The gnome project tried expert mode. There were 3 levels Beginner Intermediate Expert.
It didn't work.
People had different expectations of what features/options should be in which level, and so in the end, everyone just switched to Expert all the time, so that they could see all the features.
And this is *exactly* where the GNOME Project started ignoring their users. Yes, the users *turned on Expert mode* because they *want* all the features. Really. If the GNOME developers cannot manage to visually differentiate to the users between "advanced" features and "basic" features (via an Advanced dialog or tab or whatnot), they are free to ask for users to make mockups or suggestions of how the two should be differentiated. Hiding features is just *not* good, wastes time and effort of advanced users, and helps basic users not at all versus simply just differentiating advanced features.
I'm fine with their defaults -- they can make them whatever they want. I just want my "Advanced" tabs back. I'm tired of trudging through FAQs and obscure USENET posts to try to figure out how to re-eanble functionality that I've been using for years.
Look at Firefox. Where are the options? How are they clustered? How deep are some things? Generally, the more expert a user who would care about the setting, the more remote it is.
And I care about a number of options in Firefox. I want to control how many connections are open at once (pretty much impossible to effectively use Freenet without jacking this up by at least an order of magnitude). I want to be able to set my mail handling program, and run an ed2k link handler when I click an ed2k link.
And yet, while I can do all these things, the Firefox team has made it extremely annoying to do so -- go read a FAQ, find the option, plug it into your config file, restart the browser, see if it worked. That is not fun. I do not believe that it benefits the new user at *all* to have these options unavailable. Tagging them as "advanced" -- fine. Making them a huge pain to use for advanced users is *not* fine. It's frusterating and wastes time of people everywhere.
I like Firefox, and there are few things about it that really cheese me off. This is one of the few ones.
GNOME suffers from exactly the same bad philosophy.
That still doesn't mean that it shouldn't be easily changeable.
I used the Mac for years. I fell in love with spatial file-browsers. I *hated* using Explorer, which wasn't spatial.
On the other hand, a number of Windows users bitterly hated using the Mac, because it forced you to open a new window each time (well, you could hold down Option while you were using the computer, yes), and the windows kept "moving around".
I see *no* reason not to allow both methods of operation. Literally zero, except for the times when Person A is using Person B's account, which they shouldn't be in the *first* goddamn place. If your problem is people having configs that differ from the default, we should work on migrating configs around computers, not on forcing everyone to use one config unless they spend months trying to figure out how to get away from said config.
Also, GNOME has neutered a number of projects that it's come in contact with. At some point, the GNOME people decided that "viewports and multiple desktops" were both very similar. Okay, fair enough. Users had managed just fine for years, and it'd be easy to just tuck viewports in an advanced tab, but some GNOME person decided that there should be only one, and that multiple desktops were better than viewports. So, all of a sudden, GNOME suddenly forced you to use multiple desktops.
For a while, Sawfish, a beautiful GTK-based WM that can be rewritten in lisp while running, much like emacs, became the default GNOME WM. And in that period of time, all kinds of features were ripped out of it -- focus settings, viewport support, etc. A lot of it could be pulled back in an unsupported manner, but most of it started getting buggier and buggier as things broke.
Now, GNOME has decided that there's zero point to having LISP-based configurability -- that configurability is actually *bad*, because it might possibly cause something to operate differently than users expect. So they came up with Metacity, which is possibly the most brain-dead WM in existence. They left, in their wake, a ruined sawfish. Thanks, GNOME.
This is *exactly* like the "disabled on a vanilla system and must be re-enabled through a config file" user-rebindable accelerators in GNOME. There are too many features that are simply *hidden*, tucked away to leave the GNOME hackers that demand them happy and keep whatever UI person that insists that limited functionality is the only way to make a UI usable happy. For the love of God, you could make an entire "advanced control panel" just to turn on all the useful features of GNOME if you want (Emacs keys, user-rebindable accelerators, file selector usable by a bash person), but for the love of God, stop hiding it. At least tuck away a couple of checkboxes somewhere to enable all the useful features. Please.
Maybe he should try KDE instead? That does everything he wants, and has tons of configurable options. I think you can modify the Earth's rotation speed in the KDE Control Center.
