I remember president Ronald Reagan pulling the same kind of stuff when he was in office. Some of the statistics Reagan quoted in his public speeches often were wrong or had no data supporting the claim. Why is it that people buy into BS when it comes out of the president or some CEO?
That was KAL 007, the Korean 747 which a Soviet fighter mistakenly shot down. Reagan waved about a pile of paper, saying that he was holding proof that the Russkis knew they were shooting down a civilian airliner. It was pure fiction. (The true story, as I recall, was that the KAL flight had gone off course and was unwittingly following a similar flight plan to the American ELINT, or electronic intelligence, aircraft, which routinely "tested" Soviet air defences. Those aircraft, incidentally, were converted transport planes -- not too different from an airliner.)
I have to say, however, that I'm not sure lying for the sake of boosting profits and lying for the sake of increasing tensions with a nuclear-armed superpower are strictly comparable.
Oh, but indeed they are. The FCC has a whole set of regulations covering consumer electronic devices and their possible RF emissions. You better believe that Sony has to file some serious paperwork with the FCC to get permission to sell the things.
Everything's regulated nowadays.
That's life in a modern bureaucratic state -- U.S., Canada, E.U., or any other -- and it's generally a good thing, because that's how you know that the blender you buy isn't going to explode and hurl the blade at your face the first time you plug it in.
There are two imporant distinctions to make:
Some things are illegal or restricted, period, regardless of how they came into your possession. Lead, copper, saltpetre, sulphur, carbon, etc., aren't illegal, but assembling them into ammunition creates something which most governments restrict, whether you buy it or make it yourself. Analogies to these aren't helpful, because a game station isn't absolutely illegal or restricted like a weapon is.
Selling something is different from making it for yourself. If I cut myself, and I have the ( balls | lack of brains ) to sew it up myself, I'm in the clear. If, however, I do it for my buddy, and he pays me $50 for my trouble, I'm practicing medicine without a license. It's the same thing with cooking -- once people start paying me for giving them dinner, my kitchen is going to be regulated as a restaurant and I can't just do as I please. There's a world of difference between modding your box and selling modded equipment.
I'll usually design using IE and then tweak it until it looks good in IE and Moz. (even when using 'cross platform' code, it still never works right in both, in my experience)
In those cases it's generally IE's problem -- there's a huge chunk of CSS2 that even IE6 ignores or botches, but that Gecko gets right.
Netscape 4 users can go fuck themselves, though. Seriously.
As a Web developer, I've said the same thing on more than one occasion -- but then had to support NS4 anyway because a couple of the directors (i.e., boss's bosses) still use it.
Regarding NS4, the biggest problem for me is when I need to browse from UNIX boxes where I have only non-root access, and NS4 is often the only choice. What I'm leaning toward now is putting all the CSS in files exploiting the `media="all"' bug so NS4 ignores them. Then the NS4 users get a plain-vanilla grey-background text page which may be ugly as sin but still works. That's what's important.
FWIW, your site seems to work fine with NS4.75 for SGI IRIX;)
Actually, the current HTML spec (dated 26 January 2000) is XHTML 1.0 -- and close tags are required for <tr>, <th>, <td>, and all other elements. XML, of which XHTML is an application, doesn't allow implicit closure of elements.
A feature is an objective attribute such as "provides variable-sized fonts". It is not something like "must be identical to MS Office". Just as a bid for cars will specify horsepower, gas mileage, etc. and cannot say "must be identical to a Ford."
In my experience doing work for the Agency for International Development, the deliverables in the RFP included reports delivered in electronic format, and the format specified was MS Word. It didn't specify a laundry list of features, it specified Microsoft Word 95. Sometime after 1996 (I don't recall exactly which year) USAID switched from WP5.1 to Word, and all the contractors then had to switch.
They also required formatting for US letter paper, which is a royal pain if youre on an overseas project you cant even buy letter size paper in most countries. Thats another gripe, though.
