Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans
on
Interstellar Ark
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· Score: 1
Excluding those with a degree in Chaucerian English, no modern English speaker can make much sense of the "English" spoken 500 years ago.
I'm not sure what Chaucerian English is supposed to have to do with the English spoken 500 years ago, given that the two are separated by over a century.
And the simple fact of the matter is that even Chaucerian English, as spoken over 600 years ago, is perfectly accessible to an educated modern reader if it is presented with a modernised orthography and glosses of the more difficult words. This is, of course, a characteristic it shares with just about every other language that is documented that far back. 14th-century French is not readily accessible to modern French readers unless the spellings are modernised and the difficult words glossed. 14th-century Japanese is not readily accessible to modern Japanese readers unless the spellings are modernised and the difficult words glossed. And so on.
Realistically, English is only about 450 years old, being one of the youngest languages around.
No, Modern English is about 500 years old. Its standard modern form is about the same age as that of any European language, and considerably older than the equivalents in those languages that only developed written standardisation in more recent times.
How do you measure such things, anyway? Modern Simplified Chinese literature would be practically unreadable to someone from just 100 years ago without special training; does that make Chinese less than 100 years old?
The point of having a rather diverse choice of desktop environments in Linux is that if you don't like one of them, you can use another.
And the point of desktop environments being configurable is that once you've found the choice that is closest to what you want, you can tweak it until it's perfect for you.
Right now, people who find Gnome 95% perfect are suffering, because it won't let them fix the last 5% and get their dream environment. And you are not doing these people any favours by telling them they should use some other environment instead, because if Gnome is 95% perfect then KDE, Xfce, Blackbox, etc. will all be worse for them.
Wait, why are you bringing KDE into this? What on earth does KDE have to do with the question of whether Gnome is limiting or not?
If you'll forgive my saying this, you sound like one of those people who responds to every criticism of Bush by bringing up something Clinton did. This isn't a binary thing. This isn't a "everyone who hates Gnome must love KDE" thing. It is perfectly possible and legitimate to criticise Gnome's decisions completely without reference to KDE. I for one think both environments are equally unpleasant to use; I use Gnome at the moment purely because I haven't got round to looking for something better.
Honestly, Gnome works for many people, and KDE does, too. What's the problem with that? It's about TASTE or PREFERENCE. Don't argue about it; just let people freely choose their desktop.
You see? You are totally missing the point. This is not about whether Gnome is better than KDE or vice versa! This is about whether someone for whom Gnome is 95% perfect is able to fix that remaining 5%, or whether they're going to be permanently frustrated by little niggles that they can't straighten out. This is about whether the decisions Gnome's powers-that-be make are allowing Gnome to fit the TASTE and PREFERENCE of people who want to choose Gnome, because Gnome is closer to what they want than any of the other choices.
I don't get it. Why do so many people like you seem to think that the existence of other desktop environments means it should somehow be off-limits to discuss the benefits and disadvantages of any individual environment? Why do you think that any attempt to improve a minor aspect of one environment must really be a conspiracy to replace it with a different environment? Why are so many people dedicated to stifling debate? We're talking about desktop environments here, not religion, for God's sake.
My reply was to point out that when you run RPM, you know exactly how you are running it. So, it's almost the same as what vista does. Except that you gain privileges before you try to run it, rather then being asked afterwards.
Except that isn't really the case in the desktop context, where you don't run RPM or apt-get or whatever at all: instead you run a GUI-based package manager, which (in my experience) tends to ask for privileges after you try to run it, just like in Vista.
One counterexample does not disprove a trend. Nobody disputes that there exist some small inventors who actually manage to use the patent system to protect themselves against predatory companies. The question is whether the innovation they produce is greater than the innovation that is lost because patent holders use their portfolios to restrict competition.
Many of us believe that it is not, and that the world would be a better place if the tiny minority of backyard inventors gave up their tiny chance of leveraging patents to succeed, in order that society as a whole had more freedom to build incrementally on known technologies.
