His comment was an excellent piece of sarcasm. For actual retarded comments, we need look no further than your own:
"Look how much was *lost* in the dark ages"
What precisely was lost in the dark ages? Historians call the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages "dark" because there is a relative dearth of West European written information, but this doesn't mean that everybody suddenly descended into ignorance and barbarism, and historians do not use the term to imply that they did. The general level of literacy in Western Europe after Rome fell was pretty much the same as it had been during its pre-eminence, i.e. rich people, trained scribes, and those in religious hierarchies could read and write in both their own languages and Latin, while the general population was completely illiterate. The only thing that they really lost was the huge centralised imperial bureaucracy which generated large volumes of paper that became important to later historians, and the comprehensive international messenger network that Rome maintained to move it around.
"hundreds of years of torment, torture, slavery, and having to rediscover even the most basic science"
To add to the thousands of years of torment, torture, slavery, and cultural and scientific discontinuity that preceded it. Rome was an empire built on slavery that delighted in watching people and animals kill each other for sport, invented crucifixion, and "lifted" most of its technology from others; Greek philosophers and mathematicians could laze around in the sun debating things because there were tens of thousands of slaves making sure that their beautiful cities were built and maintained, and they had plenty to eat and drink; and the other great ancient civilisations such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia were likewise kept running by large numbers of slaves who led short, miserable lives filled with endless toil and brutality.
"the point is where would we be in the astronomers of Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, and India had been able to work together since the beginning"
And how precisely were they to do this in a world that hadn't invented printing, where the speed of communication was the same as that of walking, and all of them spoke different languages? Written information was a hugely expensive resource when it had to be copied by hand, and transcription errors were commonplace. Transporting things over long distances could take years, and was a very dangerous undertaking, hence the fact that spices, silk, and other products from "the Orient" were worth much more than gold or diamonds by weight throughout most of history. A copy of an Indian astronomical text transported to Greece would thus end up costing the equivalent of millions of dollars in today's money, and you'd have spent it on something that contained several factual errors which would be compounded by whoever translated it from Sanskrit to Greek (assuming of course that one could find such a person in Greece, which is by no means certain).
"Instead we have entire continents that went to fire and sword as one empire after another fell"
Please name one entire continent that went to fire and sword.
"With them fell their knowledge, their science, and their arts"
This happened in a very few cases, but empires usually assimilated the arts, sciences, and other cultural elements of civilisations that they conquered, and then spread them to other cultures. Alexander The Great for example took Greek culture across the then known world, and also brought significant amounts of non-European influences into Europe. He founded Alexandria in Egypt, and it was one of the descendants of his general Ptolemy who built the Great Royal Library. Rome likewise spread both its own culture far and wide, and also assimilated and distributed that of its civilised subject nations, the most obvious and famous example of which is Christianity, which would probably have continued to be a small mystical Jewish sect if the the Romans hadn't adopted it, and then "encouraged" others to do so.
"I'm sorry that you don't understand how succession works in the executive branch"
You seem to be a very confused individual. I have yet to see a single source cited by you that in any way contradicts what the original poster or I have written, i.e that the Speaker is next in line after the VP, and therefore could become president on the event of his death.
"If Wikipedia isn't an authoritative enough source"
Texts that can be edited at any time by people with an agenda isn't an authoritative source on anything. A large number of articles in Wikipedia have been conclusively shown to be utter rubbish, so it cannot therefore be trusted on anything.
"would you accept Cornell University?"
Indeed I would,, especially as it doesn't contradict anything I've written. Note phrases such as "Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office _upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress_". What happens if one or both houses repeatedly reject the nominations, and the President (i.e. the prior Vice President) dies before he can nominate someone they'd accept? This isn't exactly unlikely considering how the current Democrat-controlled Congress would react to the sort of person that Cheney would be likely to nominate. This would mean that the chain of succession comes into play, and the Speaker (Pelosi) becomes President, and then gets to nominate a VP, who the Democrat-controlled Congress would vote to accept in a heartbeat.
Whichever way you try and slice, dice, or liquefy it, the fact of the matter is that Cheney's health isn't in good, and he's even less popular with both the Democrats and the public than Bush. If he ever became President because of Bush's death, they'd make his life as difficult as they possibly could because they'd reckon they had a public mandate to do so, which means that he'd be under a hell of a lot more stress, thus magnifying the likelihood of him either dying or becoming too incapacitated to continue (the mere thought that Democrat delaying tactics could result in Pelosi becoming President might well be enough to kill him outright!).
NB: republics whose heads of state are part of the party political framework can have notable problems with succession when there's as much bad blood between parties as is currently the case in the US. A lot of Democrats seem to have a venomous hatred for Bush, and utterly detest Cheney, so the probability of them doing everything (legitimately) possible to get rid of him in the event that Bush was unable to continue in office is I think pretty high.
It's a deep personal flaw that I've been working to overcome for many years, but to no avail. I just have to take life one day at a time.
"Are all Europeans as arrogant and bigoted as you"
I'd say 90% of us are at least as arrogant as me. However, bigots have a negative opinion without any factual basis for it, whereas my negative opinion is based on Fox News, which is carried internationally by cable and satellite networks. It would thus be more correct to describe my attitude as one of increasingly astonished prejudice, because the likes of Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and some of the radio talk show hosts that they have as guests (plus of course Anne Coulter) ably demonstrate that we Europeans still have much to learn about the art of arrogant bigotry.
"No, citizens should be afraid when protests are no longer legal... but they should not be afraid if protests are no longer relevant."
They should be afraid if big ones are no longer relevant to their government, because besides voting (which, with the US Electoral College system, is only a guideline for the people that actually decide who becomes president of your country), it's the only legal form of showing dissatisfaction that's open to most citizens.
"If you abuse the credulity of the people, at some point they are going to stop taken you seriously"
You seem to be labouring under the assumption that protests are aimed at other people, when they are actually aimed at whoever is responsible for what's being protested against. This is why they are protected by law in free societies.
"People have been desensitized to protest as a means of expression."
If this is true, then why did Al Jabush (sorry, Fox News) spend such large amounts of air time trying to discredit the people behind last year's anti-war protests? If people were as desensitised as you claim, then surely the best tactic would simply have been to ignore them.
"Not only that, but protesting is a crude form of expression. It doesn't educate people about an issue, it doesn't often change minds about an issue"
Protests aren't aimed at passers by who have no power to change anything, so they don't try to educate anyone. This is the reason that they carry placards instead of stacks of books or DVDs, and chant slogans rather than reciting complex manifestos. When such people wish to communicate with the public, the tend to choose the much less difficult to organise system of handing out leaflets in busy streets.
"many times, it is designed to intimidate with the implicit threat of violence rather than be a form of expression (Many of the current batch of protests, such as the anti-WTO protests, are organized to actually disrupt the meetings, as opposed to simply show disaproval to the people at the meeting)."
The sorts of protests that are protected by law in free societies are defined as _peaceful_ assemblies. Violent assemblies are known as riots, and many countries have specially trained police groups known as "riot police" to deal with them. The reason we have different words for "protest", "demonstration", and "riot" is because they aren't the same things, and therefore tend to be treated very differently by the laws of most countries (i.e. protests and demonstrations are allowed in free societies, government-mandated demonstrations are compulsory in non-free ones, whereas riots are illegal in both).
