He was also a frequent customer of all five victims and chose to tell the world (or at least the BBC) about it. He even pointed out that there were very good reasons to suspect him of being their murderer.
I'm not saying that what the media (mostly British tabloids) did to him was right but his MySpace account didn't have anything to do with it.
Well, my G4 iBook survived multiple drops from my bed and from tables, got dropped out of my hands (~1 m I'd guess), fell out of my backpack while I was standing on an escalator and once went flying down a staircase (about 6 m), landing on a tiled floor. No visible damage at all, still works perfectly. That last incident crashed the OS though.
My point is: proper typography is impossible on the Web, by design. And that's a good thing. You can't and shouldn't be able to assume how your content will be displayed. That's entirely up to the user and his choice of browser to decide.
No. Not a single graphic designer or typographer knows in what circumstances I will view his website. He doesn't know me. He might not know that I have trouble reading his "beautiful" (curved) fonts because I'm graphically challenged (really, even those Slashdot gotchas are hard for me). Maybe I want to sit back an look at my monitor from a couple of meters away and zoom in, thereby necessarily changing the layout (Opera is great for this BTW). Maybe I need ultra-high contrast (because my vision is bad or the sun is shining) and have to override his choice of colors. Maybe I view your website on a monochrome screen and your black-on-grey color scheme doesn't make sense. Maybe I am one of the ~5-10% of males that are color blind in some form or other (I am actually, green and red texts or backgrounds are just a blurry mess to my eyes). You get the idea.
Layout in print only works because you can control everything, including display size and type of display. That said, it's still a compromise that has to be made because of technical contrainsts. It's not ideal for anyone.
That's why CSS and HTML are designed so that users can override the layout in any way they want (really easy in Opera by the way; not surprising since they practically invented CSS).
Let's hope that most websites will never be rendered as an image, vector or otherwise. I'm actually shocked that you would suggest that.
Finally, suggesting someone "dismiss their dryer" is a bit pointless
Honest question: why? I don't use a dryer and my clothes always dry overnight (inside, faster if the weather's good and I can hang them outside). The notion of wasting energy for that seems kind of ludicrous to me. Not to mention that dryers destroy your clothes (at least the ones I know produce an awful lot of lint).
Google for "District Heating", "District Cooling" and "Combined Heat and Power".
Yeah, we have that here in some newer buildings, the heating part of it anyway (I'm in a rather densely populated city). It's expensive to implement, expensive to use (much more so than gas) and you can't control the temperature.
There's a reason most people use gas around here. Well, it also helps that practically every house has a gas line.
That said, I hope that at some point natural gas will be expensive enough to make people look for alternatives. At the moment those compressed wood pellet systems are all the rage here; they're even more efficient than gas and the fuel is much cheaper.
There was the recent case of an unemployed lady there who was refused continuing unemployment benefits because she didn't take a job as a "sex worker."
This has never been reported as an actual fact in Germany, not by any real news source anyway. This was more of a (not very tasteful) thought experiment in response to giving prostitutes some of the insurance benefits (unemployment, medical etc.) that most other people get, thus making prostitution more of a "normal" profession.
Europe is working hard to remove any hint that Nazism ever existed
Not true at all. I don't know where you are from but we here (were Hitler was from) are inredibly well-informed about the Third Reich. The point of all these anti-Nazi-symbol laws is to prevent that from ever happening again - not that I necessarily agree that that's a solution or that it works but the intention of these laws is not at all to forget. And our school system makes damn sure that children know all about the evils of Nazism. Too much really, kids are making jokes about it because it's so prevalent.
Oh, and it's "Mein Kampf". "Krampf" translates to cramp;-).
Ehm, The Netherlands (not Holland, which is a province of The Netherlands)
A province? Now I'm not Dutch or anything but I've only ever been to Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland. I thought it hadn't been a single province/country/whatever for a long time (province or provincie being a purely political subdivision in the Netherlands).
