As I recall it, iTools was free. When it morphed into.Mac, it became pay-only. iTools was a suite of tools--.Mac was bigger and better, and justified charging.
I'm glad that you're happy with your Free software. I simply fail to see how Apple's software, easily the most aggressively priced offerings they have, screws you. Your justification that you are paid less in Brazil than you would in the US only compounds my confusion. You would seriously find a better solution with X86 hardware if money is that tight. So long as you're using Free software, the hardware hardly makes a difference.
I don't much feel sorry for you. I stayed with Mac OS 8.6 until 10.2. I didn't feel fleeced at all. Just as I skipped over Windows ME on my PC--I went straight from Windows 98 to XP. I didn't feel fleeced there, either.
Of course, I didn't immediately jump because I stopped, read reviews, saw that my workflow would be critically interrupted, and didn't change. If you bought hardware during the 10.0, 10.1 days, basically all of them came with OS 9, and dual-booted, so I'm not sure where you got screwed.
As for iTools, why should they be free? They provide secured server and mail space, backup and virus tools for $100/year. Hell, Virex by itself is $30 retail. Also, I don't consider less than $10/mo for these tools as "paying dearly", especially since they are hardly required additions to the OS--just something nice to have.
I simply fail to see how Apple screws people with their software. They have a client OS that's half the price of XP, a server version that's 1/3 the price of Windows server, client applications that are brilliant and easy to use, professional applications that are (natch) brilliant and easy to use. I suppose an argument could be made that Apple is screwing over 3rd-party developers by moving so many apps in-house, but even that fails the smell test. Adobe treated Apple like a red-headed stepchild with Premiere, even though they realize a great deal of profit from Mac users.
Now Apple hardware has traditionally included a hefty markup & profit margin, which was made worthwhile to suffer because Apple software made it worthwhile. I've seen this argument a dozen times, but yours is totally novel to me. You would get a much better cost/benefit ratio on X86 hardware so long as you intend to run a Free OS. The one exception may be that Apple's laptop offerings are generally superior to Wintel, but unless the Free OSes support all the various oddball hardware, I don't see the point of crippling your laptop with them.
Sometimes an Inbox is a to-do list. For example, I get requests for changes, additions, or other small items via email. This is a much preferred method to getting a dozen calls a day, which invariably have chit-chat filler at the start of the conversation.
I can batch-process email requests at times of the day that are convenient, or off-load them for later completion.
Now, this obviously doesn't work for everybody, but it does for me. I supposed I could set up some fancy system whereby I forward these emails to a procmailed account that puts it into a bona fide To-Do list, but that's long work for short reward. I could also set up a "ticket" system for clients to use, but it's not significantly different, plus the clients are already knowledgeable and comfortable with email. I do not want to spend time training them for a one-off application.
(Oh, and an overflowing Inbox actually is a fairly decent filing system. For one, it's right there in front of you, instantly telling you how much work you have to do. It's arranged in reverse-chronological order, unless you knock it over, which is something a filing cabinet will NEVER do for you without a lot of manual work. If you get fancy, you can have TWO or more piles which you execute snap-filing decisions as new items come in--this is "process soon", this is "process later".)
Your points are valid, but not neccessarily gospel.
I get where the humor is supposed to come from, but it's just not that funny, especially as you say it happens again and again. Your example of Fawlty Towers, although I haven't seen it either, describes my attitude. I just couldn't watch The Office sometimes. Now, granted, I watched it basically all the way through, all the episodes in a couple of nights. That's a lot to swallow all at once. Maybe it's not so grating if it comes is small doses.
I'm a fan of dry British wit, but this was just painful. And it's annoying when fanboys--the great-grandparent post--flog it mercilessly. He was *shocked* at how the American version *ruined* his precious show. I thought it would be educational for him to see a point of view that differed, and could back it up.
Oh, I got it alright. Yes, outrageously annoying bosses and stupidly blinkered co-workers is damned funny! Only I got it first when I read Dilbert some 800 million years ago. It was funny the first time--now it's just a bit played.
For the record, the whooshing sound I heard was me trying to drink until it became funny enough. It took an awful lot.
