I have yet to see the pocket-veto be a force of democracy as much as its supposed to be a check on Congress, yet there's enough diversity in Congress that the pocket veto simply isn't needed.
Hah--as far as I can tell almost everyone other than Ron Paul is a stark raving statist. And he probably has his own problems.
Nope, for three reasons. First, I am quite familiar with Godwin's, and knowledge thereof protects one from its invocation. Second, I didn't invoke the H-word or N-word (quite deliberately), choosing instead to use the NSDAP. Third, and most importantly, it doesn't apply when the object of discussion is one of the Godwin triggers--and since socialism is the discussion, mentioning the Bolsheviks, ChiComs and National Socialists makes perfect sense.
To sum it up, you believe that market is the best solution by defintion.
Since it has been demonstrated time and time again for centuries, yes I do.
This is simple brainwashing by the American propaganda machine and there is simply nothing that I can do.
No, it was education. Under a professor who was a socialist, of all things. I read the sources, I read his arguments and those of others, and my conclusion was that he was wrong, that sociliasm is evil and that the often-strange free market is the best of a bunch of bad solutions.
You, OTOH, are an elitist who would crush beneath your heel any who would prefer to drive a car (which is the optimal solution: it offers convenience, privace, speed and cheapness, none of which are offered by public transportation); who would prefer to live their own lives; who would prefer to indulge their own (perhaps stupid) preferences rather than yours. Like any socialist, when it gets right down to it, you're no different from Stalin, Mao, the NSDAP &c. Less bloody, but of the same ideological mold.
People will not love their cars, unless they have them. For you the efficiency of the market is an axiom. Forget about it for a moment. There isn't only one optimal solution. And public transportation system will be used if there is no alternative in the form of expensive and polluting personal cars. And people will be happy.
But not as happy as they would be with their cars (we know this, because the vast majority of people, fully acquainted with the advantages and disadvantages of both, prefer personal transport over public). That's the point: central planning results in less happiness than freedom.
Just look at American music and movies. The fact that they are made in a free market doesn't mean they are the best possible. Countries where movie and/or music production was controlled (planned) had higher quality products. Of course, let to themselves, people will consistently choose crap over quality product in this area, that's precisely why free market fails.
If it's what people want, by definition it's not crap. Perhaps, just maybe, it's the artistic films which no-one will pay money for which are the crap. I wouldn't argue that, actually: I'd simply note that tastes differ, and that it is best to let folks vote with their pocketbooks. You may dislike American cinema (I'm not enraptured with it, to be frank), but obviously people are happier with it than the alternatives available.
This reveals the essential elitism of the socialist position: I know what's best for you; you have no taste and need to be force-fed quality; trust me to make you a better man. No thanks--while I incline slightly to the elitist position at times, I haven't enough pride to say that my taste should rule the world.
What I meant is that BG's happiness is many times more important than the happiness of any other person.
Sure--but there are many times more other people than there are Gateses. It balances out. And, much as I personally find his software less than worthless, apparently a lot of people disagree. I've been outvoted. The market is a kind of democratic election where the will of the people is supreme: and their will is that Bill Gates have lots of dough and Bob Uhl not. Oh well:-)
Do you think that Bill's job was hundred thousand of times more important than creation of penicillin or invention of WWW? Than Ghandi's work? Than MLK's job?
I don't know how much money the funders and manufacturers have gotten for penicillin, but I imagine it's rather more than $1,000,000. As for the issue in general, life isn't necessarily fair. It's like the law of the jungle: a wolf might have a simply incredible mutation which would be great for the species, but it breaks its leg and dies. Whoops. Artificially trying to tinker with things just makes them worse. We know this is true of the environment; we know it is true of economics. Besides, had Gandhi not been assassinated, he would have ended up wielding more power than Bill Gates. I'm not so certain about King, but who knows?
How's this a bad thing? It's not. It defends the end-user's right to do with his terminal as he desires. If he wants adware, well that's his business--hardly mine. If he doesn't, again that's his business.
A finding in the other direction could have had very bad implications for `You Might Like...' features, pop-up blockers and end-user control in general.
As for the morons who install adware by mistake: they're morons. I have as little sympathy for them as I do the idiots who climb into bear cages at the zoo.
Take cars for example. Cars are considered an integral part of American Way, but a central planner would simply build a convenient public transporation system and provide cars only to emergency services and taxi companies. Did he fail to foresee the fad? How could you say it when in that alternative reality the fad failed to emerge.
That's exactly the sort of thing central planners do--and that's exactly why they fail. We love our cars (most of us; the exceptions are just so much statistical noise). The central planner will spend a shitload of money on a little-used system. Gosh, that was efficient.
That means that happiness of Bill Gates is considered first and foremost priority in the world.
NNope--as wealthy as he and Warren Buffet are, their net worths are a mere drop in an enormous economic bucket. The real powerhouse is the middle class, which has a decent amount of money and decent numbers. I daresay that one could define middle class by the intersection of income and population curves. The free market means that what most folks want, they get. This doesn't guarantee the best solution: note the number of McDonald's restaurants and Protestant churches in the world. But it is fair.
