Just because something is changing from the way you found it doesn't mean it is worse.
It does, when you've got six billion people adapted to "the way you found it". In very fragile civilization, it does not take too big of a push for the whole shebang to come crashing down.
Bend nature to our will? Sure, why not, just warm up the climate control systems and fire away... what do you mean we don't have climate control systems? Oh well, looks like we're going to "get used to it" in old fashioned way, droughts, famine, disease and huge areas going uninhabitable, which will lead to wars that make ww2 look like a childs play, hopefully the few survivors find a place with enough of biosphere left that it doesn't require high tech to live, because they probably won't have any high tech anymore.
Hey, but who cares, why should we care if our children will be the last generation of humans on this ball of dirt, we're not there any more to witness the doom, eh.
I would think that proximity to a large planet would make any moon less likely to meteorite impact, since meteors and comets would be more attracted to the planet's gravity instead of the moon's.
Well, the problem is that planet's gravity indeed does attract lots of junk, however the moon is in the same gravity well rather near to the planet, so some of them are bound to hit it. Some of the ones that would never have come near it too, if it were not for the big planet...
Some theorisize that Jupiter is what keeps big comets from smashing into Earth
That might be true, but Jupiter is really friggin' far away, if Earth were orbiting Jupiter, it might end up getting hit by more stuff than it is now.
surely you haven't forgotten last year when Debian, GNU and Gentoo all got rooted because of a remote vuln, mmm?
No, I haven't. You seem to have... or more likely, you never even bothered to find out. Why let the facts to spoil good piece of shit-talk. Debian vuln was a local. GNU vuln was a local. Gentoo vuln was a local.
Ooh! Three boxes locally hacked, by skillfull inviduals after lots of work. Clearly the same as thousands of machines falling prey to simple automated worms. And no, the worm in question didn't require user interaction.
And you'd be stupid to let an ATM be connected to the 'net, regardless of what OS you were using.
They weren't connected to net. Someone plugged an infected laptop into intra. Besides, an ATM SHOULD NOT BE RUNNING general-purpose OS, not even OpenBSD or whatever they claim is most secure.
Also, there's no accounting for the construction of the pyramids with modern man's intelligence/knowledge, so there must've been smart humans at that time as well.
WTF? Pyramids were built no more than 5000 years ago, and the people who did were definitely the same as we still are and just as smart. Now, if you can find me a pyramid built by non-homo sapiens sapiens hominid, that's certaily big news...
It also sounds nuts to me that they'd claim this is an entirely different species.
And what reasons you have to believe it isn't? Are you a morphologist? Anthropologist? Any kind of experience with studying remains (preferably human) at all? Seen the skull, have you (no, the picture on article doesn't count)? Ah. Thought so.
It seems to me that it's just as much a seperate species as blacks are a different species than whites, or what have you. They're still fundamentally human, and can co-populate with other humans. Granted, there's no direct evidence that this was possible, but it seems possible. There are plenty of 4-foot-tall humans today.
They're human, that's what genus Homo is all about, but they're definitely entirely different species as well. What seems to you, or me, or anyone that isn't a fricking skull expert doesn't mean a thing, because we don't know a crap about it. Show skulls of black, white, a pygmy, and one from 4-foot-tall human to boot to someone who knows what they're doing, and (s)he'll instantly regognize them all to be modern humans, show this and he'll say it isn't. WHO ARE YOU TO ARGUE THAT HE'S WRONG, AND YOU'RE RIGHT? Especially considering you say it yourself: no evidence, not just direct but you don't have any evidence whatsoever.
You, sir, are the quack here. You're the whole fricking definition of a quack, you make up something, and then you blame the people who actually have evidence, considerable amount of them, to be quacks based on... nothing.
My question is, howso? They're smaller than ours??? From my own observation of the pic in the story, the single skull that was found looked very human, only smaller.
