Re:Jews for Jesus (MASSIVELY OFF TOPIC)
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Battlefield Earth
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I presume you're Jewish, I'm Christian (of the evangelical variety) myself.
You presume well.
I don't want to start a religious fight or anything, but to explain the Christian perspective for a moment, Christians believe that those things will be fulfilled at Christ's second coming.
No religious fight taken;-) I hope I don't insult any of your beliefs along the way.
It's that whole second coming bit that is the problem with Jesus in the eyes of Jews. There's no mention of such a thing in the various messianic writings by the Hebrew prophets.
Furthermore, the idea that the messiah would himself/herself be divine is foreign to Jews. Several people have been proclaimed (or have proclaimed themselves) the Jewish Messiah. Bar Kochba and Shabatai Zvi are probably the two most famous. In both cases, they were just men and never claimed otherwise (and neither did their followers).
As a complete aside, the idea of the Jewish God having some divine company wasn't introduced by Christianity. There was a heretical stream of Jewish thought about 2 1/2 thousand years ago which sucked in Asherah/Asarte/Ishtar (of "Snow Crash" fame) from the Babelonians and made her the "Consort" of the Jewish God. It hasn't survived, but the "Shechinah" (which seems to have a similar root word as "Asherah"), is sort of like the "feminine" aspect of God. But it's not considered a different personality or anything, like the Holy Spirit.
But seriously, about that sect distinction with Jews for Jesus. If you think about it, Christianity itself is a sect of Judaism, albeit one that "real" Jews would consider heretical. (Like how "real" Christians consider Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses)
At one point (say, around the year 100 AD), that was certainly true. But over time, Christian doctrine and theology have strayed very far from Jewish ways. The term "Judeo-Christian ethics" bugs me, because most of the time it either refers to explictly Christian ideas or ideas that are universal to all reasonably civilized people.
I don't think the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses have moved quite as far from Christianity as Christianity has moved from Judiasm. I'd certainly consider them Christian sects. Trying to put Jesus into Judiasm today is not creating a sect; it's moving to an entirely different religion.
Apple's PowerBook 1400 (released in 1996) has a slide-out panel on the top, called a BookCover. You can put in different cardboard cutouts, and some companies made BookCovers with pockets for disks and pens and such.
A few years ago, a company (name escapes me)sold a solar panel BookCover for the 1400. It wouldn't entirely power a 1400, but you could extend battery life a bit. You could also recharge the internal battery in about 6 hours (the battery gave about 2 hours of run time, if you were lucky). I never picked one up, and I can't find much about it on the WWW any more.
Jews for Jesus are most certainly NOT a Jewish sect. They are a evangelical Christian church that targets ignorant Jews for conversion.
Since Jesus fufilled none of the requirements of the Messiah in Jewish theology (seen any lions laying down with the lambs? Swords beaten into plowshares?), believing he is the Messiah (and that he will Come Again), mean you are (drum roll please) a Christian, not a Jew. I'm not even going to get into the idea of a trinity and all those images of Jesus that Christians have (both of which, in the eyes of observant Jews, violate the Ten Commandments).
Now the Chassids might count as a sect of Judaism. Karites certainly do. Ethiopian Jews would probably qualify, too. But Jews for Jesus. Ugh.
How is this different than a member of the Liberal Left having issues with a school because they don't want their kids exposed to dangerous ideas like the existence of a holy and personal Creator which might cause them to think for themselves? I bet you'd be screaming if the schools were teaching that.
You are damn right I'd be screaming about that. You want your God taught in public schools to my kids? Great. We'll then teach my God to your kids. We can start with what a load of crap this whole Jesus idea is. Then we can discuss the various parallels between Santa Claus and the idea of a God that gives you Eternal Life if you'd only be good.
Maybe we could move on to the idolatry section of the course, where we teach the kids that leaving nice presents in front of a certain statue will make one of the gods happy.
Finally, we can move on to the Moloch section of the course, where students can bring in infant siblings. The teacher will then tell them to smash their heads against the walls and drop their bodies into a pit of fire to ensure a good crop.
For the advanced students, we might want to have a section on temple prostitues.
I bet you'd be screaming if the schools were teaching that.
Well, here's some of that non-government sanctioned education you want so much. Welcome to Math 101. I'll be your teacher today.
It is left-wing secular homeschooling which has been the fastest-growing form of homeschooling for the last decade. For a reason.
Because there aren't many people doing it?
If one person is a member of club X, and one more person joins, they have a 100% increase in membership! That's a fast growing club!
If one hundred people are a member of club Y, and one more person joins, they have a 1% increase in membership. Not so impressive.
Other dumb things you said:
The idea that it's the state's job -- even the state's prerogative -- to advance every social good is the very pretext by which they usurp the rights of citizens.
If it is the state which is educating your children, you have already abdicated your responsibility.
First of all, it is very much in the state's interest to make sure that everyone is well-educated. Well educated people commit fewer crimes. Well educated people tend to earn more money and produce greater economic growth. If you want the children of poor people (who can't afford to pay for prep schools) to get ahead, public education is the way to go. Tell me, in 25 words or less, a poor immigrant is going to teach their children English. My grandparents didn't have English at home, even though they were born in the US. Public school is where they learned it. The same is true today.
