Alan Colmes may say he's a liberal, but if he is he makes the poorest arguments of any liberal I know. Try reading the real liberal arguments, and see how Colmes was selected specifically because he can't argue his way out of a wet paper bag.
It's a straw man argument. You attack your opponents not by attacking their actual strongest arguments, but by attacking their poorest arguments, or arguments they don't even make.
I'll assume you're being serious, although it seems more likely you're trolling.
First things first: paragraphs. Learn what they are, use them, more people will read what you type and actually take you seriously.
Secondly, go read mediamatters.org and see how biased towards the neocon view all of the mainstream tv is. The reality is that neocons are not just plain wrong on many issues (their economic theories, like trickle-down economics, have long since been disproven, and their military policies are outright failures, e.g. the war in iraq). Yet somehow they manage to get their voice not just mentioned on mainstream news, but presented as having equal value to the truth. It's not biased when you don't report lies. Take a skeptical look at the actual facts that people like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Anne Coulter say (go look up the actual quotes and the actual statistics they cite), and you'll see they lie and distort to serve their own wrongheaded worldview.
Additionally, the reality is that the "liberal" voices you hear on mainstream tv are people cherry-picked to make a poor argument, like Alan Colmes. The left has much better arguments, but the good arguments don't end up on the tv screen. It's a well known strategy to discredit your political opponent, and the right has practiced it with much success.
Now, as for specific responses to what you typed:
Their idea of "balance" is to have a commetator, 3 panelist (all of which spout liberal garbage), and one somewhat moderate conservative. That is their idea of balance. Air America, the so far disappointing attempt by the left to "get their message out" will fail. Why? simple. They are not entertaining. I listened to it a few times on XM, and all it was was whinning, name calling about what is wrong with the conservatives. Did they offer any constructive ideas? No.
You should read your own post. First you accuse the mainstream media of left-wing bias, then you say air america is the left's attempt to get their message out. Why would the left need air america if the mainstream media was biased towards the liberal view? Additionally, I have listened to air america, and I've heard a lot of constructive ideas. My guess is you haven't listened for more than a few hours at best. Try listening for a week.
Why do you think they are working to allow convicted felons, and prisoners the "right" to vote?
Are you talking about the scrubbing of the voter rolls in the 2000 florida elections? You should read up on that. They didn't just remove people who had comitted a felony, they removed people with similarities (names, locations,...) to people who had comitted a felony, but were felony-free themselves. That's illegal, and it made the difference in deciding who became president. And guess what, They (Jeb Bush's cabinet) are doing it again for the 2004 elections.
It's a valid point to say that people convicted of a felony shouldn't be allowed to vote. But you should look into how racist the US judicial system is. Black people get convicted of a lot more crimes, and sent away for much longer terms. That by the very definition is racism, and the only way you can say it is fair is by taking the position that black people are subhuman (naturally commit more and worse crimes than white people). As a result, the system is rigged to ensure people who would vote democratic (the disenfranchised and the poor) don't get to vote because they get locked away more than middle-class white people.
I also invite you to follow the money. Look at how the entire media industry has been making record profits from bush being in the whitehouse (and the matching media deregulation), and how they donate primarily to the right. If they really had a liberal bias, why would they be republican donors, and why would they be biting the hand that feeds them?
Mind you, I'm not opposed to the classical conservative worldview, of small government, sane fiscal policies, and maintaining t
Why do people assume ID cards would be a privacy invasion? Every modern country needs to keep track of its citizens for various things, from banking to medical insurance. The US uses the combination of social security number and driver's license as a facsimile for an ID card. The problem with these facsimiles is that they weren't originally designed to uniquely identify a person, so identity theft is a lot easier.
Here in Belgium we have had ID cards for as long as I can remember, and it has never to my knowledge been a privacy problem. Yes, the ID card lets people gather up all your data in one tight bundle, but that can be done with or without an ID card. It is not some disastrous measure that suddenly opens up your data to all the world. There is no privacy in modern society. Not in Western Europe (which mostly has ID cards) and not in the US. Deal with it.
I don't get the hysteria people have around things like ID cards. The government doesn't need them to find out what they want about you. And they are a protection against identity theft.
Now, as for why the British government thinks ID cards will solve illegal immigration, let me explain why this would be the case. Currently since there are no ID cards, once someone gets inside the British borders, they can pretend to be a citizen, and even if the police stops them they aren't easily identified as illegal immigrants. Therefore all someone needs to do to live as an illegal immigrant in Britain is sneak past customs (not a hard thing to do). When there is a national ID card not carrying your ID sets you apart for scrutiny, and life as an illegal immigrant becomes a lot harder. And since most modern ID card systems are tied into a database which cops can easily access they are very hard to fake, so the black market won't be the answer.
First of all, compact discs, like all the formats before them, were developed for one major purpose: to make you rebuy the music you already own. The record industry does this. Every few decades they switch to an entirely new format and make people buy their music all over again. We're due for a new format shortly, expect them to start pushing music dvd's like crazy (we're already seeing this, but expect it to get bigger and for dvd players to become essential components in a home stereo system).
