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You have quite the hard-on for Trump.

He sure is an attractive guy...

Why do you love Fascism?

No, I like Godwin's Law...

Okay, then I'd recommend C++.

So long as your target machine is big enough to support C++'s support library. People used to joke about "Think of the elevator controllers!" as an excuse people give to hold up language design. But it's no joke anymore, as Arduino's MCU kits brought programming for a constrained machine to the masses.

the world can always use more escaped lions

Can't handle a little bit of stuff (is it too much stuff?) in just a few (or is it too many) parenthesis? I bet you would hate Lisp if you ever used it. Besides, I didn't even nest parenthesis in that post. (ESR[1] says that hackers tend to nest parenthesis when writing (like this). I do that, and I'm not even a hacker.)
Anyway, how is it an abuse? I'm just using them as intended (to mark an area of text that could be removed, and the rest of the text would still make sense).

[1] http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/h/HackerWritingStyle.html

[citation provided]

Ha, while looking for that, I found this , here.

Some of them rhyme with VAXen though.

Jargon file entry for "mu". Answering this way isn't going to work in most cases though...

I don't think so, for one I think the term "killer app" predates Java applets. I also remember reading somewhere Jobs, like a lot of people, had a habit of calling applications "apps" since the 80's but frustratingly I cannot find it right now.

two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agree to meet after 2 months. When they finally meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says: "How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me -- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The fat one replies: "Well, *I* hid near an NASA office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!"

"Half a billion" is not "Billions." "Billions" implies plural. If I cut you in half and threw your legs out the window, I wouldn't have "people" left, I'd have "Half a person."

I don't need a study. I stop eating meat, I start dying. All of your "facts" and "science" work about as well as voo-doo magic and chiropractic cancer cures: I can stand here and keep "believing" while my body rots away, and then I'll die; or I can tell you to shut the fuck up. I didn't claim that not eating meat causes horrible immunodeficiency and scurvy and eventual dermal necrosis; I claimed that if I don't get meat in my diet, that shit happens to ME. I have found a simple solution to that problem.

Sorry, I have never been so pissed off in my /. life and I've got to say: "timothy, you're an idiot".

You pick THIS moment to be pissed off?

That's one of the thing I hate about mac keyboards and Apple's inability to understand that people have a limited number of fingers.

Not sure what you mean by a limited number of fingers... we're not talking about Emacs and its quadruple bucky keystrokes. However, I fully agree that Apple's idea of useful key bindings is sometimes ridiculous. For example, they insist that Home and End keys jump all the way to the top and bottom of the whole document, rather than the carriage home (start) and the end of the current line. In most files I am editing, there are (say) a thousand lines, so there are a couple thousand handy locations I may want to jump to with a single logical keystroke. The number of times I want to jump to the end of the document is vanishingly small in comparison, and can be done by holding down a Page Down key for a moment or two instead.

Hmm. Lots going on here. I think that a disconnect on the discussion's framework is probably at the core. Let's see if we can reign things in.

My original reading of the ACs post was of senators as lusers, wielding legislation as a sword to solve mundane technical problems. ("When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.") I thought it to be facetious, and crafted a reply in kind. This may have been foolish, but I did not think it out of place in a Slashdot thread. To be honest, your original reply caught me off-guard; I did not expect it to be taken seriously. It was not intended to represent my feelings on these issues, and while it may have been anti-government, I hope that I am not so.

So, I'll admit that it was not legitimate. Many of my arguments above were trying to show that I meant it facetiously, but I can see that I did not explain myself very well. I wrote a comment that was unsupportable because I felt that the one I was replying to was also unsupportable. I will own that Slashdot would be a more useful place without meaningless straw-man stereotypes, and I will think twice about posting such things again.

Before I say anything further, can you tell me: Were there statements in my subsequent comments that you found to be anti-government, or was it just that initial remark?

Anyone remember Kremvax? Started out as a hoax, but eventually becamse something real.

In an even more ironic historical footnote, kremvax became an electronic center of the anti-communist resistance during the bungled hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three days the Soviet UUCP network centered on kremvax became the only trustworthy news source for many places within the USSR. Though the sysops were concentrating on internal communications, cross-border postings included immediate transliterations of Boris Yeltsin's decrees condemning the coup and eyewitness reports of the demonstrations in Moscow's streets

Who knows, perhaps someday the nascent net in Korea will lead to something greater?

