There are some good tools for the job. Relatively speaking, Java isn't one of them.
While Java does include some built-in support for multithreading primitives, its underlying model (using locks on data to prevent simultaneous access) is the same as many other mainstream languages today. Thus it suffers from the same weaknesses, including deadlocking, and potentially also things like potential priority inversion, depending on how clever the implementation of the concurrency tools is.
If you want serious multithreaded programming, there are languages practically built around it (Erlang, for example), and for that matter whole approaches that lend themselves to it much better than those used by today's popular commercial languages (e.g., functional programming without side effects). But right now, you still have to look out of the mainstream to find them, and be prepared to accept a fundamental shift in how you look at program construction if you want to take advantage of them.
I think you're mistaking a standard for a formal specification.
I agree with you that it would be great if the whole browser world followed W3C recommendations, given their popularity outside the IE world, and the fact that they are formally specified. However, the word "standard" implies a widespread acceptance, and the only player in that game today is defined by "what IE 6 does". Calling most specifications about the web from the W3C "standards" is, unfortunately, rather misleading; you cannot have less than 1/5 of the market share and claim to be any sort of standard, and AFAICS the W3C themselves rarely use that term.
You don't like it. I don't like it. But it is the way things are, and for the foreseeable future it's the way things will be (except that it will become IE 7 if all the auto-updates take effect and half the market shifts overnight). We can, and should, plan for the future by discussing possible ways forward and seeking to reach a concensus that can be recommended to all web browser developers, but that recommendation will become the standard only if widely adopted.
My dad is a real user. He has trouble remembering how to shut down the computer. He doesn't understand the concept of windows - when a dialog pops up, he asks how to get back to the previous page because he doesn't know he's supposed to click on the 'X'. He's a typical novice user with minimum computer skills. Yet he could smoothly switch back and forth between IE and Firefox. Heck, he can't even tell the difference.
I believe you just conceded the argument.
IME, the only difference most users can tell is that some sites only work with IE. As I've said before, you can argue that people should support W3C standards all you like, but the reality is that when Microsoft have 80+% market share, they define the only standard that matters. The stubborn insistence of the developers of alternative browsers - those of Firefox in particular - that they will support W3C standards only and not render non-standard pages written for IE, is one of the major reasons more people don't use other browsers, IMHO.
It seems these days that people understand less and less about how technology works
That's an ironic claim, from someone who had just written:
In the time it takes for you to utter "Hello World!" with your voice, you could send hundreds of text messages in the same data stream. So text messages are essentially "free" from the cell providers point of view,
Firstly, mobile communications tend to use multiple channels for different purposes. It's not very likely that your text messages are in the same data stream as someone else's voice call.
Secondly, you're ignoring overheads. Getting the software in place throughout a network's infrastructure to support text messaging is not cheap. Testing it is certainly not cheap, and is an ongoing expense: when I worked for a mobile radio company a few years ago, it was standard policy to check all new radios sent for approval for use on the network exhaustively, by quite literally making every possible type of call to every type of approved radio and checking that it worked. That's a very time-consuming process - several man-weeks - just to check a single radio. Now we have so many new kinds of data flying around, that's one more variable for the operating companies to worry about, and one more thing to fix when someone making a new phone screws up their software (or gets a worm, or whatever).
In other words, you're way off base with your claim about text messaging effectively being free to the operators.
If I can charge you $40 for the basic service and $10 more for an added service that doesn't require any more technology than the basic service (or less in the case of text messaging), then consumers are getting ripped off.
Only if the original $40 represented the true cost of the service. It's not uncommon for businesses in any industry to run a basic service at a slight loss to minimise the big number on the advert, and then make their money on the optional extras.
In fact, why in the world don't prices drop further for established services? Why do all your typical monthly bills seem to bottom out at around $20 to $30 (a single person, living alone). Why are they all about the same, even for completely differing services.
Probably because there are basic costs that the suppliers have to meet, which limit their pricing if they are not to make a loss, and because the suppliers of different services are effectively in competition: you can have a gas cooker or an electric cooker, but you're still cooking the same number of dinners on it, and if one service becomes much cheaper, customers are likely to switch to that alternative.
