Who says that it's "a loss of genetic information" that prevents interbreeding? You know nothing about genetics, do you?
By the way, chimps (and some other primates) have more chromosomes than humans, so we must have "lost genetic information" -- I guess by your theory, chimps are more highly evolved than humans?
And who says that evolution is unidirectional? There's no such thing as "devolution", only evolution in a different direction.
Some members of the Intelligent Design movement are agnostics, for example.
No they're not. Liars or (self deluded) fools, perhaps, but not agnostic -- Intelligent Design must be taken on faith, just like Pastafarianism.
Just because someone dies doesn't automatically invalidate a potentially valid legal claim.
Actually yeah, it pretty much does. Being dead rather effectively denies the defendant the opportunity to defend himself. Doesn't necessarily invalidate the claim, but most judges would throw it out.
US senators were originally chosen by the State legislatures, it wasn't until the 17th Amendment was fully ratified in 1913 that popular election of senators became practise.
Arguably things have gone downhill since, althought the 6-year term for senators vs 2 years for representatives does help a bit -- the latter are pretty much campaigning all the time.
Otherwise, I really don't see the point of these APIs.
You're not viewing it from the right perspective. You're looking at it like a non-MSFT developer, or any otherwise sane individual. You have to look at it from Microsoft's perspective, and then it becomes obvious: the point is to sell more Microsoft software.
Libraries should be pulled, if anything... and those libraries should be distributable with whatever is developed with them
Not the Microsoft Way. If the (potential) users of this app need the libraries, they must be encouraged to buy a copy of MS Office 2007 to get them.
Define "military use". Okay, they sort of did with their paraphrasing of Asimov's First Law of Robotics:
"the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed."
What about cases where those conditions are contradictory? For example, a case where the program could be used to protect humans from harm (in which case it must be run to avoid the "through inaction" part), but doing so might cause some other group of humans to be harmed?
To take a clearly non-military case, suppose the software is used in a weather-forecasting system that determines an area must be evacuated -- and people are injured in the evacuation process? (Recall the bus fire during the evacuation ahead of Katrina).
I could go on, but ultimately the clause is so vague and self-contradictory as to be unenforceable. Asimov made a nice living writing stories based on the inherent contradictions of his three laws, what makes anyone think that lawyers won't?
You obviously missed the "given that", referring to the pre-9/11 view of hijackings, and thus the total point of my post.
Better to be taken out than to be given an upfront view of a diversion to, say, Cuba? Probably not.
Better than plowing the plane into a major building in an urban area at 500MPH? Sure. But until that happened the first time, nobody had reason to expect it.
Which is what the passengers of Flight 93 did when they realized what was going on -- but by that time the hijacker-pilots were already in the cockpit.
Remember, standard procedure for hijackings until 9/11 was to cooperate, fly the plane to whatever airport the hijacker wanted, and negotiate for safe return of plane, passengers and crew. The possibility that the hijackers might be more interested in doing a kamikaze run wasn't part of the equation.
And given that, if the hijacker has grabbed a stewardess and is holding the boxcutter against her throat, what are you going to do?
Now that WTC is part of the equation, that's unlikely to work ever again even if someone does get a boxcutter aboard -- again as witness Flight 93. (Which kind of makes the some of the security restrictions against sharp objects a bit redundant. Oh well.)
Quite possibly. I haven't seen anything definitive on what they were planning on using, but I've seen suggested that it was acetone peroxide (or rather triacetone triperoxide). Acetone is indeed both volatile and stinky, and you need pretty highly concentrated peroxide (read "unstable") to get a decent reaction rate.
(As for acetone peroxide itself -- yeah, pretty exciting stuff, and doesn't need anything special in the way of detonators that a lot of the more stable nitrate-based explosives do. And because it isn't nitrate based, isn't detected by the nitrate-sniffers used in a lot of bomb detectors. I had a chance to play with a few grams of the stuff once (in its powder form). It doesn't take much confinement to go from "whoosh" of a fireball to "BANG!" of a detonation.)
Plenty of other possible liquid explosives too, of course. (Nitroglycerine is a liquid, although not one I'd want to carry around in a Gatorade bottle.)
