Other religions don't consider mere depiction to be blasphemy, so I don't think it would help so much to illustrate your point: Most religions don't have their followers send death threats because of mere blasphemy, at least not anymore.
A better example would be South Park. While it's been pulled before, the Super Best Friends episode aired unedited, as did many other episodes blaspheming Christianity, Scientology, Buddhism, Mormonism, pretty much every major religion. But only Islam actually sent death threats and got South Park censored.
If you know he's imaginary, why would you need him anymore? Why does our hypothetical Christian need an imaginary friend to tell him not to be an asshat?
There isn't even a public beta, let alone source code. Sorry, but it's a lot easier to get excited about this stuff than a bunch of screenshots.
And now that Steam is being ported to Linux and OS X, will this project be portable? Will it be open source? Will it integrate with local package managers, or other distribution systems?
If police came knocking on my door and said I'm under investigation for downloading child porn, you think it would be ok for me to say "don't worry, it was a mistake and I'm going to be deleting it soon" and they wouldn't want my computer and hard drives to investigate it?
Sure, they'd want it. But I also don't think it should be a crime to possess child porn, and the attempt to censor it has a corrosive effect on freedom of speech and net neutrality.
If someone's dick ended up in my rectum, I also wouldn't consider the possibility that it's in any way analogous to someone maybe spying on my fucking zoom levels.
Come on, people -- we even take a sane position towards Microsoft these days.
Chromium is an open-source project. Write a patch and see what happens.
And if you really insist it must be deliberate, please explain how spying on your fucking zoom level, and storing it in a local file which is never sent over any network, is so dangerous.
I just reproduced it in the exact same beta on Ubuntu. Steps are:
Open new Incognito window
Visit brand-new website
Change zoom level dramatically
Close Incognito window (all of them)
Visit website in a non-Incognito window
And people, please. What happened to "never ascribe to malice"? Chromium is an open-source project -- if you have to, fix it yourself, I have little doubt that patch would make it into the official Google Chrome.
Firefox would have to shred(1) or zero out the file.
And then there's journals.
Still, truncating the file makes recovery much more difficult, and makes it so that any process can reclaim it, not just Firefox. Fortunately, it's not that difficult to do it yourself -- just run VACUUM in sqlite.
But this guy isn't helping matters by using the words "conservative" and "extremist" together.
Even when they're absolutely accurate and appropriate?
He did that on purpose, and it was meant to polarize...
If you say so. If I was a conservative, I imagine I'd still think this is appropriate -- just as if I was a Muslim, I wouldn't object to the term "Islamic extremists" when appropriate.
In fact, let's run with that analogy. I don't care what the political situation is, if you shout "Allahu Akbar" and then blow yourself up in a crowded area, you're an Islamic extremist -- and that's the nice way of putting it. You're also a terrorist and a killer.
Similarly, if you try to revise history and education to fit your neo-conservative agenda (isn't that an oxy-moron?), and you do it to such an extreme that even Orwell would blush, you're a conservative extremist -- and that's the nice way of putting it. You're also either delusional or a liar, probably both.
If you're a conservative, and you don't want people to be able to "score cheap points" in this wholly legitimate way, you need to speak out, loudly, about what your fellow conservatives are doing. The silence from the majority of conservatives on this issue speaks volumes, just as the silence of the majority of Muslims on Islamic terrorism and Sharia law.
If we were able to "reboot" the internet, xml wouldn't exist.
In that sense, it seems a bit like C. If we were to "reboot" the software world, C wouldn't exist, and we'd (hopefully) have something better in its place.
But if you're going to replace it, have something better to replace it with.
Let's dissect this:
I am one of the world's leading experts on markup languages. I'll start there. I'm a 20-year veteran of desktop publishing...
I'm big and important. Sounds familiar, actually. Here's what Jerry Taylor had to say about himself:
I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.
Years of experience doesn't automatically make you an expert, as Mr. Taylor's record shows.
A markup language is predicated on the idea that the markup is an exception in a river of text. That is, the markup is a departure from the state that existed at the time the markup was encountered.
What about XML prevents it from being used in exactly that way?
Another tenet of a markup language is that only the syntax is specified. The semantics of what the markup means is implicit (HTML) or described earlier (Scribe) or some combination of the two (CSS).
Given this, what is problematic about a generic markup language?
a pure ASCII text file is a valid example of any markup language.
Bullshit, and HTML is the perfect example. Even if you ignore all the stuff the standards ask you to add -- even HTML4 wants a DOCTYPE at the top -- anywhere I want to use the < character, I have to escape it. This is true of any markup. (Plain text really doesn't count as a "markup language" in its own right, as it provides no means of, oh, marking things up.)
So this "expert" is factually wrong -- or at best, exaggerating on one of his main points. The blog itself is hardly unbiased. On to the next:
XML is most often used as a kind of container to hold structured data of some kind.
In this case, I would agree that there are much better choices. Depending on the data, I might use JSON, Yaml, or separate out the binary bits into a separate file, or a custom format if I actually need vertical performance.
There is one big problem with XML as a container. Its syntax, which is borrowed from HTML and SGML, involves angle brackets and a begin/end paradigm. The problem with this is that you can't embed similar data inside the XML file without escaping all the angle brackets.
That's true of using any markup language to hold structured data, including embedding source code in a string in source code. So what?
It also makes it essentially impossible to embed binary data in an XML file because you can't know whether or not to escape the XML sequences within the binary data (you should NOT, if the binary data is to be respected).
What? No, you should, so that the binary data will be extracted as a raw string. That said, I don't think XML was ever designed to handle binary data -- the only ways it currently does is as a Base64-encoded string.
