Fair enough, but what I was referring to was that IE6 will, in fact, display XHTML pages mostly correctly (CSS issues aside) as long as they are served as text/html rather than as application/xhtml+xml. I realize that this only works because XHTML is sort of close to HTML and IE (along with other browsers) treats the incorrect HTML loosely enough that it ends up working, but the point is that web developers have effectively been using XHTML with IE for some time except that they have to make sure not to serve it as application/xhtml+xml. You could certainly make the argument that it would be better for Microsoft to wait until IE has real XHTML support before "enabling" the application/xhtml+xml MIME type, but I don't see any real benefit to that at this point.
Does anyone know whether IE7 finally supports the application/xhtml+xml MIME type? That would mean we can finally start serving XHTML pages the way they're supposed to get served, with no stupid browser detection. (I know, I know, IE6 will be around for the next six decades or so...)
You can believe, argue, and hold dear whatever you like. If you are trying to sway public opinion of something, however, being an extremist will typically work against you. If you want to, great, go for it. I'm not telling you to sell your ideology short, I'm just telling the reality of its effectiveness. Women's suffrage was an extreme position at one time, but, as society changed. it became less of an extremist position, and so was finally adopted.
It seems to me that you are advocating moderation of the position itself on the basis of "extremism," as opposed to moderating the presentation thereof; if such is the case then you are, in fact, telling me to "sell my ideology short." Also, how do you think women's suffrage became mainstream over time? People had to make arguments that were considered "extremist" over and over again, until people finally began to accept them. Even if a given argument is not likely sway people's opinions directly or completely, it may make them more receptive to similar arguments down the road.
When it coems to Free Speech, however, the extremist position has always stayed relatively extreme. If you cannot punish, under any circumstance, what someone says (the extremist of extreme positions), then, as an extreme example, you couldn't prosecute somone for calling in a bomb threat. It would be Free Speech.
I don't think you're going to find many people who will support that, indeed I highly doubt that you would. So what that means is that there has to be a line a somewhere between Speech that is allowed and Speech which is punishable (civilly or criminally). The true argument then is not whether there ought to be limits on Free Speech, but where those limits should be. If you're over in the corner arguing that there shouldn't be a line then, whatever you may have to say about its placement is also going to be ignored. That's reality.
I did not at any time make the argument that there should be no limits on free speech, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Also, please do not make assumptions about what I would or would not support.
I'm not trying to tell you what to believe or how to pursue it, but I am telling you that the gap between ideology and reality can be extremely difficult to overcome.
I'm honestly not sure what you mean by that last clause.
You're suggesting that one not take up "extremist" positions because many people will reject them? That amounts to letting the majority determine the range of your opinions, which I find intellectually disgusting. Winning an argument is not as important as honesty and integrity are. Furthermore, it is precisely by advancing "extremist" viewpoints that the majority can, over time, be brought to consider those viewpoints mainstream-- I'm sure women's suffrage was at one time considered an "extremist" viewpoint, for example.
Free speech does not, nor has it ever, allowed people to lie about someone else. That is not its intent and arguing that it ought to be allowed does far more damage than good.
Oh, you were doing so well until that last phrase. "Arguing that it ought to be allowed does far more damage than good"? Arguing? You're seriously suggesting that simply making a case against libel laws is itself harmful? That sounds like classic FUD designed to chill any discussion of the matter.
Contrary to the other posters, I've seen it labelled in supermarkets as "ground beef" or "ground chuck," but never "hamburger." Then again, maybe I just haven't been paying enough attention.
Why do you care how much profit they make? What matters is whether the games are worth that price to you. And if high marginal profits bother you, guess what? Plastic CDs in cardboard boxes don't cost a whole lot to manufacture, either.
Concentration of wealth leads to concentration of power, which leads to control of the regulatory process.
Except that in a truly free market, there is no regulatory process to control. This shows exactly why government-imposed regulations can end up hurting more than they help: they can get corrupted and abused easily, despite the best of intentions.
How are you depriving him of his right to his property? You sneak over the fence at midnight when he's asleep, or when he's on vacation. You argue, hey, he wasn't there to collect the money anyway. You haven't deprived him of anything!
Since you seem to be so hung up on this trespassing thing, would it help if I re-worded that part of the assertion to be "using his property" instead of "depriving him of the fair use of his property"? I was reluctant to use the former wording because the term "intellectual property" has confused the issue of what is property and what is not-- but see my next paragraph below for my argument on why "intellectual property" cannot really be considered property at all.
