I used both WebCT and Blackboard quite extensively, and I absolutely hated CebCT's user interface. Blackboard is slightly better. The only thing I prefer about WebCT is that you can work around it by creating content (including quiz questions and quizzes) offline and upload them to the system. I haven't figure out how to do that with Blackboard yet.
Although Windows isn't "complete" immediately after installing it, I can at least take comfort in the fact that the user interface itself works quite well.
Actually, it's the user interface I hate most about windows. Most of the software I use on Linux is now actually ported to Windows, so lack of applications is no longer a problem, but the user interface in Windows suck *#$@! That said, I don't particularly enjoy KDE either, but it's still miles ahead of windows. Also, on Linux, I don't have to use KDE.
I don't know anything about this particular deal, but my guess the answer to your question is "yes".
You will definitely have to have some of OO on the pc, but with remote document storage, there is a lot of junk in any office suite that doesn't have to be stored locally at all. Some of it could be plugins that gets loaded only when you need them, some of the stuff would only run on the server.
I don't know about openoffice, but I always thought LyX would be an excellent candidate for runing over the net. LyX is basically a frontend to LaTeX. There is really no reason you couldn't run LaTeX (or any other engine of that type) on a remote server, store your documents on a remote server, and have only a small frontend client application on your computer.
With OO, the client will not be so small, but you can still store your documents, all export/import filters, printer drivers, hi-res fonts, clipart and lot of other junk remotely. Locally, you would just need the wordprocessor executable and screen fonts.
This is interesting. On Windows, you have Foxit. On OS X the Preview, on X11, ghostscript, xpdf, gpdf, kpdf and evince, at least. None of these does evrything Adobe Reader does, but they are all faster and smaller. I wonder how is this going to affect the pdf format.
Pdf files can do a lot of things. You can create interactive documents, with animations, scripted with javascript, you can embed movies into documents. Few examples, just from the top of my head:
I have seen much more and better ones, I just don't seem to be able to find them right now.
Most of these things will not work in any of the small pdf viewers. I wonder if as the small viewers become more common, authors will have to avoid using any advanced features of pdf, therefore effectively dumbing down the format.
There is another great feature of adobe reader, a feature most people don't know about. In adobe reader, you can annotate, comment, and even draw on pdf files. That is great, because I could send my pdf files to proofreaders, all they need to do is open them in reader and write their comments. Why don't people know about that? Because Adobe made it in such a way that you have to specifically enable it in each frigging document using the newest vestion of the frigging Acrobat Professional! That means if I make my document using pdflatex, it cannot be annotated, if you make your document using OpenOffice, it cannot be annotated. If you made your document using an older version of Acrobat, it cannot be annotated. And even if you used the right version of Acrobat but forgot to enable the annotation, it still cannot be annotated. As a result, very few documents you come across will have this enabled. So you have this great feature in reader which you can never use!
I wonder if competition from all these small pdf viewers will force Adobe to reconsider this IMHO very stupid decision and if they will enable annotations by default, disabling them perhaps only for encrypted/digitally signed documents.
That's another thing. Last 5 times I want to see a movie, I went home with a huge headache from the noise. The sound was incredibly loud. Once it was so loud several people went to complain, so they turned it down a little. Other time, in a different theater, they refused to turn it down, and about half of the visitors left during the movie.
Maybe I am just getting old, but it seems to me that the sound in movies is louder every year. No matter how old I am, when the movie starts and most people in the theater duck and start covering their ears, something is wrong.
Re:Talking out both sides of out mouths.
on
Pepping Up Windows
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Ok, when I install in Linux, where are my icons?
If you installed a package using your distro's package manager, they will be in the menus, where all the other icons are. If it's a command line application, there will be no icons, but it will be in your path, and your shell will include it in its tab completion mechanism.
Where did the installation go?
Two answers:
First: I don't care. I have the icons to start it from the GUI, it's in the PATH so I ca easily start it from the command line, why should I care where it is?
Second: unless you installed a package that was designed by some raving idiot, the installed files will be exactly where they belong to. Binaries in/usr/bin, libraries in/usr/lib, data ans shared config files in/usr/share, and so on. Unlike on Windows, where the installer dumps everything into some random directory, so you end up with your hard disk completely cluttered with junk after just a couple of months.