That's probably the reason you're not an anthoropologist. I can't make all that much much difference between most human remains either, but that doesn't mean they're all the same. People who've dedicated their lives on the subject obviously have much more experience on it, not to mention, it's just a pic, rather small one at that, you haven't held the darn skull.
If that's not enough, they were also there tens of thousands of years earlier than any modern human, if there were H. Sapiens on indonesia 100k years ago (which would probably be a major find on it's own), why aren't there any remains of THEM?
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand quaternary, those who don't, those that think it's binary or ternary, and then there's are the ones who insist on making stupid jokes about numeric systems.
A cure for what? Human curiosity? Why on Earth would anyone want to be "cured" from that, and become something less instead. It's one of the few good qualities that have brought us so far despite our lacking on other important areas...
On computer geeks, need to know how things work naturally becomes directed towards computers...
so from the point of view of the brain, it's an aeroplane. and it flies around in it's self contained reality.
It's too small to have a "point of view" or anything like that, but if it weren't... wouldn't you want to be an aeroplane? Or even better, a spacecraft? 100ft killer robot? In actual reality, preferably, and not a computer game.
Maybe not, certainly not something everyone would do, but many people would gladly replace their bodies for mechanical ones if it were possible and safe... even more so if it were possible to hook up the original body to life support or freeze it and get back if you ever wanted to.
There you go asserting things again to which you have no proof.
So you think a insects are conscious? Fruit flyes have got few hundred thousand neurons in their brains, tens of times more than this... better not swat those pesky mosquitoes any more, after all, they're clearly conscious...
Where is your dividing line?
Dunno, but I can tell that it's not at or below insect level.
This collection of neurons is orders of magnitude too small to become in any way self-aware (unless you think insects for example are sentient, drosophila has got ten times more neurons in it's brain than this)
so that it won't have to fly a fucking plane 24/7
However, even if we were talking about something equal to the human brain, and all the in/outputs would be wired to correct places, consider: It doesn't have any other sensory inputs, it's not flying a fucking plane 24/7 any more than you're "controlling your body 24/7". It IS the fucking plane... which, I for one, find in a strange way cool, many people would love to implant their brains in a machine body, if there would be risk free way to do so.
instead get thrown into the trash were it can adapt and take over the world?
It's not a self-sufficient organism, but part of enormously complex animal, those brain cells can not live outside of a nutrient solution without rest of the rat body feeding and protecting 'em. It can't adapt any more than your hand will become invidual little animal with five "legs" if you cut it off and throw it into trash.
The other question is slightly more serious; Does anyone else wonder how long it's going to be before we have "bio neural networks" embedded in everything from our cellphones to doing fuzzy logic in our washing machines?
Little fuzzy logic in lost of things sure couldn't hurt, but... how would you keep it alive there either, cellphone that needs to "eat", be kept in a right temperature and all other nasty requirements those picky animal cells have doesn't sound very nice.
The./ story, as well as the link (Portable Virtual Privacy Machine), say that it's 100% GPL, but at least the Mozilla parts (Firefox and Thunderbird) are under the Netscape Public License.
Huh? NPL is Gone. Dead. Buried. Mozilla has been (mostly, and the exceptions should be BSD etc. GPL-compatible) LGPL/GPL/MPL tri-licensed for quite a while now, the new licensing policy is over three years old.
At what point does it cease to be a Camera Phone, and become a Phone Camera?
When it has a real lens. And optical zoom. In other words, probably never, they're just too expensive and too big to make it into something like a cell phone.
5 megapixels seems like a good place to start. You could definitely use this as your "main" digital camera, and occasionally use the phone functionality, as needed.
Sure, whatever, as long as you don't mind that you're looking at five million pixels of blurry plastic lens, instead of what you were trying to take a photo of... bigger does not equal better, all the other components must be up to it, too.
For people like me who rarely use a cell phone, and don't really want one, a Phone Camera might be the ideal solution!
Sounds like camera would be the ideal solution, after all, you don't really want the phone...
