There's a little-used standard that came out of the W3C along with XSLTs called XSL:FO. You write your document in XSL:FO markup, and then one of any number of processors like XEP to convert it into PDF or what have you.
One of the original purposes of it was so that you could use XSLTs to transform the same XML data into both XHTML or XSL:FO for publishing. The standard never took off though. XSL:FO just doesn't have enough options to be typographically interesting, compared to SVG.
Of course, the right answer is LaTeX, but you might want to give XSL:FO a try for familiarity's sake.
Economic policy, social liberty policy, and nationality policy are three separate dimension
Recognizing your broader point, I would hesitate to call them three separate dimensions in anything but a mechanical sense. Ultimately people subscribe to an ethos, not a set of policies. Like all semantics with the implicit assertion of straightforwardness, employing the right-left spectrum is an act of conceptual violence, but from the perspective of ethos, it has both utility and basis.
With deference to your point, though, you give the GP a little too much credit.
Also, I would suggest that promoting a national dialog about the sapping of the system's resources by an underclass would be a total catastrophe.
Both Labour and the BNP are hard left, not centre or right-wing. Both see Government as an engine for social change.
Don't think you can redefine the political spectrum to find a clear-cut home for your purity-in-inaction philosophy. Hard-line nationalism and all that it entails has long been considered a far-right phenomenon.
I completely accept the use of that phrasing when describing a national action. But if you're going to present the formula, "Iranians wanted this, so it doesn't make sense to get involved," you're clearly abusing the simplicity of the semantics to artificially inflate your point. In this case, it happens to be done in a particularly offensive way.
Do you realize how offensive it is to lump all the Iranian people under one label when ascribing motivations or actions to them? If you want to make the state sovereignty argument, fine, but leave it at that. Don't be all, like, "Those damned brown people."
So, while I don't have ANY sympathy for the flood victims
Tell me, how long do you have to sit in intellectual purgatory, destroying all cognitive dissonance in favor of easy-answer ideologies, before you're capable of writing something like this? Only on Slashdot could such socially and emotionally retarded drivel get modded up. Seriously, go fuck yourself.
1) Love your users. Be happy to help them. If you're having a bad day, either fake pleasantness or apologize for seeming "a little off" and explain with open sincerity about your bad day. If you can't create an atmosphere of good faith and empathy, you don't belong in IT. 2) Don't assume that because you can do something, it must be easy. Google searching, for example, is not easy. Don't assume that knowing how to do something really well means that that you can be effective at explaining it. If a user gets confused, blame yourself. "Sorry, I haven't found a good way to explain this." "Oh come on, you're not stupid; it's just not as intuitive as it should be. We're still in the dark ages of software." 3) Recognize that people need validation. In general, people hate having to ask for help. Acknowledge their need as reasonable. Any kind of hesitancy to help will create a sense of invalidation, which can poison your reputation forever. 4) Where reasonable, cultivate friendships with your users. 5) If the user seems incapable, your response should be..oO(That user needs training.) Not..oO(That user is an idiot.) 6) In policy disputes, be an advocate for the users. When you enforce policy, be clear that it is out of obligation. 7) Acknowledge that your role is to give other people the tools and environment they need to do their work.
You'd do well to trade in your sense of entitlement for a sense of gratitude.
If by "entitlement," you mean "your civic responsibility" and if by "gratitude," you mean "a pleasant feeling of complacency."
Wikimedia would be nothing without its users. We have a seat at the bargaining table. You have a responsibility not to walk away from that table.
I think people cultivate your attitude because right now it's very difficult for a highly fragmented interest like users to leverage their power. People get tired of feeling impotent, and go the coward's route of abdicating responsibility. Hopefully in a few years, we'll start seeing technologies emerge that people to make their shared interest felt in a libertarian-friendly way.
In the meantime, well, we can all be glad that Jimmy Wales is a decent human being.
Some minuscule assistance in making a site popular does not give you any right to control how it may be used in the future. If that doesn't sit well with you, too bad--you should've considered it before contributing.
Your implicit argument is that since I'm powerless to stop the abuse, no abuse occurred. Or perhaps even the more famous non-sequitor, "if you lived in a shack in Montana, this wouldn't be a problem."
Look, I'm a libertarian. I wish libertarians would spend more time discussing non-governmental approaches to preventing abuse rather than retroactively defining abuse as being the transubstantiation of rainbows and puppies.
As long as Wikipedia's "power" does not have force of law, it is not censorship.
