> The problem is the key ingredient -- acetaminophen -- can easily damage > or destroy a patient's liver if more than 2000 mg are used per day.
Yeah, but 2000 mg in one day? Come on, who needs that much? What are you trying to do, anesthetize yourself at home for DIY surgery?
Okay, so if you take over 2000mg of acetaminophen every day, you can hurt your liver. Did you know, you can also hurt your kidneys by drinking more than twenty quarts of water a day? It's all about dose.
I've only once had pain that half that amount wouldn't solve permanently, and that was an absessed tooth. (What *did* take the pain away that time? Amoxycillin. Took one of those babies, and an hour later the pain started to subside. Within four hours, the pain was totally gone. You better believe I took those things as prescribed until the bottle was empty. Never try to treat a symptom when you can go straight to the cause.)
For any *normal* amount of pain, 250mg of acetaminophen is enough, or maybe 500 tops. And I know the package says wait four hours before taking more, but, honestly, you ordinarily *don't* have to take more, unless some new cause comes along and creates new pain for a new reason. You take the Tylenol, headache goes away, problem solved, and you don't think about it again until weeks later when you get another headache. Well, that's been my experience.
The other thing is, I cannot think of a single drug on the market that has fewer or less problematic side effects than acetaminophen. The stuff takes away pain and, umm, oh, yeah, if you happen to have a fever, it might bring the fever down some. That's it. To my knowledge, taken in sane doses, it doesn't do anything else. That's quite rare in a drug. Certainly I don't know of any other pain-killer that's nearly so well behaved.
I mean, what else do you take for pain?
Asperin is a blood thinner, which is frequently a bad thing.
Ibuprofen has various effects, a couple of which are more pronounced than its pain-killing (though, granted, the anti-inflammatory effect is seldom a very big problem and frequently useful). Oh, and it's hard on the GI system in an assortment of ways, which is always fun.
Then there are opium-derived things, probably the safest of which is darvocet (which, come to think of it, is generally sold with some Tylenol included). Don't even get started on morphine and so forth; in terms of side-effects, compared to those things, Tylenol may as well be a sugar pill.
OBTW, you know why they can't keep Tylenol in the jungle? Because, parrots-eat-'em-all. Don't hate me; you know you needed a chuckle, or at least a groan.
> the real solution is to get the bogus patents invalidated.
We're talking about here about technology that was included in a product released in 1994. They expire in less than five years. Even if it were possible to win the court cases and get the patents thrown out, it would take most of the remaining patent lifespan to do so, if not longer (not to mention a large load of cash to feed the lawyers).
So, the real solution would be to drag the TomTom case out for a couple more years, so that there won't be enough time left afterward for Microsoft to sue anyone else over the same thing before the patent clock runs out. (Oh, wait, too late... they already settled. Darn.)
Perhaps you're missing the fact that there are only about a dozen people in the open-source community who want anything to do with Mono, for exactly this reason. Nothing of any consequence uses it.
A lot of UDF implementations don't support random access in write mode. Unless that changes, it's not really useful for most of the things FAT is used for. Needing to erase the whole filesystem and rewrite it every time you change a file is totally unacceptable for a lot of applications.
> Don't know about you, but I like my USB drives to be small things.
You know, just for the sheer absurdity of it, somebody ought to make a Flash-ROM-based USB 2.0 Mass Storage Device that's too large to carry in a C-130. Perhaps it could feature an indicator light with a higher lux rating than an airport beacon and be powered by an internal nuclear reactor.
The world could use a new cross-platform filesystem format. Criteria:
1. simple enough to be easily implemented in every OS 2. not tied to specific capabilities of a particular OS 3. flexible enough to allow each OS to preserve its precious metadata (ownership information, ACLs, resource forks, symbolic links, or what-have-you) and still allow the data itself to be readable even to systems that don't understand all those wonky attributes 4. intended for use with either read-only or read-write media 5. suitable for both relatively small media (like the 64MB Flash-based USB keychains that come in the bottom of specially marked boxes of breakfast cereal) and also for future large hard drives (like the 256-exabyte models that will be available twenty-five years from now when people are still using this old filesystem because everything is compatible with it) 6. supported by both Microsoft and Apple 7. free of patent encumbrances so that absolutely everyone can implement it, including the makers of cheap yum-cha handheld devices and whatnot 8. entirely described by freely available documentation
Until that comes along, we'll be stuck using FAT for a lot of things.
