* I hate the fact that I can never find *anything* I'm looking for. I spend entirely too long searching around for applications, their support files, and system configuration options. I realize that Apple designs these things for people who aren't familiar with computers, but fuck, it makes it hard for someone that is quite comfy with Linux and Windows configurations.
Hmm, "depends on your definition of find"(tm). mdfind is a spotlight interface from command line. locate and find work pretty much exactly as in every other unix system. Preferences are usually in ~/Library/Preferences. App resources are either in APPNAME.app/Contents/Resources or in ~/Library/Application Support. If you're not sure what files app uses, you could either do lsof while it's running (just like Linux); or you could run ktrace appname anth then do kdump -f ktrace.out - that's Mac analog of strace. There's a defaults command, that is pretty much like a command line interface to all settings. Man pages are usualy there for every command.
* I hate the fact that I have no idea what the fuck is going on behind the scenes with the Mac. Yeah, XP has gotten to this point but I guess because I have a basic idea built up over the years from other versions of Windows, I don't mind as much. Being built on Unix, I would expect to understand more about what OS X is doing -- but I don't.
* I really don't like the fact that I *could* do stuff on the CLI but I can never find out how. The files aren't in the locations I would expect.
Well, Unix - related files are usually in/etc and/usr/, just like you would expect. To interface with Cocoa/Carbon apps, I suggest you use Applescript. osascript is a command-line Applescript utility, so you could do things like osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to pause' from command-line. Again, read up Apple darwin docs.
It was (and still is) a dream of defense contractors to waste taxpayers money on unworkable "star wars" system. Pretty much all politicians - i.e. Reagan, Bush, the democrats - are in the pocket of defense contractors, so all politicians share the same dream of funding this bullshit.
To be honest, his strategy for initially winning the war was really damn good. He is honestly a man I would want leading out troops in a traditional war. (minus the body armor stupidity...)
His strategy for war was mediocre at best. Rumsfeld was lucky enough to fight a war against a country 10 times smallert than USA (25 mil vs 300 mil population), with 20 times less money, 50 smaller army and weapons from 1980. In a traditional war you want competent people like Gen. Zinni and Gen. Shinseki, who were fired by Rumsfeld for, well, accurately predicting current disaster in Iraq.
will not be pleased if the only thing to come out of the House in the next two years is a bunch of investigations and impeachment hearings. ...
Now that the Dems control the House, and will have a solid say in what happens in the Senate (regardless of outcome in Montana and Virginia), I want to see some action on real issues.
Well, in some cases action on real issues is about investigation. I (for one) am concerned about:
War profiteering and torture. There are a lot of issues about how Iraq war is handled and what private contractors (Halliburton, mercenary companies) are doing. Did you know, for instance, that there were private, non-Army interrogators in Abu Ghraib, not bound by US Military Code of Justice (I highly recommend watching "Iraq for sale" movie, BTW) ? Then there are CIA secret prisons. I definitely want that investigated.
Illegal wiretaps. I have my 4th ammendment rights and I want to know if government was violating them.
Reasons we got into war. 2839 Americans and about 600,000 Iraqis are dead. Somehow no one even got fired for that. I don't like the idea of politician being able to murder more than half a million people and just simply get away with it.
Corruption. Well, I don't have high hopes for that, because all politicians are corrupt and they won't put themselves in jail. Still, this needs to be investigated.
Erm, try reading the article, maybe ? This is Iraq research from before the first Gulf war, before all sanctions were in place. Iraq stopped all WMD programs after first Gulf war, and wasn't advancing them. Even more importantly, they weren't giving this information to al-Quaida and every other nutball with Internet connection.
It won't make a difference for a government - which is fine, I'm not that scared of governments having nukes (given how we survived for the last 50 years). Governments have all kind of rules for monitoring each other and generally they aren't suicidal, so MAD works fine with nation-states.
However, it might make a difference, since now al-Quaeda has access to these docs as well. If al-Quaida manages to also steal Uranium too, we will be in trouble. It's just another example how our government jeopardizes the actual security for stupid PR actions.
Well, there's a lot of technologies that aren't classified as WMD, but are still secret and should not end up in al-Quaeda's hands (s.a. those released documents). Saddam Hussein was apparently smart enough to prevent terrorists from seeing those. Our government, OTOH, is more interesting in creating positive PR for themselves.
