Re:I don't hate the war, just GWB
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Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
Iraq was still not complying. The UN did nothing. It had done nothing for 12 years. At what point do you say "screw the security council!"?
The main problem is imho that the US didn't just say "screw the security council", but they more or less said "screw more than half the world". If almost everyone were behind this war, but some members of the security council were using their veto to block everyone else, it would be a completely different situation I think.
I don't mean that to be antagonistic, but just to throw the question out there. When will the UN make itself relevant again? I believe in the concept, and that if you sign the charter that you should abide by the rulings. But...as soon as countries don't and nothing is done, the organization might as well not exist.
I wouldn't say nothing was being done, with the embargo's and weapon inspections. They were being held up until Iraq complied. I agree that not much progress was being made on that front and that it would have been much better if other measures could be worked out that did have a more visible effect.
The problem I have with this war is that although it may indeed ultimately result in the removal of Saddam from power and making certain that Iraq doesn't have any WMD's (anymore), the people behind it don't seem to care at all that on every other imaginable front, it makes the whole world situation worse. A lot of people think so at least and I haven't seen anyone here yet arguing it isn't so when replying to my posts (only got a few new foes and friends:).
Before you go to war, you have to ask yourself whether it's really worth it. Obviously, most of the countries in the UN didn't think so. Bush wanted a war he could win (he thought it would even be easy, but it seems like he made a small mistake there), so he used the UN resolutions as a pretext to start this war.
It is certainly possible that France, Germany and Russia have other reasons to be against a war on Iraq than just that they think it's plain stupid (like someone else replied to another comment of mine), but they were/are not the only ones that are against. Of course they are the most vocal, since they are all quite large countries, but for example Belgium ("my" country) is also against. And all those millions of people that protested against the war. I don't think you can dismiss that all as "they are scared" or "they have other interests to protect" or "they are misguided, they don't know what they are talking about".
Just think about it: maybe the fact that the majority was/is against a war means that it is/was indeed a bad idea to start it and that was their way to try to prevent it. Maybe they were trying to stop the US from going to war not because they didn't like the US or because they didn't really want Saddam to follow the UN resolutions, but because they thought that waging such a war would do more harm than good.
Just removing Saddam isn't going to stop terrorism or dagers in this world, it's not even a first step in that process the way it's being done now. On the contrary, it seems like with this war, it's just become the beginning of a much larger scale armed conflict. And somehow, I can't help but think that that is exactly what several people high up in the current US government want, since that's the only way they can justify all the spending they've taken away from other important sectors and pumped into the army.
But now that the USA is threatened, rather than some cute ethnic minority, oh no we musn't defend ourselves.
And the one thing that "you whiny conservative righties" don't seem to understand, is that by waging this war, you are not defending yourself, but instead helping Al Qaeda and other terrorist organisations as much as you can!
A lot of families will lose one or more members resulting in a lot of broken families. Do you think the rest will say "Thank you USA for solving this conflict in a violent way and it's ok that you took away the lives of our family members, it was worth it." or "F*ck you USA, Al Qaeda is right: you are the terrorists here and they are the freedom fighters. I've got nothing left to lose, see you in hell."
The majority of countries in the world is against this war, including some with veto power in the UN. The USA simply ignored that, called using a veto and other means of diplomatic actions things that "weasels" do and went bombing anyway. So another assertion of Al Qaeda, namely that the US wants world domination and is rogue (since they defy the UN) is "confirmed".
After the war is over, the US wants to install a military government (under US control of course) and contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq are already being signed, a lot of them going to... US companies of course, one of which was headed for a long time by Powel! So the claim that the US is headed by nothing but a corrupt bunch of corporatists that only want to extend their influences in the Middle East is affirmed.
The US is already talking about invading Iran after Iraq is finished... Need I say more?
Don't you understand that GWB is doing a better recruitment campaign for Al Qaeda & Co than whatever they could come up with themselves? All the US is doing is making sure it becomes more hated every day. Al Qaeda will only become stronger because of the war in Iraq, since they'll get more recruits ready for brainwashing, they're not being hurt at all. The only reason that GWB is waging this war, is because he wants revenge for his dad, he wants to please his "neo-conservative think-tank" and his corporate friends and because he doesn't want to be remembered as "the president that couldn't catch Osama bin Laden".
Think for yourself, instead of blindly believing all the nonsense the Bush adminsitration and the media spew at you. They have no clue (the fact that they are actually surprised that the Iraqi's fight back, says enough imho). Even if you actually believe that this war is righteous, don't delude yourself into thinking that it is solving any kind of problem the US has with terrorism, it is only making matters worse. For the whole world. But the US doesn't seem to care what the rest of the world thinks. Which is why so many people are angry with the US. And some of those are weak and can be recruited by terrorist organisations for use as cannon fodder.
