Unless there's some feature of the site that cannot possibly be made to work in a past browser, it's silly to not support anything.
Now, admittedly, whne I do I site for someone, I don't test it with every old crippled browser that's ever been, but a well designed site should work (at least more or less) in any browser... unless you're using all that newfangled technology like Java... and then you've got to ask yourself, am I using this technology because it adds something vital to the site, or is it just the trendy thing to do?
Of course this is all antecdotal, but when I first got out of college, I was told by one of my interviewers (a staffing company that was hiring VMS sysops for a huge multinational) that they were being told specificially to not hire any white males for any of the entry-level positions, because the company was receiving a lot of bad publicity for not being "diverse enough".
That's the neat part about the nation's obsession with skin color, we've managed to find a way to discriminate against everybody.
Warrantless wiretapping, anti-anonymity laws, calls for heavier regulation of pre-pay cell phone purchases, video cameras on street corners, "free speech zones" where they ask you to show ID.
RFID is going in the same direction as the rest of the world, which is away from individual privacy vis-a-vis the state and vis-a-vis the large, "trustworthy" corporation
It's also a lot easier to keep quiet when you order a robot to torture somebody or massacre a group of protesters... there are all sorts of benefits that the would-be supervillain wouldn't want to pass up.
Exactly, there are already companies exploring the notion of asteroid mining: there's no good reason to imagine that out resource limits in the far-flung future (lets face facts, Eritrea isn't going to become a modern, western copper needing society overnight) are solely the terrestrial supply.
We've got 9 planets people... and a lot of moons... and an asteroid belt... and the stray comet... we're not going to run out of elemental copper.
But of course this begs the question: rent of what?
In this town, you can rent a decent house in a decent neighborhood for $550 or so a month... now almost nobody outside of a union (besides doctors and lawyers) is making four times this in this city... but then when we glance at the union workers, we see them making, not including benefits, almost twice this proscribed amount... perhaps not surprisingly this employer (Delphi) has been driven into bankrupcy by this though.
But back to my point... you can rent a house in the ghetto for $300 a month... a decent house for $550... and I'm sure if you look in the ritsy neighborhoods (to the extent we have any) it just keeps going up and up.
So even if you get them to agree to 4 times prevalent rent... you're liable to see them bickering then over what's the reasonable house to base it on... I'm sure the union pictures it's workers as entitled to a much nicer homes than the employer does.
I agree with your point about changing the attitudes of people.. but I still think that government is at best a reflection of the negative qualities of people and often seems to be a motivator of such behavior... governments tend to err on the side of tyranny, to the extent that they've been given the power to do so. If we can convince the individual that he's got some moral responsibility to his fellow man (a fact which I think deep down he already knows, and goes to great effort to convince himself otherwise) then the battle is already won, and forcing a government on top of this situation is just an unnecessary complication.
The only thing I would add is that for all the talk of the government being the protector of the poor, it seems to me that historical examples show 3 kinds of states (at the risk of oversimplifying): the state that's too weak to do much of anything, the state that's powerful and in bed with big business, and the state that's really really powerful and tries to become a religion unto itself. What I don't see are any examples of a state doing a lot of meaningful things for the poor, at least nothing that wasn't previously being done by private charities.
Indeed, I wonder if the democratic system is inherently biased towards the person who gives lipservice to helping the poor, but doesn't do anything to really help them. It's similar to those politicians that run on a platform of improving state education... and 30 years later the system is little changed (except for more bureaucratic and wasteful) and they're still running on that same platform. Once you solve a problem, you can't run on it anymore... and that's bad news for the career politician.
Also, in your union example, I think it's perfectly natural for the owner to want to pay $2... indeed to want to pay $0.01 an hour... and for the employee to want to make $30... or $100 if he could swing it. Relocating a company to a third world nation has costs of its own, and even past the initial setup costs, the employees come with their own sets of problems. If the two sides are reasonable about it (and the union realizes that the owner can't make a profit at $30 an hour) they'll come to some middle ground which is somewhat acceptable to both.
The problem is that often the state gives the union some sort of added "advantage" which discourages them from being reasonable (like making it illegal for the owner to fire them all and hire different workers if the union's demands are too great)... and when the union pushes them a little too far... the owner is left with the choice of either closing altogether, or relocating to a different country to escape those laws. Of course the union sees this as unfair, and they're trying their darnedest to make it illegal for the owner to relocate as well. That'll leave him with one choice... and it's not any prettier for the workers, just worse for him.
