That's OK, I was a student at the lazy school too. Dropped out because of lazyness and impatience. The idea of firing up an editor to write a perl script, which always seems to evolve various bells and whistles, yet still never does quite what I want the next time, and therefore needs to be maintained, version controlled, and documented, when I even have problems remembering what I _called_ the bloody thing, just seemed too much work. Instead I learned most of the generally useful features of various tools (ksh, grep, sed, ex, awk, but also Perl) and now simply rely on fast typing to combine them as needed. I guess you could say my programs' names are simply their code spelled out. My shell windows are 132 characters wide, and I occasionally write commands longer than that.
(When I noted there was a reply, I "feared" it would be someone flaming me for not answering the question of doing the echo as an unprivileged user. In anticipation of that flame, here's how: echo "foobar"|sudo sh -c 'cat >/root/file')
Freedom of speech must include the right to hold stupid opinions and express them, even if they are denials of historical facts such as holocaust or the Armenian genocide, as long as you don't directly promote, for example, violence. That's also why Kurdish ROJ TV still is able to send from Denmark. Although I probably disagree with a lot of what the Kurds stand for (including all of Islam, which I find abominable) I strongly support their presence here, and hope we will not budge under the pressure, not only from Turkey, but also from the USA.
France and Germany are two bad examples, and the attempts by Germany to impose a EU-wide version of the Franco-German laws against for example holocaust-denial and display of the swastika, really stink. I think I've said it before - if they succeed, I will start wearing the swastika.
The European Union is an impossible and futile project. Ethics and morality simply varies too much, with strongly catholic parts, strongly protestant christian parts, and a few places that are nominally and traditionally protestant, but only weakly so, in practice. Recently we heard pope-ruled[1] Poland argue for making abortion illegal EU-wide. Such silly proposals seem to become more and more frequent, and one day, such a terrible thing just might go through.
Even in Scandinavia, we have such huge differences among us on some matters, that common legislation for them would be outrageous.
The more a democratic majority rule approaches a consensus, the better. This is easier to achieve with smaller administrative units. On a global scope, rules should be very few and very general. And even so, we see that in practice, there cannot be a global agreement on something as fundamental and general as human rights, because of the totally insane views of the islamic parts of the world. That's also why Turkey should never become a member of the EU.
-Lasse
[1] Poland may be a democracy, but effectively it seems to be a self-imposed theocratic dictatorship. I see no significant difference between the Pope and Hitler.
What's next? Outlawing Free Operating Systems on which their trojans won't run? The German government is a bunch of brain-dead idiots.
To my astonishment though, it seems Brigitte Zypries, the German minister of justice, has shot down Schäuble on this trojan matter. Not that that makes her any better in my eyes, with those EU-wide swastika ban and holocaust-denial-denial ideas of hers. Fucking idiots, all of them. Not saying that we don't have our share of idiotic politicians in Denmark, of course.
I think I will send a few threats and insults to a selection of EU politicians one of these days. Paper-mail can still be anonymous, fortunately.
-Lasse Hillerøe Petersen (Arguing for safe pseudonymity on the net since 1993, though I have rarely had any use for it myself. And I'm no John Smith either. My name is globally unique.)
As you didn't say the Earth was spherical, just that it was "round", the correct way to get back at you would be to pull out some fractals and talk about jagged structures on the surface. Still, as an overall average, it should be considered correct to say that the Earth is round.
Oy! I'm a modeller - haven't been into flying models because the damn things are just to BIG for my taste (and available space.) But imagine having a whole squadron of remote controlled 1/350 F-14's flying in close formation in the living room, and practicing deck landings on a Tamiya carrier!!! THAT would be cool!
Sacrilege! Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is THE PERFECT RECORD! (The only fault with it is that Jeff Lynne is not involved, but that doesn't mean it's not perfect.) Calling _Fixing a Hole_ a "dud", sheesh, the nerve!!!
As penance (not punishment) you must buy the movie Yellow Submarine and watch it twice a day for a whole month. That might teach you to love good music.
Concerning the Apple Computer/Apple Corps deal - well, I liked Apple Computer in the 90'es when noone else did. I'm done with them today. (Still love my original shape iMac though.)
"I fail to see where I insulted you, as that was a hypothetical, but whatever."
Oh no, you didn't insult me at all. It was you who brought the word "asshole" into the discussion, not me. I guess you did so because you thought I was an asshole. Fine with me. Assholes can be nice people too, and nice people can just as well be assholes.
"It's a subjective topic, there is no right or wrong answer. Until a large-scale revolution happens, we'll never know for sure."
All interesting topics are ultimately subjective, but that doesn't mean there are not clear, obvious answers to particular aspects sometimes.
