1) Are actually fully specified somewhere as of a few years ago 2) Are failed by at least one of Safari, Opera, and Mozilla.
Turns out you have to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to find those. The more practical things that are actually covered by specs there's decent compat on.
Let's see. The and elements are parsed. Cells are grouped into columns and columns into colgroups. You can collapse and uncollapse a column or colgroup at a time. You can set backgrounds and borders on columns and colgroups. You can set the widths of columns and colgroups. All the properties that CSS2.1 allows on them are supported. Colgroups can span multiple columns. Logical columns can span multiple columns of cells.
The only thing that's not supported is align/valign on columns and colgroups, and that only because it's not really so compatible with a proper CSS implementation. Now maybe that means in your book that "Firefox doesn't support COL or COLGROUP". But at that rate, you might as well say it doesn't support CSS, since there are parts of CSS that don't work (say positioning::before content).
What that link tells me is that there is no align/valign support (which I already knew) and that a lot of people have a hard time correctly phrasing a question (which I also already knew, to be honest).
> it doesn't mean people aren't working later in life.
While true, from what I've seen they largely aren't. Too much age discrimination preventing them from getting jobs. That would change if there were fewer young people, of course. And again this is anecdotal, so it could vary widely with industry or geography.
> the population of the US is increasing by about 90% each year
You mean 0.9%, which is what that site you point to lists? Note that the same site lists a death rate or 8.26/1000 and a birth rate of 14.16/1000, giving a ratio of births to deaths of about 1.75, not 1.9. That's pretty close to replacement as historical numbers go.
Why? The test expressly picked things that one of Opera, Safari, and Firefox would fail, preferably more than one, and tried to balance the number of tests each would fail.
Put another way it looked really hard for things to test that would give browsers low scores.
There's nothing to say that the things it tests are necessarily useful. Some are, some are not.
> Javascript - Safari, Opera, and Konquerer all have at least some support > for Javascript DOM 3, which Firefox lacks in the released versions so > far.
Care to cite? Last I checked, various parts of DOM3 Core and DOM3 Events (as it existed at the time; it's been mutating since) were supported in Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2. See:
(1.8 is the Gecko version for Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2.)
> image formats
While it's nice to support more of these, there is no standard that requires their support in a web browser... MNG and Tiff in particular were judged to not be worth the code it would take to support them. That's a judgement call, of course.
> Web Forms 2.0
Which isn't a standard yet. Not even close.
I do agree with your general point that trying to judge which browser is "more standards compliant" by comparing _which_ standards they implement is silly. The only sane questions to ask are: "Which browsers support this standard I want to make use of?" and "How good is their support for that standard?" And even the latter of these two is pretty fuzzy.
> If these future adults don't exist for whatever reason
Which is what one of the original posts in this thread advocated, unless we start having future adults without present children.
> With longer lifespans, people work longer.
Statistically speaking, not true. Life expectancies are rising faster than average working spans, even if you ignore the tendency to start working later (due to spending more time in school).
What's the last time the retirement age increased? And note that a larger fraction of people are opting for early retirement, though this tends to fluctuate somewhat.
> With a life-expectancy increase, the time that a person is able to care > for themselves (i.e., work for a living) should increase at least > somewhat proportionally.
Sadly, not the case. We're increasing lifespans but not making people any less frail, so we end up with more and more people who can't work.
> A continually rising population also puts more pressure on those who > work to produce enough to support the growing pool of children who are > too young to work.
This is true, and if the average family in the U.S. were having more like 6-7 children I agree that it would be hard to say which direction the flow goes. But at barely replacement levels of child-bearing, I'm pretty sure the flow is from young to old. If it were the other way around, the standard of living would decrease with time, which is not what happens based on observational data.
> Well, we can't prepare for every eventuality.
True. I'm not suggesting there's any decent way to hedge against complete monetary system collapse. I sure wish I could think of one, though!
I agree with the sentiment, and it's a good one. But what are you saving? Food, clothing, and furniture? Tools?
If all you're saving is paper (in any form: cash, bonds, stocks, etc) then all you're saving are claims on the future production of people who are children now. But why exactly should they owe you anything, one could ask? Even if you're saving something like gold, you'll want to be trading it to people for the things they produce.
