If you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer, you're probably not eating right and exercising. Once again, Science proves out that which Common Sense[tm] cannot!
You're right, IQ is incredibly meaningless. A well-socialized individual with a good work ethic, who is willing to parlay whatever gray matter they have into the task at hand will always prove successful at life. Many of the under-20 uber-nerds who cling to their IQ scores as proof positive of their superiority over others haven't figured this out yet, and to their credit, it's something that's only realized with time: Intelligence is both nature and nurture--the daughter of a doctor and lawyer becomes a bum if she has no direction or commitment. The daughter of a field hand and a grocer becomes the world's most well-respected biologist if she has direction and commitment.
-------------
Funny story: The guy downstairs had his "MENSA Bulletin" delivered to my mailbox by mistake (probably due to the innerwebs and lack of blue mailboxes!), so of course I kept it. I've been leaving it prominently near the john for some high brow bathroom reading. And man oh man, have I been disappointed. The articles are poorly conceived and written, the letters from readers absolutely dumb. The pictures of "smart people" show them not even badly dressed, but incapably dressed--as in , for example, they clearly missed belt loops when they were putting on their belts (Is looking accidentally slovenly for nationally distributed photographs the mark of a genuinely intelligent person who likes themselves? I submit that it is not.)
So my friends have been coming over, and when they inevitably have to use the restroom, they see the magazine and go "You're in MENSA?" all accusingly. And of course I pretend to be, and mutter something about how "we're trying to reform the government under our own intelligent rule" (did you see that episode of The Simpsons too?)
And as I can feel their opinion of me lessening, lessening...I finally let on that, no, of course I'm not a part of fucking MENSA. And every time, they respond with something like "Oh I was gonna say, because those people are idiots!" And then we page through the magazine together, mocking it the entire time. And we live happily ever after. The end.
Ah, a semantics troll. The breakdown is 2 official booths and 3 pay phones with the little metal privacy hoods. And that means what, exactly? Thank you, come again.
Everything I've read on the subject identifies increased security as being the primary reason for the reduced number of postal mailboxes.
I realize that the "Email is obsoleting the Post Office!" angle makes for good copy, just like it did 20 years ago or so when the Post Office was supposed to go the way of the dinosaur, but it just ain't so.
Here, this is what I found with 30 seconds of Google searching:
And then of course the sloppy Baltimore Sun article cited in the story mentions that it's "the Postal Service, working with the Homeland Security Department" (we call it the Department of Homeland Security, for godsake...) who is removing all the boxes. But the article snows over that to proudly proclaim that "disuse is the primary reason for box removal."
It might be that rising costs really are the reason for the removal of the boxes, but that "security concerns" are cited as pretext. Or maybe it's just that blaming innovation for cutbacks has become more fashionable than scaring people into going along with being inconvenienced. In any case, there's your story, if it's true, not this "the internet is killing mailboxes, and by extension, postal delivery!" presumptuous junk. And speaking of junk, I've got to go wade through the 30 pieces of junk mail that just arrived in my mailbox.
You must live in a nice part of town. There are at least 5 pay telephones within a minute's walk of here. Pay telephones aren't going anywhere just yet. Incidentally, I also live close to a heavily used urban bus line. Not everybody has a cell phone and a car (just all Slashdot readers?).
I've had still another experience. Ext3 and ReiserFS have been solid as a rock under Linux for years now, and I've only run into trouble when I get brave and try to read and write to ext2 and ext3 partitions from Windows. Something about how windows (not surprisingly) does not respect the file permissions.
Under Windows (which, like it or not, is what many of KDE's UI concepts were *cough* borrowed *cough* from) there's regedit for some of the more obscure settings. I would suggest that that's at the very extreme end of the unusability spectrum. And sure, a Control Center that offers to change regedit-like settings but with checkboxes is not much of an improvement. But just getting rid of the options altogether could alienate the more hardcore crowd. The "different user levels" idea could be a sound solution to the problem, but yeah, it's been badly implemented in the past. I don't know if a notorious history of bad implementation derails it as a potential solution or not.
