If Catholics aren't Christians, then who are the Christians? Name the sects, please; I'm really curious.
Also, while you're at it, are Jews Christian? I've heard that Jesus was a Jew. Or are Christians supposed to follow the example Jesus sets for the rest of us, and convert to Judaism? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Re:A long slippery slope down to Hell
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
What is this contempt for scientists I've seen here lately? Of course they desire to expand human knowledge; that's their job. However, if you think that they don't consider the ethical ramifications of their actions, then you are SORELY mistaken.
The people best equipped to decide these things dedicate their lives to it. They might be scientists, but they usually aren't just religious fanatics who think they know best for everybody else. They generally have some training in ethics or bio-ethics, or know the technical and legal details involved, and the past case history as well.
I ask you, if Christians aren't backward or superstitious, then would they ever learn this knowledge in the first place, or question anything about their universe? My answer is this: Some Christians are not backward or superstitious.
In fact, I'm sure that many of the scientists you so roundly condemn who worked on this project are Christians. The odds are with me on this one. Maybe they're doing your god's will, and adding to his glory, and you don't even know it.
Instead of condemning your faith or your zealotry, I will simply quote your bretheren. "The Lord works in mysterious ways". --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, I think that's what Taco and Timothy are using to post, now.
They're testing the 2-node redundancy now, working up to 16 nodes for scalable parallel comment discussions.
(Hey, anything's better than how it was yesterday, right? Even if it is the same story, over, and over...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
So even if it's not Tuesday, it's good to be reminded that when talking about giant telescopes, shooting off into space, there's always Natalie Portman.
Incidentally, have you seen pulpphantom.com? It's way too funny for its own good. If you're a fan of any two: Pulp Fiction, Star Wars, or Natalie Portman (and I know you are), then go see it... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's why the Crusoe doesn't emulate a PPC (yet).
If that's not an issue, then, sure, go for it.
And please don't bring performance into it, because then we'll all just say "for what", and we'll be arguing about Photoshop and The Gimp and kernel compiles and optimizing compilers and registers and architecture...
Also, if speed isn't an issue, you can run *cough* Soft Windows.
Actually, how fast have the PC emulators gotten? I never tried VirtualPC before. Are any of them better than about two orders of magnitude slower than native performance, yet? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, after Microsoft, it looks like we'll need to take care of Intel, and maybe that darn sewing-circle of PC manufacturers, too.
I agree with them to an extent, though: the Crusoe will probably see most of its success on web-pads and whatnot. If you're feeling cautious, wait until that takes off before you bet the farm on the low-end laptop business.
However, any laptop with even as much power as my K6/300 would be fine with me; and if it lasted for 8 hours or more, so much the better. I still don't see why I would want a computer that's 50% faster if it can only last 2 hours, and still does all the word-processing you could possibly expect a computer to do...
Oh wait, you're using Office 2000 on Windows 2000? What? On a laptop?!?? Never mind...;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
(For the acronym and humor-impaired, that's "Really Damn Big Integrated Circuits And Stuff, With Too Many Transistors"; but "I Am Not An Electrical Engineer") --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What are the benefits of having an Earth-bound, optical telescope?
Or rather, what can a larger optical telescope find better from Earth that we can't already find on other wavelengths and from other venues (i.e. The Hubble)?
If there are no advantages here, is it more cost-effective, or what? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Who cares if Oracle investigated Microsoft? Anyone could hire IGI and have them investigate *anyone else*. As long as they don't break the law, there's nothing wrong here.
The important part, IMO, is what Microsoft had to hide. I was always suspicious about that "Freedom to Innovate" campaign, and it's nice to see some more skeletons being turned up...
Bottom line: if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. Investigate me all you want. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's right, folks; the entire web is just 17 clicks away from being TOTALLY ILLEGAL!
If you have any off-site links, just TURN YOURSELF IN NOW, you FELONS!!
