Re: CHAT: browsers

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse à Tristan <kesuari@...>:
>
>>Ah, okay ;) I guess WinXP is one of those really-good-or-really-bad
>>things.
>
> Which seems to be quite common among Windoze thingies ;)) .
Ah, love Windows...

>>Not necassarily. And I generally use it in text-based environments
>>where
>>people are less likely to complain about already knowing what it means
>>because I could be talking to a dozen different people.
>
> I thought you were talking about real life! In that case it's quite different
> indeed...
Oh, no. I don't often talk of computer measurements in real life, or
when I do, I say things like 'kays' and 'megs', which I can accept as
ambiguous.

>>LOL. And anyway, how could they kill crickets in countries where they
>>don't exist?
>
> OK, replace crickets with your own version of the plague insect ;)) .
But would they still be cricket bats?

>>Sure you can. The precompile XFT-enable Phoenix will run in any
>>directory you choose.
>>        tar xjf phoenix-whatever.tar.bz2; cd phoenix; ./phoenix
>>and there you are! The whole idea of installing software is incredibly
>>old-fashioned.
>
> Seems to be the rule here though...
Not with precompiled distro-independent Linux programs.

>>And anyway, when compiling all the bits and pieces (except perhaps
>>XFT,
>>I'm not sure---it may mix in too much with X), you just run
>>'./configure
>>--prefix=~/mozilla' and when you type 'make install' it'll be
>>installed
>>into ~/mozilla.
>
> You could talk to me in Chinese that it wouldn't be less understood...
Sorry. I imagine you don't compile your own software anyway, so it's
probably all irrelevant.

>>Are ewe shore about Word? People hear no better then two trust a spell
>>chequer...
>
> But that's because English orthography is magellish, while French orthography
> is simply Etabnanninous, and thus regular at heart (and homophones are rare
> enough or happen in very different contexts) so that a spell checker does work
> well on it (just don't trust it for applying agreement rules correctly, it
> seems to consider that an adjective or a participle must follow the word they
> complete directly! ;)) ).
Well, spellcheckers also get it wrong (like with the organization thing
I meantioned before)... Is Quebecois spelt the same way as French? If
not, that could lead to inconsistencies in the spellchecker...

>>Really? Oh. I got that from some website-or-other that was suggesting
>>the English were taking the whole metrication thing to far. I should
>>know better than to trust websites, shouldn't I?
>
> Especially one which is not in favour of metrication. They'll invent every
> reason to not accept it. As for still using pounds, but metric ones, you would
> have a point in Holland. Here the "pond" is still in common use, and is exactly
> 500g. Less commonly used but I've heard it sometimes is the "ons", which is
> exactly 100g here :)) .
And that could confuse me, too.

> LOL. This Commonwealth thing seems to make things quite complicated ;))) .
Try reading our constitution. It gives the Governor-General almost
dictatorial powers, and Parliament is merely his advisors. But the only
time a G.-G. tried to use his powers (and asked the Queen to fire the
Prime Minister---not that there's any constitutional requirement for a
PM *anyway*), there was a huge uproar...

> I
> find it strange already that you can accept having a head of state who lives at
> tens of thousands of kilometers from you...
It's hardly my fault. We have a warped Prime Minister who wanted us to
stay with a constitutional monarchy, so he only grudgingly held the
referendum and had the question biassed against the republic. And
anyway, he held it a few years early. I bet if he waited for some of the
new generation of republicans to reach 18 (and some of the older
monarchists to die), the No group would've lost.

And anyway, what does the Queen *do*? She doesn't even sit there looking
pretty---it's a big event when she sets foot on our soil. (Not an
argument for a HoS who lives tens of thousands of kilometres away, true,
but it can be an argument for not caring.)

Give us another twenty years or so. When I'm Prime Minister of this
godforesaken land, I'll do my best to make us a Republic.

> In France and anywhere in Europe, a Republic is a system where you vote for the
> head of *state*, not only for the government and chambers. So if the head of
> state is not elected (at least indirectly, like in America) by the people, this
> is not a republic. But that doesn't mean it's not a democracy. Unlike what most
> French people think (and most republicans - in the European sense - in other
> European countries), republic and democracy are two different and separate
> things. You needn't be a republic to be democratic. And even in republics the
> head of state (even if s/he is called "president") needn't have any power. Just
> look at France during the Third Republic. The President was elected by the
> Parliament (and thus indirectly by the people) but didn't have any power to
> speak of. I think the same system is still working today in Italy.
If the president isn't voted for by the people, he isn't voted for in my
book: he's appointed. The system I prefer for an Australian Republic
would have the President be a powerless position, appointed by the Prime
Minister (or maybe the Government) from a list of *nominations* by the
people. That actually makes it possible for anyone to get the position.
If the people vote for it, it'd go out of reach of the majority...
(think America). I would not consider that an elected position, any more
than the Governor-Generalship or Governorships are elected (officially
appointed by the Queen, but by tradition 'on the advice' of the
PM/Premier (i.e. whoever the PM/Premier says to)). (The Premier is the
head of the State governments.)

(So it seems the Australian and European senses are basically
equivalent; the difference is what we consider elected.)

>>I thought they were both official, with L preferred.
>
> Officially, 'l' is *tolerated*. It's certainly not official on the same level
> as 'L'.
Oh, okay.

Tristan.

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