And what's so wrong with someone's value being approximate to his wealth? After all, one only gains wealth by providing service to other folks: if one weren't doing a decent job, they'd not be paying.
Consider Russia, where free market brought misery to the majority of the population after the centrally planned economy was destroyed.
That's because Russia's market wasn't free. The state industries were auctioned off to about a dozen plutocrats. A repressive tax regime remained in place. Property rights and the rule of law were not enforced. Russia is a text-book example of how not to be free (always has been, really).
would rather wait in line to get my milk than have 45% of the people in the country live below the official poverty line...
Fine--that means you'd rather be a slave than a free man. Slavery has its attractions: guaranteed room & board. The free man can startve--but he can also excel. Socialism is, quite simply, mass slavery. No thanks.
Boo-hoo: we don't treat illegal combatants as prisoners of war;
Okay, so we declare war, and then declare that anyone who fights against us is doing so against our will, and thus illegally. Viola! No more POW problems.
It doesn't work that way. There are quite clear rules laying down who is and isn't a valid combatant, agreed to by international treaty; we aren't making them up as we go along. The rules of war exist in order to make a fundamentally terrible exercise (wholesale murder) somewhat less so. In this case, the rules for legitimate combat serve to protect civilian populations from reprisals, and to give both military sides a fair chance.
we had a few incidents of police brutality (which will be punished)
Uh, there are no US police in Iraq.
We're not discussing about Iraq--we're discussing the Amnesty International report on the US. RTFA.
The US is the only first-world country that still executes prisoners.
So what? If everyone else were leaping off a bridge, would you follow? Execution is a perfectly reasonable response to certain crimes. From the Texas Death Row Homepage:
The following crimes are Capital Murder in Texas: murder of a public safety officer or firefighter; murder during the commission of kidnapping, burglary, robbery, aggravated sexual assault, arson, or obstruction or retaliation; murder for remuneration; murder during prison escape; murder of a correctional employee; murder by a state prison inmate who is serving a life sentence for any of five offenses (murder, capital murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault, or aggravated robbery); multiple murders; murder of an individual under six years of age.
Is it enlightened to let those who commit the above crimes live? Multiple murderers, murder-rapists, child murderers, hit men &c.?
[Re: the ICC]Translation: we won't be held accountable, except to ourselves, and even that's negotiable lately.
As opposed to being held accountable by a politised court which will charge innocents for the `crime' of being Americans? See the Belgian courts which have indicted Rumsfeld et al. Not to mention that the traditional safeguards of Anglo-American jurisprudence would be completely lacking. No sane state would wish to have its citizens be susceptible to such an open-ended, unfair and untrustworthy court.
Yeah, because "leftist = bad", right?
Let's see, famous leftists of the twentieth century:
Lenin
Stalin
Hitler (yup: National Socialist Democratic Worker's Party)
Mao Tse-tung
Pol Pot
Leftism is dedicated to the annihilation of the individual and of individual freedom in favour of collectivism. It's an abhorrent philosophy wholly opposed to liberty. Yes, leftist = bad.
It's fascinating to look at these early efforts at controlled economies and think how much better the US economy could be with a bit of technological innovation.
Study economics. Planned economies are fundamentally worse than free ones. Think about it: how can a central planner know what the next big fad is going to be? Who knows best what you want: you or him? Multiply that out by 300 million souls...
The free market is the best possible mechanism for the allocation of scarce resources (which is all an economy really is). Its flexibility and fairness are unsurpassed. Central planning is the key to shortages, rationing, misery and death.
Sure, Allende wanted a democratic Chile: one where the tyranny of the majority was in full force. Steal from the rich, give to the poor, until everyone's poor and miserable. Not that Pinochet was any good, either.
OTOH, a structure-oriented word processor would be no less easy to use than a presentation-oriented one, and the payoff would be the same.
I would love to know more about how you see this working, as it may be a better stepping stone between the 2 than what I had proposed. (Note: if any of these have been created, I would love to see it!)
It's pretty simple, really: eliminate all presentation-oriented buttons from the word processor toolbar and menus. So now there is no Italic, no Bold, no left-align, no margin-setting--nothing. Sounds pretty painful, like a text editor (painful to the ordinary user, anyway; that's how I like my editor...).
Now, add in structure-oriented buttons, menu items &c. E.g.: New Chapter; Title; New Section; Emphasis; Citation. The word processor can infer a new para at carriage returns, so there's no need for that most noisome of markup items:-) There would, of course, be some sort of style editor as well--that would have options like italic &c.
Let's say the user wishes to write a letter. He selects New Document..., then the Letter template (of course, he can create his own templates or modify the standard ones: a template is a group of predefined styles and mandatory items). He's prompted to enter the addressee, a greeting and a salutation, then is dropped to the ordinary text-editing display. He types along in a document which has been pre-filled with the aforementioned items. He wishes to quote Sally, so he types what she said, selects it and clicks the Quote button. Perhaps the Quote is a single sentence--then the word processor just surrounds it with nice smart quotes. Maybe it's a few lines--then the wp formats it as a blockquote.
