Very simple: that's how I research anything. These represent 27 things I haven't finished with (one of them is today's Slashdot stories). I tend to research things by kicking off a few searches or Wikipedia entries. Then when I come across something I need to look at, I middle-click it and it becomes an (indented vertical coloured) tab. This morning I was messing about with large KMZ files (many millions of Placemarks, KMZs of hundreds of megabytes) and was running into weird Google Earth bugs. There's probably 120 or so Python and Google Earth related random forum and blog posts. Once I'm finished debugging, I'll just close the window and finish with what I was doing there. There's one window with 326 tabs devoted to some interesting threads of reading that began with the Battle of Quiberon Bay but went as far afield as HMS Warspite, Admiral Cochrane, NAFTA, the Second Battle of El Alamein, the Fairey Swordfish, the Battle of Chillianwalla, the Marseillaise, Victor Hugo, and the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle. That's the idle pleasure window, as you can guess. I'll be closing that one any day now.:)
It's just really useful to me to be able to browse kind of like an outline or a mind map (not that I've ever used one of those) and not have to worry about back and forward and where I saw something. Tab Kit lets me track what I've read and haven't, and lets me see my browsing in a handy tree of tabs, branches of which I can collapse/expand. Session Manager lets me not worry about crashes, and lets me copy a session from profile to profile as I switch computers/OSes/versions. NoScript lets me do the same with YouTube, because I block Flash until I click on it. And there are a handful of other useful extensions I have installed, mostly for finer control (cookie export, cookie swap, firebug, greasemonkey).
Session Manager tells me I am currently running 889 tabs in 27 windows. I'll admit this is using just a shade under a GB of RAM, and that I browse mostly text sites and I run NoScript, and that it's noticeably not as fast as if I were to close this session and start a new one (which would be trivial in Session Manager, and I could even choose which windows/tabs to restore when reloading the session -- and that would restore all the indentation and read/unread states of my tabs in Tab Kit). But it's still pretty snappy. Also I'm running under Linux, but my memory is that Firefox on Windows always was snappier and used less memory than Firefox on Linux.
The fact is, no browser delivers me anywhere near the amount of power as Firefox does, and which I do appreciate. With Firefox I actually feel like I'm in control of browsing, whereas Opera and Safari and IE and Chrome and K-Meleon and Epiphany and Galeon and Konqueror and Elinks all leave me frustrated and somehow shackled.
That's pretty stupid. Idea is you solve the distribution once and can relay messages many times after that. Give a few harddrives worth of one-time pad to your submarine captain or embassy or agent and broadcast messages to him as long as you like.
The rights gained in the French revolution? Those rights were quite late and only really helped people on paper. That's even overlooking the massive bloodbath that was the French revolution and the notorious instability of French republics. When England had a more liberal Bill of Rights a hundred years earlier and America had just ratified a very progressive Bill of Rights, colour me unimpressed with the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" -- especially as it didn't help the average Man in the street too much. When England had asserted the supremacy of parliament and America had established an actual republic, France was merely following a global trend.
Napoleon gave the world the Napoleonic Code (though when you break things down, around 2.5 billion people today live under common law systems and around 2 billion under civil law systems, not all derived from the Napoleonic code) but he wasn't too assiduous in enforcing the rule of law. Face it, he was a dictator, and sometimes had his enemies murdered. The Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries are who really spread liberal democracy, and they had also asserted equality before the law, which you cite, centuries before.
I'm sorry your home city was sacked and burned. Spain -- I assume? -- had little option but to side with her powerful and oppressive neighbour, and I respect the guerillas that continued to fight against France. I'm from a country -- Hungary -- which was chopped up, in some areas unfairly, by the Allies in 1919, and left to the Russians in 1945 because of Roosevelt. The tides of history often pound the unlucky.
The French have shown more valor, bravery and courage under fire than America ever has. The French are true warriors, and true defenders of freedom.
