As a person who's spent years involved in radical politics and activism, I want to thank you for being so honest about the revolutionary socialist program. What an absolutely morally bankrupt answer to the very real problems Communism is meant to address.
While I look forward to HTML5 features as a web developer, I think it's hardly fair to complain that IE has incomplete support for an incomplete standard. If you look at the implementations provided by Apple and Google and Mozilla, you'll see that among (and even within) the more mature engines there are huge areas of incompatibility in HTML5 and CSS3, much of which is barely in a draft state. The IE team has (unsurprisingly and un-offensively, IMO) chosen to focus on *stable* specs for IE 9, and have executed well in this regard.
This was the argument that I was making after IE 8's release, and I think the IE team has proven us wrong. I was convinced that Trident was irreparably compromised by backwards compatibility, but in IE 9 they have made great strides in interoperability with the rest of the browser vendors. It's probable that IE 9 won't get them all the way there (although they've continually surprised with adding substantial improvements with each pre-release, including the introduction of canvas when it seemed they were going to skip it), but they clearly have a platform that is flexible enough to catch up... given enough time. Bear in mind that they're almost a decade behind (as of IE 8). They have tremendous resources and great programmers, but neither is enough to overcome a decade of latency in one release.
What a strange question. While it's conceivable that people out there are developing bespoke graphics web applications for themselves, by and large web developers are developing for a larger audience. What kind of system the developer uses is irrelevant, when the developer can trust that the broader audience's system profiles are fragmented. And since Microsoft is championing the "same code" mantra (which is hardly an achievement to shout to the heavens, as all the other browser vendors have had this motto since Mozilla started releasing betas), one should be able to expect the platform not to matter at all.
It depends what you're trying to do. In terms of just straight vector animations, either canvas+JavaScript or SVG. In terms of interaction with vector animations and raster graphics or video, canvas+JavaScript. CSS3 where supported may improve this in some ways. If you just want to animate some page components, a simple DOM animation engine like that in jQuery might suffice.
You might think that the browser vendors (and third-party JavaScript library developers) haven't been trying to address that question, but they really have. Everyone is on board, but (at least for decent performance with vector graphics, where current IE releases lag significantly) it's going to take a lot of time until the proper browsers have enough usage share to justify it.
As it stands, in my professional work I've only ever worked on one site that "needed" Flash, and it could have been replaced with pure JS + DOM given enough budget to replace a single Flash component. We chose not to do this over budget. But all of the rest of the web animation we've done has been accommodated with standard jQuery animations or at worst with an easing plugin for greater control over animation easing. Granted, my employer doesn't focus too heavily on animation, but there's a lot that can be done without browser add-ons.
Since you love posts picking nits... and I suspect this bit of education isn't for you but for the people you're mocking... the slippery slope argument itself is not a fallacy. A slippery slope argument is valid insofar as the logical basis for the starting point remains constant through to the ending point. Where it becomes fallacious is where additional premises are required to arrive at the ending point. It can even remain a valid argument even if the actual consequences fall short of the ending point.
the record shows that these groups more completely integrated into society and have generally become much more supportive of the military and the government overall.
That doesn't challenge my position, it supports it. By co-opting the civil rights struggles of the 60s/70s, the US state separated the direct concerns of people of color in the US from the indirect concerns of solidarity with people around the world who are victims of the US war machine.
In reality, the extension of civil rights to disaffected groups reaffirms support for the status quo, not the other way around.
That's... kind of what I said. Which is why I say that a meaningful struggle for civil rights will be founded on equal rights for all, and will not accept this kind of division.
(i.e. you seem to be saying and correct me if I'm wrong, that the oppression of groups prevents them from uniting against a flawed and equally repressive international policy of the government)
Nope! I'm saying that it is the isolation and co-opting of a given oppressed group's struggle that breaks its unity with other oppressed classes. Moreover, because the military is concerned, this is already a strategy of divide-and-conquer in terms of recruiting the poor and weak and presenting them a "way out" that involves being cannon fodder and committing murder for the state.
The problem with "prove it" is I'm not sure which claims are being disputed, and on what grounds. It's too open-ended and to address it without any more insight into what's being doubted would require a book (or probably volumes of books). I think you'll agree that it's a waste of everyone's time for me to post that much detail.