"Also, a large protest doesn't mean that a plurality of people are behind something. Some friends of mine have no trouble getting 20,000 kids to come out to their convention for their underground band every year... if an underground band who gets little radio play and isn't on MTV or anything can get 20,000 kids modivated to travel to someplace for a weekend for $150 a head admission (not including travel costs and accomidation), then the 50,000 or so angry protestors at an "anti-globalization" rally don't nessicarilly represent a plurality of the population because they come out for free."
"Again, the original poster would only be correct if Cheney died before a new vice president was selected"
It isn't a case of "again", because you originally denied that this could occur, so you aren't reiterating anything.
"Wikipedia explains it quite clearly"
I don't care what Wikipedia says about anything. It is the product of a Beowulf cluster of idiots, and is only useful for finding lists of references which aren't other Wikipedia articles or somebody's blog.
"My point was to clarify that a president dying doesn't give everyone in the line of succession a promotion, i.e. the Speaker of the House does not become vice president"
It appears that the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 says the chain of succession is President->Vice President->Speaker (with a whole bunch of others who in their turn succeed them), so the original poster was right in saying that Pelosi would become Acting President if Cheney died after succeeding Bush.
Some points: 1) The fact that my reply wasn't particularly serious appears to have gone over your head. Perhaps I should have realised that I was replying to an American, and therefore ensured that each word was delimited by an emoticon to make things clear.
2) A country where people feel free to protest peacefully about things that most others regard as trivial is one where people still have at least some freedoms. However, if protests themselves become irrelevant irrespective of how many people are involved, then citizens should start being afraid, because the name for a system where politicians do whatever they want irrespective of whether the public likes it or not is "a dictatorship". Allowing people to vote for their dictators once in a while doesn't change the fact that they are dictators.
Read the GP post for the definition that poster used or "office", i.e. why people would be anxious to keep Bush alive, hence his fear of Pelosi becoming acting president. It is for this reason the the reply to it was utterly stupid, and thoroughly deserved to be highlighted as such.
"If Cheney dies in office, Bush would replace him"
That'd be a neat trick considering the fact that for Cheney to be in office, Bush would either have to be dead or so severely incapacitated that he was unable to function as president (yes, I know a lot of people think he fits that definition already!). Is there an official federal medium, or would Congress hold a seance with an Ouija board to find out who Bush wanted to replace Cheney with?
"if human ears were more sensitive than what they are, we would be continually distracted by random molecules hitting our eardrums."
That's not actually true. Mammals and birds have pretty similar auditory thresholds because (1) they use a closed pressure drum system, and (2) are warm blooded with fast circulatory systems that make a lot of noise. Other types of animal with slower metabolisms and open pressure-differential hearing systems have much greater sensitivity, and this rather interesting article on the Acoustical Society of America for example (http://www.acoustics.org/press/swa9501.html) measured some frog hearing systems as being around 100 times more sensitive than any mammalian ear, albeit in a fairly narrow band.
"and the French will revert to imperial measurements"
The French never used Imperial measurements because, like the rest of Europe, they weren't a part of the British Empire. And for that matter, neither does the US, whose "English" measurements aren't quite the same as Imperial ones (a US pint for example is 0.473 litres, while an Imperial pint is 0.568 litres). This highlights a significant problem with the traditional measurement systems, which were characterised by analogous units (in Europe at any rate, most countries of which used based them on Roman ones) whose actual quantities could vary by significant amounts not only from country to country, but also between regions of the same country, and even from person to person, something which had been a common cause of disputes between merchants for centuries.
"A more equivocal trade would be for us to adopt the Euro while Europe reverts to the imperial system."
The only part of Europe that can "revert" to the Imperial system is Britain, because they're the only country who used it. Note also that Imperial units didn't exist until the 1824 Weights And Measures Act, which means that it's actually newer than the metric system, which France officially adopted in 1794 (although Napoleon suspended it temporarily in 1812).
"He correctly surmised that the easiest way to fight this battle was simply to make people aware of it. Generally speaking, people consider themselves good. They won't allow that kind of injustice to continue if they are not able to turn away from it."
He correctly surmised that these things were true of the _British_, who didn't approve of soldiers killing unarmed civilians. It is however very unlikely that passive resistance would have worked against the WWII-era Japanese, whose standard tactic for dealing with such things was to spend a few weeks killing anybody they could find.
"After all, don't they pay for XP Pro on a machine they're going to image over with their separately licensed XP?"
Corporate customers can buy machines from big vendors such as Dell and HP without Windows. HP offer FreeDOS (and interestingly, Mandrake Linux) as a direct option for most machines on their corporate web site, while Dell will do so if you call them (if you're actually a corporate client, and not an individual who is trying to buy one machine sans Windows!). They do not therefore pay for Windows twice.
"Wasn't doubling the cost for no more benefit what Software Assurance was about?"
See above. Note also that corporate Software Assurance covers all the Microsoft products that companies use, not just the OS, and includes a number of other services.
"some people have been paying 1/3 of the price of an OS each year for 5 years waiting for the dog that Vista is"
Most companies go for SA precisely because they can pay for their software in three annual installments without the extra cost of interest that a loan would incur. This together with volume discounts (which can be significant for large customers) and other included services are the hooks that make SA attractive to corporations, not access to new software, which the majority won't even think about using until (a) various extremely detailed impact analyses have been conducted, and (b) all existing systems can be migrated to it at the same time. It is for this reason that so many newly purchased corporate desktops and laptops end up with Windows-2000 on them, and also why alternative operating systems like Linux and OS X have such a hard job even being considered, let alone accepted by these people.
NB: I am _not_ suggesting that Microsoft's SA is a great deal for anyone besides Microsoft!
" it's not like they couldn't hire their own lawyer to help them wade through the contract language and negotiate as necessary."
Did you not read what I and the links I gave said about the notes of intent that A&R men write out in an informal setting such as a restaurant, and then lie to the artists, saying that it's only an agreement between that A&R man and them to ensure that they give him a chance to at least match any deals that other A&R men might offer? There's no way any lawyer can negotiate the artists out of such a note of intent once signed, and those who sign it are completely beholden to the record company, who doesn't even have to offer them a contract, but can merely use the note to prevent them from signing with anyone else, or charge a large sum for permission to do so. it is for this reason that A&R men routinely lie about what the notes are, because nobody would sign the things if they told the truth, and there'd far fewer (probably less than 1/20th) as many people stuck with the option of either signing an obviously unfair contract, or leaving the music business altogether. Not all of these people are young or stupid, and it's a fact that large numbers of them have consulted lawyers over the years, but there's nothing they can do because the record industry has used teams of lawyers to hone their methodology over many decades to ensure that nobody can ever prove they were lied to, or that the nature of note of intent wasn't fully explained to them before signing it (A&R men are adept at ensuring that there are no witnesses when these things happen).