This is why, for instance, both OOXML and OpenDocument are apparently stored as a zipfile containing several XML documents and several binary files, where the binary files represent images. This makes sense, and it's more or less the same structure as HTML.
There are many other approaches to file formats which might have been better choices. For example, instead of a begin/end paradigm, specifying type and length data allows unambiguous parsing.
It also sacrifices the ability of humans to edit and debug the data with a text editor, as the article says:
No one is implying that all conservatives are evil. That's why it said this:
The alterations and fallacies made by these extremist conservatives are offensive to our communities and inaccurate of our nation's diverse history.
Frankly, if you've looked at the changes suggested, anyone in favor of these is an extremist. The best you could say is that they're not truly a conservative, as they're advocating wholesale revision to the point of making shit up. Here, TFA sums it up neatly:
The Texas recommendations... include adding language saying the country's Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles and a new section on "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s." That would include positive references to the Moral Majority, the National Rifle Association and the Contract with America, the congressional GOP manifesto from the 1990s.
The amendments to the state's curriculum standards also minimize Thomas Jefferson's role in world and U.S. history because he advocated the separation of church and state, and require that students learn about "the unintended consequences" of affirmative action and Title IX, the landmark federal law that bans gender discrimination in education programs and activities.
If you don't already see that for the steaming pile of bullshit it is, let me break it down for you:
the country's Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles
"Lighthouses are more useful than churches." -- Ben Franklin.
Thomas Jefferson had some stronger words about the Christian faith in particular, but I couldn't find them offhand. No, these men were largely deists, making this an outright lie. The most charitable interpretation you could make is that they were guided by Christian principles, even if they weren't Christian, but that's obviously mistaken at best -- the Bible itself is clear about submitting to authority, that any Earthly authority (like, say, the British King) was placed there by God. No, they were guided largely by ideas floating around the world at the time, many dating back to the Greeks -- books like Plato's Republic, not the Holy Bible.
...a new section on "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s." That would include positive references to the Moral Majority, the National Rifle Association and the Contract with America, the congressional GOP manifesto from the 1990s.
Hardly nonpartisan. I suppose you're going to tell me that the books are currently favorable to modern liberals? I'd say that this is pretty damning evidence of these being not just extremists, but conservative extremists.
The amendments to the state's curriculum standards also minimize Thomas Jefferson's role in world and U.S. history because he advocated the separation of church and state...
Can't have that, can we? It's only one of the pillars of the Great American Experiment, a prerequisite for religious freedom and expression. I very much doubt anyone writing this is a current member of the Church of England, are they? Then they owe their freedom to practice their current religion to Thomas Jefferson.
...and require that students learn about "the unintended consequences" of affirmative action and Title IX, the landmark federal law that bans gender discrimination in education programs and activities.
Are they really suggesting that banning gender discrimination was a bad idea? If you needed an example of why Yee said, "some Texas politicians may want to set their educational standards back 50 years," this is it.
I have to imagine that most conservatives would be ashamed to be associated with drivel like this. In light of that, I think the sentence you quoted is entirely true and warranted, as written:
The alterations and fallacies made by these extremist conservatives are offensive to our communities and inaccurate of our nation's diverse history.
One of the facets of sin is that you must be conscious of the act being wrong for it to be sinful.
Oh? Well, I'm not conscious of any sex act between consenting adults being sinful. I guess I'm exempt, too. Cool!
I'm not sure what 'social progress' is inhibited by the puritanical view that sex is only appropriate between husband and wife while being open to producing children.
Um. Sex education, for starters?
Consider the blatant lie the Pope told recently, backed up by that puritanical view -- that condoms increase the risk of AIDS. If I recall, he did this wearing his infallibility hat.
Studies...
Yeah, you don't get to talk about studies yet. Studies show that condoms are effective -- not just mechanically effective, but effective on a large scale in that no, abstinence-only education results in more teen pregnancies. In other words, the infallible Pope is factually wrong. Given that, yes, we should be distributing condoms to people at risk of AIDS, and explaining how to use them.
By infallibly declaring that condoms not only don't work, but increase the risk of AIDS, the Pope is personally responsible for the deaths of thousands, if not millions, particularly in Africa. And he declared that because of his own puritanical view.
Now you can talk.
Studies generally conclude that two parent households are the most stable environment in which to raise a child.
I agree.
However, we really don't have much data on two-parent households where both parents are of the same gender. I certainly don't know of any studies about the effect of casual sex before settling down into that two-parent household, or of open marriages of two parents, or of any of the other things you'd want to prevent.
Yet it is these same values which drive people to deliberately deny gays the right to marry. Unless you're deluded enough to think that gays can become straight or abstinent (in which case, studies show you're wrong), the choice is either to marry each other, to enter a false heterosexual marriage (what kind of parents would they be, then?), or to never create a stable family unit at all.
But that's just homosexuality, which is hardly the only thing the sex police want to repress.
Is it social progress to promote the spread of STDs via non-monogamous intercourse?
No one is promoting STDs themselves, but remember: Abstinence doesn't work. More specifically, abstinence works, but no one does it. Thus, if your goal is to limit the spread of STDs, give people a proper sex education. That's proper condom use (along with other contraceptives), how to get tested, what to watch for, etc. You can tell people to abstain if you want, but if you actually care about preventing STDs and unwanted pregnancies, you have to also teach about safe sex.
Granted, we do get more data for epidemiological models this way, but I thought we had left involuntary medical experimentation behind us.
And what's involuntary about it, unless you mean to imply that all extramarital sex is rape?