Actually, to be honest, I've been increasingly impressed with the KDE user interface vs the GNOME one. However, I still stick with GNOME because I simply cannot accept the KDE license situation (or the fact that the whole bleeding thing is implemented in C++, and not very STL-ish C++ at that).
Among other things:
* The KDE people don't have a "we should hide rebindable accelerators as far in the bowels of the system as possible in hopes that no users can ever find them" approach. This is one of the few major UI improvements that GNOME/KDE have contributed to the world, and I find it very frusterating that GNOME is now trying to stuff them back down.
* The KDE people have a system (DCOP) which allows scripts to interface with GUI apps.
I find the "exclude power users" approach that GNOME is taking *very* frusterating, especially since I *want* badly to use GNOME instead of KDE, and I find myself constantly thwarted by "dumb it down" design decisions.
1) I have seen God-knows-how-much breakage with apps trying to talk to gconf over the years, or gconf crashing, or claiming that they couldn't connect to gconf or what-have-you. The design may be justified, but it's broken an awful lot over the years.
2) GConf is too often used as an excuse for creating a GUI option by a number of GNOME developers that have confused "ease of use" with "hiding all advanced features". I don't use the GNOME DE, but I do use GNOME apps in preference to KDE apps, and I see this too much. Simply shunting every advanced option off into the depths of GConf or the dotfiles, frankly, sucks.
I saw someone suggesting an expert mode. It has been tried, and it doesn't work.
Fine. Have "Advanced" tabs that are always visible, if you want. You're using Windows as the golden standard for usability, ne? That approach has certainly worked acceptably for Microsoft.
Speaking of AOL patents, AOL holds a patent on running a tracker server used to contact users (basically, instant messaging). There are an insane 200 claims in this patent, but you don't need to read many...
My point is more that I'm not sure that I consider it a good thing to depose world leaders that we consider nasty.
The point of nations existing is that they are basically autonomous. Remember the Cold War, when the same philosophy led the USSR and the US to both "help" nations, one by deposing "evil leaderships" and "spreading democracy" and the other by deposing "corrupt capitalist" leaderships and "spreading communism"?
If a form of government is so much better, or a leader is so unpopular, isn't it better to let the people of the country deal with the problem?
In particular, the instant that I started to read the NYT story, I dope-slapped myself for not having thought of the reverse implication of the technology, namely that it might be used to prove that a contraband image (such as child-porn) is NOT faked (and therefore is genuinely illicit).
That's a good point. Hmm. Perhaps a free plugin for Photoshop/GIMP could be released and widely distributed that modifies an image to be in conformance with the model? That'd retain plausible deniability.
My first thought is that JPEG and other lossy compression formats would also throw this off -- sure enough, the NYTimes article backs this up, and says that this is the case (and if someone can come up for a "fix", to determine what probably is a JPEG artifact and what isn't, we have a new and improved post-processor for JPEG decompressors!)
Now what, exactly, would privatizing the space industry do? It sure as hell wouldn't make us push the limits. You'd get lots of companies shoving people up to LEO for kicks or launching satellites. You'd have reduced profit margins, and less incentive to be extremely careful about waste being released in orbit. You certainly wouldn't go to Mars or the Moon -- doing so is expensive and unlikely to produce a return.
Really, the only economically viable approaches I can see that private industry would provide would be space tourism (sounds good, only scales to a certain degree), and satellite launches.
Why dont we also stop sending probes out as well, since those are *SUCH* a waste of money as well NASA?
Not NASA's fault. IIRC, Bush had existing NASA funding reallocated towards Mars work. It is not new news. Take a look at this article from 2001: Bush's budget was to:
(CNN) -- While giving a boost to Mars exploration, the proposed 2002 budget for NASA would scrap a mission to Pluto, tighten the reins on the international space station and cut programs that monitor world climate changes.
Nope. But if you'd like a couple, try a list of Kerry's and Bush's platform issues.
As a quick summary:
* Kerry is more pro-affirmative-action.
* Kerry opposes a gay marriage ban, Bush supports.
* Kerry wants gays to be allowed to be open in the military, Bush wants them to stay in the closet.
* Kerry wants to allow adoptions by gays, Bush wants to ban them.
* Kerry wants to allow attacks on gays to be classifiable as hate crimes, Bush opposes.
* Bush wants Star Wars, Kerry opposes.
* Kerry explicitly wants to increase number of personnel in Army, Bush wants to "increase military spending"? Probably just a minor variant in approach.