The good news is of course that a combination of the Internet and articles in musician-oriented magazines have resulted in people being a lot more suspicious of the hip, friendly A&R men than they used to be, and the massive increase in the number of artists who opt for an "indie" company or entirely self-finance their recordings over the last decade or so probably means that this tactic is much less successful nowadays. However, lying to artists is still far more common than telling the truth, and the fact that it doesn't always work now does not excuse those who do it, or the companies who employ them to force people into a position where the only option that allows them to follow their chosen career is to sign a contract that they would otherwise reject. It's likely that such tactics would have been outlawed years ago if the music industry didn't have so many lawmakers in its pocket, because few (if any) other sorts of companies would be allowed to get away with it.
"That a band may have stars in their eyes, or be willing to do anything to become a rock star, well, that's not a problem with the contracts or the RIAA."
What is however a problem with the RIAA's contracts is the fact that their A&R men deliberately lie about the nature of the deals, and what the innocuous-looking little "note of intent" that they apparently ad-lib onto the back of a napkin is and does. By the time the band finds out that nothing the A&R man promised is at all binding, but the hastily scribbled note means they've sold themselves to his company on any terms it feels like setting, the only choices left to the band or any members thereof are to sign an unfair contract, or get out of the music business.
"And most importantly, that somebody else -- namely musicians -- signed a bad contract does not mean that anyone else then gets to stick it to the record companies by downloading and sharing music for free."
The fact that _vast_ numbers of those contracts were effectively signed under duress means we're morally justified in sharing and downloading music for free from the "big five", because they're primarily responsible for not only using lies to obtain artists, but also lying to the public, politicians, and anyone else they think they can con. This does not of course mean that we're justified in copying all music, because there are some companies who treat artists and customers fairly, and it would be a shame to penalise them for the acts of those who grew wealthy through decades of blatant dishonesty and exploitation. Those who use the endemic disease in the music industry to justify downloading music, books, software, or other media are of course on a similar moral level to the very people they claim to be rebelling against.
NB: despite my views, I don't download anything that I haven't already bought on some medium or other, i.e. I will use it for format shifting, but not to obtain anything I haven't paid for at some point, and still have the original media for. Note also that I've never been stung by a nasty recording contract, but have known several people who were basically conned out of very promising careers by being lied to, and therefore firmly believe that the music industry (and indeed the world) would be significantly better off if Internet piracy ends up either destroying or reforming the "big five" music companies.
"That many musicians would rather NOT go that route, and would rather have the record companies pay for the recording and production, and artwork, and sales and marketing and distribution and all that, doesn't mean that the artists are getting ripped off."
The record companies don't pay for the recording, production, or any of the other things you list -- these and other costs are paid by the artist(s), usually from an advance much like the ones book publishers give to authors, and said advance must be paid back in full from the artist's portion of the royalties from sales before they actually see any money from those royalties themselves. If there aren't enough royalties from CD sales to pay the advance back, they'll have to find some other way of doing it, e.g. touring, waiting on tables, flipping burghers, etc. Record companies will only pay for the following things:
1) Promotional expenses such as travelling to TV and radio interviews. 2) Pressing, printing, and transporting the packaged product. 3) Bribes (sorry, _incentives_) to radio stations and the like (although these are reserved for a very small number of artists). 4) Shelf space fees (where such are incurred) in certain large retail chains.
"Oh, and also offloading all of the risk that they are unable to recoup any of these costs."
You're either a troll who is deliberately spreading lies, or have never actually seen a standard contract from any of the five major labels, and are therefore simply spouting tripe from ignorance rather than deliberate malice.
"The musicians made the deals with the record companies willingly"
They did indeed, although most (and I do mean most, i.e. just about anybody that isn't mega-famous) seem to repent the fact after discovering that the deal they _thought_ they were getting (which was a lot like your fictitious account of generous record companies who pay for everything) resulted in them having no net earnings despite selling significant numbers of CDs, or (more usually) large amounts of debt that must be paid back.
Read the following links. If you are merely misguided, then you will be less so afterwards, and will not therefore post balderdash like this in the future. A troll who is trying to present the record companies as a cuddly brotherhood of artist defenders will obviously not bother to read them, and continue to disseminate total crap in the vain hope that somebody with the IQ of a cardboard box will believe them without bothering to verify anything for themselves.
"It's also an interesting exercise to talk to people from the generation who actually got to vote in the original UK referendum on entry into the common market"
There was no referendum on whether Britain entered the Common Market -- Edward Heath's government took the country in without giving the people themselves a say in the matter. A subsequent government headed by Harold Wilson had a referendum on whether Britain should continue to be a part of it or withdraw in 1975, and the majority (67%)voted to stay in.
"The GPL only has power if the government grants an "unnatural right" [as they referred to it in the link] known as copyright."
The flaw here is in the idea that copyrights are somehow less "natural" than any of the other things that we are permitted to have and do by entirely invented human laws which eventually boil down to use of force (or the threat thereof) by powerful groups to ensure that everybody else complies with their wishes. You have the "right" not to be killed by anyone except the powerful, or their delegates; you have the "right" not to be imprisoned by anyone except the powerful or their delegates; and you have the right to any property that the powerful and their delegates don't want for themselves. Not only do they get to grant these and other "rights" entirely on their own terms, but also redefine any words used to describe them whenever they see fit so they can say things like "of course you have the right to property, but the _legal_ definition of property (i.e. our special private version that has a different meaning from what everyone else thought) clearly excludes these things that we're going to take away from you".
Laws and statutes are simply sets of rules that people invent to control other people, and all of them are therefore equally artificial, hence their notable geographic and temporal variability. Arguing that one set of such artificial constructs is somehow more "natural" than another set makes no more sense than arguing that AM radio is more "natural" than FM.
" We elected a leader, and he became a Bush follower and sold us out."
After which you elected him again for a third term, thereby proving to all UK politicians that being caught lying, selling out to foreigners, wasting vast sums turning the country into a ID card holding, constantly watched society of nannied pussies, and generally behaving like the Caudillo of a military junta is pretty much what the British people want from their leaders. And after the disgustingly craven way that their armed forces behaved with the Iranians, they probably also welcome their new status as Europe's premier surrender monkeys.
The recent earthquake in Kent was probably caused by Winston Churchill's body spinning so quickly in his grave that it caused subterranean sonic booms. It's a good thing that most of the WWII generation are already dead, because they've been spared the shame of seeing their country's metamorphosis from a bastion of freedom that so many fought and died to protect into an island of snivelling cowardly shits who've handed their liberty to Fuhrer Blair in return for being "protected" from a few Muslim extremists (who only become active some time _after_ British forces were sent to Iraq on an American-led wild goose chase, and then stayed there as occupying conquerors), illegal immigration (worse now than before Blair despite endless empty promises), and the evil EC, which is obviously the real reason for all Britain's ills, and not the fact that that they're a nation of passive dweebs who've repeatedly elected a government that they know will anally rape them at every opportunity.
"Highlighting doesn't work with a narrowing search as everything matches initially"
I fail to see where this is different from a list, which would also initially contain everything in a narrowing search.
"So either the Mac doesn't do this in a narrowing search, or, more likely, it does indeed lowlight them. Hence, the problem remains."
