Agreed - the widget set is not huge. Then again, I've never encountered another toolkit where writing your own low level widgets was as easy.
QT comes 2nd IMNSHO. Better widget set, but not as fast or flexible.
As for the DOS window - do shut up, your ignorance is showing. Compile the 50 or so
example programs that come with fltk in release mode and observe the lack of any dos windows. For those too slow to type "fltk dos window" into google:
> For MSVC++ the switch to the linker is:
>
>/SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS/ENTRY:mainCRTStartup
Yeah, well, fuck you.. I have been using java since 0.9 was available for download. I was using it before any books on the language were available. Also, I did have aquaintances who were in the early java implementation team. No, I didn't work for Sun, I co-founded my own company instead.
Just because you're too stupid to be trusted with MI doesn't mean everybody is. Yes, MI as implemented in C++ makes it easy to get your nickers in a twist, but the argument that things shouldn't be allowed because morons might abuse them is one of my pet hates. It's fine for school kids just starting out, this is what pascal
was designed for. Java is like an OO pascal.
You are so right. I've been programming java on and off for 6 years (on again at the moment, server side, marketing decision...)
My main problem with java is not the speed of execution (although that's still a problem). It's the ton's of superfluous shitty code that seems to get generated in any java project.
The flaws you mention aren't even the main ones IMHO - lack of MI (no, interfaces are *not* as good, eg EJB programming wouldn't be quite so cumbersome if the methods one needed to overload had default implementations) and templates is even more irritating. Then there is the stupid overuse of try/catch blocks because the style encourages this, leads to local error handling code all over the place and defeats the whole purpose of exception. The lack of enums is unforgivable too, aargh... And then Swing - good god, what a piece of shit. Try FLTK instead, to reduce code size by factor of 4 and increase speed by factor of 100.
Re:I haven't been able to nail it down
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 2
> can't even control its lunatic fringe
What the fuck ? How are they expected to control anything ? Do you expect protestors to hire their own private police force. Suppose that when the early American protestors started rebelling against the British there were a few morons taking the opportunity to smash things up a bit, would that invalidate the whole thing ? There are morons everywhere, some of them are going to be on your side. Some are going to turn up for any kind of protest. If the government was anti-WTO and there had been a sufficiently large pro-WTO demonstration many of the same idiots would show up to cause aggro.
I did start my own business. I ain't exactly a socialist. It's not easy, even with a decent education and living in a rich country. It's a hugely harder option for the seriously deprived.
> if schools are failing at anything...
I guess you're not sufficiently right wing to argue that there shouldn't be any state sponsored schools then ? Public schooling is a socialist idea too.
> We believe that without the government, prices would skyrocket (they wouldn't, supply and demand and competition prevent that)
Do you have any evidence for this, historical or otherwise ? Monopolies or cartels are the natural order of things. Companies maximise their profits, but they are not entirely short-sited and stupid about this. If it costs $10 to make a widget, then simplistic economic reasoning tell you that the price of widgets will level off at $10 + delta. Most companies would prefer to sell the widget at $20 or more. Competition is supposed to keep them honest, but companies can make more money through cooperation. What actually happens is that the market diversifies into confusopolies (see The Dilbert Future) where each company in the market makes a healthy profit. Cooperation is a very natural state of affairs (nicely demonstrated by computer simulations http://www.howardri.org/dilemmas_1_robert-axerod.h tm)
If a new company enters the market and tries to sell at a more "competitive" price then the existing entrenched companies will sell at below cost until the newcomer becomes bankrupt. Cooperation and coercment happen all the time on a vastly greater scale than commonly acknowledged. The government makes an effort to real in the worst offenders, especially monopolists, but co-operating cartels do not need to meet and talk in order for comfortable price levels to emerge.
Anyway, it's all irrelevent until one fixes the issue of where money comes from. In the current system, money is invented by private banks in the form of loans. This is not an ideal system, but I can't be bothered to go into that just now.
Hard-core capitalism superficially maximimses freedom, but things are not as simple as that. If 10% of the population own 95% of the property, those born with little spend their lives in service to the 10%. Governments can (and do)alleviate this.
The pharoes of the 21st century have the slaves begging for work.
Re:I haven't been able to nail it down
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> but whatever their message is it isn't getting out. Protestors in seattle just looked like hooligans.
Yes. Entirely true. Everything from CNN to West Wing protrayed them as a bunch of clueless whining disorganised morons. But, do you remember seeing an interview with any of the protestors' spokesmen on mainstream media, or did you just see a bunch of studio jockeys vaguely paraphrasing what they were unhappy about. Did you actually see any air time given to someone explaining what they were unhappy about and what they were trying to achieve ?
The media always portrays it as: look at these silly people, they don't understand the benefits of free trade.
Consider the possibility that the people who went to all the trouble of travelling to Seattle, risking arrest, etc, have actually looked into these issues rather more carefully than the average couch potato. Then the media invites all "regular folks" to feel contempt and scorn for these ignorant fools.
So, your impression is perfectly understandable, but you have probably only heard one side of the story. Or, more accurately, you have heard various conflicting opinions on one side of the story. To get another side, try here:
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/jan2000albert. ht m
I really don't understand why this is marked as flamebait. It seems like a genuine post to me, not even particuarly unreasonable.
