The reason that real Christians live seperated lives is that it helps keep down the tendency to sin.
If the reason you don't sin is because you avoid all temptation, and/or because you desire reward or fear punishment in the afterlife, you have accomplished nothing. Christianity fails to be a moral religion because it preaches that kind of pseudo-morality.
Same place as the last half dozen times 3D was the next big thing in movies and entertainment: you can pick up a whole bunch of semi-worthless 3D gear for next to nothing.
The only people who consider them "worthless" are the people who do not comprehend them.
You are absolutely right that I do not comprehend C++, after 25 years and writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code. I have yet to meet anybody who does, and I have yet to see a substantial piece of C++ code that I couldn't find serious problems in. If you think you comprehend C++, most likely you suffer from Dunning Kruger.
None of that prevents me from getting useful work done in C++ (the compilers and libraries are good), otherwise I wouldn't be using it. But as a language, C++ is a piss-poor design that has not advanced the state of the art in programming languages.
If medical research were really as close-to-useless as The Fine Summary claims, we'd be hardly better off with modern Western medicine than with homeopathy and prayer.
In fact, we aren't: medical research has added fairly little to our life expectancy. Most increase in life expectancy is due to improved public health, hygiene, quarantine, isolation, city planning, etc. Of course, there are some success stories: some vaccinations, antibiotics, some surgeries, but they represent a tiny fraction of all medical research. Another dirty little secret is that for many drugs, while the drug treatment is statistically better than a placebo, the placebo effect is often bigger than the little bit of extra effect you get from the drug.
Having been sick recently, I also found that doctors really have very little idea of what's going on. Their hands-on experience is valuable, but they don't really think about it much (or just get it wrong); they are really more like medicine men with knives and drugs, and they rely less on medical research and more on their own experience.
So it means that you have a lower return on investment, given that your testing costs are higher.
If you want your testing costs to be low, just write generic, portable apps. It's the cheapest and easiest way of developing.
You need to do more than that only if you require really specialized features that not all handsets support. Of course, on Apple hardware, you often can't support that kind of software at all because *no* hardware supports what you need.
Furthermore, instead of worrying about each device, just make your app a little more configurable: let people change the buttons around, choose different themes and font sizes, etc.
This is a problem, and one of the things that risks ruining Android's "openness"
No, there isn't any problem. Android has fewer versions than any of its competitors. There are only two major versions, and most software runs on both.
Carriers cannot change the APIs or make the system incompatible or they lose access to the Android market. Carriers like to install their own home screen and add some of their apps, and that's fine, it doesn't affect compatibility.
Furthermore, most Android handsets allow you to install applications from outside Google's market, and there are even third party software markets that you can use, all of which are compatible.
This whole "100 version meme" is astroturfing by Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe.
That sounds like Apple-placed FUD to me, or maybe they are trying to market Adobe Air as the "solution" to this "problem". Tweetdeck is written in Adobe Air; maybe that's the source of their problems. (And, frankly, I think Tweetdeck kind of sucks anyway. I deleted it from my iPad.)
I have several Android phones, from 1.6 to 2.2, all with different screen sizes, and most software just runs on all of them without problems. The Android programs I have written didn't require anything special to be done either.
I remember the rise of both C and C++; I was part of it. In college and grad school, it was basically the only thing you could use; compilers for all other languages were hard to get or much more expensive. We knew that C and C++ sucked, we knew that there were better languages and better development environments, but we couldn't easily use them, and they often came with expensive runtime licenses attached.
So, it's not that C and C++ solved some grand problem that hadn't been solved before. If anything, they were just considered so worthless that nobody bothered charging much for them.
Objective-C is a caricature of Smalltalk, combining all the disadvantages of C with only few of the advantages of Smalltalk. It also lacks pretty much all the advantages of Java: Objective-C is not type-safe, it does not provide runtime safety, it does not provide sandboxing, and it does not allow you to safely load extension modules.
C++ started out as a simple set of fixes to problems in C, and for the first few years, it was a pretty good tool. That's why it won over Objective-C, which came out around the same time. Eventually, C++ bloated beyond recognition, while Objective-C stagnated from disuse, and that's the state we're still in. There are still a few valid use cases for C++, but I see none for Objective-C.
