That's not too interesting at all. It's a known phenominon called "Object Permanence." Babies don't have it; that's why Peek-a-Boo is fun for them.
I can't decide whether or not my dog has a sense of object permanence; she can find toys she leaves in other rooms, but gets confused when I hide something behind my back. Go figure.
The worst part about articles like this is the assumption that the writer is just SO much smarter than everyone else in the world. They're all brainwashed drones of Big Media. He is A Clear Thinker, able to throw off their mind-crushing influence. Give me a break.
So, Katz, how were you so much smarter than the Great Unwashed Masses and able to overcome the Big Media brainwashing in the Corporate Republic?
which in itself is debatable when one considers the "market economies" of India and Africa starved out their populations during that era
You'd have to be ignorant or on crack to think that India and the various countries in Africa (unlike you, I don't think Africa is a country)had anything resembling a first-world market economy. India was proudly socialist. The non-socialist African countries were by and large kleptocracies, where the head poobah (often installed by the CIA; there is American culpability here) and his cronies would steal everything that wasn't nailed down.
Calling these countries "market economies" is like calling Microsoft "innovative;" it takes an awful perversion of the meaning of the word to get to that conclusion.
First of all, rats ain't people. Has anyone done these studies on people? It shouldn't be hard to give cell phones to 100 college students, have them talk on them for one hour, and then test their short term memory vs. a group which talked on a land-line phone for an hour. Memory tests would be trivial; dye injection is a bit trickier, but could be done. The fact that this research isn't out there is highly suspect. It's the first thing I thought of, and I don't do this for a living.
Secondly, some of this data is seriously old. #4 is from 1982. It was self-published (Via the SUNY-Albany press), not published in a peer-reviewed journal. The peer-review process might have its problems, but I trust it a heck of a lot more than some guy who publishes stuff on his own.
#5 is from 1974 in a Warsaw Bloc country. I have no idea what sort of review it would have undergone, and I have no idea how valid its methods are. Unless you read Polish, I don't think you know what it says, either.
Show me ONE paper by a scientist who didn't attend "Bob's Skool o'Science Stuff" which demonstrates that non-ionizing radiation AT THE LEVELS PRODUCED BY CELL PHONES has a detrimental effect. Then we'll talk. For now, I'm rating you at the same level as the guy with the sandwich board who keeps telling me the world is about to end due to the CIA/UFO conspiracy.
trying to associate people (and the vast majority of the world's governments) who rightfully deplore Isreal's criminal actions against their own population as Idaho ZOG loonies is pure claptrap.
Another one who can't spell "Israel." Sheesh.
The "vast majority" of world governments aren't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Muslim countries. If you don't believe that they are using antisemitism to rile up their masses and deflect attention from their own bankrupt policies, you aren't paying attention.
Two easy examples: Indonesia's former finance minister claimed that the economic problems of Indonesia were due to "Jewish bankers" in the US; i.e., Jews control the world economy. Egypt's newspapers constantly talk about the Jewish control over the US government, especially during Colin Powel's trip to the region. Spend some time reading the newspapers from Arab and/or Muslim countries if you want to see more examples of what I mean.
And by the by, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza aren't Israeli citizens. Most of them hold Jordanian passports; some hold Egyptian. The Arabs who are Israeli citizens are the only Arabs in the region who can vote for their governmental officials, who have freedom to worship (or not) as they choose, and who live under a (more or less) free market economy. Yes, there is discrimination against Arabs in Israel, but the Israeli Supreme Court (which includes an Arab as a justice) has made repeated rulings to end the biases.
As for Israel's "criminal actions," I maintain that Israel is no worse than every other country on the planet, and in many cases a heck of a lot better. Israel didn't level a town and kill 25,000 people, like Syria did in the early 80's. Syria is still occupying Lebanon, despite UN Resolutions telling it to get out (550, I believe). Funny, Hezbollah isn't shooting rockets at Syria over that. Must not be any Jews in Syria.
What's even funnier is the way that Hezbollah and Hamas will take money from Iraq, which spends a lot of time trying to kill Shi'ites. I guess the Shi'ite Hezbollah and Hamas find it OK for Iraq to gas Shi'ites, as long as Iraq will help them kill Jews.