* Bush wants to remove the ban on oil industry setting up in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, Kerry wants to keep it.
* Kerry wants to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, Bush (not surprisingly) isn't that interested.
* Bush wants to ban citizens from suing their HMOs, Kerry wants to allow them.
* Kerry wants to disallow US citizens from being classifiable as enemy combatants, Bush wants to allow this.
* Kerry opposes the PATRIOT Act, Bush supports it.
* Kerry is more in favor of allowing immigration.
* Bush is much more pro-Iraq-war than Kerry.
* Bush was, for most of his term, much more opposed to UN involvement in Iraq -- he may be moving towards Kerry's position of promoting UN involvement.
* Bush favors pre-emptive strikes on countries, Kerry wants UN approval first.
* Kerry is pro-choice, Bush is pro-life
* Kerry is anti-death-penalty, Bush is pro-death-penalty
* Kerry is more in favor of regulating gun manufacturers.
* Obviously, Kerry is going to appoint more liberal and Bush more conservative Supreme Court Justices.
* Kerry is opposed to Social Security privatization, Bush is in favor.
* Kerry wants to tax the wealthy as much as they were before Bush's tax cuts, Bush wants to retain the cuts.
Basically, Kerry is socially liberal, more in favor of big government spending, takes a more pacifist approach to foreign affairs, and is more in favor of protecting civil rights.
It was nonprofits being run by the Republican party, involved with the campaigning not just people who happen to be Republicans. The problem actually wasn't so much that they were funneling money to Nader, but on some technicalities regarding who is allowed to do so.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't do that, but it is a point of nastiness -- a chunk of the people out there helping Nader don't like him one bit. Before you get friendly, enthusiastic "advice" from someone about how one should vote for Nader, one ought to consider whether this really is an honest Nader backer or a Republican who is lying.
Very misleading. The rich are a tiny minority of those who received tax cuts under the Bush plan.
The rich are a tiny minority to begin with. By giving a $1 tax credit to every person with less than $1M/year income, and a $100,000 tax credit to every person with more than $1M/year income, you do exactly what you just described.
I'd say that your statement is more misleading than that in the parent of your post.
This article is about a *release candidate* for SP2 still having issues.
No kidding. A release candidate.
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but this is *ridiculous*. Does anyone think that *Linus's* release candidate kernels are problem-free?
The only thing that bashing Microsoft for BS reasons does is damage credibility of the people doing so. Oh, in the short term, people wind up thinking "unstable old Microsoft", but when SP2 comes out and it's just another SP, people start getting a "boy who cried wolf" attitude towards those that were wrongly throwing a fit.
It just has never had an authentication and authorization system added.
SPF is a pretty bad at the above, and people are likely to attempt to use it in various other systems. It's like making a really broken, unusable PGP implementation and then having people build things on it. It's asking for a lot of trouble down the road.
1. Has vowed to stay the course in Iraq - why switch? 2. Has vowed to create a new Intelligence Czar 3. Has vowed to double government spending on domestic surveillance
2 is a minor bureaucratic reshuffling, and has little direct impact on citizens. 1 and 3 are unfortunate points that were pretty much guaranteed by anyone hoping to win the election. The media turned 9/11 into a crucial election point, and Demms and Reps have both accused each other of failure to address the problem, and lack of resolve to address the problem in the future. It is unlikely that *anyone* is going to be called out on "going too far to stop another 9/11", but "not doing enough" is a nasty accusation. Point is, it'd be nice if someone could win without (1) and (3), but it's just not going to happen. There were almost no legislators that stood up to the war in Iraq -- even that unpopular and risky move was seen as too dangerous to a political career.
4. Is a dyed in the wool big spender who'll only grow the government
Yup. Also guaranteed of the winner of this election. Lots of old boomers and echo-of-the-baby-boomers who very much do not want government subsidization of their lifes (largely by younger, working people) to end.
5. Will continue the current ill-conceived 'war on drugs' just as both major parties have for almost 30 years now
Probably, though the Demms are somewhat softer than Republicans. This is also something hard to overcome -- seventy years of antidrug propaganda has had a serious impact on the American psyche. World War II propaganda still affects viewpoints -- talk to some older people sometime, it's frightening -- and that ran for a much shorter period of time. There's a reason for the hard line politicos are taking -- decades of their predecessors worked very hard to associate the terms "recreational drug" and "bad".
