It depends on what sort of object and how one defines "shiny".
Quality tools usually have an understated aesthetic, a wabi sort of thing that is attractive, but that I wouldn't call "shiny" -- indeed it's sort of deliberately "anti-shiny". I'd never buy a hammer whose designers tried to make it shiny.
Quality toys can of course be shiny, the shininess being part of their toy nature. And some things partake of both the tool and the toy nature -- such as a sports car or an electric guitar.
However, proprietary and quality are mutually exclusive: if you can't open it, you don't own it. And Apple is the king -- or at least an archduke -- of proprietary.
"Yes, you can't even open the case to replace the battery, but how shiny the buttons are!"
Exhibit A: Microsoft Windows--makes a lot of money AND they don't care about users. Exhibit B: Mac OSX--makes a lot of money but has to care about users, otherwise they render themselves obsolete.
Apple "cares" about its users the same way a gold-digging wife "cares" about her husband, or a manufactured pop music group "cares" about its fans.
Apple cares about keeping its users blinded with shiny distractions, sure. It does not care about providing quality products or services, or about the long-term well-being of its customers.
Apple has been a bunch of lawsuit trolls since the infamous "look and feel" lawsuits of the late 1980s. There are every bit as evil as Microsoft, just smaller and wrapper in a prettier box.
It is true, if I can see it from a public location, it isn't private. End of story. You might not agree with it, but legally, that's how it works.
Except that that whole premise of this thread is that "Expressing a preference or desire that is different than that enshrined in the law is hardly sufficient grounds to label someone an idiot."
When arguing whether law is proper or if it ought to be changed, citing the law to resolve an issue is begging the question.
So, no. The fact that you can see something from a public location does not make it public. If the law currently holds that (and I'd like you to cite a statute to that effect, please), than the law is an ass, the law is in variance with the requirements of human dignity and freedom, and the law must change.
Manifestly untrue. From such public areas as roads and sidewalks, we can see through windows into people's houses and apartments and backyards, their private areas. In civilized areas, we don't have to black out our windows or put up high fences but can rely on other people to respect our expectation of privacy -- to take no more than a passing glance inside, not to press their face up against the glass.
The problem with Google's Street View is that it can take that passing glance, make it permanent, and publish it to the world. The folks who ran the Google car out of town may not be able to articluate it clearly, but there is a real problem here, and it cannot be glossed over by pretending that there is a clear separation between public and private areas.
Steve Mann's idea of Humanistic Property is relevant here (though his rhetoric is sometimes needlessly inflammatory).
straight HTML spit out by a server-side CGI script was about the fastest way you could possibly display the insane amount of information on a slashdot comments page quickly
Yes. Please, please, please, STOP with the pointless and annoying AJAXing of Slashdot. It is not a "web application" like Google maps where you want to be able to zoom and drag. It is an information source, so send me the information -- not a program to view the information in the way you think is cool.
Classic mode works fine (except, as the parent notes, the broken pagination), whereas attempting to use the "new and improved" system makes me want to put my fist through the screen. If they ever remove the option to use classic mode, for the safety of my hardware I'll have to stop using the site.
You seem to be under delusions of what the driving forces are behind the "you can't have" mantra. It's nothing to do with whether it's right or wrong in the world, it's whether it's a threat or not. If your interests are "what are the threats to us?"...
...the the hypocricy comes from holding your own actions to that standard, while claiming that others should respect the rule of law.
If our actions are based on "what are the threats to us?", then it is hypocritical to condemn North Korea for acting on the standard, "what are the threats to North Korea?"
Being the ones who opened the bottle, and then saw how dangerous the genie is, and shoved the cork right back in, we take it as our responsibility to guard the bottle against others who would open it.
Nice fairy tale, but if that had been the case, we would have take our duty under the NNPT seriously and worked for disarmament. Instead we spent decades in an arms race that made nukes more common, and continued a brutal and stupid foreign policy that inspired small nations to obtain nukes as a deterrent against invasion.
No.... we're not "better," just much less likely to use them against others.
On what historical evidence do you base that claim?
While of course Kim Jong Il's rule has been absolutely horrible for the people of North Korea, U.S. foreign policy has been far more belligerent than North Korea's. And the U.S. remains the only country to have used nuclear weapons.