I'm not even going to get into European colonization of Africa, Asia, America, and Australia. But I'm sure that if you can find a Native American or an Australian Aboriginie, they'll tell you all about it.
You can only get so far with narrow-vision algorithmic optimization, as proven by the failure of 40 years of research. (Failure, only as defined as producing code as good as a human can).
For certain classes of problems, compilers do a hell of a lot better job than people do. I don't think most people are that great at optimizing assembly code by doing things like properly sharing registers. In general, when it comes to optimizing memory access, compilers will beat 99% of all programmers out there.
But for picking a better algorithm, no, compilers suck. But I don't know of any active research in having a compiler change the algorithm implemented by the programmer, so you're using a straw man here. Then again, it's been 4 years since I've done any compiler research...
thankfully, people do watch and care about the palestinians.
That's debatable. There's a lot of evidence that support for the Palestinians is more lip service than actual support. The other Arab nations talk a lot about monetary aid for the Palestinians, but they rarely actually send any. Jordan threw out a bunch of PLO supporters after the Black September uprising in the early 70's. Between 1948 and 1967, Egypt and Jordan didn't allow the creation of Palestinian state; they kept the West Bank and Gaza as their own. Other Arab nations didn't absorb Palestinian refugees the way Pakistan absorbed millions of Muslims who fled India when the subcontinent was partitioned. Doesn't quite sound like care to me.
What it does sound like is that the Palestinians are being used by the other Arab nations. By keeping the Palestinians in a squalid condition, Israel becomes the target of hate by the Arab "street". By directing the commoner's hate at Israel, they pay no attention to how crappy their lives are, and they support whatever horror their government will inflict on them, as long as it is in the name of defeating the "Zionists." Orwell described the technique quite well in "1984." He even picked a Jewish target for the Five Minute Hate sessions; he knew how these things work.
it would destroy ties with benefactor usa
Part of the whole "Israel is committing genocide" paranoid fantasy is that Jews (and through them, Israel) control the US government. If the Israelis were going to kill all the Palestinians, why wouldn't the Zionist Occupied Government of the US let them?
not to mention millions of palestinians rushing into israel to escape the bombing
There are heck of a lot more hiding spaces in Rwanda than there are in Gaza. Didn't help there. The sad lesson about genocide is that those who are committed to it often succeed quite well.
The days of razing cities and incorporating their populations as slaves is over.
Maybe in Europe, but that's still happening in the Sudan, Congo, and Sierra Leone. And some of the events in the Bosnia war were pretty close to the old "rape, pillage, and burn" method of war.
It's dangerous to pretend that the world is a civilized place. Peace and prosperity is not the normal condition for humans. Abject poverty and perpetual war are much more common. Right now, those of us in the western, first-world countries are very lucky and most don't appreciate how good we have it. Maybe the people of the world are slowly getting tired of stupidly killing each other. But take a look through most of the third world and you'd be hard-pressed to come to that conclusion.
And besides, I wasn't thinking so much of Yugoslavia and Iraq (hell, Iraq was mostly hit with precision weaponry anyway) as of Vietnam (carpet bombing, anyone?) or Cambodia (ever wondered why you don't see any civilians from American aircraft?).
Well, the US did destroy an amazing amount of Iraqi civilian infrastructure in the Gulf War, precision weapons or no. Water purification facilities are still kaput. That probably has a lot more to do with the rise in Iraqi infant mortality than depleted uranium.
Vietnam was another case of the US' enemy not exactly fighting according to the Geneva Convention. Whether or not you thought the US should have been in Vietnam, the Viet Cong were using civilians as cover, sending women with babies wired with bombs at US troops, etc. The enemy was fighting dirty. The US fought dirty in its own way (carpet bombing, several massacres of Vietnamese villages), but not as dirty as it could have (nuclear bombs, for example, or a massive invasion of the North, forcing them to battle on two fronts). The end result: the US lost. You can be quite sure that the US military is aware of this lesson.
