... the Constitution is only for rich white folks?
Well, I've read a number of histories that explained that before the 20th century, the US Constitution really only protected land-owning white males. Part of the historic evidence is from voter records. There seems to be quite a lot of evidence that non-citizens routinely voted - if they were male and owned land. This effectively prevented most immigrants from voting, except for the tiny minority that were rich enough when they arrived to buy property. It generally excluded females, because if when they married, their property became their husband's property, and unmarried women very rarely had the funds to buy property. They could inherit property, but in that case they were generally wealthy enough to also attract a husband, who became the landowner. And, of course, the means by which property ownership were denied to non-whites is rather well known (and not totally extinct).
Some historians argue that the current American obsession with citizenship arose in the early 1900s, along with the push to allow all adults to vote. Before that, the discrimination was based on race and sex, as well as whether one was wealthy enough to own land. And it should be noted that the American legal system rarely recognized that the "savage Indians" owned the land that they lived on. That land was public property, often listed as uninhabited in public records, meaning that it was available to people who were able to settle it and defend it. Even now, it's generally considered that Reservation land is owned by the "tribe", which is legally an incorporated governmental body. If a tribe has registered some of that land as private property, this may or may not be recognized by non-tribal courts. Before the 1900s, this would have excluded Indians from voting outside the reservation, even if they were male and owned (reservation) land. But a white male with a property deed could vote anywhere, regardless of citizenship.
The whole story is a lot more complicated than most people realize. And it's not unique to America; similar complexities exist in much of the rest of the world.
Hey, you must have been reading George Bush's biography! It seems that the only profitable parts of his "business" experience consisted of buddy-buddy dealings with government agencies to channel tax money into support of his businesses. If you're not familiar with the story, look into his dealings with the Texas Rangers, and how they became profitable, at least for Dubya and a few friends, who managed to pocket most of the public subsidies for things like their new stadium.
But this isn't exactly On Topic...
Or maybe it is. The OLPC isn't exactly something decided on by its "consumers", i.e., the kids. Like schooling in general, it's accepted or rejected by school administrators and local government burequcrats, and paid for from a mixture of taxes and charitable contributions. The kids, as always, accept the educational tools that are handed to them. So market arguments are fundamentally irrelevant, as there is no "market" at all. Not that this will deter the Adam Smith fans here.;-)
1. Do something. 2. Do something else. 3. "and then some magic happens" 4. Profit!
Hey, that's just a slight rephrasing of Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market" theory. We have a lot of people here for whom that is a primary religious belief.;-)
I bet the OLPC people had some nifty "pedagogical theories" -- you might say the whole concept of the OLPC is a major pedagogical theory itself ("give them computers and they will learn!").
I'd agree with most of your comment except for the above parenthesized pseudo-quote.
The OLPC crowd has made it clear from the start that their intent was never to provide kids with a computer. Their intent was to provide access to information. The computer was included simply because to most of the target population, the only possible access to good information requires a computer and a wireless network. We have centuries of experience saying that the traditional books just weren't making it; kids in underdeveloped areas typically don't have access to those in any meaningful sense. But the Internet can be made available at a cost that's orders of magnitude lower than building a local library in the local language and populating it with good books against the opposition of local rulers. So they were aiming at leveraging the Internet, via a wireless-only small computer, to give the kids access to real information.
But you'll find all over in comments from the OLPC folks that the computer itself was never the primary goal. It's just a tool. The goal is access to information, something that the commercial and political systems show very little interest in providing. We might also note that the listed problems can mostly be summarized as the results of commercial and political opposition to providing their kids with such information.
It's not terribly surprising that, with such a goal, the OLPC project might have a certain skepticism about involving education professionals except as occasional consultants. A personal anecdote: As a high-school in the 9th grade, I decided that math was interesting, so I started asking the math teachers if I could borrow their books. I'd read one, return it a few weeks or a month later, and ask for another. After a few months, I'd read all the texts for the school's courses, so I started asking if I could borrow their college texts. Each teacher flatly refused to let me read them. I "wasn't ready" for college stuff. I had some friends at a nearby college, so I started borrowing from them. This got my teachers very upset.
Since then, I've mentioned this experience to a number of teachers, and every one of them has agreed that I "wasn't ready" for the advanced stuff. This was clearly nonsense, since I could understand the college texts. The theory that I developed, which I've seen a lot of support for since, is that the teachers were simply threatened by the loss of control from my going behind their backs and getting more information from other sources. This is a common problem with "educators" everywhere. They control what the kids are supposed to be learning, and they tend to clamp down on kids who try to avoid the controls and advance too quickly or into areas that the teachers don't understand.
This was well before there was such a thing as personal computers, so it has nothing to do with computers. They might not say it too openly, but part of what the OLPC project has been aiming at is breaking the stranglehold of the local authorities, and give kids access to much better information than they've ever had. I'm not at all surprised that this should get "pushback" from the local authorities as well as the commercial world.
And anyone who has ever seen any ads should understand that the commercial world is not interested in education. It is interested in persuasion, something very different. So we should especially expect pushback from commercial sources.
(And my Firefox 3's spellchecker didn't like "pushback"; it suggested "pushcart" as the right spelling.;-)
If you want an especially perverse interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause, look at the bottom of that wikipedia article on Wickard v Filburn:
The Supreme Court majority that decided the 2005 case Gonzales v. Raich relied heavily on Filburn in upholding the power of the federal government to prosecute individuals who grow their own medicinal marijuana pursuant to state law. In Raich, the court held that, as with the home grown wheat at issue in Filburn, home grown marijuana is a legitimate subject of federal regulation because it competes with marijuana that moves in interstate commerce.
Yes, the Supreme Court apparently did argue that privately-grown marijuana (legal in a few states) can be "regulated" by the federal government because it interferes with commercial marijuana traffic (illegal under federal law). They actually did decide in favor of illegal drug traffic and against the legal local producer.
Professional satirists wouldn't have the nerve to come up with a plot line like this.
As child, I could see that the continents of North and South America could plausibly fit up to Africa, yet my science teacher dismissed the idea that they were once joined.
Actually, that idea goes back to the mid-1800s. It is usually attributed to Alfred Wegener. Until the 1970s, it was correctly "dismissed" in scientific circles. That is, the general reaction was "That's an interesting hypothesis; can you find any evidence for or against it?" Until we developed the technology to sample the mid-oceanic ridge system, we really had no way of collecting such evidence. So it didn't properly belong in a science class, except as an example of an untestable hypothesis. Then some geologists figured out how to collect the evidence, and over a few years it went from untested hypothesis to accepted fact.
The history of science is full of such hypotheses that turn out to be correct, but were quite properly dismissed until we found ways to test them. One of my favorites is was the reclassification of birds as dinosaurs a couple of decades back. This was also suggested in the mid-1800s, by none other than Charles Darwin, since some of the growing collection of dinosaur fossils showed remarkable similarities to bird skeletons. The problem was that birds don't fossilize well, and until around 1980 we only had a handful of avian fossils from a single limestone deposit in Germany. Then the opening up of China to modern scholarship and science gave us more avian fossils from several Chinese sites, especially the Liaoning deposits. It quickly became clear that birds are dinosaurs, theropods in fact. But before then, the bird-dinosaur link was little more than an untestable hypothesis, and was properly "dismissed" by most scientists who wanted to see the evidence.