It's especially important to use 3 spaces between sentences when you are using a proportional font. That's because the spaces are narrower than the regular characters, and get compressed more when they are pushed through the internet tubes.

Although if you're working on one of these new "TV Typewriters" you might want a different spacing.

And what's the deal with -mdash- in the title? Can't we just go back to using -- instead of having to type m d a s h?

--Joe

There's no equivalent to RIAA in C

That's only because the standard C library has no audio output facility. Did you mean RAII?

there's also no equivalent to stack unwinding or many of the other C++ constructs which are central to good C++ programming.

But how big is the library support for those C++ constructs? Once you #include <iostream> and reference cout, your statically linked hello world already almost fills RAM of your elevator controller. Do you want to see byte counts for a static hello-iostream.cpp on two different platforms?

Five years is ancient history? What grade are you in, son? IBM started business in 1885. THAT'S ancient history. Thinking like yous is what's wrong with business and politics today -- nobody thinks long-term.

By 5 years, most IBM execs have been eaten by the lion.

Isn't this the Story of Mel, all over again, just on a higher level of abstraction?

We don't need to work like that any more.

I was saying that since the income inequality is so big, it's only fair that tax inequality is also big.

I did not state, that it is "unfair". I was simply proving, beyond shadow of doubt, that "rich" are not "exempted" from taxes — and that you were wrong alleging, that they were.

And quoting the National Tax Payers Union about social justice

I did not quote them "about social justice" — but I believe their figures accurate. You don't? What figures do you have?

like quoting Adolf Hitler about racial justice.

Visiting this page may prove enlightening...

Your next issue is about military spending versus social spending. 21.6 percent spent on defense is completely crazy.

Crazy or not, these are the facts. The combined spending on defense and "war on terror" is about the same as Social Security or Medicaid/Medicair alone. Even if 50% of the defense spending were "waste", you'd only save about 10% of the federal budget by ending it — nothing to sneeze at, but no magic bullet either.

You put a smug comment, that all budget troubles could be solved, if only we could a) stop exempting the rich from paying taxes; and b) stop wasting money and defense contracts. The facts I was able to find with 30 seconds of Googling disprove both of your contentions: a) the rich already carry the vast share of tax burden (whether that's fair or not is off-topic); and b) the entire defense spending is only 21% of the federal budget and thus even if you halved it, you wouldn't save very much.

Your argument completely defeated you dare coming back?.. Wow...

And it [defense spending -mi] is money sent down the toilet.

Is it your contention, that the United States needs no military at all? Please, state for the record...

Also, if your Medicare and Medicaid are so expensive, you must be doing something wrong.

Of course! The first thing wrong, was establishing these programs in the first place. Instead of fixing this, you and yours propose even more of the same — why don't we expand Medicare to all — that's what you are asking...

Then the problem is not the government, but plain old capitalism gone wild.

Capitalism's record at providing immense economic benefits even to the least fortunate of its participants is well established and beyond doubt.

Socialism, on the other hand, has little to show economically wherever practiced, and slides into horrible tyranny (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim, Pol Pot, Castro, Mugabe) from a slightest push-over. Having tried both, I'll choose capitalism over and over again — the "wilder" the better. Thank you very much.

If you aren't trying to create a new word, it's TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. See: http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TANSTAAFL.html

That shit you link to in your sig is utter racism.

No, it is not... There is, no doubt, the thing called "Arab identity" and "Arab culture". Discussing such things in positive light is always welcome (i.e. "Black History Month"). Logically, criticizing them ought to be valid too.

Lumping all Arabs in as one group and making them liable for the crimes of a few is no better than saying all Caucasians are responsible for Hitlers crimes.

(

Your comparison with Hitler, actually, disqualifies you immediately, but I'll pretend, Bush is still president, and that Godwin's Law is still suspended.)

It is not "few" — I'm talking about the vast numbers of murderous rapists calling themselves Janjaweed, of the overwhelming majorities freely electing and otherwise supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, and the "civilized elites" comprising the Arab League — one which instructs member countries to not give citizenship to the Palestinians.

There is simply no denying, that Israel is held to the very high standards, even by the people, who apply such standards neither to themselves (like Hamas) nor to others. "The shit" you were referring to is simply pointing out the hypocrisy — with very concrete examples. I'm glad it struck your nerve.

I am a Caucasian, but I have Jewish and Arabic friends

Sure, sure. No problem with particular representatives of any demos. If you, actually, read "the shit", you would've found out — from the very first sentence — that it is talking about Arab states, not your friendly Halal meat seller.

