That's not entirely fair. As far as I've seen the folks against federally funded stem cell research have always been enthusiastic about any source of stem cells other than embryos.
Heh... this troll is a work of genius & I salute you for it. Personal anecdote, wikipedia link to some obscure software & a plausible sounding argument all in support of an outrageously silly conclusion: "OS X will not be a popular platform for artists" who are of course the Mac's single most loyal market. Beautiful.
If Apple even has 3 billion in cash I would be surprised. If they have 30 in cash someone belongs in prison for breach as fiduciary.
According to a recent Wired article Apple has $15.4 billion in cash reserves. Thus all the opinion pieces about what Apple should buy. However this'll never happen, Apple has never gone for big acquisitions. They prefer smaller, easily digestible meals: small companies & a few deals for just an application and/or it's development team from another company that otherwise remains independent (SoundJam from Cassidy & Green, FinalCut from Macromedia).
And no, no Apple stockholders are angry at Apple for holding onto a pile of cash... we're pretty happy with the way they're fulfilled their fiduciary duties ( I for instance bought my stock about 5 years ago for around $20 *before* the split, yesterdays close was $187.44 (Yippee!!) )
I think I'm understanding your point, "eye candy" like reflections and translucency can be conveying real information using the metaphor of 3-dimensional space. I certainly have no problem with that (I'm a graphic designer by trade). The problem is that the subtle information about relationships being conveyed by your "latent spatial relationships" could be conveyed in another manner. The manner it IS being conveyed with has the potential (in the menu) and the certainty (in the Dock) of completely obscuring the critical information you NEED to display in those cases. The knocked out icons on the dock are certain to often be over-layed on top of visually busy backgrounds since they pop-up into the work area, the menu *might* if the user is unwise in their choice of background images. The glowing dot active application indicator is pretty subtle even without clutter, and as I said before there is no possible excuse for "stacks" deceptively displaying the wrong icon because they display not their own icon but the icon of whatever object happens to be the first in the directory. Perceptual depth is a good thing, gaining it at the expense of legibility is not. I can forgive the menu since they decreased the transparency in the released version and I can control the background on which it's over-layed, the new dock though is a big step backwards for an interface which was already problematic.
"translucent objects are used in the real world every day. Map Panels, Dividing walls, Map Overlays, etc. find use by Engineers, Scientists, Military, etc"
Sure but in (most of) those cases the translucence is doing something beneficial. In the cases Siracusa is complaining about it's not, it's actually detrimental. Translucency isn't bad in itself (and his really damning complaints aren't about the translucency anyway), it CAN be useful, but it can also be misused and Siracusa's specific complaints are well justified. There's a good reason for a map overlay to be translucent, so you can see the map below it. That doesn't hold true for the menu bar, no useful information is being conveyed through the transparency, just visual clutter that makes the menu illegible. The dock is even worse, translucency may be marginally useful there revealing some of the real work area beneath it (& the Dock is already translucent) But vignetted icons on who knows what background and shiny surfaces reflecting visual noise are just bad ideas. They only make it more difficult discern the information that's being conveyed to you. There's simply no excuse for the stupidity of how the dock now deals with folders. Stacks are an intriguing idea but this implementation is significantly less useful than a simple folder, and displaying not the folder icon but the first item in the folder? That's not just bad but wrong.
Really? Did you read the same review I did? It seems Siracusa was saying the opposite, that all the exciting stuff is for developers that users won't even notice (Aside from the cool new stuff developers can do with it) DTrace, FSEvents , Core Animation, Core Text, better 64-Bit support, Objective C 2.0.
Leopard will have "Spaces" but it sounds like all of a particular application's windows will be tied to a particular desktop. I like to have all the files associated with a particular project open in each desktop which may be in same application(s), so I'll probably stick with Desktop Manager
You've made his point. There are a dozen links under Needlepoint to particular stitches 2/3rds of which go nowhere and the remainder are stubs. Only one goes to an actual article. Needlepoint isn't a particularly obscure activity yet there isn't much on wikipedia about it beyond that single article. A far more obscure topic from computer science would be fully fleshed out with plenty of links to even more obscure sub-topics.
33% of Fox viewers said that the U.S. had actually physically found WMDs in the course of the invasion.
To be fair those 33% of Fox viewers were technically correct, while the larger majority would be technically incorrect.. Real, live, physical WMD's had in fact been found in Iraq amounting to a few hundred artillery shells containing Sarin and Mustard gas. The caveat being that these were left-overs in various stages of degradation from Saddams pre-Kuwiat invasion WMD program that was dismantled and not from an ongoing WMD program.