Don't get me wrong. I generally agree with your points. My point is that we live in a democracy; there's no point in pretending we don't (for the moment, hold arguments about representative republics or whatnot, as it doesn't affect my point). You need to not only ask for what you want, but what others will accept (otherwise, hell, you could just ask to be dictator and all of your desires would go through nicely).
You like the electoral college? I don't.
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Take away the electoral college and you take away the only thing keeping your over-populated metropolises fed.
You should be made aware that the electoral college is already population-based. California, for instance, has many, many more votes than North Dakota does.
The issues that people have with the electoral college focus around the fact that it is only a rough-grained representation of what people want. For example, by Gerrymandering (redrawing voting districs for political advantage), one can isolate all the people that feel strongly about one issue in a single district, and limit their influence to one vote, leaving remaining districts to be narrow victories for the other side.
The main reasons people support the electoral college at all are logisticial issues that I largely now see as solved. It can reduce the cost of recounts by localizing disputes, and speed up the amount of time until the results from voting are in.
Other political effects -- it tends to reduct the impact of physical areas that overwhelmingly feel strongly about something. This tends to blunt the political impact of, say, Mormons in Utah, since Utah has as much clout as a bunch of people in New York, which might somewhat favor abortions but not be screaming and raving about it like the Mormons.
Theoretically, the representative elected in an electoral college does *not* have to follow the vote of the people that he is representing (a rather disturbing thought to many people, including me). It has only happened a handful of times; perhaps ten electors have disregarded the wishes of the people they represented over the history of the United States, but it can happen.
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The gnome project tried expert mode.
There were 3 levels
Beginner
Intermediate
Expert.
It didn't work.
People had different expectations of what features/options should be in which level, and so in the end, everyone just switched to Expert all the time, so that they could see all the features.
And this is *exactly* where the GNOME Project started ignoring their users. Yes, the users *turned on Expert mode* because they *want* all the features. Really. If the GNOME developers cannot manage to visually differentiate to the users between "advanced" features and "basic" features (via an Advanced dialog or tab or whatnot), they are free to ask for users to make mockups or suggestions of how the two should be differentiated. Hiding features is just *not* good, wastes time and effort of advanced users, and helps basic users not at all versus simply just differentiating advanced features.
Personally, I like the new Gnome defaults.
I'm fine with their defaults -- they can make them whatever they want. I just want my "Advanced" tabs back. I'm tired of trudging through FAQs and obscure USENET posts to try to figure out how to re-eanble functionality that I've been using for years.
Look at Firefox. Where are the options? How are they clustered? How deep are some things? Generally, the more expert a user who would care about the setting, the more remote it is.
And I care about a number of options in Firefox. I want to control how many connections are open at once (pretty much impossible to effectively use Freenet without jacking this up by at least an order of magnitude). I want to be able to set my mail handling program, and run an ed2k link handler when I click an ed2k link.
And yet, while I can do all these things, the Firefox team has made it extremely annoying to do so -- go read a FAQ, find the option, plug it into your config file, restart the browser, see if it worked. That is not fun. I do not believe that it benefits the new user at *all* to have these options unavailable. Tagging them as "advanced" -- fine. Making them a huge pain to use for advanced users is *not* fine. It's frusterating and wastes time of people everywhere.
I like Firefox, and there are few things about it that really cheese me off. This is one of the few ones.
GNOME suffers from exactly the same bad philosophy.
That still doesn't mean that it shouldn't be easily changeable.
I used the Mac for years. I fell in love with spatial file-browsers. I *hated* using Explorer, which wasn't spatial.
On the other hand, a number of Windows users bitterly hated using the Mac, because it forced you to open a new window each time (well, you could hold down Option while you were using the computer, yes), and the windows kept "moving around".
I see *no* reason not to allow both methods of operation. Literally zero, except for the times when Person A is using Person B's account, which they shouldn't be in the *first* goddamn place. If your problem is people having configs that differ from the default, we should work on migrating configs around computers, not on forcing everyone to use one config unless they spend months trying to figure out how to get away from said config.