And if you really want to know where did the installed files go, most Linux package managers let you see the complete list of files installed by a package, with locations and everything. I don't see why a regular user would ever want to do that, but the option is there. You can also take a random file and ask which package did it come from.
It may be simple to some of you, but not to me. In windows it's easy to install and un-install.
For many applications in windows, you have to go to the Programs menu and find the "uninstall..." item. You click on that and hope you didn't accidentally erased the directory containing the application with its uninstall data in some mad attempt to clean your disk. I don't see what's so easy about that.
I have been using Linux and various other Unices for years. I actually never used windows seriously until my current job, I went straight from DOS to Unix, then to Solaris, and then to Linux, with couple of BSD flavors for short periods of time sprinkled here and there.
In my current job I have a windows laptop for my office computer. I suffered for a while with the user interface and lack of any decent software, but after a while I found and installed bunch of programs that made it actually possible for me to get my work done. Curiously enough, lot of them are the exact same programs I have been using on Linux for years. Now most of the time, my windows box feels sort of like my linux box at home, as long as I don't try to do something special, and as long as I don't need to interact with the actual system (configure things, etc.). The worst problem is keybindings. It seems that in windows, the system reserves many key combinations so I cannot use them for my custom keybindings. Unfortunately, many of those seem to be exactly the combinations I have been using for years in my own custom FVWM setup.
Here are the applications I use on windows:
1) cygwin. From that, I mostly use rxvt, bash or zsh (I am a zsh junkie, but bash seems to work better for me on windows), and grep, less and couple of similar basic commands. Oh, and ssh and ncftp.
2) VirtuaWin with several modules for desktop switching and some basic window managment. Can't be compared to FVWM, but at least makes the system usable.
3) TXMouse (http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/) for focus follow mouse and X11-like cut and paste. This is absolutely wonderful application, which I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion yet.
4) proTeXt (http://www.tug.org/protext/) for my TeX distro. I used TeXLive before, which had more packages, but proTeXt integrates with windows better, and is based on MikTeX. For some reason, almost all windows applications that use TeX in any way expect to find MikTeX, and come preconfigured for it. With TeXLive, I usually had to do whole bunch of changes.
5) Vim with LaTeX-suite. I have been using this for a while on Linux, and I was very pleased to discover that it works just as well on Windows.
6) IPE (http://ipe.compgeom.org/) for my drawings. Again something I have been using on Linux for a while.
7) LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) when I don't feel like editing TeX by hand. I used to use LyX quite a bit before discovering LaTeX-suite for vim. Now I find using vim much faster and more flexible, but I think LyX should definitely be mentioned in this discussion.
8) Treeline (http://www.bellz.org/treeline/) for quick outlining, planning, to-do lists, notes etc. This is the only program which I didn't use on Linux before, and which I picked specifically because it works on both Windows and Linux.
9) Gimp and Inkscape for any graphics work. I have those installed, but rarely use them on Windows. For some reason I prefer to wait till I get home. I guess for this type of work, the windows user interface still gets too much in the way. Maybe it's also because it's a laptop. Also, the MathMap plugin for Gimp doesn't work on windows, and I use it a lot.
Anyway, with these, I can get most of my work done without the os getting too much in the way. If I need something extra, or something unusual, I just wait and do it at home.
Who in the world moded that informative? The MS powertoys multiple desktop tool is incredibly bugy, and can't be compared to VirtuaWin. I used it for several months (it's still better than nothing) before discovering VirtuaWin, and I was cursing it several times a day.
I have only two minor problems with VirtuaWin. First, there doesn't seem to be a visual pager, like for example in Enlightement or FVWM. Second, every time I watch DVD on my laptop, the shortcut key I use for cycling desktops down (Ctrl-Alt-L) stops working. I have to logout and login again for it to start working. Shortcut for cycling desktops up (ctrl-alt-H) works fine. Luckily, I vary rarely watch DVD's on the laptop.
Why do you say US jurisdiction doesn't extend to Slovakia? Of course it does! US jurisdiction extends everywhere! (Except perhaps to the parts of former Yugoslavia that are under Russian jurisdiction, like Georgia and eastern Poland.)
WHY should the DNC be allowed to use photographs of dead soldiers in an anti-war screed? They will you know.
And so they should! If they believe that the soldiers should not have died the way they did, I see nothing wrong with using photographs of an actual event to illustrate and emphasize their point.