I'm waiting for when links get classified as MUNITIONS, since they let people ignore international boundaries and traffic in stolen goods, and defraud the poor, innocent, rich multinational conglomorates that are looking out four our best interests.
Hey, it's not quite as stupid as charging hackers with MAIL FRAUD just because you didn't have the proper laws on the books... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
...or forced to create real cross-platform applications for all other OSes with equivalent native performance / size compared to the Windows versions, and maintain NT for them as well...
The hard part will be making it all rhyme. As Gates slaveth on code / and watcheth the bloat erode / his head was fit to explode / with each optimized opcode
...better write it in Italian, or Pascal, or something... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
>ask troll about "Signal 11" Which Signal 11 do you mean, SIGSEGV or (Slashdot User #203709)?
>oops #203709
TRoLLaXoR stares at you and says "New around here, eh, Karma Whore? Signal 11 is much older than that, but we Trolls have destroyed his account and burned his webpages! The Great Karma Whore is no more!"
>ask troll about "Great Karma Whore"
TRoLLaXoR chuckles in delight. "The form errors were only the first step in our plan to overthrow the evil moderators. Now he has been reduced to his mortal form as the lowly 'Bojay Baggins'."
>bojay
The vaporous shapes envelop you; you are teleported through a rabit hole.
>look
You are in a rabbit hole. All the posts have expired. There is a dead link to the east. There is a dangling HREF here.
>look HREF The link text says "The Search for Signal 11 begins here". The anchor is unreadable.
Thanks for the info about the La Raza movement; I was really wondering what his problem was.
I learned a little Spanish in school, but even then I could tell that different countries had many different dialects and words for everything. I couldn't keep track of them all even if I had kept up with my Spanish...
Also, "statesunitedian" doesn't make sense, because literally translating a sentence without regard to sentence structure (or word order) is just stupid... But if we were smart about that, we'd probably call them "IS Units" instead of "SI Units", and mess up many other acronyms, allowing the US (EU? EEUU?) to continue to confuse everyone once again.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, if you want to specify North or South American, that's generally "norteamericano" or "sudamericano" (if I remember anything from the Spanish classes I took 5 years ago...:) and it looks like they have some other words for it.
But I know my English pretty well, and I can guarantee you that if the proper term isn't "American", well... it sure as hell isn't "unitedstatesian". If you want to check, ask someone from Britain or France. I guarantee you they'll say "Silly american!".:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Let me help you with that chip on your shoulder there, Estanislao. I'm Peter.
I'm a United States citizen, also known as an "American". I don't know what a "unitedstatesian" is, but I'm not it. That makes about as much sense as "puertoriquenian", which is to say none. It's a disrespectful, mangled version of the original form, so watch what you say, lest you offend somebody.
I guarantee you, no benevolent US scientists go to third world countries and use the locals as human guinea pigs. That doesn't even make any sense; it doesn't parse!
It's possible that some malevolent US scientists might do whatever evil things they are capable of, but I doubt they'd get any sponsorship of this. It's also possible that some malevolent Central American scientists could do tests on people in their country or in other counrtries, but I hope they wouldn't have government support.
Also, in all the cases I know about where there was government support, it was covered up for a long time, and I have no idea who was responsible, but I couldn't imagine blaming the entire country as a whole for actions they had know knowledge of. Generally when these experiments were performed, their effects were not known, and they either had consent, or couldn't obtain consent. (Hence the coverup; I'm thinking about the early radiation experiments with retarded kids, for instance; I hadn't heard about the stories you cited, but they sound horrible)
In the vast majority of these experiments, however, there is informed consent, often because the people involved are dirt-poor, and there is money offered. By reading a local paper, I'm sure I could find many studies looking for smokers, blood donations, or whatever else. I don't think they ask for "Hispanic" specifically, I think the applicant has to come to them. Try not to blame the US for what people would willingly do on their own. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There are many kinds of people in this world, and they sometimes overlap.