What most anti-war protestors object to is killing a bunch of people who had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks. For instance, it's estimated that 100,000-1,000,000 people will starve as a result of US/UK bombing of Afghanistan. This is not the estimate of those who will starve, it is the difference between the numbers who would have died anyway, and the number who will die now. The assassination of the leaders of those responsible would be just fine with lot's of people who object to the "war" (myself included). Unfortunately this is not very easy to accomplish.
Just a couple of quick questions for you here: how many of the terrorists were Afghans ?
where did the majority of the terrorists come from ?
which country provides most the funding for AlQueada ?
(hint: 0,Saudi-12/18,Saudi)
So, given the above, how many dead civilian Afghanis would be acceptable in your opinion ? Seriously, I'm curious, is it
a) "all of them",
b) 10,000,000-1,000,000
c) 1,000,000-100,000
d) 100,000-10,000
e) 10,000-1,000
f) 1-1000
g) none
Personally, I would opt for (e),(f) or maybe even (d) *if* I was convinced this would prevent another Sept 11 or worse.
And I guess the related question is: for what objectives are you prepare to kill that number of people ?
Would that be acceptable in order to also achieve death of Osama Bin Laden, or OBL + most of Al-Queada, or OBL+AlQueada+Taliban, or what ?
> we need to stop being so... law abiding? moral?
What I'm curious about is where you got the impression that the US was doing those things anyway ? What laws do you think the IS abiding by ? On the moral front, I agree with right to defend oneself, I'm just not convinced that this is what's going on here. Are you starting to feel safer now that some Afghans have been blown up too ? Do you believe this reduces the threat of future terrorist attacks ?
This isn't meant to be rehetorical. I'm just puzzled. I'll answer hawksish questions in response if mine are answered.
It seems curious to me how often some Brit comes along and claims that they invented something a few years after everybody has accredited someone else with the idea.
There are various excuses for this: sometimes it's official secrets act (computers, public key cryptography, etc), but more often it's a case of "oh, I thought of that but didn't do anything about it". Even as a Brit, my response to these claims is "yeah, whatever". If you did invent it, then you should have made the most of it at the time. As a non-Brit I would be more irritated than impressed by these claims.
On the other hand, we're not the only nation that has a tendancy to claim we invented everything;)
I have a real problem with laws that are never enforced.
They lead to a situation where anybody that the government is particuarly irritated by can be locked up easily because they are bound to be breaking a few laws. Lots of other people may be breaking those laws too, but since they're not doing anything that irritates those in power, they are ignored.
This is not a theoretical problem, it happens all the time. For instance, there is very selective prosecution of people breaking the official secrets act. AFAICT, the law is - if you say something that causes embarresment to active politicians or any senior member of the intelligence services, then you go to jail.
In fact, if you think about it for a moment, you'll realise that this is the entire *point* of these laws. You'll be very comfortable as long as you keep to prescribed boundaries. Stray outside, and you'll see a different side to things.
Your course has lost your attention because it's not difficult enough. If you're just implementing something from a book, you're wasting everybodies time. It's fine for beginners, but if you're finding it boring then it's probably not challenging you enough. The alternative is that you can't be bothered to concentrate on tricky technical stuff and it's too much like hard work, in which case you need to find a career which is better suited to someone who doesn't want to think. Practically anything will do. So, if it's the latter, try and choose which does something useful like becoming a teacher or a drug dealer, as opposed to parasitical careers like law, banking, or marketing.
On the other hand, if it's a question of not being stretched enough, you have no excuse. You're at university - you have access to equipment, information and vaguely competent colleagues, so find yourself something interesting to do. Preferably something which seems feasible, but hasn't been done before. If you can't think of anything, maybe you don't have a brain, in which case see careers advice above.
The kind of project I mean is: writing some software that expresses migratory patterns of birds as music, try modelling and simulating the way flocks of birds form patterns, or creating some music visualization software that works well with classical music, or writing some software that measures the effects of mozart on brain wave patterns. If that kind of thing is too difficult write some software that respins CNN articles so that the propoganda effect is reversed, start simple with keyword substitution (terrorist -> freedom fighter, our brave soldiers -> our insitutionalized murderers, etc). Write some software that analyzes english text and determines a coefficient for it's manipulative content, then try it on everything from Rush Limbar to Richard Feynman, do something interesting for fucks sake.
WRT software schedules - seldom has so much crap been written by so many for the benefit of so few.
The problem is that the term "software schedule" is too wide a field to say anything meaningful about it. If you want to estimate how long it will take to put together a customized ecommerce web site, and the organisation has already built 5 of them, there is no problem. If you want to solve some problem that hasn't been solved before, it could take a week or a hundred years. Recognising the difference between these two cases is less simple than one might expect. And, if there's genuinely no novelty in the problem one should not be writing software at all. Someone should just write an application to solve that general class of problems.
People get unstuck when they break the problem down into small chunks and then guess a number on each chunk. Often the initial decomposition misses crucial interactions and needs to be refactored later on. This is a bit like answering the problem about how long is a piece of string, by saying - well the string eginning, a middle and an end, I estimate each piece is 5 inches long, so the string is probably about 15 inches long. Unless the breakdown has brought genuine insight into the unknown aspects of the project, the estimate it provides is worse than useless. However, since one can then stick things out in MS project, print out pretty GANT charts, etc, this estimate is given more credence than a number generated by just reading the spec and making an educated guess.