Yet, our bills seem to keep going up. Why?
For a start, because customers are prepared to pay for it, and the businesses are in business to make a profit.
For seconds, because every one of those wonderful initiatives that governments come up with to "protect the public" or whatever usually winds up costing the affected businesses a significant amount of money. Did you expect them to absorb the entire cost of all that regulation, insurance, etc?
CSS Zen Garden is a fascinating web site, and a nice demonstration of what can be achieved if you work hard enough. It's also a great demonstration of the fact that to get professional design grade results with CSS, you still have to use entirely non-semantic mark-up all over the place, usually fix a lot of your layouts instead of using liquid, and frequently depend on graphics to do the clever things. Drawing conclusions about the power (or otherwise) of (today's) CSS is left as an exercise for the reader.
The biggest single problem with LaTeX, IMHO, is that when someone's already written a package that does what you want, everything's great, but if they haven't, you're basically sunk.
Consider this simple example: I have recently given up entirely on using colour when typesetting a LaTeX document. Why? Because it simply doesn't work. The LaTeX engine does not support proper colour tagging, with the result that you get arbitrary blocks of text at the start or end of an output page in the wrong colour. There is no way to fix the problem, and never will be; it is an architectural weakness.
The same could be said for a lot of the image placement and vertical spacing algorithms: while Knuth may have developed a great paragraph justification algorithm, his tool's vertical spacing (even allowing for stretch factors and the like) leaves much to be desired, and so does everything built on it, including anything using LaTeX.
LaTeX is very good at what it was designed for: presenting papers nicely. I can't see anyone but a masochist of the highest order trying to use it for serious work in other contexts. With a few more decades of experience that we now have, I don't see why we can't design a serious DTP system that learns from the things LaTeX did well, while dropping the academic focus, obscure macro hackery and artificial limitations.
I think this just amounts to a "best tool for the task" problem. HTML is not a replacement for PDF.
Agreed, on both counts.
If you need a brochure, designed by graphics folks, use a professional publishing tool, create your brochure, and save it as a PDF (or even a SVG). If you need easily searched, easily understood text online, use HTML.
But this is where we differ. You seem to take it as read that we must have one or the other. What I'd like to see is a semantic web, enabling all of the searching, cross-referencing and other useful content-based tricks, but presented to a professional standard, which means good graphic design and typography (amongst many other things).
There are plenty of absolutely stunning web sites out there that are standards-compliant, don't have layout tied to imagery, and scale wonderfully and appear reasonably on a variety of media. The technology and skills exist out there today to do this effectively.
And this is where we really differ. Although I'm not a professional web designer, I've long held an interest in what I collectively term "presentation skills". I believe that if something is worth saying, then it's worth taking the time to say it as clearly and accurately as possible, and that good presentation supports the content. Indeed, I'm in the process of updating a reasonably large site for a society I belong to, from the design we created a few years ago (which isn't bad even by today's standards) to something that looks a little cleaner and easier on the today's eyes, and shifts the focus somewhat in light of the information we now know our members and interested visitors are most likely to want.
With this in mind, I'm reasonably familiar with what current web technologies can and cannot do as compared to the "ideals" of design available through traditional print, PDF, and the like. I've read the usual sites and check the usual blogs now and then. And I think it's fair to say that I have seen very few pages that fit your description, and those that I have seen have often been limited in some way.
Could you perhaps give some examples that you would consider "stunning", that use only (or even predominantly) the basic web standards without relying on graphics or other tricks for effect? This is a genuine question, as I'm curious to know whether there's a whole world out there I simply haven't encountered yet, or whether I just set higher standards for acceptable presentation than you do.
The problem is, there is no viable alternative if you want your site to look good, and there won't be any time soon, either. Good typography and graphic design benefit both the reader and the content provider, and the tools to support these disciplines on the web are poor at best if you exclude the use of images.
Fluid design is a neat idea, but a lot of people have managed to convert it into the idea that the user knows more about how to arrange content than the content provider does, and will be better catered for when they can adjust anything they like about how the page is rendered, as arbitrarily as they like. In many cases, that simply isn't going to be true: note the bizarre lack of correlation between what sort of fonts and typography users think look good when asked "Does this look good to you?" and the sorts of font and typography that actually lead to improved viewer comfort and understanding when measured objectively.