I'm in favor of more limited and fiscally disciplined government, like we had under Clinton.
It sometimes seems to me that the rational voter should vote "against" the presidential candidate that espouses his values... Once in office there are powerful temptations pushing presidents to pursue policies that are the opposite of their party's positions. They will face withering criticism for being an "extremist" or "radical" if they govern according to their stated principles. They dare not go too far. On the other hand they want grand political successes... and that's VERY hard to get pursuing the traditional policy goals of their own party because they need support from the opposing party to do anything big. BUT... it's very EASY to do if you pick one or two policy goals of the opposing party... as the head of your party you can get grudging support & even apparent enthusiasm (big smiles through gritted teeth) from all but the most principled/radical/extremist in your own party, and the support of much of the opposition as well. You can have way more success pursuing your opponents goals than you can pursuing your own (or your opponent would have pursuing his goals himself). As they said "Only Nixon can go to China"
After overreaching pursuing liberal policies he didn't run on Clinton got his head handed to him in the '92 mid-terms. After that he only pursued essentially Republican policies (at least on the big things). A Republican could never have had the successes Clinton had in reforming welfare along Republican lines. It was a huge success for a conservative Republican policy... He has no comparable successes enacting liberal Democratic policies. In terms of policy Clinton would have been considered very successful *as a Republican* His reputation for success as a Democrat is purely a matter of politics (You WIN politically when you steal your opponents policies)
By the same token Bush's pursued and won the Medicare prescription drug benefit that Clinton failed to get (a HUGE spending increase Clinton wanted but gave up on) and pushed through an Education policy largely written by Ted Kennedy that won more Democratic than Republican votes. He is criticized even on these policies by his opponents but they could not gotten anywhere near as much had they pursued those policies themselves (indeed they didn't.. Clinton's similar Medicare prescription drug bill was a huge political defeat). On domestic policy the Bush administration has been a huge success for Democratic policy goals.
Now, in a million small ways each President's administration was/is true to their parties goals if only because of the dictum "personnel is policy" and their personnel in thousands of political posts are party loyalists & true believers. But for their really big policy changes (on the Domestic front at least) they were effectively (very effectively) members of the opposite party.
Well, you're both right!... the island has under 1,000 people the town across the water has over 7,000.
The arguments for building the bridge are:
1) The city doesn't have much adjacent developable land because it's all too mountainous... the nearby island has a lot of flat developable land...
2) The airport is on the island. And most importantly...
3) Senator Stevens is on the appropriations committee.
The arguments against spending federal money to build the bridge are:
1) It's classic pork-barrel spending on a local, not federal issue. The state of Alaska, and the city involved have their own money to spend on their own issues. And most importantly...
2) Because of the large amount of money and the tiny population of the island it provides plenty of good sound-bites to imply it's particularly frivolous pork. Especially when it was introduced right after Hurricane Katrina and there were a lot of bridges in need of repair there getting a lot less (or no) money.
Your assumption about the price of gasoline doubling... I think that's pretty much a given. We -know- there's a limited amount of fuel in the world. We think we know about how much. We know we use more every year than the previous year.
I don't think it's a given at all. As oil becomes more expensive alternatives will become competitive and the price stabilizes, increases more slowly than predicted, or even falls as the alternatives become more efficient. Just sticking with alternative sources of petroleum and ignoring alternatives TO petroleum there is a LOT of other recoverable oil out there not (usually) included in estimated reserves. At the new higher prices and with better extraction techniques (developed to take advantage of high prices) Canadian tar sands are already cost competitive and have recently been added to Canada's estimated reserves. This has changed their estimated reserves from 5 billion barrels to 180 billion barrels (making their reserves bigger than those of any middle eastern nation other than Saudi Arabia). It's likely that eventually Venezuela's Orinoco tar sands will also be taken into account taking them from known reserves of a little under 80 billion barrels to 350 billion barrels & making their reserves significantly larger than the Saudi's. Things really get fun if the price of oil hits a sustained price between $75-85 per barrel and Oil Shale becomes competitive. At that point the USA goes from it's current ~20 billion known reserves to 800 billion barrels(!!!) That dwarfs the entire middle east's current conventional reserves. Around that same price point (IIRC) using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal to petroleum also becomes competitive further increasing the USA's (and the worlds) petroleum reserves. These are all proven resources and the known techniques to extract them. Nothing significant needs to be invented, no undiscovered resource needs to be found (though it's likely that a lot more Oil Shale exists out there to be found, because it's not yet competitive nobody has bothered too much to look for it).
