I write program X under the GPL, but in order for it to work with, say, device D, I have to link in libraries from the company that makes device D. I now can't distribute program X so long as it needs the device D libraries, unless I can get the company to change their license?
You should read the GPL:
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
This covers system libraries. So you can dynamically link GPL code to whatever libraries are standard in the platform you're running.
The way your phrase your answer, you haven't contested that as economic actors accumulate wealth, they acquire more and more power to warp the "pure" capitalist economy, by creating information disparities, favorable trade barriers, and so on.
I take it that you intend to mean that competition puts a limit on the warping-- you can't warp the free market much because the competition gets in the way.
But how can competition stop this in principle? In fact, there are many things that one company can do to tilt the market in its favor that also benefit many of its direct competitors-- import tariffs on certain goods, for example, or general advertising in favor of the general type of product they sell. For example, "Got milk?" campaigns benefit competing companies.
Thus competition is not incompatible at all with many kinds of collusion-- actors _will_ do things that benefit their competitors and hurt the poor, if there is an incentive to do so. You could put it like this: "If I do something good for myself, which also happens to be good for my competitors, I've still done something good for myself".
As long as you pretend that wealth acts as a class, conspiring against other classes, you won't appreciate that poor people can USE the power of wealthy people against other wealthy people.
And as long as you pretend that wealth cannot act as a class, recognizing threats from other classes, and using their power to impose all sorts of repressive measures to stop this from happening, you won't appreciate that the powerful ACTUALLY USE their combined might against poor people.
Textbook Capitalism assumes that "economic actors" are "rational" in the game-theoretic sense-- i.e. that they make the optimal use of the information they have available when making their economic decision.
Thinking further about this, I think there's yet another serious flaw.
Game Theory, widely used in economics modeling, talks about "optimum strategies" or "Nash equilibria" for multi-player "games". There are a number of results about optimum strategies-- theorems about the existence of optimum strategies and such. Saying an actor is rational amounts to saying that she will pick the optimum strategy in any given game.
The problem is that, given some particular game, even if by the results of game theory we know that there is some optimal strategy, could actually computing such a stategy be an undecidable problem?
As to whether such a situation is possible, I suspect it is-- you can define truth for first-order logic in terms of games, and first-order truth is undecidable.
Still, even if a particular problem were decidable, it may yet have an untractable computational profile-- it might be exponential time, for instance.
Essentially, the point is that the assumption that actors in an economy are rational may make some untenable computational assumptions. Even if there is a rational action in some particular economic setting, finding that action may be computationally too expensive, or even undecidable.
I thought that capitalism had a lot to do with selling people shit that they don't need. This suggests that they assume people are stupid.
Textbook Capitalism assumes that "economic actors" are "rational" in the game-theoretic sense-- i.e. that they make the optimal use of the information they have available when making their economic decision. Another assumption is that the existing information needed to make the rational decisions will be available to the actor. Of course, in the real world, this is not quite so.
But I think a more fundamental flaw is that it is possible for actors to act in such a way that diminishes either the rationality or information available to other actors-- and that in fact, it is rational for actors to do this. For example, advertising. Thus, the conditions needed for Textbook Capitalism are self-undermining.
AS LONG as everyone's property rights are recognized, and air and water pollution is paid for by those producing it, then all the social and environmental factors can be considered just by comparing prices.
And as long as there are wealth and power disparities, actors who can violate these conditions in order to increase their profits will do so. Which will lead to more wealth for them, which gives them more power to do the same thing more extensively, which leads to more wealth, which...
Really, people who go on with all this body of capitalist economic theorizing I feel live in a fantasy world. Even if you could get the world to the conditions needed for textbook pure capitalism to work like it is supposed to (rational agents, very low externalities, free flow of information, etc.), that would be a very unstable situation, which would be bound to vanish randomly at any moment.
Several problems generally occur in the implementation, though, that work counter to the free market.
Translation: "The free market is a fantasy. There can be no such thing as a free market in a real world with real people. Free markets only exist in the minds of economists."
