So the lesson is that any time the US manages to incite and abuse a large portion of the world so severely with our adventurism that many of them choose to die in order to spite us, we should just go ahead and incite and abuse them even further with even more adventurism-- but somewhere else?
This strikes me as a somewhat unsustainable approach.
No, you're right. Godwin's law was aimed more at, "Y'know who else liked single-threaded webservers? The Nazis!!!"
I think that the very specific topic of ways in which open, democratic societies can slide into militant fascism is one to which Godwin's does not apply.
This is an important and under-repeated point: Iraq was, in fact, our best friend in the region. There's fairly clear evidence that Iraq requested US permission to invade Kuwait in 1991, and believed (mistakenly) that they had gotten it; they were genuinely surprised when we took issue with it.
Iraq consistently exaggerated their weapons capabilities, and were reluctant to admit how completely powerless they were, because they wanted to deter Iran. Y'know, that other society with whom they've been at periodic war for thousands of years, and against whom we were their allies? Hussein has spent the last ten years trying to walk the line between not antagonizing Washington and not inviting invasion by Tehran.
This is what I first expected to happen when we invaded. Scary-sounding weapons would be "found" right away, and the US public would be eager to accept this retroactive evidence of the morality of our war.
But after some thought, it's just not tenable. Pulling off such a scheme would require the involvement of at least hundreds of people, and more likely thousands. (Military and intelligence agencies are designed to work as large cooperative bureaucracies, with lots of internal checks and paperwork on transactions. A few rogue people concealing their actions from the rest of the organization is exactly what they're designed to prevent.)
There's no way for the Administration to confidently expect every one of them to choose to keep mum for years or decades. Even if a certain number of them were to be given, "Don't ask why you're burying this shipping container, soldier!" orders, they'd pick it up pretty quickly when suddenly Fox news started showing pictures of that container and that site a week later.
It would be slightly closer to feasible for the Administration to just declare that weapons had been found, referring to no real objects whatsoever. But even in that case, you'd have many military and intelligence personnel who would expect to have some involvement in the location, disposal, verification, or documentation of this, and they'd pretty quickly figure out that not only hadn't they, neither had anyone else.
Really, this is just part of the more general rule that anything grandiose enough to be called enough a "conspiracy" is just too unstable to work.
While applying physical-object laws to information is always a questionable business, the corresponding meatspace function would be that of a fence, and is usually called something like "receipt of stolen goods." The idea is that even if a fence never actually steals anything himself, he still knowingly facilitates the role of thief as a livelihood for others, and thus shares some of the burden of their crimes.
You could open up a discussion about whether such indirect legislation is ethical or adviseable, but that would be something of a different topic. It can at least safely be said that it has extensive precedent.
I cannot speak for the other poster, but I could in most ways be described as "liberal", and I'm the one arguing for the more-standard behaviour. I would imagine this complicates your arbitrary assertions of political connotations to interface behaviour.
Following you into tangentland, the advent of politics.slashdot has caused me great dismay by revealing additional views of people whom I'd previously liked and respect; and yes, I'm looking at you, pudge. As passionate as I am about the macintosh, I can't manage to hold a choice of computer platform as more important than, say, the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent humans.
Since the journal to which you refer won't let me respond without an account, I'll do so here:
When you start adding support for CVS, wouldn't you agree that handling code indenting automatically would benefit so many more users?
Um, no. If you consider the text that you're editing to be important, there's no reason for absolutely any file ever to not be in cvs. And in fact you don't need your editor to speak sftp (or, heaven forfend, ftp) if you're being sane, and committing to a repository rather than writing directly to live copies.
And if I select a bunch of text and press tab, indent it, don't replace it with a tab character (and if I press shift-tab, remove the indent). When would I ever want to replace a bunch of text with a tab character?
If you don't want to replace that text with what you type next, why would you use the mechanism that has been incredibly consistent and standardized for literally decades for saying, "replace this text with what I type next"? Why would you possibly think that ruining the consistency and predictability of this extremely fundamental text editing behaviour is worthwhile so that you can avoid hitting ^a or similar?
