I use a Mac and am usually embarrassed when I see Mac fans going on about how the Mac is better than anything else on this earth including sex with Jessica Alba, but what really frightens me is what is going to happen next year when Apple starts bringing out Intel based Macs and they start to use the same fan based logic on Intel CPUs that they use on Macs: (Future Quote: "Intel is the best and I know this because Steve said so and I trust him with my babies and my credit cards")
I remember reports on how listening to music through earphones/headphones/1000watt stereo etc could damage your hearing back in the days of the Sony walkman, i.e. 1978 or so. It's a slow new years eve week when they drag that one out of the closet, dust it off and send it around the block to shock gullible mommies and poppies before putting it back into cold storage for the next dull tech news week.
NEWSFLASH!!!!!! (OMG!) Extremely loud sound can damage your hearing.
While I can only speak for my employer, we test against IE for Windows and Mac OS, Firefox on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, Safari, and Opera on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.
If you're testing against Safari on Linux and Windows, then I think I can perhaps begin to understand the depths of your problems.;-)
And what do you get as a return type
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
I have just finished a long project written in Java, ASP (don't ask) and Perl on an Oracle DB, and have spent time inbetween debugging a complex php application. Granted, Java is verbose and it really pisses off newcomers to have to declare their variables, but taking ASP as an example, and much of the same applies to any loosely typed language, you simply don't have the easy ability to see what your return types or paramters are. Usually in an ASP or PHP class, you have to delve into the code (if it isn't documented) of the actual class to see what it takes and returns.
This little feature is what I really love about Java (or C# for that matter). The fact that a certain structure is enforced on you should not cramp your style, but if it does, it suggests that you don't understand the reasons for that enforced structure, which is to help make the code cleaner. Being up late at night debugging someone else's scripting language classes which have neither a compiler nor something like a stack trace is really painful. To all those people who maintain that Java is dying, they haven't seen a real enterprise application. I know that php is moving in that direction, but you have to be extremely disciplined in php not to create a mess of code that is impossible to debug. I wouldn't write a small script to parse a text file in Java and I wouldn't write an enterprise application in perl.
Personally, I think that Ruby has the best design of any of the new languages and will only improve with time. It has namespaces and many important features that Java has. php might have hundreds of extra features but it has no namespaces and is a terrible mix of perl, C++ and Java. Java and Ruby have, IMO, the one thing that really makes a language stand out: consistency.
I'm not a gamer at all (I use a Mac after all), and I don't have any particular preference for any one console or system, but purely from an consumer perspective I would think it would make sense to wait with one's purchase of a gaming console until all three new consoles are released so that one can compare them for price and features. I don't don't think that throwing around money for three different consoles is good money management (but then again, I suppose one could say that about me and my Mac as well;-)
Given that I was dumb enough to fall for a bit Register flamebait recently, I should hope I wouldn't fall for another one so soon again. You know the famous Bush saying, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you";-). What the Register and its scummy snotrag excuses for journalists are doing is almost as old as the printing press in the UK: writing inflammatory articles explicitly because some fuckhead here at Slashdot will link to it and thereby get the Register loads of pageviews that it doesn't deserve.
The Register in general and Andrew Orlowski in particular don't give a flying fuck about bothering to stick to any standards of journalism, and actually checking up on the facts behind any story would be a sin for the Register. I remember Orlowski doing the same flamebait stuff with OSX when it was new and there have been a steady trickle of wildly innacurate Mac/OSX stories over the years (take a look at their original predictions for the flatpanel iMac).
They simply don't care. The only redeeming point about the Register and bum fucks like Orlowski is that they are equally innacurate and inflammatory about anything they write.
In this wonderful fundamentalist^Wdevout republic, Mullah^Wpreacher Pat Robertson will finally have a place to feel at home, where women will wear chadors^W^Wnot wear bikinis and where all the umma^Wchristian community will be able to lead a life safe from heresy according to the word of Führer^W Father Pat Robertson (God's sole representative on Earth). The Taleban^WChristian warriors will beat up and occasionaly execute heathen, infidels or anyone who doesn't believe and do exactly as they're told to.
FTFA: I'll leave you with one thought. Finns are socialists. Linus Torvalds is Finnish. Linus Torvalds got here on an airplane.
