If both sides stop acting belligerent, there will be peace.
There are no "both sides" that are acting.
In Israel, the same entity controls the military and its level of violence, makes decisions on settlement policy, has a functioning police force, and participates in the peace talks.
For the Palestinians, this is not true. Violence by Palestinians is carried out by a wide variety of forces, many of which are under nobody's control. The people suffering from settlements are your average farmer. And the people participating in peace talks have little ability to control anything. They have tried turning the Palestinian territories into a police state, and they still can't get a handle on terrorism.
Israel is the only entity with the power and control to change anything. And what Israel does is to use their power in effect to ensure that there will be continued violence by Palestinian extremists, which then is used by the Israeli government to justify even more repressive actions.
The Palestinians live under Israeli control. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a conflict that exists, effectively, internal to the state of Israel. Israel needs to figure out how to solve it, either by giving the Palestinians equal rights within Israel or by unilaterally creating a viable Palestinian state. The negotiations that are going on are just a PR stunt to prolong the status quo.
Sun and IBM's JDKs are not under an open source license.
And the fact that something is distributed under an open source license doesn't protect you from patent lawsuits.
In particular, Oracle can assert patents against you even though they give you the JDK under the GPL: the GPL is a redistribution license and applies to your redistribution, not theirs (they don't need a license, they hold the copyright).
The "Java is open source" and "Java is an open standard" claims are just marketing lies; Java is neither.
Rod Blagovich in IL and the fact that he got off on the vote of city employee who owed their job to him.
The jury was lawfully seated, each side got its challenges, and it rendered its verdict. A juror may have been biased, but that doesn't make the process corrupt.
And in terms of the law making process adding unrelated riders to bills (cash for amendments)
That's not corruption and no cash changes hands; it's political horsetrading.
I seem to remember on here a paragraph got added mysteriously to a bill concerning file sharing did that ever get investigated?
If it's illegal, it gets investigated. If it was merely representatives sleeping through a last minute edit, that's their problem.
The funny thing is that the only reason you can complain about this is because media worldwide report about every detail of US politics and the US justice system, whereas nobody really cares much about bias and corruption in the UK.
And you also simply do not understand how US government works; most of the bills important for day-to-day life are made at the local and state level, and the processes work differently there. If you want to make a reasonable comparison, compare the US federal government to the EU and the California state government to the UK government.
"Have you ever tried to download an operating system update only to have it fail and have to start all over?
No. Many downloaders support restarting downloads. Get DTA (Down Them All) for Firefox, which can do that and a lot more.
You don't need torrents for restarts, and many people couldn't meaningfully participate in the distribution anyway and would just have to disable uploading. That said, I think Ubuntu ISOs are available as torrents.
Funnier stories are those like the guy who got "pig meat" in chinese letters because it was copied off a can of that.
Good tattoos are ambiguous. He can tell someone "I just liked the look, guess it's kind of a bummer", or he can tell someone "It says 'pig meat' because I like to eat, party, and f*ck, wanna come along?"
But you just have to wonder if there's some brave soul somewhere in China wearing a tattoo that says "I suck cock" and thinks it means "loyalty, courage, honour";)
I have seen Asian girls wear literally that T-shirt, and they did not look like they meant it.
But the UK system delivers stronger government EG Margret thatcher won a mandate and changed the uk radically
That is exactly what the US system is supposed to prevent. Americans like political change to come very gradually, and require hard political battles. Most important legislation takes a decade or two at least before it finally passes. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), the US has been at the forefront of a lot of important legislative battles in the 20th century, with UK and others following many years later.
US presidents can circumvent the US Constitution on a short-term basis (for a few years), albeit at their own peril if it doesn't work out, and without lasting effect if Congress doesn't translate their actions into laws.
Pres Obama did something similar but got hamstrung by the system.
Then the system is working as intended.
And you get less corruption soory to say it but "A bit like that" is how it is in some areas. UK Politicians have got 4 years in jail for SOP for American politicians.