If you believe that a nuclear North Korea really would use a weapon against a populated area (either in the U.S., or South Korea, or Japan), and that the odds of them doing this only increase with time until it becomes a near certainty, and you also believe that it is the duty of governments to protect the lives of their own citizens first, and enemy states' citizens second, then there is an argument for a first strike against North Korea.
I believe that NK will use nuclear weapon as a defense measure, if they are attacked and couldn't defend otherwise - the same way we would. If we don't attack them, I highly doubt they would attack us first, because there's absolutely nothing for them to gain. I also highly doubt NK will share their nukes with anybody willingly. The really scary part about this is that NK is not capable of adequately securing their weapons, so it's in both our and their best interest to make sure no terrorist group steals a nuke. Now, going to war will destabilize NK, and quite obviously it will be way much harder to keep track of their nukes (remember the story with RDX in Iraq Al-Quaqua base after invasion ?). Plus, there's always a risk that NK will actually use a nuke when attacked.
The ACLU never really had a case. It's been virtually silent about the far more draconian measures the Europeans are using to fight terrorism, particularly the French.
ACLU operates in USA only. Civil liberties violations in Europe should be handled by European counterparts of ACLU.
Look, you can't have it both ways. Either Bush is right for invading when diplomacy is obviously not working, or he isn't.
There are multiple diplomatic approaches. The one Bush chose didn't work because Bush sucks at diplomacy and is way too incompetent to handle complicated jobs such as being President. One obvious example of Bush not being able to negotiate his way out of paper bag is this North Korea nuke fiasco. And that's my main complain - not that Bush decided to use diplomacy, but that he is incapable of doing his job. Diplomacy actually works if you smart enough to negotiate properly. Bush isn't.
And really, do we know for a fact that Iraq didn't have WMD's?
Yes.
For heavens sake, we told him 6 months before we invaded that we were coming. He had plenty of time to hide and/or ship out anything he had!
So when you know ahead of time that some cocaine-crazed cowboy wannabe is going to invade your country and kill your people, the best strategy is to hide away your most powerful weapons ? You think Saddam expected Bush to go in Iraq, find out there are no WMDs and say "Oops, my bad. Keep your oil, we're leaving" ?
/* since we are only now jsut approaching those Atlantean high temps of 12K years ago. */
Grrr... Temperature wasn't higher 12K years ago. We only have accurate temperature records for the past 12K years. We simply don't know what the temperature was 12K years ago, so we could only state that the temperature is the highest ever measured over a 12K year period. Somehow this is a common mistake in EVERY/. discussion about climate.
Yes, you did, when you hit Slashdot or any.org site: the root name server for.org domain is using PostgreSQL. Postgres needs some knowledge to set it up properly, but it certainly could perform very well.
Mac could do auth over LDAP, so yes you could set elevated privileges on the whole domain. As for setup, Apple Remote Desktop allows you to install packages remotely.
Plus OS X is really just a Unix box, and applications are really just directories. That means you could quickly do something like: for m in mac1 mac2 mac3 mac4; do tar -c/Applications/Firefox.app|ssh $m 'tar -C / -xv';done
/* Go actually read the difference between using Video RAM to buffer the onscreen image (as in OSX) and using all of the GPU for 3D applications and interaction. */
Not quite. OS X has several drawing models for application to render stuff into window. QuickDraw is the old API for compatibility, which is not 3D-accelerated. Quartz2D is the new API for rendering stuff into window, and it does use GPU if it's available. Then there's also OpenGL, which of course is also accelerated. Now, after app rendered contents of it's window into video buffer, a window compositor (called Quartz Compositor) actually draws windows on screen. This is the step where things like transparency happen, and this part is also accelerated if GPU is available.
So OS X does use GPU and (falls back to CPU) for pretty much everything, except for old QuickDraw apps. If fact, on Tiger with CoreImage you could even make it do all common image manipulation tasks on GPU, if it's available. And if your app uses standard frameworks (Cocoa, QuickTime), it will automatically use Quartz2D.
But what about a global coincidence theory ? Or, it might be the fault of the sun - we didn't have sun 100 years ago, right ? Hey, Michael Crichton himself says this global warming thing is not real - I guess you hippie pinko lesbian communist godless gay-marrying terrorists would claim that global warming is real while Jurassic Park isn't ? And think of all the horrors that would happen if we cut down fuel consumption for nothing: our children would have to breathe this totally clean and transparent air, won't have to go to war for oil, won't have crazy gas prices. I'm telling you, I'm not going to believe into this "global warming" thing unless you can explain me how it's all Clinton's fault.