They are using Open Source because Darwin uses BSD code and they didn't want to receive any bad publicity for closing ther own modifications.
And you conveniently cut out Rendezvous and Darwin Streaming Server, which were created entirely at Apple, as well as all my arguments as to why releasing the source *is* benefiting (both directly and indirectly) them.
Darwin is not a product, is only a kernel. The *product* is MacOS X.
Darwin is an OS. The kernel is either called rather unimaginatively the "Darwin Kernel" or also sometimes "xnu". If you don't believe me, you can download Darwin-the-OS here.
Ever heard of the term "examples"? If you want, you can start looking through all darwin related mailing lists on lists.apple.com, opendarwin.org and maybe some FreeBSD (and other BSD) related lists to create an exhaustive list o reported bugs and submitted improvements. Maybe you can also ask Apple for access to their bug reporting system, so you can check whether no one reported a bug only in that way.
Apple isn't a good example because MacOS X is not an Open Source product (did you forgot the hole context of this article? Microsoft opening an *entire* product?)
Darwin is an entire product. So is Darwin Streaming Server fwiw.
Two kernel patches are not a real benefit, they are just a small payback that is certainly not enough to get the whole 'open the source' equation "out of the red". A real benefit generates *profit* (all kinds of profit, not only US Dollars), otherwise is not a true benefit at all (IMHO).
Getting the cause of a bug on which you have 3 engineers working (you know what 3 engineers cost?) because you can't figure out what's wrong delivered to you on a silver platter is definitely not something you want to miss out on. Making things easier for developers is also an enormous asset.
They are using Open Source not because they are fans of ESR, but because they get real benefits from it. If it only cost to them, they would stop instead of keep adding new open source projects like open directory, rendezvous and webcore.
I don't know if it was a joke but: Apple doesn't receive any benefits from the darwin source.
Says who? Don't you remember the infamous "dial-up with modem hangs the system" for which the cause was found by an outsider? Recently someone also found a locking bug in the file system code (log/pass = archives/archives). Most driver developers are also very happy that the source code of the kernel is available, because it makes their development a lot easier. Maybe you should actually read the open source and darwin-related mailing lists a bit instead of spreading FUD like that.
Sorry, this is not Flamebait: Only broke companies see benefit on releasing the source.
Apple went broke again? The last time was only a month ago!
Re:I don't hate the war, just GWB
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
No, if there were real opposition, the US forces would have to get past Russian subs and Chinese fighters before taking Baghdad.
Maybe if all of those countries had a GWB or a Saddam Houssein at the head, this would have started WWIII or a new cold war, yes. Fortunately, that is not the case and those (and other) countries know that putting their own armies in the way would make matters even worse. If GWB would have called this off for any reason, he'd have to find a new enemy to crush (one which he can catch, so not Osama bin Laden / Al Qaeda), otherwise he would lose everything he built his "carreer" on: the army and "homeland security".
So which is it? "We oppose your actions" or "We say we oppose your actions, but we do not oppose them strongly enough to take action of our own?"
If we would take action, we'd be labeled as terrorists instead of as weasels. Your "take action" approach is the approach of antiquity, the simplistic approach, the survival-of-the-fittest approach. It sounds as if you would love the rest of the world to oppose the US with weapons, so you/the US could even more strongly justify their militarisation and act as if they are the poor underdogs, the ones that no-one else understands and the ones that are threatened by the big, bad world out there.
I don't want to play that game. In a diplomatic and civilized world, you take action by using your veto's and your votes. Yes, the US ignored those and went to war anyway. If you think that using a veto in the UN is "just use words and not take action", then it means you've confirmed what so many others have already said: the US and its allies just made the UN irrelevant, it's as if the UN was only their to let the US justify whatever action it wanted to take. Why would any other country still take the UN serious? The US is invading Iraq because it supposedly violates UN resolutions, but by doing that they are doing exactly the same thing!
Don't you fscking get it that the only thing that this war does, is make matters worse on all counts? More destroyed families and desperate survivors -> more recruits for Al Qaeda. The US defies the UN -> the terrorists have more ammo win people for their "cause" (or what they claim that is their cause), since the US now has very little moral ground left to stand on. A sock puppet government gets installed in Iraq -> the terrorists will use this to convince more people to join their ranks, since that's "proof" that US is in for complete world domination.
The US are helping the terrorists in a way those organisations could only dream about of doing themselves (not on purpose of course, but it is the end result)! These organisations can only get people so far that they commit suicide if these people are completely desperate and feel they have absolutely no control anymore about what's happening to their life and environment. This war will only increase and encourage such breakdowns, it will do everything but help the fight against terrorism.