I don't understand what you're saying. On the only objective measure of corruption that I can find (percent of people reporting paying a bribe in 2009, Transparency International), the US does better than the EU or UK. If you find other objective measures, please share them.
The EU and the USA are very different political entities - are you saying that the USA isn't a country?
The US was intended to be a body similar to the EU: a union of states with basic human rights, freedom of movement, unrestricted internal trade, common defense, common currency, and common foreign policy; it has turned out (as it will turn out in Europe) that the central government will try to wrest more powers away from its member states. Generally, however, there is a desire in the US to devolve power back from the federal government to the states.
Whether you call the US a "country" or not really doesn't matter for what it actually is. If you do, you probably have to call the EU a "country" as well fairly soon. Of course, European pride won't allow that.
is for example Washington to going to hang the poorer states out to dry like the Germans and the french are to Greece?
The Germans and French just paid huge amounts of money to Greece; how is that "letting Greece hang out to dry"? They could have instead kicked Greece out of the monetary union.
US states could fail financially, just like Greek could have; as a practical matter, it's unlikely to happen for the same reason that the EU didn't let it happen: it's bad for the common currency.
one final point the UK doesn't have the chief executive's of counties auctioning off Mps seats (ala Blagojevich).
Blagojevich tried, was captured and prosecuted, because that sort of thing is not acceptable in the US; even if he had succeeded, that would at worst have lasted a couple of years. Furthermore, all he was asking for was a bit political quid-pro-quo (a new job), something that probably wouldn't raise an eyebrow elsewhere.
The situation in the UK, on the other hand, has been corrupt for a long time:
Even when corruption isn't involved, there are often murky political, religious, and personal motivations at work; for example, the UK tried to appoint a hate-monger like Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor to a life peerage.
So, yeah, I'd say the UK is much worse than the US in that regard.
You or anybody can set their DNS service to whatever they like; it's less than a minute. You can even run your own DNS service. Most people just happen to prefer the DNS services running in "American satellites", probably because they also do their shopping, their socializing, and their traveling in those "American satellites".
Yes i know American politics is "A bit like that" - but the solution is to move to a more modern political system and reform your existing 18th century system that worked for a mainly agricultural system with limited franchise - to a more modern system that works in a more democratic way.
And you base this recommendation on what exactly? Those supposedly more "modern" systems were already in place when France and Britain brutally oppressed their colonies, and when Hitler was elected to power. Where's the evidence that they work better?
all are in the same monkey league, and league's governance is in usa
The US is by far the most powerful of the Western allies, and therefore it sets the agenda. No conspiracy there.
any country which joined nato, had to get this organization's equivalent.
They also had to commit troops and put them under US command, they were scrutinized by US intelligence, and they had to allow US troops to be stationed on their soil, imagine that!
The still wanted to join, voluntarily, because of the Soviet threat and because the US had what it took to hold it off.
And it was pretty good, because all of a sudden, warring and genocidal empires like France, England, Germany, and Turkey had to cooperate instead of plotting the next world war.
probably for the first time in/. history, i will put someone in foe list
More fabrications; you already have half a dozen people on there.
that kind of rotten mind is the reason this planet is in knee deep shit
This planet is a lot better off, in large part because the US first fought fascism, then rebuilt Europe, and staved off communism. Mistakes come with the territory; you show me a superpower in world history that has done better.
despicable bullshit. justifying
Americans don't have to justify anything to a nitwit like you who won't even come clear on what totalitarian hellhole he escaped from.
unfortunately my country hasnt been able to dominate the world, installing 12 direct puppet dictators, and setting up gladios in 20 other countries and instigating coups, assassinations and industry takeovers.
Yes, that's quite unfortunate for you. I'm glad my country has the power to do this when it is necessary to protect itself and others.
I see no alternative to installing puppet dictators when a nation threatens the US and has been incapable of forming a peaceful democracy; what's your bright idea for how to deal with such nations?
would the track record of my country change the track record of america?