It's the age-old argument: is it truly better for the user to have a wide choice of service, or to provide them with one good option rather than a host of mediocre ones? Of course, there will always be the exceptions, typically where highly visually impaired readers are concerned in this case, but tweaking the standard layout is unlikely to provide a satisfactory outcome for them unless the site designers considered this category of user carefully anyway. Similarly, there will always be users with different preferences and some minor adjustments will be beneficial here, but this is where fluid layout really does help.
However, this sort of adjustment is a far cry from saying that when a designer has carefully laid out a page to group related information and draw the reader through the content in a meaningful way, the user would be better off with a random page layout generated by messing up the proportions of different elements. Until scalable graphics and more advanced typography and layout features become widely supported on the web - still something several years away today - the only way to achieve the former effect is with judicious use of graphics to support the layout.
But that's sort of the qhole point of this article: the designer just don't have the information needed to make sure the page looks good and is legible for all its users.
As others have pointed out, that's not necessarily true. However, what is quite likely is that users won't choose good personal preferences for readability. When users adjust font sizes, do they take into account the resulting physical column width and its likely impact on their reading ease, or do they hit the scale buttons until the three characters they're staring it look nicest?
Of course, you avoid all of this problem when you stop using absolute units of measure and start using relative.
At which point you instead have the far more serious problem that 98% of web graphics are fixed-size, and the remaining 2% don't work properly in 85% of browsers.*
*Statistics arbitrary, but probably pretty close to the real world anyway.
Loyalty is indeed a desirable character trait, as are trust and integrity -- but loyalty and trust are earned, not bought, and integrity comes from respecting the principle, not the money.
I am fiercely loyal to my family and friends, because I know and care about them, and I appreciate all the things they have done for me as well. If they're in need and I can help, then I do.
On the other hand, when I go to a car dealer for a test drive, we're talking about a commercial transaction. I like to support businesses that offer good service, so the fact that they take me for a test drive will make me more inclined to buy the car from them than another dealer if I decide I want one. However, if they then ask several thousand over the odds for it, I'll have no ethical problem with going to another dealer.
One could make a similar argument for my local store vs. an on-line retailer: if the prices are comparable, and I find something I want by browsing in the store and talking to their staff, then I'll generally buy it from the store to support them. On the other hand, when my local Borders whacked up their prices to nearly twice what Amazon charge in the run up to Christmas, I felt no sorrow at buying everything on-line, even if I first saw it in Borders.
And so it goes with recording artists. They make CDs or play a concert. If I like their music enough, I'll buy the CD or go to the concert, and I won't screw them by ripping the track off some random P2P network instead. But equally, if they put their prices up to a level I don't think is worth it, I'll do without the CD or the night out rather than feel some sort of obligation to pay over the odds.
It's a great truism that something is worth what someone's prepared to pay for it. Although money is a rather materialistic concept, it's also an objective measure of how much we value something in comparison to other things we might have or do instead. But there is a world of difference between expecting someone to pay for a product or service because you're asking a fair price and it's a mutually beneficial deal, and expecting that you can buy loyalty.
The only ones left are A. the occasional and usually harmless slipup by normally responsible citizens (barely over the legal limit)
Sorry, but you lose. It's irresponsible to drink at all and drive. If you have any alcohol in your blood stream, your performance is impaired. To get from the responsible situation where you haven't had a drink (or had it so long ago that the alcohol is safely out of your system) to the situation where you're "just barely" over the legal limit is not an accident, and can't happen without you knowing it was a possibility.
Just because you can't walk and talk at the same time doesn't mean you need to ban it for the rest of us.
No, the fact that other people can't do it either is the reason we ban it for them as well.
There are a few bad apples out there. How many?
In the scientific studies carried out prior to introducing the legislation in the UK? Approximately 100% of the sample, with the more seriously affected being comparable to driving well over the legal blood alcohol limit, and even the less seriously affected exhibiting significant delays in their reactions.
If there are a lot of deaths due to cellphone conversations, I've yet to see them piled up on the front page of the newspapers.
