The frustration I have is that unions don't have to behave like that, in fact I would suggest that they would have much better support if they could look into helping out the other workers that are harmed by their strikes. I mean it certainly does look bad, and contributes to the pressure for them to cave.
It's a contentious issue in the US labor movement in general, the "organize more people and trades" group (with Change to Win and the SEIU) against the more defensive "lobby for better labor laws and get better bennies" group (with the remaining AFL-CIO unions).
The main problem with most entertainment shops is that the labor organizations are split: there's the more militant SAG/AFTRA, WGA and maybe DGA, which are happy to strike over benefits and are willing to cause a huge fuss, because they know their roster of talent is ultimately indispensable, and then there's the humungous IATSE and NABET unions that rep all of the below the line talent, and they only strike against individual productions one at a time in order to get the individual productions to go Union. They never strike if the company is already union, and NEVER support the strikes of SAG or the WGA. The IATSE basic agreement actually has non-strike clauses that require all IA members to show up for work when there's a SAG or WGA picket line.
Yes, I am a member of an IATSE union (Local 700, Motion Picture Editor's Guild).
I'd say it's an investment, just not one that returns monetarily.
Collectibles and antiques can appreciate considerably, though they aren't dependable on a year-over-year income basis as, say, stocks or bonds, or as an absolute store of value way as, say, gold. You do have to claim valuable collectibles you own or aquire as assets for tax purposes, among other things, and you just need to watch one episode of the Antiques Roadshow to see just how valuable a piece of entertainment memorabilia can be worth.
I received similar love with MacBook and iPhone issues, but don't look for that kind of attention with a MacPro; the Genius Bars (at least in LA, which would seem to suggest everywhere) won't look at them and you're better off going to a plain old AppleCare center -- ironically, I brought my quad G5 to the nearest CompUSA when it had a mobo issue, and they took care of it as well as anything else. Of course you have that whole 'wait for a part from AppleCare fulfillment' nonsense.
Something particularly hazardous is the difference in ruby between a proc and a lambda. A Proc will execute using its creating context's binding, and if you use a return keyword, the return is bound to the creating continuation, not the calling one, more like an exception throw than a return (I guess this is why people rarely use a return in a Proc, and just let the last evaluated line speak for itself!) The return keyword in a lambda, however, is bound to the lambda's local continuation, and simply makes program flow leave the lambda back to the caller.
I regret that I couldn't think of a non-contrived example that worked in the context of the GPs post. But the principle is right: when you pass a block to a method in ruby, using the block_given?/yield idiom, it's captured as a Proc and retains its original binding, so it can always refer to names in its originating scope.
The binding of given block, particularly the binding of x? When the upto calls the block for each number in the range, it can't see the implementation or any of the variables in the block. It only knows the block takes a single variable, it doesn't even know the name of it, and the variables in the block scope stay bound to the. This might be a better example:
def createErrorReporter(outputStream) return Proc.new{|str| outputStream.puts(str)} end
I don't see the average Mac in the Army being used to edit video or sound.
The army has battalions of guys that donothing else. In my quite narrow experience with the military, they generally buy the top of the line of whatever's available, even if it means the guy running the point-of-sale in the mess gets an Intellistation or a Mac Pro.
How is that different than following a function pointer in C?
You can change a function pointer, but when you call the mystery function, you always know that flow will return back to the line following your call (unless the mystery function blocks forever or exits or whatever). You also know that the called function has no access to the caller's scope.
It's the basic difference between a goto and a function call. A goto always moves execution from one point in a scope to another within that scope (well you can cheat that, but you're asking for trouble), and goto's don't return.
Sorry, Nyquist's theorem states that you can accurately represent frequencies up to 1/2 the sampling rate.
You said:
Really? I have a square wave, a sine wave, and a sawtooth wave, all at 22KHz. Now, you tell me how they'll be quantized such that all are accurately represented.
