I gather that this interface is meant to be much easier to use for novices. (I like the "task based" idea for that goal) That said, the problem with Word is that it does WAY to much. Most of the features people don't use are, in fact, useless. (word art...) I think what Word does wrong is that it lets its features get in the way of doing the real work of word processing. I would prefer a word processor that focuses on the job at hand. No layout or drawing tools other than tables. Basic, basic formating options and a simple, open XML format. Then another tool (publisher I suppose) can open this document and you can style and layout to your heart's content. Or maybe that is a bad idea. Just a thought anyway.
This is not a valid argument. Just because Clinton did something doesn't make it right. Your goal with that kind of arguement is to imply that outrage over the NSA spying on us is simply partisan sniping. It isn't. People are outraged because this is outrageous. If the constitution makes it to hard to enforce the law and protect the country tough shit. That's one of the downsides to living in a free society. Just like having to deal with neo-nazis marching down main street. We can make exceptions to freedom.
Oh god I hate CMSes...they really seem to hate web standards. I just finished a big site for a large non-profit. We went with dot net nuke and it was a NIGHTMARE to get it to serve up html without tables. It still sticks a few (non-semantic) tables in because they are hard coded into controls.
I am tired of this race to the bottom. IT is not suffering like manufacturing, but its all the relentless drive to cut costs a little more to drive up quarterly numbers. Long term planning? Too expensive. R&D? Too expensive. Local network admins? Too expensive.
Four million dollar bonus for Hector Ruiz...? hmmm...
This is all going to bite them in the ass in the end because the jobs being cut are salaries that go into the us consumer economy, which pays for AMD servers in the end.
You misunderstand. People opposed to this are not necessarily blind partisans. I am a democrat, but if Pelosi knew the full details of this program AND signed off on it, she should leave office. This program is unacceptable.
Very popular sites are going to show up in search results no matter how bad their html is. The thing about standards is that crossing every t and making sure every image has an alt tag might not be worth it. Because validation is not the goal. Semantic html is the goal. It doesn't really take any more effort to make a layout with no tables and relatively semantic markup. Which is better than just letting frontpage make all the decisions.
That information is something I send to the IRS. I know what it says, and it doesn't include my private phone calls. Just my income. And any spending I choose to deduct. A little harder to use that info for evil. Also, in order for tax collection to work, they must have that info. But, to protect our privacy there are many things they cannot do with that data. Just like the NSA isn't allowed to do what they are doing. Because when we give the government powers we create laws to check those powers. This administration has claimed that they don't have to obey those laws. And that is the problem. The government asserts the right to break any law they see fit. This is a problem, don't you think?
Ok, so if it is a great tool congress can pass a law making it legal. Its not. The real complaint is that the government thinks they don't have to obey the laws. If they want to wiretap, they can get a warrent. If they want phone records they can get a court order. They can't just take them because they want them.
Hey, guess what? I fucking know what happened on 9/11, and I agree with the parent. You know that he was making a rhetorical point, not advocating doing nothing in response to terrorism. The face is that terrorism is not serious enough of a threat to make it worth giving up all the things that we cherish about this country.
If this program guaranteed that no terrorist attack would ever happen it STILL wouldn't be ok with me. If a man shoots another in front of twenty witnesses and leaves a note promising to kill more the police need a warrant to search his home. That’s because we can’t necessarily trust the police to never do anything wrong. When you entrust people with power their must be checks to prevent is abuse. Even though those checks may be inconvenient and may slow down law enforcement.
Sorry, but that is the way free countries work. If you disagree write your congressperson to change the law. But don't tell me that the government should be able to do whatever they want because of 9/11. That is bullshit, and you should know that.
Yeah, those people are stupid. I think there is a kind of liberal that lives in micro-utopias like Boulder or Eugene where every problem can be solved by organic gardening or starting a co-op. In these communities major social problems tend to exist elsewhere, so people living there think that those of us living in big cities are fools and if we all just got back to the land the problem would be solved. A pragmatic environmentalist looks at the situation in regards to how to we make sure six billion people can be healthy and fed?