The problem is that politicians could lie and get away with it. Before the war Bush & Co were pretending that we were in danger from Iraq, and now that they've been proven wrong no one called them on the original claims. If I call the police and falsely claim there's a robbery when there isn't, I will be fined for false call. Bush made a false call which caused 2,000+ Americans and unknown number of Iraqis to die - and he just got away with it.
We need some sort of accountability system that would force politicians to pay for their mistakes. Require them to publicly estimate cost of war and take all outstanding costs from their personal bank accounts. Wolfowitz estimated war to cost around half a billion, and so far we ended up with more than $200 billion (yes, two hundreen billion US dollars) of extra costs. If Bush & Co were forced to pay all outstanding costs, they would've estimated the cost of war honestly, and people wouldn't be misled into supporting war.
Same thing for human cost. Require pro-war politicians to gather signatures. It's way too easy to say "I support a war" while sitting at home in front of TV. Make a law that starting a war would require million or so legally binding signatures from people to cover in case we run out of troops. There's always so many vocal pro-war supporters, but when it comes to actually fighting the war we always seem to run out of people. Make war supporters actually carry the cost of war, and they will actually start using their brains first.
/* What do you do if your opponent is perfectly willing to die just to kill you? */
So all of them are willing to die ? Each and every person involved into making nukes ? Including the higher-ups in government ? And everyone who supplies them with missle technology ?
And they will be concentrating on a very open way of attacking us with a missle, instead of, say, bringing said nuke into US in the cargo container ?
I think a way more realistic threat is some rogue terrorist group sneaking nuclear (or chemical/biological/fuel-air) bomb into US and blowing it up inside. Our defence budget is limited, we can't spend insane amounts of money unworkable solutions to improbable threats. It's way more logical to spend the money on something immediately useful and tangible, like border security.
/* The alternative is to throw up your hands and give up. */
The working alternative is MAD. I.e. if anyone attacks US we will have enough time to respond.
The "missle shield" is unworkable - well, it does it's job of fooling taxpayers into funding Raythenon, but so far it can't even intercept test missles with known trajectory. And even if we somehow manage to make it "work", it will still be useless against, say, a torpedo with nuke hitting any of our coastal cities. Or against a hijacked airliner with nuke. Or against a nuke delivered by car.
n response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.
At least Google is being consistent with obeying the law of the land.
/*Your points throught the rest are on point (bad me for not RTFA), but I don't agree that this one is necessarily going to get you anywhere. You're going to the class to *learn* the subject. Perhaps if the subject is something that actually has a lot of objective background that you have the expertise to look up independantly, you could learn it on your own and then put the professor in their box.*/
Well, if professor's politics are annoying enough to interfere with your learning, then it would be easy enough to gather enough students and complain to dean or department. Most schools I know have anonymous teacher evaluations at the end of each semester, and if professor can't teach he will lose his job. If, on the other hands, professor only briefly mentions his politics - why not just ignore him ? Generally, there's a lot of checks and balances in academic world to make sure professor's beliefs - political or otherwise - don't stand in your way of learning.
/*Funny, that's exactly what they claim to be trying to combat.*/
Well, "f*ck freedom of speech" isn't really a good public slogan. Frankly, I don't even see how teachers could impose political beliefs on students. If professor fails you because of your politics and you actually do know the subject well enough - you could always go to the department chair, or to the dean and prove your case. If professor spends too much time talking about things not related to teaching the subject - there's teacher evaluation, again you could go talk to department or dean. If you think everyone in department is corrupt - there's quite a number of student organizations on campus that will help you. Of course if you don't know the course material and fail the course "because of politics"...
/*Unless you have evidence that they're really only targettingthe left or the right, I fail to see how they're doing anything particularly egregious.*/
Well, from the article that we all are supposed to read before making comments;-) : Jones' site describes his campaign as "dedicated to exposing UCLA's most radical professors" and his list of the university's "worst of the worst" singles out only professors he says hold left-wing views.
/*And if the University really believes it's a matter of free speech, then guess what? Nothing will actually happen.*/
Then what is a purpose of this blacklist ? Why not, I don't know, try to argue your view point using facts and logic, instead of personally targeting everyone who opposes your viewpoint ?