Now, if you personally want to limit your own sexual experience to missionary position, in the dark, with your spouse, with the sole intent of having children, that's fine. I think you're missing out, and I'm not sure it's healthy, but that's your loss.
I also feel sorry for your children, who will grow up thinking of sex as a dirty thing, something to be ashamed of, unwanted urges they feel guilty for having, to be repressed and hidden away, instead of a natural, healthy part of being human, an expression of mutual affection, a wonderful, new world of sensation and possibility to explore... But how you raise your children is not my business. It may not be healthy, but you're (probably) not actually being abusive.
Where I get angry is when you start trying to get everyone else to f
If you actually bothered to RTFA, or even just TFFirstPost,
I also read the actual complaint and the mail exchange. Follow the link at the bottom of TFA.
The matter at hand is an accusation of sexual harassment...
And there's serious doubt as to the merit of that accusation. In fact, an initial investigation did not find the professor guilty of sexual harassment, and the single reason he was disciplined was this one event. But the woman didn't give him any indication that this was disturbing to her -- to the contrary, she laughed and requested a copy -- and was unwilling to pursue any resolution other than the direct, formal approach. Even her report about this -- that he shared it with her alone in her office -- is in dispute.
The professor also shared the paper with a dozen other colleagues, none of whom filed a complaint or gave him any indication that he'd done something wrong.
This is basically coming down to her word against his, but he's actually got a witness to back him up at least partly (they weren't alone in the room), and again, sharing a single, published, peer-review paper shouldn't qualify as sexual harassment.
Given all of this, the woman's reaction, and the President's, are both fairly unreasonable. It's difficult to find a motive other than that they either dislike him personally, or that they really do feel some "puritanical impulse to censor."
Oh, and there was a comment by one of the investigators about the paper being "smut", so I think I'll let my original comment stand as-is.
Stop, think, then post (maybe).
You're right in that I didn't do that, though I suspect my post would've been somewhat more buried if I had. But I stand by it -- whatever other factors were involved, there is a puritanical element here. Peer-reviewed literature is not "smut", even if it makes you personally uncomfortable about female bats' ability to perform fellatio during intercourse.
ActiveX was technically superior to the competition (Java) in regards to execution speed and a (Windows) compatibility.
Key word there. I was advocating implementing platform-specific solutions until someone mentioned that GStreamer already handles the appropriate backends on all platforms, making even that excuse weak. However, ActiveX requires platform-specific content, while this wouldn't.
There is no magical "play H.264 as per for HTML5" function call that Mozilla decided not to use. They still have to write the code, test it and, most importantly, support it in future versions.
Which they can do once for "play anything GStreamer supports," which would cover Theora, VP8 if it's ever opened, and everything else. It would also allow codec development to happen independently of browser development.
the failure to produce/include code for/into a free software project is not a restriction. Hindrance maybe.
What I'm getting from you and others is that it's more than your unwillingness to do it yourself. I'm actually getting the distinct impression that even if there was a magical playAllCodecs() library call you could make today, you wouldn't do it. Even if someone else did 100% of the work, you'd reject it out of hand, just so H.264 doesn't win.
Be sure to tell them how to turn off the various data collection features.
Sure -- it's right there in options.
Otherwise it's a decent browser.
I love it, but it's far from perfect. One of these days, I'll write my own...
The internet isn't flooded with complaints about the choice for IE9 or Safari, just about Firefox.
Mostly because we expect more from Firefox. Also because there aren't currently any major video services which provide an HTML5 viewer with Theora-only content.
Last I recall the same was said for JPEG2000, that hasn't gone anywhere and the internet world is still turning.
Was it really? Because I see a ton of H.264 content, and I don't see -- can't ever remember seeing -- tons of jpeg2k content.
The Ubuntu that everyone and their dog downloads will not have H.264 bundled or available for free and legal download.
My mistake... unless, of course, it happens to be installed on a computer with an nVidia card. Then again, I don't advocate that Ubuntu to ordinary users -- I tell them to buy a computer with Ubuntu preloaded.
So was using ActiveX, calling out to native code in a controlled manner.
Do I really have to spell out how an arbitrary native-code plugin system is different than a specified and controlled codec system? That's a bit like comparing the image tag to ActiveX just because a browser might link against a local image-processing library.
Let me ask you: Does Firefox implement its own printing system? I was under the assumption that they used whatever the native OS did. Same for windowing. Same for audio output. And apparently, Firefox is implementing WebGL -- surely that's evil native code that shouldn't be allowed?
The fact that you want to sabotage the stated goal of a project you aren't even using says a lot about you.
Let's actually find a manifesto to work from, because I can't imagine "refusing to use the capabilities of the host OS" was ever Firefox's goal. The closest I can find is "Meet the world’s best browser, made just the way you like it."
Well, except it's not just the way I like it, because some asshat decided I shouldn't be able to watch H.264 videos.
And since this is a primary reason I'm not using it, why would you dismiss my opinion out of hand as a "non-user"?
At the end of the day companies get a free pass when they make political decisions for competitive reasons and FLOSS gets pounded into the ground by non-users.
Well, except the FLOSS which does it right. Like, say, Chromium -- I can link it against ffmpeg if I'm in a country which doesn't have those restrictions, or I can download Google Chrome. But Theora also works.
Or, say, mplayer. Not only can I download versions with or without the restricted codecs, but I can even use my native H.264 decoder.
At the end of the day, you're trying to promote open-ness by adding restrictions. That makes about as much sense as a suicide-bombing pacifist, and users will perceive it in about the same way.
If it makes you feel better, I hate IE9 largely for other reasons, and I won't use Safari so long as I have free alternatives. Instead, I'll send users to Chrome, where these things Just Work.