Part of the problem is that it's described as software engineering. Then we get all sorts of morons saying: civil engineers can tell us how long it will take to build a bridge, the problem must be that software engineers are unprofessional or that the subject is in it's infancy - things will improve. No, they won't, for the same reason that mathematicians couldn't tell you how long it would take to solve Fermat's last theorem.
> the controlling factions of Afghanistan have committed an act of war
Really ? There were 0 (count em) Afghanis involved on Sept 11. Maybe you refer to their refusing to hand over the chief suspect without evidence, or at least refusing to hand him directly to USA. They offered to turn him over for trial to the UN, but this offer was rejected. Is this the act of war you are referring to ?
The Taliban are assholes. Unfortunately the bombs have strengthened their grip on the country. Foreign aggression always has that effect. For instance, the USA didn't rise up against Bush as a result of attacks. Even if the fundamentalists had dropped curried goat as well as plane-bombs on the US, I doubt they would have won our hearts and minds and inspired us to overthrow our unelected government.
> We can have a few dozen Afghan innocents die, or just keep letting Americans die
If it were this simple, I would respect your logic if not your principles. Unfortunately there are c. 1,000,000,000 muslims in the world, most of them do not live in Afghanistan. Many of them see this action as an attack on their spiritual bretheren. It is very likely that 100000-1000000 innocent people will starve as a result of the US action (the deaths through bombs are likely to be relatively low). Maybe you don't care about these people and think the price is worth it, but there is a good chance that some other people in the world don't care about you (and me) either, and think that killing more Americans may be the only way to express their distaste for this action. After all, it's the only language we seem to understand.
The level of insight offered in this speech is outstanding and thoroughly depressing when compared to the level of debate offered by parliament or congress. What would one of these men thought if transported into the 21st century and introduced to a debate in our current "democracies"? Imagine the disgust such a man would have felt at the degeneration and stupidity that has overtaken our political system.
nov55 stuff (about anthrax misinformation) looks sensible enough, but other stuff on his site is complete bullshit, so I can't say I trust the guy. Eg, from http://nov55.com/fve.html
"Physicists operate with an incorrect formula representing kinetic energy....Energy has been misdefined in that the formula for kinetic energy is incorrect. The formula is KE = ½mv. It indicates that the energy of motion is in proportion to mass times velocity squared. Squaring the velocity is the problem, because no mass can move at velocity squared."
Ugggh, "no mass can move at velocity squared" indeed, so E=mc must be completely wrong because mass certainly can't move at the speed of light squared. Hell, anything more than 55mph is illegal in the states... This kind of "debunking scientific myths" makes my brain ache.
No, please, not yet. Don't mention the C-word for at least a month. I want to go to Japan to escape Xmas - they are pleasantly unclear on the concept there. Sometimes they make a token effort - one department store had a christmas display showing father christmas nailed to the cross.
Anyway, you don't need to go out of your way to give a true hacker a hackable device. In fact, its oxymoronic. A hack is where you figure it out yourself and modify something in an unforseen way. Giving somebody a "hackable" toy is condescending.
Slightly offtopic - I plan on making a homemade EEG (Electro-encephalogram, scan brainwaves) for an Xmas present to myself, I can handle the software side, but can anyone tell me what components I need to get some sensible signal into the serial port.
Yes, there's no way that dedicated terrorists would bother to watch arabian news stations that do broadcast this stuff. But if the networks shows them, the terrorist messages might get through. It's not because ordinary Americans might see/hear a different perspective that they don't want these broadcasts shown. It's because of the very real threat that they will be used to give terrorists instructions.
> they said to be smart and responsible for what you put on the air.
They made it clear that they were unhappy that the networks were showing this stuff and implied that they those doing so were putting their own greedy motives above the safety of Americans. The media are obviously being unsufficiently patriotic.
You're quite right of course, when we rearrange some rubble with a $1 million cruise missile in Afghanistan, it's not like anything tangible has been destroyed except some explosives, some metal and maybe an Afghan or two.
The more significant impact of this (from American perspective, Afghan's may see it differently) is that money has been redistributed. Likewise, the main impact of shooting rockets into space is to enrich the owners and employees of technology companies. It's a form of state subsidy for technology. State sponsorship of high tech is a good thing IMO, but it would be more democratic if it wasn't disguised as something else.
The problem is that the roundabout way of doing things severely distorts several things. In the first case, people are mislead as to what they are paying for. A manual labourer of gas attendent may accept that it's fair for him to pay taxes to spend on "defense". He may be less impressed if it was clear that his taxes were subsidising people far richer than him.
Also, if the extent to which large corporations were subsidised by the state was clear, then people might start complaining that things were a little unfair. The last few decades has seen the income of the average worker stagnate in real terms while the rich have become immensly richer. It's not unfettered capitalism that redistributes wealth upwards, and is responsible for technological advances. In fact the actual research and development of high tech (computers, aeroplanes, internet, etc) is mostly paid for by the state. Once a sector becomes profitable ownership is transfered to the private sector, so that the 1/2% of the population who own 80% of the shares can become wealthier. Now, maybe this is a good system, but you're deluded if you think that it's simply a product of a "free market". I don't agree with taxing the rich to pay the lazy, but stealing from the poor (actually the middle) to give to the rich, seems a bit much.