This is for situations where a company gives a person a computer for free in exchange for looking at their ads. This isn't going to be a standard feature in Windows / something end-users install.
Right. Just like you get cable TV for free in exchange for looking at their ads?
Oh, wait, you don't. With TV, you pay for your TV and then you get loads of ads dumped on you anyway. You don't even have the option of paying more to get ad-free TV!
The likely scenario is that what they'll do is bring in a new set of PCs with advertising that are not free, but about $100 cheaper than current PCs. That will train enough sheep to be used to PCs having advertising that they can start to hike the prices of ad-free PCs, all the while telling us that it's not their fault, PCs are getting more expensive to make what with all the government regulation, and if we don't want to pay more then there are ad-subsidised versions that are cheaper. Then one day they stop selling the ad-free versions.
Why would anyone do that? Because they make more money that way.
If you don't like it, you can switch to a Mac - you'll still get advertising before long, but at least it'll be cool advertising with like all silhouettes on plain white backgrounds and such. Or you can switch to Linux, and everything will be fine as long as you remember to sudo apt-get remove kpunch-the-penguin-and-win-free-beer after every OS update...
Canvascape in firefox in linux is really slow. I get maybe 5fps max on 3ghz dual core pentium D.
Fascinating, since I get about 10fps on my 1.4ghz Athlon XP. And that's the textured version; the non-textured version, which is what was actually linked to, is beautifully fast and smooth.
Either Intel chips suck worse than the most fanatical AMD fanboy could ever have dreamed, or you're doing something seriously wrong, like compiling Gentoo in the background at the same time.:P
Ummm...Google Apps for your domain doesn't include an office suite yet either. Google Docs has yet to be integrated into GAFYD.
And GAFYD won't include an office suite even if they integrate Google Docs into it. Google Docs provides extremely basic text editing and spreadsheet functionality in an innovative online environment. It's the electronic equivalent of a whiteboard - designed for multiple people to draft documents together. But you don't just take a photo of your whiteboard at the end of a meeting and publish that. Google Docs can't stand alone; it relies on exporting documents for you to edit properly using a rich desktop client like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org when you finish brainstorming online.
Yes! It's the Wordpad-killer we've been waiting for all these years.
Oh, wait... was it Word that was the market leader, not Wordpad? Oops, I guess Writely's not going to be eating into Microsoft's market share quite yet then.
really, when do you not learn how to learn? If a college would just focus on teaching you how to be an expert programmer on as many programming languages they could jam down your throat, wouldn't you still learn the processes of learning how to program?
No, not really.
What you're missing is that there's a difference between learning how to learn, and merely learning how to be trained.
A course such as you propose would be useless. It would effectively teach students that programming languages are difficult things that are all entirely different and all require special training before they can be used. A student coming out of that course, faced with an unknown programming language, would say "sorry, I don't know this language. I need training before I can do this job."
Computer science, on the other hand, teaches students about what goes on behind the scenes. A student coming out of an abstract and mathematical computer science course understands that programming languages are just layers of abstraction over maths. A smart computer scientist, faced with an unknown programming language, merely says "OK, give me an hour or two to read up on the language and I'll get right on with it."
The former has been taught to be trained. The latter has been taught to learn. Which do you think is more valuable?
Hey, you know what would be even more fun and rewarding? Lobbying! Yeah, lobbying your country's politicians to introduce heavy tariffs on foreign technical workers.
Sure, if you want all the companies to move overseas instead, while you simultaneously spark a major trade war with every emerging power.
If you care about the American economy, on the other hand, your time would be better spent working out why companies want to go to the considerable effort of hiring foreign workers instead of using the local talent. Then maybe you could start lobbying your fellow Americans either to acknowledge that their pay demands are unreasonable for a commodity skill like programming, or to go out there and get the extra skills and experience they must lack, if jumping through bureaucratic hoops to hire an H1B is the most appealing prospect.