We also have many more nukes, making it effectively cheaper to use them.
Putting effective ICBMs in the hands of someone like Kim Jong Il is insanely irresponsible.
Nobody is talking about putting them into his hands. He's building them on his own. The alternatives are:
bitch and moan about it
engage in positive diplomacy so that North Korea feels so safe and secure that it doesn't feel it needs such armaments
engage in negative diplomacy, using economic and political sanctions, so that it is in North Korea's rational self-interest to get rid of such armaments
going to war to wipe out North Korea's ability to make nukes and missles
I hope we can agree that going to war with an insane dictator who has nuclear weapons, because we're worried he might use nuclear weapons if we ever went to war, is a non-starter.
Relying on North Korea to act out of rational self-interest would require Kim Jong Il to be rational. Har-de-har-har.
It's probably too late to sweet talk a country once you (or your predecessor) have dug yourself into a pit by labeling them part of an "axis of evil".
Fortunately, bitching and moaning about it is free.
Only the "Left" are abused of their Constitutional Rights?
Did I say that? No, I did not.
However, since cops tend to be conservative on social issues, bad cops who decide to abuse their authority are more likely to target liberals. More bad cops get a thrill out of harassing Rainbows than out of messing with Young Republicans.
Of course there are cases where people are the right are unfairly harassed by law enforcement, probably the most famous being Ruby_Ridge and Waco. However these don't tend to be tangles with the local cops.
pupils being expeled from public school for reading a Bible on a school bus on the way to school.
Thank goodness that liberals like the ACLU are there to defend those student's rights.
Cops don't just randomly pick people to pick on, even the most corrupt cops. They are after all, people, and for the most part they have better things to do, until you make yourself a target.
Randomly? No. They pick their targets on a variety of criteria: race, political affiliation, religious beliefs, sexual preference, hairstyle, and so on. So, yes, you're safe until you make yourself a target by being black, or having a Grateful Dead sticker on your car, or wearing your hair in dreadlocks, or being an anti-war activist...so long as you're a middle-class white person of mainstream religious, political, and lifestyle affiliation, you've nothing to worry about.
Somehow we keep going... I'm gonna go listen to some Dust Bowl Ballads, excuse me.
May I suggest "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd"? Awfully relevant these days: "Now as through this world I ramble /
I see lots of funny men / Some will rob you with a Six gun / And some with a fountain pen."
I get amused when I hear folks complain about how rap music glorifies crime. Songs have celebrated criminals for hundreds of years: "I Shot the Sheriff", "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd", going back to "Whiskey in the Jar" from the 17th century, and of course earlier to ballads of Robin Hood. When the system is corrupt -- which it always is to some degree, but sometimes worse than others -- when every cop is a criminal, than people will glorify the outlaws, and take the sinners to be saints.
They are more than that: progressive taxes are also an important governor on the government actions and policies that enable the concentration of wealth.
Why should one person pay more for an identical service rendered than another person?
But the government does not render the same service to the rich as for the poor. Since one of the government's prime tasks is to create and enforce so-called "property rights", it provides much more service to the rich than to the the poor; it is the government that keeps the poor from setting up shanties on the lawns of the owning class's mansions.
That's because the corporations don't have the power to (a) steal money directly from my wallet or (b) send me to jail if I refuse to pay or (c) use an involuntary military draft to make me die in some shithole in Vietnam or Iraq.
But of course they do. Where do your tax dollars end up? The military-industrial complex, or the prison-industrial complex. Why did we go to war in Vietnam and Iraq? Because war is good for the military-industrial complex, communism must be contained (because it tends to make workers uppity), and American industry needs cheap oil and cheap tungsten and tin.
Corporations are government entities. They are created by government fiat ("charters"), and when they grow large enough, they exert disturbing levels of control on their environment, including governments.
Big business is big government. "Anarcho-capitalism" is a self-contradiction.
It's called jury nullification, and I'd think most judges won't let you argue for it, make juries swear an oath to uphold the law
While judges will prevent lawyers from talking about the jury's rightful power to consider questions of law as well as fact, in so doing they are the ones violating their oath to uphold the law. A juror who votes to acquit a defendant accused of a "crime" under an unconstitutional law in upholding the law of the land, the one that legislatures ignored in passing the statute, and that police and prosecutors ignored in enforcing it.