If that statement appears to you to carry any more authority than that of an unsolicited opinion from some schmuck on the Internet, the problem is with your critical thinking skills. The only authority I expect to convey is in my ability to reason through my premises and address concerns raised. If that isn't sufficient to defend my opinions, feel free to disagree with me. But if you want me to change my mind or stop posting my opinions, you'll need to provide contradictory reasoning.
The comment above is clearly written in a way that will get a rise out of people, but it makes a legitimate point. Insofar as the LGBTQ civil rights struggle is one rooted in justice and equal rights, the DADT repeal strategy has left a lot of us scratching our heads. Any civil rights struggle which fits in a broader context would necessarily come to the same conclusions that the 60s/70s racial civil rights struggle in the US did: the oppression of classes within the domestic population is part of the same system of oppression waging imperial war elsewhere, and that the internal oppression is used as a means of social control in order to divide people who might otherwise unite to stop the broader system of oppression.
I'm amazed this cute bit of nonsense took so long to come out.
Thanks for proving my point! I have no question in my mind that this will be used to promote the "morality" of the US mission in the Middle East and South Asia.
But anyway, I'm not fighting them. I don't know if you are, but since you scare-quoted the word queer, I can only assume you're straight. If you are fighting them, I think they're more interested in killing you than me.
What you're proposing seems to me like you want to impose a certain view of the world, a specific interpretation of the past, present, and possible futures and a code of conduct derived from all that upon queers everywhere (or at least in the USA).
Nope. Just stating my opinion. I can see how you'd make that mistake though... wait, no I can't.
Why should gays and lesbians be forbidden to play with guns and handgrenades if it pleases them fine?
They shouldn't. But destroying the lives of brown people half a world away to improve one's lot in life is not an equal rights victory. The same goes for heteros in the US military.
It's the same question as: Why should boys not play with dolls or girls with little toy soldiers and tanks and get dirty on a soccer field? Why do we always have to mold people into what we think is right?
Huh? My problem with queers in the US military has nothing to do with gender/sexual orientation roles. It has to do with the function of the US military.
This might come as a shock to you, but I also don't want women in the US military. Or people of color. Or white men. Or German Shepherds. Or computers. I could go on.
Insofar as Israel's gay rights record isn't being distorted (which it is), it's not horrible. What's horrible is their manipulation of it as a justification for their imperial/colonial mission. To repeat, again, I am queer. I do support equal rights for queers. I do NOT want them to be co-opted by a morally backwards policy of domination of other peoples. America can't be both a city on a hill and a superpower.
You're asking me to provide evidence for something I haven't said. Why don't you tell me what you think is going on, in contrast with my own position, so at least I have some idea what I'm supposed to be disputing.
You're being a douche, there is no conflict there.
Uh, yes there is. You can't have both "DADT repeal is a civil rights victory" and "there is no civil right to military service". They are mutually contradictory.
I'm replying to multiple comments because they're all making somewhat different points, and I don't think any one of them deserves an off-topic response to points made by other commenters.
The reason you're wrong is because you seek to eliminate personal choice by telling people what is right for them to do.
Not really. All other things being equal, I promote equal rights in any context. But I don't have any illusions that equal employment rights across sexual orientations in the military is not a civil rights victory. It's a triumph of the military's agility and it signifies a change in strategy in the US state. It will bolster US imperialism, and the majority of the queer rights movement that opposes that will come to view it as a mistake.
And if I'm wrong, so be it. I'm willing to be corrected by history.
Now, in my opinion, focusing on the imperialism and militarism of the US is still focusing on a symptom. The cause is that over the last 150 or so years corporations have been acquiring all the rights of individual humans (and shedding the responsibilities).
Nah, we had imperialism before that. Corporatism is certainly a shift in power from the feudal beginnings of the US, but it's the same dynamic it always was... concentrated power, force and manipulation. Imperialism is definitely a symptom, but if it weren't corporations it would be churches or some other power center.
I don't disagree that we should end the treatment of corporations as persons, but I think it's a mistake to treat that as some new horror.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah? And? So? What?
As a person who's spent years involved in radical politics and activism, I want to thank you for being so honest about the revolutionary socialist program. What an absolutely morally bankrupt answer to the very real problems Communism is meant to address.
He's probably single, you should go check that dating site.
Why would anyone sue themselves for libel?
