Excuse me for following up twice to the same comment, but I couldn't let this go without being mentioned.
You've responded to two different posts -- in the same thread mind you -- the exact same way. This one says
Actually take the TIME to read what I wrote and then get back with me if you have something intelligent to say, if you can't figure out the part I'm referring to, I suggest you take some classes on basic English comprehension.
I suggest you actually take the TIME to read what I wrote and then get back with me if you have something intelligent to say... otherwise I suggest you take some classes on basic English comprehension.
That's sad. That's really sad. It's a stock response. I guess I should be greatful that it wasn't just cut and pasted in, but still... Damn. That's pathetic. I mean, that's the kind of tactic I'd expect from a elementary school student. You know, something along the lines of "Nuh-uh!" and "I'm rubber and you're glue! What you you say bounces of me and sticks to you!" I mean, I haven't heard a ready made stock response to a criticism since the 5th grade. Seriously! And I know you're not 10. You have way to low of an ID for that. You're like what 30+? Geez.
Now the fact that you're using a stock response, that not only doesn't rebut the criticism, but rather make some vague swipe at the critic's intellegence and english composition skills, is incredibly ironic. I mean, apparently only have one trick, and you apply it whether it makes sense or not. Since the responses don't make any sense in this contet, it draws into question whether you actually read and understood the criticism. I mean, if you did, you'd have a better response than, "You're stupid."
Okay fine, you get flustered, and can't come up with a quick rebut, but your passion got inflamed and so you shot off something without really thinking it out. Okay, fine. You didn't have to respond right away. You could have waited until you came up with something good, you know totake advantage of stairwell wit, but whatever. The passion was too much. It happens to us all. No harm done. (And sadly in this case, less harm than usual.) But you didn't even take the time to come up with something original. Now there's just no excuse for that. Have some decency man! If you need help coming up with something original, I suggest you take some classes in creative writing.
So it took Microsoft three months to issue a patch? Well given the fact that most commercial developers schedule releases on a quarterly basis, that would be "next release." The very fastest a group can release something that isn't an immediate critical problem, i.e. a disaster of biblical proportions. You know, Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria. (apologies to "Ghostbusters")
The fact that you're getting you're critical systems patched in less than a day for non-critical problems, implies that you're basing your system off the live CVS branches. Why are on Earth are you doing that? It's so unstable. Someone checks in a wonky patch, and you're screwed. What project are you working on? I'd like to avoid it.
The Mozilla codebase is a mess. However, it is getting better. Did you look at it at all when Netscape first released the source? It was absolutely terrible. The Mozilla guys have done a good job at cleaning it over the years, but it's still a mess. They really should have just started from scratch and used the old codebase as a reference.
Hold on a minute! They did do that. They rewrote the whole damn thing starting on October 1998, a mere seven months after the initial release of the source code. One year later, mozilla shipped nothing, and JWZ resigned citing lack of progress. In 2000 -- two years after the rewrite started -- mozilla released the new layout engine, Gecko. Jaws all around had to be picked up off the floor. It was a horribly buggy. (The most obvious bug to me was the fact that scrolling to the bottom of a page, then back up, then back down a second time, caused TWO copies of the page to appear in the window. Repeat N times, and you got N copies. I discovered that bug within the first five minutes of use.) FOUR years after the rewrite, Mozilla released version 1.0. Now four years after 1.0, 8 years after the rewrite that is widely considered the biggest blunder of mozilla's history. A blunder that is made all the worse since it's outcome was immediately forseeable.
Now you're not seriously proposing the repeat their old mistakes are you?
That's right they volunteered. The volunteered to dot a job. Now apparently some didn't realize that when you volunteer, you have to actually support the project instead of just call yourself a "developer" and shuffle deck chairs around. When the user base wants something fixed, then it should be fixed. That's called "being responsible" and "taking pride in your work." Volunteering is not a one way street, and some would have you believe. It's work and it doesn't mean that only have to do the the easy things that you like to do. That's why people don't volunteer. This is doubly so, when the group, like mozilla, has placed high barriers to entry. Specifically, the code is a poorly documented bizzare mishmash of multiple languages spread out among directories that don't have obvious names. Also, the review process effectively eliminates all external development, as the the codebase moves faster than the review process, and the sheer arrogance of the developers that "I own this." I'm sorry, you can't say you "own" it in one breath, and in the very next breath say "fix it yourself."