Emacs integrates very well with shell commands. Like, for instance, I use XEmacs on powerbook, so I added a simple function+keybinging to call "mdfind", and I now have Spotlight support in emacs. Could very well be any other command. There are elisp scripts to integrate it with just about every version control system I used, for instance. My co-worker has a script (one command, that is) that runs build, runs unit tests and opens the failing ones in emacs.
Every command in emacs is really a lisp function, so it's very easy to use hooks and wrappers. For instance emacs has mouse gestures mode ("strokes") and code folding mode ("hideshow"). With one or two lines of config you could have things like code folding done by mouse gesture and such, set up exactly the way you like, specific for each language/editing mode, etc.
Command line. You could tell emacs to run group of commands several times, on lines that match specific patterns, etc. Like for instance, couple of weeks ago I was editing Python script and I told emacs to add a `print "calling func(x="+x+")"` on each line right after `def func(x):`. It took me like 3 or 4 commands, and emacs was able to parse and quote function arguments. It's very useful to be able to do things like that on the fly.
Emacs integrates really well with the rest of normal unix environment. You could browse to file in the terminal, and then open the file using 'gnuclient', which will load file in your running emacs session. If you want, you could run shell inside emacs buffer. You could run emacs in text mode over ssh. You could run emacs in batch mode - I never did, but it's possible. You could have shared emacs sessions between two emacs running on different computers.
There's great support for just about every language, which other IDEs don't have. For instance, Eclipse is a great IDE, but it's python mode often screws up if file is indented with both tabs and spaces. PHP mode for Eclipse can't fold blocks of code after "if" statement, while Java mode for the same Eclipse does it. In emacs these quirks usually don't exist, and even if they do fixing them is a matter of adding one line in emacs startup file.
This is completely off-topic, but you are just simply wrong:
Really? I thought the invasion rested on Saddam continuation to break UN resolutions time and time again. Should we just not invade and thus not inforce these resolutions? Do you prefer a nice slap on the wrist to and from a bunch of corrupt beurocrats?
You pretend that there were only two options: invade or ignore Iraq completely. In fact there was a much better option, to enforce the resolutions using sanctions and inspections. In case you haven't noticed, sanctions actually worked, and achieved their goal without producing huge number of flag-drapped coffins.
Second, Saddam (his party to be exact whome he was a part of) was implicitly allied with al Qaeda as he aided and supported them. Did you not listen to Bush durring his address to the nation?
Factually wrong, pure and simple. Saddam Hussein had no links with Al-Quaida, as was proven by 9/11 commision. Bush lied during his address to the nation (if you look at the video, you'll see that Bush's lips are moving, which means he is lying).
Third, we did not invade Iraq per say. We invaded Saddam and his supporters.
Bullshit. We murdered innocent civilians, like for instance these Iraqi children. I'm sorry, but 10 year old children aren't part of Saddam's government.
And wow! did they come out in droves to vote dispite the weekly car bombings and threats.
If you really take those "elections" seriously, read this. And weekly car bombings means they hate us so much that they are actually willing to attack us with car bombs. I know that there's a lot of cultural misunderstanding going on, so let me clear this up for you: in Iraqi culture blowing up someone with a car bomb means you dislike them. It's not some form of holliday fireworks, but rather a statement that they want you dead - as expressed by their attempt to kill you. Similarly, the act of, say, shooting at you with AK-47 does not mean they tried to fire in the air to congratulate you and missed.
To put it simply, if they try to kill you it means they want you dead, and that means they dislike you. I know it's kind of hard to interpret at first, but Iraq is pretty similar to Vietnam in this regard.
/* You seem unaware that London did not have any IRA bombings after their downtown surveillance camera system went in place. */
Hey, I just got a cell phone with tiger-protecting camera, and guess what - not a single tiger attacked me after that.
/* And the recent islamofacist bombers were tracked down and caught impressively quickly after the tapes were perused. */
Let me understand this straight: * There were cameras in London before bombing * Bombing still happened * Cameras did bupkus to prevent them
Just what exactly is impressive about it ?!?
/* As for detecting and preventing ahead of time, nothing can do that outside of an oppressive police state that prevents free movement of people. */
So, what exactly is the point of having those cameras ? So we could punish suicide bombers after they blow themselves up ?