Why not found a religious order? Get yourself a mail-order D.D. (Doctor of Divinity) and register the Church of the Open Source with the Feds. They youre tax-exempt, but theres no restriction on your turning a profit. Recruit among slashdotters and convince them to tithe to save their souls . ..
Slashdot Mirror
I remember president Ronald Reagan pulling the same kind of stuff when he was in office. Some of the statistics Reagan quoted in his public speeches often were wrong or had no data supporting the claim. Why is it that people buy into BS when it comes out of the president or some CEO?
That was KAL 007, the Korean 747 which a Soviet fighter mistakenly shot down. Reagan waved about a pile of paper, saying that he was holding proof that the Russkis knew they were shooting down a civilian airliner. It was pure fiction. (The true story, as I recall, was that the KAL flight had gone off course and was unwittingly following a similar flight plan to the American ELINT, or electronic intelligence, aircraft, which routinely "tested" Soviet air defences. Those aircraft, incidentally, were converted transport planes -- not too different from an airliner.)
I have to say, however, that I'm not sure lying for the sake of boosting profits and lying for the sake of increasing tensions with a nuclear-armed superpower are strictly comparable.
Everything's regulated nowadays. That's life in a modern bureaucratic state -- U.S., Canada, E.U., or any other -- and it's generally a good thing, because that's how you know that the blender you buy isn't going to explode and hurl the blade at your face the first time you plug it in.
There are two imporant distinctions to make:
Debian has a bug filed against libjpeg62. It sounds like libjpeg62 has to go to non-US if the patent holds.
--TK
I mean, if war breaks out between France and the US, and they don't allow Windows exports, that would be catastrophic!
Nah, the French would surrender before they even got Linux downloaded, let alone noticed how much better it is. 8-)
Old gags do die hard, don't they?
One might be inclined to note that:
--TK
I'll usually design using IE and then tweak it until it looks good in IE and Moz. (even when using 'cross platform' code, it still never works right in both, in my experience)
In those cases it's generally IE's problem -- there's a huge chunk of CSS2 that even IE6 ignores or botches, but that Gecko gets right.
Netscape 4 users can go fuck themselves, though. Seriously.
As a Web developer, I've said the same thing on more than one occasion -- but then had to support NS4 anyway because a couple of the directors (i.e., boss's bosses) still use it.
Regarding NS4, the biggest problem for me is when I need to browse from UNIX boxes where I have only non-root access, and NS4 is often the only choice. What I'm leaning toward now is putting all the CSS in files exploiting the `media="all"' bug so NS4 ignores them. Then the NS4 users get a plain-vanilla grey-background text page which may be ugly as sin but still works. That's what's important.
FWIW, your site seems to work fine with NS4.75 for SGI IRIX ;)
Actually, the current HTML spec (dated 26 January 2000) is XHTML 1.0 -- and close tags are required for <tr>, <th>, <td>, and all other elements. XML, of which XHTML is an application, doesn't allow implicit closure of elements.
A feature is an objective attribute such as "provides variable-sized fonts". It is not something like "must be identical to MS Office". Just as a bid for cars will specify horsepower, gas mileage, etc. and cannot say "must be identical to a Ford."
In my experience doing work for the Agency for International Development, the deliverables in the RFP included reports delivered in electronic format, and the format specified was MS Word. It didn't specify a laundry list of features, it specified Microsoft Word 95. Sometime after 1996 (I don't recall exactly which year) USAID switched from WP5.1 to Word, and all the contractors then had to switch.
They also required formatting for US letter paper, which is a royal pain if youre on an overseas project you cant even buy letter size paper in most countries. Thats another gripe, though.
Why not found a religious order? Get yourself a mail-order D.D. (Doctor of Divinity) and register the Church of the Open Source with the Feds. They youre tax-exempt, but theres no restriction on your turning a profit. Recruit among slashdotters and convince them to tithe to save their souls . . .
I think itd work . . .