And, of course, scientific history is replete with hypotheses that, when finally tested, turned out to be invalid. That's why we should dismiss them all, until someone finally comes up with ways to get the evidence. Or rather, we should look at them skeptically, and discuss ways that they might be tested, while dismissing people who insist that something is true before the evidence has been collected.
We are very proud to announce our new workshop called Subversion of Justice. We think this is the new trend in law at this moment,...
Heh. Very deserving of the "funny" mods. But it's actually not anything new at all. The US Constitution's 5th Amendment was written to include the phrasing "... nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy..." in order to prevent exactly this sort of thing.
The folks who wrote the US Constitution were familiar with the history of monarchs and other tyrants handling their victims via "perpetual trial", in which a person would be arrested and tried, and if the court decided for the defense, it didn't matter. As you walked out of the courtroom, you would be immediately arrested again on the same charges. You could easily spent the rest of your life in jail awaiting a sequence of trials. The general legal term for this is res judicata (q.v.).
But that term only deals with cases that have been decided by an earlier court. The American revolutionaries were also familiar with the tactic for avoiding res judicata: Terminate a trial before the decision is handed down, and file the same or similar charges against the victim in a new case. The phrasing in the US Constitution was supposed to prevent this approach, which is what the RIAA is doing.
So it's nothing new; it's a centuries-old legal tactic used by people in power to deal with their opponents by draining their finances with unending legal battles.
It's not a recently rediscovered tactic in the US, either. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of "subversive" groups claimed (and investigative journalists verified) that they were treated the same way. Their people would be arrested and held in jail the maximum time allowed without filing charges. They would be released without charges, and as they walked out the door of the police station, they would be met by officers who would arrest them and haul them back inside. In these cases, there weren't even charges filed, much less any trials, so the lawyers could argue that the Fifth Amendment technically didn't apply.
It's an old story, and the legal system doesn't seem to be very good at preventing it or punishing people for doing it.
Believing in Guided Evolution (which is what Catholics and many/most contemporary Protestants believe) isn't remotely controversial except to the most staunch anti-religionists, since the presence or absence of a guiding intelligence to evolution is a matter of philosophy/religion rather than one of science.
All true, perhaps, but irrelevant to the main issue: In the US, the minority of religious nutcases who believe that God did it all has had some success at imposing a requirement that science teachers in the public schools also teach biblical creationism as a scientific theory. They have also generally succeeded at eliminating biological evolution from most pre-college textbooks. This has had a serious impact on scientific thought among the general population.
This isn't a philosophical or religious issue. It's an issue of religious people forcing science teachers to teach religion in science classes.
If it were solely a philosophical/religious issue, scientists would have no trouble with it. A great many scientists are also science-fiction readers. The idea of visiting aliens (which is what gods and angels are) can be tremendously fun to consider, especially in the hands of a good writer. But such things have no place in a serious scientific setting such as a classroom. If we ever do find good scientific evidence for outside interference with evolution on our planet, then it'll be time to mention it in science classes. But so far all the actual evidence is that there was no intelligence behind our biosphere, and the religious beliefs otherwise are simple Off Topic in a science classroom.
But creationists are still waiting for a single example of a mutation that adds genetic material that was not already there instead of shuffling or removing what they would say God put there to begin with.
I would be very interested in knowing how they define "adding genetic material" and still manage to believe that no mutations ever do this.
If you want to get them really confused, mention "viral transduction". They probably won't know the phrase, but you can give them a brief synopsis. And suggest that they google the phrase, which should convince them of the reality of the phenomenon.
If they do understand it, they're probably try to argue that it only transfers genes that have already arisen (probably via God's interference) elsewhere. But in fact, this isn't true. Viral transduction generally isn't dependent on gene boundaries, and transfers arbitrary chunks of DNA, not single genes. And in any case, a chunk of DNA transferred from one organism into another will generally not have the same effect in its new home, even when it contains an entire gene.
An interesting aspect of bacterial genetics is that new genes often appear in the small rings of DNA called "plasmids", which can be transferred as a unit from one bacterium to another. This does seem to imply that viral transduction via plasmids is an adaptive capability in bacteria, not some sort of biological accident.
If you can get this far with a creationist, you might ask them why God would have given bacteria the ability to do viral transduction on new genes (such as a gene that detoxifies an antibacterial chemical that we produce), but God didn't give a similar capability to humans. It sure would be useful if, when one human developed antibodies to a new disease, that human could transfer the immunity directly to other nearby humans. Bacteria can do this; why did God so favor them over humans? Does God want to protect bacteria from our pesticides?
Okay. See you in a few million years. I've got a breeding program to set up...
Actually, you could probably do it in a year or so. Pick a few puppies that are female, and wait for them to mature enough to handle a pregnancy. Do an IVF with some cat ova and sperm. When you get a few fertilized ova that are starting to divide, implant them in the female dogs. Dogs and cats are sufficiently close that the cat embryos should develop without problems inside a dog. And a few months later, you could publish your photos of the dog giving birth to kittens.
Now, if you want it to happen "naturally", it'll be a bit trickier. I wonder if you could do an ovary transplant from a cat to a dog?
And with hemp, if you speak of the unsmokable male plant, can grow 7x faster than corn, replenishes the soil, and would put a lot of industries under.
Actually, one of the main reasons that hemp was outlawed in the US was that it was a cheap source of high-quality fiber. Google for "marijuana hemp paper Hearst" to find lots of the history.
The basic summary is that in the 1920s and 1930s, the Hearst publishing empire owned extensive acreage of pulpwood farms. But some very cheap methods of making high-quality paper from hemp had been developed, and were seriously threatening to make the Hearst-owned forests worthless. So the Hearst-owned publications, especially newspapers, went into a major PR campaign about the dangers of the female hemp plant, aka marijuana. They also paid for lots of lobbying in Congress. They succeeded in getting marijuana added to the growing list of outlawed drugs. But the actual intent was to make it illegal to grow hemp for fiber.
It's common knowledge that paper mills are among the worst industrial polluters. If hemp were legal, and most of the pulpwood farms were converted to hemp, it would not only result in cheaper paper; it would also result in a lot less pollution from the paper-making process.
Hemp is also a good source of oil (from its seeds), and is a fairly good crop for producing cheap industrial (fuel) alcohol.
I suppose one could object to such things because they "put a lot of industries under". But that argument could be used against any scheme to improve the efficiency of any industry by introducing a new process. An industry that can't adopt improved production processes probably deserves to go under.
Not only that, but can someone please introduce people to hard carriage returns instead of these virtual ones? Ultra-long lines are not fun in these HTML-type emails... and LookOut and AOL are two of the primary culprits in proliferating this failure to actually wrap the lines somewhere around 80 characters.