Take another hypothetical - instead of just requiring signed binaries, Tivo (for example) contracts with a CPU vendor for a chip with a custom instruction set. Tivo ports GCC, Linux, and whatever else it needs to run Linux under that new architecture. Tivo distributes boxes using the custom CPU and the source to all the GPL'd code that box uses -- but not GCC (it doesn't distribute GCC).
Let's see you run modified Linux binaries, or anything else, on that box without Tivo's custom GCC.
Sure, you're welcome to reverse engineer the binaries to see if you can figure out the instruction set, and modify GCC to match. Good luck.
Perfectly within the GPLv2 or GPLv3.
(Arguably that's not as damaged by design as merely requiring signing, but it still won't let you run binaries that Tivo doesn't want you to.)
But an otherwise general purpose computer that will only load specially signed binaries is "damaged by design" in the same way that a 6-slot motherboard that has had two slots filled with glue and sold (cheaper) as a 4-slot mobo is damaged by design. (And before you scoff at this example, review the history of some of the old DEC Q-Bus and VAX systems.) Another example would be a car inherently capable of 120MPH with a manufacturer-installed governor to limit it to 70 MPH.
"Damaged by design" implies adding something extra to limit the hardware's capabilities. Sure, it's the manufacturer's right to do so, and your problem if you're silly enough to buy it.
A quick example rebuts this - we've all seen the videos where a rocket is launched by Hezbullah, and then later an Israeli airstrike hits
Unless you can provide a link to a clip that shows continuous coverage of the same location from time of Katyusha launch through time of Israeli airstrike, I call bullshit. Even then, video can be faked. However, it may well happen that they get a barrage launched then bug out before the air strike team gets there. So what? I don't see how this rebuts anything.
So why do they attack, if not to deliberately target and terrorise the civilian population? (into preventing Hezbullah attacks from their neighbourhood, I suppose)
Well, yes, that's probably part of it. It's unlikely that the neighbors are going to actively try to boot the Hezbollahs out if they see them setting up a rocket launcher, but it does discourage support for Hezbo. Sooner or later they'll realize that the risk of letting the Hezbollah set up their rockets is greater than the risk of trying to make them go away.
Katyusha rocket launchers are trailer mounted bits of wire, essentially, with very little left after launch, (like an used LAW)
That's just not the case. They are multiple rocket launchers with 40 or so launch tubes, plus a fire control system, intended to be reloaded and fired again. The rockets need launchers. Destroying the launchers does actively reduce Hezbollah's ability to fire the rockets.
They can't simultaneously care about Israel and not care about Israel.
Don't be silly, human beings are perfectly capable of holding two (or more) simultaneous, and opposing, points of view. Logic has nothing to do with it, these aren't Vulcans.
But I take your point. The ones doing the whipping really don't care about Israel's existence per se. If Israel were just another run down 3rd-worldish, oil-lacking arid middle east country -- Jews or not -- they wouldn't much care. Just as they don't really care about the Palestinians. What really pisses them off about Israel is that they're an arid, oil-lacking middle east country with high tech industries, extremely well educated, hard working populace whose youngsters have excellent prospects (if they don't get hit by a Hezbollah rocket or a suicide bomber first). (Come to think of it, that may be why Israel isn't real popular in places like France, either.)
In other words, to the extent that they do care about Israel, they don't care about what they say they care about. Now, as for the misguided masses that they're trying to whip into a frenzy -- they may well think they care about Israel's "occupation" of former Arab (former Roman, former Israeli, former etc, etc) land.
(Of course above characterizations are generalizations. There are plenty of hard-working Arabs/Persians who are neither oil sheiks nor incipient terrorists. Many of them have emigrated to western countries to take advantage of the opportunities, many remain.)
unless the authors choose to move their license to v3 which would extend to previous versions
I'm not sure what you mean by that, but you can't mix GPLv3 code with any GPLv2-only code. GPLv3 contains "extra restrictions" that GPLv2 doesn't allow.
Or did you mean the authors relicense previous versions of their software under v3? That would have to be explicit. Just because I release version 27.42 of my software under GPLv3, that doesn't automatically relicense versions 0.01 thru 27.41. (And yes, it might make a difference if I dropped a major subsystem at version 23.2, and completely rewrote another one at 26.1 say.) I'd also have to make sure that I didn't use anybody else's GPLv2-only code or libraries in any of those versions.