Cambodia is a much murkier area. From what I know, we supposedly attempted to bomb Viet Cong bases in Cambodia. We also killed a hell of a lot of civilians who had nothing to do with it. But if the Cambodians didn't allow the Viet Cong to establish bases in the first place...you can go on and on with this. I don't know a lot about the war in Cambodia; anyone who can provide me with some accurate info will be greatly appreciated.
The Isrealis were too busy committing genocide against the Palestinians to respond...
I'm always amazed at how anti-Israeli ranters can't spell Israel correctly...
If Israel wanted to "commit genocide" against the Palestinians, they'd be long gone by now. Say Israel wanted to kill, oh, 1 million Palestinians. How long would it take? An hour of heavy bombing of Gaza? Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. There's a large sea on one side of it, and large fences on the other three. There'd be nowhere for anyone to run, and if you believe what the Palestinians say, they have no weapons which could mount a credible counter-attack. I believe the technical term would be "shooting fish in a barrel."
Heck, in Rwanda, Hutus managed to kill 500,000 to 1 million Tutsis in a month, using nothing more than machettes. After 37 years of Israeli control, there are more Palestinians than there were in 1967. I guess the Israelis must not have this genocide stuff figured out yet.
Except that the civilians living in the Iraqi dictatorship are just as much victims of the government as the civilians who the Iraqi government attacked.
I don't know if you realize it, but launching Scuds at Israel was incredibly popular in Iraq. If you're going to cheer while your country attacks civilians, taking a few bombs on your own head shouldn't lead to much complaining.
And who exactly makes up the Iraqi army? That's right, the citizens of Iraq. Trying to make some sort of artifical separation between the people and their leaders is a game for armchair warriors. In the end, the Iraqis could overthrow Saddam. There are 22+ million of them; Saddam and his henchmen couldn't kill them all. They don't. Draw your own conclusions.
We need to learn to tell the difference between the actions of a government and keep the blame off the people living under that government, especially in undemocratic countries.
So you wouldn't have fire-bombed Dresden? Nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I realize I'm edging close to Goodwin's Law territory, but what parts of Nazi Germany would you have considered off-limits to attack? Should we have stopped when most of Europe was free and the German troops were only within the borders of Germany? Were the Japanese civilians not responsible for making war goods for the Japanese military?
I know that the Gulf War wasn't WW II, but the point of war is to win. When you are facing an opponent who will do anything, trying to play by "civilized" rules will get you killed. Ask the British, who stood around in their pretty red coats while the American rebels shot them from cover. They kept complaining the colonists weren't fighting fair. They also lost.
In war, everyone is a target. War "crimes" are the winners trying the losers for losing the war, nothing more. Once upon a time, you just beheaded the losing leader and took his concubines. Now you put him on trial in the Netherlands. The only difference is the lawyers are involved...
As a Canadian whose ancestors conquered several American Indian tribes, it's nice to know that you don't need war any more. Those Indians, however, might disagree...
The reason why the Geneva Convention is pretty much ignored by the US is that it fights countries (Yugoslavia, Iraq) who ignore its spirit. Both put sensitive military installations in civilian neighborhoods, HOPING for the collateral damage so the US et al would look bad for killing women and children. What do you do when a country holds its own citizens hostage?
And in the case of Iraq, it launched missiles at civilian targets in Israel, a country not even involved in the hostilities. The fact that Israel didn't remove Baghdad from the map is remarkable. I'd say that any country which targets civilians for no good reason deserves to have its own civilians attacked.
Why not just learn assembly language if you want to know how a computer works? It get's you a lot closer to the metal then C.
Because, if you bothered to read the next paragraph in my post, C is a good compromise. I do think people should learn assembly. Read what you criticize before you open your trap. It makes you seem like less of an idiot.
Trying to Learn C won't do him any good other then painfully making leaky programs.
Everyone's first C programs leak memory. That's the nature of learning how to program.
Over time, you get better. It's called learning. Those of us with frontal lobes are capable of it.
ohh... you said 'Turing machine' a cookie for you!
Thank you; I like cookies.
I mean, fuck, you know that a 'Turing complete' language doesn't even need to have arrays, or named variables or pointers? Try programming without those for a while and come back and tell us how no languages is any more 'powerful' then any other.