In straight C you know your call graph. You know which function is called where and when.
Right up until the first function pointer slips in - which is pretty much inevitable for anything that has a non-linear interface.
Or until someone who isn't quite as smart as he thinks starts doing "clever" things with macros, in a header file included by another header file that includes itself recursively.
Or until someone relies on undefined behaviour, like the order of evaluation of function arguments, that suddenly introduces subtle bugs when you add an unrelated line of code and your compiler decides to change its optimisation strategy...
(Of course, these issues are all just as present in C++; my only point is that things aren't as rosy in C as you might think from your description, and the greater abstraction capabilities of C++'s classes and templates might make people less inclined to try to be clever in that sort of way.)
It's worth pointing out that European spaghetti refers here to the noodle itself and not what we think of now as prepared "spaghetti" since the tomato didn't find it's way to Italy until the 1700s.
Easy on the "we" there, please. We don't all share the same cultural background here. I'm not sure what you're imagining - presumably "spaghetti" in your everyday usage refers to a specific spaghetti dish? - but there's certainly no tight connection in my mind between "spaghetti" and "tomato", other than the fact that the two - which are separate and quite distinct ingredients - are often served together.
What is the point of democracy in the US and UK, for example, if most people (based on polls) hate the government?
The point is that in a democracy, the government can't afford to have people hate it too much, or it won't be the government any more after the next election.
It's quite natural that most people should hate their democratic governments. To oversimplify greatly, about half of the people who hate it do so merely because they voted for another party, and the other half don't vote and basically hate it because it taxes them. (This appears to be a necessary evil; very few people seriously believe a state could survive without any state-provided services, and even if it could, the result might easily be less popular than a democracy.)
So, yeah, it's far from perfect, but nobody's come up with a better idea yet.
You know that schools in the UK are going to start teaching "Intelligent Design" as part of religious education classes?
What's wrong with that? That's where it belongs, surely?
Nobody's ever objected to them teaching the other many and varied beliefs of the world's religions in religious education classes. If they were going to introduce it in science classes, like in the USA, then I'd be concerned, but what's wrong with teaching people about religions? A world where kids aren't aware that Intelligent Design is a religious belief rather than a scientific theory would be far more disturbing.
No the GP is right. Anyone arrested in the UK will be DNA swabbed at the station.
What exactly does that have to do with a question about whether children are being fingerprinted in schools? Absolutely nothing, that's what.
You are offtopic, and the post you have caused to be modded into oblivion was completely on-topic, completely correct, and very informative. Mods, please rectify this.
Why would you want to advocate it? What does it matter to you what that guy uses? If he asks you how to use it, and you know how, sure it'd be nice to help him, but really, why should you care of Linux is used by 1,000,000 or 100 people? If it works for you, good for you. Whether or not other people use it has no impact on your use of it.
Why would you want to advocate healthy eating and exercise? Why does it matter to you if that guy dies of a heart attack at 40? If he asks you how to get fit, and you know how, sure it'd be nice to help him, but really, why should you care of [sic] healthy lifestyles are lived by 1,000,000 people or 100 people? If it works for you, good for you. Whether or not other people live healthily has no impact on whether you're healthy.
Microsoft later killed DR-DOS off by making Win3.1 not work with it
Wow, you have a real talent for rewriting history.
Sadly, in the real world, no such thing happened. What happened was that Microsoft inserted code into a beta version of Win3.1 that displayed a warning. That's right, not only did the evil code not stop Windows working at all (it just displayed a misleading message and waited for a keypress), it was removed after the beta and never existed in any version of Windows that was sold to the public.
Sure, the code in question was indisputably added specifically in order to dissuade people from using DR-DOS, and it's hard to defend the decisions that led to it being added. But the plain and simple truth is that Microsoft did abandon that plan before Win3.1 was actually released, and therefore your assertion is false: they did not make Win3.1 not work with DR-DOS, and therefore that cannot have been what killed DR-DOS.