In the case of the Linux kernel, some authors (or their heirs and assigns, for those that have died) probably can't be tracked down to be asked to change the license.
RMS has been gamed, and he and Eben have come up with a more complicated 'solution' to the problem.
Which turns out to be even worse than the original problem. To satisfy GPLv3, all Tivo (or any other manufacturer of a device with embedded software) has to do is to stop distributing source.
Yes, really. Now, that interpretation depends on the definitions of "propagate" vs "convey", by an unintended consequence of the definitions and the rest of the license language (by at least one interpretation, and the law tends to interpret ambiguous wording in contracts (or licenses) in the way most advantageous to the party that did not write the contract language). Specifically, GPLv3 (latest draft) gives an "unlimited" license to "propagate", where "propagate" means "conveying... without making source available". (Or words to that effect, I don't have the GPLv3 in front of me.
The verbage had to do with making applications available over a network without providing source -- but a box with binary-only code is black-box equivalent to a box with a wireless network connection. (And before you beat on RF detection, I'll say the black box contains a proprietary networking method not based on otherwise available technologies. Sub-aetheric waves, for example.)
Everyone will be happy, and the spirit of GPL will be preserved.
I don't think so. The new GPL is too clever for its own good, it needs to go back to the simple and direct language of v2. Doing that may fix the above problem -- although there may be other loopholes lurking.
I buy Tivo hardware. I have the right to use it as I wish, since I own the hardware. A hardware mechanism that stops it from booting if unsigned prevents me from utilizing my rights as an owner.
Uh, no, it's just that the hardware you bought was damaged by design when you bought it. Tough, you should have bought something else. If I bought a PPC Mac would the fact that it won't boot Windows be violating my rights as an owner? No. (Of course, some of us would see that as a feature rather than a bug.)
The powerful insight is that civilians are the supporters of war, directly by providing service, or indirectly by tax contribution.
Correct, but targeting civilians long predates even this. The Mongol Horde's tactics were to approach a village and offer terms: "surrender and become our slaves, resist and we'll kill every man, woman and child". Either way the village was torched, the Mongols, being nomadic, hated towns and villages. Standard tactics for millenia for any army on the march has been to live off the supplies and crops of the land they were crossing, and if the local farmers resisted, they died.
It's only since mechanized warfare that it became more routine to supply the troops from behind the lines. (If you need a supply train to bring up fresh ammo, you might as well throw some food on there too. And if your troops are stuck in place in the trenches, they're not going to be doing much foraging from the farmers' fields.)
Why do you think Isreal is targeting Lebanese civilians?
1) Because Hezbollah, not wearing uniforms, are indistinguishable from civilians. 2) Because Hezbollah locate their munitions dumps and rocket launchers in the midst of civilan areas. 3) They're not really "targeting civilians" so much as facilities that happen to be in civilian areas; in fact, they've been giving warnings to civilians to clear out of target areas. 4) All of the above. 5) Profit.;-)
You're the one being ridiculous. Most of the islamofascists don't really give a rat's ass about Israel, they just make a convenient whipping boy to stir up unrest and support for the cause.
There are many motives, of course, but what has many of them pissed off is the fact that most arab (or in the case of Iran, persian) nations are, despite an influx of terabucks over the last few decades, still relatively backward and 3rd world as far as most of the population goes (except for the tiny percent in power). Compare with other Islamic nations like Malaysia, for example.
The prospects for the average young male in these countries is dismal. There exists in them the kind of rage that fuels ghetto riots, etc, or the kind of frustration that in post-WW-I Germany led to the rise of the Nazi party. Those in power -- the House of Saud, the mullahs in Iran, etc -- know that without an external enemy, there'd be revolutions that would throw them out.
Annex their land? Israel withdrew from their buffer zone in south Lebanon a few years ago. Steal their natural resources? At $60 for a barrel of oil that costs about $2 to pump? Yeah right. "Imagining" that they want to bring about nuclear disaster? Hey buddy, they (some of them) have explicitly stated that they'd like to nuke Israel off the map.
It's got nothing to do with meddling, or resources, or such. They (islamofascists) hate us (the West) because our system demonstrably works and theirs doesn't. (From a material point of view -- but if they don't care about the material world, why care about land or natural resources?)
