"Let's complain when they (Google) actually does something wrong instead of being reactionary and speculating about things which have yet to happen."
In these cases, prevention is better than cure, because it will be exceedingly hard to know WHEN Google has "actually done something wrong". Bhopal disaster, you knew about it because people were dying all over the place. But a company like Google can be delivering political dissenters to their governments for imprisonment and/or torture, like Yahoo now does, and the only way you'll hear about it is from a whistleblower, if one comes forward.
"It's the job of corporations to make money. It's the job of governments to adjust the rules of the money-making game so that doing good and not causing harm makes MORE money than doing bad and causing harm."
True. And so the corporations figured out long ago that the best way to ensure successful moneymaking was to invest in the government. Which they did, and the rules have been adjusted in the reverse direction to what you state.
You are not buying nukes from China, but you are buying nearly everything else. And until very recently Halliburton was doing brisk business with Iran through a Cayman-based subsidiary.
There is hardly any distinction between the government and the corporations anymore. And right now "public's best interest" is what the president (such as he is) says it is.
The federal government is, at least in theory, electable. In practice, they have long been bought and paid for by corporations. Yahoo now does dissenter policing for the Chinese government, and so does Google, though they have not yet ratted anyone out for a dozen-year stint in a Chinese reeducation camp (that we know of). When it comes to civil liberties, the government is bound by many more laws and regulations than corporations are. Try sending a FOIA request to Blackwater or Monsanto, and report back what you got.
There are no "good guys" when it comes to corporations listed on the stock market. It's a thoroughly silly question to ask, whether Google are good or bad. Some of their actions will benefit users, but only as a side-effect, since they have to benefit their shareholders first and foremost. Other actions will just benefit the shareholders without any positive side-effect for users - or, as may be the case here, with potentially adverse implications. And that's about all that can be said re good-or-evilness of Google.
The whole point of requiring an ID is to institute laws that will prevent you from doing certain things without the ID. That' and to make sure that when you do those things, the government can know about it.
And if they want to know about it, you may ask yourself what they are going to do with this knowledge.
Not best for the people living off the river that hypothetical corp is dumping waste into, no?
The "no liability" concept is the root of the corporate corruption. Think of a person who feels no guilt and fears no consequences of their actions: there's your serial killer, child abuser, tyrant ruler.
Freedom without liability is why Merck could market a drug they knew was going to kill people. Best of WHAT both worlds?
"So, should they stop their UK operations as well, since UK is a 'surveillance society'?"
Yes, especially if they are forced to do part of the surevilling. And why the heck not? When faced with a choice like this, with moral implications, a person can either decline or participate in the evildoing. Most people would refuse to participate in evil.
Most corporations will, of course, go ahead and do whatever brings them profit. Anyone who believes this is fine and dandy would apparently sell their own mother down the river - there are no two ways about it. Either profit is all, or there is still room for moral choices to be made.
What you're saying is, I should feel confident about a police officer who maybe just got married and gets his BJs regularly, and he's also just moved in to a new house bought by his rich in-laws, because he thinks life is groovy, man, and he's not in a mood to do harm to accidental citizens. And that I should, on the other hand, beware police officers who've been miserable ever since grade school for sundry and assorted reasons, once of them the fact they also happen to be incompetent.
You know what, I agree. You're probably right. So maybe we should make each "group" wear different color uniforms, or something, because I would really like to know which of my rights I can expect to be respected or denied, depending on the mental state of any particular officer.
> Why does the negative tone in your comment make me doubt everything you just said?
I don't know. Maybe because you don't intend to discuss the merits of the Ribbon UI, and prefer to spew a few ad-hominems instead?
> You must have had the "Mexican Jumping Bean" version of Office 2007. > I say this because I have not experienced ANY of what you described above. > More and more it's sounding like you are trolling...
You haven't noticed that the Ribbon changes depending on context, or are you saying it does not change? Try reading Microsoft's own guidelines for cloning the Ribbon UI. They explain in detail how the Ribbon adapts to resolution and window size changes - down to the number of pixels that must be shown between labels.