When I copied directly from the drive, the speeds were definately USB2.0 (~.5mb/sec)
Uh? That is exactly the slow/confusing speed being complained about. 0.5M/s is definitely _NOT_ USB 2.0, which has full speed of 480Mbps == 60MB/s, 120 times faster than the speed you're getting... of course you pretty much need 7200rpm 3½ " hdd to get that kind of speeds anyway, no matter the bus, but even with flash, it should be much faster than half a meg per second.
No, it's not. GP is correct, and has several references... you, on the other hand, have one folk lore, and a scifi book as sources. Well, gee...
A grain of it in your bloodstream will eventually kill you by ionizing your tissues to the point where you die.
You seem unable to grasp the sheer amount of tissue in your body, and the fact that it is self-healing and reproducing, damaged cells either fix themselves or self-destruct and get replaced. Then there's the problem of getting stuff in your bloodstream in the first place... inhaling it won't work, it'll sit in the lungs, eating it won't work, only miniscule amounts of it will be absorbed... hmm, looks like we're out of luck.
Of course, if you're talking literally, a "grain" as in grain sized amount of plutonium, yup, it will kill you. But that's a lot, several grams, similar clump of pretty much anything in your bloodstream has a good change of killing you, similar amount of many common substances not generally though of as especially toxic will kill you, lot faster than plutonium too.
It's called radiation poisoning.
Condition called radiation poisoning is when you get enough radiation to damage significant part of your body that it can't heal, or heals very slowly. Small amount of plutonium emitting an alpha particle every now and then is not capable of doing that.
It MAY end up ionizing a cell in just right way to turn it cancerous, and sometimes immune system MIGHT not notice it before it has grown too big to handle. But that's it, increased change of getting cancer. No radiation sickness, and no body-glows-in-the-dark-and-must-be-sealed-in-lead- coffin effect either.
Every other radioactive substance does the same of course, and they're everywhere. You're bound to have some C-14, K-40 and other nasty NU-CU-LAR things circling in your blood as we speak. You're probably inhaling at least some amount of natural radon as we speak, and other nuclear isotopes released to air by your friendly neighbourhood coal plant. Every time you touch the goddamn ground you're possibly exposed to Radium, Uranium and Thorium too. Scary, ain't it?
Pounds of plutonium, rendered into a powdered form and allowed to disperse would render large parts of the earth downwind dangerous to live near for centuries.
Oh crap! Better pack my bags and move to another planet. So should you, since this place is dangerous to live for centuries. NEWSFLASH: about 11 _thousand_ pounds of plutonium has been released to atmosphere in bomb tests.
My question is: How easy is it to wrap your code in a library/module and call it your own so you can call it your way?
For python code: insanely easy, modules and packages are just files and directories, and your own libraries snap into the place just like they were part of the stdlib.
For C/C++: still rather easy, even if you do it manually, with pyrex or swig, it's even better. The best part is, you call C extension just like you a python module, there's no difference in whatsoever, programmer using the library doesn't even need to know it's C.
Perl modules? Dunno, looks like it's possible from the other comments, but doesn't integrate nearly as nicely as C and python libraries.
from sys import stdin print "Who are you?" name = stdin.readline().strip() print "I'm glad to meet you, %s." % name
Overly verbose and complicated, you can write this in two lines and save an import as well as the need to know stdin is a file object to boot. And string formatter operator is not instantly clear, especially to a person who hasn't used printf(), not everyone has C background.
How about
name = raw_input("Who are you? ") print "I'm glad to meet you, " + name
there are more important considerations where they're still very far apart (and rightly so). I'm thinking particularly here of areas such as methodology, security, portability, and especially maintainability.
You are indeed correct. They are very far apart, since "scripting" languages, whatever they may be, have already long surpassed "traditional" ones in (most of those) areas <g>.
Of course all the ranting on either side is of no use unless you define a "scripting language" is, since they're as much different from each other than from the rest.. Java one because it's bytecode interpreted? If so, it's just as static as C, and strongly typed to boot. What comes to security... if you somehow screw up, due to dynamic typing or anything else, you'll usually get an exception, not potentially exploitable flaw you would in C. Does Perl engourage clarity? Perhaps not, but Python most certainly does, again much more so than C.
realize that they're not going to beat KDE on usability for newbies.
