You could argue that if Java goes GPL, gcj has been successful even if it suddenly becomes irrelevant. The same would be true of GNU Gnash if Adobe were to GPL the Flash plugin. It wouldn't invalidate the open source efforts: far from it, it would accomplish the original goal of having a free implementation of the application.
Clue yourself. I've yet to hear a single liberal claim that women and men are identical, and I've never heard progressive tax plans justified by a silly "wealth redistribution" argument. I think biodiesel is an awful fuel strategy that only makes food more expensive (and it's a policy pushed far more heavily by the right wing than by the left - our current biodiesel mess has been touted by President Bush as an "accomplishment" for years).
Personally I don't subscribe to any of the fallacies that you listed, and I'd wager that most liberals don't match the convenient template you've set up for them. But feel free to poke the straw man all you'd like.
So the ID advocates portrayed here seem to be acting in deceitful or unethical ways, and then this movie is compounding their deceit.
Welcome to America, 2008. Deceit and a lack of ethics raise concerns among people who post comments on blogs and news sites, but not necessarily among a majority of people who vote and write letters to their legislatures. We've arrived in an era in which there are two truths: right-wing truth and left-wing truth. You can pick either. Each has its own dedicated news and opinion services dedicated to it, so regardless of which one you pick, you can safely pretend the other doesn't exist until a talking head points out how silly the other side looks.
Here's the catch: most of the emotional advantages are firmly on the side of right-wing truth. Think of what feels good and it's true. America is the best country on earth, and everything we do is therefore moral. Oil production will never peak. The environment will take care of itself regardless of what we do, because it was put there for us by God. What industry lobbyists say about the climate is more correct than what most scientists say, because the scientists are communists. Human beings are special: not a type of animal that evolved along with other animals, but higher beings on a pedestal above animals.
See? Emotionally the right wing is far more satisfying. If you pick right-wing truth, there's no need to apply any scrutiny to it, and it provides a mirror of left wing truth in every respect, aside from a lack of creditability its adherents don't seem to miss.
Guess what? It still exists. I found
this mentioned in a post above. Different domain name, but part of the same web syndication. Hopefully that will remain in place.
This also describes me. I surfed to that handy calendar at least once a week, catching up on a half dozen strips at a time. I didn't even mind that it threw sneaky pop-up ads at me: the trade-off seemed worth it. That feature goes back, or I find a new way to procrastinate.
I know I'm not the only one who's dismayed by these changes. A good friend of mine has a Perl script that scrapes the comic each day and puts it into a private repository. It's been doing it for so long that he must have thousands of them... until the error message I imagine it probably generated this morning. I can almost hear him swearing.
You're right: there aren't any personal attacks here. This isn't about Microsoft, it's about the process. The easy manipulability of ISO's standards voting process is now open to scrutiny. This plea represents their shock that so many people were paying attention.
Personally I think Office Open XML becoming Open XML could lead to good things, assuming the standards body improves it over time and that we can get Microsoft to implement it faithfully. (I know, I know: big assumption.) But optimism aside, there's nothing wrong with criticizing the process and conducting an investigation into it. That concern goes way beyond Microsoft. So let's keep shining the light of accountability on this fiasco. If they're a genuine, open standards body they should welcome this.
Please tell me this is a reference to my favorite Monty Python episode, the Cycling Tour. Please. I want to know I'm not the only one who has that episode permanently stuck in my brain.
On what is normally termed the 'left' you have to ram together fascists...
Fascism is a phenomenon of right-wing nationalism and government authoritarianism. It doesn't belong on a description of the left, and I'd be inclined to leave it off the list on the right as well, since it's a loaded word and using it accomplishes very little. (Besides, the only people one should classify as fascists are those who lend unconditional support to the executive branch, advocate for greater executive power, and suggest doing away with those who think differently. I leave it up to you to decide which side of the political spectrum that sounds like, though most right-leaning people I know don't fall into that pigeonhole.)
Currently we are in the process of making a major choice between two competing and utterly incompatible philosophies. So it is proper that we have a major thowdown fight over such an important question.
Really? It's either oil or water, take your pick? So we can't have, say, (a) a nationalized healthcare system as advocated by some Democrats that sits alongside (b) private health care components that anyone is free to purchase to augment the cheap national system, and (c) pharmacies run entirely by private companies? I think a lot of ideas espoused by the right and left are often perfectly compatible. The trouble arises when the extremists on either end try to prevent pragmatic blending of these ideas, all in the name of keeping the system "purely" private or public. (To be honest, I don't know of anyone on the left that's extreme enough to advocate a healthcare system that is purely state-run, though I can think of plenty of people who advocate making it free of government involvement. But that's specific to the healthcare example - not necessarily what you were talking about.)