Your math is off. Consider the hundreds of innocent bystanders who didn't get shot. More like a fraction of a percent "false positive" failure rate.
Now, we know the number of (strongly suspected) terrorists rounded up and arrested, but we don't know how many actual terrorists were passed up ("false negative"), so we can't give an absolute percentage failure rate there. But again, it isn't 100%, since some were arrested.
People who can't do applied math scare the shit out of me.
Right, Sun's NEWS, late 1980s. One of the cool things you could do with it was just cat a.ps file to the display and it would display the image on the background. All the other workstation vendors were going with X Window System though, so any vendor doing cross-platform software (as we were) went that way, since X would also run on Sun.
Vista's Avalon addresses the resolution issue in an elegant way [...] display resolution and font size are NOT related. [...] in fact most sizes are defined as they will appear on the screen (e.g. cm, inches) and not as they are stored (pixels).
About time. This is hardly rocket science -- some of us have been doing that with apps since the late 1980s (sometime around the X10 to X11 transition). Yeah, the software needs to know how big a screen pixel is (the old DEC and Sun graphic monitors were about 0.35mm -- huge by today's standards) but that's easy enough. From there it's simple arithmetic to convert a font or feature size in screen inches (or cm) to pixels.
You could also do stuff like choosing to rescale or not when you zoom in or out, handy for maps. (The apps mentioned above were GIS and mapping software). And yes, we interpolated raster images too so you could specify the image display size without worrying about its stored pixel dimensions -- although obviously a 20x20 pixel image is going to be pretty blurry blown up to 10cm x 10cm.
Display Postscript could probably do this too, that's been around for about as long.
Its [It's] easy for people to blame Microsoft, but really if you know what your [you're] doing you soon relise [realize] Microsoft is WAY better than other OS's (Based on what you want to use it for)
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Who says that it's "a loss of genetic information" that prevents interbreeding? You know nothing about genetics, do you?
By the way, chimps (and some other primates) have more chromosomes than humans, so we must have "lost genetic information" -- I guess by your theory, chimps are more highly evolved than humans?
And who says that evolution is unidirectional? There's no such thing as "devolution", only evolution in a different direction.
Some members of the Intelligent Design movement are agnostics, for example.
No they're not. Liars or (self deluded) fools, perhaps, but not agnostic -- Intelligent Design must be taken on faith, just like Pastafarianism.
Okay, fair point about the gerrymander. I think your 90% is a bit high (maybe in your state perhaps), but it's certainly true in many places.
And of course, there's no way any law or Constitutional Amendment would ever be passed that prohibited the practise.
Just because someone dies doesn't automatically invalidate a potentially valid legal claim.
Actually yeah, it pretty much does. Being dead rather effectively denies the defendant the opportunity to defend himself. Doesn't necessarily invalidate the claim, but most judges would throw it out.
US senators were originally chosen by the State legislatures, it wasn't until the 17th Amendment was fully ratified in 1913 that popular election of senators became practise.
Arguably things have gone downhill since, althought the 6-year term for senators vs 2 years for representatives does help a bit -- the latter are pretty much campaigning all the time.
Otherwise, I really don't see the point of these APIs.
You're not viewing it from the right perspective. You're looking at it like a non-MSFT developer, or any otherwise sane individual. You have to look at it from Microsoft's perspective, and then it becomes obvious: the point is to sell more Microsoft software.
Libraries should be pulled, if anything... and those libraries should be distributable with whatever is developed with them
Not the Microsoft Way. If the (potential) users of this app need the libraries, they must be encouraged to buy a copy of MS Office 2007 to get them.
Define "military use". Okay, they sort of did with their paraphrasing of Asimov's First Law of Robotics:
"the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed."
What about cases where those conditions are contradictory? For example, a case where the program could be used to protect humans from harm (in which case it must be run to avoid the "through inaction" part), but doing so might cause some other group of humans to be harmed?
To take a clearly non-military case, suppose the software is used in a weather-forecasting system that determines an area must be evacuated -- and people are injured in the evacuation process? (Recall the bus fire during the evacuation ahead of Katrina).
I could go on, but ultimately the clause is so vague and self-contradictory as to be unenforceable. Asimov made a nice living writing stories based on the inherent contradictions of his three laws, what makes anyone think that lawyers won't?