You didn't say you had a frequency, you said you had a square wave. A square wave has a fundamental and an infinite train of odd harmonics; if you Nyquist-Shannon sample a square wave and then play it through a sinc()-reconstructing DAC, you'll only get the harmonics that fall below the Nyquist frequency. This applies to a square wave of any arbitrarily low fundamental, all non-sinusoidal waves that pass through ADC-DAC are rounded out because any steppiness preserved in the digital domain is smoothed out by the sinc function at the interpreting end.
I guess the detail the GP left out is that Nyquist treats all signals as CONTINUOUS ones.
I wish I could find the link, but there's reasonable evidence from blind listening tests that people, though they would not necessarily report any quality difference, were able to report things about the recording like "I can tell the cello is sitting in front of the viola" and other things that are very subtle and spatial. This of course depends on headphones and careful binaural recording, so on most end products it wouldn't make much of a difference.
In my line of work, most sound designers are recording all of their sound effects at 96K and 192K, a bit for the quality (guns and loud transient stuff sound totally bitchin), but also because if gives a great deal more latitude when you want to pitch down something-- you don't hear 30K overtones on an explosion, but it's nice to have them there when you pitch the explosion down 2 octaves, and your 30K overtones are at 7.5K and help keep the sound from sounding like it came over a phone.
I know a lot of you on this thread are arguing that 24 bit is worth it on an end product, but remember that the effective dynamic range at 24 bit is around 120 dB, which exceeds your threshold of pain by about 10 dB, so you're getting a ton of dynamic range that you're just going to use the volume knob on in the end to flatten out. Also, that implies you're listening in a silent room. Your average city apartment or townhouse has a noise floor around 40 db SPL at least, so you'd better have acoustical treatments or be on headphones that isolate that much (the more a set of cans isolate, though, the worse their spectral character tends to be, though.
Thanks for your service regardless. Both the Left and the Right were frantic to end the war, the left for moral reasons, whatever the value of that, and the right because they could claim to have set right the "idealistic mistakes" of the Kennedy/Johnson years, cutting off the opposition.
The whole "the Left pulled us back from the threshold of victory" argument is interesting for historical analysis, but more often it's just a bat that militarists and rightists use to beat political opposition. It's not really about the vietnam war at all, it's about how people like Dean Acheson and Walt Rostow and George Kennan really really thought people like Kissinger and Zbrigniew Brzinski were "pussies" (of course I don't recall seeing anybody on that list proposing a land invasion of North Vietnam, either). Saying they lost us the war was just a really powerful way of making that point. A very similar process occurred in the government after the fall of China to Mao in the 50s, where Acheson and Truman were accused of having "allowed" China to go Communist by people like Nixon and Henry Luce.
That shit is no good. It's not good when Americans just make the leap in their mind that other Americans would wreck the country just to win elections.
The war was "lost" because the American Left declared it lost and forced their wrong-headed opinion on the rest of the country.
The dolchstosslegende is always with us. The "American Left," neither the Democrats nor the Black Panthers (I assume you distinguish between the two), never held the white house during the draw down and Vietnamization of the 70s, and as we can all see from current events a determined president, particularly a second-termer like Nixon, is quite capable of keeping soldiers in the field for as long as he damn well pleases. Of course the Republican leadership was compromised by its stupendously illegal conduct over the previous years. The "American Left" didn't tap peoples phones without a warrant, or kidnap people and perform truth drug experiments on them. That was left to Dick Helms and Charles Colson and J. Edgar.
I know; I was there in '72 when the NVA sent 150,000 men across the border with more armor and mechanized equipment than the Germans sent to the Battle of the Kursk Salient, and got back less than one third, all of whom had to walk home because their equipment had been smashed, at a cost of less than 50 American deaths, for the entire month.
You see that, or did you hear it in briefings? David Halberstam and the other war correspondents basically demolished the veracity of the briefings the military gave, and the sort of statistics the US military would produce made Baghdad Bob look like Ed Murrow. The Pentagon considered lying about such things an important strategic maneuver.