The key point though is that as we start to exploit those resources we'll become more efficient at doing so. It's currently estimated that it would take a price of over $75 per barrel for Shale Oil extraction to be profitable BUT that once we do the cost per barrel would drop to less than half that... so the price of oil could initially peak and then drop as new resources entering the market at the higher price become more efficient.
And like most people living through such a revolution you're massively overestimating it compared with those that preceded it. The automobile, the industrial revolution, electrification all had MUCH more impact on society and individual's lives than the computer/internet have had (so far at least). It seems to me the pace of technological advancement has actually slowed considerably over the last half-century than what it was prior to that.
Think about life 50 years ago, aside from computers, and pretty much ONLY computers, not much has changed. Suburban living with a car in the driveway, indoor plumbing, electricity, home appliances and electronics - refrigerator/freezers, washing machines, clothes dryers, radio, TV etc. etc. etc.... The average adult from the 50's would certainly be appreciate at the last 50 years of *refinement* to technology he already had. At war he flew jets, potentially armed with nuclear bombs against opponents armed with RPG's and AK-47's . Not much in our modern life would be outlandish to him. Even that most revolutionary new do-hicky the personal computer would be pretty understandable as some newfangled typewriter-TV-Phone version of the IBM computers that already existed at the time. Ward Cleaver would have some adjustments to make to today's world but surprisingly few of them would be related to technology.
Now go back another 50 years. A man from that time would be much more out of place and amazed in the 50's than a man from the 50's would be today. Cars, Electricity (and it's attendant gadgets), even indoor plumbing existed but were quite rare. Henry Ford hadn't started mass production of the automobile (have to wait a year or two for that). Technology on ALL fronts was advancing *very* rapidly but hadn't trickled down. There were no suburbs, you lived in the company town & walked to your job @ the factory. The technology the common man had was the mechanical fruits of the industrial revolutions (a much, much bigger revolution than the computer/internet revolution). Go back yet another 50 years & bring that farmer forward & he'd be amazed at all the newfangled (mechanical) technology that 1907 man enjoyed and at how few of them were farmers.
Maybe it's just that by 1950 we had grabbed all the low-hanging fruit of the combination of the enlightenment & industrialization, but every step of the way from 1800 (maybe 1750?) to 1950 seemed to witness much more rapid technical advancement than the last 50 years has witnessed.
Another complaint I have is that FOSS GUIs tend to rely a lot on toolbars and icons. Although this isn't necessarily a terrible thing in and of itself
Actually it is. There is a UI principle: "a word is worth a thousand pictures." Icons are only useful if you already know them by sight and/or their meaning is painfully obvious, and even then only when there isn't too much visual clutter from a bunch of other icons around them making the user have to hunt for the particular one they want. The need for "Tooltips" is a clear sign of a bad UI. It always seemed to me that the MacOS got this, while Microsoft didn't. It's ironic that Apple which popularized icons as a UI element has always used them much more sparingly than Microsoft. It's as though Microsoft coming in later to the game said: "So they want pictures do they... well! We'll give them pictures out the yazoo" without ever fulling understanding the point of those "pictures".
The article goes on to say that some of that may be because these particular Mac users whine a lot and need more help (my words), but also "... due to the nature of the tools we use on the Mac."
I didn't think they were saying that because the users where whiners but that the Mac users in that organization were doing different tasks & had more intense computing needs than their PC users. It's certainly true of most ad agencies I've worked with/at. The PC users are typical office users with modest computing needs. The Mac user "creatives" however are doing photo, audio & video editing. And they will whine about things the PC users won't... The secretary won't even notice if the shade of red in that print isn't quite the same as what was on the monitor. To the designer though that'd be a big deal.
He's talking about Aliases on the mac, which are not the same as a hard link. They don't have the limitations you describe, you can alias to a directory, on any partition or mounted drive. For instance i have aliases on my desktop to the project directories I'm working with on the file server. If the directory is moved (from "development" to "archive" for instance) the alias will still work. It'll even connect to the server if I haven't already done so.
Because it's *always* been command+C probably for as long (or longer?) as windows has used ctrl+c.
Fortunately though it's a configurable setting:
Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard (tab) -> Modifier keys (button)
There you can map the keys to the modifier. Just map the control key to be the "command" modifier and the command key to the control modifier and you'll have the Windows key mappings you're used to.
And they are all on a yellow sticky on my desktop.I'm sorry to point out the obvious, but doesnt that negate the whole point?I'm sorry to point out the obvious, but that was the point (of the post).
The NEA isn't really a union. It is more like a professional organization.