Secondly, the W3C does not ignore common sense. Yes, there are things which should have been easier to do with CSS-based layout (mostly stuff that emulates other media, like footers below a multicolumn layout). However, you can not escape the notion that CSS-based design is vastly more powerful and time-saving than old-style design. Now you can finally separate content from presentation, and redesign your site without having to rewrite content. That's a major win for any large site. Another benefit is that CSS-based design saves bandwidth by producing smaller pages and allowing the presentation to be cached between browser sessions (if you link your stylesheet externally).
You can go look at the discussion about CSS in the W3C mailing list archives and see the reason behind every single feature and quirk of the language.
The main problem with CSS-based design right now is that the browser with the largest marketshare has really poor support for the coolest stuff in CSS, ensuring that what the standard says should be the right way to do stuff often doesn't pan out when you try it in real life. Moving the web forward from IE6 is desperately needed, but I'm not going to hold my breath until it happens. Maybe if the alternative browsers manage to get enough marketshare to make cross-browser design a must market pressures will cause microsoft to respond with IE7, despite earlier claims they're not going to do that. But it's doubtful microsoft will respond to market pressures anytime soon. It's just not their shtick.
Ofcourse, palm was bought out during the litigation, so you could argue they didn't survive the legal battle.
The only ones who can survive patent lawsuits are the truly gigantic corporate behemoths like microsoft and ibm. They have the patent portfolio to ensure that they can crosslicense their way out of most of the litigation, and the deep pockets to drag out the court case long enough that the other side gives up, regardless of the merits.
You would think it would need to determine that picard wants to talk to riker, then transmit a recording of him saying that to riker before riker could respond. But somehow the communicator knows before Picards even says "picard..." what is going to happen.
Amazing!!
I also always wondered how the universal translator knew not to translate words when someone wants to say a word in their native language. If Worf wants to say Kaplah the translator does not translate it...
It's not so amazing. Clearly the communicator picks up brain waves and interprets them to know beforehand who you wish to contact. The actual pronouncing of "picard to riker" is not meant for the communicator, but for the recipient, to know who is calling him. The one exception to this is data, who probably has a communicator modified to tap into his positronic brain via wi-fi.
That universal translator must work in a likeminded manner. At that point it becomes intent to get a word across or not, the translator would have no problem picking that up.
Ofcourse, it could just be that having constant delays in any conversations that aren't face to face would be very awkward and annoying. And there are good reasons not to have swear words spoken on daytime television, which is why the swearing always conveniently is done in a made-up language.
Actually, the trade-off is not on the application UI performance, but on the webpage UI performance (like pageload speed and dhtml/script performance). Firefox has demonstrated that an interpreted UI can perform as well as a native UI (or close enough to not matter), which is why microsoft is moving its UI's entirely to the interpreted xaml for the next windows version. The mozilla UI was a first attempt at doing the interpreted UI, and the project to improve it has basically resulted in firefox (which uses a different UI engine than mozilla proper).
In the article they mention the engine can be embedded, meaning people can make whatever UI they want and wrap it around minimo.
if they wanted to create a mini-mi package, why didn't they start with the firefox codebase... my guess is the browser would rock
Actually, firefox is built around the mozilla engine. It is based on the mozilla trunk, and picks up code changes to the trunk automatically. Mozilla is EXTREMELY modular. Mini-mo takes the kind of approach that was taken to make firefox (strip out stuff you don't need in a browser, simplify the UI, tweak settings for desktop use) to improve performance on PDA's.
It would not have been a benefit to start from the firefox codebase, since most of the firefox work is UI-related, which is radically different in mini-mo.
Hell, when I was 6 I thought Howard the Duck was a good movie too.
Funny you should mention that movie, given who the executive producer of howard the duck was. That's right, George Lucas.
Still, I watched Howard recently, and I found it much more enjoyable than either of the prequels. At least the comedy actually got me grinning. You also have got to love a movie that doesn't take itself too serious, and both of the prequels take themselves WAY too serious.
The one line I think should have been in either of the prequels to redeem them:
Howard T. Duck: It's not nice to fool with the dark overlords!
I recently got my entire hard drive wiped out when I messed up a Debian install.
I have this eerie sense that you could have saved your data. I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where you could actually permanently destroy all your data. Even if you wipe out your partition table, you can still get it back quite easily. I've done it after fscking up, so I know.
And yeah, you should have had backups. But then I bet most of the people mocking you for not having backups don't have up-to-date backups for their own data. Backups are a royal pain in the rear end, and everybody knows it. Whichever medium you choose, backups are costly if done often enough, and they always take too long.
Keeping a local image synced to a remote store with rsync would work better I think.
Anyway, to me online storage is the future. Why should you have to think about on which physical machine your data is stored? You should just have a global login that gives you access to all your data (with graceful degradation in functionality on slower links) from any computer or webdevice. As much as people rail against microsoft's passport, that kind of single sign-on global storage IS the future.
If only Apple would port the thing themselves. Add a windows compatibility layer and you've got one hell of a competitor to Microsoft.
...and one hell of a nosedive in Apple hardware sales.
And here you go assuming apple would exist long enough to see its sales influenced after such a direct challenge to microsoft to buy them out in order to shut them up.
Still, RSA was not a trivial idea, so without misters R, S and A we might still have to do without it. In this case there is at least some benefit to society.