It could be used by police to fight regular crime. However, then those cameras should be open to public review and there should be strict rules as to what exactly police could do with those cameras. A closed monitoring system installed by government under guise of "fighting terrorists" is a treat to my privacy.
/* And no, surveillance cameras used to track down criminals after the fact do not an oppressive police state make. */
The difference between criminals and terrorists you do not understand. For preventing crime they are useful, indeed. Prevent terrorist acts they will not. Tracking terrorists after the fact nearly useless is. A big pork-barrel project for Lockheed-Martin this looks like.
Slashdot Mirror
* I hate the fact that I can never find *anything* I'm looking for. I spend entirely too long searching around for applications, their support files, and system configuration options. I realize that Apple designs these things for people who aren't familiar with computers, but fuck, it makes it hard for someone that is quite comfy with Linux and Windows configurations.
Hmm, "depends on your definition of find"(tm). mdfind is a spotlight interface from command line. locate and find work pretty much exactly as in every other unix system. Preferences are usually in ~/Library/Preferences. App resources are either in APPNAME.app/Contents/Resources or in ~/Library/Application Support. If you're not sure what files app uses, you could either do lsof while it's running (just like Linux); or you could run ktrace appname anth then do kdump -f ktrace.out - that's Mac analog of strace. There's a defaults command, that is pretty much like a command line interface to all settings. Man pages are usualy there for every command.
* I hate the fact that I have no idea what the fuck is going on behind the scenes with the Mac. Yeah, XP has gotten to this point but I guess because I have a basic idea built up over the years from other versions of Windows, I don't mind as much. Being built on Unix, I would expect to understand more about what OS X is doing -- but I don't.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/in dex.html is a pretty good place to get started. They describe every part of Darwin (OS X kernel) and OS X specific userspace tools (like launchd versus inetd, etc)
* I really don't like the fact that I *could* do stuff on the CLI but I can never find out how. The files aren't in the locations I would expect.
Well, Unix - related files are usually in /etc and /usr/, just like you would expect. To interface with Cocoa/Carbon apps, I suggest you use Applescript. osascript is a command-line Applescript utility, so you could do things like osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to pause' from command-line. Again, read up Apple darwin docs.
It was (and still is) a dream of defense contractors to waste taxpayers money on unworkable "star wars" system.
Pretty much all politicians - i.e. Reagan, Bush, the democrats - are in the pocket of defense contractors, so all politicians share the same dream of funding this bullshit.
Who knew the New American Century was actually only six years long?
Well, us American voters kinda prefer the Old American Century, with Habeus Corpus and without torture. Don't you ?
To be honest, his strategy for initially winning the war was really damn good. He is honestly a man I would want leading out troops in a traditional war. (minus the body armor stupidity...)
His strategy for war was mediocre at best. Rumsfeld was lucky enough to fight a war against a country 10 times smallert than USA (25 mil vs 300 mil population), with 20 times less money, 50 smaller army and weapons from 1980. In a traditional war you want competent people like Gen. Zinni and Gen. Shinseki, who were fired by Rumsfeld for, well, accurately predicting current disaster in Iraq.
will not be pleased if the only thing to come out of the House in the next two years is a bunch of investigations and impeachment hearings.
...
Now that the Dems control the House, and will have a solid say in what happens in the Senate (regardless of outcome in Montana and Virginia), I want to see some action on real issues.
Well, in some cases action on real issues is about investigation. I (for one) am concerned about:
Erm, try reading the article, maybe ?
This is Iraq research from before the first Gulf war, before all sanctions were in place.
Iraq stopped all WMD programs after first Gulf war, and wasn't advancing them.
Even more importantly, they weren't giving this information to al-Quaida and every other nutball with Internet connection.
It won't make a difference for a government - which is fine, I'm not that scared of governments having nukes (given how we survived for the last 50 years). Governments have all kind of rules for monitoring each other and generally they aren't suicidal, so MAD works fine with nation-states.
However, it might make a difference, since now al-Quaeda has access to these docs as well. If al-Quaida manages to also steal Uranium too, we will be in trouble. It's just another example how our government jeopardizes the actual security for stupid PR actions.
Well, there's a lot of technologies that aren't classified as WMD, but are still secret and should not end up in al-Quaeda's hands (s.a. those released documents). Saddam Hussein was apparently smart enough to prevent terrorists from seeing those. Our government, OTOH, is more interesting in creating positive PR for themselves.
