I am a programmer and I have little to no confidence in my time-estimation abilities, or anyone elses. It has taken me 14 years to come to grips with that.
Okay, but how long did you originally estimate it'd take you to come to grips with that?
Software development is not a science in the normal sense. Designing large software systems is an art. It cannot be pigeonholed
That's exactly the sort of attitude that has caused the sort of spectactular failures of software projects to be accepted as the norm. Software Engineering is *not* "hacking" or "coding" or "programming", it's *engineering*, like building a bridge or a skyscraper.
But software development, which the other poster was talking about, isn't necessarily software engineering.
I've been titled "software engineer" (with appropriate prefixes) most of my salaried career, but when I made up my own title as an independent consultant, I went with "software craftsperson", because engineering, itself, isn't the major focus of the sort of software I am usually called upon to develop (operating systems, compilers, generally software-development toolchains).
Of course, I try to improve the engineering-to-black-art ratio of software I work on compared to the "norm", because I believe the engineering approach, when usable, is superior.
But actually calling myself an "engineer" seemed, and still seems, a case of calling myself by a title I respect while not being willing to insist on meeting the standards normally associated with that title.
Generally, I find the industry -- including clients and customers -- prefer "good enough yet modestly expensive and time-consuming" to "well-engineered, way too expensive and never accomplished", which is what estimates produced in the early stages of a project tend to look like for "development/hacking/coding/programming" vs. "engineering" as respective approaches.
And since most of my clients view the software I am to develop for them as merely one component in a large scheme of software, man-power, and so on, it really is up to them to best determine and evaluate their own optimization function and then decide how they want me to approach my work.
Naturally, if I was asked to develop software that controlled life-or-death machinery, I'd demand a higher standard. But the real issue would be, would the client demand such a high standard that they wouldn't even consider me for the work, given my history of working on the sort of software that is widely known to be critically buggy despite decades of industry-wide experience developing it -- operating systems, compilers, text editors, assemblers, linkers, and similar utilities?
Fortunately for me, the free market highly values someone like myself who can churn out productivity-enhancing tools (say, a 5% improvement optimizing a code generator), helping hundreds or even thousands of others make better use of their time and computing resources.
So, whether I could actually engineer something like a FORTRAN 77 compiler for a specific '80s-era computer, I can't exactly say. I'd like to think I could. But nobody ever asks me for that. Instead, they ask for new features, better performance, debugging help, and the like, always involving software that has been (or will be) developed with only a modicum of "engineering" used.
Within that context, my use of "engineering" boils down to using proven software-development and coding techniques in usually-small, specific instances -- in the nitty gritty details of a project -- such as avoiding situations where variations of the same original data are separately entered and maintained, yet not consistency-checked as part of a product validation process (such as during a build). That sort of thing is mainly a matter of saving me some embarrassment when I screw up, plus helping others who'll maintain the code down the road from making easy mistakes that end up being hard to track down.
(And on most projects on which I work, I'm treated as if I'm "going overboard" by most of my fellow developers, who seem to believe that it's okay to spend hours debugging vast, intricate code only to discover the problem is a mere typo that a simple sanity-check could have found in a few milliseconds. Sigh.)
Re:I wouldn't say rare
on
Review: K-PAX
·
· Score: 1
Because the majority in North America just want to hear THX sound and see big guns and endings which you can guess at the beginning of the movie, doesn't mean that it's the same everywhere.
I don't watch movies much anymore, and really can't say, even as an American, whether you're wrong or right...
...but is it possible your conclusion is incorrect?
Is it possible that what you claim about "the majority in North America" is in fact true about the majority of movie-goers worldwide?
Is it possible that such a clarified view would explain why American-made "Hollywood" movies are (I gather) so immensely popular outside of the USA as well as inside (and some of the most obvious examples of what you characterize as "big guns and endings which you can guess" seem to do even better outside the US than in, e.g. certain Schwarzenegger movies during the '90s, if I have my facts correct)?
Is it possible that your conclusion is jumped to simply because American movie-makers happen to be the most successful at catering to a largely worldwide demand for a certain type of big-budget movie, leaving the making of more ambiguous, artful, lower-budget works to others?
And is it possible that those "others" either lie directly in the shadow of Hollywood in the US, and thus don't get much notice at all, or operate as pretty much the only movie-makers in countries other than the US, in which case their existence is celebrated as a variant of nationalistic fervor?
Sure, I'd guess that Americans tend to prefer "bigness" in their movies moreso than those in certain other countries, but that'd be only a guess, and I'm not saying it's even close to a "majority".
But it doesn't necessarily follow that, because most big-budget Hollywood-type movies are made in Hollywood or the USA generally, the majority of Americans must necessarily prefer them to other types of movies. The global trading that goes on in the arena of movie-making seems sufficient to allow for a great deal of fluidity between a particular nation's peoples' desires for a certain sort of movie and its own movie-makers' willingness and ability to produce just that sort of movie.
I like how in the preview he says that K-Pax is X of *your* light years away. As if light years was some peculiarly human measurement.
No, he was distinguishing between "our" notion of light-years and George Lucas' notion.
For most humans, a light-year is the distance light travels in a year (almost always Earth's year, of course).
For George Lucas, based on Hans Solo's comment in Episode IV of the "Star Wars" tritrilogy, a light-year is a measurement of time.
Since prot must have known he was talking to people who thought he was a loon, and that they might also assume he got his ideas about technical terms from movies like "Star Wars", he made sure they understood he was talking about distance, not time, by saying "your light years" instead of just "light years".
See, use just one little possibly-redundant word like "your" and you generally avoid confusion and speed up understanding!
It's very simple to handle situations where a vanilla malloc fails.
Just reserve a chunk of memory via a malloc done when the program starts. The chunk needs to be big enough to accommodate whatever combination of malloc's is needed to handle a heap-exhausted error.
Then, when the vanilla malloc fails, call a routine that starts by freeing the reserved memory, then continues to handle the error -- put up the dialog box, save data, whatever -- and it'll have what it needs for its malloc calls.
Regardless of the open/closed-source issue, it's wise for programmers to always consider the "exit strategy" for their code -- exit in the sense of success or failure -- and reserve, ahead of time, whatever resources are needed to implement that strategy.
And in the case of an interactive tool such as an editor, an "exit strategy" might well include the ability to save a "journal" of changes the user made to a document, in case the document itself is too big to be saved on the storage media available.
my colleagues who use Fortran (modeling fluid flows and such like) tell me that the GNU fortran compiler is useless.
I very much doubt they said that. They probably said "it's useless for our purposes" or something like that. (In my experience, people who use Fortran for modeling fluid flows aren't so foolish as to generalize from their very narrow personal experience to the entire potential usability of a thing.)
Is it buggy? Not standards compliant? Can any experts enlighten me?
Buggy: not terribly, but it had (and probably still has) a few annoying, well-documented bugs that have proven difficult to fix.
Not standards compliant: if the standard is ANSI FORTRAN 77, that isn't the problem.
What your colleagues might be running into is most likely one of two things, or both: g77 doesn't support some widespread extensions to FORTRAN 77, like Cray pointers; and g77 hasn't, at least until recently, provided sufficient info for the debugger to use to allow a programmer to see things like variables in COMMON or EQUIVALENCE.
Less likely, but not improbably, they're frustrated by other annoyances, like poor performance or even inadequate diagnostics in certain cases. As with most any compiler, performance might be quite good for most users, but terrible, compared to a usable alternative, for some. g77 depends pretty much entirely on the GCC back end plus the f2c run-time libraries (libf2c) to achieve performance, though the g77 front end necessarily makes some "choices" among components of these other chunks of software to try to arrange for the best performance for most uses.
Or maybe they've just converted wholesale to Fortran 90 or beyond, in which case g77 will indeed be useless to them -- clearly not a fault of g77 itself!
Note that I'm considered the original author of g77, though I stopped working on it a couple of years ago. I made many mistakes in my original design and implementation of g77; only a few of these were truly problematic in the long run, but they remain as obstacles to many who've thought they could come in and "fix" certain of g77's problems by exerting a substantive combination of effort and imagination.