Um, no; 80 characters is entirely wrong. We don't use punched cards any more (though I do have a small stack of them as souvenirs of the Bad Old Days;-). The display software that shows a message to a user should wrap long lines at the edge of the window, whatever size it is. Any other choice is imposing a width that will be wrong on some nonzero-sized population of users.
I can see the objection that most email software can't do this, because it can't see the window that the email will (eventually) be displayed in. But such software has no business doing line wrapping at all. Line wrapping is to make the text readable on the user's screen. So it should be done only by the software that's actually putting the text onto the user's screen.
Doing line wrapping to any fixed size, or before the final rendering, is simply user-hostile and should be publicly mocked by any sensible users.
Why oh why oh why does message composition for new accounts default to HTML instead of plain text?
Part of the problem can be seen by skimming over the replies, and noting how many people ignored that "default". Most of the replies argue sending only plain text or only HTML. Anyone who has looked at Thunderbird at all should be aware that it can do either, and the only question is which is the default
Funny related story: My wife works from home a lot, using VPN, Skype, etc, and her office is mostly Windows users. She was complaining about problems with handling the large amounts of email, and I tossed out the suggestion that she try Thunderbird. Last week, during a lull, she decided to download it and give it a try. Several times a day now she tells me how much she loves it.
The one problem was that several of her co-workers had said that her messages had no text. They had compared her messages on several machines, and on some of them, Outlook showed the text, and on others, her messages were blank. I'd never seen such misbehavior, but then, I don't use Outlook. I did notice that she was sending HTML, and asked why; the answer was that that's what TB sends. So I showed her the "send HTML"/"send plain text" choice, and she switched it to plain text. No more problems.
Microsoft software is, of course, notorious for having its own special version of HTML that's not quite the same as anyone else's, but this one baffled us. She hadn't set any colors, and messages she sent me didn't include any colors in the tags, so it probably wasn't a white-on-white sort of problem. I don't have access to the remote machines where Outlook suppresses the text, so I can't do much to diagnose it.
But HTML in email is, well, not really evil, but more like pointless unless you have some real reason for the markup. It doesn't make any sense that a mail package would default to sending HTML without first asking the user if that's what's wanted. All it does is invite silly problems like this one with software that doesn't do HTML correctly.
OTOH, ignoring that this is a preferences setting, and arguing over whether HTML or plain text is the only correct way is also pointless. TB can do HTML, and sometimes it's useful to people who know how to use it effectively. But HTML definitely should not be enabled by default. At best, it's a waste of bandwidth, and it invites silly problems like the one above.
[A]pparently, the kids are so easily influenced that just listening to some rap song or playing some video game corrupts their minds. However, the parents and community, with whom the kids interact far more than with their music and games, is incapable of influencing them.
Well, y'see, that's because the kids have been going to Sunday School, where they were introduced to the Bible. That book is well known as one of the most violent, vicious, racist, misogynist, things ever produced. After all that biblical education, the current flock of games, rap songs, etc. seem downright tame by comparison. I mean, have you ever read the Bible? Most of the characters in the story die violently, and mostly at the hands of God's People.
The Reverend's real problem is that he objects to violent entertainment that he considers inferior to the brand that he's pushing.
...they tend to have saner content than your average crackpot with a web page. It's all about recognition, any professor can just spew out as much junk as he likes on his webpage to show how "productive" he is.
Indeed. But this doesn't necessarily mean that paper journals are the long-term answer. What's more likely is that such "papers" will be submitted to appropriate professional scientific organizations, which will vet them via the usual peer-review process, and accept approved articles into the organization's web site. Such web sites will be the replacement for printed journals.
OTOH, there might still be a role for print publications. We can see a sign of thiis in the recent revamping of the venerable Science News periodical. Their publication has traditionally arrived weekly, and contained summaries (mostly 1-4 per page) of breaking scientific news. Within the past month, they have announced a new format. They are now biweekly, and rather than reporting isolated breaking news stories, they are concentrating on "summary" articles. These articles still mention recent advances, but concentrate on tying them into their general subject matter. Their first few issues in this new format have been quite good, and Science News is still a good investment for anyone reasonably well-educated who wants to keep up with current scientific advances.
However, their print edition might still be doomed. Such summary articles can well work online. So they might end up a purely electronic "publisher", specializing in high-quality scientific summary articles for the well educated. People might be willing to pay for membership to get rid of the (mostly irrelevant) ads. We'll see.
Instead of making a book for $2.00 and selling it for $10.00, they can transfer the file for a fraction of a cent and charge $9.00. Huge increase in profit margin. And sell you a book reading device for hundreds. AND eliminate the used book market. And eliminate library borrowing.
And have you thank them for it. Damn, this "intellectual property" thing is a great scam.
And, as has happened in the music and movie industries, none of that huge increase in profit will go to the "artists", i.e., the authors.
But this may change. The Internet has made it materially easier for musicians to reach their audience. Musicians can now set up their own web site, and completely eliminate the middlemen. There's still the advertising part of the business, but that never did much for 99% of the world's musicians anyway. Eventually this new distribution system may end up benefitting them.
There are signs that authors are figuring out the same thing. There are a few authors that put their stuff online first, to get their name out there and build up a population of readers. They are figuring out that they can periodically publish their stuff and sell it to readers who have already read the online edition. There are small print shops figuring out that this is a source of business, just as there are small local recording studios and CD makers who will work directly for musicians and not take all the profits.
The times, they might be a-changin'. But not in the eyes of the big publishers, who don't yet understand what's hitting them, and think that they can increase their profits without sharing with their authors.
I've never met someone who used more than one window with firefox before, interesting From an organizational point of view, what I'm doing makes perfect sense.
And it makes sense for those of us who aren't organized.;-)
One reason I use both multiple windows and tabs is that there are a lot of sites that like to force their pages to be some specific width. Different sites rarely agree on this width, but it's common for related pages on a site to all be forced to the same width. So a set of tabs open to a single site works well. You can size the window for one tab, and it'll be a good size for the rest.
But if you have a window with tabs open to different sites, switching tabs means that you have to repeatedly resize the window, or do a lot of horizonal scrolling. This makes for slow, frustrating use of the group of tabs, and you're better off with multiple windows.
Among my daily reading is a collection of online comics. I have a set of tabs that are mostly on gocomics.com, for instance, and once I size the window for the first comic, it works for the rest. But there are a few on other sites that require a much larger window, so they're in a different set. I also have a number of sets of tabs for news sites, and they're similarly grouped by size. I'd much prefer to group them by topic. But the sites' owners, in their wisdom, make this difficult to use by forcing different widths than their competitors.
What I'd really like is a way to tell the browsers to ignore width= attributes, at least for some sites. But if any browsers have such a feature, I've never been able to find it.
It's especially annoying that slashdot forces a minimal width. I have images turned off and AdBlock cuts out most of the ads that get through. The result is a nearly text-only page, for which there's no sensible reason to force it to a width too wide for a small screen and different from other news sites. But/. has followed this common anti-reader practice. So I read/. in a separate window, with discussion and reply windows in tabs.