However unethical Microsoft's actions may have been, spreading FUD against them is not the right thing to do. Leave your lies and FUD to the evildoers, please. Fight Microsoft with the truth - it's bad enough.
M$
I'm not even going to bother with the standard Penny Arcade link. I'm sure we can all quote it from memory.;)
Instead, they have focused on marketing, "power" and other crap that's ended in DRM and botnet hell.
I'll grant you the botnets, but DRM is hardly Microsoft's fault. Where DRM is concerned, they're just copying Apple as usual.
If by "decent write-up" you mean "extremist manifesto", yes.
Sneering, condescending tone? Check. Strawman representation of opposing points of view? Check. Complains about "activist judges"? Check. Advocates faith in the "invisible hand"? Check. Quotes Ayn Rand? Check.
I think the best bit is where it suggests that America might be better off if employers were allowed to fire people for failing to wriggle out of jury service.
Device independence has been figured out decades ago, tex was able to produce dvi files that printed the same on wide variety of printers back in 1980's.
Apples and oranges. Word documents are like source code - editable, and consisting more of instructions than hard layout; and every version of Word introduces new features that affect that layout. DVI files are output-only - not designed to be editable, and consisting solely of instructions on exactly where to lay things out; and TeX has not changed, apart from bug fixes, since the 1980s. The two cases have so little in common that the very fact you consider them comparable merely betrays your ignorance.
To those who blame it on font licenses, explain me why this happens even if you only use very basic fonts that MS supplies with Windows.
Because a Word document is conceptually a text document with markup describing how the layout is to be performed, not a layout document in which every single dot and curve is positioned precisely on the page. (Oh, wait, you weren't talking to me. Oh well, I explained [it to] you anyway.)
They have complete controll of the licenses here. Heck, they even "designed" that crappy arial, just so they wouldn't have to trouble themselves with licensing Helvetica.
Er, no, actually they licensed Arial from Monotype, and had its metrics adjusted to be compatible with Helvetica's metrics precisely to improve cross-platform compatibility.
(And Arial isn't "crappy". It's derivative and overused, but it's also well built, excellently hinted, and has an unusually extensive character set - and Helvetica was hardly a paragon of freshness and originality. If you want to get angry about a font Microsoft has bundled, get angry about Book Antiqua.)
Different printers have different limitations as to what their borders and such can be. How should you display a document that someone set to use 0.4" borders, but the printer won't take any less that 0.5"?
On the monitor, of course. I've never worked in an office, however small, that had fewer than three printers available, all with different limitations, and in such a situation I damn well do not want my software trying to guess which one - if any - I'm planning to send a document to. It can complain about borders when I actually select a printer.
Can fonts not be embedded in OpenDocument files? That would be quite strange since the idea certainly isn't new. I've heard that Microsoft Office has been able to embed fonts for quite awhile.
To a certain extent, yes, but an output format like PDF is strictly more capable than any word-processor format could ever be: you can do things like convert text to outlines (which is often the only legal way to embed a font that has a restrictive license), or use very aggressive subsetting to cut down the file size, neither of which would be particularly useful features in a document that the recipient wants to edit.
Good news, then. You don't have to install anything with the command line.
What distro are you using? I use Ubuntu, which I had been given the impression was one of the least maintenance-intensive options, and I have had to install dozens of things from the command line to get everything I need working, as well as editing configuration files by hand, etc.
I find installing drivers much much easier under linux (namely, you don't have to; your hardware is pretty much supported out of the box or not at all).
Unless you want to use your expensive high-performance graphics card properly, of course. At which point you start running into nasty difficulties. If your distribution provides proprietary drivers at all, the ones it provides are likely to be very out of date compared to what the vendor provides. My experience with NVidia has been that I have to install NVidia's drivers manually. And that means my desktop breaks every time my kernel is updated slightly, dumping me unceremoniously at a command line until I reinstall the drivers all over again.