And to tell you the truth, it will ALWAYS be money before people, as that is human nature.
It always amuses me when someone claims a recent cultural invention to be part of "human nature". Do you consider agriculture part of human nature, too?
Why can we not get along and RESPECT each other's cultures. The citizens of the United States have a different culture from Europeans. Let us not resort to a flame war over which economic system is better. Remember, love not hate.
This attitude conveniently glosses over the fact that the economic system of the US generates enormous wealth for a privileged few, and huge misery for billions.
Your demand for "respect" for the US culture and economy makes no sense if the US culture and economy systematically attacks and undermines those of most of the rest of the world.
The notion that we should all have 'equal access' seems short-sighted to me. People should acquire the level of access they want. Heavy users should pay more, light users should pay less. That won't happen if it's all given to us for free by the government.
But you absolutely missed the point you were replying to!
The poster was talking about geographic equal access, as his road analogy makes clear. Private companies don't have the incentive to extend equal levels of access to everyone everywhere-- they will concentrate in the more populated and affluent areas.
In the case of phone service, for example, there have been countries where the government has bought private phone cos. because the companies wouldn't provide decent service to all of the country.
Different doesn't modify the verb, it's the object of the verb (that is, in this case, a noun). That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
I think that if you go around and check out what people understand when faced with "think different", you will find that they interpret different as a modifier of the verb, not as an argument of the verb.
Anyway, do you have any syntactic arguments to support that different is a noun? It would be a pretty bizarre occurrence, IMHO.
A split infinitive is like ending a sentence with a preposition -- it's not something most people notice. Confusing adverbs and adjectives is something the brighter sort of elementary school student can spot.
Frankly, a lot of the English grammar rules you seem to cling so strongly to were just born out of irrational prejudices of academics that didn't know much about language, and wanted English to be more "logical" and "latinate".
Double negations? You'll find a few in Shakespeare. Split infinitives, stranded prepositions? I think you can find very ancient examples of these too. Also, as I say in another post, the traditional category of "adverb" is very vague, and in many unrelated languages you see trends torwards a collapse of the difference between adverbs and adjectives.
I don't want to imply that normative grammars are no good-- only that many grammar rules for English are plain stupid, and that many "grammatical mistakes" in English have been around for centuries, way before the rules to proscribe them were created.
"Adverb", in most traditional grammars, is just a category to throw in words the grammarians don't know how to classify into other categories. Lots of weird words get classified as adverbs that a linguist wouldn't put together in the same category. For example, among adverbs there are sentence-modifying words like "occassionally", verb phrase modifiers like "quickly", adjective modifiers like "very", which are syntactically and semantically different.
Morphosyntactically speaking, many linguists consider that "true adverbs" are just a special kind of adjective, with a special inflection. Morphology is not my specialty, so I can't tell you much there.
Many languages lack adverbs distinct from adjectives.
Even with that, in languages that do have adverbs, it is very common in the spoken varieties to use adjectives in their place. In Spanish, for example, I'd more normally say "El corre rápido" (He runs fast) instead of "El corre rápidamente" (He runs "fastly").
This last thing happens also in French and many other languages-- adjectives are used in speech where grammar says that adverbs should occur. You've run into a phenomenon of language change that occurs independently in many languages.
My advice: take it easy. Grammar rules are supposed to help communication; they are a means, not an end, and it is perfectly justifiable to break them if your target audience will accept it.
"Look" (like "be" or "seems") is a copula verb; this is very different from "think"! (think of the sentences "That is different" vs. "*That is differently")
Semantically, "different" in sentence 1 modifies "that", not the verb. In "Think different", "different" modifies the verb.
Maybe you should not confuse ethnicity with nationality.
The Holocaust was the plan by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews. Not to exterminate the French, nor to exterminate the Germans. I think what I wrote was clear enough.
The French (and Germans) are understandably much more sensitive on this issue than Americans (having undergone the holocost more directly than most of us).