Yucca Mountain isn't operational and won't be for another ten years. Its safety is dependent on a number of assumptions that are impossible to predict like environmental changes and earthquakes (yes, not very probable, but you just _cannot know_ what will happen in 10,000 years; what if somebody decides to build a dam there in 10,000 years and flood the site? Impossible, you say? Entire ancient cities have been flooded, inadvertently or not, without checking what lies underneath, most recently in Turkey).
Regarding signs: every single sign relies on our cultural background. There are no universal signs, not even for concepts like life, death or danger. There are many contemporary 'universal' pictograms that you probably don't understand, simply because of cultural differences. And that's just within our current civilization.
Don't kid yourself. All it does is postpone problems, not solve them.
I'm not so confident in mankind's ability to safely store nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years (note: nobody has figured out how to do that yet, all storage facilities are for "interim" storage). There will be major problems when a world war comes around or our civilization collapses and everybody forgets about that nuclear waste along with everything else. It happened many times in our past, there's no reason it can't happen again.
Not that it's likely to ever affect us (apart from Chernobyl-like incidents) but heck, we know relatively little about what happened only 2000 years ago and keep finding buildings and cities by pure chance only. If anything our records are more ephemeral than ever.
Actual traffic safety numbers are almost always very different from what people assume intuitively (like the construction of bike paths in many European countries because politicians believe it _must_ be safer when in reality it's much more dangerous). Humans are lousy at gauging actual risk (or everybody would be scared to death of driving a car which is more dangerous than cycling in the road, incidentally).
Sorry, can't take your word for it. At least go and educate yourself about the topic, doesn't have to be in Japanese.
You do realize that Europe produces way too much food and spends money destroying said food surplus? And that in the EU (and the US for that matter) there are huge subsidies? And that farmers are paid for _not_ producing food?
I recently read a report in which a farmer in Ghana complained that he can't compete with cheap and imported Dutch onions because of EU subsidies.
I just noticed that you say, in effect, "it's dangerous because people aren't careful." Now that's just stupid. Given two options, one of which is inherently more dangerous than the other (because we're human) and saying the dangerous one could be made safer than the safe one by doing X only works if you don't do X for the safe option.
Following your logic, however, I would like to say that driving is safer than taking a train because if drivers were more careful and if there were more drivers there wouldn't be any accidents.
Okay, now I realize that I've wasted my time replying to an obvious troll. If that wasn't your intention, please at least read the relevant studies.
The main problem is intersections, i.e. when cyclists go straight ahead and drivers take a turn and sometimes don't see them. That makes bike paths (and riding on sidewalks) incredibly dangerous. In fact, you're about 10 times as likely to die on intersections if you use bike paths than if you stay on the road (study by the University of Lund, Sweden, comparing fatality rates before and after the construction of bike paths).
You can't keep cyclists totally seperated from drivers. Would be great if you could, it just isn't possible. Every kind of seperation ends at the next intersection. And bikes are vehicles and can move at great speeds, unlike pedestrians (I do about 50 kph on my bike between lights in the city, at least 35 kph for longer distances). So please tell me, how can sidewalks be safer for me (and pedestrians)?
And don't say "Japan is different, people care more." Or if you do, at least provide evidence. (Please do, I'd like to believe you.)
I cannot leave the house in Germany without carrying my passport.
It's worse than that, as a British citizen you can't leave the UK without carrying your passport (or equivalent documents). Just like I have to carry my passport if I go to the UK. IOW, that's a really stupid complaint.
And if you want fascist, let's just say you don't want to enter the UK in a car on a ferry as a non-Brit. I've never had an experience like that entering any other country.
Very true. I remember one line in an American travel guide that went like this: It is humbling to travel abroad and meet people that would not like to exchange their passports for American ones.
Apparently there really are Americans who think that everybody in the world would like to live there. Very strange. (And yes, I know the US quite well and would not like to live there if I can help it.)
I mostly use bank transfers. I'm in Europe, and within the Eurozone bank transfers are essentially free and easy. There are many people on eBay who don't accept PayPal at all. Even if a seller accepts PayPal he is usually happy to accept bank transfers.
And it's faster than PayPal, too (money in your PayPal account is worth nothing, you have to transfer it to your bank account to be sure that PayPal doesn't keep it).
