if it helps, you can drag and drop album names from the browser part of the window into the playlist column and it will automagically make a playlist from it.
Since we are talking about iTunes's supposed flaws, how about some actual features it would be nice if it had:
Sym-links: I have that same song on the original album, the best-of album, and a Soundtrack. Right now, there are three separate files, and iTunes doesn't know they are related. It would be nice if the playcounts were linked and they didn't show up one-after-the-other in random play orders. (Note: Minor work-around exists, but it is not perfect)
Tags: it would be nice to be able to tag songs as "Driving" or "Downloaded" or whatever. Blog posts can be arbitrarily tagged this way, why not songs? (Note: work-around is dragging songs into playlists to tag them, or using the Comments field on the songs. Either solution is less than optimal for some purposes)
Smarter Smart Playlists: If I can mark write an if statement for it, I should be able to have a playlist for it, but logic in forms such as ( (X && Y) || (W && Z) ) doesn't work. (Note: work-around is two smart playlists in a folder, with the folder as the real playlist. Slightly annoying)
iTunes has incomplete Library Segregation: it separates movies from podcasts from music, but it is less helpful at separating types of music. Classical Music and Pop music should be categorized and browsed differently. Albums and singles are easier to browse apart. (Note: work-around is to uncheck the music library from the interface and use smart playlists as "libraries." It seems like it would be trivial to allow these playlists to go in the libraries part of the interface, though.)
The visualizer button is gone in current releases (Note: work-around is to either use the menu to turn it on or grow up and stop using the visualizer. The second is what actually happens)
Stupid iTMS links on songs. (You can turn them off in Terminal or using a third-party app)
How could someone be a "moderate conservative"? She's a moderate.
There are many varieties of conservatism that are no more or less a genuine expression of conservatism. One can firmly and fully believe in a brand of conservatism while still being to the left or right of another committed conservative on policy positions. I see no evidence that Whitman is a moderate because she's a squish or unprincipled.
There was a movement for this not long ago, and it was defeated. While proportional division of California's votes would have been good for California, it would have been bad for the policies California's majority favors. If even a third of California's 55 electoral votes were awarded to McCain, Obama's electoral prospects would be significantly dimmer -- it would effectively mean one more coveted large swing state he'd have to put under his belt. And if even GWB can take 44% of California's vote, you have to think that McCain might get more than a third of California's electoral votes.
I should also note that it is up to each state to decide how it selects its electors
In fact, they don't even have to conduct an election! The legislature can just choose then by fiat, as was the case during some early elections when New York felt it would be too expensive to conduct an election.
It also doesn't explain why the EC votes against the popular vote every now and again.
It's the same way your sports team can score the most goals in a season without winning the most games in a season.
Whether you get 51% of the vote in Texas or 70% of the vote in Texas doesn't matter for the electoral college tally -- either way Texas gives all its votes to the winner -- but it could change the popular vote winner.
The fact that the winner of the electoral college almost always wins the popular votes is sort of incidental. Once a state is safely in their camp, a candidate won't devote much more energy to wooing more voters in that state or raising voter turnout a lot. It just isn't in their interest. But if a candidate really wanted to win the popular vote at the cost of losing the election, they almost certainly could, even if they were the weaker candidate.
That was part of their problem. The Whigs were as much a party of a few major powerbrokers like Henry Clay as they were a party of a platform. They tended to win not through ideology, but by nominating respected war heroes who would proceed to die in office.
Of course I am biased for being French, but ever since 1962 we chose our president based on popular vote,
Popular votes make a lot more sense in France than they would in the United States. For one, there is the issue of population -- France is only about the size of California and Texas combined. Second is the issue of Federalism. Whereas regional power in France is devolved from the center, the American states have authority independent of the Federal State, so the presidential election must piggyback on local elections that have varying voter eligibility, registration, rules, identification requirements, timing, and voting equipment. Confining votes to one state helps minimize the effect of fraud. Regardless of the merits of a direct election, implementing it successfully and reliably in a nation in which the popular vote is often one by far less than one vote per precinct, would be a huge logistical challenge and would require significant constitutional revision.
and what's best, we have two elections, one with the shitload of "independents" in the mix, and a second one with only the two winners from the first election
And how did that work out last time? I remember hearing that it eliminated the centrist candidate who could have handily beat (in a head-to-head contest) either of the two candidates who did make it on to the second vote.