Nice one there, Otto. Make analogies that are about as fitting as the buttplug you currently have up your arse, and make a 2003-esque snide swipe at anything European as being Sociamalist or whatever.
Congrats, it's people like you that give Americans the reputation of being loud-mouthed, overweight, dumb-as-shit, opinionated bullies with an attitde problem, while they certainly aren't, at least not all.
Now, fuckwad, did, you have anything real to say, or were you just trolling for attention again?
The Y with diaresis is a convenience spelling of ij in Dutch. Try it out. It's easier writing a y with two dots than an i and a j seperately.
Who to emulate today? Perl? Java? C++?
on
PHP 5.1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I started off doing web coding in PHP 3 years ago, and was even pleasantly pleased when PHP 4 came out as it was a real, practical improvement over PHP3, especially as regards sessions and form data. Since then, I've learnt Java, ASP, Perl and Cold Fusion and started on Ruby. (and C/ObjC for native development)
Today, after not having done any PHP for about two years, I took a look at the PHP 5 documentation.
I was appalled.
Back when I started learning Perl, many of the apparent idiosyncrasies in PHP made sense such as the $syntax, multiple variable assignation, string concatenation and others. PHP had made a simpler version of Perl (automatic dereferencing, yay!). Then, when I was reading through the docs I noticed that PHP5 was doing its utter best to ape the functionality of Java (OO, exceptions, collections, interfaces, reflection, overloading, overriding etc) with the syntax of C++ (:: for static members, -> for virtual methods) but with the same loosely typed variables (Just ask yourself when looking at code you've never seen exactly what type does that unknown function return) and no namespaces (Perl, Java and C++ all have this in some form or another) and a huge array of functions that has no consistency whatsoever.
So, in essence, we have a language that is a mix of Perl, Java and C++ but with no real innovation of its own, unlike Python or Ruby, both of which are extremely consistent and remain true to themselves. Even lowly Javascript is far more consistent than PHP.
There is no way that I will code or design a large webapp in PHP. I had to debug a fairly complex one recently and it was a nightmare. I think I'll wait another few years and look what PHP6 turns out to be.
They're not doing the hard science and answering the tough questions, like why, for instance, if intelligence in humans is SO important and crucial to our survival (we have no sharp teeth, claws, we can't run or climb or swim well compared to the rest of the animal kingdom), then why did it take so long for intelligence to develop in humans (say within the past 100,000 years)? How was it possible that WE survived all those years effectively at a huge disadvantage physically? Humans are amongst the few animals tha use sweating for cooling. As a consequence humans can run for longer periods of time than almost any other animal. Guess how this helped our ancestors survive.
Humans have two hands and two arms and can use tools, such as rocks to bash prey over the head or build other tools. Guess how this helped our anscestors survive.
I think creationists are just too frightened of life to open their eyes.
(e.g. look at Europe's wider social reaction to genetic modification). You're talking the European reaction to genetically modified foods. Given that there are many issues that have not been cleared in the whole genetically modifed food scenario, such as patents and the fact that some of the foods at least are showing issues adverse to the health of consumers, I think the European reaction is a good one.
This reminds me of the insanity of the dotcom boom (which looks very much like it's coming back to plague us and bust once again), with every dev team and their mothers coming out with some killer app that will "capture the market". The only difference to 1999 is that these days the pay sucks and no one has money for off the wall untested projects, which leads to the siuation described by the author: masses of code that have to be out the door yesterday but we can't afford the time or the devs to build it ourselves.
Hey, you heard the part about making it fast, good and cheap and picking any two?
Here in switzerland they face the very same problem, i.e. the real problem - mountain villages dying out - and they combat it in almost the exact same manor, i.e. the Bund or government pays millions every year for isolated little villages in Engadin in Graubünden that otherwise would have died out already. And what about Rumantsch? The language descended from the Romans spoken only in Graubünden in Switzerland that is rapidly dying out? There are only about 50'000 speakers left despite the language being given a standardised written form and many millions in subsidies etc by the government?
The lady should counter sue the company for attempting to drive her into bankruptcy. She should sue for percentually as much, based on the company's income, as the company is suing her, i.e. if her yearly income is $60'000 and she get's sued for $2million, then if the company's yearly income is $10million then she should sue for $400million. She should plainly state that she is counter suing because the company is maliciously attempting to drive her into bankruptcy with an amount that she could never pay instead of just suing to get her to close down the website.