"Actually, I'm an atheist who was raised Catholic."
OK, then I guess you agree with me that there are obviously stupid beliefs. But perhaps you should work a bit on your catholic reflexes. Go swim at a nude beach or something.
"And, since it seems you are so quick to judge"
I don't consider myself quick to judge, but I do tend to go with my intuition. Sometimes I make mistakes, which I readily admit. So I misjudged your view on religion. Nothing pleases me more than to admit that, especially since you - being an atheist - are more likely to be sensible enough to get my point. You are a libertarian, I guess?
"and completely unwilling to even consider a counter-argument,"
Please, what counter-argument? That you can have a.50 M-1 machine gun under your pillow if you like? Like I said, it doesn't matter as long as you don't have an organized army to control a large group of armed people, and such a group could never manage to get organized properly before the official armed forces destroyed it, unless a major part of the official armed forces joins the group. You alone against a detachment of official armed forces would just result in your 15 minutes of fame. Which you could only enjoy posthumously.
That the US may have to withdraw from Iraq? It would not be the insurgents' guns that would accomplish such a withdrawal, but the opinion and politics back home. Same as in Viet Nam. (But you can win this war if you do it right, which Petraeus just might yet.) However, in a revolution, the forces can not withdraw, their only options would be to fight or switch sides. And joining ranks with people who just shot at you is unlikely.
Please provide a believable scenario where your personal weapon of choice would be significant in a revolution.
"It's really easy to be an asshole on the internet, isn't it?"
You are apparantly new to flame wars? I may very well have been a far worse asshole on the Internet long before you knew there was such a thing. Much more fun than Counterstrike. And more educational too.
(FWIW, Mozilla crashed while I was writing this. I actually bothered digging out this post from/dev/mem. This discussion matters to me. And that's the truth. BTW, I'm not a "13 year old 1337 h@x0r", but a 39 years old father of two kids, who is generally worried about world affairs.)
All arms races are alike. You can't win. The only way not to lose is not to play the game. And if you play a different game, by defining your own rules, you just might win.
"I don't know about where you come from, but where I come from, calling someone stupid, or even just insinuating that they are, especially when it's discussing a subjective topic, is considered offensive. Maybe you like it when people call you an asshole, but I don't."
I'm from Denmark, if it matters to you. Muhammed cartoons, remember? I don't particularly like being called asshole, but I am not offended by it. Anyone is entitled to hold that opinion. BTW, I think you are an asshole too. You're welcome.
"So, if I disagree with you on a very subjective topic, I'm automatically wrong? That's nice. I can see this debate is going to get somewhere."
No, you are wrong because you believe something demonstrably false. I hope you will agree with me that an adult sincerely believing in the stork delivering babies, in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy can fairly be called "stupid", right? You may prefer "naive", but that's really just a euphemism. I prefer straight talk. (Of course, given the little I know about you, you are probably also a believer in the silly concept of "God", which is equivalent. I have kids - I know where they came from, and who Santa and the Tooth Fairy is!)
"That's not how civilized debate works. When you disagree with someone, you don't say "you're stupid," you say "I think you're wrong" or "I disagree," then explain why. There's no need for any insults. Why do I need to lecture you on this?"
Let me tell you something that is obviously unknown to you: insult is in the mind of the receiver. The Muhammed Cartoon Crisis was a great demonstration of this. If someone insists on feeling insulted, there's little I can do to stop him.
"Tell that to the insurgents in Iraq. They'd disagree with you quite strongly. They don't need tanks and jets to seriously hurt the strongest military in the world. If enough people revolted against the government here and were willing to fight, the situation would be the same."
Sure they can hurt you, but they can't defeat you in a military sense. And besides, the situation is different, as the topic at hand is a revolution (and your silly belief that a weapon will do you any good), not an insurgency against an occupying power with the attractive option of a retreat to safety. In a US revolution, that option would obviously be unavailable.
From the thread you refer to, I see that you are a former marine. Well, then you would probably know about the difference between an armed mob, and a armed force under proper command. I dare say I have not heard of any revolution where an armed mob succeeded without first forming a regulated force. Very typically such a force would include sympathising parts of the official military forces.
Suppose you serve in Iraq. You know there is a high risk that at any moment, a civilian might pull out his AK47 and fire at you. Are you inclined to shoot first if you perceive a threat? Betcha! Now suppose instead you were a Volksarmee soldier facing a civilian, unarmed crowd of cheering people with candles and banners, likely to include friends of friends, or more or less distant relatives. Would you think twice about shooting into such a crowd? I hope you would.
Now suppose you are a US soldier, ordered to suppress an insurgency in a major US city. Wouldn't you be more inclined to shoot at people who shoot at you first, than at people who merely shout "come over on our side"?