That's a weak semantic point, raised in an effort to justify a rigid, easy-answer ideology.:(
It's harder to commit extensive abuses of power without the force of law, I'll grant you. But when someone with an agenda can, in a targeted fashion, change how millions of students do research, that's the kind of "power" that doesn't require double quotes. You can say that's not censorship, but then I can call you a naïve ideologue, so that's fair.
Besides, Wikipedia is private non-profit organization. It's their servers, it's their site, and they are fully within their rights to say who is and who is not welcome to use them. It's no different when the Church of Scientology comes knocking on your door passing out their pamphlets and you slam the door in their face and tell them to get lost. Private property is private property.
I hate seeing this argument pop up again and again. Wikipedia has a lot of de facto power. We gave them this power by using the service and promoting it among our acquaintances. We didn't give Jimmy Wales this power so that he could use it to advance a personal agenda of changing social perceptions or silencing arbitrary voices. There's a certain amount of accountability here.
But the decision to ban Scientology's IP's was perfectly in line with a reasonable prior policy. That's what makes this is OK, not the fact that Wikipedia is private property.
Great reply, but I think you missed that this interchange was a discussion of reiisi's comment.
My values are subjective. That doesn't mean I'm going to stand idle when people violate those values. I would insist that moral outrage is a reasonable response, but of course I should be able to clearly communicate my objection before lamely shaking my fist.
If you follow the discussion, you'll see that the outrage presented is not at the use of the word "nigger" (out of ignorance, confusion, or even outright malice), but at the sense of entitlement of a white person who is deeply offended at not being able to use the word "nigger" or, less offensively but still problematically, a white person who feels offended at not having a vote in determining the socially-acceptable semantics for identifying black people.
Of course whites have a stake in what to call those who aren't of pure Caucasian decent. How do I describe the guy in the office next to mine who happens to be of African decent? Is he black?
That's the convention. Refer to them as black, but only if their appearance or ethnicity is pertinent to the discussion at hand. It's not hard.
Clearly you and I both have an interest in the existence of a convention. We're just not entitled to a vote on what that convention is. With few exceptions, any white person who feels entitled to such a vote is a jackass. That's my argument.
See, we all live here together. So, I'm concerned about the issue.
Concerned, sure, so am I, but I wouldn't call that a legitimate interest in setting the semantics. If you're "concerned" that you can't call black people whatever you want, or if you feel jilted because other people can use the word "nigger" and you can't, then not only do I have no sympathy for your concern, but I think you deserve a fat lip.
Non-whites can actually (usually) get away with using the term. Whites can't, but that's because whites are don't have any particular interest or stake in the semantics that govern the identification of black people.
With the exception of well-funded open source projects, the point of the open source community is to dramatically reduce the barriers between 1) Vincent and Venkatesh have an idea. 2) Vincent and Venkatesh release software/patches. 3) Vincent and Venkatesh's software becomes popular.
Community mechanisms make it easy for Vincent and Venkatesh to learn, receive feedback, and get attention. It's a positive feedback loop whose success begets a growing pool of talent.
Positive attention and community mechanisms are at the heart of getting to #3, but unsolicited criticism plays a very small role. I don't think the Keir Thomas "gets it."
See, the biggest problem with "correlation is not causation" is that it's a tool most frequently used by post-conclusion rationalizers -- people who start from a conclusion, and then create a rationale to justify it. Such people only feel compelled to discount evidence that runs contrary to their conclusion, which is much easier than actually justifying one's position in the face of alternatives. "Correlation is not causation" is a very simple formula for discounting overwhelming bodies of evidence.
It's a tiny subset that still insists that evolution "denies God," that the universe was literally created in six days, that species were set and defined at the moment of creation, etc. In other words, a minority of a minority of a minority, if you will.
Please have some integrity and stop downplaying the severity of the less favorable aspects of your fellow adherents. In this national survey, 48% marked that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". That's also true of 16% of high school biology teachers.
Sure, they're extremist nuts, but they're not some piddling minority. The evangelicals get full credit, here.
It would take a rank ideologue to assume that making legislation neutral to sex and race would be a pragmatic approach to addressing institutionalized imbalances in equity and social justice.
I was one of the early adopters. Within a week of the release of NetFlix streaming on the XBox, my PC feed became useless. It would keep stopping to buffer, and eventually stop indefinitely. When I called NetFlix to complain, they suggested I try the Silverlight player. The quality was roughly on par with YouTube, but the buffering problems went away, so I went with it.