I just adjusted my tin foil hat and realized that the developers are probably funding these "environmentalist" groups. I suspect this is a few nut-job NIMBYalists that are being supported by astro-turf campaigns from developers and their PR firms.
Or maybe people really are that foolish as to oppose renewable energy on environmental grounds. They should require these people to stop using cars and electric lighting.
These people are not environmentalists. They are NImBYalists who really only care about the environment in an aesthetic kind of way. I consider myself a strong environmentalist, and I say fuck these people. Its like people that protest powerlines and broadcast towers. They are just complainers with no interest in the common good. And that is an attitude that can cross party lines.
Ok, just so you know, the DMCA can be a bad thing without DRM being an equally bad thing. Companies ought to be able to sell music in any format they want. As long as the law doesn't enshrine DRM I see nothing wrong with it, other than its annoying. But it certainly doesn't warrant the kind of passion you seem to have for this isse.
Why have I made a bad choice? I am not trying to create some sort of enduring music collection. I just want songs, its super easy to find them on itunes, the price is right and i have an ipod. If I cared that much about having a collection of music I could listen to ten years from now I can still buy cds. I think people know what they are getting into with itunes, really. I think it is an instant gratification thing, not an objective "what is the best format for me" thing. The songs are lossy encoded already.
True now for the most part in the US. But what about places like china? What if a dictatorship seized control of the us and could ferret out dissidents with SQL queries? That's the thing, the "if you have nothing to hide you should worry about people searching you without warrants" arguement is not valid. It misses the point, the reason for warrants at all is that governments don't always have their citizens' best interests at heart.
No kidding, what a collosal waste of money. What is the point? This is my number one complaint about DHS. What the hell are they doing with our money? They sure were ready for a disaster (katrina).
I think you are attacking the straw-slashdotter. If the science is real and valid I don't care who came up with it. It looks like the very few comments bashing LDS are being modded into oblivion. And dude, don't have a persecution complex. Just because one jackass says something totally stupid doesn't mean the whole of slashdot is out to bash your faith. Personally, I think all the faiths are basically nonsense. But you can believe whatever you want, its none of my business. All a mormon or an atheist or a satan worshipper needs to do to have their science respect is produce good results that can be reproduced. Beyond that its totally irrelevant. I suspect most actual scientists would agree with me.
Totally. I second this statement. I had a job makine $7k more, and it sucked. It sounded good on paper, but it was boring and shitty. And it was going nowhere. And I had to commute 45 minutes. So I took this other job. It is interesting, pretty fun and its a 10 minute bike ride from my house. I sold my car (wrx...sniff sniff) and now I have *more* disposable income, more free time and a better quality of life. Your mileage may vary (WRX got about 24-26)
OF COURSE Saddam wanted WMDs. Every tin-pot dictator in the world does. Does that make them an immediate threat justifying war? That is the question that was never debated before the war. I thought it didn't. War sucks. It costs money and lives. It kills people. We need to be damn sure we exhaust every option before invading other countries. We did not. Saddam Hussein was contained. Iraq was a mess, but it wasn't our mess. No we are stuck with a total disaster that is sucking up lives and money with no end in site. And what, exactly, did this achieve for US interests? Are we safer now? Why?
Great post. Exactly the kind of real, intelligent debate we need. (some repliers seem to have engaged you on some points, which is great too) Sadly, the politicians can't seem to have honest debates. There are real issues here, that should have been debated and discussed BEFORE the war, but the Republicans were too busy falling over themselves to look tough on terror, the Dems where trying to pander to their base, but then not look weak, so they all managed to vote for the war (or rather, vote to let the president go to war with out approval) after expressing reserverations. The administration refused to make an honest case for war. If there where real, legitmate reasons they should have been debated. Now we are stuck in lose-lose clusterfuck.
The "admit we screwed up, ask where we go from here" solutions seems the most rational, but it has no out for the people who got us here, who will never admit an error. So that solution is out. We are down to "declare victory and leave" or "stay forever". Neither solution is good. What ever happened to the ideal of represenatatives who governed, instead of worrying about looking weak or strong rather than the consequences of action or inaction...
