That was great. Someone mod parent "Funny", right now!
Seriously, though. Isn't it a bit of a stretch to claim that "a majority of Americans" voted for Bush when he won with, what, 51% of the vote? Maybe 52%? And now that his approval ratings are sub-Clinton, that statement is even more disingenuous than ever.
Claiming that he has been "forthright and honest" is even more of a stretch. How many justifications have we heard for the Iraq invasion? How many of them have panned out to be even slightly true? It's pretty common knowledge at this point that we haven't found a single WMD since invading Iraq. It could be that we were spreading democracy, but there's good reason at this point to believe that this "democracy" won't be extended to women.
(Let me get this part out of the way: I am a Christian, I believe in the glory of God, and I accept the role of God as Creator and Maintainer of the Universe; but just because I believe that doesn't mean I have to buy in to some 5,000 year old Hebraic myth of Creation, which was probably borrowed from their Babylonian contemporaries anyway. Genesis is a MYTH, an attempt to understand our role in Creation and why there is a disconnect between God and humanity. It's not meant to be understood literally; if you take it literally, you miss out on its deeper meaning.)
The most obvious problem with ID -- and I'm sure that this has been pointed out before -- is that there is no one single version of ID out there, just as there is more than one Creation Myth out there. If Kansas and other bastions of ignorance in our nation want to give "equal time" to alternatives, they really ought to be teaching not just Biblical mythology but also the idea that Atlas has the Earth on his shoulders, that we live on a disc help up by four elephants on the back of a giant turtle, and so on. And, of course, Pastafarianism.
I understand why some Christians believe that the theory of evolution might be a threat to their worldview; but, really, it doesn't. God wants us to give up our sins, not our brains.
And, to be fair, just as I did for NN4 years ago. Just a memory of Navigator's idea of HTML and CSS parsing still makes me shiver. Ew. IE4 felt like a blessing in comparison and IE4 sucks like hell.
Heh. Indeed. And how well I remember the Hell that was NS 6. The only time when I actively recommended IE over a Netscape-based browser. Every time I did, I had to take a shower.
Don't develop for any browser, develop according to the standards. I've been doing this for 7 years.
We do our best. While each of our developers uses their own web development tool, we insist that each developer employ a validation tool set to validate according to XHTML 1.1. Some older browsers are left out in the cold, of course, which is why we decided on the most recent browser for the user's platform: IE6 on Win32, Safari on Mac, and Firefox on IE and Linux. Unfortunately, as you know, certain browsers do not implement the standards properly, so testing is still required.
Of course, we can't test for everything; I can't tell you the number of times some toolbar or plugin has broken our site's functionality for some user. We spent three days a couple of weeks ago trying to figure out why one user couldn't use the site properly, and finally figured out that it was a plugin that Earthlink had installed in IE that was causing the problems.
How are other web developers planning on dealing with the issue of testing for multiple browsers? In my office, we do our best to make sure our site and software is compatible with the most current browser on a user's platform, but most of our users have Windows 98 or Windows 2000, not XP (which we have in our office). I've never been able to have multiple versions of IE on one computer; does anyone know if that will change with IE7?
We already recommend Firefox to our customers as a superior alternative to IE. Our site is developed and tested primarily on Firefox, then IE for backwards compatibility. Even so, though, this issue has me concerned.
Okay, I put my sarcasm tags between < and > tags and turned off HTML. Unfortunately, this meant that my sarcasm tags got lost.
I do NOT believe the nonsense I mentioned above! I do NOT buy into a 5,000 year old Hebrew myth of creation that was lifted from the Babylonians in the first place!
Gah. I didn't meant o flamebait. I meant to make a snide, ironic remark about the foolishness of the right-wing Christian nuts who seem to be worming their way into the American education system.
That's okay, though, because here in Jesus-land, we know that the only true science is the science that comes out of the Bible! So, while all of those other countries are polluting the minds of their children with ideas of the Big Bang and Evilutionism, we here know that we're actually pulling ahead!
Sigh. The scary thing is that there are people in the US who actually believe that.
From TFA: "Democrats were incensed after Republican leaders blocked consideration of an amendment that would have blocked the library searches. The House approved identical language last month in a test vote."
