However, I believe (as did the founding fathers) that it is generally healthy to critique closely any attempt to restrict personal freedom.
There's a difference between critique and outright refusal to consider. Almost all of the backlash I see is of the latter, with no pragmatic consideration for whether it will improve or diminish quality of life.
I strongly disagree. Perhaps you would care to illustrate some of the "meaningless" freedoms you refer to?
Something that people regularly get upset about is a surveillance society. But whether computers (or even humans, on occasion) are watching you walk down the street or not is entirely meaningless to your quality of life. It is only an insult to ideology, not to normal experience.
That's just one example of many. Again, almost all of the backlash I see are to do with privacy issues or liberty issues which are meaningless to their actual quality of life.
It's your prerogative not to believe him, but the way I see it, if this person wants to move out of his country, something must be pushing him to do it.
Yes. Ideology.
You seem all about trading that which is of little value for that which is of high value... it seems to me that this guy is doing just that. He is looking to see if he can find an environment which will give him a reasonable degree of comfort and security without unduly infringing on his rights and freedoms.
He'll be giving up high value liberties for what will ultimately turn out to be low value ones. Although, of course, as is the case with those blinded by ideology, he'll probably be oblivious to his degraded condition.
You have conducted an exhaustive search of "all such claims on the internet"?
All that I have seen. Yes.
You have ascertained that "almost" all of them come from "libertarian minded ideologues"?
Yes. Almost always American youths who've been swallowing the steady stream of libertarian propaganda that you get through sites like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. What is niche in the greater populous is mainstream amongst technologically enabled American youth.
Are you positive that their ideas don't correlate with real world benefits?
Quite positive. The arguments are almost always non-existent when it comes to here and now impacts of the privacy/liberty restrictions (except for arguments based purely on ideology), and the only arguments of strength are based on the premise that the government will turn on the people and use these things against them. Which doesn't bear out as rational when you're talking about countries that are highly ranked for political transparency and stability.
You're obviously exaggerating here, whether you're conscious of it or not.
No, I'm not. I've been observing these arguments for going on ten years now. I'm not an American and don't live in a world where these sorts of beliefs are shared or are common, so they stand out starkly and clearly. They and their character are easy to see. An essay on their constructivist makeup would be an easy write.
I'll wager they're very much not so easy to see or understand from the inside. For an American youth it'll be a case of not seeing the wood for the trees.
You're as much of an ideologue as the "libertarians" you attack. Since your views seem to be those of a modern liberal, it would follow that you would perceive much of the rest of the world to be libertarian by comparison.
Not at all. The rest of the world is largely similar to the balance I perceive as working best at present. The US is also mostly similar to that balance. The libertarian youth of America are the standouts.
Ensuring privacy and freedom does not need to conflict with pragmatic governance.
Some societal improvements come at the cost of privacy and freedom. The point being that those privacies are meaningless ones and freedoms provided no great quality (except to the ideologically driven).
Lose things of no value and replace them with things of high value. Of course, again, the values are different (and not relating to real life measures) to the ideologically driven.
Well, obviously it is having a adverse effect on this person.
I don't believe that. Almost all such claims on the internet are from libertarian minded ideologues who are fighting for ideas, not real world benefits.
A government that does not recognize it's citizens' rights to freedom is not worthy of their trust.
Freedom and liberty are only simple, one dimensional words to libertarians. They encompass much more than basic negative liberties to normal, everyday people (whether they consciously realise it or not). What good is the freedom to own a gun when it is at the price of the freedom to live without fear.
Calm down. I'm not arguing against government, I'm arguing that unfettered government and unprotected individual rights is a recipe for trouble, and history - as well as current events - bears the proof.
You see what you want to see, not what is really there. Current events? Not Iran, as much as people like to believe. Maybe China though. And not a concern in the UK, for other more complex reasons (stable, long running democracy, institutions, military, etc).
It depends where the ideology came from. If it came from pragmatic intentions, then it'll have some real world applicability. What this person is describing doesn't sound that way.
Do you propose that infringing on personal rights to privacy, liberty, and self-defense does not have an *actual* effect on people, either as individuals or together as a whole?
Yes, I'm saying that. There's nothing that's been done in the UK that's having any negative impact on peoples' quality of life. Just because someone's privacy or liberty is being limited, does not automatically mean it is hurting them. Judge each one on its practical merits, not on whether it conflicts with your ideology.
Consider this - the abuse and repression of Iranians by their government is being facilitated [slashdot.org] by technology and infrastructure that didn't *actually* seem to hurt their quality of life until now, when it is too late to do anything about it.
