I wouldn't say that the web is totally stagnant, but in certain areas it certainly has been stagnant. There are a lot of tremendous things that we could do with CSS, except that Internet Explorer hasn't been upgraded in 4 years so there's no point to using those features since 97% of the market can't use them. If Firefox had 60% market share, I have no doubt we'd see CSS 3 move along much more quickly. I dream at night of CSS columns support...
7) CSS isn't a magic bullet for making clean HTML, either. One of the ideas behind CSS is that, by separating content from design, you only use the HTML tags required to describe the data, and don't introduce any extraneous ones that are used just for design.
Unfortunately, due to some current limitations of CSS, you see a lot of CSS sites introducing extraneous HTML tags - just different kinds of extraneous HTML tags. Where old sites used TABLEs where there was no tabular data, you'll see new sites throw in extra SPAN or DIV tags just because they need additional elements on the page to place styles on. For example, let's sat you wanted to put a paragraph into a rounded recntangle. One day, with CSS 3, you'll be able to just style the P tag with a background-color and rounded-corner styles. But, today, since there is no rounded-corner tag, you end up needing to create maybe 5 elements to style so that you have 4 elements to place a rounded corner on, and 1 to contain those four rounded corners (I don't know if you actually need 5 - maybe there's a way to do it with 3 - but you get the idea).
As a web designer, it makes my heart very happy to view an HTML page that is truly clean. For one client, we took their existing table-designed web site and converted it to CSS. HTML pages that took 1000 lines now took 250 lines, and were much easier to find content on...
But, so what? Yes, HTML readability is nice. Yes, saving bandwidth is nice. Yes, data flexibility is nice. But what does HTML readability get us? Nothing, of course, because most of us aren't editing our HTML with a text editor any more (actually, I am, because I work faster and better that way, but even then, it's not exactly hard for me to do a search to find the spot in the HTML that I am looking for).
What does lower bandwidth get us? Of course, if you're a huge site, it buys you something. But most of us aren't CNN or even Slashdot, and it doesn't add up to much either.
Data flexibility? Great, in theory. But what does it mean in reality? Until we switch to XML, a search engine could no more figure out that <span class="authorName"> means that the data in the tag is an author's name than it could if I used <b> to bold the author's name.
Does data flexibility mean that you can easily deliver data to different user agent types? That's a very worthy goal for CSS. I don't think CSS has come anywhere near succeeding in that goal yet. And for most sites, it's really not an issue.
Does data flexibility mean that you can easily change designs? If so, I'm betting that it's easier to use a CMS with a templating system (that just regenerates the HTML of the page in tabular designs) to allow the user to switch designs than to use CSS.
Does data flexibility mean accessibility? I'm not convinced that CSS is all that much more flexible than tabular design (for example, sight-impaired users could use a user style agent to increase font sizes on pages, but I think it's probably a better solution for them to simply use Opera with text zoom).
CSS is a very good idea, in my opinion. Eventually, it may very well enhance users' experience at a site. I don't believe it has gotten there yet. So, until that day, if it's a choice between having really fine control over a site's design, and being able to develop the site quickly with the knowledge that it will work in all browsers (including old browsers like Netscape 4.7), and using CSS because it's good in theory, I choose good design.
Becuase good graphic design is not just an afterthought. It is critically important to a user's experience on a web site. Research bears this out - one study at Stanford found that attractive site design was the most important factor in whether a user trusted a web site, twice as important as the brand name on the site!
(For the record, I am responding to this comment:
However, for the CSS Zen Garden, no matter how badly the CSS renders, I can always just drop into user mode and read the content thanks to its lovely semantic mark-up...In my opinion, flexible data is more important than pixel perfection, so I ultimately disagree with the grandparent's half-hearted tables-with-CSS approach. Clearly, you'll never, ever get pixel perfection for every user without a lot of hacks (using tables for anything other than tabular data is a hack), so you should really just give up and focus on fluid designs.
I love CSS Zen Garden. It is an amazing site. And, you're absolutely right that not all CSS sites need to look the same (I like to think that my site, which totally relies upon CSS for design, does not look like every other "CSS site" out there). That being said, I do agree with the original poster's sentiments to a large degree.
Off the top of my head (finishing a long day at work):
1) CSS Zen Garden is great, but it's much easier to mess around with CSS style-switching like that when you have only one page to support. It becomes much more difficult to do when you have a lot of different pages with different types of content and different amounts of content on different pages.
Plus, a lot of the designs on CSS Zen Garden are eye-catching - but hardly useful (and rather distracting) if you are trying to make a serious site geared towards content delivery. This it not a slam on CSS Zen Garden at all, which is, after all, supposed to show that CSS can deliver the goods when it comes to amazing graphic design. Just that, at the end of the day, what matters is normally intuitive content delivery wrapped in a good design, not being able to switch styles.
2) It can still be quite a bitch to get CSS to work the same in Opera, Mozilla, and IE.
3) Given the difficulty of getting CSS stylesheets to work correctly across all browsers, you have to ask yourself - doesn't it make more sense to use tabular design and some content management system that contains templating features, rather than struggling with the theoretically cool but difficult to implement CSS design switching?
4) One of the things that initially attracted me to CSS was the possibility of creating web pages that are more accessible to sight-impaired and motion-impaired users. But, after much effort, it has become clear to me that CSS is not a magic bullet for this at all. First of all, tabular design is not as inaccessible as it's made out to be. Screen readers are very good at dealing with tabular design by now. Secondly, there are a lot of situations where CSS has no bearing on the issue. For example, if I have a budget tool that I want to update costs on the fly, that will wreak havoc on screen readers, regardless of whether CSS is used or not. (More generally, web standards are no magic bullet. For example, let's say we have a tool where most users will benefit from being able to click on an item and have a pop-up window appear with more information on the item. Now, some users will have JavaScript turned off, meaning that the budget item link should use TARGET=BLANK for those users. But according to HTML 4/XHTML 1 Strict, you cannot use TARGET=BLANK any more, because that would be mixing content and design. In theory, the W3C is absolutely right. Where the link opens is a design issue, and should be handled by manipulating the DOM, not in the anchor tag itself. But, unfortunately, theory leaves those users with JavaScript turned off with a much lesser experience, becuase they would benefit from viewing both the additional information in the pop-up window and the information they were viewing previously at the same time on the screen. Maybe that's the right trade-off to make, but it's still a trade-off.)
5) The idea that with different stylesheets you can support radically different user agents - Palm users, WebTV users, users with 640x480 resolution, users with 1024x768 resolution, screen readers, etc. - is a great idea. I question how many sites have actually put it into action, though. Let's be honest - how many site really have a need to deliver information to users across all those user agent types yet? And, if you do have such a need, you're probably a huge site where it may make more sense to - again - use an advanced CMS that can handle that by relying on custom conversion from XML to whatever template you have for the different user agents, rather than CSS.
6) CSS would become much more useful if we could get some of the features that were be
The problem with the treatment of P2P on Slashdot is that most posters are unable to distinguish between P2P technology and the popular P2P networks.