That's how the system works: you're too young to produce and society (either just your parents or also those around them) invests in you, then you have your productive years, during which you spend part of your production investing in children and part supporting retirees, and then you stop working and are supported by the rest of society. The money is just a way of keeping track of who owes whom how much in the way of goods and services. But with longer lifespans and rising productivity (as well as rising population), the net flow of goods and services is distinctly from newer generations to older ones.
If that ever changed, our economy would be in big trouble, because our monetary system is based on the assumption that that's the way the flow works.
To make it clear, there's not that much difference from your point of view between paying taxes that support education and paying higher prices that allow people to have more money to pay for their childrens' education. If everyone has children it all comes out about the same. If some people don't, they end up being net beneficiaries of the economy as a whole, especially given that people are living longer and longer and that productivity increases with time.
But as another comment in this thread pointed out the right way to view children from society's point of view is as an investment.
The question of morality of force and whether government should exist in general is an interesting one, and somewhat beyond the scope of what society's best approach is to ensuring a future labor pool. Children existed (and were somewhat subsidized, one way or another) before the current era of big government.
> The more people there are the less money there is to go around, period.
You seem to think money has intrinsic worth. It doesn't. Money is only worth something as long as there are goods or services you can exchange it for. Nor is there a fixed quantity of it. I suggest you read up a bit on how the monetary system works in the US (and most of the rest of the world). Note in particular that the debt-backed money we have depends on an expanding economy.
The environmental effects are a serious concern, and we'll need to restructure the way our money is set up at some point to handle that. In the meantime, the economy can't handle a population decline without collapsing.
> i'm talking about an airline or air service that doesn't allow infants > and small children.
Which is not a bad idea at all, by the way. The more options that are actually different in the marketplace, the better off everyone is. The current trends toward completely homogeneous offerings from different service providers is quite unfortunate.
> it's the fact their retarded parents aren't in the least bit considerate > of other people.
Agreed that this is a huge problem. Too bad there's no "child having license" that you have to pass a basic test for...
Aha! This is actually the first valid criticism so far in this thread of the "encourage children so that there is a future workforce" policy that society has chosen.
You're correct that allowing more immigration or a larger guest worker program are two other solutions for the same problem. All three have their disadvantages.
Encouraging children involves subsidizing them and doesn't as well unless you make sure they become productive citizens (something that we're not doing that well on).
Allowing more immigration (with citizenship granted after 5-6 years, etc, as it tends to be) runs into the problem of finding a sufficient pool of immigrants that can be productive (produce more than they get from the government, specifically) and at the same time share the core values this country is nominally founded on (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, rule of law come to mind). It's remarkably hard to find such people outside the "so-called developed countries". Either that, or both the EU and the US are doing a very poor job of looking.
Having a larger guest worker program runs the risk of ending up like Saudi Arabia, where last I checked north of 80% of the non-government employees were guest workers. You end up with an underclass and societal unrest. We're well on our way here, unofficially, of course... But that's not necessarily a trend that should be encouraged.
In the end, you have to weigh the disadvantages against each other. I think investing in a locally-grown well-educated workforce is the best of these three options. That's not a foregone conclusion, though, and since so many of the advantages and disadvantages are intangibles others can easily come to a different conclusion here. It's just a matter of gut feeling.
In practice, there will always be people who are paying more into the system than they're getting monetarily out of it right this minute. There are even people who will end up paying in more than they ever get back out (in money; intangibles like public safety are hard to quantify).
That all has little bearing on whether having children around is a good idea.
> Right, because *obviously* social security and medicare aren't going to > be bankrupt and defunct by then...
It's pretty sure that they will. Nevertheless, as I said in another post in this thread, your retirement funds will need to be spent on something produced by the workforce, which means there needs to be a workforce capable of producing something.
I agree that FICA as set up right now is a complete scam, but abolishing it wouldn't change much with regard to whether we need a future workforce, which was the original bone of contention here.
I think you missed the point. You agree that the existence of children now is something you will benefit from after you retire. Yet you don't want to suffer any inconvenience now for this future benefit.
Sorry, you don't get something for nothing. If you decide to not have any children of your own, then to reap the future benefits from other people having children you end up subsidizing them now.