A simple test of your theory, summarily fire a teacher and an accountant for gross incompetance, which side does the NEA and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants take in their respective cases? Which of the two professional organizations has a contract negotiated with management which prevents a summary firing? (for that matter which organization uses strikes as a tactic in those negotiations?) Which organization's contract (if there is one) mandates that it be involved as a representative of the employee in an appeals process?
Answer those questions and you know which organization is a professional organization and which is a union. The NEA has the trappings of a professional organization (training, seminars, conferences, professional publications for their members etc.) but then again so do the Teamsters. You CAN'T summarily dismiss a teacher, to fire them you must go through an involved process negotiated with the union, where the union represents the teacher regardless of the merits of his individual case. A professoinal organization probably has no position on any individual summary dismissal, and if pressed for one probably takes the side of the employer because it's promoting the excellence of it's profession not the well being of each and every practitioner of it's profession.
How is this a conservative agenda? Every important item in your list is about telling others how to live! A true conservative agenda is that basically people should be as free as possible from government interference.
You are confusing "conservative" with libertarian (or "classical liberal", or sometimes even just "liberal" though it's more of a 18th century meaning of the word) which means "that basically people should be as free as possible from government interference". thus "liberal" as in "liberty".
Conservative on the other hand means you like things the way they are or used to be in the fairly recent past. You want to "conserve" what is good about society and you are pessimistic about the likely benefits of proposed reforms. It's essentially political pessimism, or if you prefer, humility. A belief that society is unknowably complex and grand changes to our social structures even when they sound good on their face are likely to have unintended bad consequences. Conservatism in this sense has been described as an "antiideology" because the policies it defends may not be logically consistent (since it's just the way things happen to be, not as they would be if they reflected a coherent political ideology)
The united states was founded on liberal (in the old sense of the word) principles so conservatives in America tend to be defending classically liberal policies and ideas, and to adhere to a classically liberal political philosophy (albeit inconsistently). Opposing gay marriage, which is a pretty radical change to *very* long-standing social convention in the name of a logically consistent egalitarian political ideology is very rightly called "conservative". Abortion is less about liberal/conservative in this sense since the nature of the government intrusion involved is one that even the most libertarian would agree is within the proper sphere of government intrusion (protecting someone from bodily harm). The point of disagreement is about whether or not unborn children are entitled to that protection. You can be a perfectly logically consistent hyper-libertarian and still be pro-life if you are of the conviction that unborn children are entitled to that government protection.
So I, personally, am happier hearing that people went and just voted according to whim than hearing that people went and voted straight ticket (I find the odds of each candidate at all levels of government for a given party just happening to line up with your opinions on each issue at each level of government to be quite low).
I don't vote straight ticket (almost, but not quite) but it's a defensible strategy. The parties have somewhat definable, somewhat consistent agendas and if you are largely in agreement with one of these agendas voting straight ticket makes a lot of sense. Some of your votes may go to "mavericks" who's stated position on a particular issue is one you disagree with and the opposite of the party line... even in that case pressure from the leadership may cause them to vote your way in the end, or at the worst they will make the procedural votes that will move your agenda forward generally even if on the individual vote they go against your position.
On the other hand those mavericks if they are in a position of sufficient power can do a lot of mischief for your positions so the more powerful they are the less sense it makes to vote for them if you disagree with them. If you're looking at being in a solid majority/minority their procedural vote may not be worth the grief they can cause you. If you're on a knife edge (like we're likely to see as a result tonight) your vote for a conservative boll-weevil Democrat or a northeastern RINO Republican is a vote for or against Speaker Pelosi even if the specific person you're voting for is 180 degrees away from you on all the issues you most care about.
Now if you make that straight ticket decision you'll probably be smart to vote in the primaries, since that is where the direction of the party as a whole is determined and you have more viable choices & the opportunity to support candidates that you agree with on more of the specifics.
Absolutely untrue. What could be more hacker-proof than a paper ballot system?
I'd hardly call paper ballots "hacker-proof", maybe "computer-hacker-proof" but paper ballots can be hacked any number of ways (ballot stuffing, spoiling, ballots going missing, simply being miscounted etc.). Voter fraud existed even way back when paper ballots were the only option.
That being said I like the optical-scanner/paper ballot system they use in my state. It provides a nice balance, presumably impartial machines do the initial count but they can be checked (for some kind of computer-hack fraud) by an old-fashioned hand count which would make hacking the results after the fact much harder. Of course it doesn't do anything about hacking the input. Any hack that either fraudulently introduces a "valid" ballot (ineligible voters, the "voting dead" etc.) or fraudulently prevents the casting of a valid ballot. (voter intimidation or deception etc.)