I am not trolling. You, on the other hand, are either in denial or lack basic skills of perception. Which is it?
If I'm a dolt, who are you for having missed the whole point? This is not about tooltips displayed on pointing to a command with the mouse. This is about the keyboard accelerator tooltips, displayed on Alt key press.
You're not pointing to anything - you're pressing the Alt key, and all the accelerators pop up. Some of them obscure the labels of the commands they invoke. So when you are done with verbal abuse, explain to me how it benefits the user that the keyboard accelerator tooltips obscure the command labels.
So let me point out again that the keyboard shortcuts are no longer tied to any UI elements, which makes them useful only as long as you remember what you used in a previous version of Office. Alt+F makes no sense if there is no _F_ile menu. The shortcut is now devoid of the logical association it once had.
yeah, the "Office" button, which doesn't LOOK like a button at all, but rather like some huge icon. Ever heard of affordances? A button should look like a button, so that the instant you look at it, you know it's clickable. Why does the Office button exist at all? Why not put Save As on the Ribbon with all the other commands?
Great, except that the shortcut no longer makes any sense. Since there is no _F_ile menu, the alt+F is not a shortcut to any visible UI element. And what about localized versions? It wasn't always alt+F in all languages.
> Your comment above sounds *exactly* like someone who has never seen the interface.
I've seen the interface, I've used it, I've had a hand in localizing it. It still sucks.
> I've been using it for months now and would *hate* to go back to the "old" office setup.
And you're entitled to your preference, as others are to theirs.
> Everything I've ever looked for (page formatting options, etc) are *exactly* where one would expect them to be.
How about this huge gaping hole in your logic: NOBODY who's used previous versions of Office expects the commands to be where they are, until they get well used to the ribbon. Because they used to be *elsewhere*, and that is where "one" expects them to be. The most you can say is that the commands are placed where YOU expect them to be now that you have gotten used to the Ribbon.
This is incidentally one of the major problems with the Ribbon: things jump around constantly. First, this behavior makes it harder to focus on editing the document, since colorful icons are constantly shifting in your peripheral vision whenever you click somewhere, scroll, type, etc. It's terribly distracting. Second, because of the shifting, you never know where to find the function you need. First you have to scan the currently displayed commands, which Office thinks you are likely to use, then you go hunting. The problem is that instead of learning the position of commands afetr using each once or twice, you now have to hunt for them every time.
Some commands have labels, others don't, and the labels disappear as you resize the window. What's worse, the buttons themselves disappear (are folded into drop-downs) as the window size changes. As a result, things are almost never where one expects them. A button you saw right there a minute ago is no longer there because you made the windows smaller. Except for outright crashing, this is the most annoying thing a program can do to a user.
Oooo, tooltips! Too bad they tend to obscure part of what the button icons and/or labels they're attached to!
This is exactly one of the things that are hair-pullingly wrong about the Ribbon. The tooltips are entirely separated from the labels, so there is no immediate connection between "H" and "Thumbnails" - while "T_h_umbnails" is self-explanatory and makes the accelerator much easier to memorize.
So what? They didn't just have matching names, they recognized themselves in the pictures released by thr FBI. That was in September 2001. Since then no official body has bothered to even strike out their names from the official list of hijackers, and the 9-11 Commission Report has perpetuated the falsehood. So even though (some of) the hijackers' identities have been disproved in major media such as the BBC, the US government still claims those names are correct, and has waged two wars as a consequence, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives so far.
Slashdot Mirror
"Let's complain when they (Google) actually does something wrong instead of being reactionary and speculating about things which have yet to happen."
In these cases, prevention is better than cure, because it will be exceedingly hard to know WHEN Google has "actually done something wrong". Bhopal disaster, you knew about it because people were dying all over the place. But a company like Google can be delivering political dissenters to their governments for imprisonment and/or torture, like Yahoo now does, and the only way you'll hear about it is from a whistleblower, if one comes forward.