Multibooters store their files on FAT filesystems because they're supported by, in a word, everything. Want to share your files between FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, BeOS, and OS/2? FAT is your friend. I still keep most of my data on a vfat filesystem for this reason even though I haven't used Windows in aeons. When I switched from FreeBSD to Debian, I didn't have to worry about whether UFS support was included out of the box, or what package to install to get it, or whatever; all my data were on vfat, which is always available, always supported, on every OS.
People who carry data around on portable disks also use FAT, in case they need to access it from a friend's computer, a computer at work, a computer at the library, or cetera, which may not have the same operating system they use at home. I carry around a small Flash-ROM-based USB 2.0 Mass Storage Device on a lanyard, which I have formatted vfat. If I need to copy files onto it from a computer that's running an old version of Debian with no NTFS read/write support, I can. If I need to take those files and copy them onto a computer that's running the Windows Seven RC, I can. If I'm at a relative's house and they want to see the photos that I've got on there, and their computer is a Mac, it's no problem.
FAT is also simple, well documented, and well understood. If you're the sort of nerd who wants to reserve the possibility, in case anything goes wrong (say, an untimely power blink), of looking at the block device for the disk directly and *finding* that lost file, it's not very hard with FAT. (Yes, I actually did this a couple of times back in the DOS days. Successfully.)
Finally, a lot of people have old disks sitting around, containing data they want to keep, on FAT filesystems in many cases.
> Stop wasting trees. There is no reason to print a web page. Ever. Stop it.
Yeah, I used to think that way.
And then I got my current job, and started working with normal, non-IT-industry users.
I know, for IT people, it doesn't make sense. I mean, printing it is unnecessary and just creates extra physical clutter, a piece of paper you're just going to misplace. If you just save the link (possibly someplace online, like your private scratchpad at Perlmonks), you can go there any time, from anywhere. Why would you ever want it on paper?
But it's different for normal users, because (Are you sitting down? Mind your blood pressure, this may be a bit of a shock...) they don't have the internet available everywhere all the time.
Really, no fooling.
They don't have handheld devices that can browse the web. They don't have the internet on every floor (much less every room) of their house. They don't have it in their car. The computer in the house (there's never more than one) is probably shared between several family members, and even if nobody else is using it, it still takes at least five minutes, usually more like ten, to get something off the internet, because they have to wait for the computer (which is old and slow and never had enough RAM in the first place because it was a cheaper model) to boot up, then wait for the internet connection to dial, then try to find the site...
That's assuming they *have* the internet at home; a double-digit percentage of the population doesn't.
Some people only have internet access at a friend's house, or at the public library.
Many only have internet at work. They can't take a web page home, and even if it's needed for a job-related reason, they can't take it with them to meetings, or when they have job duties away from their regular desk -- or maybe they can't take it to the desk, if they have internet at a shared workstation, which is common. They can't take a website and show it to a coworker, or the boss.
So they print the web page (or the email message, or whatever) so that they can have continued access to it when they walk away from the computer. They want to take it with them.
> Microsoft implemented a version of those standards before they were standards, > and became the Defacto Quirks Mode way things were done for a long time,
You left out the middle steps, wherein the standards were officially released, and Microsoft categorically refused to update its implementation for roughly a decade.
Personally I think HTML5 is fundamentally a move in the wrong direction. Does anybody really want to go back to non-wellformed markup? What a PAIN, _especially_ if you're composing a page dynamically including some user-supplied components and want to check that said components can't screw up the whole page in deviously egregious ways. With legacy SGML malarke, you pretty much have to build a complete parser into your code. With XHTML, you can check for basic well-formedness in about six lines of Perl. (This doesn't guarantee validity, but if you're serving as text/html that really doesn't matter. It *does* guarantee that the user-supplied content can't close out the containing elements and diddle around in the rest of the page, among other things.) Having realized the benefits of wellformed markup, why would we EVER want to go back? No thanks.
And then there's XHTML2, which appears to want to change as many things as possible, just for the sake of it. Meh.
The only thing I really want in a new version of HTML is the ability to put block-level elements within paragraphs. That's all I want. Add that to XHTML 1.0, call the result XHTML 1.0.1, and I'm good. Seriously.