OK, you love France, I get it, but I can't let bullshit like that slide. In French history, when Frenchman wasn't killing Frenchman, they teamed up to invade foreigners. Napoleon was the Hitler of the 18th century, lest you forget. Under fire, France has been unimpressive, with a largely conscript army that lacked real morale and discipline, and this is consistent going back to the Middle Ages. In modern times, it has a volunteer army that may be pretty good, but is untested. Occasional flashes of valour like Napoleon's imperial guard or the tough guys of legend in Algeria and Indochina and in the colonial empire before them or the Resistance are drowned out by a long record of brutality and oppression and cowardice. (That's what amuses me when people think of France as a civilised country. Maybe compared to Germany, but certainly not compared to say Austria-Hungary or England or America.)
No, sorry to contradict you, but France has never been a defender of freedom and its sons have rarely been true warriors.
I'm sorry, I meant since the war, as that was what we were talking. Since the war Japan hasn't had a serious military and certainly not an independent one.
Germany is a big success story, but undeniably a lot of it was foreign investment and later trade. Left to her own devices, even without war reparations, there's no reason to believe a second Weimar wouldn't have happened (economically, at least).
Most powerful and technologically advanced? Japan has always had a tottering economy, a lack of innovation (they just used to take Western products and do them smaller and cheaper) and no serious (and certainly no independent) military. If it weren't for their car industry they'd have gone under. No, Japan is anything but a success story. Germany now is different, they really are a success story, but they had heavy investment from the Allies to buffer against Russia.
That's if you assume that good grades are results. The tragedy is, most people today really seem to believe that all you ought to do is get good grades, and that only because good grades will secure you a good job. We don't even have other criteria left to evaluate kids by during school, so quite how abhorrent this idea is doesn't even register. I will say that compared to what actually goes on in most schools today, it's an improvement, but really that's saying a frying pan is better than a fire.
And what of it? All he was saying is that it's not news-worthy until there are results. Then we'll get tremendously excited about them. Right now it's her business, and that of anyone else she can get enthusiastic about it, to actually do some science. Once there's a result it becomes the business of other scientists and reporters and laypeople to get interested.
China is the most successful country in the world right now, who could possibly step up and believably claim they could do a better job in power?
What the fuck are you smoking?
Per capita, China is poorer than many Third World countries. Its citizens enjoy less freedom than those of many Third World countries. Average living standards are appalling. It is bursting at the seams with people, and the only way it has avoid a total crisis is by forced abortions, which are leaving it with a massive gender imbalance. Its record of human rights abuse is not a jot better than that of the Soviet Union. Its primary sources of innovation are stealing technology from Western countries (how different from its glory days half a millenium ago, of course) -- it has massive industrial espionage networks. Its army is ridiculous and is built on the Stalin principle. ("Quantity has a quality all its own.") Its life expectancy and infant mortality figures are definitely Third World -- but in a way it is lucky for the people who die before their time, because there would be nobody to feed them in a ripe old age. It owns gigantic buckets of American and European debt that it will never be paid the rightful amount for. It is insular and proud, which means in practice that it doesn't do business with the outside world very well (and sweatshops are not good business) -- by contrast see India for what it could do if more of its people bothered to learn English. Western companies and Western governments must be laughing all the way to the bank. Its primary role now and for the foreseeable future is the low-tech workshop of the world for starvation wages, and that is no way to dig itself out of the mess it is in.
If you are trying to base your ideas of success on percent GDP increases from quarter to quarter, let me tell you the parable of the homeless tramp who found a dollar in the street. He had a 2000% GDP increase that quarter.
I don't like these facts any more than you do, because the sight of the greatest hole of human misery on the planet by sheer numbers appalls me. But they're true nonetheless.
It's worth noting that C. Northcote Parkinson pointed all this out about 50 years ago (I think 1959, to be exact), in Parkinson's Law and some of the other wonderful books he wrote. Did you know that he originated the 'colour of the bikeshed' analogy (it was material in his case, but someone on a BSD mailing list changed it to colour at one point). Very much worth reading.