Yes, exactly my point. Thanks.
You obviously missed the "given that", referring to the pre-9/11 view of hijackings, and thus the total point of my post.
Better to be taken out than to be given an upfront view of a diversion to, say, Cuba? Probably not.
Better than plowing the plane into a major building in an urban area at 500MPH? Sure. But until that happened the first time, nobody had reason to expect it.
Which is what the passengers of Flight 93 did when they realized what was going on -- but by that time the hijacker-pilots were already in the cockpit.
Remember, standard procedure for hijackings until 9/11 was to cooperate, fly the plane to whatever airport the hijacker wanted, and negotiate for safe return of plane, passengers and crew. The possibility that the hijackers might be more interested in doing a kamikaze run wasn't part of the equation.
And given that, if the hijacker has grabbed a stewardess and is holding the boxcutter against her throat, what are you going to do?
Now that WTC is part of the equation, that's unlikely to work ever again even if someone does get a boxcutter aboard -- again as witness Flight 93. (Which kind of makes the some of the security restrictions against sharp objects a bit redundant. Oh well.)
Quite possibly. I haven't seen anything definitive on what they were planning on using, but I've seen suggested that it was acetone peroxide (or rather triacetone triperoxide). Acetone is indeed both volatile and stinky, and you need pretty highly concentrated peroxide (read "unstable") to get a decent reaction rate.
(As for acetone peroxide itself -- yeah, pretty exciting stuff, and doesn't need anything special in the way of detonators that a lot of the more stable nitrate-based explosives do. And because it isn't nitrate based, isn't detected by the nitrate-sniffers used in a lot of bomb detectors. I had a chance to play with a few grams of the stuff once (in its powder form). It doesn't take much confinement to go from "whoosh" of a fireball to "BANG!" of a detonation.)
Plenty of other possible liquid explosives too, of course. (Nitroglycerine is a liquid, although not one I'd want to carry around in a Gatorade bottle.)
Is it really? I don't think so.
Take another hypothetical - instead of just requiring signed binaries, Tivo (for example) contracts with a CPU vendor for a chip with a custom instruction set. Tivo ports GCC, Linux, and whatever else it needs to run Linux under that new architecture. Tivo distributes boxes using the custom CPU and the source to all the GPL'd code that box uses -- but not GCC (it doesn't distribute GCC).
Let's see you run modified Linux binaries, or anything else, on that box without Tivo's custom GCC.
Sure, you're welcome to reverse engineer the binaries to see if you can figure out the instruction set, and modify GCC to match. Good luck.
Perfectly within the GPLv2 or GPLv3.
(Arguably that's not as damaged by design as merely requiring signing, but it still won't let you run binaries that Tivo doesn't want you to.)
Looks like overall you're agreeing with my point.
But an otherwise general purpose computer that will only load specially signed binaries is "damaged by design" in the same way that a 6-slot motherboard that has had two slots filled with glue and sold (cheaper) as a 4-slot mobo is damaged by design. (And before you scoff at this example, review the history of some of the old DEC Q-Bus and VAX systems.) Another example would be a car inherently capable of 120MPH with a manufacturer-installed governor to limit it to 70 MPH.
"Damaged by design" implies adding something extra to limit the hardware's capabilities. Sure, it's the manufacturer's right to do so, and your problem if you're silly enough to buy it.
A quick example rebuts this - we've all seen the videos where a rocket is launched by Hezbullah, and then later an Israeli airstrike hits
Unless you can provide a link to a clip that shows continuous coverage of the same location from time of Katyusha launch through time of Israeli airstrike, I call bullshit. Even then, video can be faked. However, it may well happen that they get a barrage launched then bug out before the air strike team gets there. So what? I don't see how this rebuts anything.
So why do they attack, if not to deliberately target and terrorise the civilian population? (into preventing Hezbullah attacks from their neighbourhood, I suppose)
Well, yes, that's probably part of it. It's unlikely that the neighbors are going to actively try to boot the Hezbollahs out if they see them setting up a rocket launcher, but it does discourage support for Hezbo. Sooner or later they'll realize that the risk of letting the Hezbollah set up their rockets is greater than the risk of trying to make them go away.