Even without invading Iraq, the events of September 11, 2001 have made it quite clear to many in the US that we've already crossed that Rubicon, that there already exist plenty of terrorists who simply want to kill us all. We've accepted that,
You mean GWB has accepted this chance to spew a lot of nonsense, to please his ultra-conservative supporters and to finally take revenge on Saddam and others who have been a PITA for the US since a long time.
and have moved on to trying to minimize their ability to do so.
The whole point of my previous post is that you are actually maximizing their ability to do by making sure the terrorist organisations get more and more supporters. You can't stop a worldwide terrorism organisation by bombing a country into oblivion or by removing a dictator from power. OTOH, you create a lot of new broken families, you give the terrorsits extra arguments against you for recruiting new victims (the US wants that Iraq follows UN resolutions, but they don't do so themselves; presenting "evidence" of Iraq weapons of mass destruction that is just as amateurishly concocted as the evidence that Microsoft presented in its anti-trust trial...)
Terrorism can only be stopped by taking away the motivations for doing these terrible acts. You can't scare terrorists, people that go on a plane and crash it into a building are way beyond the point of being scared. They may have lost many members of their family, maybe they saw others "succumb" to the Western influences that they so despise, they see how the US gains more and more power and now even defies the UN. I mean, can't you at least slightly understand that the only thing that this war does, is give these people new reasons to hate the US? And to help them "prove" that it's the US that's lawless and that they (the terrorists) are the ones fighting the rightful battle against an oppresor? You aren't fighting terrorism, you're doing a better recruitment campaign for Al Qaeda than whatever they could setup themselves.
And, in a sense, we did bring it on ourselves, but we've already done so.
But you're making things only worse! This is no solution in any sense, except maybe to satisfy an urge for revenge. I mean, it's almost as if GWB is a suck puppet for Osama, making sure the latter gets new recruits...
Even if you overlook the appalling human rights abuses Iraq's government is responsible for (including nerve gassing ethnic minorities),
Even if you overlook the appalling human rights abuses the US government is responsible for (like keeping alleged terrorists locked up without due process),
even if you ignore his sponsorship of Hamas (who admittedly aren't anything to do with al-Queda, but they're still terrorists),
even if you ignore their sponshorship of Al Qaeda (yes, *the* Al Qaeda), Saddam Houssein and who knows how many other "terrorists",
Saddam must not be permitted to invade his neighbors again.
the US must not be permitted to invade other countries (like Panama and probably soon Iraq) again.
No, I'm not serious. I don't think there should be a world war against the USA. And yes, the USA also has done quite a few real humanitarian missions like in former Yugoslavia (unlike Saddam and Al Qaeda). But I'm sick of this rhetoric about how Saddam is so evil that the great US of A has to do a pre-emptive strike to save the poor Iraqi people and by extension the whole world.
Frankly, I think that things will only get worse, *especially* in the battle against worldwide terrorism. I doubt the Iraqi people will see the US Army & allies as the ones that come to free them, but simply as a change of oppressor. First it was Saddam, afterwards it will be a sock puppet of the allies. The latter most likely won't use nerve gasses and I'm fairly certain that the overall situation will improve, but only in ways approved by the allies (ie., they control what will happen; they are the boss, not the Iraqi's themselves).
And just like in Afghanistan, there will probably be mass arrests after the fighting is over, leaving lots of families without fathers & sons. Will the remaining people of those families say "Thank you allies for taking away these bad people from us!"? No, most likely they'll see it as a confirmation of Al Qaeda's assertions that the West only wants total control over the East and that the West is the oppressor in the conflict, with Al Qaeda the guerrilla movement that wants to protect them.
If anything, I think this war will *increase* Al Qaeda's popularity and therefore also its power. These terrorist organisations depend on desperate people to join their ranks (in general only the top is truly "evil", the rest is merely misguided and/or brainwashed). Such a war will only ascertain their supply of fresh blood:(
Then again, I'm just one of those Belgian weasels of course <g>
Actually, I'm under the impression that since the introduction of Mac OS X, a lot more third party stuff is available for the Mac. First of all, there's all the free and non-free (like MatLab and Oracle) unix software that got or is being ported. Also, pretty much all programs that were available for Mac OS 9 have been ported to Mac OS X (with the notable exception of QuarkXPress, although that will be out in a couple of months as well).
Regarding the processor speed issue: yes, that is a real issue for a lot of people (though certainly not for everyone). Apple knows this:) But do you honestly think that people who think about lighting in a store can do something about that? Why would trying to make a store as good as possible be mutually exclusive with improving the speed of the PPC's, especially since it's not Apple itself that makes them? It's not like they have to choose between one or another...
That's weird, my 12" iBook (32MB VRAM model) battery is also rated as 3.9 Ah, but my current maximum capacity is 4.192 Ah:) You won't hear me complaining about that though!
My 1 month old iBook 800 (12") also has no problems. You may also want to try the script poster by a reader at macintouch, it gets the status of the battery from the ioregistry.