Been there, done that. It's called assembly language. Anyone who has a CS degree worth a fuck should be able to handle it. Most CS degrees, though, are crap. Most programmers are even worse.
Since you have a poor grasp of English, let me restate what I wrote. No computer language is any more powerful than any other. Sure, high-level languages constructs which make bookkeeping (keeping track of variables, memory, start/endpoints of code fragments, calculating jumps to code fragments, etc.) easier. But that's all it is; bookkeeping. It makes programming more convenient; nothing more. Convenience isn't power. It's helpful, don't get me wrong, but that's about it.
I'd say Java is in the middle. It's more powerful than C but simpler than C++
What does "Power" mean? All of these languages are Turing-complete; they all have exactly the same expressive power (which is the same as a Turing Machine. If you don't know what a Turing Machine is, you aren't qualified to have an opinion on this topic.).
Java is a great language; I make my living at it. But C is the first language any moderately competent programmer should learn. After you understand C, you should then take courses on theory and software engineering. Then pick a language and IDE.
Use C is the task fits C's solution set. Otherwise use Java, Perl, Python or whatever happens to fit your problem best.
Use C for the right task, but LEARN C before you become a serious programmer. Understanding pointers (and memory allocation/deallocation), low-level I/O, allocation on the stack vs. the heap, and all the other headaches that C forces on you helps you to really understand what is going on behind the curtain presented by higher-level languages. It also helps you to appreciate what the higher level languages do for you.
I'd suggest that people learn how to write assembly, too, but that seems to be beyond most people's skill sets. The more you understand about what is REALLY going on, the better a programmer you will be. C, as a high-level assembly language, is a good compromise.
I'd also suggest that a good course in algorithms and/or discrete math should also be on the menu. Programming languages are just syntax. Understanding how the parts should all fit together (and why one way is better than another) is much more important.
Once you have the theory down, the practice is next. Software engineering is more than just writing code; it's writing maintainable code. Most programmers love showing off how clever they are. Their programs, however, suck. For any non-trivial project, clever tricks are a bad idea. Leave the hacks for the Obsfuscated C contests...
Once you have all of this down, it's time to pick a programming language and IDE. Remember: wax on, wax off, wax on, wax off...
Just as it is wrong to destroy your home with a wrecking ball (defeating the function of the house), is it not wrong to defeat the purpose of the algorithim?
If there was a DMCA-style law against house-destroying, you would now be guilty. You just described how to destroy a house. You didn't actually destroy a house, approve of someone else doing so, but the act of description is itself a crime.
That's what Professor Felton did. He didn't hack anyone's data. He just said, "here's how to do it."
So, you going to turn yourself in now, thought criminal?
-jon
Re:Some Free Software Advocates Show Their Colors
on
GIMP And OS X
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· Score: 2
Let's see; my digital camera came with a copy of PhotoDeluxe. My scanner came with a copy of Photoshop LE. GraphicConverter costs $35US. Photoshop Elements costs $100US. Any/all of these programs are better than GIMP, and cost between free and $100. That's reasonable for the non-professional artist.
Is there a place for GIMP? Sure. But anyone who thinks it's going to replace Photoshop is deluding themselves.
"Frameworks are boring" pegged the meter on the idiot-o-meter.
Frameworks are boring. Users don't use frameworks, they use applications built on frameworks. Only the geeks care about the frameworks. This is a point which is often lost on geeks.
-jon
Some Free Software Advocates Show Their Colors
on
GIMP And OS X
·
· Score: 2
Based on the comments so far by many of the pro-GIMP people, it seems they only understand Free Software as "software that don't cost me nutin'." They keep on comparing the upfront cost in dollars of Photoshop ($600-700) to the upfront cost in dollars of GIMP ($0).
This is not a good argument for Free Software, and it's not a good argument to switch from Photoshop to GIMP. A decent designer makes more than the cost of Photoshop in a day, and the expense is tax-deductible, anyway. Students can get Photoshop on the cheap, and consumers can get Photoshop Elements (Photoshop minus pre-press features) for $100.