I believe that NK will use nuclear weapon as a defense measure, if they are attacked and couldn't defend otherwise - the same way we would. If we don't attack them, I highly doubt they would attack us first, because there's absolutely nothing for them to gain. I also highly doubt NK will share their nukes with anybody willingly. The really scary part about this is that NK is not capable of adequately securing their weapons, so it's in both our and their best interest to make sure no terrorist group steals a nuke. Now, going to war will destabilize NK, and quite obviously it will be way much harder to keep track of their nukes (remember the story with RDX in Iraq Al-Quaqua base after invasion ?). Plus, there's always a risk that NK will actually use a nuke when attacked.
ACLU operates in USA only. Civil liberties violations in Europe should be handled by European counterparts of ACLU.
There are multiple diplomatic approaches. The one Bush chose didn't work because Bush sucks at diplomacy and is way too incompetent to handle complicated jobs such as being President. One obvious example of Bush not being able to negotiate his way out of paper bag is this North Korea nuke fiasco. And that's my main complain - not that Bush decided to use diplomacy, but that he is incapable of doing his job. Diplomacy actually works if you smart enough to negotiate properly. Bush isn't.
And really, do we know for a fact that Iraq didn't have WMD's?
Yes.
For heavens sake, we told him 6 months before we invaded that we were coming. He had plenty of time to hide and/or ship out anything he had!
So when you know ahead of time that some cocaine-crazed cowboy wannabe is going to invade your country and kill your people, the best strategy is to hide away your most powerful weapons ? You think Saddam expected Bush to go in Iraq, find out there are no WMDs and say "Oops, my bad. Keep your oil, we're leaving" ?
/* since we are only now jsut approaching those Atlantean high temps of 12K years ago. */
... Temperature wasn't higher 12K years ago. We only have accurate temperature records for the past 12K years. We simply don't know what the temperature was 12K years ago, so we could only state that the temperature is the highest ever measured over a 12K year period. Somehow this is a common mistake in EVERY /. discussion about climate.
Grrr
I've never seen PostgreSQL perform, ever.
.org site: the root name server for .org domain is using PostgreSQL. Postgres needs some knowledge to set it up properly, but it certainly could perform very well.
Yes, you did, when you hit Slashdot or any
Mac could do auth over LDAP, so yes you could set elevated privileges on the whole domain.
/Applications/Firefox.app|ssh $m 'tar -C / -xv';done
As for setup, Apple Remote Desktop allows you to install packages remotely.
Plus OS X is really just a Unix box, and applications are really just directories.
That means you could quickly do something like:
for m in mac1 mac2 mac3 mac4; do tar -c
Also, there are network home directories, etc.
/* Go actually read the difference between using Video RAM to buffer the onscreen image (as in OSX) and using all of the GPU for 3D applications and interaction. */
Not quite. OS X has several drawing models for application to render stuff into window. QuickDraw is the old API for compatibility, which is not 3D-accelerated. Quartz2D is the new API for rendering stuff into window, and it does use GPU if it's available. Then there's also OpenGL, which of course is also accelerated.
Now, after app rendered contents of it's window into video buffer, a window compositor (called Quartz Compositor) actually draws windows on screen. This is the step where things like transparency happen, and this part is also accelerated if GPU is available.
So OS X does use GPU and (falls back to CPU) for pretty much everything, except for old QuickDraw apps. If fact, on Tiger with CoreImage you could even make it do all common image manipulation tasks on GPU, if it's available. And if your app uses standard frameworks (Cocoa, QuickTime), it will automatically use Quartz2D.
Oh, and we Mac users actually get laid, too.
But what about a global coincidence theory ?
Or, it might be the fault of the sun - we didn't have sun 100 years ago, right ?
Hey, Michael Crichton himself says this global warming thing is not real - I guess you hippie pinko lesbian communist godless gay-marrying terrorists would claim that global warming is real while Jurassic Park isn't ?
And think of all the horrors that would happen if we cut down fuel consumption for nothing: our children would have to breathe this totally clean and transparent air, won't have to go to war for oil, won't have crazy gas prices.
I'm telling you, I'm not going to believe into this "global warming" thing unless you can explain me how it's all Clinton's fault.
The problem is that politicians could lie and get away with it. Before the war Bush & Co were pretending that we were in danger from Iraq, and now that they've been proven wrong no one called them on the original claims. If I call the police and falsely claim there's a robbery when there isn't, I will be fined for false call. Bush made a false call which caused 2,000+ Americans and unknown number of Iraqis to die - and he just got away with it.