Just for yuks, I opened that in a new window. I was reading/. with SeaMonkey, so that's the browser I used. This was on my Mac Powerbook, SM 1.1.9. I had an Activity Monitory window open to the side. Over about three minutes I watched as SM's memory grew slowly by around 15 MB (RSIZE) and 35 MB (VSIZE). Its CPU usage fluctuated between 12% and 31%.
Finally, satisfied that this indeed looked like a case of slowly-growing memory use while "idle", I killed the window. CPU use dropped to around 5%, and memory use dropped. The RSIZE went back to about 95 MB, which it was before the test. The VSIZE dropped to 363 MB, which was about 10 MB more than it was before the test. So that URL apparently caused a permanent increase of about 10 MB in SeaMonkey's VSIZE.
I haven't tried the test with FF3.
With FF2, I've seen some pages that result in the VSIZE increasing by over 50 MB per minute, eventually reaching a VSIZE of several GB, at which point I kill it because all apps have slowed to a crawl. But usually by that time, I can't identify the offending URL, because I can no longer close tabs in FF, or do anything else with it.
Now, again, if you see any memory problem, you'll have to be specific about what it is. The rest of us don't see it. It's not "denial," it's just the truth.
OK, so suppose I'm in a typical state of having, say, 5 windows with 23 tabs open. I notice that when I'm not doing anything, just sitting there looking at a page, my top command or Activity Monitor window or whatever shows that firefox's memory is slowly growing. What tools are available that will tell me which of those 23 URLs is the one causing the problem?
I have occasionally used the technique of closing tabs one at a time, and waiting for the process-monitoring software to stabilize. But this takes a very long time, and usually doesn't even work. In some cases, I've reached the point of closing all tabs, FF has no windows at all open, and its memory usage is still slowly growing.
How do I identify the problem in such cases? I don't have a clue. That's why I've also generally given up trying to report them. As a programmer with a few decades experience, I pretty much understand what's needed for a bug report to be useful. I don't find very many cases with FF where I can present what I'd consider to be useful evidence if it were sent to me.
They still don't have a fast way, when looking at the bookmarks, to point at a folder and "open all in new window". I have about a dozen browsers on my Mac (Isn't web testing fun?), and FF seems to be the only browser that lacks this handy gimmick. Instead, what you have to do is find another FF window, bring it to the foreground, and (on the Mac) type CMD-N, which opens a new window. Then you move back to the mouse, move the pointer back to the bookmarks window, click on it, CMD-click to get the menu, and finally you can "Open All in Tabs".
This clumsy series of actions to do something so simple is my favorite example to explain to people why I think the FF gang isn't particularly concerned with giving users a good UI. In general, FF seems to have evolved its UI to require many more actions to do common things than most other browsers now require.
And AdBlock doesn't load. If this gets annoying enough, I may go back to version 2. OTOH, NoScript seems to work fine, and it successfully blocks most of the active garbage in ads, so it may be acceptable. I'll play with it and see.
(One silly question: Why is the bookmarks window now labelled "Library"? Well, maybe it'll make more sense after I play with it for a while. For now, it's just one more inexplicable change that seems to do nothing but add to what I need to remember when I'm testing pages against multiple browsers.
i still want to apply rollercoaster technology to public transit before having flying cars though.
That's a wonderful concept! It would be expensive in flat places like Chicago, of course. But imagine what could be done in San Francisco. You'd get on the car at the top of Telegraph Hill, and it would descend without breaks, reaching 200 mph at the bottom, where it would go through several progressively smaller and tighter loop-the-loops to lose momentum, finally coming to rest at the Market. Yee-haw! Here in Boston, there's a lot of potential energy at the top of Beacon Hill that could be used similarly.
On a more serious level, I've read several articles about attempts back in the 1970s (I think) to build "ground-effect" vehicles, i.e., street-going hovercraft. It didn't get anywhere for an interesting reason: It turned out that pretty much everywhere in the US or Europe, such a vehicle is legally an "aircraft" (since it "flies" along above the ground). But it flies at an altitude of around 30-50 cm, which is far below the legal minimum for aircraft flying over a city. So they were illegal aircraft in any urban areas. When lawyers pointed out what it would take to get the laws changed to something more reasonable, the developers just abandoned the projects and went on to other things.
Now, there are some obvious potential problems that such vehicles would have to overcome. They are a variant on the "swamp buggies" used in southern Florida and Louisianna, and those are incredibly noisy. Sorta like large lawnmowers without wheels, and a flexible "skirt" to help keep the air bubble in. They also need a rather wide path, because they are, uh, "fun" on corners. They would potentially make mincemeat of any cat, dog or small child that got in the way. OTOH, they don't need a solid suface; a fairly smooth grassy path would be a fine road for such vehicles. We'll never know whether the problems could have been overcome, though, because the insanity of the legal system considering them aircraft pretty much strangled the concept in the cradle.
We have the technology to make flying cars we have for a long time. The reason you dont see them is because they are expensive. If you think a hummer gets bad mileage a flying car gets much worse.
Huh? It's easy to find data on the fuel usage of various vehicles, including airplanes. There's a rough summary at this wikipedia page. Airplanes generally have roughly the same fuel per 100 km per passenger mileage as autos. This includes the general observation that the bigger the vehicle, the smaller the fuel/distance*passengercount ratio. The big airliners, like trains, have among the best fuel mileage. If you compare, say, small 4-seat autos, airplanes, and helicopters, you find roughly the same mileage.
Now, granted, anything you read on this topic will start off warning that you're "comparing apples and oranges". Aircraft fuel usage is a lot more variable, for a lot of obvious reasons. OTOH, aircraft can generally take more direct routes, somewhat decreasing fuel usage. Takeoffs use a lot of fuel, landings don't use much at all. A head wind uses more fuel, a tail wind uses less, and this effect is much larger for aircraft than for ground vehicles. And so on.
But overall fuel usage data is available for all kinds of vehicles. It turns out that fuel consumption isn't the major consideration in deciding what sort of vehicle to use, because they mostly turn out fairly similar. The main consideration is things like travel time and how close a given vehicle can get to your trip's end points. Autos win much of the time because they can do point-to-point trips. Aircraft aren't too practical if your endpoints are in the middle of cities.
Actually, the main thing blocking "flying cars" is: Do you really want all those millions of idiots off the roads and flying over your house? Or, expressed another way, flying cars haven't been developed because they are in fact illegal almost everywhere that people live. There is a minimal permitted flying altitude over most inhabited areas, for good reason. Unless you live out in the country, you can't legally fly or land anywhere near your house. To understand why, just imagine all your neighbors firing up their aircars for their morning commutes, all of them trying to take off at about the same time.
However, out in the American West, it's not unusual for the rural folk to have both cars and airplanes. A lot of small towns have a landing strip next to the commercial strip of stores, parallel to the road but on the other side of the stores. In good weather, a lot of farmers and ranchers will routinely use the plane for shopping trips. But this is feasible for the maybe 1% of the population that lives in the areas with the lowest population density. In built-up areas, it would be utter insanity.