What should you use then? As far as languages that you can realistically use, I think the best ones around are C#, Go, Python, and Ruby. There is nothing (zero) new ideas in those languages compared to what's been available for decades and their implementations are mediocre and bloated at best. The evolution of programming languages has been a big, fat disappointment.
I have only claimed one thing: that it was not obvious that the hardware of 2004 would accelerate video compression.
Yes, and that's bullshit. "Programmable vector arrays" with frame buffer outputs have been available for at least 25 years, and that includes 2004. The fact that you could use them for video compression was completely obvious then as it was now; in fact, much of the early development was done on just that kind of hardware. How do you think MPEG was developed?
The only thing that has changed is that this kind of hardware has finally reached you local Best Buy and is made by mass market manufacturers, instead of being a specialty item.
Array processing boards with frame buffers for UNIX workstations, the Connection Machine, and Crays, among many others. All of those were extensively used for graphics and visualization, they were all well-suited for the kinds of data parallel operations that occur in rendering and graphics, and they all could also be used for other purposes.
I used to use many of them, and of course, many of the people who did were waiting with bated breath for cheap consumer GPUs to become general-purpose enough to be programmed in the same way. In fact, I am porting some of my code from the 1980's to GPUs now.
Re:Israel is an interesting exercise in Game Theor
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my ancestors were religiously persecuted twice
Since you seem to like to jump to conclusions, let me just point out that my ancestors were from a persecuted branch of Christianity, so neither Jewish nor Muslim nor Arab.
Re:Israel is an interesting exercise in Game Theor
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Even functioning democracies can have different subgroups within them.
True, but while those subgroups can cause political trouble, they do not commit violence against other nations on their own as long as the democracy is still functioning.
Then the government is replaced with people less likely to "support them"
That is a political reality, but it is irrelevant to the negotiations. Israel, as a party to the negotiations, could deliver on a removal of all settlements and a complete ceasefire; Israel doesn't do that because its voters choose not to elect leaders that do so. Palestinian negotiators cannot deliver on a complete end to violence; they may be able to suppress terrorist activity for a while, but sooner or later, violence will break out again.
Unfortunately, I don't have any solution to overcome this fear.
Israelis don't have to overcome their fear, they just need to start making some economic sacrifices if they want peace. It's a fiction that the Palestinians are a separate people, and a two-state solution is never going to work. Palestinians live under Israeli control, and so Israel should accept responsibility. Israel should remove Jewish settlers, build schools, build roads, build homes, send in educators, provide water for the fields, support trade and development, etc. Once Palestinians do reasonably well economically and have had a couple of generations to forget, the two societies can grow together and form some kind of federation.
But Israel doesn't want peace, it wants a cheap peace without any responsibility, and that's not going to work.
Re:Israel is an interesting exercise in Game Theor
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You assume too much. Specifically, about the religion part. For example, I'm an atheist, and majority of Israel's Jewish population is secular or atheist and doesn't really care for the religious claims.
In fact, I know that most of the population is either atheist or moderate because I have been to Israel many times. But I also know--and you seem to ignore--that religious and ultra-conservative Jews are an enormously strong force in Israeli politics, and have become stronger and stronger over the years. No, I'm simply pointing out what Israeli law and politicians say.
The truth is that Jews as a NATIONALITY have had continuous presence in this land for thousands of years,
Where was that "Jewish nation" 500 years ago?
and have a strong HISTORIC claim on it. And no sane and accepted historian can deny this, because it is based on undisputed archeological evidence.
And what do you think this claim is based on? Because you have some tenuous genetic relationship to people who called themselves "Jews" and lived there?
Everybody came from somewhere else; my ancestors were religiously persecuted twice, were forced to leave their home countries, and settled somewhere else. We don't go around making "historic claims" on where we came from, even though we have also had a continuous presence there for a long time.
Another thing that you probably assume is that you understand the persecution of Jews. Well, surprise to you: YOU DON'T. Only Jews who actually lived in countries with strong tradition of antisemitism can understand it.
You presume a little too much about what I understand and don't understand.
But being persecuted and even living under the threat of death does not give you the right to create a new homeland for yourself in a place where other people are already living. It does give you the right to seek asylum in places where you aren't persecuted, of which there are plenty. And if you haven't been personally persecuted (and you haven't if you live in the US or the EU), you aren't persecuted.