Also, GNOME has neutered a number of projects that it's come in contact with. At some point, the GNOME people decided that "viewports and multiple desktops" were both very similar. Okay, fair enough. Users had managed just fine for years, and it'd be easy to just tuck viewports in an advanced tab, but some GNOME person decided that there should be only one, and that multiple desktops were better than viewports. So, all of a sudden, GNOME suddenly forced you to use multiple desktops.
For a while, Sawfish, a beautiful GTK-based WM that can be rewritten in lisp while running, much like emacs, became the default GNOME WM. And in that period of time, all kinds of features were ripped out of it -- focus settings, viewport support, etc. A lot of it could be pulled back in an unsupported manner, but most of it started getting buggier and buggier as things broke.
Now, GNOME has decided that there's zero point to having LISP-based configurability -- that configurability is actually *bad*, because it might possibly cause something to operate differently than users expect. So they came up with Metacity, which is possibly the most brain-dead WM in existence. They left, in their wake, a ruined sawfish. Thanks, GNOME.
This is *exactly* like the "disabled on a vanilla system and must be re-enabled through a config file" user-rebindable accelerators in GNOME. There are too many features that are simply *hidden*, tucked away to leave the GNOME hackers that demand them happy and keep whatever UI person that insists that limited functionality is the only way to make a UI usable happy. For the love of God, you could make an entire "advanced control panel" just to turn on all the useful features of GNOME if you want (Emacs keys, user-rebindable accelerators, file selector usable by a bash person), but for the love of God, stop hiding it. At least tuck away a couple of checkboxes somewhere to enable all the useful features. Please.
Maybe he should try KDE instead? That does everything he wants, and has tons of configurable options. I think you can modify the Earth's rotation speed in the KDE Control Center.
Actually, to be honest, I've been increasingly impressed with the KDE user interface vs the GNOME one. However, I still stick with GNOME because I simply cannot accept the KDE license situation (or the fact that the whole bleeding thing is implemented in C++, and not very STL-ish C++ at that).
Among other things:
* The KDE people don't have a "we should hide rebindable accelerators as far in the bowels of the system as possible in hopes that no users can ever find them" approach. This is one of the few major UI improvements that GNOME/KDE have contributed to the world, and I find it very frusterating that GNOME is now trying to stuff them back down.
* The KDE people have a system (DCOP) which allows scripts to interface with GUI apps.
I find the "exclude power users" approach that GNOME is taking *very* frusterating, especially since I *want* badly to use GNOME instead of KDE, and I find myself constantly thwarted by "dumb it down" design decisions.
I do have problems with GConf, though.
1) I have seen God-knows-how-much breakage with apps trying to talk to gconf over the years, or gconf crashing, or claiming that they couldn't connect to gconf or what-have-you. The design may be justified, but it's broken an awful lot over the years.
2) GConf is too often used as an excuse for creating a GUI option by a number of GNOME developers that have confused "ease of use" with "hiding all advanced features". I don't use the GNOME DE, but I do use GNOME apps in preference to KDE apps, and I see this too much. Simply shunting every advanced option off into the depths of GConf or the dotfiles, frankly, sucks.
I saw someone suggesting an expert mode. It has been tried, and it doesn't work.
Fine. Have "Advanced" tabs that are always visible, if you want. You're using Windows as the golden standard for usability, ne? That approach has certainly worked acceptably for Microsoft.
Speaking of AOL patents, AOL holds a patent on running a tracker server used to contact users (basically, instant messaging). There are an insane 200 claims in this patent, but you don't need to read many ...
Second the argument for Boucher (and don't live in Virginia, dammit).
My point is more that I'm not sure that I consider it a good thing to depose world leaders that we consider nasty.
The point of nations existing is that they are basically autonomous. Remember the Cold War, when the same philosophy led the USSR and the US to both "help" nations, one by deposing "evil leaderships" and "spreading democracy" and the other by deposing "corrupt capitalist" leaderships and "spreading communism"?
If a form of government is so much better, or a leader is so unpopular, isn't it better to let the people of the country deal with the problem?
In particular, the instant that I started to read the NYT story, I dope-slapped myself for not having thought of the reverse implication of the technology, namely that it might be used to prove that a contraband image (such as child-porn) is NOT faked (and therefore is genuinely illicit).
That's a good point. Hmm. Perhaps a free plugin for Photoshop/GIMP could be released and widely distributed that modifies an image to be in conformance with the model? That'd retain plausible deniability.