I plug in the Ethernet cable, a script automatically starts and disables wi-fi card, duplicates NIC settings from the wi-fi card (IP address and so on) then brings up Ethernet. My applications just continue running, still connected to servers and such. If I pull out the ethernet cable, Wi-fi starts up, connects to the relevant network (if it's there) and my applications still aren't disconnected from anything.
Two questions:
1) Why couldn't you write a script to do this in MacOS X?
2) Why would you need a script to do this? (Spoken as a Mac user who's used to network connections working pretty much like that automagically)
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That's not entirely fair. As far as I've seen the folks against federally funded stem cell research have always been enthusiastic about any source of stem cells other than embryos.
Heh... this troll is a work of genius & I salute you for it. Personal anecdote, wikipedia link to some obscure software & a plausible sounding argument all in support of an outrageously silly conclusion: "OS X will not be a popular platform for artists" who are of course the Mac's single most loyal market. Beautiful.
Not that I think this is even remotely likely, But, you think the prospect of getting bought out for a giant pile of cash is a disincentive?
And no, no Apple stockholders are angry at Apple for holding onto a pile of cash... we're pretty happy with the way they're fulfilled their fiduciary duties ( I for instance bought my stock about 5 years ago for around $20 *before* the split, yesterdays close was $187.44 (Yippee!!) )
I think I'm understanding your point, "eye candy" like reflections and translucency can be conveying real information using the metaphor of 3-dimensional space. I certainly have no problem with that (I'm a graphic designer by trade). The problem is that the subtle information about relationships being conveyed by your "latent spatial relationships" could be conveyed in another manner. The manner it IS being conveyed with has the potential (in the menu) and the certainty (in the Dock) of completely obscuring the critical information you NEED to display in those cases. The knocked out icons on the dock are certain to often be over-layed on top of visually busy backgrounds since they pop-up into the work area, the menu *might* if the user is unwise in their choice of background images. The glowing dot active application indicator is pretty subtle even without clutter, and as I said before there is no possible excuse for "stacks" deceptively displaying the wrong icon because they display not their own icon but the icon of whatever object happens to be the first in the directory. Perceptual depth is a good thing, gaining it at the expense of legibility is not. I can forgive the menu since they decreased the transparency in the released version and I can control the background on which it's over-layed, the new dock though is a big step backwards for an interface which was already problematic.
"translucent objects are used in the real world every day. Map Panels, Dividing walls, Map Overlays, etc. find use by Engineers, Scientists, Military, etc"
Sure but in (most of) those cases the translucence is doing something beneficial. In the cases Siracusa is complaining about it's not, it's actually detrimental. Translucency isn't bad in itself (and his really damning complaints aren't about the translucency anyway), it CAN be useful, but it can also be misused and Siracusa's specific complaints are well justified. There's a good reason for a map overlay to be translucent, so you can see the map below it. That doesn't hold true for the menu bar, no useful information is being conveyed through the transparency, just visual clutter that makes the menu illegible. The dock is even worse, translucency may be marginally useful there revealing some of the real work area beneath it (& the Dock is already translucent) But vignetted icons on who knows what background and shiny surfaces reflecting visual noise are just bad ideas. They only make it more difficult discern the information that's being conveyed to you. There's simply no excuse for the stupidity of how the dock now deals with folders. Stacks are an intriguing idea but this implementation is significantly less useful than a simple folder, and displaying not the folder icon but the first item in the folder? That's not just bad but wrong.
Really? Did you read the same review I did? It seems Siracusa was saying the opposite, that all the exciting stuff is for developers that users won't even notice (Aside from the cool new stuff developers can do with it) DTrace, FSEvents , Core Animation, Core Text, better 64-Bit support, Objective C 2.0.
Leopard will have "Spaces" but it sounds like all of a particular application's windows will be tied to a particular desktop. I like to have all the files associated with a particular project open in each desktop which may be in same application(s), so I'll probably stick with Desktop Manager
You've made his point. There are a dozen links under Needlepoint to particular stitches 2/3rds of which go nowhere and the remainder are stubs. Only one goes to an actual article. Needlepoint isn't a particularly obscure activity yet there isn't much on wikipedia about it beyond that single article. A far more obscure topic from computer science would be fully fleshed out with plenty of links to even more obscure sub-topics.
33% of Fox viewers said that the U.S. had actually physically found WMDs in the course of the invasion.
To be fair those 33% of Fox viewers were technically correct, while the larger majority would be technically incorrect.. Real, live, physical WMD's had in fact been found in Iraq amounting to a few hundred artillery shells containing Sarin and Mustard gas. The caveat being that these were left-overs in various stages of degradation from Saddams pre-Kuwiat invasion WMD program that was dismantled and not from an ongoing WMD program.