Seriously, grow up. As the paper in question demonstrates, the animal kingdom clearly has at least as many kinks as us humans do. It's not "sinful." Far from it -- if you believe in a deity, it seems obvious that this deity heartily approves of sex in all kinds of variety.
Or, if you can't deal with that, fine, believe whatever you want -- but stop retarding scientific and social progress with your puritanical ideals.
And there is nothing stopping Microsoft and Apple from implementing Theora. However you don't seem to demand that their give up their business decisions to do it.
I would rather they support Theora, and I would rather Firefox support H.264. Right now, H.264 destroys Theora technologically, and there's tons of content in H.264, including content directly from most camcorders.
Why then is it ok to demand that Mozilla fuck with portability,
GStreamer is portable.
user friendliness (there won't always be a H.264 decoder on the host
So it's better to not have a feature at all than to sometimes have a feature? How the fuck is that user-friendly?
Oh, and with Ubuntu's support, it's official: All major modern OSes have built-in H.264 decoders. Most modern desktops come with hardware H.264 decoder support. This is a bit like whining that Firefox doesn't support Windows 98 anymore.
and compromise their goals in regards to openness?
That's what it really comes down to, isn't it? But how about my freedom as a user? Here's my current choices:
Don't watch YouTube.
Watch YouTube with the proprietary Adobe Flash player.
Watch YouTube in HTML5 with the proprietary H.264 codec, on a browser other than Firefox.
Option #1 is what you seem to be demanding, unless you're seriously advocating #2. Between #2 and #3, the choice seems pretty clear -- but it would be nice to have the option to watch it with Firefox.
In any case, this places the choice back in the hands of the user. I'm sorry, but "open-ness" means choice. It doesn't mean forcing the user to go with the "more open" option.
It's also the right technical choice, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not. Calling out to a separate, native library allows decoders to be implemented in hardware, or at least be hardware-accelerated. Thus, even if people implement hardware Theora decoders capable of full, beautiful 1080p, either Firefox has to implement direct support for every chip, or they have to call out to some native library anyway.
The fact that you're willing to sabotage Firefox technologically for political reasons says a lot about you, and it's a big reason why I'm not using Firefox anymore.
The way you deal with stupid laws is you stop voting for Republicans and Democrats.
Great! Got a third option for me?
No?
Constructive criticism is helpful. Key word is "constructive." You're just criticizing.
Basically, deal with it.
In other words, bend over and take it? No thanks.
Which, again, leaves you with the option of not buying the car.
This is where the analogy breaks down, because again, that's not good enough when this is both a huge force in the market and a disturbing trend in the industry.
Remember the browser wars? I always had the option of not using IE, but Firefox only really became viable -- let alone Chrome and Opera -- when we started convincing enough of the general population to switch. Even then, every IE user was a reason for me to have to spend an extra 20% of my time (at least), on every web app I develop, dealing with IE bullshit.
Whether or not I buy it, it does affect me.
Of course, if you really don't like what I'm saying, you don't have to read or reply. Why does it bother you so much that it bothers me?
I think Volvo already makes a car basically like this--no hood and it can only be serviced by authorized dealers.... Am I hurt by this in some way....
I didn't know Volvo was doing it too... But no, not particularly, because the vast majority of the market is not doing this. While Apple doesn't have a majority yet, they've been steadily growing in volume, hype, and individual, targeted apps -- all of which are cause for concern.
Fine by me. The more jackoffs who flood the iPad/iPhone market to code leave more jobs available for guys like me.
That's a bit arrogant. Yes, in the short term, they leave jobs open for you. In the long term, they erode platforms like the PC, maybe eventually the Web, and those jobs they've left open start disappearing.
At the end of the day, in any government or market where "the people" dictate things (by their vote or their pocket books), we're all slaves in some way to the stupid fucking whims of the uneducated masses.
Solution: Educate the masses. I can't believe you want me to shut up about this, instead of trying to convince at least some of those masses to change their minds.
I think what everyone here is afraid of is some monopoly of the iPad and iPhone.
It doesn't even have to be a monopoly. IE doesn't have to be even 50% marketshare to make every web developer's life miserable. Push it below 20% and you might get away with ignoring it, but that's not going to happen for a long time.
There's plenty of competition out there
And I am doing what I can to ensure the competition wins.
What I see is the general bitching when it comes to Apple's stuff is that geeks DO love it and want it, but they want it their way and they seem to feel that stupid sense of entitlement.
I don't think I've ever explicitly said that, and in fact, I've said the opposite -- I don't want it, because it's missing that critical feature.
What you might be sensing, or actually reading, is that I see wasted potential. I see individual things Apple does that I like and want, but because of a broken patent system, I'll have to wait decades for -- the magnetic power plug on Macbooks, for example. And the iPhone does have a lot of potential, which is being killed by restricting it that much.
Yes, there is competition, and yes, I'm hoping the competition does better. No, I'm not in any way demanding that Apple change what it's doing -- but I still don't have to like it.
And right now, Apple is the single greatest threat to an industry, profession, and culture that I love. Maybe I am overreacting. Maybe you're right, and it's not actually a threat. I'm still not going to take it lying down -- nor am I going to just bend over and take it if they win, as they have with the DMCA.
Slashdot Mirror
Other religions don't consider mere depiction to be blasphemy, so I don't think it would help so much to illustrate your point: Most religions don't have their followers send death threats because of mere blasphemy, at least not anymore.