Video? I still don't understand what's wrong with just linking to an MPEG and letting the operating system decide what software to use to play it. That's worked very well on every major operating system since 1994 and, if the user has decent video-playback software installed, provides a MUCH better UI than any of the in-browser video playing schemes I've ever seen, including this new one.
> Did it appear to anyone else that we may have temporarily slahdotted wiki?
Not likely. Wikipedia handles more traffic in an hour than slashdot gets in a day.
Wikipedia does occasionally get more traffic than it can handle promptly and return results slowly, but a link from slashdot has nothing to do with this.
> [information] just wants to be anthropomorphized.
I think you're projecting your own desires on the information. Because *you* like being anthropomorphized, you assume that information must want this as well, but in fact information doesn't care whether it's anthropomorphized or not, as long as it's not late for dinner.
> This specific limitation of free speech in Germany (and Austria) > is a direct consequence of the "never again" principle. These > laws were made out of respect for the survivors of the Holocaust
Yeah, I know all that. The restrictions on political speech in Germany are a reflection of the concern that people have that they might be dominated by a totalitarian Nazi regime that would do horrible things.
Now, do you know how Hitler managed to come to power?
There are a lot of details, but this point is at the center of it: people were concerned that they might be dominated by a totalitarian Communist regime that would do horrible things, curtail liberties, and so forth.
So they weren't dominated by Commies. They willingly gave power to Nazis instead.
> There are similar restrictions in every country, including the US > (you're not allowed to put up a sign saying that blacks aren't > wanted here, for example).
It's true that you can't actually exclude blacks from a public building (and that includes a public building that's a business, such as a grocery). But you *can* carry around a protest sign that says "We don't want blacks here". It exactly doesn't top the list of ways to achieve prestige and respect and popularity, but you can do it. You can even organize an entire political party around such an idea. (In fact, there is one. It's not very popular, but it exists. There's also a communist party. It's so unpopular most Americans are unaware of its existence, but it *does* exist.)
And you can write letters to the editor (which the newspaper is free to publish if it chooses, along with a response, if it chooses) arguing for your views, arguing that slavery was not wrong, that the antebellum order was the morally correct one, that blacks aren't even really human, and whatever other baloney you want. You're not going to be taken seriously by most folks, but you can say what you like.
You can even start your own newspaper, and publish whatever you like. A white supremacist newspaper, or a pro-Nazi newspaper for that matter, is unlikely to achieve a very wide readership. But you can hand it out to anyone who will take it.
If your society is really free, information is not a threat.
> In Germany, pro-Nazi talk is forbidden, in the US, obscene speech is restricted.
Pornography isn't mainly intended to express political ideas, so restricting it is categorically different from restricting political speech. If anything, the restriction against libel is more dangerous.
I don't know that Germany will necessarily fall victim to another severe regime and start World War III. But I also don't have any great confidence that they won't.
> Personally, the number of people killed by terrorism compared to, > say, traffic accidents is so minuscule that I think the magnitude > of our reaction to the problem is a waste of time and money.
You'd be right, except for the fact that you've missed an important point.
If the purpose of airport security were to prevent a few deaths, then you'd be absolutely right: our time and money would be MUCH better spent putting a few extra patrol cars on the highways just to be seen and thus remind drivers that speed limits exist. (There are other things that could be done too, but just this would quite easily prevent more deaths than the TSA.)
But the thing is, people drive so much, so often, they've become numb to the risk. People aren't afraid to drive. They go ahead and hop in the car and go wherever they're going, without thinking about the risk.
The same is not true of planes. Even before 9/11, a lot of people were fairly nervous about flying; after 9/11, a LOT of people were afraid to fly, and even now a fair percentage of people who don't fly very often are still pretty on edge about it.
We could say, "if people are afraid to fly, that's their problem; rational people aren't afraid to fly, so meh". But the rational people and frequent fliers would be paying more for tickets then (among other things). Flight is more economic when you can fill up the plane, and that means you do need some of those infrequent fliers.
It's been a couple of years now, and I suspect the actual need for airport security has dwindled now to the point where it would be possible to gradually phase out most of the more time-consuming stuff and work our way back toward an rational and efficient process.
But in 2002, the TSA was definitely needed, to get people flying again.
> The part about the security people not believing that comic books have scripts, > or maybe that there are people who get paid to write them, is also a bit ridiculous.
I think you're overstating yourself here. I know Slashdot geeks all think comic books are a major form of literature and everything, but honestly, outside of a few geeky circles, I don't think *most* people are really aware that comic books are read by adults or can be significantly darker and edgier than Superman.