The Mac "lowlights" the items that _don't_ fit the search criteria along with the surrounding page, so the ones that do fit stand out because they're not only much brighter and more colourful than the rest, but also picked out with a "searchlight" effect that's only used during searches, and isn't seen otherwise. It's analogous to stage lighting effects where the overall lights are dimmed, and a few key performers are picked out by spotlights, which is a metaphor that most people are familiar with.
"Thankfully, since it also provides a dropdown list with only the matching items, the problem is mitigated."
The fact that there are two complimentary views is very important because the list provides a context for the visual cues on the icons. Although Apple have a less than perfect record on the UI design front, they're generally much better at it than their remaining competitors, who often try to copy some of their ideas while omitting others that are often key factors in making the Apple version useful.
"As I suspected, it works because Mac has fairly limited customisability. Fits with my Gnome extreme view of Macs."
It certainly is limited compared with KDE, but the reason the Apple system works so well is not due to any limitations, but comes instead from the way things are initially presented, i.e. as an organised hierarchy of options. The System Preferences windows is a 7x4 grid that's by default visually separated by an effect similar to music paper into four distinct lines that represent categories called "Personal", "Hardware", "Internet and Network", and "System" (this can however be changed into a strictly alphabetical grid if preferred). Each icon in a line is an applet that can contain several pages, and it is references to the entries on these pages that get returned in response to search terms. The list that drops down from the search text window is updated dynamically as letters are typed, and the icons containing any of those entries are highlighted; if one moves down the list using the keyboard or mouse, the highlights change dynamically to reflect whatever entry is selected. Double-clicking a highlighted icon opens the applet at the page referenced by the search term, i.e. it takes a user directly to the correct level of the hierarchy. This is far from the entirety of the System Preferences functionality, but it should give an idea of how it works on a base level.
"My heuristic is perfectly fine for a heuristic. (a) is irrelevant, no sane person would make a narrowing search for 5 items. (b) and (c) is just lame, it doesn't matter how they are presented, not whether it is used often, it still have to be done in a userfriendly manner."
Your assertion that my point about presentation is "lame" does I think say a great deal about why Linux in general, and KDE in particular, have earned a notable reputation for being the antithesis of the user friendliness that you claim is so important.
"Lowlighting doesn't help with this problem. In fact, it makes it worse... why are all those icons monochrome?"
This is a problem with a particular Linux program, not the Mac, which as I have explained previously, highlights the icons that fit the search criteria. Linux is awash with examples of dreadful UI design (although both the Mac and Windows have their fair share of them too), and this sounds like yet another.
"That argument is only relevant with something you do often. Configuring the system is hopefully not one of them, unless it is severely broken."
Unfortunately, it may well be one of the things that people who are new to KDE have to do, so bad design choices here can sour the initial experience.
"I'm not talking about random UI elements... indeed, in a menu bar, leaving some items in greyed out might be better, if you make sure that hover (or similar) explains why they are greyed out."
Indeed.
"But in a narrowing search, greying out is bonkers"
This does I think depend on what's being searched. It makes perfect sense in the Mac's System Preference dialogue, which has a relatively small number of fixed options displayed on a square grid of icons, all of which are visible whenever the dialogue is opened -- it would however be an extremely poor choice for files, which can exist in very large numbers, and are liable to change on a fairly regular basis. There is no single mechanism that is equally well suited to everything.
"Think of a list with 100 items, and you have to hunt for the 2 that is not greyed out? That would be highly annoying"
It would indeed. However, the fact that neither of the professionally designed systems uses scrolling lists to present system configuration options, despite both of them shipping with perfectly serviceable list control widgets, could well indicate that there are much better ways to do this. It does not of course mean that a well programmed list isn't better than a badly written alternative, which appears to be the case with the amateurish Kubuntu attempt to emulate Apple's system, but by the same token, it's unfair to judge other systems by assuming that a poor quality rip-off is in any way representative of the original.
"I find that a good rule of the thumb is that if you are ever greying out more than 1/2, greying out is not the way to go."
There is no adequate heuristic for this, because so much depends on (a) how many items there are, (b) the way they're presented, and (c) whether they change on a regular basis.
"I have only ever used a Mac for a few minutes at the time, which was (as can only be expected) a highly annoying and frustrating experience. Time pressure and a new interfaces just doesn't mix:)"
I also found it very annoying after having become accustomed to Windows and KDE (I tried gnome, but didn't like it as much as KDE, although this was purely a matter of personal preference). It took quite a while (several weeks) to realise that I was in fact trying to do things in a far more complex way than was necessary because I'd never used a full GUI that was based around a very rigourous application of a few basic metaphors, and now the frustration comes when using other systems, which seem like a hodge-podge of ill fitting mechanisms duct-taped together by comparison. This does not however mean that I think OS X is unreservedly wonderful, because it's far from being so, and theree are many things about it that I dislike such as the stupid fixed menu bar that obviously made sense on a single-tasking system with a small screen, but is IMO totally stupid in a multitasking OS that is frequently used with several 30" displays.
"I always view Mac OS as a sort of Gnome extreme --- very our-way-or-the-highway like"
This is a very valid criticism. However, the other side of the coin is that a disciplined and highly integrated system is much easier for newbs to learn than a more anarchic one that incorporates a whole bunch of distinct ideas, and the very
"So it has a dropdown list --- Kubuntu's config doesn't. I suppose that makes the apple version tolerable."
Indeed.
"I hate the lowlighting stuff: if something is irrelevant, removing it altogether (like KConfig does) is infinitely clearer and better."
The problem with your preferred method is twofold:
1) People who leave a search term in place (or accidentally type some rubbish in that the system "thinks" is a search term) may be presented with an incomplete list of options, and not know why, or how to get the full list back again.
2) The whole desktop metaphor is based on spatial awareness, which is lost if items keep moving around, disappearing, etc. This is a major reason for so many users disliking the new UI in MS Office -- they'd learned _where_ things were on previous versions, and don't like the fact that they've not only moved, by keep doing so based on context.
"Anyway, good thing that part of Mac, at least, isn't screwy, even if it still have a way to come to be on par:)"
While I agree that some things in KDE that are better than their OS X equivalents (and it has things that OS X doesn't have, although the reverse is also true) , UI elements that appear and disappear isn't one of them.
"What was the problem? The icon I needed to click is ALWAYS monochrome! I thought the search was excluding it."
Apple's system "darkens" the entire page of icons, and highlights the ones that fit the search terms with a searchlight effect, i.e. they are "illuminated" by a bright circle. It is I think rather unlikely that anyone would assume the darkened icons are the valid ones rather than the bright ones.
" I hear it is a clone from the Mac; if so I pity the Mac people for yet another reason."
OS X's "System Preferences" dialogue has a search bar that works extremely well: it not only drops down a list of "hits", but highlights the applet(s) containing each term as one moves through them, and will take users to the correct page of the relevant applet when a term is selected. The Kubuntu configuration system you are describing is not therefore a clone of the Mac one, irrespective of what you may have heard.
It did indeed, but the "official" British armed forces were also frequently used to further its interests, e.g. when the British fleet was used against China to protect the British East India Company's opium trade.