1) Those who RTFM 2) Those who beg #1 to please reinstall their computer for them because they can't RTFM or get their stuff to work 3) Those who make software without manuals for #2; software without manuals doesn't work. If you don't explain it, and insist on hiding it, there might be something wrong with it. This is what would be called "suspicious behavior" anywhere else. 4) Those who try to have useful discussions about these topics. 5) Those who whine, bitch, moan, and flame #4.
...and your arguments are *completely* unsound, even for a rant *OR* a flame.
It's like saying that apples have been oranges all along, I mean, what are those seeds for?
So let me help you.
1) UNIX does things properly.
2) Windows does things in a way that allows the most people to be able to use it, at least theoretically.
3) However, if #2 doesn't do things properly, how can it allow anyone to use it, ultimately? Also, how could knowing how to do a task help you when the procedure doesn't work?
Give me my pipes, my C, and my terse documentation any day, until you can show me another system that *works* as well.
Feel free to make things easier to use once you've at least gotten them working in the first place. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I care. I'm sure the people working on the project cares.
Hey, "who the fuck cares, if" some big corporation takes my domain name away from me?
I think that any software project, no matter how big, could take the time to see if someone is already using its name. That's just common courtesy.
Remember, "Internet Explorer" was trademarked before Microsoft got to it. They didn't seem to check, know, or care.
Hey, I was just remembering an old programming language fondly. When I realized it might not be the same one, I was disturbed. It seemed to bother you a lot more, though. Chill, dude. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This can't be a real law site. You said it yourself: it's surprisingly readable.
The real law site would be called www.the.internet.law.journal.tm.com, and all its pages would get referred by an.asp script, which arbitrarily places you two directories lower and refers you to another script.
It would then inform you that by reading this webpage, you're relinquishing all rights to the intellectual property contained within, including but not limited to misrepresentation, or defamation. But not in so few words.
In fact, the only resemblance I see between this site, and a *real* law site is that this site is unreachable right now. But I'm willing to blame that on Slashdot.
Anyone want to post a mirror, so I can try for an informed comment later?:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I concede that it's powerful, but I don't know if I'd call it easy-to-use, precisely. I think a less powerful subset of perl would be useful and easy to learn, but less powerful.
However, perl is just too big to be that simple, and a lot of its charm comes from its regexps, which are actually pretty complicated, once you get right down to it. It has many handy C system calls and UNIX shell commands, and these aren't commonly regarded as being that easy or obvious.
And Perl is an interpreted language that supports lexical scoping, has an eval command, does some rudimentary garbage collection, etc., which puts it in the same class of languages as Lisp or Scheme, and that means you can do some weird, whacked-out stuff in Perl. Like writing a program to write Perl for you, and recursively doing something with the results.
Maybe if you're a programmer, and you spend some time learning it, Perl can be very powerful and somewhat easy to use. But I know there are some gotchas in there, and I'm sure many programmers have found themselves writing Perl code late one night and looking at it the next day, not knowing what it does, or how it does it... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, well, well. Now you've got my attention.
If Catholics aren't Christians, then who are the Christians? Name the sects, please; I'm really curious.
Also, while you're at it, are Jews Christian? I've heard that Jesus was a Jew. Or are Christians supposed to follow the example Jesus sets for the rest of us, and convert to Judaism?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What is this contempt for scientists I've seen here lately? Of course they desire to expand human knowledge; that's their job. However, if you think that they don't consider the ethical ramifications of their actions, then you are SORELY mistaken.
The people best equipped to decide these things dedicate their lives to it. They might be scientists, but they usually aren't just religious fanatics who think they know best for everybody else. They generally have some training in ethics or bio-ethics, or know the technical and legal details involved, and the past case history as well.
I ask you, if Christians aren't backward or superstitious, then would they ever learn this knowledge in the first place, or question anything about their universe? My answer is this: Some Christians are not backward or superstitious.
In fact, I'm sure that many of the scientists you so roundly condemn who worked on this project are Christians. The odds are with me on this one. Maybe they're doing your god's will, and adding to his glory, and you don't even know it.