How can the Republican party pull this kind of shit and still claim that they stand for democracy? I honestly feel sorry for my Republican friends who have to deal daily with the knowledge that their party is under the control of bullies and bastards like these.
"No, I'm not, as long as I take these injections every ten minutes." *poke* "GYAARGHH!!! Woo hoo, I love boobies!"
Seriously, though. I only suffer from mild depression, so I'm certainly not going to be looking into getting a vagus nerve stimulator, but I know people who are unable to function at all due to their messed up neurochemistries, and whose depression has resisted all treatments, medical and therapeutic. This is excellent news for those people.
I can't help but wonder, though, what future developments we might see that are similar to this one. The "Smithers Injection" -- either chemical or neuroelectrical -- is certainly not likely to ever come to pass (much to the dismay of the American Taliban), but this certainly opens new worlds of psychiatric interventions.
Duh! What good is content if someone isn't making a profit off of its delivery? What, did you want to learn or be entertained? Don't be ridiculous. The only point of generating any content at all -- or delivering pre-made content -- is to get money out of you. Since someone, somewhere, stands to lose money off of delivering content to Linux, the best thing to do is to lock Linux out of being able to deliver that content. Hopefully, Linux -- and open source in general -- will be outlawed in the US soon, so that no information exchange can happen without someone profiting from it.
Welcome to 21st century America, where the Ownership Society Owns You!
(Me, I'm hoping to get the hell out of here while the getting's still possible.)
Don't be ridiculous. If that happens, then the record companies will only make billions instead of trillions of dollars! For God's sake, have some sympathy, man!
I swear. Kids these days have no sympathy for the starving record producers. And neither do the artists. Man, if there was only a way to produce content without content producers...
I'm in favor of leaving the LaGrange points out of the control of any government body, because I would hate to see either the militarization or commercialization of space. Unfortunately, human beings are still primitive territorial animals, so such scrabbling is inevitable.
So, if any of the nations must dominate the LaGrange points, I guess I'd prefer to see the US there. Sure, we'll both militarize AND overcommercialize them, probably worse than anyone else, but at least we're pretty generous in letting facilities be used for research purposes as well.
Hm. When I was a library student, I discovered that the issue of open document formats was an extremely important one; it wasn't so much because we needed people to be able to open documents in one program or another, but because we wanted people to be able to open documents, period. What happens when some documents written today can no longer be opened because (a) the vendor who created the format no longer exists; or (b) the vendor chooses not to support that format anymore. I've seen (a) happen plenty of times (used to work in a company where we had to spend a lot of time converting databases from ancient proprietary formats to something usable by modern databases). And documents I wrote in MS-Word 2 can't be opened properly by MS-Word 2003. And I have no software that can open the documents I wrote in WordPerfect 6 (though OOo 2 should be able to).
If all documents are created in OASIS format or some other open standard, then companies will have to find new ways to compete with each other; perhaps some will have better interfaces than others, or so on. I'm not concerned about that; when the market opens one door, a new niche for enterprise is opened.
I wonder what words they'll ban in Vietnam? Will they ban "freedom" and "democracy" like they did in China? Or will they add "human rights" to that list as well?
When I use the word "un-American" I am almost always trying to be ironic. In this case, my main goal was just to point out the blatant hypocrisy which the current American administration is engendering in our society.
I don't trust anyone whose goal is the "spreading of democracy" or "making the world safe for American values" or similar nonsense. I'm all for defending human rights throughout the world, and I agree that working through OTAN and OAS and other organizations is the way to do this. I'm not in favor of unilateral action by any organization. And trust me, I am deeply ashamed of our country's recent actions throughout the world.
I was also using "un-American" in a very idealistic sense. As a nation, the US supposedly stands for the ideals and virtues of liberty, justice, and human rights throughout the world. Very high ideals, indeed. Any actions which are in opposition to these ideals I consider "un-American" because they undermine those ideals. In this sense, I believe that George W. Bush and the current administration are just as un-American. I do recognize, though, that there is baggage attached to the phrase; but, I figure, if Bush & Co. can play Orwellian games with the language ("No Child Left Behind", for example, or "Clear Skies Initiative") then I can try to do so as well.