Even if we were killing guys at the rate you give, why weren't we marching on Hanoi right then and there? Maybe because it probably would've triggered a world war with China and or Russia, and even the most die hard Republicans didn't care so much about the RVN that they were willing to even chance that, even if meant "appeasement" (remember Kissinger had been negotiating with Le Duc Tho since '68). Also, once we've marched into Hanoi and pulled down all the Ho Chi Minh statues, what do we do then? The south vietnamese government was little more than a junta run by whichever general Westmoreland, Cabot Lodge or Kissinger liked the best at the time, and was profoundly unpopular and illegitimate. It's the same crap all over again, "if we kill all the bad guys the good guys obviously win," instead in this case it was Kennedy and Johnson making the assumption.
Some purchase has been gotten over the last few years by pundits who claim that the essential characteristic of the "domino theory," that SE Asia would fall to Communism, in fact played out exactly as we'd been warned. What is neglected is that, in fact, the number one factor in predicting if a country would fall to Communism was the level of US involvement in it. The more we tried to help with our bombs, the more likely it was that Communism would overrun the country. Countries we didn't touch might have leftist or Communists in there parliament, but would generally stay non-aligned and pacific. Countries we "helped" had killing fields.
You know why you are wrong? The idea of a pure semanticly described document with all the formatting elseware works only for non interactive documents that get printed, like a book. Period.
Semantic markup languages like HTML break down because the web isn't for print. Semantic markup is the holey grail in the print world because it works so well for linear documents.
I admit being deeply confused about the body of the post, even given the setup, since I don't think it really addresses the main point. If you wanna have absolute control over how all elements are positioned in the body box or viewport, you're necessarily taking control of this away from the client, and just IMO this is probably a mistake, since the client knows a lot of things the web publisher doesn't, like view limitations, availability of fonts, the mode of rendition of those fonts (like aliasing, which can have a profound effect on layout), and output device, be it screen, paper, screen reader, or some other unpredicted interface.
I'm not necessarily saying that you should use (h1) instead of a (div) with styling, or a (strong) instead of a (span) with styling, but that HTML flavors in general are built around the assumption that the enclosed content is organized "semantically" into blocks of text (just like every other markup language since the beginning of desktop publiching, like nroff, TeX, RTF, or OO, you name it). A block of text is a much more flexible specification of content than any absolute method; it maps to a common mode of human interaction and thus can be made to work on a variety of output devices and regimes. It's also a natural fit for the need to position runs of text around other positioned objects, when the final position of the imposing object is not known at the time the HTML is generated... This is starting to sound a lot like a strict versus dynamic typing argument, isn't it?, with rendering == execution and html authoring == compiling.
I'm also not saying you can't use grids or tables either, everyone does, but even on the trickiest sites the grids are just a framing device for the stuff to be read. The news story, or slashdot post contained within the glue of the table is always organized semantically, into paragraphs, lists, quotes, etc.
WYSIWYG is impossible if you are using templates. You gotta visualize how the chunks come together!
But you have to specify "how all the chunks come together" for a variable set of page widths and glyph sizes.
How about a way to take our centuries of knowledge about "traditional graphic design" and apply it to the a web-based medium
They did. Where exactly do you think the idea of floating and clearing came from? Open up a copy of your favorite magazine, and the text wraps around floated images. The big impedance mismatch between a web page and a piece of paper is the fact that a webpage can be displayed in an arbitrarily sized viewport with arbitrarily-sized and replaceable fonts. A grid layout just invites everybody to write "this website is optimized for 1024x768 monitors, expand the window to full screen for the complete experience!"
The formatting model in HTML and XHTML trade strict definition of every element position (which you can still do with tables) for better presentation on a wide range of viewing systems, from a Vista box with QXGA to a Treo. HTML and XHTML tags aren't supposed to position elements; they give semantic hints that the browser uses to position the objects itself. Under the hypertext model, the browser always has final say about the positioning of elements, and this is particularly important on mobile devices and in the unusual though important case of the user providing his own stylesheets.
If Microsoft took punitive actions against OEMs that did not bundle particular software - then that would be extremely strong grounds for a lawsuit, given Microsoft's monopoly status.