I'm in favor of more limited and fiscally disciplined government, like we had under Clinton.
It sometimes seems to me that the rational voter should vote "against" the presidential candidate that espouses his values... Once in office there are powerful temptations pushing presidents to pursue policies that are the opposite of their party's positions. They will face withering criticism for being an "extremist" or "radical" if they govern according to their stated principles. They dare not go too far. On the other hand they want grand political successes... and that's VERY hard to get pursuing the traditional policy goals of their own party because they need support from the opposing party to do anything big. BUT... it's very EASY to do if you pick one or two policy goals of the opposing party... as the head of your party you can get grudging support & even apparent enthusiasm (big smiles through gritted teeth) from all but the most principled/radical/extremist in your own party, and the support of much of the opposition as well. You can have way more success pursuing your opponents goals than you can pursuing your own (or your opponent would have pursuing his goals himself). As they said "Only Nixon can go to China"
After overreaching pursuing liberal policies he didn't run on Clinton got his head handed to him in the '92 mid-terms. After that he only pursued essentially Republican policies (at least on the big things). A Republican could never have had the successes Clinton had in reforming welfare along Republican lines. It was a huge success for a conservative Republican policy... He has no comparable successes enacting liberal Democratic policies. In terms of policy Clinton would have been considered very successful *as a Republican* His reputation for success as a Democrat is purely a matter of politics (You WIN politically when you steal your opponents policies)
By the same token Bush's pursued and won the Medicare prescription drug benefit that Clinton failed to get (a HUGE spending increase Clinton wanted but gave up on) and pushed through an Education policy largely written by Ted Kennedy that won more Democratic than Republican votes. He is criticized even on these policies by his opponents but they could not gotten anywhere near as much had they pursued those policies themselves (indeed they didn't.. Clinton's similar Medicare prescription drug bill was a huge political defeat). On domestic policy the Bush administration has been a huge success for Democratic policy goals.
Now, in a million small ways each President's administration was/is true to their parties goals if only because of the dictum "personnel is policy" and their personnel in thousands of political posts are party loyalists & true believers. But for their really big policy changes (on the Domestic front at least) they were effectively (very effectively) members of the opposite party.
Well, you're both right!... the island has under 1,000 people the town across the water has over 7,000.
The arguments for building the bridge are:
1) The city doesn't have much adjacent developable land because it's all too mountainous... the nearby island has a lot of flat developable land...
2) The airport is on the island. And most importantly...
3) Senator Stevens is on the appropriations committee.
The arguments against spending federal money to build the bridge are:
1) It's classic pork-barrel spending on a local, not federal issue. The state of Alaska, and the city involved have their own money to spend on their own issues. And most importantly...
2) Because of the large amount of money and the tiny population of the island it provides plenty of good sound-bites to imply it's particularly frivolous pork. Especially when it was introduced right after Hurricane Katrina and there were a lot of bridges in need of repair there getting a lot less (or no) money.
Your assumption about the price of gasoline doubling... I think that's pretty much a given. We -know- there's a limited amount of fuel in the world. We think we know about how much. We know we use more every year than the previous year.
I don't think it's a given at all. As oil becomes more expensive alternatives will become competitive and the price stabilizes, increases more slowly than predicted, or even falls as the alternatives become more efficient. Just sticking with alternative sources of petroleum and ignoring alternatives TO petroleum there is a LOT of other recoverable oil out there not (usually) included in estimated reserves. At the new higher prices and with better extraction techniques (developed to take advantage of high prices) Canadian tar sands are already cost competitive and have recently been added to Canada's estimated reserves. This has changed their estimated reserves from 5 billion barrels to 180 billion barrels (making their reserves bigger than those of any middle eastern nation other than Saudi Arabia). It's likely that eventually Venezuela's Orinoco tar sands will also be taken into account taking them from known reserves of a little under 80 billion barrels to 350 billion barrels & making their reserves significantly larger than the Saudi's. Things really get fun if the price of oil hits a sustained price between $75-85 per barrel and Oil Shale becomes competitive. At that point the USA goes from it's current ~20 billion known reserves to 800 billion barrels(!!!) That dwarfs the entire middle east's current conventional reserves. Around that same price point (IIRC) using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal to petroleum also becomes competitive further increasing the USA's (and the worlds) petroleum reserves. These are all proven resources and the known techniques to extract them. Nothing significant needs to be invented, no undiscovered resource needs to be found (though it's likely that a lot more Oil Shale exists out there to be found, because it's not yet competitive nobody has bothered too much to look for it).