Slashdot Mirror
"That's a retarded comment"
His comment was an excellent piece of sarcasm. For actual retarded comments, we need look no further than your own:
"Look how much was *lost* in the dark ages"
What precisely was lost in the dark ages? Historians call the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages "dark" because there is a relative dearth of West European written information, but this doesn't mean that everybody suddenly descended into ignorance and barbarism, and historians do not use the term to imply that they did. The general level of literacy in Western Europe after Rome fell was pretty much the same as it had been during its pre-eminence, i.e. rich people, trained scribes, and those in religious hierarchies could read and write in both their own languages and Latin, while the general population was completely illiterate. The only thing that they really lost was the huge centralised imperial bureaucracy which generated large volumes of paper that became important to later historians, and the comprehensive international messenger network that Rome maintained to move it around.
"hundreds of years of torment, torture, slavery, and having to rediscover even the most basic science"
To add to the thousands of years of torment, torture, slavery, and cultural and scientific discontinuity that preceded it. Rome was an empire built on slavery that delighted in watching people and animals kill each other for sport, invented crucifixion, and "lifted" most of its technology from others; Greek philosophers and mathematicians could laze around in the sun debating things because there were tens of thousands of slaves making sure that their beautiful cities were built and maintained, and they had plenty to eat and drink; and the other great ancient civilisations such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia were likewise kept running by large numbers of slaves who led short, miserable lives filled with endless toil and brutality.
"the point is where would we be in the astronomers of Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, and India had been able to work together since the beginning"
And how precisely were they to do this in a world that hadn't invented printing, where the speed of communication was the same as that of walking, and all of them spoke different languages? Written information was a hugely expensive resource when it had to be copied by hand, and transcription errors were commonplace. Transporting things over long distances could take years, and was a very dangerous undertaking, hence the fact that spices, silk, and other products from "the Orient" were worth much more than gold or diamonds by weight throughout most of history. A copy of an Indian astronomical text transported to Greece would thus end up costing the equivalent of millions of dollars in today's money, and you'd have spent it on something that contained several factual errors which would be compounded by whoever translated it from Sanskrit to Greek (assuming of course that one could find such a person in Greece, which is by no means certain).
"Instead we have entire continents that went to fire and sword as one empire after another fell"
Please name one entire continent that went to fire and sword.
"With them fell their knowledge, their science, and their arts"
This happened in a very few cases, but empires usually assimilated the arts, sciences, and other cultural elements of civilisations that they conquered, and then spread them to other cultures. Alexander The Great for example took Greek culture across the then known world, and also brought significant amounts of non-European influences into Europe. He founded Alexandria in Egypt, and it was one of the descendants of his general Ptolemy who built the Great Royal Library. Rome likewise spread both its own culture far and wide, and also assimilated and distributed that of its civilised subject nations, the most obvious and famous example of which is Christianity, which would probably have continued to be a small mystical Jewish sect if the the Romans hadn't adopted it, and then "encouraged" others to do so.
"I'm sorry that you don't understand how succession works in the executive branch"
You seem to be a very confused individual. I have yet to see a single source cited by you that in any way contradicts what the original poster or I have written, i.e that the Speaker is next in line after the VP, and therefore could become president on the event of his death.
"If Wikipedia isn't an authoritative enough source"
Texts that can be edited at any time by people with an agenda isn't an authoritative source on anything. A large number of articles in Wikipedia have been conclusively shown to be utter rubbish, so it cannot therefore be trusted on anything.
"would you accept Cornell University?"
Indeed I would,, especially as it doesn't contradict anything I've written. Note phrases such as "Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office _upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress_". What happens if one or both houses repeatedly reject the nominations, and the President (i.e. the prior Vice President) dies before he can nominate someone they'd accept? This isn't exactly unlikely considering how the current Democrat-controlled Congress would react to the sort of person that Cheney would be likely to nominate. This would mean that the chain of succession comes into play, and the Speaker (Pelosi) becomes President, and then gets to nominate a VP, who the Democrat-controlled Congress would vote to accept in a heartbeat.
Whichever way you try and slice, dice, or liquefy it, the fact of the matter is that Cheney's health isn't in good, and he's even less popular with both the Democrats and the public than Bush. If he ever became President because of Bush's death, they'd make his life as difficult as they possibly could because they'd reckon they had a public mandate to do so, which means that he'd be under a hell of a lot more stress, thus magnifying the likelihood of him either dying or becoming too incapacitated to continue (the mere thought that Democrat delaying tactics could result in Pelosi becoming President might well be enough to kill him outright!).
NB: republics whose heads of state are part of the party political framework can have notable problems with succession when there's as much bad blood between parties as is currently the case in the US. A lot of Democrats seem to have a venomous hatred for Bush, and utterly detest Cheney, so the probability of them doing everything (legitimately) possible to get rid of him in the event that Bush was unable to continue in office is I think pretty high.
"what an asshole!"
It's a deep personal flaw that I've been working to overcome for many years, but to no avail. I just have to take life one day at a time.
"Are all Europeans as arrogant and bigoted as you"
I'd say 90% of us are at least as arrogant as me. However, bigots have a negative opinion without any factual basis for it, whereas my negative opinion is based on Fox News, which is carried internationally by cable and satellite networks. It would thus be more correct to describe my attitude as one of increasingly astonished prejudice, because the likes of Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and some of the radio talk show hosts that they have as guests (plus of course Anne Coulter) ably demonstrate that we Europeans still have much to learn about the art of arrogant bigotry.
"No, citizens should be afraid when protests are no longer legal... but they should not be afraid if protests are no longer relevant."
They should be afraid if big ones are no longer relevant to their government, because besides voting (which, with the US Electoral College system, is only a guideline for the people that actually decide who becomes president of your country), it's the only legal form of showing dissatisfaction that's open to most citizens.
"If you abuse the credulity of the people, at some point they are going to stop taken you seriously"
You seem to be labouring under the assumption that protests are aimed at other people, when they are actually aimed at whoever is responsible for what's being protested against. This is why they are protected by law in free societies.
"People have been desensitized to protest as a means of expression."
If this is true, then why did Al Jabush (sorry, Fox News) spend such large amounts of air time trying to discredit the people behind last year's anti-war protests? If people were as desensitised as you claim, then surely the best tactic would simply have been to ignore them.
"Not only that, but protesting is a crude form of expression. It doesn't educate people about an issue, it doesn't often change minds about an issue"
Protests aren't aimed at passers by who have no power to change anything, so they don't try to educate anyone. This is the reason that they carry placards instead of stacks of books or DVDs, and chant slogans rather than reciting complex manifestos. When such people wish to communicate with the public, the tend to choose the much less difficult to organise system of handing out leaflets in busy streets.
"many times, it is designed to intimidate with the implicit threat of violence rather than be a form of expression (Many of the current batch of protests, such as the anti-WTO protests, are organized to actually disrupt the meetings, as opposed to simply show disaproval to the people at the meeting)."
The sorts of protests that are protected by law in free societies are defined as _peaceful_ assemblies. Violent assemblies are known as riots, and many countries have specially trained police groups known as "riot police" to deal with them. The reason we have different words for "protest", "demonstration", and "riot" is because they aren't the same things, and therefore tend to be treated very differently by the laws of most countries (i.e. protests and demonstrations are allowed in free societies, government-mandated demonstrations are compulsory in non-free ones, whereas riots are illegal in both).