It would be if they were so bald about it, but since the antitrust complaint they use a "point system" for their OEMs. You get points for using MS branding and marketing messages (like "Enhanced for Windows Vista" or whatever), and points for packaging WMP, and points for not including competing products.
This is an interesting strategy that many organizations have been using recently to act in a manner that's unlawful if unlawfulness stems from intent. For example, it's illegal to use a person's race as a determining factor in getting them a slot in a law school, but you can have a point system where a person's race is given a certain point value, along with their high school grades, extra-curricular activites, etc. (this is what the U Mich. did after their getting sued for using "Affirmative Action" in a very general sense)
Think about how facebook looks to the CIA or NSA and now you entire social network was mapped. Not by them, but by you.
I've posted this before on this topic, but since you mentioned it...
The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor of the GPU, is reported to have invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; brown circles indicated persons in contact with friends of the suspect but not known to him personally; cross-relationships between the suspect's friends, political and nonpolitical, and the friends of his friends were indicated by lines between the respective circles. Obviously the limitations of this method are set only by the size of the filing cards, and, theoretically, a gigantic single sheet could show the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population. And this is the utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police: a look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish, not who is who or who thinks what, but who is related to whom and in what degree or kind of intimacy.
It may be apropos of the issue at hand that the speaker never had any children either, despite being one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 19th century. Notwithstanding another one of his expressions, also from Zarathustra... "Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly."
Stopping people from deliberately sending signals is not going to make us invisible. We've been sending signals for decades.
It might be worth it, in that case, to try send out some signal explaining that the really powerful signals they get are just television. I'd rather the Vulcan survey ship not see American Idol, but if we've got no choice about it, we might as well try to assert with a different broadcast that, despite all the other evidence, we are in fact 'intelligent' beings.
That was a Pioneer, not Voyager. You can tell by the plaque; I think non-canon lit rules it Pioneer 11.
or even return to Earth is a horrible epic adventure involving the Enterprise....
Did you ever see the director's cut DVD that came out a few years ago? It's a much better film, still a bit slow, but the visual effects are much better -- and were restored in a manner in keeping with the original concepts -- and now I think it's the best of the odd-numbered Treks. The cuts they made, the proper sound mix and the good visuals let you focus a lot more on the story which is really compelling in a 70s hard scifi way.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's how it works: You get the experts together, opine on the "100 years in the future" scenario, and then you know positively what won't happen.
It's a contentious issue in the US labor movement in general, the "organize more people and trades" group (with Change to Win and the SEIU) against the more defensive "lobby for better labor laws and get better bennies" group (with the remaining AFL-CIO unions).
The main problem with most entertainment shops is that the labor organizations are split: there's the more militant SAG/AFTRA, WGA and maybe DGA, which are happy to strike over benefits and are willing to cause a huge fuss, because they know their roster of talent is ultimately indispensable, and then there's the humungous IATSE and NABET unions that rep all of the below the line talent, and they only strike against individual productions one at a time in order to get the individual productions to go Union. They never strike if the company is already union, and NEVER support the strikes of SAG or the WGA. The IATSE basic agreement actually has non-strike clauses that require all IA members to show up for work when there's a SAG or WGA picket line.
Yes, I am a member of an IATSE union (Local 700, Motion Picture Editor's Guild).
Collectibles and antiques can appreciate considerably, though they aren't dependable on a year-over-year income basis as, say, stocks or bonds, or as an absolute store of value way as, say, gold. You do have to claim valuable collectibles you own or aquire as assets for tax purposes, among other things, and you just need to watch one episode of the Antiques Roadshow to see just how valuable a piece of entertainment memorabilia can be worth.
The article doesn't give profit numbers, but each Apple store averages $4-5K per square foot revenues per year, which is 6x Neiman Marcus, 4x Best Buy and 1.5x of Tiffany's.
I received similar love with MacBook and iPhone issues, but don't look for that kind of attention with a MacPro; the Genius Bars (at least in LA, which would seem to suggest everywhere) won't look at them and you're better off going to a plain old AppleCare center -- ironically, I brought my quad G5 to the nearest CompUSA when it had a mobo issue, and they took care of it as well as anything else. Of course you have that whole 'wait for a part from AppleCare fulfillment' nonsense.