Actually, I'm not sure how well that'd work. Most of the excitement here is that you can make lateral flexibility and vertical flexibility vary independently, to satisfy the goals of smooth ride, consistent traction, and good maneuverability.
Unfortunately, motorcyles don't have a consistent "lateral" and "vertical" orientation for their wheels. As soon as you turn sharply, you're sideways enough that these two axes are nearly reversed, and your tires end up doing exactly the wrong things.
These things help... some. The problem is that once you've done all this, you've essentially created a new and different game: "see how unpleasant I can make other people's lives without 'losing' in these various ways." The same set of people who are so antisocial in the first place will tend to find this new game more compelling than the one that the sane participants are interested in playing.
This new rash of for-money games actually have a somewhat easier time of it, as you get some fairly conclusive information about which characters are the same player. In the old world in which you had nothing more authoritative than source IP or email address, it was hard to enforce any kind of lasting punishment anyway.
Jesus fuck, people, would it kill you to stick "Nintendo" somewhere in the summary text? The hell makes you think that "DS" is to special and unique a term that even an average slashdot reader would immediately know what it is? I'm sure there's a subset of nintendo geeks who will find this instantly obvious, but could you please make things clear to the rest of it? It'd really streamline my process of not caring. Thanks.
As for grind - the very aspect of having character levels, with an obvious experience bar, promotes the grind aspect of the game. Grinding may now involve completing quests, but that is still grinding, and will end up being about as fun in the long run.
Well, any game in which you're continually trying to make progress can be called "grinding"; the only question is whether if feels repetitive and boring and burdensome.
While this is not unprecedented, WoW seems to minimize this a bit by giving you many different aspects of your character which you can spend time advancing. You can get xp by killing challenging mobs, or by completing many different quests. If you tire of those, you can spend some time working on your crafting/gathering/fishing/cooking skills, or collecting money to buy improved equipment, or just explore new areas. By the time you've rotated through the full span of things that need development, going back and finishing up those quests you've been ignoring starts to sound interesting.
Huh. I guess they were writing this game for me, not you.
As someone who has played and adminned muds for ten years, I hate PK, and I'm thrilled to see that WoW doesn't encourage it. It's always struck me as a method for players to just be unconscionable bastards to each other, which I don't find to be fun. "Recognition" for PK would just seem to encourage this antisocial behaviour.
Certainly your suggestion that one should be forced into open-PK areas to "get high lvl or accomplish anything significant" sounds awful. Just because some players are constantly looking for new victims to whom to be assholes, I'm not interested in being forced to deal with them just to play the game.
Similarly, the importance of eq and level seem fairly appropriate to me. That's not a lack of emphasis on "skill"; that's allowing your skill to manifest over time as an advanced character with a powerful kit. This essentially focuses on cumulative skill, not just how much skill you're expressing at any given moment.
The one point on which I agree with you is that the automatic stat progression and the minimal effects of talents are a little disappointing. I much preferred Diablo II's system of moderately scarce skill points that could yield vastly different characters within the same class.
I'm sorry that the game doesn't address what you find enjoyable. But I'm also kind of not sorry, because if the game were targetted at you, I'd find it miserable.
Uh, I had assumed that the idea was to sue AT&T, not Blizzard. While I'm not sure that a lawsuit is really appropriate in either case, that's where I'd aim my ire.
Blizzard's just asking you to use a moderately standard protocol, which already has many implementations for any platform on which their game runs, and for which they provide you a nice automated client. AT&T, on the other hand, are the ones failing to be an "Internet Service Provider". I'm not much inclined to pay people to be a "Some Part of the Internet Which We Happen to Like Provider". I'm sure that the packaging and specs of the game make it clear that it requires "Internet access", and that's what AT&T is failing to provide.
Right, I learned from experience that dragging things around onto representations of changeable things often changes those things to match the dragee. Then I used that general knowledge to form an expectation of how this particular item in this particular application would work.
When people talk about intuitiveness of user interaction, they're talking about the ease and reliability of forming such expectations. It could every bit as well be called "predictability", if you're happier with that term. The term intuitiveness probably comes from the fact that when it's working well, people don't consciously go through a formal theorizing process, they just unconsciously develop a hunch about how things will work.