Eh, the Germans and the French did not undergo the Holocaust-- the Jews did.
There are more possible reasons why one would complain strongly about the intent of the/. editors to publish this book than just a confusion of morality and law.
I personally think that yes, it would be good for all these posts to be published, even if it's possible that they are illegal. But if the powers that be at/. want to make such a move, they better know what they are getting into legally and morally. Until I'm satisfied that they have demonstrated that they have really weighed the moral and legal issues, I can't support them in breaking the law. Especially when it is to their economic advantage to do so.
What I understand they are doing is considered fair use.
It's impossible to say unless given, e.g., a draft of the book. There's a difference in citing other people's work in your own work, and publishing other people's work. The first clearly is protected by fair use, the second one clearly isn't.
If the book is mostly the work of Katz, and quotes/. posters to support the points he makes in his own words, there could be a case of fair use. If the book is mostly reproduction of/. comments, then that's publishing other people's work without permission.
It doesn't matter whether or not crime is up or down as a result. In the United States, gun control violates the highest law of the land and it is therefore wrong.
This has to be one of the dumbest things I've ever read. Laws are made to serve people, not the other way around. If a law is hurting the people the law is in the wrong, not the people.
There is no failure of subject/verb agreement in that sentence. The subject is "the reader", which is 3rd sing., and the verb is the past form "purchased", which is undifferentiated for person/number. So the subject and the verb agree.
What we get here is failure of anaphoric agreement-- the plural genitive pronoun "their" does not agree in number with its antecedent, "the reader".
The thing is that just about anything you can make is technology. Sometimes crude technology but technology nonetheless. You can't simply point at a flint axe and claim that it isn't technology.
I'd say it is very shortsighted and arrogant to claim that the computer has been a more important technological advance than the flint axe. The flint axe clearly has had a much bigger impact on mankind than the computer.
Ugly hack; basically, you have to explicitly lay out your text in the two columns. And switiching back and forth between multicolumn and normal mode requires a lot of editing.
Footnotes and endnotes.
Read "FONT SIZE=1" and "I"
Yeah right. Has it occured to you that there's more to footnotes than just small script?
Automatic section numbering.
uh what? an html editor would be able to automatically add page numbering, not sure what section numbering is
You don't know what section numbering is, yet you want to claim HTML is adequate for serious document preparation? Jeez.
Automatic generation of tables of contents and indexes.
Read "TABLE" again
Yeah, right. Which is the HTML tag whose semantics consists of looking at all the sections and subsections in my document, figure out their numbering and in which page they occur, and automatically generate a table of contents?
Which is the HTML tag that allows me to mark points in the document I want indexed, and which is the tag that, when encountered, will cause and index of all the parts I marked, with page numbers, to be generated automatically?
Extensibility with macros.
Any decent GUI html editor would be able to add this fearture
But again, you sorely miss the point. I don't mean a keyboard macro in an editor to insert some preset text; I mean a macro facility to extend the document language itself. In HTML, this would be, for example, something like a tag that let you define a new tag.
When you are repeating a particular pattern over and over, you want a new language idiom to represent the pattern (which makes your document more legible), not just a keyboard macro to insert it over and over again. I do this all the time in LaTeX-- when I find I'm repeating some commands to often in a certain way, I define a new command to encapsulate the pattern.
Need I continue?
More than likely, I still don't see you point. Ok lets assume Word97 is the greatest word processer of all time, say it has the prefect user interface.
I refuse to make that assumption;-)
Ok, now on the back end, rip, tear and pull out that property format. Ok, so you just have the front end now right? Ok when it tries to save the file, have it push everything out into html instead of Word97 DTD. Ok, so you have an HTML file pushed out, but the user doesn't know it is an html document, pretty neat huh?
One thing is to use HTML as the file format for a particular application-- the application can do a lot of things that HTML _itself_ doesn't have. But the original post was talking about editing HTML with vi or HotDog Pro.