Your faith in the free press is misplaced. Try looking at the accident stats, and correlating with increased mobile phone use by drivers. Of course correlation is not the same as causation, but it is evidence of an unwelcome trend. When the correlation becomes strong and no other likely contributory factors have been identified to explain the trend, it's a good bet that you've found the source of your problem.
Of course you're right that the real solution involves proper traffic policing and not just robotic enforcement of unenforceable laws. But that doesn't mean the laws are wrong, or that it's a bad idea to educate society about the dangerous behaviour until it becomes socially unacceptable. And that goes for several of the other, similarly dangerous behaviours you mentioned, too.
Perhaps there are exceptions. Perhaps you're even one of them, though when tested objectively, pretty much everyone who thinks they are turns out not to be. In any case, that's not really the point, because the overall trend is clear.
I'm an experienced driver, with above-average training, and I drive an exceptional vehicle. Statistically, I'm far less likely to have an accident at speeds significantly above the legal limit than an average driver is to have an accident below it. Do I complain that the speed limits are wrong on this basis and that it's unfair that I can't legally drive faster? No, because I recognise that road safety laws have to be mostly a least common denominator affair. If a limit is inappropriate for driving in general, that's one thing. If it's inconvenient to me personally but generally sound, that's another.
I think you are a bandwagon jumper. You have little to contribute, but are vocal in your opinion.
The difference between this applied to the grandparent post and this applied to your own is merely that the grandparent's claims correspond to the available scientific evidence, while yours correspond to the common driver error of overconfidence.
driving without proper authority (no licence, tax, insurance, or whatever your jurisdiction would normally require).
If something's not dangerous or inconsiderate to anyone, and not a technical offence, why should it be illegal?
If it is unreasonably dangerous or annoying to others, why shouldn't it?
This approach is simple, and combined with sensible policing and allowing courts wide discretion in awarding penalties, it's also probably far more effective than our current policies, at least here in the UK.
Talking on a phone not only distracts you from keeping track of hazards, it compromises control of the vehicle something rotten.
That's true, but in tests leading up to the UK ban, it was found that drivers using hands-free kits are almost as dangerous as those on hand-held phones. The distraction is the main problem, not the fact that you've only got one hand on the wheel. It's not the same as someone sitting next to you, because usually someone sitting next to you can see both you and the road ahead, and will instinctively shut up when they sense that you need to concentrate on approach to a hazard.
The UK government proceeded to implement a ban on hand-held phones only, and a lot of "responsible" organisations have since been promoting the highly-dangerous habit of driving while on a hands-free kit. It will be interesting, in a macabre kind of way, to see whether the introduction of the anti-mobile-phone legislation here actually correlates with an improvement in road safety.
The only really safe way to use a phone in a car is when you're not driving it at the time. I don't care how urgent your business call is, or that you need your other half to put the kettle on now so the coffee's ready when you get home. Either pull over in a safe and legal place and make/answer the call, or wait until you've arrived. Anything else is dangerous driving, and should be prosecuted under your local dangerous driving laws regardless of any phone-specific restrictions. If it really was safer than not making the call (e.g., you're calling the emergency services a good reason) then that should be a sufficient defence in court.
Well, TFA mentions minimal collateral damage. How close to zero that is, and under what circumstances it's greater, is left as an exercise to the read (provided they have sufficient security clearance, presumably)...
The examples in TFA all seem to talk about big armour like tanks and APCs. AIUI, the major (though obviously not only) threat from RPGs in places like Iraq is to Hummers and such, and the big problem is that even up-armoured versions of these light vehicles are far from immune to a good RPG shot. If this system really is as effective as the article makes out, and really will be ready within a couple of years, I wonder whether its first use will be on light vehicles like the next generation Hummer replacement, rather than on the M1A2 and friends.
Reactive armour is basically another layer of material on the outside of the vehicle. If I read TFA right, the Trophy system sends a stream of projectiles to intercept incoming threats at ranges of 10-30 metres. It's more attacking the incoming weapon ahead of time than waiting for the weapon to hit but trying to disrupt its effects when it does (though the basic principle - try to get it to explode early - is the same).