Sadly, I'm no longer an Apple customerWhy not?
Something particularly hazardous is the difference in ruby between a proc and a lambda. A Proc will execute using its creating context's binding, and if you use a return keyword, the return is bound to the creating continuation, not the calling one, more like an exception throw than a return (I guess this is why people rarely use a return in a Proc, and just let the last evaluated line speak for itself!) The return keyword in a lambda, however, is bound to the lambda's local continuation, and simply makes program flow leave the lambda back to the caller.
I regret that I couldn't think of a non-contrived example that worked in the context of the GPs post. But the principle is right: when you pass a block to a method in ruby, using the block_given?/yield idiom, it's captured as a Proc and retains its original binding, so it can always refer to names in its originating scope.
It is? What does it close over?
The binding of given block, particularly the binding of x? When the upto calls the block for each number in the range, it can't see the implementation or any of the variables in the block. It only knows the block takes a single variable, it doesn't even know the name of it, and the variables in the block scope stay bound to the. This might be a better example:
It's a Festivus Miracle!
The army has battalions of guys that do nothing else. In my quite narrow experience with the military, they generally buy the top of the line of whatever's available, even if it means the guy running the point-of-sale in the mess gets an Intellistation or a Mac Pro.
You can change a function pointer, but when you call the mystery function, you always know that flow will return back to the line following your call (unless the mystery function blocks forever or exits or whatever). You also know that the called function has no access to the caller's scope.
It's the basic difference between a goto and a function call. A goto always moves execution from one point in a scope to another within that scope (well you can cheat that, but you're asking for trouble), and goto's don't return.
The GP said:
Sorry, Nyquist's theorem states that you can accurately represent frequencies up to 1/2 the sampling rate.You said:
Really? I have a square wave, a sine wave, and a sawtooth wave, all at 22KHz. Now, you tell me how they'll be quantized such that all are accurately represented.You didn't say you had a frequency, you said you had a square wave. A square wave has a fundamental and an infinite train of odd harmonics; if you Nyquist-Shannon sample a square wave and then play it through a sinc()-reconstructing DAC, you'll only get the harmonics that fall below the Nyquist frequency. This applies to a square wave of any arbitrarily low fundamental, all non-sinusoidal waves that pass through ADC-DAC are rounded out because any steppiness preserved in the digital domain is smoothed out by the sinc function at the interpreting end.
I guess the detail the GP left out is that Nyquist treats all signals as CONTINUOUS ones.
I wish I could find the link, but there's reasonable evidence from blind listening tests that people, though they would not necessarily report any quality difference, were able to report things about the recording like "I can tell the cello is sitting in front of the viola" and other things that are very subtle and spatial. This of course depends on headphones and careful binaural recording, so on most end products it wouldn't make much of a difference.
In my line of work, most sound designers are recording all of their sound effects at 96K and 192K, a bit for the quality (guns and loud transient stuff sound totally bitchin), but also because if gives a great deal more latitude when you want to pitch down something-- you don't hear 30K overtones on an explosion, but it's nice to have them there when you pitch the explosion down 2 octaves, and your 30K overtones are at 7.5K and help keep the sound from sounding like it came over a phone.
I know a lot of you on this thread are arguing that 24 bit is worth it on an end product, but remember that the effective dynamic range at 24 bit is around 120 dB, which exceeds your threshold of pain by about 10 dB, so you're getting a ton of dynamic range that you're just going to use the volume knob on in the end to flatten out. Also, that implies you're listening in a silent room. Your average city apartment or townhouse has a noise floor around 40 db SPL at least, so you'd better have acoustical treatments or be on headphones that isolate that much (the more a set of cans isolate, though, the worse their spectral character tends to be, though.
With disappointments like the iphone, who needs successes? iPhone OS X has surpassed WinCE in total marketshare in 2 quarters.
Pal, you forgot to put up a link to your demo!