Honestly, I *do* know that comic books can be pretty dark and edgy, but still, if I saw a script involving terrorist plots, my first thought would *not* be, "Oh, must be for a comic book."
OTOH, my first thought would also not be "Oh, must be real terrorist plans."
Come to think of it, my first guess probably would have been that the dude fancied himself a movie script writer. Rolling of eyes might well have ensued.
But people like me usually don't work in airport security. Boring.
> know very well what's at stake, and take the words "never again" very seriously.
However seriously they may think they take said words, Germany still worries me, because they still fundamentally do not believe in freedom and protection of political speech. It is, for example, illegal in Germany to publicly express certain political ideas (e.g., pro-Nazi ideas). That's the very sort of thing that got them into trouble and allowed the Nazi party to do what it did, and they haven't ever repented of it. I mean, they've repented of the outcome, but that's kind of like saying "I'm sorry I got caught". It's NOT the same thing as learning your lesson. No free speech, no free press, from my perspective it looks as if they're determined to let more or less the same thing happen again sooner or later.
Depending on your definition, the naval base may also be construed as not being US soil. The US military only leases it from Cuba (for a small sum, an arrangement that Cuba is powerless to change or cancel). It's an absurd technicality, but there you go.
Regarding the legitimacy of the treaty (which Cuba disputes on the grounds that they had no choice but to sign it, something that could be said of the treaties ending most wars), it is worth noting that the war was against Spain, and Cuba obtained its independence as a result, so it's kind of disingenuous of the Cuban government to insist that we stole the bay from Cuba by military threat. In some ways it would be more accurate to say that we stole all of Cuba from Spain by military action, kept one little bay, and allowed the rest of Cuba its independence. I'm not sure why a subsequent change of government in Cuba should be expected to alter the arrangement. (Although, I'm also not entirely sure why the lease didn't expire after a century. I suppose there's a story behind that, but I don't know it.)
Speaking of Cuba, I keep wondering how much longer Castro can keep going. The man's been in power since Strom Thurmond was a young whippersnapper...
Slashdot is intended to be an American forum. As such, Unicode is neither necessary nor desirable. If it were supported, foreigners and trolls would start posting all kinds of diacritical marks and funny symbols and weird junk like that, which is not wanted.
If Europeans want a Unicode-friendly forum where they can use foreign currency symbols and letters with funny looking little hats overtop and whatnot, they can jolly well start their own site. We don't want it here.
Growing up, I was strongly right-handed, to the extent that my left arm barely got used for anything at all, because it had no coordination, dexterity, or strength. I'd use my left hand to hold something in place while working on it with my right (e.g., to hold the paper still on the desk while writing with the right hand), and that was about it.
I'm more balanced now, perhaps partly because I'm just a lot more physically coordinated in general (which really started to come together when I was in my twenties; yeah, I know that's several years later than average) but, I am convinced, also partly because of a series of increasingly challenging ways in which I exercised it.
When I first started doing puppetry, for instance, I only used my right hand, but then when I started needing to use arm rods, I switched the puppet to my left hand so that I could use it for the diction (the easier task at that point; this was pretty simple diction, open once per syllable type of stuff, and nothing fast) and work the rods with the right; later, when I was fairly experienced with the rods, I had to do a solo with a lot of unusually challenging diction (biting off words, near-closes, stretched consonants, that sort of thing), so I switched back to my right for the diction and learned to work the arm rods with the left hand. Eventually, I reached the point where I could do either thing with either hand.
Typing is another activity that exercised my left-hand coordination considerably.
My right hand is still better, but not by nearly as wide a margin.
Slashdot Mirror
> The problem is the key ingredient -- acetaminophen -- can easily damage
> or destroy a patient's liver if more than 2000 mg are used per day.
Yeah, but 2000 mg in one day? Come on, who needs that much? What are you trying to do, anesthetize yourself at home for DIY surgery?
Okay, so if you take over 2000mg of acetaminophen every day, you can hurt your liver. Did you know, you can also hurt your kidneys by drinking more than twenty quarts of water a day? It's all about dose.
I've only once had pain that half that amount wouldn't solve permanently, and that was an absessed tooth. (What *did* take the pain away that time? Amoxycillin. Took one of those babies, and an hour later the pain started to subside. Within four hours, the pain was totally gone. You better believe I took those things as prescribed until the bottle was empty. Never try to treat a symptom when you can go straight to the cause.)