You assume they would not have made their invention without it being patentable. I think inventors invent regardless of the environment they're in. As soon as an inventor has the means to focus on his inventions, he will make them. And I highly doubt R, S and A were borrowing money based on the promised patent to fund the development of their algorithm.
I don't think the issue with patents is whether or not inventions get made, it's whether or not people are rewarded for advancing the state of the art in some field of science by a large degree. Conceivably we could set up a lot of systems that reward inventors without monopolising their inventions.
This concept can be held to any kind of patent. From engines to circuit boards to anything. So, your saying there should be no patents. No IP protections.
There are arguments to be made that patents are never good, for anything. And I have yet to see an independent study that proves that patents are a net benefit.
But that wasn't really what he was arguing. What he was arguing was that 20 years is way too long for patents in the software industry, even if you concept software should be patentable. The software industry has lifecycles of 2 to 5 years (most products inching closer to 2 than to 5), meaning you go through 4 to 10 iterations of your product before your patent expires. That's too much. 2 or 3 product iterations is ok, but more than that is not in the public interest. And remember that patents, copyrights and trademarks are meant to serve the public interest, not the corporate bottom line.
Besides, just look at the examples of long lasting patents on useful stuff that expired. Take the patent of RSA. Once that expired we've seen a dramatic upsurge in encryption products. Before it expired, ssh was a niche product, now it's often the only way to log into a system. That single expiration brought dramatic benefits to the entire software industry. I'm not saying the original inventors shouldn't have benefited from their invention, but the RSA patent held back strong encryption, and the products based on it, for two decades.
Besides, I think there's something seriously wrong if the only way we can reward inventors is by handing them absolute monopolies for two decades. Solve the cause, not the symptoms.
The ICC, like it or not, infringes on sovereignty. We'll deal with our own troops thank you.
How can you expect any nation to deal with their own troops when there are war crimes going on? when things like genocide happen, you can not honestly expect a country to police themselves, since those kinds of things happen with knowledge of the top, always. Those responsible for the balkan genocide would not have been brought to justice were it not for the UN. The ICC codifies permanently the de-facto existance of an international UN court that goes after war criminals, under clear guidelines of who can be brought to justice, under what laws, and with what rights.
So, I honestly don't see how you can claim there should not be any international court. And once you do agree there should be one, you have to agree it has to apply equally to everyone, including the US. Like it or not, the efforts of the US to escape any change that a US citizen could be brought in front of the ICC sends the message "you can't hold US citizens responsible for their actions during war." That message, as you must understand, is not received very well.
If the US had specific problems with the court, like how it is assembled, what laws it is based on, what crimes it covers, and so on, then they should have negotiated about that. But unilaterally withdrawing totally from any concept of an international court, that's not acceptable.
Secondly, Kyoto is ridiculous. If all countries are held to the same standard (i.e. India and developing nations as well) I could almost stomach it. From a paranoid Yank point of view it really does appear as though Kyoto is targeted at "leveling the playing field" economically (in other words, lets take the US down a notch).
The theory behind kyoto is that the burden should be carried equally. Since some countries have more resources than others and so can clean up at a lower cost to them (even though the absolute cost might be higher) it tries to set up a system where poor countries are motivated to not pollute more than they are (a generally neglectable amount when compared to the US or the EU) so they can sell their surplus clean air to countries which have the money to buy their way out of cleaning up. And the estimates presented in the US press of how much it would cost the US to comply with kyoto were generally unrealistic because they assumed the US would buy the right to pollute instead of cleaning up energy plants (which according to most estimates could be done very cheaply, since plants haven't had to clean up in decades, and technology has advanced a lot.)
The reality is that global warming is a fact, that something has to be done about it, and there is an absolute refusal of the US to even keep pollution levels the same, let alone lower them. That reeks of corporate cronyism. If the specific kyoto agreement that was signed was a problem, again, the US should have negotiated about specific issues they had with it, but the Bush administration refuses to even negotiate.
There's a word for those kinds of policies: protectionism. And history has plenty of information on what happens to nations that practice protectionism.
Nice to know that having good relations with the likes of Saddam is viewed more important than having good relations with USA. I understand people might disagree about ways to remove/contain a dangerous dictator but to completely turn this issue into US hate-fest is something completely different.
Ok, second point first. The anti-americanism in my view (as a belgian citizen) could more appropriately be called anti-bushism. My 16yo sister wants to go to the US, because she thinks it's a great country, but George W. Bush is number one on her hate list. So, no, from my perspective there is no US hate-fest. This might be different in other countries though. I can imagine the french not being happy with how they have been treated over the past few years.
As to wanting better relations with Saddam than with the US. Do you honestly believe that? It is just plain silly. The problem Europe had was not that they thought we should all be friends with Saddam, it was that war should be a last resort. The reason given prior to the Iraq invasion, weapons of mass destruction, was generally known over here to be a bogus reason. Even if there were wmd's (which we now know there weren't) then it would have been better to let the UN inspectors find them. Instead, the US went on a pointless and unfounded smear campaign against the inspectors (on-going to this day), and then said that war was the only way to get things done in iraq, which was a lie. As an aside, do you believe Saddam was an immediate threat to the US, and if so, why?