Now he's typing that he feels `really happy': he selects really and hits the Emphasis button. Then he types `joie de vie,' selects it and hits the Foreign button (or menu item, or what-have-you).
Perhaps he doesn't like the margins the letter template comes with--he opens up the style editor and changes 'em. Perhaps he has a colour printer and would rather emphasise words in blue--he opens up the style editor and alters the Emphasis style. Or maybe he prefers underlines (ugh), or grey, or...
Because the document is marked up, if it has sections, he can collapse them and get an outline view. Because it uses styles, he can change the fonts used throughout the document with a single edit, rather than one contiguous bit of text at a time. If he's a real geek, he could even use XML tools or elisp to hack the data file, depending on the format.
Meanwhile, the indexing engine on his 'puter is able to extract more useful information about the document. When the user searches for `articles on string theory,' he's much more likely to get something using the article template with 'string theory' in the title, rather than an email mentioning `articles of clothing,' `string cheese,' and `that's a dumb theory.'
Boo-hoo: we don't treat illegal combatants as prisoners of war; we had a few incidents of police brutality (which will be punished); we are so backwards as to execute murderers; we won't dilute our sovereignty by being a party to the Internation Criminal Court (motto: we bring to justice what the United Nations has brought to legislation). Amnesty International has deviated terribly from its original fine purpose (William F. Buckley used to be on its board, I believe--he was at least a member). Their leftist stance has wounded them greatly.
WYSIWYG has become a way many people think about their documents,
Compare it to the use of pen and paper, or pigment on a cave wall. No, it's more the way we normally think about creating a document.
You play about adjusting fonts when handwriting? You use italic? Typing ASCII is much closer to handwriting than using a wordprocessor, closer too than using mark-up. But, like handwriting, text-based markup has a continuity and a self-similarity to it which makes it pleasant to edit.
We're discussing two types of WYSIWYG: presentation-oriented tomfoolery, which leads only to contentless emptiness; and (the literal meaning) What You See is What You Get. Which is why I suggest WYSIWYG Done Right: yes, you see in front of you the document as it will print--but you will not be marking it up with presentational styles, but with structurual styles. You'll select Chapter Heading, not Font X, size y, weight z, underline, left-align. You'll select emphasis, not italics. All word-processed documents are marked up: currently it's presentation markup, not structural.
The problem is that current WYSIWYG editors are similar to troff (which is much more presentation-minded than structurally-oriented). They need to advance in technology.
This is one of the advantages of visible markup, BTW. I can use emacs to edit troff, or LaTeX, or XML. But a GUI WYSIWYG editor can only do the one thing it was designed to do. But that's another discussion--and probably to the less-skilled, a less-versatile tool is more friendly (witness that some still use pico when emacs or even vi is available). It's not a bad thing, just different.
Just a program that goes through a WYSIWYG document, and at every change in the text asks the user to select from a list what they were doing. The system could remember the previous choices, and make it the default choice.
Sounds terribly time-consuming to me, without much immediate pay-off for the end-user. OTOH, a structure-oriented word processor would be no less easy to use than a presentation-oriented one, and the payoff would be the same.
Re:Ian Fleming's Bond
on
Bay of Souls
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· Score: 1
FYI, the only film to closely follow the Ian Fleming novel of the same name was 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' and to a lesser extent 'Dr. No' IMO.
Hey, Casino Royale had the carpet-beater in the background of the tied-to-a-chair scene!
Now there's a movie which could have been much funnier than it was:-(
Markup is not a natural way for humans to think about or create content. It's a hack that we humans came up with to make it easier for machines to render what we want them to.
True enough. But driving is not a natural way for men to travel. Dialing a number is not a natural way to contact one's family. But we do them all the time, because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Likewise with markup: the advantage of having real documents, not just print on a page, are huge. Note that web pages which are poorly marked-up tend to not be as searchable, nor as indexable, nor as readable, nor as useful.
Unless you are a programmer, or have otherwise gotten used to working with a markup language, it is just not natural way of thinking about content. WYSIWYG on the otherhand, is a more natural way (and thats why it is used so much).
WYSIWYG is not a `natural way of thinking about content,' because it doesn't consider content at all: it is focused on presentation from the beginning through to the end. Content is an afterthought--note the myriad PowerPoint presentations which look snappy but don't say anything.
WYSIWYG has become a way many people think about their documents, and that is why I suggest an editor which offers structural styles rather than presentational ones. That way users who have become accustomed to seeing their documents as they will print will be satisfied, but will also have the ability to apply various stylesheets to get varying effects. It would be WYSIWYG, yes, but done right: concerned about substance, not style.
One of the reasons I think that the person that creates the document should go through it with the program to get to this point. Yes, it would be a ball buster to write the application, and you would want the application to learn how its user formats things in order to fasilitate the process, but it could be done.