Since it's so blindingly obvious, why don't you explain it to me? I'm not a total knob, I can fathom a joke if it's not to tiresome or tedious, so have at it. But I should warn you: if the show is so one-dimensional that it can't appeal to even the most open-minded of casual watchers, the "point" which you so emphatically insist is there is so narrow to be meaningless. That is, in smaller words, you think you're privy to a secret, special meaning that likely doesn't exist. Sort of like if I told a virulently racist joke--would you accept it if I exclaimed that you "just didn't get it" if you failed to find it highly risible?
I'll just sit here and wait for you to sketch in the barest outline as to how I missed the point of the show. No, really, I'm waiting. Prove me to be a fucktard.
I have not seen the American version of The Office, but I did see the UK version just recently (shoutz to mah homies at Netflix!).
I'm not sure what you mean by the NBC version being TERRIBLE. Do you mean "not deliberately awkward with cartoonish characters and based on a bizarre premise to begin with"?
There were some genuinely funny parts in The Office. There is also, occassionally, some corn in my turds, but that doesn't mean I'm going to hunker down and dig in my scat pile for a tasty corn snack.
What kills me is that I watched it all the way through the normal seasons--I have not seen the "revisited" episodes--hoping that it would somehow get better. But, no, I was treated to more of the same. Broad-brushed, absurd characters in what was supposed to be a "reality" show.
There was one slightly realistic character, Tim. The rest were obvious foils or bit parts to move the turgid plot along. I know I was supposed to pine for Tim and Dawn's unrequited love, but come on--the fat bitch deserved what she got. She stuck with an obivous ogreish simpleton for no reason whatsoever, other than because the Script Said So. And what the hell was a documentary crew doing in a nondescript office in the ass end of nowhere that sells paper? They would be lucky if the local news anchor/stuffed shirt did a 15 second profile on them, much less a full camera crew for--how long? A week? A month? I simply don't buy it--but I would have accepted it if I wasn't subjected to painful "funny" bits where a guy acted like an ass. Shit, I've got Slashdot already.
As far as I can tell, people in this country hail it as High Comedy simply because it's British, and for little other reason than reverse American bias.
This is an important point. I'm not sure if Microsoft actually does provide bennies for gay employees, but the point is a good one nonetheless. Labor laws have many consequences, some of them good, some of them bad, some of them unintended, and some are strategic.
Mandating that a business be "moral" is little different than mandating that you be moral. The questions always comes down to, "Who is going to define morality, and why?"
However, I can find no mention of Fox News on your MRC link. Is the FNC exempt from this "liberal media" moniker?
Possibly. Maybe they are "fair and balanced" after all! MRC only gets its panties in a wad when just a single liberal point of view is offered. If you cover both sides, they're okay with that.
Of course, if you search for "Fox" on MRC, you'll find that Brent Bozell takes Fox (the network, not the news division) to task quite often, but usually for being raunchy, not biased.
Do you believe that the average television news viewer makes that distinction? Does the O'Reilly Factor carry a disclaimer that says, "The views expressed in this program are not necessarily those of the Fox News Channel?"
Ah, so your argument is that "people are stupid". Nice. I'll bet that you're also one of those people who believes in loosening voting restrictions too, to include felons and deviants and other Democratic voting blocks.
Here's an idea! "The Fox News Update" comes from Fox! "The Bill O'Reilly Show" likely comes from Bill O'Reilly! I know it's a clever, clever encryption scheme, but I think a few of the brighter bulbs can figure it out.
I'm not so sure that Fox has that much bias. They have bias, sure, but they seem to actually try to acheive some kind of balance, and that mitigates things quite a bit. Other news outlets tend to assume that Republicans are doing something dirty or criminal, and it's up to the politician in question to prove their innocence. Whereas lefty politicos largely get a pass. When was the last time Bill Clinton got a hard question thrown his way? Or Hillary Clinton? When did John Kerry EVER get hammered about not signing his Form 180 during the Swift Boat debacle?
You seem to admit that the other news channels are biased as well. So even if Fox were heavily biased, wouldn't that seem to be an ideal situation? We get meta-balance by watching CBS, then Fox, and mixing the two together. Of course, you've already stated that people are too goddamn stupid to figure out that the Bill O'Reilly show isn't a mouthpiece for the Fox News Channel's editorial board, so maybe a "meta-balance" is too tricky a concept.