Criminal defendant have the right to trial by jury. But what is a jury? At the time that the Constitution was created, it was clear that "jury" meant a body empowered to dismiss charges brought under bad and unjust laws. As John Adams put it: "It is not only his right but also his duty... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."
And John Jay, first Chief Justice: "It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision... you [juries] have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy."
This idea is still explicitly written into the state constitutions of Maryland and Indiana, and in implicit in that of Pennsylvania.
Perhaps doing so and then rebuilding it "as its forefathers intended" (and accounting for current situations) might be a good plan.
Its forefathers intended it to be a nation run by and for wealthy white men. Which, for the most part, it still is.
Its forefathers intended it to be an agrarian, rural nation -- Jefferson, for example, believed that large cities were "pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man."
Rebuilding the U.S. "as its forefathers intended" would mean a lot of regression; "accounting for current situations" leaves little relevance to many of their ideas.
The Founders had a few good ideas -- the U.S. ought to avoid foreign wars and mind its own business, government ought to be representative and its powers limited, and those limits should be fixed in writing. And I have to give Washington serious props for doing the Cincinnatus thing.
But by and large, they were slave-owning aristocrats, and we ought not worship them or their ideals.
The Constitution spells out what government's job is. The Bill of Rights spells out what the government can NOT do.
First, the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution. Please don't speak as if they were separate things.
Second, the Bill of Rights states "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people," and "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
In other words, the list of federal powers listed in the Constitution is a limit on them, while the list of right is not a limit on people's rights. The Constitution sets a floor on our rights and a ceiling on government power.
It took a long time for UIs to get "mostly good" on the desktop, and the same is true of websites in general.
The problem is that web applications were "mostly good" UIs before all this AJAX crap. They were simple and consistent. Tim Bray got it right (of course):
When the web came along people shriked with glee and universally abandoned all those rich immersive responsive pre-internet applications and ran into the arms of the web. I can remember like yesterday content management conference that was held sometimes in the middle late nineties and it was a woman from a large manufacturing company talking about the content management for the technical documentation, which was a pretty big project, and she said "Oh it was so great when the vendors all brought in the web interfaces because it forced them to get rid of all these weird cascading menus and options that nobody ever used, and brutally simplified everything down" and at the end of the day the interface the browser presents is something that people are comfortable with....
...
I have not once in all those years heard an ordinary user say "Oh I wish we go back to before the days of the web when every application was different and idiosyncratic... ".
Re:Sorry, but I have to consider the source
on
UN Attacks Free Speech
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
An earlier Reuters story notes that "Similar unbinding resolutions have been passed since 1999 in the U.N. General Assembly and by the 47-nation Human Rights Council". (I think that should be "non-binding" rather than "unbinding", but I'll let the English majors fight it out.)
This is a tempest in a teacup, being seized upon by the usual suspects who want Islam to replace the USSR as the generator of sufficient fear and loathing to keep the military-industrial complex humming. Relax.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on what sort of object and how one defines "shiny".
Quality tools usually have an understated aesthetic, a wabi sort of thing that is attractive, but that I wouldn't call "shiny" -- indeed it's sort of deliberately "anti-shiny". I'd never buy a hammer whose designers tried to make it shiny.
Quality toys can of course be shiny, the shininess being part of their toy nature. And some things partake of both the tool and the toy nature -- such as a sports car or an electric guitar.
However, proprietary and quality are mutually exclusive: if you can't open it, you don't own it. And Apple is the king -- or at least an archduke -- of proprietary.
"Yes, you can't even open the case to replace the battery, but how shiny the buttons are!"
Apple "cares" about its users the same way a gold-digging wife "cares" about her husband, or a manufactured pop music group "cares" about its fans.
Apple cares about keeping its users blinded with shiny distractions, sure. It does not care about providing quality products or services, or about the long-term well-being of its customers.
Apple has been a bunch of lawsuit trolls since the infamous "look and feel" lawsuits of the late 1980s. There are every bit as evil as Microsoft, just smaller and wrapper in a prettier box.
Except that that whole premise of this thread is that "Expressing a preference or desire that is different than that enshrined in the law is hardly sufficient grounds to label someone an idiot."