Sounds like AI to me. There's just no way, short of a human, to know what an author is getting at with a particular instance of mark-up. Is that emphasis? A citation? A chapter heading? A footnote? What's that rule doing there?
Sure, some heuristics would help with the easy stuff. Like with most AI problems, the first 20% isn't too bad; it's the remaining 80% which sucks. And the first 20% of that 80% is similar. AI is an unsolvable problem.
Even if IBM didn't know about the toxic conditions, it was IBM who put the employees there, and they should likely have to deal with the consequences.
The employees chose to work at the occupation. If IBM didn't know about the risks, and they didn't know about the risks, how is the corporation any more to blame than they are? Why should it be held at fault for something it had no knowledge of? That's like blaming a homeowner because, while away on vacation, his kids threw a party.
Note: I am an IBM employee and stockholder, but naturally my opinions are not those of the IBM Corporation, its officers &c. Nor would they be different if another corporation were concerned (even SCO: let the bastards be blamed for what is their fault, not what's not).
"Cause Stallman says proprietary software is bad? Oh man, I need help."
Why? That's a perfectly justified reason not to purchase it. If one believes that proprietary software is immoral, than why should one purchase it?
Me, I don't think it's necessarily immoral (or that free software is necessarily moral): I just believe that proprietary software is by its nature less good than free software. There are circumstances under which I will support it anyway. The real world is not one of boolean Good and Evil, but of unattainable Good and innumerable shades of grey.
Typographical design is a craft. It takes a real skill to do well. The vast majority of computer users don't have, and will never really want those skills.
That's the genius of LaTeX, and HTML, and any other markup language which attempts to separate content and presentation. Most men are (or can be: public education does its best to stamp out this trait) good enough at creating content; machines are good enough at presentation (a large amount of it can be done algorithmically: note TeX's text layout algorithms, which are brilliant). That's why structural markup is so useful.
The problem with WYSIWYG is that it lets someone who is, most likely, a moron in the domain (I don't exempt myself from that) hack about with the formatting side of things.
This application should go through the WYSIWYG document WITH the user and figure out what is what (by and large), while maintaining the current look of the document. The resulting file then gets imported to a LaTeX style program for correction, additional formatting, &c.
I disagree--by the time the document has been created, it's too late to add structure, save by back-breaking work (anyone who has had to take over maintenance of presentation-oriented web sites and tried to convert 'em to structure-oriented patterns can attest to this). A better idea would be to remove the ability for the novice user to access primitive presentation abilities: instead, give him structural commands and a library of styles. Take a document and see what the affect of various business-oriented stylesheets is. See which invite pattern works best for you.
I think the time might be right for this approach. People are becoming used to websites like evite.com which takes content from them, and lets them style it a certain number of ways. Perhaps they could see the advantage of doing this with their documents. Corporations, certainly, should leap at the chance to present a common brand image in all their documents--and change it at the drop of a hat, e.g. when a new logo is moved to.
Of course, if a user wanted to, he could certainly screw about with his own styles. This, BTW, is where I feel LaTeX falls down the worst. Let's be honest: TeX ain't the most fun language to write in, and that's what one must do when hacking LaTeX styles. A secretary should not be setting the brand image for her corporation; my mother doesn't need, nor especially want, pixel-level control of her documents. Replacing the Italics button with Emphasis, Citation, Abbreviation &c. might actually be welcomed by many users.
Of course--dvi (which is what's produced by LaTeX and TeX) isn't made for viewing onscreen, but for layout. It performs the same job as PostScript, but is rather measurably better in several ways. Compare it to PDF (which is just warmed-over PostScript), not to things like HTML. It's made to be printed on paper, not read on-screen.
But for things like screen reading, I'm with you: ASCII or HTML (which is getting better and better these days, what with CSS &c.).
The problem is that the domains are fundamentally different. The screen is resizable; the printed page is not. One can get away with a myriad cheap tricks to create a printed document which are computationally infeasible in interactive use. IMHO TeX is the best solution yet to generating attractive printed documents. DocBook is possibly the best for on-screen use (with a suitable XSL transformation into HTML, of course).
You're kidding, right? Compare the appearance of documents created with LaTeX to Word documents. LaTeX wins.
Amen, brother. My senior year in college I converted from Mac to Linux & from WYSIWYG to LaTeX, and I never looked back. Absolutely beautiful output with hardly any effort at all. I got all As that year, and while part was due to improved study habits (to write a paper, check every possible book out of the library, head to the local pub and don't leave until it's written), I credit most of it to the fact that the standard LaTeX article template is so pleasant to read.
WYSIWYG was really a step backward, unfortunately. Text should be written as content, then rendered into a visually appealing form automatically.
30 is the smallest integer which cannot be expressed as the product of 2 distinct prime factors.
8: 2 x 2 x 2, and is thus not a product of 2 distinct primes, nor can be expressed as such (4 x 2? Nope--4 ain't prime).