Regardless of which you call it, it's still one of the most critical facets of interaction design. And shouting, "nothing about computers is intuitive, you still have to learn them!" doesn't lead to progress in the field.
Answer? Nothing about computers is 'intuitive' it's all learned behaviour.
This is a pretty meaningless argument. I don't think that anyone is suggesting that someone who has never seen a computer before would be able to intuit anything about its use. But a user with any nonzero amount of experience will have expectations and suspicions about how to do specific things they've never done before.
I recently wanted to change the thumbnail I present in ichat. I found a picture of a swearing fuchikoma on the web, grabbed the image from my browser window and dragged it directly onto my thumbnail where it appears in ichat; ichat did what I expected and changed my icon to what I'd given it.
Did I know with certainty that ichat would accept input that way? Had I read the docs on it? Do I even know where exactly it saved the image on disk? Nope. But even without this concrete knowledge, I intuited that it would probably work that way.
I agree that trashing disks to eject them is unobvious, and would be pretty bad as the primary way to do so. No sane novice would ever figure that out, or be willing to experiment with it.
But that's pretty irrelevant. Dragging the disk to the trash is a quick shortcut for skilled users, but has never been the primary method. The primary, normal method of ejecting a disk has always been the same way you perform actions on other icons: select it, then choose "Eject" from the "File" menu. No voodoo, no risk, no inconsistency.
I think that on the scale of "user interactions of software written after 1990," these things qualify as "horrible" and suchlike. Obviously there are greater evils in the world than a web browser, but we'd be hard pressed to have a productive conversation about anything if we always scaled our adjectives to the very best and worst things in the imaginable universe.
FYI, I heard the explanation for this some time ago in #mozilla: no system widgets exist that would allow mozilla/firefox to implement the CSS specification(s).
That's an interesting explanation, but I'm having a tough time figuring out how it could be the case. On the one hand, it seems hard to believe that the CSS spec demands something so exotic of, say, radio buttons, that the standard ones wouldn't work. And on the other, there are counterexamples like Safari, which seem to accomplish the task without difficulty.
But CSS is certainly not my area of expertise, so perhaps there's some underlying complication that I'm missing.
System specs, please? A little bit of RAM and prefetching can work wonders.
Dual 1.8GHz G5 with 2.5G of memory.
Firefox seems to load and navigate pages at a perfectly reasonable speed, it's just the initial launching of the application that seems to take absurdly long. It takes longer than even the most slothful other applications that come to mind, such as Word and Photoshop.
This alone is hardly damning, of course; if everything else about the application were nice and smooth, I'd probably just shrug it off on the every-few-weeks interval that I had any occasion to restart my system. But with the combination of terrible interaction behaviours and sluggish performance, it's very hard to not just write this off as a very poorly written application.
As for the missing features (adblocking etc), I have one work for you - plugins. FireFox is designed to be lightweight and simple, with additional functionality that not everyone wants available as plugins. Personally, I don't use an adblocker, but if you want one, go download one.
That's fair enough, I'd be happy for many pieces of software to have a much narrower definition of what a "browser" is. It was just a little irksome to find that even after I'd slogged through the unpleasant configuration process, all web pages still looked considerably more polluted than I'd ever seen them.
But if we're getting into the downloading of additional add-ons, I'll also throw out another complaint that escaped my lengthy list: it's an especially nice touch that the resource for downloading new themes appears to not include any previews or screenshots or visual cues about them whatsoever, just names. Thanks, guys, very helpful.
I've been a happy w3m/Omniweb/Safari user for some years now, but I really want to like Mozilla and its children. It's such the darling of the open-source development community that every few years I think that they must have finally ironed out all the very simple and severe bugs that I've seen in the past, and give it another shot. Sadly, this release has proven to be as disappointing as the others:
- Mousewheel scrolling works in some places, but not in preferences windows
- Selecting some preferences options changes the contents of the current sheet, some others close the current one and open a new sheet, and at least one (Advanced Javascript settings) opens a violently nonstandard window with no titlebar or other decorations.