It would mean that you take responsibility for your own country, history, and citizenship, instead of blaming others and being evasive.
So why are you so ashamed to admit where you are actually from? What is the track record of your glorious nation on human rights, tolerance, and peace?
"Furthermore, European nations have done and still do the same things if it suits them: massive weapons shipments, deals with undemocratic regimes, and holding on to colonies until near bankruptcy."
there are 2 european nations which employed puppet dictators in the last 60 years. you dont know shit about history,
Non-sequitur. It's the democratic European governments that have been massive weapons exporters and supporters of undemocratic regimes. Democratic European governments tried to hold on to their colonies with massive military spending and democratic European governments created the messes in the Middle East and Asia.
Of course, over the last 60 years, there were dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, a massive civil war and genocide in Yugoslavia, half of Germany and most of Eastern Europe was governed by (sometimes vicious) communist regimes. Etc. Nice little continent you have there.
thankfully, america is basically a bankrupt chinese puppet now, with 2 other superpowers to offset its military dicta.
Indeed, deploying its troops around the world is bankrupting the US and can't go on. So, get ready for when Russia and China start calling the shots. The just have such a soft spot in their hearts for Europe given the tender mercies Europe has bestowed upon them in the past, and how can they not be anything but happy to slow down their own economic development to make sure that European seniors get the large pensions and health care they deserve!
this is why the world hates america. with your self centered bigotry, you have just added to that animosity
Good! Translate that animosity into action to kick those evil American bastards out of Europe and start fending for yourself already!
Not only that, Sun also tried to develop a new numeric programming language called "Fortress", saying that Java wasn't well suited to it. All of that shows that Gosling is full of shit when he tries to portray Java as well-suited to numerical programming; not even Sun believed that.
It depends. Gtk+ is "better integrated" only if you're using Gnome. On Windows or even KDE, Gtk+ applications don't look much less "alien" than Java applications using the native toolkit.
None of that contradicts what I said: Python with Gtk+ is a better cross-platform solution than Java.
You can use Qt from Java, too, if you really want to - Qt is not more "native" to Python than it is to Java.
Qt is not part of Java.
Java provides a standard library comprising a lot of stuff out of the box:
Sadly, many of of those libraries are bloated and crappy.
All of this is available with identical functionality across all of the supported platforms
If only; many of those libraries are add-ons that don't work properly, or don't work at all on, say, Linux.
it is totally the opposite. you have much easier time and approval if you are ethnic in those countries. maybe this can be counted as a handicap.
Being an ethnic curiosity is not the same as tolerance, approval, or acceptance.
the 'handful' you speak of constitutes at least 5 countries in entire europe. even if the situation declines from there, it is not as horrible as usa.
Even according to the UN development index that you linked to, the EU as a whole is doing worse than the US, and the EU represents only the most developed nations of Europe as a whole.
my country has only recently been able to establish an auto industry, for example, because it was being used as a colony for american industry, through military (thanks, soviet threat) and political pressure. and even gladio.
So what? You whine and complain as if America owes you anything. If you're not willing to do what it takes to defend yourself, don't complain when the people that do attach strings.
not to mention 12+ puppet dictators america installed around the world in 3rd world countries, who have committed worst crimes against humanity in the last 60 years.
So what? America's politicians are elected to ensure the safety and protect the interests prosperity of the American people, nothing more. Most of the time, the US prefers to help countries democratize and develop, because that's the cheapest and most effective strategy. But if that's not feasible, the US will install dictators if it is vital to US interests, no apologies.
Furthermore, European nations have done and still do the same things if it suits them: massive weapons shipments, deals with undemocratic regimes, and holding on to colonies until near bankruptcy.
excuse me, but, you are still in the hands of brainwashing propaganda.
No, you are in the hands of brain-washing propaganda. Europeans like you have eaten up the same propaganda of supposed European moral, intellectual, and educational superiority for centuries, all the while they were slaughtering natives around the globe, bleeding other nations dry, and killing each other at home over religion and ethnicity. Free yourself from the propaganda you have been subjected to all your life in your ideologically biased, government-controlled educational system and media and start actually learning something about the world beyond your borders.
you can become norwegian, and swiss, even if their criteria is heavier and it takes longer.