Look, you don't like Fox because they don't portray Republicans and Conservatives as hate-filled, self-loathing aliens from the planet Puppysquisher. Fine. But don't delude yourself into thinking that you're somehow more highly evolved simply because you hate hate hate the Bushy McChimpler.
Yes. Democrats never resort to ad hominem attacks. The 2004 election wasn't filled with some of the most hate-filled, personal attack rhetoric this country has seen in recent history. Well, since Ronald "He kicks the homeless" Reagen.
Notice, please, that I just refuted your dumb ass. You should beware what you wish for.
But since you're so interested, let's do them in order:
1) That's not bias, that's Bill O'Reilly being a twat. That's part of O'Reilly's job description, I'm sure--"Be a twat, Bill." Mistakes, even dumb ones, are not bias.
2) I don't get it--Brit Hume reports rumors and speculation, and now he's somehow culpable? I'm thinking it was one of those "true, but inaccurate" thingies.
3) The attacks on Tom DeLay are largely trumped up and due to partisan character assassination. There's a vicious partisan DA in Texas after him--who pulled similar shenanigans against Kay Bailey Hutchinson--and there are questions about a lobbyist who accompanied DeLay on a trip, who may have paid for the whole thing. All that proves is that the lobbyist was a bad boy. You've got a long way to go to prove complicity on DeLay's part. But, if you hammer the insinuation enough, you'll create a aura of wrongdoing. The charge that it's partisan hackery is certainly not "baseless". It is a time-honored political tactic, used on Newt Gingritch, Trent Lott, and Bill Clinton to varying degrees of success, mostly unsuccessful only against Democrats since they have historically had support from the major media outlets. Just imagine if a Republican drowned a campaign worker while drunk as a lord.
4) A bunch of hooey. Right now the Democrats are proposing that if we do nothing, then in 2030, they may have to cut benefits by 25%. If the Republicans proposed cutting bennies by 25%, anybody with a brain in their head knows that the Dems would literaly pop a rivet over how mean, cruel and full of hatred the Republicans are for sending Grannie to the poorhouse. These assholes as Media Matters have come to the brilliant conclusion that if you allow people to invest some of their SS into private accounts that suits on Wall Street will make money. OMG, SCANDAL! I mean, duh. There is nobody here under the age of 40 who isn't already putting money into a 401k or an IRA. Damn those Wall Street tycoons for ripping me off! Never mind that there is exactly zero dollars in the SS Trust Fund, and all the taxes from that have been spent on the Robert C. Byrd Memorial Water Slide. So if Angle is guilty of anything it's not coming right out and calling Democrats lying jerkfaces.
5) That's not bias, that's poor fact-checking. Did she know he wasn't a Nobel nominated doctor? If not, it's sloppy reportage.
6) If they opine about gays, they're biased? What kind of logic is that? I shouldn't even have to demolish this, it should be obvious.
7) DeLay again. I tell you, you libs have a real hard-on for DeLay, don't you? You must be a bunch of bummers. (Ooh, I just "mused on gay rights". I'm doomed, here comes Media Matters.) If Media Matters is so convinced of DeLay's guilt, why don't they bring the proof? Hearsay and guilt by association doesn't cut it. Media Matters has set a bar--DeLay is guilty guilty guilty, and anybody who doesn't agree is de facto biased--and then when Fox doesn't meet their (self-imposed) standard, they blast them for bias. Well, good job guys! Color me unimpressed.
And all this was the grandparent's "choice" selections. I'd love to see the "squirrelly, kinda embarrassing soft-focus" selections.
Benefit to some, feature hole to others. Now you have two systems to admin, not one. Don't misunderstand, I'm not kicking your project for fun, I'm just expressing what I would perceive as a hassle. Once you've installed Bricolage, you still have to decide what and how you will serve your content, which is a non-trivial problem in itself.
Of course, since Bricolage seems to be focussed towards enterprises, those kinds of companies won't blink an eye at high-dollar dual admined systems.
But what do I know, i'm just some Slashdot schlub.