With the abundance of weapons in the USA, I know a peaceful unarmed mob of this kind is unlikely. Therefore I am sure the troops would be inclined to shoot. A bloodbath would be the result. Sure, some rebels might flee into the countryside and form guerillas, but really, either they would be too few to bother about, or they would be sufficiently many to warrant a strike with helicopters or even attack jets.
"You don't seem to understand the kind of hardware that's available on the public market here in the U.S."
Even if you had a nuclear warhead Tomahawk cruise missile under your pillow (mighty unco
Now, I won't claim being an expert on argumentation and rhetorics, but I think "ad hominem" isn't the case in my post. And if my reading of the wikipedia entry is not altogether wrong, then my thinking isn't either.
A (fallacious) ad hominem argument has the basic form:
Person A makes claim X
There is something objectionable about Person A
Therefore claim X is false
I didn't do that. My argument was: if you assert X (X being "think that gun-ownership is useful in the given context"), which I claim is false, then you asserted a falsehood, which in my eyes is a sign of stupidity. I then gave arguments for why I think your assertion was false.
Maybe I should have moderated my statement a bit, and said "you are stupid concerning your belief about the usefulness of guns" instead of calling you stupid in general, but that would have been too verbose. Perhaps I should just have said "It's stupid of you to think..., because...". Also note that I didn't generalize to saying that gun-ownership was bad in general, although I think it is. I specifically argued that guns can't help protect you from an opressive government (in control of a strong military force.)
Last, but not least, I don't consider stupidity offensive in itself. We are all stupid sometimes. Not doing anything about the stupidity however, is very offensive. Now, if you will argue why you would think it is not stupid to think that a personal weapon could be useful in fighting a strongly armed military force in a revolutionary setting, I am all ears. I'm sure there are many in Iraq who also would like to know how to get the most out of their guns against the US forces. You seem to think they can win. I just think they can prolong the suffering indefinitely. That's not winning.
If you think the right to have a gun under your pillow somehow can help protect you from an opressive government, you are, I'm sorry to say, stupid.
If the need should arise to oust a corrupt tyrant (a description that fits Bush very well) who is in control of the armed forces, you need well-organized and equipped forces yourself. This means forces like the National Guards, and parts of the national armed forces that will be led by "good" commanders who will have realized that they should not protect a despot. If the despot remains in control of parts of the military, then you may have a very bloody civil war on your hands. This is a foolish way to conduct a revolution, as history has proven again and again.
If there are no such commanders, your only hope is to convince their soldiers not to fight their fellow people. You can't do that by shooting at them with your peashooter, can you? Depending on the degree of success, you may have a revolution with very little blodshed. I think that's preferable.
Really, this is Revolution 101. Weapons are not very significant. A revolver in the hand of the most determined man, still can't hope to win a fight against a tank. A flower in the hands of a pretty little girl just might.
And yes, I realize I am discussing how to conduct a revolution in the USA. I suppose that makes me a terrorist and an enemy combatant. Fine. I can be found - easily - in the Danish telephone directories. Come and get me!
Thanks for posting that. I was just thinking of posting a link, but you beat me to it by posting the entire thing.
I think of that story very often these days. Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with information storage and retrieval, without having read that story first.
The DNS system reflects its origin in educational systems and a few large enterprises, where fairly deep hierarchical departmental structures made sense. For large-scale commercial purposes this conflicts with the primary commercial desire: being easy to remember.
The only effective solution will be to abolish domains completely, and rely on search engines, augmented by tagged searches (for example "Trademark:Apple", or "Stock:AAPL".) It would probably be best to inject a level of (complex) random numeric identifiers instead of relying on IP addresses directly, as using the latter directly from the search engines might result in a preference for certain IP adresses, as has been seen with phone numbers.
Unfortunately, this would mean that Google would effectively hold the keys to the whole Internet, which is probably undesirable, even despite "do no evil" and all. Perfection is unattainable, it seems. Ultimately this is closely connected to the philosophical notion of identity and uniqueness, and I don't think there can be a good permanent solution.
The DNS system is severely borken. By design. Of course this is a consequence of lack of foresight back when it was designed. No new TLD can fix that error, a complete redesign from a global perspective is required. In the beginning, there was distributed hosts files, where each host had a globally unique name. This was replaced by the hiearchical system with a few TLDs. The intent, of course, was to have a deep hierarchy that would allow better performance and overall usability. However, except for a few countries that mirror the TLDs, we effectively have a two-level system, with a great deal of overlap. (www.apple.dk redirecting to http://www.apple.com/dk for example.) The usage of a pointless extraneous protocol identifier (www.) is a stupidity in itself, of course.