So? It's not the technology or infrastructure that's at fault, but the ideology. The same technologies and infrastructure exists in all modern societies. Throwing them away would be lunacy.
It's the same old libertarian logical failing as always. "Anything the government does might go bad! So don't do anything at all!"
Get real.
Choosing comfort over freedom sounds like a poor choice to me.
Then move to an anarchy and live a shit life, every day until you die, just so you can be sure that the government isn't going to do anything that they might be able to use against you if they turn bad.
Or alternatively you could live somewhere where you have a decent level of trust in your government and the country's political systems, and from there allow growing and evolving social and political systems to continue to improve your quality of life.
Indeed. Sounds like the original question asker is ideology driven, not reality driven.
Are the privacy invasions *actually* hurting their quality of life? I seriously doubt it. They're letting ideology override their actual life experience.
Flash has been a place keeper / workaround for missing browser features for years now. Once browsers can do everything properly themselves, we'll no longer need Flash, and we'll be better for it.
That's not the point though. Yes, there's workarounds we can do as developers. But the browsers have all the relevant information already, and are the best and most sensible and logical candidates for presenting that information to the user.
The fact that we've been doing workarounds for so many years is, frankly, absurd.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that I have never had problems with the right button on my Mighty Mouse.
I had problems with the side buttons (they were completely useless due to poor positioning), and with the scroll ball (gets dirty and stops working), but never the right button.
I do love the scroll ball though, when it works. Pure bliss.
Because it amuses me, toying with emotional failures like yourself.
There's so much misguided hate and passion going on, it's entertaining to watch. You're the flipside to the Apple fanboy, but so much darker and more disturbing.
See, the extremes of the Apple fanboys, while sad and pathetic, at least have some basis in reality. Apple really are making the cream of tech products at the moment.
But the anti-fanboy crowd, like yourself, you're a dark and disturbing thing. It's bitter contrarianism in the face of a reasonably undeniable reality, and at such a passionate level that hints at much darker personal issues beneath the surface. It's like watching a moving drama about family abuse or alcoholism or something.
Look, I'm not even reading your arguments. I stop reading each of your messages one or two sentences in.
I've seen you and your kind around for decades (as long as I've been in this industry). Hell, you're not even unique to this industry. You're a reasonably universal phenomenon.
Fascinating to study in psychology and sociology, but pointless to actually debate with. What's driving you is not rationality. Passion and negativity, for sure, but not rational.
If I were to engage your arguments I'd be missing the point. And if I were to try and help you out of your fugue I'd be giving you free medical service. Sorry buddy, I'm off the clock.
So, let me get this straight... the only way to either unlock your phone with regards to apps or network is to do something strictly against the Terms of Service, thus invalidating your warranty.
Nope. You're still wrong. Network unlocks are available from the networks themselves in most countries.
Oh, and maybe you brick the thing in the process.
Again wrong. The jailbreak and unlock processes are practically single click now, and there's next to no risk of bricking. And if you do somehow manage to brick it you can always do a restore through iTunes, even getting your stored data back in the process.
Personally I like to use devices I have paid for in the way I choose to, not the way Steve Jobs TELLS me to... and *I'm* the prick ?
Yep, you're still the prick and you still have a bee in your bonnet. You're no more locked in with an iPhone than you are with any other phone. You've got issues son, and I suggest you go cry them out in private. Your whinging and wining in public is embarrassing.
I'm not even confined to one vendor for application and use.
I never quite understand this comment. You're not constrained to Apple's applications or usage with the iPod. There are iTunes alternatives and music bought on other stores (except ones using competing DRM solutions) will play fine on iPods.
Where does this idea come from? If anything the lock in is from iTunes Store to iPod, but not at all from iPod to iTunes. It's iTunes Store customers who experience lock in, not iPod customers.
You say you were building an intranet site but then mention that IE is 95% of web users? Aside from that figure not quite being true (most statistically significant measures put it at below 80% of international traffic, and a rapidly growing portion of that are IE7 users), for an intranet site the wider web user statistics are meaningless. If you're building an intranet site then you explicitly support a small set of browsers and versions (be it IE6 and below, or only Firefox, Safari and IE7, or whatever fits depending on the nature of the company) and you work to the features that are supported in that small set.