The American state of Louisiana still has many remnants of French Law, portions of its electoral system being one of them. It is the topic of some ridicule and frustration.
You would certainly be able to indenture yourself, if you choose to -- to anyone, who would want such a thing from you.
Isn't it a valid criticism that if you're free to "voluntarily" indenture yourself, you're also open to being coerced? If someone says "be my slave and tell everyone it's voluntary, or I'll kill your family," what will you do?
It is a valid criticism, though not always the overpowering concern. Plenty of libertarians, myself included, would not allow people to indenture themselves, while still allowing people to contract more ways than are currently available. I would note that we allow actors to contract to a tv series for a large number of years, and we don't think the possibility of coercion is an overriding consideration, even though this bears some similarity to indentured servitude.
Whereas currently, if the government sees that you're not getting proper wages for your work, it's taken out of your hands. You don't have the right to give up your rights - they're "inalienable."
Sometimes taking away certain freedoms actually protect others. If I travel abroad with an aid organization, and they have a policy to never negotiate with terrorists, and I'm kidnapped, my supervisors don't have the freedom to negotiate. On the other hand, this policy will probably prevent many kidnappings, increasing the actual freedom of life and limb for our staff.
The problem with your analogy between minimum wage laws that prevent certain negotiations between the parties in a labor contract and your aid organization's policy of not negotiating with terrorists is that the aid organization's policy simply increases freedom while the minimum wage law transfers freedom, helping some and hurting others.
A minimum wage law tends to cause a certain subset of people, often those who already have existing jobs, to receive higher wages, but it comes at the cost of pricing some people out of the labor market. Some people will gain freedom through increased wealth, but others will go from having an "improper" wage to having no wage, and will lose freedom through decreased wealth and opportunities. Now, maybe you think that is a good trade-off, but that's a moral question without an obvious values-neutral answer.
there is no benefit for the oil companies to develop and market an alternative technology until all the oil is gone.
Yes, because why would anyone want to be able to produce a product entirely within the confines of the property-rights-respecting West when they could make massive investments in pumping oil out of 3rd world kleptocracies with the knowledge that there is always a chance of losing everything to Nationalization of the Petroleum industry?
I take your point that this material is fully copyrightable under our laws, and that the church is only enforcing that copyright. Those of us angry at the legal consequences of this system should attack the system, not the church, but...
Being legal doesn't mean being above reproach. The underlying justification for intellectual property is to encourage creation and dissemination of works. When copyright is used to maintain a secret, rather than to put information into the hands of the public, it is only natural to question whether this goes against the spirit in which the law was crafted.
The idea that things must be hidden so that they are not taken out of context is a logical position, but I don't think it is one widely shared in America, and especially not on slashdot. It just doesn't jibe with the theory and tradition of free speech in the country. I think most of us feel like context will be provided as the result of any serious public conversation.
Beyond that, this is a religious document, and I think a lot of people especially feel that religious documents should not be secret. If it is part of your religion and you are a universal faith (Mormonism is), then you should want to share it. With religion, copyright presumably plays no role in encouraging creation of works, because salvation, not profit, is supposed to be the goal.
Finally, I think the secrecy involved in this case reminds people of an aspect of LDS they mistrust, which is its highly centralized control of their adherents. The thing that really separates a religion from a cult is that the life of a cult is directed from the top down, usually by a charismatic leader, and the life of a religion boils up from ground level of the faithful, with only a certain amount of control possible by religious leaders. LDS clearly falls on the religion side of that spectrum, but the fact that it is more centrally controlled than other major denominations makes people nervous. Secrecy with documents just reminds people of the fact that LDS is centralized enough to have such secrecy.
FYI, "Muslim gang-rapists" has nothing to do with Islam. Show me one single Hafiz of Qur'an "gang-raper", show me one single Muslim "gang-raper" who prays 5 times a day.