Fox's "bias" is usually shown to exist because they don't automatically assume that Republicans are inherently evil. Also, it's worth noting that at least part of your examples come from editorial opinion-type shows. Holding Fox as a whole responsible for bias in an opinion show is silly. I'd say "stupid", but that would make me biased.
states in midwest where you cannot even find bread that's edible. In most places, it's Applebee's or China Bufet
Well,you do have me there. I was in central Illinois recently, and we ended up eating at a Chili's. There was nothing else, or at least nothing we could find. It was also the most whitebread town I have ever been in. Creepy.
Actually, for me the expression of my freedom and individuality is more my ability to walk to places, or get places without having to drag a large metal box on wheels with me.
Diff'rent strokes, then. Driving doesn't bother me, and I can get more places further out than I can by walking. And the public transportation in my city sucks 100% ass, so that's not even an option, assuming it went to places I needed to go.
As a business, when you depend on foot-traffic for your daily bread, you do tend to get invested in the neighborhood you live in. However, when that neighborhood changes outside of your control--which happens--you're SOL. Now, if you cluster your shopping and commerce areas together, away from your residential, that makes them destinations and less likely to go pear-shaped because the city council rezoned the nearby block for titty-bars.
Better? Not really. Different? Sure. And a lot of folks like it that way. I would prefer living in-town myself, but owning a horse kind of prevents that.
Kerry did a fine job of distorting himself, without Republican prompting. It's opponents like Kerry that make Karl Rove look like a genius when all he really had to do was make sure GWB didn't get caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.
I agree that foreign travel is important to the idea of "well-travelled", but:
mass transit services that actually work well
Subsidized and run at a loss, until recently privitized--or so I understand. I'm willing to be educated on this point. When you spend tax money on a service, it gets very difficult to come out and say "this works well", because public spending gets very muddy indeed.
American mass-transit works very well, BTW. We call them "fast cars" and "the Interstate". I would think that Slashdot nerds would see the value in packet-based travelling.
Rail works well in Europe because the cities are old and well established. NYC, for example, runs a pretty decent mass-transit service in the form of the subway system. However, out in the Great Wide Open of America, an entire city can sprout in the course of a decade. We Americans also like our elbow room, and we value freedom and individuality--the ultimate expression of which is the Corvette.
or how to use public space in their cities
I don't know what this means. Public space in cities is generally used to accomodate residents, and newer American cities barely have those. Commuting is king.
If you mean fountains and statuary and whatnot, I'm not sure how that's a calcuable benefit. I guess it's nice; the tourists like 'em anyway, but then they go home.
Or how to cook decent food.
You're eating at the wrong places. Try something other than Applebee's. Of course, I'm from the South, and eating is a religion down here. Due to the melting-pot nature of America, you can get every kind of European food you can imagine, except the kind of food that people left Europe to get away from. Calf brains and kidney pie comes to mind.
If you're going to tell me that you can't get good food in New Orleans, I'll damn you to hell for lying.
What I'd like to know is whether offering support for MySQL means that it is forced to use workarounds for 3.x versions of MySQL that are still scattered around on Web hosting services. Things like a lack of foreign keys, stored procedures, transactions (or full-text indexing, if you use InnoDB for the transactions), etc.
When a PHP/Ruby/Perl/Whatever Web API tool gets built, it assumes a connection to a half-ass DB like MySQL, which it then uses as a less-dangerous way to store stuff on the filesystem. This utilizes a RDBMS's strengths not a whit, and makes your data modelling a joke.
Rails' ability to sniff out a schema and make intelligent decisions about it is very neat. But if you have a complex data model, how well does it do then? Or are you limited to the showy demo things I've seen in the reviews. If I want a recipe app, there are billions already coded. I'm not interested in using Ruby just for fun.
Having a Client involved during all phases of the project, much less have a day to day interaction with the team is a phenomenal idea. I have had great success with this, but it becomes a bit of a problem, when the project is outsourced. No amount of communication (documents/mail/phone) can stand up to having a person next to you to tell you whats important and whats not.
I've been toying with the idea of blogging *spit* my projects. It gives me an active record of what happened and when, and it gives the client something to look at so they don't call me and spend an hour asking me "how is it going?"