Not that it wouldn't be grand if everyone could just pay for their own kids, and I'm very much in favor of anything that makes that possible. But in the end, the people who can fully afford to pay for their own kids just aren't having enough kids to keep the economy going, so it's in society's interest to encourage others to have kids too.
> I'm 30, I assume that I will never again see any money I give to the > government for SSI.
That's about where I am myself. But the value of your retirement portfolio will nevertheless depend on the amount of goods and services produced by people when you retire...
Put another way, if we all stopped having kids now, when we retired there would be no one to buy food from with all that money we'd saved. The usual hyper-inflation (too much cash, not enough goods) would ensue.
> there will be no such thing as a pension when i retire,
If no one has children, sure.;) As it is, when you retire you will be depending on economic activity generated by the children you currently disparage to produce the stuff you consume.
> It's people like me that subsidize your brats
Given that my only child is not yet 1 and that no public money has been spent on him in any way, I doubt that you're subsidizing him.
If trends continue as they have, I doubt you will ever subsidize any of my kids in any way.
> and you have the cheek to claim i owe you?
Nope. You don't owe me one bit, nor did I ever claim that you do. I claim that barring a horrible accident by the time you die you will owe people who are children right now.
You mean like paying for your children's education? Again, unless you are rather wealthy I doubt that you're paying enough in taxes to fund their public school educations (last I checked, $10000 per student per year was close to the national average, and that's mostly property taxes, not income taxes).
Society recognizes that the children involved will be paying for society's social security and medicare 30-40 years from now.
Unless you plan to either have enough money to not use either of those programs or have your own kids (whom you'd have to have first) pay enough in taxes to support you in your old age, be glad others are having kids...
Slashdot Mirror
The Acid3 test was trying to test things that:
1) Are actually fully specified somewhere as of a few years ago
2) Are failed by at least one of Safari, Opera, and Mozilla.
Turns out you have to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to find those. The more practical things that are actually covered by specs there's decent compat on.
> Do these tests increase compatibility by pushing
> the envelope on new standards, or are they just
> a browser-war pissing contest?
Some of both. Last I looked at the ACID3 draft, it tested some useful things, and a whole bunch of pretty useless ones...
Let's see. The and elements are parsed. Cells are grouped into columns and columns into colgroups. You can collapse and uncollapse a column or colgroup at a time. You can set backgrounds and borders on columns and colgroups. You can set the widths of columns and colgroups. All the properties that CSS2.1 allows on them are supported. Colgroups can span multiple columns. Logical columns can span multiple columns of cells.
::before content).
The only thing that's not supported is align/valign on columns and colgroups, and that only because it's not really so compatible with a proper CSS implementation. Now maybe that means in your book that "Firefox doesn't support COL or COLGROUP". But at that rate, you might as well say it doesn't support CSS, since there are parts of CSS that don't work (say positioning
What that link tells me is that there is no align/valign support (which I already knew) and that a lot of people have a hard time correctly phrasing a question (which I also already knew, to be honest).
> it doesn't mean people aren't working later in life.
While true, from what I've seen they largely aren't. Too much age discrimination preventing them from getting jobs. That would change if there were fewer young people, of course. And again this is anecdotal, so it could vary widely with industry or geography.
> the population of the US is increasing by about 90% each year
You mean 0.9%, which is what that site you point to lists? Note that the same site lists a death rate or 8.26/1000 and a birth rate of 14.16/1000, giving a ratio of births to deaths of about 1.75, not 1.9. That's pretty close to replacement as historical numbers go.
For example, Egypt has a ratio closer to 4 to 1.
Why? The test expressly picked things that one of Opera, Safari, and Firefox would fail, preferably more than one, and tried to balance the number of tests each would fail.
Put another way it looked really hard for things to test that would give browsers low scores.
There's nothing to say that the things it tests are necessarily useful. Some are, some are not.
True enough. Mostly to do with using a CSS renderer and there being no way to represent this part of HTML in CSS...
;)
The best part about standards is when they contradict each other.
> Javascript - Safari, Opera, and Konquerer all have at least some support > for Javascript DOM 3, which Firefox lacks in the released versions so
> far.
Care to cite? Last I checked, various parts of DOM3 Core and DOM3 Events (as it existed at the time; it's been mutating since) were supported in Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2. See:
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla1.8/find?string=nsIDOM3
(1.8 is the Gecko version for Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2.)
