Then again binoculars and small video cameras 'may seriously intrude on the privacy...' of European people too. Are they going after things of that nature as well?
Video cameras are already covered by Data Protection legislation, so that if I have reasonable cause to believe I'm captured on someone's video camera, I am entitled to a copy of the tape within 30 days of my request. In the UK implementation at the moment I believe that the penalty for non-compliance is a criminal prosecution which can lead to 5 years on jail and a fine of up to UKP5000. The camera owner is permitted to charge up to a maximum of UKP10 to cover the costs of providing the tape.
In short, that answer to macdaddy's question is Yes, they are.
Braben's working (stiiiiiill) on Elite 4 at Frontier Developments, no really, it WILL be released at some point...
Bell's become a techno-shamen trance DJ cat-breeder, homepage is here. a Proper old-school game designer, possibly madder than Yak, but probably not as productive.
Text based elite port (based on Ian Bell's txtelite reference code and a bunch of reverse engineering) implemented in ColdFusion with combat and trading, links to WAP emulators at the site to keep those phone bills down
Galaxy 1 is all there, galaxies 2-8 to follow. Vipers went in a month or so ago (bastards!!). Thargons and Witchspace to follow soon.
As Modesty says, now you CAN sell slaves to Diso while you're waiting for the bus.
Install a matrix of tiny bright lamps on the back window, enough to display detailed graphics or text
I've long wished for something along these lines, although not quite for the same purpose. What I'd like would be the ability to unambiguously let another driver know that, for example, his/her left front indicator / right brake light or whatever wasn't working right.
As things stand, the only way to try and get a message like this across is to flash the headlights, which (a) doesn't specify anything, and (b) could be taken as a sign of aggression.
Because at the moment, it's entirely possible on a long journey that the first you'd know about a blown bulb would be the police pulling you over for a violation and charging you.
The real question is: do I really need $100 audio cables? Not really [...]
likewise, the interconnects in my stereo (Arcam, Quad and Tannoy) all come in around the 40-GBP-per-stereo-cable mark, and in a sense, no, I don't need them.
But they make me happy. Which is why I spent all that money on the system in the first place.
If cheaper equipment, cheaper interconnect and lower bitrates make you happy, that's fantastic. good on you.
In my case, ~2000 GBP worth of equipment does a pretty good job (though my mum's ~5000 GBP Naim stuff makes me weep every time I hear it)
...but this statement about language lock-in seems entirely false to me. I have done programming for research purposes and combined C with C++, C with Scheme, and used tools mostly written in C call Fortran libraries. I have seen and used examples of Perl and Python programs accessing common C libraries.
As presented to us by MS, and I'm not saying this is true, just that this is what MS said, the big deal with multiple language objects under the CLR is that you can inherit between languages transparently.
That is, I could write a component in C++, then when you use it in your project under the CLR you could inherit, override and so on, all in 'python#', then, looking at your extensions and liking them, another developer could inherit from you, writing his/her extensions in, let's say, J#. This would mean, for example, that you could end up with a class whose methods are all written in different languages, say perl for text-handling stuff, fortran for number crunching, and so on, each playing to the particular strengths of a language, or the particular skills of a developer on the project team.
So it's a slightly different direction in terms of code reuse. Face it, even VB could always call C-based win32 API functions with a bit of bodge.
TomV
Re:Initial reactions
on
J#
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Microsoft's decision to not include a JVM in WinXP concerns me
This seems a reasonable point to attach the following question, to which I cannot come up with a reasonmable answer right now...
How can it be evil for MS to INCLUDE a browser / media player / etc in XP, viciously anticompetitive and so forth,...
and...
simultaneously evil for MS to EXCLUDE a JVM in XP?
If anyone can supply a reasonably coherent answer to this, I'd be really pleased to see it:-)
The article put me in mind of the Echo and The Bunnymen UK tour at the start of the 1980's
The tour seemed to be a series of random flits from town to town, with no consideration for efficient routing or logic of any sort, and including gigs in village halls on obscure islands in the back of nowhere, even the Northern Isles, miles off the coast of Scotland.
But when the New Musical Express asked the Bunnymen's manager, Bill Drummond (later of The KLF, Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, Timelords, K Foundation etc) why they were following such a random route, Drummond's reply was:
"It's not random: if you look at a map of the world, the whole tour's in the shape of a rabbit's ears."