I think that might be oversimplifying: it's no accident that so many of the major players in, for instance, American politics right now are former (and likely future) corporate heads. If the corporations really had so much more power than the government, why would a corporate head run for public office?
Moreover, if large defense corporations had so much more power than government officials, why would they bother bribing Congressmen with such regularity? I mean, are they just that generous? Should someone who's just a Congressman really wind up with billions of dollars in lergesse if he didn't have some power that the corporations giving it to him lack?
I see a major problem developing here, but rather than economics marginalizing politics I see it more as economics merging with politics into some form of ever more state regulated pseudo-market where the only reliable way to succeed anymore is with government contracts and government-granted advantages over your struggling small business competitors.
I might be coloring this picture too much with the fact that I live in the state with the highest unemployment (and in a city so short of work that the population's been shrinking basically my whole life), watching as even large local businesses are driving out to make room for competition who treat their employees like shit, offer vastly inferior products and services for trivially smaller prices and get all sorts of state favors that the local companies never dreamed of.
In all of this I see the state as the main corrupting influence: we watched as they granted all sorts of special favors to organized labor, allowing them to drive the cost of labor up to the point that domestic companies couldn't compete with foreign ones. Then when they were all-but-broken, we see the state in bed with the large multi-national corporations, and watch as the state seizes land for them so they don't have to pay a market price, we watch as they drive the cost of labor down so low that the average full-time employee is barely surviving.
And lets not forget that corporations are a government contrivance in the first place. "Unrestrained greed and personal ambition" can be dangerous things indeed, but when coupled with the corporation's total lack of individual accountability it becomes downright lethal. A private company in which the owner or owners are ultimately culpable for their actions would never dream of doing a lot of the thngs that these corporations do as a matter of course.
When was the last time you could challenge the practices of your executive management and still retain your employment?
That's awful if that happens... it's not been my experience, but I tend to seek out employers I don't have major ideological clashes with in the first place.
Do you remember the old 80's sitcom Bosom Buddies? I'm not saying this is always the case, but sometimes I get the impression that these situations where an employee clashes with management are a lot like if the characters from this show complained about being evicted when their secret was uncovered. I'm sure that's not always the case... but I don't have any personal examples to go by.
But the same thing is happening with CNN and other mainstream media. For example, it is very "uncool" to report on the number of deaths in Iraq. That's the for-profit effect of corporatism.
But again, how much practical harm is it really doing? CNN mentions the number of deaths in Iraq quite often despite this prejudice against doing so (and a good chunk of that prejudice comes not from inside the corporation, but rather from the government itself, who imply that the information is 'aiding the enemy'). But even if all the TV news channels colluded in some smoke-filled room and agreed not to report it... the information is out there. You could find it in virtually any newspaper.
And I know what you may be thinking here: but newspapers are corporations too... so lets say this is more of a smoke-filled auditorium, and all the TV stations and all the Newspapers in the entire country somehow got together and agreed not to report casualty numbers for Iraq.
It's an inconvenience, to be sure... but again, a minor one. A person who really wants this information can seek it out any number of places, not the least of which is here. And I think I can personally guarentee, without fear of contradiction from my employer, that we're not going to be involved in any behind-the-scenes deal to hide casualty numbers.
But that's just the thing, the corporate censorship, while much broader in practice, is in many cases so impotent as to be more or less merely theoretical. Microsoft's power to censor me is virtually non-existant... even those who run afoul of them and get, for instance, their blog removed have numerous recourses, from finding another host to hosting it themselves... Microsoft's censorship is at best for this person a mild inconvenience, and certainly nothing compared to the very realistic possibility of winding up in jail for sedition or worse, shot outright for treason.
We should be realistic though: we can't even reliably guarentee that political dissidents won't be put in gulags at this point (or tortured, for what it's worth)...
To me worrying about corporate censorship right now is like putting on insect repellent while you're being chased by a grizzly.
Corporate governance is as democratic as state governance... that's a fundamental flaw with both. Corporations have the same flawed system of elections with the same sets of false choices... and those doing the voting are constantly trying to decide the lesser of two unacceptable evils.
One thing I will say about corporate censorship, it rarely lands you in a gulag the way state censorship so often does.
My favorite IE Mac experience came earlier this year, when a perfectly HTML standard clickable button worked on every browser on the planet made in the last decade except for the IE that comes with Mac OS9.
The only way I ever managed to get it working for IE without breaking it in everything else (or making it do something stupid) was to make it a non-functioning but clickable button and then have a Javascript onclick do all the work. Of course now the page doesn't work properly if you don't have Javascript enabled.