The argument that if something is provided at no cost, it's somehow above reproach is an absurd intellectual cop out. The cost of something is completely irrelevant to its merits. Let's take your soup kitchen analogy. Suppose you walked into a soup kitchen and was served a soup consisting broken glass in a fine urine base. Would you honestly say, "Oh. Well this sucks, but I shouldn't complain. Afterall, it's free." Bullshit. Incompetence is incompetence at any price.
The reason I brought it up is because the author of the article implied that he has the skill to fix at least one of the bugs that he's complaining about. While I agree that he's under no obligation to do so if he doesn't want to, I also think it's extremely bad form to sit around complaining that no one else will.
As if he doesn't have better things to do. The great thing of sophmoric refrain of "Use the source! Fix it yourself" is the shear arrogance of it. It's, "Why don't you drop everything, and do my job for me." Why is it your job? Because you're the maintainer. You're the developer. You chose that role, and now that someone is depending on you, you tell them screw off. Now that's "bad form" buddy.
Perhaps pornography is simply a Western invention and a predilection that strikes people in Asia as bizzare. Then again, I have no doubt that people in these countries are freely downloading Western porn; they just aren't producing it themselves.
What? Asia is full of porn. Porn, love hotels, brothels, hostess bars (i.e. emotional prostitutes), strip clubs. Seriously. How were you not aware of this? And no. The bars don't cater to only a a foreign clientel. Many Japanese bars frequently put up big Jim Crow-esque signs that read "Japanese Only."
well, how about if you live in a poor crime-ridden neighborhood and you can't even leave your house without being threatend with rape, mugging, and general loutish violent behavior on a daily basis? and guess what? if you lived in such an environment, you would LOVE these cameras
And yet those are just the neighborhoods where the cameras aren't there. No. The cameras are deployed in "high profile" neighborhoods. In short, where the rich live and work. Not the inner city slums, but rather downtown in the commercial districts.
and in fact, that is the case: ask residents of housing projects what they think of these camera systems: they LOVE them. they get a life again. they can go outside again. the thugs get chased out of the public areas
and those who complain about these systems are usually your sort of middle class to upper middle class busy body who is disturbed by the idea of cameras... but not so disturbed about the prevalance of crime, because they don't have to deal with it on a daily basis. in other words, their opinion is formed on a half-truth, formed in a vacuum disconnected from reality that doesn't see all of the factors in play. propaganda is based on half-truths. it's an appeal to emotion, rather than an appeal to reason. "cameras bad! end of story!" the oh-so-wise slashdot crowd falls for it, brainwashed on the topic. a kneejerk, thoughtless reaction
some of you have opinions about these camera systems that seems to start with the assumption that the british government just likes to put up cameras and spy on its citizens for no good reason. can you possibly imagine a good reason why the government AND its people would want these cameras? or is life a stupid hollywood b-grade movie, where all government officials are nefarious schizophrenic's fantasy life cardboard cutout villains, cheerfully twittering their hairline moustaches, rubbing their hands together, boldly thinking up new negarious plots to remove all of your freedoms for... no good reason at all. just general cartoonish malice. right?
There's a falacy to your logic. You're assuming that the government and the citizenry support the cameras for the same purposes. That's only half true.
The government places the cameras as a kneejerk reaction to the occurance of a very unlikely, but high profile event. Why? Because it's visible and speciously effective. In actuallity it's security theater, because the government is unwilling to take the hard actions that will lead to real security. The citizenry, after being whipped up into a panic accepts anything for the sake of the children. The government then uses then continues to use the perceived threat to justify the creation additional survelliance regimes, both overt and covert. These survellience regimes inevtiably becomes corrupted by conservative[*]authoritarian (i.e. crypto-facist) forces for political purposes because the survelliance is directed internally rather than externally. Or have you forgotten COINTELPRO?