> image formats
While it's nice to support more of these, there is no standard that requires their support in a web browser... MNG and Tiff in particular were judged to not be worth the code it would take to support them. That's a judgement call, of course.
> Web Forms 2.0
Which isn't a standard yet. Not even close.
I do agree with your general point that trying to judge which browser is "more standards compliant" by comparing _which_ standards they implement is silly. The only sane questions to ask are: "Which browsers support this standard I want to make use of?" and "How good is their support for that standard?" And even the latter of these two is pretty fuzzy.
Sorry, but this is false. There's support for those, and has been for a good long time.
> If these future adults don't exist for whatever reason
Which is what one of the original posts in this thread advocated, unless we start having future adults without present children.
> With longer lifespans, people work longer.
Statistically speaking, not true. Life expectancies are rising faster than average working spans, even if you ignore the tendency to start working later (due to spending more time in school).
What's the last time the retirement age increased? And note that a larger fraction of people are opting for early retirement, though this tends to fluctuate somewhat.
> With a life-expectancy increase, the time that a person is able to care
> for themselves (i.e., work for a living) should increase at least
> somewhat proportionally.
Sadly, not the case. We're increasing lifespans but not making people any less frail, so we end up with more and more people who can't work.
> A continually rising population also puts more pressure on those who
> work to produce enough to support the growing pool of children who are
> too young to work.
This is true, and if the average family in the U.S. were having more like 6-7 children I agree that it would be hard to say which direction the flow goes. But at barely replacement levels of child-bearing, I'm pretty sure the flow is from young to old. If it were the other way around, the standard of living would decrease with time, which is not what happens based on observational data.
> Well, we can't prepare for every eventuality.
True. I'm not suggesting there's any decent way to hedge against complete monetary system collapse. I sure wish I could think of one, though!
I agree with the sentiment, and it's a good one. But what are you saving? Food, clothing, and furniture? Tools?
If all you're saving is paper (in any form: cash, bonds, stocks, etc) then all you're saving are claims on the future production of people who are children now. But why exactly should they owe you anything, one could ask? Even if you're saving something like gold, you'll want to be trading it to people for the things they produce.
That's how the system works: you're too young to produce and society (either just your parents or also those around them) invests in you, then you have your productive years, during which you spend part of your production investing in children and part supporting retirees, and then you stop working and are supported by the rest of society. The money is just a way of keeping track of who owes whom how much in the way of goods and services. But with longer lifespans and rising productivity (as well as rising population), the net flow of goods and services is distinctly from newer generations to older ones.
If that ever changed, our economy would be in big trouble, because our monetary system is based on the assumption that that's the way the flow works.
To make it clear, there's not that much difference from your point of view between paying taxes that support education and paying higher prices that allow people to have more money to pay for their childrens' education. If everyone has children it all comes out about the same. If some people don't, they end up being net beneficiaries of the economy as a whole, especially given that people are living longer and longer and that productivity increases with time.
I fully expect to have to do just that, actually.
But as another comment in this thread pointed out the right way to view children from society's point of view is as an investment.
The question of morality of force and whether government should exist in general is an interesting one, and somewhat beyond the scope of what society's best approach is to ensuring a future labor pool. Children existed (and were somewhat subsidized, one way or another) before the current era of big government.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, you will still be depending on the economic activity of today's children at that point.
> The more people there are the less money there is to go around, period.
You seem to think money has intrinsic worth. It doesn't. Money is only worth something as long as there are goods or services you can exchange it for. Nor is there a fixed quantity of it. I suggest you read up a bit on how the monetary system works in the US (and most of the rest of the world). Note in particular that the debt-backed money we have depends on an expanding economy.
The environmental effects are a serious concern, and we'll need to restructure the way our money is set up at some point to handle that. In the meantime, the economy can't handle a population decline without collapsing.
> i'm talking about an airline or air service that doesn't allow infants
> and small children.
Which is not a bad idea at all, by the way. The more options that are actually different in the marketplace, the better off everyone is. The current trends toward completely homogeneous offerings from different service providers is quite unfortunate.
> it's the fact their retarded parents aren't in the least bit considerate
> of other people.