DHS are the gestapo.

If there is one reason I can't wait 'till January 21st, it is the reinstatement of the Godwin's Law:

Godwin's Law /prov./ [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

With Bush in power the law got suspended and it got most fashionable to compare American Government with 3rd Reich — instead of losing the argument instantly, one gets a +5 moderation...

Not after the upcoming inauguration, one Hopes.

Does anyone have records of Gestapo mailing a German a copy of their file on them? Oh, never mind...

From the jargon File:Gorilla Arm

Spot-on.

I write open-source code because I enjoy others being able to use my code (and it doesn't hurt that I get paid for it). I don't use it for "security"; as we've seen in the Debian OpenSSL debacle, that doesn't always work.

The people who go "How do you know? Have you seen the source code?" almost invariably don't audit the code at all. Furthermore, there are cases of source code not even being enough--I am reminded of a nifty story about Ken Thompson's login hack.

mollymoo spake:

They too had emergency cutoff switches - big red buttons, with no cover, on poles bout 4 feet high

With that username, you will probably never forget the name for the covers that ought to have been covering those switches: The Molly-Guard.

Except that those antisemites aren't "leftists", and are probably rightwing trolls. When you're confronted with the evidence of their posts infesting rightwing sites, too, you just shunt into your programmed talking points, ignoring the facts.

Facts like how antisemitism has always been popular across the land, not just among "rich, White Northeastern Republicans". But hey, since that is exactly who you Republican lowlives have always fantasized about becoming, why shouldn't you lie about them being the antisemites, too? You're lying about the antisemites being mainly on "the left", so why not just plow ahead with some more lies about your fantasy master race?

It's fabulous how your "Libertarians", ashamed of being called "Republicans" anymore, are bringing your inability to see logic with you to the next shell Party for your scams. May you find a happy home there with all your friends. Whatever merit there is to the libertarian attitude, you'll soon discredit it as thoroughly as you showed "Conservatism" to be a scam for thieves doing the opposite of what you say.

Of course, you don't even know what a troll is, as my posts are designed to add something to the discussion other than predictable, probably angry, responses. Even when I flame someone, it's designed to add to the conversation by shutting them up - which few can predict will happen, as you are demonstrating here. But hey, if you're going to work in league with a bunch of troll moderators, who moderate me based on how I've whipped them in the past rather than the content of the post they're moderating, you're really at the vanguard of the cowardly thug movement. Bob Barr's Libertarian Party is your natural environment.

Have fun polluting it into toxic collapse.

Eh, see software-rot.

Term used to describe the tendency of software that has not been used in a while to lose; such failure may be semi-humorously ascribed to bit rot. More commonly, `software rot' strikes when a program's assumptions become out of date. If the design was insufficiently robust, this may cause it to fail in mysterious ways.

For example, owing to endemic shortsightedness in the design of COBOL programs, most will succumb to software rot when their 2-digit year counters wrap around at the beginning of the year 2000. Actually, related lossages often afflict centenarians who have to deal with computer software designed by unimaginative clods. One such incident became the focus of a minor public flap in 1990, when a gentleman born in 1889 applied for a driver's license renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina. The new system refused to issue the card, probably because with 2-digit years the ages 101 and 1 cannot be distinguished.

From a business perspective, this looks like a one-banana problem and solution. Maybe I haven't looked, but I haven't seen that kind of attitude from other distributions or the rest of the community.

"No science is advanced enough for any but the most deluded scientist to think they can answer that question."

Just about any Science Fiction writer who's ever been published more than a few times has presented better 'visions' than Roddenberry, or anybody else who has produced for Television. You can do better than Roddenberry. As long as you don't overly focus on Television, which isn't just 90% crap per Sturgeon's Law, but probably closer to the Ivory Soap ratio of 99 and 44/100% crap. Or maybe it's time to whip out some server reliability figures. How many 'nines' of television are complete crap? Six nines, perhaps?

Read some Ballard, or Pohl, or dozens and dozens of other writers from the period. A good approach is to go into used bookstores and buy only science fiction paperbacks with the original cover price being under two bucks. There was a lot of brilliant speculative fiction being written in the 60's and early 70's. That whole scene got wiped out by the Star Wars abomination, which, frankly, destroyed Science Fiction for a long time afterwards.

Roddenberry sucked! If you're a SF fan, you'll realize how much he sucked. Star Trek was better than anything on TeeVee those seasons, but there wasn't a heck of a lot of competition. I gave you a clue: read The Glass Teat if you haven't already.