The INDUCE Act does not outlaw, and the RIAA/MPAA, are not opposed to P2P technology itself. Professor Susan Crawford, positively quoted in a previous Slashdot story about the INDUCE Act, says, "The Act (to be proposed tomorrow by songwriter Sen. Hatch and others) amends the copyright law to say that anyone who 'induces' copyright infringement is himself/itself an infringer."
The act is about is preventing copyright infringement via P2P, not about P2P. Believe me, Orrin Hatch, the RIAA, and the MPAA have absolutely no problem if some P2P network replaces Google as the search engine of choice.
More to the point, the RIAA/MPAA have no problem using P2P themselves if they can control it so that it does not get used to pirate movies and music. If a proprietary P2P network that allows them to charge for distribution of works turns out to be the best way to rent movies, the MPAA would be happy to cut Blockbuster out of the picture and keep those profits to itself.
What they cannot allow is unrestricted use of existing P2P networks for piracy of music and movies. And let's face it - that's exactly what Kazaa and Limewire networks are used for today. I say this as someone who uses P2P to PIRATE MUSIC AND MOVIES. But at least I admit that's what I use it for. I don't pretend that P2P is a future business model for the RIAA/MPAA that they are too stupid to understand.
Many on Slashdot make the argument that P2P-based music and movie piracy is actually good for the music and movie industries, because it may actually lead people to purchase more music and movies - music and movies that they otherwise would not know of. And this argument may be true.
The problem is that it ignores the fact that while content piracy is good for content producers when it exists in moderation, it means certain bankruptcy for content producers when taken to an extreme.
That is why Adobe could care less if you use a pirated copy of Photoshop to make your first web page, but will absolutely send in the BSA ninjas if you run a 200 man web design firm that doesn't own a single license to the product. Short of a totalitarian state, piracy could never be stamped out. It's reality of life, just like stolen merchandise is in the retail business (no, I am not saying that copying copyrighted works is equivalent to stealing physical products). The RIAA and MPAA understand this. They're not worried about the guys who videotape movies and sell a dozen copies on the street corner. That's nothing to them.
The problem with uncontrolled P2P networks is that, if unchecked, there is absolutely nothing stopping everyone from pirating music and movies. Look how easy it is to get popular music and movies on Limewire today. And Limewire has what, a few million users at any given time? Well, what if downloading movies and music from Limewire were known to be legal, and what if it were covered on the front of Time or Newsweek, as Napster once was? You'd get 50 million users. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be using it constantly. The number of shared files would balloon. The speed of acquiring files would, correspondingly, increase.
It would be wonderful for all of us. But it would be the end of the RIAA and the MPAA companies. Because who the hell would ever pay for music and movies under those circumstances? Sure, a few collectors - like the people who insist on buying vinyl records today - but the majority could care less. I assure you, in the time of iPods, the packaging and liner notes mean very little to the average consumer.
That's why the RIAA and MPAA need to have legal means to fight file sharing. They'll never shut down online piracy completely - just like Adobe will never be able to track down every home user who has a copy of Photshop 5.5 on his PC that he got from a friend. But they don't need to. They just need to have enou
Republican != neocon. Traditional republicans are ones who try to eliminate as much waste/pork as possible(McCain is a good example of this type)
It's not as simple as that by any means. McCain was more identified with the neocons than Bush was in 2000. That's why the Weekly Standard endorsed McCain (and also why McCain was a darling of the neo-lib New Republic).
There's hardly a wasteful neo-con/thrify paleo-con dichotomy. I think it probably depends a lot more on the individual politician, and the circumstances of government. It's been shown that both parties are wasteful when they control both the legislature and the executive branch (think Republicans since 2000 in DC), while more much thrify when government is divided (think the balanced budgets of the late 90s, when Clinton and the GOP split government). Of course, in California, it's split government.
They're not at all related. You're the pedant who's wrong.
When Katie T talks about an internet predator, she is talking about a 27 year old who tries to carry out statuatory rape on a 13 year old.
When you talk about an internet predator, you're talking about taking someone's domain away from them.
So let's see, rape vs. making someone move from katie.com to katiejones.com. [sarcasm] Yes, clearly those are equivalent. How ironic! [/sarcasm]
Please, this is like saying that if I am against kidnappers locking people in their basements, I must also be against forcing someone turn down the exceedingly loud music coming from their apartment. After all, they're both infringements of rights! Clearly, they are equivalent, and it is both ironic and hypocritical to be against one and not the other.
Anyone but the most rabid libertarian understands the difference.
I don't know why this post got modded as a troll. Connecting unrelated ideas is a Michael Moore specialty. For example, talking about Afghan oil pipeline negotiations and then showing a picture of Bush bombing Afghanistan. If you don't think about it, it makes sense, just like it initially seems shady that Microsoft is selling Slate two weeks after Slate wrote an article praising Firefox. But then you give it a bit more thought, and realize that the Afghan pipeline negotiations happened under Clinton, not Bush, and that no pipeline has been built since the Taliban were overthrown, or you realize that if Microsoft wanted to prevent positive articles about Slate it would maintain its control over Slate, not sell it.
But to realize that, you need to been thinking critically. For Slashdot readers and for viewers of Michael Moore's movies, that critical eye is not always open. Because it's easy and more comfortable to simply agree with something that validates your existing notions (Microsoft bad, Bush bad).
So, no, Stevyn is not trolling, and yes, this is like Michael Moore.
I don't disagree that investors (and corporations) can make the wrong decision and choose short-term profit over larger long-term profits. But let's not act as if it's simply that "investors are a bunch of gullible sheep who lack the ability to think in the long-term." Microsoft is one of the most profitable, successful companies in the world. So, first of all, they seem to have managed their business quite well. It's a bit arrogant, don't you think, to post on Slashdot about how poorly Microsoft is run? Do you have a business that makes $10 billion in profits per year?
Secondly, it is not easy to grow your business when you already have massive market share and huge revenues. It's much more difficult to grow at a 20% per year clip when you have 5% market share than when you have 95% market share. It's easy to say, "Invest in new technologies for the long-run," but that's easier said than done. After all, Apple, for all their innovation, has not been able to grow their profits or market share much at all over the past few years.
Finally, remember, in the long-run, we're all dead. Stock holders are allowed to care about the short-run. It's not necessarily irrational to prefer short-run gain to long-term gain.
Let me weigh in with reviews of Bowling for Columbine, and one (the New Republic) review of his new movie. Moore is hardly honest, even accounting for his bias. And note that of these reviews, only the WSJ and National Post are conservative, the NYT, Slate, American Prospect, and TNR are left:
"Well, the speaker ought to know. As critics have pointed out repeatedly, Mr. Moore himself is a world-class expert on 'fictition'; in fact, when it comes to truth telling, not to mention logic, you might say that less is Moore."