Katyusha rocket launchers are trailer mounted bits of wire, essentially, with very little left after launch, (like an used LAW)
That's just not the case. They are multiple rocket launchers with 40 or so launch tubes, plus a fire control system, intended to be reloaded and fired again. The rockets need launchers. Destroying the launchers does actively reduce Hezbollah's ability to fire the rockets.
They can't simultaneously care about Israel and not care about Israel.
Don't be silly, human beings are perfectly capable of holding two (or more) simultaneous, and opposing, points of view. Logic has nothing to do with it, these aren't Vulcans.
But I take your point. The ones doing the whipping really don't care about Israel's existence per se. If Israel were just another run down 3rd-worldish, oil-lacking arid middle east country -- Jews or not -- they wouldn't much care. Just as they don't really care about the Palestinians. What really pisses them off about Israel is that they're an arid, oil-lacking middle east country with high tech industries, extremely well educated, hard working populace whose youngsters have excellent prospects (if they don't get hit by a Hezbollah rocket or a suicide bomber first). (Come to think of it, that may be why Israel isn't real popular in places like France, either.)
In other words, to the extent that they do care about Israel, they don't care about what they say they care about. Now, as for the misguided masses that they're trying to whip into a frenzy -- they may well think they care about Israel's "occupation" of former Arab (former Roman, former Israeli, former etc, etc) land.
(Of course above characterizations are generalizations. There are plenty of hard-working Arabs/Persians who are neither oil sheiks nor incipient terrorists. Many of them have emigrated to western countries to take advantage of the opportunities, many remain.)
unless the authors choose to move their license to v3 which would extend to previous versions
I'm not sure what you mean by that, but you can't mix GPLv3 code with any GPLv2-only code. GPLv3 contains "extra restrictions" that GPLv2 doesn't allow.
Or did you mean the authors relicense previous versions of their software under v3? That would have to be explicit. Just because I release version 27.42 of my software under GPLv3, that doesn't automatically relicense versions 0.01 thru 27.41. (And yes, it might make a difference if I dropped a major subsystem at version 23.2, and completely rewrote another one at 26.1 say.) I'd also have to make sure that I didn't use anybody else's GPLv2-only code or libraries in any of those versions.
In the case of the Linux kernel, some authors (or their heirs and assigns, for those that have died) probably can't be tracked down to be asked to change the license.
Slashdot features some of the most anti-GPL trolls around =- they can put the Microsoft Marketing department to shame on occasion.
No, no, you misunderstand. Most of those trolls are the Microsoft Marketing department.
RMS has been gamed, and he and Eben have come up with a more complicated 'solution' to the problem.
... without making source available". (Or words to that effect, I don't have the GPLv3 in front of me.
Which turns out to be even worse than the original problem. To satisfy GPLv3, all Tivo (or any other manufacturer of a device with embedded software) has to do is to stop distributing source.
Yes, really. Now, that interpretation depends on the definitions of "propagate" vs "convey", by an unintended consequence of the definitions and the rest of the license language (by at least one interpretation, and the law tends to interpret ambiguous wording in contracts (or licenses) in the way most advantageous to the party that did not write the contract language). Specifically, GPLv3 (latest draft) gives an "unlimited" license to "propagate", where "propagate" means "conveying
The verbage had to do with making applications available over a network without providing source -- but a box with binary-only code is black-box equivalent to a box with a wireless network connection. (And before you beat on RF detection, I'll say the black box contains a proprietary networking method not based on otherwise available technologies. Sub-aetheric waves, for example.)
Everyone will be happy, and the spirit of GPL will be preserved.
I don't think so. The new GPL is too clever for its own good, it needs to go back to the simple and direct language of v2. Doing that may fix the above problem -- although there may be other loopholes lurking.
then we give up.
Surrender accepted. Now go away and stop bothering us.
Oh, and GPL all your base on your way out.
I buy Tivo hardware. I have the right to use it as I wish, since I own the hardware. A hardware mechanism that stops it from booting if unsigned prevents me from utilizing my rights as an owner.
Uh, no, it's just that the hardware you bought was damaged by design when you bought it. Tough, you should have bought something else. If I bought a PPC Mac would the fact that it won't boot Windows be violating my rights as an owner? No. (Of course, some of us would see that as a feature rather than a bug.)
The powerful insight is that civilians are the supporters of war, directly by providing service, or indirectly by tax contribution.