For any *normal* amount of pain, 250mg of acetaminophen is enough, or maybe 500 tops. And I know the package says wait four hours before taking more, but, honestly, you ordinarily *don't* have to take more, unless some new cause comes along and creates new pain for a new reason. You take the Tylenol, headache goes away, problem solved, and you don't think about it again until weeks later when you get another headache. Well, that's been my experience.
The other thing is, I cannot think of a single drug on the market that has fewer or less problematic side effects than acetaminophen. The stuff takes away pain and, umm, oh, yeah, if you happen to have a fever, it might bring the fever down some. That's it. To my knowledge, taken in sane doses, it doesn't do anything else. That's quite rare in a drug. Certainly I don't know of any other pain-killer that's nearly so well behaved.
I mean, what else do you take for pain?
Asperin is a blood thinner, which is frequently a bad thing.
Ibuprofen has various effects, a couple of which are more pronounced than its pain-killing (though, granted, the anti-inflammatory effect is seldom a very big problem and frequently useful). Oh, and it's hard on the GI system in an assortment of ways, which is always fun.
Then there are opium-derived things, probably the safest of which is darvocet (which, come to think of it, is generally sold with some Tylenol included). Don't even get started on morphine and so forth; in terms of side-effects, compared to those things, Tylenol may as well be a sugar pill.
OBTW, you know why they can't keep Tylenol in the jungle? Because, parrots-eat-'em-all. Don't hate me; you know you needed a chuckle, or at least a groan.
> What does that make Mono? A really really bad idea?
Mono would be a bad idea even if there were no such thing as software patents.
> the real solution is to get the bogus patents invalidated.
We're talking about here about technology that was included in a product released in 1994. They expire in less than five years. Even if it were possible to win the court cases and get the patents thrown out, it would take most of the remaining patent lifespan to do so, if not longer (not to mention a large load of cash to feed the lawyers).
So, the real solution would be to drag the TomTom case out for a couple more years, so that there won't be enough time left afterward for Microsoft to sue anyone else over the same thing before the patent clock runs out. (Oh, wait, too late... they already settled. Darn.)
> why ... would we trust them with C# ?
We don't.
> What am I missing here ?
Perhaps you're missing the fact that there are only about a dozen people in the open-source community who want anything to do with Mono, for exactly this reason. Nothing of any consequence uses it.
A lot of UDF implementations don't support random access in write mode. Unless that changes, it's not really useful for most of the things FAT is used for. Needing to erase the whole filesystem and rewrite it every time you change a file is totally unacceptable for a lot of applications.
> Don't know about you, but I like my USB drives to be small things.
You know, just for the sheer absurdity of it, somebody ought to make a Flash-ROM-based USB 2.0 Mass Storage Device that's too large to carry in a C-130. Perhaps it could feature an indicator light with a higher lux rating than an airport beacon and be powered by an internal nuclear reactor.
Yeah.
The world could use a new cross-platform filesystem format. Criteria:
1. simple enough to be easily implemented in every OS
2. not tied to specific capabilities of a particular OS
3. flexible enough to allow each OS to preserve its precious metadata (ownership information, ACLs, resource forks, symbolic links, or what-have-you) and still allow the data itself to be readable even to systems that don't understand all those wonky attributes
4. intended for use with either read-only or read-write media
5. suitable for both relatively small media (like the 64MB Flash-based USB keychains that come in the bottom of specially marked boxes of breakfast cereal) and also for future large hard drives (like the 256-exabyte models that will be available twenty-five years from now when people are still using this old filesystem because everything is compatible with it)
6. supported by both Microsoft and Apple
7. free of patent encumbrances so that absolutely everyone can implement it, including the makers of cheap yum-cha handheld devices and whatnot
8. entirely described by freely available documentation
Until that comes along, we'll be stuck using FAT for a lot of things.
There are several reasons to want to use FAT:
Multibooters store their files on FAT filesystems because they're supported by, in a word, everything. Want to share your files between FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, BeOS, and OS/2? FAT is your friend. I still keep most of my data on a vfat filesystem for this reason even though I haven't used Windows in aeons. When I switched from FreeBSD to Debian, I didn't have to worry about whether UFS support was included out of the box, or what package to install to get it, or whatever; all my data were on vfat, which is always available, always supported, on every OS.