You're fearful because people who attach the same label to themselves as you have been persecuted and killed? Welcome to the club! Much of the world population lives that way. If we all packed up and started making homelands for themselves, there would be carnage in the world like we have never seen before.
Connect the dots yourself, if you have the brains.
I connect the dots just fine, you just don't. You have a big chip on your shoulder, but unless you're a holocaust victim yourself or a refugee from a still anti-semitic country who faced real persecution, you are just spewing a lot of self-righteous indignation.
As for Israel, it was started with the best of intentions even towards the Palestinians and then things started spinning out of control. I have no idea how to fix it and I think the best thing to do at this point is for the US and Europe to stop intervening and to stop pumping billions of dollars a year into Israel and its neighboring countries.
but the original point made that it is obvious that a graphic card should accelerate video is simply wrong.
GPUs weren't invented in 2004, they have been around for decades. And GPUs with general purpose computing capabilities have been around for decades too, it's just that they are only now becoming cheap enough for consumers. But you have been able to get GPUs that were actually useful (and used) for video encoding for a long time. The only thing that's changed is that now it may start to be cost-effective.
So you, the OP and the other reply (not to mention the mods) are all wrong BECAUSE YOU ARE ASSUMING IT IS OBVIOUS NOW GIVEN OUR PROGRAMMABLE VECTOR ARRAYS. All of you lack the experience or the memory to say how obvious it would be ON THE HARDWARE AVAILABLE THEN.
Nonsense; people have been using GPUs for any computation they possibly could for decades; I was using it in the 1980's. It simply didn't use to speed up video compression much.
Furthermore, by your argument, Microsoft's patent would only be valid for the limited hardware of 2004, because on the general purpose hardware of today, the use is indeed obvious even according to you.
Re:Israel is an interesting exercise in Game Theor
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Gambling On Bacteria
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· Score: 1
Hamas do have the ability to stop the rockets and have done so in the past for long periods of time, those gestures were largely ignored by Isreal.
Hamas has some control and some persuasion. But it can't guarantee a stop to terrorist attacks. Furthermore, even that level of control comes at the cost of imposing a police state on the Palestinians.
For it's part Isreal forcibly evicted all jewish settlers from the west bank, that gesture was largely ignored by Hamas.
Israel evicted all Jewish settlers from the West Bank? When? There has been a steady growth since 1972 according to Israel's own data summarized here.
Even if Israel had done that, what would you have expected anyone to do in response? Removing the settlers shouldn't be a bargaining chip, it is a self-evident necessity if there is to be a solution to this conflict. It's like asking people to thank you for not talking with your mouth full.
Apply that to to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and tell me if your conclusion that violence is still the Nash Equilibrium.
For the politicians involved, absolutely: elections and popular support are won most easily by instilling fear of an outside enemy into the population.
And if you can't fabricate a reason ("Nazi Germany is fighting back against Polish aggression") and don't get one handed on a silver platter (9/11), then you provoke attacks (Israeli settlements and blockades).
Fear of the outside enemy--it's the favorite tool of politicians everywhere (mostly conservative politicians).
Re:Israel is an interesting exercise in Game Theor
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Gambling On Bacteria
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
It's basic ethics and morality
Absolutely! And people who believe they have rights over land based on ancient religious texts and define their nation through religion and ethnic origin really fail in the "basic ethics and morality" department.
Re:Israel is an interesting exercise in Game Theor
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Gambling On Bacteria
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· Score: 1
Even if you get most of the groups to agree to a peaceful arrangement, the sub-groups who don't agree can spoil it for everyone by causing trouble
No, that's where you are wrong. Israel is a functioning democracy with governmental control over the military and settlers; they can stop violence against the Palestinians, even if subgroups disagree. The violent elements within the Palestinians are terrorists, uncontrollable by the state.
For Israel to demand an end to violence by the Palestinians is therefore an impossible goal to set, and by setting it, they are effectively saying that they don't want peace at all.
In addition, Israel keeps provoking violence through its expansion of settlements, also a deliberate strategy. If the West Bank and Gaza didn't have any settlements and were allowed to trade, life would probably be largely normal and violence would have abated years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Because he's not really adding value, only a markup for selling in a different place.
That is adding value.
The reason that real Christians live seperated lives is that it helps keep down the tendency to sin.