After the war, the reason given became iraqi freedom, but at the same time we're seeing the iraqi's do not have control over their own natural resources (oil production and profits are entirely in US hands), do not have control over their own financial resources (all the government money is in US hands), and do not have control over the political decisions taken (a power which is supposed to be handed over soon, but nobody knows to whom, and the resources to use that power aren't coming along with it). Not to mention that if you hold iraq as the standard for countries in need of liberation, you need to go liberate half the world, including current US allies, like China (which is a dictatorship with a horrible human rights record, and a history of invading other countries, just like Iraq).
The US is the most powerful democracy in the world, and as a result, the EU holds it to a very high standard. We expect moral leadership from the US, and the whole Iraq situation is such a disgrace to the US that we have problems understanding why the American public would back an administration that makes such poor decisions. The loud criticism of the US you've heard is our way of saying "we expect better of you, now go do something about it!"
Europe is not US ally anymore.
Europe definitely wants to be a US ally, but the Bush administration has made it really really hard, with all kinds of anti-european economic policies (which is being called a "trade war" in the international press), a unilateral withdrawal from many treaties which Europe considers crucial (Kyoto, the international criminal court, the treaties on chemical and biological weapons, the nuclear disarmament treaties, and so on...), and a general smear campaign against any EU country which dares voice political opposition ("that's old europe", remember that one?).
You have to treat people with respect to get respect back. All the US needs to do to have a strong ally in Europe is to do what it claims to stand for.
I still remember Aznar speech in which he described the secret rejoicing of various Europeans politicians he witnessed in the months after 9/11 - especially of the " that's what you get for supporting Israel" type.
I never heard that. If he did say it, and if it is true, then I wouldn't be surprised by it. 9/11 IS a direct consequence of US middle east policy over the last few decades. Osama himself has said the primary reason for him was the US mili
I see you're an adherent of the power philosophy, stating that when someone has the power to do something, they are inherently right to do it.
How can you back democracy and at the same time support a minority of the world (the US) going against the interests of the rest of the world (the UN)?
It's a complicated matter. The EU parliament is a directly elected body where the number of representatives for every country is according to the size of that country. The council is a group of ministers where each country has a pre-defined voting weight, also roughly based on size. The council also appoints the commission, which tends to make the executive decisions, rather than the legislative, but doesn't seem to have a clearly defined job, and so gets its hands into a lot of stuff.
Only parliament is directly elected. The council represents the national voting results in each country, but few people take EU policy into account when they cast a vote, so I have my doubts on how democratic the council is. The commission, being appointed by the council for 5 years, could hardly be called anything close to democratic. Anyway, it's apparent the EU has a long slog towards real democratic representation ahead.
And no, the system never was and never will be that every country has one vote.
There is a EU parliament with democratically elected representatives. The problem is that the council, which isn't elected, can overrule it on a lot of issues. Like how the council reverted the software patent draft to a version that seems written by a microsoft lawyer, despite an explicit voting record in parliament that goes directly against that.
I disagree that you would need a login shell. You could conceivably modify init to start up X11 and firefox hardwired. And you definitely wouldn't need a window manager. Window managers are pure eye candy.
Like donating money for the first guy that will report a specific application as working.
The problem is that often you can do hacks to enable some specific app, while regressing on overall api compatility. Like how the earlier implementations of the installshield support worked.
Microsoft is doing a pretty good job with backwards compatibility. I have windows 3.11 games written in 1994 that still run in windows xp, a decade later, without modification. There are few operating systems which can boost that level of backwards compatibility (IBM's stuff comes to mind though, but they use the virtualization trick to do it).
Still, I believe the future lies in the aforementioned inclusion of full virtualization to run previous OS versions into the base operating system. Apple included an OS9 environment that way into OS X, and microsoft could include a version of virtual pc (which they own). That way you can ease ancient API's out of the codebase and still allow people to run their old stuff. And given how much spare cpu cycles modern PC's have, this shouldn't even be much of a slowdown.
Sorry, I made a mistake, I said it's a yearly trade deficit of 40 billion dollars, while instead it is monthly. So that's a yearly deficit of half a trillion.
Like other people have pointed out, the US has a current trade deficit of 40 billion dollars. That means that every year after the subtraction between import and export is made 40 billion dollars flows from the US to the rest of the world.
The reasons for this are numerous.
Few products still get made inside the US, and the money paid for products from companies known as US businesses is no longer flowing into the US ever since the wave of offshoring of the corporate structure, and by extension the financial resources, to dodge taxes (60 percent of US businesses no longer pay any taxes, at all). My guess is mcdonalds and pepsi both fall into this category, and so very little of the money earned by them around the world actually flows back into the US.
The US has refused implementing basic health safety standards in food produced domestically, like testing for BSE (they've actually forbidden US companies to test for it themselves, under a "if you can't find it, it doesn't exist" policy), and like usage of some provably unhealthy hormones to breed animals faster and fatter. For this reason the EU refuses to import a lot of categories of food from the US.
Companies like walmart have almost all their goods produced in countries like china. And so everytime you buy walmart, you buy chinese. That's money of which a considerable chunk flows to china and doesn't come back (a quarter of the trade deficit is with china alone). Most of the rest flows to the walton family bank accounts and does not leave it to be reinvested in the US economy.
I could go on and on with reasons for the trade deficit. Let's just say that the US economy is very strong, but it is bleeding to death from a thousand papercuts under policies created through decades of corporate deregulation.