There is now a GNU Fortran 95 project underway, which, if your colleagues contribute to in some fashion, might better meet their needs. I'm not sure, but I think they started by ignoring pretty much all the g77-specific code in GCC: probably a wise move.
Yeah, right. Tell me, what Distribution comes with Fortran?
Red Hat, certainly. Probably it's easier to make a list of GNU/Linux distributions that don't come with a Fortran compiler, given that:
The GNU Fortran compiler (g77) is a component of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).
A free Fortran-to-C convertor tool (f2c), including run-time libraries, is available from netlib, and has been included on some distributions since before g77 was released to the public.
If the Fortran code released by NASA sticks to the FORTRAN 77 standard, it'll likely work "out of the box" on Linux distributions.
(Note that, while installing a distribution like Red Hat, you might have to explicitly select g77 to get it installed...it's not so small that it can be installed without checking with the admin doing the install, I guess.)
At least with the two (rather mundane) alarm systems we've used in our first and second homes, they have a switch ("RJ-45" comes to mind) that allows the alarm system to immediately disconnect any call in progress so it can dial out to the central location.
Yeah, but imagine a typical telemarketing firm. Dozens, even hundreds of cubicals. Everyone talking all at the same time. No problems communicating, because the microphone and speaker are mounted on the worker's head.
They're not collaborating in ways that require high-bandwidth interactivity, which is the other poster's point -- in fact, the whole point of the microphone and speaker is to insulate what each of them says and hears from each other.
So, "it" isn't a solved problem, because "it" is people collaborating and communicating directly with each other using the means humans have already perfected -- speech and hearing -- while also, individually, operating machinery for other purposes (communications with others not nearby, recording data, writing or trying out software, browsing web sites, etc.), and if operating that machinery requires speech and hearing, in the same kinda way that "operating computers" in the workplace today requires Microsoft Windows (to ease training), then the whole proposal will fall well short of the market penetration required to justify the expense.
So, indeed, it'll be useful in niches -- not general situations, but specific ones in which speech and hearing can be devoted to the task of interacting with computer technology, because it isn't already critical for other things.
(E.g. it'll be for people who don't need to talk on the phone while operating their computers. So cross me off the list, even though, 99% of the time I use my computer, nobody is even in the room; I don't want to even think about having to choose whether to make or take a call and continue working on my computer.)
SAAB has been doing some experiments trying to get away from steering wheels, replacing it with a stick by your hand instead. The reason is that the wheel causes a good deal of damage in an accident (even with airbags); and it's stopping some people with reduced mobility to drive, even though they would otherwise be perfectly capable of it.
I wonder if someone (the driver, a passenger?) getting impaled on the stick poses enough of a risk to counter the problem with the wheel....
Also, maybe it'll turn out to be best to get away from mechanical systems for control as much as possible in such environments. Any mechanical control can, I would think, become a hazard in an accident.
Instead, using minimal mechanics (say, tiny high-res cameras and some kind of 2D or 3D projection) and failsafe designs, vehicles might become not just safer in accidents, but lighter (and therefore more efficient) in everyday use.
They might even serve to more easily disable use by people not up to the task (say, people who are drunk).
But the failsafe design aspect is crucial, and seems, to me, much further away from realization than the interfaces I've suggested, above, implemented on a desktop where safety in "collisions" isn't an issue.
When the communists (who were atheists) killed it was not because they were atheists. They did not kill only the religous for example they were indiscriminate.
They were hardly "indiscriminate" -- at best, they killed the religious, destroyed or occupied their churches, with little regard for their particular religious beliefs.
In the case of religion inspired killings (take osama bin laden for example) he kills because he is a muslim and his target is christians
No, he kills because he his a mass-murdering tyrant and finds it easier to use religion as an excuse, compared to the mass-murdering tyrants of the past century who used atheism and communism (which are, of course, tightly related) as their excuse.
What does this mean. How can you be a christian and not believe in God? In order to be a christian you have to believe in god who is invisible and lives in the sky. Not only that but you also have to believe that Jesus Christ was his son, that jesus was born of a virgin mother mother, and the jesus was resurected. You also have to accept that the bible represents the word of god. Without all this you not a christian. So you are either a chistian or you don't believe in the invisible man in the sky.
Bzzt. Wrong. Like I said, you really ought to actually learn something about religion, rather than blindly accept that anti-religious hatred with which you've clearly been indoctrinated.
Simply put: I am a Christian. I believe Jesus was born of a virgin as a child of God and was resurrected. I believe we all are children of God -- after all, the first two words of the prayer Jesus himself gave us all to pray are "Our Father". And I believe God is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and omniactive.
More to the point, I don't so much believe that God is a man who lives in the sky, as that God is the intelligence, the divine Mind, that created both man and what we see as the sky.
That some Christians disagree with this is indisputable, but they do not define Christianity for me.
when you say "other denominations" do you mean being married by muslim clerics, budhist clerics, perhaps wiccan or druid clerics? How about a cleric of the church of sata? Or do you mean another denomination of the christian church?
Depends on how the local authorities define "clergyman who is legally authorized" (and, no, my religion's church has no clergy as such, that is, that meets this definition).
This is just one way in which a particular Christian sect assuredly does not outline a goal of "converting or killing everyone else" as you blindly claim is the case for all of them.
Meanwhile, if you're so hung up on my use of the word "atheism", then simply replace it with whatever word you use, or might make up, to describe your crusade against religion and religious people, then replace my use of "atheism" in my earlier post with that word, and actually respond to the issues I raise, instead of constantly pursuing your witchhunt against the religious?
In particular, if it isn't atheism that causes you to post anti-religious rhetoric in response to someone saying something a little bit positive about religion, what is it that so motivates you? Make up a word for that, use it instead of "atheism" in my earlier post, and respond.
Stop continuing to sling mud at religion and "religious nuts" as you call people like me. Explain your own evident hatred and bigotry, why it's preferable to the hatred and bigotry practiced by those who are religious, and why you refuse to criticize tyranny per se and instead focus on religion's (but not atheism's) use of it as the source of all evil.
Ah, I see. That's an unfortunate artifact of translation, apparently; certainly I knew, as an English-speaking American, that Bush did not, in any way, shape, or form, declare a "holy war" against Islam or even against terrorism. (Such a call would be nonsensical coming from the President of the USA; if he'd used the phrase "holy war", I'd have questioned his suitability for the job, since the US government is specifically designed to avoid representing itself, or anything it does, as "holy".)
Now, looking at my (probably rather poor) dictionary, they "connect" only via their 2nd definitions. For "crusade" that's preferable to the first, which refers to the historical crusades against Muslims, but the second refers to a "remedial action" undertaken with zeal and enthusiasm.
In that sense alone, Bush certainly used a correct word.
However, while the 1st definition of "jihad" is "holy war" -- which I think the dictionary must have wrong, since I thought I'd heard the main definition was really "striving" -- the 2nd is, and I quote, "a crusade for a principle or belief".
That's why Bush should have avoided the word -- it's too easy for someone to mistranslate.
But it also suggests that anyone who translates Bush's use of "crusade" into "holy war" is deliberately inflamming tensions in an already touchy situation, since, while "crusade" can be translated "jihad", it should be made clear by the translator to refer to the specific form of that word that amounts to:
A remedial action for a principle or belief undertaken with zeal and enthusiasm.
That is, the word "crusade" apparently cannot be correctly translated into "holy war", except perhaps where it refers to the historical Crusades -- clearly not the situation here. A wise translator would, I think, avoid translating Bush's use of "crusade" into "jihad" at all, and choose another term instead -- if one is available in the target language.
Again, I think you are overreacting, based on one man's translation, a translation chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to depict Bush (and perhaps the USA) in the worst possible light and aggravate tensions even further, perhaps to the brink of outright war between Islam and the West.
Thankfully, most people, speaking in public, consciously choose to use the least inflammatory language available to translate the statements of others, because most people, I think, prefer to promote peace, not war.