If the reason you don't sin is because you avoid all temptation, and/or because you desire reward or fear punishment in the afterlife, you have accomplished nothing. Christianity fails to be a moral religion because it preaches that kind of pseudo-morality.
While it is true that homosexuality is wrong, so also is lusting after a member of the opposite sex to whom you are not married.
Homosexuality isn't morally wrong; Christianity is morally wrong.
It "works" in the sense of complying with specs. It doesn't "work" in the sense that it doesn't do something people want done.
Same place as the last half dozen times 3D was the next big thing in movies and entertainment: you can pick up a whole bunch of semi-worthless 3D gear for next to nothing.
The only people who consider them "worthless" are the people who do not comprehend them.
You are absolutely right that I do not comprehend C++, after 25 years and writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code. I have yet to meet anybody who does, and I have yet to see a substantial piece of C++ code that I couldn't find serious problems in. If you think you comprehend C++, most likely you suffer from Dunning Kruger.
None of that prevents me from getting useful work done in C++ (the compilers and libraries are good), otherwise I wouldn't be using it. But as a language, C++ is a piss-poor design that has not advanced the state of the art in programming languages.
If medical research were really as close-to-useless as The Fine Summary claims, we'd be hardly better off with modern Western medicine than with homeopathy and prayer.
In fact, we aren't: medical research has added fairly little to our life expectancy. Most increase in life expectancy is due to improved public health, hygiene, quarantine, isolation, city planning, etc. Of course, there are some success stories: some vaccinations, antibiotics, some surgeries, but they represent a tiny fraction of all medical research. Another dirty little secret is that for many drugs, while the drug treatment is statistically better than a placebo, the placebo effect is often bigger than the little bit of extra effect you get from the drug.
Having been sick recently, I also found that doctors really have very little idea of what's going on. Their hands-on experience is valuable, but they don't really think about it much (or just get it wrong); they are really more like medicine men with knives and drugs, and they rely less on medical research and more on their own experience.
No, $0.99 isn't profitable when you have to pay an army of testers.
Fortunately, on Android, you don't have to. The problem is fabricated.
The people writing Tweetdeck aren't even Android developers, they are Adobe Air developers.
So it means that you have a lower return on investment, given that your testing costs are higher.
If you want your testing costs to be low, just write generic, portable apps. It's the cheapest and easiest way of developing.
You need to do more than that only if you require really specialized features that not all handsets support. Of course, on Apple hardware, you often can't support that kind of software at all because *no* hardware supports what you need.
Furthermore, instead of worrying about each device, just make your app a little more configurable: let people change the buttons around, choose different themes and font sizes, etc.
This is a problem, and one of the things that risks ruining Android's "openness"
No, there isn't any problem. Android has fewer versions than any of its competitors. There are only two major versions, and most software runs on both.
Carriers cannot change the APIs or make the system incompatible or they lose access to the Android market. Carriers like to install their own home screen and add some of their apps, and that's fine, it doesn't affect compatibility.
Furthermore, most Android handsets allow you to install applications from outside Google's market, and there are even third party software markets that you can use, all of which are compatible.
This whole "100 version meme" is astroturfing by Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe.
That sounds like Apple-placed FUD to me, or maybe they are trying to market Adobe Air as the "solution" to this "problem". Tweetdeck is written in Adobe Air; maybe that's the source of their problems. (And, frankly, I think Tweetdeck kind of sucks anyway. I deleted it from my iPad.)
I have several Android phones, from 1.6 to 2.2, all with different screen sizes, and most software just runs on all of them without problems. The Android programs I have written didn't require anything special to be done either.
I remember the rise of both C and C++; I was part of it. In college and grad school, it was basically the only thing you could use; compilers for all other languages were hard to get or much more expensive. We knew that C and C++ sucked, we knew that there were better languages and better development environments, but we couldn't easily use them, and they often came with expensive runtime licenses attached.
So, it's not that C and C++ solved some grand problem that hadn't been solved before. If anything, they were just considered so worthless that nobody bothered charging much for them.
Objective-C is a caricature of Smalltalk, combining all the disadvantages of C with only few of the advantages of Smalltalk. It also lacks pretty much all the advantages of Java: Objective-C is not type-safe, it does not provide runtime safety, it does not provide sandboxing, and it does not allow you to safely load extension modules.