She might not win, but it would provide precedence for annyone who is harrassed by giant companies in the future. (Hallo RIAA, did you hear that?) IT sure would be good to see some of those corporations think twice before abusing their power in future.
They had a good thing going when they were vending relatively unique hardware. Now they have decided to switch, ever increasingly, to less propietary hardware in order to save costs. They did it when they adopted PCI, PC style memory and IDE mass storage devices. Before long, people were upgrading their own systems with non-Apple stuff. Now the very core of the computer itself is being moved over to something more readily available on the market... they don't expect people to want to play?
There were more viruses for the Mac OS back in the early 90's, when Apple was on almost completely proprietry hardware (680xx, ADB, Nubus etc) than there are now where the only thing distinguishing a Mac from a PC on the hardware side is the CPU.
I myself believe in God, but I don't follow any organised religion. For me God is a feeling of peace inside one. But that's just me. I know that that statement will make some of the more religious crowd shout "sacrilege" and "you'll burn in hell" bla bla bla, and the other side will laugh because I believe in a "feeling". But who are Christians anyway to tell me how to feel? And how on earth do they even know what hell is and why I personally will burn there because I don't believe the same thing as they do. And what is the difference between a Christian wanting me to believe as he does (why, fuckhead? do you feel lonely or what?) and some Islamic nutcase frothing at the mouth about Allah and Infidels and heathens etc?
Who is right? The Christians, the Jews, the Moslems, the Buddhists, the Hindus etc? Who? Every religion claims to know "The Truth". Explain that to me enlightened Christians who claim to know everything but got it from an old book that has as much of interest in it as Hemmingway's The Old Man and The See.
I don't know if there IS a God. I certainly don't believe a church or any religion that routinely slaughtered people in the name of a God that has strange problems about sex or eating funny foods, especially on Fridays.
I think that anyone who actively tries to convince others that his religion is the only right one is a fucking moron who's afraid of people who think for themselves.
I personally don't hold much stake in atheism either, since my feelings tell me there is more to life than just a collection of chemicals, but I may be wrong.
I think it would be wonderful if people would think for themselves and come to their own conclusions, but that is terribly out of fashion today.
I think that Microsoft has taken a page from Apple's book in making the free Express editions of their tools available on the web for download. Free tools are what get people interested in your tools. I'm a Mac user but my next computer will be a PC because I'm interested in using Microsoft's tools since they seem to be pretty good.
If there was ever an obvious prior art in one of these bullshit hairbrained patent suits, it is SGML, of which XML is a subset (and html originally too, although the browsers let the strict compliance slip). SGML has been around for a long time.
In any case, stuff like this shouldn't be allowed to proceed. It's pure and simple bullshit tactics on the part of companies that otherwise have no real product.
Java, rather, jsp and struts, hibernate etc may be an enormous pain to set up with ant, maven etc in Tomcat or on BEA or whatever, but they have real advantages compared to PHP as an application grows. Java tends to enforce abstraction whereas PHP doesn't really care. I've developed with both and I've noticed that while PHP is fun for simpler sites, it's very easy to make a nightmare out of it with larger ones. Yes, there are now templates and various PEAR modules and various accelerators but they simply don't compre to Java in terms of maturity or clean code, and for very large object collections, Java is faster by quite a bit. Another really serious problem with PHP is the moving target syndrome where there is little deprecation but lots of dropping of legacy functionality. A company I know has a real problem at the moment in that it is facing serious costs in moving some old PHP code to a newer version, but is forced due to customer pressure to keep some older versions around. It's messy.
I really like Ruby On Rails approach. It is however too new to be used on critical projects. It lacks certain things like precompilation and is still only runnable as CGI.