Your argument is ridiculous - you should respect people's intellectual property the same way you respect their physical property. It has very little to do with "depriving" someone of something.
I don't, because they are NOT THE SAME. As I stated in my last post, information and physical objects are fundamentally different: physical objects are scarce, while information is not. Therefore, I claim, the construct of "property" which we apply to physical objects is not appropriate for information. It's like trying to fit square pegs into round holes, and it's why we are having so many problems related to IP today: the concept is fundamentally broken.
Someone has IP and says you can see it for a fee, you refuse, case closed.
Except that's not the only situation in which IP applies. IP applies even if I never interact with the creator directly, e.g. if I download an mp3 from some third-party site. My claim is that the creator has no right to tell me what I can and cannot do with the content of that mp3, since it is information and therefore cannot be "owned" by anyone. The situation is, of course, different if I am interacting with the creator directly: he may certainly refuse to let me see his information under whatever conditions he sees fit.
Furthermore, you use the phrase "has IP" as if IP were a physical thing one could possess. It's not; it is a construct of law, and I thought we already agreed that law is not a basis for morality.
...someone standing there on the corner playing an instrument and demanding that you pay because you were in ear shot is ridiculous and you know it, and it's not how any of this protection of IP works. Don't pretend you don't see the difference.
Of course it's ridiculous. That's how reductio ad absurdum works, and it is a perfectly valid form of argumentation. You can't refute it simply by saying "don't pretend you don't see the difference."
How is it different? You aren't seriously suggestion that giving away content for free and asking for donations (like the street musician and many OSS project creators) is the SAME as someone asking for compensation before giving you their creation, and in fact denying you the right to use their creation without compensation?
You have missed my point. It does not matter whether or not the creator asks for compensation first, because he HAS NO RIGHT to demand anything from me in the first place. I could stand on a public street and demand that people pay me in order to pass, but clearly I have no right to demand this, regardless of how much work I may have put into making my signs. Therefore, even though people are aware of my demands before they choose to pass or not to pass, they are under no obligation to accept my terms.
I'm saying people who create IP are free to disseminate it as they see fit, you don't have any "right" to disseminate someone elses content (to yourself or anyone else), unless the creator of that content says you do.
Someone else's content? Define that. Suppose person A writes a poem, and person B later composes the same poem independently. Does that information "belong" to person A? How can we say that information "belongs" to anyone, when it is not a physical entity and does not reside in one place? Information does not naturally have the kind of scarcity that physical goods do, which is the only reason we have property in the first place: to allocate scarce goods. If physical goods could be duplicated as information can, then we would have no need for property at all.
By your assertion, since you wouldn't be depriving him of his property, you could then climb over the wall and admire the pond without compensating him.
Wrong. You missed a crucial word in my assertion: I said what's not allowed is depriving him of the use of his property, which includes trespass because one use of property is to decide who gets to be on it. In any case, this is clearly irrelevant to IP unless you're asserting that some form of trespass is taking place.
Look, I know where you are coming from, but what you're saying is you don't respect the author creator to compensate him for his IP.
That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that the creator does not have the right to force me to pay for the privilege of using "his" information. Whether or not I choose to compensate him in some way for his hard work is a separate question, just as in the case of the street musician.
Unless you can argue there is absolutely no value to IP, then by simply taking it without compensation is indeed stealing from the creator.
I disagree. Stealing is by definition depriving someone of his own property, and as I have stated, no such deprivation takes place. Semantic issues aside, you already agreed that passers-by should not be forced to pay the street musician even though his music certainly has value, so how is copyright different? It makes no difference whether the creator worked with the expectation of making money in a certain way; after all, enterpreneurs fail all the time when their business models don't pan out, yet we aren't making laws to guarantee them a certain way of making money.
My assertion is basically this: if I am not depriving a given person of the fair use of his property, that person has no right to force conditions upon my behavior. We benefit from others all the time without paying for it; for example, I might enjoy the sight of an artificial pond my neighbor built, but should I have to pay him for the pleasure of looking at it? No, and the reason has nothing to do with how much work he put into the pond, how much benefit I derive from it, or with what expectations he built it. What matters is that I am not impinging upon his property rights, and therefore he cannot tell me what to do, period.
I never made a point, and never would, that morals=law.