A better example would be South Park. While it's been pulled before, the Super Best Friends episode aired unedited, as did many other episodes blaspheming Christianity, Scientology, Buddhism, Mormonism, pretty much every major religion. But only Islam actually sent death threats and got South Park censored.
If you know he's imaginary, why would you need him anymore? Why does our hypothetical Christian need an imaginary friend to tell him not to be an asshat?
Please explain how "Draw Mohammed Day" was done for commercial purposes.
I grew up around Windows, and then discovered Unix. It's unbelievable how bad a commandline DOS is. Even the NT commandline still sucks.
There isn't even a public beta, let alone source code. Sorry, but it's a lot easier to get excited about this stuff than a bunch of screenshots.
And now that Steam is being ported to Linux and OS X, will this project be portable? Will it be open source? Will it integrate with local package managers, or other distribution systems?
If police came knocking on my door and said I'm under investigation for downloading child porn, you think it would be ok for me to say "don't worry, it was a mistake and I'm going to be deleting it soon" and they wouldn't want my computer and hard drives to investigate it?
Sure, they'd want it. But I also don't think it should be a crime to possess child porn, and the attempt to censor it has a corrosive effect on freedom of speech and net neutrality.
If someone's dick ended up in my rectum, I also wouldn't consider the possibility that it's in any way analogous to someone maybe spying on my fucking zoom levels.
Come on, people -- we even take a sane position towards Microsoft these days.
Chromium is an open-source project. Write a patch and see what happens.
And if you really insist it must be deliberate, please explain how spying on your fucking zoom level, and storing it in a local file which is never sent over any network, is so dangerous.
I just reproduced it in the exact same beta on Ubuntu. Steps are:
And people, please. What happened to "never ascribe to malice"? Chromium is an open-source project -- if you have to, fix it yourself, I have little doubt that patch would make it into the official Google Chrome.
Firefox would have to shred(1) or zero out the file.
And then there's journals.
Still, truncating the file makes recovery much more difficult, and makes it so that any process can reclaim it, not just Firefox. Fortunately, it's not that difficult to do it yourself -- just run VACUUM in sqlite.
But this guy isn't helping matters by using the words "conservative" and "extremist" together.
Even when they're absolutely accurate and appropriate?
He did that on purpose, and it was meant to polarize...
If you say so. If I was a conservative, I imagine I'd still think this is appropriate -- just as if I was a Muslim, I wouldn't object to the term "Islamic extremists" when appropriate.
In fact, let's run with that analogy. I don't care what the political situation is, if you shout "Allahu Akbar" and then blow yourself up in a crowded area, you're an Islamic extremist -- and that's the nice way of putting it. You're also a terrorist and a killer.
Similarly, if you try to revise history and education to fit your neo-conservative agenda (isn't that an oxy-moron?), and you do it to such an extreme that even Orwell would blush, you're a conservative extremist -- and that's the nice way of putting it. You're also either delusional or a liar, probably both.
If you're a conservative, and you don't want people to be able to "score cheap points" in this wholly legitimate way, you need to speak out, loudly, about what your fellow conservatives are doing. The silence from the majority of conservatives on this issue speaks volumes, just as the silence of the majority of Muslims on Islamic terrorism and Sharia law.
Did you even look in options? Turn off "search suggestions". That's the feature that relies on this information being sent to Google.
Please, please stop spreading Microsoft's FUD.
I play an h264 movie with a fresh copy of Ubuntu 10.04 and it does it's apt-get magic
I'm guessing that's after you had to click through something about non-free codecs.
I can also install "alternate" video players and also be immediately be in business.
Sure, but that's hardly an endorsement from Ubuntu.
If we were able to "reboot" the internet, xml wouldn't exist.
In that sense, it seems a bit like C. If we were to "reboot" the software world, C wouldn't exist, and we'd (hopefully) have something better in its place.
But if you're going to replace it, have something better to replace it with.
Let's dissect this:
I am one of the world's leading experts on markup languages. I'll start there. I'm a 20-year veteran of desktop publishing...
I'm big and important. Sounds familiar, actually. Here's what Jerry Taylor had to say about himself:
I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.
Years of experience doesn't automatically make you an expert, as Mr. Taylor's record shows.
A markup language is predicated on the idea that the markup is an exception in a river of text. That is, the markup is a departure from the state that existed at the time the markup was encountered.
What about XML prevents it from being used in exactly that way?
Another tenet of a markup language is that only the syntax is specified. The semantics of what the markup means is implicit (HTML) or described earlier (Scribe) or some combination of the two (CSS).
Given this, what is problematic about a generic markup language?
a pure ASCII text file is a valid example of any markup language.
Bullshit, and HTML is the perfect example. Even if you ignore all the stuff the standards ask you to add -- even HTML4 wants a DOCTYPE at the top -- anywhere I want to use the < character, I have to escape it. This is true of any markup. (Plain text really doesn't count as a "markup language" in its own right, as it provides no means of, oh, marking things up.)
So this "expert" is factually wrong -- or at best, exaggerating on one of his main points. The blog itself is hardly unbiased. On to the next:
XML is most often used as a kind of container to hold structured data of some kind.
In this case, I would agree that there are much better choices. Depending on the data, I might use JSON, Yaml, or separate out the binary bits into a separate file, or a custom format if I actually need vertical performance.
There is one big problem with XML as a container. Its syntax, which is borrowed from HTML and SGML, involves angle brackets and a begin/end paradigm. The problem with this is that you can't embed similar data inside the XML file without escaping all the angle brackets.
That's true of using any markup language to hold structured data, including embedding source code in a string in source code. So what?
It also makes it essentially impossible to embed binary data in an XML file because you can't know whether or not to escape the XML sequences within the binary data (you should NOT, if the binary data is to be respected).