OR use their death to support an ideology they, and their families, vehemently disagree with.
Do you get it now?
I don't. Or maybe it's you who doesn't get it. Once we start using criteria like "which ideology is going to be supported by this picture" to regulate which picture could be taken or released, we are on a slippery slope towards censorship. And that is what people are outraged about.
Tell me again why you have the right to take photographs of dead men?
Because people have right to see what is happenning in a war their nation is involved in. Because only pictures like that can actually show people what war is about. Because only pictures like that can turn these men's sacrifice from an empty number in some official statistic into a real thing.
Freedom of the press, which includes the right to make grieving families even more uncomfortable?
Indeed. Freedom of press cannot stop because of concerns like this. Also, if the families are proud of their son's sacrifice, why should a picture of the son's coffins make them uncomfortable? If they argree with the ideals for which the men sacrificed their lives, such picture should make them proud. If they don't, that's another story. I would be much more offended by somebody trying to hide a death of my family member, or ignore it! Or turn it into some stupid statistic in some governmental records.
Sorry, but I see no need for taking pictures of dead soldiers. It's a pathetic attempt to use their sacrifice as a sounding board, and it's extremely distasteful.
Or maybe it's war that's extremely distasetful?
Would you say that photographers like Robert Capa should have been banned from taking all those pictures of dead and dying people, because it may offend somebody or make somebody uncomfortable?
It may be that they are getting confident. It may also be that they are beginning to panic. Or it may be a sign of some slight power shift in the leadership of the party. Then again, it could just be few isolated hard-liners in some ministry of information of whatever they call it trying to test water and see what can they get away with. Heck, this is Slashdot, one can even speculate about invisible hand of Microsoft trying to tip the ballance and then claim that with Windows, you can get much tighter controll of information than with Linux;)
Anyway, the point is without further information, all you can do is speculate. I don't follow Chinese politics, so I really don't know what's going on. The only fact is that this is happenning. My oppinion on that is it is quickly going to evolve into enormous stupid byrocratic hurdle, everybody will hate it, and eventually it will become another nail in the coffin of one party rule in China. It may take a long time, though.
Not everyone wants the "freedom" that the American military is exporting. Look at Iraq now for example. The constitution that they came up with is certainly not at all what the Americans wanted. Pure and simple, Iraqis don't want the "freedom" the Americans have. They want to live by their Islamic law. So let them. If you force "freedom" on Iraq, it is becomes something far more sinister; imperialism. Saying that the Americans need to export "freedom," where freedom is their particular implementation of it that the rest of the world may not agree with, is equivalent to saying that the Americans are better than everyone else and needs to take care of them. Wait, we've heard this line of reasoning before; it's the classic "White Man's Burden" argument for Europeans to justify conquering Africa, and it's been discredited already.
I mostly agree with you there. You cannot force freedom onto a society, the change has to come from within. You can influence it by helping to change their culture, but you cannot just storm in, shoot all the party officials, military and cops, and say to the people "now you be free!" (even though I must admit that shooting party officials sound like great fun, no matter which party). On the other hand, the problems in Iraq (and elsewhere) are caused not only by sudden American invasion, but are mostly inherited from centuries of European colonialism, and have a lot to do with the stupid way countries were created and borders were drawn when Europeans "pulled out".
Students in China did not "die for freedom" in Tian'an men Square. This is a Western myth. They were mere puppets, and their strings were being pulled by crime organizations and Western governments
At this moment I lost all respect for you. I have heard a *lot* of communist propaganda in my life (actually, at one point, I hade it my hobby to collect examples of that crap), and these three sentences are a prime shining example of it. They could be (and probably are, I bet) taken straight from a mouth of any communist ideologist, any official government speaker, any speech at a party conference.
I have been there too. I have heard my friends, my parents, my former teachers, many people I hold in very high regard, as well as myself, called puppets of western governments, criminals and who knows what. I did experience a large student protest against a communist rule. Luckily, in our case, the army refused to go against what they called "their own people", most of the population eventually joined the protest, the government resigned, and free elections followed. I personally don't know anybody, with the exception of few former communist bosses, who would regret it.
Russia has been in a shithole for the last 15 years, and is only beginning to climb out of it.