All that said, PHP is growing and will no doubt eventually make Java's life difficult as it grows into larger applications and becomes more mature, but it might just find that Ruby might overtake it eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
I use a Mac and am usually embarrassed when I see Mac fans going on about how the Mac is better than anything else on this earth including sex with Jessica Alba, but what really frightens me is what is going to happen next year when Apple starts bringing out Intel based Macs and they start to use the same fan based logic on Intel CPUs that they use on Macs: (Future Quote: "Intel is the best and I know this because Steve said so and I trust him with my babies and my credit cards")
I remember reports on how listening to music through earphones/headphones/1000watt stereo etc could damage your hearing back in the days of the Sony walkman, i.e. 1978 or so. It's a slow new years eve week when they drag that one out of the closet, dust it off and send it around the block to shock gullible mommies and poppies before putting it back into cold storage for the next dull tech news week.
NEWSFLASH!!!!!! (OMG!) Extremely loud sound can damage your hearing.
Weep.
try macupdate.com or versiontracker.com
Google is difficult to contact directly, but they do have a public discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/google.public.suppo rt.general
Use that and let them you'll be setting yahoo as your default search engine if they start to include images.
While I can only speak for my employer, we test against IE for Windows and Mac OS, Firefox on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, Safari, and Opera on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.
;-)
If you're testing against Safari on Linux and Windows, then I think I can perhaps begin to understand the depths of your problems.
I have just finished a long project written in Java, ASP (don't ask) and Perl on an Oracle DB, and have spent time inbetween debugging a complex php application. Granted, Java is verbose and it really pisses off newcomers to have to declare their variables, but taking ASP as an example, and much of the same applies to any loosely typed language, you simply don't have the easy ability to see what your return types or paramters are. Usually in an ASP or PHP class, you have to delve into the code (if it isn't documented) of the actual class to see what it takes and returns.
This little feature is what I really love about Java (or C# for that matter). The fact that a certain structure is enforced on you should not cramp your style, but if it does, it suggests that you don't understand the reasons for that enforced structure, which is to help make the code cleaner. Being up late at night debugging someone else's scripting language classes which have neither a compiler nor something like a stack trace is really painful. To all those people who maintain that Java is dying, they haven't seen a real enterprise application. I know that php is moving in that direction, but you have to be extremely disciplined in php not to create a mess of code that is impossible to debug. I wouldn't write a small script to parse a text file in Java and I wouldn't write an enterprise application in perl.
Personally, I think that Ruby has the best design of any of the new languages and will only improve with time. It has namespaces and many important features that Java has. php might have hundreds of extra features but it has no namespaces and is a terrible mix of perl, C++ and Java. Java and Ruby have, IMO, the one thing that really makes a language stand out: consistency.
The question is why NOT buy an Xbox 360?
;-)
I'm not a gamer at all (I use a Mac after all), and I don't have any particular preference for any one console or system, but purely from an consumer perspective I would think it would make sense to wait with one's purchase of a gaming console until all three new consoles are released so that one can compare them for price and features. I don't don't think that throwing around money for three different consoles is good money management (but then again, I suppose one could say that about me and my Mac as well
Given that I was dumb enough to fall for a bit Register flamebait recently, I should hope I wouldn't fall for another one so soon again. You know the famous Bush saying, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you" ;-). What the Register and its scummy snotrag excuses for journalists are doing is almost as old as the printing press in the UK: writing inflammatory articles explicitly because some fuckhead here at Slashdot will link to it and thereby get the Register loads of pageviews that it doesn't deserve.
The Register in general and Andrew Orlowski in particular don't give a flying fuck about bothering to stick to any standards of journalism, and actually checking up on the facts behind any story would be a sin for the Register. I remember Orlowski doing the same flamebait stuff with OSX when it was new and there have been a steady trickle of wildly innacurate Mac/OSX stories over the years (take a look at their original predictions for the flatpanel iMac).
They simply don't care. The only redeeming point about the Register and bum fucks like Orlowski is that they are equally innacurate and inflammatory about anything they write.
In this wonderful fundamentalist^Wdevout republic, Mullah^Wpreacher Pat Robertson will finally have a place to feel at home, where women will wear chadors^W^Wnot wear bikinis and where all the umma^Wchristian community will be able to lead a life safe from heresy according to the word of Führer^W Father Pat Robertson (God's sole representative on Earth). The Taleban^WChristian warriors will beat up and occasionaly execute heathen, infidels or anyone who doesn't believe and do exactly as they're told to.
Amin^WAhmen.
FTFA: I'll leave you with one thought. Finns are socialists. Linus Torvalds is Finnish. Linus Torvalds got here on an airplane.