That it was better than a failed Soviet state is no ringing endorsement. The fact of the matter is, beacon of freedom was largely propaganda. In the nineteenth century, the US used to have standards of political liberty and social welfare somewhat less than the rest of the English-speaking world. Its main attraction was that it had less social restrictions than other Western countries. About two-thirds of immigrants either died or returned to their home country within 7 years of immigration. The twentieth century was marked by economic prosperity, especially by contrast with war-torn Europe, and America's wealth and relatively lax immigration laws became its main attraction. After the war, the whole of the West became more liberal and political freedom caught up with the English-speaking world. America became an overall laggard in political freedom in the West, but this didn't deter immigrants, who followed money and easy immigration. However, in the 21st century, both those advantages have decreased, and immigration has correspondingly dropped.
Anyway I'm not anti-American, I'm just stating that "beacon of freedom" was always propaganda. American political and social freedoms most closely mirror developments in the rest of the English-speaking world, usually with lag of a few years to several decades, depending on the issue (and sometimes with those freedoms coming sooner, of course). Speaking as a European, I am extremely glad and grateful to her that she stood up to Russia in the Cold War, just as I am grateful to Britain for standing up to France and Germany in centuries past. And I came to America from Europe from one of the failed Eastern states, but if you asked me why, I'd tell you that there was more money in my field than in my own country and it was easier to emigrate to than the EU. Both those have changed, and I think America can only be the loser by the changes. So I think it's worth acknowledging historical truths rather than repeating propaganda -- you can't learn useful lessons from the latter.
The one set is free, the other set involves taking my money and giving it to someone else.
Considering that the money spent on the military, police and intelligence (not to mention all the money that is channelled into the military-industrial complex as kickbacks) is quite a bit greater than that spent on healthcare and education, and furthermore that the cost of healthcare would go down under a socialised system -- your argument doesn't make sense.
After more than 30 years of life, I have not found much to be gained from your Western values, culture and your vapid mindless "entertainment" that my people are so fond of aping.
Except reading Slashdot, apparently...
Mitchell and Webb had a good sketch about this a couple of years ago expressing much the same thoughts but snappily and funnily. (Sorry!) Mitchell and Webb - Identity Theft
That's the radio version; I've only seen the TV version (check out the DVDs, or just watch their sketches on YouTube, they're a surprisingly intelligent sketch show).
Oh, you think invested money just returns magically? Invested money is all about taking proactive steps to generate enough welth for the investor and the investee. It just means someone else can generate more wealth (and possibly make more progress) with the money than you can. If you think you can do something better in 50 years' time, then you need capital and you play the long game. But your assertion is sort of like Zen: nonsense that sounds good until you think about it just a bit.
Not saying Israel was unfair or a mistake. I'm hardly qualified to do so, am I? But there were some things that were clear mistakes, like the coup in Iran. Iran was headed in the right direction in terms of liberalism. It's ten times worse today. And in fact the whole of the Middle East is somewhat worse than it was in the 50s and 60s.
Theistic fascism or their human rights record is beside the point. Do I wish it were otherwise? Yes. In fact, I wish we still ran the place on a colonial basis, in which case they would probably be attacking the West even more. But let me remind you of your original point: someone said that the countries have specific historical gripes with US foreign policy, and you discounted this, saying that Cubans weren't flying planes into American buildings.
Which is a BS argument, because both have known and often legit gripes; the Cubans simply don't deal with the situation with a military or terrorist response. If you question the gripe, I accept that but then you'll have to make a real argument.
If you're speaking for the whole of America, as you seem to be -- let me say that seems a change of heart. In fact, given that when I see some American broadcasting or catch it on YouTube, most politicians seem to be either against it with bags of vitriol or for it in such a tepid and conciliatory way that you'd think all they want to do is expand Medicaid a little bit.
That's as may be, but America sowed the wind. Do you really think that if the West hadn't meddled so much in the affairs of the Middle East after the Second World War they'd be sending suicide bombers against her 50-60 years on?