As I was saying: you can become a citizen (hard as it is), but few people ever manage to become part of the culture.
u.s. comes THIRTEENTH in the ranking of civil liberties, tolerance, high standard of living, life security, democracy expectations, safety, child safety, and countless other criteria combined.
You point to the UN development index; it averages life expectancy, education, and GDP; civil liberties and tolerance have nothing to do with it. Other indexes people have tried to compile are just as problematic.
lets see which countries eclipse your country.
Most of those "countries" are smaller than many US states; you're basically cherry-picking homogeneous wealthy nationlets in Europe. The logical comparison is EU vs US, and the EU comes out worse than the US. If you include all of continental Europe, it gets worse still, and that's just according to the human development index. In terms of civil liberties and tolerance, European nations don't even come close.
please, dont talk out of your ass, if you dont know what you are talking about. you are basically selling baseless bullshit right wing propaganda.
I've actually visited most of those countries and lived in several; I know what I'm talking about. You obviously don't.
Yeah, those nations are really nice to live in if you happen to be a member of the preferred ethnicity and culture; otherwise, you're an outsider that's politely tolerated but never accepted. Many of those governments are also quite intrusive and restrictive. And with those nations, you picked off the handful of best examples in Europe, it's downhill from there, down to active and violent ethnic and religious conflicts in many parts of Europe. Even that kind of Europe only exists because the US spent trillions defending it against the USSR. Some utopia indeed!
relevance ? 'best' means the top place in a group. and in the group of 250 or so countries (or whatever) on earth, america doesnt have that title. but it is touted.
Yes, the US is best (or close to it) if you value both civil liberties and a high standard of living. And it is probably the only one of those countries that you can realistically immigrate to and become part of (Norway and Switzerland, for example, are nice in many ways, but you can't really become Norwegian or Swiss, even if you are lucky enough to be able to immigrate). Canada is close, but not as good on either measure.
it means you either dont know shit about countries other than your own
Well, you certainly don't if you think that "sweden, norway, finland, denmark, netherlands" are the epitome of civil liberties, tolerance, and/or a high standard of living (as you did in another post). Each of them fails badly on one or more of those criteria.
I don't know about being blamed for everything, the USA can be blamed for quite a few nasty things, you don't get to be a superpower without doing nasty things,
The US didn't want to become a superpower. It became a superpower because Europe's and Asia's superpowers imploded and left behind a worldwide mess and power vacuum. The US just filled the vacuum. Unlike France, Germany, the Netherlands, or the UK, the US didn't need do "nasty things" to achieve that position. The US has made plenty of mistakes since (it's not easy being a superpower), but nothing like the calculated, self-serving evil of that the European colonial powers committed.
If a wiretap provides the proof that a violent criminal actually committed the crime for which they are being charged, then that is a good thing
The fact that if you were to shoot into a crowd of people, occasionally you might hit a murderer, doesn't make shooting into crowds of people a good thing.
Wiretaps are bad because their costs to society today far outweigh their benefits. That didn't use to be the case; when phone service was analog, wiretapping didn't require modifying the infrastructure, but it did require a significant effort to perform. But today, it requires destroying our communications infrastructure and gives governments (and likely others) potentially unlimited access to communications with no oversight.
They may have "put a lot of effort in it", but like so much in Java, it was misdirected. Numerical programmers know how to deal with existing floating point implementations, we do it every day; we don't need Gosling to help us out. Java still lacks most of the things that are needed to support modern numerical programming; it is easily one of the worst language for numerical programming in existence, short perhaps of Tcl.
Slashdot Mirror
If both sides stop acting belligerent, there will be peace.
There are no "both sides" that are acting.
In Israel, the same entity controls the military and its level of violence, makes decisions on settlement policy, has a functioning police force, and participates in the peace talks.