Face-to-face conversations are okay, but usually I have an overwhelming urge to teach and explain things to people who really couldn't give a shit. "I'm using a VIEW here, with a stored procedure to prevent the data model from getting excessively complicated." "Huh--can you make that box there blue instead of green?" Educating customers is one of those things that sounds good until you actually try to do it. (Just like educating teenagers who couldn't care less sounds like a good idea until you actually try.)
"We would like to upload an Excel file to update the site."
That's what I got, just days before completion. I asked if they were comfortable with uploading a CSV instead. They're grudgingly amenable to that, but they felt the need to inform me that Amazon allows them to upload an Excel file.
Yeah, they have the same budget as Amazon, riiiight. I have found an option, but still--the staggering ignorance in using Amazon as a comparable is, well, staggering.
Do you use that Studio Display with the laptop positioned that way? I ask because I have tried the stacked screen layout, but it destroys Fitt's law unless you move the menu bar to the top monitor, which I generally don't do because I'm using the big monitor for Photoshop.
It's an inefficient layout, but it is also unfortunately the simplest to set up due to how we normally interact with laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad that you're happy with your Free software. I simply fail to see how Apple's software, easily the most aggressively priced offerings they have, screws you. Your justification that you are paid less in Brazil than you would in the US only compounds my confusion. You would seriously find a better solution with X86 hardware if money is that tight. So long as you're using Free software, the hardware hardly makes a difference.
But, to each his own.
Of course, I didn't immediately jump because I stopped, read reviews, saw that my workflow would be critically interrupted, and didn't change. If you bought hardware during the 10.0, 10.1 days, basically all of them came with OS 9, and dual-booted, so I'm not sure where you got screwed.
As for iTools, why should they be free? They provide secured server and mail space, backup and virus tools for $100/year. Hell, Virex by itself is $30 retail. Also, I don't consider less than $10/mo for these tools as "paying dearly", especially since they are hardly required additions to the OS--just something nice to have.
I simply fail to see how Apple screws people with their software. They have a client OS that's half the price of XP, a server version that's 1/3 the price of Windows server, client applications that are brilliant and easy to use, professional applications that are (natch) brilliant and easy to use. I suppose an argument could be made that Apple is screwing over 3rd-party developers by moving so many apps in-house, but even that fails the smell test. Adobe treated Apple like a red-headed stepchild with Premiere, even though they realize a great deal of profit from Mac users.
Now Apple hardware has traditionally included a hefty markup & profit margin, which was made worthwhile to suffer because Apple software made it worthwhile. I've seen this argument a dozen times, but yours is totally novel to me. You would get a much better cost/benefit ratio on X86 hardware so long as you intend to run a Free OS. The one exception may be that Apple's laptop offerings are generally superior to Wintel, but unless the Free OSes support all the various oddball hardware, I don't see the point of crippling your laptop with them.
I can batch-process email requests at times of the day that are convenient, or off-load them for later completion.
Now, this obviously doesn't work for everybody, but it does for me. I supposed I could set up some fancy system whereby I forward these emails to a procmailed account that puts it into a bona fide To-Do list, but that's long work for short reward. I could also set up a "ticket" system for clients to use, but it's not significantly different, plus the clients are already knowledgeable and comfortable with email. I do not want to spend time training them for a one-off application.
(Oh, and an overflowing Inbox actually is a fairly decent filing system. For one, it's right there in front of you, instantly telling you how much work you have to do. It's arranged in reverse-chronological order, unless you knock it over, which is something a filing cabinet will NEVER do for you without a lot of manual work. If you get fancy, you can have TWO or more piles which you execute snap-filing decisions as new items come in--this is "process soon", this is "process later".)
Your points are valid, but not neccessarily gospel.
So, you find that Apple fleeces you on their pricing structure for their operating system? Sorry, but that makes zero sense.
Um, the kid is five. You make him sound like Oliver Wendell Holmes with an attitude.
I'm a fan of dry British wit, but this was just painful. And it's annoying when fanboys--the great-grandparent post--flog it mercilessly. He was *shocked* at how the American version *ruined* his precious show. I thought it would be educational for him to see a point of view that differed, and could back it up.
For the record, the whooshing sound I heard was me trying to drink until it became funny enough. It took an awful lot.