Slashdot Mirror
Very simple: that's how I research anything. These represent 27 things I haven't finished with (one of them is today's Slashdot stories). I tend to research things by kicking off a few searches or Wikipedia entries. Then when I come across something I need to look at, I middle-click it and it becomes an (indented vertical coloured) tab. This morning I was messing about with large KMZ files (many millions of Placemarks, KMZs of hundreds of megabytes) and was running into weird Google Earth bugs. There's probably 120 or so Python and Google Earth related random forum and blog posts. Once I'm finished debugging, I'll just close the window and finish with what I was doing there. There's one window with 326 tabs devoted to some interesting threads of reading that began with the Battle of Quiberon Bay but went as far afield as HMS Warspite, Admiral Cochrane, NAFTA, the Second Battle of El Alamein, the Fairey Swordfish, the Battle of Chillianwalla, the Marseillaise, Victor Hugo, and the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle. That's the idle pleasure window, as you can guess. I'll be closing that one any day now. :)
It's just really useful to me to be able to browse kind of like an outline or a mind map (not that I've ever used one of those) and not have to worry about back and forward and where I saw something. Tab Kit lets me track what I've read and haven't, and lets me see my browsing in a handy tree of tabs, branches of which I can collapse/expand. Session Manager lets me not worry about crashes, and lets me copy a session from profile to profile as I switch computers/OSes/versions. NoScript lets me do the same with YouTube, because I block Flash until I click on it. And there are a handful of other useful extensions I have installed, mostly for finer control (cookie export, cookie swap, firebug, greasemonkey).
Happens to be default if you middle-click, and always has been. I admit that before I knew about that browsing was more frustrating.
Session Manager tells me I am currently running 889 tabs in 27 windows. I'll admit this is using just a shade under a GB of RAM, and that I browse mostly text sites and I run NoScript, and that it's noticeably not as fast as if I were to close this session and start a new one (which would be trivial in Session Manager, and I could even choose which windows/tabs to restore when reloading the session -- and that would restore all the indentation and read/unread states of my tabs in Tab Kit). But it's still pretty snappy. Also I'm running under Linux, but my memory is that Firefox on Windows always was snappier and used less memory than Firefox on Linux.
The fact is, no browser delivers me anywhere near the amount of power as Firefox does, and which I do appreciate. With Firefox I actually feel like I'm in control of browsing, whereas Opera and Safari and IE and Chrome and K-Meleon and Epiphany and Galeon and Konqueror and Elinks all leave me frustrated and somehow shackled.
That's pretty stupid. Idea is you solve the distribution once and can relay messages many times after that. Give a few harddrives worth of one-time pad to your submarine captain or embassy or agent and broadcast messages to him as long as you like.
The rights gained in the French revolution? Those rights were quite late and only really helped people on paper. That's even overlooking the massive bloodbath that was the French revolution and the notorious instability of French republics. When England had a more liberal Bill of Rights a hundred years earlier and America had just ratified a very progressive Bill of Rights, colour me unimpressed with the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" -- especially as it didn't help the average Man in the street too much. When England had asserted the supremacy of parliament and America had established an actual republic, France was merely following a global trend.
Napoleon gave the world the Napoleonic Code (though when you break things down, around 2.5 billion people today live under common law systems and around 2 billion under civil law systems, not all derived from the Napoleonic code) but he wasn't too assiduous in enforcing the rule of law. Face it, he was a dictator, and sometimes had his enemies murdered. The Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries are who really spread liberal democracy, and they had also asserted equality before the law, which you cite, centuries before.
I'm sorry your home city was sacked and burned. Spain -- I assume? -- had little option but to side with her powerful and oppressive neighbour, and I respect the guerillas that continued to fight against France. I'm from a country -- Hungary -- which was chopped up, in some areas unfairly, by the Allies in 1919, and left to the Russians in 1945 because of Roosevelt. The tides of history often pound the unlucky.
The French have shown more valor, bravery and courage under fire than America ever has. The French are true warriors, and true defenders of freedom.