Now, if it was easy for designers to add new functionality to GIMP due to its Open Source nature, that'd be a different story. But most designers aren't programmers, and would rather pay for a Photoshop Plug-In that can do the job than learn C++ and waste weeks (or months) trying to build it themselves. It's all about knowing your target market.
Sure, someone is going to say that you should teach a man to fish and he'll never go hungry, but not everyone wants to fish. People specialize.
The sad fact is that Open Source tools will only beat out Closed Source tools when the target market is able to take advantage of the winning features of Open Source: customizability and trust (since you can read the source). That limits its success to programmers and IT professionals.
I suppose that the NCSA web server I'd been running, featuring everything offered by the first Apache release, doesn't count... because, why?
Take a look at the Apache web site to get the chronology. NCSA's httpd was the basis for Apache. But httpd was a toy. Apache is a real, enterprise class solution. Apache probably didn't start to take off until httpd's limitations were apparent to everyone. Then the fact that it was free and robust made it the de facto web server.
While you are reading this (or, I suspect, having it read to you while you stare at the animated GIFs and drool), you are looking at the net result of a framework dubbed "The World Wide Web." Everyone and their grandmother has invented other frameworks that do the same thing. Why don't you do everyone a huge favor and stop using this "boring" framework and go do something interesting, like sitting in a corner and stroking a peice of felt. That seems about your speed.
HTML/HTTP are as unique as Java (i.e., it's not). Both are ideas that had been around for a long time, and had been implemented poorly before. But they were in the right place, at the right time, and had very cool things available at their launch to demonstrate their usefulness. Jxta (the reason for this thread) does nothing useful at launch, and it solves a problem for which many people already have good solutions. In short, it's going nowhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't decide whether or not my dog has a sense of object permanence; she can find toys she leaves in other rooms, but gets confused when I hide something behind my back. Go figure.
-jon
So, Katz, how were you so much smarter than the Great Unwashed Masses and able to overcome the Big Media brainwashing in the Corporate Republic?
-jon
Calling these countries "market economies" is like calling Microsoft "innovative;" it takes an awful perversion of the meaning of the word to get to that conclusion.
-jon
First of all, rats ain't people. Has anyone done these studies on people? It shouldn't be hard to give cell phones to 100 college students, have them talk on them for one hour, and then test their short term memory vs. a group which talked on a land-line phone for an hour. Memory tests would be trivial; dye injection is a bit trickier, but could be done. The fact that this research isn't out there is highly suspect. It's the first thing I thought of, and I don't do this for a living.
Secondly, some of this data is seriously old. #4 is from 1982. It was self-published (Via the SUNY-Albany press), not published in a peer-reviewed journal. The peer-review process might have its problems, but I trust it a heck of a lot more than some guy who publishes stuff on his own.
#5 is from 1974 in a Warsaw Bloc country. I have no idea what sort of review it would have undergone, and I have no idea how valid its methods are. Unless you read Polish, I don't think you know what it says, either.
-jon
Show me ONE paper by a scientist who didn't attend "Bob's Skool o'Science Stuff" which demonstrates that non-ionizing radiation AT THE LEVELS PRODUCED BY CELL PHONES has a detrimental effect. Then we'll talk. For now, I'm rating you at the same level as the guy with the sandwich board who keeps telling me the world is about to end due to the CIA/UFO conspiracy.
-jon
Another one who can't spell "Israel." Sheesh.
The "vast majority" of world governments aren't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Muslim countries. If you don't believe that they are using antisemitism to rile up their masses and deflect attention from their own bankrupt policies, you aren't paying attention.
Two easy examples: Indonesia's former finance minister claimed that the economic problems of Indonesia were due to "Jewish bankers" in the US; i.e., Jews control the world economy. Egypt's newspapers constantly talk about the Jewish control over the US government, especially during Colin Powel's trip to the region. Spend some time reading the newspapers from Arab and/or Muslim countries if you want to see more examples of what I mean.
And by the by, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza aren't Israeli citizens. Most of them hold Jordanian passports; some hold Egyptian. The Arabs who are Israeli citizens are the only Arabs in the region who can vote for their governmental officials, who have freedom to worship (or not) as they choose, and who live under a (more or less) free market economy. Yes, there is discrimination against Arabs in Israel, but the Israeli Supreme Court (which includes an Arab as a justice) has made repeated rulings to end the biases.