For the Palestinians, this is not true. Violence by Palestinians is carried out by a wide variety of forces, many of which are under nobody's control. The people suffering from settlements are your average farmer. And the people participating in peace talks have little ability to control anything. They have tried turning the Palestinian territories into a police state, and they still can't get a handle on terrorism.
Israel is the only entity with the power and control to change anything. And what Israel does is to use their power in effect to ensure that there will be continued violence by Palestinian extremists, which then is used by the Israeli government to justify even more repressive actions.
The Palestinians live under Israeli control. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a conflict that exists, effectively, internal to the state of Israel. Israel needs to figure out how to solve it, either by giving the Palestinians equal rights within Israel or by unilaterally creating a viable Palestinian state. The negotiations that are going on are just a PR stunt to prolong the status quo.
Sun and IBM's JDKs are not under an open source license.
And the fact that something is distributed under an open source license doesn't protect you from patent lawsuits.
In particular, Oracle can assert patents against you even though they give you the JDK under the GPL: the GPL is a redistribution license and applies to your redistribution, not theirs (they don't need a license, they hold the copyright).
The "Java is open source" and "Java is an open standard" claims are just marketing lies; Java is neither.
Rod Blagovich in IL and the fact that he got off on the vote of city employee who owed their job to him.
The jury was lawfully seated, each side got its challenges, and it rendered its verdict. A juror may have been biased, but that doesn't make the process corrupt.
And in terms of the law making process adding unrelated riders to bills (cash for amendments)
That's not corruption and no cash changes hands; it's political horsetrading.
I seem to remember on here a paragraph got added mysteriously to a bill concerning file sharing did that ever get investigated?
If it's illegal, it gets investigated. If it was merely representatives sleeping through a last minute edit, that's their problem.
The funny thing is that the only reason you can complain about this is because media worldwide report about every detail of US politics and the US justice system, whereas nobody really cares much about bias and corruption in the UK.
And you also simply do not understand how US government works; most of the bills important for day-to-day life are made at the local and state level, and the processes work differently there. If you want to make a reasonable comparison, compare the US federal government to the EU and the California state government to the UK government.
"Have you ever tried to download an operating system update only to have it fail and have to start all over?
No. Many downloaders support restarting downloads. Get DTA (Down Them All) for Firefox, which can do that and a lot more.
You don't need torrents for restarts, and many people couldn't meaningfully participate in the distribution anyway and would just have to disable uploading. That said, I think Ubuntu ISOs are available as torrents.
Funnier stories are those like the guy who got "pig meat" in chinese letters because it was copied off a can of that.
Good tattoos are ambiguous. He can tell someone "I just liked the look, guess it's kind of a bummer", or he can tell someone "It says 'pig meat' because I like to eat, party, and f*ck, wanna come along?"
But you just have to wonder if there's some brave soul somewhere in China wearing a tattoo that says "I suck cock" and thinks it means "loyalty, courage, honour" ;)
I have seen Asian girls wear literally that T-shirt, and they did not look like they meant it.
But the UK system delivers stronger government EG Margret thatcher won a mandate and changed the uk radically
That is exactly what the US system is supposed to prevent. Americans like political change to come very gradually, and require hard political battles. Most important legislation takes a decade or two at least before it finally passes. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), the US has been at the forefront of a lot of important legislative battles in the 20th century, with UK and others following many years later.
US presidents can circumvent the US Constitution on a short-term basis (for a few years), albeit at their own peril if it doesn't work out, and without lasting effect if Congress doesn't translate their actions into laws.
Pres Obama did something similar but got hamstrung by the system.
Then the system is working as intended.
And you get less corruption soory to say it but "A bit like that" is how it is in some areas. UK Politicians have got 4 years in jail for SOP for American politicians.
I don't understand what you're saying. On the only objective measure of corruption that I can find (percent of people reporting paying a bribe in 2009, Transparency International), the US does better than the EU or UK. If you find other objective measures, please share them.