Given your sentiments regarding the US, I suppose I can understand why you chose a different approach.
The point is that Bush declared a Jihad before the Taliban
No, he didn't. He made an unfortunate choice in using the word "crusade" under the circumstances, but I find your suggestion that Muslims interpreted his declaring a "crusade against terrorism" as being a "jihad", or Holy War, against Muslims to be tantamount to claiming that Muslims are too ignorant or stupid to understand words and their meanings.
But, you go right ahead and assume many Muslims are stupid and ignorant, that they're right that Bush declared a jihad before the Taliban did, and that "Americans and America sucks", as you say (typos fixed for you free of charge).
Then, if (or maybe when) an Islamic extremist government takes over the USA and takes charge of your life -- after they gain access to nuclear-missile weaponry, which seems inevitable at this point -- you can explain to them that you were on their side all along.
Let me get this straight: you resent the USA because it spent $B to rebuild enemy nations[...]
I most certainly do not 'resent' the United States - I merely wish they could be somewhat more enlightened as to the actual nature of global governance, and not so very convinced of 'their' way being the sole, correct, way.
The fact is, when someone pointed out that the US rebuilt countries and economies of vanquished enemies, you had to chime in and state that the US only did that because it expected to get the $$ back. You can only have done that because of your resentment of the US, given the fact that your argument was so irrational as to be laughable, which my comment illustrated.
Further, you seem to have this strange notion that anyone has a good handle on the nature of "global governance" sufficient to deserve to exercise it. I disagree with that, and believe history demonstrates that the most dangerous mass-murderers of the world are exclusively those who claim to be "enlightened" about "global governance" as you do.
On the one hand, the US is evil because it is too involved in global affairs, on the other, it is unintelligent because it is insufficiently so.
Oh, pish. I have never said that the United States is 'too' involved, but I do claim that a great many of the ways in which the United States does
effect its ideologies are somewhat poorly sighted. That is all.
Thank you for your opinion. Of course, others like you state exactly what you say you've never claimed, so who are we to believe? And, besides, who are you to order us around? Are you perfect in how you effect your policies? Is your country's government perfect in how it does that? Meanwhile, for a country of our power, we're remarkably hesitant to order other people and nations around, relatively speaking to other historical examples, as far as I can see.
Meanwhile, I put it to you that the US is demonstrably more involved with the affairs of freedom , such as engaging in trade,[...]
Such as, say, Indonesia, which has benefitted greatly from Nike's 'trade'.
What are you saying -- that Indonesia was forced to trade with Nike, that the workers never chose to work there but were forced to, a la the sort of slave labor that is typical under Communism?
than any other country, given the international success of US-based companies compared to most any other.
Money. That's all you seem to think it boils down to, isn't it? Money. Pah! There are far more important things to think about. Such as happiness, lack of suffering, lack of poverty, etc.
You, my friend, are the one with "money" on the brain. I didn't mention it there -- I pointed out that when it came to free choice, worldwide, people would generally rather do business with the USA and Americans generally than most any other nation or peoples.
Now, it's true that one measure used to arrive at that conclusion is monetary, but it's not the only measure -- look at immigration, e.g. where people try to get to, especially when they're fleeing for their lives from oppressive regimes.
And, you can claim that the only reason people trade with us is "money", but, in that case, you're really saying they are only interested in money -- not me.
Further, you listed "lack of poverty" as being more important than "money". Hey, I'll agree that money doesn't buy the first two items on your list -- happiness or even lack of suffering -- but I'm darned if I can't figure out how money fails to solve the problem of poverty. Seems to me everyone I know that has enough money isn't poor, but maybe that's just the result of my provincial thinking?
That US citizens don't sit around and whine about how their
Funny thing, that. I was under the (obviously mistaken) impression that the Kyoto protocol was written under the auspices of the United Nations
(another body the US seems to take too lightly). Must be my memory playing up on me again. Ah well.
Dunno for sure what you're driving at, but, guessing that you are attempting to refute my point about Europeans promoting Kyoto at the expense of the "stupid" US President George W. Bush, it's irrelevant who wrote it.
The fact was, and is, the European elite (mainly the governments and the press) entertain the massive self-delusion that they are the culmination of thousands of years of experience predicting and altering the global climate.
If that wasn't the case, they surely wouldn't be so arrogant about the "stupidity" of Americans to not quickly sign on to an agreement that is, fundamentally, a fraud.
[...]prescriptions for changing the global climate over the next 500 years
Out by a magnitude of about 2 (have you people even heard of, oh, what's it called, El Nino?).
If you're going to practice the art of oblique references, at least get it right, because I have no idea what you're trying to say. "Off" by a magnitude, I can guess at, but don't see the relevance -- whether 10, 100, 250, 500, or 1000 years, the belief they can predict, especially manipulate, the global climate over that time is a massive self-delusion.
As far as El Nino, what that phenomenon, which substantially predates the sort of industrial activity the clueless blame for changes in global climate, has to do with your argument, I can't even begin to guess.
[...]free trade.
Unilateral free trade is, well, not 'free' at all.
Depends on what you mean by "unilateral free trade" -- do you mean "we trade freely with whoever we like", or "we force everyone to trade freely"?
The US practices neither, but tends to practice the best aspects of the former better than it does the worst aspects of the latter, compared to most other nations that have global economic significance.
But I was getting at the more fundamental notion that the willing exchange of goods and services among individuals is a freedom that is crucial to global peace, and that the US, generally, promotes and demonstrates that kind of trade moreso than most nations. By so doing, its people mingle and cooperate with citizens of other nations in ways that could never be orchestrated by central governments, "global governance", and so on -- ways that are critical to encouraging understand across cultural boundaries.
BTW, for a good book on the ways in which the United States' foreign policy beaurocracy is somewhat underwhelmingly useful, see Leon Sigal's book, Disarming Strangers, published by Princeton, about the process of forging (good) relations with North Korea some years ago.
I'll try to get to it -- thanks for the recommendation.
Note that I'm not a big fan of US foreign policy as you might be referring to it -- as being the policy of its government. I see that as merely one component of the larger system of global interrelations and interdependencies perhaps accurately characterized as "US global relations", which includes not just government, but non-profit (charity), church (religious), and corporate (business) relationships as well, most of which are conducted without direction by the Federal Government.
Okay, sorry, I thought you were saying we gave the Taliban no opportunity to turn over bin Laden, which we obviously did (several weeks, during which their story changed various times).
I agree, our government hasn't shared evidence regarding the WTC bombings with the Taliban.
I disagree that there's a moral requirement that it do so to apprehend and try him.
What is it with these religious nuts. Why do keep insisting that atheism is somehow a religion or even a body of thought or philosophy. Atheism is nothing more or nothing less then a non belief in god. To say that I belong in a religion called atheism because I don't believe in god is just stupid. What religion do I belong in if I don't belive in UFOs? What religion do I belong in if I don't believe that the moon is made of green cheese?
As I thought I made clear -- apparently to anyone else except you -- I meant "atheism" taken as broadly as you take "religion".
You can pretty much replace "atheism" and a few irrelevant details above and the truth of it remains the same:
What is it with these atheistic nuts. Why do they keep refusing to believe their atheism is somehow a religion or even a body of thought or philosophy? After all, it's defined as a "doctrine" in the dictionary! Meanwhile, religion is nothing more or nothing less then a belief in God or the supernatural. To say that I belong in what they
call religion -- but what they identify as an exercise of tyranny, the source of all evil in the world, etc. -- simply because I believe in God is just stupid.
Then you go on to say a bunch of stuff I pretty much agree with 100%, except for this:
Of course none of the churchgoing christians condemn them
You obviously haven't been paying attention, perhaps too blinded by your willingness to paint "religious nuts" like myself with such a broad brush.
Like it or not it's these people who are in charge of any religion and it's these people who cause untold suffering and death in the world
There's plenty of suffering and death caused by atheists in similar positions -- or have you not learned of the facts of history, e.g. read the Black Book of Communism?