FWIW, the output on my 88% charged iBook 800 (12", combo drive, november '02 model, bought in Januari) is voltage=11928 flags=4/0x004 amperage=1023 capacity=4192 current=3692 [88.1%]. I can squeeze 5+ hours out of this (just typing text, screen dimmed to the one but darkest setting, cpu speed set to "automatic"), so the battery is definitely good. I don't know what normal or good capacity values for other models are.
I nowhere claimed RMS is omniscient (nor have I seen anyone else claiming that) and I doubt I'll ever see him again (he simply gave a speech at our university). Nevertheless, I think reality contradicts whatever good intentions the USPTO may have, unless this evolution of the obvious requirements is *very* recent (which I can't see since the "last modified" date at the bottom is "2003-03-05", so it may even have been introduced today).
Why is the fact that its a patent on software make it evil?
I happened to have gone to a speech by RMS about software patents quite recently and he explained it very well (no, I'm not a stallman junkie nor a GNU addict in any way).
Some reasons software patents are evil are:
regular patents protect one specific thing, software patents protect one tiny piece of a large puzzel. So a single program most of the time infringes on a large number of patents, making licensing not feasible (if you have to pay 5% of your revenue for every patent you use, you'll probably have to pay for each copy you sell).
they don't protect small-time developers at all (except maybe against other small-time developers). If you find out that IBM or Microsoft violates your patent and you demand some retribution for that, they'll have a look at your program and probably find that you violate 30 patents of theirs. Of course, because they are such nice guys, they will probably allow you to keep using their patented stuff if they can use your 1 patent. So the protection you get is zero, and if they're not nice guy's you'll have to pay extra. The advantage of a small software developer is the speed at which he can follow changes of the market and do things, compared to the big, slow megacorporations.
Programming not very unlike composing a symphony: just like you can't just take a couple of "musical techniques", throw them together and get something that sounds good, you can't take just a couple of (patented) cool software techniques, throw them together and get a killer app. It's the way you make those things work/sound together, the hours of debugging/refining that makes/breaks the result.
In the same spirit: Beethoven is considered a great composer that was very progressive for his time, i.e. he introduced a lot of "new" things in his music. Nevertheless, should there have been music patents in his time, he would have been unable to make any of his compositions, since although he was smart, he wasn't smart/good enough to reinvent the music from zero and still get something that sounds good. It's similar in software development: you may be a superprogrammer with great ideas, but no one is that good that he can reinvent software development from scratch. You're just bound to reuse ideas that others have had before (and lots of people have the same ideas at the same time, without knowing anything about eachother).
Software patents are granted for the most stupid things, for tthe simple reason that if you take something already existing that is completely obvious, but do it in software, it is considered new (e.g. selling stuff in a store -> selling stuff via the Internet, keeping client records in a store -> keeping client records in an internet store,...)
there are so many software patents that pretty much every program in existence probably violates several patents. If you want to develop a program, sell it and make sure you don't violate any patent, you'll probably spend more time on lawyers to look at all available software patents than you'll ever make selling your program.
The bottom line is that software patents do not promote progress and inventions (which is the original goal of the patent system), but in fact retard it (since you should be scared to do something, knowing that you're probably violating at least one patent or another and that when someone who has such a patent finds you annoying enough, he'll either sue you to hell or force you to give him all "intellectual property" you got). See also this article.
The hungersite says (after you've clicked): "100% of collected revenue from sponsor banner advertising is given to our charity partners, Mercy Corps and America's Second Harvest, who use it to provide hunger relief". The Mercy Corps seems to be an international organisation, America's Second Harvest is purely US focussed.
At freedonation.com you can actually donate for a lot of different charities, some of which are US-focussed (e.g. for the homeless) and some which are not. The reason is that both sites are US-based and as such do have opportunities to give to US-only organisations. Frankly, I couldn't care less about this (I'm not a US citizen at all and I'm no fan of US international politics either), I think that everyone who needs help as equal rights to getting help.
As such, I do find it objectionable though that you put it so bluntly that you think the problems of Americans should be solved before you want to help solving problems of others (unless maybe as in the case of the hungersite, it's easy for you to do both at once). I really don't see why one should depend of another. In fact, if you think about it, you'll come to the conclusion that all poverty will never be solved in the US, just like it will never be solved anywhere else (except maybe in Monaco, where you have to be a millionaire before you are allowed to immigrate).
The type of food you're talking about is also a "want". You can eat (and even eat properly) for a lot less than $50. But if you want to have something more luxurious, you pay more...
The original article that introduced it can be found here (download links for the article in several formats are at the top). Google also has a nice collection of links.
First of all, the kernel isn't a UNIX kernel, it's a hacked Mach kernel with a BSD compatibility layer.
The Linux kernel is a hacked Minix kernel and not a UNIX kernel. So what?