If you want a permanent underclass, get rid of public education. If you want to have opportunity for the poorest people in society, public education is the way to go.
And no, I don't want to hear about vouchers. Should a childless couple get their money back to spend as they see fit? After all, they aren't getting ANYTHING directly out of the school system, either. Just as it's in the state's best interest for everyone to be educated, it's also in EVERYONE's best interests for people to be educated, for the exact same reasons. In a democracy, the people are the state.
When I was in grad school (Madison, WI), my wife and I were living on a combined annual income of around $16,000. Believe it or not, we were able to break even. We had no car, no cable TV, rarely ate out (food bill for two people each week around $40), rarely ate meat, and didn't partake of very many movies or concerts. Looking back, I can't say that I ever thought we were suffering from poverty (suffering from grad school is another story).
Now that we're both gainfully employed in high tech, it's hard to believe that we lived on so little (esp. considering the cost of living in Northern California). But there are certainly people in my current home town scraping by on $16K.
You completely missed the point of what I am saying.
Let me try another take: have you ever taken a chemistry class? Are you familiar with the term "Limiting Reagent?" Cancer is not the limiting reagent in the life expectancy equation for first world nations because even though the amount of cancer has gone up, life expectancy in general has not gone down.
The cancer rate is not going to be high if you don't live long enough to get cancer. When 2/3 of Europe's population was wiped out from bubonic plague, cancer rates must have been very low. Why? PEOPLE WERE DYING OF PLAGUE! In the 20th century, plague outbreaks are rare. Other things are going to kill people. Cancer is one of the things that we still can't do too much about, so it's a big killer.
Why do some people get cancer in their 30's and 40's and some people don't? Current medical thinking is that most cancers in younger people are due to genetic defects. Cancer is, more or less, a set of cells that keep on reproducing and consuming food far beyond what they need to do. This happens because the cell has been damaged somehow. It can happen from exposure to certain chemicals or radiation or it can happen just because. Figure out the "just because" part (remarkable amounts of work have actually been done on this) and how to prevent it (this is the much harder bit), and you'll win the Nobel Prize.
I'm certainly not arguing that we shouldn't waste time curing cancer. It is, after all, the #2 killer of Americans. But understanding WHY cancer rates are increasing is important. You avoid yammerheads who blame power lines, cereal additivies and other pseudoscientific sources and focus on the real sources of the problem.
Passing stat classes and logic classes should be a requirement for a high school diploma. And maybe for the right to vote. But I digress...
The world we live in today, has lots of good things and lots of bad things. It's much safer world in terms of all the natural dangers that used to kill off all of our ancestors. I will venture to say there lots of new dangers in terms of, say, nuclear radiations from artifical sources, chemical pollution, and new dangers like car accidents. Can we agree on that so far?
Since people are living longer in first world nations which have things like "artificial" nuclear radiation and cars, it's safe to say that the new dangers are far less dangerous than the old dangers.
By the way, where and when was life expectancy around 35 for most of human existence? And if huge number of people died in childbirth, wouldn't say that of those who survived, quite a few of them lived well past 35? Statistically speaking, it would make sense in order for things to balance out, no?
Life expectancy was 35 (the source says 37) around 1800 (Source: http://www.positive.net/perspective/archive/96-08- 04.html).
My fingers typed "childbirth" when I meant to say "childhood." However, Women frequently died while giving birth. There are two people involved in that birth process, after all.
A disease as hard to catch as AIDS (and yeah, compared to something like the flu or the common cold, catching AIDS is damn hard.) isn't going to wipe out the human race.
AIDS is spreading rapidly in places where the people (1) do not understand/believe how the disease is spread and (2) have serious problems testing for and treating the disease. Do you know how AIDS is spread? Can you avoid doing things (sharing needles, having sex with people who might have AIDS) which would get you AIDS? Poof! You're virtually AIDS-proof. If you don't get it, then you don't need to be treated for it.
Being cancer-proof, OTOH, is virtually impossible. Not smoking will prevent one of the most common cancers, as will staying out of the sun. Good diet and exercise will keep your body in shape. But beyond that, there isn't too much that you can do to prevent cancer. It'd be nice if research money went to problems that were hard to prevent in the first place. It's not that I don't have sympathy for HIV-infected people, but cancer is a far worse problem.
Man, this post is so stupid and SO gets my goat that I have to respond again.
You keep talking about how "our ancestors" lived. Well, bucky, life expectancy was around 35 (due the huge number of people who died in childbirth) for most of human existance. In just the time since Social Security was enacted in the US, average life expectancy has gone from around 62 to around 80. Maybe, just maybe, some it has to do with better diet, like that milk and OJ that you are holding up as "unnatural?" Given the choice between living when my ancestors lived (pick a time period, any time period) and today, I'd pick today, even with evil vitamin-packed orange juice.
Cancer, by the way, does not come from accumulating "impurities" in your body. That's the bullshit New Age explaination which lets con artists get losers to give them hundreds of dollars for high colonics and homeopathic medicines.