Oh really? That's curious, considering they've already beat KDE on usability for newbies, long ago. KDE doesn't particularly shine on that front with it's "hey! let's have option for every feature imaginable, and then add couple for unimagible ones" scheme. KDE is nigh unusable even for power users, and totally uncomprehensible for newbies.
I don't particularly like the "tv tax" (we have it here in Finland too), but I can, somewhat, understand the reasoning behind it when it comes to old everyone-can-receive analog broadcasts.
Applying it to the Internet because the state tv companies _CHOSE_ to give away free 'net streams however does not have any excuses. It's trivially simple to implement a system whereas only people who have paid the fee can access those online shows. Looks like a calculated move to milk more money from people who DO NOT WATCH the fee sponsored channels to me, instead of trying to get "freeloaders" to pay.
It would also trivially simple to do the same for digital tv, just encrypt it and give cards to people who pay. These taxes for owning something should be going away now that they can easily control whether or not you can watch the channels in question with that something, but instead they are being expanded...
Slashdot Mirror
Just because something is changing from the way you found it doesn't mean it is worse.
It does, when you've got six billion people adapted to "the way you found it". In very fragile civilization, it does not take too big of a push for the whole shebang to come crashing down.
Bend nature to our will? Sure, why not, just warm up the climate control systems and fire away... what do you mean we don't have climate control systems? Oh well, looks like we're going to "get used to it" in old fashioned way, droughts, famine, disease and huge areas going uninhabitable, which will lead to wars that make ww2 look like a childs play, hopefully the few survivors find a place with enough of biosphere left that it doesn't require high tech to live, because they probably won't have any high tech anymore.
Hey, but who cares, why should we care if our children will be the last generation of humans on this ball of dirt, we're not there any more to witness the doom, eh.
I would think that proximity to a large planet would make any moon less likely to meteorite impact, since meteors and comets would be more attracted to the planet's gravity instead of the moon's.
Well, the problem is that planet's gravity indeed does attract lots of junk, however the moon is in the same gravity well rather near to the planet, so some of them are bound to hit it. Some of the ones that would never have come near it too, if it were not for the big planet...
Some theorisize that Jupiter is what keeps big comets from smashing into Earth
That might be true, but Jupiter is really friggin' far away, if Earth were orbiting Jupiter, it might end up getting hit by more stuff than it is now.
surely you haven't forgotten last year when Debian, GNU and Gentoo all got rooted because of a remote vuln, mmm?
No, I haven't. You seem to have... or more likely, you never even bothered to find out. Why let the facts to spoil good piece of shit-talk.
Debian vuln was a local.
GNU vuln was a local.
Gentoo vuln was a local.
Ooh! Three boxes locally hacked, by skillfull inviduals after lots of work. Clearly the same as thousands of machines falling prey to simple automated worms. And no, the worm in question didn't require user interaction.
And you'd be stupid to let an ATM be connected to the 'net, regardless of what OS you were using.
They weren't connected to net. Someone plugged an infected laptop into intra. Besides, an ATM SHOULD NOT BE RUNNING general-purpose OS, not even OpenBSD or whatever they claim is most secure.
First, this would be the first case of modern humans having even psuedo-recorded contact with another intelligent species.
How so? Modern humans in Europe overlap with Neanderthals as well.
Also, there's no accounting for the construction of the pyramids with modern man's intelligence/knowledge, so there must've been smart humans at that time as well.
... nothing.
WTF? Pyramids were built no more than 5000 years ago, and the people who did were definitely the same as we still are and just as smart. Now, if you can find me a pyramid built by non-homo sapiens sapiens hominid, that's certaily big news...
It also sounds nuts to me that they'd claim this is an entirely different species.