I'm wondering if the problem is not so much poor software quality as it is a bottleneck in the feed itself. Perhaps the servers can't take the load, or perhaps they simply don't have enough well-placed bandwidth. Their instant viewing subscriber base has been climbing tremendously.
Yeah, except I'd rather have a system where a small number of wealthy, well-connected producers condescend to toss farthings at genius scriptwriters than a system where even moderate production costs can't be recouped.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a little-used standard that came out of the W3C along with XSLTs called XSL:FO. You write your document in XSL:FO markup, and then one of any number of processors like XEP to convert it into PDF or what have you.
http://www.w3schools.com/xslfo/default.asp
One of the original purposes of it was so that you could use XSLTs to transform the same XML data into both XHTML or XSL:FO for publishing. The standard never took off though. XSL:FO just doesn't have enough options to be typographically interesting, compared to SVG.
Of course, the right answer is LaTeX, but you might want to give XSL:FO a try for familiarity's sake.
Right, hence the "conceptual violence." =) All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
Recognizing your broader point, I would hesitate to call them three separate dimensions in anything but a mechanical sense. Ultimately people subscribe to an ethos, not a set of policies. Like all semantics with the implicit assertion of straightforwardness, employing the right-left spectrum is an act of conceptual violence, but from the perspective of ethos, it has both utility and basis.
With deference to your point, though, you give the GP a little too much credit.
Also, I would suggest that promoting a national dialog about the sapping of the system's resources by an underclass would be a total catastrophe.
Don't think you can redefine the political spectrum to find a clear-cut home for your purity-in-inaction philosophy. Hard-line nationalism and all that it entails has long been considered a far-right phenomenon.
I completely accept the use of that phrasing when describing a national action. But if you're going to present the formula, "Iranians wanted this, so it doesn't make sense to get involved," you're clearly abusing the simplicity of the semantics to artificially inflate your point. In this case, it happens to be done in a particularly offensive way.
Do you realize how offensive it is to lump all the Iranian people under one label when ascribing motivations or actions to them? If you want to make the state sovereignty argument, fine, but leave it at that. Don't be all, like, "Those damned brown people."
Tell me, how long do you have to sit in intellectual purgatory, destroying all cognitive dissonance in favor of easy-answer ideologies, before you're capable of writing something like this? Only on Slashdot could such socially and emotionally retarded drivel get modded up. Seriously, go fuck yourself.
1) Love your users. Be happy to help them. If you're having a bad day, either fake pleasantness or apologize for seeming "a little off" and explain with open sincerity about your bad day. If you can't create an atmosphere of good faith and empathy, you don't belong in IT. ..oO(That user needs training.) Not ..oO(That user is an idiot.)
2) Don't assume that because you can do something, it must be easy. Google searching, for example, is not easy. Don't assume that knowing how to do something really well means that that you can be effective at explaining it. If a user gets confused, blame yourself. "Sorry, I haven't found a good way to explain this." "Oh come on, you're not stupid; it's just not as intuitive as it should be. We're still in the dark ages of software."
3) Recognize that people need validation. In general, people hate having to ask for help. Acknowledge their need as reasonable. Any kind of hesitancy to help will create a sense of invalidation, which can poison your reputation forever.
4) Where reasonable, cultivate friendships with your users.
5) If the user seems incapable, your response should be
6) In policy disputes, be an advocate for the users. When you enforce policy, be clear that it is out of obligation.
7) Acknowledge that your role is to give other people the tools and environment they need to do their work.
Hope this helps.
You're right, disengagement is the way to go. I've got my canned meat, my rifle, and my shack. Care to join me?
Agreed, but no matter how you want to spin the issue, the fact that many, many students use Wikipedia as a starting point is not trivial.
If by "entitlement," you mean "your civic responsibility" and if by "gratitude," you mean "a pleasant feeling of complacency."
Wikimedia would be nothing without its users. We have a seat at the bargaining table. You have a responsibility not to walk away from that table.
I think people cultivate your attitude because right now it's very difficult for a highly fragmented interest like users to leverage their power. People get tired of feeling impotent, and go the coward's route of abdicating responsibility. Hopefully in a few years, we'll start seeing technologies emerge that people to make their shared interest felt in a libertarian-friendly way.
In the meantime, well, we can all be glad that Jimmy Wales is a decent human being.
Your implicit argument is that since I'm powerless to stop the abuse, no abuse occurred. Or perhaps even the more famous non-sequitor, "if you lived in a shack in Montana, this wouldn't be a problem."