This is, of course, horse pucky. The reasons for cancer rates increasing is simple: people don't die of lots of things they used to die of (know anyone in the US to die from cholera recently? How about bubonic plague?). Eventually, something is going to kill you. It's likely to be something that we don't know how to cure yet, like, oh, cancer.
If the increasing cancer rate was a limiting factor, then human life expectancy in countries with relatively high cancer rates would be DROPPING. Guess what? It isn't.
A stat class should be a prerequisite before opening your mouth.
-jon
Re:Java won't ever replace C++ for me until
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Swing
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Do you know how anonymous inner classes work? They compile to standard, run-of-the-mill classes. They even have.class files. The only difference is that they have funny names (usually the parent class name with $n after it). I'd have to check the JVM docs to be certain, but I'm pretty sure that the addition of inner classes (and anonymous inner classes) required a language spec change and a compiler change, but no JVM change.
For MS to claim that Gosling is wrong and delegates generate classes rather than inner classes is just spin. There is still going to be some sort of intermediate class automatically generated with a computer-generated name. What's the difference between that and an anonymous inner class? Nothing. What is the performance advantage? None. What was the point of delegates? Yet Another Pointless API Change for Lock-in. Yay Microsoft. I reiterate my original point: Delegates suck.
In fact, this is similar to what I do in my own code. I take it one step further. I put the boolean in an interface, which is then implemented by other classes. That way, I can switch on or off debugging at compile time by changing the value of one debug flag in one interface.
public interface Debug { public static final boolean _debug; }
public class foo implements Debug { public void baz() { if(_debug) { } } }
public class bar implements Debug { public void boo() { if(_debug) { } } }
(As an aside, any field in an interface is implicitly public static final. But I like to make things explicit.)
-jon
Re:Java won't ever replace C++ for me until
on
Swing
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· Score: 1
1) TowerJ is not free. And I was talking about sun stop being stupid over the JVM.
Awwww.... yet another/.er who whines when other people make them pay for their work. My heart bleeds for you.
Sun is not being stupid over the JVM. They release a reference JVM. TowerJ has written a Java->Native compiler which must include a JVM of sorts as well (things like dynamic class loading and reflection still need to work).
2) Templates are still "coming" (and have been for a while). Sun have been saying they'll integrate pizza features for over 2 years.
You have this pathetic fixation on having Mommy Sun give you all your software (and for free!). Go to http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/wadler/pizza/gj/in dex.html and download GJ. Use it today.
3) Delegates rock. They use classes, NOT anonymous inner classes (get a clue). They have the same overhead as making a function call - unlike AIC.
Horseshit. Tell me how, in 20 words or less, Microsoft implemented first class function pointers without violating the Java Class File Format. The article from Microsoft's Java architect has disappeared from their WWW site, or I'd pass on a link to it to you. He says that delegates compile to anonymous inner classes. What, you know better?
Here is Sun's analysis of delegates: http://java.sun.com/docs/white/delegates.html The analysis of how MS implemented delegates is given in http://java.sun.com/docs/white/sidebar.html
Yes, there are ways to hack ASSERT into java, but it usually involves using an if statement so the compiler will weed it out, rather than a simple "Assert" statement.
If you knew about HotSpot, you'd know that if branches that aren't ever taken will be compiled out. And since we're talking about long-running server processes (remember your whining about native compilers?), HotSpot's adaptive compiling is perfect.
Does anyone know if MS gives domestic partners benefits? A large number of high tech companies (HP and Apple, just to name two) do. I wonder what Jesus' self-appointed spokesman thinks about that...
-jon
Re:Java won't ever replace C++ for me until
on
Swing
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I love these kinds of posts! Ignorant, bigoted people who haven't done any research...
1) Compile once run anywhere is not as important for where java is heading (server end). Please stop insulting us, and give us a native compiler sun. We are capable of compiling to bytecode when we want to use applets on webpages (noone does that anymore tho:P).
Get TowerJ. It compiles. It runs on Linux. Sun doesn't provide it, but I thought that/.ers whined when everything came from one source...
2) Give me paramterised types or templates. Writing our own collection classes and/or casting really really sucks. Some of the stuff that the folks who wrote Pizza are cool, anonymous functions for java:D! (basically lambda expressions) and parameterised types. It's even compatable with current virtual machines, just most IDEs and compilers won't like it.
It's coming. The people who designed Pizza have now designed GJ, which is going to be incorporated into some future version of Java. In the meantime, you can download the GJ compiler (and a java.util package that has been modified to work with GJ) right now.
3) Delegates, I want MS 'delegate' style function pointers in java. Anonymous Inner Classes are horrific, and spoil Swing.
Delegaes sucked. Furthermore, delegates just compiled into anonymous inner classes. No gain, there.
4) ASSERT. We need asserts!!!! Lucky J++ has a simple preprocessor. So many bugs could be caught if people used ASSERT more, Sun don't even think we need them!
Sadly, ASSERT is coming to Java. However, it's a bad idea. Cafe au Lait has discussed why this is a bad idea in the past.
In the meantime, you can write your own assert facilities. Programmers at my company did so. It'll catch problems at run-time, not compile-time, which is how I remember ASSERT working, but it's been a few years.
There are several third party libs with this functionality.