Then I apologize for misunderstanding. You used the word "illegal" or "illegally" three times in your post, which led me to the conclusion that legality was a major factor in your position.
Morally: if I don't think it's worth what they are asking for it, I don't buy it, but I also don't just take it.
What, exactly, would you be taking? You deprive the creator of nothing. "Potential revenue" is not something one can possess, and he still retains all the information he had previously. That's why I made the analogy to the street musician: he has no right to demand that people pay him, because they are not on his property and they are not depriving him of anything he owns.
You're forgetting the free rider problem: when you can't exclude non-payers from consuming the end product, what incentive is there for them to pay in the first place? That's especially true when there are a lot of small "investors," so that the work will be produced (or fail to do so) regardless of any individual contribution. That's very much like the problem with voting, which is partly why we see such low voter turnouts in large elections.
I'm not saying the system won't work at all, just that basic game theory implies it won't be nearly as effective as you seem to believe it will.
It might not be very nice to listen to a street musician without giving him any money, but I certainly wouldn't call it dishonest. I don't think the musician has any right to demand that everyone who listens to him pay up, since he is performing in a public area and therefore does not have the right to decide who may stay and who must go.
Now suppose there were a law mandating that if you listen to a street musician for a certain length of time, you must pay him. Would that change the morality of the situation? Only if you believe that violating laws is in and of itself immoral. In your "brain-dead honesty" I see only a slavish devotion to nonsensical laws; you should decide for yourself what is right and wrong, not let the majority do it for you. I would be able to respect your opinion on "honesty" more (though I'd still disagree) if it didn't seem like you were using the law as part of the justification for your position-- believe me, I understand how seductive that thinking can be, but conflating legality with morality has led to much evil in our history.
Please don't accuse me of using convenient reasoning to justify my own actions, because I'm not. My own actions are irrelevant to this discussion, and my argument will stand or fall on its own regardless of how you perceive me.
When I opened up my dual core mac, I had to download 123 megabytes of updates to the OS. . . I wasn't sure if it was to be "safe" or not, as there were no real details on this issue provided.
Untrue. Software Update always describes the updates it lists, at least to the extent of "security-related" vs. other stuff.
Then when it came back up, it had me strike keys on my keyboard so it could figure out what kind of keyboard I was using.
I have never heard of this. Granted, I haven't set up a new Mac very recently, but it sounds suspiciously trollish.
Also, I noticed that my monitor and mac came in 2 different boxes. . . but the commercial indicated I could just open the box and make a webpage.
If you were so concerned with getting a computer that's easy to set up, why didn't you get an iMac? The Pro line is-- guess what-- targeted at professionals.
Then I discovered that if I wanted to do this "easily," I could pay an additional 80 dollars a year to rent the software that makes this easy to do.
Untrue. You are paying $80/yr (assuming that's the actual price) for web hosting and other online services, not "renting software."
Nice troll, but I give it only a 6 out of 10 for lack of originality.
No, it isn't. He's talking about a microkernel, like QNX or L4. Mach is also considered a microkernel, but OS X is not based on Mach; it is based on XNU, a hybrid kernel that consists of Mach bolted into the FreeBSD monolithic kernel, with I/O Kit thrown in for good measure.
You give performance arguments, but the speed of OX X does not imply that it uses a microkernel; quite the opposite, microkernels have been known to run significanly slower than monolithic ones, which is presumably why Apple went the hybrid route instead of using pure Mach. To be fair, Mach is rather outdated among microkernels, and "modern" microkernels like the aforementioned L4 have shown that the speed penalty might be as low as 5-10%, but the point still stands. Don't confuse simplicity of code with performance.
...a single strongman will fuck up the playing field for everybody by assimilating, subjugating, and repressing everyone else (while getting even stronger in the process).
You mean like the government? Isn't that exactly the topic we're on right now? It's either the strongman you fear or the one you make yourself, and frankly I'd rather take my chances.
Yes, the free market is the best possible scenario, except that human nature being what it is, the market will quickly degrade into something horrible if completely uncontrolled.
Even if that were true, then the relevant question would be whether a statist system is likely to resist such degradation longer than an anarcho-capitalist one. I'm not going to try to answer that question now (though you can guess my thoughts on the matter); I just want to point out that your argument cuts both ways.
By all means, let's design a newer, better pail so that we can scoop water more efficiently from our sinking ship of state.