IMO the only meaningful solution is to replace domain names by random n-digit ID numbers, created in a way so that each ID has no regular pattern in it (otherwise we will see hoarding of "pretty" ID numbers.) Naturally, that would just replace domain name squatting with search engine doping, but perhaps this could be a good thing. Search engines would have to work harder to reject fake boosters and focus on valid quality content.
Alternatively, enforcing a deeper hierarchical model could help a bit, but that would require global agreement upon a categorical hierarchy which is a pipe dream if there ever was one!
Creating an.xxx TLD will result in a TLD where there is porn (by definition), but it is absolutely useless unless you are interested in porn, because the object of desire and the motivation for all the fuss is to have a place WITHOUT porn.
The only SANE solution would be to create a.noxxx TLD into which all of the worlds domains could be embedded/replicated, on the provision that they agree to be penalized with a hefty fine by the TLD registry if there is found any porn on their site. This could even be enforced through semiautomatic or fullautomatic AI robot means. All domains in the.noxxx are simply returning the result for the equivalent domain without.noxxx. Probably a better name would be.censored - but.noxxx was used above for clarity. There could even be a second-level domain below.censored, so you could get various levels of censorship.
This way slashdot.org.censored could be just the same as slashdot.org except that whenever the goatse guy is posted, and then found by the registry-robot, it gets disabled, and Slashdot would have to pay a fine and reregister.
DON'T use aliases to protect yourself from nasty behaviour. If you get to rely on it, even the slightest bit, you will become careless and one day you login without your normal profile, and thus witout aliases, and *whoosh* you just messed up. And now you probably messed up a system that you are not used to work on (because otherwise you'd have had your comforting aliases), which makes it even harder to clean up the mess.
Anything involving rm should never be habitual or "safety-enhanced".
Right. So 10 *really* good Unix "habits" would be: 1. Never use csh or any derivative thereof. 2. Know the portable behaviour of your Unix tools. 3. Learn to use ed, one day you'll be glad you did. You can also use ed and ex from scripts or from a command. 4. A shell command is a small program. If you are unsure about a command, test it first, like you would any program. 5. Learn to use the standard shell on your system. 6. Learn useful nonstandard extensions of utilities, but use them with care. 7. Never rely on an extension to the point that you forget how to do it portably. The definition of "portably" is up to you. 8. Learn to use csh enough that you can make do in an emergency, and learn *why* you shouldn't use it. 9. If your standard shell is Bash, learn Korn too. And vice versa. Learn both, how they differ, and how they differ form your standard shell. 10. Sometimes a real C program or a script in a different language is better than using shell.
able:~ $ mkdir foo able:~ $ cd foo able:~/foo $ csh % touch a % echo * >foobar % cat foobar a foobar
As you see, the * is expanded *after* the destination file is created. Now, depending on buffers file sizes, and possibly the phase of the Moon, this may not bite you, but if grep output from other files is flushed into foobar before foobar has been processed, the grep will reach foobar, start grepping it, and appending the result to foobar. Endless loop until disk full. I've seen it happen, it's for real, and NOT a pretty sight.
Sneaky, awful, and _very_ bad. As I said, I wonder why this hasn't made it into Tom Christiansen's list of bad things about csh.
All Bourne-like shells I know expand the wildcard first BEFORE creating the output file.
The guy who I think invented that notation for Algol68, Aad van Wijngaarden, should be counted among the cleverest in the history of Computer Science. The reason there is no rof is because in Algol68, the loop construct combines for and while and as both can be omitted, all that remains is do...od which is why using od is the consistent choice. Bourne probably replaced od by done because od had already been taken for the octal dump command.
And don't get me started on two-level vW-grammars!
I have several colleagues, who have the habit of logging on to an AIX system (which has ksh as/bin/sh) and then type tcsh to get a shell with "sensible" editing. One of them used to tease me about my fierce evangelism for using the default Korn shell instead (and just type set -o emacs to get editing) rather than tcsh. He stopped when one day he did a cd to a log directory, then grep somepattern * >filename. The partition on which this directory was located was just about half full already, and thus soon filled up completely. We lost a few minutes of log data before he discovered the problem.
tcsh is just as borken as csh. Dangerously braindead if you ask me. The Perl hacker Tom Christiansen has written the Csh considered harmful FAQ, which everybody using csh should read. To my surprise I just discovered he doesn't mention this particular bug.
Actually it will work with Korn shell as well, and probably zsh too. Not to mention that many systems have a/bin/sh which is Bourne-compatible but enhanced. Many systems have a/bin/sh implementation that supports this, not just bash-based Linux systems.