Radix support for byte and short
Eh? That's been in the language since JDK 1.0.
In Byte:
public static byte parseByte(String s, int radix);
public static Byte valueOf(String s, int radix);
In Short:
public static short parseShort(String s, int radix);
public static Short valueOf(String s, int radix);
A replace(string1, string2) method for strings
It's in JDK 1.3. StringBuffer.replace(). Strings in Java aren't mutable.
A windowing toolkit that doesn't eat all my swap space (unlike Swing)
Use AWT. Or you might want to look at KFC (seriously!): (http://openlab.ring.gr.jp/kyasu/)
Any other nitpicking reasons? I know, you'll make up an excuse, but I want to see what it is;-)
-jon
You don't know what "lightweight" means
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Swing
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Swing was supposed to be a lightweight GUI toolkit
And it is. By "lightweight," Sun means that Swing components are not using native resources, but are drawn using Java only (no peers). This isn't strictly true for all Swing components (for example, JFrames need to be real frames at a certain level and popups that extend past the edge of the window need to be heavyweight to be drawn outside the bounds of their window.), but it's close enough to be approximately true.
If a 4-page cheat sheet can't cover more than 90% of the things one usually needs to do in GUI coding, the package is badly designed anyway.
As far as API size, Swing was NEVER intended to be small. It has over 2 dozen different widgets! It includes an HTML and RTF parser! A 4-page cheet sheet isn't going to cut it for anything but the very bare minimum. You couldn't adequately describe the functionality of a JTable with 4 pages. If you want bare minimum in Java, stick with AWT. There you only get a few widgets.
I tried Swing once, but discovered it was both slow and not yet widely deployed in browsers. But that was six months ago. Have things improved?
Swing in browers isn't going to be common, probably ever. You'd need the Java Plug-in installed to use it, and the vast majority of users currently have about a 28.8 connection. The 8MB download for the Java Plug-in isn't going to cut it. That's OK, because Swing functions best as an in-house, cross-platform VB app builder. Commercial apps on the order of Word or Photoshop couldn't be built in Swing right now. That doesn't make Swing useless, though.
It's not just that IE was illegally tied to Windows, it's that the close integration of IE into Windows doesn't provide benefit to the consumer and is only intended to hurt competition.
As someone who has had plenty of grief from IE recently (Win NT 4.0 sp 6 was BLUE SCREENING when I'd do things like close a window in MSIE), I'd clearly agree that putting a browser into the operating system kernel was not done for my benefit.
By the by, I can't think of another OS which has a browser as such a core part of the OS. Mac OS? Linux? BeOS (the example of NetPositive given during the trial was a red herring; NetPositive is just an app)?
The HTML rendering engine could be provided as operating system utilities without hurting general stability, as could support for HTTP and FTP. Check out how the Mac OS has done so in Mac OS 8.x and higher.
The US is _also_ to blame that the Cold War began in the first place.
Whoa, whoa, whoa!
Do you _seriously_ think that the USSR were the good guys? Are you even slightly aware of Stalin's crimes? Say what you will about the US' checkered past, but I can't think of any time we killed 30 to 50 million of our own citizens within 30 years.
Geeez, please, walk down to the library and borrow (if you able to do so in US?) a book on European history... To compare the Serbia-Cosova crisis with US would mean that Utah declare independence and start killing all non-mormons living there. I believe the US government would react, using force, just like Slobodan Milosovic did, and I believe Canada and Mexico would be fairly passive, just like the other European countries were.
So you are equating the Muslims (or as the are called in much of the Western press, "Ethnic Albanians") in Kosovo with the hypothetical Mormons in your example? I think you need to visit a local library yourself and check out some newspaper archives. The Serbs were killing the Muslims, not the other way around. Sure, there were Muslim separatists who committed their own atrocities, but nothing on the same scale.
And it's not like the terrorists didn't have any provocation. Muslims were barred by Yugoslavia from many professions, their native language was banned, and they were being treated like second class citizens by a government that most of the world blames for fanning the flames of ethnic hatred in order to stay in power.
I just wrote them an email saying: You either sell the thing for $99 or you don't! Now what's your price WITHOUT your crappy internet service? Are they really dumb enough to throw away the easy sale of 3,000 units?
If the thing is sold at a loss to get people to use their "crappy internet service," then, yeah, telling you to piss off is good business. What do you think, they sell each unit for a loss, but they'll make it up in volume?
Repeat after me: positive times negative equals negative...
So, what Moravec is saying is that we're going to become the pets of robots. I don't think that's exactly optimistic, either. I don't want to be a pet.
Again, here, Microsoft is ripping off Apple, who was the FIRST major software company to pervert the definition of "open source" to it's own purposes.
Um, how has Apple "perverted" the meaning of Open Source? If you want the source to the kernel underlying Mac OS X (Darwin), you can go and download it. You can do what you want with it. The same is true for a streaming QuickTime server.
Apple hasn't open sourced any of the graphical layers of Mac OS X, but this is abundantly clear in the documentation. It's their choice. Put whatever GUI you want on top of Darwin and redistribute it.
Man, I hate it when people slander Heinlein, and in particular, Starship Troopers.