As an aside, partial blame for the (in some cases poor) default DE settings should fall on the distributions as well. They have just as much ability to change the settings to suit their intended userbase as the KDE people do.
One final thing to consider is that most people don't configure their desktop environment any more than once, (or as you pointed out) if at all. I can't remember the last time I've tinkered with my KDE settings--it's probably been about 18 months since I have. So in that sense, I am perhaps not the best judge about the importance of this because I don't see an argument about the difficult of configuring as having the same weight as arguments against day-to-day usability. But hey, that won't stop me from opining on the subject! Woo woo, Slashdot!
Fair enough. At least you don't presume to demand that KDE should be the way you like it the moment you use it, the way some of these other people have. That's about as empty and selfish as complaints go. But if you're sitting there trying to use the software, and you have an idea to change something, look at the menus and go "Eh..." then that's a sure sign that there's a problem. The KDE "Control Center" is easily the best and worst thing about it. Best because hey, the options to change almost everything are there and worst because the way they're presented is so unintuitive. It would be so much better if you could just toggle your user setting to "beginner" or "intermediate" so you didn't have to see the other 500 options you don't ever have to worry about.
In all honesty though it sounds like the Gnome style of sparse options is more suited to your tastes, so you should probably stick with it (I'm assuming that's what your current DE is).
Hit the nail on the head. The good news for people who have unsurmountable problems with KDE is that there are literally dozens of other options out there. With enough energy and curiosity they'll find something they like. KDE, one of the few DE's that at least tries to be a shoe that fits every foot is taking heat for its lack of customization and default options, which I find highly ironic. I can tell by the way this thread has been moderated that I'm alone in noticing this.
But keep in mind that these people are not KDE users--they're people who are logging onto Slashdot using Firefox on their Windows machines to complain about how ass-hurt they are that KDE didn't have the exact settings they wanted enabled by default. They're typically not people who even use KDE/Linux/whatever else enough to have anything but the stupidest of complaints. A legitimate complaint about KDE would be something like "Help! There are all these menus and I can't figure out how to change this stuff!" That's a good sign that something's wrong. Not, "I'm such a pompous ass that I believe this should already be the way I want it by default. I represent all KDE users, everywhere."
No, I read the word "default" just fine. I guess I just don't share the arrogance associated with believing that I'm some kind of Everyman and that all software I use should be exactly the way I like it the first time I use it--especially when making it that way requires the most trivial of changes.
Bizarre megalomania aside, if the default settings are too spartan and ugly for you, then perhaps you've forgotten that every time something is made "prettier" it uses more RAM, burns more CPU cycles, or both. The idea is to make software that will run capably on most anything without tweaking, from a lowly Pentium I all the way up to the latest and greatest hardware. Complaining that you own the latest and greatest gear and have to change a handful of settings to take advantage of it tends to resonate as so much empty bleating. Are you sure you wouldn't just be happier running Vista?
Those are way better complaints than the typical ones, which are usually something like "KDE isn't the way I like it by default and I don't understand why a desktop environment is not exactly the way I like it by default! Forget navigating one menu and clicking one option, What about my needs!"
1. OK/Apply/Cancel - Yes, this was stolen from Windows and I can't say I like it myself. In the Control Panel, if you forget to apply your settings before moving on, you will get a notice asking you if you want to apply them. That kinda helps the problem, but not really.
2. Open folder in new/same window. - I thought for sure this was the default setting anyway. If not, in Konqueror go to Settings --> Configure Konqueror --> and it's the very first checkbox you see, right on the Behavior tab. That's a really, really easy fix. I was beginning to doubt you until you said...
3. Too many menus! - This is a very good point--I would mod you up for it if I could. A lot of software has novice/intermmediate/advanced user settings that hide or show certain options based on the user's sophistication level. With KDE it's just WHAM: "How about these 500 different settings, do you like those?" If you don't know where to go to change a setting, then be prepared to look for it. And I agree, that's not something a user should have to do. (note: There may already be a way of doing this, but if there is, I'm not aware of it and it's buried in the menus somewhere. How's that for irony?;)
4. Customising shortcut keys. Yes, shortcut configuration is more intuitive in GTK apps. With KDE, you usually have to navigate a few menus in the DE and/or in most KDE apps to change them.