My point was that HTML is a terrible language for _authoring_ documents. If you want to use some portable, application independent language for _writing_ serious documents, HTML doesn't cut it-- it's underfeatured. A good language for these purposes is LaTeX; it's free, extensible (and has tons of extensions), featureful, and can be used to output a document into many formats: dvi, ps, pdf and html, among others. It has professional typesetting capability. It has facilities for automating tables of contents, indexes, bibliographies, and many other things.
Really, take a look at LaTeX and its feature set. This is the kind of thing you want for a document authoring language.
TeX is Turing-complete, which for a description language is a bad thing.
You've hit the nail in the head. This is very closely related to my major gripe with TeX and LaTeX.
The fact that you extend TeX by writing programs in TeX is absolutly horrendous. I find it to be completely dense and impenetrable. TeX might be a reasonable page description language, but it absolutely sucks as a programming language.
If I could design the LaTeX replacement of my dreams, I'd go with a system with 2 or 3 languages:
The language you use to write the document itself. I'd pick some SGML DTD, and give it a standard tagset that mirrors LaTeX.
A simple language to provide a macro-rewriting facility for end users. Stuff to save users from typing too much.
A full blown programming language to implement serious extension modules to the basic system. An extension could thus be a DTD defining additional tags, together with a program to provide semantics for them.
And did I mention that TeX's syntax is just horrible? "\command{...}"-- it's just begging for users to mismatch braces when stuff gets nested too deep!
The title in your post is really crazy. I thought you were saying someting absolutely nuts, until I distilled the essentials of what you want: portable file format, editable with simple tools, readable on its own, etc.
HTML is a crazy choice (at least as a _writing_ format; it might be a good choice for _presentation_), but LaTeX is pretty good for this.
Not to say that LaTeX is perfect-- I have tons of gripes with it, but it works, it's here now, and has a large user base that continuously extends it.
Seriously name one fearture in Word97, Star Office, Word Prefect that couldn't been done in a nice GUI html editor? Just name one, one example.
Multiple column text. Footnotes and endnotes. Automatic section numbering. Automatic generation of tables of contents and indexes. Extensibility with macros. Precise control over how your document will be formatted on the printed page. Need I continue?
Not that Word does any of these particularly well, BTW;)
Easiest way to be safe is to just shoot all criminals (cheap too).
Agreed. This would result in a drastic decrease in crime, which would benefit everybody.
Not necessarily. Contrary to the circular assumption implicit in your statement, crime is not caused by just there being a bunch of criminals out there. Crime is caused by a lot of complex social, political and economical circumstances. Killing convicts in no way addresses these.
I don't see how you can argue against it really - after all, the only people being harmed are those that have done something wrong.
Under the assumption that everybody who is convicted has done something wrong, and that everybody who has done something wrong is convicted. Hardly warranted assumptions.
And prevention is better than a cure - this would be a great way to prevent people from commiting criminal acts - certainly better than the threat of "community service".
Crime, again, arises because of the interplay of very complicated social factors, not because "the authorities are not being tough enough".
And prisons take up a lot of money we could use in better ways - why should honest people pay for criminals to live in luxury?
You must be trolling. You really believe prisoners are living in luxury? Hahaha!
Slashdot Mirror
You should read the GPL:
This covers system libraries. So you can dynamically link GPL code to whatever libraries are standard in the platform you're running.
The way your phrase your answer, you haven't contested that as economic actors accumulate wealth, they acquire more and more power to warp the "pure" capitalist economy, by creating information disparities, favorable trade barriers, and so on.
I take it that you intend to mean that competition puts a limit on the warping-- you can't warp the free market much because the competition gets in the way.
But how can competition stop this in principle? In fact, there are many things that one company can do to tilt the market in its favor that also benefit many of its direct competitors-- import tariffs on certain goods, for example, or general advertising in favor of the general type of product they sell. For example, "Got milk?" campaigns benefit competing companies.