What you seem to confuse is the concept of rule with the concept of religion. Here, I'll try to educate you with an analogy.
A person with a bow and arrow sets up a target in an open field and shoots at it. He is engaging in what many would call "target practice".
Another person with a bow and arrow shoots an arrow into a man's chest, killing him. He is engaging in what many would call "murder".
Now, those who confuse these two might look at the fact that the murderer is shooting at a target, so they might insist that the culprit is "target practice".
These people will preach to the high hills how "target practice" -- by bow and arrow, by gun and bullet, etc. -- is the cause of all suffering and evil in the world.
Every time they see someone murdered by anything involving a projectile, in their minds, they identify that as "target practice". They generally disregard the actual motivations of the murderers, and they also disregard, or belittle, the many other murders and similar evil acts that are perpetrated without the targeting of a projectile.
Then, whenever anyone stands up an points out that their engagement in target practice is crucial to defending the innocent against evil acts, they are told, by these confused people, "you are just more practitioners of target practice, you are the source of all the evil in the world".
That's what you are doing, confusing "religion" with "evil". You ignore the fact that much evil is committed by those who reject religion outright and force their doctrine -- aka atheism -- down the throats (sometimes quite literally) of their victims. You ignore the fact that the vast majority of those who do practice religion and believe in God actually contribute much good in the world. You look at people who rule, who commit evil, and if you can find any trace of "religion" in their beliefs or in their ability to hold on to power, you blame religion, but you refuse to do the same when it comes to atheism.
So, again, I know I can't convince you, but by illustrating the irrational arguments you resort to as such, I hope to prevent others from falling down the deep chasm of despair that is a lifetime of belittling deeply held religious beliefs.
Christian or Moslem or Jew all of them are convinced that the others are to be converted or killed but never ever left alone to live as they want.
As I said before the only exception to is Budhism which is by and large a non theistic religion (they don't belive in an invisible man in the sky).
You really should stop discussing religion in ways that exhibit your vast ignorance of the subject. Perhaps you should undertake a study of comparative religions.
For example, I'm a member of a smallish, yet international, Christian group that neither believes in "an invisible man in the sky" nor in the necessity of converting or killing others. In fact, our church documents require us to be married by clergy of other denominations -- meaning that, if we converted/killed everyone else overnight, we'd be unable to get married according to the rules of our church -- and state that, among man's inalienable rights as granted by God himself are those of self-government, reason, and conscience.
Further, at least a few of us actually believe this stuff -- that we have no right, certainly no necessity, of imposing our will on others, either in act or in thought.
Yet you have stated that we do not exist, or are liars, by saying that "all Christians" believe in converting or killing everyone, never letting them live as they see fit.
Whether this line of argument holds much merit, I don't myself know, being quite ignorant of the situation in the Middle East, but it stands to reason that if Palestinians demonstrated a long-term commitment to democracy, respect for the rule of law, respect of property rights
Rule of law like International law that stated nations shouldn't place migrants on occuiped land?
Respect for property rights, like not razing Palestinians buildings and farms at will? Or building settlement on confiscated Palestinain land?
Yes, rule of law exactly like that. Demonstrating the ability to go with the rule of law even when inconvenient, especially when it's been used, or abused, against you.
Everyone has a choice: to return cursing for cursing, or blessing for cursing. Those who choose the former effectively insist that the world become a worse and worse place to live, that the worst aspects of history continually be relived, amplified, and recreated against the descendants of those assumed to have perpetrated them.
Those who choose the latter make the world a better place, and demonstrate their moral authority to conduct their lives as they see fit.
Right now, nothing can be done to "set right" the sins to which you refer without resorting to yet more violence.
But, right now, each and every Palestinian could decide to follow the path I suggested, which would not require them to engage in any more violence, and which has a demonstrated history of leading various peoples to a much more promising future than the Palestinians of the Middle East are likely to enjoy on their present path of suicide bombings and such.
Let's see. Bush declares a "Crusade" against terrorism. How does that translate to an Islam? As a Jihad!
Your attempt to equate Islam with terrorism is unpersuasive to me, but you might encounter Muslims who resent it and make that resentment clear to you.
The claims by our government that we gave them a chance are complete and utter BS.
Your sources for this claim?
Alternatively, can you explain why every other government in the world (except maybe one or two, last I heard) has cut ties with the Taliban that you claim the US is lying about?
IMO, either they all agree the Taliban had plenty of opportunity to Do The Right Thing and chose not to, or they're all such spineless blobs that they break off relations over -- what exactly?
Maybe you're thinking that citizens of certain countries are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?
Even that isn't really true, in the USA at least. O.J. Simpson wasn't proven guilty, yet he was impoverished as a punishment, and that impoverishment was done by force. Had he liquidated his holdings prior to court and holed up with them in a cave, authorities would have, someday, used force to get him and his money out. All despite the fact he was never proven guilty in a court of law.
In the case of bin Laden, even though he has been shown to be guilty in courts of law beyond a reasonable doubt, the problem is that of apprehension and the fact that there's no international court of law that has sufficient legitimacy in the eyes of both the West and those who follow bin Laden.
That might explain, in case you're wondering, why the trial and conviction in a US court of law of those who perpetrated the 1993 WTC attacks did not dissuade their cohorts from trying again, years later -- because they don't respect our court system whatsoever.
When you use a legal system like the US's or world's, you have to be sure that either a) the accused's comrades have some respect for it or b) its enforcement arm will be able to restrain them from showing their "disrespect" through violent action. Neither is the case here, any more than it has been the case in other situations in which the US has gone to war.
So, you claim "WAR IS WRONG", but don't offer any rational basis by which its fundamental component -- violence -- can be avoided in the presence of those who are committed to its pursuit and unimpressed with the rulings of any judicial body.
Change can come without violence.
So, if you are about to be killed by someone, and I'm the only one that can stop it, and can stop it only by violence, I should just say to myself "change can come without violence" and leave you to your fate?
You seem to confuse war with self-defense, the rights of self-government with the non-existent rights of governments, and so on, all in a severely anti-American, or at least elitist, manner. Hardly persuasive, IMO. Your ideals are, however, high, even if your approach to implementing them inadequately thought out.
to ask for 'justice' when absolute proof does not exist of the individual's involvemnt is missing, leaving only circumstantial evidence, is indeed conceit of the highest order -
the 'we think this is so, so it must be the case' form.
If not insisting on "absolute proof" while pursuing justice is a conceit, then you are a hypocrite, having convicted America, and the developed world generally, on so many counts in your posts.
THe United States has made far
more money, not to mention otherwise capital, out of such agreements.
Let me get this straight: you resent the USA because it spent $B to rebuild enemy nations so their populations could voluntarily choose to trade with most anyone they liked, and they chose the USA rather than, say, the prosperous nation of Bayurmanstan (fans of American country music though they be)??
one would think that such a country could a afford to be more involved than others in more global affairs
On the one hand, the US is evil because it is too involved in global affairs, on the other, it is unintelligent because it is insufficiently so. I get it now.
Meanwhile, I put it to you that the US is demonstrably more involved with the affairs of freedom, such as engaging in trade, than any other country, given the international success of US-based companies compared to most any other. That US citizens don't sit around and whine about how their prescriptions for changing the global climate over the next 500 years aren't immediately adopted worldwide the way Europeans seem to is not, in my view, nearly as persuasive regarding their global awareness as the degree to which they successfully learn of the interests of those around the globe and demonstrate that learning through charity and free trade.
given the large, but certainly nt nearly exclusive, American readership that Slashdot has, I should have expected no more.
Ah, both a bigot and an elitist. You must be the life of the party where you live.
I realize you might well be thoroughly indoctrinated into the atheist, religion-hating point of view, but for those who might yet be sitting on the fence...
...religion is fundamentally about uniting people -- people who would, naturally, consider themselves, their families, and perhaps their tribe as "us" and everyone else as "them", regardless of the consequences, absent any modern sense of "teaching" or "preaching".