Unfortunately all of those old systems used copious amounts of magic smoke.

In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July.

Had it really been the Nazi's Gestapo, he would not be posting anything in September...

Zonk et al. really need to glue a nicely printed and framed quote of the Godwin's Law on their beds' footboards, to make it the first thing they see waking up...

Godwin's Law /prov./ [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

Some cypherpunks discovered that Detweiler was using his own theories, and that he had several tentacles of his own.

This incident confirms the Detweiler theory.

Some cypherpunks discovered that Detweiler was using his own theories, and that he had several tentacles of his own.

This incident confirms the Detweiler theory.

You seem to be saying that because it's very easy to make a flawed comparison with fascist states of the past, that we shouldn't talk about whether the US is now or is becoming a fascist state.

I'm just refreshing/expanding the arguments behind Godwin's Law for the uninitiated (Since September never ended)...

You could be arguing that the actual comparisons made on this thread are faulty and attempting to paint the US as a genocidal state, but I haven't seen that.

I argue, that associating a target of the name-calling with the gross misdeeds of Fascists is the only reason to bring up such comparisons — they have no other purpose. From Tim Skirvin's excellent write-up on Godwin's Law:

In case your head has been buried in the sand for the last sixty years or so, the Nazis were a German political party led by Adolf Hitler that slaughtered upwards of ten million people that didn't meet their standards of "ethnic purity" and set off to conquer Europe and the world in World War II. They are generally considered the most evil group of people to live in modern times, and to compare something or someone to them is usually considered the gravest insult imaginable.

As a Usenet discussion gets longer it tends to get more heated; as more heat enters the discussion, tensions get higher and people start to insult each other over anything they can think of. Godwin's Law merely notes that, eventually, those tensions eventually cause someone to find the worst insults that come to mind - which will almost always include a Nazi comparison.

Oran's Dictionary of the Law (1983) defines treason as: "...[a]...citizen's actions to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure the [parent nation]."

I can think of fewer things more injurious to the United States than the Fascist dribble coming out of the mouth of our nation's attorney General.

It is injurious, but as long as it is not done to help a foreign government, it is not treason. That's the point. Oh, and you dearly need to educate yourself on the perils of mentioning Fascism in a debate... You could've said "Communism", you know...

I'm not some random person, I'm a citizen of an allied nation.

Sadly, we had terrorist acts against us committed by citizens of allied nations. Heck — even by our own citizens... And the allied nations — Germany, Spain, Britain — have suffered similarly, from either their own citizens, or trusted visitors.

[...] can only be described as a neo-fascist [...]

Bzzz.... You lose. Remember to logout...

[yada-yada] You'd think the Jews would be smarter than that after all, it's EXACTLY what Hitler did to them...

Mmm, exactly what Hitler did to them? You mean, Jews are burning millions of Arabs in ovens, uh?..

Anyway, here is a useful link for you. Remember to logout, loser.

Move along people, there's nothing new to see here.

The unfortunate reality is that these concepts _are_ new to an unfortunately large proportion of "hot young programmers"

I'm currently struggling with an application which has all the hallmarks of being developed by programmers who:

• dropped out of Uni because, hey, their skills were more valued in the real world
• think an MS certification is more useful than a degree
• belief "Knuth" is cussing
• have never heard of Steve McConnell, Frederick P. Brooks, Tom Demarco, Edward Yourdon
• Or Lisp

I'll not name names to avoid being sued, but every bug I discover indicates:

• an ignorance of pre-existing solutions in the problem space;
• broken architecture;
• the review and test plan was never written, never mind followed.
• and that engineering governence is totally missing.
• But, dude, relax, all bugs are FITNR. And have been for years. :-(

Yes, I've been writing programs for over a quarter of a century. So I'm an Old Coot (tm). But I see these whippersnappers making f@#$%@ups that would have gotten me a quick slap 'round the ears. And claiming that they're doing something 3ll33t and, just, like, so, y'know, waay beyond the comprehension of anyone over 23.

Dude.

It's Crap, Ray, Crap

Well that blows the unrestricted movement

It does not — you can still move, and you don't need special documentation for it. What you can't do is move anonymously. Although this anonymity was never guaranteed, it was a fact of life for some time, and taking it away diminishes the privacy, which was the topic of the forum.

Kinda reminds me of Nazi Germany " Where are your papers" does anyone ever get the feeling that there is a serious lack of understanding history?