OK, you love France, I get it, but I can't let bullshit like that slide. In French history, when Frenchman wasn't killing Frenchman, they teamed up to invade foreigners. Napoleon was the Hitler of the 18th century, lest you forget. Under fire, France has been unimpressive, with a largely conscript army that lacked real morale and discipline, and this is consistent going back to the Middle Ages. In modern times, it has a volunteer army that may be pretty good, but is untested. Occasional flashes of valour like Napoleon's imperial guard or the tough guys of legend in Algeria and Indochina and in the colonial empire before them or the Resistance are drowned out by a long record of brutality and oppression and cowardice. (That's what amuses me when people think of France as a civilised country. Maybe compared to Germany, but certainly not compared to say Austria-Hungary or England or America.)
No, sorry to contradict you, but France has never been a defender of freedom and its sons have rarely been true warriors.
I'm sorry, I meant since the war, as that was what we were talking. Since the war Japan hasn't had a serious military and certainly not an independent one.
Germany is a big success story, but undeniably a lot of it was foreign investment and later trade. Left to her own devices, even without war reparations, there's no reason to believe a second Weimar wouldn't have happened (economically, at least).
Most powerful and technologically advanced? Japan has always had a tottering economy, a lack of innovation (they just used to take Western products and do them smaller and cheaper) and no serious (and certainly no independent) military. If it weren't for their car industry they'd have gone under. No, Japan is anything but a success story. Germany now is different, they really are a success story, but they had heavy investment from the Allies to buffer against Russia.
It's still a useful tool. Or do you think gravity is so 17th century?
Except that there are victimless ways of making money but no victimless ways of making child pornography (not the drawn kind, the photographic kind).
I'm amazed at the shit that gets modded up sometimes.
That's if you assume that good grades are results. The tragedy is, most people today really seem to believe that all you ought to do is get good grades, and that only because good grades will secure you a good job. We don't even have other criteria left to evaluate kids by during school, so quite how abhorrent this idea is doesn't even register. I will say that compared to what actually goes on in most schools today, it's an improvement, but really that's saying a frying pan is better than a fire.
And what of it? All he was saying is that it's not news-worthy until there are results. Then we'll get tremendously excited about them. Right now it's her business, and that of anyone else she can get enthusiastic about it, to actually do some science. Once there's a result it becomes the business of other scientists and reporters and laypeople to get interested.
China is the most successful country in the world right now, who could possibly step up and believably claim they could do a better job in power?
What the fuck are you smoking?
Per capita, China is poorer than many Third World countries. Its citizens enjoy less freedom than those of many Third World countries. Average living standards are appalling. It is bursting at the seams with people, and the only way it has avoid a total crisis is by forced abortions, which are leaving it with a massive gender imbalance. Its record of human rights abuse is not a jot better than that of the Soviet Union. Its primary sources of innovation are stealing technology from Western countries (how different from its glory days half a millenium ago, of course) -- it has massive industrial espionage networks. Its army is ridiculous and is built on the Stalin principle. ("Quantity has a quality all its own.") Its life expectancy and infant mortality figures are definitely Third World -- but in a way it is lucky for the people who die before their time, because there would be nobody to feed them in a ripe old age. It owns gigantic buckets of American and European debt that it will never be paid the rightful amount for. It is insular and proud, which means in practice that it doesn't do business with the outside world very well (and sweatshops are not good business) -- by contrast see India for what it could do if more of its people bothered to learn English. Western companies and Western governments must be laughing all the way to the bank. Its primary role now and for the foreseeable future is the low-tech workshop of the world for starvation wages, and that is no way to dig itself out of the mess it is in.
If you are trying to base your ideas of success on percent GDP increases from quarter to quarter, let me tell you the parable of the homeless tramp who found a dollar in the street. He had a 2000% GDP increase that quarter.
I don't like these facts any more than you do, because the sight of the greatest hole of human misery on the planet by sheer numbers appalls me. But they're true nonetheless.
It's worth noting that C. Northcote Parkinson pointed all this out about 50 years ago (I think 1959, to be exact), in Parkinson's Law and some of the other wonderful books he wrote. Did you know that he originated the 'colour of the bikeshed' analogy (it was material in his case, but someone on a BSD mailing list changed it to colour at one point). Very much worth reading.