1. Heinlein had TB, before it was treatable. That's what got him out of the Navy and into writing (a lunger wasn't healthy enough to do rigorous work).
2. Here's the definition of fascism from dictionary.com:
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism."
The political system in ST was just like today's 20th Century America, with one crucial difference: you had to complete at least two years of public service before you could vote or hold public office. People who were still in public service could NOT vote or hold public office.
Public service included military service, but was not limited to it. For example, Juan's best friend is a researcher on Pluto. The recruiter mentions that if someone who was completely physically incapable wanted to join the public service, he could get two years of counting the hairs on a catapiller by touch.
Public service was completely voluntary; there was no draft. You could quit public service at any time if you weren't in the military, and in the military you could quit any time that you weren't in active combat. Once you quit, however, you could never reapply.
Now how the fsck does ANY of this come off as fascist? Heinlein was suggesting two things: (1) Only people who had given something (ANYTHING!) to their country should have a say in how it is run and (2) People who are currently on the dole (and to all those government employees out there, you're on the dole) shouldn't be allowed to vote for their own bread and circuses.
Originally, only landowners were allowed to vote in the US. Women didn't get the vote (with a few exceptions, like Wyoming) until 1920. American blacks weren't able to vote freely in large portions of the country until the 1960's. Was the US fascist? The biases in who was allowed to vote in the US seems to disenfranchise a heck of a lot more people than the system Heinlein proposes in ST. It would be a lot easier for someone to enter public service than for a woman to become a man or a black person to become white.
I've refused to see the movie because it completely perverts the point of the book. Apparently, some people who are incapable of reading are using the movie as Cliff's Notes for the book. What a shame.
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You presume well.
I don't want to start a religious fight or anything, but to explain the Christian perspective for a moment, Christians believe that those things will be fulfilled at Christ's second coming.
No religious fight taken ;-) I hope I don't insult any of your beliefs along the way.
It's that whole second coming bit that is the problem with Jesus in the eyes of Jews. There's no mention of such a thing in the various messianic writings by the Hebrew prophets.
Furthermore, the idea that the messiah would himself/herself be divine is foreign to Jews. Several people have been proclaimed (or have proclaimed themselves) the Jewish Messiah. Bar Kochba and Shabatai Zvi are probably the two most famous. In both cases, they were just men and never claimed otherwise (and neither did their followers).
As a complete aside, the idea of the Jewish God having some divine company wasn't introduced by Christianity. There was a heretical stream of Jewish thought about 2 1/2 thousand years ago which sucked in Asherah/Asarte/Ishtar (of "Snow Crash" fame) from the Babelonians and made her the "Consort" of the Jewish God. It hasn't survived, but the "Shechinah" (which seems to have a similar root word as "Asherah"), is sort of like the "feminine" aspect of God. But it's not considered a different personality or anything, like the Holy Spirit.
But seriously, about that sect distinction with Jews for Jesus. If you think about it, Christianity itself is a sect of Judaism, albeit one that "real" Jews would consider heretical. (Like how "real" Christians consider Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses)
At one point (say, around the year 100 AD), that was certainly true. But over time, Christian doctrine and theology have strayed very far from Jewish ways. The term "Judeo-Christian ethics" bugs me, because most of the time it either refers to explictly Christian ideas or ideas that are universal to all reasonably civilized people.
I don't think the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses have moved quite as far from Christianity as Christianity has moved from Judiasm. I'd certainly consider them Christian sects. Trying to put Jesus into Judiasm today is not creating a sect; it's moving to an entirely different religion.
-jon
A few years ago, a company (name escapes me)sold a solar panel BookCover for the 1400. It wouldn't entirely power a 1400, but you could extend battery life a bit. You could also recharge the internal battery in about 6 hours (the battery gave about 2 hours of run time, if you were lucky). I never picked one up, and I can't find much about it on the WWW any more.
-jon
Jews for Jesus are most certainly NOT a Jewish sect. They are a evangelical Christian church that targets ignorant Jews for conversion.
Since Jesus fufilled none of the requirements of the Messiah in Jewish theology (seen any lions laying down with the lambs? Swords beaten into plowshares?), believing he is the Messiah (and that he will Come Again), mean you are (drum roll please) a Christian, not a Jew. I'm not even going to get into the idea of a trinity and all those images of Jesus that Christians have (both of which, in the eyes of observant Jews, violate the Ten Commandments).
Now the Chassids might count as a sect of Judaism. Karites certainly do. Ethiopian Jews would probably qualify, too. But Jews for Jesus. Ugh.
-jon
You are damn right I'd be screaming about that. You want your God taught in public schools to my kids? Great. We'll then teach my God to your kids. We can start with what a load of crap this whole Jesus idea is. Then we can discuss the various parallels between Santa Claus and the idea of a God that gives you Eternal Life if you'd only be good.
Maybe we could move on to the idolatry section of the course, where we teach the kids that leaving nice presents in front of a certain statue will make one of the gods happy.
Finally, we can move on to the Moloch section of the course, where students can bring in infant siblings. The teacher will then tell them to smash their heads against the walls and drop their bodies into a pit of fire to ensure a good crop.
