The IDF uses F-16's, Apaches, etc. to attack legitimate military targets. That's not terrorism. They do a respectable job of minimizing civilian casualties. There were 13,000 Palestinian civilians in Jenin -- the IDF kept 12,977 of those civilians safe. That's not so bad, is it? We'd all prefer that they'd kept ALL of them safe, but international law recognizes that all you can do is try your damnedest. The terrorists resident in Jenin were a legitimate military target, by any objective standards you care to name. Israel had a legitimate right to go in there.
That's just one example; the others are all in the same vein: Israel uses those military weapons against military targets. Their goal is to kill combatants. Active members of Islamic Jihad, Izzedine al Qassam, the PFLP, etc., are (at best) combatants. They're actively, directly, and voluntarily engaged in hostilities. They kill people. It's okay to shoot back at them. Of course, they're not "combatants" in the honorable sense in which IDF soldiers are combatants, because the Islamic "militants" focus primarily on killing civilians -- their intent is to kill people who are not combatants. That's a war crime. That's terrorism.
The Palestinian "militants" attempt to maximize civilian casualties. They perpetrate massacres as a matter of deliberate policy. This has been the policy of the PLO since its foundation in 1964 (not to mention Arab massacres of Jews in 1920, 1929, and so on).
Speaking of economic security, there was plenty of that in the PA for years. The terrorism continued throughout the years of the Oslo Accords: Something like 350 Israelis were killed by Palestinian terrorism between 1993 and the outbreak of violence in late 2000. That's quite a few, and the PA economy was going great guns back then (in fact, Palestinian terrorism has generally correlated positively with concessions made by Israel; they initiated the current violence after Israel's unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon, and immediately after Barak offered unprecedented concessions at Camp David in 2000. It seems counterintuitive, but think about it: The more territory Arafat & Co. control, the more extensive their bomb factories and training facilities can be, the more openly they can operate and recruit, etc.). Well, anyhow: Try to imagine how France would react if Germans were killing 50 Frenchmen every year, or how England would react if, say, Catholics in Northern Ireland were... oh, wait... They'd call it "terrorism" and react appropriately, wouldn't they? I mean, let's be serious here!
The IDF is not in the business of terrorism. The Islamic "militants" over there are in precisely that business. You suggest that there is some kind of moral equivalence between the two, but you are mistaken. If Arafat had the kind of resources the IDF has, tens of thousands of Israeli civilians would have been killed since 2000. If Israel wanted to kill Palestinian citizens, they have the means to kill them in droves -- but they have not chosen to do so.
And don't tell me that Lebanese Maronite Christians are helpless automatons, incapable of controlling their own trigger-fingers.
The Palestinian people surely do deserve self-determination, hell yeah -- and so did the people of Japan in 1945. But they didn't get it until they chilled out a bit and learned to live in peace with their neighbors. The "militants" in the PA claim loudly and often that they won't stop killing people if Israel withdraws from Gaza and the West Bank. Instead, they will stop killing Jews when they can't find any more Jews to kill. Make no mistake, their ideology is explicitly racist and rejects any and all political solutions. These people very closely resemble the Ku Klux Klan in the USA (but much more enthusiastic, of course). You can be on the losing side and still be a swine. You can spout national liberation rhetoric and still be a swine.
Wow, that's a pretty good strategy you guys got there: Surrender and become a client/dependency of a dictatorship. There's a lot of future in that! Let's not forget that "older and wiser" statesman Vidkun Quisling, either.
Back when China was allegedly laughing at your efforts, they weren't laughing very hard. Why not? Because they had been colonized, humiliated, brutalizeed, and robbed blind by European powers. How did that happen? I'll tell you: They had that precious attitude that Europe has now. But they learned their less. Try invading China now and see what you get. They're on the road to recovery, God bless 'em.