With or without the electoral college, an individual's vote is already so meaningless in a federal election that the only reasons left for rational people to vote are what an economist might call "psychological benefits" (feeling good about voting because of a sense of civic duty, for example). In other words, I'm saying that democracy itself becomes less effective the larger the scale at which it's applied.
Imagine what would happen if (say) half of the federal government's powers were transferred to the individual states, tomorrow. That would mean that if I wanted to change something about the way government affects me, there's a good chance that I would have to compete only with the population of one state (or even one city) instead of with that of a whole nation. In addition, I could move to another state if mine didn't suit me, since there would be a greater variance between the states themselves.
The CSS inheritance model is nonsensical, I need a 2-page cheat-sheet to get the syntax right, its designer thinks declaring aliases are 'too complex' and it takes a bona fide css expert to get css positioning working across browsers with a design that survives user-preferred fonts.
Could you elaborate? I've always found writing CSS to be fairly natural and straightforward, but then again I'm a programmer. What parts of CSS, specifically, do you find nonsensical or excessively complex?
As for needing an expert to get a design working across browsers and fonts, that seems reasonable to me. First you have to take into account that IE's "special" rendering of CSS makes things roughly twice as difficult as they would be otherwise, which is something you can't entirely blame on CSS itself. Second, making an elaborate design work across multiple font faces and sizes is naturally a bit complex; CSS is really the first visual medium in which people have even attempted this!
Before anyone starts spouting off again about Mac OS X being "slow by design" or somesuch, read this article by an Apple engineer that investigates those claims.
If by "hardly" you mean "two to three times" then yes.
They should have just bundled the controller with whatever handful of games they plan to have it work with and called it a day.
Yeah, like the CD-I. That worked really well, right? No console add-on with fundamentally different capabilities from the base console has ever gained wide acceptance. Nintendo would be shooting itself in the foot if it did that, even if the Wii's capabilities were the same as the Gamecube's.
He conveniently ignores or chooses to remain ignorant of the fact that L4Linux is typically faster than Linux itself.
I was under the impression that L4Linux has a 5-10% performance overhead versus native Linux. This is still pretty good given that L4Linux is pretty much just Linux running on top of the L4 microkernel, and it's certainly much better than (say) MkLinux, but "faster than Linux itself"? Unlikely.
Nintendo does have a habit of offering gimmicky features with their game systems.
What's the difference between a "gimmick" and a revolutionary (no pun intended) new feature? Degree of success. Nintendo has always experimented with new and interesting control schemes, gameplay styles, etc. Some of them succeed, and some of them don't. Was the analog joystick a "gimmick"? Shoulder buttons? I'm sure there were people who thought so at the time.
Only time will tell whether the Revolution controller becomes a success. To dismiss it this early as a "gimmick" targeted at "an excessive fad/trend based society that spazzes out over anything novel and new by throwing heaping wads of money at it" is unfair and short-sighted.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough, but what I was referring to was that IE6 will, in fact, display XHTML pages mostly correctly (CSS issues aside) as long as they are served as text/html rather than as application/xhtml+xml. I realize that this only works because XHTML is sort of close to HTML and IE (along with other browsers) treats the incorrect HTML loosely enough that it ends up working, but the point is that web developers have effectively been using XHTML with IE for some time except that they have to make sure not to serve it as application/xhtml+xml. You could certainly make the argument that it would be better for Microsoft to wait until IE has real XHTML support before "enabling" the application/xhtml+xml MIME type, but I don't see any real benefit to that at this point.
Does anyone know whether IE7 finally supports the application/xhtml+xml MIME type? That would mean we can finally start serving XHTML pages the way they're supposed to get served, with no stupid browser detection. (I know, I know, IE6 will be around for the next six decades or so...)
I did not at any time make the argument that there should be no limits on free speech, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Also, please do not make assumptions about what I would or would not support.
I'm honestly not sure what you mean by that last clause.
You're suggesting that one not take up "extremist" positions because many people will reject them? That amounts to letting the majority determine the range of your opinions, which I find intellectually disgusting. Winning an argument is not as important as honesty and integrity are. Furthermore, it is precisely by advancing "extremist" viewpoints that the majority can, over time, be brought to consider those viewpoints mainstream-- I'm sure women's suffrage was at one time considered an "extremist" viewpoint, for example.
Free speech does not, nor has it ever, allowed people to lie about someone else. That is not its intent and arguing that it ought to be allowed does far more damage than good.