And what reasons you have to believe it isn't? Are you a morphologist? Anthropologist? Any kind of experience with studying remains (preferably human) at all? Seen the skull, have you (no, the picture on article doesn't count)? Ah. Thought so.
It seems to me that it's just as much a seperate species as blacks are a different species than whites, or what have you. They're still fundamentally human, and can co-populate with other humans. Granted, there's no direct evidence that this was possible, but it seems possible. There are plenty of 4-foot-tall humans today.
They're human, that's what genus Homo is all about, but they're definitely entirely different species as well. What seems to you, or me, or anyone that isn't a fricking skull expert doesn't mean a thing, because we don't know a crap about it. Show skulls of black, white, a pygmy, and one from 4-foot-tall human to boot to someone who knows what they're doing, and (s)he'll instantly regognize them all to be modern humans, show this and he'll say it isn't. WHO ARE YOU TO ARGUE THAT HE'S WRONG, AND YOU'RE RIGHT? Especially considering you say it yourself: no evidence, not just direct but you don't have any evidence whatsoever.
You, sir, are the quack here. You're the whole fricking definition of a quack, you make up something, and then you blame the people who actually have evidence, considerable amount of them, to be quacks based on
My question is, howso? They're smaller than ours??? From my own observation of the pic in the story, the single skull that was found looked very human, only smaller.
That's probably the reason you're not an anthoropologist. I can't make all that much much difference between most human remains either, but that doesn't mean they're all the same. People who've dedicated their lives on the subject obviously have much more experience on it, not to mention, it's just a pic, rather small one at that, you haven't held the darn skull.
If that's not enough, they were also there tens of thousands of years earlier than any modern human, if there were H. Sapiens on indonesia 100k years ago (which would probably be a major find on it's own), why aren't there any remains of THEM?
Why not just GE the kittens to be sterile in the first place?
Because then they'd have to splice or clone each kitten, and it'd be goddamn expensive (to them, looks like it already is for the buyers..)?
Much cheaper to just let nature take care of creating more cats, and then render them sterile.
How about this instead:
There are 10 kinds of people in the world:
Those who understand quaternary, those who don't, those that think it's binary or ternary, and then there's are the ones who insist on making stupid jokes about numeric systems.
Do you know if there's a cure for this?
A cure for what? Human curiosity? Why on Earth would anyone want to be "cured" from that, and become something less instead. It's one of the few good qualities that have brought us so far despite our lacking on other important areas...
On computer geeks, need to know how things work naturally becomes directed towards computers...
so from the point of view of the brain, it's an aeroplane. and it flies around in it's self contained reality.
It's too small to have a "point of view" or anything like that, but if it weren't... wouldn't you want to be an aeroplane? Or even better, a spacecraft? 100ft killer robot? In actual reality, preferably, and not a computer game.
Maybe not, certainly not something everyone would do, but many people would gladly replace their bodies for mechanical ones if it were possible and safe... even more so if it were possible to hook up the original body to life support or freeze it and get back if you ever wanted to.
There you go asserting things again to which you have no proof.
So you think a insects are conscious? Fruit flyes have got few hundred thousand neurons in their brains, tens of times more than this... better not swat those pesky mosquitoes any more, after all, they're clearly conscious...
Where is your dividing line?
Dunno, but I can tell that it's not at or below insect level.
What happends when the "brain" becomes sentient
This collection of neurons is orders of magnitude too small to become in any way self-aware (unless you think insects for example are sentient, drosophila has got ten times more neurons in it's brain than this)
so that it won't have to fly a fucking plane 24/7
However, even if we were talking about something equal to the human brain, and all the in/outputs would be wired to correct places, consider: It doesn't have any other sensory inputs, it's not flying a fucking plane 24/7 any more than you're "controlling your body 24/7". It IS the fucking plane... which, I for one, find in a strange way cool, many people would love to implant their brains in a machine body, if there would be risk free way to do so.
instead get thrown into the trash were it can adapt and take over the world?