No great problem for me, because I'm an unashamed nerd who's comfortable with Unix. I like the command line. But would I ask anyone less confident to put up with that? No chance.
Installing software is easier too, unless it's not provided by your distribution.
Which it easily might not be, if it's anything out of the ordinary. And even if it is, centralised repositories tend to be rather out of date.
For example, recently I needed to access some stuff on an old Windows drive, and I was overjoyed to discover that Ubuntu Edgy had ntfs-3g in (IIRC) universe. But the performance sucked accessing large files, which was odd, because the ntfs-3g site claimed they'd fixed that problem. Probing a little deeper, I found that the reason was that the version Ubuntu provided was months out of date; installing a current version by hand fixed the problem. Fine for me, but that's no comfort for Auntie Ethel.
In that case, it's exactly the same as Windows, as you click on an installer to install the software
I'm trying very hard to think of a single instance where I have installed Linux software by "clicking on an installer". And I cannot think of one. Not a single occasion.
I can think of a few times where I've installed stuff from downloaded package files, which works fine where there's a package for your distro and is utterly useless when there isn't. And I can think of several times where I've installed stuff from binary tarballs by running an enclosed installation script from the command line, which generally works for recent releases and fails miserably for anything older.
But most of the time, when I install stuff my distro doesn't provide, I've had to do so with the good old./configure && make && sudo make install incantation. Which would be fine if that incantation always worked - even my grandmother could probably be coaxed into pasting that into a terminal window with sufficiently detailed instructions. Unfortunately, it's usually more of a case of./configure; less INSTALL; find . -name INSTALL; less doc/INSTALL; [install obscure dependency];./configure;./configure --help;./configure --with-obscure-dependency-path=/path/to/obscure-de pendency; make; emacs src/foo.cpp; [fix code that presumably worked with whatever g++ version the developers used]; make; sudo make install... and if your grandmother can cope with that, she has my utmost respect.
There is an InstallShield installer available, just like Windows.
That's largely irrelevant, though, because basically nobody uses it, and obviously you can't use it to install software that doesn't explicitly support being installed that way. It's potentially of interest to developers, but to users it's meaningless.
The autopackage installer seemed pretty nice too.
Yes, it's very nice. Unfortunately, basically nobody uses it, etc.
Lets face it a $5999 dual core system not to long ago goes for $599 today. Everything in personal computing has gone down but Microsoft.
Ignoring the obvious fallacy in your claim (many things have not become cheaper - not just software from other vendors, but also things like printer consumables are not significantly cheaper today than they were a few years ago), you are comparing apples to oranges, or rather hardware to software. Moore's Law leads us to expect massive depreciation of hardware. There is nothing comparable for software.
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And the simple fact of the matter is that even Chaucerian English, as spoken over 600 years ago, is perfectly accessible to an educated modern reader if it is presented with a modernised orthography and glosses of the more difficult words. This is, of course, a characteristic it shares with just about every other language that is documented that far back. 14th-century French is not readily accessible to modern French readers unless the spellings are modernised and the difficult words glossed. 14th-century Japanese is not readily accessible to modern Japanese readers unless the spellings are modernised and the difficult words glossed. And so on.No, Modern English is about 500 years old. Its standard modern form is about the same age as that of any European language, and considerably older than the equivalents in those languages that only developed written standardisation in more recent times.
How do you measure such things, anyway? Modern Simplified Chinese literature would be practically unreadable to someone from just 100 years ago without special training; does that make Chinese less than 100 years old?
Right now, people who find Gnome 95% perfect are suffering, because it won't let them fix the last 5% and get their dream environment. And you are not doing these people any favours by telling them they should use some other environment instead, because if Gnome is 95% perfect then KDE, Xfce, Blackbox, etc. will all be worse for them.