C++ started out as a simple set of fixes to problems in C, and for the first few years, it was a pretty good tool. That's why it won over Objective-C, which came out around the same time. Eventually, C++ bloated beyond recognition, while Objective-C stagnated from disuse, and that's the state we're still in. There are still a few valid use cases for C++, but I see none for Objective-C.
What should you use then? As far as languages that you can realistically use, I think the best ones around are C#, Go, Python, and Ruby. There is nothing (zero) new ideas in those languages compared to what's been available for decades and their implementations are mediocre and bloated at best. The evolution of programming languages has been a big, fat disappointment.
I have only claimed one thing: that it was not obvious that the hardware of 2004 would accelerate video compression.
Yes, and that's bullshit. "Programmable vector arrays" with frame buffer outputs have been available for at least 25 years, and that includes 2004. The fact that you could use them for video compression was completely obvious then as it was now; in fact, much of the early development was done on just that kind of hardware. How do you think MPEG was developed?
The only thing that has changed is that this kind of hardware has finally reached you local Best Buy and is made by mass market manufacturers, instead of being a specialty item.
Array processing boards with frame buffers for UNIX workstations, the Connection Machine, and Crays, among many others. All of those were extensively used for graphics and visualization, they were all well-suited for the kinds of data parallel operations that occur in rendering and graphics, and they all could also be used for other purposes.
I used to use many of them, and of course, many of the people who did were waiting with bated breath for cheap consumer GPUs to become general-purpose enough to be programmed in the same way. In fact, I am porting some of my code from the 1980's to GPUs now.
my ancestors were religiously persecuted twice
Since you seem to like to jump to conclusions, let me just point out that my ancestors were from a persecuted branch of Christianity, so neither Jewish nor Muslim nor Arab.
Even functioning democracies can have different subgroups within them.
True, but while those subgroups can cause political trouble, they do not commit violence against other nations on their own as long as the democracy is still functioning.
Then the government is replaced with people less likely to "support them"
That is a political reality, but it is irrelevant to the negotiations. Israel, as a party to the negotiations, could deliver on a removal of all settlements and a complete ceasefire; Israel doesn't do that because its voters choose not to elect leaders that do so. Palestinian negotiators cannot deliver on a complete end to violence; they may be able to suppress terrorist activity for a while, but sooner or later, violence will break out again.
Unfortunately, I don't have any solution to overcome this fear.
Israelis don't have to overcome their fear, they just need to start making some economic sacrifices if they want peace. It's a fiction that the Palestinians are a separate people, and a two-state solution is never going to work. Palestinians live under Israeli control, and so Israel should accept responsibility. Israel should remove Jewish settlers, build schools, build roads, build homes, send in educators, provide water for the fields, support trade and development, etc. Once Palestinians do reasonably well economically and have had a couple of generations to forget, the two societies can grow together and form some kind of federation.
But Israel doesn't want peace, it wants a cheap peace without any responsibility, and that's not going to work.
You assume too much. Specifically, about the religion part. For example, I'm an atheist, and majority of Israel's Jewish population is secular or atheist and doesn't really care for the religious claims.
In fact, I know that most of the population is either atheist or moderate because I have been to Israel many times. But I also know--and you seem to ignore--that religious and ultra-conservative Jews are an enormously strong force in Israeli politics, and have become stronger and stronger over the years. No, I'm simply pointing out what Israeli law and politicians say.
The truth is that Jews as a NATIONALITY have had continuous presence in this land for thousands of years,
Where was that "Jewish nation" 500 years ago?
and have a strong HISTORIC claim on it. And no sane and accepted historian can deny this, because it is based on undisputed archeological evidence.
And what do you think this claim is based on? Because you have some tenuous genetic relationship to people who called themselves "Jews" and lived there?
Everybody came from somewhere else; my ancestors were religiously persecuted twice, were forced to leave their home countries, and settled somewhere else. We don't go around making "historic claims" on where we came from, even though we have also had a continuous presence there for a long time.
Another thing that you probably assume is that you understand the persecution of Jews. Well, surprise to you: YOU DON'T. Only Jews who actually lived in countries with strong tradition of antisemitism can understand it.
You presume a little too much about what I understand and don't understand.