- Popup menus are incredibly inconsistent not only with the OS, but even with each other. For example, the popup menu for selecting a default destination for downloads draws hideously all over itself, ending up about twice its proper size. And when clicked, it displays a thing which is not a popup menu, but instead some nonstandard device which is hard-coded to aqua-esque colors and fonts, completely ignoring my actual system settings. Similarly, the faked popup menus for font selection employ a completely nonstandard (and awful) mechanism of scrollbars within the menu, rather than a menu that just scrolls for you as you reach beyond the edge of what's currently displayed.
- Similarly, system widgets aren't used even for in-page items like radio buttons, checkboxes, buttons, text fields. I cannot fathom the hubris that makes the Mozilla developers feel that their application is so uniquely important that it deserves to look different than every other application on my system.
- There's still no standard gui-accessible way to do something so basic as disabling gif animation. You can get to it through about:config, if you're willing to either wade through several thousand cryptically named options to find it, or happen to know that it's called image.animation_mode. Of course, once you've found it, your reward is to try and figure out how to change it correctly. It's not clear whether you want to change the "Status" or "Value", or what settings would be valid for either. (It turns out, of course, that you can only change "Value", not "Status". I had foolishly assumed at first that when I right-clicked on the "Value" and selected "Modify", that it would modify what I had selected, not some adjacent thing.)
Being able to disable gif animations is what made IE better than Netscape in 1997, and was the one and only thing I added when I got the source Netscape 4. I'm saddened to see that even after this many years of open development, Mozilla has fundamentally still not caught up to every other browser in existence.
- Similarly, not having any builtin way to filter banner ads and such is pretty terrible. I started regularly filtering banner ads before they even became standard, so I've pretty much never used the web with them. On the rare occasion when I use a tool such as this, I'm horrified to see how infested civilized-seeming sites are.
Sure, you can whip up a stylesheet that attempts to block many of them, or play games with proxies. But these days I'd really expect a browser to not only take care of such things for me, but to default to doing so without any intervention on my part at all.
- Lastly... ohmygod is it slow. I haven't seen it take this long to launch a browser since Netscape 1.0. Even worse, it appears to want to make me feel as if it's faster by drawing a window toward the beginning of the half-minute ordeal of starting it up. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually do anything, respond to any input, even draw any menus until several aeons later, so the pretense of being usable is pretty flimsy.
So I guess I'll head back to the array of browsers that actually work well, and resume hoping that someday Mozilla will join the party.
The compartmentalization of agencies was most certainly not for no good reason. It was to make law enforcement less effective, which was a good and important goal of our governmental design.
The thing that Mr. Ashcroft and the rest of the executive branch have forgotten is that we need to be at least as suspicious and limiting of our government as of the people from whom our government is supposedly protecting us. Instead, the executive branch has taken the absurd view that their enemies are "Evil", and thus that their own actions are--definitionally--Good.
This is a dangerous premise. History has taught us that governments very reliably stray from Good. Every single act undertaken by a government must be carefully evaluated with questions like, "Does this make us the bad guys? Is this worse than what we're trying to solve?" And even after such questions have been asked, we need to still assume that they've been answered incorrectly, and place harsh limitations on the fundamental things a government can do.
This is the origin of bans on interdepartmental cooperation, statutes of limitation, limitations on search and siezure, the specificity of of search warrants, and so on. After all, if your government were always the good guys, you wouldn't need any such protections, right?
Wow, yeah, a stable Iraq and friendly Iraq would be incredibly helpful, wouldn't it? Hey, what a shame we didn't think of doing something similarly clever with Iran a couple decades ago...
Slashdot Mirror
This strikes me as a somewhat unsustainable approach.
No, you're right. Godwin's law was aimed more at, "Y'know who else liked single-threaded webservers? The Nazis!!!"
I think that the very specific topic of ways in which open, democratic societies can slide into militant fascism is one to which Godwin's does not apply.
Iraq consistently exaggerated their weapons capabilities, and were reluctant to admit how completely powerless they were, because they wanted to deter Iran. Y'know, that other society with whom they've been at periodic war for thousands of years, and against whom we were their allies? Hussein has spent the last ten years trying to walk the line between not antagonizing Washington and not inviting invasion by Tehran.