5. The open & save dialogs. I'm not sure I completely understand your problem, but I will say that the GTK dialogs, in my opinion, are even worse. They're blocky and borderline non-functional and love to ignore old save points as well. My own issue with the KDE dialogs is that getting file listings for large directories just chokes. It doesn't matter if I'm trying to get listings for FAT or ext3 partitions, too. I've got lightning fast drives, but for some reason giving me the graphical equivalent of an "ls" under KDE takes forever. So yeah, you've got another legit complaint--the dialogs need some optimization work or something.
6. Complexity. This is just the same problem as #3. There needs to be a way to pare down the options so that just the ones that most people will want to change are obvious, while advanced users still retain access to the more minute settings.
You raise some great points. You know, I was once a huge critic of KDE. On my old box, it was slow, unresponsive and bloated. I don't know exactly when the KDE people fixed those problems--version 3.x maybe? But anyway, when I tried it again after another few years of development I was very pleased with it. Now it's less a question of optimizing the code and more about tweaking the design. The good news is they're listening to their userbase and they're willing to make changes to whatever we don't like. That's about the best we could hope for from the people behind such a huge open source project.
It's funny how most of KDE's critics just have no idea what they're talking about, and haven't even used KDE long enough to know how to fix any of the "problems" they have with it. All of your issues with KDE are easily fixed. Watch:
The fonts are ugly.
Font anti-aliasing isn't even enabled in the screenshot you linked to. That's a very easy fix. Control Center --> Appearance & Themes --> Fonts --> Tick "Use anti-aliasing for fonts". The difference will be dramatic. Everything will look beautiful after that. In fact on my main box, the fonts in KDE with anti-aliasing turned on look much better than the fonts in Windows XP with font smoothing/Cleartype turned on. I kid you not.
The interface by default, is full of huge buttons wasting screen real estate.
Again, I can tell you haven't actually used KDE. Otherwise, you might know that the little perforated area on the left of the toolbars in that screenshot let's you easily drag the toolbars to where you want them. If that's not good enough, you can right click on the buttons and customize the toolbars that way. In fact, in my own setup, I have those two toolbars combined into one.
They (KDE) should look at hiring a beautification expert. Xandros and Linspire should provide a hint.
This gave me a little chuckle. You see, both of those distros ship their own KDE theme on top of ordinary, run-of-the-mill KDE. So what you've basically just said is that you like the default KDE themes for those distributions. That's why KDE is themeable in the first place, just like Windows, Gnome, and pretty much everything else--there is this understanding that all users might not like the same color schemes and graphical changes. KDE allows for plenty of different ways of customizing what you see. In fact, I daresay you can change pretty much everything you see. My own desktop looks very OS X-y because I spent about 5 minutes making it look like that. If you're not willing to invest the same amount of time into making KDE look better, than why do you have all this free time to complain about how it looks?
I have a feeling the soldiers would be more welcome and more accepted by the locals if they at least made a token effort to learn a little bit of the language and try to understand a little bit about local culture and values. Like, you know, read a few books published by iraqis for instance.
That's absolutely true. A "shukran" here and there would go a long way.
You also have to keep in mind that when the soldiers aren't out doing their jobs as soldiers, they're in lockdown at the base, isolated from the Iraqis for the sake of security. So their days aren't really one big immersive experience where they go to dine at Iraqi restaurants, hit up the local sookhs (sp?) to barter the cost of Iraqi goods, and so on. It might therefore be possible to remain ignorant of the language and cultural conventions for years. To the soldiers, the Iraq experience is like one long training simulation where they are deliberately removed from the people they are killing/protecting (depending on your politics).
Plus, keep in mind that the bar for admission to the military has been lowered significantly because the various military branches have not met recruiting quotas for years now. Even men and women without high school diplomas or of subnormal intelligence are now welcome to join up. The U.S. military used to court only the best and brightest, but they sadly no longer have that luxury. To ask Privates Dumbass and Cornpone to learn Arabic might be asking too much--it therefore necessitates the use of live translators or at least live translation.