Furthermore, there are very significant differences in userland, including things like a case-insensitive file system
Yes, Mac OS X by default has full support (i.e. it can boot off of it) for a case insensitive file system as well as for UFS. So what?
huge changes in system administration,
Like what? There are default GUI tools available to do it? It uses Netinfo by default instead of flat files? (although you can tell Netinfo to get all of its info from these flat files, after which administration is the same as on other machines) So a Linux box that uses NIS is less UNIX than a Linux box that uses flat files, because system administration is suddenly completely different?
lack of device nodes for things like audio and video,
UNIX didn't even have audio or video in the beginning. Anyone who uses these things directly, is bound to get portability problems to any other UNIX, because the nodes may be called different or the way to control them may be different. That's why libraries like SDL were developed, because there is no standard (UNIX or other) audio/video interface.
multiple views of the file system (from Carbon/UNIX),
Carbon is just a framework (look at it as a giant library). Do you mean the fact that if a Carbon app asks a path name the path delimiter is a colon, while a command line app (one that doesn't use Carbon anyway) will see slashes? Why does the existence of such a library make a system merely "UNIX-like" and not a "true UNIX"?
Porting UNIX programs to OS X can be a lot of work, much more than to just about any other platform that claims to be UNIX-compatible.
Have you actually ported something yourself? Are you talking about porting a project that previously only ran on Linux/x86, or projects which already ran on several different UNIX'es? I have personally compiled a couple of small things which I found and they didn't require that much tinkering. The fact that they did require tinkering doesn't prove your point, because those projects were already full of conditional defines for the other supported UNIX'es, Darwin just wasn't present (and didn't require a lot of extra defines or changes, definitely not more than the others).
In case you care, the programs I'm talking about are base64 (a simple base64 decoder, required no changes), HUGS (a Haskell interpreter, didn't require any changes either to compile, only to install; note that this was before it was includeded in the fink ports tree) and umoria (rogue clone, required 3 changes).
A UNIX kernel hacker coming to Darwin has to start learning from scratch because its architecture is so different.
Then why are people who ask about poorly documented area's of the Darwin kernel (e.g. the Virtual File System layer) referred to the relevant documentation for 4.4BSD by Apple employees? (login/pass = archives/archives).
Apart from that, do you really think the kernels of Solaris, AIX, Linux, 4.4BSD,... have that much in common? (even ignoring the fact that some of those follow System V with POSIX interfaces bolted on later, while others are the other way round). There simply is no "standard UNIX kernel implementation", except maybe the original one by AT&T. When one OS is better at low-level things (e.g. multithreading or virtual memory handling), this pretty much invariably means that that particular OS has completely different (or at least heavily hacked) implementation of this facility than other OS'es (otherwise it would be the same). That doesn't make it less UNIX or anything else though.
X11 on OS X is rather inefficient.
No, it's not. Older implementations were, because they didn't use hardware acceleration. X11 is also inefficient under Linux when used together with a graphics chipset for which no proper XFree86 drivers are available. Current implementations (XFree86 4.2.99 and later, including the newly released 4.3.0) are quite snappy under OS X, using full hardware accelleration (although I still fail to see how this makes Mac OS X more or less of a UNIX).
Multimedia works differently.
You mean you don't need 4 or 5 sound daemons under Mac OS X because one program requires this one and another that one? Or that there's no/dev/dsp? (there isn't one under Solaris either, does that mean Solaris isn't a real UNIX according to you? Look here for more info).
Etc. Etc. OS X just doesn't function like a "true, complete Unix". It's a good approximation, but no more.
Unless you meant Linux instead of Unix in the above sentence, I think you are dead wrong.
On OS X, X11 runs on top of, and in parallel with, the existing Mac window system. Normally, X11 has sole and complete control of the frame buffer, graphics hardware, and accelerator.
You can run X11 on Mac OS X both rootless (i.e. next to the standard Mac OS X GUI) and rooted (completely on its own, Mac OS X's windowserver killed or on a pure Darwin System). On Linux, X11 uses drivers to access the hardware acceleration features of the available graphics card. On Mac OS X, it uses drivers as well. The only difference is that in the former case, the drivers are part of the XFree package (since there are such drivers by default on a Linux system), on Mac OS X it uses the drivers that come with Mac OS X.
According to you, would Mac OS X be more of a Unix if the XFree people had to write their own driver, i.e. if Mac OS X didn't supply it's own accelerated drivers? Or does supplying a default window server that is different from X11 make an operating system suddenly less Unix?
The fact simply is that all UNIX flavors differ on several points, but that doesn't make any of them less of a UNIX. Some more general UNIX reading can be found at Bell Labs.