Oh, you were doing so well until that last phrase. "Arguing that it ought to be allowed does far more damage than good"? Arguing? You're seriously suggesting that simply making a case against libel laws is itself harmful? That sounds like classic FUD designed to chill any discussion of the matter.
Seriously, I fail to see how it's hard to write an insecure SQL query in Perl. Does this not work?
Contrary to the other posters, I've seen it labelled in supermarkets as "ground beef" or "ground chuck," but never "hamburger." Then again, maybe I just haven't been paying enough attention.
I mean, without food you'd die; but you'd be willing to spend every last cent on it because of what it's worth to you?
Absolutely, if that's the price food was going for. Are you saying you'd rather keep your money and starve to death?
Why do you care how much profit they make? What matters is whether the games are worth that price to you. And if high marginal profits bother you, guess what? Plastic CDs in cardboard boxes don't cost a whole lot to manufacture, either.
Concentration of wealth leads to concentration of power, which leads to control of the regulatory process.
Except that in a truly free market, there is no regulatory process to control. This shows exactly why government-imposed regulations can end up hurting more than they help: they can get corrupted and abused easily, despite the best of intentions.
How are you depriving him of his right to his property? You sneak over the fence at midnight when he's asleep, or when he's on vacation. You argue, hey, he wasn't there to collect the money anyway. You haven't deprived him of anything!
...someone standing there on the corner playing an instrument and demanding that you pay because you were in ear shot is ridiculous and you know it, and it's not how any of this protection of IP works. Don't pretend you don't see the difference.
Since you seem to be so hung up on this trespassing thing, would it help if I re-worded that part of the assertion to be "using his property" instead of "depriving him of the fair use of his property"? I was reluctant to use the former wording because the term "intellectual property" has confused the issue of what is property and what is not-- but see my next paragraph below for my argument on why "intellectual property" cannot really be considered property at all.
Your argument is ridiculous - you should respect people's intellectual property the same way you respect their physical property. It has very little to do with "depriving" someone of something.
I don't, because they are NOT THE SAME. As I stated in my last post, information and physical objects are fundamentally different: physical objects are scarce, while information is not. Therefore, I claim, the construct of "property" which we apply to physical objects is not appropriate for information. It's like trying to fit square pegs into round holes, and it's why we are having so many problems related to IP today: the concept is fundamentally broken.
Someone has IP and says you can see it for a fee, you refuse, case closed.
Except that's not the only situation in which IP applies. IP applies even if I never interact with the creator directly, e.g. if I download an mp3 from some third-party site. My claim is that the creator has no right to tell me what I can and cannot do with the content of that mp3, since it is information and therefore cannot be "owned" by anyone. The situation is, of course, different if I am interacting with the creator directly: he may certainly refuse to let me see his information under whatever conditions he sees fit.
Furthermore, you use the phrase "has IP" as if IP were a physical thing one could possess. It's not; it is a construct of law, and I thought we already agreed that law is not a basis for morality.
Of course it's ridiculous. That's how reductio ad absurdum works, and it is a perfectly valid form of argumentation. You can't refute it simply by saying "don't pretend you don't see the difference."
How is it different? You aren't seriously suggestion that giving away content for free and asking for donations (like the street musician and many OSS project creators) is the SAME as someone asking for compensation before giving you their creation, and in fact denying you the right to use their creation without compensation?
You have missed my point. It does not matter whether or not the creator asks for compensation first, because he HAS NO RIGHT to demand anything from me in the first place. I could stand on a public street and demand that people pay me in order to pass, but clearly I have no right to demand this, regardless of how much work I may have put into making my signs. Therefore, even though people are aware of my demands before they choose to pass or not to pass, they are under no obligation to accept my terms.
I'm saying people who create IP are free to disseminate it as they see fit, you don't have any "right" to disseminate someone elses content (to yourself or anyone else), unless the creator of that content says you do.
Someone else's content? Define that. Suppose person A writes a poem, and person B later composes the same poem independently. Does that information "belong" to person A? How can we say that information "belongs" to anyone, when it is not a physical entity and does not reside in one place? Information does not naturally have the kind of scarcity that physical goods do, which is the only reason we have property in the first place: to allocate scarce goods. If physical goods could be duplicated as information can, then we would have no need for property at all.
By your assertion, since you wouldn't be depriving him of his property, you could then climb over the wall and admire the pond without compensating him.