Oh please. Bleu Copas was by no means "flaming". Skeptical? See if you can "tell" if you didn't know to "ask" when you check out The Daily Show's hilarious take on the incident. Since anti-gay conservatives are as desirous of pragmatic thinking as they are 16 year old boys, let me ask you this: What do you think is more important, the safety of U.S. troops or the fact that the straight-acting man who is interpreting their words prefers men?
1. Inflection and emphasis of some words over others
This is very important. Ever have somebody tell you "It's not what you say, it's how you say it"? It's true.
2. Colloquial expressions and figures of speech.
Right now, I'm looking at this book filled with conversational Arabic expressions I picked up in the U.A.E., most of which make absolutely no sense when translated into English. Do you know what "The son of a duck is a floater" means? Neither will U.S. troops or this device.
3. Body language
Many Arabic speakers in particular gesticulate while they speak. It is just part of their cultural identity and often, the body language is just as important as what is being said. U.S. troops in the field won't understand the importance of what they see, let alone what they hear, and this device certainly won't help them with that either.
This is just what I could think of in a minute or so. I'm sure there are many more fundamental problems with using the translation device. Note that with a real live translator, most of these problems are avoided. If the U.S. military kept its Arabic translators in their ranks instead of firing them based on their sexual orientation then maybe they wouldn't have to resort to these ridiculous devices.
I agree. Wouldn't it just have been easier (and less vaingloriously controversial) to move the Firefox package to non-free than to fork it and adopt the childish name? Hopefully somebody who knows about Debian's policies on moving packages can offer some insight as to why just moving the package wasn't a viable option.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer, you're probably not eating right and exercising. Once again, Science proves out that which Common Sense[tm] cannot!
;-)
Signed,
A thin person who is mocking you
You're right, IQ is incredibly meaningless. A well-socialized individual with a good work ethic, who is willing to parlay whatever gray matter they have into the task at hand will always prove successful at life. Many of the under-20 uber-nerds who cling to their IQ scores as proof positive of their superiority over others haven't figured this out yet, and to their credit, it's something that's only realized with time: Intelligence is both nature and nurture--the daughter of a doctor and lawyer becomes a bum if she has no direction or commitment. The daughter of a field hand and a grocer becomes the world's most well-respected biologist if she has direction and commitment.
-------------
Funny story: The guy downstairs had his "MENSA Bulletin" delivered to my mailbox by mistake (probably due to the innerwebs and lack of blue mailboxes!), so of course I kept it. I've been leaving it prominently near the john for some high brow bathroom reading. And man oh man, have I been disappointed. The articles are poorly conceived and written, the letters from readers absolutely dumb. The pictures of "smart people" show them not even badly dressed, but incapably dressed--as in , for example, they clearly missed belt loops when they were putting on their belts (Is looking accidentally slovenly for nationally distributed photographs the mark of a genuinely intelligent person who likes themselves? I submit that it is not.)
So my friends have been coming over, and when they inevitably have to use the restroom, they see the magazine and go "You're in MENSA?" all accusingly. And of course I pretend to be, and mutter something about how "we're trying to reform the government under our own intelligent rule" (did you see that episode of The Simpsons too?)
And as I can feel their opinion of me lessening, lessening...I finally let on that, no, of course I'm not a part of fucking MENSA. And every time, they respond with something like "Oh I was gonna say, because those people are idiots!" And then we page through the magazine together, mocking it the entire time. And we live happily ever after. The end.
Ah, a semantics troll. The breakdown is 2 official booths and 3 pay phones with the little metal privacy hoods. And that means what, exactly? Thank you, come again.
I love it when a plan comes together.
Everything I've read on the subject identifies increased security as being the primary reason for the reduced number of postal mailboxes.
o m_content&task=view&id=3222&Itemid=2 (security)
6 0928/NATION/609280323/1020 (vaguely cites rise in net communications and Sep. 11th attack as hastening the death of the mailbox)
I realize that the "Email is obsoleting the Post Office!" angle makes for good copy, just like it did 20 years ago or so when the Post Office was supposed to go the way of the dinosaur, but it just ain't so.