"Also, a large protest doesn't mean that a plurality of people are behind something. Some friends of mine have no trouble getting 20,000 kids to come out to their convention for their underground band every year... if an underground band who gets little radio play and isn't on MTV or anything can get 20,000 kids modivated to travel to someplace for a weekend for $150 a head admission (not including travel costs and accomidation), then the 50,000 or so angry protestors at an "anti-globalization" rally don't nessicarilly represent a plurality of the population because they come out for free."
"Again, the original poster would only be correct if Cheney died before a new vice president was selected"
It isn't a case of "again", because you originally denied that this could occur, so you aren't reiterating anything.
"Wikipedia explains it quite clearly"
I don't care what Wikipedia says about anything. It is the product of a Beowulf cluster of idiots, and is only useful for finding lists of references which aren't other Wikipedia articles or somebody's blog.
"My point was to clarify that a president dying doesn't give everyone in the line of succession a promotion, i.e. the Speaker of the House does not become vice president"
It appears that the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 says the chain of succession is President->Vice President->Speaker (with a whole bunch of others who in their turn succeed them), so the original poster was right in saying that Pelosi would become Acting President if Cheney died after succeeding Bush.
Some points:
1) The fact that my reply wasn't particularly serious appears to have gone over your head. Perhaps I should have realised that I was replying to an American, and therefore ensured that each word was delimited by an emoticon to make things clear.
2) A country where people feel free to protest peacefully about things that most others regard as trivial is one where people still have at least some freedoms. However, if protests themselves become irrelevant irrespective of how many people are involved, then citizens should start being afraid, because the name for a system where politicians do whatever they want irrespective of whether the public likes it or not is "a dictatorship". Allowing people to vote for their dictators once in a while doesn't change the fact that they are dictators.
Read the GP post for the definition that poster used or "office", i.e. why people would be anxious to keep Bush alive, hence his fear of Pelosi becoming acting president. It is for this reason the the reply to it was utterly stupid, and thoroughly deserved to be highlighted as such.
"and will protest any world leader except Hugo Chavez"
Be fair, please -- they wouldn't protest against Castro either.
"If Cheney dies in office, Bush would replace him"
That'd be a neat trick considering the fact that for Cheney to be in office, Bush would either have to be dead or so severely incapacitated that he was unable to function as president (yes, I know a lot of people think he fits that definition already!). Is there an official federal medium, or would Congress hold a seance with an Ouija board to find out who Bush wanted to replace Cheney with?
"if human ears were more sensitive than what they are, we would be continually distracted by random molecules hitting our eardrums."
That's not actually true. Mammals and birds have pretty similar auditory thresholds because (1) they use a closed pressure drum system, and (2) are warm blooded with fast circulatory systems that make a lot of noise. Other types of animal with slower metabolisms and open pressure-differential hearing systems have much greater sensitivity, and this rather interesting article on the Acoustical Society of America for example (http://www.acoustics.org/press/swa9501.html) measured some frog hearing systems as being around 100 times more sensitive than any mammalian ear, albeit in a fairly narrow band.
"and the French will revert to imperial measurements"
The French never used Imperial measurements because, like the rest of Europe, they weren't a part of the British Empire. And for that matter, neither does the US, whose "English" measurements aren't quite the same as Imperial ones (a US pint for example is 0.473 litres, while an Imperial pint is 0.568 litres). This highlights a significant problem with the traditional measurement systems, which were characterised by analogous units (in Europe at any rate, most countries of which used based them on Roman ones) whose actual quantities could vary by significant amounts not only from country to country, but also between regions of the same country, and even from person to person, something which had been a common cause of disputes between merchants for centuries.
"A more equivocal trade would be for us to adopt the Euro while Europe reverts to the imperial system."
The only part of Europe that can "revert" to the Imperial system is Britain, because they're the only country who used it. Note also that Imperial units didn't exist until the 1824 Weights And Measures Act, which means that it's actually newer than the metric system, which France officially adopted in 1794 (although Napoleon suspended it temporarily in 1812).
"He correctly surmised that the easiest way to fight this battle was simply to make people aware of it. Generally speaking, people consider themselves good. They won't allow that kind of injustice to continue if they are not able to turn away from it."
He correctly surmised that these things were true of the _British_, who didn't approve of soldiers killing unarmed civilians. It is however very unlikely that passive resistance would have worked against the WWII-era Japanese, whose standard tactic for dealing with such things was to spend a few weeks killing anybody they could find.
"After all, don't they pay for XP Pro on a machine they're going to image over with their separately licensed XP?"
Corporate customers can buy machines from big vendors such as Dell and HP without Windows. HP offer FreeDOS (and interestingly, Mandrake Linux) as a direct option for most machines on their corporate web site, while Dell will do so if you call them (if you're actually a corporate client, and not an individual who is trying to buy one machine sans Windows!). They do not therefore pay for Windows twice.
"Wasn't doubling the cost for no more benefit what Software Assurance was about?"
See above. Note also that corporate Software Assurance covers all the Microsoft products that companies use, not just the OS, and includes a number of other services.
"some people have been paying 1/3 of the price of an OS each year for 5 years waiting for the dog that Vista is"
Most companies go for SA precisely because they can pay for their software in three annual installments without the extra cost of interest that a loan would incur. This together with volume discounts (which can be significant for large customers) and other included services are the hooks that make SA attractive to corporations, not access to new software, which the majority won't even think about using until (a) various extremely detailed impact analyses have been conducted, and (b) all existing systems can be migrated to it at the same time. It is for this reason that so many newly purchased corporate desktops and laptops end up with Windows-2000 on them, and also why alternative operating systems like Linux and OS X have such a hard job even being considered, let alone accepted by these people.
NB: I am _not_ suggesting that Microsoft's SA is a great deal for anyone besides Microsoft!
" it's not like they couldn't hire their own lawyer to help them wade through the contract language and negotiate as necessary."
Did you not read what I and the links I gave said about the notes of intent that A&R men write out in an informal setting such as a restaurant, and then lie to the artists, saying that it's only an agreement between that A&R man and them to ensure that they give him a chance to at least match any deals that other A&R men might offer? There's no way any lawyer can negotiate the artists out of such a note of intent once signed, and those who sign it are completely beholden to the record company, who doesn't even have to offer them a contract, but can merely use the note to prevent them from signing with anyone else, or charge a large sum for permission to do so. it is for this reason that A&R men routinely lie about what the notes are, because nobody would sign the things if they told the truth, and there'd far fewer (probably less than 1/20th) as many people stuck with the option of either signing an obviously unfair contract, or leaving the music business altogether. Not all of these people are young or stupid, and it's a fact that large numbers of them have consulted lawyers over the years, but there's nothing they can do because the record industry has used teams of lawyers to hone their methodology over many decades to ensure that nobody can ever prove they were lied to, or that the nature of note of intent wasn't fully explained to them before signing it (A&R men are adept at ensuring that there are no witnesses when these things happen).