DRM limits your ability to move the media to a format of your choice, giving you no alternative but to keep rebuying.
Except, of course, that no-one has yet developed a crack-proof DRM technology, and while the record label has to be lucky every time, the public has to be lucky only once and they've got a non-DRM'd copy in circulation. Hence there is always an alternative, even if it's illegal.
The thing about intellectual property, or any other law for that matter, is that it only works when it's a reasonable foundation for civilised behaviour and widely accepted in society. If the public feels that the asking price for music is fair, they'll respect the copyright and pay up, as evidenced by the millions of downloads made from services like iTunes even though one could no doubt find the content on-line for free but illegally. However, faced with the abusive use of DRM+DMCA to inhibit fair use, it's a good bet that the public as a whole will rebel, and the best the recording industry will be able to do in return is file a few very nasty lawsuits against a small number of people, a mere drop in the file-sharing ocean.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, someone else is looking at them. You'll have to wait until later.
There are some good tools for the job. Relatively speaking, Java isn't one of them.
While Java does include some built-in support for multithreading primitives, its underlying model (using locks on data to prevent simultaneous access) is the same as many other mainstream languages today. Thus it suffers from the same weaknesses, including deadlocking, and potentially also things like potential priority inversion, depending on how clever the implementation of the concurrency tools is.
If you want serious multithreaded programming, there are languages practically built around it (Erlang, for example), and for that matter whole approaches that lend themselves to it much better than those used by today's popular commercial languages (e.g., functional programming without side effects). But right now, you still have to look out of the mainstream to find them, and be prepared to accept a fundamental shift in how you look at program construction if you want to take advantage of them.
[Glances at article title]
Riiiiiight. No-one would ever dream of suggesting that Macs were previously "immune to viruses". :-)
I think you're mistaking a standard for a formal specification.
I agree with you that it would be great if the whole browser world followed W3C recommendations, given their popularity outside the IE world, and the fact that they are formally specified. However, the word "standard" implies a widespread acceptance, and the only player in that game today is defined by "what IE 6 does". Calling most specifications about the web from the W3C "standards" is, unfortunately, rather misleading; you cannot have less than 1/5 of the market share and claim to be any sort of standard, and AFAICS the W3C themselves rarely use that term.
You don't like it. I don't like it. But it is the way things are, and for the foreseeable future it's the way things will be (except that it will become IE 7 if all the auto-updates take effect and half the market shifts overnight). We can, and should, plan for the future by discussing possible ways forward and seeking to reach a concensus that can be recommended to all web browser developers, but that recommendation will become the standard only if widely adopted.
I believe you just conceded the argument.
IME, the only difference most users can tell is that some sites only work with IE. As I've said before, you can argue that people should support W3C standards all you like, but the reality is that when Microsoft have 80+% market share, they define the only standard that matters. The stubborn insistence of the developers of alternative browsers - those of Firefox in particular - that they will support W3C standards only and not render non-standard pages written for IE, is one of the major reasons more people don't use other browsers, IMHO.
That's an ironic claim, from someone who had just written:
Firstly, mobile communications tend to use multiple channels for different purposes. It's not very likely that your text messages are in the same data stream as someone else's voice call.
Secondly, you're ignoring overheads. Getting the software in place throughout a network's infrastructure to support text messaging is not cheap. Testing it is certainly not cheap, and is an ongoing expense: when I worked for a mobile radio company a few years ago, it was standard policy to check all new radios sent for approval for use on the network exhaustively, by quite literally making every possible type of call to every type of approved radio and checking that it worked. That's a very time-consuming process - several man-weeks - just to check a single radio. Now we have so many new kinds of data flying around, that's one more variable for the operating companies to worry about, and one more thing to fix when someone making a new phone screws up their software (or gets a worm, or whatever).
In other words, you're way off base with your claim about text messaging effectively being free to the operators.
Only if the original $40 represented the true cost of the service. It's not uncommon for businesses in any industry to run a basic service at a slight loss to minimise the big number on the advert, and then make their money on the optional extras.