"Mr. Moore is hardly the first to engage in a little nostalgic mythmaking. What makes him unique is his willingness to construct his myths on a scaffolding of calculated untruths. " -- The Wall Street Journal
"Yes, it is a free country, but it is not a perfect one. Because in a perfect country, an irresponsible, intellectually dishonest windbag like Moore would not be a rich, successful, Oscar-winning documentarian. He would instead be just another anonymous nutter, mumbling about fluoride in the water and penning anti-establishment tracts by candlelight in some backwoods Appalachian shack. And he would never, ever find another funder for his 'art.'" -- The New Republic
The problem is, once you delve beneath the humor, it turns out [Moore's] "facts and hard-core analysis" are frequently inaccurate, contradictory and confused...Like many of the political celebrities increasingly filling our TV screens and bookstores, he is entertaining, explicitly partisan, and all too willing to twist facts to promote himself and his vision of the truth.1 - Spinsanity
The slippery logic, tendentious grandstanding and outright demagoguery on display in "Bowling for Columbine" should be enough to give pause to its most ardent partisans...Mr. Moore, when it serves his purposes, is happy to generalize in the absence of empirical evidence and to make much of connections that seem spurious on close examination. - The New York Times
ONE OF THE MOSQUITO-BITE IRRITAtions of being on the left is finding your ideals represented in public by Michael Moore...Although he'd have made a crackerjack ad man, he's a slipshod filmmaker, and the movie quickly collapses, burying its subject beneath bumper-sticker rehashes of received ideas...At once punchy and incoherent -- Moore contradicts himself vividly every few minutes -- the film has the scattershot shapelessness of a concept album made by a singles band.
Although Moore takes delight in thumping Cops and TV newscasts, he himself uses tabloid techniques and is guilty of manipulative heartlessness. - LA Weekly
His journalism, in short, on the subject of Canada and Canadians, is nothing short of shoddy, manipulative and untrue. The same can be said for his journalism on his own country, and indeed on the terrible and complicated issue he purports to adjudicate. - National Post (Canada)
If you want about as clear a demonstration as you're likely to find of the difference between truth and politics, go see Eminem's 8 Mile...and then go see Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine...Though Moore claims to have made a documentary, his examination of American gun culture presents viewers with a more heavily edited fiction than producer Brian Grazer's attempt to clean up Eminem. Whereas the rapper's movie reaches for the sort of truth mere facts cannot convey, Moore's film grabs viewers with the old demagogue's trick of using just as much factual information as is necessary to lead people toward false conclusions. - The American Prospect
"[T]he greatest danger to liberalism isn't the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Andrew Sullivan, but blowhards like Alan Parker and Michael Moore--the thugs of humanism. Given the way in which it's administered, I don't support the death penalty for people. But I emphatically support it for certain careers." -- Slate
I know you're making a valid point about the science of this here, but could we lay off the "invading Iraq to steal oil" meme?
1: invade Iraq. 2: Steal the Oil
The US did not invade Iraq to steal oil, for a number of very obvious reasons:
Invading Iraq caused oil production from Iraq to dip below pre-war levels, as everyone predicted it would
Invading Iraq has already cost $200 billion - the equivalent of purchasing 6 billion barrels of oil. Since Iraq produces 2.5 million barrels per day, we'd have to steal about 6 years worth of production to break even. Of course, the US would actually have to steal more than 6 years to break even, because to continue stealing the oil it would have to keep paying to keep its army in Iraq.
If the US wanted cheaper oil generally and access to Iraqi oil for US companies specifically, the easiest way to do it would have been to drop sanctions in return for Saddam Hussein selling a lot more oil and giving contracts to American companies. Hussein wanted to sell more oil and get rid of sanctions anyway, and would have been happy to throw some contracts to the Americans to get that.
Please...It's getting ridiculous that so many people still believe that this is a war for oil when the numbers didn't add up before the war and still don't add up after the war...
This is more akin to how the US has berated china over keeping its currency artifically low against the Dollar, while doing the same thing to Europe.
How has the US done this to Europe? China and Japan keep their currencies artificially low by buying up American bonds, thereby driving up the price for dollar denominated assets and lowering the cost of yuan/yen-denominated assets to Americans. America plays no such game on the European asset market.
Creative Criticism: The DHTML or whatever is used to give the advanced editing features of Exchange 2000 web mail, msn hotmail, yahoo mail, and the geocities web site editor don't work in Firebird; If they did my sister, my mom and many other web users would never use IE again.
That would be a nice feature to have...but I believe that this is a Microsoft proprietary extension to the JavaScript DOM, not a standard. Which is not to say that the Mozilla team is incapable of reproducing it, just that they may have some qualms about it.
Honestly, until something is seriously done by the government and companies (determing a percentage that can be offshored, completely redoing the tariffs in the so-called "free trade" agreements, etc.), it's difficult to make a case for going to a college or university. To train for what? Everyone behind a desk is vulnerable to being offshored.
Yes, white collar jobs are now vulnerable to off-shoring - but far more blue collar jobs have already been off-shored. There's a reason why factory payrolls just declined for the 42nd straight month, even as total payrolls in the US increased.
Besides, off-shoring isn't the only factor in the job market. Over all, it pays to get a college degree. According to surveys (see article) the average college graduate makes $17,000 more per year than the average high school graduate. Even if you go to an expensive private college at $35,000 per year, you still more than make back that cost over the course of your career.
I have mod points, but I really need to respond to this:
The Guardian hates the BBC, and they along with Rupert Murdoch have been trying to get the British government to shut down the BBCs great website, so that more people go to their services.
I'm really curious where you get this from. The BBC and the Guardian are both slanted left - the reason Murdoch dislikes the BBC, other than it being a competitor, is because he is right-wing. The Guardian and BBC have no such ideological disagreement. In fact, it has been argued that one of the reasons the BBC is so slanted to the left is because it primarily advertises its open positions in the Guardian, so there is a closed circle into which few right-wingers or centrists ever enter.
If invading Iraq were simply about attaining oil, we would have just dropped the sanctions. It would have been $200 billion cheaper and been faster to bring a lot more oil onto the world market (to lower oil prices). Which is not to say that Iraq isn't partially about protecting oil supplies, but it's not as direct as you seem to think.
Finally, it's not just "the Yanks" who have to deal with the problem that the world economy depends on fuel. If there were a major oil crisis - let's say the Saudi fuel depots get hit by a terrorist attacks, which makes oil prices rise by 80% (totally possible) - everyone is fucked. China is a major oil importer now whose economy becomes more dependent on oil every day. Japan is hugely dependent on foreign oil. Europe is dependent. America is dependent. You think the world economy will do well after America, Europe, China, and Japan (jointly responsible for, what, 80% of world GDP?) go into recession? You think you're still going to have a job after that?
Shit, maybe you should thank the Yanks for safeguarding the foundation of the world economy, rather than attacking it.
The Internet is fantastic. It has changed my life too: I have made friends over the Internet; I have the career I have because I fell in love with web design; I started two online magazines; and I spend probably two hours per day reading news and commentary from around the world. It still blows my mind how much better informed I can be thanks to the fact that I can read blogs from Iran, newspapers from India, etc.
But I also use the Internet to forward silly emails, chat mindlessly with peers, to search for pornography, and download crappy quality music files. In other words, to have fun.
It's great to be engaged intellectually with things that interest you, but it's also a fundamental human right to goof off.