(Yes, I have been on a few such flying shopping trips. They were faster and more comfortable than taking the car. But I wouldn't want to do it during tornado weather.;-)
I wonder if we can extend this flying-car analogy to explain why computerized brains just might end up illegal? Can you imagine, in 2030, when most of the population has just been (involuntarily) upgraded to the latest Microsoft Brain 8.0 release, and half the people on the road are part of a botnet? Suddenly they get preempted to perform a DDOS attack on the nearby commuter-rail line...
Slashdot Mirror
... the Constitution is only for rich white folks?
Well, I've read a number of histories that explained that before the 20th century, the US Constitution really only protected land-owning white males. Part of the historic evidence is from voter records. There seems to be quite a lot of evidence that non-citizens routinely voted - if they were male and owned land. This effectively prevented most immigrants from voting, except for the tiny minority that were rich enough when they arrived to buy property. It generally excluded females, because if when they married, their property became their husband's property, and unmarried women very rarely had the funds to buy property. They could inherit property, but in that case they were generally wealthy enough to also attract a husband, who became the landowner. And, of course, the means by which property ownership were denied to non-whites is rather well known (and not totally extinct).
Some historians argue that the current American obsession with citizenship arose in the early 1900s, along with the push to allow all adults to vote. Before that, the discrimination was based on race and sex, as well as whether one was wealthy enough to own land. And it should be noted that the American legal system rarely recognized that the "savage Indians" owned the land that they lived on. That land was public property, often listed as uninhabited in public records, meaning that it was available to people who were able to settle it and defend it. Even now, it's generally considered that Reservation land is owned by the "tribe", which is legally an incorporated governmental body. If a tribe has registered some of that land as private property, this may or may not be recognized by non-tribal courts. Before the 1900s, this would have excluded Indians from voting outside the reservation, even if they were male and owned (reservation) land. But a white male with a property deed could vote anywhere, regardless of citizenship.
The whole story is a lot more complicated than most people realize. And it's not unique to America; similar complexities exist in much of the rest of the world.
Hey, you must have been reading George Bush's biography! It seems that the only profitable parts of his "business" experience consisted of buddy-buddy dealings with government agencies to channel tax money into support of his businesses. If you're not familiar with the story, look into his dealings with the Texas Rangers, and how they became profitable, at least for Dubya and a few friends, who managed to pocket most of the public subsidies for things like their new stadium.
But this isn't exactly On Topic
Or maybe it is. The OLPC isn't exactly something decided on by its "consumers", i.e., the kids. Like schooling in general, it's accepted or rejected by school administrators and local government burequcrats, and paid for from a mixture of taxes and charitable contributions. The kids, as always, accept the educational tools that are handed to them. So market arguments are fundamentally irrelevant, as there is no "market" at all. Not that this will deter the Adam Smith fans here.
Hey, that's just a slight rephrasing of Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market" theory. We have a lot of people here for whom that is a primary religious belief.
I bet the OLPC people had some nifty "pedagogical theories" -- you might say the whole concept of the OLPC is a major pedagogical theory itself ("give them computers and they will learn!").
;-)
I'd agree with most of your comment except for the above parenthesized pseudo-quote.
The OLPC crowd has made it clear from the start that their intent was never to provide kids with a computer. Their intent was to provide access to information. The computer was included simply because to most of the target population, the only possible access to good information requires a computer and a wireless network. We have centuries of experience saying that the traditional books just weren't making it; kids in underdeveloped areas typically don't have access to those in any meaningful sense. But the Internet can be made available at a cost that's orders of magnitude lower than building a local library in the local language and populating it with good books against the opposition of local rulers. So they were aiming at leveraging the Internet, via a wireless-only small computer, to give the kids access to real information.
But you'll find all over in comments from the OLPC folks that the computer itself was never the primary goal. It's just a tool. The goal is access to information, something that the commercial and political systems show very little interest in providing. We might also note that the listed problems can mostly be summarized as the results of commercial and political opposition to providing their kids with such information.
It's not terribly surprising that, with such a goal, the OLPC project might have a certain skepticism about involving education professionals except as occasional consultants. A personal anecdote: As a high-school in the 9th grade, I decided that math was interesting, so I started asking the math teachers if I could borrow their books. I'd read one, return it a few weeks or a month later, and ask for another. After a few months, I'd read all the texts for the school's courses, so I started asking if I could borrow their college texts. Each teacher flatly refused to let me read them. I "wasn't ready" for college stuff. I had some friends at a nearby college, so I started borrowing from them. This got my teachers very upset.
Since then, I've mentioned this experience to a number of teachers, and every one of them has agreed that I "wasn't ready" for the advanced stuff. This was clearly nonsense, since I could understand the college texts. The theory that I developed, which I've seen a lot of support for since, is that the teachers were simply threatened by the loss of control from my going behind their backs and getting more information from other sources. This is a common problem with "educators" everywhere. They control what the kids are supposed to be learning, and they tend to clamp down on kids who try to avoid the controls and advance too quickly or into areas that the teachers don't understand.
This was well before there was such a thing as personal computers, so it has nothing to do with computers. They might not say it too openly, but part of what the OLPC project has been aiming at is breaking the stranglehold of the local authorities, and give kids access to much better information than they've ever had. I'm not at all surprised that this should get "pushback" from the local authorities as well as the commercial world.
And anyone who has ever seen any ads should understand that the commercial world is not interested in education. It is interested in persuasion, something very different. So we should especially expect pushback from commercial sources.
(And my Firefox 3's spellchecker didn't like "pushback"; it suggested "pushcart" as the right spelling.
Yes, the Supreme Court apparently did argue that privately-grown marijuana (legal in a few states) can be "regulated" by the federal government because it interferes with commercial marijuana traffic (illegal under federal law). They actually did decide in favor of illegal drug traffic and against the legal local producer.
Professional satirists wouldn't have the nerve to come up with a plot line like this.
As child, I could see that the continents of North and South America could plausibly fit up to Africa, yet my science teacher dismissed the idea that they were once joined.
Actually, that idea goes back to the mid-1800s. It is usually attributed to Alfred Wegener. Until the 1970s, it was correctly "dismissed" in scientific circles. That is, the general reaction was "That's an interesting hypothesis; can you find any evidence for or against it?" Until we developed the technology to sample the mid-oceanic ridge system, we really had no way of collecting such evidence. So it didn't properly belong in a science class, except as an example of an untestable hypothesis. Then some geologists figured out how to collect the evidence, and over a few years it went from untested hypothesis to accepted fact.
The history of science is full of such hypotheses that turn out to be correct, but were quite properly dismissed until we found ways to test them. One of my favorites is was the reclassification of birds as dinosaurs a couple of decades back. This was also suggested in the mid-1800s, by none other than Charles Darwin, since some of the growing collection of dinosaur fossils showed remarkable similarities to bird skeletons. The problem was that birds don't fossilize well, and until around 1980 we only had a handful of avian fossils from a single limestone deposit in Germany. Then the opening up of China to modern scholarship and science gave us more avian fossils from several Chinese sites, especially the Liaoning deposits. It quickly became clear that birds are dinosaurs, theropods in fact. But before then, the bird-dinosaur link was little more than an untestable hypothesis, and was properly "dismissed" by most scientists who wanted to see the evidence.