Slashdot Mirror
That's OK, I was a student at the lazy school too. Dropped out because of lazyness and impatience. The idea of firing up an editor to write a perl script, which always seems to evolve various bells and whistles, yet still never does quite what I want the next time, and therefore needs to be maintained, version controlled, and documented, when I even have problems remembering what I _called_ the bloody thing, just seemed too much work. Instead I learned most of the generally useful features of various tools (ksh, grep, sed, ex, awk, but also Perl) and now simply rely on fast typing to combine them as needed. I guess you could say my programs' names are simply their code spelled out. My shell windows are 132 characters wide, and I occasionally write commands longer than that.
(When I noted there was a reply, I "feared" it would be someone flaming me for not answering the question of doing the echo as an unprivileged user. In anticipation of that flame, here's how:
echo "foobar"|sudo sh -c 'cat >/root/file')
-Lasse
Interesting. Must have been a challenge to do math before that.
-Lasse
Oh you Unix-wannabees!
sudo sh -c 'echo foobar >/root/file'
-Lasse
Well said.
Freedom of speech must include the right to hold stupid opinions and express them, even if they are denials of historical facts such as holocaust or the Armenian genocide, as long as you don't directly promote, for example, violence. That's also why Kurdish ROJ TV still is able to send from Denmark. Although I probably disagree with a lot of what the Kurds stand for (including all of Islam, which I find abominable) I strongly support their presence here, and hope we will not budge under the pressure, not only from Turkey, but also from the USA.
France and Germany are two bad examples, and the attempts by Germany to impose a EU-wide version of the Franco-German laws against for example holocaust-denial and display of the swastika, really stink. I think I've said it before - if they succeed, I will start wearing the swastika.
The European Union is an impossible and futile project. Ethics and morality simply varies too much, with strongly catholic parts, strongly protestant christian parts, and a few places that are nominally and traditionally protestant, but only weakly so, in practice. Recently we heard pope-ruled[1] Poland argue for making abortion illegal EU-wide. Such silly proposals seem to become more and more frequent, and one day, such a terrible thing just might go through.
Even in Scandinavia, we have such huge differences among us on some matters, that common legislation for them would be outrageous.
The more a democratic majority rule approaches a consensus, the better. This is easier to achieve with smaller administrative units. On a global scope, rules should be very few and very general. And even so, we see that in practice, there cannot be a global agreement on something as fundamental and general as human rights, because of the totally insane views of the islamic parts of the world. That's also why Turkey should never become a member of the EU.
-Lasse
[1] Poland may be a democracy, but effectively it seems to be a self-imposed theocratic dictatorship. I see no significant difference between the Pope and Hitler.
What's next? Outlawing Free Operating Systems on which their trojans won't run? The German government is a bunch of brain-dead idiots.
To my astonishment though, it seems Brigitte Zypries, the German minister of justice, has shot down Schäuble on this trojan matter. Not that that makes her any better in my eyes, with those EU-wide swastika ban and holocaust-denial-denial ideas of hers. Fucking idiots, all of them. Not saying that we don't have our share of idiotic politicians in Denmark, of course.
I think I will send a few threats and insults to a selection of EU politicians one of these days. Paper-mail can still be anonymous, fortunately.
-Lasse Hillerøe Petersen
(Arguing for safe pseudonymity on the net since 1993, though I have rarely had any use for it myself. And I'm no John Smith either. My name is globally unique.)
Why? Did it cross the road?
-Lasse
Linux is down the drain already!
-Lasse
As you didn't say the Earth was spherical, just that it was "round", the correct way to get back at you would be to pull out some fractals and talk about jagged structures on the surface. Still, as an overall average, it should be considered correct to say that the Earth is round.
You shouldn't surrender so easily.
-Lasse
Oy! I'm a modeller - haven't been into flying models because the damn things are just to BIG for my taste (and available space.) But imagine having a whole squadron of remote controlled 1/350 F-14's flying in close formation in the living room, and practicing deck landings on a Tamiya carrier!!! THAT would be cool!
-Lasse
Sacrilege! Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is THE PERFECT RECORD! (The only fault with it is that Jeff Lynne is not involved, but that doesn't mean it's not perfect.) Calling _Fixing a Hole_ a "dud", sheesh, the nerve!!!
As penance (not punishment) you must buy the movie Yellow Submarine and watch it twice a day for a whole month. That might teach you to love good music.
Concerning the Apple Computer/Apple Corps deal - well, I liked Apple Computer in the 90'es when noone else did. I'm done with them today. (Still love my original shape iMac though.)
-Lasse
"I fail to see where I insulted you, as that was a hypothetical, but whatever."
.50 M-1 machine gun under your pillow if you like?