Show me the passage in the Bible that tells people to protest the funerals of dead American soldiers. Or show me one single member of the Westboro Baptist Church who lives by Christian virtues.
The point is that if someone is doing something bad in the name of your religion and others are following, it is your job to debate them and their faith, not to blame the people who are accurately reporting that another (more hateful) version of your religion exists.
while in the EU you go to jail for holocaust denial... and the U.S government tramples on every human right there is... some ppl on/. point finger up north.
maybe its time to invade canada ?
That's such a tired old trope. "You can't talk about injustice X because injustice Y is so much more important." Why can't we talk about both? And why can't we talk about injustice X in the thread about injustice X? Those of us complaining about Canada's actions are also complaining about the EU and US. We just don't feel a need to talk about it in every context.
Specifically, with regards to the U.S. government: yes, elements of it are attempting, with mixed success, to deny their obligation to a specific set of human rights. But a huge number of Americans are up in arms about that. Congress and the courts have attempted to intervene. Executive branch officials have resigned in protest. The media has covered the hell out of it. And bloggers on all sides of the political spectrum have condemned it.
If the U.S. were doing the same thing as Canada and people complained about Canada, but not the U.S., that would be hypocritical, but I guarantee you that much more ink has been spilled in America about our own government's actions than about Canada's.
The problem is that a tree can only store so much carbon, and after it dies, either decay or combustion tends to release that carbon back into the atmosphere.
What you would really need to do to cause a net reduction in atmospheric carbon is grow trees, cut them down, bury them, then rinse and repeat. Considering that products made of trees are quite valuable, it is hard to see having a financial incentive to bury them until our society was a lot more excess wealth to throw around.
Though for now I will happily go on my way believing that sending lots of paper to the landfills is helping our environment by sequestering carbon.
I disagree. If the universe is entirely predictable, then my actions may be deterministic, deriving entirely from my internal processes, making me relevant to what I do -- free will. If truly random events can occur, then my actions may simply be the rolls of dice, unrelated to my own will.
You have the right idea suggesting they break the book into more parts, but I say why stop at 2 or 3?
I just bought the Dune sci-fi channel mini-series on DVD, and even the expanded version seemed rushed.
What I'd really like to see is an HBO-type mini-series treatment with 10-12 hour long episodes. I felt like they were able to do convincing political drama on Rome, so why not use that format for something like Dune?
I am perfectly willing to grant you that the stories that you list there are vapid, poorly written, or lacking in content. If I expected anything more from those sites, I might read them on occasion. But....
Many of those items address things that are perfectly newsworthy. The proposal to grant the Federal Reserve new powers matters, even though it is as yet only a proposal, is important news. The release of new data on pharmaceuticals is news. The economic ideas of the 3 people most likely to become the leader of the world's foremost superpower is a perfectly appropriate feature story topic. Same goes for many of the other topics.
Now, I wouldn't rank the financial news as being as important as MSNBC does. And I wouldn't give the stuff that interests conservatives the importance that Fox does. But these things are news to some people, and the fact that they may not interest you probably reflects the fractionalization and targeting of news as much as it does any lack of "real news." That targeting isn't going away. The power of the internet is probably going to be that if you are interested in news of a certain type, you will be more and more able to read all about it and only about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Likely this version of the OS will last 2 years, so that's less than $400 for one decade and two computers.
if it helps, you can drag and drop album names from the browser part of the window into the playlist column and it will automagically make a playlist from it.
ah. i see. i just use the normal "view > show browser" function to navigate the genre>artist>album hierarchy.
yep. they flatten out when on my iPod, but in iTunes they have a nested directory structure
um.... didn't they? I have folders of folders of playlists. and some of those playlists are actually folders of several playlists.
There are many varieties of conservatism that are no more or less a genuine expression of conservatism. One can firmly and fully believe in a brand of conservatism while still being to the left or right of another committed conservative on policy positions. I see no evidence that Whitman is a moderate because she's a squish or unprincipled.