Big implicit assumption here is that there is a conflict between the two. I would argue that there isn't. Reducing freedom often reduces your security too. This is because, the freedom any government is most keen to irradicate, is the freedom to disagree with it. For instance, Germany wasn't a very free place before WWII, the lack of freedom and rampant patriotism allowed their leaders to drag them into a war which seriously decreased the security of the German people.
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Herman Goering
The proposed law concentrates on classifying things like cyber-activism as terrorism. Most of this legislation is not aimed at reducing the chances of someone releasing anthrax at the super-bowl, it's aimed at reducing protest and dissent, which they are expecting for good reason.
The talk about innocent civilians being killed in Afghanistan misses the point IHMO. A question which is probably of more relevence to Americans is: are we benefitting from this action ?
Trying to irradicate terrorists with bombs is like trying to clean a windscreen with greasy fingers. You might shift the original bits of dirt, but you make a far worse mess in the process. The problem is not a few makeshift training camps in Afghanistan. Where did the terrorists learn to fly planes, where had they
been living for the past few years ? The root problem is the hatred in people's hearts. If you want to understand the hatred, don't read CNN, read some middle east papers and see what they say. Even if it's nothing but a pack of lies, it's worth knowing what the US is accused of.
To figure out whether this action might make us safer, there are two questions to answer:
(1) will it decrease the hatred (particuarly amongst muslims) ?
(2) will it make terrorists think that attacking the west is a bad idea ?
I'll leave the answer to question (1) as an exercise for the reader. The answer to (2) is less obvious, but I don't think you need a degree in psychology to figure it out. The kind of people capable of flying planes into buildings,
or releasing anthrax at a football game, will not be swayed by logic. It was never their strongpoint. Since we seem to believe we
can secure our goals through terror and bombs, I don't see any reason to expect better reasoning from terrorists.
For a hint as to where the push for war comes from, look at http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/10/11/17799.htm l (disclaimer: yes of course this article contains propoganda, but then what doesn't).
> I don't see this as a problem of the US government, but a problem of the culture
It's certainly a problem *for* the US government. For what it's worth, I agree that the problem is cultural. I also agree that welfare, in its current form at least, exacerbates the problem. Most of the worst problems can be tracked to the fact that we have a debt-based economy (money is invented by banks), but I can't be bothered to go into that just now. Black culture in the US is completely fucked up, identifying the culprits for this is less important than trying to make it less fucked up. Throwing a large chunk of them into prison on drug offences doesn't help any.
> Because we are not oppressive, and grant our citizens more freedom.
Well, that's one theory. Since America has the 2nd highest level of incarceration in the world, just behind Russia, I guess that means that you are less oppressive than everywhere except Russia. Possibly there is more to it than that, and you are considering your country through rose tinted spectacles. In fact, once you have thought about it for a while, and examined which countries have the highest levels of imprisonment, you might realise that having vast numbers of people in prison is not a good sign. Try to consider the possibility that your interpretation of facts tends to favor explanations which reflect well upon America.
> I don't see how its helpful to list all the lies that circulate through the Islamic countries. That's just a symptom of the fact that they hate us.
The stuff that the Islamic world believes about the USA is more the cause of the hatred than a symptom of it. It's worth looking at the accusations - if they are simply false, then surely there are measures the US can take to correct the misinformation. That rumour about 4000 Israelis (the rumour spoke of Israelis rather than jews) is easily refuteable bullshit of course. Some of the other accusations (such as USA's pro-Israel bias) are not so easy to dismiss. It's worth looking at what your opponents say - if it's nothing but a pack of lies, great.
I did read the articles, and while they are not as simplistic or jingoistic as TV news, they are extraordinarily selective in what they leave out. Imagine if someone tried to explain why America was bombing Afghanistan without mentioning what happened on Sept 11. They could write something that seemed balanced and thoughtful, but would leave you screaming "hang on a moment.."
When Madelene Albright responded to a question on the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children with "we think the price was worth it" this caused a fair bit of anger. You may reply that these deaths are Saddam Hussein's fault, maybe they are, but that is not how it is perceived in the middle east. Saddam Hussein is widely hated too. The fact that the US supported Saddam with arms and funds while he was doing our bidding doesn't help much. He wasn't a nice person then either. Neither was Osama bin Laden when the CIA was funding him.
Indonesia is mentioned in the articles as an example of a progressive praiseworthy Islamic regmine that the US is friendly with. The fact that they slaughtered a large chunk of the population of East Timor seems relevent here.
Syria is discussed as an example of a terribly repressive Islamic regime. Fair enough, but here is an interesting fact: they imprison a smaller percentage of their population than the US. If America is such a paradigm of freedom, why does it have the largest prison population in the world.
If you really want to understand why America is hated, you won't find it by reading newsweek. You will find it by reading things like http://www.zmag.org http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/10/11/17799.htm l or pakistani news sources
The accusations against the US might be a completely unjustified pack of lies, but you should at least know what the accusations are. You cannot possibly refute them if they are not even mentioned.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed - the widget set is not huge. Then again, I've never encountered another toolkit where writing your own low level widgets was as easy.
/SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS /ENTRY:mainCRTStartup
QT comes 2nd IMNSHO. Better widget set, but not as fast or flexible.