I know that this is way of topic, but as an American who is a Circket fan (am I the only one?), I just have to say that a test average of 99.94 is just insane...that's like, hitting 300 RBI's per season for your whole carreer in baseball.
Bradman isn't just an Australian Legend - you've hit the nail on the head - he was without doubt the most brutally effective batsman who ever played first class cricket, by a country mile.
Played 80 innings in test matches, not out in 10, highest score 334, total runs 6996, average only 99.94 because he went for nothing in his last ever test - 4 runs would have been enough to make it a hundred average. In 338 first class matches we're looking at 211 centuries, including 41 doubles, 8 triples and an HS of 452 not out. The nearest competitors for average are Graeme Pollock (60.97 from 41 innings) and George Headley (60.83 from 40 innings). Of current players, Tendulkar averages 57.18, Steve Waugh 51.87 and Lara 47.68.
Search on 'Bodyline' and you'll see how there was an Imperial crisis and several changes to the laws of cricket just because Bradman was so insanely great. Not that that stopped him...
The version commonly extant in the UK when I was of an age for nursery rhymes (late 1960s, early 1970s) runs/ran as follows:
Ring a ring of roses
(refers to characteristic circular pattern of skin lesions in Plague sufferers)
A pocket full of posies
(posies - bunches of flowers, used both as a purported means of staving off infection, and to cover the appalling smell arising from the buboes, although how one could detect it over the appalling smell of the middle ages...)
Atishoo, atishoo
(onomatopaeic reference to sneezing, symptomatic of plague)
We all fall down
(obvious really)
I've never heard the 'Ashes' variant before - is that standard in the US? Has anyone in the UK ever heard it?
Now, I'm not saying it's definitely a plague reference, but rightly or wrongly we were taught in school that it was exactly that, and indeed that most nursery rhymes contained historical messages (other examples including The Grand Old Duke Of York (a dig at the future James II's supposed military incompetence during the Civil War) and Georgie Porgie Pudding and Pie (basically a tabloid-style 'expose' of George, 2nd Duke Of Buckingham, or possibly George the Prince Regent, later king George IV of England))
Then again (replying to own post, bad!), this does come at the same time as BBC also reports 3 people shot at Amsterdam Schiphol airport. Which seems like a big coincidence given the circumstances recently.
As for whether this, or the Toulouse incident, are related to the dawn raids in France in which 8 people were arrested at the request of anti-terrorist magistrates.
I know, offtopic. But facts are better than panic.
No evidence as yet of terrorism, or any other specific cause, but the BBC story was only posted at 10:49 am and it's 11:12 am at time of this post, so give it a bit of time for the details.
And petrochemichal factories have been known to go pop from time to time...
For blood? No. I'm already sick from the smell of it.
And for water? Not as thirsty as the people of Afghanistan after a sustained drought lasting, so far, 3 1/2 years.
Not only are there only a few ruined cities to bomb, and no communications infrastructure like Iraq had, you can't even lay waste to their farms and orchards, turn their fields to dustbowls and slaughter all their livestock. Because all this has already happened. And you can't take away their freedom, because under the Taleban, they have none.
There's very little more dangerous than a people who have nothing left to lose.
The Taleban don't even have the support of the majority of the Afghan population.
At the moment, the Taleban, as an oppressive government, don't have the support of the majority of the Afghan population (which is another good reason not to murder the majority of the Afghan population for the Taleban's actions/inactions/policies).
But it seems, at least, credible that the Taleban as the focus of resistance to a foreign attack (more and more so depending on the brutality of that attack) would gain at least pragmatic support very rapidly.
Think about it - two weeks ago, a lot of Americans were still very vocal about their reservations w.r.t. President Bush. Right now, even though those reservations may remain, you're pretty much all pulling behind him, because when all's said and done he's your president and C-in-C, and you're under attack, so it's the right thing to do. Why would the situation in Afghanistan be so very different?
If Afghanistan were turned into a smoking crater in the Earth do you really think anyone would miss them?