People who carry data around on portable disks also use FAT, in case they need to access it from a friend's computer, a computer at work, a computer at the library, or cetera, which may not have the same operating system they use at home. I carry around a small Flash-ROM-based USB 2.0 Mass Storage Device on a lanyard, which I have formatted vfat. If I need to copy files onto it from a computer that's running an old version of Debian with no NTFS read/write support, I can. If I need to take those files and copy them onto a computer that's running the Windows Seven RC, I can. If I'm at a relative's house and they want to see the photos that I've got on there, and their computer is a Mac, it's no problem.
FAT is also simple, well documented, and well understood. If you're the sort of nerd who wants to reserve the possibility, in case anything goes wrong (say, an untimely power blink), of looking at the block device for the disk directly and *finding* that lost file, it's not very hard with FAT. (Yes, I actually did this a couple of times back in the DOS days. Successfully.)
Finally, a lot of people have old disks sitting around, containing data they want to keep, on FAT filesystems in many cases.
> Stop wasting trees. There is no reason to print a web page. Ever. Stop it.
Yeah, I used to think that way.
And then I got my current job, and started working with normal, non-IT-industry users.
I know, for IT people, it doesn't make sense. I mean, printing it is unnecessary and just creates extra physical clutter, a piece of paper you're just going to misplace. If you just save the link (possibly someplace online, like your private scratchpad at Perlmonks), you can go there any time, from anywhere. Why would you ever want it on paper?
But it's different for normal users, because (Are you sitting down? Mind your blood pressure, this may be a bit of a shock...) they don't have the internet available everywhere all the time.
Really, no fooling.
They don't have handheld devices that can browse the web. They don't have the internet on every floor (much less every room) of their house. They don't have it in their car. The computer in the house (there's never more than one) is probably shared between several family members, and even if nobody else is using it, it still takes at least five minutes, usually more like ten, to get something off the internet, because they have to wait for the computer (which is old and slow and never had enough RAM in the first place because it was a cheaper model) to boot up, then wait for the internet connection to dial, then try to find the site...
That's assuming they *have* the internet at home; a double-digit percentage of the population doesn't.
Some people only have internet access at a friend's house, or at the public library.
Many only have internet at work. They can't take a web page home, and even if it's needed for a job-related reason, they can't take it with them to meetings, or when they have job duties away from their regular desk -- or maybe they can't take it to the desk, if they have internet at a shared workstation, which is common. They can't take a website and show it to a coworker, or the boss.
So they print the web page (or the email message, or whatever) so that they can have continued access to it when they walk away from the computer. They want to take it with them.
Well, you could install Seamonkey...
Will Flash videos play if I don't have Adobe's thrice-becursed annoying crash-happy proprietary plugin installed?
Oops! Oh, well.
(I still don't understand what's wrong with just linking to an MPEG and letting the user's operating system decide what software to use to play it.)
> Microsoft implemented a version of those standards before they were standards,
> and became the Defacto Quirks Mode way things were done for a long time,
You left out the middle steps, wherein the standards were officially released, and Microsoft categorically refused to update its implementation for roughly a decade.
Yeah.
Personally I think HTML5 is fundamentally a move in the wrong direction. Does anybody really want to go back to non-wellformed markup? What a PAIN, _especially_ if you're composing a page dynamically including some user-supplied components and want to check that said components can't screw up the whole page in deviously egregious ways. With legacy SGML malarke, you pretty much have to build a complete parser into your code. With XHTML, you can check for basic well-formedness in about six lines of Perl. (This doesn't guarantee validity, but if you're serving as text/html that really doesn't matter. It *does* guarantee that the user-supplied content can't close out the containing elements and diddle around in the rest of the page, among other things.) Having realized the benefits of wellformed markup, why would we EVER want to go back? No thanks.
And then there's XHTML2, which appears to want to change as many things as possible, just for the sake of it. Meh.
The only thing I really want in a new version of HTML is the ability to put block-level elements within paragraphs. That's all I want. Add that to XHTML 1.0, call the result XHTML 1.0.1, and I'm good. Seriously.
Video? I still don't understand what's wrong with just linking to an MPEG and letting the operating system decide what software to use to play it. That's worked very well on every major operating system since 1994 and, if the user has decent video-playback software installed, provides a MUCH better UI than any of the in-browser video playing schemes I've ever seen, including this new one.