;-)
Correct, but targeting civilians long predates even this. The Mongol Horde's tactics were to approach a village and offer terms: "surrender and become our slaves, resist and we'll kill every man, woman and child". Either way the village was torched, the Mongols, being nomadic, hated towns and villages. Standard tactics for millenia for any army on the march has been to live off the supplies and crops of the land they were crossing, and if the local farmers resisted, they died.
It's only since mechanized warfare that it became more routine to supply the troops from behind the lines. (If you need a supply train to bring up fresh ammo, you might as well throw some food on there too. And if your troops are stuck in place in the trenches, they're not going to be doing much foraging from the farmers' fields.)
Why do you think Isreal is targeting Lebanese civilians?
1) Because Hezbollah, not wearing uniforms, are indistinguishable from civilians.
2) Because Hezbollah locate their munitions dumps and rocket launchers in the midst of civilan areas.
3) They're not really "targeting civilians" so much as facilities that happen to be in civilian areas; in fact, they've been giving warnings to civilians to clear out of target areas.
4) All of the above.
5) Profit.
Um, I'll go with 4.
You're the one being ridiculous. Most of the islamofascists don't really give a rat's ass about Israel, they just make a convenient whipping boy to stir up unrest and support for the cause.
There are many motives, of course, but what has many of them pissed off is the fact that most arab (or in the case of Iran, persian) nations are, despite an influx of terabucks over the last few decades, still relatively backward and 3rd world as far as most of the population goes (except for the tiny percent in power). Compare with other Islamic nations like Malaysia, for example.
The prospects for the average young male in these countries is dismal. There exists in them the kind of rage that fuels ghetto riots, etc, or the kind of frustration that in post-WW-I Germany led to the rise of the Nazi party. Those in power -- the House of Saud, the mullahs in Iran, etc -- know that without an external enemy, there'd be revolutions that would throw them out.
Annex their land? Israel withdrew from their buffer zone in south Lebanon a few years ago. Steal their natural resources? At $60 for a barrel of oil that costs about $2 to pump? Yeah right. "Imagining" that they want to bring about nuclear disaster? Hey buddy, they (some of them) have explicitly stated that they'd like to nuke Israel off the map.
It's got nothing to do with meddling, or resources, or such. They (islamofascists) hate us (the West) because our system demonstrably works and theirs doesn't. (From a material point of view -- but if they don't care about the material world, why care about land or natural resources?)
Your math is off. Consider the hundreds of innocent bystanders who didn't get shot. More like a fraction of a percent "false positive" failure rate.
Now, we know the number of (strongly suspected) terrorists rounded up and arrested, but we don't know how many actual terrorists were passed up ("false negative"), so we can't give an absolute percentage failure rate there. But again, it isn't 100%, since some were arrested.
People who can't do applied math scare the shit out of me.
Right, Sun's NEWS, late 1980s. One of the cool things you could do with it was just cat a .ps file to the display and it would display the image on the background. All the other workstation vendors were going with X Window System though, so any vendor doing cross-platform software (as we were) went that way, since X would also run on Sun.
Vista's Avalon addresses the resolution issue in an elegant way [...]
display resolution and font size are NOT related. [...] in fact most sizes are defined as they will appear on the screen (e.g. cm, inches) and not as they are stored (pixels).
About time. This is hardly rocket science -- some of us have been doing that with apps since the late 1980s (sometime around the X10 to X11 transition). Yeah, the software needs to know how big a screen pixel is (the old DEC and Sun graphic monitors were about 0.35mm -- huge by today's standards) but that's easy enough. From there it's simple arithmetic to convert a font or feature size in screen inches (or cm) to pixels.
You could also do stuff like choosing to rescale or not when you zoom in or out, handy for maps. (The apps mentioned above were GIS and mapping software). And yes, we interpolated raster images too so you could specify the image display size without worrying about its stored pixel dimensions -- although obviously a 20x20 pixel image is going to be pretty blurry blown up to 10cm x 10cm.
Display Postscript could probably do this too, that's been around for about as long.
Its [It's] easy for people to blame Microsoft, but really if you know what your [you're] doing you soon relise [realize] Microsoft is WAY better than other OS's (Based on what you want to use it for)
Well, except spelling perhaps.