"It's the job of corporations to make money. It's the job of governments to adjust the rules of the money-making game so that doing good and not causing harm makes MORE money than doing bad and causing harm."
True. And so the corporations figured out long ago that the best way to ensure successful moneymaking was to invest in the government. Which they did, and the rules have been adjusted in the reverse direction to what you state.
"Google will have just as much info about you before and after the purchase. i.e. They know everything about your life."
If it were so, why purchase doubleclick? Of course the acquisition is expanding their database, it's the only value doubleclick has.
You are not buying nukes from China, but you are buying nearly everything else. And until very recently Halliburton was doing brisk business with Iran through a Cayman-based subsidiary.
There is hardly any distinction between the government and the corporations anymore. And right now "public's best interest" is what the president (such as he is) says it is.
The federal government is, at least in theory, electable. In practice, they have long been bought and paid for by corporations. Yahoo now does dissenter policing for the Chinese government, and so does Google, though they have not yet ratted anyone out for a dozen-year stint in a Chinese reeducation camp (that we know of). When it comes to civil liberties, the government is bound by many more laws and regulations than corporations are. Try sending a FOIA request to Blackwater or Monsanto, and report back what you got.
There are no "good guys" when it comes to corporations listed on the stock market. It's a thoroughly silly question to ask, whether Google are good or bad. Some of their actions will benefit users, but only as a side-effect, since they have to benefit their shareholders first and foremost. Other actions will just benefit the shareholders without any positive side-effect for users - or, as may be the case here, with potentially adverse implications. And that's about all that can be said re good-or-evilness of Google.
The whole point of requiring an ID is to institute laws that will prevent you from doing certain things without the ID. That' and to make sure that when you do those things, the government can know about it.
And if they want to know about it, you may ask yourself what they are going to do with this knowledge.
"So because I have a child, pay my bills, get laid every night, and don't jump onto the whole "Rove took all my rights" bandwagon, I have no life?"
He only took away the rights you apparently weren't using anyway.
The difference, then, is only one of degree.
Okay let's see... The first three words are "What the fuck", right? Some censorship!
Not best for the people living off the river that hypothetical corp is dumping waste into, no?
The "no liability" concept is the root of the corporate corruption. Think of a person who feels no guilt and fears no consequences of their actions: there's your serial killer, child abuser, tyrant ruler.
Freedom without liability is why Merck could market a drug they knew was going to kill people. Best of WHAT both worlds?
"So, should they stop their UK operations as well, since UK is a 'surveillance society'?"
Yes, especially if they are forced to do part of the surevilling. And why the heck not? When faced with a choice like this, with moral implications, a person can either decline or participate in the evildoing. Most people would refuse to participate in evil.
Most corporations will, of course, go ahead and do whatever brings them profit. Anyone who believes this is fine and dandy would apparently sell their own mother down the river - there are no two ways about it. Either profit is all, or there is still room for moral choices to be made.
Hardware Abstraction Layer in Windows. I can't let you play that protected content, Dave!
Some would say this is exactly what happened on 9-11.
What you're saying is, I should feel confident about a police officer who maybe just got married and gets his BJs regularly, and he's also just moved in to a new house bought by his rich in-laws, because he thinks life is groovy, man, and he's not in a mood to do harm to accidental citizens. And that I should, on the other hand, beware police officers who've been miserable ever since grade school for sundry and assorted reasons, once of them the fact they also happen to be incompetent.
You know what, I agree. You're probably right. So maybe we should make each "group" wear different color uniforms, or something, because I would really like to know which of my rights I can expect to be respected or denied, depending on the mental state of any particular officer.
1. He can't read /.
2. He can't surf for pr0n.
One is cruel. Both are inhuman.
An add-on for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/722/
> Why does the negative tone in your comment make me doubt everything you just said?
I don't know. Maybe because you don't intend to discuss the merits of the Ribbon UI, and prefer to spew a few ad-hominems instead?