[*] conservative because they seek to maintain the status quo, a key component of all conservative philosophy.
CONGRATULATIONS! You've just won an all expense paid vacation to the sunny Carribean island of CUBA! Enjoy the beaches, the sand, the water[bording]! It's amazing!
Please stay right where you are. A representitive will be there shortly to award you your prize.
Why would you want to do this? Seriously. Why? You bought a mac, but you want to remove all the mac specific stuff from it. Why didn't you save you're money and just by a PC and install linux on it. If you're not using the mac apps, (and let's be honest, Darwin doesn't count. It's just another BSD clone, which is essentially just another unix.) then you bought the hardware to look cool. If you absolutely have to look cool, but not run any of the macosx apps, then just dual boot.
The whole point of a unix guy owning a mac is that it's unix in all the way he wants (command line, symlinks, standard unix tools) and none of the ways he doesn't (insmod, recompiliing kernels, fucking with wpasupplicant and buggy ass drivers). It Just Works(tm). You seem bent on ignoring THE advantage of the mac, and turning it into just another piece of commodity hardware, only at luxury prices. It's absolutely pointless.
What you're saying sounds like you're being responsible, but you're actually being a fool. You have convinced yourself that happiness is a somehting that you can't afford. You've become obsessed. Trust me. The executive director isn't worring about you while going down the slopes in Vail, why should you worry about him?
If you were hit by a bus today, the company would go on. You're completely replaceable. Take advantege of that.
Still not convicned? Let me put it in terms of enlightened self interest. You don't have a "number two," because you've never given a "number two" a chance to develop. You're doing the job all the time. Don't. He'll figure out it out when you're gone. Then you'll have your number two.
Yes, schools are more and either testing students or preparting students for the tests. When I was in high school we had 2 or 3 standardized test our junior year, not counting the college entrance examines. I believe now the number is even more. State tests. District tests. National tests. College entrance tests. It's gone test overboard. Everyone wants their own test instead of just creating one test and getting their metrics from that. (Heaven forbid, there be a national curriculum guidelines! If I want pi to equal 3 then it does dagnabit!)
However, dropping out of school is an incredibly suboptimal course of action. You do learn things in college, and you can't go to college without a high school education. You do need the piece of paper to get a job. No, GEDs aren't the same as diplomas. A high school diploma says, "I am capabale of putting forth a minimal amount of effort. " A GED says, "I'm a lazy loser that couldn't even be bothered to show up." Seriously, that's what it says. Academically the minimum standard for a high school diploma is incredibly low. It's essentially scoring 60% on things that you've heard every year since the 3rd grade. It's just glorified attendence. Given this, it's no wonder that high school dropouts occupy the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
If by "real world" you mean "having an occupation," then high school hasn't done that since the 60s. The world has become more complicated, and thus requires more education. All too often though, "real world," is really just a contemptious term used by who have become small bitter people that are angry at their own impotence in life. It is not possible to interact with society at large and yet still be isolated from it. In a very real sense nothing prepares someone for the "real world," except experience and as Vernon Sanders put it, "Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards." Given that, no 16 year old high school drop out who is "too cool for school" because "the teachers only teach out the book and I could get that the library and it's just a bunch of random facts that don't mean nothin', and anyway I'm going to be an X and I don't need high school for that" is ready for your so called "real world," and their attitude proves it.
But see you missed my point. There's litterally millions of Spanish speakers in the United States, almost none of which can type the characters. You used Argentina for example, so let's use that. Say there's an expatriate Argentinian that wants to read about what's going on back in Argentina. He goes to the website for the newspaper Clarín. Let's say Clarín's jumps on the unicode dns bandwagon and registers clarín.ar, and for some reason discards their current clarin.ar domain. The expatriate just got screwed because he has the wrong the keyboard and can't find the correct keyboard anywhere in the country he now resides.