There was a movement for this not long ago, and it was defeated. While proportional division of California's votes would have been good for California, it would have been bad for the policies California's majority favors. If even a third of California's 55 electoral votes were awarded to McCain, Obama's electoral prospects would be significantly dimmer -- it would effectively mean one more coveted large swing state he'd have to put under his belt. And if even GWB can take 44% of California's vote, you have to think that McCain might get more than a third of California's electoral votes.
In fact, they don't even have to conduct an election! The legislature can just choose then by fiat, as was the case during some early elections when New York felt it would be too expensive to conduct an election.
It's the same way your sports team can score the most goals in a season without winning the most games in a season.
Whether you get 51% of the vote in Texas or 70% of the vote in Texas doesn't matter for the electoral college tally -- either way Texas gives all its votes to the winner -- but it could change the popular vote winner.
The fact that the winner of the electoral college almost always wins the popular votes is sort of incidental. Once a state is safely in their camp, a candidate won't devote much more energy to wooing more voters in that state or raising voter turnout a lot. It just isn't in their interest. But if a candidate really wanted to win the popular vote at the cost of losing the election, they almost certainly could, even if they were the weaker candidate.
That was part of their problem. The Whigs were as much a party of a few major powerbrokers like Henry Clay as they were a party of a platform. They tended to win not through ideology, but by nominating respected war heroes who would proceed to die in office.
Popular votes make a lot more sense in France than they would in the United States. For one, there is the issue of population -- France is only about the size of California and Texas combined. Second is the issue of Federalism. Whereas regional power in France is devolved from the center, the American states have authority independent of the Federal State, so the presidential election must piggyback on local elections that have varying voter eligibility, registration, rules, identification requirements, timing, and voting equipment. Confining votes to one state helps minimize the effect of fraud. Regardless of the merits of a direct election, implementing it successfully and reliably in a nation in which the popular vote is often one by far less than one vote per precinct, would be a huge logistical challenge and would require significant constitutional revision.
And how did that work out last time? I remember hearing that it eliminated the centrist candidate who could have handily beat (in a head-to-head contest) either of the two candidates who did make it on to the second vote. The American state of Louisiana still has many remnants of French Law, portions of its electoral system being one of them. It is the topic of some ridicule and frustration.
It is perhaps worth noting that:
Not that this should make you less flabbergasted. Just to let you know it was apparently intentional flabbergasting.
Well, in fairness to McCain, Whitman is a sane and principled moderate conservative. You couldn't put someone like that on a ticket!
It is a valid criticism, though not always the overpowering concern. Plenty of libertarians, myself included, would not allow people to indenture themselves, while still allowing people to contract more ways than are currently available. I would note that we allow actors to contract to a tv series for a large number of years, and we don't think the possibility of coercion is an overriding consideration, even though this bears some similarity to indentured servitude.
The problem with your analogy between minimum wage laws that prevent certain negotiations between the parties in a labor contract and your aid organization's policy of not negotiating with terrorists is that the aid organization's policy simply increases freedom while the minimum wage law transfers freedom, helping some and hurting others.
A minimum wage law tends to cause a certain subset of people, often those who already have existing jobs, to receive higher wages, but it comes at the cost of pricing some people out of the labor market. Some people will gain freedom through increased wealth, but others will go from having an "improper" wage to having no wage, and will lose freedom through decreased wealth and opportunities. Now, maybe you think that is a good trade-off, but that's a moral question without an obvious values-neutral answer.
I take your point that this material is fully copyrightable under our laws, and that the church is only enforcing that copyright. Those of us angry at the legal consequences of this system should attack the system, not the church, but...
Being legal doesn't mean being above reproach. The underlying justification for intellectual property is to encourage creation and dissemination of works. When copyright is used to maintain a secret, rather than to put information into the hands of the public, it is only natural to question whether this goes against the spirit in which the law was crafted.
The idea that things must be hidden so that they are not taken out of context is a logical position, but I don't think it is one widely shared in America, and especially not on slashdot. It just doesn't jibe with the theory and tradition of free speech in the country. I think most of us feel like context will be provided as the result of any serious public conversation.