/dev/mem. This discussion matters to me. And that's the truth. BTW, I'm not a "13 year old 1337 h@x0r", but a 39 years old father of two kids, who is generally worried about world affairs.)
Oh no, you didn't insult me at all. It was you who brought the word "asshole" into the discussion, not me. I guess you did so because you thought I was an asshole. Fine with me. Assholes can be nice people too, and nice people can just as well be assholes.
"It's a subjective topic, there is no right or wrong answer. Until a large-scale revolution happens, we'll never know for sure."
All interesting topics are ultimately subjective, but that doesn't mean there are not clear, obvious answers to particular aspects sometimes.
"Actually, I'm an atheist who was raised Catholic."
OK, then I guess you agree with me that there are obviously stupid beliefs. But perhaps you should work a bit on your catholic reflexes. Go swim at a nude beach or something.
"And, since it seems you are so quick to judge"
I don't consider myself quick to judge, but I do tend to go with my intuition. Sometimes I make mistakes, which I readily admit. So I misjudged your view on religion. Nothing pleases me more than to admit that, especially since you - being an atheist - are more likely to be sensible enough to get my point. You are a libertarian, I guess?
"and completely unwilling to even consider a counter-argument,"
Please, what counter-argument?
That you can have a
Like I said, it doesn't matter as long as you don't have an organized army to control a large group of armed people, and such a group could never manage to get organized properly before the official armed forces destroyed it, unless a major part of the official armed forces joins the group. You alone against a detachment of official armed forces would just result in your 15 minutes of fame. Which you could only enjoy posthumously.
That the US may have to withdraw from Iraq?
It would not be the insurgents' guns that would accomplish such a withdrawal, but the opinion and politics back home. Same as in Viet Nam. (But you can win this war if you do it right, which Petraeus just might yet.) However, in a revolution, the forces can not withdraw, their only options would be to fight or switch sides. And joining ranks with people who just shot at you is unlikely.
Please provide a believable scenario where your personal weapon of choice would be significant in a revolution.
"It's really easy to be an asshole on the internet, isn't it?"
You are apparantly new to flame wars? I may very well have been a far worse asshole on the Internet long before you knew there was such a thing. Much more fun than Counterstrike. And more educational too.
(FWIW, Mozilla crashed while I was writing this. I actually bothered digging out this post from
All arms races are alike. You can't win. The only way not to lose is not to play the game. And if you play a different game, by defining your own rules, you just might win.
-Lasse
"I don't know about where you come from, but where I come from, calling someone stupid, or even just insinuating that they are, especially when it's discussing a subjective topic, is considered offensive. Maybe you like it when people call you an asshole, but I don't."
I'm from Denmark, if it matters to you. Muhammed cartoons, remember? I don't particularly like being called asshole, but I am not offended by it. Anyone is entitled to hold that opinion. BTW, I think you are an asshole too. You're welcome.
"So, if I disagree with you on a very subjective topic, I'm automatically wrong? That's nice. I can see this debate is going to get somewhere."
No, you are wrong because you believe something demonstrably false. I hope you will agree with me that an adult sincerely believing in the stork delivering babies, in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy can fairly be called "stupid", right? You may prefer "naive", but that's really just a euphemism. I prefer straight talk. (Of course, given the little I know about you, you are probably also a believer in the silly concept of "God", which is equivalent. I have kids - I know where they came from, and who Santa and the Tooth Fairy is!)
"That's not how civilized debate works. When you disagree with someone, you don't say "you're stupid," you say "I think you're wrong" or "I disagree," then explain why. There's no need for any insults. Why do I need to lecture you on this?"
Let me tell you something that is obviously unknown to you: insult is in the mind of the receiver. The Muhammed Cartoon Crisis was a great demonstration of this. If someone insists on feeling insulted, there's little I can do to stop him.
"Tell that to the insurgents in Iraq. They'd disagree with you quite strongly. They don't need tanks and jets to seriously hurt the strongest military in the world. If enough people revolted against the government here and were willing to fight, the situation would be the same."
Sure they can hurt you, but they can't defeat you in a military sense. And besides, the situation is different, as the topic at hand is a revolution (and your silly belief that a weapon will do you any good), not an insurgency against an occupying power with the attractive option of a retreat to safety. In a US revolution, that option would obviously be unavailable.
From the thread you refer to, I see that you are a former marine. Well, then you would probably know about the difference between an armed mob, and a armed force under proper command. I dare say I have not heard of any revolution where an armed mob succeeded without first forming a regulated force. Very typically such a force would include sympathising parts of the official military forces.