Since it's so blindingly obvious, why don't you explain it to me? I'm not a total knob, I can fathom a joke if it's not to tiresome or tedious, so have at it. But I should warn you: if the show is so one-dimensional that it can't appeal to even the most open-minded of casual watchers, the "point" which you so emphatically insist is there is so narrow to be meaningless. That is, in smaller words, you think you're privy to a secret, special meaning that likely doesn't exist. Sort of like if I told a virulently racist joke--would you accept it if I exclaimed that you "just didn't get it" if you failed to find it highly risible?
I'll just sit here and wait for you to sketch in the barest outline as to how I missed the point of the show. No, really, I'm waiting. Prove me to be a fucktard.
I'm not sure what you mean by the NBC version being TERRIBLE. Do you mean "not deliberately awkward with cartoonish characters and based on a bizarre premise to begin with"?
There were some genuinely funny parts in The Office. There is also, occassionally, some corn in my turds, but that doesn't mean I'm going to hunker down and dig in my scat pile for a tasty corn snack.
What kills me is that I watched it all the way through the normal seasons--I have not seen the "revisited" episodes--hoping that it would somehow get better. But, no, I was treated to more of the same. Broad-brushed, absurd characters in what was supposed to be a "reality" show.
There was one slightly realistic character, Tim. The rest were obvious foils or bit parts to move the turgid plot along. I know I was supposed to pine for Tim and Dawn's unrequited love, but come on--the fat bitch deserved what she got. She stuck with an obivous ogreish simpleton for no reason whatsoever, other than because the Script Said So. And what the hell was a documentary crew doing in a nondescript office in the ass end of nowhere that sells paper? They would be lucky if the local news anchor/stuffed shirt did a 15 second profile on them, much less a full camera crew for--how long? A week? A month? I simply don't buy it--but I would have accepted it if I wasn't subjected to painful "funny" bits where a guy acted like an ass. Shit, I've got Slashdot already.
As far as I can tell, people in this country hail it as High Comedy simply because it's British, and for little other reason than reverse American bias.
A MySQL Interlude, in One Act
Some call it masturbation, but I call it "strategeric thinking".
Mandating that a business be "moral" is little different than mandating that you be moral. The questions always comes down to, "Who is going to define morality, and why?"
Possibly. Maybe they are "fair and balanced" after all! MRC only gets its panties in a wad when just a single liberal point of view is offered. If you cover both sides, they're okay with that.
Of course, if you search for "Fox" on MRC, you'll find that Brent Bozell takes Fox (the network, not the news division) to task quite often, but usually for being raunchy, not biased.
Do you believe that the average television news viewer makes that distinction? Does the O'Reilly Factor carry a disclaimer that says, "The views expressed in this program are not necessarily those of the Fox News Channel?"
Ah, so your argument is that "people are stupid". Nice. I'll bet that you're also one of those people who believes in loosening voting restrictions too, to include felons and deviants and other Democratic voting blocks.
Here's an idea! "The Fox News Update" comes from Fox! "The Bill O'Reilly Show" likely comes from Bill O'Reilly! I know it's a clever, clever encryption scheme, but I think a few of the brighter bulbs can figure it out.
I'm not so sure that Fox has that much bias. They have bias, sure, but they seem to actually try to acheive some kind of balance, and that mitigates things quite a bit. Other news outlets tend to assume that Republicans are doing something dirty or criminal, and it's up to the politician in question to prove their innocence. Whereas lefty politicos largely get a pass. When was the last time Bill Clinton got a hard question thrown his way? Or Hillary Clinton? When did John Kerry EVER get hammered about not signing his Form 180 during the Swift Boat debacle?
You seem to admit that the other news channels are biased as well. So even if Fox were heavily biased, wouldn't that seem to be an ideal situation? We get meta-balance by watching CBS, then Fox, and mixing the two together. Of course, you've already stated that people are too goddamn stupid to figure out that the Bill O'Reilly show isn't a mouthpiece for the Fox News Channel's editorial board, so maybe a "meta-balance" is too tricky a concept.