Anyway, 24 fps is good enough (visually indistinguishable from real motion--it's what's used in TVs, I believe), and is twice a dozen, and 12 has an absolutely incredible amount of special relationships (which is why real units are much better than base-10 French units).
Another great thing about M2 is that is keeps track of threads -- very handy for mailing lists, but also for those long back-and-forth discussions.
Gnus has been handling threads in email for about a decade now, I believe. Part of the advantage of reading email as though 'twere news. Mutt attempts to thread emails; I'm not certain how successful it is, as it's been years since I've used that excellent mail reader.
What we really need is for someone to code up JWZ's Intertwingle, which would make life truly great. Not to mention that it'd be a perfect job for elisp, which means it'd be perfect for emacs, which means it'd be perfect for gnus, which means that it'd be perfect.
Any legitimate use it implements is also in GPG, which doesn't have the problem that it provides better possibilities for doing illegal things.
Well, that's the most ignorant thing I've read today (haven't made it to the Dean website yet, though...). I like GPG; I use GPG; but I'm under no illusions about GPG. It offers highly-secure encryption--which means that it also offers criminals doing illegal things a very easy way to obscure what they are doing. What, exactly, would be the difference between execs trading GPG-signed-and-encrypted documents detailing their nefarious doings, and execs trading MSDRM docs? None from our point of view.
Well, save that GPG is standardised, free and Good, while MSDRM is idiosyncratic, enslaved and Evil.
I presume you don't count yourself among the morons. In fact, just like everybody else around here who complains about "stupid people" you must be a genius.
Well, of course. There's a bit of selection pressure: stupid people don't complain about the stupidity of those like them.
Besides, I'm complaining about those who are willfully stupid. Sure, there was a time when I didn't know about computers--but I learned. There was a time I didn't know about a lot of things--but I learned them. Life is not something easy: it requires work. To use computers effectively, to drive effectively, to speak effectively: these things take work.
And quite frankly, I haven't time for folks who will not admit they need to put in some work.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah--as far as I can tell almost everyone other than Ron Paul is a stark raving statist. And he probably has his own problems.
Nope, for three reasons. First, I am quite familiar with Godwin's, and knowledge thereof protects one from its invocation. Second, I didn't invoke the H-word or N-word (quite deliberately), choosing instead to use the NSDAP. Third, and most importantly, it doesn't apply when the object of discussion is one of the Godwin triggers--and since socialism is the discussion, mentioning the Bolsheviks, ChiComs and National Socialists makes perfect sense.
Since it has been demonstrated time and time again for centuries, yes I do.
This is simple brainwashing by the American propaganda machine and there is simply nothing that I can do.
No, it was education. Under a professor who was a socialist, of all things. I read the sources, I read his arguments and those of others, and my conclusion was that he was wrong, that sociliasm is evil and that the often-strange free market is the best of a bunch of bad solutions.
You, OTOH, are an elitist who would crush beneath your heel any who would prefer to drive a car (which is the optimal solution: it offers convenience, privace, speed and cheapness, none of which are offered by public transportation); who would prefer to live their own lives; who would prefer to indulge their own (perhaps stupid) preferences rather than yours. Like any socialist, when it gets right down to it, you're no different from Stalin, Mao, the NSDAP &c. Less bloody, but of the same ideological mold.
But not as happy as they would be with their cars (we know this, because the vast majority of people, fully acquainted with the advantages and disadvantages of both, prefer personal transport over public). That's the point: central planning results in less happiness than freedom.
Just look at American music and movies. The fact that they are made in a free market doesn't mean they are the best possible. Countries where movie and/or music production was controlled (planned) had higher quality products. Of course, let to themselves, people will consistently choose crap over quality product in this area, that's precisely why free market fails.
If it's what people want, by definition it's not crap. Perhaps, just maybe, it's the artistic films which no-one will pay money for which are the crap. I wouldn't argue that, actually: I'd simply note that tastes differ, and that it is best to let folks vote with their pocketbooks. You may dislike American cinema (I'm not enraptured with it, to be frank), but obviously people are happier with it than the alternatives available.
This reveals the essential elitism of the socialist position: I know what's best for you; you have no taste and need to be force-fed quality; trust me to make you a better man. No thanks--while I incline slightly to the elitist position at times, I haven't enough pride to say that my taste should rule the world.
What I meant is that BG's happiness is many times more important than the happiness of any other person.
Sure--but there are many times more other people than there are Gateses. It balances out. And, much as I personally find his software less than worthless, apparently a lot of people disagree. I've been outvoted. The market is a kind of democratic election where the will of the people is supreme: and their will is that Bill Gates have lots of dough and Bob Uhl not. Oh well:-)
Do you think that Bill's job was hundred thousand of times more important than creation of penicillin or invention of WWW? Than Ghandi's work? Than MLK's job?
I don't know how much money the funders and manufacturers have gotten for penicillin, but I imagine it's rather more than $1,000,000. As for the issue in general, life isn't necessarily fair. It's like the law of the jungle: a wolf might have a simply incredible mutation which would be great for the species, but it breaks its leg and dies. Whoops. Artificially trying to tinker with things just makes them worse. We know this is true of the environment; we know it is true of economics. Besides, had Gandhi not been assassinated, he would have ended up wielding more power than Bill Gates. I'm not so certain about King, but who knows?