I agree that while corporations should be held accountable for their actions, they simply aren't; and it seems that their owners just don't feel any need to adhere to any social guidelines. It's a pity, and I'm sure that there are people who somehow believe that this is a virtue, but there it is.
That's an awfully un-American action for such a large American company. If we're so committed to spreading democracy throughout the world, then it seems that every individual and corporation ought to act like we really do believe in the values that we profess. Otherwise, they're just words, and we really do prove who we are by our deeds.
And because I'm a left-wing radical like Justice Rehnquist, I can't help but wonder how long before the same thing happens here?
I got lucky in that I have a boss who's as much a Linux/Open Source advocate as I am. I was hired on to migrate our department's distance learning system from a Windows/Cold Fusion platform to a Linux/PHP platform. What's cooler is that I pretty much have free reign to do my job in any way I want, as long as the job gets done and I keep in contact with my boss to let him know what I'm doing.
What I wish I had known before signing on, though, was that no one at this University, at any level (except the very highest, of course) has gotten a salary increase in at least four years; and I am not exaggerating. People are getting the same amount of money that they were four years ago. Not a single additional dime has been given to anyone; you could be doing the best job possible and saving your department a billion dollars a year, and you'd get the same raise as the lump who sits behind the desk and picks his nose all day long: which is to say, zero. And thanks to our state's budgeting woes and the current governor's budget proposals, it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon.
At least we get more holidays per year than people in the private sector. And this year we got two additional paid days off at Christmas to make up for the miserable salary increase issue.
Slashdot Mirror
BWAH HA HA HAAA!!!
That was great. Someone mod parent "Funny", right now!
Seriously, though. Isn't it a bit of a stretch to claim that "a majority of Americans" voted for Bush when he won with, what, 51% of the vote? Maybe 52%? And now that his approval ratings are sub-Clinton, that statement is even more disingenuous than ever.
Claiming that he has been "forthright and honest" is even more of a stretch. How many justifications have we heard for the Iraq invasion? How many of them have panned out to be even slightly true? It's pretty common knowledge at this point that we haven't found a single WMD since invading Iraq. It could be that we were spreading democracy, but there's good reason at this point to believe that this "democracy" won't be extended to women.
How American is that?
(Let me get this part out of the way: I am a Christian, I believe in the glory of God, and I accept the role of God as Creator and Maintainer of the Universe; but just because I believe that doesn't mean I have to buy in to some 5,000 year old Hebraic myth of Creation, which was probably borrowed from their Babylonian contemporaries anyway. Genesis is a MYTH, an attempt to understand our role in Creation and why there is a disconnect between God and humanity. It's not meant to be understood literally; if you take it literally, you miss out on its deeper meaning.)
The most obvious problem with ID -- and I'm sure that this has been pointed out before -- is that there is no one single version of ID out there, just as there is more than one Creation Myth out there. If Kansas and other bastions of ignorance in our nation want to give "equal time" to alternatives, they really ought to be teaching not just Biblical mythology but also the idea that Atlas has the Earth on his shoulders, that we live on a disc help up by four elephants on the back of a giant turtle, and so on. And, of course, Pastafarianism.
I understand why some Christians believe that the theory of evolution might be a threat to their worldview; but, really, it doesn't. God wants us to give up our sins, not our brains.
I say we call it Yuggoth. No reason. Just, uh, because. Yeah.
And, to be fair, just as I did for NN4 years ago. Just a memory of Navigator's idea of HTML and CSS parsing still makes me shiver. Ew. IE4 felt like a blessing in comparison and IE4 sucks like hell.
Heh. Indeed. And how well I remember the Hell that was NS 6. The only time when I actively recommended IE over a Netscape-based browser. Every time I did, I had to take a shower.
Don't develop for any browser, develop according to the standards. I've been doing this for 7 years.
We do our best. While each of our developers uses their own web development tool, we insist that each developer employ a validation tool set to validate according to XHTML 1.1. Some older browsers are left out in the cold, of course, which is why we decided on the most recent browser for the user's platform: IE6 on Win32, Safari on Mac, and Firefox on IE and Linux. Unfortunately, as you know, certain browsers do not implement the standards properly, so testing is still required.