For the advanced students, we might want to have a section on temple prostitues.
I bet you'd be screaming if the schools were teaching that.
-jon
It is left-wing secular homeschooling which has been the fastest-growing form of homeschooling for the last decade. For a reason.
Because there aren't many people doing it?
If one person is a member of club X, and one more person joins, they have a 100% increase in membership! That's a fast growing club!
If one hundred people are a member of club Y, and one more person joins, they have a 1% increase in membership. Not so impressive.
Other dumb things you said:
The idea that it's the state's job -- even the state's prerogative -- to advance every social good is the very pretext by which they usurp the rights of citizens.
If it is the state which is educating your children, you have already abdicated your responsibility.
First of all, it is very much in the state's interest to make sure that everyone is well-educated. Well educated people commit fewer crimes. Well educated people tend to earn more money and produce greater economic growth. If you want the children of poor people (who can't afford to pay for prep schools) to get ahead, public education is the way to go. Tell me, in 25 words or less, a poor immigrant is going to teach their children English. My grandparents didn't have English at home, even though they were born in the US. Public school is where they learned it. The same is true today.
If you want a permanent underclass, get rid of public education. If you want to have opportunity for the poorest people in society, public education is the way to go.
And no, I don't want to hear about vouchers. Should a childless couple get their money back to spend as they see fit? After all, they aren't getting ANYTHING directly out of the school system, either. Just as it's in the state's best interest for everyone to be educated, it's also in EVERYONE's best interests for people to be educated, for the exact same reasons. In a democracy, the people are the state.
-jon
Now that we're both gainfully employed in high tech, it's hard to believe that we lived on so little (esp. considering the cost of living in Northern California). But there are certainly people in my current home town scraping by on $16K.
-jon
Let me try another take: have you ever taken a chemistry class? Are you familiar with the term "Limiting Reagent?" Cancer is not the limiting reagent in the life expectancy equation for first world nations because even though the amount of cancer has gone up, life expectancy in general has not gone down.
The cancer rate is not going to be high if you don't live long enough to get cancer. When 2/3 of Europe's population was wiped out from bubonic plague, cancer rates must have been very low. Why? PEOPLE WERE DYING OF PLAGUE! In the 20th century, plague outbreaks are rare. Other things are going to kill people. Cancer is one of the things that we still can't do too much about, so it's a big killer.
Why do some people get cancer in their 30's and 40's and some people don't? Current medical thinking is that most cancers in younger people are due to genetic defects. Cancer is, more or less, a set of cells that keep on reproducing and consuming food far beyond what they need to do. This happens because the cell has been damaged somehow. It can happen from exposure to certain chemicals or radiation or it can happen just because. Figure out the "just because" part (remarkable amounts of work have actually been done on this) and how to prevent it (this is the much harder bit), and you'll win the Nobel Prize.
I'm certainly not arguing that we shouldn't waste time curing cancer. It is, after all, the #2 killer of Americans. But understanding WHY cancer rates are increasing is important. You avoid yammerheads who blame power lines, cereal additivies and other pseudoscientific sources and focus on the real sources of the problem.
Passing stat classes and logic classes should be a requirement for a high school diploma. And maybe for the right to vote. But I digress...
-jon
Since people are living longer in first world nations which have things like "artificial" nuclear radiation and cars, it's safe to say that the new dangers are far less dangerous than the old dangers.
By the way, where and when was life expectancy around 35 for most of human existence? And if huge number of people died in childbirth, wouldn't say that of those who survived, quite a few of them lived well past 35? Statistically speaking, it would make sense in order for things to balance out, no?
Life expectancy was 35 (the source says 37) around 1800 (Source: http://www.positive.net/perspective/archive/96-08- 04.html).
My fingers typed "childbirth" when I meant to say "childhood." However, Women frequently died while giving birth. There are two people involved in that birth process, after all.
-jon
AIDS is spreading rapidly in places where the people (1) do not understand/believe how the disease is spread and (2) have serious problems testing for and treating the disease. Do you know how AIDS is spread? Can you avoid doing things (sharing needles, having sex with people who might have AIDS) which would get you AIDS? Poof! You're virtually AIDS-proof. If you don't get it, then you don't need to be treated for it.
Being cancer-proof, OTOH, is virtually impossible. Not smoking will prevent one of the most common cancers, as will staying out of the sun. Good diet and exercise will keep your body in shape. But beyond that, there isn't too much that you can do to prevent cancer. It'd be nice if research money went to problems that were hard to prevent in the first place. It's not that I don't have sympathy for HIV-infected people, but cancer is a far worse problem.
-jon
You keep talking about how "our ancestors" lived. Well, bucky, life expectancy was around 35 (due the huge number of people who died in childbirth) for most of human existance. In just the time since Social Security was enacted in the US, average life expectancy has gone from around 62 to around 80. Maybe, just maybe, some it has to do with better diet, like that milk and OJ that you are holding up as "unnatural?" Given the choice between living when my ancestors lived (pick a time period, any time period) and today, I'd pick today, even with evil vitamin-packed orange juice.
Cancer, by the way, does not come from accumulating "impurities" in your body. That's the bullshit New Age explaination which lets con artists get losers to give them hundreds of dollars for high colonics and homeopathic medicines.