Thus competition is not incompatible at all with many kinds of collusion-- actors _will_ do things that benefit their competitors and hurt the poor, if there is an incentive to do so. You could put it like this: "If I do something good for myself, which also happens to be good for my competitors, I've still done something good for myself".
As long as you pretend that wealth acts as a class, conspiring against other classes, you won't appreciate that poor people can USE the power of wealthy people against other wealthy people.
And as long as you pretend that wealth cannot act as a class, recognizing threats from other classes, and using their power to impose all sorts of repressive measures to stop this from happening, you won't appreciate that the powerful ACTUALLY USE their combined might against poor people.
Thinking further about this, I think there's yet another serious flaw.
Game Theory, widely used in economics modeling, talks about "optimum strategies" or "Nash equilibria" for multi-player "games". There are a number of results about optimum strategies-- theorems about the existence of optimum strategies and such. Saying an actor is rational amounts to saying that she will pick the optimum strategy in any given game.
The problem is that, given some particular game, even if by the results of game theory we know that there is some optimal strategy, could actually computing such a stategy be an undecidable problem?
As to whether such a situation is possible, I suspect it is-- you can define truth for first-order logic in terms of games, and first-order truth is undecidable.
Still, even if a particular problem were decidable, it may yet have an untractable computational profile-- it might be exponential time, for instance.
Essentially, the point is that the assumption that actors in an economy are rational may make some untenable computational assumptions. Even if there is a rational action in some particular economic setting, finding that action may be computationally too expensive, or even undecidable.
Textbook Capitalism assumes that "economic actors" are "rational" in the game-theoretic sense-- i.e. that they make the optimal use of the information they have available when making their economic decision. Another assumption is that the existing information needed to make the rational decisions will be available to the actor. Of course, in the real world, this is not quite so.
But I think a more fundamental flaw is that it is possible for actors to act in such a way that diminishes either the rationality or information available to other actors-- and that in fact, it is rational for actors to do this. For example, advertising. Thus, the conditions needed for Textbook Capitalism are self-undermining.
And as long as there are wealth and power disparities, actors who can violate these conditions in order to increase their profits will do so. Which will lead to more wealth for them, which gives them more power to do the same thing more extensively, which leads to more wealth, which ...
Really, people who go on with all this body of capitalist economic theorizing I feel live in a fantasy world. Even if you could get the world to the conditions needed for textbook pure capitalism to work like it is supposed to (rational agents, very low externalities, free flow of information, etc.), that would be a very unstable situation, which would be bound to vanish randomly at any moment.
Translation: "The free market is a fantasy. There can be no such thing as a free market in a real world with real people. Free markets only exist in the minds of economists."
It always amuses me when someone claims a recent cultural invention to be part of "human nature". Do you consider agriculture part of human nature, too?
Why can we not get along and RESPECT each other's cultures. The citizens of the United States have a different culture from Europeans. Let us not resort to a flame war over which economic system is better. Remember, love not hate.
This attitude conveniently glosses over the fact that the economic system of the US generates enormous wealth for a privileged few, and huge misery for billions.
Your demand for "respect" for the US culture and economy makes no sense if the US culture and economy systematically attacks and undermines those of most of the rest of the world.
But you absolutely missed the point you were replying to!
The poster was talking about geographic equal access, as his road analogy makes clear. Private companies don't have the incentive to extend equal levels of access to everyone everywhere-- they will concentrate in the more populated and affluent areas.
In the case of phone service, for example, there have been countries where the government has bought private phone cos. because the companies wouldn't provide decent service to all of the country.
I should mention that MS has Québec French translations for its flagship products already.
I think that if you go around and check out what people understand when faced with "think different", you will find that they interpret different as a modifier of the verb, not as an argument of the verb.
Anyway, do you have any syntactic arguments to support that different is a noun? It would be a pretty bizarre occurrence, IMHO.
Frankly, a lot of the English grammar rules you seem to cling so strongly to were just born out of irrational prejudices of academics that didn't know much about language, and wanted English to be more "logical" and "latinate".