And, of course, scientific history is replete with hypotheses that, when finally tested, turned out to be invalid. That's why we should dismiss them all, until someone finally comes up with ways to get the evidence. Or rather, we should look at them skeptically, and discuss ways that they might be tested, while dismissing people who insist that something is true before the evidence has been collected.
We are very proud to announce our new workshop called Subversion of Justice. ...
..." in order to prevent exactly this sort of thing.
We think this is the new trend in law at this moment,
Heh. Very deserving of the "funny" mods. But it's actually not anything new at all. The US Constitution's 5th Amendment was written to include the phrasing "... nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy
The folks who wrote the US Constitution were familiar with the history of monarchs and other tyrants handling their victims via "perpetual trial", in which a person would be arrested and tried, and if the court decided for the defense, it didn't matter. As you walked out of the courtroom, you would be immediately arrested again on the same charges. You could easily spent the rest of your life in jail awaiting a sequence of trials. The general legal term for this is res judicata (q.v.).
But that term only deals with cases that have been decided by an earlier court. The American revolutionaries were also familiar with the tactic for avoiding res judicata: Terminate a trial before the decision is handed down, and file the same or similar charges against the victim in a new case. The phrasing in the US Constitution was supposed to prevent this approach, which is what the RIAA is doing.
So it's nothing new; it's a centuries-old legal tactic used by people in power to deal with their opponents by draining their finances with unending legal battles.
It's not a recently rediscovered tactic in the US, either. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of "subversive" groups claimed (and investigative journalists verified) that they were treated the same way. Their people would be arrested and held in jail the maximum time allowed without filing charges. They would be released without charges, and as they walked out the door of the police station, they would be met by officers who would arrest them and haul them back inside. In these cases, there weren't even charges filed, much less any trials, so the lawyers could argue that the Fifth Amendment technically didn't apply.
It's an old story, and the legal system doesn't seem to be very good at preventing it or punishing people for doing it.
Believing in Guided Evolution (which is what Catholics and many/most contemporary Protestants believe) isn't remotely controversial except to the most staunch anti-religionists, since the presence or absence of a guiding intelligence to evolution is a matter of philosophy/religion rather than one of science.
All true, perhaps, but irrelevant to the main issue: In the US, the minority of religious nutcases who believe that God did it all has had some success at imposing a requirement that science teachers in the public schools also teach biblical creationism as a scientific theory. They have also generally succeeded at eliminating biological evolution from most pre-college textbooks. This has had a serious impact on scientific thought among the general population.
This isn't a philosophical or religious issue. It's an issue of religious people forcing science teachers to teach religion in science classes.
If it were solely a philosophical/religious issue, scientists would have no trouble with it. A great many scientists are also science-fiction readers. The idea of visiting aliens (which is what gods and angels are) can be tremendously fun to consider, especially in the hands of a good writer. But such things have no place in a serious scientific setting such as a classroom. If we ever do find good scientific evidence for outside interference with evolution on our planet, then it'll be time to mention it in science classes. But so far all the actual evidence is that there was no intelligence behind our biosphere, and the religious beliefs otherwise are simple Off Topic in a science classroom.
If you want to get them really confused, mention "viral transduction". They probably won't know the phrase, but you can give them a brief synopsis. And suggest that they google the phrase, which should convince them of the reality of the phenomenon.
If they do understand it, they're probably try to argue that it only transfers genes that have already arisen (probably via God's interference) elsewhere. But in fact, this isn't true. Viral transduction generally isn't dependent on gene boundaries, and transfers arbitrary chunks of DNA, not single genes. And in any case, a chunk of DNA transferred from one organism into another will generally not have the same effect in its new home, even when it contains an entire gene.
An interesting aspect of bacterial genetics is that new genes often appear in the small rings of DNA called "plasmids", which can be transferred as a unit from one bacterium to another. This does seem to imply that viral transduction via plasmids is an adaptive capability in bacteria, not some sort of biological accident.
If you can get this far with a creationist, you might ask them why God would have given bacteria the ability to do viral transduction on new genes (such as a gene that detoxifies an antibacterial chemical that we produce), but God didn't give a similar capability to humans. It sure would be useful if, when one human developed antibodies to a new disease, that human could transfer the immunity directly to other nearby humans. Bacteria can do this; why did God so favor them over humans? Does God want to protect bacteria from our pesticides?
Actually, you could probably do it in a year or so. Pick a few puppies that are female, and wait for them to mature enough to handle a pregnancy. Do an IVF with some cat ova and sperm. When you get a few fertilized ova that are starting to divide, implant them in the female dogs. Dogs and cats are sufficiently close that the cat embryos should develop without problems inside a dog. And a few months later, you could publish your photos of the dog giving birth to kittens.
Now, if you want it to happen "naturally", it'll be a bit trickier. I wonder if you could do an ovary transplant from a cat to a dog?
And with hemp, if you speak of the unsmokable male plant, can grow 7x faster than corn, replenishes the soil, and would put a lot of industries under.
Actually, one of the main reasons that hemp was outlawed in the US was that it was a cheap source of high-quality fiber. Google for "marijuana hemp paper Hearst" to find lots of the history.
The basic summary is that in the 1920s and 1930s, the Hearst publishing empire owned extensive acreage of pulpwood farms. But some very cheap methods of making high-quality paper from hemp had been developed, and were seriously threatening to make the Hearst-owned forests worthless. So the Hearst-owned publications, especially newspapers, went into a major PR campaign about the dangers of the female hemp plant, aka marijuana. They also paid for lots of lobbying in Congress. They succeeded in getting marijuana added to the growing list of outlawed drugs. But the actual intent was to make it illegal to grow hemp for fiber.
It's common knowledge that paper mills are among the worst industrial polluters. If hemp were legal, and most of the pulpwood farms were converted to hemp, it would not only result in cheaper paper; it would also result in a lot less pollution from the paper-making process.
Hemp is also a good source of oil (from its seeds), and is a fairly good crop for producing cheap industrial (fuel) alcohol.
I suppose one could object to such things because they "put a lot of industries under". But that argument could be used against any scheme to improve the efficiency of any industry by introducing a new process. An industry that can't adopt improved production processes probably deserves to go under.
Not only that, but can someone please introduce people to hard carriage returns instead of these virtual ones? Ultra-long lines are not fun in these HTML-type emails... and LookOut and AOL are two of the primary culprits in proliferating this failure to actually wrap the lines somewhere around 80 characters.
;-). The display software that shows a message to a user should wrap long lines at the edge of the window, whatever size it is. Any other choice is imposing a width that will be wrong on some nonzero-sized population of users.
Um, no; 80 characters is entirely wrong. We don't use punched cards any more (though I do have a small stack of them as souvenirs of the Bad Old Days
I can see the objection that most email software can't do this, because it can't see the window that the email will (eventually) be displayed in. But such software has no business doing line wrapping at all. Line wrapping is to make the text readable on the user's screen. So it should be done only by the software that's actually putting the text onto the user's screen.
Doing line wrapping to any fixed size, or before the final rendering, is simply user-hostile and should be publicly mocked by any sensible users.