You say sites must work in IE, but you don't say which version. If you're working on a site where it's acceptable to not support (or only partially support) IE6 then a massive amount of your problems are solved right there. There's also the option of having slightly different presentation for IE6 and below than for all modern browsers. Just use conditional style sheets that are only applied for IE6 and below (and occasionally one for IE7, if there's IE7 quirks you need to accommodate), and you're good. Much simpler than trying to make one set of CSS work for all browsers.
You don't need to pile hack upon hack, you just need to know the most elegant and simple approach. And I repeat: the most elegant approach is not going to be to fall back to tables for layout. If that is your answer then you're not sufficiently skilled. If you are beating your head against the wall trying to make it work, then you perhaps don't know as much as you think you do.
Sounds to me like you don't know as much as you think you do about CSS then. Getting CSS layouts right isn't just a matter of knowing the appropriate CSS properties - it also requires considerable experience. But once you've got that experience you can do everything with CSS that can be done with tables, and much more, and with relative ease. If you're giving up and going back to tables, then you've got more to learn and more experience to gather.
Looking at your website I see you're using divs and spans in places where there are more appropriate semantic tags. It also looks as if you're using more nested block elements than should be necessary for that layout. I'd also suggest trying multiple CSS classes per element in some cases. An example (that will be entirely wrong because I haven't spent the time to learn how your layout is working): class="wrapper outer float-wrap center" instead of five separate divs with one class each. You're also often using classes that describe the CSS properties, rather than semantically describing the content. eg class="float-wrap" instead of class="newsitem" or some such.
I'm not trying to be condescending. I really like your design. I'm just saying that if you're ending up with the answer being tables then you need to acquire more skills so that you can better answer the question.
I sell all my old iPods and cellphones through online auction sites, and get good money for them. So yes, there really is a market for used cell phones and iPods.
This also allows me to upgrade each of them yearly (or more often, if the mood hits) without getting caught with a nasty bill. I essentially just pay a small upgrade cost (ie the difference between the resale value of the old time and the retail value of the new item). Same goes for my laptops and desktop machines - I auction them off yearly, and end up only paying a small upgrade cost to have a new laptop and desktop every year.
You've just circled yourself back to trying to solve a gun problem by throwing more guns at it. And a little hint: whenever you come down to "the only way to solve this", you're not thinking everything through.
Metal-detectors on every door? Daily room and person searches?
Yes. Granted, it'd just be patching the wound rather than curing the disease, but the real cure is far more difficult so might as well take same steps in the meantime. The real solution is to fix America's gun violence culture problem. Undo the cultural damage done by the continuous glorification of gun violence.
Chances are that a good 90% of the military would refuse those orders, and a good percentage of that 90% would use their training to help the 299.9 million stand up against the 100,000.
If the government do not have the military on their side then there's absolutely no need for a civilian uprising. A military coup will happen instead, achieving the same goal without any need for civilian deaths and without need for arming an unstable populous. If the government do have the military on their side then no amount of armed civilian uprising will succeed. It will simply lead to mass slaughter of civilians.
The idea of arming the civilian populace for the purpose of overthrowing the American government has been an absurd idea for a long time now.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between critique and outright refusal to consider. Almost all of the backlash I see is of the latter, with no pragmatic consideration for whether it will improve or diminish quality of life.
Something that people regularly get upset about is a surveillance society. But whether computers (or even humans, on occasion) are watching you walk down the street or not is entirely meaningless to your quality of life. It is only an insult to ideology, not to normal experience.
That's just one example of many. Again, almost all of the backlash I see are to do with privacy issues or liberty issues which are meaningless to their actual quality of life.
Yes. Ideology.
He'll be giving up high value liberties for what will ultimately turn out to be low value ones. Although, of course, as is the case with those blinded by ideology, he'll probably be oblivious to his degraded condition.
All that I have seen. Yes.
Yes. Almost always American youths who've been swallowing the steady stream of libertarian propaganda that you get through sites like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. What is niche in the greater populous is mainstream amongst technologically enabled American youth.
Quite positive. The arguments are almost always non-existent when it comes to here and now impacts of the privacy/liberty restrictions (except for arguments based purely on ideology), and the only arguments of strength are based on the premise that the government will turn on the people and use these things against them. Which doesn't bear out as rational when you're talking about countries that are highly ranked for political transparency and stability.
No, I'm not. I've been observing these arguments for going on ten years now. I'm not an American and don't live in a world where these sorts of beliefs are shared or are common, so they stand out starkly and clearly. They and their character are easy to see. An essay on their constructivist makeup would be an easy write.
I'll wager they're very much not so easy to see or understand from the inside. For an American youth it'll be a case of not seeing the wood for the trees.