No matter what technologies we invent, not everyone is going to want to program, read the news all day, or found a business. People have other interests, and that's fine.
Listen, I'm horrible at sports, I don't know the first thing about plumbing, I have no idea how to fix a car, and I'd rather buy take-out than learn to cook. Does this make me a bad person? Am I a lesser person because I am not engaged enough to learn how a car works? No, of course not! It just means that I have different interests from others, and I should be able to follow my interests just as much as they can follow theirs.
Note 1: Your case would be a lot more convincing if you didn't make it while posting to Slashdot! Shouldn't you be coding or informing yourself, rather than goofing off?
Note 2: Your case would also be a lot more convincing if you didn't make the argument that the Internet is a failure because it hasn't shown everyone that the Republicans are bad. One of the great advantages for me of the Internet is that it has expanded my news sources past the traditional left-wing sources that I read on paper (like the New York Times) to centrist (Washington Post) and conservative sources (like the National Review and Weekly Standard). I've become more, not less conservative, as the result of reading the Internet. It is objectively true that the Internet expands the range of sources we have our fingertips, but it is extremely subjective to say that having access to more sources makes you more liberal.
The great majority of people worldwide will agree with the following two ideas:
1) People everywhere are basically the same, with the same human desires, goals, motivations, etc.
2) Different cultures organize themselves very differently, and some cultures are preferable to others in specific aspects.
There are two problems with the discussion we're having about these articles. First of all, it's not clear whether we're talking about individuals or cultures. So when we're asked "why should Saudi geeks be any different from us," some people are responding by referencing culture (Saudi geek culture exists in a national culture that is very different from ours, so naturally it will be different) and some are responding by referencing human nature (people are people, people who likes playing with Linux in Saudi Arabia like playing with Linux for the same reason as we do in the US).
These two groups of respondents are not really talking to each other, they're talking past each other, because they use the same words but with different meanings.
This makes the discussion frustrating, but what makes it far worse is the small group of people who believe that because people are people it is unfair to judge between cultures. In their argument, because all cultures are made up of people, and people are the same at heart, we have no right to judge others just because they chose to organize their society along different cultural lines.
So now, we have three groups: 1. People doing cultural/political comparisons 2. People doing comparisons of individuals 3. People insisting that cultural/political comparisons are innately invalid.
Most people in group 1 would have no problem with what group 2 is saying, and most people in group 2 would have no problem with group 1 are saying, provided they understood that to focus on cultural differences instead of similarities as individuals is not to deny the similarity of human nature across cultures (and vice versa).
But once you introduce group 3 claiming that group 1 are racists, group 1 is obviously going to get very defensive. And the problem is, it's very hard for group 1 to distinguish between group 2 - the people who are simply framing the discussion differently - and group 3 - the people who are claiming racism. So they start reacting to all criticism as coming from group 3, even though most of it comes from group 2.
Anyway, to go back to what you said about American journalism:
The articles in question were vignettes on a much more human, reasonable side of Saudi life. Oh, the heresy. These complaints smack of 1980's propaganda about the Soviet Union wherein any attempt to humanize even the most lowly of citizens on the other side to a degree that didn't fit that approved portrayal was viewed as practically treasonous.
This is a classic example of the problem we're seeing right now on the Slashdot message boards.
Believe it or not, very few thought that Russians were different from us as individuals. And believe it or not, the neoconservatives (Paul Wolfowitz, for example) do not hate (for example) Iranians, but think that because Iranians are the same as us they should organize their political culture along the same lines as well, because democracy is a basic human right since all humans are essentially the same.
But the problem is, group 3 uses arguments that all people are the same to deny all differences between political cultures. So in the 1980s, group 3 said that because people are people, that meant that we had no right to fear the Soviet government, no right to act against the Soviet Union, no right to try to bring down the Soviet system. They argued that because the average Russian feared war just as much as the average American, then the Soviet government is no different from the American government and we should not act in judgment of it.
I am an environmentalist, in that it seems obvious to me that we are destroying much natural beauty and causing damage to human health with pollution. I also suspect (although I am just a layman) that we are causing global warming, and that we should avoid changing the climate until we are more capable of understanding what impact this will have. To me, "first doing no harm" is the truly conservative approach to the environment, not the "we'll do nothing until the proof is overwhelming" argument that some so-called conservatives make.
I do not drive an SUV. In fact, I do not own a car at all, and I take public transportation or walk everywhere.
BUT...I am becoming more and more skeptical of the environmental movement. Too much of it seems to be pushing an anti-capitalist morality with which I do not agree (e.g., I have a friend who once argued that subcontinent Indians are better off in abject poverty than as computer programmers in air conditioned offices). I don't want people to have less goods - I just want to make sure that we all have iPods in such a way that we don't destroy the earth in the process.
More importantly, I am seeing cases where the environmental movement is wilfully exaggerating how bad things are, and is arguing that no matter what the choice, the environment is both the first and the only thing.
Well, I obviously want a clean, healthy environment. But it must be balanced against other needs. And to make the correct decisions, we must have accurate, not exaggerated, accounts of the situation.
That is why I appreciate people like Dr. Lomborg (or Gregg Easterbrook at the New Republic), who bring some balance to the debate between environmentalists and oil-company-sponsored "non-profits."
The rainforests burn, in part, because western farm subsidies keep the price of food artificially high to support agrobusiness profits--certainly too high for south American campesinos to buy it.
Is this really true? It seems to me that:
Subsidies by developed (not Western, because it includes Japan too) countries to their farmers artificially inflate the supply of agricultural products produced by farmers in these nations.
Higher supply leads, naturally, to lower prices.
Lower prices for farm goods (and, essentially, excess supply) means that farmers in underdeveloped nations have a hard time surviving by farming.
This was the complaint of the developed world at the Cancun WTO talks. But I don't see how subsidies destroy the rain forest. It seems to me that if anything, if we eliminated subsidies to farmers in developed nations, it would be much more profitable for farmers in South America to farm, and so they'd burn down more of the rain forest so that they could farm more and make more money. After all, the marginal value of each additional acre of farmland would greatly increase if we eliminated the $300 billion in farm subsidies the developed world gives.
Am I wrong? I would be happy if someone else could chime in and clear this up.
I wish Slashdot would stop setting up the recording industry with these straw men arguments. I don't think the recording industry ever thought (or said) that it would never sell mp3s online. It said that it was unrealistic to sell mp3s online if they could be easily pirated by anyone the next day. And you know what? They were right.
My interest in using iTMS is very high now - the only reason I don't use any of the online music stores is because I don't want to be locked into one store/one mp3 player (software)/one mp3 player (hardware). But once a standard is defined, I'll be there to buy.
But I wouldn't use iTMS, or any music store, if the old Napster were still around, or if Kazaa were any good for finding the music I am interested in. Back when Napster was king, I could find any song I wanted for free. As a result, I didn't buy a CD for a couple years (file sharing over the college network helped too). Now Napster is gone, and Kazaa has a ton of phony files that have made it a hassle to use. As a result, I'm willing to pay so that I don't have to waste a lot of time finding the free version on Kazaa - since time, after all, is money.