We don't do cheques here because we don't need them. I don't even know if you can still get them from banks.
Check eBay's own PayPal forums. Even with all the censoring that's going on there you can still see plenty of legitimate complaints.
It doesn't matter how seldom they defraud people (like freezing your account indefinitely because they have a problem with someone they think you are related to, or freezing your account for reasons they won't tell you), it shouldn't happen. Even if it happened to only one in a billion people, there's no justification for some of the things they do.
It requires two hands to operate, whereas you could use two mouse-buttons with just one hand.
No, it doesn't. It requires two fingers and a thumb. It would have never occured to me to use both hands but granted, that would be really awkward and useless.
It's also not Apple's solution; I've done that on my older iBook using third-party tools long before Apple implemented it.
Slashdot Mirror
He was also a frequent customer of all five victims and chose to tell the world (or at least the BBC) about it. He even pointed out that there were very good reasons to suspect him of being their murderer.
I'm not saying that what the media (mostly British tabloids) did to him was right but his MySpace account didn't have anything to do with it.
Well, my G4 iBook survived multiple drops from my bed and from tables, got dropped out of my hands (~1 m I'd guess), fell out of my backpack while I was standing on an escalator and once went flying down a staircase (about 6 m), landing on a tiled floor. No visible damage at all, still works perfectly. That last incident crashed the OS though.
I figure I'm just lucky though.
My point is: proper typography is impossible on the Web, by design. And that's a good thing. You can't and shouldn't be able to assume how your content will be displayed. That's entirely up to the user and his choice of browser to decide.
Get over it.
No. Not a single graphic designer or typographer knows in what circumstances I will view his website. He doesn't know me. He might not know that I have trouble reading his "beautiful" (curved) fonts because I'm graphically challenged (really, even those Slashdot gotchas are hard for me). Maybe I want to sit back an look at my monitor from a couple of meters away and zoom in, thereby necessarily changing the layout (Opera is great for this BTW). Maybe I need ultra-high contrast (because my vision is bad or the sun is shining) and have to override his choice of colors. Maybe I view your website on a monochrome screen and your black-on-grey color scheme doesn't make sense. Maybe I am one of the ~5-10% of males that are color blind in some form or other (I am actually, green and red texts or backgrounds are just a blurry mess to my eyes). You get the idea.
Layout in print only works because you can control everything, including display size and type of display. That said, it's still a compromise that has to be made because of technical contrainsts. It's not ideal for anyone.
That's why CSS and HTML are designed so that users can override the layout in any way they want (really easy in Opera by the way; not surprising since they practically invented CSS).
Let's hope that most websites will never be rendered as an image, vector or otherwise. I'm actually shocked that you would suggest that.
There's a reason most people use gas around here. Well, it also helps that practically every house has a gas line.
That said, I hope that at some point natural gas will be expensive enough to make people look for alternatives. At the moment those compressed wood pellet systems are all the rage here; they're even more efficient than gas and the fuel is much cheaper.
About the "cluttered UI", I would offer this comment.
Regarding bloat: All the modules that you mention (mail, news etc.) measure in the hundreds of kilobytes total and are only loaded when they are used.
Oh, and it's "Mein Kampf". "Krampf" translates to cramp
It's "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea."
That's my favourite phrase of the entire series. Way too beautiful to be altered in any way.
I suggest you look up what "pedophile" means. Hint: it doesn't automatically translate to actions that are "exploitative."
Come on, don't just repeat what you hear on TV.
His nationality is irrelevant. Does he live in Canada or in the US?
Yucca Mountain isn't operational and won't be for another ten years. Its safety is dependent on a number of assumptions that are impossible to predict like environmental changes and earthquakes (yes, not very probable, but you just _cannot know_ what will happen in 10,000 years; what if somebody decides to build a dam there in 10,000 years and flood the site? Impossible, you say? Entire ancient cities have been flooded, inadvertently or not, without checking what lies underneath, most recently in Turkey).
Regarding signs: every single sign relies on our cultural background. There are no universal signs, not even for concepts like life, death or danger. There are many contemporary 'universal' pictograms that you probably don't understand, simply because of cultural differences. And that's just within our current civilization.