Right, because the current and future residents of those cities all share moral responsibility for Bin Laden's choices, yeah?
This is what I first expected to happen when we invaded. Scary-sounding weapons would be "found" right away, and the US public would be eager to accept this retroactive evidence of the morality of our war.
But after some thought, it's just not tenable. Pulling off such a scheme would require the involvement of at least hundreds of people, and more likely thousands. (Military and intelligence agencies are designed to work as large cooperative bureaucracies, with lots of internal checks and paperwork on transactions. A few rogue people concealing their actions from the rest of the organization is exactly what they're designed to prevent.)
There's no way for the Administration to confidently expect every one of them to choose to keep mum for years or decades. Even if a certain number of them were to be given, "Don't ask why you're burying this shipping container, soldier!" orders, they'd pick it up pretty quickly when suddenly Fox news started showing pictures of that container and that site a week later.
It would be slightly closer to feasible for the Administration to just declare that weapons had been found, referring to no real objects whatsoever. But even in that case, you'd have many military and intelligence personnel who would expect to have some involvement in the location, disposal, verification, or documentation of this, and they'd pretty quickly figure out that not only hadn't they, neither had anyone else.
Really, this is just part of the more general rule that anything grandiose enough to be called enough a "conspiracy" is just too unstable to work.
While applying physical-object laws to information is always a questionable business, the corresponding meatspace function would be that of a fence, and is usually called something like "receipt of stolen goods." The idea is that even if a fence never actually steals anything himself, he still knowingly facilitates the role of thief as a livelihood for others, and thus shares some of the burden of their crimes.
You could open up a discussion about whether such indirect legislation is ethical or adviseable, but that would be something of a different topic. It can at least safely be said that it has extensive precedent.
I cannot speak for the other poster, but I could in most ways be described as "liberal", and I'm the one arguing for the more-standard behaviour. I would imagine this complicates your arbitrary assertions of political connotations to interface behaviour.
Following you into tangentland, the advent of politics.slashdot has caused me great dismay by revealing additional views of people whom I'd previously liked and respect; and yes, I'm looking at you, pudge. As passionate as I am about the macintosh, I can't manage to hold a choice of computer platform as more important than, say, the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent humans.
Actually, I'm not sure how well that'd work. Most of the excitement here is that you can make lateral flexibility and vertical flexibility vary independently, to satisfy the goals of smooth ride, consistent traction, and good maneuverability.
Unfortunately, motorcyles don't have a consistent "lateral" and "vertical" orientation for their wheels. As soon as you turn sharply, you're sideways enough that these two axes are nearly reversed, and your tires end up doing exactly the wrong things.
These things help... some. The problem is that once you've done all this, you've essentially created a new and different game: "see how unpleasant I can make other people's lives without 'losing' in these various ways." The same set of people who are so antisocial in the first place will tend to find this new game more compelling than the one that the sane participants are interested in playing.
This new rash of for-money games actually have a somewhat easier time of it, as you get some fairly conclusive information about which characters are the same player. In the old world in which you had nothing more authoritative than source IP or email address, it was hard to enforce any kind of lasting punishment anyway.
Jesus fuck, people, would it kill you to stick "Nintendo" somewhere in the summary text? The hell makes you think that "DS" is to special and unique a term that even an average slashdot reader would immediately know what it is? I'm sure there's a subset of nintendo geeks who will find this instantly obvious, but could you please make things clear to the rest of it? It'd really streamline my process of not caring. Thanks.
While this is not unprecedented, WoW seems to minimize this a bit by giving you many different aspects of your character which you can spend time advancing. You can get xp by killing challenging mobs, or by completing many different quests. If you tire of those, you can spend some time working on your crafting/gathering/fishing/cooking skills, or collecting money to buy improved equipment, or just explore new areas. By the time you've rotated through the full span of things that need development, going back and finishing up those quests you've been ignoring starts to sound interesting.
Huh. I guess they were writing this game for me, not you.
As someone who has played and adminned muds for ten years, I hate PK, and I'm thrilled to see that WoW doesn't encourage it. It's always struck me as a method for players to just be unconscionable bastards to each other, which I don't find to be fun. "Recognition" for PK would just seem to encourage this antisocial behaviour.