If you'll forgive my saying this, you sound like one of those people who responds to every criticism of Bush by bringing up something Clinton did. This isn't a binary thing. This isn't a "everyone who hates Gnome must love KDE" thing. It is perfectly possible and legitimate to criticise Gnome's decisions completely without reference to KDE. I for one think both environments are equally unpleasant to use; I use Gnome at the moment purely because I haven't got round to looking for something better.You see? You are totally missing the point. This is not about whether Gnome is better than KDE or vice versa! This is about whether someone for whom Gnome is 95% perfect is able to fix that remaining 5%, or whether they're going to be permanently frustrated by little niggles that they can't straighten out. This is about whether the decisions Gnome's powers-that-be make are allowing Gnome to fit the TASTE and PREFERENCE of people who want to choose Gnome, because Gnome is closer to what they want than any of the other choices.
I don't get it. Why do so many people like you seem to think that the existence of other desktop environments means it should somehow be off-limits to discuss the benefits and disadvantages of any individual environment? Why do you think that any attempt to improve a minor aspect of one environment must really be a conspiracy to replace it with a different environment? Why are so many people dedicated to stifling debate? We're talking about desktop environments here, not religion, for God's sake.
One counterexample does not disprove a trend. Nobody disputes that there exist some small inventors who actually manage to use the patent system to protect themselves against predatory companies. The question is whether the innovation they produce is greater than the innovation that is lost because patent holders use their portfolios to restrict competition.
Many of us believe that it is not, and that the world would be a better place if the tiny minority of backyard inventors gave up their tiny chance of leveraging patents to succeed, in order that society as a whole had more freedom to build incrementally on known technologies.
Oh, wait, you don't. With TV, you pay for your TV and then you get loads of ads dumped on you anyway. You don't even have the option of paying more to get ad-free TV!
The likely scenario is that what they'll do is bring in a new set of PCs with advertising that are not free, but about $100 cheaper than current PCs. That will train enough sheep to be used to PCs having advertising that they can start to hike the prices of ad-free PCs, all the while telling us that it's not their fault, PCs are getting more expensive to make what with all the government regulation, and if we don't want to pay more then there are ad-subsidised versions that are cheaper. Then one day they stop selling the ad-free versions.
Why would anyone do that? Because they make more money that way.
If you don't like it, you can switch to a Mac - you'll still get advertising before long, but at least it'll be cool advertising with like all silhouettes on plain white backgrounds and such. Or you can switch to Linux, and everything will be fine as long as you remember to sudo apt-get remove kpunch-the-penguin-and-win-free-beer after every OS update...
Either Intel chips suck worse than the most fanatical AMD fanboy could ever have dreamed, or you're doing something seriously wrong, like compiling Gentoo in the background at the same time.
Oh, wait... was it Word that was the market leader, not Wordpad? Oops, I guess Writely's not going to be eating into Microsoft's market share quite yet then.
What you're missing is that there's a difference between learning how to learn, and merely learning how to be trained.
A course such as you propose would be useless. It would effectively teach students that programming languages are difficult things that are all entirely different and all require special training before they can be used. A student coming out of that course, faced with an unknown programming language, would say "sorry, I don't know this language. I need training before I can do this job."
Computer science, on the other hand, teaches students about what goes on behind the scenes. A student coming out of an abstract and mathematical computer science course understands that programming languages are just layers of abstraction over maths. A smart computer scientist, faced with an unknown programming language, merely says "OK, give me an hour or two to read up on the language and I'll get right on with it."
The former has been taught to be trained. The latter has been taught to learn. Which do you think is more valuable?
If you care about the American economy, on the other hand, your time would be better spent working out why companies want to go to the considerable effort of hiring foreign workers instead of using the local talent. Then maybe you could start lobbying your fellow Americans either to acknowledge that their pay demands are unreasonable for a commodity skill like programming, or to go out there and get the extra skills and experience they must lack, if jumping through bureaucratic hoops to hire an H1B is the most appealing prospect.
Or until someone who isn't quite as smart as he thinks starts doing "clever" things with macros, in a header file included by another header file that includes itself recursively.