The good news is of course that a combination of the Internet and articles in musician-oriented magazines have resulted in people being a lot more suspicious of the hip, friendly A&R men than they used to be, and the massive increase in the number of artists who opt for an "indie" company or entirely self-finance their recordings over the last decade or so probably means that this tactic is much less successful nowadays. However, lying to artists is still far more common than telling the truth, and the fact that it doesn't always work now does not excuse those who do it, or the companies who employ them to force people into a position where the only option that allows them to follow their chosen career is to sign a contract that they would otherwise reject. It's likely that such tactics would have been outlawed years ago if the music industry didn't have so many lawmakers in its pocket, because few (if any) other sorts of companies would be allowed to get away with it.
"That a band may have stars in their eyes, or be willing to do anything to become a rock star, well, that's not a problem with the contracts or the RIAA."
What is however a problem with the RIAA's contracts is the fact that their A&R men deliberately lie about the nature of the deals, and what the innocuous-looking little "note of intent" that they apparently ad-lib onto the back of a napkin is and does. By the time the band finds out that nothing the A&R man promised is at all binding, but the hastily scribbled note means they've sold themselves to his company on any terms it feels like setting, the only choices left to the band or any members thereof are to sign an unfair contract, or get out of the music business.
"And most importantly, that somebody else -- namely musicians -- signed a bad contract does not mean that anyone else then gets to stick it to the record companies by downloading and sharing music for free."
The fact that _vast_ numbers of those contracts were effectively signed under duress means we're morally justified in sharing and downloading music for free from the "big five", because they're primarily responsible for not only using lies to obtain artists, but also lying to the public, politicians, and anyone else they think they can con. This does not of course mean that we're justified in copying all music, because there are some companies who treat artists and customers fairly, and it would be a shame to penalise them for the acts of those who grew wealthy through decades of blatant dishonesty and exploitation. Those who use the endemic disease in the music industry to justify downloading music, books, software, or other media are of course on a similar moral level to the very people they claim to be rebelling against.
NB: despite my views, I don't download anything that I haven't already bought on some medium or other, i.e. I will use it for format shifting, but not to obtain anything I haven't paid for at some point, and still have the original media for. Note also that I've never been stung by a nasty recording contract, but have known several people who were basically conned out of very promising careers by being lied to, and therefore firmly believe that the music industry (and indeed the world) would be significantly better off if Internet piracy ends up either destroying or reforming the "big five" music companies.
"That many musicians would rather NOT go that route, and would rather have the record companies pay for the recording and production, and artwork, and sales and marketing and distribution and all that, doesn't mean that the artists are getting ripped off."
c ontract.htm
The record companies don't pay for the recording, production, or any of the other things you list -- these and other costs are paid by the artist(s), usually from an advance much like the ones book publishers give to authors, and said advance must be paid back in full from the artist's portion of the royalties from sales before they actually see any money from those royalties themselves. If there aren't enough royalties from CD sales to pay the advance back, they'll have to find some other way of doing it, e.g. touring, waiting on tables, flipping burghers, etc. Record companies will only pay for the following things:
1) Promotional expenses such as travelling to TV and radio interviews.
2) Pressing, printing, and transporting the packaged product.
3) Bribes (sorry, _incentives_) to radio stations and the like (although these are reserved for a very small number of artists).
4) Shelf space fees (where such are incurred) in certain large retail chains.
"Oh, and also offloading all of the risk that they are unable to recoup any of these costs."
You're either a troll who is deliberately spreading lies, or have never actually seen a standard contract from any of the five major labels, and are therefore simply spouting tripe from ignorance rather than deliberate malice.
"The musicians made the deals with the record companies willingly"
They did indeed, although most (and I do mean most, i.e. just about anybody that isn't mega-famous) seem to repent the fact after discovering that the deal they _thought_ they were getting (which was a lot like your fictitious account of generous record companies who pay for everything) resulted in them having no net earnings despite selling significant numbers of CDs, or (more usually) large amounts of debt that must be paid back.
Read the following links. If you are merely misguided, then you will be less so afterwards, and will not therefore post balderdash like this in the future. A troll who is trying to present the record companies as a cuddly brotherhood of artist defenders will obviously not bother to read them, and continue to disseminate total crap in the vain hope that somebody with the IQ of a cardboard box will believe them without bothering to verify anything for themselves.
http://www.futureofmusic.org/contractcrit.cfm
http://www.iaje.org/article.asp?ArticleID=122
http://negativland.com/albini.html
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/recording-
"It's also an interesting exercise to talk to people from the generation who actually got to vote in the original UK referendum on entry into the common market"
There was no referendum on whether Britain entered the Common Market -- Edward Heath's government took the country in without giving the people themselves a say in the matter. A subsequent government headed by Harold Wilson had a referendum on whether Britain should continue to be a part of it or withdraw in 1975, and the majority (67%)voted to stay in.
"The GPL only has power if the government grants an "unnatural right" [as they referred to it in the link] known as copyright."
The flaw here is in the idea that copyrights are somehow less "natural" than any of the other things that we are permitted to have and do by entirely invented human laws which eventually boil down to use of force (or the threat thereof) by powerful groups to ensure that everybody else complies with their wishes. You have the "right" not to be killed by anyone except the powerful, or their delegates; you have the "right" not to be imprisoned by anyone except the powerful or their delegates; and you have the right to any property that the powerful and their delegates don't want for themselves. Not only do they get to grant these and other "rights" entirely on their own terms, but also redefine any words used to describe them whenever they see fit so they can say things like "of course you have the right to property, but the _legal_ definition of property (i.e. our special private version that has a different meaning from what everyone else thought) clearly excludes these things that we're going to take away from you".
Laws and statutes are simply sets of rules that people invent to control other people, and all of them are therefore equally artificial, hence their notable geographic and temporal variability. Arguing that one set of such artificial constructs is somehow more "natural" than another set makes no more sense than arguing that AM radio is more "natural" than FM.
" We elected a leader, and he became a Bush follower and sold us out."
After which you elected him again for a third term, thereby proving to all UK politicians that being caught lying, selling out to foreigners, wasting vast sums turning the country into a ID card holding, constantly watched society of nannied pussies, and generally behaving like the Caudillo of a military junta is pretty much what the British people want from their leaders. And after the disgustingly craven way that their armed forces behaved with the Iranians, they probably also welcome their new status as Europe's premier surrender monkeys.
The recent earthquake in Kent was probably caused by Winston Churchill's body spinning so quickly in his grave that it caused subterranean sonic booms. It's a good thing that most of the WWII generation are already dead, because they've been spared the shame of seeing their country's metamorphosis from a bastion of freedom that so many fought and died to protect into an island of snivelling cowardly shits who've handed their liberty to Fuhrer Blair in return for being "protected" from a few Muslim extremists (who only become active some time _after_ British forces were sent to Iraq on an American-led wild goose chase, and then stayed there as occupying conquerors), illegal immigration (worse now than before Blair despite endless empty promises), and the evil EC, which is obviously the real reason for all Britain's ills, and not the fact that that they're a nation of passive dweebs who've repeatedly elected a government that they know will anally rape them at every opportunity.
"Highlighting doesn't work with a narrowing search as everything matches initially"
I fail to see where this is different from a list, which would also initially contain everything in a narrowing search.
"So either the Mac doesn't do this in a narrowing search, or, more likely, it does indeed lowlight them. Hence, the problem remains."