What? No, you should, so that the binary data will be extracted as a raw string. That said, I don't think XML was ever designed to handle binary data -- the only ways it currently does is as a Base64-encoded string.
This is why, for instance, both OOXML and OpenDocument are apparently stored as a zipfile containing several XML documents and several binary files, where the binary files represent images. This makes sense, and it's more or less the same structure as HTML.
There are many other approaches to file formats which might have been better choices. For example, instead of a begin/end paradigm, specifying type and length data allows unambiguous parsing.
It also sacrifices the ability of humans to edit and debug the data with a text editor, as the article says:
It is not, however, easy to comp
Gotta love the evil conservative hyperbole there.
No one is implying that all conservatives are evil. That's why it said this:
The alterations and fallacies made by these extremist conservatives are offensive to our communities and inaccurate of our nation's diverse history.
Frankly, if you've looked at the changes suggested, anyone in favor of these is an extremist. The best you could say is that they're not truly a conservative, as they're advocating wholesale revision to the point of making shit up. Here, TFA sums it up neatly:
The Texas recommendations... include adding language saying the country's Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles and a new section on "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s." That would include positive references to the Moral Majority, the National Rifle Association and the Contract with America, the congressional GOP manifesto from the 1990s.
The amendments to the state's curriculum standards also minimize Thomas Jefferson's role in world and U.S. history because he advocated the separation of church and state, and require that students learn about "the unintended consequences" of affirmative action and Title IX, the landmark federal law that bans gender discrimination in education programs and activities.
If you don't already see that for the steaming pile of bullshit it is, let me break it down for you:
the country's Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles
"Lighthouses are more useful than churches." -- Ben Franklin.
Thomas Jefferson had some stronger words about the Christian faith in particular, but I couldn't find them offhand. No, these men were largely deists, making this an outright lie. The most charitable interpretation you could make is that they were guided by Christian principles, even if they weren't Christian, but that's obviously mistaken at best -- the Bible itself is clear about submitting to authority, that any Earthly authority (like, say, the British King) was placed there by God. No, they were guided largely by ideas floating around the world at the time, many dating back to the Greeks -- books like Plato's Republic, not the Holy Bible.
...a new section on "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s." That would include positive references to the Moral Majority, the National Rifle Association and the Contract with America, the congressional GOP manifesto from the 1990s.
Hardly nonpartisan. I suppose you're going to tell me that the books are currently favorable to modern liberals? I'd say that this is pretty damning evidence of these being not just extremists, but conservative extremists.
The amendments to the state's curriculum standards also minimize Thomas Jefferson's role in world and U.S. history because he advocated the separation of church and state...
Can't have that, can we? It's only one of the pillars of the Great American Experiment, a prerequisite for religious freedom and expression. I very much doubt anyone writing this is a current member of the Church of England, are they? Then they owe their freedom to practice their current religion to Thomas Jefferson.
...and require that students learn about "the unintended consequences" of affirmative action and Title IX, the landmark federal law that bans gender discrimination in education programs and activities.
Are they really suggesting that banning gender discrimination was a bad idea? If you needed an example of why Yee said, "some Texas politicians may want to set their educational standards back 50 years," this is it.
I have to imagine that most conservatives would be ashamed to be associated with drivel like this. In light of that, I think the sentence you quoted is entirely true and warranted, as written:
The alterations and fallacies made by these extremist conservatives are offensive to our communities and inaccurate of our nation's diverse history.
[citation needed]
One of the facets of sin is that you must be conscious of the act being wrong for it to be sinful.
Oh? Well, I'm not conscious of any sex act between consenting adults being sinful. I guess I'm exempt, too. Cool!
I'm not sure what 'social progress' is inhibited by the puritanical view that sex is only appropriate between husband and wife while being open to producing children.
Um. Sex education, for starters?
Consider the blatant lie the Pope told recently, backed up by that puritanical view -- that condoms increase the risk of AIDS. If I recall, he did this wearing his infallibility hat.
Studies...
Yeah, you don't get to talk about studies yet. Studies show that condoms are effective -- not just mechanically effective, but effective on a large scale in that no, abstinence-only education results in more teen pregnancies. In other words, the infallible Pope is factually wrong. Given that, yes, we should be distributing condoms to people at risk of AIDS, and explaining how to use them.
By infallibly declaring that condoms not only don't work, but increase the risk of AIDS, the Pope is personally responsible for the deaths of thousands, if not millions, particularly in Africa. And he declared that because of his own puritanical view.
Now you can talk.
Studies generally conclude that two parent households are the most stable environment in which to raise a child.
I agree.
However, we really don't have much data on two-parent households where both parents are of the same gender. I certainly don't know of any studies about the effect of casual sex before settling down into that two-parent household, or of open marriages of two parents, or of any of the other things you'd want to prevent.
Yet it is these same values which drive people to deliberately deny gays the right to marry. Unless you're deluded enough to think that gays can become straight or abstinent (in which case, studies show you're wrong), the choice is either to marry each other, to enter a false heterosexual marriage (what kind of parents would they be, then?), or to never create a stable family unit at all.
But that's just homosexuality, which is hardly the only thing the sex police want to repress.
Is it social progress to promote the spread of STDs via non-monogamous intercourse?
No one is promoting STDs themselves, but remember: Abstinence doesn't work. More specifically, abstinence works, but no one does it. Thus, if your goal is to limit the spread of STDs, give people a proper sex education. That's proper condom use (along with other contraceptives), how to get tested, what to watch for, etc. You can tell people to abstain if you want, but if you actually care about preventing STDs and unwanted pregnancies, you have to also teach about safe sex.