Look, you don't like Fox because they don't portray Republicans and Conservatives as hate-filled, self-loathing aliens from the planet Puppysquisher. Fine. But don't delude yourself into thinking that you're somehow more highly evolved simply because you hate hate hate the Bushy McChimpler.
Notice, please, that I just refuted your dumb ass. You should beware what you wish for.
But since you're so interested, let's do them in order:
1) That's not bias, that's Bill O'Reilly being a twat. That's part of O'Reilly's job description, I'm sure--"Be a twat, Bill." Mistakes, even dumb ones, are not bias.
2) I don't get it--Brit Hume reports rumors and speculation, and now he's somehow culpable? I'm thinking it was one of those "true, but inaccurate" thingies.
3) The attacks on Tom DeLay are largely trumped up and due to partisan character assassination. There's a vicious partisan DA in Texas after him--who pulled similar shenanigans against Kay Bailey Hutchinson--and there are questions about a lobbyist who accompanied DeLay on a trip, who may have paid for the whole thing. All that proves is that the lobbyist was a bad boy. You've got a long way to go to prove complicity on DeLay's part. But, if you hammer the insinuation enough, you'll create a aura of wrongdoing. The charge that it's partisan hackery is certainly not "baseless". It is a time-honored political tactic, used on Newt Gingritch, Trent Lott, and Bill Clinton to varying degrees of success, mostly unsuccessful only against Democrats since they have historically had support from the major media outlets. Just imagine if a Republican drowned a campaign worker while drunk as a lord.
4) A bunch of hooey. Right now the Democrats are proposing that if we do nothing, then in 2030, they may have to cut benefits by 25%. If the Republicans proposed cutting bennies by 25%, anybody with a brain in their head knows that the Dems would literaly pop a rivet over how mean, cruel and full of hatred the Republicans are for sending Grannie to the poorhouse. These assholes as Media Matters have come to the brilliant conclusion that if you allow people to invest some of their SS into private accounts that suits on Wall Street will make money. OMG, SCANDAL! I mean, duh. There is nobody here under the age of 40 who isn't already putting money into a 401k or an IRA. Damn those Wall Street tycoons for ripping me off! Never mind that there is exactly zero dollars in the SS Trust Fund, and all the taxes from that have been spent on the Robert C. Byrd Memorial Water Slide. So if Angle is guilty of anything it's not coming right out and calling Democrats lying jerkfaces.
5) That's not bias, that's poor fact-checking. Did she know he wasn't a Nobel nominated doctor? If not, it's sloppy reportage.
6) If they opine about gays, they're biased? What kind of logic is that? I shouldn't even have to demolish this, it should be obvious.
7) DeLay again. I tell you, you libs have a real hard-on for DeLay, don't you? You must be a bunch of bummers. (Ooh, I just "mused on gay rights". I'm doomed, here comes Media Matters.) If Media Matters is so convinced of DeLay's guilt, why don't they bring the proof? Hearsay and guilt by association doesn't cut it. Media Matters has set a bar--DeLay is guilty guilty guilty, and anybody who doesn't agree is de facto biased--and then when Fox doesn't meet their (self-imposed) standard, they blast them for bias. Well, good job guys! Color me unimpressed.
And all this was the grandparent's "choice" selections. I'd love to see the "squirrelly, kinda embarrassing soft-focus" selections.
If you automatically dislike someone who's right of Chomsky--that's you, BTW--then, yes, I'll bet Fox is a right eyesore.
Benefit to some, feature hole to others. Now you have two systems to admin, not one. Don't misunderstand, I'm not kicking your project for fun, I'm just expressing what I would perceive as a hassle. Once you've installed Bricolage, you still have to decide what and how you will serve your content, which is a non-trivial problem in itself. Of course, since Bricolage seems to be focussed towards enterprises, those kinds of companies won't blink an eye at high-dollar dual admined systems. But what do I know, i'm just some Slashdot schlub.
Media Research Center. Look, now the bias horserace is neck-and-neck!
Fox's "bias" is usually shown to exist because they don't automatically assume that Republicans are inherently evil. Also, it's worth noting that at least part of your examples come from editorial opinion-type shows. Holding Fox as a whole responsible for bias in an opinion show is silly. I'd say "stupid", but that would make me biased.