As for the DOS window - do shut up, your ignorance is showing. Compile the 50 or so
example programs that come with fltk in release mode and observe the lack of any dos windows. For those too slow to type "fltk dos window" into google:
> For MSVC++ the switch to the linker is:
>
>
Daisy cutters and cluster bombs are kinda unfriendly. Not exactly "surgical" either..
.. that is too cruel.
But Baywatch
Yeah, well, fuck you.. I have been using java since 0.9 was available for download. I was using it before any books on the language were available. Also, I did have aquaintances who were in the early java implementation team. No, I didn't work for Sun, I co-founded my own company instead.
Just because you're too stupid to be trusted with MI doesn't mean everybody is. Yes, MI as implemented in C++ makes it easy to get your nickers in a twist, but the argument that things shouldn't be allowed because morons might abuse them is one of my pet hates. It's fine for school kids just starting out, this is what pascal
was designed for. Java is like an OO pascal.
You are so right. I've been programming java on and off for 6 years (on again at the moment, server side, marketing decision...)
My main problem with java is not the speed of execution (although that's still a problem). It's the ton's of superfluous shitty code that seems to get generated in any java project.
The flaws you mention aren't even the main ones IMHO - lack of MI (no, interfaces are *not* as good, eg EJB programming wouldn't be quite so cumbersome if the methods one needed to overload had default implementations) and templates is even more irritating. Then there is the stupid overuse of try/catch blocks because the style encourages this, leads to local error handling code all over the place and defeats the whole purpose of exception. The lack of enums is unforgivable too, aargh... And then Swing - good god, what a piece of shit. Try FLTK instead, to reduce code size by factor of 4 and increase speed by factor of 100.
Glad I'm not the only one who feels this way..
The robot works out cheaper in the long run.
> can't even control its lunatic fringe
What the fuck ? How are they expected to control anything ? Do you expect protestors to hire their own private police force. Suppose that when the early American protestors started rebelling against the British there were a few morons taking the opportunity to smash things up a bit, would that invalidate the whole thing ? There are morons everywhere, some of them are going to be on your side. Some are going to turn up for any kind of protest. If the government was anti-WTO and there had been a sufficiently large pro-WTO demonstration many of the same idiots would show up to cause aggro.
I did start my own business. I ain't exactly a socialist. It's not easy, even with a decent education and living in a rich country. It's a hugely harder option for the seriously deprived.
...
> if schools are failing at anything
I guess you're not sufficiently right wing to argue that there shouldn't be any state sponsored schools then ? Public schooling is a socialist idea too.
> We believe that without the government, prices would skyrocket (they wouldn't, supply and demand and competition prevent that)
h tm)
Do you have any evidence for this, historical or otherwise ? Monopolies or cartels are the natural order of things. Companies maximise their profits, but they are not entirely short-sited and stupid about this. If it costs $10 to make a widget, then simplistic economic reasoning tell you that the price of widgets will level off at $10 + delta. Most companies would prefer to sell the widget at $20 or more. Competition is supposed to keep them honest, but companies can make more money through cooperation. What actually happens is that the market diversifies into confusopolies (see The Dilbert Future) where each company in the market makes a healthy profit. Cooperation is a very natural state of affairs (nicely demonstrated by computer simulations http://www.howardri.org/dilemmas_1_robert-axerod.
If a new company enters the market and tries to sell at a more "competitive" price then the existing entrenched companies will sell at below cost until the newcomer becomes bankrupt. Cooperation and coercment happen all the time on a vastly greater scale than commonly acknowledged. The government makes an effort to real in the worst offenders, especially monopolists, but co-operating cartels do not need to meet and talk in order for comfortable price levels to emerge.
Anyway, it's all irrelevent until one fixes the issue of where money comes from. In the current system, money is invented by private banks in the form of loans. This is not an ideal system, but I can't be bothered to go into that just now.
Hard-core capitalism superficially maximimses freedom, but things are not as simple as that. If 10% of the population own 95% of the property, those born with little spend their lives in service to the 10%. Governments can (and do)alleviate this.
The pharoes of the 21st century have the slaves begging for work.
> but whatever their message is it isn't getting out. Protestors in seattle just looked like hooligans.
. ht m
Yes. Entirely true. Everything from CNN to West Wing protrayed them as a bunch of clueless whining disorganised morons. But, do you remember seeing an interview with any of the protestors' spokesmen on mainstream media, or did you just see a bunch of studio jockeys vaguely paraphrasing what they were unhappy about. Did you actually see any air time given to someone explaining what they were unhappy about and what they were trying to achieve ?
The media always portrays it as: look at these silly people, they don't understand the benefits of free trade.
Consider the possibility that the people who went to all the trouble of travelling to Seattle, risking arrest, etc, have actually looked into these issues rather more carefully than the average couch potato. Then the media invites all "regular folks" to feel contempt and scorn for these ignorant fools.
So, your impression is perfectly understandable, but you have probably only heard one side of the story. Or, more accurately, you have heard various conflicting opinions on one side of the story. To get another side, try here:
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/jan2000albert
I really don't understand why this is marked as flamebait. It seems like a genuine post to me, not even particuarly unreasonable.