The key problem with your position is that you believe that at some level not using diacriticals is a choice. For a very large number of people, it's impossible for them to do so. That is the problem. You can't dismiss these people. That's balkanization. You've gone from people self-selecting to throwing up a velvet rope and saying that certain people because of where they live and what technology they have access to aren't wanted. That is a stupid.
Languages are anachronisms, the only reason we have more than one is the physical distance between locations and difficulty travelling allowed them to evolve independently. Well that isn't the world we live in any more and the different languages actually make communication far more difficult now. They're no longer beneficial. So get rid of them, insist on a common language. The most popular happens to be English at the moment. I could live with Spanish, but for those of you about to suggest Chinese, read this before deciding: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
Languages are more than a means to convey information. They're identity. Why do you think Ireland, Wales, and Scotland are dusting off dead languages are nameing all their cities and trying to teach it school? (The irony that literally no one knows how to spell these words or even what words should be used, should not be lost.) It's a big ol' wankfest to try and to assert national identity to nations that either already exist, or ceased to exist more than 1000 years ago. The Jews did the same thing with Hebrew in the 19th century and then again in the 20th when they needed words like "telephone,"
Yeah, I speak English. Yeah, I'm an American. And yes, trying to dictate a language through legislation and "academies" is a pointless attempt at nationalism. When you're own people don't even speak the language you've lost. Give it up.
I don't have mediocre English spelling, and I would use the correct accented characters in English words like "naive" - except I don't know how to type those characters.
To be pedantic, naive is properly spelled with an umlaut, not an accent mark. The general term is diacritical marks. And don't call the diacriticals in pinyin "accent marks." They're tonal marks damn it.;)
Yes keyboards exist to type those extended characters, but the fact is that not everyone that is a potential user of the site with the accented domain has the correct keyboard. You mention spanish, and that's a great example. Spanish is the second most popular language in the United States, yet I have never seen a keyboard in the United States that has the keys to type spanish words correctly. Simply calling people lazy or stupid for not typing accents is frankly lazy and stupid. For a large number of users, it's impossible to do the right thing.
Unicode domain names sound nice, but frankly they're an unworkable solution.
That brings up an interesting point. You're right to say that cops filter out false tips from people, but these "tips" aren't coming from a person. They're coming from a machine. That's an important distinction. There could be an bias (concious or unconcious) to believe the machine. The machine is "state of the art," "highly complex," and most importantly, "scientific." If it gives you good tips, then one may become inclined to trust it when it gives less obviously good results. Cops already use with scientific methods that they may or may not totally understand how they work. Fingerprints, trace evidence, and now DNA. This is just another tool. However, without the experience of what it can and can not do, one may give it an undeserved biased towards believabilty.
I'm not saying the cops are or would become slaves to the machine as it were, but it's the border cases I'm more interested in.
So the guy's.edu account is going away. Why doesn't he just get a.org domain and some hosting and just move the site there? Closing the site due to the loss of an.edu account sounds like a convient excuse to stop managing the site.
That ad campaign is creepy. Creepy like the end of 2001 creepy. I think they're the good kind of creepy, but I of all the people I talked to, no one else thinks that. They think the ads are the bad kind of creepy. The kind of creepy that heralds something demonic.
Don't forget to check and respect robots.txt. Python has a module that helps you parse that file
[sarcasm] Why? Google doesn't. [/sarcasm]
And once I even repeatedly voted on an online poll and changed the course of history.
So did I! Back in 2000 I got the Underwear Gnomes episode of South Park aired.
I think the best use of a spider in an online poll was by whatever Red Sox fan voted a million times for Nomar Garciapara to make the all star team back in 2000.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Konqueror uses KHTML, which is used in Safari, not Firefox. Gecko is a mozilla project, and always has been.