Believe me, Russia has been a shithole for much longer than 15 years. The main reason: decades of communist rule. If you think about it, Russia went from rather strict Tsarist rule, with wonderful and extremely rich culture, but with industry and economy in serious need of reforms, through brief period of attempted democracy, seriously hampered by an ongoing civil war, to nearly a century of communist dictatorship, its economy devastated by one 5-year plan after another. The World War 2 did not exactly help, either. The last time Russia has not been a shithole, at least as far as economy goes, was probably in the NEP years. But at least now, as you yourself said, they have a chance to climb out of it. And it's not because of some western intervention, that's because the people just got tired of living in a shithole, and decided to do something about it. And it was about time, because, IMHO, one of the greatest nations of the world, nation that gave us Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevski, Tschechov, Gorkij, Andreyev, Bulgakov, Zoshtsenko, and I could go for a long time, not even mentioning some of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in the history, should not live in a shithole!
"Slaves" of a communist regime? I grew up in a communist country, and while there were many things horribly wrong with that, it could hardly be compared to slavery. As a matter of fact, it was sometimes pretty hard to even find somebody working. A popular saying was that "the main principle of communism is simple: people pretend to work and the state pretend to pay them for it".
If you refer to GULAG and other prison camps, I highly doubt that any of these prisoners contributed in any way to the boosters that are currently in use (or perhaps any boosters at all).
I hate to be a Negative Nancy but Yet Another Email client? Why?
Because "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." (Michael Elkins, cca 1995)
Jokes aside, as far as I can tell, so far nobody managed to write a mail client that would have all the power and configurability of mutt or gnus, with a simple and easy to use gui. Maybe columba is the thing?
An analogy: imagine how unpleasant it would be if critical controls on cars varied from car to car. I mean, relocating the headlights is annoying enough, but what if each car shifted driver's position, steering, windshield and seating, and what order the pedals were in on the floor. Gas on left on Chevy's, on the right on cars made in Europe. Safety and user experience would plummet.
Actually, most OS's user interfaces are the same on this level, I mean things like driver position, steering, etc. All computers have keyboards that are very similar, rectangular screen. On the screen you have windows, each window has a sort of title bar, usually with buttons on it, frame, there is typically a menu bar (except sometimes the menu bar is at the top of the screen), menus work pretty much the same way, your data are in files on disk, sorted in folders or directories. The differences are more like location and lable on a cruise control button, radio, horn, maybe a shift stick etc. The problem is that user interface of a computer is much more complicated (they are used for many more purposes than cars), so the details become much more important.
This summer I drove a 4 weel drive pickup truck with a trailer (helping a friend with bales of hay) for the first time, and I did feel somewhat like using an unfamiliar OS or application. There wasn't that much to learn, but I wasn't used to it, which made it difficult (the fact that I could have made a lot of damage with it didn't really help).
As for the "horrible" GIMP interface, the main reason people have trouble with it seems to be the same as the reason Adobe radically changed the interface when they ported PS to windows. It's the fact that Windows (despite its name) is absolutely unable to do any real window managment at all. The design of Windows "window manager" practically didn't change since the old Windows 3.1 or whatever it was called. I mean the time when if you were very adventurous, you would have two application windows open at the same time, and maybe a dialog box. This part of Windows is what sucks the most, and long overdue for a major overhaul (another part is the stupid file system with all the drive letters and crap, but that doesn't get that much in the way as the lack of window managment).
Making your UI different so as not to be the same as photoshop is like making a car that uses a joystick to steer so that it's different from your competitors'.
Actually, GIMP's interface was intentionally designed to be very similar to photoshop. Photoshop on Mac, that is. The problem is the interface for Photoshop on Windows is completely different from the original Mac one. Can you figure out why? Hint: it has everything to do with the way Windows manages (or fails to manage) windows.
That's a problem with windows, not gimp. I hate using gimp on windows, and I hate using photoshop on windows, too. I have no problem whatsoever with the interface of gimp on X11 nor with the interface of PS on mac.
Slashdot Mirror
I used both WebCT and Blackboard quite extensively, and I absolutely hated CebCT's user interface. Blackboard is slightly better. The only thing I prefer about WebCT is that you can work around it by creating content (including quiz questions and quizzes) offline and upload them to the system. I haven't figure out how to do that with Blackboard yet.
Although Windows isn't "complete" immediately after installing it, I can at least take comfort in the fact that the user interface itself works quite well.