The key point though is that as we start to exploit those resources we'll become more efficient at doing so. It's currently estimated that it would take a price of over $75 per barrel for Shale Oil extraction to be profitable BUT that once we do the cost per barrel would drop to less than half that... so the price of oil could initially peak and then drop as new resources entering the market at the higher price become more efficient.
And like most people living through such a revolution you're massively overestimating it compared with those that preceded it. The automobile, the industrial revolution, electrification all had MUCH more impact on society and individual's lives than the computer/internet have had (so far at least). It seems to me the pace of technological advancement has actually slowed considerably over the last half-century than what it was prior to that.
Think about life 50 years ago, aside from computers, and pretty much ONLY computers, not much has changed. Suburban living with a car in the driveway, indoor plumbing, electricity, home appliances and electronics - refrigerator/freezers, washing machines, clothes dryers, radio, TV etc. etc. etc.... The average adult from the 50's would certainly be appreciate at the last 50 years of *refinement* to technology he already had. At war he flew jets, potentially armed with nuclear bombs against opponents armed with RPG's and AK-47's . Not much in our modern life would be outlandish to him. Even that most revolutionary new do-hicky the personal computer would be pretty understandable as some newfangled typewriter-TV-Phone version of the IBM computers that already existed at the time. Ward Cleaver would have some adjustments to make to today's world but surprisingly few of them would be related to technology.
Now go back another 50 years. A man from that time would be much more out of place and amazed in the 50's than a man from the 50's would be today. Cars, Electricity (and it's attendant gadgets), even indoor plumbing existed but were quite rare. Henry Ford hadn't started mass production of the automobile (have to wait a year or two for that). Technology on ALL fronts was advancing *very* rapidly but hadn't trickled down. There were no suburbs, you lived in the company town & walked to your job @ the factory. The technology the common man had was the mechanical fruits of the industrial revolutions (a much, much bigger revolution than the computer/internet revolution). Go back yet another 50 years & bring that farmer forward & he'd be amazed at all the newfangled (mechanical) technology that 1907 man enjoyed and at how few of them were farmers.
Maybe it's just that by 1950 we had grabbed all the low-hanging fruit of the combination of the enlightenment & industrialization, but every step of the way from 1800 (maybe 1750?) to 1950 seemed to witness much more rapid technical advancement than the last 50 years has witnessed.
Another complaint I have is that FOSS GUIs tend to rely a lot on toolbars and icons. Although this isn't necessarily a terrible thing in and of itself
Actually it is. There is a UI principle: "a word is worth a thousand pictures." Icons are only useful if you already know them by sight and/or their meaning is painfully obvious, and even then only when there isn't too much visual clutter from a bunch of other icons around them making the user have to hunt for the particular one they want. The need for "Tooltips" is a clear sign of a bad UI. It always seemed to me that the MacOS got this, while Microsoft didn't. It's ironic that Apple which popularized icons as a UI element has always used them much more sparingly than Microsoft. It's as though Microsoft coming in later to the game said: "So they want pictures do they... well! We'll give them pictures out the yazoo" without ever fulling understanding the point of those "pictures".
He's talking about Aliases on the mac, which are not the same as a hard link. They don't have the limitations you describe, you can alias to a directory, on any partition or mounted drive. For instance i have aliases on my desktop to the project directories I'm working with on the file server. If the directory is moved (from "development" to "archive" for instance) the alias will still work. It'll even connect to the server if I haven't already done so.
Because it's *always* been command+C probably for as long (or longer?) as windows has used ctrl+c.
Fortunately though it's a configurable setting:
Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard (tab) -> Modifier keys (button)
There you can map the keys to the modifier. Just map the control key to be the "command" modifier and the command key to the control modifier and you'll have the Windows key mappings you're used to.
And they are all on a yellow sticky on my desktop.I'm sorry to point out the obvious, but doesnt that negate the whole point?I'm sorry to point out the obvious, but that was the point (of the post).
The NEA isn't really a union. It is more like a professional organization.
A simple test of your theory, summarily fire a teacher and an accountant for gross incompetance, which side does the NEA and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants take in their respective cases? Which of the two professional organizations has a contract negotiated with management which prevents a summary firing? (for that matter which organization uses strikes as a tactic in those negotiations?) Which organization's contract (if there is one) mandates that it be involved as a representative of the employee in an appeals process?
Answer those questions and you know which organization is a professional organization and which is a union. The NEA has the trappings of a professional organization (training, seminars, conferences, professional publications for their members etc.) but then again so do the Teamsters. You CAN'T summarily dismiss a teacher, to fire them you must go through an involved process negotiated with the union, where the union represents the teacher regardless of the merits of his individual case. A professoinal organization probably has no position on any individual summary dismissal, and if pressed for one probably takes the side of the employer because it's promoting the excellence of it's profession not the well being of each and every practitioner of it's profession.