Do you think if we stopped talking about racism it would disappear? Seriously?
Actually that's one of the benefits of these laws from the perspective of someone who doesn't have to live under them. They provide a nice counter-example to prove that criminalizing an unpopular opinion does not make that opinion vanish.
When did dual boot systems become the decisive test? You can buy any number of desktop systems that don't come with Windows... how does the lack of Windows as a dual-boot option on these computers strengthen the case for monopoly?
The closest I've owned to a Microsoft product since 1999 was a Sega Dreamcast (some of the games came with some Windows CE software on them)... I've bought four computers in the meantime... not a one had Windows on it.
But for the record when Windows 95 first came out, Best Buy was still selling dual-boot DEC computers that came with both Windows NT and VMS.
They weren't selling IE to begin with (well... they were a long long time ago)...
Why Microsoft should spend $400 Million for something that's going to support their platform either way and is going to be given away is beyond me.
Microsoft stopped bothering with IE for Mac when OSX stopped making it the default, bundled browser. I can't say as I blame them, Safari came out of the gate at least it's equal and has vaulted past it in terms of speed and reliability. It's hard enough to get people to switch to a generally superior browser like Firefox... imagine trying to convince people to go out of their way to install an inferior one.
Indeed, I recall in the late 90's a bunch of activists buying up single shares of Philip Morris and trying to get them to stop making cigarettes. They used to make quite a fuss at those meetings... not that the voting was ever close.
The only shareholder activism I was ever personally involved in was an attempt to get Sun Microsystems to promise not to use slave labor... which got defeated interestingly enough.
Well, you all do have that rampaging gang of drunken Santas, but I guess it's still a step up...
Is becoming an immigrant to New Zealand very difficult?
Slashdot Mirror
Unless there's some feature of the site that cannot possibly be made to work in a past browser, it's silly to not support anything.
Now, admittedly, whne I do I site for someone, I don't test it with every old crippled browser that's ever been, but a well designed site should work (at least more or less) in any browser... unless you're using all that newfangled technology like Java... and then you've got to ask yourself, am I using this technology because it adds something vital to the site, or is it just the trendy thing to do?
Of course this is all antecdotal, but when I first got out of college, I was told by one of my interviewers (a staffing company that was hiring VMS sysops for a huge multinational) that they were being told specificially to not hire any white males for any of the entry-level positions, because the company was receiving a lot of bad publicity for not being "diverse enough".
That's the neat part about the nation's obsession with skin color, we've managed to find a way to discriminate against everybody.
Yeah, there's hundreds of guys with blue uniforms and pistols watching my every move and I'm worried about the terrorists.
Warrantless wiretapping, anti-anonymity laws, calls for heavier regulation of pre-pay cell phone purchases, video cameras on street corners, "free speech zones" where they ask you to show ID.
RFID is going in the same direction as the rest of the world, which is away from individual privacy vis-a-vis the state and vis-a-vis the large, "trustworthy" corporation
It's also a lot easier to keep quiet when you order a robot to torture somebody or massacre a group of protesters... there are all sorts of benefits that the would-be supervillain wouldn't want to pass up.
Exactly, there are already companies exploring the notion of asteroid mining: there's no good reason to imagine that out resource limits in the far-flung future (lets face facts, Eritrea isn't going to become a modern, western copper needing society overnight) are solely the terrestrial supply.
We've got 9 planets people... and a lot of moons... and an asteroid belt... and the stray comet... we're not going to run out of elemental copper.
I'm not sure how a metal detector would react to this, but what if instead of aluminum foil I used something like Velostat to line a wallet like this?
I'd say RTFA, but I don't think it'd help (it's light on theory).
Probably start here, then head here for some background on what is being done here.
But of course this begs the question: rent of what?
In this town, you can rent a decent house in a decent neighborhood for $550 or so a month... now almost nobody outside of a union (besides doctors and lawyers) is making four times this in this city... but then when we glance at the union workers, we see them making, not including benefits, almost twice this proscribed amount... perhaps not surprisingly this employer (Delphi) has been driven into bankrupcy by this though.
But back to my point... you can rent a house in the ghetto for $300 a month... a decent house for $550... and I'm sure if you look in the ritsy neighborhoods (to the extent we have any) it just keeps going up and up.
So even if you get them to agree to 4 times prevalent rent... you're liable to see them bickering then over what's the reasonable house to base it on... I'm sure the union pictures it's workers as entitled to a much nicer homes than the employer does.