While I look forward to HTML5 features as a web developer, I think it's hardly fair to complain that IE has incomplete support for an incomplete standard. If you look at the implementations provided by Apple and Google and Mozilla, you'll see that among (and even within) the more mature engines there are huge areas of incompatibility in HTML5 and CSS3, much of which is barely in a draft state. The IE team has (unsurprisingly and un-offensively, IMO) chosen to focus on *stable* specs for IE 9, and have executed well in this regard.
This was the argument that I was making after IE 8's release, and I think the IE team has proven us wrong. I was convinced that Trident was irreparably compromised by backwards compatibility, but in IE 9 they have made great strides in interoperability with the rest of the browser vendors. It's probable that IE 9 won't get them all the way there (although they've continually surprised with adding substantial improvements with each pre-release, including the introduction of canvas when it seemed they were going to skip it), but they clearly have a platform that is flexible enough to catch up... given enough time. Bear in mind that they're almost a decade behind (as of IE 8). They have tremendous resources and great programmers, but neither is enough to overcome a decade of latency in one release.
Trident is going to catch up.
What a strange question. While it's conceivable that people out there are developing bespoke graphics web applications for themselves, by and large web developers are developing for a larger audience. What kind of system the developer uses is irrelevant, when the developer can trust that the broader audience's system profiles are fragmented. And since Microsoft is championing the "same code" mantra (which is hardly an achievement to shout to the heavens, as all the other browser vendors have had this motto since Mozilla started releasing betas), one should be able to expect the platform not to matter at all.
It depends what you're trying to do. In terms of just straight vector animations, either canvas+JavaScript or SVG. In terms of interaction with vector animations and raster graphics or video, canvas+JavaScript. CSS3 where supported may improve this in some ways. If you just want to animate some page components, a simple DOM animation engine like that in jQuery might suffice.
You might think that the browser vendors (and third-party JavaScript library developers) haven't been trying to address that question, but they really have. Everyone is on board, but (at least for decent performance with vector graphics, where current IE releases lag significantly) it's going to take a lot of time until the proper browsers have enough usage share to justify it.
As it stands, in my professional work I've only ever worked on one site that "needed" Flash, and it could have been replaced with pure JS + DOM given enough budget to replace a single Flash component. We chose not to do this over budget. But all of the rest of the web animation we've done has been accommodated with standard jQuery animations or at worst with an easing plugin for greater control over animation easing. Granted, my employer doesn't focus too heavily on animation, but there's a lot that can be done without browser add-ons.
I do not have this problem in Safari/Mac.
If you can't decide whose cunt you rammed your goomba into, you probably shouldn't be ramming it into anyone's cunt.
Since you love posts picking nits... and I suspect this bit of education isn't for you but for the people you're mocking... the slippery slope argument itself is not a fallacy. A slippery slope argument is valid insofar as the logical basis for the starting point remains constant through to the ending point. Where it becomes fallacious is where additional premises are required to arrive at the ending point. It can even remain a valid argument even if the actual consequences fall short of the ending point.
I hope it also serves mimosas.
Are you saying we shouldn't have bothered with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at all?
Of course not. I'm saying we should have gone much much further.
Are you seriously suggesting that GLBT people shouldn't serve their country?
Of course not, but that is quite a different question from whether they should join the US military.
What about conservagays and lesbolibertarians?
What about them? Being queer doesn't make someone's politics right.
the record shows that these groups more completely integrated into society and have generally become much more supportive of the military and the government overall.
That doesn't challenge my position, it supports it. By co-opting the civil rights struggles of the 60s/70s, the US state separated the direct concerns of people of color in the US from the indirect concerns of solidarity with people around the world who are victims of the US war machine.
In reality, the extension of civil rights to disaffected groups reaffirms support for the status quo, not the other way around.
That's... kind of what I said. Which is why I say that a meaningful struggle for civil rights will be founded on equal rights for all, and will not accept this kind of division.
(i.e. you seem to be saying and correct me if I'm wrong, that the oppression of groups prevents them from uniting against a flawed and equally repressive international policy of the government)
Nope! I'm saying that it is the isolation and co-opting of a given oppressed group's struggle that breaks its unity with other oppressed classes. Moreover, because the military is concerned, this is already a strategy of divide-and-conquer in terms of recruiting the poor and weak and presenting them a "way out" that involves being cannon fodder and committing murder for the state.