Wrong. You missed a crucial word in my assertion: I said what's not allowed is depriving him of the use of his property, which includes trespass because one use of property is to decide who gets to be on it. In any case, this is clearly irrelevant to IP unless you're asserting that some form of trespass is taking place.
Look, I know where you are coming from, but what you're saying is you don't respect the author creator to compensate him for his IP.
That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that the creator does not have the right to force me to pay for the privilege of using "his" information. Whether or not I choose to compensate him in some way for his hard work is a separate question, just as in the case of the street musician.
Unless you can argue there is absolutely no value to IP, then by simply taking it without compensation is indeed stealing from the creator.
I disagree. Stealing is by definition depriving someone of his own property, and as I have stated, no such deprivation takes place. Semantic issues aside, you already agreed that passers-by should not be forced to pay the street musician even though his music certainly has value, so how is copyright different? It makes no difference whether the creator worked with the expectation of making money in a certain way; after all, enterpreneurs fail all the time when their business models don't pan out, yet we aren't making laws to guarantee them a certain way of making money.
My assertion is basically this: if I am not depriving a given person of the fair use of his property, that person has no right to force conditions upon my behavior. We benefit from others all the time without paying for it; for example, I might enjoy the sight of an artificial pond my neighbor built, but should I have to pay him for the pleasure of looking at it? No, and the reason has nothing to do with how much work he put into the pond, how much benefit I derive from it, or with what expectations he built it. What matters is that I am not impinging upon his property rights, and therefore he cannot tell me what to do, period.
I never made a point, and never would, that morals=law.
Then I apologize for misunderstanding. You used the word "illegal" or "illegally" three times in your post, which led me to the conclusion that legality was a major factor in your position.
Morally: if I don't think it's worth what they are asking for it, I don't buy it, but I also don't just take it.
What, exactly, would you be taking? You deprive the creator of nothing. "Potential revenue" is not something one can possess, and he still retains all the information he had previously. That's why I made the analogy to the street musician: he has no right to demand that people pay him, because they are not on his property and they are not depriving him of anything he owns.
You're forgetting the free rider problem: when you can't exclude non-payers from consuming the end product, what incentive is there for them to pay in the first place? That's especially true when there are a lot of small "investors," so that the work will be produced (or fail to do so) regardless of any individual contribution. That's very much like the problem with voting, which is partly why we see such low voter turnouts in large elections.
I'm not saying the system won't work at all, just that basic game theory implies it won't be nearly as effective as you seem to believe it will.
It might not be very nice to listen to a street musician without giving him any money, but I certainly wouldn't call it dishonest. I don't think the musician has any right to demand that everyone who listens to him pay up, since he is performing in a public area and therefore does not have the right to decide who may stay and who must go.
Now suppose there were a law mandating that if you listen to a street musician for a certain length of time, you must pay him. Would that change the morality of the situation? Only if you believe that violating laws is in and of itself immoral. In your "brain-dead honesty" I see only a slavish devotion to nonsensical laws; you should decide for yourself what is right and wrong, not let the majority do it for you. I would be able to respect your opinion on "honesty" more (though I'd still disagree) if it didn't seem like you were using the law as part of the justification for your position-- believe me, I understand how seductive that thinking can be, but conflating legality with morality has led to much evil in our history.
Please don't accuse me of using convenient reasoning to justify my own actions, because I'm not. My own actions are irrelevant to this discussion, and my argument will stand or fall on its own regardless of how you perceive me.
When I opened up my dual core mac, I had to download 123 megabytes of updates to the OS. . . I wasn't sure if it was to be "safe" or not, as there were no real details on this issue provided.
Untrue. Software Update always describes the updates it lists, at least to the extent of "security-related" vs. other stuff.
Then when it came back up, it had me strike keys on my keyboard so it could figure out what kind of keyboard I was using.
I have never heard of this. Granted, I haven't set up a new Mac very recently, but it sounds suspiciously trollish.
Also, I noticed that my monitor and mac came in 2 different boxes. . . but the commercial indicated I could just open the box and make a webpage.
If you were so concerned with getting a computer that's easy to set up, why didn't you get an iMac? The Pro line is-- guess what-- targeted at professionals.
Then I discovered that if I wanted to do this "easily," I could pay an additional 80 dollars a year to rent the software that makes this easy to do.
Untrue. You are paying $80/yr (assuming that's the actual price) for web hosting and other online services, not "renting software."
Nice troll, but I give it only a 6 out of 10 for lack of originality.