But being persecuted and even living under the threat of death does not give you the right to create a new homeland for yourself in a place where other people are already living. It does give you the right to seek asylum in places where you aren't persecuted, of which there are plenty. And if you haven't been personally persecuted (and you haven't if you live in the US or the EU), you aren't persecuted.
You're fearful because people who attach the same label to themselves as you have been persecuted and killed? Welcome to the club! Much of the world population lives that way. If we all packed up and started making homelands for themselves, there would be carnage in the world like we have never seen before.
Connect the dots yourself, if you have the brains.
I connect the dots just fine, you just don't. You have a big chip on your shoulder, but unless you're a holocaust victim yourself or a refugee from a still anti-semitic country who faced real persecution, you are just spewing a lot of self-righteous indignation.
As for Israel, it was started with the best of intentions even towards the Palestinians and then things started spinning out of control. I have no idea how to fix it and I think the best thing to do at this point is for the US and Europe to stop intervening and to stop pumping billions of dollars a year into Israel and its neighboring countries.
I mean to insist that an entity whose power is truly limitless (something that our brains can't fully comprehend) wouldn't give a fuck what we do.
God probably likes porn and sex just as much as many other powerful guys, like US presidents and many popes.
but the original point made that it is obvious that a graphic card should accelerate video is simply wrong.
GPUs weren't invented in 2004, they have been around for decades. And GPUs with general purpose computing capabilities have been around for decades too, it's just that they are only now becoming cheap enough for consumers. But you have been able to get GPUs that were actually useful (and used) for video encoding for a long time. The only thing that's changed is that now it may start to be cost-effective.
So you, the OP and the other reply (not to mention the mods) are all wrong BECAUSE YOU ARE ASSUMING IT IS OBVIOUS NOW GIVEN OUR PROGRAMMABLE VECTOR ARRAYS. All of you lack the experience or the memory to say how obvious it would be ON THE HARDWARE AVAILABLE THEN.
Nonsense; people have been using GPUs for any computation they possibly could for decades; I was using it in the 1980's. It simply didn't use to speed up video compression much.
Furthermore, by your argument, Microsoft's patent would only be valid for the limited hardware of 2004, because on the general purpose hardware of today, the use is indeed obvious even according to you.
Hamas do have the ability to stop the rockets and have done so in the past for long periods of time, those gestures were largely ignored by Isreal.
Hamas has some control and some persuasion. But it can't guarantee a stop to terrorist attacks. Furthermore, even that level of control comes at the cost of imposing a police state on the Palestinians.
For it's part Isreal forcibly evicted all jewish settlers from the west bank, that gesture was largely ignored by Hamas.
Israel evicted all Jewish settlers from the West Bank? When? There has been a steady growth since 1972 according to Israel's own data summarized here.
Even if Israel had done that, what would you have expected anyone to do in response? Removing the settlers shouldn't be a bargaining chip, it is a self-evident necessity if there is to be a solution to this conflict. It's like asking people to thank you for not talking with your mouth full.
Apply that to to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and tell me if your conclusion that violence is still the Nash Equilibrium.
For the politicians involved, absolutely: elections and popular support are won most easily by instilling fear of an outside enemy into the population.
And if you can't fabricate a reason ("Nazi Germany is fighting back against Polish aggression") and don't get one handed on a silver platter (9/11), then you provoke attacks (Israeli settlements and blockades).
Fear of the outside enemy--it's the favorite tool of politicians everywhere (mostly conservative politicians).
It's basic ethics and morality
Absolutely! And people who believe they have rights over land based on ancient religious texts and define their nation through religion and ethnic origin really fail in the "basic ethics and morality" department.
Even if you get most of the groups to agree to a peaceful arrangement, the sub-groups who don't agree can spoil it for everyone by causing trouble
No, that's where you are wrong. Israel is a functioning democracy with governmental control over the military and settlers; they can stop violence against the Palestinians, even if subgroups disagree. The violent elements within the Palestinians are terrorists, uncontrollable by the state.
For Israel to demand an end to violence by the Palestinians is therefore an impossible goal to set, and by setting it, they are effectively saying that they don't want peace at all.
In addition, Israel keeps provoking violence through its expansion of settlements, also a deliberate strategy. If the West Bank and Gaza didn't have any settlements and were allowed to trade, life would probably be largely normal and violence would have abated years ago.