Slashdot Mirror
Alan Colmes may say he's a liberal, but if he is he makes the poorest arguments of any liberal I know. Try reading the real liberal arguments, and see how Colmes was selected specifically because he can't argue his way out of a wet paper bag.
It's a straw man argument. You attack your opponents not by attacking their actual strongest arguments, but by attacking their poorest arguments, or arguments they don't even make.
I'll assume you're being serious, although it seems more likely you're trolling.
...) to people who had comitted a felony, but were felony-free themselves. That's illegal, and it made the difference in deciding who became president. And guess what, They (Jeb Bush's cabinet) are doing it again for the 2004 elections.
First things first: paragraphs. Learn what they are, use them, more people will read what you type and actually take you seriously.
Secondly, go read mediamatters.org and see how biased towards the neocon view all of the mainstream tv is. The reality is that neocons are not just plain wrong on many issues (their economic theories, like trickle-down economics, have long since been disproven, and their military policies are outright failures, e.g. the war in iraq). Yet somehow they manage to get their voice not just mentioned on mainstream news, but presented as having equal value to the truth. It's not biased when you don't report lies. Take a skeptical look at the actual facts that people like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Anne Coulter say (go look up the actual quotes and the actual statistics they cite), and you'll see they lie and distort to serve their own wrongheaded worldview.
Additionally, the reality is that the "liberal" voices you hear on mainstream tv are people cherry-picked to make a poor argument, like Alan Colmes. The left has much better arguments, but the good arguments don't end up on the tv screen. It's a well known strategy to discredit your political opponent, and the right has practiced it with much success.
Now, as for specific responses to what you typed:
Their idea of "balance" is to have a commetator, 3 panelist (all of which spout liberal garbage), and one somewhat moderate conservative. That is their idea of balance. Air America, the so far disappointing attempt by the left to "get their message out" will fail. Why? simple. They are not entertaining. I listened to it a few times on XM, and all it was was whinning, name calling about what is wrong with the conservatives. Did they offer any constructive ideas? No.
You should read your own post. First you accuse the mainstream media of left-wing bias, then you say air america is the left's attempt to get their message out. Why would the left need air america if the mainstream media was biased towards the liberal view? Additionally, I have listened to air america, and I've heard a lot of constructive ideas. My guess is you haven't listened for more than a few hours at best. Try listening for a week.
Why do you think they are working to allow convicted felons, and prisoners the "right" to vote?
Are you talking about the scrubbing of the voter rolls in the 2000 florida elections? You should read up on that. They didn't just remove people who had comitted a felony, they removed people with similarities (names, locations,
It's a valid point to say that people convicted of a felony shouldn't be allowed to vote. But you should look into how racist the US judicial system is. Black people get convicted of a lot more crimes, and sent away for much longer terms. That by the very definition is racism, and the only way you can say it is fair is by taking the position that black people are subhuman (naturally commit more and worse crimes than white people). As a result, the system is rigged to ensure people who would vote democratic (the disenfranchised and the poor) don't get to vote because they get locked away more than middle-class white people.
I also invite you to follow the money. Look at how the entire media industry has been making record profits from bush being in the whitehouse (and the matching media deregulation), and how they donate primarily to the right. If they really had a liberal bias, why would they be republican donors, and why would they be biting the hand that feeds them?
Mind you, I'm not opposed to the classical conservative worldview, of small government, sane fiscal policies, and maintaining t
Why do people assume ID cards would be a privacy invasion? Every modern country needs to keep track of its citizens for various things, from banking to medical insurance. The US uses the combination of social security number and driver's license as a facsimile for an ID card. The problem with these facsimiles is that they weren't originally designed to uniquely identify a person, so identity theft is a lot easier.
Here in Belgium we have had ID cards for as long as I can remember, and it has never to my knowledge been a privacy problem. Yes, the ID card lets people gather up all your data in one tight bundle, but that can be done with or without an ID card. It is not some disastrous measure that suddenly opens up your data to all the world. There is no privacy in modern society. Not in Western Europe (which mostly has ID cards) and not in the US. Deal with it.
I don't get the hysteria people have around things like ID cards. The government doesn't need them to find out what they want about you. And they are a protection against identity theft.
Now, as for why the British government thinks ID cards will solve illegal immigration, let me explain why this would be the case. Currently since there are no ID cards, once someone gets inside the British borders, they can pretend to be a citizen, and even if the police stops them they aren't easily identified as illegal immigrants. Therefore all someone needs to do to live as an illegal immigrant in Britain is sneak past customs (not a hard thing to do). When there is a national ID card not carrying your ID sets you apart for scrutiny, and life as an illegal immigrant becomes a lot harder. And since most modern ID card systems are tied into a database which cops can easily access they are very hard to fake, so the black market won't be the answer.
Two things:
First of all, compact discs, like all the formats before them, were developed for one major purpose: to make you rebuy the music you already own. The record industry does this. Every few decades they switch to an entirely new format and make people buy their music all over again. We're due for a new format shortly, expect them to start pushing music dvd's like crazy (we're already seeing this, but expect it to get bigger and for dvd players to become essential components in a home stereo system).