"Violence doesn't solve anything", you say? Violence "solved" Hitler pretty thoroughly, as I recall. It also solved the massacres in Serbia. Ask a few surviving Balkan Muslims whether they'd prefer to have been killed, or to have a few Serbs bombed into the stone age. I bet you they're pretty satisfied to be alive and to have Milosevic's evil bastards dead instead.
There are two solutions to a war: Winning, and losing. Losing is a shitty option, and winning requires violence. That's life. It's not "idealism". It's reality. You don't always get to choose not to be in a war. Kuwait didn't get to choose not to be in a war with Iraq. Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France didn't get to choose not to be in a war with Germany.
"Today's enemy is a friend tomorrow?" Let's focus real hard and remember the peace that France and England dictated at the end of WWI -- and the peace the USA dictated at the end of WWII. Your punitive madness led to another war. Our generous terms made permanent friends and allies out of our old enemies. Don't try to teach Grandpa to chew cheese, Junior.
Don't get me wrong, it's great to see Linux able to take advantage of AltiVec. You can deride graphics as "fluff", but the fact is it's a very important area for free software to be competing in. I shouldn't have sounded like I was downplaying the importance of that.
However: How many PowerPC boxes are running Linux, and how many are running OS X? And which is a more high-profile market?
Linux, furthermore, is a "market" that GCC already owns. I know, I know, you can retarget from wherever, but making GCC a viable, and in some senses technically superior, choice for OS X development can only be a good thing. Can you compile Carbon apps w/ GCC? I have no idea, but if not, in eight months you will.
The real worth here lies in the fact that MacOS X is, let's not forget, essentially a UN*X platform. If RH play their cards right on this one, we should start seeing GNU tools perceived as a technical leader where in the past they've been perceived as something more like a reliable least common denominator.
Free software has to grow. It still needs to prove itself to make that happen. It's good to see RH concentrating on something genuinely forward-looking.
Um, yeah, whatever. The regime now in power in Iraq has a long history of a) launching wars of conquest against its neighbors in cases where it was not threatened in any way at all; b) using chemical weapons against its own citizens (hello?!) c) devoting considerable effort to expanding its chemical and biological arsenals and developing a nuclear arsenal as well.
Them's called "facts", son. The European approach is to hide one's head in the sand until it's too late, and then wring one's hands and whimper about "international law". The US approach is to kill the problem while it's small. The US approach saves lives. The European approach cares nothing for lives. All Europe cares about is short-term convenience.
The European mentality killed tens of thousands of civilians in the Balkans in the past decade, and millions -- literally millions -- of civilians during the second world war. The United States cleaned up their mess in both cases, at great cost to ourselves. What thanks do we get? No thanks at all, as it turns out. The Europeans aren't just helpless children; they're insolent and ungrateful as well.
Letting Europeans run around loose with their own countries is lunacy. They can't handle the responsibility.
The surrendering chatter-monkeys of Europe have much to teach us about how to lose wars, lose international prestige, and turn first-world powers into sagging, helpless welfare states.
They insist that we must let them teach us these valuable skills!
Fuck that. Europe just wants to drag us down the same rathole of poverty, decadence, and irrelevancy they live in. Fuck that.
Sun Tzu said that "the perfection of war lies in sapping your opponent's will to fight", didn't he? Well, he lived a long time ago. Back then, if you wanted a meal, you had to prepare it. Nowadays, it's all done for you: Just pop some frozen crap in the microwave. Likewise, back then if you wanted a spineless, helpless opponent, you had to sap his will yourself. These days, you just attack Europe. They come pre-de-backboned for your conquering pleasure. They couldn't even stand up to Serbia.
"The greatest danger to good computer science education today is excessive relevance" -- Dennis M. Ritchie
I'm quoting from memory so I probably got it slightly wrong, but that's the gist of what he said. And he's right. Tools come and go. Vendors come and go. If you understand what you're doing, you're a professional. If you don't understand what you're doing, you're a trained monkey.
No, it's humorless morons like you who have fucked Slashdot up. The flooders are humorless morons. You're probably a fucking flooder yourself. Fuck off.