Why oh why oh why does message composition for new accounts default to HTML instead of plain text?
Part of the problem can be seen by skimming over the replies, and noting how many people ignored that "default". Most of the replies argue sending only plain text or only HTML. Anyone who has looked at Thunderbird at all should be aware that it can do either, and the only question is which is the default
Funny related story: My wife works from home a lot, using VPN, Skype, etc, and her office is mostly Windows users. She was complaining about problems with handling the large amounts of email, and I tossed out the suggestion that she try Thunderbird. Last week, during a lull, she decided to download it and give it a try. Several times a day now she tells me how much she loves it.
The one problem was that several of her co-workers had said that her messages had no text. They had compared her messages on several machines, and on some of them, Outlook showed the text, and on others, her messages were blank. I'd never seen such misbehavior, but then, I don't use Outlook. I did notice that she was sending HTML, and asked why; the answer was that that's what TB sends. So I showed her the "send HTML"/"send plain text" choice, and she switched it to plain text. No more problems.
Microsoft software is, of course, notorious for having its own special version of HTML that's not quite the same as anyone else's, but this one baffled us. She hadn't set any colors, and messages she sent me didn't include any colors in the tags, so it probably wasn't a white-on-white sort of problem. I don't have access to the remote machines where Outlook suppresses the text, so I can't do much to diagnose it.
But HTML in email is, well, not really evil, but more like pointless unless you have some real reason for the markup. It doesn't make any sense that a mail package would default to sending HTML without first asking the user if that's what's wanted. All it does is invite silly problems like this one with software that doesn't do HTML correctly.
OTOH, ignoring that this is a preferences setting, and arguing over whether HTML or plain text is the only correct way is also pointless. TB can do HTML, and sometimes it's useful to people who know how to use it effectively. But HTML definitely should not be enabled by default. At best, it's a waste of bandwidth, and it invites silly problems like the one above.
Sure is. Whose gyrating hips would you rather watch, Elvis's or Shakira's?
(Hmmm
Yeah, but stuff the Swedish government doesn't want released will be released in Norway.
Or maybe in China.
[A]pparently, the kids are so easily influenced that just listening to some rap song or playing some video game corrupts their minds. However, the parents and community, with whom the kids interact far more than with their music and games, is incapable of influencing them.
Well, y'see, that's because the kids have been going to Sunday School, where they were introduced to the Bible. That book is well known as one of the most violent, vicious, racist, misogynist, things ever produced. After all that biblical education, the current flock of games, rap songs, etc. seem downright tame by comparison. I mean, have you ever read the Bible? Most of the characters in the story die violently, and mostly at the hands of God's People.
The Reverend's real problem is that he objects to violent entertainment that he considers inferior to the brand that he's pushing.
...they tend to have saner content than your average crackpot with a web page. It's all about recognition, any professor can just spew out as much junk as he likes on his webpage to show how "productive" he is.
Indeed. But this doesn't necessarily mean that paper journals are the long-term answer. What's more likely is that such "papers" will be submitted to appropriate professional scientific organizations, which will vet them via the usual peer-review process, and accept approved articles into the organization's web site. Such web sites will be the replacement for printed journals.
OTOH, there might still be a role for print publications. We can see a sign of thiis in the recent revamping of the venerable Science News periodical. Their publication has traditionally arrived weekly, and contained summaries (mostly 1-4 per page) of breaking scientific news. Within the past month, they have announced a new format. They are now biweekly, and rather than reporting isolated breaking news stories, they are concentrating on "summary" articles. These articles still mention recent advances, but concentrate on tying them into their general subject matter. Their first few issues in this new format have been quite good, and Science News is still a good investment for anyone reasonably well-educated who wants to keep up with current scientific advances.
However, their print edition might still be doomed. Such summary articles can well work online. So they might end up a purely electronic "publisher", specializing in high-quality scientific summary articles for the well educated. People might be willing to pay for membership to get rid of the (mostly irrelevant) ads. We'll see.
Instead of making a book for $2.00 and selling it for $10.00, they can transfer the file for a fraction of a cent and charge $9.00. Huge increase in profit margin. And sell you a book reading device for hundreds. AND eliminate the used book market. And eliminate library borrowing.
And have you thank them for it. Damn, this "intellectual property" thing is a great scam.
And, as has happened in the music and movie industries, none of that huge increase in profit will go to the "artists", i.e., the authors.
But this may change. The Internet has made it materially easier for musicians to reach their audience. Musicians can now set up their own web site, and completely eliminate the middlemen. There's still the advertising part of the business, but that never did much for 99% of the world's musicians anyway. Eventually this new distribution system may end up benefitting them.
There are signs that authors are figuring out the same thing. There are a few authors that put their stuff online first, to get their name out there and build up a population of readers. They are figuring out that they can periodically publish their stuff and sell it to readers who have already read the online edition. There are small print shops figuring out that this is a source of business, just as there are small local recording studios and CD makers who will work directly for musicians and not take all the profits.
The times, they might be a-changin'. But not in the eyes of the big publishers, who don't yet understand what's hitting them, and think that they can increase their profits without sharing with their authors.
And it makes sense for those of us who aren't organized.
One reason I use both multiple windows and tabs is that there are a lot of sites that like to force their pages to be some specific width. Different sites rarely agree on this width, but it's common for related pages on a site to all be forced to the same width. So a set of tabs open to a single site works well. You can size the window for one tab, and it'll be a good size for the rest.
But if you have a window with tabs open to different sites, switching tabs means that you have to repeatedly resize the window, or do a lot of horizonal scrolling. This makes for slow, frustrating use of the group of tabs, and you're better off with multiple windows.
Among my daily reading is a collection of online comics. I have a set of tabs that are mostly on gocomics.com, for instance, and once I size the window for the first comic, it works for the rest. But there are a few on other sites that require a much larger window, so they're in a different set. I also have a number of sets of tabs for news sites, and they're similarly grouped by size. I'd much prefer to group them by topic. But the sites' owners, in their wisdom, make this difficult to use by forcing different widths than their competitors.
What I'd really like is a way to tell the browsers to ignore width= attributes, at least for some sites. But if any browsers have such a feature, I've never been able to find it.
It's especially annoying that slashdot forces a minimal width. I have images turned off and AdBlock cuts out most of the ads that get through. The result is a nearly text-only page, for which there's no sensible reason to force it to a width too wide for a small screen and different from other news sites. But
http://www.smh.com.au/
/. with SeaMonkey, so that's the browser I used. This was on my Mac Powerbook, SM 1.1.9. I had an Activity Monitory window open to the side. Over about three minutes I watched as SM's memory grew slowly by around 15 MB (RSIZE) and 35 MB (VSIZE). Its CPU usage fluctuated between 12% and 31%.
Just for yuks, I opened that in a new window. I was reading
Finally, satisfied that this indeed looked like a case of slowly-growing memory use while "idle", I killed the window. CPU use dropped to around 5%, and memory use dropped. The RSIZE went back to about 95 MB, which it was before the test. The VSIZE dropped to 363 MB, which was about 10 MB more than it was before the test. So that URL apparently caused a permanent increase of about 10 MB in SeaMonkey's VSIZE.
