to you could get past our filters.
"On a per capita basis (CO2 emissions per person), the U.S. is not at the top, and there are several developed nations who are right up there with the U.S."
Every country above the US in that list is either tiny or an oil producer and thus obviously uninterested in CO emission restrictions. Australia has refused to sign the Kyoto treaty like the US, and now you're using them as an argument? Note that the worst European emitters - apart from small, wholly covered with industry, coal mines and roads Luxembourg - produce a full third less than the US. On a per capita scale, the German economy is as massive and developed as the US equivalent, with highways without speed limits, even, and yet produces just half its CO emissions.
And China, which Bush likes to trot out is ranked 99th, with a sixth of US output.
Looks like that list doesn't work in your favor after all. Yes, Canada and Australia need to be reigned in as well, but they are already in lockstep with the US, so that would follow automatically, if something happened in the White House.
Rainforest is not just another crop. It is an interlocked ecosystem that consists of thousands of species growing on a very thin layer of soil. Replacing that with a monoculture of eucalyptus or some such would be a criminal waste and probably doomed to failure due to soil erosion. And countries like Malaisia and Brazil have proved quite beyond doubt that they are too greedy, indifferent or incompetent to take care of their rainforests - which happen to produce much of the oxygen you are breathing.
We know very little about rainforests and couldn't even begin to "predictably grow and harvest" one within the next fifty years. So far, all attempts have had disastrous consequences.
A thousand new species of algae and bacteria hardly make up for the loss of one mammal species. And I haven't heard of any slowing down in the extinction rate, so it looks to me that you are suffering from wishful thinking.
At present extinction rates, the longer you delay, the less work you'll need to do. I wish I had a job like that!
There have been defamation laws in every country for a long time. Since the press gives the impression that you can write anything about public persons (and then report the law suits they lose in very tiny print), kids get the impression that you can publish on the net, for all the world to see, any slander a minor can utter on the schoolyard.
Words have effects, after all. You can destroy a person's reputation and career with the right combination of words, even if they're lies. You can thoroughly invade her/his privacy with words. Are all these to be sacrificed on the altar of Freedom of Speech?
There are still many places all over the world where just being suspected of being homosexual can get you fired, divorced, defrocked, decustodied, friendless or killed. Even in Western countries. And many places where being called a union organizer gets you fired or killed. And on and on.
Words can kill. Words on a European site can kill people in Asia. It's a hard problem that does not yield to glib solutions.
"I don't think that we should panic and make irrational changes which will have severe and immediate economic effects on a global scale."
Well, happily, ecologically viable technology happens to be also economically sensible. You will find that in most cases, industries and societies with massive and unchanging CO output levels are stuck in dead ends. Detroit SUV manufacturers, power plants without efficiency upgrades, the Soviet Union etc. The "severe and immediate economic effects" you are talking about are called investments. They're good for you. So eat your spinach, pay your student loans and shut up. You'll thank me later.
I, for one, welcome our Gilmore Girls marathon masters.
If you cut out both sex and violence from tv, you are left with Gilmore Girls, selected Friends episodes and the Teletubbies. Most childrens' cartoons would have to go, as well, since they are mostly about clobbering people in imaginative ways. Although I really can't imagine what an angel I would be, if I had been spared Wile E. Coyote and Tom & Jerry in my childhood. I would probably be walking on water while turning it into wine.