Or until someone relies on undefined behaviour, like the order of evaluation of function arguments, that suddenly introduces subtle bugs when you add an unrelated line of code and your compiler decides to change its optimisation strategy...
(Of course, these issues are all just as present in C++; my only point is that things aren't as rosy in C as you might think from your description, and the greater abstraction capabilities of C++'s classes and templates might make people less inclined to try to be clever in that sort of way.)
It's quite natural that most people should hate their democratic governments. To oversimplify greatly, about half of the people who hate it do so merely because they voted for another party, and the other half don't vote and basically hate it because it taxes them. (This appears to be a necessary evil; very few people seriously believe a state could survive without any state-provided services, and even if it could, the result might easily be less popular than a democracy.)
So, yeah, it's far from perfect, but nobody's come up with a better idea yet.
Nobody's ever objected to them teaching the other many and varied beliefs of the world's religions in religious education classes. If they were going to introduce it in science classes, like in the USA, then I'd be concerned, but what's wrong with teaching people about religions? A world where kids aren't aware that Intelligent Design is a religious belief rather than a scientific theory would be far more disturbing.
You are offtopic, and the post you have caused to be modded into oblivion was completely on-topic, completely correct, and very informative. Mods, please rectify this.
Sadly, in the real world, no such thing happened. What happened was that Microsoft inserted code into a beta version of Win3.1 that displayed a warning. That's right, not only did the evil code not stop Windows working at all (it just displayed a misleading message and waited for a keypress), it was removed after the beta and never existed in any version of Windows that was sold to the public.
Sure, the code in question was indisputably added specifically in order to dissuade people from using DR-DOS, and it's hard to defend the decisions that led to it being added. But the plain and simple truth is that Microsoft did abandon that plan before Win3.1 was actually released, and therefore your assertion is false: they did not make Win3.1 not work with DR-DOS, and therefore that cannot have been what killed DR-DOS.
However unethical Microsoft's actions may have been, spreading FUD against them is not the right thing to do. Leave your lies and FUD to the evildoers, please. Fight Microsoft with the truth - it's bad enough. I'm not even going to bother with the standard Penny Arcade link. I'm sure we can all quote it from memory.
Sneering, condescending tone? Check.
Strawman representation of opposing points of view? Check.
Complains about "activist judges"? Check.
Advocates faith in the "invisible hand"? Check.
Quotes Ayn Rand? Check.
I think the best bit is where it suggests that America might be better off if employers were allowed to fire people for failing to wriggle out of jury service.
(And Arial isn't "crappy". It's derivative and overused, but it's also well built, excellently hinted, and has an unusually extensive character set - and Helvetica was hardly a paragon of freshness and originality. If you want to get angry about a font Microsoft has bundled, get angry about Book Antiqua.)
No great problem for me, because I'm an unashamed nerd who's comfortable with Unix. I like the command line. But would I ask anyone less confident to put up with that? No chance. Which it easily might not be, if it's anything out of the ordinary. And even if it is, centralised repositories tend to be rather out of date.
For example, recently I needed to access some stuff on an old Windows drive, and I was overjoyed to discover that Ubuntu Edgy had ntfs-3g in (IIRC) universe. But the performance sucked accessing large files, which was odd, because the ntfs-3g site claimed they'd fixed that problem. Probing a little deeper, I found that the reason was that the version Ubuntu provided was months out of date; installing a current version by hand fixed the problem. Fine for me, but that's no comfort for Auntie Ethel. I'm trying very hard to think of a single instance where I have installed Linux software by "clicking on an installer". And I cannot think of one. Not a single occasion.
I can think of a few times where I've installed stuff from downloaded package files, which works fine where there's a package for your distro and is utterly useless when there isn't. And I can think of several times where I've installed stuff from binary tarballs by running an enclosed installation script from the command line, which generally works for recent releases and fails miserably for anything older.
But most of the time, when I install stuff my distro doesn't provide, I've had to do so with the good old