As for Israel's "criminal actions," I maintain that Israel is no worse than every other country on the planet, and in many cases a heck of a lot better. Israel didn't level a town and kill 25,000 people, like Syria did in the early 80's. Syria is still occupying Lebanon, despite UN Resolutions telling it to get out (550, I believe). Funny, Hezbollah isn't shooting rockets at Syria over that. Must not be any Jews in Syria.
What's even funnier is the way that Hezbollah and Hamas will take money from Iraq, which spends a lot of time trying to kill Shi'ites. I guess the Shi'ite Hezbollah and Hamas find it OK for Iraq to gas Shi'ites, as long as Iraq will help them kill Jews.
I'm not even going to get into European colonization of Africa, Asia, America, and Australia. But I'm sure that if you can find a Native American or an Australian Aboriginie, they'll tell you all about it.
-jon
For certain classes of problems, compilers do a hell of a lot better job than people do. I don't think most people are that great at optimizing assembly code by doing things like properly sharing registers. In general, when it comes to optimizing memory access, compilers will beat 99% of all programmers out there.
But for picking a better algorithm, no, compilers suck. But I don't know of any active research in having a compiler change the algorithm implemented by the programmer, so you're using a straw man here. Then again, it's been 4 years since I've done any compiler research...
-jon
That's debatable. There's a lot of evidence that support for the Palestinians is more lip service than actual support. The other Arab nations talk a lot about monetary aid for the Palestinians, but they rarely actually send any. Jordan threw out a bunch of PLO supporters after the Black September uprising in the early 70's. Between 1948 and 1967, Egypt and Jordan didn't allow the creation of Palestinian state; they kept the West Bank and Gaza as their own. Other Arab nations didn't absorb Palestinian refugees the way Pakistan absorbed millions of Muslims who fled India when the subcontinent was partitioned. Doesn't quite sound like care to me.
What it does sound like is that the Palestinians are being used by the other Arab nations. By keeping the Palestinians in a squalid condition, Israel becomes the target of hate by the Arab "street". By directing the commoner's hate at Israel, they pay no attention to how crappy their lives are, and they support whatever horror their government will inflict on them, as long as it is in the name of defeating the "Zionists." Orwell described the technique quite well in "1984." He even picked a Jewish target for the Five Minute Hate sessions; he knew how these things work.
it would destroy ties with benefactor usa
Part of the whole "Israel is committing genocide" paranoid fantasy is that Jews (and through them, Israel) control the US government. If the Israelis were going to kill all the Palestinians, why wouldn't the Zionist Occupied Government of the US let them?
not to mention millions of palestinians rushing into israel to escape the bombing
There are heck of a lot more hiding spaces in Rwanda than there are in Gaza. Didn't help there. The sad lesson about genocide is that those who are committed to it often succeed quite well.
-jon
Maybe in Europe, but that's still happening in the Sudan, Congo, and Sierra Leone. And some of the events in the Bosnia war were pretty close to the old "rape, pillage, and burn" method of war.
It's dangerous to pretend that the world is a civilized place. Peace and prosperity is not the normal condition for humans. Abject poverty and perpetual war are much more common. Right now, those of us in the western, first-world countries are very lucky and most don't appreciate how good we have it. Maybe the people of the world are slowly getting tired of stupidly killing each other. But take a look through most of the third world and you'd be hard-pressed to come to that conclusion.
-jon
Well, the US did destroy an amazing amount of Iraqi civilian infrastructure in the Gulf War, precision weapons or no. Water purification facilities are still kaput. That probably has a lot more to do with the rise in Iraqi infant mortality than depleted uranium.
Vietnam was another case of the US' enemy not exactly fighting according to the Geneva Convention. Whether or not you thought the US should have been in Vietnam, the Viet Cong were using civilians as cover, sending women with babies wired with bombs at US troops, etc. The enemy was fighting dirty. The US fought dirty in its own way (carpet bombing, several massacres of Vietnamese villages), but not as dirty as it could have (nuclear bombs, for example, or a massive invasion of the North, forcing them to battle on two fronts). The end result: the US lost. You can be quite sure that the US military is aware of this lesson.