Double negations? You'll find a few in Shakespeare. Split infinitives, stranded prepositions? I think you can find very ancient examples of these too. Also, as I say in another post, the traditional category of "adverb" is very vague, and in many unrelated languages you see trends torwards a collapse of the difference between adverbs and adjectives.
I don't want to imply that normative grammars are no good-- only that many grammar rules for English are plain stupid, and that many "grammatical mistakes" in English have been around for centuries, way before the rules to proscribe them were created.
- "Adverb", in most traditional grammars, is just a category to throw in words the grammarians don't know how to classify into other categories. Lots of weird words get classified as adverbs that a linguist wouldn't put together in the same category. For example, among adverbs there are sentence-modifying words like "occassionally", verb phrase modifiers like "quickly", adjective modifiers like "very", which are syntactically and semantically different.
- Morphosyntactically speaking, many linguists consider that "true adverbs" are just a special kind of adjective, with a special inflection. Morphology is not my specialty, so I can't tell you much there.
- Many languages lack adverbs distinct from adjectives.
- Even with that, in languages that do have adverbs, it is very common in the spoken varieties to use adjectives in their place. In Spanish, for example, I'd more normally say "El corre rápido" (He runs fast) instead of "El corre rápidamente" (He runs "fastly").
- This last thing happens also in French and many other languages-- adjectives are used in speech where grammar says that adverbs should occur. You've run into a phenomenon of language change that occurs independently in many languages.
My advice: take it easy. Grammar rules are supposed to help communication; they are a means, not an end, and it is perfectly justifiable to break them if your target audience will accept it.2.*That looks differently.
"Look" (like "be" or "seems") is a copula verb; this is very different from "think"! (think of the sentences "That is different" vs. "*That is differently")
Semantically, "different" in sentence 1 modifies "that", not the verb. In "Think different", "different" modifies the verb.
Mine is set to Compose.
The Holocaust was the plan by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews. Not to exterminate the French, nor to exterminate the Germans. I think what I wrote was clear enough.
Eh, the Germans and the French did not undergo the Holocaust-- the Jews did.
I personally think that yes, it would be good for all these posts to be published, even if it's possible that they are illegal. But if the powers that be at /. want to make such a move, they better know what they are getting into legally and morally. Until I'm satisfied that they have demonstrated that they have really weighed the moral and legal issues, I can't support them in breaking the law. Especially when it is to their economic advantage to do so.
It's impossible to say unless given, e.g., a draft of the book. There's a difference in citing other people's work in your own work, and publishing other people's work. The first clearly is protected by fair use, the second one clearly isn't.
If the book is mostly the work of Katz, and quotes /. posters to support the points he makes in his own words, there could be a case of fair use. If the book is mostly reproduction of /. comments, then that's publishing other people's work without permission.
This has to be one of the dumbest things I've ever read. Laws are made to serve people, not the other way around. If a law is hurting the people the law is in the wrong, not the people.
What we get here is failure of anaphoric agreement-- the plural genitive pronoun "their" does not agree in number with its antecedent, "the reader".
I'd say it is very shortsighted and arrogant to claim that the computer has been a more important technological advance than the flint axe. The flint axe clearly has had a much bigger impact on mankind than the computer.
read "TABLE" tag.
Ugly hack; basically, you have to explicitly lay out your text in the two columns. And switiching back and forth between multicolumn and normal mode requires a lot of editing.
Footnotes and endnotes.
Read "FONT SIZE=1" and "I"
Yeah right. Has it occured to you that there's more to footnotes than just small script?
Automatic section numbering.
uh what? an html editor would be able to automatically add page numbering, not sure what section numbering is
You don't know what section numbering is, yet you want to claim HTML is adequate for serious document preparation? Jeez.
Automatic generation of tables of contents and indexes.
Read "TABLE" again
Yeah, right. Which is the HTML tag whose semantics consists of looking at all the sections and subsections in my document, figure out their numbering and in which page they occur, and automatically generate a table of contents?