Instead of condemning your faith or your zealotry, I will simply quote your bretheren. "The Lord works in mysterious ways".
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, I think that's what Taco and Timothy are using to post, now.
They're testing the 2-node redundancy now, working up to 16 nodes for scalable parallel comment discussions.
(Hey, anything's better than how it was yesterday, right? Even if it is the same story, over, and over...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Now that's some weird, wild stuff right there.
Forget the in-car mp3 player, I can stream them and waste bandwidth!
Um... what is this "tape deck" you speak of? And what do you mean I have to *pay* for local cellphone access?
...nevermind...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Umm... Telescopes, blah blah blah...
Are they gone yet?
Okay.
----------
Thank you, Open Source Man!
Gee, the trolls have been really quiet lately.
So even if it's not Tuesday, it's good to be reminded that when talking about giant telescopes, shooting off into space, there's always Natalie Portman.
Incidentally, have you seen pulpphantom.com? It's way too funny for its own good. If you're a fan of any two: Pulp Fiction, Star Wars, or Natalie Portman (and I know you are), then go see it...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
x86 compatibility.
That's why the Crusoe doesn't emulate a PPC (yet).
If that's not an issue, then, sure, go for it.
And please don't bring performance into it, because then we'll all just say "for what", and we'll be arguing about Photoshop and The Gimp and kernel compiles and optimizing compilers and registers and architecture...
Also, if speed isn't an issue, you can run *cough* Soft Windows.
Actually, how fast have the PC emulators gotten? I never tried VirtualPC before. Are any of them better than about two orders of magnitude slower than native performance, yet?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, after Microsoft, it looks like we'll need to take care of Intel, and maybe that darn sewing-circle of PC manufacturers, too.
;)
I agree with them to an extent, though: the Crusoe will probably see most of its success on web-pads and whatnot. If you're feeling cautious, wait until that takes off before you bet the farm on the low-end laptop business.
However, any laptop with even as much power as my K6/300 would be fine with me; and if it lasted for 8 hours or more, so much the better. I still don't see why I would want a computer that's 50% faster if it can only last 2 hours, and still does all the word-processing you could possibly expect a computer to do...
Oh wait, you're using Office 2000 on Windows 2000? What? On a laptop?!?? Never mind...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh yeah right, like we're any better.
:)
(or don't you know what VLSI stands for?
I'm pushing for RDBICASWTMT, myself, but IANAEE.
(For the acronym and humor-impaired, that's "Really Damn Big Integrated Circuits And Stuff, With Too Many Transistors"; but "I Am Not An Electrical Engineer")
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What are the benefits of having an Earth-bound, optical telescope?
Or rather, what can a larger optical telescope find better from Earth that we can't already find on other wavelengths and from other venues (i.e. The Hubble)?
If there are no advantages here, is it more cost-effective, or what?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Heh heh heh.
Why am I not surprised that Berkeley has "something for the ACID crowd"...
:)
There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.
We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
-- fortune
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Who cares if Oracle investigated Microsoft? Anyone could hire IGI and have them investigate *anyone else*. As long as they don't break the law, there's nothing wrong here.
The important part, IMO, is what Microsoft had to hide. I was always suspicious about that "Freedom to Innovate" campaign, and it's nice to see some more skeletons being turned up...
Bottom line: if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. Investigate me all you want.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Gee, thanks, I try reel hard...
*blushes*
Does this mean I have to go back to marking my posts with "HUMOR:" in the subject line?
Maybe I'll just stick with "LAUGH, DAMN YOU!"; then I won't have to listen to Europeans telling me that I spelled "HUMOR" wrong.
*sigh*
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's right, folks; the entire web is just 17 clicks away from being TOTALLY ILLEGAL!
If you have any off-site links, just TURN YOURSELF IN NOW, you FELONS!!
I'm waiting for when links get classified as MUNITIONS, since they let people ignore international boundaries and traffic in stolen goods, and defraud the poor, innocent, rich multinational conglomorates that are looking out four our best interests.