Secondly, the W3C does not ignore common sense. Yes, there are things which should have been easier to do with CSS-based layout (mostly stuff that emulates other media, like footers below a multicolumn layout). However, you can not escape the notion that CSS-based design is vastly more powerful and time-saving than old-style design. Now you can finally separate content from presentation, and redesign your site without having to rewrite content. That's a major win for any large site. Another benefit is that CSS-based design saves bandwidth by producing smaller pages and allowing the presentation to be cached between browser sessions (if you link your stylesheet externally).
You can go look at the discussion about CSS in the W3C mailing list archives and see the reason behind every single feature and quirk of the language.
The main problem with CSS-based design right now is that the browser with the largest marketshare has really poor support for the coolest stuff in CSS, ensuring that what the standard says should be the right way to do stuff often doesn't pan out when you try it in real life. Moving the web forward from IE6 is desperately needed, but I'm not going to hold my breath until it happens. Maybe if the alternative browsers manage to get enough marketshare to make cross-browser design a must market pressures will cause microsoft to respond with IE7, despite earlier claims they're not going to do that. But it's doubtful microsoft will respond to market pressures anytime soon. It's just not their shtick.
Ofcourse, palm was bought out during the litigation, so you could argue they didn't survive the legal battle.
The only ones who can survive patent lawsuits are the truly gigantic corporate behemoths like microsoft and ibm. They have the patent portfolio to ensure that they can crosslicense their way out of most of the litigation, and the deep pockets to drag out the court case long enough that the other side gives up, regardless of the merits.
You would think it would need to determine that picard wants to talk to riker, then transmit a recording of him saying that to riker before riker could respond. But somehow the communicator knows before Picards even says "picard..." what is going to happen.
Amazing!!
I also always wondered how the universal translator knew not to translate words when someone wants to say a word in their native language. If Worf wants to say Kaplah the translator does not translate it...
It's not so amazing. Clearly the communicator picks up brain waves and interprets them to know beforehand who you wish to contact. The actual pronouncing of "picard to riker" is not meant for the communicator, but for the recipient, to know who is calling him. The one exception to this is data, who probably has a communicator modified to tap into his positronic brain via wi-fi.
That universal translator must work in a likeminded manner. At that point it becomes intent to get a word across or not, the translator would have no problem picking that up.
Ofcourse, it could just be that having constant delays in any conversations that aren't face to face would be very awkward and annoying. And there are good reasons not to have swear words spoken on daytime television, which is why the swearing always conveniently is done in a made-up language.
Even Firefox falls down in the responsiveness category -- UI actions still sometimes get blocked while pages are loading etc.
That has nothing to do with inherent performance of XUL, that has to do with the fact that the UI runs in the same thread as the rendering engine.
Actually, the trade-off is not on the application UI performance, but on the webpage UI performance (like pageload speed and dhtml/script performance). Firefox has demonstrated that an interpreted UI can perform as well as a native UI (or close enough to not matter), which is why microsoft is moving its UI's entirely to the interpreted xaml for the next windows version. The mozilla UI was a first attempt at doing the interpreted UI, and the project to improve it has basically resulted in firefox (which uses a different UI engine than mozilla proper).
In the article they mention the engine can be embedded, meaning people can make whatever UI they want and wrap it around minimo.
if they wanted to create a mini-mi package, why didn't they start with the firefox codebase ... my guess is the browser would rock
Actually, firefox is built around the mozilla engine. It is based on the mozilla trunk, and picks up code changes to the trunk automatically. Mozilla is EXTREMELY modular. Mini-mo takes the kind of approach that was taken to make firefox (strip out stuff you don't need in a browser, simplify the UI, tweak settings for desktop use) to improve performance on PDA's.
It would not have been a benefit to start from the firefox codebase, since most of the firefox work is UI-related, which is radically different in mini-mo.
Funny you should mention that movie, given who the executive producer of howard the duck was. That's right, George Lucas.
Still, I watched Howard recently, and I found it much more enjoyable than either of the prequels. At least the comedy actually got me grinning. You also have got to love a movie that doesn't take itself too serious, and both of the prequels take themselves WAY too serious.
The one line I think should have been in either of the prequels to redeem them:
I recently got my entire hard drive wiped out when I messed up a Debian install.
I have this eerie sense that you could have saved your data. I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where you could actually permanently destroy all your data. Even if you wipe out your partition table, you can still get it back quite easily. I've done it after fscking up, so I know.
And yeah, you should have had backups. But then I bet most of the people mocking you for not having backups don't have up-to-date backups for their own data. Backups are a royal pain in the rear end, and everybody knows it. Whichever medium you choose, backups are costly if done often enough, and they always take too long.
Keeping a local image synced to a remote store with rsync would work better I think.
Anyway, to me online storage is the future. Why should you have to think about on which physical machine your data is stored? You should just have a global login that gives you access to all your data (with graceful degradation in functionality on slower links) from any computer or webdevice. As much as people rail against microsoft's passport, that kind of single sign-on global storage IS the future.
And here you go assuming apple would exist long enough to see its sales influenced after such a direct challenge to microsoft to buy them out in order to shut them up.
Still, RSA was not a trivial idea, so without misters R, S and A we might still have to do without it. In this case there is at least some benefit to society.
You assume they would not have made their invention without it being patentable. I think inventors invent regardless of the environment they're in. As soon as an inventor has the means to focus on his inventions, he will make them. And I highly doubt R, S and A were borrowing money based on the promised patent to fund the development of their algorithm.