ROTFL! Copy-pasting from an article linked by Slashdot (see excerpt here) that was so stupid that it got pulled by the publisher. Is that all you got?:)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem I have with this war is that although it may indeed ultimately result in the removal of Saddam from power and making certain that Iraq doesn't have any WMD's (anymore), the people behind it don't seem to care at all that on every other imaginable front, it makes the whole world situation worse. A lot of people think so at least and I haven't seen anyone here yet arguing it isn't so when replying to my posts (only got a few new foes and friends :).
Before you go to war, you have to ask yourself whether it's really worth it. Obviously, most of the countries in the UN didn't think so. Bush wanted a war he could win (he thought it would even be easy, but it seems like he made a small mistake there), so he used the UN resolutions as a pretext to start this war.
It is certainly possible that France, Germany and Russia have other reasons to be against a war on Iraq than just that they think it's plain stupid (like someone else replied to another comment of mine), but they were/are not the only ones that are against. Of course they are the most vocal, since they are all quite large countries, but for example Belgium ("my" country) is also against. And all those millions of people that protested against the war. I don't think you can dismiss that all as "they are scared" or "they have other interests to protect" or "they are misguided, they don't know what they are talking about".
Just think about it: maybe the fact that the majority was/is against a war means that it is/was indeed a bad idea to start it and that was their way to try to prevent it. Maybe they were trying to stop the US from going to war not because they didn't like the US or because they didn't really want Saddam to follow the UN resolutions, but because they thought that waging such a war would do more harm than good.
Just removing Saddam isn't going to stop terrorism or dagers in this world, it's not even a first step in that process the way it's being done now. On the contrary, it seems like with this war, it's just become the beginning of a much larger scale armed conflict. And somehow, I can't help but think that that is exactly what several people high up in the current US government want, since that's the only way they can justify all the spending they've taken away from other important sectors and pumped into the army.
Thanks for the correction.
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A lot of families will lose one or more members resulting in a lot of broken families. Do you think the rest will say "Thank you USA for solving this conflict in a violent way and it's ok that you took away the lives of our family members, it was worth it." or "F*ck you USA, Al Qaeda is right: you are the terrorists here and they are the freedom fighters. I've got nothing left to lose, see you in hell."
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The majority of countries in the world is against this war, including some with veto power in the UN. The USA simply ignored that, called using a veto and other means of diplomatic actions things that "weasels" do and went bombing anyway. So another assertion of Al Qaeda, namely that the US wants world domination and is rogue (since they defy the UN) is "confirmed".
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After the war is over, the US wants to install a military government (under US control of course) and contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq are already being signed, a lot of them going to
... US companies of course, one of which was headed for a long time by Powel! So the claim that the US is headed by nothing but a corrupt bunch of corporatists that only want to extend their influences in the Middle East is affirmed.
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The US is already talking about invading Iran after Iraq is finished... Need I say more?
Don't you understand that GWB is doing a better recruitment campaign for Al Qaeda & Co than whatever they could come up with themselves? All the US is doing is making sure it becomes more hated every day. Al Qaeda will only become stronger because of the war in Iraq, since they'll get more recruits ready for brainwashing, they're not being hurt at all. The only reason that GWB is waging this war, is because he wants revenge for his dad, he wants to please his "neo-conservative think-tank" and his corporate friends and because he doesn't want to be remembered as "the president that couldn't catch Osama bin Laden".Think for yourself, instead of blindly believing all the nonsense the Bush adminsitration and the media spew at you. They have no clue (the fact that they are actually surprised that the Iraqi's fight back, says enough imho). Even if you actually believe that this war is righteous, don't delude yourself into thinking that it is solving any kind of problem the US has with terrorism, it is only making matters worse. For the whole world. But the US doesn't seem to care what the rest of the world thinks. Which is why so many people are angry with the US. And some of those are weak and can be recruited by terrorist organisations for use as cannon fodder.
And yes, this is completely off topic...
I (as non-native English speaker) always pronounced it more or less as jag-war or jag-u-war (not pronouncing the "u" very explicitly of course).
They are using Open Source not because they are fans of ESR, but because they get real benefits from it. If it only cost to them, they would stop instead of keep adding new open source projects like open directory, rendezvous and webcore.
I don't want to play that game. In a diplomatic and civilized world, you take action by using your veto's and your votes. Yes, the US ignored those and went to war anyway. If you think that using a veto in the UN is "just use words and not take action", then it means you've confirmed what so many others have already said: the US and its allies just made the UN irrelevant, it's as if the UN was only their to let the US justify whatever action it wanted to take. Why would any other country still take the UN serious? The US is invading Iraq because it supposedly violates UN resolutions, but by doing that they are doing exactly the same thing!
Don't you fscking get it that the only thing that this war does, is make matters worse on all counts? More destroyed families and desperate survivors -> more recruits for Al Qaeda. The US defies the UN -> the terrorists have more ammo win people for their "cause" (or what they claim that is their cause), since the US now has very little moral ground left to stand on. A sock puppet government gets installed in Iraq -> the terrorists will use this to convince more people to join their ranks, since that's "proof" that US is in for complete world domination.