What most anti-war protestors object to is killing a bunch of people who had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks. For instance, it's estimated that 100,000-1,000,000 people will starve as a result of US/UK bombing of Afghanistan. This is not the estimate of those who will starve, it is the difference between the numbers who would have died anyway, and the number who will die now. The assassination of the leaders of those responsible would be just fine with lot's of people who object to the "war" (myself included). Unfortunately this is not very easy to accomplish.
Just a couple of quick questions for you here: how many of the terrorists were Afghans ?
where did the majority of the terrorists come from ?
which country provides most the funding for AlQueada ?
(hint: 0,Saudi-12/18,Saudi)
So, given the above, how many dead civilian Afghanis would be acceptable in your opinion ? Seriously, I'm curious, is it
a) "all of them",
b) 10,000,000-1,000,000
c) 1,000,000-100,000
d) 100,000-10,000
e) 10,000-1,000
f) 1-1000
g) none
Personally, I would opt for (e),(f) or maybe even (d) *if* I was convinced this would prevent another Sept 11 or worse.
And I guess the related question is: for what objectives are you prepare to kill that number of people ?
Would that be acceptable in order to also achieve death of Osama Bin Laden, or OBL + most of Al-Queada, or OBL+AlQueada+Taliban, or what ?
> we need to stop being so... law abiding? moral?
What I'm curious about is where you got the impression that the US was doing those things anyway ? What laws do you think the IS abiding by ? On the moral front, I agree with right to defend oneself, I'm just not convinced that this is what's going on here. Are you starting to feel safer now that some Afghans have been blown up too ? Do you believe this reduces the threat of future terrorist attacks ?
This isn't meant to be rehetorical. I'm just puzzled. I'll answer hawksish questions in response if mine are answered.
It seems curious to me how often some Brit comes along and claims that they invented something a few years after everybody has accredited someone else with the idea.
;)
There are various excuses for this: sometimes it's official secrets act (computers, public key cryptography, etc), but more often it's a case of "oh, I thought of that but didn't do anything about it". Even as a Brit, my response to these claims is "yeah, whatever". If you did invent it, then you should have made the most of it at the time. As a non-Brit I would be more irritated than impressed by these claims.
On the other hand, we're not the only nation that has a tendancy to claim we invented everything
I have a real problem with laws that are never enforced.
They lead to a situation where anybody that the government is particuarly irritated by can be locked up easily because they are bound to be breaking a few laws. Lots of other people may be breaking those laws too, but since they're not doing anything that irritates those in power, they are ignored.
This is not a theoretical problem, it happens all the time. For instance, there is very selective prosecution of people breaking the official secrets act. AFAICT, the law is - if you say something that causes embarresment to active politicians or any senior member of the intelligence services, then you go to jail.
In fact, if you think about it for a moment, you'll realise that this is the entire *point* of these laws. You'll be very comfortable as long as you keep to prescribed boundaries. Stray outside, and you'll see a different side to things.
There are two problems here:
1 your course
2 you
Your course has lost your attention because it's not difficult enough. If you're just implementing something from a book, you're wasting everybodies time. It's fine for beginners, but if you're finding it boring then it's probably not challenging you enough. The alternative is that you can't be bothered to concentrate on tricky technical stuff and it's too much like hard work, in which case you need to find a career which is better suited to someone who doesn't want to think. Practically anything will do. So, if it's the latter, try and choose which does something useful like becoming a teacher or a drug dealer, as opposed to parasitical careers like law, banking, or marketing.
On the other hand, if it's a question of not being stretched enough, you have no excuse. You're at university - you have access to equipment, information and vaguely competent colleagues, so find yourself something interesting to do. Preferably something which seems feasible, but hasn't been done before. If you can't think of anything, maybe you don't have a brain, in which case see careers advice above.
The kind of project I mean is: writing some software that expresses migratory patterns of birds as music, try modelling and simulating the way flocks of birds form patterns, or creating some music visualization software that works well with classical music, or writing some software that measures the effects of mozart on brain wave patterns. If that kind of thing is too difficult write some software that respins CNN articles so that the propoganda effect is reversed, start simple with keyword substitution (terrorist -> freedom fighter, our brave soldiers -> our insitutionalized murderers, etc). Write some software that analyzes english text and determines a coefficient for it's manipulative content, then try it on everything from Rush Limbar to Richard Feynman, do something interesting for fucks sake.
WRT software schedules - seldom has so much crap been written by so many for the benefit of so few.
The problem is that the term "software schedule" is too wide a field to say anything meaningful about it. If you want to estimate how long it will take to put together a customized ecommerce web site, and the organisation has already built 5 of them, there is no problem. If you want to solve some problem that hasn't been solved before, it could take a week or a hundred years. Recognising the difference between these two cases is less simple than one might expect. And, if there's genuinely no novelty in the problem one should not be writing software at all. Someone should just write an application to solve that general class of problems.
People get unstuck when they break the problem down into small chunks and then guess a number on each chunk. Often the initial decomposition misses crucial interactions and needs to be refactored later on. This is a bit like answering the problem about how long is a piece of string, by saying - well the string eginning, a middle and an end, I estimate each piece is 5 inches long, so the string is probably about 15 inches long. Unless the breakdown has brought genuine insight into the unknown aspects of the project, the estimate it provides is worse than useless. However, since one can then stick things out in MS project, print out pretty GANT charts, etc, this estimate is given more credence than a number generated by just reading the spec and making an educated guess.