Hey, it's not quite as stupid as charging hackers with MAIL FRAUD just because you didn't have the proper laws on the books...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, you're right.
C# == type foo.tpw | p2c
(or, for the prompt-impaired people out there, C# looks like a Borland Turbo Pascal for Windows program run through a Pascal-to-C translator...)
Gosh. The worst of Delphi, Visual C++, and Java.
What will they innovate next, guys?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
...or forced to create real cross-platform applications for all other OSes with equivalent native performance / size compared to the Windows versions, and maintain NT for them as well...
The hard part will be making it all rhyme.
As Gates slaveth on code /
and watcheth the bloat erode /
his head was fit to explode /
with each optimized opcode
...better write it in Italian, or Pascal, or something...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yes!
Now all we need is a rewritten and updated version of Dante's Inferno, and have it approved and endorsed by the pope!
Cower in FEAR, AOL, TELEMARKETERS, MICROSOFT!!!
The telemarketers will be FORCED to sit in a room answering phones all day and POLITELY LISTEN to mind-numbingly BORING advertisements!!!
Top AOL employees will have to DOWNLOAD programs to UPDATE their pitiful computers... only to have AOL CRASH on them, and give them BUSY signals!!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
>talk troll
What do you want to say to troll?
>ask troll about "Signal 11"
Which Signal 11 do you mean, SIGSEGV or (Slashdot User #203709)?
>oops #203709
TRoLLaXoR stares at you and says "New around here, eh, Karma Whore? Signal 11 is much older than that, but we Trolls have destroyed his account and burned his webpages! The Great Karma Whore is no more!"
>ask troll about "Great Karma Whore"
TRoLLaXoR chuckles in delight. "The form errors were only the first step in our plan to overthrow the evil moderators. Now he has been reduced to his mortal form as the lowly 'Bojay Baggins'."
>bojay
The vaporous shapes envelop you; you are teleported through a rabit hole.
>look
You are in a rabbit hole. All the posts have expired. There is a dead link to the east. There is a dangling HREF here.
>look HREF
The link text says "The Search for Signal 11 begins here". The anchor is unreadable.
>i
You have a cookie, and 5 Karma.
>xyzzy
What do you think this is, boy? Adventure?
>
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thanks for the info about the La Raza movement; I was really wondering what his problem was.
:)
I learned a little Spanish in school, but even then I could tell that different countries had many different dialects and words for everything. I couldn't keep track of them all even if I had kept up with my Spanish...
Also, "statesunitedian" doesn't make sense, because literally translating a sentence without regard to sentence structure (or word order) is just stupid... But if we were smart about that, we'd probably call them "IS Units" instead of "SI Units", and mess up many other acronyms, allowing the US (EU? EEUU?) to continue to confuse everyone once again.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, if you want to specify North or South American, that's generally "norteamericano" or "sudamericano" (if I remember anything from the Spanish classes I took 5 years ago... :) and it looks like they have some other words for it.
:)
But I know my English pretty well, and I can guarantee you that if the proper term isn't "American", well... it sure as hell isn't "unitedstatesian". If you want to check, ask someone from Britain or France. I guarantee you they'll say "Silly american!".
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Let me help you with that chip on your shoulder there, Estanislao. I'm Peter.
I'm a United States citizen, also known as an "American". I don't know what a "unitedstatesian" is, but I'm not it. That makes about as much sense as "puertoriquenian", which is to say none. It's a disrespectful, mangled version of the original form, so watch what you say, lest you offend somebody.
I guarantee you, no benevolent US scientists go to third world countries and use the locals as human guinea pigs. That doesn't even make any sense; it doesn't parse!
It's possible that some malevolent US scientists might do whatever evil things they are capable of, but I doubt they'd get any sponsorship of this. It's also possible that some malevolent Central American scientists could do tests on people in their country or in other counrtries, but I hope they wouldn't have government support.