-jon
If the increasing cancer rate was a limiting factor, then human life expectancy in countries with relatively high cancer rates would be DROPPING. Guess what? It isn't.
A stat class should be a prerequisite before opening your mouth.
-jon
For MS to claim that Gosling is wrong and delegates generate classes rather than inner classes is just spin. There is still going to be some sort of intermediate class automatically generated with a computer-generated name. What's the difference between that and an anonymous inner class? Nothing. What is the performance advantage? None. What was the point of delegates? Yet Another Pointless API Change for Lock-in. Yay Microsoft. I reiterate my original point: Delegates suck.
-jon
In fact, this is similar to what I do in my own code. I take it one step further. I put the boolean in an interface, which is then implemented by other classes. That way, I can switch on or off debugging at compile time by changing the value of one debug flag in one interface.
public interface Debug {
public static final boolean _debug;
}
public class foo implements Debug {
public void baz() {
if(_debug) {
}
}
}
public class bar implements Debug {
public void boo() {
if(_debug) {
}
}
}
(As an aside, any field in an interface is implicitly public static final. But I like to make things explicit.)
-jon
Awwww.... yet another /.er who whines when other people make them pay for their work. My heart bleeds for you.
Sun is not being stupid over the JVM. They release a reference JVM. TowerJ has written a Java->Native compiler which must include a JVM of sorts as well (things like dynamic class loading and reflection still need to work).
2) Templates are still "coming" (and have been for a while). Sun have been saying they'll integrate pizza features for over 2 years.
You have this pathetic fixation on having Mommy Sun give you all your software (and for free!). Go to http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/wadler/pizza/gj/in dex.html and download GJ. Use it today.
3) Delegates rock. They use classes, NOT anonymous inner classes (get a clue). They have the same overhead as making a function call - unlike AIC.
Horseshit. Tell me how, in 20 words or less, Microsoft implemented first class function pointers without violating the Java Class File Format. The article from Microsoft's Java architect has disappeared from their WWW site, or I'd pass on a link to it to you. He says that delegates compile to anonymous inner classes. What, you know better?
Here is Sun's analysis of delegates: http://java.sun.com/docs/white/delegates.html The analysis of how MS implemented delegates is given in http://java.sun.com/docs/white/sidebar.html
Yes, there are ways to hack ASSERT into java, but it usually involves using an if statement so the compiler will weed it out, rather than a simple "Assert" statement.
If you knew about HotSpot, you'd know that if branches that aren't ever taken will be compiled out. And since we're talking about long-running server processes (remember your whining about native compilers?), HotSpot's adaptive compiling is perfect.
-jon
-jon
1) Compile once run anywhere is not as important for where java is heading (server end). Please stop insulting us, and give us a native compiler sun. We are capable of compiling to bytecode when we want to use applets on webpages (noone does that anymore tho :P).
Get TowerJ. It compiles. It runs on Linux. Sun doesn't provide it, but I thought that /.ers whined when everything came from one source...
2) Give me paramterised types or templates. Writing our own collection classes and/or casting really really sucks. Some of the stuff that the folks who wrote Pizza are cool, anonymous functions for java :D! (basically lambda expressions) and parameterised types. It's even compatable with current virtual machines, just most IDEs and compilers won't like it.
It's coming. The people who designed Pizza have now designed GJ, which is going to be incorporated into some future version of Java. In the meantime, you can download the GJ compiler (and a java.util package that has been modified to work with GJ) right now.
3) Delegates, I want MS 'delegate' style function pointers in java. Anonymous Inner Classes are horrific, and spoil Swing.
Delegaes sucked. Furthermore, delegates just compiled into anonymous inner classes. No gain, there.
4) ASSERT. We need asserts!!!! Lucky J++ has a simple preprocessor. So many bugs could be caught if people used ASSERT more, Sun don't even think we need them!
Sadly, ASSERT is coming to Java. However, it's a bad idea. Cafe au Lait has discussed why this is a bad idea in the past.
In the meantime, you can write your own assert facilities. Programmers at my company did so. It'll catch problems at run-time, not compile-time, which is how I remember ASSERT working, but it's been a few years.
Anything else?
-jon
There are several third party libs with this functionality.
Radix support for byte and short
Eh? That's been in the language since JDK 1.0.
In Byte:
public static byte parseByte(String s, int radix);
public static Byte valueOf(String s, int radix);
In Short:
public static short parseShort(String s, int radix);
public static Short valueOf(String s, int radix);
A replace(string1, string2) method for strings
It's in JDK 1.3. StringBuffer.replace(). Strings in Java aren't mutable.
A windowing toolkit that doesn't eat all my swap space (unlike Swing)
Use AWT. Or you might want to look at KFC (seriously!): (http://openlab.ring.gr.jp/kyasu/)
Any other nitpicking reasons? I know, you'll make up an excuse, but I want to see what it is ;-)
-jon
And it is. By "lightweight," Sun means that Swing components are not using native resources, but are drawn using Java only (no peers). This isn't strictly true for all Swing components (for example, JFrames need to be real frames at a certain level and popups that extend past the edge of the window need to be heavyweight to be drawn outside the bounds of their window.), but it's close enough to be approximately true.