The problem with "prove it" is I'm not sure which claims are being disputed, and on what grounds. It's too open-ended and to address it without any more insight into what's being doubted would require a book (or probably volumes of books). I think you'll agree that it's a waste of everyone's time for me to post that much detail.
9_9
If that statement appears to you to carry any more authority than that of an unsolicited opinion from some schmuck on the Internet, the problem is with your critical thinking skills. The only authority I expect to convey is in my ability to reason through my premises and address concerns raised. If that isn't sufficient to defend my opinions, feel free to disagree with me. But if you want me to change my mind or stop posting my opinions, you'll need to provide contradictory reasoning.
The comment above is clearly written in a way that will get a rise out of people, but it makes a legitimate point. Insofar as the LGBTQ civil rights struggle is one rooted in justice and equal rights, the DADT repeal strategy has left a lot of us scratching our heads. Any civil rights struggle which fits in a broader context would necessarily come to the same conclusions that the 60s/70s racial civil rights struggle in the US did: the oppression of classes within the domestic population is part of the same system of oppression waging imperial war elsewhere, and that the internal oppression is used as a means of social control in order to divide people who might otherwise unite to stop the broader system of oppression.
Prove it.
Gladly. What are you disputing?
I'm amazed this cute bit of nonsense took so long to come out.
Thanks for proving my point! I have no question in my mind that this will be used to promote the "morality" of the US mission in the Middle East and South Asia.
But anyway, I'm not fighting them. I don't know if you are, but since you scare-quoted the word queer, I can only assume you're straight. If you are fighting them, I think they're more interested in killing you than me.
What you're proposing seems to me like you want to impose a certain view of the world, a specific interpretation of the past, present, and possible futures and a code of conduct derived from all that upon queers everywhere (or at least in the USA).
Nope. Just stating my opinion. I can see how you'd make that mistake though... wait, no I can't.
Why should gays and lesbians be forbidden to play with guns and handgrenades if it pleases them fine?
They shouldn't. But destroying the lives of brown people half a world away to improve one's lot in life is not an equal rights victory. The same goes for heteros in the US military.
It's the same question as: Why should boys not play with dolls or girls with little toy soldiers and tanks and get dirty on a soccer field? Why do we always have to mold people into what we think is right?
Huh? My problem with queers in the US military has nothing to do with gender/sexual orientation roles. It has to do with the function of the US military.
This might come as a shock to you, but I also don't want women in the US military. Or people of color. Or white men. Or German Shepherds. Or computers. I could go on.
Apparently the Slashdot comment form. I didn't realize that posting my opinion on some Internet forum conveyed authority.
Insofar as Israel's gay rights record isn't being distorted (which it is), it's not horrible. What's horrible is their manipulation of it as a justification for their imperial/colonial mission. To repeat, again, I am queer. I do support equal rights for queers. I do NOT want them to be co-opted by a morally backwards policy of domination of other peoples. America can't be both a city on a hill and a superpower.
You're asking me to provide evidence for something I haven't said. Why don't you tell me what you think is going on, in contrast with my own position, so at least I have some idea what I'm supposed to be disputing.
You're being a douche, there is no conflict there.
Uh, yes there is. You can't have both "DADT repeal is a civil rights victory" and "there is no civil right to military service". They are mutually contradictory.
I'm replying to multiple comments because they're all making somewhat different points, and I don't think any one of them deserves an off-topic response to points made by other commenters.
The reason you're wrong is because you seek to eliminate personal choice by telling people what is right for them to do.
Not really. All other things being equal, I promote equal rights in any context. But I don't have any illusions that equal employment rights across sexual orientations in the military is not a civil rights victory. It's a triumph of the military's agility and it signifies a change in strategy in the US state. It will bolster US imperialism, and the majority of the queer rights movement that opposes that will come to view it as a mistake.
And if I'm wrong, so be it. I'm willing to be corrected by history.
Now, in my opinion, focusing on the imperialism and militarism of the US is still focusing on a symptom. The cause is that over the last 150 or so years corporations have been acquiring all the rights of individual humans (and shedding the responsibilities).
Nah, we had imperialism before that. Corporatism is certainly a shift in power from the feudal beginnings of the US, but it's the same dynamic it always was... concentrated power, force and manipulation. Imperialism is definitely a symptom, but if it weren't corporations it would be churches or some other power center.
I don't disagree that we should end the treatment of corporations as persons, but I think it's a mistake to treat that as some new horror.