How is this a conservative agenda? Every important item in your list is about telling others how to live! A true conservative agenda is that basically people should be as free as possible from government interference.
You are confusing "conservative" with libertarian (or "classical liberal", or sometimes even just "liberal" though it's more of a 18th century meaning of the word) which means "that basically people should be as free as possible from government interference". thus "liberal" as in "liberty".
Conservative on the other hand means you like things the way they are or used to be in the fairly recent past. You want to "conserve" what is good about society and you are pessimistic about the likely benefits of proposed reforms. It's essentially political pessimism, or if you prefer, humility. A belief that society is unknowably complex and grand changes to our social structures even when they sound good on their face are likely to have unintended bad consequences. Conservatism in this sense has been described as an "antiideology" because the policies it defends may not be logically consistent (since it's just the way things happen to be, not as they would be if they reflected a coherent political ideology)
The united states was founded on liberal (in the old sense of the word) principles so conservatives in America tend to be defending classically liberal policies and ideas, and to adhere to a classically liberal political philosophy (albeit inconsistently). Opposing gay marriage, which is a pretty radical change to *very* long-standing social convention in the name of a logically consistent egalitarian political ideology is very rightly called "conservative". Abortion is less about liberal/conservative in this sense since the nature of the government intrusion involved is one that even the most libertarian would agree is within the proper sphere of government intrusion (protecting someone from bodily harm). The point of disagreement is about whether or not unborn children are entitled to that protection. You can be a perfectly logically consistent hyper-libertarian and still be pro-life if you are of the conviction that unborn children are entitled to that government protection.
So I, personally, am happier hearing that people went and just voted according to whim than hearing that people went and voted straight ticket (I find the odds of each candidate at all levels of government for a given party just happening to line up with your opinions on each issue at each level of government to be quite low).
I don't vote straight ticket (almost, but not quite) but it's a defensible strategy. The parties have somewhat definable, somewhat consistent agendas and if you are largely in agreement with one of these agendas voting straight ticket makes a lot of sense. Some of your votes may go to "mavericks" who's stated position on a particular issue is one you disagree with and the opposite of the party line... even in that case pressure from the leadership may cause them to vote your way in the end, or at the worst they will make the procedural votes that will move your agenda forward generally even if on the individual vote they go against your position.
On the other hand those mavericks if they are in a position of sufficient power can do a lot of mischief for your positions so the more powerful they are the less sense it makes to vote for them if you disagree with them. If you're looking at being in a solid majority/minority their procedural vote may not be worth the grief they can cause you. If you're on a knife edge (like we're likely to see as a result tonight) your vote for a conservative boll-weevil Democrat or a northeastern RINO Republican is a vote for or against Speaker Pelosi even if the specific person you're voting for is 180 degrees away from you on all the issues you most care about.
Now if you make that straight ticket decision you'll probably be smart to vote in the primaries, since that is where the direction of the party as a whole is determined and you have more viable choices & the opportunity to support candidates that you agree with on more of the specifics.
Absolutely untrue. What could be more hacker-proof than a paper ballot system?
I'd hardly call paper ballots "hacker-proof", maybe "computer-hacker-proof" but paper ballots can be hacked any number of ways (ballot stuffing, spoiling, ballots going missing, simply being miscounted etc.). Voter fraud existed even way back when paper ballots were the only option.
That being said I like the optical-scanner/paper ballot system they use in my state. It provides a nice balance, presumably impartial machines do the initial count but they can be checked (for some kind of computer-hack fraud) by an old-fashioned hand count which would make hacking the results after the fact much harder. Of course it doesn't do anything about hacking the input. Any hack that either fraudulently introduces a "valid" ballot (ineligible voters, the "voting dead" etc.) or fraudulently prevents the casting of a valid ballot. (voter intimidation or deception etc.)
but I wish they would put in a button to turn it on (next to the one to turn on Apache).
I'm glad they don't. If someone can't figure out how to turn it on without a simple button shouldn't be using it.
I plug in the Ethernet cable, a script automatically starts and disables wi-fi card, duplicates NIC settings from the wi-fi card (IP address and so on) then brings up Ethernet. My applications just continue running, still connected to servers and such. If I pull out the ethernet cable, Wi-fi starts up, connects to the relevant network (if it's there) and my applications still aren't disconnected from anything.
Two questions:
1) Why couldn't you write a script to do this in MacOS X?
2) Why would you need a script to do this? (Spoken as a Mac user who's used to network connections working pretty much like that automagically)