Actually, it's the user interface I hate most about windows. Most of the software I use on Linux is now actually ported to Windows, so lack of applications is no longer a problem, but the user interface in Windows suck *#$@! That said, I don't particularly enjoy KDE either, but it's still miles ahead of windows. Also, on Linux, I don't have to use KDE.
I don't know anything about this particular deal, but my guess the answer to your question is "yes".
You will definitely have to have some of OO on the pc, but with remote document storage, there is a lot of junk in any office suite that doesn't have to be stored locally at all. Some of it could be plugins that gets loaded only when you need them, some of the stuff would only run on the server.
I don't know about openoffice, but I always thought LyX would be an excellent candidate for runing over the net. LyX is basically a frontend to LaTeX. There is really no reason you couldn't run LaTeX (or any other engine of that type) on a remote server, store your documents on a remote server, and have only a small frontend client application on your computer.
With OO, the client will not be so small, but you can still store your documents, all export/import filters, printer drivers, hi-res fonts, clipart and lot of other junk remotely. Locally, you would just need the wordprocessor executable and screen fonts.
Yeah, take an empty sardines can and put it in the sink so that the water from the faucet falls on the half open lid...
As most of the workers don't have mental capability to think anyway, why waste money for walls?
This is interesting. On Windows, you have Foxit. On OS X the Preview, on X11, ghostscript, xpdf, gpdf, kpdf and evince, at least. None of these does evrything Adobe Reader does, but they are all faster and smaller. I wonder how is this going to affect the pdf format.
Pdf files can do a lot of things. You can create interactive documents, with animations, scripted with javascript, you can embed movies into documents. Few examples, just from the top of my head:
a calculator
Lorenz Attractor
I have seen much more and better ones, I just don't seem to be able to find them right now.
Most of these things will not work in any of the small pdf viewers. I wonder if as the small viewers become more common, authors will have to avoid using any advanced features of pdf, therefore effectively dumbing down the format.
There is another great feature of adobe reader, a feature most people don't know about. In adobe reader, you can annotate, comment, and even draw on pdf files. That is great, because I could send my pdf files to proofreaders, all they need to do is open them in reader and write their comments. Why don't people know about that? Because Adobe made it in such a way that you have to specifically enable it in each frigging document using the newest vestion of the frigging Acrobat Professional!
That means if I make my document using pdflatex, it cannot be annotated, if you make your document using OpenOffice, it cannot be annotated. If you made your document using an older version of Acrobat, it cannot be annotated. And even if you used the right version of Acrobat but forgot to enable the annotation, it still cannot be annotated. As a result, very few documents you come across will have this enabled. So you have this great feature in reader which you can never use!
I wonder if competition from all these small pdf viewers will force Adobe to reconsider this IMHO very stupid decision and if they will enable annotations by default, disabling them perhaps only for encrypted/digitally signed documents.
(sound quality *has* improved)
That's another thing. Last 5 times I want to see a movie, I went home with a huge headache from the noise. The sound was incredibly loud. Once it was so loud several people went to complain, so they turned it down a little. Other time, in a different theater, they refused to turn it down, and about half of the visitors left during the movie.
Maybe I am just getting old, but it seems to me that the sound in movies is louder every year. No matter how old I am, when the movie starts and most people in the theater duck and start covering their ears, something is wrong.
Ok, when I install in Linux, where are my icons?
/usr/bin, libraries in /usr/lib, data ans shared config files in /usr/share, and so on. Unlike on Windows, where the installer dumps everything into some random directory, so you end up with your hard disk completely cluttered with junk after just a couple of months.
..." item. You click on that and hope you didn't accidentally erased the directory containing the application with its uninstall data in some mad attempt to clean your disk. I don't see what's so easy about that.
If you installed a package using your distro's package manager, they will be in the menus, where all the other icons are. If it's a command line application, there will be no icons, but it will be in your path, and your shell will include it in its tab completion mechanism.
Where did the installation go?
Two answers:
First: I don't care. I have the icons to start it from the GUI, it's in the PATH so I ca easily start it from the command line, why should I care where it is?
Second: unless you installed a package that was designed by some raving idiot, the installed files will be exactly where they belong to. Binaries in
And if you really want to know where did the installed files go, most Linux package managers let you see the complete list of files installed by a package, with locations and everything. I don't see why a regular user would ever want to do that, but the option is there. You can also take a random file and ask which package did it come from.