Probably because there are basic costs that the suppliers have to meet, which limit their pricing if they are not to make a loss, and because the suppliers of different services are effectively in competition: you can have a gas cooker or an electric cooker, but you're still cooking the same number of dinners on it, and if one service becomes much cheaper, customers are likely to switch to that alternative.
For a start, because customers are prepared to pay for it, and the businesses are in business to make a profit.
For seconds, because every one of those wonderful initiatives that governments come up with to "protect the public" or whatever usually winds up costing the affected businesses a significant amount of money. Did you expect them to absorb the entire cost of all that regulation, insurance, etc?
Assumption failure at line 1.
CSS Zen Garden is a fascinating web site, and a nice demonstration of what can be achieved if you work hard enough. It's also a great demonstration of the fact that to get professional design grade results with CSS, you still have to use entirely non-semantic mark-up all over the place, usually fix a lot of your layouts instead of using liquid, and frequently depend on graphics to do the clever things. Drawing conclusions about the power (or otherwise) of (today's) CSS is left as an exercise for the reader.
The biggest single problem with LaTeX, IMHO, is that when someone's already written a package that does what you want, everything's great, but if they haven't, you're basically sunk.
Consider this simple example: I have recently given up entirely on using colour when typesetting a LaTeX document. Why? Because it simply doesn't work. The LaTeX engine does not support proper colour tagging, with the result that you get arbitrary blocks of text at the start or end of an output page in the wrong colour. There is no way to fix the problem, and never will be; it is an architectural weakness.
The same could be said for a lot of the image placement and vertical spacing algorithms: while Knuth may have developed a great paragraph justification algorithm, his tool's vertical spacing (even allowing for stretch factors and the like) leaves much to be desired, and so does everything built on it, including anything using LaTeX.
LaTeX is very good at what it was designed for: presenting papers nicely. I can't see anyone but a masochist of the highest order trying to use it for serious work in other contexts. With a few more decades of experience that we now have, I don't see why we can't design a serious DTP system that learns from the things LaTeX did well, while dropping the academic focus, obscure macro hackery and artificial limitations.
Agreed, on both counts.
But this is where we differ. You seem to take it as read that we must have one or the other. What I'd like to see is a semantic web, enabling all of the searching, cross-referencing and other useful content-based tricks, but presented to a professional standard, which means good graphic design and typography (amongst many other things).
And this is where we really differ. Although I'm not a professional web designer, I've long held an interest in what I collectively term "presentation skills". I believe that if something is worth saying, then it's worth taking the time to say it as clearly and accurately as possible, and that good presentation supports the content. Indeed, I'm in the process of updating a reasonably large site for a society I belong to, from the design we created a few years ago (which isn't bad even by today's standards) to something that looks a little cleaner and easier on the today's eyes, and shifts the focus somewhat in light of the information we now know our members and interested visitors are most likely to want.
With this in mind, I'm reasonably familiar with what current web technologies can and cannot do as compared to the "ideals" of design available through traditional print, PDF, and the like. I've read the usual sites and check the usual blogs now and then. And I think it's fair to say that I have seen very few pages that fit your description, and those that I have seen have often been limited in some way.
Could you perhaps give some examples that you would consider "stunning", that use only (or even predominantly) the basic web standards without relying on graphics or other tricks for effect? This is a genuine question, as I'm curious to know whether there's a whole world out there I simply haven't encountered yet, or whether I just set higher standards for acceptable presentation than you do.
The problem is, there is no viable alternative if you want your site to look good, and there won't be any time soon, either. Good typography and graphic design benefit both the reader and the content provider, and the tools to support these disciplines on the web are poor at best if you exclude the use of images.
Fluid design is a neat idea, but a lot of people have managed to convert it into the idea that the user knows more about how to arrange content than the content provider does, and will be better catered for when they can adjust anything they like about how the page is rendered, as arbitrarily as they like. In many cases, that simply isn't going to be true: note the bizarre lack of correlation between what sort of fonts and typography users think look good when asked "Does this look good to you?" and the sorts of font and typography that actually lead to improved viewer comfort and understanding when measured objectively.