Fact: people choose to have same-sex relationships that are very similar to heterosexual marriages.
Fact: these people do not have the same protection under the law that heterosexual couples have.
You think because "people think it is icky" those people don't deserve legal protection. If they have conflicts over custody or property you think that they should be treated differently because they aren't straight. This has nothing to do with how people feel about marriage. The law doesn't care about your feelings. Marriage came BEFORE the law. The law exists to provide a framework to handle the inevitable conflicts that come from such relationships. Law, as in the Lockian ideal of law that exists in the US, is not supposed to be religion. It doesn't tell you how to feel about marriage. It just acknowledges that people want to get married, that people who are married treat their belongings differently and that the conflicts between married and divorced people are different and need a framework to handle them.
As other posters have mentioned this includes joint property, etc. The law isn't there to make hetero married couples "feel good" about their situation. And we are talking about the law here, not religion. You may think the law is more than a social contract. But the law disagrees. The law thinks marriage is a legal contract, nothing more. It never felt differently either. You seem to think that somehow the law defines how people think of marriage, and somehow you think that when we talk about the laws of marriage we should act as if they are special and sacred because some people think they are. Some people think a lot of things are special and sacred, but the law doesn't have anything to do with it.
Oh dude that is a sad story...way to ruin my lunch break, kidding, of course. I don't know what to say, but it makes me think of my own relationship and how special I suppose it is. Easy to take for granted that out loved ones are there. I know he will always be special for you, but I hope that you meet someone new someday and have another shot at love like that.
This hypothetical speciation story assumes something that may not be true...that the change in behavior happened after the mutation. Perhaps the initial mutation was a change in behavior, creating a new species. As that species stopped interbreeding with the main line a 22 chromosome mutation spread through the population. Of course, either way it is speculation about a hypothetical situation. But we have to assume that in most situation if a mutation appears that makes it very difficult or impossible for an animal to breed it is unlikely to succeed.
Slashdot Mirror
I gather that this interface is meant to be much easier to use for novices. (I like the "task based" idea for that goal) That said, the problem with Word is that it does WAY to much. Most of the features people don't use are, in fact, useless. (word art...) I think what Word does wrong is that it lets its features get in the way of doing the real work of word processing. I would prefer a word processor that focuses on the job at hand. No layout or drawing tools other than tables. Basic, basic formating options and a simple, open XML format. Then another tool (publisher I suppose) can open this document and you can style and layout to your heart's content. Or maybe that is a bad idea. Just a thought anyway.
This is not a valid argument. Just because Clinton did something doesn't make it right. Your goal with that kind of arguement is to imply that outrage over the NSA spying on us is simply partisan sniping. It isn't. People are outraged because this is outrageous. If the constitution makes it to hard to enforce the law and protect the country tough shit. That's one of the downsides to living in a free society. Just like having to deal with neo-nazis marching down main street. We can make exceptions to freedom.
So if Clinton did it (which he didn't, but still) that makes it ok? Now that is a bad argument. The "appeal to Clinton" fallacy.
Oh god I hate CMSes...they really seem to hate web standards. I just finished a big site for a large non-profit. We went with dot net nuke and it was a NIGHTMARE to get it to serve up html without tables. It still sticks a few (non-semantic) tables in because they are hard coded into controls.
I am tired of this race to the bottom. IT is not suffering like manufacturing, but its all the relentless drive to cut costs a little more to drive up quarterly numbers. Long term planning? Too expensive. R&D? Too expensive. Local network admins? Too expensive.
Four million dollar bonus for Hector Ruiz...? hmmm...
This is all going to bite them in the ass in the end because the jobs being cut are salaries that go into the us consumer economy, which pays for AMD servers in the end.
You misunderstand. People opposed to this are not necessarily blind partisans. I am a democrat, but if Pelosi knew the full details of this program AND signed off on it, she should leave office. This program is unacceptable.
Very popular sites are going to show up in search results no matter how bad their html is. The thing about standards is that crossing every t and making sure every image has an alt tag might not be worth it. Because validation is not the goal. Semantic html is the goal. It doesn't really take any more effort to make a layout with no tables and relatively semantic markup. Which is better than just letting frontpage make all the decisions.