The US are helping the terrorists in a way those organisations could only dream about of doing themselves (not on purpose of course, but it is the end result)! These organisations can only get people so far that they commit suicide if these people are completely desperate and feel they have absolutely no control anymore about what's happening to their life and environment. This war will only increase and encourage such breakdowns, it will do everything but help the fight against terrorism.
Terrorism can only be stopped by taking away the motivations for doing these terrible acts. You can't scare terrorists, people that go on a plane and crash it into a building are way beyond the point of being scared. They may have lost many members of their family, maybe they saw others "succumb" to the Western influences that they so despise, they see how the US gains more and more power and now even defies the UN. I mean, can't you at least slightly understand that the only thing that this war does, is give these people new reasons to hate the US? And to help them "prove" that it's the US that's lawless and that they (the terrorists) are the ones fighting the rightful battle against an oppresor? You aren't fighting terrorism, you're doing a better recruitment campaign for Al Qaeda than whatever they could setup themselves.
But you're making things only worse! This is no solution in any sense, except maybe to satisfy an urge for revenge. I mean, it's almost as if GWB is a suck puppet for Osama, making sure the latter gets new recruits...Storms bring sunshine.
No, I'm not serious. I don't think there should be a world war against the USA. And yes, the USA also has done quite a few real humanitarian missions like in former Yugoslavia (unlike Saddam and Al Qaeda). But I'm sick of this rhetoric about how Saddam is so evil that the great US of A has to do a pre-emptive strike to save the poor Iraqi people and by extension the whole world.
Frankly, I think that things will only get worse, *especially* in the battle against worldwide terrorism. I doubt the Iraqi people will see the US Army & allies as the ones that come to free them, but simply as a change of oppressor. First it was Saddam, afterwards it will be a sock puppet of the allies. The latter most likely won't use nerve gasses and I'm fairly certain that the overall situation will improve, but only in ways approved by the allies (ie., they control what will happen; they are the boss, not the Iraqi's themselves).
And just like in Afghanistan, there will probably be mass arrests after the fighting is over, leaving lots of families without fathers & sons. Will the remaining people of those families say "Thank you allies for taking away these bad people from us!"? No, most likely they'll see it as a confirmation of Al Qaeda's assertions that the West only wants total control over the East and that the West is the oppressor in the conflict, with Al Qaeda the guerrilla movement that wants to protect them.
If anything, I think this war will *increase* Al Qaeda's popularity and therefore also its power. These terrorist organisations depend on desperate people to join their ranks (in general only the top is truly "evil", the rest is merely misguided and/or brainwashed). Such a war will only ascertain their supply of fresh blood :(
Then again, I'm just one of those Belgian weasels of course <g>
Do you really think that would help?
Regarding the processor speed issue: yes, that is a real issue for a lot of people (though certainly not for everyone). Apple knows this :) But do you honestly think that people who think about lighting in a store can do something about that? Why would trying to make a store as good as possible be mutually exclusive with improving the speed of the PPC's, especially since it's not Apple itself that makes them? It's not like they have to choose between one or another...
Look at this Apple KB article to find out what the key combo is to reset the PMU on your 'book.
That's weird, my 12" iBook (32MB VRAM model) battery is also rated as 3.9 Ah, but my current maximum capacity is 4.192 Ah :) You won't hear me complaining about that though!
FWIW, the output on my 88% charged iBook 800 (12", combo drive, november '02 model, bought in Januari) is voltage=11928 flags=4/0x004 amperage=1023 capacity=4192 current=3692 [88.1%]. I can squeeze 5+ hours out of this (just typing text, screen dimmed to the one but darkest setting, cpu speed set to "automatic"), so the battery is definitely good. I don't know what normal or good capacity values for other models are.
I nowhere claimed RMS is omniscient (nor have I seen anyone else claiming that) and I doubt I'll ever see him again (he simply gave a speech at our university). Nevertheless, I think reality contradicts whatever good intentions the USPTO may have, unless this evolution of the obvious requirements is *very* recent (which I can't see since the "last modified" date at the bottom is "2003-03-05", so it may even have been introduced today).
Some reasons software patents are evil are:
- regular patents protect one specific thing, software patents protect one tiny piece of a large puzzel. So a single program most of the time infringes on a large number of patents, making licensing not feasible (if you have to pay 5% of your revenue for every patent you use, you'll probably have to pay for each copy you sell).
- they don't protect small-time developers at all (except maybe against other small-time developers). If you find out that IBM or Microsoft violates your patent and you demand some retribution for that, they'll have a look at your program and probably find that you violate 30 patents of theirs. Of course, because they are such nice guys, they will probably allow you to keep using their patented stuff if they can use your 1 patent. So the protection you get is zero, and if they're not nice guy's you'll have to pay extra. The advantage of a small software developer is the speed at which he can follow changes of the market and do things, compared to the big, slow megacorporations.