If a 4-page cheat sheet can't cover more than 90% of the things one usually needs to do in GUI coding, the package is badly designed anyway.
As far as API size, Swing was NEVER intended to be small. It has over 2 dozen different widgets! It includes an HTML and RTF parser! A 4-page cheet sheet isn't going to cut it for anything but the very bare minimum. You couldn't adequately describe the functionality of a JTable with 4 pages. If you want bare minimum in Java, stick with AWT. There you only get a few widgets.
I tried Swing once, but discovered it was both slow and not yet widely deployed in browsers. But that was six months ago. Have things improved?
Swing in browers isn't going to be common, probably ever. You'd need the Java Plug-in installed to use it, and the vast majority of users currently have about a 28.8 connection. The 8MB download for the Java Plug-in isn't going to cut it. That's OK, because Swing functions best as an in-house, cross-platform VB app builder. Commercial apps on the order of Word or Photoshop couldn't be built in Swing right now. That doesn't make Swing useless, though.
-jon
As someone who has had plenty of grief from IE recently (Win NT 4.0 sp 6 was BLUE SCREENING when I'd do things like close a window in MSIE), I'd clearly agree that putting a browser into the operating system kernel was not done for my benefit.
By the by, I can't think of another OS which has a browser as such a core part of the OS. Mac OS? Linux? BeOS (the example of NetPositive given during the trial was a red herring; NetPositive is just an app)?
The HTML rendering engine could be provided as operating system utilities without hurting general stability, as could support for HTTP and FTP. Check out how the Mac OS has done so in Mac OS 8.x and higher.
-jon
Whoa, whoa, whoa!
Do you _seriously_ think that the USSR were the good guys? Are you even slightly aware of Stalin's crimes? Say what you will about the US' checkered past, but I can't think of any time we killed 30 to 50 million of our own citizens within 30 years.
Geeez, please, walk down to the library and borrow (if you able to do so in US?) a book on European history... To compare the Serbia-Cosova crisis with US would mean that Utah declare independence and start killing all non-mormons living there. I believe the US government would react, using force, just like Slobodan Milosovic did, and I believe Canada and Mexico would be fairly passive, just like the other European countries were.
So you are equating the Muslims (or as the are called in much of the Western press, "Ethnic Albanians") in Kosovo with the hypothetical Mormons in your example? I think you need to visit a local library yourself and check out some newspaper archives. The Serbs were killing the Muslims, not the other way around. Sure, there were Muslim separatists who committed their own atrocities, but nothing on the same scale.
And it's not like the terrorists didn't have any provocation. Muslims were barred by Yugoslavia from many professions, their native language was banned, and they were being treated like second class citizens by a government that most of the world blames for fanning the flames of ethnic hatred in order to stay in power.
-jon
If the thing is sold at a loss to get people to use their "crappy internet service," then, yeah, telling you to piss off is good business. What do you think, they sell each unit for a loss, but they'll make it up in volume?
Repeat after me: positive times negative equals negative...
-jon
-jon
Um, how has Apple "perverted" the meaning of Open Source? If you want the source to the kernel underlying Mac OS X (Darwin), you can go and download it. You can do what you want with it. The same is true for a streaming QuickTime server.
Apple hasn't open sourced any of the graphical layers of Mac OS X, but this is abundantly clear in the documentation. It's their choice. Put whatever GUI you want on top of Darwin and redistribute it.
-jon
1. Heinlein had TB, before it was treatable. That's what got him out of the Navy and into writing (a lunger wasn't healthy enough to do rigorous work).
2. Here's the definition of fascism from dictionary.com:
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism."
The political system in ST was just like today's 20th Century America, with one crucial difference: you had to complete at least two years of public service before you could vote or hold public office. People who were still in public service could NOT vote or hold public office.
Public service included military service, but was not limited to it. For example, Juan's best friend is a researcher on Pluto. The recruiter mentions that if someone who was completely physically incapable wanted to join the public service, he could get two years of counting the hairs on a catapiller by touch.
Public service was completely voluntary; there was no draft. You could quit public service at any time if you weren't in the military, and in the military you could quit any time that you weren't in active combat. Once you quit, however, you could never reapply.
Now how the fsck does ANY of this come off as fascist? Heinlein was suggesting two things: (1) Only people who had given something (ANYTHING!) to their country should have a say in how it is run and (2) People who are currently on the dole (and to all those government employees out there, you're on the dole) shouldn't be allowed to vote for their own bread and circuses.
Originally, only landowners were allowed to vote in the US. Women didn't get the vote (with a few exceptions, like Wyoming) until 1920. American blacks weren't able to vote freely in large portions of the country until the 1960's. Was the US fascist? The biases in who was allowed to vote in the US seems to disenfranchise a heck of a lot more people than the system Heinlein proposes in ST. It would be a lot easier for someone to enter public service than for a woman to become a man or a black person to become white.
I've refused to see the movie because it completely perverts the point of the book. Apparently, some people who are incapable of reading are using the movie as Cliff's Notes for the book. What a shame.
-jon
-jon