Oh yeah, and if you're too fucking stupid to spell, you're too fucking stupid to post. Okay, brainless? Slashdot is bad enough already without cretins like you making it worse.
someone who doesn't, apparently, understand the concepts of irony or of having a sense of humor.
Uh, yeah, hence the nick (hence also the bit about sendmail and the master race). The Pot says he wants to talk to you as soon as you're free.
Furthermore, if Katz and Raymond are involved in this thing, I'm willing to bet you can bid "irony" and "sense of humor" a fond farewell. Those guys don't treat "geek pride" as an ironic or humorous issue. As far as I can tell from their writings, they're quite serious.
when it comes from someone still subscribing to nonsense like "geek == unable to get laid", I think we can safely ignore it.
Okay, I'll smiley it next time. Happy?
"Geek Pride Festival" is an inherently funnier name than "A Big Party For The Type Of People Commonly Known As 'Geeks' Although We Stress That It Is Also OK Not To Be A Geek And In Fact We Don't Even Like To Admit We Are Geeks In Case Someone Thinks We're Bragging," which is what Venomous seems to think we should be calling it.
That's either a lumbering attempt at a "joke", or else a lumbering attempt at getting away with a false opposition fallacy, right? Just curious.
is that gays asserted "gay pride" at a time when they were defined as criminals just for living their lives
DeCSS, Napster, VCDs, cphack, DDoS, software patents..need I go on?
No, not really. The point, such as it is, has been made, and my point is weaker than it looked when I wrote it. Nevertheless, you can be a "geek" without mirroring DeCSS or cphack. I really don't see an exact analogy there, sorry.
And arguably a true geek would spend all night figuring them out.
When we start splitting hairs about who's a "geek" and who's not, that's where I draw the line. This is precisely what's annoying me about the whole thing.
The difference between "geek pride" and for example "gay pride" is that gays asserted "gay pride" at a time when they were defined as criminals just for living their lives; it took some balls to get out in the streets about it. "Geeks" invented "geek pride" after we got acceptance and stock options. BFD.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with fun. If it were billed as Geek Drinking Day I'd be there in a minute. But Raymond and Katz are involved and you know damn well they're not going to get up, say "get drunk, have fun" and then put down the mike.
"Geek Pride" my ass. What a ridiculous crock of shit. Thousands of at-least-semi-intelligent young men, most of whom can't get laid, all standing around and telling themselves they're the master race because they know how to configure sendmail.
If geek pride didn't involve inventing bogus excuses to sneer at everybody else, I might be able to take it seriously.
Furthermore, the prospect of meeting Eric "You're Endangering My Tribe" Raymond is about as appealing as a headwound.
Even if I did want to play Professional Geek this weekend, I can't: I've got to be in the office. I've got code to write.
I keep forgetting to put the FSF on my "they need it more than I do" list along with Planned Parenthood and the ASPCA.
Good call.
I'd also like to third (?! -- or twentieth, by now:) the hardware idea. Somebody suggested a European (or hell, just alternate) version of SourceForge, and somebody else was into a community legal fund. Now that is a groovy notion. If there already is one, somebody let me know here and they'll go on the list, too.
Propellers are not circular, and they are balanced. When you think about it that way, suddenly it's not counter-intuitive at all.
(BTW, this isn't quite on the point, look up how they load centrifuges: If they have seven identical things to go in a centrifuge, they put in three things, spaced 120 degrees apart. It's balanced, and you can forget about those three things completely. Then they put in the other four things, 90 degrees apart. They're balanced too, so the whole thing is still balanced. What's cool is they don't have to worry at all about where the four things are relative to the first three: They simply don't care, because the two groups don't affect each other due to the fact that they're balanced among themselvess. If you look at it, it looks wrong as all hell, but it's balanced right and it won't freak out at high speed.)