Cambodia is a much murkier area. From what I know, we supposedly attempted to bomb Viet Cong bases in Cambodia. We also killed a hell of a lot of civilians who had nothing to do with it. But if the Cambodians didn't allow the Viet Cong to establish bases in the first place...you can go on and on with this. I don't know a lot about the war in Cambodia; anyone who can provide me with some accurate info will be greatly appreciated.
-jon
I'm always amazed at how anti-Israeli ranters can't spell Israel correctly...
If Israel wanted to "commit genocide" against the Palestinians, they'd be long gone by now. Say Israel wanted to kill, oh, 1 million Palestinians. How long would it take? An hour of heavy bombing of Gaza? Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. There's a large sea on one side of it, and large fences on the other three. There'd be nowhere for anyone to run, and if you believe what the Palestinians say, they have no weapons which could mount a credible counter-attack. I believe the technical term would be "shooting fish in a barrel."
Heck, in Rwanda, Hutus managed to kill 500,000 to 1 million Tutsis in a month, using nothing more than machettes. After 37 years of Israeli control, there are more Palestinians than there were in 1967. I guess the Israelis must not have this genocide stuff figured out yet.
-jon
I don't know if you realize it, but launching Scuds at Israel was incredibly popular in Iraq. If you're going to cheer while your country attacks civilians, taking a few bombs on your own head shouldn't lead to much complaining.
And who exactly makes up the Iraqi army? That's right, the citizens of Iraq. Trying to make some sort of artifical separation between the people and their leaders is a game for armchair warriors. In the end, the Iraqis could overthrow Saddam. There are 22+ million of them; Saddam and his henchmen couldn't kill them all. They don't. Draw your own conclusions.
We need to learn to tell the difference between the actions of a government and keep the blame off the people living under that government, especially in undemocratic countries.
So you wouldn't have fire-bombed Dresden? Nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I realize I'm edging close to Goodwin's Law territory, but what parts of Nazi Germany would you have considered off-limits to attack? Should we have stopped when most of Europe was free and the German troops were only within the borders of Germany? Were the Japanese civilians not responsible for making war goods for the Japanese military?
I know that the Gulf War wasn't WW II, but the point of war is to win. When you are facing an opponent who will do anything, trying to play by "civilized" rules will get you killed. Ask the British, who stood around in their pretty red coats while the American rebels shot them from cover. They kept complaining the colonists weren't fighting fair. They also lost.
In war, everyone is a target. War "crimes" are the winners trying the losers for losing the war, nothing more. Once upon a time, you just beheaded the losing leader and took his concubines. Now you put him on trial in the Netherlands. The only difference is the lawyers are involved...
-jon
-jon
And in the case of Iraq, it launched missiles at civilian targets in Israel, a country not even involved in the hostilities. The fact that Israel didn't remove Baghdad from the map is remarkable. I'd say that any country which targets civilians for no good reason deserves to have its own civilians attacked.
-jon
Because, if you bothered to read the next paragraph in my post, C is a good compromise. I do think people should learn assembly. Read what you criticize before you open your trap. It makes you seem like less of an idiot.
Trying to Learn C won't do him any good other then painfully making leaky programs.
Everyone's first C programs leak memory. That's the nature of learning how to program. Over time, you get better. It's called learning. Those of us with frontal lobes are capable of it.
-jon
Thank you; I like cookies.
I mean, fuck, you know that a 'Turing complete' language doesn't even need to have arrays, or named variables or pointers? Try programming without those for a while and come back and tell us how no languages is any more 'powerful' then any other.
Been there, done that. It's called assembly language. Anyone who has a CS degree worth a fuck should be able to handle it. Most CS degrees, though, are crap. Most programmers are even worse.
Since you have a poor grasp of English, let me restate what I wrote. No computer language is any more powerful than any other. Sure, high-level languages constructs which make bookkeeping (keeping track of variables, memory, start/endpoints of code fragments, calculating jumps to code fragments, etc.) easier. But that's all it is; bookkeeping. It makes programming more convenient; nothing more. Convenience isn't power. It's helpful, don't get me wrong, but that's about it.