The real test is the future. If Microsoft works through ISO to improve the standard, and ODF and OOXML are gradually harmonized, then all our complaining is moot. If other companies and projects implement OOXML and have no trouble doing it, and Microsoft doesn't sue them for infringement of some obscure patent, that's fine. We get what we want.
Consider this silver lining: without ODF, under what other circumstances would Microsoft have turned their new document file format over to a standards body? This whole scenario would have been an open source advocate's wet dream in the 1990s. Sure, what happened with the ISO vote was deplorable and calls the standards body's process and impartiality into question, but things are a lot better than they would have been without ODF.
If News Corp outbids Microsoft for Yahoo!, will I still be able to search for information about Democrats using their site, or will it be a fair and balanced search engine?
I've read Nightfall, The Last Question and Foundation. All three involved important men meeting in a room and talking about the future, the challenges to their society and how times have changed. In some cases (Foundation and The Last Question) this happened repeatedly across multiple generations; IIRC in Nightfall it was just the same two scientists the whole time, theorizing about the concept of night.
His ideas are very original, and I enjoyed reading them (though I found Foundation a bit of a bore). I love his development of concepts. But his characters stink. I think he himself admitted that he was never interested in building characters, just in developing the concepts. (On the other side of the coin you have writers like Robert Jordan who just let their characters evolve and bicker with each other constantly, to the point that he gradually lost track of the concepts that kept people interested. That's equally bad, if not more so.)
Like the other poster said: Please just read The God Delusion, it explains all of this. Read it. IMHO, Dawkins being belligerent and quoting other people doesn't make a very convincing set of arguments. Funny, but people seem to find it plenty convincing when theists do that. Yeah, and quotes are especially convincing if they're nested, like all of yours.
I prefer authors with repeatability - one hit after another. Like Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke.
Yeah, Asimov is no one-hit wonder like Douglas Adams. My favorite Asimov story is the one where two important but undeveloped male characters meet in a room and talk about the future, the challenges to their society and how times have changed, and exchange indistinguishable lines of dialogue for so long you forget which character is which. What was the title of that story again?
IANAL, however it seems like this should come down a question of visibility. Is the house visible from the street? Then it seems that publishing a photo that includes the house shouldn't be a problem. It would be different if it were a close-up photo of the house, or one looking inside it, but if it's just the same view available to a passer-by, what's the harm? My only question is whether the 'Private Road' sign could cause problems. What's a 'private road?' Do the residents pave it and light it, or is it really a public road maintained by the municipality with a sign that discourages visitors?
This reminds me a bit of companies that place security guards to stop people from photographing their buildings. My reaction has always been that you shouldn't put a building in a public place if you don't want it to be photographed.
(which isn't to say he wasn't extraordinarily influential in both industries)
You're being inaccurate. Perhaps I should have expanded on the above to avoid flames, but I gave credit where due - Edison was an amazing inventor and businessman who devised a complete light bulb system, without which lights would not have been marketable or even very useful. But some of the prior examples of incandescent lights are, in fact, bulbs. Edison can be credited for vastly improving their design, and consequently for the fact that they became popular. That's patentable and enormously beneficial, but it doesn't mean he invented the core concept of an electrified filament in a bulb. By your logic Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invented operating systems and Apple invented the GUI.
Sometimes so-called "revisionist history" is history that has been revised for a good reason. Columbus did not discover America, and didn't even discover it for Europeans. And Edison not only didn't invent sound recording, he didn't invent the light bulb either (which isn't to say he wasn't extraordinarily influential in both industries).
What version of Netscape was he running? If it was 4.01, or 6, I'd have to laugh at the guy. But it was Netscape 8, that browser was just a branded repackaging of Firefox, so in a way he would have been fairly up-to-date with 8, and barely switched browsers by going to Firefox. Even if he was on Netscape 7 he would have had a fairly modern version of the Gecko rendering engine that both Netscape and Firefox share. This article makes it sound like he installed Navigator 4 in the mid-90s and never upgraded. I have a hard time believing that, judging from his nice metallic flat screen display.
Interestingly, the Belgium joke was added to the American edition of Life, the Universe and Everything. In the original British edition the Rory was an award for the most gratuitous use of the word "fuck" in a serious screenplay. Presumably the US publishers asked Adams to change it, so in the American version it's "Belgium." This led to a whole extra passage about how offensive the word Belgium is throughout the galaxy, and how funny it is that Earthicans (that's an unrelated Futurama reference - pay no heed) named a country after it.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119
For those too busy to consult RFC 2119 in detail, it basically states the following:
Should should mean "should."
Must must mean "must."
Must not must not mean anything other than "must not."
Required is required if you want to express the idea of a requirement.
Shall shall mean "shall."
Shall not shall not be construed as indicating that something "shall." (In fact it shall be the opposite.)