Also, in all the cases I know about where there was government support, it was covered up for a long time, and I have no idea who was responsible, but I couldn't imagine blaming the entire country as a whole for actions they had know knowledge of. Generally when these experiments were performed, their effects were not known, and they either had consent, or couldn't obtain consent. (Hence the coverup; I'm thinking about the early radiation experiments with retarded kids, for instance; I hadn't heard about the stories you cited, but they sound horrible)
In the vast majority of these experiments, however, there is informed consent, often because the people involved are dirt-poor, and there is money offered. By reading a local paper, I'm sure I could find many studies looking for smokers, blood donations, or whatever else. I don't think they ask for "Hispanic" specifically, I think the applicant has to come to them. Try not to blame the US for what people would willingly do on their own.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Let me check the timetable...
Ah yes, then we start preparing the humans for the alien colonization and takeover of Earth.
With this genome information, we can finally perfect The Black Oil!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think you've isolated the problem.
There are many kinds of people in this world, and they sometimes overlap.
1) Those who RTFM
2) Those who beg #1 to please reinstall their computer for them because they can't RTFM or get their stuff to work
3) Those who make software without manuals for #2; software without manuals doesn't work. If you don't explain it, and insist on hiding it, there might be something wrong with it. This is what would be called "suspicious behavior" anywhere else.
4) Those who try to have useful discussions about these topics.
5) Those who whine, bitch, moan, and flame #4.
...and your arguments are *completely* unsound, even for a rant *OR* a flame.
It's like saying that apples have been oranges all along, I mean, what are those seeds for?
So let me help you.
1) UNIX does things properly.
2) Windows does things in a way that allows the most people to be able to use it, at least theoretically.
3) However, if #2 doesn't do things properly, how can it allow anyone to use it, ultimately? Also, how could knowing how to do a task help you when the procedure doesn't work?
Give me my pipes, my C, and my terse documentation any day, until you can show me another system that *works* as well.
Feel free to make things easier to use once you've at least gotten them working in the first place.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I care. I'm sure the people working on the project cares.
Hey, "who the fuck cares, if" some big corporation takes my domain name away from me?
I think that any software project, no matter how big, could take the time to see if someone is already using its name. That's just common courtesy.
Remember, "Internet Explorer" was trademarked before Microsoft got to it. They didn't seem to check, know, or care.
Hey, I was just remembering an old programming language fondly. When I realized it might not be the same one, I was disturbed. It seemed to bother you a lot more, though. Chill, dude.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This can't be a real law site. You said it yourself: it's surprisingly readable.
.asp script, which arbitrarily places you two directories lower and refers you to another script.
:)
The real law site would be called www.the.internet.law.journal.tm.com, and all its pages would get referred by an
It would then inform you that by reading this webpage, you're relinquishing all rights to the intellectual property contained within, including but not limited to misrepresentation, or defamation. But not in so few words.
In fact, the only resemblance I see between this site, and a *real* law site is that this site is unreachable right now. But I'm willing to blame that on Slashdot.
Anyone want to post a mirror, so I can try for an informed comment later?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, I've been learning Perl lately, actually.
I concede that it's powerful, but I don't know if I'd call it easy-to-use, precisely. I think a less powerful subset of perl would be useful and easy to learn, but less powerful.
However, perl is just too big to be that simple, and a lot of its charm comes from its regexps, which are actually pretty complicated, once you get right down to it. It has many handy C system calls and UNIX shell commands, and these aren't commonly regarded as being that easy or obvious.
And Perl is an interpreted language that supports lexical scoping, has an eval command, does some rudimentary garbage collection, etc., which puts it in the same class of languages as Lisp or Scheme, and that means you can do some weird, whacked-out stuff in Perl. Like writing a program to write Perl for you, and recursively doing something with the results.
Maybe if you're a programmer, and you spend some time learning it, Perl can be very powerful and somewhat easy to use. But I know there are some gotchas in there, and I'm sure many programmers have found themselves writing Perl code late one night and looking at it the next day, not knowing what it does, or how it does it...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.