Which is the HTML tag that allows me to mark points in the document I want indexed, and which is the tag that, when encountered, will cause and index of all the parts I marked, with page numbers, to be generated automatically?
Extensibility with macros.
Any decent GUI html editor would be able to add this fearture
But again, you sorely miss the point. I don't mean a keyboard macro in an editor to insert some preset text; I mean a macro facility to extend the document language itself. In HTML, this would be, for example, something like a tag that let you define a new tag.
When you are repeating a particular pattern over and over, you want a new language idiom to represent the pattern (which makes your document more legible), not just a keyboard macro to insert it over and over again. I do this all the time in LaTeX-- when I find I'm repeating some commands to often in a certain way, I define a new command to encapsulate the pattern.
Need I continue?
More than likely, I still don't see you point. Ok lets assume Word97 is the greatest word processer of all time, say it has the prefect user interface.
I refuse to make that assumption ;-)
Ok, now on the back end, rip, tear and pull out that property format. Ok, so you just have the front end now right? Ok when it tries to save the file, have it push everything out into html instead of Word97 DTD. Ok, so you have an HTML file pushed out, but the user doesn't know it is an html document, pretty neat huh?
One thing is to use HTML as the file format for a particular application-- the application can do a lot of things that HTML _itself_ doesn't have. But the original post was talking about editing HTML with vi or HotDog Pro.
My point was that HTML is a terrible language for _authoring_ documents. If you want to use some portable, application independent language for _writing_ serious documents, HTML doesn't cut it-- it's underfeatured. A good language for these purposes is LaTeX; it's free, extensible (and has tons of extensions), featureful, and can be used to output a document into many formats: dvi, ps, pdf and html, among others. It has professional typesetting capability. It has facilities for automating tables of contents, indexes, bibliographies, and many other things.
Really, take a look at LaTeX and its feature set. This is the kind of thing you want for a document authoring language.
You've hit the nail in the head. This is very closely related to my major gripe with TeX and LaTeX.
The fact that you extend TeX by writing programs in TeX is absolutly horrendous. I find it to be completely dense and impenetrable. TeX might be a reasonable page description language, but it absolutely sucks as a programming language.
If I could design the LaTeX replacement of my dreams, I'd go with a system with 2 or 3 languages:
And did I mention that TeX's syntax is just horrible? "\command{...}"-- it's just begging for users to mismatch braces when stuff gets nested too deep!
HTML is a crazy choice (at least as a _writing_ format; it might be a good choice for _presentation_), but LaTeX is pretty good for this.
Not to say that LaTeX is perfect-- I have tons of gripes with it, but it works, it's here now, and has a large user base that continuously extends it.
Seriously name one fearture in Word97, Star Office, Word Prefect that couldn't been done in a nice GUI html editor? Just name one, one example.
Multiple column text. Footnotes and endnotes. Automatic section numbering. Automatic generation of tables of contents and indexes. Extensibility with macros. Precise control over how your document will be formatted on the printed page. Need I continue?
Not that Word does any of these particularly well, BTW ;)
Agreed. This would result in a drastic decrease in crime, which would benefit everybody.
Not necessarily. Contrary to the circular assumption implicit in your statement, crime is not caused by just there being a bunch of criminals out there. Crime is caused by a lot of complex social, political and economical circumstances. Killing convicts in no way addresses these.
I don't see how you can argue against it really - after all, the only people being harmed are those that have done something wrong.
Under the assumption that everybody who is convicted has done something wrong, and that everybody who has done something wrong is convicted. Hardly warranted assumptions.
And prevention is better than a cure - this would be a great way to prevent people from commiting criminal acts - certainly better than the threat of "community service".
Crime, again, arises because of the interplay of very complicated social factors, not because "the authorities are not being tough enough".
And prisons take up a lot of money we could use in better ways - why should honest people pay for criminals to live in luxury?
You must be trolling. You really believe prisoners are living in luxury? Hahaha!