Not at all. The rest of the world is largely similar to the balance I perceive as working best at present. The US is also mostly similar to that balance. The libertarian youth of America are the standouts.
You can accuse me of being ideologically d
Some societal improvements come at the cost of privacy and freedom. The point being that those privacies are meaningless ones and freedoms provided no great quality (except to the ideologically driven).
Lose things of no value and replace them with things of high value. Of course, again, the values are different (and not relating to real life measures) to the ideologically driven.
I don't believe that. Almost all such claims on the internet are from libertarian minded ideologues who are fighting for ideas, not real world benefits.
Freedom and liberty are only simple, one dimensional words to libertarians. They encompass much more than basic negative liberties to normal, everyday people (whether they consciously realise it or not). What good is the freedom to own a gun when it is at the price of the freedom to live without fear.
You see what you want to see, not what is really there. Current events? Not Iran, as much as people like to believe. Maybe China though. And not a concern in the UK, for other more complex reasons (stable, long running democracy, institutions, military, etc).
It depends where the ideology came from. If it came from pragmatic intentions, then it'll have some real world applicability. What this person is describing doesn't sound that way.
Yes, I'm saying that. There's nothing that's been done in the UK that's having any negative impact on peoples' quality of life. Just because someone's privacy or liberty is being limited, does not automatically mean it is hurting them. Judge each one on its practical merits, not on whether it conflicts with your ideology.
So? It's not the technology or infrastructure that's at fault, but the ideology. The same technologies and infrastructure exists in all modern societies. Throwing them away would be lunacy.
It's the same old libertarian logical failing as always. "Anything the government does might go bad! So don't do anything at all!"
Get real.
Then move to an anarchy and live a shit life, every day until you die, just so you can be sure that the government isn't going to do anything that they might be able to use against you if they turn bad.
Or alternatively you could live somewhere where you have a decent level of trust in your government and the country's political systems, and from there allow growing and evolving social and political systems to continue to improve your quality of life.
Indeed. Sounds like the original question asker is ideology driven, not reality driven.
Are the privacy invasions *actually* hurting their quality of life? I seriously doubt it. They're letting ideology override their actual life experience.
Foolish.
I'd say both. Just because it's inspired browser features, doesn't mean that Flash has ever been The Right Way.
I would.
Flash has been a place keeper / workaround for missing browser features for years now. Once browsers can do everything properly themselves, we'll no longer need Flash, and we'll be better for it.
That's not the point though. Yes, there's workarounds we can do as developers. But the browsers have all the relevant information already, and are the best and most sensible and logical candidates for presenting that information to the user.
The fact that we've been doing workarounds for so many years is, frankly, absurd.
IE has a progress bar (or at least, some versions have had).
All the other browsers (to my knowledge) do not.
And yes, shame on them. It's absurd. The browser knows how big the file is and how much it's sent. IT CAN PROVIDE A FUCKING PROGRESS BAR.
But no. Instead web devs have to write absolutely absurd hacks around this basic missing feature.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that I have never had problems with the right button on my Mighty Mouse.
I had problems with the side buttons (they were completely useless due to poor positioning), and with the scroll ball (gets dirty and stops working), but never the right button.
I do love the scroll ball though, when it works. Pure bliss.
Because it amuses me, toying with emotional failures like yourself.
There's so much misguided hate and passion going on, it's entertaining to watch. You're the flipside to the Apple fanboy, but so much darker and more disturbing.
See, the extremes of the Apple fanboys, while sad and pathetic, at least have some basis in reality. Apple really are making the cream of tech products at the moment.
But the anti-fanboy crowd, like yourself, you're a dark and disturbing thing. It's bitter contrarianism in the face of a reasonably undeniable reality, and at such a passionate level that hints at much darker personal issues beneath the surface. It's like watching a moving drama about family abuse or alcoholism or something.
Look, I'm not even reading your arguments. I stop reading each of your messages one or two sentences in.
I've seen you and your kind around for decades (as long as I've been in this industry). Hell, you're not even unique to this industry. You're a reasonably universal phenomenon.
Fascinating to study in psychology and sociology, but pointless to actually debate with. What's driving you is not rationality. Passion and negativity, for sure, but not rational.
If I were to engage your arguments I'd be missing the point. And if I were to try and help you out of your fugue I'd be giving you free medical service. Sorry buddy, I'm off the clock.
A nerve with fellow crying babies like yourself.
Pathetic.
Nope. You're still wrong. Network unlocks are available from the networks themselves in most countries.