It's not a self-sufficient organism, but part of enormously complex animal, those brain cells can not live outside of a nutrient solution without rest of the rat body feeding and protecting 'em. It can't adapt any more than your hand will become invidual little animal with five "legs" if you cut it off and throw it into trash.
The other question is slightly more serious; Does anyone else wonder how long it's going to be before we have "bio neural networks" embedded in everything from our cellphones to doing fuzzy logic in our washing machines?
Little fuzzy logic in lost of things sure couldn't hurt, but... how would you keep it alive there either, cellphone that needs to "eat", be kept in a right temperature and all other nasty requirements those picky animal cells have doesn't sound very nice.
Thanks for pointing out the same thing as the previous post.
The previous post whas not there when I clicked "reply".
And besides, it was wrong too, since Mozilla is not just MPL, but GPL and LGPL too, whichever fits you.
Anyway, my point was that the thing claims to have 100% GPL'ed software, but not everything on it is GPL'ed.
Except that you chose to drive that point with an example that is in fact GPL'd, so shouldn't you find another one before the point will stand?
Sure, it might, but I for one don't care enough to dl the thing and see what it has eaten.
The ./ story, as well as the link (Portable Virtual Privacy Machine), say that it's 100% GPL, but at least the Mozilla parts (Firefox and Thunderbird) are under the Netscape Public License.
Huh? NPL is Gone. Dead. Buried. Mozilla has been (mostly, and the exceptions should be BSD etc. GPL-compatible) LGPL/GPL/MPL tri-licensed for quite a while now, the new licensing policy is over three years old.
At what point does it cease to be a Camera Phone, and become a Phone Camera?
When it has a real lens. And optical zoom. In other words, probably never, they're just too expensive and too big to make it into something like a cell phone.
5 megapixels seems like a good place to start. You could definitely use this as your "main" digital camera, and occasionally use the phone functionality, as needed.
Sure, whatever, as long as you don't mind that you're looking at five million pixels of blurry plastic lens, instead of what you were trying to take a photo of... bigger does not equal better, all the other components must be up to it, too.
For people like me who rarely use a cell phone, and don't really want one, a Phone Camera might be the ideal solution!
Sounds like camera would be the ideal solution, after all, you don't really want the phone...
When I copied directly from the drive, the speeds were definately USB2.0 (~.5mb/sec)
Uh? That is exactly the slow/confusing speed being complained about. 0.5M/s is definitely _NOT_ USB 2.0, which has full speed of 480Mbps == 60MB/s, 120 times faster than the speed you're getting... of course you pretty much need 7200rpm 3½ " hdd to get that kind of speeds anyway, no matter the bus, but even with flash, it should be much faster than half a meg per second.
Plutonium is extremely toxic.
- coffin effect either.
No, it's not. GP is correct, and has several references... you, on the other hand, have one folk lore, and a scifi book as sources. Well, gee...
A grain of it in your bloodstream will eventually kill you by ionizing your tissues to the point where you die.
You seem unable to grasp the sheer amount of tissue in your body, and the fact that it is self-healing and reproducing, damaged cells either fix themselves or self-destruct and get replaced. Then there's the problem of getting stuff in your bloodstream in the first place... inhaling it won't work, it'll sit in the lungs, eating it won't work, only miniscule amounts of it will be absorbed... hmm, looks like we're out of luck.
Of course, if you're talking literally, a "grain" as in grain sized amount of plutonium, yup, it will kill you. But that's a lot, several grams, similar clump of pretty much anything in your bloodstream has a good change of killing you, similar amount of many common substances not generally though of as especially toxic will kill you, lot faster than plutonium too.
It's called radiation poisoning.
Condition called radiation poisoning is when you get enough radiation to damage significant part of your body that it can't heal, or heals very slowly. Small amount of plutonium emitting an alpha particle every now and then is not capable of doing that.