My friends who can still find what they want on Kazaa have no interest in using music stores. Those who can't, do.
I'm not saying it's all or nothing. There are some users who always would have paid for their music, and some who never will. But there are also a HUGE number of users - and they're not just computer geeks, remember Newsweek had a cover story on Napster - who will pirate the music if it's easy, and pay for it it's hard to pirate.
It used to be really, really freaking easy to pirate music. Let's stop pretending that the music industry was saying that it would never sell mp3s online. It was saying it wouldn't sell mp3s online as long as doing so just made it incredibly easy to pirate them.
Slashdot Mirror
My monitor goes all the way to 11!
Er, 12 actually.
I wouldn't say that the web is totally stagnant, but in certain areas it certainly has been stagnant. There are a lot of tremendous things that we could do with CSS, except that Internet Explorer hasn't been upgraded in 4 years so there's no point to using those features since 97% of the market can't use them. If Firefox had 60% market share, I have no doubt we'd see CSS 3 move along much more quickly. I dream at night of CSS columns support...
I just hope I have enough ammo to shoot the fire out.
Wanted to add one:
7) CSS isn't a magic bullet for making clean HTML, either. One of the ideas behind CSS is that, by separating content from design, you only use the HTML tags required to describe the data, and don't introduce any extraneous ones that are used just for design.
Unfortunately, due to some current limitations of CSS, you see a lot of CSS sites introducing extraneous HTML tags - just different kinds of extraneous HTML tags. Where old sites used TABLEs where there was no tabular data, you'll see new sites throw in extra SPAN or DIV tags just because they need additional elements on the page to place styles on. For example, let's sat you wanted to put a paragraph into a rounded recntangle. One day, with CSS 3, you'll be able to just style the P tag with a background-color and rounded-corner styles. But, today, since there is no rounded-corner tag, you end up needing to create maybe 5 elements to style so that you have 4 elements to place a rounded corner on, and 1 to contain those four rounded corners (I don't know if you actually need 5 - maybe there's a way to do it with 3 - but you get the idea).
But, so what? Yes, HTML readability is nice. Yes, saving bandwidth is nice. Yes, data flexibility is nice. But what does HTML readability get us? Nothing, of course, because most of us aren't editing our HTML with a text editor any more (actually, I am, because I work faster and better that way, but even then, it's not exactly hard for me to do a search to find the spot in the HTML that I am looking for).
What does lower bandwidth get us? Of course, if you're a huge site, it buys you something. But most of us aren't CNN or even Slashdot, and it doesn't add up to much either.
Data flexibility? Great, in theory. But what does it mean in reality? Until we switch to XML, a search engine could no more figure out that <span class="authorName"> means that the data in the tag is an author's name than it could if I used <b> to bold the author's name.
Does data flexibility mean that you can easily deliver data to different user agent types? That's a very worthy goal for CSS. I don't think CSS has come anywhere near succeeding in that goal yet. And for most sites, it's really not an issue.
Does data flexibility mean that you can easily change designs? If so, I'm betting that it's easier to use a CMS with a templating system (that just regenerates the HTML of the page in tabular designs) to allow the user to switch designs than to use CSS.
Does data flexibility mean accessibility? I'm not convinced that CSS is all that much more flexible than tabular design (for example, sight-impaired users could use a user style agent to increase font sizes on pages, but I think it's probably a better solution for them to simply use Opera with text zoom).
CSS is a very good idea, in my opinion. Eventually, it may very well enhance users' experience at a site. I don't believe it has gotten there yet. So, until that day, if it's a choice between having really fine control over a site's design, and being able to develop the site quickly with the knowledge that it will work in all browsers (including old browsers like Netscape 4.7), and using CSS because it's good in theory, I choose good design.
Becuase good graphic design is not just an afterthought. It is critically important to a user's experience on a web site. Research bears this out - one study at Stanford found that attractive site design was the most important factor in whether a user trusted a web site, twice as important as the brand name on the site!
(For the record, I am responding to this comment:
)
I love CSS Zen Garden. It is an amazing site. And, you're absolutely right that not all CSS sites need to look the same (I like to think that my site, which totally relies upon CSS for design, does not look like every other "CSS site" out there). That being said, I do agree with the original poster's sentiments to a large degree.
Off the top of my head (finishing a long day at work):
1) CSS Zen Garden is great, but it's much easier to mess around with CSS style-switching like that when you have only one page to support. It becomes much more difficult to do when you have a lot of different pages with different types of content and different amounts of content on different pages.
Plus, a lot of the designs on CSS Zen Garden are eye-catching - but hardly useful (and rather distracting) if you are trying to make a serious site geared towards content delivery. This it not a slam on CSS Zen Garden at all, which is, after all, supposed to show that CSS can deliver the goods when it comes to amazing graphic design. Just that, at the end of the day, what matters is normally intuitive content delivery wrapped in a good design, not being able to switch styles.
2) It can still be quite a bitch to get CSS to work the same in Opera, Mozilla, and IE.
3) Given the difficulty of getting CSS stylesheets to work correctly across all browsers, you have to ask yourself - doesn't it make more sense to use tabular design and some content management system that contains templating features, rather than struggling with the theoretically cool but difficult to implement CSS design switching?
4) One of the things that initially attracted me to CSS was the possibility of creating web pages that are more accessible to sight-impaired and motion-impaired users. But, after much effort, it has become clear to me that CSS is not a magic bullet for this at all. First of all, tabular design is not as inaccessible as it's made out to be. Screen readers are very good at dealing with tabular design by now. Secondly, there are a lot of situations where CSS has no bearing on the issue. For example, if I have a budget tool that I want to update costs on the fly, that will wreak havoc on screen readers, regardless of whether CSS is used or not. (More generally, web standards are no magic bullet. For example, let's say we have a tool where most users will benefit from being able to click on an item and have a pop-up window appear with more information on the item. Now, some users will have JavaScript turned off, meaning that the budget item link should use TARGET=BLANK for those users. But according to HTML 4/XHTML 1 Strict, you cannot use TARGET=BLANK any more, because that would be mixing content and design. In theory, the W3C is absolutely right. Where the link opens is a design issue, and should be handled by manipulating the DOM, not in the anchor tag itself. But, unfortunately, theory leaves those users with JavaScript turned off with a much lesser experience, becuase they would benefit from viewing both the additional information in the pop-up window and the information they were viewing previously at the same time on the screen. Maybe that's the right trade-off to make, but it's still a trade-off.)
5) The idea that with different stylesheets you can support radically different user agents - Palm users, WebTV users, users with 640x480 resolution, users with 1024x768 resolution, screen readers, etc. - is a great idea. I question how many sites have actually put it into action, though. Let's be honest - how many site really have a need to deliver information to users across all those user agent types yet? And, if you do have such a need, you're probably a huge site where it may make more sense to - again - use an advanced CMS that can handle that by relying on custom conversion from XML to whatever template you have for the different user agents, rather than CSS.
6) CSS would become much more useful if we could get some of the features that were be
The problem with the treatment of P2P on Slashdot is that most posters are unable to distinguish between P2P technology and the popular P2P networks.