- Programming not very unlike composing a symphony: just like you can't just take a couple of "musical techniques", throw them together and get something that sounds good, you can't take just a couple of (patented) cool software techniques, throw them together and get a killer app. It's the way you make those things work/sound together, the hours of debugging/refining that makes/breaks the result.
- Software patents are granted for the most stupid things, for tthe simple reason that if you take something already existing that is completely obvious, but do it in software, it is considered new (e.g. selling stuff in a store -> selling stuff via the Internet, keeping client records in a store -> keeping client records in an internet store,
...)
- there are so many software patents that pretty much every program in existence probably violates several patents. If you want to develop a program, sell it and make sure you don't violate any patent, you'll probably spend more time on lawyers to look at all available software patents than you'll ever make selling your program.
The bottom line is that software patents do not promote progress and inventions (which is the original goal of the patent system), but in fact retard it (since you should be scared to do something, knowing that you're probably violating at least one patent or another and that when someone who has such a patent finds you annoying enough, he'll either sue you to hell or force you to give him all "intellectual property" you got). See also this article.In the same spirit: Beethoven is considered a great composer that was very progressive for his time, i.e. he introduced a lot of "new" things in his music. Nevertheless, should there have been music patents in his time, he would have been unable to make any of his compositions, since although he was smart, he wasn't smart/good enough to reinvent the music from zero and still get something that sounds good. It's similar in software development: you may be a superprogrammer with great ideas, but no one is that good that he can reinvent software development from scratch. You're just bound to reuse ideas that others have had before (and lots of people have the same ideas at the same time, without knowing anything about eachother).
At freedonation.com you can actually donate for a lot of different charities, some of which are US-focussed (e.g. for the homeless) and some which are not. The reason is that both sites are US-based and as such do have opportunities to give to US-only organisations. Frankly, I couldn't care less about this (I'm not a US citizen at all and I'm no fan of US international politics either), I think that everyone who needs help as equal rights to getting help.
As such, I do find it objectionable though that you put it so bluntly that you think the problems of Americans should be solved before you want to help solving problems of others (unless maybe as in the case of the hungersite, it's easy for you to do both at once). I really don't see why one should depend of another. In fact, if you think about it, you'll come to the conclusion that all poverty will never be solved in the US, just like it will never be solved anywhere else (except maybe in Monaco, where you have to be a millionaire before you are allowed to immigrate).
The type of food you're talking about is also a "want". You can eat (and even eat properly) for a lot less than $50. But if you want to have something more luxurious, you pay more...
The original article that introduced it can be found here (download links for the article in several formats are at the top). Google also has a nice collection of links.
In case you care, the programs I'm talking about are base64 (a simple base64 decoder, required no changes), HUGS (a Haskell interpreter, didn't require any changes either to compile, only to install; note that this was before it was includeded in the fink ports tree) and umoria (rogue clone, required 3 changes).
Then why are people who ask about poorly documented area's of the Darwin kernel (e.g. the Virtual File System layer) referred to the relevant documentation for 4.4BSD by Apple employees? (login/pass = archives/archives).Apart from that, do you really think the kernels of Solaris, AIX, Linux, 4.4BSD, ... have that much in common? (even ignoring the fact that some of those follow System V with POSIX interfaces bolted on later, while others are the other way round). There simply is no "standard UNIX kernel implementation", except maybe the original one by AT&T. When one OS is better at low-level things (e.g. multithreading or virtual memory handling), this pretty much invariably means that that particular OS has completely different (or at least heavily hacked) implementation of this facility than other OS'es (otherwise it would be the same). That doesn't make it less UNIX or anything else though.
No, it's not. Older implementations were, because they didn't use hardware acceleration. X11 is also inefficient under Linux when used together with a graphics chipset for which no proper XFree86 drivers are available. Current implementations (XFree86 4.2.99 and later, including the newly released 4.3.0) are quite snappy under OS X, using full hardware accelleration (although I still fail to see how this makes Mac OS X more or less of a UNIX). You mean you don't need 4 or 5 sound daemons under Mac OS X because one program requires this one and another that one? Or that there's noAccording to you, would Mac OS X be more of a Unix if the XFree people had to write their own driver, i.e. if Mac OS X didn't supply it's own accelerated drivers? Or does supplying a default window server that is different from X11 make an operating system suddenly less Unix?
The fact simply is that all UNIX flavors differ on several points, but that doesn't make any of them less of a UNIX. Some more general UNIX reading can be found at Bell Labs.
ROTFL! Copy-pasting from an article linked by Slashdot (see excerpt here) that was so stupid that it got pulled by the publisher. Is that all you got? :)