It's the age-old argument: is it truly better for the user to have a wide choice of service, or to provide them with one good option rather than a host of mediocre ones? Of course, there will always be the exceptions, typically where highly visually impaired readers are concerned in this case, but tweaking the standard layout is unlikely to provide a satisfactory outcome for them unless the site designers considered this category of user carefully anyway. Similarly, there will always be users with different preferences and some minor adjustments will be beneficial here, but this is where fluid layout really does help.
However, this sort of adjustment is a far cry from saying that when a designer has carefully laid out a page to group related information and draw the reader through the content in a meaningful way, the user would be better off with a random page layout generated by messing up the proportions of different elements. Until scalable graphics and more advanced typography and layout features become widely supported on the web - still something several years away today - the only way to achieve the former effect is with judicious use of graphics to support the layout.
As others have pointed out, that's not necessarily true. However, what is quite likely is that users won't choose good personal preferences for readability. When users adjust font sizes, do they take into account the resulting physical column width and its likely impact on their reading ease, or do they hit the scale buttons until the three characters they're staring it look nicest?
At which point you instead have the far more serious problem that 98% of web graphics are fixed-size, and the remaining 2% don't work properly in 85% of browsers.*
*Statistics arbitrary, but probably pretty close to the real world anyway.
Fitting more on-screen, particularly on wide-screen monitors, is a useful idea, but a separate issue covered in other articles.
Loyalty is indeed a desirable character trait, as are trust and integrity -- but loyalty and trust are earned, not bought, and integrity comes from respecting the principle, not the money.
I am fiercely loyal to my family and friends, because I know and care about them, and I appreciate all the things they have done for me as well. If they're in need and I can help, then I do.
On the other hand, when I go to a car dealer for a test drive, we're talking about a commercial transaction. I like to support businesses that offer good service, so the fact that they take me for a test drive will make me more inclined to buy the car from them than another dealer if I decide I want one. However, if they then ask several thousand over the odds for it, I'll have no ethical problem with going to another dealer.
One could make a similar argument for my local store vs. an on-line retailer: if the prices are comparable, and I find something I want by browsing in the store and talking to their staff, then I'll generally buy it from the store to support them. On the other hand, when my local Borders whacked up their prices to nearly twice what Amazon charge in the run up to Christmas, I felt no sorrow at buying everything on-line, even if I first saw it in Borders.
And so it goes with recording artists. They make CDs or play a concert. If I like their music enough, I'll buy the CD or go to the concert, and I won't screw them by ripping the track off some random P2P network instead. But equally, if they put their prices up to a level I don't think is worth it, I'll do without the CD or the night out rather than feel some sort of obligation to pay over the odds.
It's a great truism that something is worth what someone's prepared to pay for it. Although money is a rather materialistic concept, it's also an objective measure of how much we value something in comparison to other things we might have or do instead. But there is a world of difference between expecting someone to pay for a product or service because you're asking a fair price and it's a mutually beneficial deal, and expecting that you can buy loyalty.
Sorry, but you lose. It's irresponsible to drink at all and drive. If you have any alcohol in your blood stream, your performance is impaired. To get from the responsible situation where you haven't had a drink (or had it so long ago that the alcohol is safely out of your system) to the situation where you're "just barely" over the legal limit is not an accident, and can't happen without you knowing it was a possibility.
No, the fact that other people can't do it either is the reason we ban it for them as well.
In the scientific studies carried out prior to introducing the legislation in the UK? Approximately 100% of the sample, with the more seriously affected being comparable to driving well over the legal blood alcohol limit, and even the less seriously affected exhibiting significant delays in their reactions.
Your faith in the free press is misplaced. Try looking at the accident stats, and correlating with increased mobile phone use by drivers. Of course correlation is not the same as causation, but it is evidence of an unwelcome trend. When the correlation becomes strong and no other likely contributory factors have been identified to explain the trend, it's a good bet that you've found the source of your problem.
Of course you're right that the real solution involves proper traffic policing and not just robotic enforcement of unenforceable laws. But that doesn't mean the laws are wrong, or that it's a bad idea to educate society about the dangerous behaviour until it becomes socially unacceptable. And that goes for several of the other, similarly dangerous behaviours you mentioned, too.