Don't Paramount have a movie coming out, by the very name "Star Trek", for Xmas next year? Seems like a dumb time to drop the site.
Thanks for your service regardless. Both the Left and the Right were frantic to end the war, the left for moral reasons, whatever the value of that, and the right because they could claim to have set right the "idealistic mistakes" of the Kennedy/Johnson years, cutting off the opposition.
The whole "the Left pulled us back from the threshold of victory" argument is interesting for historical analysis, but more often it's just a bat that militarists and rightists use to beat political opposition. It's not really about the vietnam war at all, it's about how people like Dean Acheson and Walt Rostow and George Kennan really really thought people like Kissinger and Zbrigniew Brzinski were "pussies" (of course I don't recall seeing anybody on that list proposing a land invasion of North Vietnam, either). Saying they lost us the war was just a really powerful way of making that point. A very similar process occurred in the government after the fall of China to Mao in the 50s, where Acheson and Truman were accused of having "allowed" China to go Communist by people like Nixon and Henry Luce.
That shit is no good. It's not good when Americans just make the leap in their mind that other Americans would wreck the country just to win elections.
The dolchstosslegende is always with us. The "American Left," neither the Democrats nor the Black Panthers (I assume you distinguish between the two), never held the white house during the draw down and Vietnamization of the 70s, and as we can all see from current events a determined president, particularly a second-termer like Nixon, is quite capable of keeping soldiers in the field for as long as he damn well pleases. Of course the Republican leadership was compromised by its stupendously illegal conduct over the previous years. The "American Left" didn't tap peoples phones without a warrant, or kidnap people and perform truth drug experiments on them. That was left to Dick Helms and Charles Colson and J. Edgar.
I know; I was there in '72 when the NVA sent 150,000 men across the border with more armor and mechanized equipment than the Germans sent to the Battle of the Kursk Salient, and got back less than one third, all of whom had to walk home because their equipment had been smashed, at a cost of less than 50 American deaths, for the entire month.You see that, or did you hear it in briefings? David Halberstam and the other war correspondents basically demolished the veracity of the briefings the military gave, and the sort of statistics the US military would produce made Baghdad Bob look like Ed Murrow. The Pentagon considered lying about such things an important strategic maneuver.
Even if we were killing guys at the rate you give, why weren't we marching on Hanoi right then and there? Maybe because it probably would've triggered a world war with China and or Russia, and even the most die hard Republicans didn't care so much about the RVN that they were willing to even chance that, even if meant "appeasement" (remember Kissinger had been negotiating with Le Duc Tho since '68). Also, once we've marched into Hanoi and pulled down all the Ho Chi Minh statues, what do we do then? The south vietnamese government was little more than a junta run by whichever general Westmoreland, Cabot Lodge or Kissinger liked the best at the time, and was profoundly unpopular and illegitimate. It's the same crap all over again, "if we kill all the bad guys the good guys obviously win," instead in this case it was Kennedy and Johnson making the assumption.
Some purchase has been gotten over the last few years by pundits who claim that the essential characteristic of the "domino theory," that SE Asia would fall to Communism, in fact played out exactly as we'd been warned. What is neglected is that, in fact, the number one factor in predicting if a country would fall to Communism was the level of US involvement in it. The more we tried to help with our bombs, the more likely it was that Communism would overrun the country. Countries we didn't touch might have leftist or Communists in there parliament, but would generally stay non-aligned and pacific. Countries we "helped" had killing fields.
I admit being deeply confused about the body of the post, even given the setup, since I don't think it really addresses the main point. If you wanna have absolute control over how all elements are positioned in the body box or viewport, you're necessarily taking control of this away from the client, and just IMO this is probably a mistake, since the client knows a lot of things the web publisher doesn't, like view limitations, availability of fonts, the mode of rendition of those fonts (like aliasing, which can have a profound effect on layout), and output device, be it screen, paper, screen reader, or some other unpredicted interface.