The INDUCE Act does not outlaw, and the RIAA/MPAA, are not opposed to P2P technology itself. Professor Susan Crawford, positively quoted in a previous Slashdot story about the INDUCE Act, says, "The Act (to be proposed tomorrow by songwriter Sen. Hatch and others) amends the copyright law to say that anyone who 'induces' copyright infringement is himself/itself an infringer."
The act is about is preventing copyright infringement via P2P, not about P2P. Believe me, Orrin Hatch, the RIAA, and the MPAA have absolutely no problem if some P2P network replaces Google as the search engine of choice.
More to the point, the RIAA/MPAA have no problem using P2P themselves if they can control it so that it does not get used to pirate movies and music. If a proprietary P2P network that allows them to charge for distribution of works turns out to be the best way to rent movies, the MPAA would be happy to cut Blockbuster out of the picture and keep those profits to itself.
What they cannot allow is unrestricted use of existing P2P networks for piracy of music and movies. And let's face it - that's exactly what Kazaa and Limewire networks are used for today. I say this as someone who uses P2P to PIRATE MUSIC AND MOVIES. But at least I admit that's what I use it for. I don't pretend that P2P is a future business model for the RIAA/MPAA that they are too stupid to understand.
Many on Slashdot make the argument that P2P-based music and movie piracy is actually good for the music and movie industries, because it may actually lead people to purchase more music and movies - music and movies that they otherwise would not know of. And this argument may be true.
The problem is that it ignores the fact that while content piracy is good for content producers when it exists in moderation, it means certain bankruptcy for content producers when taken to an extreme.
That is why Adobe could care less if you use a pirated copy of Photoshop to make your first web page, but will absolutely send in the BSA ninjas if you run a 200 man web design firm that doesn't own a single license to the product. Short of a totalitarian state, piracy could never be stamped out. It's reality of life, just like stolen merchandise is in the retail business (no, I am not saying that copying copyrighted works is equivalent to stealing physical products). The RIAA and MPAA understand this. They're not worried about the guys who videotape movies and sell a dozen copies on the street corner. That's nothing to them.
The problem with uncontrolled P2P networks is that, if unchecked, there is absolutely nothing stopping everyone from pirating music and movies. Look how easy it is to get popular music and movies on Limewire today. And Limewire has what, a few million users at any given time? Well, what if downloading movies and music from Limewire were known to be legal, and what if it were covered on the front of Time or Newsweek, as Napster once was? You'd get 50 million users. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be using it constantly. The number of shared files would balloon. The speed of acquiring files would, correspondingly, increase.
It would be wonderful for all of us. But it would be the end of the RIAA and the MPAA companies. Because who the hell would ever pay for music and movies under those circumstances? Sure, a few collectors - like the people who insist on buying vinyl records today - but the majority could care less. I assure you, in the time of iPods, the packaging and liner notes mean very little to the average consumer.
That's why the RIAA and MPAA need to have legal means to fight file sharing. They'll never shut down online piracy completely - just like Adobe will never be able to track down every home user who has a copy of Photshop 5.5 on his PC that he got from a friend. But they don't need to. They just need to have enou
Republican != neocon. Traditional republicans are ones who try to eliminate as much waste/pork as possible(McCain is a good example of this type)
It's not as simple as that by any means. McCain was more identified with the neocons than Bush was in 2000. That's why the Weekly Standard endorsed McCain (and also why McCain was a darling of the neo-lib New Republic).
There's hardly a wasteful neo-con/thrify paleo-con dichotomy. I think it probably depends a lot more on the individual politician, and the circumstances of government. It's been shown that both parties are wasteful when they control both the legislature and the executive branch (think Republicans since 2000 in DC), while more much thrify when government is divided (think the balanced budgets of the late 90s, when Clinton and the GOP split government). Of course, in California, it's split government.
BTW, if anybody knows Javascript workarounds for Combobox functionality, I'd be very happy if you could post them.
I know there's others out there, but I don't have the time to track them down right now. But...
Combo box
Combo Box
They're not at all related. You're the pedant who's wrong.
When Katie T talks about an internet predator, she is talking about a 27 year old who tries to carry out statuatory rape on a 13 year old.
When you talk about an internet predator, you're talking about taking someone's domain away from them.
So let's see, rape vs. making someone move from katie.com to katiejones.com. [sarcasm] Yes, clearly those are equivalent. How ironic! [/sarcasm]
Please, this is like saying that if I am against kidnappers locking people in their basements, I must also be against forcing someone turn down the exceedingly loud music coming from their apartment. After all, they're both infringements of rights! Clearly, they are equivalent, and it is both ironic and hypocritical to be against one and not the other.
Anyone but the most rabid libertarian understands the difference.
I don't know why this post got modded as a troll. Connecting unrelated ideas is a Michael Moore specialty. For example, talking about Afghan oil pipeline negotiations and then showing a picture of Bush bombing Afghanistan. If you don't think about it, it makes sense, just like it initially seems shady that Microsoft is selling Slate two weeks after Slate wrote an article praising Firefox. But then you give it a bit more thought, and realize that the Afghan pipeline negotiations happened under Clinton, not Bush, and that no pipeline has been built since the Taliban were overthrown, or you realize that if Microsoft wanted to prevent positive articles about Slate it would maintain its control over Slate, not sell it.
But to realize that, you need to been thinking critically. For Slashdot readers and for viewers of Michael Moore's movies, that critical eye is not always open. Because it's easy and more comfortable to simply agree with something that validates your existing notions (Microsoft bad, Bush bad).
So, no, Stevyn is not trolling, and yes, this is like Michael Moore.
I don't disagree that investors (and corporations) can make the wrong decision and choose short-term profit over larger long-term profits. But let's not act as if it's simply that "investors are a bunch of gullible sheep who lack the ability to think in the long-term." Microsoft is one of the most profitable, successful companies in the world. So, first of all, they seem to have managed their business quite well. It's a bit arrogant, don't you think, to post on Slashdot about how poorly Microsoft is run? Do you have a business that makes $10 billion in profits per year?
Secondly, it is not easy to grow your business when you already have massive market share and huge revenues. It's much more difficult to grow at a 20% per year clip when you have 5% market share than when you have 95% market share. It's easy to say, "Invest in new technologies for the long-run," but that's easier said than done. After all, Apple, for all their innovation, has not been able to grow their profits or market share much at all over the past few years.
Finally, remember, in the long-run, we're all dead. Stock holders are allowed to care about the short-run. It's not necessarily irrational to prefer short-run gain to long-term gain.
Let me weigh in with reviews of Bowling for Columbine, and one (the New Republic) review of his new movie. Moore is hardly honest, even accounting for his bias. And note that of these reviews, only the WSJ and National Post are conservative, the NYT, Slate, American Prospect, and TNR are left:
"Well, the speaker ought to know. As critics have pointed out repeatedly, Mr. Moore himself is a world-class expert on 'fictition'; in fact, when it comes to truth telling, not to mention logic, you might say that less is Moore."