Here, this is what I found with 30 seconds of Google searching:
http://www.standardspeaker.com/index.php?option=c
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/200
And then of course the sloppy Baltimore Sun article cited in the story mentions that it's "the Postal Service, working with the Homeland Security Department" (we call it the Department of Homeland Security, for godsake...) who is removing all the boxes. But the article snows over that to proudly proclaim that "disuse is the primary reason for box removal."
It might be that rising costs really are the reason for the removal of the boxes, but that "security concerns" are cited as pretext. Or maybe it's just that blaming innovation for cutbacks has become more fashionable than scaring people into going along with being inconvenienced. In any case, there's your story, if it's true, not this "the internet is killing mailboxes, and by extension, postal delivery!" presumptuous junk. And speaking of junk, I've got to go wade through the 30 pieces of junk mail that just arrived in my mailbox.
Interesting problem. I hear that top men are working on it now.
Calling those children 'tards won't solve a thing. Oh no, I think I've misread something...
You must live in a nice part of town. There are at least 5 pay telephones within a minute's walk of here. Pay telephones aren't going anywhere just yet. Incidentally, I also live close to a heavily used urban bus line. Not everybody has a cell phone and a car (just all Slashdot readers?).
I've had still another experience. Ext3 and ReiserFS have been solid as a rock under Linux for years now, and I've only run into trouble when I get brave and try to read and write to ext2 and ext3 partitions from Windows. Something about how windows (not surprisingly) does not respect the file permissions.
As some Slashdot posters may already know, there's a whole section in Sears where element 118 can shop.
Under Windows (which, like it or not, is what many of KDE's UI concepts were *cough* borrowed *cough* from) there's regedit for some of the more obscure settings. I would suggest that that's at the very extreme end of the unusability spectrum. And sure, a Control Center that offers to change regedit-like settings but with checkboxes is not much of an improvement. But just getting rid of the options altogether could alienate the more hardcore crowd. The "different user levels" idea could be a sound solution to the problem, but yeah, it's been badly implemented in the past. I don't know if a notorious history of bad implementation derails it as a potential solution or not.
As an aside, partial blame for the (in some cases poor) default DE settings should fall on the distributions as well. They have just as much ability to change the settings to suit their intended userbase as the KDE people do.
One final thing to consider is that most people don't configure their desktop environment any more than once, (or as you pointed out) if at all. I can't remember the last time I've tinkered with my KDE settings--it's probably been about 18 months since I have. So in that sense, I am perhaps not the best judge about the importance of this because I don't see an argument about the difficult of configuring as having the same weight as arguments against day-to-day usability. But hey, that won't stop me from opining on the subject! Woo woo, Slashdot!
and instantly thought that Santa just delivered a sleigh full of Sony batteries to the iPod factory.
Fair enough. At least you don't presume to demand that KDE should be the way you like it the moment you use it, the way some of these other people have. That's about as empty and selfish as complaints go. But if you're sitting there trying to use the software, and you have an idea to change something, look at the menus and go "Eh..." then that's a sure sign that there's a problem. The KDE "Control Center" is easily the best and worst thing about it. Best because hey, the options to change almost everything are there and worst because the way they're presented is so unintuitive. It would be so much better if you could just toggle your user setting to "beginner" or "intermediate" so you didn't have to see the other 500 options you don't ever have to worry about.
Hit the nail on the head. The good news for people who have unsurmountable problems with KDE is that there are literally dozens of other options out there. With enough energy and curiosity they'll find something they like. KDE, one of the few DE's that at least tries to be a shoe that fits every foot is taking heat for its lack of customization and default options, which I find highly ironic. I can tell by the way this thread has been moderated that I'm alone in noticing this.