The EU and the USA are very different political entities - are you saying that the USA isn't a country?
The US was intended to be a body similar to the EU: a union of states with basic human rights, freedom of movement, unrestricted internal trade, common defense, common currency, and common foreign policy; it has turned out (as it will turn out in Europe) that the central government will try to wrest more powers away from its member states. Generally, however, there is a desire in the US to devolve power back from the federal government to the states.
Whether you call the US a "country" or not really doesn't matter for what it actually is. If you do, you probably have to call the EU a "country" as well fairly soon. Of course, European pride won't allow that.
is for example Washington to going to hang the poorer states out to dry like the Germans and the french are to Greece?
The Germans and French just paid huge amounts of money to Greece; how is that "letting Greece hang out to dry"? They could have instead kicked Greece out of the monetary union.
US states could fail financially, just like Greek could have; as a practical matter, it's unlikely to happen for the same reason that the EU didn't let it happen: it's bad for the common currency.
one final point the UK doesn't have the chief executive's of counties auctioning off Mps seats (ala Blagojevich).
Blagojevich tried, was captured and prosecuted, because that sort of thing is not acceptable in the US; even if he had succeeded, that would at worst have lasted a couple of years. Furthermore, all he was asking for was a bit political quid-pro-quo (a new job), something that probably wouldn't raise an eyebrow elsewhere.
The situation in the UK, on the other hand, has been corrupt for a long time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_for_Honours
Even when corruption isn't involved, there are often murky political, religious, and personal motivations at work; for example, the UK tried to appoint a hate-monger like Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor to a life peerage.
So, yeah, I'd say the UK is much worse than the US in that regard.
You or anybody can set their DNS service to whatever they like; it's less than a minute. You can even run your own DNS service. Most people just happen to prefer the DNS services running in "American satellites", probably because they also do their shopping, their socializing, and their traveling in those "American satellites".
1 get rid of a lot the states powers,
That will happen just about the time the UK gives up its powers to the European parliament. The US states aren't called "states" for nothing.
As for the rest of your suggestions, where's the evidence that the UK works any better politically than the US? Certainly doesn't look it to me.
Yes i know American politics is "A bit like that" - but the solution is to move to a more modern political system and reform your existing 18th century system that worked for a mainly agricultural system with limited franchise - to a more modern system that works in a more democratic way.
And you base this recommendation on what exactly? Those supposedly more "modern" systems were already in place when France and Britain brutally oppressed their colonies, and when Hitler was elected to power. Where's the evidence that they work better?
all are in the same monkey league, and league's governance is in usa
The US is by far the most powerful of the Western allies, and therefore it sets the agenda. No conspiracy there.
any country which joined nato, had to get this organization's equivalent.
They also had to commit troops and put them under US command, they were scrutinized by US intelligence, and they had to allow US troops to be stationed on their soil, imagine that!
The still wanted to join, voluntarily, because of the Soviet threat and because the US had what it took to hold it off.
And it was pretty good, because all of a sudden, warring and genocidal empires like France, England, Germany, and Turkey had to cooperate instead of plotting the next world war.
The great thing about this research is that, no matter what you find, you can't be proven wrong.
probably for the first time in /. history, i will put someone in foe list
More fabrications; you already have half a dozen people on there.
that kind of rotten mind is the reason this planet is in knee deep shit
This planet is a lot better off, in large part because the US first fought fascism, then rebuilt Europe, and staved off communism. Mistakes come with the territory; you show me a superpower in world history that has done better.
despicable bullshit. justifying
Americans don't have to justify anything to a nitwit like you who won't even come clear on what totalitarian hellhole he escaped from.
unfortunately my country hasnt been able to dominate the world, installing 12 direct puppet dictators, and setting up gladios in 20 other countries and instigating coups, assassinations and industry takeovers.
Yes, that's quite unfortunate for you. I'm glad my country has the power to do this when it is necessary to protect itself and others.