To do such a thing would, firstly, be to stride blindly into Osama's tripwire, triggering a global war between Muslims and the west, giving every lunatic demagogue fundamentalist, be it Mullah Mohammed Omar of the Taleban or the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the perfect excuse to sell their own agendas to frightened, angry people, exactly what OBL has so far failed to achieve, and would, secondly, be an act of terrorism unparalleled in history.
NORAID is a US-based organisation which has, since its foundation in 1969, funded what it terms the 'armed struggle against British oppression' in northern Ireland. The US has, to date, refused to extradite any NORAID activists to the UK on the grounds that theirs is a political struggle, despite the fact that NORAID has been a major channel of funds from the US to the IRA.
In 1977, the U.S. Department of Justice made Noraid register officially as an agent of the Provisional IRA. The group has said its funds are distributed through Sinn Fein in Dublin and the Green Cross in Belfast. In 1982, five Noraid officials were acquitted in New York of gun-running to the IRA. Sinn Fein is the 'political wing' of the IRA and its deputy leader, Martin McGuinness has recently admitted that, as was long suspected, he was for much of the 1970's a very senior member of the IRA's 'Army Council'.
New York, 11 September 2001 will live a long time in the American memory. Here in the UK, we already have names like The Birmingham Pub Bombings, Guildford, the Arndale Centre, Enniskillen, Omagh, Bishopsgate, Canary Wharf, and nearly 3000 other tawdry, dirty little murders over the last 30 years. And I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
THAT's what NORAID is. and hopefully in the current atmosphere, they will now be treated like any other sponsor of terrorism.
The Director of the BBC, John Burt [sic], has made an official appology to the American Ambassador [sic]
point of information. John Birt retired as Director-General several months ago. However, it is accurate to say that the DG, Greg Dyke, did indeed apologise to the former US Ambassador to London, Philip Lader, for the unexpected vehemence of some sections of the audience.
But that vehemence did reinforce, again, just how far we are all infiltrated already.
No, it's something that arises from the total brainfVck of trying to hold the following quotations from your post in one head at the same time:
How exactly do you define oppression: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
As you say, Life is a key right...
Of course innocent people may be killed, but...
I'd have much preferred it if this sentence had stopped right there, before the 'but'
their survival will depend on adopting Western values; if they don't, they will parish. Either way, the civilized world wins.
If it comes to a situation where survival is contingent on accepting 'western values', then Liberty got abandoned somewhere, and with it, those very 'western values', and indeed the whole concept of a 'civilised world'. This is already a tragedy, but if it results in the nation which has most consistently defended the values of the Enlightenment for the last 200+~ years becoming a Maoist, Stalinist, Godwin'sLawSubject-ist totalitarian force punishing thought crimes across the globe, then it seems to me that the USA would not have 'won' this war. Far from it, in fact.
TomV
p.s. this is not a personal attack on the parent poster. I entirely appreciate the pain and outrage at this point. But the world has changed this week - let's all do whatever we can to make it a change for the better, not a descent into barbarism.
They know who is responsible, and they know where they live.
They have a pretty clear idea who is responsible, and they are aware that those people are spread thinly across many nations, including the USA itself, most of europe as well as the middle east, sharing cities and countryside with the overwhelming majority who utterly abhor their actions.
This calls for a good old fashion ass whooping. Kill them.
I'd certainly agree that the people responsible for this cannot be allowed to remain at large, able to repeat this atrocity at will, and I concur that this will likely involve kiling them. I'd prefer to see lawlessness countered with lawful arrest and very public trial, but it does seem unlikely that a group of suicide bombers would allow themselves to be taken alive.
flatten the whole fucking countryside and then burn them out of their stinking rotten holes in the ground.
I understand the pain. I have been bereaved in a non-related incident this very week, and I live in the UK where we have had ongoing domestic terrorism for 30 years - believe me I know the pain right now. But to avenge the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians trying to go about their lives by taking actions that would kill thousands of innocent civilians trying to go about their lives would be exactly the worst thing to do right now. When a group of terrorists attemt to show that world that indiscriminate slaughter is more powerful than the rule of law and justice, to counter their actions with more indiscriminate slaughter is to show that they have won the argument. The US has become a target specifically BECAUSE it has gone around the world, 'meddling in other countries affairs', to uphold the very principle that law is higher than force. Such is sometimes the terrible price of goodness.