But keep in mind that these people are not KDE users--they're people who are logging onto Slashdot using Firefox on their Windows machines to complain about how ass-hurt they are that KDE didn't have the exact settings they wanted enabled by default. They're typically not people who even use KDE/Linux/whatever else enough to have anything but the stupidest of complaints. A legitimate complaint about KDE would be something like "Help! There are all these menus and I can't figure out how to change this stuff!" That's a good sign that something's wrong. Not, "I'm such a pompous ass that I believe this should already be the way I want it by default. I represent all KDE users, everywhere."
Oh well, at least another person gets it.
No, I read the word "default" just fine. I guess I just don't share the arrogance associated with believing that I'm some kind of Everyman and that all software I use should be exactly the way I like it the first time I use it--especially when making it that way requires the most trivial of changes.
Bizarre megalomania aside, if the default settings are too spartan and ugly for you, then perhaps you've forgotten that every time something is made "prettier" it uses more RAM, burns more CPU cycles, or both. The idea is to make software that will run capably on most anything without tweaking, from a lowly Pentium I all the way up to the latest and greatest hardware. Complaining that you own the latest and greatest gear and have to change a handful of settings to take advantage of it tends to resonate as so much empty bleating. Are you sure you wouldn't just be happier running Vista?
Those are way better complaints than the typical ones, which are usually something like "KDE isn't the way I like it by default and I don't understand why a desktop environment is not exactly the way I like it by default! Forget navigating one menu and clicking one option, What about my needs!"
;)
1. OK/Apply/Cancel - Yes, this was stolen from Windows and I can't say I like it myself. In the Control Panel, if you forget to apply your settings before moving on, you will get a notice asking you if you want to apply them. That kinda helps the problem, but not really.
2. Open folder in new/same window. - I thought for sure this was the default setting anyway. If not, in Konqueror go to Settings --> Configure Konqueror --> and it's the very first checkbox you see, right on the Behavior tab. That's a really, really easy fix. I was beginning to doubt you until you said...
3. Too many menus! - This is a very good point--I would mod you up for it if I could. A lot of software has novice/intermmediate/advanced user settings that hide or show certain options based on the user's sophistication level. With KDE it's just WHAM: "How about these 500 different settings, do you like those?" If you don't know where to go to change a setting, then be prepared to look for it. And I agree, that's not something a user should have to do. (note: There may already be a way of doing this, but if there is, I'm not aware of it and it's buried in the menus somewhere. How's that for irony?
4. Customising shortcut keys. Yes, shortcut configuration is more intuitive in GTK apps. With KDE, you usually have to navigate a few menus in the DE and/or in most KDE apps to change them.
5. The open & save dialogs. I'm not sure I completely understand your problem, but I will say that the GTK dialogs, in my opinion, are even worse. They're blocky and borderline non-functional and love to ignore old save points as well. My own issue with the KDE dialogs is that getting file listings for large directories just chokes. It doesn't matter if I'm trying to get listings for FAT or ext3 partitions, too. I've got lightning fast drives, but for some reason giving me the graphical equivalent of an "ls" under KDE takes forever. So yeah, you've got another legit complaint--the dialogs need some optimization work or something.
6. Complexity. This is just the same problem as #3. There needs to be a way to pare down the options so that just the ones that most people will want to change are obvious, while advanced users still retain access to the more minute settings.
You raise some great points. You know, I was once a huge critic of KDE. On my old box, it was slow, unresponsive and bloated. I don't know exactly when the KDE people fixed those problems--version 3.x maybe? But anyway, when I tried it again after another few years of development I was very pleased with it. Now it's less a question of optimizing the code and more about tweaking the design. The good news is they're listening to their userbase and they're willing to make changes to whatever we don't like. That's about the best we could hope for from the people behind such a huge open source project.
It's funny how most of KDE's critics just have no idea what they're talking about, and haven't even used KDE long enough to know how to fix any of the "problems" they have with it. All of your issues with KDE are easily fixed. Watch:
The fonts are ugly.
Font anti-aliasing isn't even enabled in the screenshot you linked to. That's a very easy fix. Control Center --> Appearance & Themes --> Fonts --> Tick "Use anti-aliasing for fonts". The difference will be dramatic. Everything will look beautiful after that. In fact on my main box, the fonts in KDE with anti-aliasing turned on look much better than the fonts in Windows XP with font smoothing/Cleartype turned on. I kid you not.