When arguing whether law is proper or if it ought to be changed, citing the law to resolve an issue is begging the question.
So, no. The fact that you can see something from a public location does not make it public. If the law currently holds that (and I'd like you to cite a statute to that effect, please), than the law is an ass, the law is in variance with the requirements of human dignity and freedom, and the law must change.
Manifestly untrue. From such public areas as roads and sidewalks, we can see through windows into people's houses and apartments and backyards, their private areas. In civilized areas, we don't have to black out our windows or put up high fences but can rely on other people to respect our expectation of privacy -- to take no more than a passing glance inside, not to press their face up against the glass.
The problem with Google's Street View is that it can take that passing glance, make it permanent, and publish it to the world. The folks who ran the Google car out of town may not be able to articluate it clearly, but there is a real problem here, and it cannot be glossed over by pretending that there is a clear separation between public and private areas.
Steve Mann's idea of Humanistic Property is relevant here (though his rhetoric is sometimes needlessly inflammatory).
Yes. Please, please, please, STOP with the pointless and annoying AJAXing of Slashdot. It is not a "web application" like Google maps where you want to be able to zoom and drag. It is an information source, so send me the information -- not a program to view the information in the way you think is cool.
Classic mode works fine (except, as the parent notes, the broken pagination), whereas attempting to use the "new and improved" system makes me want to put my fist through the screen. If they ever remove the option to use classic mode, for the safety of my hardware I'll have to stop using the site.
...the the hypocricy comes from holding your own actions to that standard, while claiming that others should respect the rule of law.
If our actions are based on "what are the threats to us?", then it is hypocritical to condemn North Korea for acting on the standard, "what are the threats to North Korea?"
Nice fairy tale, but if that had been the case, we would have take our duty under the NNPT seriously and worked for disarmament. Instead we spent decades in an arms race that made nukes more common, and continued a brutal and stupid foreign policy that inspired small nations to obtain nukes as a deterrent against invasion.
On what historical evidence do you base that claim?
While of course Kim Jong Il's rule has been absolutely horrible for the people of North Korea, U.S. foreign policy has been far more belligerent than North Korea's. And the U.S. remains the only country to have used nuclear weapons.
We also have many more nukes, making it effectively cheaper to use them.
Nobody is talking about putting them into his hands. He's building them on his own. The alternatives are:
I hope we can agree that going to war with an insane dictator who has nuclear weapons, because we're worried he might use nuclear weapons if we ever went to war, is a non-starter.
Relying on North Korea to act out of rational self-interest would require Kim Jong Il to be rational. Har-de-har-har.
It's probably too late to sweet talk a country once you (or your predecessor) have dug yourself into a pit by labeling them part of an "axis of evil".
Fortunately, bitching and moaning about it is free.
Umm...you do know the original source of that bit of dialog, and that it was merely sampled by G&R, right?
Did I say that? No, I did not.
However, since cops tend to be conservative on social issues, bad cops who decide to abuse their authority are more likely to target liberals. More bad cops get a thrill out of harassing Rainbows than out of messing with Young Republicans.
Of course there are cases where people are the right are unfairly harassed by law enforcement, probably the most famous being Ruby_Ridge and Waco. However these don't tend to be tangles with the local cops.
Thank goodness that liberals like the ACLU are there to defend those student's rights.
Randomly? No. They pick their targets on a variety of criteria: race, political affiliation, religious beliefs, sexual preference, hairstyle, and so on. So, yes, you're safe until you make yourself a target by being black, or having a Grateful Dead sticker on your car, or wearing your hair in dreadlocks, or being an anti-war activist...so long as you're a middle-class white person of mainstream religious, political, and lifestyle affiliation, you've nothing to worry about.
May I suggest "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd"? Awfully relevant these days: "Now as through this world I ramble / I see lots of funny men / Some will rob you with a Six gun / And some with a fountain pen."
I get amused when I hear folks complain about how rap music glorifies crime. Songs have celebrated criminals for hundreds of years: "I Shot the Sheriff", "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd", going back to "Whiskey in the Jar" from the 17th century, and of course earlier to ballads of Robin Hood. When the system is corrupt -- which it always is to some degree, but sometimes worse than others -- when every cop is a criminal, than people will glorify the outlaws, and take the sinners to be saints.