Forgot to mention: they managed to kill some 40 million while so doing. I'll take freedom any day.
A finding in the other direction could have had very bad implications for `You Might Like...' features, pop-up blockers and end-user control in general.
As for the morons who install adware by mistake: they're morons. I have as little sympathy for them as I do the idiots who climb into bear cages at the zoo.
That's exactly the sort of thing central planners do--and that's exactly why they fail. We love our cars (most of us; the exceptions are just so much statistical noise). The central planner will spend a shitload of money on a little-used system. Gosh, that was efficient.
That means that happiness of Bill Gates is considered first and foremost priority in the world.
NNope--as wealthy as he and Warren Buffet are, their net worths are a mere drop in an enormous economic bucket. The real powerhouse is the middle class, which has a decent amount of money and decent numbers. I daresay that one could define middle class by the intersection of income and population curves. The free market means that what most folks want, they get. This doesn't guarantee the best solution: note the number of McDonald's restaurants and Protestant churches in the world. But it is fair.
And what's so wrong with someone's value being approximate to his wealth? After all, one only gains wealth by providing service to other folks: if one weren't doing a decent job, they'd not be paying.
Consider Russia, where free market brought misery to the majority of the population after the centrally planned economy was destroyed.
That's because Russia's market wasn't free. The state industries were auctioned off to about a dozen plutocrats. A repressive tax regime remained in place. Property rights and the rule of law were not enforced. Russia is a text-book example of how not to be free (always has been, really).
would rather wait in line to get my milk than have 45% of the people in the country live below the official poverty line...
Fine--that means you'd rather be a slave than a free man. Slavery has its attractions: guaranteed room & board. The free man can startve--but he can also excel. Socialism is, quite simply, mass slavery. No thanks.
It doesn't work that way. There are quite clear rules laying down who is and isn't a valid combatant, agreed to by international treaty; we aren't making them up as we go along. The rules of war exist in order to make a fundamentally terrible exercise (wholesale murder) somewhat less so. In this case, the rules for legitimate combat serve to protect civilian populations from reprisals, and to give both military sides a fair chance.
We're not discussing about Iraq--we're discussing the Amnesty International report on the US. RTFA.
So what? If everyone else were leaping off a bridge, would you follow? Execution is a perfectly reasonable response to certain crimes. From the Texas Death Row Homepage:
Is it enlightened to let those who commit the above crimes live? Multiple murderers, murder-rapists, child murderers, hit men &c.?
As opposed to being held accountable by a politised court which will charge innocents for the `crime' of being Americans? See the Belgian courts which have indicted Rumsfeld et al. Not to mention that the traditional safeguards of Anglo-American jurisprudence would be completely lacking. No sane state would wish to have its citizens be susceptible to such an open-ended, unfair and untrustworthy court.
Let's see, famous leftists of the twentieth century:
Leftism is dedicated to the annihilation of the individual and of individual freedom in favour of collectivism. It's an abhorrent philosophy wholly opposed to liberty. Yes, leftist = bad.
Study economics. Planned economies are fundamentally worse than free ones. Think about it: how can a central planner know what the next big fad is going to be? Who knows best what you want: you or him? Multiply that out by 300 million souls...
The free market is the best possible mechanism for the allocation of scarce resources (which is all an economy really is). Its flexibility and fairness are unsurpassed. Central planning is the key to shortages, rationing, misery and death.
Sure, Allende wanted a democratic Chile: one where the tyranny of the majority was in full force. Steal from the rich, give to the poor, until everyone's poor and miserable. Not that Pinochet was any good, either.
It's pretty simple, really: eliminate all presentation-oriented buttons from the word processor toolbar and menus. So now there is no Italic, no Bold, no left-align, no margin-setting--nothing. Sounds pretty painful, like a text editor (painful to the ordinary user, anyway; that's how I like my editor...).
Now, add in structure-oriented buttons, menu items &c. E.g.: New Chapter; Title; New Section; Emphasis; Citation. The word processor can infer a new para at carriage returns, so there's no need for that most noisome of markup items:-) There would, of course, be some sort of style editor as well--that would have options like italic &c.
Let's say the user wishes to write a letter. He selects New Document..., then the Letter template (of course, he can create his own templates or modify the standard ones: a template is a group of predefined styles and mandatory items). He's prompted to enter the addressee, a greeting and a salutation, then is dropped to the ordinary text-editing display. He types along in a document which has been pre-filled with the aforementioned items. He wishes to quote Sally, so he types what she said, selects it and clicks the Quote button. Perhaps the Quote is a single sentence--then the word processor just surrounds it with nice smart quotes. Maybe it's a few lines--then the wp formats it as a blockquote.
Now he's typing that he feels `really happy': he selects really and hits the Emphasis button. Then he types `joie de vie,' selects it and hits the Foreign button (or menu item, or what-have-you).