The interface by default, is full of huge buttons wasting screen real estate.
Again, I can tell you haven't actually used KDE. Otherwise, you might know that the little perforated area on the left of the toolbars in that screenshot let's you easily drag the toolbars to where you want them. If that's not good enough, you can right click on the buttons and customize the toolbars that way. In fact, in my own setup, I have those two toolbars combined into one.
They (KDE) should look at hiring a beautification expert. Xandros and Linspire should provide a hint.
This gave me a little chuckle. You see, both of those distros ship their own KDE theme on top of ordinary, run-of-the-mill KDE. So what you've basically just said is that you like the default KDE themes for those distributions. That's why KDE is themeable in the first place, just like Windows, Gnome, and pretty much everything else--there is this understanding that all users might not like the same color schemes and graphical changes. KDE allows for plenty of different ways of customizing what you see. In fact, I daresay you can change pretty much everything you see. My own desktop looks very OS X-y because I spent about 5 minutes making it look like that. If you're not willing to invest the same amount of time into making KDE look better, than why do you have all this free time to complain about how it looks?
CP/M-80 with ZCPR for the win.
And yes, I still have my Kaypro II.
And we could call the sequel "The Return of the Revenge of the Son of Powerpoint: First Blood Part II." Eh, needs work.
Try again
;-)
Don't encourage them!
That's absolutely true. A "shukran" here and there would go a long way.
You also have to keep in mind that when the soldiers aren't out doing their jobs as soldiers, they're in lockdown at the base, isolated from the Iraqis for the sake of security. So their days aren't really one big immersive experience where they go to dine at Iraqi restaurants, hit up the local sookhs (sp?) to barter the cost of Iraqi goods, and so on. It might therefore be possible to remain ignorant of the language and cultural conventions for years. To the soldiers, the Iraq experience is like one long training simulation where they are deliberately removed from the people they are killing/protecting (depending on your politics).
Plus, keep in mind that the bar for admission to the military has been lowered significantly because the various military branches have not met recruiting quotas for years now. Even men and women without high school diplomas or of subnormal intelligence are now welcome to join up. The U.S. military used to court only the best and brightest, but they sadly no longer have that luxury. To ask Privates Dumbass and Cornpone to learn Arabic might be asking too much--it therefore necessitates the use of live translators or at least live translation.
Oh please. Bleu Copas was by no means "flaming". Skeptical? See if you can "tell" if you didn't know to "ask" when you check out The Daily Show's hilarious take on the incident. Since anti-gay conservatives are as desirous of pragmatic thinking as they are 16 year old boys, let me ask you this: What do you think is more important, the safety of U.S. troops or the fact that the straight-acting man who is interpreting their words prefers men?
1. Inflection and emphasis of some words over others
This is very important. Ever have somebody tell you "It's not what you say, it's how you say it"? It's true.
2. Colloquial expressions and figures of speech.
Right now, I'm looking at this book filled with conversational Arabic expressions I picked up in the U.A.E., most of which make absolutely no sense when translated into English. Do you know what "The son of a duck is a floater" means? Neither will U.S. troops or this device.
3. Body language
Many Arabic speakers in particular gesticulate while they speak. It is just part of their cultural identity and often, the body language is just as important as what is being said. U.S. troops in the field won't understand the importance of what they see, let alone what they hear, and this device certainly won't help them with that either.
This is just what I could think of in a minute or so. I'm sure there are many more fundamental problems with using the translation device. Note that with a real live translator, most of these problems are avoided. If the U.S. military kept its Arabic translators in their ranks instead of firing them based on their sexual orientation then maybe they wouldn't have to resort to these ridiculous devices.
I agree. Wouldn't it just have been easier (and less vaingloriously controversial) to move the Firefox package to non-free than to fork it and adopt the childish name? Hopefully somebody who knows about Debian's policies on moving packages can offer some insight as to why just moving the package wasn't a viable option.
Made-up News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.