Well,you do have me there. I was in central Illinois recently, and we ended up eating at a Chili's. There was nothing else, or at least nothing we could find. It was also the most whitebread town I have ever been in. Creepy.
Actually, for me the expression of my freedom and individuality is more my ability to walk to places, or get places without having to drag a large metal box on wheels with me.
Diff'rent strokes, then. Driving doesn't bother me, and I can get more places further out than I can by walking. And the public transportation in my city sucks 100% ass, so that's not even an option, assuming it went to places I needed to go.
As a business, when you depend on foot-traffic for your daily bread, you do tend to get invested in the neighborhood you live in. However, when that neighborhood changes outside of your control--which happens--you're SOL. Now, if you cluster your shopping and commerce areas together, away from your residential, that makes them destinations and less likely to go pear-shaped because the city council rezoned the nearby block for titty-bars.
Better? Not really. Different? Sure. And a lot of folks like it that way. I would prefer living in-town myself, but owning a horse kind of prevents that.
Kerry did a fine job of distorting himself, without Republican prompting. It's opponents like Kerry that make Karl Rove look like a genius when all he really had to do was make sure GWB didn't get caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.
I tell you, these rah-rah-Canada jokes never get old.
Why are you on Slashdot?
I agree that foreign travel is important to the idea of "well-travelled", but: mass transit services that actually work well
Subsidized and run at a loss, until recently privitized--or so I understand. I'm willing to be educated on this point. When you spend tax money on a service, it gets very difficult to come out and say "this works well", because public spending gets very muddy indeed.
American mass-transit works very well, BTW. We call them "fast cars" and "the Interstate". I would think that Slashdot nerds would see the value in packet-based travelling.
Rail works well in Europe because the cities are old and well established. NYC, for example, runs a pretty decent mass-transit service in the form of the subway system. However, out in the Great Wide Open of America, an entire city can sprout in the course of a decade. We Americans also like our elbow room, and we value freedom and individuality--the ultimate expression of which is the Corvette.
or how to use public space in their cities
I don't know what this means. Public space in cities is generally used to accomodate residents, and newer American cities barely have those. Commuting is king.
If you mean fountains and statuary and whatnot, I'm not sure how that's a calcuable benefit. I guess it's nice; the tourists like 'em anyway, but then they go home.
Or how to cook decent food.
You're eating at the wrong places. Try something other than Applebee's. Of course, I'm from the South, and eating is a religion down here. Due to the melting-pot nature of America, you can get every kind of European food you can imagine, except the kind of food that people left Europe to get away from. Calf brains and kidney pie comes to mind.
If you're going to tell me that you can't get good food in New Orleans, I'll damn you to hell for lying.
When a PHP/Ruby/Perl/Whatever Web API tool gets built, it assumes a connection to a half-ass DB like MySQL, which it then uses as a less-dangerous way to store stuff on the filesystem. This utilizes a RDBMS's strengths not a whit, and makes your data modelling a joke.
Rails' ability to sniff out a schema and make intelligent decisions about it is very neat. But if you have a complex data model, how well does it do then? Or are you limited to the showy demo things I've seen in the reviews. If I want a recipe app, there are billions already coded. I'm not interested in using Ruby just for fun.
I've been toying with the idea of blogging *spit* my projects. It gives me an active record of what happened and when, and it gives the client something to look at so they don't call me and spend an hour asking me "how is it going?"
Face-to-face conversations are okay, but usually I have an overwhelming urge to teach and explain things to people who really couldn't give a shit. "I'm using a VIEW here, with a stored procedure to prevent the data model from getting excessively complicated." "Huh--can you make that box there blue instead of green?" Educating customers is one of those things that sounds good until you actually try to do it. (Just like educating teenagers who couldn't care less sounds like a good idea until you actually try.)
That's what I got, just days before completion. I asked if they were comfortable with uploading a CSV instead. They're grudgingly amenable to that, but they felt the need to inform me that Amazon allows them to upload an Excel file.
Yeah, they have the same budget as Amazon, riiiight. I have found an option, but still--the staggering ignorance in using Amazon as a comparable is, well, staggering.
It's an inefficient layout, but it is also unfortunately the simplest to set up due to how we normally interact with laptops.