Suppose you serve in Iraq. You know there is a high risk that at any moment, a civilian might pull out his AK47 and fire at you. Are you inclined to shoot first if you perceive a threat? Betcha! Now suppose instead you were a Volksarmee soldier facing a civilian, unarmed crowd of cheering people with candles and banners, likely to include friends of friends, or more or less distant relatives. Would you think twice about shooting into such a crowd? I hope you would.
Now suppose you are a US soldier, ordered to suppress an insurgency in a major US city. Wouldn't you be more inclined to shoot at people who shoot at you first, than at people who merely shout "come over on our side"?
With the abundance of weapons in the USA, I know a peaceful unarmed mob of this kind is unlikely. Therefore I am sure the troops would be inclined to shoot. A bloodbath would be the result. Sure, some rebels might flee into the countryside and form guerillas, but really, either they would be too few to bother about, or they would be sufficiently many to warrant a strike with helicopters or even attack jets.
"You don't seem to understand the kind of hardware that's available on the public market here in the U.S."
Even if you had a nuclear warhead Tomahawk cruise missile under your pillow (mighty unco
Now, I won't claim being an expert on argumentation and rhetorics, but I think "ad hominem" isn't the case in my post. And if my reading of the wikipedia entry is not altogether wrong, then my thinking isn't either.
I didn't do that. My argument was: if you assert X (X being "think that gun-ownership is useful in the given context"), which I claim is false, then you asserted a falsehood, which in my eyes is a sign of stupidity. I then gave arguments for why I think your assertion was false.
Maybe I should have moderated my statement a bit, and said "you are stupid concerning your belief about the usefulness of guns" instead of calling you stupid in general, but that would have been too verbose. Perhaps I should just have said "It's stupid of you to think
Last, but not least, I don't consider stupidity offensive in itself. We are all stupid sometimes. Not doing anything about the stupidity however, is very offensive. Now, if you will argue why you would think it is not stupid to think that a personal weapon could be useful in fighting a strongly armed military force in a revolutionary setting, I am all ears. I'm sure there are many in Iraq who also would like to know how to get the most out of their guns against the US forces. You seem to think they can win. I just think they can prolong the suffering indefinitely. That's not winning.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind.
-Lasse
Naaah, it's her turn now. What's the comparable term (to "blowjob") for cunnilingus? Poon-job?
-Lasse
If you think the right to have a gun under your pillow somehow can help protect you from an opressive government, you are, I'm sorry to say, stupid.
If the need should arise to oust a corrupt tyrant (a description that fits Bush very well) who is in control of the armed forces, you need well-organized and equipped forces yourself. This means forces like the National Guards, and parts of the national armed forces that will be led by "good" commanders who will have realized that they should not protect a despot. If the despot remains in control of parts of the military, then you may have a very bloody civil war on your hands. This is a foolish way to conduct a revolution, as history has proven again and again.
If there are no such commanders, your only hope is to convince their soldiers not to fight their fellow people. You can't do that by shooting at them with your peashooter, can you? Depending on the degree of success, you may have a revolution with very little blodshed. I think that's preferable.
Really, this is Revolution 101. Weapons are not very significant. A revolver in the hand of the most determined man, still can't hope to win a fight against a tank. A flower in the hands of a pretty little girl just might.
And yes, I realize I am discussing how to conduct a revolution in the USA. I suppose that makes me a terrorist and an enemy combatant. Fine. I can be found - easily - in the Danish telephone directories. Come and get me!
-Lasse Hillerøe Petersen
Thanks for posting that. I was just thinking of posting a link, but you beat me to it by posting the entire thing.
I think of that story very often these days. Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with information storage and retrieval, without having read that story first.
-Lasse
The DNS system reflects its origin in educational systems and a few large enterprises, where fairly deep hierarchical departmental structures made sense. For large-scale commercial purposes this conflicts with the primary commercial desire: being easy to remember.
The only effective solution will be to abolish domains completely, and rely on search engines, augmented by tagged searches (for example "Trademark:Apple", or "Stock:AAPL".) It would probably be best to inject a level of (complex) random numeric identifiers instead of relying on IP addresses directly, as using the latter directly from the search engines might result in a preference for certain IP adresses, as has been seen with phone numbers.
Unfortunately, this would mean that Google would effectively hold the keys to the whole Internet, which is probably undesirable, even despite "do no evil" and all. Perfection is unattainable, it seems. Ultimately this is closely connected to the philosophical notion of identity and uniqueness, and I don't think there can be a good permanent solution.