That it was better than a failed Soviet state is no ringing endorsement. The fact of the matter is, beacon of freedom was largely propaganda. In the nineteenth century, the US used to have standards of political liberty and social welfare somewhat less than the rest of the English-speaking world. Its main attraction was that it had less social restrictions than other Western countries. About two-thirds of immigrants either died or returned to their home country within 7 years of immigration. The twentieth century was marked by economic prosperity, especially by contrast with war-torn Europe, and America's wealth and relatively lax immigration laws became its main attraction. After the war, the whole of the West became more liberal and political freedom caught up with the English-speaking world. America became an overall laggard in political freedom in the West, but this didn't deter immigrants, who followed money and easy immigration. However, in the 21st century, both those advantages have decreased, and immigration has correspondingly dropped.
Anyway I'm not anti-American, I'm just stating that "beacon of freedom" was always propaganda. American political and social freedoms most closely mirror developments in the rest of the English-speaking world, usually with lag of a few years to several decades, depending on the issue (and sometimes with those freedoms coming sooner, of course). Speaking as a European, I am extremely glad and grateful to her that she stood up to Russia in the Cold War, just as I am grateful to Britain for standing up to France and Germany in centuries past. And I came to America from Europe from one of the failed Eastern states, but if you asked me why, I'd tell you that there was more money in my field than in my own country and it was easier to emigrate to than the EU. Both those have changed, and I think America can only be the loser by the changes. So I think it's worth acknowledging historical truths rather than repeating propaganda -- you can't learn useful lessons from the latter.
The one set is free, the other set involves taking my money and giving it to someone else.
Considering that the money spent on the military, police and intelligence (not to mention all the money that is channelled into the military-industrial complex as kickbacks) is quite a bit greater than that spent on healthcare and education, and furthermore that the cost of healthcare would go down under a socialised system -- your argument doesn't make sense.
After more than 30 years of life, I have not found much to be gained from your Western values, culture and your vapid mindless "entertainment" that my people are so fond of aping.
Except reading Slashdot, apparently...
It seems at least 3 of us posted a link to the same sketch. :) I hadn't realised M&W were so well-known!
Mitchell and Webb had a good sketch about this a couple of years ago expressing much the same thoughts but snappily and funnily. (Sorry!)
Mitchell and Webb - Identity Theft
That's the radio version; I've only seen the TV version (check out the DVDs, or just watch their sketches on YouTube, they're a surprisingly intelligent sketch show).
Oh, you think invested money just returns magically? Invested money is all about taking proactive steps to generate enough welth for the investor and the investee. It just means someone else can generate more wealth (and possibly make more progress) with the money than you can. If you think you can do something better in 50 years' time, then you need capital and you play the long game. But your assertion is sort of like Zen: nonsense that sounds good until you think about it just a bit.
Ah, OK. Misunderstood what you were railing against.
Not saying Israel was unfair or a mistake. I'm hardly qualified to do so, am I? But there were some things that were clear mistakes, like the coup in Iran. Iran was headed in the right direction in terms of liberalism. It's ten times worse today. And in fact the whole of the Middle East is somewhat worse than it was in the 50s and 60s.
Theistic fascism or their human rights record is beside the point. Do I wish it were otherwise? Yes. In fact, I wish we still ran the place on a colonial basis, in which case they would probably be attacking the West even more. But let me remind you of your original point: someone said that the countries have specific historical gripes with US foreign policy, and you discounted this, saying that Cubans weren't flying planes into American buildings.
Which is a BS argument, because both have known and often legit gripes; the Cubans simply don't deal with the situation with a military or terrorist response. If you question the gripe, I accept that but then you'll have to make a real argument.
If you're speaking for the whole of America, as you seem to be -- let me say that seems a change of heart. In fact, given that when I see some American broadcasting or catch it on YouTube, most politicians seem to be either against it with bags of vitriol or for it in such a tepid and conciliatory way that you'd think all they want to do is expand Medicaid a little bit.
That's as may be, but America sowed the wind. Do you really think that if the West hadn't meddled so much in the affairs of the Middle East after the Second World War they'd be sending suicide bombers against her 50-60 years on?