Beyond that, this is a religious document, and I think a lot of people especially feel that religious documents should not be secret. If it is part of your religion and you are a universal faith (Mormonism is), then you should want to share it. With religion, copyright presumably plays no role in encouraging creation of works, because salvation, not profit, is supposed to be the goal.
Finally, I think the secrecy involved in this case reminds people of an aspect of LDS they mistrust, which is its highly centralized control of their adherents. The thing that really separates a religion from a cult is that the life of a cult is directed from the top down, usually by a charismatic leader, and the life of a religion boils up from ground level of the faithful, with only a certain amount of control possible by religious leaders. LDS clearly falls on the religion side of that spectrum, but the fact that it is more centrally controlled than other major denominations makes people nervous. Secrecy with documents just reminds people of the fact that LDS is centralized enough to have such secrecy.
Show me the passage in the Bible that tells people to protest the funerals of dead American soldiers. Or show me one single member of the Westboro Baptist Church who lives by Christian virtues.
The point is that if someone is doing something bad in the name of your religion and others are following, it is your job to debate them and their faith, not to blame the people who are accurately reporting that another (more hateful) version of your religion exists.
That's such a tired old trope. "You can't talk about injustice X because injustice Y is so much more important." Why can't we talk about both? And why can't we talk about injustice X in the thread about injustice X? Those of us complaining about Canada's actions are also complaining about the EU and US. We just don't feel a need to talk about it in every context.
Specifically, with regards to the U.S. government: yes, elements of it are attempting, with mixed success, to deny their obligation to a specific set of human rights. But a huge number of Americans are up in arms about that. Congress and the courts have attempted to intervene. Executive branch officials have resigned in protest. The media has covered the hell out of it. And bloggers on all sides of the political spectrum have condemned it.
If the U.S. were doing the same thing as Canada and people complained about Canada, but not the U.S., that would be hypocritical, but I guarantee you that much more ink has been spilled in America about our own government's actions than about Canada's.
The problem is that a tree can only store so much carbon, and after it dies, either decay or combustion tends to release that carbon back into the atmosphere.
What you would really need to do to cause a net reduction in atmospheric carbon is grow trees, cut them down, bury them, then rinse and repeat. Considering that products made of trees are quite valuable, it is hard to see having a financial incentive to bury them until our society was a lot more excess wealth to throw around.
Though for now I will happily go on my way believing that sending lots of paper to the landfills is helping our environment by sequestering carbon.
I mean, how do you expect me to log in at that URL unless you first send me the code to run on my server? So rude.....
I disagree. If the universe is entirely predictable, then my actions may be deterministic, deriving entirely from my internal processes, making me relevant to what I do -- free will. If truly random events can occur, then my actions may simply be the rolls of dice, unrelated to my own will.
You have the right idea suggesting they break the book into more parts, but I say why stop at 2 or 3?
I just bought the Dune sci-fi channel mini-series on DVD, and even the expanded version seemed rushed.
What I'd really like to see is an HBO-type mini-series treatment with 10-12 hour long episodes. I felt like they were able to do convincing political drama on Rome, so why not use that format for something like Dune?
I am perfectly willing to grant you that the stories that you list there are vapid, poorly written, or lacking in content. If I expected anything more from those sites, I might read them on occasion. But....
Many of those items address things that are perfectly newsworthy. The proposal to grant the Federal Reserve new powers matters, even though it is as yet only a proposal, is important news. The release of new data on pharmaceuticals is news. The economic ideas of the 3 people most likely to become the leader of the world's foremost superpower is a perfectly appropriate feature story topic. Same goes for many of the other topics.
Now, I wouldn't rank the financial news as being as important as MSNBC does. And I wouldn't give the stuff that interests conservatives the importance that Fox does. But these things are news to some people, and the fact that they may not interest you probably reflects the fractionalization and targeting of news as much as it does any lack of "real news." That targeting isn't going away. The power of the internet is probably going to be that if you are interested in news of a certain type, you will be more and more able to read all about it and only about it.
+1 Self-Fulfilling Prophecy