I'm not necessarily saying that you should use (h1) instead of a (div) with styling, or a (strong) instead of a (span) with styling, but that HTML flavors in general are built around the assumption that the enclosed content is organized "semantically" into blocks of text (just like every other markup language since the beginning of desktop publiching, like nroff, TeX, RTF, or OO, you name it). A block of text is a much more flexible specification of content than any absolute method; it maps to a common mode of human interaction and thus can be made to work on a variety of output devices and regimes. It's also a natural fit for the need to position runs of text around other positioned objects, when the final position of the imposing object is not known at the time the HTML is generated... This is starting to sound a lot like a strict versus dynamic typing argument, isn't it?, with rendering == execution and html authoring == compiling.
I'm also not saying you can't use grids or tables either, everyone does, but even on the trickiest sites the grids are just a framing device for the stuff to be read. The news story, or slashdot post contained within the glue of the table is always organized semantically, into paragraphs, lists, quotes, etc.
But you have to specify "how all the chunks come together" for a variable set of page widths and glyph sizes.
How about a way to take our centuries of knowledge about "traditional graphic design" and apply it to the a web-based mediumThey did. Where exactly do you think the idea of floating and clearing came from? Open up a copy of your favorite magazine, and the text wraps around floated images. The big impedance mismatch between a web page and a piece of paper is the fact that a webpage can be displayed in an arbitrarily sized viewport with arbitrarily-sized and replaceable fonts. A grid layout just invites everybody to write "this website is optimized for 1024x768 monitors, expand the window to full screen for the complete experience!"
The formatting model in HTML and XHTML trade strict definition of every element position (which you can still do with tables) for better presentation on a wide range of viewing systems, from a Vista box with QXGA to a Treo. HTML and XHTML tags aren't supposed to position elements; they give semantic hints that the browser uses to position the objects itself. Under the hypertext model, the browser always has final say about the positioning of elements, and this is particularly important on mobile devices and in the unusual though important case of the user providing his own stylesheets.
It would be if they were so bald about it, but since the antitrust complaint they use a "point system" for their OEMs. You get points for using MS branding and marketing messages (like "Enhanced for Windows Vista" or whatever), and points for packaging WMP, and points for not including competing products.
This is an interesting strategy that many organizations have been using recently to act in a manner that's unlawful if unlawfulness stems from intent. For example, it's illegal to use a person's race as a determining factor in getting them a slot in a law school, but you can have a point system where a person's race is given a certain point value, along with their high school grades, extra-curricular activites, etc. (this is what the U Mich. did after their getting sued for using "Affirmative Action" in a very general sense)
.I've posted this before on this topic, but since you mentioned it...
The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor of the GPU, is reported to have invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; brown circles indicated persons in contact with friends of the suspect but not known to him personally; cross-relationships between the suspect's friends, political and nonpolitical, and the friends of his friends were indicated by lines between the respective circles. Obviously the limitations of this method are set only by the size of the filing cards, and, theoretically, a gigantic single sheet could show the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population. And this is the utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police: a look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish, not who is who or who thinks what, but who is related to whom and in what degree or kind of intimacy.Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism
It may be apropos of the issue at hand that the speaker never had any children either, despite being one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 19th century. Notwithstanding another one of his expressions, also from Zarathustra... "Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly."
It might be worth it, in that case, to try send out some signal explaining that the really powerful signals they get are just television. I'd rather the Vulcan survey ship not see American Idol, but if we've got no choice about it, we might as well try to assert with a different broadcast that, despite all the other evidence, we are in fact 'intelligent' beings.
Or maybe I speak too soon.
STOP! Geek time-
or be destroyed by Klingons...That was a Pioneer, not Voyager. You can tell by the plaque; I think non-canon lit rules it Pioneer 11.
or even return to Earth is a horrible epic adventure involving the Enterprise....Did you ever see the director's cut DVD that came out a few years ago? It's a much better film, still a bit slow, but the visual effects are much better -- and were restored in a manner in keeping with the original concepts -- and now I think it's the best of the odd-numbered Treks. The cuts they made, the proper sound mix and the good visuals let you focus a lot more on the story which is really compelling in a 70s hard scifi way.