I agree with your point about changing the attitudes of people.. but I still think that government is at best a reflection of the negative qualities of people and often seems to be a motivator of such behavior... governments tend to err on the side of tyranny, to the extent that they've been given the power to do so. If we can convince the individual that he's got some moral responsibility to his fellow man (a fact which I think deep down he already knows, and goes to great effort to convince himself otherwise) then the battle is already won, and forcing a government on top of this situation is just an unnecessary complication.
The only thing I would add is that for all the talk of the government being the protector of the poor, it seems to me that historical examples show 3 kinds of states (at the risk of oversimplifying): the state that's too weak to do much of anything, the state that's powerful and in bed with big business, and the state that's really really powerful and tries to become a religion unto itself. What I don't see are any examples of a state doing a lot of meaningful things for the poor, at least nothing that wasn't previously being done by private charities.
Indeed, I wonder if the democratic system is inherently biased towards the person who gives lipservice to helping the poor, but doesn't do anything to really help them. It's similar to those politicians that run on a platform of improving state education... and 30 years later the system is little changed (except for more bureaucratic and wasteful) and they're still running on that same platform. Once you solve a problem, you can't run on it anymore... and that's bad news for the career politician.
Also, in your union example, I think it's perfectly natural for the owner to want to pay $2... indeed to want to pay $0.01 an hour... and for the employee to want to make $30... or $100 if he could swing it. Relocating a company to a third world nation has costs of its own, and even past the initial setup costs, the employees come with their own sets of problems. If the two sides are reasonable about it (and the union realizes that the owner can't make a profit at $30 an hour) they'll come to some middle ground which is somewhat acceptable to both.
The problem is that often the state gives the union some sort of added "advantage" which discourages them from being reasonable (like making it illegal for the owner to fire them all and hire different workers if the union's demands are too great)... and when the union pushes them a little too far... the owner is left with the choice of either closing altogether, or relocating to a different country to escape those laws. Of course the union sees this as unfair, and they're trying their darnedest to make it illegal for the owner to relocate as well. That'll leave him with one choice... and it's not any prettier for the workers, just worse for him.
I think that might be oversimplifying: it's no accident that so many of the major players in, for instance, American politics right now are former (and likely future) corporate heads. If the corporations really had so much more power than the government, why would a corporate head run for public office?
Moreover, if large defense corporations had so much more power than government officials, why would they bother bribing Congressmen with such regularity? I mean, are they just that generous? Should someone who's just a Congressman really wind up with billions of dollars in lergesse if he didn't have some power that the corporations giving it to him lack?
I see a major problem developing here, but rather than economics marginalizing politics I see it more as economics merging with politics into some form of ever more state regulated pseudo-market where the only reliable way to succeed anymore is with government contracts and government-granted advantages over your struggling small business competitors.
I might be coloring this picture too much with the fact that I live in the state with the highest unemployment (and in a city so short of work that the population's been shrinking basically my whole life), watching as even large local businesses are driving out to make room for competition who treat their employees like shit, offer vastly inferior products and services for trivially smaller prices and get all sorts of state favors that the local companies never dreamed of.
In all of this I see the state as the main corrupting influence: we watched as they granted all sorts of special favors to organized labor, allowing them to drive the cost of labor up to the point that domestic companies couldn't compete with foreign ones. Then when they were all-but-broken, we see the state in bed with the large multi-national corporations, and watch as the state seizes land for them so they don't have to pay a market price, we watch as they drive the cost of labor down so low that the average full-time employee is barely surviving.
And lets not forget that corporations are a government contrivance in the first place. "Unrestrained greed and personal ambition" can be dangerous things indeed, but when coupled with the corporation's total lack of individual accountability it becomes downright lethal. A private company in which the owner or owners are ultimately culpable for their actions would never dream of doing a lot of the thngs that these corporations do as a matter of course.
When was the last time you could challenge the practices of your executive management and still retain your employment?
That's awful if that happens... it's not been my experience, but I tend to seek out employers I don't have major ideological clashes with in the first place.
Do you remember the old 80's sitcom Bosom Buddies? I'm not saying this is always the case, but sometimes I get the impression that these situations where an employee clashes with management are a lot like if the characters from this show complained about being evicted when their secret was uncovered. I'm sure that's not always the case... but I don't have any personal examples to go by.
But the same thing is happening with CNN and other mainstream media. For example, it is very "uncool" to report on the number of deaths in Iraq. That's the for-profit effect of corporatism.