Have you even heard of Godwin's Law? You can't pull out "Nazi Germany" as an example, unless you are talking about genocide, ovens, and gas chambers...

You're still a noob -- a Real Programmer loads machine code into the CPU registers directly!

(Side note: Greg Lindahl is also a noob, for posting a version of the story in prose instead of free verse.)

Lessee, those tie to issues of the power of corporations, DRM, and how the tech we work with actually gets developed. This fails to qualify as "news for nerds", how? If you don't like the submissions, start looking for more interesting stuff. Or just ignore a lot of threads. (I tend to skip most of the hardware-mod stuff, myself.

2. Drop the politics section. While I'm sure it will go away as soon as a Democrat is elected president, regardless of his wrong doings, it's become nothing but a bashfest that has added no substance

You're evidently not old enough to remember Usenet. Often seperate newsgroups were created to give overly popular bashfests their own place to go, so they would be less likely to interfere with vaguely productive discussions elsewhere. It worked well then (until a couple of lawyers introduced intrusive advertising), and it's worked moderately well now on Slashdot.

I admit that it's likely that section will tone down; however, this is because I fear Bush is probably one of the four or five worst presidents in US history, and the Democrats will have to work hard to come up with someone as bad. (Hillary has possibilities.)

The overall "lean" of Slashdot isn't so much Democratic as Libertarian: socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Under Bush, the republicans has demonstrated neither characteristic. While I've stopped classing myself as a hard libertarian due to doubts about the checks and balances of corporate power, it took George W. Bush's first term to convince me to vote anything but a straight libertarian ticket. Energy issues and the national debt are problems neither party is willing to seriously address at this point, so it's not a question of whether I'll complain, but what other issues I'll complain about.

3. I get mod points back. It's sad that I lost mod points because I don't do the slashdot goosestep. Hence, I'm a troll today.

Actually, it looks like your post got an asbestos cork mod instead this time.

Good karma helps gain mod points. Interesting non-AC posts build karma. It's possible to be interesting while disagreeing with someone's position. Just keep the ad hominem attacks to a minimum, and focus on a well organized, reasoned logical argument, backed by solid facts. Build karma for a while by posting, then worry about modding.

4. Get rid of the overrated/underrated mods.

I might lean with you on this one. However, I'd be more inclined to make them zero-point mods, requiring one mod-point to use. It might also be nice to have a mod for "factually wrong" stuff, for cases when someone posts items as bad as "Ronald Reagan was the Thirty-Second US President". Currently, "Troll" is the closest, and that really doesn't fit well when an otherwise solid post has one glaring error.

We're your customer, Taco, we're always right.

No, you're just always the customer. And, since you aren't a subscriber, you're not a paying customer, just a potential customer — meaning it's not as important to listen to you unless Taco feels the need for more money. Add in that you come across as an asshat, and dealing with you gets hit with a renice to something behind "sort dryer lint".

The Story of Mel

Ken Thompson for President

I'd bet he would get plenty of votes!

ROTFL!

For those who aren't aware, Ken Thompson admitted to actually writing and installing a back door in the unix login program and the associated C compiler, as described in his 1983 Turing Award lecture.

This worked by having the compiler recognize what it's compiling and:
  - If compiling login, insert the back door.
  - If compiling a later version of itself, insert the compiler patch.
This has the advantage that, once you get it working, you can throw out the source code and it still propagates.

Put in a lot padding on your estimates so you can slack off [...] pretend you don't know [...] take the credit when something works and pass the blame when it doesn't [...] give the impression you actually give a shit

Wow. You personally exemplify why most large companies are bad places to work at. I think for most people who act like you Hanlon's Razor applies. Pretty sad that you actually know that you're peeing in the punchbowl and are recommending it to others as a way of "life".

my router cries tears of pain

Actually, this was only true of early routers, where gnomes hand-routed packets. In modern ASIC-based routing hardware, the magic smoke gets out. Minor smoke releases just lead to packet loss and unexpected firewall holes, which can be hard to detect. That's why Cisco salespeople encourage replacing your routing hardware every 18 months, just to be safe. At least, that's what they told me.

Vendors are already liable for their bugs, they just pay out of their userbase instead of their pockets. Which comes out of their pockets indirectly at a later point.

That is a wonderfully insightful comment and succinctly put, too.
What are you doing on Slashdot?

Generally speaking? Proving Sturgeon's Law inductively by way of posting.