Should should usually mean "should," but not always.
Should not should not mean anything other than the opposite of "should," but also not always.
Recommend is recommended for use in RFCs as well, but may be optional.
I'll believe it when I see it, but this is good news if it's true, and if "standards" means what you'd hope. The best thing for the web is for all of the major browsers to abandon support for decrepit, non-standards-compliant sites and send the message that they're committed to CSS and other modern elements of design. Microsoft has been hesitant to do this for many reasons aside from anticompetitiveness, but the chicken and egg problem of needing to support legacy sites is getting old. If they pull this off I'll stop using my nasty voice when I talk about IE.
Slashdot Mirror
You could argue that if Java goes GPL, gcj has been successful even if it suddenly becomes irrelevant. The same would be true of GNU Gnash if Adobe were to GPL the Flash plugin. It wouldn't invalidate the open source efforts: far from it, it would accomplish the original goal of having a free implementation of the application.
Clue yourself. I've yet to hear a single liberal claim that women and men are identical, and I've never heard progressive tax plans justified by a silly "wealth redistribution" argument. I think biodiesel is an awful fuel strategy that only makes food more expensive (and it's a policy pushed far more heavily by the right wing than by the left - our current biodiesel mess has been touted by President Bush as an "accomplishment" for years).
Personally I don't subscribe to any of the fallacies that you listed, and I'd wager that most liberals don't match the convenient template you've set up for them. But feel free to poke the straw man all you'd like.
Welcome to America, 2008. Deceit and a lack of ethics raise concerns among people who post comments on blogs and news sites, but not necessarily among a majority of people who vote and write letters to their legislatures. We've arrived in an era in which there are two truths: right-wing truth and left-wing truth. You can pick either. Each has its own dedicated news and opinion services dedicated to it, so regardless of which one you pick, you can safely pretend the other doesn't exist until a talking head points out how silly the other side looks.
Here's the catch: most of the emotional advantages are firmly on the side of right-wing truth. Think of what feels good and it's true. America is the best country on earth, and everything we do is therefore moral. Oil production will never peak. The environment will take care of itself regardless of what we do, because it was put there for us by God. What industry lobbyists say about the climate is more correct than what most scientists say, because the scientists are communists. Human beings are special: not a type of animal that evolved along with other animals, but higher beings on a pedestal above animals.
See? Emotionally the right wing is far more satisfying. If you pick right-wing truth, there's no need to apply any scrutiny to it, and it provides a mirror of left wing truth in every respect, aside from a lack of creditability its adherents don't seem to miss.
Guess what? It still exists. I found this mentioned in a post above. Different domain name, but part of the same web syndication. Hopefully that will remain in place.
This also describes me. I surfed to that handy calendar at least once a week, catching up on a half dozen strips at a time. I didn't even mind that it threw sneaky pop-up ads at me: the trade-off seemed worth it. That feature goes back, or I find a new way to procrastinate.
I know I'm not the only one who's dismayed by these changes. A good friend of mine has a Perl script that scrapes the comic each day and puts it into a private repository. It's been doing it for so long that he must have thousands of them ... until the error message I imagine it probably generated this morning. I can almost hear him swearing.
You're right: there aren't any personal attacks here. This isn't about Microsoft, it's about the process. The easy manipulability of ISO's standards voting process is now open to scrutiny. This plea represents their shock that so many people were paying attention.
Personally I think Office Open XML becoming Open XML could lead to good things, assuming the standards body improves it over time and that we can get Microsoft to implement it faithfully. (I know, I know: big assumption.) But optimism aside, there's nothing wrong with criticizing the process and conducting an investigation into it. That concern goes way beyond Microsoft. So let's keep shining the light of accountability on this fiasco. If they're a genuine, open standards body they should welcome this.
Fascism is a phenomenon of right-wing nationalism and government authoritarianism. It doesn't belong on a description of the left, and I'd be inclined to leave it off the list on the right as well, since it's a loaded word and using it accomplishes very little. (Besides, the only people one should classify as fascists are those who lend unconditional support to the executive branch, advocate for greater executive power, and suggest doing away with those who think differently. I leave it up to you to decide which side of the political spectrum that sounds like, though most right-leaning people I know don't fall into that pigeonhole.)
Really? It's either oil or water, take your pick? So we can't have, say, (a) a nationalized healthcare system as advocated by some Democrats that sits alongside (b) private health care components that anyone is free to purchase to augment the cheap national system, and (c) pharmacies run entirely by private companies? I think a lot of ideas espoused by the right and left are often perfectly compatible. The trouble arises when the extremists on either end try to prevent pragmatic blending of these ideas, all in the name of keeping the system "purely" private or public. (To be honest, I don't know of anyone on the left that's extreme enough to advocate a healthcare system that is purely state-run, though I can think of plenty of people who advocate making it free of government involvement. But that's specific to the healthcare example - not necessarily what you were talking about.)