Yes, this is rage. I would question the patriotism of anyone who ISN'T outraged at this point. 90% of Americans see this as an act of war. We will accept nothing less than war against the people that perpetrated this atrocity.
It's not even a matter of patriotism, rather the same underlying principle but applied to humanity rather than to a nation. I would question the very humanity of anyone who isn't outraged at this point. But to fight a war, you need an enemy, and weapons. When the Japanese Air Force bombed Pearl Harbour, it was clear that the enemy was the Japanese nation, that the target was the Japanese armed forces, and that the war could be ended by use of heavy military personnel and equipment to force the surrender of the islands of Japan. In the current situation, we don't know how to easily identify the enemy, they aren't uniformed, their bases are widely distributed, their structure is non-hierarchical, so just taking out Osama won't do it, you can't measure progress in the battle, and there is no readily identifiable point at which it is possible to say 'the war is won'. Slaughter every living terrorist, and more will appear to avenge them.
Police action on an unprecedented scale is needed now, but so is a rethink of the very principles of foreign policy by every nation on earth.
What a ghastly world we live in since Tuesday. These people want to start World War 3. Let's all do everything we can to make sure they don't succeed.
I think the point that some on TV have made that there is a significant lack of "human' intelligence (i.e. spies) is a lot more important than the lack of electronic surveillance and crackable crypto.
I'm in the UK, so, tragically, have had to be a bit more aware of terrorism for the last 30 years.
The Guardian newspaper made a similar point yesterday, citing the example of IRA standard operating practice where operational information has almost never been passed using telephones, fax or more recently email. The procedure most widely known has been for the two terrorists to get onto the same bus from different stops, talk quietly on the top floor, and get off at different stops.
Crypto back doors, satellites, phone taps, the whole panoply of technological measures, whilst reassuring, can never have a useful impact on this sort of approach.
OTOH, if, in fact, the CIA have 10,000 agents of middle-eastern origin under deep cover throughout the world, I don't want to hear them proclaim the fact to get out of a bad PR situation. Rather better to take the PR hit and leave the agents in place doing the job.
So far this is an internal US matter. Keep my country out of it.
If only this were the case. NOT because of any animosity for the US, where I am still trying to find friends and family who might have been on Manhattan, but because, atrocity though it is, that would at least be a limited situation.
This is the WORLD Trade Centre - the victims will include North and South Americans, Europeans, Africans, Asians, Australasians. Every country involved in International Trade will almost certainly have lost people.
In the first instance, yes, this was an attack on the USA. But it's also a clearly intended attack on civilisation itself by those who would have the world ruled by the most ruthless and bloodthirsty, at whim.
The Trade Towers attack said 'this is against the global culture'. The Pentagon attack said 'this is war'. Alaric's sack of Rome comes unpleasantly to mind.
TomV
Show me what a script that automates a GUI app in Windows using COM looks like
Here's a VB script which uses Word to convert UNIX-style line breaks in text files dragged'n'dropped onto its icon into Windows-style ANSI 13 + ANSI 10 CRLF's. It's about the simplest example I could find here, but apart from what's here you basically just need to know the COM object model for the app you're automating.
'REM create an instance of Word
set objWord=createobject("word.application")
'REM next bit handlesthe drag'n'drop
Set objArgs = WScript.Arguments
For I = 0 to objArgs.Count - 1
fileToProcess= objArgs(I)
'REM now we get Word to open the file and save it into another format.
'REM in this example we're using numeric values
'REM rather than constant names, - they're all
'REM in the COM Type Library for word but doing
'REM it this way saves a reference to another file
with objWord
.Documents.Open fileToProcess, 0, 0, 0, "", "", 0, "", "", 0
.ActiveDocument.SaveAs fileToProcess, 5, 0, "", 0, "", 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
.ActiveDocument.Close
end with
Next
msgbox "completed"
'REM tell Word to quit
objWord.quit
'REM get rid of reference to Word
set objWord=nothing
'REM comments include REM for clarity to non-VB ppl
Although this is a VB script example, the same result is achievable from, at least, C, C++, JavaScript, ActiveState Perl, well, basically any language that can talk COM on the windows platform.
...the list was compiled by polling Gamespy staff and several "prominent" PC developers' top 10 games of all time.