Of course, we can't test for everything; I can't tell you the number of times some toolbar or plugin has broken our site's functionality for some user. We spent three days a couple of weeks ago trying to figure out why one user couldn't use the site properly, and finally figured out that it was a plugin that Earthlink had installed in IE that was causing the problems.
Kudos for recommending Firefox to your customers.
Thanks. We just want the best for our customers.
How are other web developers planning on dealing with the issue of testing for multiple browsers? In my office, we do our best to make sure our site and software is compatible with the most current browser on a user's platform, but most of our users have Windows 98 or Windows 2000, not XP (which we have in our office). I've never been able to have multiple versions of IE on one computer; does anyone know if that will change with IE7?
We already recommend Firefox to our customers as a superior alternative to IE. Our site is developed and tested primarily on Firefox, then IE for backwards compatibility. Even so, though, this issue has me concerned.
Okay, I put my sarcasm tags between < and > tags and turned off HTML. Unfortunately, this meant that my sarcasm tags got lost.
I do NOT believe the nonsense I mentioned above! I do NOT buy into a 5,000 year old Hebrew myth of creation that was lifted from the Babylonians in the first place!
Gah. I didn't meant o flamebait. I meant to make a snide, ironic remark about the foolishness of the right-wing Christian nuts who seem to be worming their way into the American education system.
*crawling back in my hole now*
That's okay, though, because here in Jesus-land, we know that the only true science is the science that comes out of the Bible! So, while all of those other countries are polluting the minds of their children with ideas of the Big Bang and Evilutionism, we here know that we're actually pulling ahead!
Sigh. The scary thing is that there are people in the US who actually believe that.
From TFA: "Democrats were incensed after Republican leaders blocked consideration of an amendment that would have blocked the library searches. The House approved identical language last month in a test vote."
How can the Republican party pull this kind of shit and still claim that they stand for democracy? I honestly feel sorry for my Republican friends who have to deal daily with the knowledge that their party is under the control of bullies and bastards like these.
Every time the government uses an excuse like this to restrict the freedom of Americans...
...the terrorists win just a little bit more.
Every time an American citizen is held indefinitely by the courts without trial or proof of guilt...
Every time a hate crime is committed against a Moslem...
Every time the government suspends its laws in the name of the War on Terror...
(Yeah, I know it'll be modded "redundant." It's just something that's been on my mind for awhile, and now seemed like a good time to say it.)
The "Smithers Injection".
"Mr. Smithers? But I thought you were gay!"
"No, I'm not, as long as I take these injections every ten minutes." *poke* "GYAARGHH!!! Woo hoo, I love boobies!"
Seriously, though. I only suffer from mild depression, so I'm certainly not going to be looking into getting a vagus nerve stimulator, but I know people who are unable to function at all due to their messed up neurochemistries, and whose depression has resisted all treatments, medical and therapeutic. This is excellent news for those people.
I can't help but wonder, though, what future developments we might see that are similar to this one. The "Smithers Injection" -- either chemical or neuroelectrical -- is certainly not likely to ever come to pass (much to the dismay of the American Taliban), but this certainly opens new worlds of psychiatric interventions.
Wow. I'm impressed by how badly you missed my point.
*shrug* Whatever. I'll know better next time to better indicate that I'm being sarcastic, and actually believe the opposite of what I posted.
Dammit. I guess I should have been a lot more blatant with my SARCASM tags. Jesus Christ.
Duh! What good is content if someone isn't making a profit off of its delivery? What, did you want to learn or be entertained? Don't be ridiculous. The only point of generating any content at all -- or delivering pre-made content -- is to get money out of you. Since someone, somewhere, stands to lose money off of delivering content to Linux, the best thing to do is to lock Linux out of being able to deliver that content. Hopefully, Linux -- and open source in general -- will be outlawed in the US soon, so that no information exchange can happen without someone profiting from it.
Welcome to 21st century America, where the Ownership Society Owns You!
(Me, I'm hoping to get the hell out of here while the getting's still possible.)
I'm sure a number of distributions would be more than happy to hop on board. Be sure to call Caldera!
Don't be ridiculous. If that happens, then the record companies will only make billions instead of trillions of dollars! For God's sake, have some sympathy, man!