-Lasse
The DNS system is severely borken. By design. Of course this is a consequence of lack of foresight back when it was designed. No new TLD can fix that error, a complete redesign from a global perspective is required. In the beginning, there was distributed hosts files, where each host had a globally unique name. This was replaced by the hiearchical system with a few TLDs. The intent, of course, was to have a deep hierarchy that would allow better performance and overall usability. However, except for a few countries that mirror the TLDs, we effectively have a two-level system, with a great deal of overlap. (www.apple.dk redirecting to http://www.apple.com/dk for example.) The usage of a pointless extraneous protocol identifier (www.) is a stupidity in itself, of course.
IMO the only meaningful solution is to replace domain names by random n-digit ID numbers, created in a way so that each ID has no regular pattern in it (otherwise we will see hoarding of "pretty" ID numbers.) Naturally, that would just replace domain name squatting with search engine doping, but perhaps this could be a good thing. Search engines would have to work harder to reject fake boosters and focus on valid quality content.
Alternatively, enforcing a deeper hierarchical model could help a bit, but that would require global agreement upon a categorical hierarchy which is a pipe dream if there ever was one!
-Lasse
Creating an .xxx TLD will result in a TLD where there is porn (by definition), but it is absolutely useless unless you are interested in porn, because the object of desire and the motivation for all the fuss is to have a place WITHOUT porn.
.noxxx TLD into which all of the worlds domains could be embedded/replicated, on the provision that they agree to be penalized with a hefty fine by the TLD registry if there is found any porn on their site. This could even be enforced through semiautomatic or fullautomatic AI robot means. All domains in the .noxxx are simply returning the result for the equivalent domain without .noxxx. Probably a better name would be .censored - but .noxxx was used above for clarity. There could even be a second-level domain below .censored, so you could get various levels of censorship.
The only SANE solution would be to create a
This way slashdot.org.censored could be just the same as slashdot.org except that whenever the goatse guy is posted, and then found by the registry-robot, it gets disabled, and Slashdot would have to pay a fine and reregister.
-Lasse
Ah, this reminds me of another good habit.
DON'T use aliases to protect yourself from nasty behaviour. If you get to rely on it, even the slightest bit, you will become careless and one day you login without your normal profile, and thus witout aliases, and *whoosh* you just messed up. And now you probably messed up a system that you are not used to work on (because otherwise you'd have had your comforting aliases), which makes it even harder to clean up the mess.
Anything involving rm should never be habitual or "safety-enhanced".
-Lasse
Right. So 10 *really* good Unix "habits" would be:
1. Never use csh or any derivative thereof.
2. Know the portable behaviour of your Unix tools.
3. Learn to use ed, one day you'll be glad you did. You can also use ed and ex from scripts or from a command.
4. A shell command is a small program. If you are unsure about a command, test it first, like you would any program.
5. Learn to use the standard shell on your system.
6. Learn useful nonstandard extensions of utilities, but use them with care.
7. Never rely on an extension to the point that you forget how to do it portably. The definition of "portably" is up to you.
8. Learn to use csh enough that you can make do in an emergency, and learn *why* you shouldn't use it.
9. If your standard shell is Bash, learn Korn too. And vice versa. Learn both, how they differ, and how they differ form your standard shell.
10. Sometimes a real C program or a script in a different language is better than using shell.
-Lasse
Sneaky, awful, and _very_ bad. As I said, I wonder why this hasn't made it into Tom Christiansen's list of bad things about csh.
All Bourne-like shells I know expand the wildcard first BEFORE creating the output file.
-Lasse
The guy who I think invented that notation for Algol68, Aad van Wijngaarden, should be counted among the cleverest in the history of Computer Science. The reason there is no rof is because in Algol68, the loop construct combines for and while and as both can be omitted, all that remains is do...od which is why using od is the consistent choice. Bourne probably replaced od by done because od had already been taken for the octal dump command.
And don't get me started on two-level vW-grammars!
-Lasse
I have several colleagues, who have the habit of logging on to an AIX system (which has ksh as /bin/sh) and then type tcsh to get a shell with "sensible" editing. One of them used to tease me about my fierce evangelism for using the default Korn shell instead (and just type set -o emacs to get editing) rather than tcsh. He stopped when one day he did a cd to a log directory, then grep somepattern * >filename. The partition on which this directory was located was just about half full already, and thus soon filled up completely. We lost a few minutes of log data before he discovered the problem.
tcsh is just as borken as csh. Dangerously braindead if you ask me. The Perl hacker Tom Christiansen has written the Csh considered harmful FAQ, which everybody using csh should read. To my surprise I just discovered he doesn't mention this particular bug.
-Lasse
Actually it will work with Korn shell as well, and probably zsh too. Not to mention that many systems have a /bin/sh which is Bourne-compatible but enhanced. Many systems have a /bin/sh implementation that supports this, not just bash-based Linux systems.
-Lasse