I haven't tried the test with FF3.
With FF2, I've seen some pages that result in the VSIZE increasing by over 50 MB per minute, eventually reaching a VSIZE of several GB, at which point I kill it because all apps have slowed to a crawl. But usually by that time, I can't identify the offending URL, because I can no longer close tabs in FF, or do anything else with it.
Now, again, if you see any memory problem, you'll have to be specific about what it is. The rest of us don't see it. It's not "denial," it's just the truth.
OK, so suppose I'm in a typical state of having, say, 5 windows with 23 tabs open. I notice that when I'm not doing anything, just sitting there looking at a page, my top command or Activity Monitor window or whatever shows that firefox's memory is slowly growing. What tools are available that will tell me which of those 23 URLs is the one causing the problem?
I have occasionally used the technique of closing tabs one at a time, and waiting for the process-monitoring software to stabilize. But this takes a very long time, and usually doesn't even work. In some cases, I've reached the point of closing all tabs, FF has no windows at all open, and its memory usage is still slowly growing.
How do I identify the problem in such cases? I don't have a clue. That's why I've also generally given up trying to report them. As a programmer with a few decades experience, I pretty much understand what's needed for a bug report to be useful. I don't find very many cases with FF where I can present what I'd consider to be useful evidence if it were sent to me.
So what's this "right click" of which you speak?
;-)
My Mac Powerbook only has a single button under its trackpad.
(and I should add "you insensitive clod".
Actually, I should also download the new FF to my linux box. It has a 3-button mouse, and things often work a lot better there with that mouse.
They still don't have a fast way, when looking at the bookmarks, to point at a folder and "open all in new window". I have about a dozen browsers on my Mac (Isn't web testing fun?), and FF seems to be the only browser that lacks this handy gimmick. Instead, what you have to do is find another FF window, bring it to the foreground, and (on the Mac) type CMD-N, which opens a new window. Then you move back to the mouse, move the pointer back to the bookmarks window, click on it, CMD-click to get the menu, and finally you can "Open All in Tabs".
This clumsy series of actions to do something so simple is my favorite example to explain to people why I think the FF gang isn't particularly concerned with giving users a good UI. In general, FF seems to have evolved its UI to require many more actions to do common things than most other browsers now require.
And AdBlock doesn't load. If this gets annoying enough, I may go back to version 2. OTOH, NoScript seems to work fine, and it successfully blocks most of the active garbage in ads, so it may be acceptable. I'll play with it and see.
(One silly question: Why is the bookmarks window now labelled "Library"? Well, maybe it'll make more sense after I play with it for a while. For now, it's just one more inexplicable change that seems to do nothing but add to what I need to remember when I'm testing pages against multiple browsers.
i still want to apply rollercoaster technology to public transit before having flying cars though.
That's a wonderful concept! It would be expensive in flat places like Chicago, of course. But imagine what could be done in San Francisco. You'd get on the car at the top of Telegraph Hill, and it would descend without breaks, reaching 200 mph at the bottom, where it would go through several progressively smaller and tighter loop-the-loops to lose momentum, finally coming to rest at the Market. Yee-haw! Here in Boston, there's a lot of potential energy at the top of Beacon Hill that could be used similarly.
On a more serious level, I've read several articles about attempts back in the 1970s (I think) to build "ground-effect" vehicles, i.e., street-going hovercraft. It didn't get anywhere for an interesting reason: It turned out that pretty much everywhere in the US or Europe, such a vehicle is legally an "aircraft" (since it "flies" along above the ground). But it flies at an altitude of around 30-50 cm, which is far below the legal minimum for aircraft flying over a city. So they were illegal aircraft in any urban areas. When lawyers pointed out what it would take to get the laws changed to something more reasonable, the developers just abandoned the projects and went on to other things.
Now, there are some obvious potential problems that such vehicles would have to overcome. They are a variant on the "swamp buggies" used in southern Florida and Louisianna, and those are incredibly noisy. Sorta like large lawnmowers without wheels, and a flexible "skirt" to help keep the air bubble in. They also need a rather wide path, because they are, uh, "fun" on corners. They would potentially make mincemeat of any cat, dog or small child that got in the way. OTOH, they don't need a solid suface; a fairly smooth grassy path would be a fine road for such vehicles. We'll never know whether the problems could have been overcome, though, because the insanity of the legal system considering them aircraft pretty much strangled the concept in the cradle.
We have the technology to make flying cars we have for a long time. The reason you dont see them is because they are expensive. If you think a hummer gets bad mileage a flying car gets much worse.
;-)
...
Huh? It's easy to find data on the fuel usage of various vehicles, including airplanes. There's a rough summary at this wikipedia page. Airplanes generally have roughly the same fuel per 100 km per passenger mileage as autos. This includes the general observation that the bigger the vehicle, the smaller the fuel/distance*passengercount ratio. The big airliners, like trains, have among the best fuel mileage. If you compare, say, small 4-seat autos, airplanes, and helicopters, you find roughly the same mileage.
Now, granted, anything you read on this topic will start off warning that you're "comparing apples and oranges". Aircraft fuel usage is a lot more variable, for a lot of obvious reasons. OTOH, aircraft can generally take more direct routes, somewhat decreasing fuel usage. Takeoffs use a lot of fuel, landings don't use much at all. A head wind uses more fuel, a tail wind uses less, and this effect is much larger for aircraft than for ground vehicles. And so on.
But overall fuel usage data is available for all kinds of vehicles. It turns out that fuel consumption isn't the major consideration in deciding what sort of vehicle to use, because they mostly turn out fairly similar. The main consideration is things like travel time and how close a given vehicle can get to your trip's end points. Autos win much of the time because they can do point-to-point trips. Aircraft aren't too practical if your endpoints are in the middle of cities.
Actually, the main thing blocking "flying cars" is: Do you really want all those millions of idiots off the roads and flying over your house? Or, expressed another way, flying cars haven't been developed because they are in fact illegal almost everywhere that people live. There is a minimal permitted flying altitude over most inhabited areas, for good reason. Unless you live out in the country, you can't legally fly or land anywhere near your house. To understand why, just imagine all your neighbors firing up their aircars for their morning commutes, all of them trying to take off at about the same time.
However, out in the American West, it's not unusual for the rural folk to have both cars and airplanes. A lot of small towns have a landing strip next to the commercial strip of stores, parallel to the road but on the other side of the stores. In good weather, a lot of farmers and ranchers will routinely use the plane for shopping trips. But this is feasible for the maybe 1% of the population that lives in the areas with the lowest population density. In built-up areas, it would be utter insanity.
(Yes, I have been on a few such flying shopping trips. They were faster and more comfortable than taking the car. But I wouldn't want to do it during tornado weather.
I wonder if we can extend this flying-car analogy to explain why computerized brains just might end up illegal? Can you imagine, in 2030, when most of the population has just been (involuntarily) upgraded to the latest Microsoft Brain 8.0 release, and half the people on the road are part of a botnet? Suddenly they get preempted to perform a DDOS attack on the nearby commuter-rail line