Religion generally teaches that there is a conscious presence unperceived by the five human senses that somehow guards and guides people to treat each other -- regardless of tribe, race, gender, and so on -- better than they otherwise might think necessary.
Sure, people distort religion to make it tribal, racist, sexist, but those people are acting out of their own base human instincts, either their own beliefs, or manipulating the base instincts of others to obtain power for themselves.
And, of course, people acting on base instincts of thinking in terms of "us vs. them" look to their religious training to justify, rather than rebuke, those instincts. Do those instincts take the blame? No; religion generally does, even though atheism in its similarly generalized forms probably murdered more innocents in the 20th Century alone than did all religions in the first 20 centuries put together.
Even atheism, as a teaching, is much like religion in that it is a civilizing tool. While I'm unaware of any fundamentals of atheism that approach the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule, in terms of teaching adherents to treat others well regardless of their genetic, cultural, or intellectual ancestry, the mere act of trying to convince someone else that they are foolish to believe in one God or many gods is, itself, an act of faith, hence a sort of religion.
(That is, it's an act of faith that there's actually another "mind" being preached to, that the other "mind" might convert to atheism in this case, and that such a conversion would be a thing worth pursuing, despite no objective evidence whatsoever that any of these things are true. And by "objective evidence" I mean the sort of evidence atheists themselves would accept if it supported the belief in the existence of one God.)
In that sense, I see people who blame religion for violence as just as religious as myself, even though they are trying to differentiate me from them, because they are demonstrating a faith that, somehow, because of their repeating such claims, they're going to make the world a better place in their eyes, by either enlightening me, or by succeeding in getting me punished by others whom their words enlighten. (I'm unimpressed by arguments they might make that they don't really care -- taking time to post, even to speak, is a form of caring for one's fellow man, IMO. After all, in my experience, atheists treat even the preaching, i.e. speaking, of religious beliefs as an affront to their own belief systems -- why else did "Malcontent" post here, after all, except in response to mere opinion?)
So, while certain religions (e.g. strains of atheism, collectivism) try to distance themselves from other religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) by calling them "religious", preaching hatred and ridicule of their adherents in an "us vs. them", divisive fashion, and so on, they're all part of the overall tapestry called "civilization".
True, most religions, strictly speaking, "divide" people. That's necessary for any body of teaching to survive, I believe; else, how are the teachers of the body to be chosen out of the new generation? Without any distinction made between those who can teach the body of teaching well and those who can't, the body itself would surely die, especially in the presence of difficulties challenging the population to be educated.
But not all religions, by any means, teach the next thing implied by the poster, that "us" are good and "them" are bad, to be attacked, etc. Many Christian strains do not teach that, for example -- after all, Christ Jesus' own teachings are pretty clear on how to deal with one's "enemy", which is the most extreme way to describe someone who disagrees with one's views, and it doesn't involve attacking them in the least.
In that sense, while it might be the case that a true, pure Christian wouldn't commit violence to defend himself or anyone else, it isn't hard to see why many who value the teachings of Christianity -- or Islam, Judaism, etc. -- and who might follow them imperfectly, might choose to commit violence, even extreme violence, to defend those belief systems, or, more specifically, their vessels -- citizens and the societies they form that are better examples of those idealized ways of life than are those who would wipe them out.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, but how long did you originally estimate it'd take you to come to grips with that?
But software development, which the other poster was talking about, isn't necessarily software engineering.
I've been titled "software engineer" (with appropriate prefixes) most of my salaried career, but when I made up my own title as an independent consultant, I went with "software craftsperson", because engineering, itself, isn't the major focus of the sort of software I am usually called upon to develop (operating systems, compilers, generally software-development toolchains).
Of course, I try to improve the engineering-to-black-art ratio of software I work on compared to the "norm", because I believe the engineering approach, when usable, is superior.
But actually calling myself an "engineer" seemed, and still seems, a case of calling myself by a title I respect while not being willing to insist on meeting the standards normally associated with that title.
Generally, I find the industry -- including clients and customers -- prefer "good enough yet modestly expensive and time-consuming" to "well-engineered, way too expensive and never accomplished", which is what estimates produced in the early stages of a project tend to look like for "development/hacking/coding/programming" vs. "engineering" as respective approaches.
And since most of my clients view the software I am to develop for them as merely one component in a large scheme of software, man-power, and so on, it really is up to them to best determine and evaluate their own optimization function and then decide how they want me to approach my work.
Naturally, if I was asked to develop software that controlled life-or-death machinery, I'd demand a higher standard. But the real issue would be, would the client demand such a high standard that they wouldn't even consider me for the work, given my history of working on the sort of software that is widely known to be critically buggy despite decades of industry-wide experience developing it -- operating systems, compilers, text editors, assemblers, linkers, and similar utilities?
Fortunately for me, the free market highly values someone like myself who can churn out productivity-enhancing tools (say, a 5% improvement optimizing a code generator), helping hundreds or even thousands of others make better use of their time and computing resources.
So, whether I could actually engineer something like a FORTRAN 77 compiler for a specific '80s-era computer, I can't exactly say. I'd like to think I could. But nobody ever asks me for that. Instead, they ask for new features, better performance, debugging help, and the like, always involving software that has been (or will be) developed with only a modicum of "engineering" used.
Within that context, my use of "engineering" boils down to using proven software-development and coding techniques in usually-small, specific instances -- in the nitty gritty details of a project -- such as avoiding situations where variations of the same original data are separately entered and maintained, yet not consistency-checked as part of a product validation process (such as during a build). That sort of thing is mainly a matter of saving me some embarrassment when I screw up, plus helping others who'll maintain the code down the road from making easy mistakes that end up being hard to track down.
(And on most projects on which I work, I'm treated as if I'm "going overboard" by most of my fellow developers, who seem to believe that it's okay to spend hours debugging vast, intricate code only to discover the problem is a mere typo that a simple sanity-check could have found in a few milliseconds. Sigh.)
Thpoilthport!!
I don't watch movies much anymore, and really can't say, even as an American, whether you're wrong or right...
Is it possible that what you claim about "the majority in North America" is in fact true about the majority of movie-goers worldwide?
Is it possible that such a clarified view would explain why American-made "Hollywood" movies are (I gather) so immensely popular outside of the USA as well as inside (and some of the most obvious examples of what you characterize as "big guns and endings which you can guess" seem to do even better outside the US than in, e.g. certain Schwarzenegger movies during the '90s, if I have my facts correct)?
Is it possible that your conclusion is jumped to simply because American movie-makers happen to be the most successful at catering to a largely worldwide demand for a certain type of big-budget movie, leaving the making of more ambiguous, artful, lower-budget works to others?
And is it possible that those "others" either lie directly in the shadow of Hollywood in the US, and thus don't get much notice at all, or operate as pretty much the only movie-makers in countries other than the US, in which case their existence is celebrated as a variant of nationalistic fervor?
Sure, I'd guess that Americans tend to prefer "bigness" in their movies moreso than those in certain other countries, but that'd be only a guess, and I'm not saying it's even close to a "majority".
But it doesn't necessarily follow that, because most big-budget Hollywood-type movies are made in Hollywood or the USA generally, the majority of Americans must necessarily prefer them to other types of movies. The global trading that goes on in the arena of movie-making seems sufficient to allow for a great deal of fluidity between a particular nation's peoples' desires for a certain sort of movie and its own movie-makers' willingness and ability to produce just that sort of movie.
No, he was distinguishing between "our" notion of light-years and George Lucas' notion.
For most humans, a light-year is the distance light travels in a year (almost always Earth's year, of course).
For George Lucas, based on Hans Solo's comment in Episode IV of the "Star Wars" tritrilogy, a light-year is a measurement of time.
Since prot must have known he was talking to people who thought he was a loon, and that they might also assume he got his ideas about technical terms from movies like "Star Wars", he made sure they understood he was talking about distance, not time, by saying "your light years" instead of just "light years".
See, use just one little possibly-redundant word like "your" and you generally avoid confusion and speed up understanding!