...and of course, prominence comes and goes. Plenty of people at M$ games, iD, Sony and the likes, but once upon a time, we' actually choose games specifically because of the authors.
Back in the days when i had all my own teeth and hair,;-), I'd look out for stuff by 'prominent' developers including:
Ian Bell, Donald Braben (Elite)
Jeff Minter a.k.a. Yak (Llamasoft)
Geoff Crammond (racing games for Microprose plus the mind-blowing Sentinel.)
Matthew Smith (bugByte - wrote Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy)
Nick Pelling (Arcadians, Zalaga, Frak!)
Chris Roberts (Wing Commander)
and so on. One thing I'd be fascinated to see is a top (however many) games written after the 8-bit era, as ranked by a good selection of this previous generation of writers. I've got some idea of what Yak likes, from postings on alt.music.pink-floyd, wher he's still very much a regular, and perhaps a converse exercise where the 16+ bit guys rated the earlier stuff.
It's a cliche, sure, but when the tech was that limited, a game could only live or die by its gameplay. Not that it's impossible to have innovative gameplay now, but it IS a lot easierto get away with a vacuous remake of a remake as long as the pictures are unprecedentedly pretty.
Slashdot Mirror
Video cameras are already covered by Data Protection legislation, so that if I have reasonable cause to believe I'm captured on someone's video camera, I am entitled to a copy of the tape within 30 days of my request. In the UK implementation at the moment I believe that the penalty for non-compliance is a criminal prosecution which can lead to 5 years on jail and a fine of up to UKP5000. The camera owner is permitted to charge up to a maximum of UKP10 to cover the costs of providing the tape.
In short, that answer to macdaddy's question is Yes, they are.
TomV
Bell's become a techno-shamen trance DJ cat-breeder, homepage is here. a Proper old-school game designer, possibly madder than Yak, but probably not as productive.
TomV
take a look at Modesty's WAP Elite port.
Text based elite port (based on Ian Bell's txtelite reference code and a bunch of reverse engineering) implemented in ColdFusion with combat and trading, links to WAP emulators at the site to keep those phone bills down
Galaxy 1 is all there, galaxies 2-8 to follow. Vipers went in a month or so ago (bastards!!). Thargons and Witchspace to follow soon.
As Modesty says, now you CAN sell slaves to Diso while you're waiting for the bus.
TomV
I've long wished for something along these lines, although not quite for the same purpose. What I'd like would be the ability to unambiguously let another driver know that, for example, his/her left front indicator / right brake light or whatever wasn't working right.
As things stand, the only way to try and get a message like this across is to flash the headlights, which (a) doesn't specify anything, and (b) could be taken as a sign of aggression.
Because at the moment, it's entirely possible on a long journey that the first you'd know about a blown bulb would be the police pulling you over for a violation and charging you.
TomV
1890's, surely?
TomV
likewise, the interconnects in my stereo (Arcam, Quad and Tannoy) all come in around the 40-GBP-per-stereo-cable mark, and in a sense, no, I don't need them.
But they make me happy. Which is why I spent all that money on the system in the first place.
If cheaper equipment, cheaper interconnect and lower bitrates make you happy, that's fantastic. good on you.
In my case, ~2000 GBP worth of equipment does a pretty good job (though my mum's ~5000 GBP Naim stuff makes me weep every time I hear it)
TomV
As presented to us by MS, and I'm not saying this is true, just that this is what MS said, the big deal with multiple language objects under the CLR is that you can inherit between languages transparently.
That is, I could write a component in C++, then when you use it in your project under the CLR you could inherit, override and so on, all in 'python#', then, looking at your extensions and liking them, another developer could inherit from you, writing his/her extensions in, let's say, J#. This would mean, for example, that you could end up with a class whose methods are all written in different languages, say perl for text-handling stuff, fortran for number crunching, and so on, each playing to the particular strengths of a language, or the particular skills of a developer on the project team.
So it's a slightly different direction in terms of code reuse. Face it, even VB could always call C-based win32 API functions with a bit of bodge.
TomV
This seems a reasonable point to attach the following question, to which I cannot come up with a reasonmable answer right now...
How can it be evil for MS to INCLUDE a browser / media player / etc in XP, viciously anticompetitive and so forth,
and...
simultaneously evil for MS to EXCLUDE a JVM in XP?