It may be simple to some of you, but not to me. In windows it's easy to install and un-install.
For many applications in windows, you have to go to the Programs menu and find the "uninstall
I have been using Linux and various other Unices for years. I actually never used windows seriously until my current job, I went straight from DOS to Unix, then to Solaris, and then to Linux, with couple of BSD flavors for short periods of time sprinkled here and there.
In my current job I have a windows laptop for my office computer. I suffered for a while with the user interface and lack of any decent software, but after a while I found and installed bunch of programs that made it actually possible for me to get my work done. Curiously enough, lot of them are the exact same programs I have been using on Linux for years. Now most of the time, my windows box feels sort of like my linux box at home, as long as I don't try to do something special, and as long as I don't need to interact with the actual system (configure things, etc.). The worst problem is keybindings. It seems that in windows, the system reserves many key combinations so I cannot use them for my custom keybindings. Unfortunately, many of those seem to be exactly the combinations I have been using for years in my own custom FVWM setup.
Here are the applications I use on windows:
1) cygwin. From that, I mostly use rxvt, bash or zsh (I am a zsh junkie, but bash seems to work better for me on windows), and grep, less and couple of similar basic commands. Oh, and ssh and ncftp.
2) VirtuaWin with several modules for desktop switching and some basic window managment. Can't be compared to FVWM, but at least makes the system usable.
3) TXMouse (http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/) for focus follow mouse and X11-like cut and paste. This is absolutely wonderful application, which I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion yet.
4) proTeXt (http://www.tug.org/protext/) for my TeX distro. I used TeXLive before, which had more packages, but proTeXt integrates with windows better, and is based on MikTeX. For some reason, almost all windows applications that use TeX in any way expect to find MikTeX, and come preconfigured for it. With TeXLive, I usually had to do whole bunch of changes.
5) Vim with LaTeX-suite. I have been using this for a while on Linux, and I was very pleased to discover that it works just as well on Windows.
6) IPE (http://ipe.compgeom.org/) for my drawings. Again something I have been using on Linux for a while.
7) LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) when I don't feel like editing TeX by hand. I used to use LyX quite a bit before discovering LaTeX-suite for vim. Now I find using vim much faster and more flexible, but I think LyX should definitely be mentioned in this discussion.
8) Treeline (http://www.bellz.org/treeline/) for quick outlining, planning, to-do lists, notes etc. This is the only program which I didn't use on Linux before, and which I picked specifically because it works on both Windows and Linux.
9) Gimp and Inkscape for any graphics work. I have those installed, but rarely use them on Windows. For some reason I prefer to wait till I get home. I guess for this type of work, the windows user interface still gets too much in the way. Maybe it's also because it's a laptop. Also, the MathMap plugin for Gimp doesn't work on windows, and I use it a lot.
Anyway, with these, I can get most of my work done without the os getting too much in the way. If I need something extra, or something unusual, I just wait and do it at home.
Who in the world moded that informative? The MS powertoys multiple desktop tool is incredibly bugy, and can't be compared to VirtuaWin. I used it for several months (it's still better than nothing) before discovering VirtuaWin, and I was cursing it several times a day.
I have only two minor problems with VirtuaWin. First, there doesn't seem to be a visual pager, like for example in Enlightement or FVWM. Second, every time I watch DVD on my laptop, the shortcut key I use for cycling desktops down (Ctrl-Alt-L) stops working. I have to logout and login again for it to start working. Shortcut for cycling desktops up (ctrl-alt-H) works fine. Luckily, I vary rarely watch DVD's on the laptop.
You guys are trying to trick me! I know my geography!
Koenigsberg is the small country between Swizerland and Australia. It's famous for its casinos.
I realize I have been wrong about the Poland. What I meant was Latvia, Estonia or Finland, one of those Hungarian speaking countries.
Why do you say US jurisdiction doesn't extend to Slovakia? Of course it does! US jurisdiction extends everywhere! (Except perhaps to the parts of former Yugoslavia that are under Russian jurisdiction, like Georgia and eastern Poland.)
WHY should the DNC be allowed to use photographs of dead soldiers in an anti-war screed? They will you know.
And so they should! If they believe that the soldiers should not have died the way they did, I see nothing wrong with using photographs of an actual event to illustrate and emphasize their point.
OR use their death to support an ideology they, and their families, vehemently disagree with.