Again wrong. The jailbreak and unlock processes are practically single click now, and there's next to no risk of bricking. And if you do somehow manage to brick it you can always do a restore through iTunes, even getting your stored data back in the process.
Yep, you're still the prick and you still have a bee in your bonnet. You're no more locked in with an iPhone than you are with any other phone. You've got issues son, and I suggest you go cry them out in private. Your whinging and wining in public is embarrassing.
Case in point.
I never quite understand this comment. You're not constrained to Apple's applications or usage with the iPod. There are iTunes alternatives and music bought on other stores (except ones using competing DRM solutions) will play fine on iPods.
Where does this idea come from? If anything the lock in is from iTunes Store to iPod, but not at all from iPod to iTunes. It's iTunes Store customers who experience lock in, not iPod customers.
You say you were building an intranet site but then mention that IE is 95% of web users? Aside from that figure not quite being true (most statistically significant measures put it at below 80% of international traffic, and a rapidly growing portion of that are IE7 users), for an intranet site the wider web user statistics are meaningless. If you're building an intranet site then you explicitly support a small set of browsers and versions (be it IE6 and below, or only Firefox, Safari and IE7, or whatever fits depending on the nature of the company) and you work to the features that are supported in that small set.
You say sites must work in IE, but you don't say which version. If you're working on a site where it's acceptable to not support (or only partially support) IE6 then a massive amount of your problems are solved right there. There's also the option of having slightly different presentation for IE6 and below than for all modern browsers. Just use conditional style sheets that are only applied for IE6 and below (and occasionally one for IE7, if there's IE7 quirks you need to accommodate), and you're good. Much simpler than trying to make one set of CSS work for all browsers.
You don't need to pile hack upon hack, you just need to know the most elegant and simple approach. And I repeat: the most elegant approach is not going to be to fall back to tables for layout. If that is your answer then you're not sufficiently skilled. If you are beating your head against the wall trying to make it work, then you perhaps don't know as much as you think you do.
Sounds to me like you don't know as much as you think you do about CSS then. Getting CSS layouts right isn't just a matter of knowing the appropriate CSS properties - it also requires considerable experience. But once you've got that experience you can do everything with CSS that can be done with tables, and much more, and with relative ease. If you're giving up and going back to tables, then you've got more to learn and more experience to gather.
Looking at your website I see you're using divs and spans in places where there are more appropriate semantic tags. It also looks as if you're using more nested block elements than should be necessary for that layout. I'd also suggest trying multiple CSS classes per element in some cases. An example (that will be entirely wrong because I haven't spent the time to learn how your layout is working): class="wrapper outer float-wrap center" instead of five separate divs with one class each. You're also often using classes that describe the CSS properties, rather than semantically describing the content. eg class="float-wrap" instead of class="newsitem" or some such.
I'm not trying to be condescending. I really like your design. I'm just saying that if you're ending up with the answer being tables then you need to acquire more skills so that you can better answer the question.
I sell all my old iPods and cellphones through online auction sites, and get good money for them. So yes, there really is a market for used cell phones and iPods.
This also allows me to upgrade each of them yearly (or more often, if the mood hits) without getting caught with a nasty bill. I essentially just pay a small upgrade cost (ie the difference between the resale value of the old time and the retail value of the new item). Same goes for my laptops and desktop machines - I auction them off yearly, and end up only paying a small upgrade cost to have a new laptop and desktop every year.
They could do that, or they could do even better and do exactly what they've done with two finger clicking.
What you're describing requires you moving your hand unduly. What they've done requires only the slightest change in movement. Better.
Inquisitor for Safari is far, far superior to what's available in Firefox for search box magic. It even gives instant results as you type.
You've just circled yourself back to trying to solve a gun problem by throwing more guns at it. And a little hint: whenever you come down to "the only way to solve this", you're not thinking everything through.
Yes. Granted, it'd just be patching the wound rather than curing the disease, but the real cure is far more difficult so might as well take same steps in the meantime. The real solution is to fix America's gun violence culture problem. Undo the cultural damage done by the continuous glorification of gun violence.
If the government do not have the military on their side then there's absolutely no need for a civilian uprising. A military coup will happen instead, achieving the same goal without any need for civilian deaths and without need for arming an unstable populous. If the government do have the military on their side then no amount of armed civilian uprising will succeed. It will simply lead to mass slaughter of civilians.
The idea of arming the civilian populace for the purpose of overthrowing the American government has been an absurd idea for a long time now.