You've responded to two different posts -- in the same thread mind you -- the exact same way. This one says
And then in this one you said:
That's sad. That's really sad. It's a stock response. I guess I should be greatful that it wasn't just cut and pasted in, but still... Damn. That's pathetic. I mean, that's the kind of tactic I'd expect from a elementary school student. You know, something along the lines of "Nuh-uh!" and "I'm rubber and you're glue! What you you say bounces of me and sticks to you!" I mean, I haven't heard a ready made stock response to a criticism since the 5th grade. Seriously! And I know you're not 10. You have way to low of an ID for that. You're like what 30+? Geez.
Now the fact that you're using a stock response, that not only doesn't rebut the criticism, but rather make some vague swipe at the critic's intellegence and english composition skills, is incredibly ironic. I mean, apparently only have one trick, and you apply it whether it makes sense or not. Since the responses don't make any sense in this contet, it draws into question whether you actually read and understood the criticism. I mean, if you did, you'd have a better response than, "You're stupid."
Okay fine, you get flustered, and can't come up with a quick rebut, but your passion got inflamed and so you shot off something without really thinking it out. Okay, fine. You didn't have to respond right away. You could have waited until you came up with something good, you know totake advantage of stairwell wit, but whatever. The passion was too much. It happens to us all. No harm done. (And sadly in this case, less harm than usual.) But you didn't even take the time to come up with something original. Now there's just no excuse for that. Have some decency man! If you need help coming up with something original, I suggest you take some classes in creative writing.
Now that my good man, is how you flame someone.
So, now an ad hominium attack. Truly, the last refuge of a man whose argument has been beaten.
Bravo.
So it took Microsoft three months to issue a patch? Well given the fact that most commercial developers schedule releases on a quarterly basis, that would be "next release." The very fastest a group can release something that isn't an immediate critical problem, i.e. a disaster of biblical proportions. You know, Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria. (apologies to "Ghostbusters")
The fact that you're getting you're critical systems patched in less than a day for non-critical problems, implies that you're basing your system off the live CVS branches. Why are on Earth are you doing that? It's so unstable. Someone checks in a wonky patch, and you're screwed. What project are you working on? I'd like to avoid it.
Nothing to see here folks. He violated the terms of his visa, and thus got deported. The only thing unusual was his buisness.
Move along. Move along.
The Mozilla codebase is a mess. However, it is getting better. Did you look at it at all when Netscape first released the source? It was absolutely terrible. The Mozilla guys have done a good job at cleaning it over the years, but it's still a mess. They really should have just started from scratch and used the old codebase as a reference.
Hold on a minute! They did do that. They rewrote the whole damn thing starting on October 1998, a mere seven months after the initial release of the source code. One year later, mozilla shipped nothing, and JWZ resigned citing lack of progress. In 2000 -- two years after the rewrite started -- mozilla released the new layout engine, Gecko. Jaws all around had to be picked up off the floor. It was a horribly buggy. (The most obvious bug to me was the fact that scrolling to the bottom of a page, then back up, then back down a second time, caused TWO copies of the page to appear in the window. Repeat N times, and you got N copies. I discovered that bug within the first five minutes of use.) FOUR years after the rewrite, Mozilla released version 1.0. Now four years after 1.0, 8 years after the rewrite that is widely considered the biggest blunder of mozilla's history. A blunder that is made all the worse since it's outcome was immediately forseeable.
Now you're not seriously proposing the repeat their old mistakes are you?
That's right they volunteered. The volunteered to dot a job. Now apparently some didn't realize that when you volunteer, you have to actually support the project instead of just call yourself a "developer" and shuffle deck chairs around. When the user base wants something fixed, then it should be fixed. That's called "being responsible" and "taking pride in your work." Volunteering is not a one way street, and some would have you believe. It's work and it doesn't mean that only have to do the the easy things that you like to do. That's why people don't volunteer. This is doubly so, when the group, like mozilla, has placed high barriers to entry. Specifically, the code is a poorly documented bizzare mishmash of multiple languages spread out among directories that don't have obvious names. Also, the review process effectively eliminates all external development, as the the codebase moves faster than the review process, and the sheer arrogance of the developers that "I own this." I'm sorry, you can't say you "own" it in one breath, and in the very next breath say "fix it yourself."