Granted, we do get more data for epidemiological models this way, but I thought we had left involuntary medical experimentation behind us.
And what's involuntary about it, unless you mean to imply that all extramarital sex is rape?
Now, if you personally want to limit your own sexual experience to missionary position, in the dark, with your spouse, with the sole intent of having children, that's fine. I think you're missing out, and I'm not sure it's healthy, but that's your loss.
I also feel sorry for your children, who will grow up thinking of sex as a dirty thing, something to be ashamed of, unwanted urges they feel guilty for having, to be repressed and hidden away, instead of a natural, healthy part of being human, an expression of mutual affection, a wonderful, new world of sensation and possibility to explore... But how you raise your children is not my business. It may not be healthy, but you're (probably) not actually being abusive.
Where I get angry is when you start trying to get everyone else to f
If you actually bothered to RTFA, or even just TFFirstPost,
I also read the actual complaint and the mail exchange. Follow the link at the bottom of TFA.
The matter at hand is an accusation of sexual harassment...
And there's serious doubt as to the merit of that accusation. In fact, an initial investigation did not find the professor guilty of sexual harassment, and the single reason he was disciplined was this one event. But the woman didn't give him any indication that this was disturbing to her -- to the contrary, she laughed and requested a copy -- and was unwilling to pursue any resolution other than the direct, formal approach. Even her report about this -- that he shared it with her alone in her office -- is in dispute.
The professor also shared the paper with a dozen other colleagues, none of whom filed a complaint or gave him any indication that he'd done something wrong.
This is basically coming down to her word against his, but he's actually got a witness to back him up at least partly (they weren't alone in the room), and again, sharing a single, published, peer-review paper shouldn't qualify as sexual harassment.
Given all of this, the woman's reaction, and the President's, are both fairly unreasonable. It's difficult to find a motive other than that they either dislike him personally, or that they really do feel some "puritanical impulse to censor."
Oh, and there was a comment by one of the investigators about the paper being "smut", so I think I'll let my original comment stand as-is.
Stop, think, then post (maybe).
You're right in that I didn't do that, though I suspect my post would've been somewhat more buried if I had. But I stand by it -- whatever other factors were involved, there is a puritanical element here. Peer-reviewed literature is not "smut", even if it makes you personally uncomfortable about female bats' ability to perform fellatio during intercourse.
And yet, you haven't refuted my point. Are you actually going to tell me that XML is worse than HTML?
ActiveX was technically superior to the competition (Java) in regards to execution speed and a (Windows) compatibility.
Key word there. I was advocating implementing platform-specific solutions until someone mentioned that GStreamer already handles the appropriate backends on all platforms, making even that excuse weak. However, ActiveX requires platform-specific content, while this wouldn't.
There is no magical "play H.264 as per for HTML5" function call that Mozilla decided not to use. They still have to write the code, test it and, most importantly, support it in future versions.
Which they can do once for "play anything GStreamer supports," which would cover Theora, VP8 if it's ever opened, and everything else. It would also allow codec development to happen independently of browser development.
the failure to produce/include code for/into a free software project is not a restriction. Hindrance maybe.
What I'm getting from you and others is that it's more than your unwillingness to do it yourself. I'm actually getting the distinct impression that even if there was a magical playAllCodecs() library call you could make today, you wouldn't do it. Even if someone else did 100% of the work, you'd reject it out of hand, just so H.264 doesn't win.
Be sure to tell them how to turn off the various data collection features.
Sure -- it's right there in options.
Otherwise it's a decent browser.
I love it, but it's far from perfect. One of these days, I'll write my own...
Exactly what every other H.264 advocate says...
And when did I become an H.264 advocate?
The internet isn't flooded with complaints about the choice for IE9 or Safari, just about Firefox.
Mostly because we expect more from Firefox. Also because there aren't currently any major video services which provide an HTML5 viewer with Theora-only content.
Last I recall the same was said for JPEG2000, that hasn't gone anywhere and the internet world is still turning.
Was it really? Because I see a ton of H.264 content, and I don't see -- can't ever remember seeing -- tons of jpeg2k content.
The Ubuntu that everyone and their dog downloads will not have H.264 bundled or available for free and legal download.
My mistake... unless, of course, it happens to be installed on a computer with an nVidia card. Then again, I don't advocate that Ubuntu to ordinary users -- I tell them to buy a computer with Ubuntu preloaded.
So was using ActiveX, calling out to native code in a controlled manner.
Do I really have to spell out how an arbitrary native-code plugin system is different than a specified and controlled codec system? That's a bit like comparing the image tag to ActiveX just because a browser might link against a local image-processing library.
Let me ask you: Does Firefox implement its own printing system? I was under the assumption that they used whatever the native OS did. Same for windowing. Same for audio output. And apparently, Firefox is implementing WebGL -- surely that's evil native code that shouldn't be allowed?
The fact that you want to sabotage the stated goal of a project you aren't even using says a lot about you.
Let's actually find a manifesto to work from, because I can't imagine "refusing to use the capabilities of the host OS" was ever Firefox's goal. The closest I can find is "Meet the world’s best browser, made just the way you like it."
Well, except it's not just the way I like it, because some asshat decided I shouldn't be able to watch H.264 videos.
And since this is a primary reason I'm not using it, why would you dismiss my opinion out of hand as a "non-user"?
At the end of the day companies get a free pass when they make political decisions for competitive reasons and FLOSS gets pounded into the ground by non-users.
Well, except the FLOSS which does it right. Like, say, Chromium -- I can link it against ffmpeg if I'm in a country which doesn't have those restrictions, or I can download Google Chrome. But Theora also works.