"Mr. Moore is hardly the first to engage in a little nostalgic mythmaking. What makes him unique is his willingness to construct his myths on a scaffolding of calculated untruths. "
-- The Wall Street Journal
"Yes, it is a free country, but it is not a perfect one. Because in a perfect country, an irresponsible, intellectually dishonest windbag like Moore would not be a rich, successful, Oscar-winning documentarian. He would instead be just another anonymous nutter, mumbling about fluoride in the water and penning anti-establishment tracts by candlelight in some backwoods Appalachian shack. And he would never, ever find another funder for his 'art.'"
-- The New Republic
The problem is, once you delve beneath the humor, it turns out [Moore's] "facts and hard-core analysis" are frequently inaccurate, contradictory and confused...Like many of the political celebrities increasingly filling our TV screens and bookstores, he is entertaining, explicitly partisan, and all too willing to twist facts to promote himself and his vision of the truth.1
- Spinsanity
The slippery logic, tendentious grandstanding and outright demagoguery on display in "Bowling for Columbine" should be enough to give pause to its most ardent partisans...Mr. Moore, when it serves his purposes, is happy to generalize in the absence of empirical evidence and to make much of connections that seem spurious on close examination.
- The New York Times
ONE OF THE MOSQUITO-BITE IRRITAtions of being on the left is finding your ideals represented in public by Michael Moore...Although he'd have made a crackerjack ad man, he's a slipshod filmmaker, and the movie quickly collapses, burying its subject beneath bumper-sticker rehashes of received ideas...At once punchy and incoherent -- Moore contradicts himself vividly every few minutes -- the film has the scattershot shapelessness of a concept album made by a singles band.
Although Moore takes delight in thumping Cops and TV newscasts, he himself uses tabloid techniques and is guilty of manipulative heartlessness.
- LA Weekly
His journalism, in short, on the subject of Canada and Canadians, is nothing short of shoddy, manipulative and untrue. The same can be said for his journalism on his own country, and indeed on the terrible and complicated issue he purports to adjudicate.
- National Post (Canada)
If you want about as clear a demonstration as you're likely to find of the difference between truth and politics, go see Eminem's 8 Mile...and then go see Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine...Though Moore claims to have made a documentary, his examination of American gun culture presents viewers with a more heavily edited fiction than producer Brian Grazer's attempt to clean up Eminem. Whereas the rapper's movie reaches for the sort of truth mere facts cannot convey, Moore's film grabs viewers with the old demagogue's trick of using just as much factual information as is necessary to lead people toward false conclusions.
- The American Prospect
"[T]he greatest danger to liberalism isn't the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Andrew Sullivan, but blowhards like Alan Parker and Michael Moore--the thugs of humanism. Given the way in which it's administered, I don't support the death penalty for people. But I emphatically support it for certain careers."
-- Slate
1: invade Iraq.
2: Steal the Oil
The US did not invade Iraq to steal oil, for a number of very obvious reasons:
Please...It's getting ridiculous that so many people still believe that this is a war for oil when the numbers didn't add up before the war and still don't add up after the war...
This is more akin to how the US has berated china over keeping its currency artifically low against the Dollar, while doing the same thing to Europe.
How has the US done this to Europe? China and Japan keep their currencies artificially low by buying up American bonds, thereby driving up the price for dollar denominated assets and lowering the cost of yuan/yen-denominated assets to Americans. America plays no such game on the European asset market.
Explanation, please.
Creative Criticism: The DHTML or whatever is used to give the advanced editing features of Exchange 2000 web mail, msn hotmail, yahoo mail, and the geocities web site editor don't work in Firebird; If they did my sister, my mom and many other web users would never use IE again.
That would be a nice feature to have...but I believe that this is a Microsoft proprietary extension to the JavaScript DOM, not a standard. Which is not to say that the Mozilla team is incapable of reproducing it, just that they may have some qualms about it.
The quality of graduates from a university I have never heard of, surpasses all other schools in the US? Uh-huh...
If you've never heard of WUSTL, then you clearly don't know much about computer science academic programs. It is very highly regarded in the field.
Honestly, until something is seriously done by the government and companies (determing a percentage that can be offshored, completely redoing the tariffs in the so-called "free trade" agreements, etc.), it's difficult to make a case for going to a college or university. To train for what? Everyone behind a desk is vulnerable to being offshored.
Yes, white collar jobs are now vulnerable to off-shoring - but far more blue collar jobs have already been off-shored. There's a reason why factory payrolls just declined for the 42nd straight month, even as total payrolls in the US increased.
Besides, off-shoring isn't the only factor in the job market. Over all, it pays to get a college degree. According to surveys (see article) the average college graduate makes $17,000 more per year than the average high school graduate. Even if you go to an expensive private college at $35,000 per year, you still more than make back that cost over the course of your career.
I have mod points, but I really need to respond to this:
The Guardian hates the BBC, and they along with Rupert Murdoch have been trying to get the British government to shut down the BBCs great website, so that more people go to their services.
I'm really curious where you get this from. The BBC and the Guardian are both slanted left - the reason Murdoch dislikes the BBC, other than it being a competitor, is because he is right-wing. The Guardian and BBC have no such ideological disagreement. In fact, it has been argued that one of the reasons the BBC is so slanted to the left is because it primarily advertises its open positions in the Guardian, so there is a closed circle into which few right-wingers or centrists ever enter.
What an inane comment:
The Palestinians have nothing to do with fuel.
If invading Iraq were simply about attaining oil, we would have just dropped the sanctions. It would have been $200 billion cheaper and been faster to bring a lot more oil onto the world market (to lower oil prices). Which is not to say that Iraq isn't partially about protecting oil supplies, but it's not as direct as you seem to think.
Finally, it's not just "the Yanks" who have to deal with the problem that the world economy depends on fuel. If there were a major oil crisis - let's say the Saudi fuel depots get hit by a terrorist attacks, which makes oil prices rise by 80% (totally possible) - everyone is fucked. China is a major oil importer now whose economy becomes more dependent on oil every day. Japan is hugely dependent on foreign oil. Europe is dependent. America is dependent. You think the world economy will do well after America, Europe, China, and Japan (jointly responsible for, what, 80% of world GDP?) go into recession? You think you're still going to have a job after that?
Shit, maybe you should thank the Yanks for safeguarding the foundation of the world economy, rather than attacking it.
Jesus Christ, come off your high-horse.
The Internet is fantastic. It has changed my life too: I have made friends over the Internet; I have the career I have because I fell in love with web design; I started two online magazines; and I spend probably two hours per day reading news and commentary from around the world. It still blows my mind how much better informed I can be thanks to the fact that I can read blogs from Iran, newspapers from India, etc.
But I also use the Internet to forward silly emails, chat mindlessly with peers, to search for pornography, and download crappy quality music files. In other words, to have fun.
It's great to be engaged intellectually with things that interest you, but it's also a fundamental human right to goof off.
No matter what technologies we invent, not everyone is going to want to program, read the news all day, or found a business. People have other interests, and that's fine.
Listen, I'm horrible at sports, I don't know the first thing about plumbing, I have no idea how to fix a car, and I'd rather buy take-out than learn to cook. Does this make me a bad person? Am I a lesser person because I am not engaged enough to learn how a car works? No, of course not! It just means that I have different interests from others, and I should be able to follow my interests just as much as they can follow theirs.