-jon
What does "Power" mean? All of these languages are Turing-complete; they all have exactly the same expressive power (which is the same as a Turing Machine. If you don't know what a Turing Machine is, you aren't qualified to have an opinion on this topic.).
Java is a great language; I make my living at it. But C is the first language any moderately competent programmer should learn. After you understand C, you should then take courses on theory and software engineering. Then pick a language and IDE.
-jon
Use C for the right task, but LEARN C before you become a serious programmer. Understanding pointers (and memory allocation/deallocation), low-level I/O, allocation on the stack vs. the heap, and all the other headaches that C forces on you helps you to really understand what is going on behind the curtain presented by higher-level languages. It also helps you to appreciate what the higher level languages do for you.
I'd suggest that people learn how to write assembly, too, but that seems to be beyond most people's skill sets. The more you understand about what is REALLY going on, the better a programmer you will be. C, as a high-level assembly language, is a good compromise.
I'd also suggest that a good course in algorithms and/or discrete math should also be on the menu. Programming languages are just syntax. Understanding how the parts should all fit together (and why one way is better than another) is much more important.
Once you have the theory down, the practice is next. Software engineering is more than just writing code; it's writing maintainable code. Most programmers love showing off how clever they are. Their programs, however, suck. For any non-trivial project, clever tricks are a bad idea. Leave the hacks for the Obsfuscated C contests...
Once you have all of this down, it's time to pick a programming language and IDE. Remember: wax on, wax off, wax on, wax off...
-jon
-jon
Sometimes you gotta set up The Man...and then beat him with his own laws.
-jon
If there was a DMCA-style law against house-destroying, you would now be guilty. You just described how to destroy a house. You didn't actually destroy a house, approve of someone else doing so, but the act of description is itself a crime.
That's what Professor Felton did. He didn't hack anyone's data. He just said, "here's how to do it."
So, you going to turn yourself in now, thought criminal?
-jon
Is there a place for GIMP? Sure. But anyone who thinks it's going to replace Photoshop is deluding themselves.
-jon
Frameworks are boring. Users don't use frameworks, they use applications built on frameworks. Only the geeks care about the frameworks. This is a point which is often lost on geeks.
-jon
This is not a good argument for Free Software, and it's not a good argument to switch from Photoshop to GIMP. A decent designer makes more than the cost of Photoshop in a day, and the expense is tax-deductible, anyway. Students can get Photoshop on the cheap, and consumers can get Photoshop Elements (Photoshop minus pre-press features) for $100.
Now, if it was easy for designers to add new functionality to GIMP due to its Open Source nature, that'd be a different story. But most designers aren't programmers, and would rather pay for a Photoshop Plug-In that can do the job than learn C++ and waste weeks (or months) trying to build it themselves. It's all about knowing your target market.
Sure, someone is going to say that you should teach a man to fish and he'll never go hungry, but not everyone wants to fish. People specialize.
The sad fact is that Open Source tools will only beat out Closed Source tools when the target market is able to take advantage of the winning features of Open Source: customizability and trust (since you can read the source). That limits its success to programmers and IT professionals.
-jon
Take a look at the Apache web site to get the chronology. NCSA's httpd was the basis for Apache. But httpd was a toy. Apache is a real, enterprise class solution. Apache probably didn't start to take off until httpd's limitations were apparent to everyone. Then the fact that it was free and robust made it the de facto web server.
While you are reading this (or, I suspect, having it read to you while you stare at the animated GIFs and drool), you are looking at the net result of a framework dubbed "The World Wide Web." Everyone and their grandmother has invented other frameworks that do the same thing. Why don't you do everyone a huge favor and stop using this "boring" framework and go do something interesting, like sitting in a corner and stroking a peice of felt. That seems about your speed.
HTML/HTTP are as unique as Java (i.e., it's not). Both are ideas that had been around for a long time, and had been implemented poorly before. But they were in the right place, at the right time, and had very cool things available at their launch to demonstrate their usefulness. Jxta (the reason for this thread) does nothing useful at launch, and it solves a problem for which many people already have good solutions. In short, it's going nowhere.
-jon