My first thought is that JPEG and other lossy compression formats would also throw this off -- sure enough, the NYTimes article backs this up, and says that this is the case (and if someone can come up for a "fix", to determine what probably is a JPEG artifact and what isn't, we have a new and improved post-processor for JPEG decompressors!)
Digital watermarking might also muck things up.
'The new setup is designed to get around obstacles in some states' data laws.'"
Yeah, damn those data-privacy-protecting obstacles! They do nothing but aid "the terrorists"!
Now what, exactly, would privatizing the space industry do? It sure as hell wouldn't make us push the limits. You'd get lots of companies shoving people up to LEO for kicks or launching satellites. You'd have reduced profit margins, and less incentive to be extremely careful about waste being released in orbit. You certainly wouldn't go to Mars or the Moon -- doing so is expensive and unlikely to produce a return.
Really, the only economically viable approaches I can see that private industry would provide would be space tourism (sounds good, only scales to a certain degree), and satellite launches.
Saddam is gone, after all.
Is that a good thing?
Why dont we also stop sending probes out as well, since those are *SUCH* a waste of money as well NASA?
Not NASA's fault. IIRC, Bush had existing NASA funding reallocated towards Mars work. It is not new news. Take a look at this article from 2001: Bush's budget was to:
(CNN) -- While giving a boost to Mars exploration, the proposed 2002 budget for NASA would scrap a mission to Pluto, tighten the reins on the international space station and cut programs that monitor world climate changes.
(I'm actually not supposed to be on the computer right now, but... oh well.)
Seriously, not to make you feel bad or anything, but what would possess you to ignore post-op orders on your *eyes*?
Nope. But if you'd like a couple, try a list of Kerry's and Bush's platform issues.
As a quick summary:
* Kerry is more pro-affirmative-action.
* Kerry opposes a gay marriage ban, Bush supports.
* Kerry wants gays to be allowed to be open in the military, Bush wants them to stay in the closet.
* Kerry wants to allow adoptions by gays, Bush wants to ban them.
* Kerry wants to allow attacks on gays to be classifiable as hate crimes, Bush opposes.
* Bush wants Star Wars, Kerry opposes.
* Kerry explicitly wants to increase number of personnel in Army, Bush wants to "increase military spending"? Probably just a minor variant in approach.
* Bush wants to remove the ban on oil industry setting up in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, Kerry wants to keep it.
* Kerry wants to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, Bush (not surprisingly) isn't that interested.
* Bush wants to ban citizens from suing their HMOs, Kerry wants to allow them.
* Kerry wants to disallow US citizens from being classifiable as enemy combatants, Bush wants to allow this.
* Kerry opposes the PATRIOT Act, Bush supports it.
* Kerry is more in favor of allowing immigration.
* Bush is much more pro-Iraq-war than Kerry.
* Bush was, for most of his term, much more opposed to UN involvement in Iraq -- he may be moving towards Kerry's position of promoting UN involvement.
* Bush favors pre-emptive strikes on countries, Kerry wants UN approval first.
* Kerry is pro-choice, Bush is pro-life
* Kerry is anti-death-penalty, Bush is pro-death-penalty
* Kerry is more in favor of regulating gun manufacturers.
* Obviously, Kerry is going to appoint more liberal and Bush more conservative Supreme Court Justices.
* Kerry is opposed to Social Security privatization, Bush is in favor.
* Kerry wants to tax the wealthy as much as they were before Bush's tax cuts, Bush wants to retain the cuts.
Basically, Kerry is socially liberal, more in favor of big government spending, takes a more pacifist approach to foreign affairs, and is more in favor of protecting civil rights.
It was nonprofits being run by the Republican party, involved with the campaigning not just people who happen to be Republicans. The problem actually wasn't so much that they were funneling money to Nader, but on some technicalities regarding who is allowed to do so.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't do that, but it is a point of nastiness -- a chunk of the people out there helping Nader don't like him one bit. Before you get friendly, enthusiastic "advice" from someone about how one should vote for Nader, one ought to consider whether this really is an honest Nader backer or a Republican who is lying.
As in, if we have a device that can tell us what we *will* do, we might as well just do it?
:-)
Yeah, I'll go for that.
Okay, there was some assumed meaning to "does nothing". I'll clarify. We operate within the framework of our knowledge available.