That is essentially what Apple has done.
No, it isn't. He's talking about a microkernel, like QNX or L4. Mach is also considered a microkernel, but OS X is not based on Mach; it is based on XNU, a hybrid kernel that consists of Mach bolted into the FreeBSD monolithic kernel, with I/O Kit thrown in for good measure.
You give performance arguments, but the speed of OX X does not imply that it uses a microkernel; quite the opposite, microkernels have been known to run significanly slower than monolithic ones, which is presumably why Apple went the hybrid route instead of using pure Mach. To be fair, Mach is rather outdated among microkernels, and "modern" microkernels like the aforementioned L4 have shown that the speed penalty might be as low as 5-10%, but the point still stands. Don't confuse simplicity of code with performance.
...a single strongman will fuck up the playing field for everybody by assimilating, subjugating, and repressing everyone else (while getting even stronger in the process).
You mean like the government? Isn't that exactly the topic we're on right now? It's either the strongman you fear or the one you make yourself, and frankly I'd rather take my chances.
Yes, the free market is the best possible scenario, except that human nature being what it is, the market will quickly degrade into something horrible if completely uncontrolled.
Even if that were true, then the relevant question would be whether a statist system is likely to resist such degradation longer than an anarcho-capitalist one. I'm not going to try to answer that question now (though you can guess my thoughts on the matter); I just want to point out that your argument cuts both ways.
By all means, let's design a newer, better pail so that we can scoop water more efficiently from our sinking ship of state.
With or without the electoral college, an individual's vote is already so meaningless in a federal election that the only reasons left for rational people to vote are what an economist might call "psychological benefits" (feeling good about voting because of a sense of civic duty, for example). In other words, I'm saying that democracy itself becomes less effective the larger the scale at which it's applied.
Imagine what would happen if (say) half of the federal government's powers were transferred to the individual states, tomorrow. That would mean that if I wanted to change something about the way government affects me, there's a good chance that I would have to compete only with the population of one state (or even one city) instead of with that of a whole nation. In addition, I could move to another state if mine didn't suit me, since there would be a greater variance between the states themselves.
The CSS inheritance model is nonsensical, I need a 2-page cheat-sheet to get the syntax right, its designer thinks declaring aliases are 'too complex' and it takes a bona fide css expert to get css positioning working across browsers with a design that survives user-preferred fonts.
Could you elaborate? I've always found writing CSS to be fairly natural and straightforward, but then again I'm a programmer. What parts of CSS, specifically, do you find nonsensical or excessively complex?
As for needing an expert to get a design working across browsers and fonts, that seems reasonable to me. First you have to take into account that IE's "special" rendering of CSS makes things roughly twice as difficult as they would be otherwise, which is something you can't entirely blame on CSS itself. Second, making an elaborate design work across multiple font faces and sizes is naturally a bit complex; CSS is really the first visual medium in which people have even attempted this!
Before anyone starts spouting off again about Mac OS X being "slow by design" or somesuch, read this article by an Apple engineer that investigates those claims.
Wii is hardly more powerful than gamecube.
If by "hardly" you mean "two to three times" then yes.
They should have just bundled the controller with whatever handful of games they plan to have it work with and called it a day.
Yeah, like the CD-I. That worked really well, right? No console add-on with fundamentally different capabilities from the base console has ever gained wide acceptance. Nintendo would be shooting itself in the foot if it did that, even if the Wii's capabilities were the same as the Gamecube's.
He conveniently ignores or chooses to remain ignorant of the fact that L4Linux is typically faster than Linux itself.
I was under the impression that L4Linux has a 5-10% performance overhead versus native Linux. This is still pretty good given that L4Linux is pretty much just Linux running on top of the L4 microkernel, and it's certainly much better than (say) MkLinux, but "faster than Linux itself"? Unlikely.
Nintendo does have a habit of offering gimmicky features with their game systems.
What's the difference between a "gimmick" and a revolutionary (no pun intended) new feature? Degree of success. Nintendo has always experimented with new and interesting control schemes, gameplay styles, etc. Some of them succeed, and some of them don't. Was the analog joystick a "gimmick"? Shoulder buttons? I'm sure there were people who thought so at the time.
Only time will tell whether the Revolution controller becomes a success. To dismiss it this early as a "gimmick" targeted at "an excessive fad/trend based society that spazzes out over anything novel and new by throwing heaping wads of money at it" is unfair and short-sighted.