> You must have had the "Mexican Jumping Bean" version of Office 2007.
> I say this because I have not experienced ANY of what you described above.
> More and more it's sounding like you are trolling...
You haven't noticed that the Ribbon changes depending on context, or are you saying it does not change? Try reading Microsoft's own guidelines for cloning the Ribbon UI. They explain in detail how the Ribbon adapts to resolution and window size changes - down to the number of pixels that must be shown between labels.
I am not trolling. You, on the other hand, are either in denial or lack basic skills of perception. Which is it?
If I'm a dolt, who are you for having missed the whole point? This is not about tooltips displayed on pointing to a command with the mouse. This is about the keyboard accelerator tooltips, displayed on Alt key press.
You're not pointing to anything - you're pressing the Alt key, and all the accelerators pop up. Some of them obscure the labels of the commands they invoke. So when you are done with verbal abuse, explain to me how it benefits the user that the keyboard accelerator tooltips obscure the command labels.
So let me point out again that the keyboard shortcuts are no longer tied to any UI elements, which makes them useful only as long as you remember what you used in a previous version of Office. Alt+F makes no sense if there is no _F_ile menu. The shortcut is now devoid of the logical association it once had.
yeah, the "Office" button, which doesn't LOOK like a button at all, but rather like some huge icon. Ever heard of affordances? A button should look like a button, so that the instant you look at it, you know it's clickable. Why does the Office button exist at all? Why not put Save As on the Ribbon with all the other commands?
Great, except that the shortcut no longer makes any sense. Since there is no _F_ile menu, the alt+F is not a shortcut to any visible UI element. And what about localized versions? It wasn't always alt+F in all languages.
> Your comment above sounds *exactly* like someone who has never seen the interface.
I've seen the interface, I've used it, I've had a hand in localizing it. It still sucks.
> I've been using it for months now and would *hate* to go back to the "old" office setup.
And you're entitled to your preference, as others are to theirs.
> Everything I've ever looked for (page formatting options, etc) are *exactly* where one would expect them to be.
How about this huge gaping hole in your logic: NOBODY who's used previous versions of Office expects the commands to be where they are, until they get well used to the ribbon. Because they used to be *elsewhere*, and that is where "one" expects them to be. The most you can say is that the commands are placed where YOU expect them to be now that you have gotten used to the Ribbon.
This is incidentally one of the major problems with the Ribbon: things jump around constantly. First, this behavior makes it harder to focus on editing the document, since colorful icons are constantly shifting in your peripheral vision whenever you click somewhere, scroll, type, etc. It's terribly distracting. Second, because of the shifting, you never know where to find the function you need. First you have to scan the currently displayed commands, which Office thinks you are likely to use, then you go hunting. The problem is that instead of learning the position of commands afetr using each once or twice, you now have to hunt for them every time.
Some commands have labels, others don't, and the labels disappear as you resize the window. What's worse, the buttons themselves disappear (are folded into drop-downs) as the window size changes. As a result, things are almost never where one expects them. A button you saw right there a minute ago is no longer there because you made the windows smaller. Except for outright crashing, this is the most annoying thing a program can do to a user.
Oooo, tooltips! Too bad they tend to obscure part of what the button icons and/or labels they're attached to!
This is exactly one of the things that are hair-pullingly wrong about the Ribbon. The tooltips are entirely separated from the labels, so there is no immediate connection between "H" and "Thumbnails" - while "T_h_umbnails" is self-explanatory and makes the accelerator much easier to memorize.
So what? They didn't just have matching names, they recognized themselves in the pictures released by thr FBI. That was in September 2001. Since then no official body has bothered to even strike out their names from the official list of hijackers, and the 9-11 Commission Report has perpetuated the falsehood. So even though (some of) the hijackers' identities have been disproved in major media such as the BBC, the US government still claims those names are correct, and has waged two wars as a consequence, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives so far.
So what, indeed.