I swear. Kids these days have no sympathy for the starving record producers. And neither do the artists. Man, if there was only a way to produce content without content producers...
I'm in favor of leaving the LaGrange points out of the control of any government body, because I would hate to see either the militarization or commercialization of space. Unfortunately, human beings are still primitive territorial animals, so such scrabbling is inevitable. So, if any of the nations must dominate the LaGrange points, I guess I'd prefer to see the US there. Sure, we'll both militarize AND overcommercialize them, probably worse than anyone else, but at least we're pretty generous in letting facilities be used for research purposes as well.
Hm. When I was a library student, I discovered that the issue of open document formats was an extremely important one; it wasn't so much because we needed people to be able to open documents in one program or another, but because we wanted people to be able to open documents, period. What happens when some documents written today can no longer be opened because (a) the vendor who created the format no longer exists; or (b) the vendor chooses not to support that format anymore. I've seen (a) happen plenty of times (used to work in a company where we had to spend a lot of time converting databases from ancient proprietary formats to something usable by modern databases). And documents I wrote in MS-Word 2 can't be opened properly by MS-Word 2003. And I have no software that can open the documents I wrote in WordPerfect 6 (though OOo 2 should be able to).
If all documents are created in OASIS format or some other open standard, then companies will have to find new ways to compete with each other; perhaps some will have better interfaces than others, or so on. I'm not concerned about that; when the market opens one door, a new niche for enterprise is opened.
I wonder what words they'll ban in Vietnam? Will they ban "freedom" and "democracy" like they did in China? Or will they add "human rights" to that list as well?
When I use the word "un-American" I am almost always trying to be ironic. In this case, my main goal was just to point out the blatant hypocrisy which the current American administration is engendering in our society.
I don't trust anyone whose goal is the "spreading of democracy" or "making the world safe for American values" or similar nonsense. I'm all for defending human rights throughout the world, and I agree that working through OTAN and OAS and other organizations is the way to do this. I'm not in favor of unilateral action by any organization. And trust me, I am deeply ashamed of our country's recent actions throughout the world.
I was also using "un-American" in a very idealistic sense. As a nation, the US supposedly stands for the ideals and virtues of liberty, justice, and human rights throughout the world. Very high ideals, indeed. Any actions which are in opposition to these ideals I consider "un-American" because they undermine those ideals. In this sense, I believe that George W. Bush and the current administration are just as un-American. I do recognize, though, that there is baggage attached to the phrase; but, I figure, if Bush & Co. can play Orwellian games with the language ("No Child Left Behind", for example, or "Clear Skies Initiative") then I can try to do so as well.
Yeah, I figured someone would think Microsoft's action was A Good Thing.
I agree that while corporations should be held accountable for their actions, they simply aren't; and it seems that their owners just don't feel any need to adhere to any social guidelines. It's a pity, and I'm sure that there are people who somehow believe that this is a virtue, but there it is.
That's an awfully un-American action for such a large American company. If we're so committed to spreading democracy throughout the world, then it seems that every individual and corporation ought to act like we really do believe in the values that we profess. Otherwise, they're just words, and we really do prove who we are by our deeds.
And because I'm a left-wing radical like Justice Rehnquist, I can't help but wonder how long before the same thing happens here?
I got lucky in that I have a boss who's as much a Linux/Open Source advocate as I am. I was hired on to migrate our department's distance learning system from a Windows/Cold Fusion platform to a Linux/PHP platform. What's cooler is that I pretty much have free reign to do my job in any way I want, as long as the job gets done and I keep in contact with my boss to let him know what I'm doing.
What I wish I had known before signing on, though, was that no one at this University, at any level (except the very highest, of course) has gotten a salary increase in at least four years; and I am not exaggerating. People are getting the same amount of money that they were four years ago. Not a single additional dime has been given to anyone; you could be doing the best job possible and saving your department a billion dollars a year, and you'd get the same raise as the lump who sits behind the desk and picks his nose all day long: which is to say, zero. And thanks to our state's budgeting woes and the current governor's budget proposals, it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon.
At least we get more holidays per year than people in the private sector. And this year we got two additional paid days off at Christmas to make up for the miserable salary increase issue.
...or do things suck just a little bit more every day?