Nice one there, Otto. Make analogies that are about as fitting as the buttplug you currently have up your arse, and make a 2003-esque snide swipe at anything European as being Sociamalist or whatever.
Congrats, it's people like you that give Americans the reputation of being loud-mouthed, overweight, dumb-as-shit, opinionated bullies with an attitde problem, while they certainly aren't, at least not all.
Now, fuckwad, did, you have anything real to say, or were you just trolling for attention again?
The Y with diaresis is a convenience spelling of ij in Dutch. Try it out. It's easier writing a y with two dots than an i and a j seperately.
I started off doing web coding in PHP 3 years ago, and was even pleasantly pleased when PHP 4 came out as it was a real, practical improvement over PHP3, especially as regards sessions and form data. Since then, I've learnt Java, ASP, Perl and Cold Fusion and started on Ruby. (and C/ObjC for native development)
Today, after not having done any PHP for about two years, I took a look at the PHP 5 documentation.
I was appalled.
Back when I started learning Perl, many of the apparent idiosyncrasies in PHP made sense such as the $syntax, multiple variable assignation, string concatenation and others. PHP had made a simpler version of Perl (automatic dereferencing, yay!). Then, when I was reading through the docs I noticed that PHP5 was doing its utter best to ape the functionality of Java (OO, exceptions, collections, interfaces, reflection, overloading, overriding etc) with the syntax of C++ (:: for static members, -> for virtual methods) but with the same loosely typed variables (Just ask yourself when looking at code you've never seen exactly what type does that unknown function return) and no namespaces (Perl, Java and C++ all have this in some form or another) and a huge array of functions that has no consistency whatsoever.
So, in essence, we have a language that is a mix of Perl, Java and C++ but with no real innovation of its own, unlike Python or Ruby, both of which are extremely consistent and remain true to themselves. Even lowly Javascript is far more consistent than PHP.
There is no way that I will code or design a large webapp in PHP. I had to debug a fairly complex one recently and it was a nightmare. I think I'll wait another few years and look what PHP6 turns out to be.
They're not doing the hard science and answering the tough questions, like why, for instance, if intelligence in humans is SO important and crucial to our survival (we have no sharp teeth, claws, we can't run or climb or swim well compared to the rest of the animal kingdom), then why did it take so long for intelligence to develop in humans (say within the past 100,000 years)? How was it possible that WE survived all those years effectively at a huge disadvantage physically? Humans are amongst the few animals tha use sweating for cooling. As a consequence humans can run for longer periods of time than almost any other animal. Guess how this helped our ancestors survive.
Humans have two hands and two arms and can use tools, such as rocks to bash prey over the head or build other tools. Guess how this helped our anscestors survive.
I think creationists are just too frightened of life to open their eyes.
(e.g. look at Europe's wider social reaction to genetic modification). You're talking the European reaction to genetically modified foods. Given that there are many issues that have not been cleared in the whole genetically modifed food scenario, such as patents and the fact that some of the foods at least are showing issues adverse to the health of consumers, I think the European reaction is a good one.
This reminds me of the insanity of the dotcom boom (which looks very much like it's coming back to plague us and bust once again), with every dev team and their mothers coming out with some killer app that will "capture the market". The only difference to 1999 is that these days the pay sucks and no one has money for off the wall untested projects, which leads to the siuation described by the author: masses of code that have to be out the door yesterday but we can't afford the time or the devs to build it ourselves.
Hey, you heard the part about making it fast, good and cheap and picking any two?
Here in switzerland they face the very same problem, i.e. the real problem - mountain villages dying out - and they combat it in almost the exact same manor, i.e. the Bund or government pays millions every year for isolated little villages in Engadin in Graubünden that otherwise would have died out already. And what about Rumantsch? The language descended from the Romans spoken only in Graubünden in Switzerland that is rapidly dying out? There are only about 50'000 speakers left despite the language being given a standardised written form and many millions in subsidies etc by the government?
Should they drop all of that as well?
The lady should counter sue the company for attempting to drive her into bankruptcy. She should sue for percentually as much, based on the company's income, as the company is suing her, i.e. if her yearly income is $60'000 and she get's sued for $2million, then if the company's yearly income is $10million then she should sue for $400million. She should plainly state that she is counter suing because the company is maliciously attempting to drive her into bankruptcy with an amount that she could never pay instead of just suing to get her to close down the website.