Part of the problem is that it's described as software engineering. Then we get all sorts of morons saying: civil engineers can tell us how long it will take to build a bridge, the problem must be that software engineers are unprofessional or that the subject is in it's infancy - things will improve. No, they won't, for the same reason that mathematicians couldn't tell you how long it would take to solve Fermat's last theorem.
> the controlling factions of Afghanistan have committed an act of war
Really ? There were 0 (count em) Afghanis involved on Sept 11. Maybe you refer to their refusing to hand over the chief suspect without evidence, or at least refusing to hand him directly to USA. They offered to turn him over for trial to the UN, but this offer was rejected. Is this the act of war you are referring to ?
The Taliban are assholes. Unfortunately the bombs have strengthened their grip on the country. Foreign aggression always has that effect. For instance, the USA didn't rise up against Bush as a result of attacks. Even if the fundamentalists had dropped curried goat as well as plane-bombs on the US, I doubt they would have won our hearts and minds and inspired us to overthrow our unelected government.
> We can have a few dozen Afghan innocents die, or just keep letting Americans die
If it were this simple, I would respect your logic if not your principles. Unfortunately there are c. 1,000,000,000 muslims in the world, most of them do not live in Afghanistan. Many of them see this action as an attack on their spiritual bretheren. It is very likely that 100000-1000000 innocent people will starve as a result of the US action (the deaths through bombs are likely to be relatively low). Maybe you don't care about these people and think the price is worth it, but there is a good chance that some other people in the world don't care about you (and me) either, and think that killing more Americans may be the only way to express their distaste for this action. After all, it's the only language we seem to understand.
Th link here is extraordinary.
The level of insight offered in this speech is outstanding and thoroughly depressing when compared to the level of debate offered by parliament or congress. What would one of these men thought if transported into the 21st century and introduced to a debate in our current "democracies"? Imagine the disgust such a man would have felt at the degeneration and stupidity that has overtaken our political system.
nov55 stuff (about anthrax misinformation) looks sensible enough, but other stuff on his site is complete bullshit, so I can't say I trust the guy. Eg, from http://nov55.com/fve.html
"Physicists operate with an incorrect formula representing kinetic energy....Energy has been misdefined in that the formula for kinetic energy is incorrect. The formula is KE = ½mv. It indicates that the energy of motion is in proportion to mass times velocity squared. Squaring the velocity is the problem, because no mass can move at velocity squared."
Ugggh, "no mass can move at velocity squared" indeed, so E=mc must be completely wrong because mass certainly can't move at the speed of light squared. Hell, anything more than 55mph is illegal in the states... This kind of "debunking scientific myths" makes my brain ache.
No, please, not yet. Don't mention the C-word for at least a month. I want to go to Japan to escape Xmas - they are pleasantly unclear on the concept there. Sometimes they make a token effort - one department store had a christmas display showing father christmas nailed to the cross.
Anyway, you don't need to go out of your way to give a true hacker a hackable device. In fact, its oxymoronic. A hack is where you figure it out yourself and modify something in an unforseen way. Giving somebody a "hackable" toy is condescending.
Slightly offtopic - I plan on making a homemade EEG (Electro-encephalogram, scan brainwaves) for an Xmas present to myself, I can handle the software side, but can anyone tell me what components I need to get some sensible signal into the serial port.
> is letting broadcasters know that /bin/laden
Yes, there's no way that dedicated terrorists would bother to watch arabian news stations that do broadcast this stuff. But if the networks shows them, the terrorist messages might get through. It's not because ordinary Americans might see/hear a different perspective that they don't want these broadcasts shown. It's because of the very real threat that they will be used to give terrorists instructions.
> they said to be smart and responsible for what you put on the air.
They made it clear that they were unhappy that the networks were showing this stuff and implied that they those doing so were putting their own greedy motives above the safety of Americans. The media are obviously being unsufficiently patriotic.
You're quite right of course, when we rearrange some rubble with a $1 million cruise missile in Afghanistan, it's not like anything tangible has been destroyed except some explosives, some metal and maybe an Afghan or two.
The more significant impact of this (from American perspective, Afghan's may see it differently) is that money has been redistributed. Likewise, the main impact of shooting rockets into space is to enrich the owners and employees of technology companies. It's a form of state subsidy for technology. State sponsorship of high tech is a good thing IMO, but it would be more democratic if it wasn't disguised as something else.
The problem is that the roundabout way of doing things severely distorts several things. In the first case, people are mislead as to what they are paying for. A manual labourer of gas attendent may accept that it's fair for him to pay taxes to spend on "defense". He may be less impressed if it was clear that his taxes were subsidising people far richer than him.
Also, if the extent to which large corporations were subsidised by the state was clear, then people might start complaining that things were a little unfair. The last few decades has seen the income of the average worker stagnate in real terms while the rich have become immensly richer. It's not unfettered capitalism that redistributes wealth upwards, and is responsible for technological advances. In fact the actual research and development of high tech (computers, aeroplanes, internet, etc) is mostly paid for by the state. Once a sector becomes profitable ownership is transfered to the private sector, so that the 1/2% of the population who own 80% of the shares can become wealthier. Now, maybe this is a good system, but you're deluded if you think that it's simply a product of a "free market". I don't agree with taxing the rich to pay the lazy, but stealing from the poor (actually the middle) to give to the rich, seems a bit much.
they didn't mention that rod based mechanical computers are likely to return with nano-tech, with carbon chains as the basic rods
> we need a balance between security and freedom
m l (disclaimer: yes of course this article contains propoganda, but then what doesn't).