If anyone can supply a reasonably coherent answer to this, I'd be really pleased to see it
TomV
The article put me in mind of the Echo and The Bunnymen UK tour at the start of the 1980's
The tour seemed to be a series of random flits from town to town, with no consideration for efficient routing or logic of any sort, and including gigs in village halls on obscure islands in the back of nowhere, even the Northern Isles, miles off the coast of Scotland.
But when the New Musical Express asked the Bunnymen's manager, Bill Drummond (later of The KLF, Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, Timelords, K Foundation etc) why they were following such a random route, Drummond's reply was:
Sheer unmitigated genius.
TomV
Bradman isn't just an Australian Legend - you've hit the nail on the head - he was without doubt the most brutally effective batsman who ever played first class cricket, by a country mile.
Played 80 innings in test matches, not out in 10, highest score 334, total runs 6996, average only 99.94 because he went for nothing in his last ever test - 4 runs would have been enough to make it a hundred average. In 338 first class matches we're looking at 211 centuries, including 41 doubles, 8 triples and an HS of 452 not out. The nearest competitors for average are Graeme Pollock (60.97 from 41 innings) and George Headley (60.83 from 40 innings). Of current players, Tendulkar averages 57.18, Steve Waugh 51.87 and Lara 47.68.
Search on 'Bodyline' and you'll see how there was an Imperial crisis and several changes to the laws of cricket just because Bradman was so insanely great. Not that that stopped him...
TomV
Ring a ring of roses
(refers to characteristic circular pattern of skin lesions in Plague sufferers)
A pocket full of posies
(posies - bunches of flowers, used both as a purported means of staving off infection, and to cover the appalling smell arising from the buboes, although how one could detect it over the appalling smell of the middle ages...)
Atishoo, atishoo
(onomatopaeic reference to sneezing, symptomatic of plague)
We all fall down
(obvious really)
I've never heard the 'Ashes' variant before - is that standard in the US? Has anyone in the UK ever heard it?
Now, I'm not saying it's definitely a plague reference, but rightly or wrongly we were taught in school that it was exactly that, and indeed that most nursery rhymes contained historical messages (other examples including The Grand Old Duke Of York (a dig at the future James II's supposed military incompetence during the Civil War) and Georgie Porgie Pudding and Pie (basically a tabloid-style 'expose' of George, 2nd Duke Of Buckingham, or possibly George the Prince Regent, later king George IV of England))
TomV
As for whether this, or the Toulouse incident, are related to the dawn raids in France in which 8 people were arrested at the request of anti-terrorist magistrates.
I know, offtopic. But facts are better than panic.
TomV
And petrochemichal factories have been known to go pop from time to time...
TomV
For blood? No. I'm already sick from the smell of it.
And for water? Not as thirsty as the people of Afghanistan after a sustained drought lasting, so far, 3 1/2 years.
Not only are there only a few ruined cities to bomb, and no communications infrastructure like Iraq had, you can't even lay waste to their farms and orchards, turn their fields to dustbowls and slaughter all their livestock. Because all this has already happened. And you can't take away their freedom, because under the Taleban, they have none.
There's very little more dangerous than a people who have nothing left to lose.
TomV
At the moment, the Taleban, as an oppressive government, don't have the support of the majority of the Afghan population (which is another good reason not to murder the majority of the Afghan population for the Taleban's actions/inactions/policies).
But it seems, at least, credible that the Taleban as the focus of resistance to a foreign attack (more and more so depending on the brutality of that attack) would gain at least pragmatic support very rapidly.
Think about it - two weeks ago, a lot of Americans were still very vocal about their reservations w.r.t. President Bush. Right now, even though those reservations may remain, you're pretty much all pulling behind him, because when all's said and done he's your president and C-in-C, and you're under attack, so it's the right thing to do. Why would the situation in Afghanistan be so very different?
TomV
To do such a thing would, firstly, be to stride blindly into Osama's tripwire, triggering a global war between Muslims and the west, giving every lunatic demagogue fundamentalist, be it Mullah Mohammed Omar of the Taleban or the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the perfect excuse to sell their own agendas to frightened, angry people, exactly what OBL has so far failed to achieve, and would, secondly, be an act of terrorism unparalleled in history.