Or, say, mplayer. Not only can I download versions with or without the restricted codecs, but I can even use my native H.264 decoder.
At the end of the day, you're trying to promote open-ness by adding restrictions. That makes about as much sense as a suicide-bombing pacifist, and users will perceive it in about the same way.
If it makes you feel better, I hate IE9 largely for other reasons, and I won't use Safari so long as I have free alternatives. Instead, I'll send users to Chrome, where these things Just Work.
Me and all the fruit bats, apparently!
Seriously, grow up. As the paper in question demonstrates, the animal kingdom clearly has at least as many kinks as us humans do. It's not "sinful." Far from it -- if you believe in a deity, it seems obvious that this deity heartily approves of sex in all kinds of variety.
Or, if you can't deal with that, fine, believe whatever you want -- but stop retarding scientific and social progress with your puritanical ideals.
And there is nothing stopping Microsoft and Apple from implementing Theora. However you don't seem to demand that their give up their business decisions to do it.
I would rather they support Theora, and I would rather Firefox support H.264. Right now, H.264 destroys Theora technologically, and there's tons of content in H.264, including content directly from most camcorders.
Why then is it ok to demand that Mozilla fuck with portability,
GStreamer is portable.
user friendliness (there won't always be a H.264 decoder on the host
So it's better to not have a feature at all than to sometimes have a feature? How the fuck is that user-friendly?
Oh, and with Ubuntu's support, it's official: All major modern OSes have built-in H.264 decoders. Most modern desktops come with hardware H.264 decoder support. This is a bit like whining that Firefox doesn't support Windows 98 anymore.
and compromise their goals in regards to openness?
That's what it really comes down to, isn't it? But how about my freedom as a user? Here's my current choices:
Option #1 is what you seem to be demanding, unless you're seriously advocating #2. Between #2 and #3, the choice seems pretty clear -- but it would be nice to have the option to watch it with Firefox.
In any case, this places the choice back in the hands of the user. I'm sorry, but "open-ness" means choice. It doesn't mean forcing the user to go with the "more open" option.
It's also the right technical choice, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not. Calling out to a separate, native library allows decoders to be implemented in hardware, or at least be hardware-accelerated. Thus, even if people implement hardware Theora decoders capable of full, beautiful 1080p, either Firefox has to implement direct support for every chip, or they have to call out to some native library anyway.
The fact that you're willing to sabotage Firefox technologically for political reasons says a lot about you, and it's a big reason why I'm not using Firefox anymore.
The way you deal with stupid laws is you stop voting for Republicans and Democrats.
Great! Got a third option for me?
No?
Constructive criticism is helpful. Key word is "constructive." You're just criticizing.
Basically, deal with it.
In other words, bend over and take it? No thanks.
Which, again, leaves you with the option of not buying the car.
This is where the analogy breaks down, because again, that's not good enough when this is both a huge force in the market and a disturbing trend in the industry.
Remember the browser wars? I always had the option of not using IE, but Firefox only really became viable -- let alone Chrome and Opera -- when we started convincing enough of the general population to switch. Even then, every IE user was a reason for me to have to spend an extra 20% of my time (at least), on every web app I develop, dealing with IE bullshit.
Whether or not I buy it, it does affect me.
Of course, if you really don't like what I'm saying, you don't have to read or reply. Why does it bother you so much that it bothers me?
I think Volvo already makes a car basically like this--no hood and it can only be serviced by authorized dealers.... Am I hurt by this in some way....
I didn't know Volvo was doing it too... But no, not particularly, because the vast majority of the market is not doing this. While Apple doesn't have a majority yet, they've been steadily growing in volume, hype, and individual, targeted apps -- all of which are cause for concern.
Fine by me. The more jackoffs who flood the iPad/iPhone market to code leave more jobs available for guys like me.
That's a bit arrogant. Yes, in the short term, they leave jobs open for you. In the long term, they erode platforms like the PC, maybe eventually the Web, and those jobs they've left open start disappearing.
At the end of the day, in any government or market where "the people" dictate things (by their vote or their pocket books), we're all slaves in some way to the stupid fucking whims of the uneducated masses.
Solution: Educate the masses. I can't believe you want me to shut up about this, instead of trying to convince at least some of those masses to change their minds.
I think what everyone here is afraid of is some monopoly of the iPad and iPhone.
It doesn't even have to be a monopoly. IE doesn't have to be even 50% marketshare to make every web developer's life miserable. Push it below 20% and you might get away with ignoring it, but that's not going to happen for a long time.
There's plenty of competition out there
And I am doing what I can to ensure the competition wins.
What I see is the general bitching when it comes to Apple's stuff is that geeks DO love it and want it, but they want it their way and they seem to feel that stupid sense of entitlement.
I don't think I've ever explicitly said that, and in fact, I've said the opposite -- I don't want it, because it's missing that critical feature.
What you might be sensing, or actually reading, is that I see wasted potential. I see individual things Apple does that I like and want, but because of a broken patent system, I'll have to wait decades for -- the magnetic power plug on Macbooks, for example. And the iPhone does have a lot of potential, which is being killed by restricting it that much.
Yes, there is competition, and yes, I'm hoping the competition does better. No, I'm not in any way demanding that Apple change what it's doing -- but I still don't have to like it.
And right now, Apple is the single greatest threat to an industry, profession, and culture that I love. Maybe I am overreacting. Maybe you're right, and it's not actually a threat. I'm still not going to take it lying down -- nor am I going to just bend over and take it if they win, as they have with the DMCA.