Don't kid yourself. All it does is postpone problems, not solve them.
I'm not so confident in mankind's ability to safely store nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years (note: nobody has figured out how to do that yet, all storage facilities are for "interim" storage). There will be major problems when a world war comes around or our civilization collapses and everybody forgets about that nuclear waste along with everything else. It happened many times in our past, there's no reason it can't happen again.
Not that it's likely to ever affect us (apart from Chernobyl-like incidents) but heck, we know relatively little about what happened only 2000 years ago and keep finding buildings and cities by pure chance only. If anything our records are more ephemeral than ever.
Actual traffic safety numbers are almost always very different from what people assume intuitively (like the construction of bike paths in many European countries because politicians believe it _must_ be safer when in reality it's much more dangerous). Humans are lousy at gauging actual risk (or everybody would be scared to death of driving a car which is more dangerous than cycling in the road, incidentally). Sorry, can't take your word for it. At least go and educate yourself about the topic, doesn't have to be in Japanese.
You do realize that Europe produces way too much food and spends money destroying said food surplus? And that in the EU (and the US for that matter) there are huge subsidies? And that farmers are paid for _not_ producing food?
I recently read a report in which a farmer in Ghana complained that he can't compete with cheap and imported Dutch onions because of EU subsidies.
I just noticed that you say, in effect, "it's dangerous because people aren't careful." Now that's just stupid. Given two options, one of which is inherently more dangerous than the other (because we're human) and saying the dangerous one could be made safer than the safe one by doing X only works if you don't do X for the safe option.
Following your logic, however, I would like to say that driving is safer than taking a train because if drivers were more careful and if there were more drivers there wouldn't be any accidents.
Okay, now I realize that I've wasted my time replying to an obvious troll. If that wasn't your intention, please at least read the relevant studies.
Vehicles don't belong on the sidewalk, period.
The main problem is intersections, i.e. when cyclists go straight ahead and drivers take a turn and sometimes don't see them. That makes bike paths (and riding on sidewalks) incredibly dangerous. In fact, you're about 10 times as likely to die on intersections if you use bike paths than if you stay on the road (study by the University of Lund, Sweden, comparing fatality rates before and after the construction of bike paths).
You can't keep cyclists totally seperated from drivers. Would be great if you could, it just isn't possible. Every kind of seperation ends at the next intersection. And bikes are vehicles and can move at great speeds, unlike pedestrians (I do about 50 kph on my bike between lights in the city, at least 35 kph for longer distances). So please tell me, how can sidewalks be safer for me (and pedestrians)?
And don't say "Japan is different, people care more." Or if you do, at least provide evidence. (Please do, I'd like to believe you.)
And if you want fascist, let's just say you don't want to enter the UK in a car on a ferry as a non-Brit. I've never had an experience like that entering any other country.
Very true. I remember one line in an American travel guide that went like this: It is humbling to travel abroad and meet people that would not like to exchange their passports for American ones.
Apparently there really are Americans who think that everybody in the world would like to live there. Very strange. (And yes, I know the US quite well and would not like to live there if I can help it.)
I mostly use bank transfers. I'm in Europe, and within the Eurozone bank transfers are essentially free and easy. There are many people on eBay who don't accept PayPal at all. Even if a seller accepts PayPal he is usually happy to accept bank transfers.
And it's faster than PayPal, too (money in your PayPal account is worth nothing, you have to transfer it to your bank account to be sure that PayPal doesn't keep it).
We don't do cheques here because we don't need them. I don't even know if you can still get them from banks.
Check eBay's own PayPal forums. Even with all the censoring that's going on there you can still see plenty of legitimate complaints.
It doesn't matter how seldom they defraud people (like freezing your account indefinitely because they have a problem with someone they think you are related to, or freezing your account for reasons they won't tell you), it shouldn't happen. Even if it happened to only one in a billion people, there's no justification for some of the things they do.
It's also not Apple's solution; I've done that on my older iBook using third-party tools long before Apple implemented it.