> Did it appear to anyone else that we may have temporarily slahdotted wiki?
Not likely. Wikipedia handles more traffic in an hour than slashdot gets in a day.
Wikipedia does occasionally get more traffic than it can handle promptly and return results slowly, but a link from slashdot has nothing to do with this.
> [information] just wants to be anthropomorphized.
I think you're projecting your own desires on the information. Because *you* like being anthropomorphized, you assume that information must want this as well, but in fact information doesn't care whether it's anthropomorphized or not, as long as it's not late for dinner.
> if you manage to piss off PETA, you know you're doing something right.
If you can manage to get PETA, Greanpeace, NOW, and Dan Bernstein all mad at you for the same thing, then you've really gone and done something.
> I hear this argument a lot
There's a reason.
> This specific limitation of free speech in Germany (and Austria)
> is a direct consequence of the "never again" principle. These
> laws were made out of respect for the survivors of the Holocaust
Yeah, I know all that. The restrictions on political speech in Germany are a reflection of the concern that people have that they might be dominated by a totalitarian Nazi regime that would do horrible things.
Now, do you know how Hitler managed to come to power?
There are a lot of details, but this point is at the center of it: people were concerned that they might be dominated by a totalitarian Communist regime that would do horrible things, curtail liberties, and so forth.
So they weren't dominated by Commies. They willingly gave power to Nazis instead.
> There are similar restrictions in every country, including the US
> (you're not allowed to put up a sign saying that blacks aren't
> wanted here, for example).
It's true that you can't actually exclude blacks from a public building (and that includes a public building that's a business, such as a grocery). But you *can* carry around a protest sign that says "We don't want blacks here". It exactly doesn't top the list of ways to achieve prestige and respect and popularity, but you can do it. You can even organize an entire political party around such an idea. (In fact, there is one. It's not very popular, but it exists. There's also a communist party. It's so unpopular most Americans are unaware of its existence, but it *does* exist.)
And you can write letters to the editor (which the newspaper is free to publish if it chooses, along with a response, if it chooses) arguing for your views, arguing that slavery was not wrong, that the antebellum order was the morally correct one, that blacks aren't even really human, and whatever other baloney you want. You're not going to be taken seriously by most folks, but you can say what you like.
You can even start your own newspaper, and publish whatever you like. A white supremacist newspaper, or a pro-Nazi newspaper for that matter, is unlikely to achieve a very wide readership. But you can hand it out to anyone who will take it.
If your society is really free, information is not a threat.
> In Germany, pro-Nazi talk is forbidden, in the US, obscene speech is restricted.
Pornography isn't mainly intended to express political ideas, so restricting it is categorically different from restricting political speech. If anything, the restriction against libel is more dangerous.
I don't know that Germany will necessarily fall victim to another severe regime and start World War III. But I also don't have any great confidence that they won't.
> Personally, the number of people killed by terrorism compared to,
> say, traffic accidents is so minuscule that I think the magnitude
> of our reaction to the problem is a waste of time and money.
You'd be right, except for the fact that you've missed an important point.
If the purpose of airport security were to prevent a few deaths, then you'd be absolutely right: our time and money would be MUCH better spent putting a few extra patrol cars on the highways just to be seen and thus remind drivers that speed limits exist. (There are other things that could be done too, but just this would quite easily prevent more deaths than the TSA.)
But the thing is, people drive so much, so often, they've become numb to the risk. People aren't afraid to drive. They go ahead and hop in the car and go wherever they're going, without thinking about the risk.
The same is not true of planes. Even before 9/11, a lot of people were fairly nervous about flying; after 9/11, a LOT of people were afraid to fly, and even now a fair percentage of people who don't fly very often are still pretty on edge about it.
We could say, "if people are afraid to fly, that's their problem; rational people aren't afraid to fly, so meh". But the rational people and frequent fliers would be paying more for tickets then (among other things). Flight is more economic when you can fill up the plane, and that means you do need some of those infrequent fliers.
It's been a couple of years now, and I suspect the actual need for airport security has dwindled now to the point where it would be possible to gradually phase out most of the more time-consuming stuff and work our way back toward an rational and efficient process.
But in 2002, the TSA was definitely needed, to get people flying again.
> The part about the security people not believing that comic books have scripts,
> or maybe that there are people who get paid to write them, is also a bit ridiculous.