Certainly your suggestion that one should be forced into open-PK areas to "get high lvl or accomplish anything significant" sounds awful. Just because some players are constantly looking for new victims to whom to be assholes, I'm not interested in being forced to deal with them just to play the game.
Similarly, the importance of eq and level seem fairly appropriate to me. That's not a lack of emphasis on "skill"; that's allowing your skill to manifest over time as an advanced character with a powerful kit. This essentially focuses on cumulative skill, not just how much skill you're expressing at any given moment.
The one point on which I agree with you is that the automatic stat progression and the minimal effects of talents are a little disappointing. I much preferred Diablo II's system of moderately scarce skill points that could yield vastly different characters within the same class.
I'm sorry that the game doesn't address what you find enjoyable. But I'm also kind of not sorry, because if the game were targetted at you, I'd find it miserable.
Blizzard's just asking you to use a moderately standard protocol, which already has many implementations for any platform on which their game runs, and for which they provide you a nice automated client. AT&T, on the other hand, are the ones failing to be an "Internet Service Provider". I'm not much inclined to pay people to be a "Some Part of the Internet Which We Happen to Like Provider". I'm sure that the packaging and specs of the game make it clear that it requires "Internet access", and that's what AT&T is failing to provide.
Right, I learned from experience that dragging things around onto representations of changeable things often changes those things to match the dragee. Then I used that general knowledge to form an expectation of how this particular item in this particular application would work.
When people talk about intuitiveness of user interaction, they're talking about the ease and reliability of forming such expectations. It could every bit as well be called "predictability", if you're happier with that term. The term intuitiveness probably comes from the fact that when it's working well, people don't consciously go through a formal theorizing process, they just unconsciously develop a hunch about how things will work.
Regardless of which you call it, it's still one of the most critical facets of interaction design. And shouting, "nothing about computers is intuitive, you still have to learn them!" doesn't lead to progress in the field.
I recently wanted to change the thumbnail I present in ichat. I found a picture of a swearing fuchikoma on the web, grabbed the image from my browser window and dragged it directly onto my thumbnail where it appears in ichat; ichat did what I expected and changed my icon to what I'd given it.
Did I know with certainty that ichat would accept input that way? Had I read the docs on it? Do I even know where exactly it saved the image on disk? Nope. But even without this concrete knowledge, I intuited that it would probably work that way.
I agree that trashing disks to eject them is unobvious, and would be pretty bad as the primary way to do so. No sane novice would ever figure that out, or be willing to experiment with it.
But that's pretty irrelevant. Dragging the disk to the trash is a quick shortcut for skilled users, but has never been the primary method. The primary, normal method of ejecting a disk has always been the same way you perform actions on other icons: select it, then choose "Eject" from the "File" menu. No voodoo, no risk, no inconsistency.
I think that on the scale of "user interactions of software written after 1990," these things qualify as "horrible" and suchlike. Obviously there are greater evils in the world than a web browser, but we'd be hard pressed to have a productive conversation about anything if we always scaled our adjectives to the very best and worst things in the imaginable universe.
But CSS is certainly not my area of expertise, so perhaps there's some underlying complication that I'm missing.
Firefox seems to load and navigate pages at a perfectly reasonable speed, it's just the initial launching of the application that seems to take absurdly long. It takes longer than even the most slothful other applications that come to mind, such as Word and Photoshop.
This alone is hardly damning, of course; if everything else about the application were nice and smooth, I'd probably just shrug it off on the every-few-weeks interval that I had any occasion to restart my system. But with the combination of terrible interaction behaviours and sluggish performance, it's very hard to not just write this off as a very poorly written application.
But if we're getting into the downloading of additional add-ons, I'll also throw out another complaint that escaped my lengthy list: it's an especially nice touch that the resource for downloading new themes appears to not include any previews or screenshots or visual cues about them whatsoever, just names. Thanks, guys, very helpful.