The argument that if something is provided at no cost, it's somehow above reproach is an absurd intellectual cop out. The cost of something is completely irrelevant to its merits. Let's take your soup kitchen analogy. Suppose you walked into a soup kitchen and was served a soup consisting broken glass in a fine urine base. Would you honestly say, "Oh. Well this sucks, but I shouldn't complain. Afterall, it's free." Bullshit. Incompetence is incompetence at any price.
The reason I brought it up is because the author of the article implied that he has the skill to fix at least one of the bugs that he's complaining about. While I agree that he's under no obligation to do so if he doesn't want to, I also think it's extremely bad form to sit around complaining that no one else will.
As if he doesn't have better things to do. The great thing of sophmoric refrain of "Use the source! Fix it yourself" is the shear arrogance of it. It's, "Why don't you drop everything, and do my job for me." Why is it your job? Because you're the maintainer. You're the developer. You chose that role, and now that someone is depending on you, you tell them screw off. Now that's "bad form" buddy.
Perhaps pornography is simply a Western invention and a predilection that strikes people in Asia as bizzare. Then again, I have no doubt that people in these countries are freely downloading Western porn; they just aren't producing it themselves.
What? Asia is full of porn. Porn, love hotels, brothels, hostess bars (i.e. emotional prostitutes), strip clubs. Seriously. How were you not aware of this? And no. The bars don't cater to only a a foreign clientel. Many Japanese bars frequently put up big Jim Crow-esque signs that read "Japanese Only."
http://archive.salon.com/sex/world/2001/03/16/sur
http://archive.salon.com/sex/galleries/2003/09/12
well, how about if you live in a poor crime-ridden neighborhood and you can't even leave your house without being threatend with rape, mugging, and general loutish violent behavior on a daily basis? and guess what? if you lived in such an environment, you would LOVE these cameras
And yet those are just the neighborhoods where the cameras aren't there. No. The cameras are deployed in "high profile" neighborhoods. In short, where the rich live and work. Not the inner city slums, but rather downtown in the commercial districts.
and in fact, that is the case: ask residents of housing projects what they think of these camera systems: they LOVE them. they get a life again. they can go outside again. the thugs get chased out of the public areas
and those who complain about these systems are usually your sort of middle class to upper middle class busy body who is disturbed by the idea of cameras... but not so disturbed about the prevalance of crime, because they don't have to deal with it on a daily basis. in other words, their opinion is formed on a half-truth, formed in a vacuum disconnected from reality that doesn't see all of the factors in play. propaganda is based on half-truths. it's an appeal to emotion, rather than an appeal to reason. "cameras bad! end of story!" the oh-so-wise slashdot crowd falls for it, brainwashed on the topic. a kneejerk, thoughtless reaction
some of you have opinions about these camera systems that seems to start with the assumption that the british government just likes to put up cameras and spy on its citizens for no good reason. can you possibly imagine a good reason why the government AND its people would want these cameras? or is life a stupid hollywood b-grade movie, where all government officials are nefarious schizophrenic's fantasy life cardboard cutout villains, cheerfully twittering their hairline moustaches, rubbing their hands together, boldly thinking up new negarious plots to remove all of your freedoms for... no good reason at all. just general cartoonish malice. right?
There's a falacy to your logic. You're assuming that the government and the citizenry support the cameras for the same purposes. That's only half true.
The government places the cameras as a kneejerk reaction to the occurance of a very unlikely, but high profile event. Why? Because it's visible and speciously effective. In actuallity it's security theater, because the government is unwilling to take the hard actions that will lead to real security. The citizenry, after being whipped up into a panic accepts anything for the sake of the children. The government then uses then continues to use the perceived threat to justify the creation additional survelliance regimes, both overt and covert. These survellience regimes inevtiably becomes corrupted by conservative[*]authoritarian (i.e. crypto-facist) forces for political purposes because the survelliance is directed internally rather than externally. Or have you forgotten COINTELPRO?