Agreed that this is a huge problem. Too bad there's no "child having license" that you have to pass a basic test for...
Aha! This is actually the first valid criticism so far in this thread of the "encourage children so that there is a future workforce" policy that society has chosen.
You're correct that allowing more immigration or a larger guest worker program are two other solutions for the same problem. All three have their disadvantages.
Encouraging children involves subsidizing them and doesn't as well unless you make sure they become productive citizens (something that we're not doing that well on).
Allowing more immigration (with citizenship granted after 5-6 years, etc, as it tends to be) runs into the problem of finding a sufficient pool of immigrants that can be productive (produce more than they get from the government, specifically) and at the same time share the core values this country is nominally founded on (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, rule of law come to mind). It's remarkably hard to find such people outside the "so-called developed countries". Either that, or both the EU and the US are doing a very poor job of looking.
Having a larger guest worker program runs the risk of ending up like Saudi Arabia, where last I checked north of 80% of the non-government employees were guest workers. You end up with an underclass and societal unrest. We're well on our way here, unofficially, of course... But that's not necessarily a trend that should be encouraged.
In the end, you have to weigh the disadvantages against each other. I think investing in a locally-grown well-educated workforce is the best of these three options. That's not a foregone conclusion, though, and since so many of the advantages and disadvantages are intangibles others can easily come to a different conclusion here. It's just a matter of gut feeling.
There's a big difference between people with kids and people with spoiled kids. Don't tar them all with the same brush.
In practice, there will always be people who are paying more into the system than they're getting monetarily out of it right this minute. There are even people who will end up paying in more than they ever get back out (in money; intangibles like public safety are hard to quantify).
That all has little bearing on whether having children around is a good idea.
> Right, because *obviously* social security and medicare aren't going to
> be bankrupt and defunct by then...
It's pretty sure that they will. Nevertheless, as I said in another post in this thread, your retirement funds will need to be spent on something produced by the workforce, which means there needs to be a workforce capable of producing something.
I agree that FICA as set up right now is a complete scam, but abolishing it wouldn't change much with regard to whether we need a future workforce, which was the original bone of contention here.
I think you missed the point. You agree that the existence of children now is something you will benefit from after you retire. Yet you don't want to suffer any inconvenience now for this future benefit.
Sorry, you don't get something for nothing. If you decide to not have any children of your own, then to reap the future benefits from other people having children you end up subsidizing them now.
Not that it wouldn't be grand if everyone could just pay for their own kids, and I'm very much in favor of anything that makes that possible. But in the end, the people who can fully afford to pay for their own kids just aren't having enough kids to keep the economy going, so it's in society's interest to encourage others to have kids too.
> ARE subsidizing the services and tax breaks you get
Uh.. you do realize that not everyone with children gets tax breaks, right?
> I'm 30, I assume that I will never again see any money I give to the
> government for SSI.
That's about where I am myself. But the value of your retirement portfolio will nevertheless depend on the amount of goods and services produced by people when you retire...
Put another way, if we all stopped having kids now, when we retired there would be no one to buy food from with all that money we'd saved. The usual hyper-inflation (too much cash, not enough goods) would ensue.
> there will be no such thing as a pension when i retire,
;) As it is, when you retire you will be depending on economic activity generated by the children you currently disparage to produce the stuff you consume.
If no one has children, sure.
> It's people like me that subsidize your brats
Given that my only child is not yet 1 and that no public money has been spent on him in any way, I doubt that you're subsidizing him.
If trends continue as they have, I doubt you will ever subsidize any of my kids in any way.
> and you have the cheek to claim i owe you?
Nope. You don't owe me one bit, nor did I ever claim that you do. I claim that barring a horrible accident by the time you die you will owe people who are children right now.
> So you really should be paying me a stipend.
You mean like paying for your children's education? Again, unless you are rather wealthy I doubt that you're paying enough in taxes to fund their public school educations (last I checked, $10000 per student per year was close to the national average, and that's mostly property taxes, not income taxes).
Society recognizes that the children involved will be paying for society's social security and medicare 30-40 years from now.
Unless you plan to either have enough money to not use either of those programs or have your own kids (whom you'd have to have first) pay enough in taxes to support you in your old age, be glad others are having kids...