The real test is the future. If Microsoft works through ISO to improve the standard, and ODF and OOXML are gradually harmonized, then all our complaining is moot. If other companies and projects implement OOXML and have no trouble doing it, and Microsoft doesn't sue them for infringement of some obscure patent, that's fine. We get what we want.
Consider this silver lining: without ODF, under what other circumstances would Microsoft have turned their new document file format over to a standards body? This whole scenario would have been an open source advocate's wet dream in the 1990s. Sure, what happened with the ISO vote was deplorable and calls the standards body's process and impartiality into question, but things are a lot better than they would have been without ODF.
If News Corp outbids Microsoft for Yahoo!, will I still be able to search for information about Democrats using their site, or will it be a fair and balanced search engine?
I've read Nightfall, The Last Question and Foundation. All three involved important men meeting in a room and talking about the future, the challenges to their society and how times have changed. In some cases (Foundation and The Last Question) this happened repeatedly across multiple generations; IIRC in Nightfall it was just the same two scientists the whole time, theorizing about the concept of night.
His ideas are very original, and I enjoyed reading them (though I found Foundation a bit of a bore). I love his development of concepts. But his characters stink. I think he himself admitted that he was never interested in building characters, just in developing the concepts. (On the other side of the coin you have writers like Robert Jordan who just let their characters evolve and bicker with each other constantly, to the point that he gradually lost track of the concepts that kept people interested. That's equally bad, if not more so.)
I'll have to check out Caves of Steel, though.
Yeah, Asimov is no one-hit wonder like Douglas Adams. My favorite Asimov story is the one where two important but undeveloped male characters meet in a room and talk about the future, the challenges to their society and how times have changed, and exchange indistinguishable lines of dialogue for so long you forget which character is which. What was the title of that story again?
Yep, Asimov was no one-hit wonder.
IANAL, however it seems like this should come down a question of visibility. Is the house visible from the street? Then it seems that publishing a photo that includes the house shouldn't be a problem. It would be different if it were a close-up photo of the house, or one looking inside it, but if it's just the same view available to a passer-by, what's the harm? My only question is whether the 'Private Road' sign could cause problems. What's a 'private road?' Do the residents pave it and light it, or is it really a public road maintained by the municipality with a sign that discourages visitors?
This reminds me a bit of companies that place security guards to stop people from photographing their buildings. My reaction has always been that you shouldn't put a building in a public place if you don't want it to be photographed.
Sometimes so-called "revisionist history" is history that has been revised for a good reason. Columbus did not discover America, and didn't even discover it for Europeans. And Edison not only didn't invent sound recording, he didn't invent the light bulb either (which isn't to say he wasn't extraordinarily influential in both industries).
There, interpreted that for you.
- Humma Kavul, missionary of the Jatravartid people
And the winner of the best animated series to return to us via DVD is ...
...
... THE HYPNOTOAD. ... ALL HAIL ... THE HYPNOTOAD.
What version of Netscape was he running? If it was 4.01, or 6, I'd have to laugh at the guy. But it was Netscape 8, that browser was just a branded repackaging of Firefox, so in a way he would have been fairly up-to-date with 8, and barely switched browsers by going to Firefox. Even if he was on Netscape 7 he would have had a fairly modern version of the Gecko rendering engine that both Netscape and Firefox share. This article makes it sound like he installed Navigator 4 in the mid-90s and never upgraded. I have a hard time believing that, judging from his nice metallic flat screen display.
Interestingly, the Belgium joke was added to the American edition of Life, the Universe and Everything. In the original British edition the Rory was an award for the most gratuitous use of the word "fuck" in a serious screenplay. Presumably the US publishers asked Adams to change it, so in the American version it's "Belgium." This led to a whole extra passage about how offensive the word Belgium is throughout the galaxy, and how funny it is that Earthicans (that's an unrelated Futurama reference - pay no heed) named a country after it.
Hey, me too. Are you also using Netscape Navigator 4.01?
For those too busy to consult RFC 2119 in detail, it basically states the following:
I'll believe it when I see it, but this is good news if it's true, and if "standards" means what you'd hope. The best thing for the web is for all of the major browsers to abandon support for decrepit, non-standards-compliant sites and send the message that they're committed to CSS and other modern elements of design. Microsoft has been hesitant to do this for many reasons aside from anticompetitiveness, but the chicken and egg problem of needing to support legacy sites is getting old. If they pull this off I'll stop using my nasty voice when I talk about IE.
Dude, do you need everything spelled out? Just start your car, drive around, and after a while you'll generate enough hydrogen to start your car.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true.