Big implicit assumption here is that there is a conflict between the two. I would argue that there isn't. Reducing freedom often reduces your security too. This is because, the freedom any government is most keen to irradicate, is the freedom to disagree with it. For instance, Germany wasn't a very free place before WWII, the lack of freedom and rampant patriotism allowed their leaders to drag them into a war which seriously decreased the security of the German people.
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Herman Goering
The proposed law concentrates on classifying things like cyber-activism as terrorism. Most of this legislation is not aimed at reducing the chances of someone releasing anthrax at the super-bowl, it's aimed at reducing protest and dissent, which they are expecting for good reason.
The talk about innocent civilians being killed in Afghanistan misses the point IHMO. A question which is probably of more relevence to Americans is: are we benefitting from this action ?
Trying to irradicate terrorists with bombs is like trying to clean a windscreen with greasy fingers. You might shift the original bits of dirt, but you make a far worse mess in the process. The problem is not a few makeshift training camps in Afghanistan. Where did the terrorists learn to fly planes, where had they
been living for the past few years ? The root problem is the hatred in people's hearts. If you want to understand the hatred, don't read CNN, read some middle east papers and see what they say. Even if it's nothing but a pack of lies, it's worth knowing what the US is accused of.
To figure out whether this action might make us safer, there are two questions to answer:
(1) will it decrease the hatred (particuarly amongst muslims) ?
(2) will it make terrorists think that attacking the west is a bad idea ?
I'll leave the answer to question (1) as an exercise for the reader. The answer to (2) is less obvious, but I don't think you need a degree in psychology to figure it out. The kind of people capable of flying planes into buildings,
or releasing anthrax at a football game, will not be swayed by logic. It was never their strongpoint. Since we seem to believe we
can secure our goals through terror and bombs, I don't see any reason to expect better reasoning from terrorists.
For a hint as to where the push for war comes from, look at http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/10/11/17799.ht
> I don't see this as a problem of the US government, but a problem of the culture
It's certainly a problem *for* the US government. For what it's worth, I agree that the problem is cultural. I also agree that welfare, in its current form at least, exacerbates the problem. Most of the worst problems can be tracked to the fact that we have a debt-based economy (money is invented by banks), but I can't be bothered to go into that just now. Black culture in the US is completely fucked up, identifying the culprits for this is less important than trying to make it less fucked up. Throwing a large chunk of them into prison on drug offences doesn't help any.
> Because we are not oppressive, and grant our citizens more freedom.
Well, that's one theory. Since America has the 2nd highest level of incarceration in the world, just behind Russia, I guess that means that you are less oppressive than everywhere except Russia. Possibly there is more to it than that, and you are considering your country through rose tinted spectacles. In fact, once you have thought about it for a while, and examined which countries have the highest levels of imprisonment, you might realise that having vast numbers of people in prison is not a good sign. Try to consider the possibility that your interpretation of facts tends to favor explanations which reflect well upon America.
> I don't see how its helpful to list all the lies that circulate through the Islamic countries. That's just a symptom of the fact that they hate us.
The stuff that the Islamic world believes about the USA is more the cause of the hatred than a symptom of it. It's worth looking at the accusations - if they are simply false, then surely there are measures the US can take to correct the misinformation. That rumour about 4000 Israelis (the rumour spoke of Israelis rather than jews) is easily refuteable bullshit of course. Some of the other accusations (such as USA's pro-Israel bias) are not so easy to dismiss. It's worth looking at what your opponents say - if it's nothing but a pack of lies, great.
I did read the articles, and while they are not as simplistic or jingoistic as TV news, they are extraordinarily selective in what they leave out. Imagine if someone tried to explain why America was bombing Afghanistan without mentioning what happened on Sept 11. They could write something that seemed balanced and thoughtful, but would leave you screaming "hang on a moment.."
m l or pakistani news sources
When Madelene Albright responded to a question on the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children with "we think the price was worth it" this caused a fair bit of anger. You may reply that these deaths are Saddam Hussein's fault, maybe they are, but that is not how it is perceived in the middle east. Saddam Hussein is widely hated too. The fact that the US supported Saddam with arms and funds while he was doing our bidding doesn't help much. He wasn't a nice person then either. Neither was Osama bin Laden when the CIA was funding him.
Indonesia is mentioned in the articles as an example of a progressive praiseworthy Islamic regmine that the US is friendly with. The fact that they slaughtered a large chunk of the population of East Timor seems relevent here.
Syria is discussed as an example of a terribly repressive Islamic regime. Fair enough, but here is an interesting fact: they imprison a smaller percentage of their population than the US. If America is such a paradigm of freedom, why does it have the largest prison population in the world.
If you really want to understand why America is hated, you won't find it by reading newsweek. You will find it by reading things like http://www.zmag.org http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/10/11/17799.ht
The accusations against the US might be a completely unjustified pack of lies, but you should at least know what the accusations are. You cannot possibly refute them if they are not even mentioned.