Look, I'm a libertarian. I wish libertarians would spend more time discussing non-governmental approaches to preventing abuse rather than retroactively defining abuse as being the transubstantiation of rainbows and puppies.
That's a weak semantic point, raised in an effort to justify a rigid, easy-answer ideology. :(
It's harder to commit extensive abuses of power without the force of law, I'll grant you. But when someone with an agenda can, in a targeted fashion, change how millions of students do research, that's the kind of "power" that doesn't require double quotes. You can say that's not censorship, but then I can call you a naïve ideologue, so that's fair.
I hate seeing this argument pop up again and again. Wikipedia has a lot of de facto power. We gave them this power by using the service and promoting it among our acquaintances. We didn't give Jimmy Wales this power so that he could use it to advance a personal agenda of changing social perceptions or silencing arbitrary voices. There's a certain amount of accountability here.
But the decision to ban Scientology's IP's was perfectly in line with a reasonable prior policy. That's what makes this is OK, not the fact that Wikipedia is private property.
Great reply, but I think you missed that this interchange was a discussion of reiisi's comment.
My values are subjective. That doesn't mean I'm going to stand idle when people violate those values. I would insist that moral outrage is a reasonable response, but of course I should be able to clearly communicate my objection before lamely shaking my fist.
If you follow the discussion, you'll see that the outrage presented is not at the use of the word "nigger" (out of ignorance, confusion, or even outright malice), but at the sense of entitlement of a white person who is deeply offended at not being able to use the word "nigger" or, less offensively but still problematically, a white person who feels offended at not having a vote in determining the socially-acceptable semantics for identifying black people.
That's the convention. Refer to them as black, but only if their appearance or ethnicity is pertinent to the discussion at hand. It's not hard.
Clearly you and I both have an interest in the existence of a convention. We're just not entitled to a vote on what that convention is. With few exceptions, any white person who feels entitled to such a vote is a jackass. That's my argument.
Concerned, sure, so am I, but I wouldn't call that a legitimate interest in setting the semantics. If you're "concerned" that you can't call black people whatever you want, or if you feel jilted because other people can use the word "nigger" and you can't, then not only do I have no sympathy for your concern, but I think you deserve a fat lip.
Fixed that for you. Jackass.
With the exception of well-funded open source projects, the point of the open source community is to dramatically reduce the barriers between
1) Vincent and Venkatesh have an idea.
2) Vincent and Venkatesh release software/patches.
3) Vincent and Venkatesh's software becomes popular.
Community mechanisms make it easy for Vincent and Venkatesh to learn, receive feedback, and get attention. It's a positive feedback loop whose success begets a growing pool of talent.
Positive attention and community mechanisms are at the heart of getting to #3, but unsolicited criticism plays a very small role. I don't think the Keir Thomas "gets it."
See, the biggest problem with "correlation is not causation" is that it's a tool most frequently used by post-conclusion rationalizers -- people who start from a conclusion, and then create a rationale to justify it. Such people only feel compelled to discount evidence that runs contrary to their conclusion, which is much easier than actually justifying one's position in the face of alternatives. "Correlation is not causation" is a very simple formula for discounting overwhelming bodies of evidence.
Please have some integrity and stop downplaying the severity of the less favorable aspects of your fellow adherents.
In this national survey, 48% marked that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". That's also true of 16% of high school biology teachers.
Sure, they're extremist nuts, but they're not some piddling minority. The evangelicals get full credit, here.
If you used air quotes while saying this in person, I'd break your God damned fingers.
It would take a rank ideologue to assume that making legislation neutral to sex and race would be a pragmatic approach to addressing institutionalized imbalances in equity and social justice.
I was one of the early adopters. Within a week of the release of NetFlix streaming on the XBox, my PC feed became useless. It would keep stopping to buffer, and eventually stop indefinitely. When I called NetFlix to complain, they suggested I try the Silverlight player. The quality was roughly on par with YouTube, but the buffering problems went away, so I went with it.
I'm wondering if the problem is not so much poor software quality as it is a bottleneck in the feed itself. Perhaps the servers can't take the load, or perhaps they simply don't have enough well-placed bandwidth. Their instant viewing subscriber base has been climbing tremendously.
Yeah, except I'd rather have a system where a small number of wealthy, well-connected producers condescend to toss farthings at genius scriptwriters than a system where even moderate production costs can't be recouped.