I think you're overstating yourself here. I know Slashdot geeks all think comic books are a major form of literature and everything, but honestly, outside of a few geeky circles, I don't think *most* people are really aware that comic books are read by adults or can be significantly darker and edgier than Superman.
Honestly, I *do* know that comic books can be pretty dark and edgy, but still, if I saw a script involving terrorist plots, my first thought would *not* be, "Oh, must be for a comic book."
OTOH, my first thought would also not be "Oh, must be real terrorist plans."
Come to think of it, my first guess probably would have been that the dude fancied himself a movie script writer. Rolling of eyes might well have ensued.
But people like me usually don't work in airport security. Boring.
> know very well what's at stake, and take the words "never again" very seriously.
However seriously they may think they take said words, Germany still worries me, because they still fundamentally do not believe in freedom and protection of political speech. It is, for example, illegal in Germany to publicly express certain political ideas (e.g., pro-Nazi ideas). That's the very sort of thing that got them into trouble and allowed the Nazi party to do what it did, and they haven't ever repented of it. I mean, they've repented of the outcome, but that's kind of like saying "I'm sorry I got caught". It's NOT the same thing as learning your lesson. No free speech, no free press, from my perspective it looks as if they're determined to let more or less the same thing happen again sooner or later.
Depending on your definition, the naval base may also be construed as not being US soil. The US military only leases it from Cuba (for a small sum, an arrangement that Cuba is powerless to change or cancel). It's an absurd technicality, but there you go.
Regarding the legitimacy of the treaty (which Cuba disputes on the grounds that they had no choice but to sign it, something that could be said of the treaties ending most wars), it is worth noting that the war was against Spain, and Cuba obtained its independence as a result, so it's kind of disingenuous of the Cuban government to insist that we stole the bay from Cuba by military threat. In some ways it would be more accurate to say that we stole all of Cuba from Spain by military action, kept one little bay, and allowed the rest of Cuba its independence. I'm not sure why a subsequent change of government in Cuba should be expected to alter the arrangement. (Although, I'm also not entirely sure why the lease didn't expire after a century. I suppose there's a story behind that, but I don't know it.)
Speaking of Cuba, I keep wondering how much longer Castro can keep going. The man's been in power since Strom Thurmond was a young whippersnapper...
I'm afraid prison time doesn't send that much of a message. It's too mundane.
Now, if they'd sentenced him to 150 years of watching Buddy's Carpet commercials sixteen hours a day, that might have got somebody's attention.
> I take it utf-8 is still broken on slashdot?
Slashdot is intended to be an American forum. As such, Unicode is neither necessary nor desirable. If it were supported, foreigners and trolls would start posting all kinds of diacritical marks and funny symbols and weird junk like that, which is not wanted.
If Europeans want a Unicode-friendly forum where they can use foreign currency symbols and letters with funny looking little hats overtop and whatnot, they can jolly well start their own site. We don't want it here.
I think it partly depends on how you use it.
Growing up, I was strongly right-handed, to the extent that my left arm barely got used for anything at all, because it had no coordination, dexterity, or strength. I'd use my left hand to hold something in place while working on it with my right (e.g., to hold the paper still on the desk while writing with the right hand), and that was about it.
I'm more balanced now, perhaps partly because I'm just a lot more physically coordinated in general (which really started to come together when I was in my twenties; yeah, I know that's several years later than average) but, I am convinced, also partly because of a series of increasingly challenging ways in which I exercised it.
When I first started doing puppetry, for instance, I only used my right hand, but then when I started needing to use arm rods, I switched the puppet to my left hand so that I could use it for the diction (the easier task at that point; this was pretty simple diction, open once per syllable type of stuff, and nothing fast) and work the rods with the right; later, when I was fairly experienced with the rods, I had to do a solo with a lot of unusually challenging diction (biting off words, near-closes, stretched consonants, that sort of thing), so I switched back to my right for the diction and learned to work the arm rods with the left hand. Eventually, I reached the point where I could do either thing with either hand.
Typing is another activity that exercised my left-hand coordination considerably.
My right hand is still better, but not by nearly as wide a margin.
> The only thing the office Volume Licenses would have gotten
> me over full retail was that there would be one key to manage...
In some situations, there's a second thing: volume licensors with Software Assurance can deploy whichever version they want any time they want.
I'm not saying it's a great deal, and I wouldn't pay for it myself. But in the interest of accuracy, let's not make it out to be any worse than it is.