We need some sort of accountability system that would force politicians to pay for their mistakes. Require them to publicly estimate cost of war and take all outstanding costs from their personal bank accounts. Wolfowitz estimated war to cost around half a billion, and so far we ended up with more than $200 billion (yes, two hundreen billion US dollars) of extra costs. If Bush & Co were forced to pay all outstanding costs, they would've estimated the cost of war honestly, and people wouldn't be misled into supporting war.
Same thing for human cost. Require pro-war politicians to gather signatures. It's way too easy to say "I support a war" while sitting at home in front of TV. Make a law that starting a war would require million or so legally binding signatures from people to cover in case we run out of troops. There's always so many vocal pro-war supporters, but when it comes to actually fighting the war we always seem to run out of people. Make war supporters actually carry the cost of war, and they will actually start using their brains first.
/* What do you do if your opponent is perfectly willing to die just to kill you? */
So all of them are willing to die ? Each and every person involved into making nukes ?
Including the higher-ups in government ? And everyone who supplies them with missle technology ?
And they will be concentrating on a very open way of attacking us with a missle, instead of, say, bringing said nuke into US in the cargo container ?
I think a way more realistic threat is some rogue terrorist group sneaking nuclear (or chemical/biological/fuel-air) bomb into US and blowing it up inside. Our defence budget is limited, we can't spend insane amounts of money unworkable solutions to improbable threats. It's way more logical to spend the money on something immediately useful and tangible, like border security.
/* The alternative is to throw up your hands and give up. */
The working alternative is MAD. I.e. if anyone attacks US we will have enough time to respond.
The "missle shield" is unworkable - well, it does it's job of fooling taxpayers into funding Raythenon, but so far it can't even intercept test missles with known trajectory. And even if we somehow manage to make it "work", it will still be useless against, say, a torpedo with nuke hitting any of our coastal cities. Or against a hijacked airliner with nuke. Or against a nuke delivered by car.
At the same time customs don't have enough resources to scan all the cargo coming into US, because huge amounts of money are spent on unworkable pork barrel projects like this "missle shield".
Do a search for Kazaa.
At the bottom it will say:
n response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.
At least Google is being consistent with obeying the law of the land.
/*Your points throught the rest are on point (bad me for not RTFA), but I don't agree that this one is necessarily going to get you anywhere. You're going to the class to *learn* the subject. Perhaps if the subject is something that actually has a lot of objective background that you have the expertise to look up independantly, you could learn it on your own and then put the professor in their box.*/
Well, if professor's politics are annoying enough to interfere with your learning, then it would be easy enough to gather enough students and complain to dean or department. Most schools I know have anonymous teacher evaluations at the end of each semester, and if professor can't teach he will lose his job.
If, on the other hands, professor only briefly mentions his politics - why not just ignore him ?
Generally, there's a lot of checks and balances in academic world to make sure professor's beliefs - political or otherwise - don't stand in your way of learning.
Well, "f*ck freedom of speech" isn't really a good public slogan. Frankly, I don't even see how teachers could impose political beliefs on students.
If professor fails you because of your politics and you actually do know the subject well enough - you could always go to the department chair, or to the dean and prove your case.
If professor spends too much time talking about things not related to teaching the subject - there's teacher evaluation, again you could go talk to department or dean.
If you think everyone in department is corrupt - there's quite a number of student organizations on campus that will help you.
Of course if you don't know the course material and fail the course "because of politics"
Well, from the article that we all are supposed to read before making comments
Jones' site describes his campaign as "dedicated to exposing UCLA's most radical professors" and his list of the university's "worst of the worst" singles out only professors he says hold left-wing views.
Then what is a purpose of this blacklist ? Why not, I don't know, try to argue your view point using facts and logic, instead of personally targeting everyone who opposes your viewpoint ?
Not quite.
...
Emacs integrates very well with shell commands. Like, for instance, I use XEmacs on powerbook, so I added a simple function+keybinging to call "mdfind", and I now have Spotlight support in emacs. Could very well be any other command.
There are elisp scripts to integrate it with just about every version control system I used, for instance. My co-worker has a script (one command, that is) that runs build, runs unit tests and opens the failing ones in emacs.