TomV
"well you've cracked the sky
scrapers fill the air"
didn't make it onto the list.
yet?
TomV
In 1977, the U.S. Department of Justice made Noraid register officially as an agent of the Provisional IRA. The group has said its funds are distributed through Sinn Fein in Dublin and the Green Cross in Belfast. In 1982, five Noraid officials were acquitted in New York of gun-running to the IRA. Sinn Fein is the 'political wing' of the IRA and its deputy leader, Martin McGuinness has recently admitted that, as was long suspected, he was for much of the 1970's a very senior member of the IRA's 'Army Council'.
New York, 11 September 2001 will live a long time in the American memory. Here in the UK, we already have names like The Birmingham Pub Bombings, Guildford, the Arndale Centre, Enniskillen, Omagh, Bishopsgate, Canary Wharf, and nearly 3000 other tawdry, dirty little murders over the last 30 years. And I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
THAT's what NORAID is. and hopefully in the current atmosphere, they will now be treated like any other sponsor of terrorism.
TomV
point of information. John Birt retired as Director-General several months ago. However, it is accurate to say that the DG, Greg Dyke, did indeed apologise to the former US Ambassador to London, Philip Lader, for the unexpected vehemence of some sections of the audience.
But that vehemence did reinforce, again, just how far we are all infiltrated already.
TomV
No, it's something that arises from the total brainfVck of trying to hold the following quotations from your post in one head at the same time:
How exactly do you define oppression: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
As you say, Life is a key right...
Of course innocent people may be killed, but...
I'd have much preferred it if this sentence had stopped right there, before the 'but'
their survival will depend on adopting Western values; if they don't, they will parish. Either way, the civilized world wins.
If it comes to a situation where survival is contingent on accepting 'western values', then Liberty got abandoned somewhere, and with it, those very 'western values', and indeed the whole concept of a 'civilised world'. This is already a tragedy, but if it results in the nation which has most consistently defended the values of the Enlightenment for the last 200+~ years becoming a Maoist, Stalinist, Godwin'sLawSubject-ist totalitarian force punishing thought crimes across the globe, then it seems to me that the USA would not have 'won' this war. Far from it, in fact.
TomV
p.s. this is not a personal attack on the parent poster. I entirely appreciate the pain and outrage at this point. But the world has changed this week - let's all do whatever we can to make it a change for the better, not a descent into barbarism.
They have a pretty clear idea who is responsible, and they are aware that those people are spread thinly across many nations, including the USA itself, most of europe as well as the middle east, sharing cities and countryside with the overwhelming majority who utterly abhor their actions.
This calls for a good old fashion ass whooping. Kill them.
I'd certainly agree that the people responsible for this cannot be allowed to remain at large, able to repeat this atrocity at will, and I concur that this will likely involve kiling them. I'd prefer to see lawlessness countered with lawful arrest and very public trial, but it does seem unlikely that a group of suicide bombers would allow themselves to be taken alive.
flatten the whole fucking countryside and then burn them out of their stinking rotten holes in the ground.
I understand the pain. I have been bereaved in a non-related incident this very week, and I live in the UK where we have had ongoing domestic terrorism for 30 years - believe me I know the pain right now. But to avenge the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians trying to go about their lives by taking actions that would kill thousands of innocent civilians trying to go about their lives would be exactly the worst thing to do right now. When a group of terrorists attemt to show that world that indiscriminate slaughter is more powerful than the rule of law and justice, to counter their actions with more indiscriminate slaughter is to show that they have won the argument. The US has become a target specifically BECAUSE it has gone around the world, 'meddling in other countries affairs', to uphold the very principle that law is higher than force. Such is sometimes the terrible price of goodness.
Yes, this is rage. I would question the patriotism of anyone who ISN'T outraged at this point. 90% of Americans see this as an act of war. We will accept nothing less than war against the people that perpetrated this atrocity.