[*] conservative because they seek to maintain the status quo, a key component of all conservative philosophy.
CONGRATULATIONS! You've just won an all expense paid vacation to the sunny Carribean island of CUBA! Enjoy the beaches, the sand, the water[bording]! It's amazing!
Please stay right where you are. A representitive will be there shortly to award you your prize.
Why would you want to do this? Seriously. Why? You bought a mac, but you want to remove all the mac specific stuff from it. Why didn't you save you're money and just by a PC and install linux on it. If you're not using the mac apps, (and let's be honest, Darwin doesn't count. It's just another BSD clone, which is essentially just another unix.) then you bought the hardware to look cool. If you absolutely have to look cool, but not run any of the macosx apps, then just dual boot.
The whole point of a unix guy owning a mac is that it's unix in all the way he wants (command line, symlinks, standard unix tools) and none of the ways he doesn't (insmod, recompiliing kernels, fucking with wpasupplicant and buggy ass drivers). It Just Works(tm). You seem bent on ignoring THE advantage of the mac, and turning it into just another piece of commodity hardware, only at luxury prices. It's absolutely pointless.
What you're saying sounds like you're being responsible, but you're actually being a fool. You have convinced yourself that happiness is a somehting that you can't afford. You've become obsessed. Trust me. The executive director isn't worring about you while going down the slopes in Vail, why should you worry about him?
If you were hit by a bus today, the company would go on. You're completely replaceable. Take advantege of that.
Still not convicned? Let me put it in terms of enlightened self interest. You don't have a "number two," because you've never given a "number two" a chance to develop. You're doing the job all the time. Don't. He'll figure out it out when you're gone. Then you'll have your number two.
Well I guess she does have a good publicist.
Yes, schools are more and either testing students or preparting students for the tests. When I was in high school we had 2 or 3 standardized test our junior year, not counting the college entrance examines. I believe now the number is even more. State tests. District tests. National tests. College entrance tests. It's gone test overboard. Everyone wants their own test instead of just creating one test and getting their metrics from that. (Heaven forbid, there be a national curriculum guidelines! If I want pi to equal 3 then it does dagnabit!)
However, dropping out of school is an incredibly suboptimal course of action. You do learn things in college, and you can't go to college without a high school education. You do need the piece of paper to get a job. No, GEDs aren't the same as diplomas. A high school diploma says, "I am capabale of putting forth a minimal amount of effort. " A GED says, "I'm a lazy loser that couldn't even be bothered to show up." Seriously, that's what it says. Academically the minimum standard for a high school diploma is incredibly low. It's essentially scoring 60% on things that you've heard every year since the 3rd grade. It's just glorified attendence. Given this, it's no wonder that high school dropouts occupy the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
If by "real world" you mean "having an occupation," then high school hasn't done that since the 60s. The world has become more complicated, and thus requires more education. All too often though, "real world," is really just a contemptious term used by who have become small bitter people that are angry at their own impotence in life. It is not possible to interact with society at large and yet still be isolated from it. In a very real sense nothing prepares someone for the "real world," except experience and as Vernon Sanders put it, "Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards." Given that, no 16 year old high school drop out who is "too cool for school" because "the teachers only teach out the book and I could get that the library and it's just a bunch of random facts that don't mean nothin', and anyway I'm going to be an X and I don't need high school for that" is ready for your so called "real world," and their attitude proves it.
But see you missed my point. There's litterally millions of Spanish speakers in the United States, almost none of which can type the characters. You used Argentina for example, so let's use that. Say there's an expatriate Argentinian that wants to read about what's going on back in Argentina. He goes to the website for the newspaper Clarín. Let's say Clarín's jumps on the unicode dns bandwagon and registers clarín.ar, and for some reason discards their current clarin.ar domain. The expatriate just got screwed because he has the wrong the keyboard and can't find the correct keyboard anywhere in the country he now resides.
