Whoa, there. Careful with this line of thought. I mean, what's next, arguing that if one who owns reading material about bombs is not necessarily a terrorist, then one who owns naked kiddy pics is not necessarily a pedophile? Or that the ownership of said material, in itself, without acting on it, is not enough for punishment? Come on, think of the children, please. It's obvious that people who read about terrorist topics intend to commit it, just like it's been proven without a doubt that the degenerates who own naked kiddy pics will invariably go out and molest little children. I don't have the exact figures or a study at hand right now, but come on, it makes perfect sense, it's like doubting the sky is blue.

Your basic idea is that "it's not needed but it helps". Guess what, WYSIWYG HTML editors don't help. They try to do both graphical editing (best relegated to an actual graphical editor) and know HTML+CSS (best relegated to a human) and make a mess of both. People who rely on them are trapped in a pathetic limbo halfway from getting either right.

It really is disappointing that no one has an answer to Dreamweaver though. I've been searching for an alternative for years.

Maybe you should have used those years to learn HTML and CSS. By which I mean learning things like the CSS box model and being able to implement designs using a simple text editor.

Once you do that you can implement any design starting from a mockup made in whatever graphical editor you want. AND you will understand what's going on there, and be able to make stuff that's simply impossible for any HTML WYSIWYG editor ever made.

The editors have their place for a competent web designer[...]

I've never met a competent web designer. Most of them come from printing backgrounds are are incapable of understanding the most basic issue: that webpages are not print, that they're supposed to reflow and change depending on browser and user preferences, they're not a poster or a leaflet. Most of them have only vague ideas about the box model and are groping in the dark for the most part, achieving the desired effects in roundabout, non-optimal ways. Most of them have no proper knowledge of CSS or HTML and rely on the editor close to 100% to supply what they don't know.

Programmers who learn HTML and CSS do a much, much better job of it, because they're used to understanding how stuff works. Unfortunately, most of programmers don't have a high artistic ability for the design part. Plus, good programmers are much more valuable writing code, not markup.

The best compromise I've seen is having designers do mockups and programmers implement them. I've never personally met the mythical beast that combines both perfectly. Stop searching for the software version of it, it's a waste of time.

Ditto. It's been... about 5 years I think since I've last used a Windows desktop. It's Linux at home and luckily work lets me use it as well (asked me to use a LTS and that's the last I heard from the sysadmin).

How do I manage that? I don't play much on the PC, the games I do play work on Linux too (emulated or whatever). I have no "special" software I "must" run and all the portable hardware I got so far seems to work with it (Kindle, iPod, Nokia phone, Canon camera etc.)

Why Linux? We just click together I guess. Lots of configurability and options. I've used various distros (mainly Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu), various desktop environments, there's "just works" software as well as getting your hands deep under the hood and rebuild the entire thing from scratch if you want to. Bonus: sharing stuff with others and FOSS.

Basically, I'm a geek and a hobbyist and on the computer Linux is the equivalent of my garage workshop. Windows and OS X don't feel like that. Sooner or later you run into walls and "you shouldn't do that" or "you can't do that".

so, if a non-tech person from idaho was recommended linux, and got ahold of a cd and attempted to install it ............ go figure.

If someone cannot figure out a BIOS switch then maybe they're not the type of person you want using Linux in the first place.

Why does the Linux community try to woo "lusers"? I've never quite understood this. It's quite a departure from traditional Linux geeks, who abhorred users in the good old fashion of the BOFH.

It's like watching Leonard try to attract Penny in "The Big Bang Theory" and fail over and over. Except here there's not even the prospect of getting some sweet booty out of it. What do these ordinary users bring to the community? Absolutely nothing. Linux and FOSS has always been about contributing and they don't.

Is it some kind of statement, a pride thing? Linux is already everywhere else, does it really grate so much that there's one niche left that a technological dinosaur won't give up?

Unless you're saying that Microsoft would modify Windows so that no unapproved software could run.

That's probably in the works. In the end it's all about DRM. They tried to drop it straight at the top of the software stack (media players) and it didn't work out so well, so now they're going from the bottom up.

Here's how it will work:

1) Control the boot-up procedure and make sure no other OS can run on the machine.
2) Tie-in with Windows Update and driver signatures, after all, nobody can argue that having hardware-authenticated updates and drivers is a good thing, right?
3) Next come the security apps -- 'cause nobody wants malware messing with or disabling their firewall and antivirus.
4) Then it's a very short step to application whitelists, which follows naturally from the security step before.
5) Finally, you can really control the app content, since the entire stack is locked tight.

[..]you could have at least shown some respect rather than making the GNU (And by association, Linux, even though we hate you) community look like tools, instead of just yourself as you usually do.

Mate, decades from now, maybe centuries, Stallman (and Jobs) will be in the history books and nobody will remember you. Think about it.

So how about you sit back and shut up and let one of them talk about the other? 'Cause Stallman earned his right to say what he's saying, and Jobs the right to his legacy, however controversial. Whereas, unless you're Linus, I don't see what right you have to talk for the Linux community.

Steve may not have liked your taste in ripped music, your torrented TV series, or your third party apps, but he would defend to the death your right to run them, as long as that means you will pay an Apple tax to do so.

I think you're missing the point. RMS is about free software and has defined the fundamental software liberties already. Software made by Apple and that kept in its walled garden does not match those liberties. The values pushed by Apple don't even come close.

Let's not delude ourselves. As far as software is concerned, with some notable exceptions, Apple always took the hard proprietary line in order to protect and add value to their hardware. It's natural for RMS to point it out. Especially at this moment in time, in a controversial manner, because well, that's what he does.

And hell, if anybody is to talk dirt about Jobs, let it be RMS, a man every bit as influential, who has fundamentally changed things and who has his place reserved in history books as well.

Surgeons and medical doctors in general do have their ethics. As should every professional. I know people are ready to believe that since "cutting into people" is what a surgeon does, he or she can't wait to do it at any opportunity. In fact it's usually quite the opposite. To put it simply, any part of the body you've cut into will never be quite the same as before, no matter how well it heals. So they try to avoid doing it unnecessarily.

Granted, not all surgeons respect this to the same degree, and then there's plastic surgery and so on, but generally speaking it's unfair to say all surgeons are knife-happy.

Lots of German providers do this too (making VoIP a ToS violation), especially on plans which are for smartphones only... the big 5 gigabyte plans which allow tethering usually don't have this restriction... maybe the same is true here.

It's being done all over Europe AFAIK. VoIP is both blocked and considered a ToS violation and forbidden on "regular" plans, as well as grounds for account suspension and damages if you're caught trying to circumvent the prevention measures. But they do allow it on their unlimited plans.

Not sure if it's about hindering a directly competing service, or about them not having enough bandwidth for every client to be using VoIP over regular mobile plans, or about trying to squeeze the extra euro out of the client. Probably all of them. But I don't see how this is news.