Most people are pretty sure that Nader is not going to win the election.
Few people are sure whether Bush or Kerry is going to win the election.
Also, opinion polls haven't been an accurate predictor of election results in the past.
Very misleading. The rich are a tiny minority of those who received tax cuts under the Bush plan.
The rich are a tiny minority to begin with. By giving a $1 tax credit to every person with less than $1M/year income, and a $100,000 tax credit to every person with more than $1M/year income, you do exactly what you just described.
I'd say that your statement is more misleading than that in the parent of your post.
This article is about a *release candidate* for SP2 still having issues.
No kidding. A release candidate.
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but this is *ridiculous*. Does anyone think that *Linus's* release candidate kernels are problem-free?
The only thing that bashing Microsoft for BS reasons does is damage credibility of the people doing so. Oh, in the short term, people wind up thinking "unstable old Microsoft", but when SP2 comes out and it's just another SP, people start getting a "boy who cried wolf" attitude towards those that were wrongly throwing a fit.
The SMTP protocol is fine.
It just has never had an authentication and authorization system added.
SPF is a pretty bad at the above, and people are likely to attempt to use it in various other systems. It's like making a really broken, unusable PGP implementation and then having people build things on it. It's asking for a lot of trouble down the road.
1. Has vowed to stay the course in Iraq - why switch?
2. Has vowed to create a new Intelligence Czar
3. Has vowed to double government spending on domestic surveillance
2 is a minor bureaucratic reshuffling, and has little direct impact on citizens. 1 and 3 are unfortunate points that were pretty much guaranteed by anyone hoping to win the election. The media turned 9/11 into a crucial election point, and Demms and Reps have both accused each other of failure to address the problem, and lack of resolve to address the problem in the future. It is unlikely that *anyone* is going to be called out on "going too far to stop another 9/11", but "not doing enough" is a nasty accusation. Point is, it'd be nice if someone could win without (1) and (3), but it's just not going to happen. There were almost no legislators that stood up to the war in Iraq -- even that unpopular and risky move was seen as too dangerous to a political career.
4. Is a dyed in the wool big spender who'll only grow the government
Yup. Also guaranteed of the winner of this election. Lots of old boomers and echo-of-the-baby-boomers who very much do not want government subsidization of their lifes (largely by younger, working people) to end.
5. Will continue the current ill-conceived 'war on drugs' just as both major parties have for almost 30 years now
Probably, though the Demms are somewhat softer than Republicans. This is also something hard to overcome -- seventy years of antidrug propaganda has had a serious impact on the American psyche. World War II propaganda still affects viewpoints -- talk to some older people sometime, it's frightening -- and that ran for a much shorter period of time. There's a reason for the hard line politicos are taking -- decades of their predecessors worked very hard to associate the terms "recreational drug" and "bad".
Don't get me wrong. I generally agree with your points. My point is that we live in a democracy; there's no point in pretending we don't (for the moment, hold arguments about representative republics or whatnot, as it doesn't affect my point). You need to not only ask for what you want, but what others will accept (otherwise, hell, you could just ask to be dictator and all of your desires would go through nicely).
Take away the electoral college and you take away the only thing keeping your over-populated metropolises fed.
You should be made aware that the electoral college is already population-based. California, for instance, has many, many more votes than North Dakota does.
The issues that people have with the electoral college focus around the fact that it is only a rough-grained representation of what people want. For example, by Gerrymandering (redrawing voting districs for political advantage), one can isolate all the people that feel strongly about one issue in a single district, and limit their influence to one vote, leaving remaining districts to be narrow victories for the other side.
The main reasons people support the electoral college at all are logisticial issues that I largely now see as solved. It can reduce the cost of recounts by localizing disputes, and speed up the amount of time until the results from voting are in.
Other political effects -- it tends to reduct the impact of physical areas that overwhelmingly feel strongly about something. This tends to blunt the political impact of, say, Mormons in Utah, since Utah has as much clout as a bunch of people in New York, which might somewhat favor abortions but not be screaming and raving about it like the Mormons.
Theoretically, the representative elected in an electoral college does *not* have to follow the vote of the people that he is representing (a rather disturbing thought to many people, including me). It has only happened a handful of times; perhaps ten electors have disregarded the wishes of the people they represented over the history of the United States, but it can happen.