Expressing a preference or desire that is different than that enshrined in the law is hardly sufficient grounds to label someone an idiot.
Obviously it would be moronic to believe that the entire universe can be simply and neatly bisected into "public" and "private" areas.
They are more than that: progressive taxes are also an important governor on the government actions and policies that enable the concentration of wealth.
But the government does not render the same service to the rich as for the poor. Since one of the government's prime tasks is to create and enforce so-called "property rights", it provides much more service to the rich than to the the poor; it is the government that keeps the poor from setting up shanties on the lawns of the owning class's mansions.
But of course they do. Where do your tax dollars end up? The military-industrial complex, or the prison-industrial complex. Why did we go to war in Vietnam and Iraq? Because war is good for the military-industrial complex, communism must be contained (because it tends to make workers uppity), and American industry needs cheap oil and cheap tungsten and tin.
Don't think corporations can send you to jail? Take another look at the headlines about the RIAA.
Corporations are government entities. They are created by government fiat ("charters"), and when they grow large enough, they exert disturbing levels of control on their environment, including governments.
Big business is big government. "Anarcho-capitalism" is a self-contradiction.
While judges will prevent lawyers from talking about the jury's rightful power to consider questions of law as well as fact, in so doing they are the ones violating their oath to uphold the law. A juror who votes to acquit a defendant accused of a "crime" under an unconstitutional law in upholding the law of the land, the one that legislatures ignored in passing the statute, and that police and prosecutors ignored in enforcing it.
Criminal defendant have the right to trial by jury. But what is a jury? At the time that the Constitution was created, it was clear that "jury" meant a body empowered to dismiss charges brought under bad and unjust laws. As John Adams put it: "It is not only his right but also his duty... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."
And John Jay, first Chief Justice: "It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision... you [juries] have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy."
This idea is still explicitly written into the state constitutions of Maryland and Indiana, and in implicit in that of Pennsylvania.
Since this supposed "control" has been going on for years and has had no effects, yes.
Not all Socialists are Communists, and not all Communists are Stalinists.
And the world's most noted anti-Communists, the Nazis, also did a bang-up job of killing millions.
Who's riding who's spaceships into orbit?
When the Shuttle stops running, the Russkies will be our only ride into space.
Its forefathers intended it to be a nation run by and for wealthy white men. Which, for the most part, it still is.
Its forefathers intended it to be an agrarian, rural nation -- Jefferson, for example, believed that large cities were "pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man."
Rebuilding the U.S. "as its forefathers intended" would mean a lot of regression; "accounting for current situations" leaves little relevance to many of their ideas.
The Founders had a few good ideas -- the U.S. ought to avoid foreign wars and mind its own business, government ought to be representative and its powers limited, and those limits should be fixed in writing. And I have to give Washington serious props for doing the Cincinnatus thing.
But by and large, they were slave-owning aristocrats, and we ought not worship them or their ideals.
First, the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution. Please don't speak as if they were separate things.
Second, the Bill of Rights states "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people," and "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
In other words, the list of federal powers listed in the Constitution is a limit on them, while the list of right is not a limit on people's rights. The Constitution sets a floor on our rights and a ceiling on government power.
The problem is that web applications were "mostly good" UIs before all this AJAX crap. They were simple and consistent. Tim Bray got it right (of course):
An earlier Reuters story notes that "Similar unbinding resolutions have been passed since 1999 in the U.N. General Assembly and by the 47-nation Human Rights Council". (I think that should be "non-binding" rather than "unbinding", but I'll let the English majors fight it out.)
This is a tempest in a teacup, being seized upon by the usual suspects who want Islam to replace the USSR as the generator of sufficient fear and loathing to keep the military-industrial complex humming. Relax.
There are many things that can "get you in trouble".
Downloading info about environmental or animal rights activism? Since green is the new red, you might make a terrorist watch-list.
Or maybe you want to read Chuck Norris's call for the formation of "cell groups" to prepare for another campaign of terrorist "succession" from the U.S..
Or maybe you want to blow the whistle on corrupt government but fear backlash, so need anonymous communication.
Or maybe you want to be able to get information about medical conditions without letting your "managed care" company know.