I don't think the issue with patents is whether or not inventions get made, it's whether or not people are rewarded for advancing the state of the art in some field of science by a large degree. Conceivably we could set up a lot of systems that reward inventors without monopolising their inventions.
This concept can be held to any kind of patent. From engines to circuit boards to anything. So, your saying there should be no patents. No IP protections.
There are arguments to be made that patents are never good, for anything. And I have yet to see an independent study that proves that patents are a net benefit.
But that wasn't really what he was arguing. What he was arguing was that 20 years is way too long for patents in the software industry, even if you concept software should be patentable. The software industry has lifecycles of 2 to 5 years (most products inching closer to 2 than to 5), meaning you go through 4 to 10 iterations of your product before your patent expires. That's too much. 2 or 3 product iterations is ok, but more than that is not in the public interest. And remember that patents, copyrights and trademarks are meant to serve the public interest, not the corporate bottom line.
Besides, just look at the examples of long lasting patents on useful stuff that expired. Take the patent of RSA. Once that expired we've seen a dramatic upsurge in encryption products. Before it expired, ssh was a niche product, now it's often the only way to log into a system. That single expiration brought dramatic benefits to the entire software industry. I'm not saying the original inventors shouldn't have benefited from their invention, but the RSA patent held back strong encryption, and the products based on it, for two decades.
Besides, I think there's something seriously wrong if the only way we can reward inventors is by handing them absolute monopolies for two decades. Solve the cause, not the symptoms.
The ICC, like it or not, infringes on sovereignty. We'll deal with our own troops thank you.
How can you expect any nation to deal with their own troops when there are war crimes going on? when things like genocide happen, you can not honestly expect a country to police themselves, since those kinds of things happen with knowledge of the top, always. Those responsible for the balkan genocide would not have been brought to justice were it not for the UN. The ICC codifies permanently the de-facto existance of an international UN court that goes after war criminals, under clear guidelines of who can be brought to justice, under what laws, and with what rights.
So, I honestly don't see how you can claim there should not be any international court. And once you do agree there should be one, you have to agree it has to apply equally to everyone, including the US. Like it or not, the efforts of the US to escape any change that a US citizen could be brought in front of the ICC sends the message "you can't hold US citizens responsible for their actions during war." That message, as you must understand, is not received very well.
If the US had specific problems with the court, like how it is assembled, what laws it is based on, what crimes it covers, and so on, then they should have negotiated about that. But unilaterally withdrawing totally from any concept of an international court, that's not acceptable.
Secondly, Kyoto is ridiculous. If all countries are held to the same standard (i.e. India and developing nations as well) I could almost stomach it. From a paranoid Yank point of view it really does appear as though Kyoto is targeted at "leveling the playing field" economically (in other words, lets take the US down a notch).
The theory behind kyoto is that the burden should be carried equally. Since some countries have more resources than others and so can clean up at a lower cost to them (even though the absolute cost might be higher) it tries to set up a system where poor countries are motivated to not pollute more than they are (a generally neglectable amount when compared to the US or the EU) so they can sell their surplus clean air to countries which have the money to buy their way out of cleaning up. And the estimates presented in the US press of how much it would cost the US to comply with kyoto were generally unrealistic because they assumed the US would buy the right to pollute instead of cleaning up energy plants (which according to most estimates could be done very cheaply, since plants haven't had to clean up in decades, and technology has advanced a lot.)
The reality is that global warming is a fact, that something has to be done about it, and there is an absolute refusal of the US to even keep pollution levels the same, let alone lower them. That reeks of corporate cronyism. If the specific kyoto agreement that was signed was a problem, again, the US should have negotiated about specific issues they had with it, but the Bush administration refuses to even negotiate.
There's a word for those kinds of policies: protectionism. And history has plenty of information on what happens to nations that practice protectionism.
Nice to know that having good relations with the likes of Saddam is viewed more important than having good relations with USA.
I understand people might disagree about ways to remove/contain a dangerous dictator but to completely turn this issue into US hate-fest is something completely different.
Ok, second point first. The anti-americanism in my view (as a belgian citizen) could more appropriately be called anti-bushism. My 16yo sister wants to go to the US, because she thinks it's a great country, but George W. Bush is number one on her hate list. So, no, from my perspective there is no US hate-fest. This might be different in other countries though. I can imagine the french not being happy with how they have been treated over the past few years.
As to wanting better relations with Saddam than with the US. Do you honestly believe that? It is just plain silly. The problem Europe had was not that they thought we should all be friends with Saddam, it was that war should be a last resort. The reason given prior to the Iraq invasion, weapons of mass destruction, was generally known over here to be a bogus reason. Even if there were wmd's (which we now know there weren't) then it would have been better to let the UN inspectors find them. Instead, the US went on a pointless and unfounded smear campaign against the inspectors (on-going to this day), and then said that war was the only way to get things done in iraq, which was a lie. As an aside, do you believe Saddam was an immediate threat to the US, and if so, why?