It's not even a matter of patriotism, rather the same underlying principle but applied to humanity rather than to a nation. I would question the very humanity of anyone who isn't outraged at this point. But to fight a war, you need an enemy, and weapons. When the Japanese Air Force bombed Pearl Harbour, it was clear that the enemy was the Japanese nation, that the target was the Japanese armed forces, and that the war could be ended by use of heavy military personnel and equipment to force the surrender of the islands of Japan. In the current situation, we don't know how to easily identify the enemy, they aren't uniformed, their bases are widely distributed, their structure is non-hierarchical, so just taking out Osama won't do it, you can't measure progress in the battle, and there is no readily identifiable point at which it is possible to say 'the war is won'. Slaughter every living terrorist, and more will appear to avenge them.
Police action on an unprecedented scale is needed now, but so is a rethink of the very principles of foreign policy by every nation on earth.
What a ghastly world we live in since Tuesday. These people want to start World War 3. Let's all do everything we can to make sure they don't succeed.
TomV
I'm in the UK, so, tragically, have had to be a bit more aware of terrorism for the last 30 years.
The Guardian newspaper made a similar point yesterday, citing the example of IRA standard operating practice where operational information has almost never been passed using telephones, fax or more recently email. The procedure most widely known has been for the two terrorists to get onto the same bus from different stops, talk quietly on the top floor, and get off at different stops.
Crypto back doors, satellites, phone taps, the whole panoply of technological measures, whilst reassuring, can never have a useful impact on this sort of approach.
OTOH, if, in fact, the CIA have 10,000 agents of middle-eastern origin under deep cover throughout the world, I don't want to hear them proclaim the fact to get out of a bad PR situation. Rather better to take the PR hit and leave the agents in place doing the job.
TomV
If only this were the case. NOT because of any animosity for the US, where I am still trying to find friends and family who might have been on Manhattan, but because, atrocity though it is, that would at least be a limited situation.
This is the WORLD Trade Centre - the victims will include North and South Americans, Europeans, Africans, Asians, Australasians. Every country involved in International Trade will almost certainly have lost people.
In the first instance, yes, this was an attack on the USA. But it's also a clearly intended attack on civilisation itself by those who would have the world ruled by the most ruthless and bloodthirsty, at whim.
The Trade Towers attack said 'this is against the global culture'. The Pentagon attack said 'this is war'. Alaric's sack of Rome comes unpleasantly to mind.
TomV
Here's a VB script which uses Word to convert UNIX-style line breaks in text files dragged'n'dropped onto its icon into Windows-style ANSI 13 + ANSI 10 CRLF's. It's about the simplest example I could find here, but apart from what's here you basically just need to know the COM object model for the app you're automating.
'REM create an instance of Word
set objWord=createobject("word.application")
'REM next bit handlesthe drag'n'drop
Set objArgs = WScript.Arguments
For I = 0 to objArgs.Count - 1
fileToProcess= objArgs(I)
'REM now we get Word to open the file and save it into another format.
'REM in this example we're using numeric values
'REM rather than constant names, - they're all
'REM in the COM Type Library for word but doing
'REM it this way saves a reference to another file
with objWord
end with
Next
msgbox "completed"
'REM tell Word to quit
objWord.quit
'REM get rid of reference to Word
set objWord=nothing
'REM comments include REM for clarity to non-VB ppl
Although this is a VB script example, the same result is achievable from, at least, C, C++, JavaScript, ActiveState Perl, well, basically any language that can talk COM on the windows platform.
Back in the days when i had all my own teeth and hair, ;-), I'd look out for stuff by 'prominent' developers including:
Ian Bell, Donald Braben (Elite)
Jeff Minter a.k.a. Yak (Llamasoft)
Geoff Crammond (racing games for Microprose plus the mind-blowing Sentinel.)
Matthew Smith (bugByte - wrote Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy)
Nick Pelling (Arcadians, Zalaga, Frak!)
Chris Roberts (Wing Commander)
and so on. One thing I'd be fascinated to see is a top (however many) games written after the 8-bit era, as ranked by a good selection of this previous generation of writers. I've got some idea of what Yak likes, from postings on alt.music.pink-floyd, wher he's still very much a regular, and perhaps a converse exercise where the 16+ bit guys rated the earlier stuff.
It's a cliche, sure, but when the tech was that limited, a game could only live or die by its gameplay. Not that it's impossible to have innovative gameplay now, but it IS a lot easierto get away with a vacuous remake of a remake as long as the pictures are unprecedentedly pretty.
TomV