I see no alternative to installing puppet dictators when a nation threatens the US and has been incapable of forming a peaceful democracy; what's your bright idea for how to deal with such nations?
would the track record of my country change the track record of america?
It would mean that you take responsibility for your own country, history, and citizenship, instead of blaming others and being evasive.
So why are you so ashamed to admit where you are actually from? What is the track record of your glorious nation on human rights, tolerance, and peace?
"Furthermore, European nations have done and still do the same things if it suits them: massive weapons shipments, deals with undemocratic regimes, and holding on to colonies until near bankruptcy."
there are 2 european nations which employed puppet dictators in the last 60 years. you dont know shit about history,
Non-sequitur. It's the democratic European governments that have been massive weapons exporters and supporters of undemocratic regimes. Democratic European governments tried to hold on to their colonies with massive military spending and democratic European governments created the messes in the Middle East and Asia.
Of course, over the last 60 years, there were dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, a massive civil war and genocide in Yugoslavia, half of Germany and most of Eastern Europe was governed by (sometimes vicious) communist regimes. Etc. Nice little continent you have there.
thankfully, america is basically a bankrupt chinese puppet now, with 2 other superpowers to offset its military dicta.
Indeed, deploying its troops around the world is bankrupting the US and can't go on. So, get ready for when Russia and China start calling the shots. The just have such a soft spot in their hearts for Europe given the tender mercies Europe has bestowed upon them in the past, and how can they not be anything but happy to slow down their own economic development to make sure that European seniors get the large pensions and health care they deserve!
this is why the world hates america. with your self centered bigotry, you have just added to that animosity
Good! Translate that animosity into action to kick those evil American bastards out of Europe and start fending for yourself already!
Not only that, Sun also tried to develop a new numeric programming language called "Fortress", saying that Java wasn't well suited to it. All of that shows that Gosling is full of shit when he tries to portray Java as well-suited to numerical programming; not even Sun believed that.
It depends. Gtk+ is "better integrated" only if you're using Gnome. On Windows or even KDE, Gtk+ applications don't look much less "alien" than Java applications using the native toolkit.
None of that contradicts what I said: Python with Gtk+ is a better cross-platform solution than Java.
You can use Qt from Java, too, if you really want to - Qt is not more "native" to Python than it is to Java.
Qt is not part of Java.
Java provides a standard library comprising a lot of stuff out of the box:
Sadly, many of of those libraries are bloated and crappy.
All of this is available with identical functionality across all of the supported platforms
If only; many of those libraries are add-ons that don't work properly, or don't work at all on, say, Linux.
it is totally the opposite. you have much easier time and approval if you are ethnic in those countries. maybe this can be counted as a handicap.
Being an ethnic curiosity is not the same as tolerance, approval, or acceptance.
the 'handful' you speak of constitutes at least 5 countries in entire europe. even if the situation declines from there, it is not as horrible as usa.
Even according to the UN development index that you linked to, the EU as a whole is doing worse than the US, and the EU represents only the most developed nations of Europe as a whole.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index
my country has only recently been able to establish an auto industry, for example, because it was being used as a colony for american industry, through military (thanks, soviet threat) and political pressure. and even gladio.
So what? You whine and complain as if America owes you anything. If you're not willing to do what it takes to defend yourself, don't complain when the people that do attach strings.
not to mention 12+ puppet dictators america installed around the world in 3rd world countries, who have committed worst crimes against humanity in the last 60 years.
So what? America's politicians are elected to ensure the safety and protect the interests prosperity of the American people, nothing more. Most of the time, the US prefers to help countries democratize and develop, because that's the cheapest and most effective strategy. But if that's not feasible, the US will install dictators if it is vital to US interests, no apologies.
Furthermore, European nations have done and still do the same things if it suits them: massive weapons shipments, deals with undemocratic regimes, and holding on to colonies until near bankruptcy.
excuse me, but, you are still in the hands of brainwashing propaganda.