Do you get it now?
I don't. Or maybe it's you who doesn't get it. Once we start using criteria like "which ideology is going to be supported by this picture" to regulate which picture could be taken or released, we are on a slippery slope towards censorship. And that is what people are outraged about.
Tell me again why you have the right to take photographs of dead men?
Because people have right to see what is happenning in a war their nation is involved in. Because only pictures like that can actually show people what war is about. Because only pictures like that can turn these men's sacrifice from an empty number in some official statistic into a real thing.
Freedom of the press, which includes the right to make grieving families even more uncomfortable?
Indeed. Freedom of press cannot stop because of concerns like this. Also, if the families are proud of their son's sacrifice, why should a picture of the son's coffins make them uncomfortable? If they argree with the ideals for which the men sacrificed their lives, such picture should make them proud. If they don't, that's another story. I would be much more offended by somebody trying to hide a death of my family member, or ignore it! Or turn it into some stupid statistic in some governmental records.
Sorry, but I see no need for taking pictures of dead soldiers. It's a pathetic attempt to use their sacrifice as a sounding board, and it's extremely distasteful.
Or maybe it's war that's extremely distasetful?
Would you say that photographers like Robert Capa should have been banned from taking all those pictures of dead and dying people, because it may offend somebody or make somebody uncomfortable?
This is political correctness taken ad absurdum.
they want the government to expand and have more and more power, rather than realizing that the government has overstepped its bounds some time ago
meaning they are both socialist. I find it funny that republicans call democrats "liberal". there is no liberal party in this country.
It may be that they are getting confident. It may also be that they are beginning to panic. Or it may be a sign of some slight power shift in the leadership of the party. Then again, it could just be few isolated hard-liners in some ministry of information of whatever they call it trying to test water and see what can they get away with. Heck, this is Slashdot, one can even speculate about invisible hand of Microsoft trying to tip the ballance and then claim that with Windows, you can get much tighter controll of information than with Linux ;)
Anyway, the point is without further information, all you can do is speculate. I don't follow Chinese politics, so I really don't know what's going on. The only fact is that this is happenning. My oppinion on that is it is quickly going to evolve into enormous stupid byrocratic hurdle, everybody will hate it, and eventually it will become another nail in the coffin of one party rule in China. It may take a long time, though.
Not everyone wants the "freedom" that the American military is exporting. Look at Iraq now for example. The constitution that they came up with is certainly not at all what the Americans wanted. Pure and simple, Iraqis don't want the "freedom" the Americans have. They want to live by their Islamic law. So let them. If you force "freedom" on Iraq, it is becomes something far more sinister; imperialism. Saying that the Americans need to export "freedom," where freedom is their particular implementation of it that the rest of the world may not agree with, is equivalent to saying that the Americans are better than everyone else and needs to take care of them. Wait, we've heard this line of reasoning before; it's the classic "White Man's Burden" argument for Europeans to justify conquering Africa, and it's been discredited already.
I mostly agree with you there. You cannot force freedom onto a society, the change has to come from within. You can influence it by helping to change their culture, but you cannot just storm in, shoot all the party officials, military and cops, and say to the people "now you be free!" (even though I must admit that shooting party officials sound like great fun, no matter which party). On the other hand, the problems in Iraq (and elsewhere) are caused not only by sudden American invasion, but are mostly inherited from centuries of European colonialism, and have a lot to do with the stupid way countries were created and borders were drawn when Europeans "pulled out".
Students in China did not "die for freedom" in Tian'an men Square. This is a Western myth. They were mere puppets, and their strings were being pulled by crime organizations and Western governments
At this moment I lost all respect for you. I have heard a *lot* of communist propaganda in my life (actually, at one point, I hade it my hobby to collect examples of that crap), and these three sentences are a prime shining example of it. They could be (and probably are, I bet) taken straight from a mouth of any communist ideologist, any official government speaker, any speech at a party conference.
I have been there too. I have heard my friends, my parents, my former teachers, many people I hold in very high regard, as well as myself, called puppets of western governments, criminals and who knows what. I did experience a large student protest against a communist rule. Luckily, in our case, the army refused to go against what they called "their own people", most of the population eventually joined the protest, the government resigned, and free elections followed. I personally don't know anybody, with the exception of few former communist bosses, who would regret it.