You should know better. The term "Pro-life" has no other purpose than to prevent rational discussion of the issue, just like "pro-family" (or the the name of the "Defense of the Family Act", which had the sole purpose of outlawing many families and discouraging the formation of others). The nuttier sort of religious people spend their entire lives demonizing everybody in sight. Once they've muddied the waters enough, the sensible people are stuck trying to explain things and clear up the confusion, while the Christians are free to hop up and down shrieking slogans and waving bibles. The slogans cut through the murk, while the sensible explanations don't. Drowing public debate in high drama and Manichean arglebargle always serves the most evil elements in society; see Hitler, Stalin, etc. ad nauseam.
These people don't give a damn about reality or about "solving issues"; they want power, period.
In an ideal world, all the code one uses would use the same string class, and all the old C libraries one links with would be rewritten in C++ and available in source form so you could compile it yourself and not have to worry about name-mangling and whatnot. On earth, we're stuck with legacy code that uses its own string classes, MFC (pray for us poor sinners) which uses their own (broken) string class, and OS API's (and other C libraries) which use char * and various typedefs thereof. We should probably all be using std::string, but I've found it sort of perplexing the few times I've bothered with it. In any case, it came along so late in the game that other string classes had already proliferated and are now immortalized by bassackwards compatibility.
However, all of these string classes have some way to get at their char *'s, and they'll all construct from char *. So char * is a sort of lingua franca or least common denominator that lets us work with all this inconsistent crap and still get code written. It's a bummer, but it's better than nothing.
I think the first thing Stroustrup should've done by way of C++ libraries was write a good solid string class while CFront 0.1 was still wet from the womb, and proselytize it endlessly. Of course, if he had, ten years later we would've ended up with a standard string class inconsistent with the rest of the STL. Oh, well. You can't have everything.
Slashdot Mirror
The IDF uses F-16's, Apaches, etc. to attack legitimate military targets. That's not terrorism. They do a respectable job of minimizing civilian casualties. There were 13,000 Palestinian civilians in Jenin -- the IDF kept 12,977 of those civilians safe. That's not so bad, is it? We'd all prefer that they'd kept ALL of them safe, but international law recognizes that all you can do is try your damnedest. The terrorists resident in Jenin were a legitimate military target, by any objective standards you care to name. Israel had a legitimate right to go in there.
That's just one example; the others are all in the same vein: Israel uses those military weapons against military targets. Their goal is to kill combatants. Active members of Islamic Jihad, Izzedine al Qassam, the PFLP, etc., are (at best) combatants. They're actively, directly, and voluntarily engaged in hostilities. They kill people. It's okay to shoot back at them. Of course, they're not "combatants" in the honorable sense in which IDF soldiers are combatants, because the Islamic "militants" focus primarily on killing civilians -- their intent is to kill people who are not combatants. That's a war crime. That's terrorism.
The Palestinian "militants" attempt to maximize civilian casualties. They perpetrate massacres as a matter of deliberate policy. This has been the policy of the PLO since its foundation in 1964 (not to mention Arab massacres of Jews in 1920, 1929, and so on).
Speaking of economic security, there was plenty of that in the PA for years. The terrorism continued throughout the years of the Oslo Accords: Something like 350 Israelis were killed by Palestinian terrorism between 1993 and the outbreak of violence in late 2000. That's quite a few, and the PA economy was going great guns back then (in fact, Palestinian terrorism has generally correlated positively with concessions made by Israel; they initiated the current violence after Israel's unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon, and immediately after Barak offered unprecedented concessions at Camp David in 2000. It seems counterintuitive, but think about it: The more territory Arafat & Co. control, the more extensive their bomb factories and training facilities can be, the more openly they can operate and recruit, etc.). Well, anyhow: Try to imagine how France would react if Germans were killing 50 Frenchmen every year, or how England would react if, say, Catholics in Northern Ireland were... oh, wait... They'd call it "terrorism" and react appropriately, wouldn't they? I mean, let's be serious here!
The IDF is not in the business of terrorism. The Islamic "militants" over there are in precisely that business. You suggest that there is some kind of moral equivalence between the two, but you are mistaken. If Arafat had the kind of resources the IDF has, tens of thousands of Israeli civilians would have been killed since 2000. If Israel wanted to kill Palestinian citizens, they have the means to kill them in droves -- but they have not chosen to do so.