Perhaps he doesn't like the margins the letter template comes with--he opens up the style editor and changes 'em. Perhaps he has a colour printer and would rather emphasise words in blue--he opens up the style editor and alters the Emphasis style. Or maybe he prefers underlines (ugh), or grey, or...
Because the document is marked up, if it has sections, he can collapse them and get an outline view. Because it uses styles, he can change the fonts used throughout the document with a single edit, rather than one contiguous bit of text at a time. If he's a real geek, he could even use XML tools or elisp to hack the data file, depending on the format.
Meanwhile, the indexing engine on his 'puter is able to extract more useful information about the document. When the user searches for `articles on string theory,' he's much more likely to get something using the article template with 'string theory' in the title, rather than an email mentioning `articles of clothing,' `string cheese,' and `that's a dumb theory.'
Boo-hoo: we don't treat illegal combatants as prisoners of war; we had a few incidents of police brutality (which will be punished); we are so backwards as to execute murderers; we won't dilute our sovereignty by being a party to the Internation Criminal Court (motto: we bring to justice what the United Nations has brought to legislation). Amnesty International has deviated terribly from its original fine purpose (William F. Buckley used to be on its board, I believe--he was at least a member). Their leftist stance has wounded them greatly.
You play about adjusting fonts when handwriting? You use italic? Typing ASCII is much closer to handwriting than using a wordprocessor, closer too than using mark-up. But, like handwriting, text-based markup has a continuity and a self-similarity to it which makes it pleasant to edit.
We're discussing two types of WYSIWYG: presentation-oriented tomfoolery, which leads only to contentless emptiness; and (the literal meaning) What You See is What You Get. Which is why I suggest WYSIWYG Done Right: yes, you see in front of you the document as it will print--but you will not be marking it up with presentational styles, but with structurual styles. You'll select Chapter Heading, not Font X, size y, weight z, underline, left-align. You'll select emphasis, not italics. All word-processed documents are marked up: currently it's presentation markup, not structural.
The problem is that current WYSIWYG editors are similar to troff (which is much more presentation-minded than structurally-oriented). They need to advance in technology.
This is one of the advantages of visible markup, BTW. I can use emacs to edit troff, or LaTeX, or XML. But a GUI WYSIWYG editor can only do the one thing it was designed to do. But that's another discussion--and probably to the less-skilled, a less-versatile tool is more friendly (witness that some still use pico when emacs or even vi is available). It's not a bad thing, just different.
Sounds terribly time-consuming to me, without much immediate pay-off for the end-user. OTOH, a structure-oriented word processor would be no less easy to use than a presentation-oriented one, and the payoff would be the same.
Hey, Casino Royale had the carpet-beater in the background of the tied-to-a-chair scene!
Now there's a movie which could have been much funnier than it was:-(
True enough. But driving is not a natural way for men to travel. Dialing a number is not a natural way to contact one's family. But we do them all the time, because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Likewise with markup: the advantage of having real documents, not just print on a page, are huge. Note that web pages which are poorly marked-up tend to not be as searchable, nor as indexable, nor as readable, nor as useful.
Unless you are a programmer, or have otherwise gotten used to working with a markup language, it is just not natural way of thinking about content. WYSIWYG on the otherhand, is a more natural way (and thats why it is used so much).
WYSIWYG is not a `natural way of thinking about content,' because it doesn't consider content at all: it is focused on presentation from the beginning through to the end. Content is an afterthought--note the myriad PowerPoint presentations which look snappy but don't say anything.
WYSIWYG has become a way many people think about their documents, and that is why I suggest an editor which offers structural styles rather than presentational ones. That way users who have become accustomed to seeing their documents as they will print will be satisfied, but will also have the ability to apply various stylesheets to get varying effects. It would be WYSIWYG, yes, but done right: concerned about substance, not style.
One of the reasons I think that the person that creates the document should go through it with the program to get to this point. Yes, it would be a ball buster to write the application, and you would want the application to learn how its user formats things in order to fasilitate the process, but it could be done.
Sounds like AI to me. There's just no way, short of a human, to know what an author is getting at with a particular instance of mark-up. Is that emphasis? A citation? A chapter heading? A footnote? What's that rule doing there?
Sure, some heuristics would help with the easy stuff. Like with most AI problems, the first 20% isn't too bad; it's the remaining 80% which sucks. And the first 20% of that 80% is similar. AI is an unsolvable problem.
The employees chose to work at the occupation. If IBM didn't know about the risks, and they didn't know about the risks, how is the corporation any more to blame than they are? Why should it be held at fault for something it had no knowledge of? That's like blaming a homeowner because, while away on vacation, his kids threw a party.
Note: I am an IBM employee and stockholder, but naturally my opinions are not those of the IBM Corporation, its officers &c. Nor would they be different if another corporation were concerned (even SCO: let the bastards be blamed for what is their fault, not what's not).
*long pause*
"Cause Stallman says proprietary software is bad? Oh man, I need help."