It MAY end up ionizing a cell in just right way to turn it cancerous, and sometimes immune system MIGHT not notice it before it has grown too big to handle. But that's it, increased change of getting cancer. No radiation sickness, and no body-glows-in-the-dark-and-must-be-sealed-in-lead
Every other radioactive substance does the same of course, and they're everywhere. You're bound to have some C-14, K-40 and other nasty NU-CU-LAR things circling in your blood as we speak. You're probably inhaling at least some amount of natural radon as we speak, and other nuclear isotopes released to air by your friendly neighbourhood coal plant. Every time you touch the goddamn ground you're possibly exposed to Radium, Uranium and Thorium too. Scary, ain't it?
Pounds of plutonium, rendered into a powdered form and allowed to disperse would render large parts of the earth downwind dangerous to live near for centuries.
Oh crap! Better pack my bags and move to another planet. So should you, since this place is dangerous to live for centuries. NEWSFLASH: about 11 _thousand_ pounds of plutonium has been released to atmosphere in bomb tests.
Since when is C the same as CO2?
Since all kinds of abundant lifeforms noticed that they can take dead C and O and convert it to CO2 while getting nice amount of energy out of it.
Unbound carbon on surface WILL become CO2 rather fast.
My question is: How easy is it to wrap your code in a library/module and call it your own so you can call it your way?
For python code: insanely easy, modules and packages are just files and directories, and your own libraries snap into the place just like they were part of the stdlib.
For C/C++: still rather easy, even if you do it manually, with pyrex or swig, it's even better. The best part is, you call C extension just like you a python module, there's no difference in whatsoever, programmer using the library doesn't even need to know it's C.
Perl modules? Dunno, looks like it's possible from the other comments, but doesn't integrate nearly as nicely as C and python libraries.
print "Who are you?"
name = stdin.readline().strip()
print "I'm glad to meet you, %s." % name
Overly verbose and complicated, you can write this in two lines and save an import as well as the need to know stdin is a file object to boot. And string formatter operator is not instantly clear, especially to a person who hasn't used printf(), not everyone has C background.
How about
there are more important considerations where they're still very far apart (and rightly so). I'm thinking particularly here of areas such as methodology, security, portability, and especially maintainability.
You are indeed correct. They are very far apart, since "scripting" languages, whatever they may be, have already long surpassed "traditional" ones in (most of those) areas <g>.
Of course all the ranting on either side is of no use unless you define a "scripting language" is, since they're as much different from each other than from the rest.. Java one because it's bytecode interpreted? If so, it's just as static as C, and strongly typed to boot. What comes to security... if you somehow screw up, due to dynamic typing or anything else, you'll usually get an exception, not potentially exploitable flaw you would in C. Does Perl engourage clarity? Perhaps not, but Python most certainly does, again much more so than C.
realize that they're not going to beat KDE on usability for newbies.
Oh really? That's curious, considering they've already beat KDE on usability for newbies, long ago. KDE doesn't particularly shine on that front with it's "hey! let's have option for every feature imaginable, and then add couple for unimagible ones" scheme. KDE is nigh unusable even for power users, and totally uncomprehensible for newbies.
That's what it is.
I don't particularly like the "tv tax" (we have it here in Finland too), but I can, somewhat, understand the reasoning behind it when it comes to old everyone-can-receive analog broadcasts.
Applying it to the Internet because the state tv companies _CHOSE_ to give away free 'net streams however does not have any excuses. It's trivially simple to implement a system whereas only people who have paid the fee can access those online shows. Looks like a calculated move to milk more money from people who DO NOT WATCH the fee sponsored channels to me, instead of trying to get "freeloaders" to pay.
It would also trivially simple to do the same for digital tv, just encrypt it and give cards to people who pay. These taxes for owning something should be going away now that they can easily control whether or not you can watch the channels in question with that something, but instead they are being expanded...
Unless, of course, you're watching ARD (see "Sendungen" on the left) live streams.
Then make those live streams only available to the folks who have paid their TV tax.
Anything else is nothing short of insane.
That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
....
If there was no Java, then just about every IP-based KVM out there would use unique $LANGUAGE-based client rather than using