Perhaps there are exceptions. Perhaps you're even one of them, though when tested objectively, pretty much everyone who thinks they are turns out not to be. In any case, that's not really the point, because the overall trend is clear.
I'm an experienced driver, with above-average training, and I drive an exceptional vehicle. Statistically, I'm far less likely to have an accident at speeds significantly above the legal limit than an average driver is to have an accident below it. Do I complain that the speed limits are wrong on this basis and that it's unfair that I can't legally drive faster? No, because I recognise that road safety laws have to be mostly a least common denominator affair. If a limit is inappropriate for driving in general, that's one thing. If it's inconvenient to me personally but generally sound, that's another.
The difference between this applied to the grandparent post and this applied to your own is merely that the grandparent's claims correspond to the available scientific evidence, while yours correspond to the common driver error of overconfidence.
There should be three driving offences:
If something's not dangerous or inconsiderate to anyone, and not a technical offence, why should it be illegal?
If it is unreasonably dangerous or annoying to others, why shouldn't it?
This approach is simple, and combined with sensible policing and allowing courts wide discretion in awarding penalties, it's also probably far more effective than our current policies, at least here in the UK.
That's true, but in tests leading up to the UK ban, it was found that drivers using hands-free kits are almost as dangerous as those on hand-held phones. The distraction is the main problem, not the fact that you've only got one hand on the wheel. It's not the same as someone sitting next to you, because usually someone sitting next to you can see both you and the road ahead, and will instinctively shut up when they sense that you need to concentrate on approach to a hazard.
The UK government proceeded to implement a ban on hand-held phones only, and a lot of "responsible" organisations have since been promoting the highly-dangerous habit of driving while on a hands-free kit. It will be interesting, in a macabre kind of way, to see whether the introduction of the anti-mobile-phone legislation here actually correlates with an improvement in road safety.
The only really safe way to use a phone in a car is when you're not driving it at the time. I don't care how urgent your business call is, or that you need your other half to put the kettle on now so the coffee's ready when you get home. Either pull over in a safe and legal place and make/answer the call, or wait until you've arrived. Anything else is dangerous driving, and should be prosecuted under your local dangerous driving laws regardless of any phone-specific restrictions. If it really was safer than not making the call (e.g., you're calling the emergency services a good reason) then that should be a sufficient defence in court.
Oh, but what's really going to bake your noodle later on is: would it still have hurt if you hadn't written that? :-)
Well, TFA mentions minimal collateral damage. How close to zero that is, and under what circumstances it's greater, is left as an exercise to the read (provided they have sufficient security clearance, presumably)...
The examples in TFA all seem to talk about big armour like tanks and APCs. AIUI, the major (though obviously not only) threat from RPGs in places like Iraq is to Hummers and such, and the big problem is that even up-armoured versions of these light vehicles are far from immune to a good RPG shot. If this system really is as effective as the article makes out, and really will be ready within a couple of years, I wonder whether its first use will be on light vehicles like the next generation Hummer replacement, rather than on the M1A2 and friends.
Reactive armour is basically another layer of material on the outside of the vehicle. If I read TFA right, the Trophy system sends a stream of projectiles to intercept incoming threats at ranges of 10-30 metres. It's more attacking the incoming weapon ahead of time than waiting for the weapon to hit but trying to disrupt its effects when it does (though the basic principle - try to get it to explode early - is the same).
Did you just say you'd found the cure for bird flu? That's amazing!
Except, of course, that no-one has yet developed a crack-proof DRM technology, and while the record label has to be lucky every time, the public has to be lucky only once and they've got a non-DRM'd copy in circulation. Hence there is always an alternative, even if it's illegal.
The thing about intellectual property, or any other law for that matter, is that it only works when it's a reasonable foundation for civilised behaviour and widely accepted in society. If the public feels that the asking price for music is fair, they'll respect the copyright and pay up, as evidenced by the millions of downloads made from services like iTunes even though one could no doubt find the content on-line for free but illegally. However, faced with the abusive use of DRM+DMCA to inhibit fair use, it's a good bet that the public as a whole will rebel, and the best the recording industry will be able to do in return is file a few very nasty lawsuits against a small number of people, a mere drop in the file-sharing ocean.