I've been a happy w3m/Omniweb/Safari user for some years now, but I really want to like Mozilla and its children. It's such the darling of the open-source development community that every few years I think that they must have finally ironed out all the very simple and severe bugs that I've seen in the past, and give it another shot. Sadly, this release has proven to be as disappointing as the others:
- Mousewheel scrolling works in some places, but not in preferences windows
- Selecting some preferences options changes the contents of the current sheet, some others close the current one and open a new sheet, and at least one (Advanced Javascript settings) opens a violently nonstandard window with no titlebar or other decorations.
- Popup menus are incredibly inconsistent not only with the OS, but even with each other. For example, the popup menu for selecting a default destination for downloads draws hideously all over itself, ending up about twice its proper size. And when clicked, it displays a thing which is not a popup menu, but instead some nonstandard device which is hard-coded to aqua-esque colors and fonts, completely ignoring my actual system settings. Similarly, the faked popup menus for font selection employ a completely nonstandard (and awful) mechanism of scrollbars within the menu, rather than a menu that just scrolls for you as you reach beyond the edge of what's currently displayed.
- Similarly, system widgets aren't used even for in-page items like radio buttons, checkboxes, buttons, text fields. I cannot fathom the hubris that makes the Mozilla developers feel that their application is so uniquely important that it deserves to look different than every other application on my system.
- There's still no standard gui-accessible way to do something so basic as disabling gif animation. You can get to it through about:config, if you're willing to either wade through several thousand cryptically named options to find it, or happen to know that it's called image.animation_mode. Of course, once you've found it, your reward is to try and figure out how to change it correctly. It's not clear whether you want to change the "Status" or "Value", or what settings would be valid for either. (It turns out, of course, that you can only change "Value", not "Status". I had foolishly assumed at first that when I right-clicked on the "Value" and selected "Modify", that it would modify what I had selected, not some adjacent thing.)
Being able to disable gif animations is what made IE better than Netscape in 1997, and was the one and only thing I added when I got the source Netscape 4. I'm saddened to see that even after this many years of open development, Mozilla has fundamentally still not caught up to every other browser in existence.
- Similarly, not having any builtin way to filter banner ads and such is pretty terrible. I started regularly filtering banner ads before they even became standard, so I've pretty much never used the web with them. On the rare occasion when I use a tool such as this, I'm horrified to see how infested civilized-seeming sites are.
Sure, you can whip up a stylesheet that attempts to block many of them, or play games with proxies. But these days I'd really expect a browser to not only take care of such things for me, but to default to doing so without any intervention on my part at all.
- Lastly... ohmygod is it slow. I haven't seen it take this long to launch a browser since Netscape 1.0. Even worse, it appears to want to make me feel as if it's faster by drawing a window toward the beginning of the half-minute ordeal of starting it up. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually do anything, respond to any input, even draw any menus until several aeons later, so the pretense of being usable is pretty flimsy.
So I guess I'll head back to the array of browsers that actually work well, and resume hoping that someday Mozilla will join the party.
The compartmentalization of agencies was most certainly not for no good reason. It was to make law enforcement less effective, which was a good and important goal of our governmental design.
The thing that Mr. Ashcroft and the rest of the executive branch have forgotten is that we need to be at least as suspicious and limiting of our government as of the people from whom our government is supposedly protecting us. Instead, the executive branch has taken the absurd view that their enemies are "Evil", and thus that their own actions are--definitionally--Good.
This is a dangerous premise. History has taught us that governments very reliably stray from Good. Every single act undertaken by a government must be carefully evaluated with questions like, "Does this make us the bad guys? Is this worse than what we're trying to solve?" And even after such questions have been asked, we need to still assume that they've been answered incorrectly, and place harsh limitations on the fundamental things a government can do.
This is the origin of bans on interdepartmental cooperation, statutes of limitation, limitations on search and siezure, the specificity of of search warrants, and so on. After all, if your government were always the good guys, you wouldn't need any such protections, right?
Wow, yeah, a stable Iraq and friendly Iraq would be incredibly helpful, wouldn't it? Hey, what a shame we didn't think of doing something similarly clever with Iran a couple decades ago...
Yes. He has actively campaigned, both to the public and to Congress, for and against existing and proposed legislation.