And don't tell me that Lebanese Maronite Christians are helpless automatons, incapable of controlling their own trigger-fingers.
The Palestinian people surely do deserve self-determination, hell yeah -- and so did the people of Japan in 1945. But they didn't get it until they chilled out a bit and learned to live in peace with their neighbors. The "militants" in the PA claim loudly and often that they won't stop killing people if Israel withdraws from Gaza and the West Bank. Instead, they will stop killing Jews when they can't find any more Jews to kill. Make no mistake, their ideology is explicitly racist and rejects any and all political solutions. These people very closely resemble the Ku Klux Klan in the USA (but much more enthusiastic, of course). You can be on the losing side and still be a swine. You can spout national liberation rhetoric and still be a swine.
Wow, that's a pretty good strategy you guys got there: Surrender and become a client/dependency of a dictatorship. There's a lot of future in that! Let's not forget that "older and wiser" statesman Vidkun Quisling, either.
Back when China was allegedly laughing at your efforts, they weren't laughing very hard. Why not? Because they had been colonized, humiliated, brutalizeed, and robbed blind by European powers. How did that happen? I'll tell you: They had that precious attitude that Europe has now. But they learned their less. Try invading China now and see what you get. They're on the road to recovery, God bless 'em.
"Violence doesn't solve anything", you say? Violence "solved" Hitler pretty thoroughly, as I recall. It also solved the massacres in Serbia. Ask a few surviving Balkan Muslims whether they'd prefer to have been killed, or to have a few Serbs bombed into the stone age. I bet you they're pretty satisfied to be alive and to have Milosevic's evil bastards dead instead.
There are two solutions to a war: Winning, and losing. Losing is a shitty option, and winning requires violence. That's life. It's not "idealism". It's reality. You don't always get to choose not to be in a war. Kuwait didn't get to choose not to be in a war with Iraq. Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France didn't get to choose not to be in a war with Germany.
"Today's enemy is a friend tomorrow?" Let's focus real hard and remember the peace that France and England dictated at the end of WWI -- and the peace the USA dictated at the end of WWII. Your punitive madness led to another war. Our generous terms made permanent friends and allies out of our old enemies. Don't try to teach Grandpa to chew cheese, Junior.
Don't get me wrong, it's great to see Linux able to take advantage of AltiVec. You can deride graphics as "fluff", but the fact is it's a very important area for free software to be competing in. I shouldn't have sounded like I was downplaying the importance of that.
However: How many PowerPC boxes are running Linux, and how many are running OS X? And which is a more high-profile market?
Linux, furthermore, is a "market" that GCC already owns. I know, I know, you can retarget from wherever, but making GCC a viable, and in some senses technically superior, choice for OS X development can only be a good thing. Can you compile Carbon apps w/ GCC? I have no idea, but if not, in eight months you will.
The real worth here lies in the fact that MacOS X is, let's not forget, essentially a UN*X platform. If RH play their cards right on this one, we should start seeing GNU tools perceived as a technical leader where in the past they've been perceived as something more like a reliable least common denominator.
Free software has to grow. It still needs to prove itself to make that happen. It's good to see RH concentrating on something genuinely forward-looking.
Um, yeah, whatever. The regime now in power in Iraq has a long history of a) launching wars of conquest against its neighbors in cases where it was not threatened in any way at all; b) using chemical weapons against its own citizens (hello?!) c) devoting considerable effort to expanding its chemical and biological arsenals and developing a nuclear arsenal as well.
Them's called "facts", son. The European approach is to hide one's head in the sand until it's too late, and then wring one's hands and whimper about "international law". The US approach is to kill the problem while it's small. The US approach saves lives. The European approach cares nothing for lives. All Europe cares about is short-term convenience.