Just reserve a chunk of memory via a malloc done when the program starts. The chunk needs to be big enough to accommodate whatever combination of malloc's is needed to handle a heap-exhausted error.
Then, when the vanilla malloc fails, call a routine that starts by freeing the reserved memory, then continues to handle the error -- put up the dialog box, save data, whatever -- and it'll have what it needs for its malloc calls.
Regardless of the open/closed-source issue, it's wise for programmers to always consider the "exit strategy" for their code -- exit in the sense of success or failure -- and reserve, ahead of time, whatever resources are needed to implement that strategy.
And in the case of an interactive tool such as an editor, an "exit strategy" might well include the ability to save a "journal" of changes the user made to a document, in case the document itself is too big to be saved on the storage media available.
I very much doubt they said that. They probably said "it's useless for our purposes" or something like that. (In my experience, people who use Fortran for modeling fluid flows aren't so foolish as to generalize from their very narrow personal experience to the entire potential usability of a thing.)
Buggy: not terribly, but it had (and probably still has) a few annoying, well-documented bugs that have proven difficult to fix.
Not standards compliant: if the standard is ANSI FORTRAN 77, that isn't the problem.
What your colleagues might be running into is most likely one of two things, or both: g77 doesn't support some widespread extensions to FORTRAN 77, like Cray pointers; and g77 hasn't, at least until recently, provided sufficient info for the debugger to use to allow a programmer to see things like variables in COMMON or EQUIVALENCE.
Less likely, but not improbably, they're frustrated by other annoyances, like poor performance or even inadequate diagnostics in certain cases. As with most any compiler, performance might be quite good for most users, but terrible, compared to a usable alternative, for some. g77 depends pretty much entirely on the GCC back end plus the f2c run-time libraries (libf2c) to achieve performance, though the g77 front end necessarily makes some "choices" among components of these other chunks of software to try to arrange for the best performance for most uses.
Or maybe they've just converted wholesale to Fortran 90 or beyond, in which case g77 will indeed be useless to them -- clearly not a fault of g77 itself!
Note that I'm considered the original author of g77, though I stopped working on it a couple of years ago. I made many mistakes in my original design and implementation of g77; only a few of these were truly problematic in the long run, but they remain as obstacles to many who've thought they could come in and "fix" certain of g77's problems by exerting a substantive combination of effort and imagination.
There is now a GNU Fortran 95 project underway, which, if your colleagues contribute to in some fashion, might better meet their needs. I'm not sure, but I think they started by ignoring pretty much all the g77-specific code in GCC: probably a wise move.
Red Hat, certainly. Probably it's easier to make a list of GNU/Linux distributions that don't come with a Fortran compiler, given that:
The GNU Fortran compiler (g77) is a component of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).
A free Fortran-to-C convertor tool (f2c), including run-time libraries, is available from netlib, and has been included on some distributions since before g77 was released to the public.
If the Fortran code released by NASA sticks to the FORTRAN 77 standard, it'll likely work "out of the box" on Linux distributions.
(Note that, while installing a distribution like Red Hat, you might have to explicitly select g77 to get it installed...it's not so small that it can be installed without checking with the admin doing the install, I guess.)
Yeah, and Jessica wasn't bad...she was just drawn that way.
At least with the two (rather mundane) alarm systems we've used in our first and second homes, they have a switch ("RJ-45" comes to mind) that allows the alarm system to immediately disconnect any call in progress so it can dial out to the central location.
They're not collaborating in ways that require high-bandwidth interactivity, which is the other poster's point -- in fact, the whole point of the microphone and speaker is to insulate what each of them says and hears from each other.
So, "it" isn't a solved problem, because "it" is people collaborating and communicating directly with each other using the means humans have already perfected -- speech and hearing -- while also, individually, operating machinery for other purposes (communications with others not nearby, recording data, writing or trying out software, browsing web sites, etc.), and if operating that machinery requires speech and hearing, in the same kinda way that "operating computers" in the workplace today requires Microsoft Windows (to ease training), then the whole proposal will fall well short of the market penetration required to justify the expense.
So, indeed, it'll be useful in niches -- not general situations, but specific ones in which speech and hearing can be devoted to the task of interacting with computer technology, because it isn't already critical for other things.
(E.g. it'll be for people who don't need to talk on the phone while operating their computers. So cross me off the list, even though, 99% of the time I use my computer, nobody is even in the room; I don't want to even think about having to choose whether to make or take a call and continue working on my computer.)
I wonder if someone (the driver, a passenger?) getting impaled on the stick poses enough of a risk to counter the problem with the wheel....
Also, maybe it'll turn out to be best to get away from mechanical systems for control as much as possible in such environments. Any mechanical control can, I would think, become a hazard in an accident.
Instead, using minimal mechanics (say, tiny high-res cameras and some kind of 2D or 3D projection) and failsafe designs, vehicles might become not just safer in accidents, but lighter (and therefore more efficient) in everyday use.
They might even serve to more easily disable use by people not up to the task (say, people who are drunk).
But the failsafe design aspect is crucial, and seems, to me, much further away from realization than the interfaces I've suggested, above, implemented on a desktop where safety in "collisions" isn't an issue.
They were hardly "indiscriminate" -- at best, they killed the religious, destroyed or occupied their churches, with little regard for their particular religious beliefs.
No, he kills because he his a mass-murdering tyrant and finds it easier to use religion as an excuse, compared to the mass-murdering tyrants of the past century who used atheism and communism (which are, of course, tightly related) as their excuse.
Bzzt. Wrong. Like I said, you really ought to actually learn something about religion, rather than blindly accept that anti-religious hatred with which you've clearly been indoctrinated.
Simply put: I am a Christian. I believe Jesus was born of a virgin as a child of God and was resurrected. I believe we all are children of God -- after all, the first two words of the prayer Jesus himself gave us all to pray are "Our Father". And I believe God is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and omniactive.
More to the point, I don't so much believe that God is a man who lives in the sky, as that God is the intelligence, the divine Mind, that created both man and what we see as the sky.
That some Christians disagree with this is indisputable, but they do not define Christianity for me.
Depends on how the local authorities define "clergyman who is legally authorized" (and, no, my religion's church has no clergy as such, that is, that meets this definition).
This is just one way in which a particular Christian sect assuredly does not outline a goal of "converting or killing everyone else" as you blindly claim is the case for all of them.
Meanwhile, if you're so hung up on my use of the word "atheism", then simply replace it with whatever word you use, or might make up, to describe your crusade against religion and religious people, then replace my use of "atheism" in my earlier post with that word, and actually respond to the issues I raise, instead of constantly pursuing your witchhunt against the religious?
In particular, if it isn't atheism that causes you to post anti-religious rhetoric in response to someone saying something a little bit positive about religion, what is it that so motivates you? Make up a word for that, use it instead of "atheism" in my earlier post, and respond.
Stop continuing to sling mud at religion and "religious nuts" as you call people like me. Explain your own evident hatred and bigotry, why it's preferable to the hatred and bigotry practiced by those who are religious, and why you refuse to criticize tyranny per se and instead focus on religion's (but not atheism's) use of it as the source of all evil.
Ah, I see. That's an unfortunate artifact of translation, apparently; certainly I knew, as an English-speaking American, that Bush did not, in any way, shape, or form, declare a "holy war" against Islam or even against terrorism. (Such a call would be nonsensical coming from the President of the USA; if he'd used the phrase "holy war", I'd have questioned his suitability for the job, since the US government is specifically designed to avoid representing itself, or anything it does, as "holy".)
Now, looking at my (probably rather poor) dictionary, they "connect" only via their 2nd definitions. For "crusade" that's preferable to the first, which refers to the historical crusades against Muslims, but the second refers to a "remedial action" undertaken with zeal and enthusiasm.
In that sense alone, Bush certainly used a correct word.
However, while the 1st definition of "jihad" is "holy war" -- which I think the dictionary must have wrong, since I thought I'd heard the main definition was really "striving" -- the 2nd is, and I quote, "a crusade for a principle or belief".