Note 1: Your case would be a lot more convincing if you didn't make it while posting to Slashdot! Shouldn't you be coding or informing yourself, rather than goofing off?
Note 2: Your case would also be a lot more convincing if you didn't make the argument that the Internet is a failure because it hasn't shown everyone that the Republicans are bad. One of the great advantages for me of the Internet is that it has expanded my news sources past the traditional left-wing sources that I read on paper (like the New York Times) to centrist (Washington Post) and conservative sources (like the National Review and Weekly Standard). I've become more, not less conservative, as the result of reading the Internet. It is objectively true that the Internet expands the range of sources we have our fingertips, but it is extremely subjective to say that having access to more sources makes you more liberal.
1) People everywhere are basically the same, with the same human desires, goals, motivations, etc.
2) Different cultures organize themselves very differently, and some cultures are preferable to others in specific aspects.
There are two problems with the discussion we're having about these articles. First of all, it's not clear whether we're talking about individuals or cultures. So when we're asked "why should Saudi geeks be any different from us," some people are responding by referencing culture (Saudi geek culture exists in a national culture that is very different from ours, so naturally it will be different) and some are responding by referencing human nature (people are people, people who likes playing with Linux in Saudi Arabia like playing with Linux for the same reason as we do in the US).
These two groups of respondents are not really talking to each other, they're talking past each other, because they use the same words but with different meanings.
This makes the discussion frustrating, but what makes it far worse is the small group of people who believe that because people are people it is unfair to judge between cultures. In their argument, because all cultures are made up of people, and people are the same at heart, we have no right to judge others just because they chose to organize their society along different cultural lines.
So now, we have three groups:
1. People doing cultural/political comparisons
2. People doing comparisons of individuals
3. People insisting that cultural/political comparisons are innately invalid.
Most people in group 1 would have no problem with what group 2 is saying, and most people in group 2 would have no problem with group 1 are saying, provided they understood that to focus on cultural differences instead of similarities as individuals is not to deny the similarity of human nature across cultures (and vice versa).
But once you introduce group 3 claiming that group 1 are racists, group 1 is obviously going to get very defensive. And the problem is, it's very hard for group 1 to distinguish between group 2 - the people who are simply framing the discussion differently - and group 3 - the people who are claiming racism. So they start reacting to all criticism as coming from group 3, even though most of it comes from group 2.
Anyway, to go back to what you said about American journalism:
This is a classic example of the problem we're seeing right now on the Slashdot message boards.
Believe it or not, very few thought that Russians were different from us as individuals. And believe it or not, the neoconservatives (Paul Wolfowitz, for example) do not hate (for example) Iranians, but think that because Iranians are the same as us they should organize their political culture along the same lines as well, because democracy is a basic human right since all humans are essentially the same.
But the problem is, group 3 uses arguments that all people are the same to deny all differences between political cultures. So in the 1980s, group 3 said that because people are people, that meant that we had no right to fear the Soviet government, no right to act against the Soviet Union, no right to try to bring down the Soviet system. They argued that because the average Russian feared war just as much as the average American, then the Soviet government is no different from the American government and we should not act in judgment of it.
That's a premise conservatives (
Just want to post my agreement:
I am an environmentalist, in that it seems obvious to me that we are destroying much natural beauty and causing damage to human health with pollution. I also suspect (although I am just a layman) that we are causing global warming, and that we should avoid changing the climate until we are more capable of understanding what impact this will have. To me, "first doing no harm" is the truly conservative approach to the environment, not the "we'll do nothing until the proof is overwhelming" argument that some so-called conservatives make.
I do not drive an SUV. In fact, I do not own a car at all, and I take public transportation or walk everywhere.
BUT...I am becoming more and more skeptical of the environmental movement. Too much of it seems to be pushing an anti-capitalist morality with which I do not agree (e.g., I have a friend who once argued that subcontinent Indians are better off in abject poverty than as computer programmers in air conditioned offices). I don't want people to have less goods - I just want to make sure that we all have iPods in such a way that we don't destroy the earth in the process.
More importantly, I am seeing cases where the environmental movement is wilfully exaggerating how bad things are, and is arguing that no matter what the choice, the environment is both the first and the only thing.
Well, I obviously want a clean, healthy environment. But it must be balanced against other needs. And to make the correct decisions, we must have accurate, not exaggerated, accounts of the situation.
That is why I appreciate people like Dr. Lomborg (or Gregg Easterbrook at the New Republic), who bring some balance to the debate between environmentalists and oil-company-sponsored "non-profits."
The rainforests burn, in part, because western farm subsidies keep the price of food artificially high to support agrobusiness profits--certainly too high for south American campesinos to buy it.
Is this really true? It seems to me that:
Subsidies by developed (not Western, because it includes Japan too) countries to their farmers artificially inflate the supply of agricultural products produced by farmers in these nations.
Higher supply leads, naturally, to lower prices.
Lower prices for farm goods (and, essentially, excess supply) means that farmers in underdeveloped nations have a hard time surviving by farming.
This was the complaint of the developed world at the Cancun WTO talks. But I don't see how subsidies destroy the rain forest. It seems to me that if anything, if we eliminated subsidies to farmers in developed nations, it would be much more profitable for farmers in South America to farm, and so they'd burn down more of the rain forest so that they could farm more and make more money. After all, the marginal value of each additional acre of farmland would greatly increase if we eliminated the $300 billion in farm subsidies the developed world gives.
Am I wrong? I would be happy if someone else could chime in and clear this up.
I wish Slashdot would stop setting up the recording industry with these straw men arguments. I don't think the recording industry ever thought (or said) that it would never sell mp3s online. It said that it was unrealistic to sell mp3s online if they could be easily pirated by anyone the next day. And you know what? They were right.
My interest in using iTMS is very high now - the only reason I don't use any of the online music stores is because I don't want to be locked into one store/one mp3 player (software)/one mp3 player (hardware). But once a standard is defined, I'll be there to buy.
But I wouldn't use iTMS, or any music store, if the old Napster were still around, or if Kazaa were any good for finding the music I am interested in. Back when Napster was king, I could find any song I wanted for free. As a result, I didn't buy a CD for a couple years (file sharing over the college network helped too). Now Napster is gone, and Kazaa has a ton of phony files that have made it a hassle to use. As a result, I'm willing to pay so that I don't have to waste a lot of time finding the free version on Kazaa - since time, after all, is money.
My friends who can still find what they want on Kazaa have no interest in using music stores. Those who can't, do.
I'm not saying it's all or nothing. There are some users who always would have paid for their music, and some who never will. But there are also a HUGE number of users - and they're not just computer geeks, remember Newsweek had a cover story on Napster - who will pirate the music if it's easy, and pay for it it's hard to pirate.
It used to be really, really freaking easy to pirate music. Let's stop pretending that the music industry was saying that it would never sell mp3s online. It was saying it wouldn't sell mp3s online as long as doing so just made it incredibly easy to pirate them.