The European mentality killed tens of thousands of civilians in the Balkans in the past decade, and millions -- literally millions -- of civilians during the second world war. The United States cleaned up their mess in both cases, at great cost to ourselves. What thanks do we get? No thanks at all, as it turns out. The Europeans aren't just helpless children; they're insolent and ungrateful as well.
Letting Europeans run around loose with their own countries is lunacy. They can't handle the responsibility.
The surrendering chatter-monkeys of Europe have much to teach us about how to lose wars, lose international prestige, and turn first-world powers into sagging, helpless welfare states.
They insist that we must let them teach us these valuable skills!
Fuck that. Europe just wants to drag us down the same rathole of poverty, decadence, and irrelevancy they live in. Fuck that.
Sun Tzu said that "the perfection of war lies in sapping your opponent's will to fight", didn't he? Well, he lived a long time ago. Back then, if you wanted a meal, you had to prepare it. Nowadays, it's all done for you: Just pop some frozen crap in the microwave. Likewise, back then if you wanted a spineless, helpless opponent, you had to sap his will yourself. These days, you just attack Europe. They come pre-de-backboned for your conquering pleasure. They couldn't even stand up to Serbia.
The strong will always survive. Let Europe rot.
"The greatest danger to good computer science education today is excessive relevance" -- Dennis M. Ritchie
I'm quoting from memory so I probably got it slightly wrong, but that's the gist of what he said. And he's right. Tools come and go. Vendors come and go. If you understand what you're doing, you're a professional. If you don't understand what you're doing, you're a trained monkey.
No, it's humorless morons like you who have fucked Slashdot up. The flooders are humorless morons. You're probably a fucking flooder yourself. Fuck off.
Oh yeah, and if you're too fucking stupid to spell, you're too fucking stupid to post. Okay, brainless? Slashdot is bad enough already without cretins like you making it worse.
Jesus Christ, what's wrong with people?! Humor is not a crime!
Relax! If your brain crashes when exposed to unexpected input, that's not Slashdot's fault.
someone who doesn't, apparently, understand the concepts of irony or of having a sense of humor.
Uh, yeah, hence the nick (hence also the bit about sendmail and the master race). The Pot says he wants to talk to you as soon as you're free.
Furthermore, if Katz and Raymond are involved in this thing, I'm willing to bet you can bid "irony" and "sense of humor" a fond farewell. Those guys don't treat "geek pride" as an ironic or humorous issue. As far as I can tell from their writings, they're quite serious.
when it comes from someone still subscribing to nonsense like "geek == unable to get laid", I think we can safely ignore it.
Okay, I'll smiley it next time. Happy?
"Geek Pride Festival" is an inherently funnier name than "A Big Party For The Type Of People Commonly Known As 'Geeks' Although We Stress That It Is Also OK Not To Be A Geek And In Fact We Don't Even Like To Admit We Are Geeks In Case Someone Thinks We're Bragging," which is what Venomous seems to think we should be calling it.
That's either a lumbering attempt at a "joke", or else a lumbering attempt at getting away with a false opposition fallacy, right? Just curious.
is that gays asserted "gay pride" at a time when they were defined as criminals just for living their lives
DeCSS, Napster, VCDs, cphack, DDoS, software patents..need I go on?
No, not really. The point, such as it is, has been made, and my point is weaker than it looked when I wrote it. Nevertheless, you can be a "geek" without mirroring DeCSS or cphack. I really don't see an exact analogy there, sorry.
You do have an appropriate alias, however.
It's called "irony".
And arguably a true geek would spend all night figuring them out.
When we start splitting hairs about who's a "geek" and who's not, that's where I draw the line. This is precisely what's annoying me about the whole thing.
The difference between "geek pride" and for example "gay pride" is that gays asserted "gay pride" at a time when they were defined as criminals just for living their lives; it took some balls to get out in the streets about it. "Geeks" invented "geek pride" after we got acceptance and stock options. BFD.
It's just fun. What's wrong with that?