That's why Bush should have avoided the word -- it's too easy for someone to mistranslate.
But it also suggests that anyone who translates Bush's use of "crusade" into "holy war" is deliberately inflamming tensions in an already touchy situation, since, while "crusade" can be translated "jihad", it should be made clear by the translator to refer to the specific form of that word that amounts to:
That is, the word "crusade" apparently cannot be correctly translated into "holy war", except perhaps where it refers to the historical Crusades -- clearly not the situation here. A wise translator would, I think, avoid translating Bush's use of "crusade" into "jihad" at all, and choose another term instead -- if one is available in the target language.
Again, I think you are overreacting, based on one man's translation, a translation chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to depict Bush (and perhaps the USA) in the worst possible light and aggravate tensions even further, perhaps to the brink of outright war between Islam and the West.
Thankfully, most people, speaking in public, consciously choose to use the least inflammatory language available to translate the statements of others, because most people, I think, prefer to promote peace, not war.
Given your sentiments regarding the US, I suppose I can understand why you chose a different approach.
No, he didn't. He made an unfortunate choice in using the word "crusade" under the circumstances, but I find your suggestion that Muslims interpreted his declaring a "crusade against terrorism" as being a "jihad", or Holy War, against Muslims to be tantamount to claiming that Muslims are too ignorant or stupid to understand words and their meanings.
But, you go right ahead and assume many Muslims are stupid and ignorant, that they're right that Bush declared a jihad before the Taliban did, and that "Americans and America sucks", as you say (typos fixed for you free of charge).
Then, if (or maybe when) an Islamic extremist government takes over the USA and takes charge of your life -- after they gain access to nuclear-missile weaponry, which seems inevitable at this point -- you can explain to them that you were on their side all along.
The fact is, when someone pointed out that the US rebuilt countries and economies of vanquished enemies, you had to chime in and state that the US only did that because it expected to get the $$ back. You can only have done that because of your resentment of the US, given the fact that your argument was so irrational as to be laughable, which my comment illustrated.
Further, you seem to have this strange notion that anyone has a good handle on the nature of "global governance" sufficient to deserve to exercise it. I disagree with that, and believe history demonstrates that the most dangerous mass-murderers of the world are exclusively those who claim to be "enlightened" about "global governance" as you do.
Thank you for your opinion. Of course, others like you state exactly what you say you've never claimed, so who are we to believe? And, besides, who are you to order us around? Are you perfect in how you effect your policies? Is your country's government perfect in how it does that? Meanwhile, for a country of our power, we're remarkably hesitant to order other people and nations around, relatively speaking to other historical examples, as far as I can see.
What are you saying -- that Indonesia was forced to trade with Nike, that the workers never chose to work there but were forced to, a la the sort of slave labor that is typical under Communism?
You, my friend, are the one with "money" on the brain. I didn't mention it there -- I pointed out that when it came to free choice, worldwide, people would generally rather do business with the USA and Americans generally than most any other nation or peoples.
Now, it's true that one measure used to arrive at that conclusion is monetary, but it's not the only measure -- look at immigration, e.g. where people try to get to, especially when they're fleeing for their lives from oppressive regimes.
And, you can claim that the only reason people trade with us is "money", but, in that case, you're really saying they are only interested in money -- not me.
Further, you listed "lack of poverty" as being more important than "money". Hey, I'll agree that money doesn't buy the first two items on your list -- happiness or even lack of suffering -- but I'm darned if I can't figure out how money fails to solve the problem of poverty. Seems to me everyone I know that has enough money isn't poor, but maybe that's just the result of my provincial thinking?
Dunno for sure what you're driving at, but, guessing that you are attempting to refute my point about Europeans promoting Kyoto at the expense of the "stupid" US President George W. Bush, it's irrelevant who wrote it.
The fact was, and is, the European elite (mainly the governments and the press) entertain the massive self-delusion that they are the culmination of thousands of years of experience predicting and altering the global climate.
If that wasn't the case, they surely wouldn't be so arrogant about the "stupidity" of Americans to not quickly sign on to an agreement that is, fundamentally, a fraud.
If you're going to practice the art of oblique references, at least get it right, because I have no idea what you're trying to say. "Off" by a magnitude, I can guess at, but don't see the relevance -- whether 10, 100, 250, 500, or 1000 years, the belief they can predict, especially manipulate, the global climate over that time is a massive self-delusion.
As far as El Nino, what that phenomenon, which substantially predates the sort of industrial activity the clueless blame for changes in global climate, has to do with your argument, I can't even begin to guess.
Depends on what you mean by "unilateral free trade" -- do you mean "we trade freely with whoever we like", or "we force everyone to trade freely"?
The US practices neither, but tends to practice the best aspects of the former better than it does the worst aspects of the latter, compared to most other nations that have global economic significance.
But I was getting at the more fundamental notion that the willing exchange of goods and services among individuals is a freedom that is crucial to global peace, and that the US, generally, promotes and demonstrates that kind of trade moreso than most nations. By so doing, its people mingle and cooperate with citizens of other nations in ways that could never be orchestrated by central governments, "global governance", and so on -- ways that are critical to encouraging understand across cultural boundaries.
I'll try to get to it -- thanks for the recommendation.
Note that I'm not a big fan of US foreign policy as you might be referring to it -- as being the policy of its government. I see that as merely one component of the larger system of global interrelations and interdependencies perhaps accurately characterized as "US global relations", which includes not just government, but non-profit (charity), church (religious), and corporate (business) relationships as well, most of which are conducted without direction by the Federal Government.
I agree, our government hasn't shared evidence regarding the WTC bombings with the Taliban.
I disagree that there's a moral requirement that it do so to apprehend and try him.
As I thought I made clear -- apparently to anyone else except you -- I meant "atheism" taken as broadly as you take "religion".
You can pretty much replace "atheism" and a few irrelevant details above and the truth of it remains the same:
Then you go on to say a bunch of stuff I pretty much agree with 100%, except for this:
You obviously haven't been paying attention, perhaps too blinded by your willingness to paint "religious nuts" like myself with such a broad brush.
There's plenty of suffering and death caused by atheists in similar positions -- or have you not learned of the facts of history, e.g. read the Black Book of Communism?
What you seem to confuse is the concept of rule with the concept of religion. Here, I'll try to educate you with an analogy.
A person with a bow and arrow sets up a target in an open field and shoots at it. He is engaging in what many would call "target practice".
Another person with a bow and arrow shoots an arrow into a man's chest, killing him. He is engaging in what many would call "murder".
Now, those who confuse these two might look at the fact that the murderer is shooting at a target, so they might insist that the culprit is "target practice".
These people will preach to the high hills how "target practice" -- by bow and arrow, by gun and bullet, etc. -- is the cause of all suffering and evil in the world.
Every time they see someone murdered by anything involving a projectile, in their minds, they identify that as "target practice". They generally disregard the actual motivations of the murderers, and they also disregard, or belittle, the many other murders and similar evil acts that are perpetrated without the targeting of a projectile.
Then, whenever anyone stands up an points out that their engagement in target practice is crucial to defending the innocent against evil acts, they are told, by these confused people, "you are just more practitioners of target practice, you are the source of all the evil in the world".
That's what you are doing, confusing "religion" with "evil". You ignore the fact that much evil is committed by those who reject religion outright and force their doctrine -- aka atheism -- down the throats (sometimes quite literally) of their victims. You ignore the fact that the vast majority of those who do practice religion and believe in God actually contribute much good in the world. You look at people who rule, who commit evil, and if you can find any trace of "religion" in their beliefs or in their ability to hold on to power, you blame religion, but you refuse to do the same when it comes to atheism.
So, again, I know I can't convince you, but by illustrating the irrational arguments you resort to as such, I hope to prevent others from falling down the deep chasm of despair that is a lifetime of belittling deeply held religious beliefs.
You really should stop discussing religion in ways that exhibit your vast ignorance of the subject. Perhaps you should undertake a study of comparative religions.