After the war, the reason given became iraqi freedom, but at the same time we're seeing the iraqi's do not have control over their own natural resources (oil production and profits are entirely in US hands), do not have control over their own financial resources (all the government money is in US hands), and do not have control over the political decisions taken (a power which is supposed to be handed over soon, but nobody knows to whom, and the resources to use that power aren't coming along with it). Not to mention that if you hold iraq as the standard for countries in need of liberation, you need to go liberate half the world, including current US allies, like China (which is a dictatorship with a horrible human rights record, and a history of invading other countries, just like Iraq).
The US is the most powerful democracy in the world, and as a result, the EU holds it to a very high standard. We expect moral leadership from the US, and the whole Iraq situation is such a disgrace to the US that we have problems understanding why the American public would back an administration that makes such poor decisions. The loud criticism of the US you've heard is our way of saying "we expect better of you, now go do something about it!"
Europe is not US ally anymore.
Europe definitely wants to be a US ally, but the Bush administration has made it really really hard, with all kinds of anti-european economic policies (which is being called a "trade war" in the international press), a unilateral withdrawal from many treaties which Europe considers crucial (Kyoto, the international criminal court, the treaties on chemical and biological weapons, the nuclear disarmament treaties, and so on...), and a general smear campaign against any EU country which dares voice political opposition ("that's old europe", remember that one?).
You have to treat people with respect to get respect back. All the US needs to do to have a strong ally in Europe is to do what it claims to stand for.
I still remember Aznar speech in which he described the secret rejoicing of various Europeans politicians he witnessed in the months after 9/11 - especially of the " that's what you get for supporting Israel" type.
I never heard that. If he did say it, and if it is true, then I wouldn't be surprised by it. 9/11 IS a direct consequence of US middle east policy over the last few decades. Osama himself has said the primary reason for him was the US mili
I see you're an adherent of the power philosophy, stating that when someone has the power to do something, they are inherently right to do it.
How can you back democracy and at the same time support a minority of the world (the US) going against the interests of the rest of the world (the UN)?
It's a complicated matter. The EU parliament is a directly elected body where the number of representatives for every country is according to the size of that country. The council is a group of ministers where each country has a pre-defined voting weight, also roughly based on size.
The council also appoints the commission, which tends to make the executive decisions, rather than the legislative, but doesn't seem to have a clearly defined job, and so gets its hands into a lot of stuff.
Only parliament is directly elected. The council represents the national voting results in each country, but few people take EU policy into account when they cast a vote, so I have my doubts on how democratic the council is. The commission, being appointed by the council for 5 years, could hardly be called anything close to democratic. Anyway, it's apparent the EU has a long slog towards real democratic representation ahead.
And no, the system never was and never will be that every country has one vote.
There is a EU parliament with democratically elected representatives. The problem is that the council, which isn't elected, can overrule it on a lot of issues. Like how the council reverted the software patent draft to a version that seems written by a microsoft lawyer, despite an explicit voting record in parliament that goes directly against that.
I disagree that you would need a login shell. You could conceivably modify init to start up X11 and firefox hardwired. And you definitely wouldn't need a window manager. Window managers are pure eye candy.
Like donating money for the first guy that will report a specific application as working.
The problem is that often you can do hacks to enable some specific app, while regressing on overall api compatility. Like how the earlier implementations of the installshield support worked.
Microsoft is doing a pretty good job with backwards compatibility. I have windows 3.11 games written in 1994 that still run in windows xp, a decade later, without modification. There are few operating systems which can boost that level of backwards compatibility (IBM's stuff comes to mind though, but they use the virtualization trick to do it).
Still, I believe the future lies in the aforementioned inclusion of full virtualization to run previous OS versions into the base operating system. Apple included an OS9 environment that way into OS X, and microsoft could include a version of virtual pc (which they own). That way you can ease ancient API's out of the codebase and still allow people to run their old stuff. And given how much spare cpu cycles modern PC's have, this shouldn't even be much of a slowdown.
Sorry, I made a mistake, I said it's a yearly trade deficit of 40 billion dollars, while instead it is monthly. So that's a yearly deficit of half a trillion.
Like other people have pointed out, the US has a current trade deficit of 40 billion dollars. That means that every year after the subtraction between import and export is made 40 billion dollars flows from the US to the rest of the world.
The reasons for this are numerous.
Few products still get made inside the US, and the money paid for products from companies known as US businesses is no longer flowing into the US ever since the wave of offshoring of the corporate structure, and by extension the financial resources, to dodge taxes (60 percent of US businesses no longer pay any taxes, at all). My guess is mcdonalds and pepsi both fall into this category, and so very little of the money earned by them around the world actually flows back into the US.
The US has refused implementing basic health safety standards in food produced domestically, like testing for BSE (they've actually forbidden US companies to test for it themselves, under a "if you can't find it, it doesn't exist" policy), and like usage of some provably unhealthy hormones to breed animals faster and fatter. For this reason the EU refuses to import a lot of categories of food from the US.
Companies like walmart have almost all their goods produced in countries like china. And so everytime you buy walmart, you buy chinese. That's money of which a considerable chunk flows to china and doesn't come back (a quarter of the trade deficit is with china alone). Most of the rest flows to the walton family bank accounts and does not leave it to be reinvested in the US economy.
I could go on and on with reasons for the trade deficit. Let's just say that the US economy is very strong, but it is bleeding to death from a thousand papercuts under policies created through decades of corporate deregulation.