Obviously there's nothing wrong with fun. If it were billed as Geek Drinking Day I'd be there in a minute. But Raymond and Katz are involved and you know damn well they're not going to get up, say "get drunk, have fun" and then put down the mike.
Nor do I claim to get laid all that damn often
That's not the point. This thing strikes me as trumped-up self-congratulatory nonsense, is all.
"Geek Pride" my ass. What a ridiculous crock of shit. Thousands of at-least-semi-intelligent young men, most of whom can't get laid, all standing around and telling themselves they're the master race because they know how to configure sendmail.
If geek pride didn't involve inventing bogus excuses to sneer at everybody else, I might be able to take it seriously.
Furthermore, the prospect of meeting Eric "You're Endangering My Tribe" Raymond is about as appealing as a headwound.
Even if I did want to play Professional Geek this weekend, I can't: I've got to be in the office. I've got code to write.
10+% of the US population is black 3-4% is white-jewish and yet, and yet they represent any newspaper, TV station or public office worth a damn.
Are you so incoherent that your meaning totally lost, or are you some kind of paranoid racist psychopath?
Just curious.
It's not the most sensible or well-informed post I've ever seen, but at least it's a break from the constant din of propaganda around here.
I like that one.
I keep forgetting to put the FSF on my "they need it more than I do" list along with Planned Parenthood and the ASPCA.
Good call.
I'd also like to third (?! -- or twentieth, by now
Good gravy, the man's making sense! Is that allowed?
Propellers are not circular, and they are balanced. When you think about it that way, suddenly it's not counter-intuitive at all.
(BTW, this isn't quite on the point, look up how they load centrifuges: If they have seven identical things to go in a centrifuge, they put in three things, spaced 120 degrees apart. It's balanced, and you can forget about those three things completely. Then they put in the other four things, 90 degrees apart. They're balanced too, so the whole thing is still balanced. What's cool is they don't have to worry at all about where the four things are relative to the first three: They simply don't care, because the two groups don't affect each other due to the fact that they're balanced among themselvess. If you look at it, it looks wrong as all hell, but it's balanced right and it won't freak out at high speed.)
You should know better. The term "Pro-life" has no other purpose than to prevent rational discussion of the issue, just like "pro-family" (or the the name of the "Defense of the Family Act", which had the sole purpose of outlawing many families and discouraging the formation of others). The nuttier sort of religious people spend their entire lives demonizing everybody in sight. Once they've muddied the waters enough, the sensible people are stuck trying to explain things and clear up the confusion, while the Christians are free to hop up and down shrieking slogans and waving bibles. The slogans cut through the murk, while the sensible explanations don't. Drowing public debate in high drama and Manichean arglebargle always serves the most evil elements in society; see Hitler, Stalin, etc. ad nauseam.
These people don't give a damn about reality or about "solving issues"; they want power, period.
That's a good one. I love the "ransom note" thing. Mixing a little farmsex into your grits is cool, too.
In an ideal world, all the code one uses would use the same string class, and all the old C libraries one links with would be rewritten in C++ and available in source form so you could compile it yourself and not have to worry about name-mangling and whatnot. On earth, we're stuck with legacy code that uses its own string classes, MFC (pray for us poor sinners) which uses their own (broken) string class, and OS API's (and other C libraries) which use char * and various typedefs thereof. We should probably all be using std::string, but I've found it sort of perplexing the few times I've bothered with it. In any case, it came along so late in the game that other string classes had already proliferated and are now immortalized by bassackwards compatibility.
However, all of these string classes have some way to get at their char *'s, and they'll all construct from char *. So char * is a sort of lingua franca or least common denominator that lets us work with all this inconsistent crap and still get code written. It's a bummer, but it's better than nothing.
I think the first thing Stroustrup should've done by way of C++ libraries was write a good solid string class while CFront 0.1 was still wet from the womb, and proselytize it endlessly. Of course, if he had, ten years later we would've ended up with a standard string class inconsistent with the rest of the STL. Oh, well. You can't have everything.
It's brilliant.