Show me a vector drawing program as:
- elegant
- efficient
- productive
- intuitive
as FreeHand and I'd be willing to say no --- until then, I have to have Windows or Mac OS X 10.6.8 or NeXT/OPENstep running either FreeHand or Altsys Virtuoso.
I'll do what I do and say what I say because I am who I am.
And I don't give a rat's shiny fat ass whether the NSA or anyone else likes it or not. The NSA is just another potential hater. No big deal.
The gold fetishist believe gold has value, no matter what. It doesn't. Examples are for instance the holocaust, people ended up selling small fortunes of gold just to survive or even just to eat. The end of time of dreamers who think that once the government collapses, their gold horde will be any safer then a bank account, forget that when Mad Max becomes real, gold has no value.
THIS is why Fallout uses bottle caps. NOT because of anything to do with bottle caps, just to show value is without meaning. People value whatever they value. And I got food and you don't I am not going to give you my food in exchange for your gold because that would leave me holding no food and only worthless gold.
VALUE is ALWAYS what someone ELSE is willing to give up in exchange for it. Take the value of a dollar bill. How much sex does it buy? It can vary from woman to woman and even from moment to moment and from buyer to buyer. Or for something slashdot readers are more familiar with, how about a softdrink from the exact same factory? Can vary from 35 cents to 2.50 with in a few hundred meters (chinese toko to convention hall).
Bitcoins trade is one person selling and another person buying. The more such traders happen, the more you get an average price. But I am going to bet that if I showed up and wanted to sell a BILLION bitcoins in one go, the average price would not apply. Same as if the US tried to sell all its gold at once.
THAT is how easy value can change. Very few things have any intrinisic value whatsoever. What is the value of water to someone living near a lake? The value of food to a farmer with a bountiful harvest? Want proof, read up on changing eating habbits. Like pigeons, peasant food, flying rats or fine dining?
The hardest thing to accept in life after death is that value is fleeting.
Your example works but there is a next level. NEW WORDS!
The Japanese have a way of dealing with new words. AN ENTIRE FUCKING NEW ALPHABET! Forget just learning Kanji (Chinese pictorgrams) Japanese students have two more alphabets to learn (Kana) hiragana and katakana, one for japanese stuff and the other for sound and foreign words. Oh and EITHER one of them is larger then the western alphabets even the really screwy ones with lots dots and slashes messing up perfectly fine letters.
Whooo!
And forget about different breeds of cats. How do you signal a list of cats? Two different icons combined? In language I only need to add an s to the word, with icons you just doubled the number of needed icons. How about extinct cat breeds? What is the icon for extinct? A dinosaur? Then what icon do I use for a dinosaur? A skeleton, then how do I signal a dead cat vs an extinct breed? You would need an infinite number of pictographs to express anything complex.
Oh wait, I GET IT, Flow charts. They are graphical... AND they tend to contain lots of text because there is just ONE database symbol so how do I make it clear one is the relational database and the other a key value store? With WORDS because the makers of flowchart programs knew LANGUAGE is more expressive and more versatile, so they created a dozen symbols and relied on TEXT to clarify them.
And it is not that you couldn't create a graphical interface for a programming language. But what about extensions? With a text library I can just add it to my text code and use it. With a graphical programming language any extension needs far more work, not just downloading a text file but an entire library with new pictographs and detailing how they can be used.
A new programming language is already hard enough to develop and get from idea to a usable product. With a text language, all the focus can be on the compiler, text editors exist very old ones can be used. But for a graphical programming tool, you first need to create a complete graphical tool before you can start using it. It is just far more work. Want me to proof it? Create a graphical config tool for for instance samba that supports EACH and EVERY option in full detail. Compare the amount of work needed for that vs sudo vim
That is the final problem... who is going to make it? Where is the market? You are looking at a tool that costs far more to develop then a conventional IDE, is less flexible, less up-to-date, less extensible for an audience that can't be bothered or isn't intelligent enough to handle text coding.
Only 11 away from being a 4-digit moniker.
I think their concern is that US courts might start following the Indian court's views on what constitutes "obvious" tweaking for the sole purpose of extending a patent.
That fear is worth spending hundreds of millions in court to salve the terror of lost revenue on a global (including US) scale.
Not that they deserve money for trivial reforumulations, such as the "safer" Oxycontin packaging. The main drug itself has not changed so there should never have been a patent extension allowed. Packaging is just packaging. It's not the drug.
And while I'm on this here soap box, let me point out that the addicts have, of course, found ways around the "safer" packaging and are still shooting up on suburban streets, patents or no patents. The whole "safer" packaging thing is a lie. Safer for their pockets, nothing else.
Early five digits.
Retirement.
I no longer have to care.
They suck. Used them. Hated them.
They're fine for simple if-then-else and loop processing logic, but when it comes to complex code, they suck donkey balls. And most of the code I have to write is complex code; I leave the simple stuff to the junior masses.
Thanks for your response. Keep them coming.
What I think would help the most is to display a small box at the top of every page on the beta site that lists all the major problems you've identified that you know have to be fixed before the new site can become the default. Ideally, each one should be a link to a page that explains the problem in more detail. This will help us to understand that you really are listening, and trust you not to plow ahead with something that's obviously currently broken.
The problem isn't that the beta site is broken. The problem is that we don't trust you to fix it, because we don't understand why you broke it in the first place and we're afraid you don't think it's broken. Please, put our fears to rest!
We are not the audience. We are the performers!
Well put!
What I said in another comment: Nobody comes here to read your content. They come here to read ours.
I tried the beta this morning. There was no obvious way to show only the comments rated 4* and above. There are ways of seeing funny or insightful posts, but you don't get to control how many.
Did you notice the little gear menu, to the right of the links for funny/insightful/etc.?
What does seem to be missing is collapsed comments - comments that are scored below a certain threshold being displayed as a single line that I can click on to expand them.
THEGODDESSOFTHENETHASTWISTINGFINGERSANDHERVOICEISLIKEAJAVELININTHENIGHTDUDE