That information is something I send to the IRS. I know what it says, and it doesn't include my private phone calls. Just my income. And any spending I choose to deduct. A little harder to use that info for evil. Also, in order for tax collection to work, they must have that info. But, to protect our privacy there are many things they cannot do with that data. Just like the NSA isn't allowed to do what they are doing. Because when we give the government powers we create laws to check those powers. This administration has claimed that they don't have to obey those laws. And that is the problem. The government asserts the right to break any law they see fit. This is a problem, don't you think?
Ok, so if it is a great tool congress can pass a law making it legal. Its not. The real complaint is that the government thinks they don't have to obey the laws. If they want to wiretap, they can get a warrent. If they want phone records they can get a court order. They can't just take them because they want them.
Hey, guess what? I fucking know what happened on 9/11, and I agree with the parent. You know that he was making a rhetorical point, not advocating doing nothing in response to terrorism. The face is that terrorism is not serious enough of a threat to make it worth giving up all the things that we cherish about this country.
If this program guaranteed that no terrorist attack would ever happen it STILL wouldn't be ok with me. If a man shoots another in front of twenty witnesses and leaves a note promising to kill more the police need a warrant to search his home. That’s because we can’t necessarily trust the police to never do anything wrong. When you entrust people with power their must be checks to prevent is abuse. Even though those checks may be inconvenient and may slow down law enforcement.
Sorry, but that is the way free countries work. If you disagree write your congressperson to change the law. But don't tell me that the government should be able to do whatever they want because of 9/11. That is bullshit, and you should know that.
Yeah, those people are stupid. I think there is a kind of liberal that lives in micro-utopias like Boulder or Eugene where every problem can be solved by organic gardening or starting a co-op. In these communities major social problems tend to exist elsewhere, so people living there think that those of us living in big cities are fools and if we all just got back to the land the problem would be solved. A pragmatic environmentalist looks at the situation in regards to how to we make sure six billion people can be healthy and fed?
I just adjusted my tin foil hat and realized that the developers are probably funding these "environmentalist" groups. I suspect this is a few nut-job NIMBYalists that are being supported by astro-turf campaigns from developers and their PR firms. Or maybe people really are that foolish as to oppose renewable energy on environmental grounds. They should require these people to stop using cars and electric lighting.
These people are not environmentalists. They are NImBYalists who really only care about the environment in an aesthetic kind of way. I consider myself a strong environmentalist, and I say fuck these people. Its like people that protest powerlines and broadcast towers. They are just complainers with no interest in the common good. And that is an attitude that can cross party lines.
Ok, just so you know, the DMCA can be a bad thing without DRM being an equally bad thing. Companies ought to be able to sell music in any format they want. As long as the law doesn't enshrine DRM I see nothing wrong with it, other than its annoying. But it certainly doesn't warrant the kind of passion you seem to have for this isse.
Why have I made a bad choice? I am not trying to create some sort of enduring music collection. I just want songs, its super easy to find them on itunes, the price is right and i have an ipod. If I cared that much about having a collection of music I could listen to ten years from now I can still buy cds. I think people know what they are getting into with itunes, really. I think it is an instant gratification thing, not an objective "what is the best format for me" thing. The songs are lossy encoded already.
True now for the most part in the US. But what about places like china? What if a dictatorship seized control of the us and could ferret out dissidents with SQL queries? That's the thing, the "if you have nothing to hide you should worry about people searching you without warrants" arguement is not valid. It misses the point, the reason for warrants at all is that governments don't always have their citizens' best interests at heart.
No kidding, what a collosal waste of money. What is the point? This is my number one complaint about DHS. What the hell are they doing with our money? They sure were ready for a disaster (katrina).