The Mac "lowlights" the items that _don't_ fit the search criteria along with the surrounding page, so the ones that do fit stand out because they're not only much brighter and more colourful than the rest, but also picked out with a "searchlight" effect that's only used during searches, and isn't seen otherwise. It's analogous to stage lighting effects where the overall lights are dimmed, and a few key performers are picked out by spotlights, which is a metaphor that most people are familiar with.
"Thankfully, since it also provides a dropdown list with only the matching items, the problem is mitigated."
The fact that there are two complimentary views is very important because the list provides a context for the visual cues on the icons. Although Apple have a less than perfect record on the UI design front, they're generally much better at it than their remaining competitors, who often try to copy some of their ideas while omitting others that are often key factors in making the Apple version useful.
"As I suspected, it works because Mac has fairly limited customisability. Fits with my Gnome extreme view of Macs."
It certainly is limited compared with KDE, but the reason the Apple system works so well is not due to any limitations, but comes instead from the way things are initially presented, i.e. as an organised hierarchy of options. The System Preferences windows is a 7x4 grid that's by default visually separated by an effect similar to music paper into four distinct lines that represent categories called "Personal", "Hardware", "Internet and Network", and "System" (this can however be changed into a strictly alphabetical grid if preferred). Each icon in a line is an applet that can contain several pages, and it is references to the entries on these pages that get returned in response to search terms. The list that drops down from the search text window is updated dynamically as letters are typed, and the icons containing any of those entries are highlighted; if one moves down the list using the keyboard or mouse, the highlights change dynamically to reflect whatever entry is selected. Double-clicking a highlighted icon opens the applet at the page referenced by the search term, i.e. it takes a user directly to the correct level of the hierarchy. This is far from the entirety of the System Preferences functionality, but it should give an idea of how it works on a base level.
"My heuristic is perfectly fine for a heuristic. (a) is irrelevant, no sane person would make a narrowing search for 5 items. (b) and (c) is just lame, it doesn't matter how they are presented, not whether it is used often, it still have to be done in a userfriendly manner."
Your assertion that my point about presentation is "lame" does I think say a great deal about why Linux in general, and KDE in particular, have earned a notable reputation for being the antithesis of the user friendliness that you claim is so important.
"Lowlighting doesn't help with this problem. In fact, it makes it worse... why are all those icons monochrome?"
:)"
This is a problem with a particular Linux program, not the Mac, which as I have explained previously, highlights the icons that fit the search criteria. Linux is awash with examples of dreadful UI design (although both the Mac and Windows have their fair share of them too), and this sounds like yet another.
"That argument is only relevant with something you do often. Configuring the system is hopefully not one of them, unless it is severely broken."
Unfortunately, it may well be one of the things that people who are new to KDE have to do, so bad design choices here can sour the initial experience.
"I'm not talking about random UI elements... indeed, in a menu bar, leaving some items in greyed out might be better, if you make sure that hover (or similar) explains why they are greyed out."
Indeed.
"But in a narrowing search, greying out is bonkers"
This does I think depend on what's being searched. It makes perfect sense in the Mac's System Preference dialogue, which has a relatively small number of fixed options displayed on a square grid of icons, all of which are visible whenever the dialogue is opened -- it would however be an extremely poor choice for files, which can exist in very large numbers, and are liable to change on a fairly regular basis. There is no single mechanism that is equally well suited to everything.
"Think of a list with 100 items, and you have to hunt for the 2 that is not greyed out? That would be highly annoying"
It would indeed. However, the fact that neither of the professionally designed systems uses scrolling lists to present system configuration options, despite both of them shipping with perfectly serviceable list control widgets, could well indicate that there are much better ways to do this. It does not of course mean that a well programmed list isn't better than a badly written alternative, which appears to be the case with the amateurish Kubuntu attempt to emulate Apple's system, but by the same token, it's unfair to judge other systems by assuming that a poor quality rip-off is in any way representative of the original.
"I find that a good rule of the thumb is that if you are ever greying out more than 1/2, greying out is not the way to go."
There is no adequate heuristic for this, because so much depends on (a) how many items there are, (b) the way they're presented, and (c) whether they change on a regular basis.
"I have only ever used a Mac for a few minutes at the time, which was (as can only be expected) a highly annoying and frustrating experience. Time pressure and a new interfaces just doesn't mix
I also found it very annoying after having become accustomed to Windows and KDE (I tried gnome, but didn't like it as much as KDE, although this was purely a matter of personal preference). It took quite a while (several weeks) to realise that I was in fact trying to do things in a far more complex way than was necessary because I'd never used a full GUI that was based around a very rigourous application of a few basic metaphors, and now the frustration comes when using other systems, which seem like a hodge-podge of ill fitting mechanisms duct-taped together by comparison. This does not however mean that I think OS X is unreservedly wonderful, because it's far from being so, and theree are many things about it that I dislike such as the stupid fixed menu bar that obviously made sense on a single-tasking system with a small screen, but is IMO totally stupid in a multitasking OS that is frequently used with several 30" displays.
"I always view Mac OS as a sort of Gnome extreme --- very our-way-or-the-highway like"
This is a very valid criticism. However, the other side of the coin is that a disciplined and highly integrated system is much easier for newbs to learn than a more anarchic one that incorporates a whole bunch of distinct ideas, and the very
"So it has a dropdown list --- Kubuntu's config doesn't. I suppose that makes the apple version tolerable."
:)"
Indeed.
"I hate the lowlighting stuff: if something is irrelevant, removing it altogether (like KConfig does) is infinitely clearer and better."
The problem with your preferred method is twofold:
1) People who leave a search term in place (or accidentally type some rubbish in that the system "thinks" is a search term) may be presented with an incomplete list of options, and not know why, or how to get the full list back again.
2) The whole desktop metaphor is based on spatial awareness, which is lost if items keep moving around, disappearing, etc. This is a major reason for so many users disliking the new UI in MS Office -- they'd learned _where_ things were on previous versions, and don't like the fact that they've not only moved, by keep doing so based on context.
"Anyway, good thing that part of Mac, at least, isn't screwy, even if it still have a way to come to be on par
While I agree that some things in KDE that are better than their OS X equivalents (and it has things that OS X doesn't have, although the reverse is also true) , UI elements that appear and disappear isn't one of them.
"What was the problem? The icon I needed to click is ALWAYS monochrome! I thought the search was excluding it."
Apple's system "darkens" the entire page of icons, and highlights the ones that fit the search terms with a searchlight effect, i.e. they are "illuminated" by a bright circle. It is I think rather unlikely that anyone would assume the darkened icons are the valid ones rather than the bright ones.
" I hear it is a clone from the Mac; if so I pity the Mac people for yet another reason."
OS X's "System Preferences" dialogue has a search bar that works extremely well: it not only drops down a list of "hits", but highlights the applet(s) containing each term as one moves through them, and will take users to the correct page of the relevant applet when a term is selected. The Kubuntu configuration system you are describing is not therefore a clone of the Mac one, irrespective of what you may have heard.
It did indeed, but the "official" British armed forces were also frequently used to further its interests, e.g. when the British fleet was used against China to protect the British East India Company's opium trade.