She might not win, but it would provide precedence for annyone who is harrassed by giant companies in the future. (Hallo RIAA, did you hear that?) IT sure would be good to see some of those corporations think twice before abusing their power in future.
They had a good thing going when they were vending relatively unique hardware. Now they have decided to switch, ever increasingly, to less propietary hardware in order to save costs. They did it when they adopted PCI, PC style memory and IDE mass storage devices. Before long, people were upgrading their own systems with non-Apple stuff. Now the very core of the computer itself is being moved over to something more readily available on the market... they don't expect people to want to play?
There were more viruses for the Mac OS back in the early 90's, when Apple was on almost completely proprietry hardware (680xx, ADB, Nubus etc) than there are now where the only thing distinguishing a Mac from a PC on the hardware side is the CPU.
Does the CCD have a blind spot, Spot? No? Good boy, Spot.
What about left handers? Are they conveniently forgotten by mouse makers when designing so-called ergonomic monstrosties?
I myself believe in God, but I don't follow any organised religion. For me God is a feeling of peace inside one. But that's just me. I know that that statement will make some of the more religious crowd shout "sacrilege" and "you'll burn in hell" bla bla bla, and the other side will laugh because I believe in a "feeling". But who are Christians anyway to tell me how to feel? And how on earth do they even know what hell is and why I personally will burn there because I don't believe the same thing as they do. And what is the difference between a Christian wanting me to believe as he does (why, fuckhead? do you feel lonely or what?) and some Islamic nutcase frothing at the mouth about Allah and Infidels and heathens etc?
Who is right? The Christians, the Jews, the Moslems, the Buddhists, the Hindus etc? Who? Every religion claims to know "The Truth". Explain that to me enlightened Christians who claim to know everything but got it from an old book that has as much of interest in it as Hemmingway's The Old Man and The See.
I don't know if there IS a God. I certainly don't believe a church or any religion that routinely slaughtered people in the name of a God that has strange problems about sex or eating funny foods, especially on Fridays.
I think that anyone who actively tries to convince others that his religion is the only right one is a fucking moron who's afraid of people who think for themselves.
I personally don't hold much stake in atheism either, since my feelings tell me there is more to life than just a collection of chemicals, but I may be wrong.
I think it would be wonderful if people would think for themselves and come to their own conclusions, but that is terribly out of fashion today.
I think that Microsoft has taken a page from Apple's book in making the free Express editions of their tools available on the web for download. Free tools are what get people interested in your tools. I'm a Mac user but my next computer will be a PC because I'm interested in using Microsoft's tools since they seem to be pretty good.
If there was ever an obvious prior art in one of these bullshit hairbrained patent suits, it is SGML, of which XML is a subset (and html originally too, although the browsers let the strict compliance slip). SGML has been around for a long time.
In any case, stuff like this shouldn't be allowed to proceed. It's pure and simple bullshit tactics on the part of companies that otherwise have no real product.
Java, rather, jsp and struts, hibernate etc may be an enormous pain to set up with ant, maven etc in Tomcat or on BEA or whatever, but they have real advantages compared to PHP as an application grows. Java tends to enforce abstraction whereas PHP doesn't really care. I've developed with both and I've noticed that while PHP is fun for simpler sites, it's very easy to make a nightmare out of it with larger ones. Yes, there are now templates and various PEAR modules and various accelerators but they simply don't compre to Java in terms of maturity or clean code, and for very large object collections, Java is faster by quite a bit. Another really serious problem with PHP is the moving target syndrome where there is little deprecation but lots of dropping of legacy functionality. A company I know has a real problem at the moment in that it is facing serious costs in moving some old PHP code to a newer version, but is forced due to customer pressure to keep some older versions around. It's messy.
I really like Ruby On Rails approach. It is however too new to be used on critical projects. It lacks certain things like precompilation and is still only runnable as CGI.
All that said, PHP is growing and will no doubt eventually make Java's life difficult as it grows into larger applications and becomes more mature, but it might just find that Ruby might overtake it eventually.
Becuase the original pronunciation (Arkans' ass) offended the founding fathers.