I think you are attacking the straw-slashdotter. If the science is real and valid I don't care who came up with it. It looks like the very few comments bashing LDS are being modded into oblivion. And dude, don't have a persecution complex. Just because one jackass says something totally stupid doesn't mean the whole of slashdot is out to bash your faith. Personally, I think all the faiths are basically nonsense. But you can believe whatever you want, its none of my business. All a mormon or an atheist or a satan worshipper needs to do to have their science respect is produce good results that can be reproduced. Beyond that its totally irrelevant. I suspect most actual scientists would agree with me.
Totally. I second this statement. I had a job makine $7k more, and it sucked. It sounded good on paper, but it was boring and shitty. And it was going nowhere. And I had to commute 45 minutes. So I took this other job. It is interesting, pretty fun and its a 10 minute bike ride from my house. I sold my car (wrx...sniff sniff) and now I have *more* disposable income, more free time and a better quality of life. Your mileage may vary (WRX got about 24-26)
OF COURSE Saddam wanted WMDs. Every tin-pot dictator in the world does. Does that make them an immediate threat justifying war? That is the question that was never debated before the war. I thought it didn't. War sucks. It costs money and lives. It kills people. We need to be damn sure we exhaust every option before invading other countries. We did not. Saddam Hussein was contained. Iraq was a mess, but it wasn't our mess. No we are stuck with a total disaster that is sucking up lives and money with no end in site. And what, exactly, did this achieve for US interests? Are we safer now? Why?
Great post. Exactly the kind of real, intelligent debate we need. (some repliers seem to have engaged you on some points, which is great too) Sadly, the politicians can't seem to have honest debates. There are real issues here, that should have been debated and discussed BEFORE the war, but the Republicans were too busy falling over themselves to look tough on terror, the Dems where trying to pander to their base, but then not look weak, so they all managed to vote for the war (or rather, vote to let the president go to war with out approval) after expressing reserverations. The administration refused to make an honest case for war. If there where real, legitmate reasons they should have been debated. Now we are stuck in lose-lose clusterfuck.
The "admit we screwed up, ask where we go from here" solutions seems the most rational, but it has no out for the people who got us here, who will never admit an error. So that solution is out. We are down to "declare victory and leave" or "stay forever". Neither solution is good. What ever happened to the ideal of represenatatives who governed, instead of worrying about looking weak or strong rather than the consequences of action or inaction...
They think gay people are icky. That is the whole story. The rest is just fluff.
Fact: people choose to have same-sex relationships that are very similar to heterosexual marriages.
Fact: these people do not have the same protection under the law that heterosexual couples have.
You think because "people think it is icky" those people don't deserve legal protection. If they have conflicts over custody or property you think that they should be treated differently because they aren't straight. This has nothing to do with how people feel about marriage. The law doesn't care about your feelings. Marriage came BEFORE the law. The law exists to provide a framework to handle the inevitable conflicts that come from such relationships. Law, as in the Lockian ideal of law that exists in the US, is not supposed to be religion. It doesn't tell you how to feel about marriage. It just acknowledges that people want to get married, that people who are married treat their belongings differently and that the conflicts between married and divorced people are different and need a framework to handle them.
As other posters have mentioned this includes joint property, etc. The law isn't there to make hetero married couples "feel good" about their situation. And we are talking about the law here, not religion. You may think the law is more than a social contract. But the law disagrees. The law thinks marriage is a legal contract, nothing more. It never felt differently either. You seem to think that somehow the law defines how people think of marriage, and somehow you think that when we talk about the laws of marriage we should act as if they are special and sacred because some people think they are. Some people think a lot of things are special and sacred, but the law doesn't have anything to do with it.
Oh dude that is a sad story...way to ruin my lunch break, kidding, of course. I don't know what to say, but it makes me think of my own relationship and how special I suppose it is. Easy to take for granted that out loved ones are there. I know he will always be special for you, but I hope that you meet someone new someday and have another shot at love like that.
This hypothetical speciation story assumes something that may not be true...that the change in behavior happened after the mutation. Perhaps the initial mutation was a change in behavior, creating a new species. As that species stopped interbreeding with the main line a 22 chromosome mutation spread through the population. Of course, either way it is speculation about a hypothetical situation. But we have to assume that in most situation if a mutation appears that makes it very difficult or impossible for an animal to breed it is unlikely to succeed.