Russia has been in a shithole for the last 15 years, and is only beginning to climb out of it.
Believe me, Russia has been a shithole for much longer than 15 years.
The main reason: decades of communist rule. If you think about it, Russia went from rather strict Tsarist rule, with wonderful and extremely rich culture, but with industry and economy in serious need of reforms, through brief period of attempted democracy, seriously hampered by an ongoing civil war, to nearly a century of communist dictatorship, its economy devastated by one 5-year plan after another. The World War 2 did not exactly help, either. The last time Russia has not been a shithole, at least as far as economy goes, was probably in the NEP years. But at least now, as you yourself said, they have a chance to climb out of it. And it's not because of some western intervention, that's because the people just got tired of living in a shithole, and decided to do something about it. And it was about time, because, IMHO, one of the greatest nations of the world, nation that gave us Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevski, Tschechov, Gorkij, Andreyev, Bulgakov, Zoshtsenko, and I could go for a long time, not even mentioning some of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in the history, should not live in a shithole!
Put another way, those studen
"Slaves" of a communist regime? I grew up in a communist country, and while there were many things horribly wrong with that, it could hardly be compared to slavery. As a matter of fact, it was sometimes pretty hard to even find somebody working. A popular saying was that "the main principle of communism is simple: people pretend to work and the state pretend to pay them for it".
If you refer to GULAG and other prison camps, I highly doubt that any of these prisoners contributed in any way to the boosters that are currently in use (or perhaps any boosters at all).
it often mis-numbers autonumbering; it botches not-terribly-complicated page layouts.
These two are not bugs, they are features. You see, they are trying to emulate MS Word.
I hate to be a Negative Nancy but Yet Another Email client? Why?
Because "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." (Michael Elkins, cca 1995)
Jokes aside, as far as I can tell, so far nobody managed to write a mail client that would have all the power and configurability of mutt or gnus, with a simple and easy to use gui. Maybe columba is the thing?
An analogy: imagine how unpleasant it would be if critical controls on cars varied from car to car. I mean, relocating the headlights is annoying enough, but what if each car shifted driver's position, steering, windshield and seating, and what order the pedals were in on the floor. Gas on left on Chevy's, on the right on cars made in Europe. Safety and user experience would plummet.
Actually, most OS's user interfaces are the same on this level, I mean things like driver position, steering, etc. All computers have keyboards that are very similar, rectangular screen. On the screen you have windows, each window has a sort of title bar, usually with buttons on it, frame, there is typically a menu bar (except sometimes the menu bar is at the top of the screen), menus work pretty much the same way, your data are in files on disk, sorted in folders or directories. The differences are more like location and lable on a cruise control button, radio, horn, maybe a shift stick etc. The problem is that user interface of a computer is much more complicated (they are used for many more purposes than cars), so the details become much more important.
This summer I drove a 4 weel drive pickup truck with a trailer (helping a friend with bales of hay) for the first time, and I did feel somewhat like using an unfamiliar OS or application. There wasn't that much to learn, but I wasn't used to it, which made it difficult (the fact that I could have made a lot of damage with it didn't really help).
As for the "horrible" GIMP interface, the main reason people have trouble with it seems to be the same as the reason Adobe radically changed the interface when they ported PS to windows. It's the fact that Windows (despite its name) is absolutely unable to do any real window managment at all. The design of Windows "window manager" practically didn't change since the old Windows 3.1 or whatever it was called. I mean the time when if you were very adventurous, you would have two application windows open at the same time, and maybe a dialog box. This part of Windows is what sucks the most, and long overdue for a major overhaul (another part is the stupid file system with all the drive letters and crap, but that doesn't get that much in the way as the lack of window managment).
Making your UI different so as not to be the same as photoshop is like making a car that uses a joystick to steer so that it's different from your competitors'.
Actually, GIMP's interface was intentionally designed to be very similar to photoshop. Photoshop on Mac, that is. The problem is the interface for Photoshop on Windows is completely different from the original Mac one. Can you figure out why? Hint: it has everything to do with the way Windows manages (or fails to manage) windows.
That's a problem with windows, not gimp. I hate using gimp on windows, and I hate using photoshop on windows, too. I have no problem whatsoever with the interface of gimp on X11 nor with the interface of PS on mac.
Yeah, that's why the PS's interface on Windows is exactly the same as the PS's interface on Mac...