But again, how much practical harm is it really doing? CNN mentions the number of deaths in Iraq quite often despite this prejudice against doing so (and a good chunk of that prejudice comes not from inside the corporation, but rather from the government itself, who imply that the information is 'aiding the enemy'). But even if all the TV news channels colluded in some smoke-filled room and agreed not to report it... the information is out there. You could find it in virtually any newspaper.
And I know what you may be thinking here: but newspapers are corporations too... so lets say this is more of a smoke-filled auditorium, and all the TV stations and all the Newspapers in the entire country somehow got together and agreed not to report casualty numbers for Iraq.
It's an inconvenience, to be sure... but again, a minor one. A person who really wants this information can seek it out any number of places, not the least of which is here. And I think I can personally guarentee, without fear of contradiction from my employer, that we're not going to be involved in any behind-the-scenes deal to hide casualty numbers.
But that's just the thing, the corporate censorship, while much broader in practice, is in many cases so impotent as to be more or less merely theoretical. Microsoft's power to censor me is virtually non-existant... even those who run afoul of them and get, for instance, their blog removed have numerous recourses, from finding another host to hosting it themselves... Microsoft's censorship is at best for this person a mild inconvenience, and certainly nothing compared to the very realistic possibility of winding up in jail for sedition or worse, shot outright for treason.
We should be realistic though: we can't even reliably guarentee that political dissidents won't be put in gulags at this point (or tortured, for what it's worth)...
To me worrying about corporate censorship right now is like putting on insect repellent while you're being chased by a grizzly.
Corporate governance is as democratic as state governance... that's a fundamental flaw with both. Corporations have the same flawed system of elections with the same sets of false choices... and those doing the voting are constantly trying to decide the lesser of two unacceptable evils.
One thing I will say about corporate censorship, it rarely lands you in a gulag the way state censorship so often does.
My favorite IE Mac experience came earlier this year, when a perfectly HTML standard clickable button worked on every browser on the planet made in the last decade except for the IE that comes with Mac OS9.
The only way I ever managed to get it working for IE without breaking it in everything else (or making it do something stupid) was to make it a non-functioning but clickable button and then have a Javascript onclick do all the work. Of course now the page doesn't work properly if you don't have Javascript enabled.
AD 2101... War was beginning
What Happen?
Somebody release Duke Nukem Forever.
What!
Do you think if we stopped talking about racism it would disappear? Seriously?
Actually that's one of the benefits of these laws from the perspective of someone who doesn't have to live under them. They provide a nice counter-example to prove that criminalizing an unpopular opinion does not make that opinion vanish.
When did dual boot systems become the decisive test? You can buy any number of desktop systems that don't come with Windows... how does the lack of Windows as a dual-boot option on these computers strengthen the case for monopoly?
The closest I've owned to a Microsoft product since 1999 was a Sega Dreamcast (some of the games came with some Windows CE software on them)... I've bought four computers in the meantime... not a one had Windows on it.
But for the record when Windows 95 first came out, Best Buy was still selling dual-boot DEC computers that came with both Windows NT and VMS.
King of the Hill character Dale Gribble.
He orders pizza under the pseudonym Rusty Shackleford. That is the point at which one becomes "too paranoid about privacy"
They weren't selling IE to begin with (well... they were a long long time ago)...
Why Microsoft should spend $400 Million for something that's going to support their platform either way and is going to be given away is beyond me.
Microsoft stopped bothering with IE for Mac when OSX stopped making it the default, bundled browser. I can't say as I blame them, Safari came out of the gate at least it's equal and has vaulted past it in terms of speed and reliability. It's hard enough to get people to switch to a generally superior browser like Firefox... imagine trying to convince people to go out of their way to install an inferior one.
It's been a few years... thank heavens sun keeps copies of their proxy statements on their site:t s/proxy_statement_03.pdf (page 34 and 35)
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/annual_repor
Note especially that the board recommended that we vote against it... which a majority did... then I sold my shares.
Indeed, I recall in the late 90's a bunch of activists buying up single shares of Philip Morris and trying to get them to stop making cigarettes. They used to make quite a fuss at those meetings... not that the voting was ever close.
The only shareholder activism I was ever personally involved in was an attempt to get Sun Microsystems to promise not to use slave labor... which got defeated interestingly enough.
Well, you all do have that rampaging gang of drunken Santas, but I guess it's still a step up... Is becoming an immigrant to New Zealand very difficult?
Statistically the odds were you wouldn't... that's exactly my point: making an injustice comparatively rare doesn't make it less wrong.