Every command in emacs is really a lisp function, so it's very easy to use hooks and wrappers. For instance emacs has mouse gestures mode ("strokes") and code folding mode ("hideshow"). With one or two lines of config you could have things like code folding done by mouse gesture and such, set up exactly the way you like, specific for each language/editing mode, etc.
Command line. You could tell emacs to run group of commands several times, on lines that match specific patterns, etc. Like for instance, couple of weeks ago I was editing Python script and I told emacs to add a `print "calling func(x="+x+")"` on each line right after `def func(x):`. It took me like 3 or 4 commands, and emacs was able to parse and quote function arguments. It's very useful to be able to do things like that on the fly.
Emacs integrates really well with the rest of normal unix environment. You could browse to file in the terminal, and then open the file using 'gnuclient', which will load file in your running emacs session. If you want, you could run shell inside emacs buffer. You could run emacs in text mode over ssh. You could run emacs in batch mode - I never did, but it's possible. You could have shared emacs sessions between two emacs running on different computers.
There's great support for just about every language, which other IDEs don't have. For instance, Eclipse is a great IDE, but it's python mode often screws up if file is indented with both tabs and spaces. PHP mode for Eclipse can't fold blocks of code after "if" statement, while Java mode for the same Eclipse does it. In emacs these quirks usually don't exist, and even if they do fixing them is a matter of adding one line in emacs startup file.
And then there's "M-x tetris"
Really? I thought the invasion rested on Saddam continuation to break UN resolutions time and time again. Should we just not invade and thus not inforce these resolutions? Do you prefer a nice slap on the wrist to and from a bunch of corrupt beurocrats?
You pretend that there were only two options: invade or ignore Iraq completely. In fact there was a much better option, to enforce the resolutions using sanctions and inspections. In case you haven't noticed, sanctions actually worked, and achieved their goal without producing huge number of flag-drapped coffins.
Second, Saddam (his party to be exact whome he was a part of) was implicitly allied with al Qaeda as he aided and supported them. Did you not listen to Bush durring his address to the nation?
Factually wrong, pure and simple. Saddam Hussein had no links with Al-Quaida, as was proven by 9/11 commision. Bush lied during his address to the nation (if you look at the video, you'll see that Bush's lips are moving, which means he is lying).
Third, we did not invade Iraq per say. We invaded Saddam and his supporters.
Bullshit. We murdered innocent civilians, like for instance these Iraqi children. I'm sorry, but 10 year old children aren't part of Saddam's government.
And wow! did they come out in droves to vote dispite the weekly car bombings and threats.
If you really take those "elections" seriously, read this.
And weekly car bombings means they hate us so much that they are actually willing to attack us with car bombs. I know that there's a lot of cultural misunderstanding going on, so let me clear this up for you: in Iraqi culture blowing up someone with a car bomb means you dislike them. It's not some form of holliday fireworks, but rather a statement that they want you dead - as expressed by their attempt to kill you. Similarly, the act of, say, shooting at you with AK-47 does not mean they tried to fire in the air to congratulate you and missed.
To put it simply, if they try to kill you it means they want you dead, and that means they dislike you. I know it's kind of hard to interpret at first, but Iraq is pretty similar to Vietnam in this regard.
/* You seem unaware that London did not have any IRA bombings after their downtown surveillance camera system went in place. */
Hey, I just got a cell phone with tiger-protecting camera, and guess what - not a single tiger attacked me after that.
/* And the recent islamofacist bombers were tracked down and caught impressively quickly after the tapes were perused. */
Let me understand this straight:
* There were cameras in London before bombing
* Bombing still happened
* Cameras did bupkus to prevent them
Just what exactly is impressive about it ?!?
/* As for detecting and preventing ahead of time, nothing can do that outside of an oppressive police state that prevents free movement of people. */
So, what exactly is the point of having those cameras ? So we could punish suicide bombers after they blow themselves up ?
It could be used by police to fight regular crime.
However, then those cameras should be open to public review and there should be strict rules as to what exactly police could do with those cameras.
A closed monitoring system installed by government under guise of "fighting terrorists" is a treat to my privacy.
/* And no, surveillance cameras used to track down criminals after the fact do not an oppressive police state make. */
The difference between criminals and terrorists you do not understand. For preventing crime they are useful, indeed. Prevent terrorist acts they will not. Tracking terrorists after the fact nearly useless is. A big pork-barrel project for Lockheed-Martin this looks like.