No, you are in the hands of brain-washing propaganda. Europeans like you have eaten up the same propaganda of supposed European moral, intellectual, and educational superiority for centuries, all the while they were slaughtering natives around the globe, bleeding other nations dry, and killing each other at home over religion and ethnicity. Free yourself from the propaganda you have been subjected to all your life in your ideologically biased, government-controlled educational system and media and start actually learning something about the world beyond your borders.
you can become norwegian, and swiss, even if their criteria is heavier and it takes longer.
As I was saying: you can become a citizen (hard as it is), but few people ever manage to become part of the culture.
u.s. comes THIRTEENTH in the ranking of civil liberties, tolerance, high standard of living, life security, democracy expectations, safety, child safety, and countless other criteria combined.
You point to the UN development index; it averages life expectancy, education, and GDP; civil liberties and tolerance have nothing to do with it. Other indexes people have tried to compile are just as problematic.
lets see which countries eclipse your country.
Most of those "countries" are smaller than many US states; you're basically cherry-picking homogeneous wealthy nationlets in Europe. The logical comparison is EU vs US, and the EU comes out worse than the US. If you include all of continental Europe, it gets worse still, and that's just according to the human development index. In terms of civil liberties and tolerance, European nations don't even come close.
please, dont talk out of your ass, if you dont know what you are talking about. you are basically selling baseless bullshit right wing propaganda.
I've actually visited most of those countries and lived in several; I know what I'm talking about. You obviously don't.
Yeah, those nations are really nice to live in if you happen to be a member of the preferred ethnicity and culture; otherwise, you're an outsider that's politely tolerated but never accepted. Many of those governments are also quite intrusive and restrictive. And with those nations, you picked off the handful of best examples in Europe, it's downhill from there, down to active and violent ethnic and religious conflicts in many parts of Europe. Even that kind of Europe only exists because the US spent trillions defending it against the USSR. Some utopia indeed!
relevance ? 'best' means the top place in a group. and in the group of 250 or so countries (or whatever) on earth, america doesnt have that title. but it is touted.
Yes, the US is best (or close to it) if you value both civil liberties and a high standard of living. And it is probably the only one of those countries that you can realistically immigrate to and become part of (Norway and Switzerland, for example, are nice in many ways, but you can't really become Norwegian or Swiss, even if you are lucky enough to be able to immigrate). Canada is close, but not as good on either measure.
it means you either dont know shit about countries other than your own
Well, you certainly don't if you think that "sweden, norway, finland, denmark, netherlands" are the epitome of civil liberties, tolerance, and/or a high standard of living (as you did in another post). Each of them fails badly on one or more of those criteria.
I don't know about being blamed for everything, the USA can be blamed for quite a few nasty things, you don't get to be a superpower without doing nasty things,
The US didn't want to become a superpower. It became a superpower because Europe's and Asia's superpowers imploded and left behind a worldwide mess and power vacuum. The US just filled the vacuum. Unlike France, Germany, the Netherlands, or the UK, the US didn't need do "nasty things" to achieve that position. The US has made plenty of mistakes since (it's not easy being a superpower), but nothing like the calculated, self-serving evil of that the European colonial powers committed.
If a wiretap provides the proof that a violent criminal actually committed the crime for which they are being charged, then that is a good thing
The fact that if you were to shoot into a crowd of people, occasionally you might hit a murderer, doesn't make shooting into crowds of people a good thing.
Wiretaps are bad because their costs to society today far outweigh their benefits. That didn't use to be the case; when phone service was analog, wiretapping didn't require modifying the infrastructure, but it did require a significant effort to perform. But today, it requires destroying our communications infrastructure and gives governments (and likely others) potentially unlimited access to communications with no oversight.
They may have "put a lot of effort in it", but like so much in Java, it was misdirected. Numerical programmers know how to deal with existing floating point implementations, we do it every day; we don't need Gosling to help us out. Java still lacks most of the things that are needed to support modern numerical programming; it is easily one of the worst language for numerical programming in existence, short perhaps of Tcl.