The key problem with your position is that you believe that at some level not using diacriticals is a choice. For a very large number of people, it's impossible for them to do so. That is the problem. You can't dismiss these people. That's balkanization. You've gone from people self-selecting to throwing up a velvet rope and saying that certain people because of where they live and what technology they have access to aren't wanted. That is a stupid.
You are too kind. :)
Languages are anachronisms, the only reason we have more than one is the physical distance between locations and difficulty travelling allowed them to evolve independently. Well that isn't the world we live in any more and the different languages actually make communication far more difficult now. They're no longer beneficial. So get rid of them, insist on a common language. The most popular happens to be English at the moment. I could live with Spanish, but for those of you about to suggest Chinese, read this before deciding: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
Languages are more than a means to convey information. They're identity. Why do you think Ireland, Wales, and Scotland are dusting off dead languages are nameing all their cities and trying to teach it school? (The irony that literally no one knows how to spell these words or even what words should be used, should not be lost.) It's a big ol' wankfest to try and to assert national identity to nations that either already exist, or ceased to exist more than 1000 years ago. The Jews did the same thing with Hebrew in the 19th century and then again in the 20th when they needed words like "telephone,"
Yeah, I speak English. Yeah, I'm an American. And yes, trying to dictate a language through legislation and "academies" is a pointless attempt at nationalism. When you're own people don't even speak the language you've lost. Give it up.
Hasta la vista.
So why does every language have strata of slang and jargon that may well be incomprehensible to outsiders? In south-east England, ...
:)
Well that's you're problem right there.
I don't have mediocre English spelling, and I would use the correct accented characters in English words like "naive" - except I don't know how to type those characters.
;)
To be pedantic, naive is properly spelled with an umlaut, not an accent mark. The general term is diacritical marks. And don't call the diacriticals in pinyin "accent marks." They're tonal marks damn it.
You're point is dead on though.
Yes keyboards exist to type those extended characters, but the fact is that not everyone that is a potential user of the site with the accented domain has the correct keyboard. You mention spanish, and that's a great example. Spanish is the second most popular language in the United States, yet I have never seen a keyboard in the United States that has the keys to type spanish words correctly. Simply calling people lazy or stupid for not typing accents is frankly lazy and stupid. For a large number of users, it's impossible to do the right thing.
Unicode domain names sound nice, but frankly they're an unworkable solution.
That brings up an interesting point. You're right to say that cops filter out false tips from people, but these "tips" aren't coming from a person. They're coming from a machine. That's an important distinction. There could be an bias (concious or unconcious) to believe the machine. The machine is "state of the art," "highly complex," and most importantly, "scientific." If it gives you good tips, then one may become inclined to trust it when it gives less obviously good results. Cops already use with scientific methods that they may or may not totally understand how they work. Fingerprints, trace evidence, and now DNA. This is just another tool. However, without the experience of what it can and can not do, one may give it an undeserved biased towards believabilty.
I'm not saying the cops are or would become slaves to the machine as it were, but it's the border cases I'm more interested in.
So the guy's .edu account is going away. Why doesn't he just get a .org domain and some hosting and just move the site there? Closing the site due to the loss of an .edu account sounds like a convient excuse to stop managing the site.
Just pass the torch man!
That ad campaign is creepy. Creepy like the end of 2001 creepy. I think they're the good kind of creepy, but I of all the people I talked to, no one else thinks that. They think the ads are the bad kind of creepy. The kind of creepy that heralds something demonic.
Don't forget to check and respect robots.txt. Python has a module that helps you parse that file
[sarcasm] Why? Google doesn't. [/sarcasm]
And once I even repeatedly voted on an online poll and changed the course of history.
So did I! Back in 2000 I got the Underwear Gnomes episode of South Park aired.
I think the best use of a spider in an online poll was by whatever Red Sox fan voted a million times for Nomar Garciapara to make the all star team back in 2000.