For example, I'm a member of a smallish, yet international, Christian group that neither believes in "an invisible man in the sky" nor in the necessity of converting or killing others. In fact, our church documents require us to be married by clergy of other denominations -- meaning that, if we converted/killed everyone else overnight, we'd be unable to get married according to the rules of our church -- and state that, among man's inalienable rights as granted by God himself are those of self-government, reason, and conscience.
Further, at least a few of us actually believe this stuff -- that we have no right, certainly no necessity, of imposing our will on others, either in act or in thought.
Yet you have stated that we do not exist, or are liars, by saying that "all Christians" believe in converting or killing everyone, never letting them live as they see fit.
Either you are wrong, or I am lying.
Which is it?
Yes, rule of law exactly like that. Demonstrating the ability to go with the rule of law even when inconvenient, especially when it's been used, or abused, against you.
Everyone has a choice: to return cursing for cursing, or blessing for cursing. Those who choose the former effectively insist that the world become a worse and worse place to live, that the worst aspects of history continually be relived, amplified, and recreated against the descendants of those assumed to have perpetrated them.
Those who choose the latter make the world a better place, and demonstrate their moral authority to conduct their lives as they see fit.
Right now, nothing can be done to "set right" the sins to which you refer without resorting to yet more violence.
But, right now, each and every Palestinian could decide to follow the path I suggested, which would not require them to engage in any more violence, and which has a demonstrated history of leading various peoples to a much more promising future than the Palestinians of the Middle East are likely to enjoy on their present path of suicide bombings and such.
Your attempt to equate Islam with terrorism is unpersuasive to me, but you might encounter Muslims who resent it and make that resentment clear to you.
Your sources for this claim?
Alternatively, can you explain why every other government in the world (except maybe one or two, last I heard) has cut ties with the Taliban that you claim the US is lying about?
IMO, either they all agree the Taliban had plenty of opportunity to Do The Right Thing and chose not to, or they're all such spineless blobs that they break off relations over -- what exactly?
Um, no, who taught you that nonsense?
Maybe you're thinking that citizens of certain countries are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?
Even that isn't really true, in the USA at least. O.J. Simpson wasn't proven guilty, yet he was impoverished as a punishment, and that impoverishment was done by force. Had he liquidated his holdings prior to court and holed up with them in a cave, authorities would have, someday, used force to get him and his money out. All despite the fact he was never proven guilty in a court of law.
In the case of bin Laden, even though he has been shown to be guilty in courts of law beyond a reasonable doubt, the problem is that of apprehension and the fact that there's no international court of law that has sufficient legitimacy in the eyes of both the West and those who follow bin Laden.
That might explain, in case you're wondering, why the trial and conviction in a US court of law of those who perpetrated the 1993 WTC attacks did not dissuade their cohorts from trying again, years later -- because they don't respect our court system whatsoever.
When you use a legal system like the US's or world's, you have to be sure that either a) the accused's comrades have some respect for it or b) its enforcement arm will be able to restrain them from showing their "disrespect" through violent action. Neither is the case here, any more than it has been the case in other situations in which the US has gone to war.
So, you claim "WAR IS WRONG", but don't offer any rational basis by which its fundamental component -- violence -- can be avoided in the presence of those who are committed to its pursuit and unimpressed with the rulings of any judicial body.
So, if you are about to be killed by someone, and I'm the only one that can stop it, and can stop it only by violence, I should just say to myself "change can come without violence" and leave you to your fate?
You seem to confuse war with self-defense, the rights of self-government with the non-existent rights of governments, and so on, all in a severely anti-American, or at least elitist, manner. Hardly persuasive, IMO. Your ideals are, however, high, even if your approach to implementing them inadequately thought out.
If not insisting on "absolute proof" while pursuing justice is a conceit, then you are a hypocrite, having convicted America, and the developed world generally, on so many counts in your posts.
Let me get this straight: you resent the USA because it spent $B to rebuild enemy nations so their populations could voluntarily choose to trade with most anyone they liked, and they chose the USA rather than, say, the prosperous nation of Bayurmanstan (fans of American country music though they be)??
On the one hand, the US is evil because it is too involved in global affairs, on the other, it is unintelligent because it is insufficiently so. I get it now.
Meanwhile, I put it to you that the US is demonstrably more involved with the affairs of freedom, such as engaging in trade, than any other country, given the international success of US-based companies compared to most any other. That US citizens don't sit around and whine about how their prescriptions for changing the global climate over the next 500 years aren't immediately adopted worldwide the way Europeans seem to is not, in my view, nearly as persuasive regarding their global awareness as the degree to which they successfully learn of the interests of those around the globe and demonstrate that learning through charity and free trade.
Ah, both a bigot and an elitist. You must be the life of the party where you live.
I realize you might well be thoroughly indoctrinated into the atheist, religion-hating point of view, but for those who might yet be sitting on the fence...
Religion generally teaches that there is a conscious presence unperceived by the five human senses that somehow guards and guides people to treat each other -- regardless of tribe, race, gender, and so on -- better than they otherwise might think necessary.
Sure, people distort religion to make it tribal, racist, sexist, but those people are acting out of their own base human instincts, either their own beliefs, or manipulating the base instincts of others to obtain power for themselves.
And, of course, people acting on base instincts of thinking in terms of "us vs. them" look to their religious training to justify, rather than rebuke, those instincts. Do those instincts take the blame? No; religion generally does, even though atheism in its similarly generalized forms probably murdered more innocents in the 20th Century alone than did all religions in the first 20 centuries put together.
Even atheism, as a teaching, is much like religion in that it is a civilizing tool. While I'm unaware of any fundamentals of atheism that approach the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule, in terms of teaching adherents to treat others well regardless of their genetic, cultural, or intellectual ancestry, the mere act of trying to convince someone else that they are foolish to believe in one God or many gods is, itself, an act of faith, hence a sort of religion.
(That is, it's an act of faith that there's actually another "mind" being preached to, that the other "mind" might convert to atheism in this case, and that such a conversion would be a thing worth pursuing, despite no objective evidence whatsoever that any of these things are true. And by "objective evidence" I mean the sort of evidence atheists themselves would accept if it supported the belief in the existence of one God.)
In that sense, I see people who blame religion for violence as just as religious as myself, even though they are trying to differentiate me from them, because they are demonstrating a faith that, somehow, because of their repeating such claims, they're going to make the world a better place in their eyes, by either enlightening me, or by succeeding in getting me punished by others whom their words enlighten. (I'm unimpressed by arguments they might make that they don't really care -- taking time to post, even to speak, is a form of caring for one's fellow man, IMO. After all, in my experience, atheists treat even the preaching, i.e. speaking, of religious beliefs as an affront to their own belief systems -- why else did "Malcontent" post here, after all, except in response to mere opinion?)
So, while certain religions (e.g. strains of atheism, collectivism) try to distance themselves from other religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) by calling them "religious", preaching hatred and ridicule of their adherents in an "us vs. them", divisive fashion, and so on, they're all part of the overall tapestry called "civilization".
True, most religions, strictly speaking, "divide" people. That's necessary for any body of teaching to survive, I believe; else, how are the teachers of the body to be chosen out of the new generation? Without any distinction made between those who can teach the body of teaching well and those who can't, the body itself would surely die, especially in the presence of difficulties challenging the population to be educated.
But not all religions, by any means, teach the next thing implied by the poster, that "us" are good and "them" are bad, to be attacked, etc. Many Christian strains do not teach that, for example -- after all, Christ Jesus' own teachings are pretty clear on how to deal with one's "enemy", which is the most extreme way to describe someone who disagrees with one's views, and it doesn't involve attacking them in the least.
In that sense, while it might be the case that a true, pure Christian wouldn't commit violence to defend himself or anyone else, it isn't hard to see why many who value the teachings of Christianity -- or Islam, Judaism, etc. -- and who might follow them imperfectly, might choose to commit violence, even extreme violence, to defend those belief systems, or, more specifically, their vessels -- citizens and the societies they form that are better examples of those idealized ways of life than are those who would wipe them out.