Why? That's a perfectly justified reason not to purchase it. If one believes that proprietary software is immoral, than why should one purchase it?
Me, I don't think it's necessarily immoral (or that free software is necessarily moral): I just believe that proprietary software is by its nature less good than free software. There are circumstances under which I will support it anyway. The real world is not one of boolean Good and Evil, but of unattainable Good and innumerable shades of grey.
That's the genius of LaTeX, and HTML, and any other markup language which attempts to separate content and presentation. Most men are (or can be: public education does its best to stamp out this trait) good enough at creating content; machines are good enough at presentation (a large amount of it can be done algorithmically: note TeX's text layout algorithms, which are brilliant). That's why structural markup is so useful.
The problem with WYSIWYG is that it lets someone who is, most likely, a moron in the domain (I don't exempt myself from that) hack about with the formatting side of things.
This application should go through the WYSIWYG document WITH the user and figure out what is what (by and large), while maintaining the current look of the document. The resulting file then gets imported to a LaTeX style program for correction, additional formatting, &c.
I disagree--by the time the document has been created, it's too late to add structure, save by back-breaking work (anyone who has had to take over maintenance of presentation-oriented web sites and tried to convert 'em to structure-oriented patterns can attest to this). A better idea would be to remove the ability for the novice user to access primitive presentation abilities: instead, give him structural commands and a library of styles. Take a document and see what the affect of various business-oriented stylesheets is. See which invite pattern works best for you.
I think the time might be right for this approach. People are becoming used to websites like evite.com which takes content from them, and lets them style it a certain number of ways. Perhaps they could see the advantage of doing this with their documents. Corporations, certainly, should leap at the chance to present a common brand image in all their documents--and change it at the drop of a hat, e.g. when a new logo is moved to.
Of course, if a user wanted to, he could certainly screw about with his own styles. This, BTW, is where I feel LaTeX falls down the worst. Let's be honest: TeX ain't the most fun language to write in, and that's what one must do when hacking LaTeX styles. A secretary should not be setting the brand image for her corporation; my mother doesn't need, nor especially want, pixel-level control of her documents. Replacing the Italics button with Emphasis, Citation, Abbreviation &c. might actually be welcomed by many users.
But for things like screen reading, I'm with you: ASCII or HTML (which is getting better and better these days, what with CSS &c.).
The problem is that the domains are fundamentally different. The screen is resizable; the printed page is not. One can get away with a myriad cheap tricks to create a printed document which are computationally infeasible in interactive use. IMHO TeX is the best solution yet to generating attractive printed documents. DocBook is possibly the best for on-screen use (with a suitable XSL transformation into HTML, of course).
German: Stop talking about the war!
Basil: well, you started it!
German: We did not!
Basil: Yes you did, you invaded France!
Amen, brother. My senior year in college I converted from Mac to Linux & from WYSIWYG to LaTeX, and I never looked back. Absolutely beautiful output with hardly any effort at all. I got all As that year, and while part was due to improved study habits (to write a paper, check every possible book out of the library, head to the local pub and don't leave until it's written), I credit most of it to the fact that the standard LaTeX article template is so pleasant to read.
WYSIWYG was really a step backward, unfortunately. Text should be written as content, then rendered into a visually appealing form automatically.
8: 2 x 2 x 2, and is thus not a product of 2 distinct primes, nor can be expressed as such (4 x 2? Nope--4 ain't prime).
Anyway, 24 fps is good enough (visually indistinguishable from real motion--it's what's used in TVs, I believe), and is twice a dozen, and 12 has an absolutely incredible amount of special relationships (which is why real units are much better than base-10 French units).
Gnus has been handling threads in email for about a decade now, I believe. Part of the advantage of reading email as though 'twere news. Mutt attempts to thread emails; I'm not certain how successful it is, as it's been years since I've used that excellent mail reader.
What we really need is for someone to code up JWZ's Intertwingle, which would make life truly great. Not to mention that it'd be a perfect job for elisp, which means it'd be perfect for emacs, which means it'd be perfect for gnus, which means that it'd be perfect.
Well, that's the most ignorant thing I've read today (haven't made it to the Dean website yet, though...). I like GPG; I use GPG; but I'm under no illusions about GPG. It offers highly-secure encryption--which means that it also offers criminals doing illegal things a very easy way to obscure what they are doing. What, exactly, would be the difference between execs trading GPG-signed-and-encrypted documents detailing their nefarious doings, and execs trading MSDRM docs? None from our point of view.
Well, save that GPG is standardised, free and Good, while MSDRM is idiosyncratic, enslaved and Evil.
Well, of course. There's a bit of selection pressure: stupid people don't complain about the stupidity of those like them.
Besides, I'm complaining about those who are willfully stupid. Sure, there was a time when I didn't know about computers--but I learned. There was a time I didn't know about a lot of things--but I learned them. Life is not something easy: it requires work. To use computers effectively, to drive effectively, to speak effectively: these things take work.
And quite frankly, I haven't time for folks who will not admit they need to put in some work.